In recent years popular music scholars have paid increasing attention to musical sound. From Robert Walser's landmark work on heavy metal (1993), to Alan Moore's important analysis of rock style periods (1993), to a number of shorter studies (Whiteley 1990; Josephson 1992; Bowman 1995; Ford 1995; Hawkins 1996; Edström 1996), more and more scholars have recognised that all levels of scholarly focus must be pursued if we are to gain purchase on the phenomena of popular music. With no exceptions of which I am aware, all the popular music scholars concerned specifically with musical sound seek to explore the connections between sound and its social contexts. My goal here is to show how attention to musical perception can forward this project and to argue that perception is best understood as a kind of social practice. The act of perception constitutes musical forms and musical meanings in experience. The act of perception is where the rubber of sound meets the road of social life, and by treating perception as a practice we can draw more intimate connections between songs and subjects, sound and society, than would be possible if we were to start from musical structures and then search for linkages to social context. None of this, of course, is to deny the value of studies focused on musical structures, performance events, broad social contexts or large-scale social history, but to argue that the constitution of musical perception by musicians and listeners deserves greater attention and to suggest how this kind of scrutiny might serve the larger aims of popular music studies.

My purpose in this paper is to recount the history of the Parents' Music Resource Center, an American organisation founded in 1985 whose main concern has been to denounce the obscenity and violence of rock music on the grounds that it is partly responsible for the numerous ills that plague the United States. The PMRC claimed that it only wished to inform the public but my suggestion here is that the actions of the organisation resulted in a de facto censorship of popular music. I shall accordingly describe the various steps of the process that led from information to censorship as well as probe the deeper reasons that may have motivated the action of the Center.

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.

In a recent issue of Popular Music devoted to the music of the Middle East, Martin Stokes and Ruth Davis note that ‘the movement of Middle Eastern sounds into Western cultural spaces … has largely been ignored’ (1996, p. 255) and that ‘Middle Eastern popular musics will probably continue to mark an unassimilable and unwelcome “otherness” for most Europeans and Americans’ (ibid, p. 257). In this paper, written partly in response to these remarks, I examine the movement of contemporary Middle Eastern sounds into Greek cultural space and Greek musical culture, a musical culture that has an affinity with ‘Eastern’ musics but also a strong sense of its own identity. Middle Eastern music can indeed take on the form of an ‘unwelcome “otherness”’ in Greece and I shall provide examples of this from my own fieldwork on the Greek island of Crete. Greece and the Greek islands are outposts, on the European periphery, on the frontier between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’, where a history of confrontations, invasions and forced exchanges in political, economic and demographic terms with the Middle East has ensued for millenia. Greece and Turkey still remain in dispute over territory from the Thracian borderlands to the smaller islands of the Eastern Aegean Sea.

Curiosity value quite possibly accounted for the success of Kate Bush's first single in 1978. Those who have continued to admire her more particularly for her later musical achievements, which have surely consolidated her position as one of the most individual and innovative artists of the 1980s and 1990s, do so possibly in spite of (rather than because of) the impact of ‘Wuthering Heights’. No other song of hers has had the same public appeal – it stayed in the British charts for seventy-five weeks (Rice 1991) – and perhaps the smaller group of admirers who remain loyal engage more with the intensely personal visions into which her lyrics have matured, as opposed to that first, more musically zany, original hit.

The following comments appeared on the front page of the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on 19 January 1989, in a story about a performance in the Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton) by Hong Kong singer Anita Mui YimFong .

Few popular songs released over the past thirty years start so memorably: that bass riff, ominous, music for Jaws before there was Jaws, so insistent and unforgiving that in GoodFellas (1990), Scorsese has de Niro do nothing but smoke a ‘square’ and look – icily – off screen while the riff sounds its ten-note pattern. And you know what the combination of de Niro's look, those sounds and that smoke mean: somebody is going to get ‘whacked’. Cream's 1968 hit, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, has been part of the shared culture of the world in which it has sounded for thirty years. In both Europe and America, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ (SYL) continues to receive airplay today. At high school and college sporting events across the US, pep bands continue to play it (Dan Farris, Assistant Director of Bands, Illinois State University, personal communication, 5 March 1997). A band played it, too, in a 5 April 1997 episode of the NBC television network series, Profiler.