When musicians ‘cover’ a previously recorded song, they provide an intertextual commentary on another musical work or style. This paper considers several ways in which such commentaries engage constructions of authenticity, focusing on two covers by the Pet Shop Boys: ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, originally by U2, and ‘Go West’, first recorded by the Village People. I analyse the musical sound, performance style, and lyrical themes of each pair of songs, as well as the discourse surrounding their production and reception. I also consider how scholars have theorised authenticity in the interpretive traditions engaged by these songs. I argue that the Pet Shop Boys’ version of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ is subversive, poking fun at certain common ways of expressing authenticity in 1980s rock, while their cover of ‘Go West’ repositions disco - a genre that has widely been construed as inauthentic - as a type of ‘roots music’ for the gay community of the 1990s.

The term ‘world music’ usually conjures up images of musics from ‘remote’ corners of the world. However, that remoteness is not always geographical and can, for example, be chronological. Tôgi Hideki, a former musician from the Imperial court in Japan, has sought to introduce court music - gagaku - to a wider audience through the reworking of traditional gagaku pieces and new compositions for gagaku instruments. Gagaku boasts a history of over 1,200 years and its esoteric nature inhibits popular interest. Tôgi Hideki’s popularised gagaku, on the other hand, has found a new audience for gagaku, and his music serves as a bridge introducing Japanese back to a remote part of Japanese musical culture.

Musical borrowings, or samples, have long been a means of creating lineage between hip-hop and older genres of African-American music such as funk, soul, and rhythm and blues. DJs who sample from this so-called ‘Old School’ attempt to link hip-hop to older, venerable traditions of black popular music. This article investigates the importance of 1970s pop and culture to hip-hop music. This era is depicted as a time in which African-American identity coalesced, and a new political consciousness was born. The primary source for images of the 1970s was and continues to be blaxploitation film, a genre of low-budget, black-oriented crime and suspense cinema. This article will detail how blaxploitation distilled certain societal concerns of the 1970s, and how in turn hip-hop feeds off blaxploitation both dramatically and musically, reusing its story lines and sampling its soundtracks.

This paper offers an introduction to a distinct group of musical consumers: bootleg collectors and tape traders. It begins by defining the types of recording under discussion before outlining some of the discourse surrounding the collection of unauthorised recordings. Bootleg collectors and tape traders exist in a relationship of mutual distrust with the legitimate music industry: collectors view the industry as a barrier to musical experience while the industry views these collectors as at best a nuisance and at worst as having a detrimental impact upon official sales. The paper argues, however, that the relationship is in fact more complex. It shows that through an intensification of discourses of authenticity, collectors of unauthorised recordings actually provide ideological support for the recording industry, helping valorise musical commodities and thus maintain a dialectical relationship between collectors and the legitimate industry.

Veteran Egyptian shaabi singer Shaaban Abd al-Rahim recently attained superstar status as the ‘interpreter of the pulse of the Egyptian-Arab street’ due to a pop hit proclaiming his hatred for Israel. Shaaban’s notoriety has been further enhanced by his abortive sponsorship of an ‘indigenous’ sandwich marketed in Egypt by McDonald's. Contracted by the fast food giant precisely because of his popularity, the singer was soon after dismissed in the wake of political pressure outside Egypt regarding the song that had made him a star. The deliberate turn to a singer like Shaaban for product sponsorship, especially for a commercial to be broadcast by state-run media, underscores weakening boundaries between what is ‘classically’ approved and what is still considered to be ‘vulgar’ or ‘low-class’ music, however popular it is among wide sectors of the population. For the moment, at least, Shaaban has become a figure with whom even a scornful intelligentsia must contend.

From the mid-1980s, rock music emerged as the leading musical culture in the major cities of the Soviet Union. In writings and research on this ‘Soundtrack of Perestroika’, attention has been primarily paid to the words rather than the sounds. Russian rock critics and academics, as well as those who participate in Russian rock culture, persistently emphasise the literary qualities of Russian rock music and most still prefer to approach rock as a form of musical poetry - ‘Rok poèziya’. This seems out of step with the growing emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach within popular music studies. The aim of this article is to investigate and discuss some of the core arguments that underpin notions of Russian rock music's literary qualities. This may help to uncover some specific national characteristics of rock in Russia, whilst at the same time questioning the need for, and value of, a literary approach to the study of Russian rock.