Cover Versions Research Articles

Book review: Layered Intrusions, ed. by Bernard Charlier, Olivier Namur, Rais Latypov, and Christian Tegner

Book review: Layered Intrusions. Edited by Bernard Charlier, Olivier Namur, Rais Latypov, Christian Tegner (2015) Springer, 748 p. $179 (Hardcover), $139 (eBook), ISBN 978-94-017-9651-4. The book entitled Layered Intrusions is a well-sized collection of 15 chapters written by 36 authors—each being an expert in their prevailing sub-discipline. Hence, the book covers all aspects of the emplacement and evolution of large mafic to ultramafic magma chambers. All chapters provide a broad introduction to their topics and are richly illustrated. References appear at the end of each chapter and support the readers’ further education on particular topics. The book is well written and intends to aid in further training of graduate and undergraduate students; however, the addition of access to illustrations and figures online would increase its value as a teaching resource. All chapters are available as e-books, so with a little extra effort and expense, if you have the hard cover version, images and figures for teaching can be obtained from these. Each of the 15 chapters are available separately for $29.95. Photographs and photomicrographs are mostly color images, where grayscale images are used, these are labelled to avoid any confusion that might arise. The book is organized into two main parts that are summarized in the two paragraphs below: the first part includes reviews and new views on the formation processes of layered intrusions. The second part reviews the state of recent cutting-edge research of layered intrusions in the field. The book begins with the geochronology of layered intrusions. Chapter 1 provides information about advantages and disadvantages of well-known dating methods, e.g., U-Th-Pb, K-Ar and which of these best applied to layered intrusions from different periods in the Earth’s history. Cooling rates of the intrusions are determined by choosing various mineral species with different closing temperatures, the temperature at which radiogenic elements are retained in the crystal lattice. The case studies suggest that duration of magmatism of layered intrusions can be restricted to brief …

Mass-Mediated Protest Music and Mobilization: Synthesizing the Civil Sphere’s EMM-Framing Theory

INTRODUCTIONI remember when I was little, my Dad-who was particularly anti-war-played this song for me depicting the night during World War I...Christmas Eve. And the soldiers...decided to have a truce. And they all have this... party and they're showing pictures of their families. And they're sharing drinks....And then the night ends and they go back to their trenches. And the next day they are all killing each other again. And my Dad was very, very moved by this song and played for me and was crying. And I remember... thinking that was an incredible song...but also being touched that touched him. (Sarah-Activist, Focus Group Interview 9/26/09)This focus group interview is part of a larger media study in which I explore a perceived decline in the U.S. collective discourse-the diminishing presence of music in the American mainstream media post 9/11. To examine this in more depth, I have thus far compiled and analyzed an original database of more than 3,600 songs that were commercially released in the United States from 1961-2011, tracking information such as the songs' popularity or the popularity of the albums on which they appeared, the record companies that produced these recordings, the number of cover versions of the songs, etc. I also interviewed artists, DJs, media researchers, and music critics, as well as conducted focus groups with activists. The research surveyed changes in the media landscape over the last fifty years and I became immersed in political economy of the media, production of culture, and technological media innovations' literatures. Yet, I also sought a theoretical and empirical framework that could answer the more weighty question about protest music's real impact: How can the presence of mass-mediated protest music affect mobilization efforts for progressive social change overall? Sarah's story illuminates three points about mass-mediated popular culture's ability to promote social change which I believe are critically important in answering this question.First, although an obvious point, bears highlighting: Social changeoriented mass-mediated popular culture can reach broad publics._John McCuthcheon's in the Trenches from the 1984 album, Winter Solstice, never made to the top of the Billboard charts, but garnered radio play both domestically and internationally. And even decades after its release, possesses cultural staying power in a variety of mass media formats. It has its own Wikipedia page, relating the song's genesis and the true story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 that occurred between British and German troops who were fighting along the Western Front. Also, many YouTube videos of the song can be found, totaling hundreds of thousands of hits.1 By Sarah's own admission, we know that her father was not particularly anti-war and we can assume that he did seek out protest music as a genre of interest. Instead, the song somehow found him, illustrating the dissemination power of massmediated popular culture.Second, can have powerful emotive, moral, and mnemonic framing effects on people. Sarah's childhood experience demonstrates how deeply this song was engrained in her memory. Her recollection also emphasizes the emotive and moral impact that protest music can elicit. She remembers her father ciying while taking in the song's moral message and recalls it was an incredible song.Third, has the potential to mobilize the general public in support of movement goals. Relating back to Sarah's story, we are privy to impact that the song may have had on her father. Even though he was not particularly anti-war, could be conjectured that the song prompted him (in tandem with numerous other cultural media inputs and personal experiences) into a deeper questioning of war-possibly leading to shifts in his opinion, his voting preferences, or even moving him to engage in some type of social movement action-like the simple act of signing a petition-that all leaned towards a less-hawkish position. …

Cochlear pitch class profile for cover song identification

Pitch class profile (PCP), which can represent the harmonic progression of a piece of music very well, is one of the widely used audio features for cover version identification. In this letter, we describe a novel procedure that enhances PCP by substantially boosting the degree of instrumental accompaniment invariance without degrading the feature’s discriminative power. Our idea is based on the assumption that human ear can identify a cover of a pop song based on their singing voice quickly and easily. So, we combine two concepts from psychoacoustics: (i) time-varying loudness contour and (ii) critical band, which have been used in speech recognition field successfully, with the conventional PCP descriptor to enhance its discriminative power. Since the CPCPs aim at a representation of singing voice, they may also obtain improved performance (as compared to conventional PCPs) when applied to a cappella singing recordings. Experimental results demonstrate that the resulting PCP feature, called cochlear pitch class profile (CPCP), outperforms conventional PCP feature in the context of pop cover song identification application.

From the Center in the Middle: Working Tambura Bands and the Construction of the In Between in Croatia and its Intimates

Prelude: Miroslav Skoro's Twentieth Anniversary Concert In November 2009, Croatian pop singer Miroslav Skoro performed in front of some twenty thousand fans at Arena Zagreb, the capital city's much lauded new sports hall. This was the second largest audience drawn by Croatian act since the hall's opening the previous December, (1) testament to Skoro's continuing status as one of Croatia's most popular patriotic performers (as well as television star and, in recent years, politician and record mogul). Aside from the notably large attendance, the concert in Zagreb was of particular significance to Skoro for its timing: held on the twentieth day of November, his performance celebrated twenty years' work in the music industry as professional singer and songwriter. Accompanied by his band (on backup vocals, tenor saxophone, acoustic and electric guitars, keyboard, drums, and electric bass) and number of guest musicians from past projects and from his family, Skoro performed repertoire from throughout his career and thereby commemorated his twenty years of hit songs and his many musical collaborations with these and other musicians. Skoro spoke to those of us in the audience about the significance of several of these individuals to his life and career, drawing particular attention to one who, although unable to attend, loomed large over the event: legendary Pittsburgh-born player of traditional tambura chordophones, Jerry Grcevich. This longtime musical collaborator of Skoro's had arranged most of the singer's early hits and had singly performed the accompaniment (of overdubbed melody and rhythm tamburas) to each of the songs on Skoro's first and third albums. Skoro singled out for us song (Ne Dirajte Mi Ravnicu--Don't Touch My Plain) that he had written and recorded with Grcevich twenty years earlier while studying in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where the singer had joined his newly wedded Croatian-American wife Kim Ann Skoro, nee Luzaich). Upon their release in the early 1990s, Skoro's original 1989 recording of Ne Dirajte Mi Ravnicu, as well as an immensely successful cover version by tambura band Zlatni Dukati, had resonated strongly with his newly independent but heavily war-torn country. Skoro acknowledged the song's widespread popularity, announcing that it had become a song that is no longer mine, but all of yours, and crediting it with inaugurating his musical career. (2) Skoro also credited Grcevich as the other person responsible for writing the song and told us that the famed tamburas (tambura player (3)) unfortunately could not be there to play it himself because of illness in his family. In lieu of personal appearance, Skoro then had video that Grcevich had recorded projected onto large screen that was suspended above and behind the stage and flanked by two enormous installations of LED light-panels in the shape of the roman numeral X (identifying the twentieth [XX] anniversary concert). High above the musicians, Grcevich's face appeared on the screen, expressing his regrets in English and sending his best wishes for the concert, all to loud cheers from the audience. As Skoro then sang the song that they had written twenty years prior to the November twentieth concert, twenty thousand fans sang along through each of several verses, choruses, and even instrumental breaks. Skoro, however, had planned yet another iteration of the number 20: although Grcevich could not be there, he announced, twenty local tamburasi would accompany his singing. Skoro had invited semiprofessional tambura bands Slavonski Becari, Ravnica, and Lyra, all from his city of birth, Osijek, to perform with him. In the middle of the concert, they assembled on stage in long row, relieving the regular band for short set of songs from this early period of Skoro's career when he sang almost exclusively to the accompaniment of tambura groups. (4) Tambura fans generally consider these the three best ensembles in Osijek, and two of them share long history of performance and mutual influence with Skoro. …

Coverversionen. Zum populären Kern der Popmusik

Cover versions have been a central element of pop and rock music ever since Elvis and the Beatles re-recorded popular RB today, up to a fifth of all successful songs are indeed new releases of old songs, and there is hardly an artist or a genre that has not produced its fair share of cover versions. Rock critics, however, seem to have a far less benevolent stance towards such productions. Alternatively condemning them as a form of cultural theft or an expression of creative bankruptcy, cover versions have been stigmatized as an economic concession to the art of pop music: indeed, cover versions seem to epitomize everything that is bad about pop. The essay proposes to understand cover versions not as an anomaly, but as the default case of pop musical practice. In order to do so, pop music has to be freed from the shackles of an essentially Romantic aesthetics on which most criticism is based. While this means to abandon demands for innovation, progress and individual artistry, a reevaluation of the cover version can open up pop music to analytic categories that escape the framework of a traditional Romantic aesthetics: affect, sound, adaptation. By doing so, pop music, finally, becomes less of a work-based form of art, but rather a specific, listener-oriented practice within the wider field of popular culture, for good or bad. ----------

Banksy Got Back? Problems with Chains of Unauthorized Derivative Works and Arrangements in Cover Songs Under a Compulsory License

This Article will analyze the scope of copyright ownership in relation to chains of unauthorized derivative works and chains of arrangement rights in cover versions of musical recordings. In particular, the analysis will focus on the gray area in the law where an unauthorized derivative work (“D1”) is created by an author and another author creates a second derivative work (“D2”) based off of D1. In situations such as these, does the creator of the original derivative work have any rights in their creation if their derivative work was unauthorized?

Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. By Damon J. Phillips. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv+217. $35.00.

Gabriel Rossman (UCLA) review of: Phillips, Damon J. 2013. Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Damon Phillips has spent a decade on a remarkable work that engages deeply with jazz from 1917 through 1933. However even if (like me) your knowledge of jazz does not extend much beyond Gershwin, Phillips’s book is both accessible and provides tremendous theoretical interest for what it says about how fields develop. The central question of Shaping Jazz is how the canon formed, as operationalized by how often songs were re­recorded. Phillips’s argument is that in various respects the early recordings of a song grants an imprimatur of identity and this in turn shapes its long­run reception. The first analysis is based on a social network of the cities where songs were recorded, where nodes are cities and arcs are defined by musician travel. Although the story is fundamentally about diffusion (of songs), his emphasis is on the identity of songs rather than flows through the network. That is, in Podolny’s terms the analysis is mostly about prisms and only secondarily about pipes. Phillips shows that the travel network was symbolically important insofar as (to simplify his model slightly) isolates come to be seen as exotic, especially when the giant component is dense. Exoticism becomes beneficial for new songs when allowed to interact with several variables that indicate a recording would be hard to categorize musically. The upshot is that sounding weird makes a song less popular when it originates in the core but more popular when it originates from a disconnected exotic city. Chapters 2 and 6 are conceptually similar insofar as both argue that a common trajectory of successful songs is to originate in a commercially less powerful position and then be adopted by actors in a more powerful position. In chapter two this means originating in an exotic city and then being rerecorded in a core city. In chapter six this means being originally recorded by a black band and subsequently rerecorded by a white band. In both cases the original recording provides authenticity and the rerecording provides legitimacy and exposure. Nonetheless, even as the cover version provides fame it draws attention to the original identity. Of course, as Phillips argues in the conclusion, the irony is that those things which once provided legitimacy and exposure may not do so in retrospect, with the important case in jazz being white bands (and in particular Paul Whiteman) that were considered both commercial and classy in their heyday but in retrospect seem like cultural usurpation and are sometimes not considered jazz at all. (I am reminded of how in my own teen years the popularity of Green Day renewed interest in The Clash, including among people who would eventually disavow interest in Green Day). That is, we have to accept not only a sociological (as compared to musicological) conception of genre, but appreciate how the “traditional” phase of sociological genre involves collective memory. There is a very funny discussion to this effect of the possibility that the smooth jazz of Kenny G will enter the canon. Indeed, even if Kenny G is not accepted in the jazz canon this does not mean he won't have directly or indirectly shaped it, much as the canon historically developed in reaction to excommunicated heretics. Chapters 3 through 5 all deal with the relationship between jazz and incumbents in the music field. Chapter 3 explores the puzzle that Weimar­era Berlin was a major center for jazz and yet in retrospect Berlin jazz has largely failed to be canonized. Phillips explains this not in terms of continuity being disrupted by the

Cover versions and the new copyright regime in India

Cover versions and the new copyright regime in India

The singer and the song: core components in Jimmy Webb's ‘Didn't We’

AbstractIn the study of popular music, much attention is given to the cover version, a performance of a song filled with reference to and even commentary upon previous performances. Analysis of cover versions tends to reveal a lot about the performers and performances but very little about the work being performed. Because different versions of a song may vary widely, it is often difficult to determine what precisely is ‘the work’ in the first place, especially in the absence of a score. Using an original analytical apparatus, the pitch-prevalence contour, and using Jimmy Webb's ‘Didn't We’ as a case study, this essay attempts to quantify the ‘core components’ of a song, the parts of a song that are retained in most if not all of its versions. It is through the analysis of various performances, seeking similarities, that one is able to see the essence of the song revealed. What is more, isolating these components simultaneously brings the differences in the performances into greater relief. The methodology thus separates the singer and the song.

There’s a kind of hush…..

The song “There’s a kind of hush all over the world”, made famous worldwide by the Herman Hermits’ cover version in 1967 comes to mind after the last year’s hype of the “MOOC”-phenomenon. The hush – or peculiar silence after the “big noise” is less of a silence than a counter attack from the more sober participants in the discourses of lifelong learning. The editor of this journal took part in the 25Th ICDE World Conference in Tianjin, China in mid-October. We experienced the excited audience that is optimistic for when the MOOCs will swipe over the higher education sector in the developing world and provide access to top quality higher education. However, we also heard the voices of the experienced group of providers of higher education who have worked intensely for the same purpose for as long as the ICDE has existed: 75 years. The irony they express is that while authorities and politicians in all industrialized countries have urged higher education institutions to move in this direction, the adoption of policies and practices has been slow. Many countries have set up their own “Open universities” to bypass some of the most obstructive forces. The most obstructive ones have been institutions that are prestigious, private or simply too protective of their own privileges. The lifelong learning entrepreneurs have always emerged from social agents who primarily argue for the humanist values of education and- gradually - more and more intertwined by human capital arguments. And suddenly – inspired by the social media, by YouTube, Khan and a number of emerging new technologies, the previously most obstructive higher education institutions are on the pathway to “revolutionize” learning, make the best teaching available to everybody and “save” the rest of the world. Five of the highest ranked Chinese universities have now contracted “Coursera” software to “deliver” their Chinese courses to the “masses”. Many, many other universities, world wide, are about to follow their example. Main universities, who traditionally have failed to take interest in provide mass education, are now, all of a sudden, at the front of “the development”.In the aftermath – or hush – second thoughts start to come to the fore. One of the main entrepreneurs of “MOOC”s, Sebastian Thrun, named “the Godfather” of MOOC, and CEO of Udacity, admits the failure of the project ran with San Jose State University. He blames the poor academic quality of the students for the failure. Rebecca Schuman, a widely acclaimed columnist and educational experts comments that the MOOCs seem to fail exactly the group of students who, allegedly, would benefit the most from this way of teaching and learning. This brings us all back to square one, and underlines what veterans in the field always have said. This is a difficult enterprise. There is no salvations provided by a new technology. I would like to add: thanks for the enthusiasm, and I look forward to what comes after “the hush”.In this issue we bring a new article from Professor Theo Hug from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. This is an analytical paper that provides us with profound perspectives about what communication related to teaching and learning with media is all about. It claims that when enthusiasts, such as the those providing MOOCs, go about and introduce new trends, they are often helpless in understanding the elementary dimension of media education, or the epistemological issues of the field. Hug sums up his contribution by arguing for polylogical design principles for an educational knowledge organization.In the paper by Michaela Rizzolli, also from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, we bring another contribution aiming at shedding light on the very foundations of media education. Ms. Rizzolli studies online playgrounds and introduces us to the problems we encounter when we stick to dichotomies in our thinking about this phenomenon. She argues for the need to think wider and inclusively when describing phenomena theoretically and empirically.In the third paper, Professors Kari Nes and Gerd Wikan of Hedmark University College, Norway report from a project involving interactive whiteboards (IWB) in teaching in schools. In analyzing closely how seven teachers go about their interactive boards when teaching, they see that the IWBs have potentials that not all teachers are able to realize. They discuss what teachers need in order to develop their ability to stage “exploratory talks” with students.Last we bring a brief research report from Jacques Kerneis, who is a professor at ESPE (École Superiéure du Professorate et de l’éducation Bretagne), France, who outlines experiences from three differents projects aiming at defining digital-, media- and information literacy in a French speaking context. Using a particular vocabulary of « apparatus », « phenomenotechnique » and « phenomenographie » the projects aimed at providing a framework of the evolving interpretations of these phenomena.

A Flexible Reformulation of the Refueling Station Location Problem

Serious environmental and economic problems of using fossil fuels in transportation sections force managers to think of alternative fuels such as hydrogen, ethanol, biodiesel, natural gas, or electricity. Meanwhile, lack of fuel network infrastructures is a major problem, which needs to be investigated considering the number and optimal location of alternative fuel stations. In the literature, two different flow-based demand modeling concepts (the maximum cover and set cover) have been proposed for solving this problem. Because of the huge number of combinations of fuel stations for covering the flow of each path, the models are impractical for the real size problems. In this paper, the flow refueling location model was reformulated and a flexible mixed-integer linear programming model was presented, which was able to obtain an optimal solution much faster than the previous set cover version. The model also could be solved in the maximum cover form in a reasonable time on the large-sized networks.

The estranged quotation in Israeli popular music

AbstractIsraeli popular music includes many quotations from earlier Israeli songs as well as other Israeliana references. Quotations may take various forms, from cover versions to the mere evocation of song titles. This phenomenon preceded the rockisation of Israeli music, had its apex in the 1970s with early rockisation, and is continuing today, despite a certain decline. The purpose of the quotations is often a mere interaction with traditional materials, but it also sometimes expresses a striving towards an experience of life that is more sincere. Two subtopics of special significance are adolescence and political critique. Since earlier hegemony in Israel was maintained by the old left, the rock music rebellion was not as anti-capitalistic as in the Woodstock Festival, rather manifesting anti-authoritarian trends similar to (but milder than) those encountered in Eastern Europe.

Popular music representation: chorus detection & emotion recognition

This paper proposes a popular music representation strategy based on the song's emotion. First, a piece of popular music is decomposed into chorus and verse segments through the proposed chorus detection algorithm. Three descriptive features: intensity, frequency band and rhythm regularity are extracted from the structured segments for emotion detection. A hierarchical Adaboost classifier is employed to recognize the emotion of a piece of popular music. The general emotion of the music is classified according to Thayer's model into four emotions: happy, angry, depressed and relaxed. Experiments conducted on a 350-popular-music database show the average recall and precision of our proposed chorus detection are approximately 95 % and 84 %, respectively; and the average precision rate of emotion detection is 92 %. Additional tests are performed on songs with cover versions in different lyrics and languages, and the resultant precision rate is 90 %. The proposes approaches have been tested and proven by the professional online music company, KKBOX Inc. and show promising performance for effectively and efficiently identifying the emotions of a variety of popular music.

Solving min ones 2-sat as fast as vertex cover

The problem of finding a satisfying assignment that minimizes the number of variables that are set to 1 is NP-complete even for a satisfiable 2-SAT formula. We call this problem min ones 2-sat. It generalizes the well-studied problem of finding the smallest vertex cover of a graph, which can be modeled using a 2-SAT formula with no negative literals. The natural parameterized version of the problem asks for a satisfying assignment of weight at most k.In this paper, we present a polynomial-time reduction from min ones 2-sat to vertex cover without increasing the parameter and ensuring that the number of vertices in the reduced instance is equal to the number of variables of the input formula. Consequently, we conclude that this problem also has a simple 2-approximation algorithm and a 2k−clogk-variable kernel subsuming (or, in the case of kernels, improving) the results known earlier. Further, the problem admits algorithms for the parameterized and optimization versions whose runtimes will always match the runtimes of the best-known algorithms for the corresponding versions of vertex cover.Finally we show that the optimum value of the LP relaxation of the min ones 2-sat and that of the corresponding vertex cover are the same. This implies that the (recent) results of vertex cover version parameterized above the optimum value of the LP relaxation of vertex cover carry over to the min ones 2-sat version parameterized above the optimum of the LP relaxation of min ones 2-sat.

Arlington Park: Variations on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway1

Arlington Park was written in the wake of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: the style and texture of Rachel Cusk’s writing is very much reminiscent of her predecessor’s prose. The contemporary author uses Woolfian features and templates (“Dallowayisms” Chatman 274) and transposes them to the present-day novel that dissects domestic middle-class suburban life. Just like Mrs Dalloway, Cusk’s observational novel drifts through time and consciousness. The novel is made up of an accumulation of little snippets of life (“patches of life,” Arlington Park 220) and the narrative switches between various characters that lead subjective and introspective “Woolfian” lives, microscopically observed by the narrator who renders their obsessive self-analysis and interrogations. Cusk’s novel focuses on the overwhelming awareness of the moment and the passage of time with its layers and thickness. It deals with what goes unsaid under the surface: fleeting moods, thoughts and unspoken communication. Like Woolf, Cusk offers the reader a multitude of aural and visual perceptions – the sensory impressionism chiselling out inner turmoil –, and has a cult for the object and for the powerful, arresting triviality of the non-event. The contemporary author shares with her predecessor the art of scrutinising material details using the same sharp eye with which she explores the characters’ minds. Besides, Cusk’s epiphany bears resemblance to the Woolfian “moment of being,” the various refrains and repetitions give her prose a musical quality, and her characters constantly attempt to give a definition of the texture of life and reality. Thus, Arlington Park constitutes a twenty-first-century cover version of Mrs Dalloway. I would like to observe Cusk’s narrative, stylistic and thematic features, which seem to situate her novel at the confluence of two traditions: firstly, her writing stems from modernism and prolongs modernist techniques, more particularly the Woolfian legacy; Cusk can thus be said to be a neo-modernist writer.2 Secondly, her work belongs to the current “literary fiction” genre: it is an elitist, lyrical, “writerly” type of fiction born with modernist aesthetics.

Effect of the land use change characteristics on the air pollution patterns above the Greater Athens area (GAA) after 2004

The Attica Peninsula has experienced the rapid expansion of the Athens urban area, prior to the Athens 2004 Olympics. As a result, the distribution of pollutant sources and emission patterns has changed with a subsequent effect on the distribution of photochemical pollutants and aerosols. The purpose of the present work is to perform a comparative study of the land use changes in the rapidly developing Attica Peninsula including the Greater Athens Area (GAA) before and after 2004, the year that the Olympic Games took place, as well as of the effect of these changes on the respective pollutant distribution profiles. The land use data were provided by USGS Global Land Use/Land Cover version 2.0 Database and the updating process was fulfilled with the help of a satellite image. The area was divided into cells using a spatial resolution of 5x5 km2. Results showed that the urban grid has expanded considerably the past fifteen years while a great shift of population has been made to the eastern area of Attica. Also, new towns were created while others expanded and many factories moved out of the center of the city of Athens. Moreover, the forest land has decreased considerably in the Attica Peninsula either by continuous and extended fires or by the residential burst. The Comprehensive Air Quality Model with extensions (CAMx) was used in order to estimate O3 distribution during a recorded pollution episode. Results revealed that land use changes affected slightly the O3 concentrations and the development of a new emission inventory related to the new LULC field is necessary.

Go Gaga: Anarchy, Chaos, and the Wild

In this essay, I track a history of punk that I associate with wild vocalization within a history of black aesthetics. Building upon the work of Fred Moten, Jayna Brown, and Tavia Nyong’o, this essay returns to some eccentric moments in punk musical production—songs by Rhoda Dakar and Poly Styrene, but also a cover version of a punk song by Grace Jones. My essay ultimately advances an alternative history of anarchism that is less about an antistate political philosophy than about the sonic breakdowns of sense and rationality in punk songs that offer rage-filled critiques of racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity.

Remapping Hong Kong popular music: covers, localisation and the waning hybridity of Cantopop

AbstractEver since its sovereignty reverted to China, Hong Kong has been torn between its national (in terms of China and its ‘soft’ power) and global status (as ‘Asia's World City’). In this special context, Hong Kong's singular, ambiguous but prolific existence ceased. This paper endeavours to map ‘Cantopop’ (Chinese popular songs) on the new media landscape and examine its decline in the context of the rise and fall of cover versions. Cantopop was once very popular, not only in Hong Kong but also in its neighbouring regions. Its rise in the 1970s was a result of its typical hybridity, an important aspect of which was influenced by the use of cover versions that changed its soundscape. In the mid-1990s, the Cantopop market started to shrink significantly. A radio campaign for localisation advocated the release of original songs aimed at enhancing the development of Cantopop, but in the end proved to have the opposite effect. In the new millennium, ‘Mandapop’ (Mandarin popular songs) has taken on the role as the trend setter of the Chinese popular music industry. We argue in this paper that Cantopop's decline is the result of Hong Kong's loss of hybridity.

Cover Versions in Hong Kong and Japan: Reflections on Music Authenticity

This paper is an anthropological attempt to shed some light on the notion of the authenticity of popular music through a comparison and contrast of the practice of recording cover versions in the music industry in Japan and Hong Kong. Both Japan and Hong Kong have a long history of covering foreign music with localized lyrics. However, cover versions enjoy completely different social status and likewise receive different responses in the two places. In Japan, the cover version has been severely criticized as an act of pakuri (plagiarism or copycatting) and thus carries negative connotations. In Hong Kong, the tradition of using foreign, especially Japanese, melodies to record cover versions is as old as the Cantopop recording industry itself. Thus, cover recording is an accepted practice within the industry. This article argues that the different status of cover versions in Japan and Hong Kong has much to do with the respective local musical traditions. It will be shown that the severe criticism of cover ...

“Tightrope walking the twenty-first century”: Jeanette Winterson’s vital connections with Modernism

In Art Objects (1995), her aesthetic manifesto, Jeanette Winterson calls for a new literature for the new millennium, and new forms of writing that could “answer to twenty-first-century needs”. Far from repudiating the past, Winterson urges the twenty-first-century artist to turn to previous generations for inspiration, and to draw poetic power from the “lineage of art”. Since “every new beginning prompts a return”, before he/she can fully experiment with language, the true artist must first experience his/her vital connections with the past, not in the spirit of ancestor worship, but to reclaim past literature, “(re-state) and (re-instate) (it) in its original vigour”. Striking a delicate balance between continuity and emancipation, responsibility and freedom, the new millennium artist, vitally connected to the past, but in search of his/her own voice, must practice the difficult art of the tightrope walker, uniting two worlds on the “taut line” of language. Because they were able to master this difficult art – breaking new ground, but writing with “generations at (their) back(s)” – it is towards Modernist writers that the new generation must turn for inspiration, and more particularly towards the works of Virginia Woolf. In an attempt to highlight the fruitful tensions between early-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century literature, this paper looks at Winterson’s “cover versions” of key Woolfian subtexts, in her works published in the new millennium – The.Powerbook (2000), Lighthousekeeping (2004), The Stone Gods (2007), and her recently published memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011).