Abstract This paper re-animates debates over the unsettled relationship between jazz and popular music through an exploration of the recent ‘London jazz explosion’. It explores the framing of London jazz’s mainstreaming as counter-hegemonic in press/promotional coverage, showing how the prominence of Black musicians and Black popular musics in ‘new London jazz’ is widely interpreted as a rejoinder to perceived elitism and institutional whiteness in British and European jazz ‘establishments’. It also examines interpretations of the scene’s relative commercial success as a meaningful reversal of jazz’s institutionalisation as art music since the 1980s. I define this discourse as ‘jazz populism’, through which the very fact of the scene’s mainstream appeal is used to promote London jazz as a musical – and cultural-political – ‘alternative’. The paper provides overdue analysis of a significant development in 2020s European popular music, and deepens our understanding of the complexities of contemporary musical mainstreams.

ABSTRACT This article explores how musicians in Equatorial Guinea navigate a deeply authoritarian and oil-dependent political economy through everyday practices of hustling and adaptation. It examines how artists engage with state and non-state institutions to access resources, maintain livelihoods, and assert claims to redistribution under oppressive conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article focuses on musicians' interactions with bureaucratic structures – such as the Ministry of Culture and foreign cultural centres – as well as their informal strategies, including cultivating patronage networks, praise singing and seeking financial support through kinship and personal connections. These practices, while often morally ambiguous, reflect a form of “distributive labour” that emphasises survival over production. By foregrounding the ambivalence, fluidity and creativity with which musicians engage the state, the article highlights how cultural workers assert agency within highly constrained environments. It argues that such tactics represent small-scale, everyday extraversion – efforts to exploit dependence on the state while demanding a share of its wealth. Ultimately, the article contributes to broader debates on cultural production under authoritarianism, the role of bureaucracy in everyday life, and the political economy of music in Africa.

This article explores how Malawi's youth express disillusionment through popular music after unfulfilled promises from the 2020 election campaign. When the government failed to deliver on its commitments, young people experienced disappointment, frustration, hopelessness, and despair—emotions that have found voice in a wave of songs tinged with disillusionment. For these young Malawians, popular music serves as a powerful medium for analyzing and critiquing the contemporary issues shaping their society. Drawing on the concept of social realism, this article examines how popular music captures youth disillusionment with broken political promises. The analysis argues that an aging political class, disconnected from future-oriented solutions, intensifies young people's sense of betrayal. Through the lens of Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed," the article interprets these musical expressions as part of youth struggles for social justice.

Abstract Background One of the core characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is emotional imbalance. Patients often experience intense and uncontrollable feelings of sadness. Listening to music is a common emotion regulation strategy in daily life, but its effectiveness in regulating specific negative emotions of BPD patients in structured situations remains to be further explored. Previous studies have mostly focused on classical or soothing music, while neglecting the potential role of commercial pop music, an easily accessible form. The research explored whether popular songs could effectively alleviate the sadness induced by BPD patients in an experimental environment. Methods The study recruited 80 participants (40 with BPD and 40 matched healthy controls). All participants first watched a five-minute sad film for induction. Following induction, participants were randomly assigned to one of two 10-minute intervention conditions: (1) Music group: Listening to a pre-selected, neutral-to-positive pop song via headphones. (2) Silence group: Sitting quietly in a silent room without auditory stimulation. The primary outcome measure was change in subjective sadness, assessed using a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (no sadness) to 100 (extreme sadness). VAS scores were collected at three time points: baseline (T1), post-sadness induction (T2), and post-intervention (T3). Statistical analysis employed a mixed-effects ANOVA with group and condition as between-subjects factors and time (T1, T2, T3) as within-subjects factors. Results The experiment demonstrated successful induction of sadness, with a significant main effect of time: sadness scores increased significantly for all participants from T1 to T2. BPD participants in the music group exhibited a mean reduction in sadness of 28.5 points, significantly greater than that observed in the silent control group (mean reduction of 12.1 points). The healthy control group in the music condition exhibited an average decrease of 25.3 points, also exceeding the healthy control group in the silent condition (average decrease of 20.8 points), though the effect size was considerably smaller than that observed in the BPD group. At T3, sadness levels in the BPD music group no longer differed significantly from baseline (T1) (p=.124), whereas sadness levels in the BPD silent group remained significantly higher than baseline (p<.01). Key findings are summarized in Table 1. Discussion The research results show that a brief intervention of listening to self-selected popular songs can effectively alleviate the sadness induced by the experiment, and the effect is particularly significant for BPD patients. Pop music may become an effective immediate emotional regulation tool through mechanisms such as distraction, cognitive reevaluation or positive emotional contagion. Future research should explore the long-term effects of personalized music intervention, identify the specific musical features that produce such effects, and use neuroimaging techniques to investigate its neural association mechanisms.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian popular music has been actively responding to the reality of war and exploring the topic of trauma. Many Ukrainian popular music artists have faced the same traumatic experiences as their audiences, which led to a close relationship between such artists and their audiences, as artists’ messages are perceived as sincere and valid. This article examines the lyrics and music videos of Ukrainian popular songs that were created after Russia’s full-scale invasion and deal with such topics as witnessing war, loss, separation, displacement, and mental health issues (including as a result of combat experiences). Guided by academic literature on trauma and cultural narratology, it examines popular songs that have a significant number of views (200,000 or more) on YouTube. The article argues that Ukrainian popular music reflects the trajectory of the full-scale invasion through constructing narratives of trauma at different stages of the post-2022 reality of war (from initial to delayed responses), whilst also creating an imagined community of people who take part in shared meaning-making. Having considered the developments in Ukrainian war-time popular music over the first three years of the invasion, this article shows that popular music becomes an important and easily accessible site of memory. The article highlights the importance of discussing language’s ability to convey trauma and artists’ meaning-making approaches when utilizing lyrics and visuals to narrate trauma in their music.

We examine whether aggregate “music mood” derived from globally popular songs can help forecast primary equity issuance. We build a Friday-anchored weekly panel that merges SEC EDGAR counts of priced Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) with features from the Spotify Daily Top 200 (audio descriptors such as valence, energy, danceability, tempo, loudness, etc.) and Genius-scraped lyrics. We extract lyric sentiment by tokenizing Genius-scraped lyrics and aggregating lexicon-based affect scores (valence and arousal) into popularity-weighted weekly indices. To address sparsity and regime shifts in issuance, we train a leakage-safe Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network on a smoothed target—the forward 4-week sum of IPOs—and obtain next-week forecasts by dividing the predicted sum by 4. On a chronological holdout, a single LSTM with look-back K = 8 outperforms strong baselines—reducing MAE by 13.9%, RMSE by 15.9%, and mean Poisson deviance by 27.6% relative to the best baseline in each metric. Furthermore, we adopt SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to explain our LSTM model, showing that IPO persistence remains the dominant driver, but music and lyrics covariates contribute incremental and robust signal. These results suggest that aggregate music sentiment contains economically meaningful information about near-term IPO activity.

ABSTRACT This article analyses three pop music cover versions that feature Jimmy Somerville on vocals. Each of the well-known disco numbers from the 1970s was a hit when performed by the original or previous artists but, I argue, took on a different and distinct meaning when released during the 1980s, given the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The first song I consider is Bronski Beat’s 1985 cover version of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, which is coupled with the Johnny Leyton hit ‘Johnny Remember Me’, on which Somerville duetted with Marc Almond. I then discuss The Communards’ 1986 hit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, originally sung by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1975 before being covered by Thelma Houston in 1976. Finally, I analyse Somerville’s 1989 cover of Sylvester’s hit ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’. Given that the three songs are all dance tracks, I consider the significance of disco for the queer community. I also examine male falsetto, which Somerville can be heard to use in all the songs, as a means to challenge the prevailing stereotypes of gender and sexuality.

Abstract This paper builds on research conducted in 2008 by Wright into the uneasy power dynamics between a music teacher and her pupils in a secondary school music classroom in Wales as a result of her Western Classical ‘habitus’; by this, we mean the habitual behaviours, attitudes and values that are commonplace when operating as a classical musician. Some 18 years on, and in a transformative Welsh education climate, narrative data collected from pre-service teachers practising in similar classrooms in Wales suggest that they have begun to move away from their Western European classical ‘habitus’ and believe in shared pedagogic ownership that takes account of pupil voice and choice. Furthermore, in learning to teach, they develop pedagogic behaviours more akin to popular musicians, such as being more improvisatory and more willing to tolerate uncertainty. A key factor is the trusting and collaborative relationships they developed with their mentors (teacher-tutors) within an education system in Wales that has committed itself to the concept of subsidiarity. These findings mark a positive step forward for the music education community within a new and aspirational educational landscape in Wales.

The widespread phenomenon of sound horeg in Toyomarto Village, Singosari District, has influenced the popularity of traditional musical instrument learning in elementary schools. The dominance of modern sound systems in community activities and celebrations has shifted students’ musical preferences toward popular music, leading to a decline in interest in traditional instruments such as the angklung and flute. This study aims to describe the role of sound horeg in shaping students’ interest in traditional musical instrument learning, identify the factors contributing to the decline in its popularity, and explore teachers’ efforts to maintain the existence of traditional musical instruments. This study employed a qualitative approach using a case study method. Data were collected through observation, interviews, and documentation involving the school principal, teachers, students, and parents. Data analysis was conducted through data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The findings show that students’ interest in traditional musical instruments is relatively low due to the dominance of popular culture, limited learning media and instructional methods, and insufficient teacher professionalism. Students tend to prefer popular songs accompanied by sound horeg because they are practical, easily accessible, and entertaining. To address these challenges, teachers implemented experience-based learning, applied innovative teaching methods and media, and strengthened extracurricular activities as spaces for student appreciation of traditional music. This study emphasizes that the success of traditional musical instrument learning depends on synergy among teachers, school support, and the involvement of parents and the local community. The findings are expected to contribute to culturally responsive learning strategies and support the preservation of traditional musical instruments amid the influence of popular culture.

Popular song does not illustrate History with a capital H, played out elsewhere in muddy trenches, grimy factories or oak-panelled offices. On the contrary, it involves a series of mass activities which are as much a part of history as are working and fighting. This contribution aims at assessing the popular love song repertoires in Britain and in France during the First World War, defining popular song, for our present purposes, simply as the songs which sold the most. In particular I want to analyze the cultural, legal, economic, historical, logistical and social reasons that these two repertoires were so radically different. Indeed, the determinedly upbeat, jolly and prudish repertoire of British music hall evenings contrasted sharply with the romantic, melodramatic, realistic and intimate stories put to music in French café-concerts.

Abstract This study explores the lexical and topic evolution of Chinese popular music lyrics from 2000 to 2025, reflecting changing public sentiments and broader socio-cultural transitions. While prior research has largely overlooked non-Western lyric corpora, this study addresses that gap by constructing the Chinese Popular Music Diachronic Corpus, comprising 1,560 representative popular songs sampled across twenty-five years. Using digital humanities approaches, it integrates word frequency analysis, readability metrics, and BERTopic-based topic modelling to trace lexical and topic evolution of lyrics over time. Findings reveal that high-frequency words consistently revolve around emotional expression, individual introspection, and interpersonal dynamics. Type-token ratio (TTR) has increased significantly, indicating growing lexical diversity, while textual complexity shows fluctuation, reflecting stylistic shifts in song writing. Topic analysis identifies twelve major topics, including romantic love, future aspirations, and urban life, with topic structures evolving from natural and temporal abstraction to emotional concreteness and psychological introspection. Recent years show a significant rise in negative emotional topics and self-referential artistic motifs. This study contributes a novel methodological framework for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of music, language, and society, and underscores the value of digital humanities tools in mapping collective emotions and cultural change through large-scale lyric analysis.

This research addresses how an interactive digital tool might emotionally connect the youth with their culture, concentrating on one of the oldest and richest traditions of China - ancient music. The application enables the user to be the instrumentalist of the virtual world through playing the guqin, bianzhong and some popular songs as well, all this while getting step-by-step instructions, a scoring feature, a playback feature, and cultural insights presented in the form of trivia tied to high scores. The purpose of the app is to use the emotional and cultural aspects to bring the past into the young people's present time and thus get them more involved. It was the systematic measures of cultural and musical engagement together with emotional reactions to learning and music that I used for the research whose participants were thirty-six young adults aged 18 to 25 and who completed a 14-day study, where the influence of the traditional cultural activities was compared with this interactive gamified method. The data imply that the app users practice the culture more deeply than other users, so interactive digital instruments can become a powerful tool to revive cultural heritage and, at the same time, make it more fun and educational. The research outcome can shape not only the future of cultural preservation but also that of education.

This research is motivated by the importance of music, especially songs, in elementary school learning, which not only serves as entertainment but also functions as a pedagogical medium that supports the learning process and the formation of students' character. The purpose of this study is to analyze how music arts teachers use songs in their teaching and to examine the interaction among habitus, cultural capital, and the school arena in music education practice. The research uses a qualitative, case study design following the Creswell model, conducted in SD Jakarta Timur Region II during the 2025/2026 semester, with music teacher subjects selected through purposive sampling. Data was obtained through observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation studies, then analyzed qualitatively through the stages of data reduction, presentation, and verification. The results showed that the interaction among habitus, cultural capital, and curriculum demands influenced teachers' song choices in elementary school music learning. The teacher's personal habitus and experience encourage the use of both traditional and popular children's songs, while institutional cultural capital emphasizes national and thematic songs. On the other hand, contemporary social dynamics open up space for teachers to adopt songs from digital media to be more in tune with students' world.

The study examines the use of music as a tool for chronicling the environmental effects of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigerian space, particularly, Lagos state. The study employs ethnographic research using interview methods and musical analysis of selected popular songs. Using purposive sampling technique, 10 people were contacted,5 each from mega slums and urban areas. Backed by ecomusicological theory and the concept of musical environmentalism, this study examines how music offers a site of memory for COVID-19 and its consequences on environment health, how popular musicians advocate for the prevention of and rehabilitation from effects of COVID-19 in African urban cities like Lagos. It also investigates the perception of Lagos dwellers on the impact of COVID-19 on environmental health. From the interviews conducted and the analysis of popular songs by Cohbams Asuquo, Adewale Ayuba,and MK Arzikii, the article concludes that music has the potential to advocate for and sensitize on the effect of COVID-19 on environmental sustainability and transformation in African cities.

This research aims to describe the use of ironic figurative language in popular song lyrics. The research used descriptive qualitative, with data consisting of excerpts from song lyrics. The data source is the Blurryface album by the American band Twenty-One Pilots. This research applies Perrine’s theory of figures of speech as the analytical framework. The findings showed that there are two cases of situational irony, one case of dramatic irony, and one case of verbal irony. The study concludes that the use of irony in song lyrics functions to strengthen meaning, evoke listeners’ emotions, and serve as a medium for social criticism and self-reflection.

The music industry is currently thriving with new songs popularized by young musicians. One striking example is Bernadya's Terlintas album, which presents a number of popular songs thanks to its lyrics that attract listeners' attention. This study aims to analyze the use of language styles in the lyrics of the songs on Terlintas album and explore the meaning contained in them. The three songs studied in this research are “Satu Bulan”, “Apa Mungkin”, and “Terlintas”. Using a descriptive qualitative approach, this study collected data through listening and note-taking techniques. The data obtained from the song lyrics were then analyzed using Keraf's (2006) stylistic theory, which distinguishes stylistic language based on direct and indirect meaning. The results show that there are three types of dominant language styles in the song lyrics, namely comparison, affirmation, and figurative language styles. Comparative language style is seen through the use of figures of speech such as metaphor, hyperbole, personification, and symbolism, which function to enrich meaning and create new images for listeners. Meanwhile, oppositional language style appears in the form of subtle criticism through irony and allusion. This research confirms that the use of language styles in song lyrics has an important role in exploring deeper meanings and strengthening the emotional message that the songwriter wants to convey. Therefore, song lyrics not only function as a means of entertainment, but also as a medium to convey ideas and feelings in a more complex manner.

TikTok has evolved as one of the most influential internet platforms in recent years. TikTok, recognized for its brief videos and viral phenomena, provides a diverse array of audio-visual content, including music-centric material that frequently incorporates popular English songs. This study investigates the use of popular English TikTok songs as authentic digital materials to enhance vocabulary retention in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context. With the growing integration of digital media in students’ daily lives, platforms like TikTok offer engaging and context-rich opportunities for language learning. Adopting qualitive method through case study design, this research explored the experiences, perceptions, and learning behaviors of students at SMAN 1 Pamekasan who actively used TikTok and engaged with English songs on the platform. Data were collected through semi-structured interview with 3 participants, Thematic analysis revealed three main findings: (1) the songs significantly increased learners’ motivation and engagement; (2) vocabulary retention improved due to repeated and contextualized exposure to language; and (3) emotional and social interactions supported deeper learning. The results suggest that integrating familiar and enjoyable content such as TikTok songs into classroom instruction can bridge the gap between formal education and students’ digital experiences, leading to more meaningful and effective vocabulary acquisition. These findings highlight the pedagogical value of leveraging students' media habits to support learner-centered and engaging language instruction.

Abstract This study analyzes the phonetic differences in the pronunciation of the letters Qaaf (ق) and Jiim (ج) in the Egyptian and Saudi Arabic dialects. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the research draws data from audiovisual sources such as popular songs and YouTube videos featuring native speakers. The findings reveal that in Egyptian Arabic, Qaaf is frequently realized as a glottal stop (/ʔ/), and Jiim as a voiced velar stop (/g/). In contrast, in Saudi Arabic, both letters tend to retain their Classical Arabic pronunciation: /q/ for Qaaf and /d͡ʒ/ for Jiim. These phonetic differences are not merely articulatory; they also carry sociolinguistic significance, reflecting social identity, formality level, and cultural values. This research contributes to modern Arabic language learning by emphasizing the importance of understanding dialectal variation in pronunciation, especially in real-life communication across Arabic-speaking regions. Keywords: Qaaf, Jiim, Arabic dialects, phonetics, Egyptian Arabic, Saudi Arabic, sociolinguistics, language learning

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The Ukrainian population has suffered from Russian attacks on civilians, hospitals and schools. In the media, we have seen the Ukrainians as a singing nation. Songs are sung in bomb shelters and by soldiers, in the streets to celebrate victories and in memorials for the dead victims. This article discusses how certain songs can find a special place in the nation’s collective memory as comfort, protest and a catalyst for emotions. A search for war songs that are sung by children and adolescents and posted on social media shows that there are a number of popular war songs, from the national anthem and traditional folk songs to more recent pop and rock songs. “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna” seems to be the most popular and important war song in Ukraine and has been posted on social media in several versions. The article analyses this Ukrainian war song as a multimodal expression, in which the artist's appearance, clothing, colours, gestures, body language expression and singing voice, timbre, pitch, melody, rhythm, instruments, arrangement, movement and dance – all of these expressions are carriers of meaning, and together they contribute to the totality (Machin 2010, 2). Furthermore, using examples from social media of Ukrainian children and young people singing “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna”, the article discusses how the younger generation can build national identity and process the trauma of war in the nation’s collective memory by singing this song and sharing their performances on social media. The analysis is rooted in Martin Clayton’s (2009) theory of the functions of music, recent studies on neuroscience and music (Levitin 2008; Brean & Skeie 2019), and the concept of collective memory (Assmann 2006).

This paper examines how Serbia’s anti-lithium environmental protests, centred on opposition to Rio Tinto’s Jadar lithium mine, are situated within the country’s broader history of civic mobilisation and democratic struggle for change. As part of the methodology, this study draws upon social movement theory (particularly the concepts of political opportunity structures and cultural framing) alongside cultural resistance scholarship, which explores the relationship between protest music and contemporary socio-political events. It also engages with environmental democracy frameworks, focusing on public participation rights. Together, these theoretical perspectives are useful in demonstrating how protest music operates as both a cultural and political resource in processes of social and political transformation. Furthermore, drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of news reports, non-governmental organisations’ (NGO) statements, activist interviews, and two popular protest songs, “Fire in Darkness” and “March Out of My Yard” (Vatra u mraku and Marš iz moje avlije), the study investigates the role of cultural expression, such as music, in sustaining activism. It also considers the fusing impact of the November 2024 Novi Sad railway station tragedy, which catalysed a broader pro-democracy coalition by linking environmental grievances to systemic governance failures. The paper argues that the Serbian case illustrates how environmental movements in post-socialist contexts can evolve into multi-issue campaigns for democratic accountability, with protest music and popular cultural production acting as a unifying force across social divides.