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The editorial from the Journal of Popular Music Studies bids farewell to the outgoing co-editors, Elliott and Kaleb, and welcomes the new leadership of Alisha Lola Jones and Benjamin Tausig. The editorial also pays tribute to scholars Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Christine Capetola, who passed away, and highlights various scholarly articles featured in the final issue of volume 36. The issue covers diverse topics such as the categorization of Afrobeats, Bruce Springsteen's reinterpretation of Sister Rosetta Tharpe's music, the racialization of musical instruments, and the exploration of trans expression in Arca's music. The editorial concludes with reviews of books that delve into the journeys of individual musicians, experimentation in writing, protest music in non-Anglophone music scenes, and the impact of earworms on contemporary listening habits. [Extracted from the article]

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The United States has been a space for global musical transnational encounters among African-descended peoples, with various artists collaborating. These collaborations have blossomed with the advent of Afrobeats—a loose term describing the contemporary transatlantic sound of popular African music. Although there are male and female Afrobeats performers on the African continent, this cultural exchange occurs more often between male artists and U.S. musicians. Because male artists are mostly invited for live performances, their visibility puts them in a position to perform with and collaborate with U.S. artists. As a result, male artists get nominations for global awards such as the Grammys and accumulate more wealth. For female artists, the result is less visibility and wealth. Using Tiwa Savage and Burna Boy—two Afrobeats giants—as case studies, this essay examines the factors that limit Tiwa, a female performer, from achieving the same wealth as her male counterpart, Burna Boy. Specifically, this study analyzes the sonic and semiotic representations in their popular music videos, Tiwa's "Koroba" and Burna Boy's "On the Low," to understand why Burna Boy might have the edge over Tiwa. Their music and career trajectories shed light on how capitalism and sociopolitical issues, including colorism, might contribute to the gender wealth disparities between male and female Afrobeats performers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music is a core aspect of human experience/culture, functioning as one of humanity's oldest forms of communication. While music is a popular focus for many forms of scholarly inquiry, there is a relative lack of research on the topic of music genres and their impact. The present study helps address this gap in the literature, detailing a focused proof-of-concept, exploratory examination that uses psycholinguistic analysis to study how song lyrics are written. Specifically, the study uses integrative complexity, which assesses how information is processed and communicated, to compare structural differences in song lyrics across five genres - country, hip-hop/rap, rock, pop, and metal. The findings demonstrate significant complex differences across the groups, indicating that genre expectations play a marked role in how lyrics are conceptualized and structured. Alongside potential avenues for future research, possible cultural, historic, and demographic explanations for the witnessed linguistic patterns are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Profanity, as the most obvious feature of popular rap music, changes the socio-linguistic indicators in the literature of people in society. The purpose of this research is to discover and investigate the mental and semantic implications of Tataloo fan girls from listening to his profanity songs, which was carried out with the qualitative method and grounded theory technique and the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 Tataloo fans. The samples were selected based on the purposeful snowball sampling. Interviews were stopped when theoretical saturation was reached. The paradigm model resulting from the interpretation of the opinions of female fans shows that acceptability of profanity songs) in connection with a set of causal conditions (social and cultural background - special situations - homophobia - attractiveness of the artist's lived experience - not getting permission and rejection from society - family background of the singer), background conditions (povertyunemployment-isolation-lack of entertainment), intervening conditions (dominance of music industry-peer group) become meaningful. Girls justify profanity in street music by using strategies (the normality of profanity in rap style - the pleasantness of profanity) which is one of its consequences (draining energy - creating a discourse of profanity - normalization of profanity to people around - tendency towards nihilism).The fans consider themselves and the singer to be rejected from the society and victims of oppression and discrimination, and because they lack the power to act against discrimination, they are like helpless and weak people who are only able to express their anger by profanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whose sounds fit in the nation-state? Countering histories of erasure, this essay investigates the role of hip hop music in articulating Black and Native histories and presence in Canada. Analysis of music by Kardinal Offishall, Webster, and Winnipeg’s Most demonstrates how minority and Indigenous groups express belonging and sovereignty, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Afrobeats' sonic aesthetics in Ghanian and Nigerian music. Topics include argument about the origin and dominance of Afrobeats music in Nigeria, a brief history of Ghana and Nigeria's colonial past, social media debates about the relationship between Ghanaians and Nigerians concerning the Afrobeats subject, the proposed frameworks for understanding the Afrobeats phenomenon, and examples of Afrobeats songs with hip hop traits such as Burna Boy's "I Told Them."

To investigate how music educators engage their students with Hip-Hop, we adopted a "research remix" approach, combining elements of case study and constructivist grounded theory. This approach allowed us to privilege Hip-Hop culture and to construct new understandings about Hip-Hop teaching and learning. Six elementary and middle school music teachers implemented Hip-Hop-focused instruction in their classrooms while also attending professional development workshops. Data included videos of classroom instruction, participant interviews, and videos of the workshops with co-facilitation from Hip-Hop artists and the researchers. Educators encountered tensions and challenges related to a perceived Hip-Hop "realness" and a lack of musical and pedagogical skills. To address these challenges, participants remixed their approaches by blending elements of Hip-Hop music and culture with their established teaching strategies. Teachers' dispositions and feedback from students and colleagues engendered critical reflections about their positionalities in relation to Hip-Hop. We constructed a visual model of a DJ as a metaphor to describe participants' approaches to remixing their teaching with Hip-Hop within their contexts. Implications include a need for increased emphasis on Hip-Hop in U.S. music teacher education programs and institutional pathways for Hip-Hop musicians to become music educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Philippines, the study of popular music is interrogated in literature, criticism, and media studies (e.g., in senior high and freshman college curriculums). Drawing heavily on my ethnography of Pinoy hip-hop, I posit that Pinoy hip-hop culture empowers its practitioners and insiders in exercising their agency with hip-hop's creative and expressive elements to not only resist mainstream (usually neoliberal, capitalist) forces and crushing socio-economic realities but to also use that agency to propagate and promote (mag-ambag sa eksena at kultura) the ethos of the culture itself. This is bolstered by the autoethnographies of urban ethnomusicologists (such as yours truly) which exemplify the dialogical interplay among researchers, artists, and fans in the Pinoy hip-hop scene. The national experience of hip-hop as it is explicitly grounded in FlipTop embodies literary elements and critical discourse in its performativity, providing a rich tapestry for the decoding of hidden and sub-texts. This article fortifies the argument that autoethnographies of subcultural, DIY Pinoy hip-hop music cultures contribute to the shaping of meaningful, relevant, critical discourse by scholars, learners, and culture bearers of the Pinoy hip-hop scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An American-influenced singing accent, referred to here as Pop Song English (PSE), is common in popular music throughout (and beyond) the Anglophone world. This article presents an analysis of the sung pronunciation of two variables (bath and nonprevocalic /r/) that distinguish New Zealand English (NZE) from American Englishes (AmE). The Phonetics of Popular Song (PoPS) corpus includes 154 performers, structured according to country of origin (NZ and the US) and musical genre (pop and hip hop). An auditory analysis was conducted for each variable, distinguishing between the NZE and PSE/AmE variants. Almost all New Zealand performers adopt the PSE variants at least some of the time, with greater adherence to the American model in pop than in hip hop. In the US, region determines hip hop, but not pop, artists' degree of rhoticity. PSE represents a supralocal norm for pop music, while hip hop artists tend to use their 'own accent'. (Pop Song English, singing accent, rap accent, supralocal norm, nonprevocalic /r/, trap–bath split, intentionality, language performance, pop music, hip hop, responsive style, initiative style) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, through the lyrics of the song, presents the representation of gender roles and stereotypes in Kosovar society. On the other hand, this study aims to shed light on music and the opportunities it ofers for the transmission of social values that help in overcoming gender stereotypes in the cultural context of Kosovo. The importance of this study is undeniable because this study was done at a time when discussions about gender equality were at the center of attention. Therefore, the study of gender issues, not only through music but also from other perspectives, is of great importance because it afects social transformation regarding equality, as a requirement for developing a real democratic society. To realize this research, the text (content) analysis method was used, through the ethnographic research approach. Through this method, the lyrics of certain songs have been analyzed to discover how they carry or challenge gender stereotypes in our society. For analysis, we have chosen some of the most popular songs. In the analysis results, we have identifed gender stereotypes expressed with a special emphasis. This includes the praise of the man as the head of the house and the one who takes care of all, including some texts that praise the son as the honor and pride of the family. On the other hand, some songs describe the man in a derogatory way, calling him stupid, owl, and using other negative insulting terms. In particular, current modern music such as rap and hip-hop, especially, tends to go even further in creating gender stereotypes, belittling women with diferent terms such as fraudsters, traitors, whores, etc. The results obtained from this research will serve as a basis for discussions on the improvement of the gender image in the media that ofer songs, especially in the lyrics of the songs to promote positive changes in Kosovar society related to gender roles and stereotypes, as well as help to raise awareness of to the general public about the role of songs in creating and cultivating a culture in favor of improving gender equality. At this point, we recommend a deeper awareness in Kosovar society about the impact of these texts on the formation of gender perceptions. Also, artists and music creators are invited to be proactive in changing this reality, to create music that refects a more equal perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion contemplates theoretical incantation as a convergence of auto-theory and music. The relevance of this mode of expression to the history and future of psychoanalytic writing is reviewed and extended. A comparison to the form that psychotherapy-informed auto-theory has emerged in pop and hip-hop music in recent years is presented. These various considerations are reconciled with the psychoanalytic project of negotiating freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research, borrowing the concepts of Popular Music Studies, Black Studies, and Global Hip hop studies, aims to explore the discursive authenticity of "Keepin' It Real" in Mainland China Hip Hop/Rap Music. It has been set a Hip hop "wave" and became a popular culture styling after the network program "Rap of China" was on air in AiQiYi. But before the program streamed, Hip Hop culture has been already appearances in China Society by the "black culture", "street style", "underground", and "fashion" which articulated through trans popular music industries. In this essay is mainly discussion the development of China Hip hop/Rap with the authenticity "Keepin' It Real" before the Rap of China was on air. And use chronicle to contextualization the historical process of its blackness being accepted and transformed in China. In this process, started by the intermediary of foreigners, to the creation of using "dialect" rap music by local teenagers, presents the narrative basis of the "Keepin' it Real" of China hip-hop culture / rap. Finally, reflect on how the mainstream media industries could continue to create the "real" appearance of China hip-hop culture/rap through the tripartite reconciliation by local cultural practice, commercial media wrapping and government intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Polizei & Wissenschaft is the property of Verlag fur Polizeiwissenschaft and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Spaces are central to identity-formation and public representation, and play key roles within narratives on queerness and self/other portrayal. In this study, focus is placed on popular culture with specific interests in the discography of Temmie Ovwasa, a self-outed queer-identifying non-binary Nigerian music artiste. I contend that Ovwasa's songs represent a deconstruction of the homophobic and misogynist space that hip hop culture vaunts. Their discography further signals a disruption of heterosexual normativity within Nigeria's contemporary popular music. Purposively selected songs are analysed with the application of the tenets of queer theory and critical discourse analysis. Close attention is paid to the thematic preoccupation of the songs as well as queer identity and agency. While there is a recognition of the limitations which a chronically homophobic milieu enforces on their agency, Ovwasa also acknowledges the redemptive role which their popularity and visibility through their discography enables in the politics of representation and conquering of hither-to disabling spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Music is a means of communication, cultural heritage that people share their common feelings since its existence in people's lives. With the influence of popular culture in Turkish society, different types of music have emerged from time to time. The features of Turkish Rap music such as having a fast rhythm being catchy and easy to memorize have made Turkish rap music popular among students. The aim of this study is to determine the adjectives used in 10 selected Turkish rap songs. For this, 10 Turkish rap songs with over 5 million streams on the platform named Youtube, which can serve as an example for students and serve the language skill acquisition of the Turkish Lesson Curriculum, were examined. Turkish rap songs, which were examined with a descriptive scanning model, were evaluated with a systematic analysis method. As a result of the research, it was determined that 189 adjectives were used in 10 Turkish rap songs. Of these adjectives, 67 are qualifying adjectives and 122 are descriptive. Examining the determination of the adjectives describing the quality and functional status of the nouns in Turkish rap songs is important in terms of the usability of Turkish rap songs in Turkish education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the global ascent of reggaetón, there was rap, and before Ivy Queen, Glory, Natti Natasha, Cardi B, Villano Antillano, and Young Miko, there was Lisa M. This essay is an analysis of Lisa M's musical career in the context of early 1990s debates about women, rap, and society in Puerto Rico, taking advantage of the increased focus on gender and on Puerto Rican women singers demonstrated by works ranging from Frances R. Aparicio's Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures to Licia Fiol-Matta's The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music. I analyse Lisa M's early musical production, particularly songs from her 1992 album Ahora vengo alborotá, and articles and letters to the editor from 1992 and 1993 in El Nuevo Día and Vea to document popular debates about rap and gender in Puerto Rico. I conclude with some reflections about Lisa M's coming out of the closet in 2010 and her musical reappearance in 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the way consumers access and engage with music changing due to the internet, record labels have looked at product placements as a crucial way to build declining revenue from music plays. The present study examines rap music’s lyrical mention of brands in most popular songs on the U.S. Billboard charts from 2006 to 2020. Overall, it is clear that the appeal for brands to partner with the music industry, and for artists to include brand mentions in songs, is still prevalent. Yet, these partnerships must be strategically pursued to lead to benefits to both the artist and the brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originally intended to sound "classic" by employing 1960s pop production aesthetics, the single is now revised and renamed in this iteration as "All I Want for Christmas Is You (SuperFestive)" from Bieber's Christmas album I Under the Mistletoe i (2011) which debuted at number 1 on the US I Billboard 200 i .[3] My initial reaction on seeing this duet became the catalyst for an investigation of what I saw the video to represent - the convergence of a hit Christmas song by Mariah Carey, the star phenomenon of an auto-tuned Justin Bieber in an "updated" duet, and the setting of a US department store as symptomatic of what I am calling "Sloanism" in popular music. Such approaches could also be compared with the Sloanism of the previous examples, or with other transtylations like heavy metal covers of pop and R&B songs (e.g. Northern Kings' "Kiss from a Rose"), progressive rock tendencies to cover classical music (e.g. Emerson, Lake and Palmer's version of "Pictures at an Exhibition"), or new films that update songs via their intermediality (e.g. the 1992 updated music video of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" to include I Wayne's World i movie footage).[76] The phenomenon of updating band members may also represent Sloanism linked to an obsolescence in function of some of their members. Songwriting production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis elucidate the distinction between the hit song and music more generally: Terry always says there's really three kinds of music: there's good music, there's bad music and there's hits. [Extracted from the article]

The first half of this article makes that case for, and develops, a preliminary conceptual framework for a 'musicriminology'. A response to recent provocations for a more sensorially orientated criminology, and more general appeals for cultural criminology to engage rigorously with popular music and sound, a musicriminology could constitute significant contribution to the cultural criminological field. The article proposes two key conceptual themes, culture and co-production that underpin such a framework. Into these broad (Double-C) themes are incorporated theories of the cultural, material, aesthetics, sonics, and the sensorial. The second half of the article uses drill music, a subset of rap or hip-hop music, as a case study. The focus is on the popular western Sydney drill group OneFour, who have recently been subject to police attempts to suppress them on the basis that their lyrics 'incite violence'. With dark, nihilistic and sometimes violent lyrics typically narrating street life, drill is often characterised by performers' relationship to place–groups are sometimes even named after their postcode. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia drill music has attracted the attention of police, politicians, and mainstream media for artists' alleged relationship to street-based violence. The article suggests that OneFour's music challenges an accepted aesthetic and cultural order. However, somewhat ironically the group has become more popular as a result of police attempts to criminalise them and to re-assert such an order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on topics including, interactions of music and politics in the case of wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin; the consequences of COVID-19 on K-pop and virtual concerts; and the political economy of music in political campaigns,.

Expressive timing in hip-hop flow concerns the practice whereby an MC (rapper) inflects their flow rhythms on a minuscule scale not easily representable with standard musical notation--how far "ahead" or "behind" the beat they rap. Mitchell Ohriner (2019) positions expressive timing as an integral part of hip-hop flow and discusses it in detail. This paper complements his work by surveying flow timing across the broader hip-hop genre. Three broad practices of expressive timing in flow are identified. Swung timing subdivides the tactus unequally, similar to a common jazz drum timekeeping pattern. Lagging timing refers to the patterned delay of flow rhythm in relation to the underlying instrumental or sampled beat. And conversational timing pertains to flow performances that resemble rhythmic patterns idiomatic of spoken language. Theoretical and notational concepts developed by Fernando Benadon (2006, 2009) and Ohriner (2019) are used to illustrate the extent to which a flow performance involves these approaches to expressive timing, and propose analytical methods for these approaches that highlight their functional and rhetorical appeal. Expressive timing is investigated in light of Signifyin(g) in African American music (Samuel Floyd Jr., 2002), groove-based expressive microtiming (Vijay Iyer, 2002), Afrocentric models of rhetoric (Ronald Jackson, 1995), and narrativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On her 2014 debut album, Społeczen'stwo jest niemiłe (Society is Mean), Polish author Dorota Masłowska introduced audiences to Mister D., an alter ego who brought Masłowska's trademark cutting social critique to an eclectic mix of hip-hop and pop musical tracks and videos. Analyzing the music video for "Chleb" (Bread) and the accompanying album art, as well as the stand-alone single "Tęcza" (Rainbow), this article demonstrates how Masłowska's sampling of familiar hip-hop tropes and nationalist narratives exposes the component parts of our everyday and reveals how quotidian performances of gender, sexuality, and nationality combine in the perception of authenticity. This analysis is framed within discourses on sampling, parody, and humor in hip-hop to highlight the critical potential of her play with recognizable types and the subversive potential of "playing the part." In her visual and verbal collage, Masłowska employs the logics of hip-hop sampling to piece together elements of extant culture and conventions alongside original material to produce a text that speaks to the present while drawing on the past. In so doing, Masłowska's critical and recombinant performance destabilizes the very idea of the authentic, revealing its artifice and insisting on an art and nation that is open to innovation and recognizes its own construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture is often othered in conservative theses as inferior and [or because it is] foreign. Scholarship and views on popular music in Nigeria have been sometimes inattentive to the extent that the popular musical forms have gone to entrench themselves as recognizable local forms. This article compares older popular forms that are now canonized--such as jùjú and highlife--with Nigerian Yoruba hip hop to show the peculiar historical factors that justify the latter's cultural heterodoxy. The dominant hip hop morality that emerged is defiantly divergent from the earlier stress on formal education and legitimate industry. Importantly, hip hop performance in Yoruba has evolved a protocol of social criticism that first presents itself as acquiescent and/or reprobate. Also, existing conceptualization of hip hop acts as hidden [or even public] transcripts is complicated by the novel strategy of mimicry now found in the Yoruba form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his contribution, the author presents the concept of a cabinet of (pop)cultural curiosities, which is based on the prefigurement of Mannerist and Baroque cabinets, or the so-called Wunderkammer, Kunstkammer, etc. He uses this concept to interpret the work of the Czech rap band Čokovoko, relying on the theory and history of the camp phenomenon, which is based on aesthetic transgressions, ironic attitudes and the stretching of the boundaries between taste and tastelessness. The metaphor of the cabinet of curiosities allows to describe and explore the specific ways in which the peculiarly frivolous play with themes concerning women and their stereotypical position as passive objects is performed in the band’s compositions against the background of the transformation of various (pop) cultural codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, Christian rap emerged in the context of Evangelical Christianity in the US. Since its birth in the 1970s, it has been often represented as a tool for evangelization and outreach in the modern urban environment. Although there are stories of purported success of these attempts, most US Christian rappers have since turned to Christians as their primary audiences. There are two main attitudes towards the world and its culture among Christian rappers that are manifest in their approach to the style of their songs. Nevertheless, the general attitude towards the world and culture in Christian rap is that of distancing from these aspects, and Christian rappers want to transform or educate the faithless society, Thereby denying the world its capacity to acquire genuine meaning and truth without Christian assistance. There is a discussion on terminology for engaging Christian rap from an academic perspective. Although some Christian rap scholars prefer to use a definition such as “Christians and hip-hop” to include all the possible interactions of Christians, rappers, and hip-hop culture, throughout the article the studied phenomenon is called “Christian rap” to distance the study of the actual rap lyrics and theology they contain from the analysis of hip-hop beats, breakdance, graffiti and/or other elements of hip-hop culture. This problem with definition mirrors the discussion common to the study of Contemporary Christian music genres, where there is debate on the question of criteria that can be employed to define “Christian music”. Latvian Christian rap represents an array of attitudes towards the world. There are examples of “worship rap” or separational approach to Contemporary Christian music and examples of integrational approach. These two approaches represent different attitudes towards the world, although fundamentally all Latvian Christian rappers that are mentioned in the article distance themselves from the world and wish to enlighten it or reach the faithless with their appropriation of popular contemporary music. Latvian Christian rap is a marginal phenomenon because it struggles with acceptance in Christian circles as much as among non-Christians that are to be its main and desired audience. Rap and hip-hop are perceived to be connected to protest, violence, drugs and other things that are foreign to the image of Christianity in Latvia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sprachreport is the property of Institut fuer Deutsche Sprache and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cahiers de Littérature Orale is the property of INALCO: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents the discussion on gospel influence reigning supreme and situated in a genealogy of black musicians. Topics include broadening notions of genre, sound, and technology engaging a technological, innovative, and performative measure of retrieval and recovery; and sampling elicit resistance and temporality through the mechanisms of performance and improvisation.

Prescription drug misuse (PDM) is a national problem in the U.S., particularly effecting youth ages 16–25. Drug-related messages in music are one known predictor of substance use for this population. Research suggests that racial/ethnic minority youth are less likely to engage in PDM; however, the prevalence of PDM references in rap music may better reflect emerging drug trends. This study examined changes in the frequency of references to PDM in rap lyrics in the top 25 songs in 2007 and 2017, using targets identified from a generated list of 235 slang terms for PDM. The lyrics for each song were obtained from Genius, a social media site with lyric annotations. Coders independently identified the target stanzas and a third member of the research team corroborated the selections. Results of the General Linear Model using a Negative Binomial distribution indicated that the number of songs referencing PDM was estimated to be 18.80 times higher in 2017 than in 2007. Implications for healthcare providers are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the SoundCloud rap movement of the 2010s signalled not only a crisis of the rap-image (the specific ways in which rap had been traditionally represented and produced), but also a moment of intense aesthetic creativity and experimentation. Following Luciana Parisi's notion of alien thinking and Kodwo Eshun's work on Afrofuturism, I see the SoundCloud rap movement as exhibiting a type of alien creativity, existing outside the human but having real effects upon the human aesthetic experience. Through techniques such as Auto-Tune, mumbling, repetition, ad-libs, triplets, rappers were able to create a radically new aesthetic form that pushed the limits of digital music production and listening. I present SoundCloud rap tracks as virtualities of aesthetic origination, with rappers and producers playing with the alien, the unknown, the incomputable and the incomprehensible, which are provided to them via cybernetic technologies. These virtualities become ways of bringing forth the alien in the form of new syntaxes, new meanings, new aesthetics and new modes of being, pushing the bounds of rap and popular music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previous study showed that 'bright' vowels (i.e. front vowels, which have higher second formants) are favoured for on-beat words in hip-hop music. Here we partially replicated these findings in a more diverse sample of pop songs from the Rolling Stone Corpus. Stressed monosyllables were classified by their vowel's place of articulation and their metric position. Bright vowels were 9–13% more likely on weak (but not strong) beats and metric positions immediately surrounding than other metric positions. Favouring bright vowels on and surrounding weak beats may mitigate masking by the snare drum, which typically plays on weak beats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]