This volume of essays by the distinguished musicologist Charles Hamm focuses on the context of popular music and its interrelationships with other styles and genres, including classical music, the meaning of popular music for audiences, and the institutional appropriation of this music for hegemonic purposes. Specific topics include the use of popular song to rouse anti-slavery sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century America, the reception of such African-American styles and genres as rock 'n' roll and soul music by the black population of South Africa, the question of genre in the early songs of Irving Berlin, the attempts by the governments of South Africa and China to impose specific bodies of music on their populations, the persistence of the minstrel show in rural twentieth-century America and the impact of modernist modes of thought on writing about popular music.

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It is a common argument by now that the modern mass media and the music they disseminate have been ‘used by economically and politically powerful interests within the state to support the capitalist relations of production and to legitimise the social, economic and political organisation of society’ (Tomaselli et al. 1986, p. 19). Criticism directed more specifically at radio has focused chiefly on capitalist societies in which there are multiple channels of entertainment and information. A recent issue of the present journal devoted to radio, for instance, was concerned only with the UK, Canada, and the USA (Popular Music, 9/2, 1990). Little critical attention has been focused on the use of radio to ‘legitimise the social, economic and political organisation of society’ in countries in which the state assumes full control over programming and transmission.

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