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Jamaican popular music started with ska in the early 1960s, evolved into rock‐steady in the mid‐1960s, and eventually into reggae in the late 1960s. This development was driven and facilitated by Jamaica's sound systems – mobile discos – and the emerging recording industry. The influences on Jamaican popular music are quite diverse, including African sensibilities mediated through Jamaican folk genres, British popular and religious music, American rhythm and blues, Trinidadian calypso, and Latin rhythms. As the music evolved into reggae, the Nyabinghi rhythms of Rastafari – adopted from Burru drumming – became the characteristic sound, and the Rastafarian philosophy pervaded the lyrics. The influence of Rastafari on the development of Jamaican popular music (reggae) has been the most salient factor in moving Rastas from the margins toward the center of Jamaican cultural life.

This chapter, which takes the story up to about 1914, deals first with the late 19th-century vernacular (and its early twentieth-century successor), demonstrating what this ‘light’ music had in common with the ‘serious’ music of the same period. It then proceeds to the blues and early jazz, pointing out its links to the same vernacular.

The cultural and historical tensions between East and West are among the most complex forces in Jewish history. Jewish music has historically embodied this tension, and it is one of the ways in which modernity emerges as a quality of Jewish music. In the synagogue, prayer and song are directed toward the altar at the eastern end of the sanctuary. Several styles and repertories of modern popular music in Israel are designated as musica mizrahit, literally “eastern music.” In modern Europe East and West also formed along a cultural fault line between Jews speaking Yiddish as a vernacular language in Eastern Europe and Jews speaking other vernaculars in Central Europe, especially German. As Jewish musicians increasingly entered the domains of popular and entertainment music in the late nineteenth century, East and West came to represent two different, even contested, identities in the Diaspora.

This chapter expands our view to include music produced in other countries. A preliminary survey of the popular music of countries with widely differing political economies, music cultures, and levels of development revealed that the four genre forms (avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditionalist) do exist to greater or lesser degrees across the globe. However, there proved to be another widely distributed form that was not found in the U.S. sample: the government-purposed genre. Musics in this genre receive substantial financial support from the government or oppositional groups with a direct interest in the ideological content of popular music. There are two major types: those sponsored directly by governments, which benefit from national distribution and legal protections, and an antistate type supported by an opposition party or constituency. The chapter examines four nation-cases to advance the argument: the People's Republic of China, Chile, Serbia, and Nigeria.

This chapter explores the aesthetics of pop music in general and then focuses on how specific artists might facilitate religious experience. It examines not just ‘light’ popular music, but also the various types to which Christians have sometimes taken most exception, among them hard rock and rap. Artists considered include the Beatles, Madonna, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Nick Cave, and The Bad Seeds.

This chapter establishes the topic, justification, theoretical framework, and methodology for the book. Dangdut Stories situates the production and circulation of meanings about a popular music genre within particular social (political and economic) and cultural (ideological) conditions.In a series of brief examples drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Java, Sumatra, and Kalimantan, the author shows how dangdut participates in social discourses, or “stories,” about social class relations, national belonging, and gendered power and difference in contemporary Indonesia.

Chapter 1 offers a contextual account of BBC broadcasting between the wars; discusses the infusion of jazz and dance music from America into British musical life; and situates the book in relation to discourses of mass culture, modernity, and the popular. Its examination of the BBC is concerned particularly with its ideologies of cultural uplift, promotion of active listening, advocacy for (classical) music appreciation, and conceptualization of its listeners through audience research. The more comprehensive discussion of dance bands and jazz in interwar British culture (necessary because of their unfamiliarity to most North American readers) is focused through the lens of broadcasting. It gives particular attention to the problem of song plugging and the BBC's turn to lighter programming during the late 1930s: these cases distilled the BBC's ambivalence about popular music, with its ties to the commercial and the American, even as it prepared for war.

Chapter 3 examines Music While You Work (MWYW), created by the BBC in response to the production drives spurred by the retreat at Dunkirk in June 1940. The half-hour program united ideologies of music as a force for cultural uplift with research in industrial efficiency in service of the war effort. As the program developed, it reflected concerns with the new female workforce, for the apathetic and unruly bodies of conscripted women workers threatened to slow production, detract from the nation's war effort, and even undermine “the health of all democracy.” Prized for its tonic qualities, MWYW was a powerful tool for factory discipline. Producers harnessed popular and light music, not according to entertainment or artistic values but for their effect on production, audibility, and impact on worker morale. Nevertheless, the program also evoked practices of dancing and background listening, which had become mass leisure activities during the preceding decades.

In 1965 the first synthesizers arrived at the Workshop. Chapter 4 discusses the impact of their arrival, with a detailed discussion both of the features of these early synthesizers and of the ways they were used by composers such as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. It also discusses how, for the first time, “nonspecialist” composers like Dudley Simpson were allowed to use the facilities of the Workshop in their BBC commissions. One of the fundamental shifts in composition resulting from the use of synthesizers rather than tape techniques was the move away from abstract sounds toward fixed pitches, resulting in even more tonally centered works. Pieces no longer blurred the boundaries of sound effect and music, tending instead to imitate traditionally composed tonal music in an electronic idiom.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Black Panther Party (BPP) used popular music as a means to represent its ideology and politics to potential supporters during the peak of its activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following an initial discussion of the ways in which the traditions of the U.S. left and popular music impacted upon the BPP, it explores the idea of black nationalism as understood and represented by the Panthers, its relationship to the traditions of Marxism, and the ways in which this relationship informed the cultural practice of the BPP. Finally, there is an examination of the ‘three moments’ alluded to in the title, a series of musical performances and recordings sponsored by the party.

This chapter discusses traces the path taken by the maverick composer, philosopher and activist Henry Flynt in the early 1960s, from a position at the heart of New York's downtown avant‐garde community, to his radical repudiation of the avant‐garde under the influence of the Marxist‐Leninist Workers World Party (WWP). The WWP both shaped the rhetoric of Flynt's attacks on the avant‐garde, and (through its militant advocacy of civil rights) encouraged his growing interest in black popular music. Paradoxically, this was to lead to tension with the WWP itself, which shared the culturally conservative outlook of Soviet communism. Flynt, by contrast, viewed “street‐Negro music” as representing the vanguard of musical evolution through its resourceful use of electric instruments and recording and broadcasting technology.

This chapter introduces the main concern of the book: the interaction of ‘rude’ (‘folk’), ‘vulgar’ (‘popular’), and ‘polite’ (‘art’) music, from about 1760 on. It deals, first, with the differentiation of these categories at this period, then with the neoclassical ethos and its ideal of the simple, natural, and (as we should now say) ‘accessible’, all of which entailed a new attitude to popular music. Whatever its ideals, in practice neoclassicism was highly eclectic. Its music made constant use of the popular, habitually setting it off against the learned.

This chapter sketches key contexts (both global-political and scholarly) for the research presented by this book. By way of introduction to the individual chapters in the book, a number of connecting preoccupations are identified: debates over artistic experiment and populism, and over the handling of cultural difference; the diverse motivations for communist organisations to become involved in music, and their anxieties about such an involvement; attempts made to evade the grasp of political and economic structures (state and commerce especially) that communists typically opposed; and experimentation in alternative forms of musical practice that were imagined better to reflect communist ideology. The irreducible plurality of positions staked out by communist musicians and groups is emphasised.

This chapter examines the subjective orientations and pathways of an earlier generation of Nashville artists who helped shape the community of Nashville's increasingly entrepreneurial, popular-music musicians. As an artistrtist activist engaged primarily in individual action, the enterprising artist thrives on self-expression, continuous self-instruction in a widening skill portfolio of artistic and support functions, self-promotion, and on maintaining mutually beneficial relations with colleagues. Enterprising artists sustain their ongoing relations with colleagues, as the profiles in this chapter show, by maintaining trusting and equitable, collegial relations, relations that may succumb to interpersonal animosity, rivalry, jealousy, and betrayal. Sociologically, this chapter depicts the subjective orientations toward success, audience, and risk and the career pathways taken by four individual representatives of what is here referred to as the “transformative generation of enterprising artists” of the changing Nashville music scene.