The study of music and national identity has been limited, in my view, by some underlying assumptions. The first is connected to some influential ideas on nationalism, while the second has to do with long-standing ideas about the relation between music and identity. On nationalism, many approaches place too much emphasis on the homogenising tendencies of nationalist discourse, whereas, in my view, homogenisation exists in a complex and ambivalent relationship with the construction of difference by the same nationalist forces that create homogeneity. In a related fashion, with respect to music and identity, several studies of Latin American musical styles and their socio-political context – for example, ones focusing on the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Brazil – display a tendency to set up a model of homogenising elites versus diversifying and resistant minorities.

Although many TV shows from the 1950s seem very odd when viewed today, one of the most peculiar relics of all is Your Hit Parade. This is especially true in light of our current understanding of what it means to visualise a song on television. Although music video looked strange when first seen in the 1970s and early 1980s, it is now highly conventionalised and part of the cultural backdrop. By contrast, Your Hit Parade gropes uneasily to connect the radio past with the burgeoning and increasingly estranged record and television industries of the 1950s. As an aesthetic document, Your Hit Parade is instructive in its display of unproductive tensions: narrative and dramatic visualisations clashing with a simpler, non-representational variety style; pop domesticating an inchoate rock and roll; and a lackadaisical parade struggling to become a quasi-eventful countdown.

When we become engaged with a music video, what draws us in? What constitutes craft or artistry in the genre? Theorists of music video have usually addressed these questions from the perspective of sociology, film theory or popular cultural studies. Film theory, in particular, has had a tremendous influence on the analysis of music video, because of the two genres' apparently similar structuring of sound and image. But by the criteria of film, music videos tend to come off as failed narratives; the genre's effectiveness eludes explanation.

In an article discussing hip-hop in Germany, one would expect an outline of how hip-hop emerged in the two German states or an analysis of the differences and similarities of the hip-hop scene in the two parts of the country or a report on how this youth culture has been affected by the process of political unification. However, an immediate analysis of the situation shows that although the hip-hop scene was organised in similar ways in both German states, and had similar role models, all the better known acts came from the west.

Since the early 1980s Indian diasporic communities have attained sufficient size, affluence, self-awareness and generational distance from South Asia to have created a set of popular music styles that are autonomous and distinctive rather than strictly derivative of Indian models. While the bhangra music of British Punjabis has attracted some scholarly and journalistic attention, chutney, a syncretic Indo-Caribbean popular music and dance idiom, is little known outside its own milieu. This article constitutes a preliminary socio-musical study of chutney.

Since autumn 1989 when the ‘peaceful revolution’ in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) made Die Mauer (The Wall) fall, Germany has gone through a transformation process incomparable in world history. To understand how popular music has changed during this period it is necessary, first, to describe the situation in the former GDR before examining the personal views of two famous exponents of rock music in East Germany, Tony Krahl (leader of the band City) and the vocal group Die Prinzen, from Leipzig.

Popular music is sometimes discussed from a rather ethnocentric viewpoint, lacking awareness of, or not acknowledging, influences assimilated from non-Western musics, while in the field of ethnomusicology, issues such as the preservation of traditional styles (see Baumann 1992, pp. 11–15) remain important, but there is an increased interest in the processes of change and the effects of technology (see, for example, Wallis and Malm 1984). As Western and traditional styles interact, changes occur, and as Frith puts it: ‘popular music study rests on the assumption that there is no such thing as a culturally “pure” sound’ (1989, p. 3).

The two passages that follow appeared within a few weeks of each other in 1963. At a glance they have little to do with one another:

Between them The Beatles adopt a do-it-yourself approach from the very beginning. They write their own lyrics, design and eventually build their own instrumental backdrops and work out their own vocal arrangements. Their music is wild, pungent, hard-hitting, uninhibited…and personal. The do-it-yourself angle ensures complete originality at all stages of the production. (Barrow 1963)

The events of 1989 mark a turning-point in German history. Among the other far-reaching economic and social consequences of German reunification, the German market for audio-visual media expanded considerably.

Robert Johnson's 1936–37 recordings are widely held to have consummated the Delta blues style, and to have provided one of the very few pre-war influences on rock. Yet it is his pathetic life and the occasional metaphysical imagery of his lyrics that have commanded critical attention. Consequently we have as yet still to discover what precisely makes his music take on such historical significance. It seems to me that two features of Johnson's music demand our attention: first, his inflections of pitch and timbre; second, his irregular, and often syncopated, metres. This article scrutinises, and extrapolates from the latter.

Early popular and theoretical work in popular music studies often bestowed implicit or explicit legitimacy on forms of music cultivating or preserving a ‘live’, ‘unplugged’, ‘acoustic’ and hence ‘authentic’ sound. Over the past fifteen years, much popular music scholarship (Frith 1986; Goodwin 1992; Cutler 1984) has rightly problematised this approach. It is important to note, however, that interpretations of popular music texts or scenes that depict the electrification or digitalisation of sound as uncomplicatedly pro-social or progressive remain problematic themselves. Within popular music production today, few areas exist where these aesthetics of recorded music have failed to penetrate. But there is one sub-field of popular music where the characteristic sounds of recording studio technology are still relatively new. It warrants the attention not only of those engaged in the study of popular music, but also of those involved in the exploration of virtual environments. This sub-field is the contemporary stage musical.

Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1923 in reference to an old ‘Fasching’ tune of that era that this song comprised the ‘most complete expression of the German “Volksseele” (“soul of people”) that one could imagine’ and that it ‘truly reveals the day and age we live in, how this age has evolved and how we ourselves come to terms with this age’ (Tucholsky 1975, p. 187). His argument can be compared to Kracauer's thesis on the effects of film (Kracauer 1979, p. 11). He suggested that the commercial character of mass cultural production was constantly affected by what was provided in a stream of feedback: only commodities which convincingly meet public expectations on either a latent or manifest level are successful with the public. If the masses are moved by a national rhythmic feeling, then the hits articulating that feeling can be seen as a kind of national expression. From this perspective, national and political identities are bound up in the daily emotional turbulence of the music industry.

Every weekday evening on Columbia Broadcasting's (CBS) Late Show, host David Letterman delivers his tongue-in-cheek top ten lists. The lists have become one of the most recognisable symbols of American popular culture. Part of the humour lies in the pithy ranked statements about current events. However, much of the fun resides in Letterman's mockery of our obsession with rankings – rankings of everything from automobiles to college football teams to human attractiveness. The humour is sustained from night to night, week to week, year to year because of our uneasiness with rankings as a very powerful and enduring value-organising tool.

Both Popular Music and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) have been in existence for almost a generation. Given the radical social and political changes affecting the general spheres of work, education and research since the establishment of those two institutions in 1981, it is perhaps time for popular music scholars to review their own historical position and to work out strategies for the brave new world of monetarism facing those who will hopefully survive another generation after we quinquagenarian baby boomers of the rock era have disappeared from the academic scene. Of course, such a process of intellectual and ideological stocktaking requires detailed discussion of a wide range of political, economic and social issues that cannot be covered in a single article. I will therefore restrict the account that follows to a discussion of one particular set of historical strands affecting the development of popular music studies. This part of our history is virtually unknown in the anglophone quarters that have, for obvious reasons of language and music media hegemony, dominated the international field of popular music studies. It is, however, as I hope to show, a story of considerable relevance to more general problems of music education and research at the turn of the millennium. I shall return to these broader issues at the end of the article.

In the field of scientific research on popular music there are a number of studies of the reception of rock music and various sociological analyses of the music industry, but there are few studies of rock musicians themselves. The empirical musician studies that do exist tend to use qualitative data analysis and to pursue limited research interests. There is thus work on the formation of rock bands (Jones and Harvey 1980; Schäffer 1996), on cover bands (Groce 1989), on group processes and structures (Groce and Dowell 1988; Tennstedt 1979), on female musicians (Groce and Cooper 1990) and on amateur musicians (Clemens 1983). Studies with standardised questionnaire and quantitative data analysis are rarer (but see Wills and Cooper 1988; and in Germany, Dollase, Rüsenberg and Stollenwerk 1974; Ebbecke and Lüschper 1987; Niketta 1986; Niketta, Niepel and Nonninger 1983; Weber 1990). The problem of these studies is their narrow database, and so I want to report here on a research project designed to provide empirically well-founded but broad-based evidence of the situation of rock musicians in West Germany. The research was undertaken in order to inform strategies for promoting rock music making in Germany (see Zickenheiner 1988). It was financed by the Federal Ministry for Education and Science and the Secretariat for Common Cultural Activities, in co-operation with the Centre for Music and Communication Technology, Wuppertal. The original project report was published in 1993 (Niketta and Volke 1993).