This article presents a close reading (or listening) of Amadou & Mariam's 2004 album, Dimanche à Bamako, meaning ‘Sunday in Bamako’, produced ‘by and with’ world music maverick Manu Chao. I consider how Dimanche à Bamako musically renders, through sound and lyrical expression, the tensions of ‘global modernity’ in postcolonial Africa and its diaspora. ‘Global modernity’ refers to the fraught encounter between local actors and the globalised socio-economic conditions in which modern subjects are increasingly embedded. By framing these local and global tensions in the context of a modern African city, Dimanche à Bamako offers a theoretically sophisticated representation of urban African social space that, while rooted in a particular place (Bamako, Mali) attends to the wider world in which a local sense of place gives way to the wanderlust and anxieties of living and labouring in a globalised world. Through critical application of Lefebvrian and Mande socio-spatial theory and focused analysis of several of the album's tracks, I argue that Dimanche à Bamako elucidates a dialectic of ‘civility’ and ‘wildness’ that shapes the way social space and subjectivity are conceived, lived, and perceived in urban African communities in an era of global modernity.

This essay challenges the received wisdom that teenpix of the 1950s were dominated by a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll. I argue that this cycle of film production was marked by a diversity of musical genres, styles and types. Not only rock 'n' roll, but rhythm 'n' blues, folk, rockabilly, swing, West Coast jazz, bebop, Latin music such as the mambo, the rhumba, the cha cha chá, and Caribbean calypsos were all heavily featured in these films. This study is carried out through a focus on the temporal arrangements – fads, cycles, trends – that govern serial production and consumption of movies and popular music. Following Philip Ennis' thesis that rock 'n' roll is best defined by its ability to ‘crossover’ musical boundaries – to move, for example, across the pop, country, and rhythm 'n' blues charts – I argue that the film industry chose not to overly limit the music it had on offer and instead provided a varied package, some of which, it expected, would crossover and appeal to diverse and capricious teenage tastes.

This article considers the integral role music plays in drag in general and ‘femme’ gender performance (or queer performances of femininity) in particular. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with performers and observations of their performances, I delineate some of the purposes music can serve in these contexts: a tool for character development, a musical lingua franca with which to establish a dialogue with the audience; a part of a nuanced intertext that troubles the cohesiveness of a musical plot or ideological discourse; a fan strategy for staking ownership over a beloved song or genre. I argue that femme gender performers critically stage their own consumption of the popular music they enjoy, interrupting its narratives and rhythms with their choreography and reterritorialising it with their dancing bodies.

In a recent interview, Bob Dylan said that he has learned never to ‘give one hundred per cent’ – a person, particularly a public artist, should always hold something in reserve. Somewhat taken aback, the interviewer pressed for a follow-up to this puzzling statement. Wasn't Dylan giving 100 per cent on those great albums of the 1960s. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on blonde? All right, Dylan finally admitted, maybe he was. The reporter dropped the question and went on to other subjects, leaving the readers, like Mr Jones, wondering just what is going on here. Most people who have followed Dylan's work throughout his career would agree that, in his work of the 1980s, he seems to be holding something back. There are flashes of brilliance, of the old verbal acuity, the ability to come up with the startlingly perfect phrase to fit his needs in a song. There have been truly great songs, like ‘Jokerman’, ‘Dark Eyes’ and ‘Brownsville Girl’. But there have also been embarrassingly awful songs, like ‘Never Gonna Be the Same Again’, lacklustre singing and woefully inconsistent production values on his records. We know what he is capable of – he knows what he is capable of – yet he doesn't give us his best. Why? In our view the answer, like most aspects of Bob Dylan, is not simple but may well involve a complex combination of factors all pertaining to the attempt to balance the dialectical forces pulling upon him from both the public and private areas of his life.

The most recent of the informal Critical Musicology study days focused on the concept of authenticity in popular music. The day consisted of seven short papers on this subject and was followed by a group discussion of issues raised by these papers.

In his opening paper, ‘ “We stripped it apart like a car and put it back together totally again”: music's authenticity-speak in the age of digital technology, c.1985’, Dai Griffiths (Oxford Brookes University) was keen to draw attention to the way that sampling technology had been interpreted, both in terms of practice and of discursive context, as a marker of identity. His historical framework made reference to earlier practices of cover and intertextual reference from the early 1960s onwards. Referring to A Tribe Called Quest and Beck, even with samples, it looked as though racial authenticity was still at issue. The role of sampling in the rendering of authenticity was also considered by Rupert Till (University College, Bretton Hall) in his paper ‘Club cultures and authenticity’. Making reference to hip-hop and dance music, he suggested that there are different authenticities for different kinds of popular music. Drawing on Sarah Thornton's (1995) study of club culture in which the underground is considered authentic and the commercial, inauthentic, Till gave examples of some of the alternative means by which it is considered possible to be financially successful and yet retain an aura of authenticity.

In the intense disciplinary upheavals of the last fifteen years or so within music scholarship, music analysis has been one of the most contentious areas of debate The sense of conflict arises from a confluence of factors: all music scholars who wish to describe the details of musical style must employ some form of music analysis, yet the very strengths of music-analytical practice Ð its ability to describe musical events with precision, its ability to explain details of musical style and demonstrate structural interrelationships Ð are couched in a technical meta-language that seems resistant to socio-cultural analysis, an area of particular interest for those involved in the self-critique of the field. Concurrent with the apearance of what are probably the best-known denouncements of analysis as formalist and tautological by Joseph Kerman in the early to mid-1980s, musicologists who were sympathetic to aspects of KermanÕs critique explored ways to harmonise the description and analysis of musical details with methods of analysis derived from different aspects of cultural theory. Many of the scholars seeking new applications for music analysis also pursued the related project of understanding the socio-historical context for music analysis itself and of unpacking the aesthetic values couched within the apparently neutral practice of analysis.

This essay examines the work of singer-songwriter William Fitzsimmons as an example of how confessional performance is constructed within indie music. I contend that both audiences and artists participate in a discourse that draws on narratives of personal communication, intimacy and authenticity in order to create a distinctively confessional aesthetic. This aesthetic orientation is then reflected in performances that are framed as autobiographical and truth-telling. After surveying aspects of indie music that contribute to the formation of this aesthetic, I trace the implications of performed confession through an exploration of the sonic, visual and relational characteristics of Fitzsimmons's performances from his 2008 album The Sparrow and the Crow. By examining how artist and audience construct the confessional, I suggest a new perspective on how the confessional trope operates in indie music.

Between 1978 and 1984 Buddy Esquire designed over 300 hip hop flyers. His career coincided with the first flourishing of the Bronx scene, when hip hop shifted from a community-based event to a full-blown commercial phenomenon. This paper analyses Buddy Esquire's flyer design style, supported by a discussion with the flyer artist. The analysis demonstrates that Esquire's ‘neo-deco’ style communicates the aspiration of live hip hop to classiness by suppressing overt graffiti elements, by alluding to the nightclub culture of disco and by using the Art Deco stylings of the Jazz Age as a signifier of sophistication. The paper then moves beyond an interpretation of the flyers, searching for reflections of Buddy Esquire's aesthetic in early hip hop culture. Finally, it proposes that Buddy Esquire's flyers challenge assumptions in current hip hop scholarship regarding early hip hop's aesthetic relationship to the past (particularly the early 20th century) and its self-documenting impulse.

Using Swedish metal band Ghost as a primary case study, this article examines how anonymous bands mediate their identity through the use of masks. The isolation of the band members’ ‘real’ identities from their musical performance complicates traditional modes of ‘knowing’ the performer, but in turn enables the formation of a multitude of connectivities, as audiences utilise masked bodies as sites upon which to project their desires and fantasies. Such projections are integral to the ways in which masking allows performers to mobilise and sustain their connections to audiences, who themselves become complicit in the maintenance of anonymity. This article thus considers how masks might challenge established notions of popular music performance, celebrity and authenticity, particularly within heavy metal contexts, and investigates how masks, rather than de-identifying a performer, can invite intimate connections among musicians and audiences.