Issues

ISSUE 15 – Volume 8, Issue 2 – November 2024

Asian Popular Music

Guest Editors: Sharon Kong-Perring (Birmingham City University, UK) and Dr Mathieu Berbiguier (Carnegie Mellon University, US)

Asian pop music has experienced a spectacular rise in markets globally and outside of the Asian continent, yet its popularity and relevance in academia, content creation, media, and editorial pieces are often still narrowly defined within a prevailing narrative: Asian popular music’s “mainstream” ideation has been contingent upon the Global North’s acknowledgment of Asian music as something that is popular. In continuing to entrench this hegemonic narrative, existing power structures that cast Global North music and media as arbiters of what is popular ignore narratives which place these Global South sounds/songs/compositions/cultures at the centre. In the same way “Squid Games” actor Lee Jung-jae was asked by an American reporter “what was the biggest change” in his life now that he was famous – the reporter unaware of his incredible stardom in Asia for two decades –, the Global North treats the Global South as part of the periphery working inward, rather than at the centre of its own story. 

In this special issue of Riffs, we place Asian popular music at the core of our focus, rather than solely exploring its intersections with “the west”.

ISSUE 14 – Volume 8, Issue 1 – February 2024

American Graffiti

Guest Editor: Prof. Nick Gebhardt (Birmingham City University, UK)

This issue brings together work developed in 2019 by members of the Riffs editorial board as part of their Write Club, designed and run by Prof. Nick Gebhardt (Birmingham City University, UK). The pieces engage with George Lucas’ (dir.) American Graffiti (1973), a film soundtracked through 1960s and 50s music, overheard from radios, diner juke boxes, and the cars of 1962 Modesto city.

ISSUE 13 – Volume 7, Issue 1 – October 2023

Popular Music Materialities Part II

Guest Editor: Dr Iain A. Taylor (University of the West of Scotland, UK)

ISSUE 12 –Volume 6, Issue 2 – February 2023

Popular Music Materialities Part I

Guest Editor: Dr Iain A. Taylor (University of the West of Scotland, UK)

“What we had thought to be an object was revealed as what I would call a thing. And the thing about things, if you will, is that far from standing before us as a fait accompli, complete in itself, each is a ‘going on’—or better, a place where several goings on become entwined” (Ingold, 2010: 96). For this issue of Riffs, we explore popular music, and popular music culture, as a thing, a ‘going on’ or, better yet, as a place where several goings on become entwined.

ISSUE 11 – Volume 6, Issue 1 – August 2022

 otobiographies: a posthumous collaboration with jacques derrida

Guest Editor: Dr Jenny Ann Cubin (independent, UK)

the ear is uncanny

(large or small)

it is the most open organ.

i tell my life to my self

(i recite and recount)

but become what i am

through the ear i borrow

(through the ear you lend).

we proceed

seeking out the edges

(the inner walls, the passages).

these labyrinths come down 

to the ear you hear me with

(to the ear I hear you with).

we recite and recount

and become what we are.

ISSUE 10 – Volume 5, Issue 2 – December 2021

Popular Music Ethnographies

Guest Editors: Shane Blackman and Rob McPherson (Christ Church Canterbury University, UK)

The reader of popular music ethnography is transported and immersed into new and unfamiliar worlds. The sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of making and experiencing music – carefully curated – sow the seeds of critical insights and we step into and through a scene, an industry, a performance, a particular moment in time or an amalgamation of years watching, listening and taking part. For a moment, we are there. We travel with the narrator and are called upon to do our own part of the intellectual labour. We learn to search for clues as we enter into a smokey club or read a very personal recollection of music that was heard last night, last month, last year, during an altogether very different life which, nonetheless, imprinted itself indelibly on the speaker: glimpses of experiences which will shortly become the topic for analysis, comparison and critique. As Sara Cohen advocates in her 1993 article:

“[ethnographic approaches to the study of popular music] should focus upon social relationships, emphasising music as social practice and process. It should also be comparative and holistic; historical and dialogical; reflexive and policy orientated. It should emphasise, among other things, the dynamic complexities of situations within which abstract concepts and models are embedded, and which they often simplify or obscure.”

ISSUE 9 – Volume 5, Issue 1 – August 2021

Popular Music Fiction

Guest Editor: Dr Ash Watson (UNSW Sydney, Australia)

“Perhaps only imagination, in its full processes, can touch and reach and recognise and embody… There are many other kinds of writing in society, but these now—of past and present and future—are close and urgent, challenging many of us to try both to understand and to attempt them” – Raymond Williams

“Good prose is like a windowpane” – George Orwell

ISSUE 8 – Volume 4, Issue 2 – December 2020

Music and Technology Part II

Guest Editor: Dr Edmund Hunt (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire UK)

ISSUE 7 – Volume 4, Issue 1 – July 2020

Music and Technology Part I

Guest Editor: Dr Edmund Hunt (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire UK)

’Technology is something I love and hate at the same time. One one hand the absence of any kind of technology means silence (or an environment of natural sounds which we hear much clearer because of the general silence); on the other hand, you need technology to make art’. – Christina Kubisch, ‘Artists’ Statements II: Christina Kubisch’, in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, ed. by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escriván, 2nd edn (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2017:176)

ISSUE 6 – Volume 3, Issue 2 – November 2019

Festivals

Issue Editors: Dr Craig Hamilton and Dr Sarah Raine (Birmingham City University, UK)

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days. – The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway.

ISSUE 5 – Volume 3, Issue 1 – April 2019

Ideas of Noise

Guest Editor: Prof Nicholas Gebhardt (Birmingham City University, UK)

In partnership with Ideas of Noise festival, Birmingham.

ISSUE 4 – Volume 2, Issue 2 – December 2018

Reggae Soundsystem

Guest Editor: Dr Simon Jones (Middlesex University, UK)

“Playing MUSIC, for me right, it gets some heads together…gets a little TRIBAL thing going on, you know. Get the FREQUENCY up…..Everybody’s on the frequency. It’s always been about that…and EXCITING people and changing their frequency“, Robbo Dread, Birmingham, 2017

ISSUE 3 – Volume 2, Issue 1 – July 2018 

Pop Music Criticism

Guest Editor: Laura Snapes, Deputy Music Editor, The Guardian (UK)

“There is nothing wrong with hating rock critics” – Of Montreal, 2003

ISSUE 2 – Volume 1, Issue 2 – October 2017

Songwriting

Guest Editor: Dr Simon Barber (Birmingham City University, UK)

A song can be about anything

About peace or war, or the sins of industry

Or the discontents of fame, or of obscurity

Or how we first met, on the warmest day

And how I hadn’t planned to love someone until you came

Or how we survived on happiness and sleeping on the floor

Or how you used to love me but you don’t even know me anymore 

– Dan Wilson, ‘A Song Can Be About Anything’ from Love Without Fear

ISSUE 1 – Volume 1, Issue 1 – February 2017

The Quality of Sound

Guest Editor: Prof Nicholas Gebhardt, (Birmingham City University, UK)

“Here are mutes, liquids, aspirates – vowels, semivowels and consonants. Now we see that words have not only a definition and possibly a connotation, but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.” (Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook).