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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

At the time of writing, several political agreements are being signed, all of which seek, despite their unevenness, peace between Israel and the Arab populations living in its midst. Popular culture in Israel at large, and popular music in particular, is not indifferent to this changing state of affairs. Indeed, numerous groups and singers have emerged whose songs appear primarily to be concerned with combining modern Hebrew with Arabic, and bringing together Israeli singers with Israeli Palestinian and Arabic popular music singers. While this kind of collaboration is becoming increasingly visible, let us not forget that it began in the heyday of the Intifada.