IASPM Journal

The Effect of Genre on Environmental Popular Song Lyrics

Håvard Haugland Bamle — 2026-05-15

This article examines how musical genre affects the expression of environmental sensibilities in contemporary song lyrics. Heavy metal and indie folk are differently attuned towards environmental themes, and artists in each genre pursue different lyric strategies to address issues like global warming and species extinction. This article examines songs by heavy metal band Gojira and indie folk band First Aid Kit to discover how genre conventions impact the environmental meaning potential of lyrics. Gojira’s songs reveal that the power aesthetics of heavy metal can accommodate explicitly environmental lyrics. First Aid Kit show that indie folk songs can rely on an associative poetics generating environmental nostalgia even without direct lyrical reference to environmental issues. Attention to how meaning is generated on the level of genre will expand our understanding of the role of song lyrics in promoting environmentalism to music fans.

Organic Metal

Jan Herbst — 2026-05-15

This article analyses the media and public discourse surrounding the sold-out symphonic metal concert, Organic Metal: Two Worlds Collide, performed by Plague of Angels at York Minster in April 2025. Using Critical Discourse Analysis of thirty-two news and broadcast items alongside netnography of Reddit discussions, it asks what the controversy tells us about how popular music’s meanings are negotiated across religious authority, heritage discourse, and fan reception. The findings pivot on three axes: heritage versus sacrilege, inclusion versus elitism, and the tension between community mission and commercialism. A single metonym, the “blasphemy-by-association” t-shirt, proved highly spreadable and repeatedly recoded the event as a moral breach. Sequencing effects were decisive: when stories led with risk to heritage and mission, coverage read as stewardship; when they led with finance, it read as commercialisation. Participatory publics often softened sacrilege by reframing the event through pragmatic preservation. The study contributes to popular music studies by showing how genre legitimacy is negotiated when metal enters institutional heritage settings, and it offers practical guidance on programming and communication for sacred heritage sites hosting popular music.

“Staccato signals of constant information”

Matthew Bannister — 2026-05-15

This essay discusses examples in 1960s-1970s popular music of Philip Tagg’s “telegraphic anaphone” or Morse code museme—rapid, high-pitched, monotonal chatter used in news themes—in terms of media “noise”. Following McLuhan’s insight that a medium’s message is not content but change of scale, pace or pattern, the museme is metonymic for the transformative effects of new technologies, a metacommunicative gesture that registers the impact of a medium as “noise”, the shock of modernity. It also relates to stammering, heralding but also impeding communication, generated by anxiety/urgency. It plays a mediating role in musical structures, occurring in introductions or between sections, and relates to innovative sounds/scenes—Motown, Nashville, 1960s LA, UK glam, and German electronica, connotations changing according to historical and cultural locations. An analogical emulation of electronic sounds, the museme became redundant with the rise of electronic music, although the “stutter” continues into hip-hop via scratching and sampling.

Insiders’ Perspectives on Democratisation of Classical Music Production

Emre Ekici — 2026-05-15

This study employs inductive thematic analysis to examine democratisation in music production—making resources and knowledge more accessible—by comparing classical (CMP) and popular music production (PMP). PMP embraces technological innovations, fostering decentralised tools and platforms for diverse creators. CMP, however, prioritises fidelity to live performance and historical conventions, resisting democratisation due to institutional conservatism and entrenched power dynamics. Using data from 34 qualitative interviews with professionals, the study highlights how educational, institutional, and technical factors slow CMP’s adaptation to technology. While the democratisation of CMP would require cultural shifts and educational reforms, the adoption of select PMP innovations might enhance accessibility without compromising CMP’s traditional values. This research contributes to the underexplored intersection of democratisation and CMP practice. The paper suggests that through implementing hybrid approaches inspired by PMP, CMP could evolve to create more flexible and creative production environments while preserving its rich heritage.

Considering Golden Section Proportionality in Popular Music

Dave Collins — 2026-05-15

The Golden Section, sometimes referred to as the “golden ratio” or “golden mean”, has been referenced in many studies in the arts, serving as a mathematically-based aesthetic criterion for form, structure, proportionality, and balance. In the domain of musical composition, scholars have noted the relationship between the golden section and musical structure; I will briefly illustrate how these studies have focused on proportions and structures in classical music only, which has used a methodology of counting bar numbers in a musical score. I follow this by demonstrating that golden section proportionality may not only be confined to classical music but can also be applied to popular music. I introduce an analytical method that measures the elapsed or clock time of the sounding music rather than examining a musical score. In doing so I use the concept of a temporal “key event point”, illustrating this in six works by Jacob Collier.

Drumming for Change

Brigitta Davidjants — 2026-05-15

Music has long been recognised as a powerful resource for uniting people around shared ideas, making it an effective tool for political activism. In this article, we examine an activist percussion group, Rhythms of Resistance (RoR) Tallinn, to identify key aspects of their activism by analysing video footage of their performance at Tallinn Pride 2023. Additional data include a focus group interview with three RoR Tallinn members and an ethnographic account. Our main research questions are: what key performance practices characterise RoR Tallinn’s activist drumming, and how do these practices localise transnational protest repertoires in the Estonian context within the post-Soviet Baltic-Nordic region? Our analysis identified four interrelated thematic dimensions: (1) the use of tactical frivolity; (2) distributed leadership; (3) care across multiple in-group and outward-reaching layers; and (4) embodied individual experience. We argue that RoR Tallinn functions not only as a form of protest but as a care-oriented, embodied practice that sustains activists and reshapes protest culture through music.

Back to the Future

Pat O'Grady — 2026-05-15

The study of songwriting invites us to enter into the music production process of making a song. Here, we may observe melodic or lyric ideas in their unfinished form. However, within this process there are also ways a songwriter might imagine how the song will sound when it is completed. This article probes this process as the “music production imagination”. Using a practice research approach coupled with brief textual analyses of existing accounts of practice, it examines the imagined futures of a song during the songwriting process. It draws on 1980s pop as an example, where highly mediated production elements, such as surreal reverb, synthesizers, and drum machines, often appear first in the imagination before they are realised in a recording.

A Mediatized and Decentered Future

Xiaodan Zhang — 2026-05-15

The 23rd IASPM Biennial Conference (Paris, 2025), themed “Recording Popular Music”, directed scholarly attention from external social crises toward a renewed focus on the medium of recording itself. This review identifies three key intellectual currents evident at the conference: an ontological turn that redefined recording as music’s mode of existence; a technological-historical turn that reframed sound technologies as cultural artifacts; and a continued engagement with identity politics, now turned inward to examine recording as a site of gendered power and decolonial contestation. Together, these shifts established recording as a central object of theory and method. The conference also signaled a move toward a more mediatized and polycentric future for the discipline, exemplified by the growing participation of scholars from beyond the Anglo-American sphere.

Review: The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies

Sangheon Lee — 2026-05-15

Review: Futuromania

Lucia Clara Affaticati — 2026-05-15

Editorial

Ann Werner — 2026-05-15

The first issue of IASPM Journal in 2026 is an open issue; it is also the first issue edited independently by a new editorial team of four: Ann Werner, Sudiipta Dowsett, Sangheon Lee and Nassos Polyzoidis. In this editorial we present ourselves, our plans and aims for the coming three years with IASPM Journal and provide an overview of the articles included in the first issue of 2026.