Among the biggest international hits of 1991 was ‘Sadeness’, a piece of music created in a studio in Spain by Michael Cretu, a German-based, Rumanian-born producer using samples from recordings of Gregorian chants. This followed the chart successes of dance records created in Belgium by Technotronic and Snap, in Italy (Black Box) and Sweden (Dr Alban).

We have now heard him, the strange wonder, whom the superstition of past ages, possessed by the delusion that such things could never be done without the help of the Evil One, would undoubtedly have condemned to the stake – we have heard him, and seen him too, which, of course, makes a part of the affair. Just look at the pale, slender youth in his clothes that signal the nonconformist; the long, sleek, drooping hair … those features so strongly stamped and full of meaning, in this respect reminding one of Paganini, who, indeed, has been his model of hitherto undreamt-of virtuosity and technical brilliance from the very first moment he heard him and was swept away.

In recent years, pop/rock has ceased being an exclusive Anglo-American phenomenon. Local styles of rock might be found today in many countries, styles which merge local traditions with the rock aesthetic. Some products of these styles are distributed successfully in the USA and Britain under the large title of ‘ethnic pop’ (sometimes ‘world music’). The work on the emergence of these local styles tends to stress their ‘authenticity’ in one way or another: in the way they reflect political resistance, in the way they express cultural change (Szemere 1983; Fiori 1984; Vila 1987; Duran 1989; Siriyuvasak 1990; Bright 1986; Manuel 1988; Frith 1989). In addition, much of the work tends to be descriptive – there are hardly any attempts to theorise the emergence of pop/rock and its becoming ‘local authentic’ music. One salient exception is the work of Wallis and Malm (1984). They describe a two-way flow of musical elements, in which local or national music cultures both contribute to and pick up from an emerging body of music which they call transcultural. Anglo-American pop/rock is the nucleus of transcultural music. The simultaneous convergence of its influence, of access to music industry technologies, of local music culture and of the will to create something different explains, according to Wallis and Malm, the first stage of transculturation in the countries they studied.

Roxette is surely one of the most successful new Euro-bands to arrive in recent years. Sales of the 1988 album ‘Look Sharp’ are over 6 million units, while the 1991 album ‘Joyride’ has already surpassed that mark making it one of the biggest selling albums of the year around the world. Still Roxette has a long way to go before reaching the hundreds of millions its Swedish predecessor Abba sold over their twelve-year-long career. While Roxette are dressed for success into the nineties they most certainly learned their career moves from Abba. This is a topic we shall have cause to return to but first I would like to discuss the transnational music companies and their European strategies. Then I shall examine recent developments and changes in the Swedish market-place before returning to a concluding look at different career models of Swedish pop stars.

JB was proof that black people were different. Rhythmically and tonally blacks had to be from somewhere else. Proof that Africa was really over there for those of us who had never seen it – it was in that voice. (Thulani Davis, quoted Guralnick 1986, pp. 242–3)

If there is any black man who symbolizes the vast differences between black and white cultural and aesthetic values, Soul Brother No. 1 (along with Ray Charles) is that man. (David Levering Lewis, quoted Guralnick 1986, p. 240)

Brown has never been a critics' favorite principally because of the apparent monotony of so many of his post-1965 recordings. But attacking him for being repetitive is like attacking Africans for being overly fond of drumming. Where the European listener may hear monotonous beating, the African distinguishes subtle polyrhythmic interplay, tonal distinctions among the various drums, the virtuosity of the master drummer, and so on. Similarly, Brown sounds to some European ears like so much harsh shrieking. (Robert Palmer 1980, p. 141)

During the 1960s James Brown single handedly demonstrated the possibilities for artistic and economic freedom that black music could provide if one constantly struggled against its limitations … He was driven by an enormous ambition and unrelenting ego, making him a living symbol of black self-determination … Motown may have been the sound of young America, but Brown was clearly the king of black America. (Nelson George 1988, pp. 98–9)

The biographies of most stars work on the misconception that a performer's true, private self can be discretely separated from the meaning of their public image. Whether it is a serious study of a major artist or a trashy exposé of a behind-the-scenes scandal, the organisational logic is usually the same: the writer assumes that since a media image is a false representation of an actual person, digging deep into the background and lifestyle of any star can only help to reveal something of what that person is ‘really’ like.

The diffusion of rock and popular music from the US and British mass entertainment industries since the 1950s has had a profound impact on the music traditions world-wide. Several generations of youth have been socialised to the musical accompaniment of rock and roll music of the 1950s, the ‘beat music’ of the 1960s, the so-called ‘psychedelic’ or ‘underground’ rock music of the 1970s, disco, punk and new wave music in the 1970s and 1980s. It has resulted in the transplantation of these ‘foreign’ styles into music cultures with small groups of fan communities for rock and roll, country and western, blues, punk, reggae and others which were previously unheard of there before their introduction. In addition, domestic traditions have been profoundly affected by the diffusion of these new music styles and have integrated some of their musical, technical and other components into their own repertoires. The Schlager music in the German-speaking countries has been one of the most prominent in this respect, adapting syncopated rhythm but modifying its harmonic attributes in order to maintain its own prominence and cultural legitimacy in the music culture. Even the volkstümliche or folk-like music, a commercialised genre of traditional folk music, has undergone changes as a result of the diffusion of the newer forms of popular music. A third type of impact upon music tradition is that of ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ styles. When imported musical and cultural innovations are mixed with domestic styles and traditions, these new styles and conventions are ultimately created. These, in turn, form a primary thrust in the cultivation and development of innovations in musical traditions, which eventually evolve into changes in the cultural identity of the particular country.

Musically, it (Lovesexy) is probably the most complex and unconventional body of work he (Prince) has ever produced. The dense undergrowth of twists and disjunctures to which even the most structured songs are subjected brings to mind once again the extended jam rehearsal technique Prince has always favoured. (Hill 1989, p. 210)

Chuck Berry recorded ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in December 1957 and it has since become one of his best-known songs. The reasons for its lasting popularity are varied, and one of the goals of this article is to elucidate and discuss them. But the main purpose is to raise ‘Johnny B. Goode’ as an example of the choices and problems Berry faced in his career as an African-American musician in the 1950s and 60s and the ways he dealt with them in this tune.

Blues music is relatively well recognised as a cultural phenomenon. In tracing its history, both as a reflection of one people's particular circumstances of oppression and as an ingredient taken into mainstream popular art, we accumulate reasons for thinking of it as important. But these are external reasons. It is possible to know that one's everyday milieu is heavily indebted to blues (in manners as well as in music), even to feel blues quality strongly, and yet not be able to articulate an understanding of the import of blues. In that case one is kept from thinking well about how the meaning of blues in, say, the life of an early twentieth-century black Mississippian relates to the meaning of blues in other sorts of life, including yours and mine today – which is precisely the inside of the cultural phenomenon of blues. To get over this hump we need to pay a kind of attention that blues rarely receives.

Música sertaneja could be considered the Brazilian counterpart to American ‘country’ music. What defines the genre is not its rhythmic patterns, which vary considerably, but a performance style involving duplas (duos) singing in parallel thirds to the accompaniment of a guitar and a viola. Having developed out of southeastern traditional genres, it is the popular musical style that most appeals to migrants from these regions now living in the industrial centres of Greater São Paulo. Although today música sertaneja is primarily an urban phenomenon, the style also reaches audiences throughout the rural areas of central and southeastern Brazil.

Rock and pop music in the USSR and eastern Europe has become an area of increasing interest to both the western mass media and cultural studies since glasnost, perestroika, the collapse of the Eastern bloc Communist regimes and the constitution of new western-styled democratic governments. This is largely because rock music has represented probably the most widespread vehicle of youth rebellion, resistance and independence behind the Iron Curtain, both in terms of providing an enhanced political context for the often banned sounds of British and American rock, and in the development of home-grown musics built on western foundations but resonating within their own highly charged political contexts. As the East German critic Peter Wicke has claimed,

Because of the intrinsic characteristics of the circumstances within which rock music is produced and consumed, this cultural medium became, in the GDR, the most suitable vehicle for forms of cultural and political resistance that could not be controlled by the state. (Wicke 1991, p. 1)

Until the late 1970s rock music in Poland was hidden behind many different labels, such as ‘music of a young generation’, ‘youth music’ or ‘big beat’, usually meaning something, if not pejorative, at least suspicious. Having the flavour of a forbidden fruit, genuine rock functioned quite successfully, mostly through independent circulation, not only as a specific form of art, but, first of all, as a symbol of protest against an existing political and social order (it does not matter if we call it ‘communistic’ or ‘capitalistic’); it was a symbol of independence and freedom.

Is country music for real? This question haunts country's detractors, critics, fans and analysts, as it haunts all students of popular culture. Country music is only an extreme example of the instability, contradiction and ironic reflexivity characteristic of popular cultural forms in general in postmodern, capitalist society. It seems impossible to locate an ‘authentic’ country music text, performance or context, one which represents the ‘real’ life of a ‘real’ community without alienated nostalgia, false consciousness or kitschy commodification. On the other hand, country remains more overtly loyal to the experience, desires and language of a particular class and culture than almost any other major popular musical genre. A unique, if elusive core of ‘authenticity’ tantalises country's supporters and infuriates its critics, but attempts to separate the true from the false in country music, whether at the level of text, context or performance, are bound to fail. Country resists all such attempts; it incorporates and combines the true and the false into a poetic which is explicitly deconstructive of the ideology which these categories encode.

There are two seemingly self-evident truths concerning the harmonic practices of popular music. The first, which finds clear expression in Adorno, is that such music's harmonic language is both detrimentally limited and static. The harmonic repertoire is considered to consist of a few formulae (Adorno deals with them in terms of standardisation: see Middleton 1990, p. 45ff.), by means of which song-writers string together their songs, uninfluenced by the song's content. For the expert listener, therefore, popular music should be uninteresting: it is only its psycho-economic dimension which makes it worthy of study. This tends also to be the conclusion of established musicology, except that there it is felt such ‘extra-musical’ speculation is best left to the sociologist. The second truth is that the differences between Afro-American-derived styles are material, since our identities are so strongly incorporated in the styles we use:

We mark out the differences between genres and styles partly by reference to contrasts in the way this stock of techniques and sounds is used. (Middleton 1990, p. 88)

Since harmony is not only at the forefront of traditional analytical investigation, but also forms an important initial focus for songwriters, it may well be assumed that it is therefore an important factor in enabling us to distinguish, for example, ‘rock’ from ‘pop’ from ‘soul’. However, the material reality behind these differences of style has rarely been subject to systematic investigation.