Volume! – The French journal of popular music studies

A historicist approach of music genres.

Focus on the question of the economic and cultural value of music, which has re-emerged with the advent of streaming platforms.

This issue explores the crossroads, contacts and contrasts between two fields of musical knowledge: ethnomusicology and popular music studies.

The analysis, history and reception of the Canterbury music scene between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The purpose of this issue "Experts / Non Experts. Participative Knowledge Construction in Popular Music: Controversies and Historiography" is to offer a retrospective and critical reflection on popular music studies' initial vocation, to bring to light repertoires that are seldom studied and even sometimes discredited.

Issue dedicated to music as work.

How the question of legitimacy and authenticity has influenced the practices and receptions of hip-hop music.

This double issue explores new analytical methods to characterize the pop voice in its singularities.

This issue proposes to examine some of the points of contact between music and hacking.

Special Metal issue.

Varia issue: Italo disco; French singer Olivia Ruiz; DIY punk fanzines in Russia; the political dimension of Ornette Coleman's music; Pop hits and new media strategy; interview with David Novak on Japanese noise; interview with Simon Frith on progressive rock. Illustrated with a selection of concert flyers.

Music video culture.

Jean-Marie Le Pen's far right music label; Rap Studies in Africa; Sampling in Palestinian rap; Bowie: the graphic art; Indie rock in Switzerland; Portugese punk rock; Multilinguism in French punk rock band Mano Negra… 35 authors have contributed to this “Varia” issue, which also inaugurates a new graphic design. Including special commissioned illustrations by artist Grégory Delauré.

This issue dedicated to Jamaican music studies presents and analyses the main characteristic features of these musical forms—from riddims to sound systems—and their associated issues—from culture to slackness. The publication features nine articles and twelve book reviews written by leading world experts (including 7 Jamaican researchers). Watch out Babylon!

The Punk Scene in France: Forty Years of History.

Special Beatles Studies issue.

If France is a land of immigration, what about its variété genre? This issue of Volume! aims at tracing the French paths of artists of foreign origin—those who integrated the legacy of chanson française, and those who left a mark on their community by singing exile. As a protean form of expression, variété is an ideal object to observe the ways in which immigrant and foreign identities have been moulded in post-1945 popular music.

This new “varia” issue of Volume! is made of six papers proposing different while often complementary perspectives on popular music (the role of the Hellfest festival in representations and uses of metal culture, discourses of loudness in rock music, recent evolutions in South American music, Damon Albarn and the English identity, La Monte Young vs The Velvet Underground). Also in the issue: Alf Björnberg and wind harmony, a musical device by Bruno Lefebvre...

Nostalgia in popular music: a whole scope of various insights on the phenomenon of nostalgia, within a diversity of genres: French chanson, Canadian country song, cold wave…

Works, authors and rights: music and dance in globalization.

Listening: Discourses, Practices, Mediations.

Utopias, dystopias, and anarchy in the Sixties counterculture and popular music. Plus a special feature on heavy-metal studies.

Counterculture in popular music: theory & scenes.

What role do the representations of the Other, the body, women and race play in highly publicized cultural productions?

What is it we call “Black” music? A selection of texts from the April 2010 conference in Bordeaux based on a critical discussion of Philipp Tagg's open letter about “Black music,” “Afro-American Music” and “European Music.”

Cover versions in popular music.

This issue of Volume! continues the investigation started in #7-1, with new questions raised about cover versions, including copyright, intertextuality, and genealogy