If you are a movie fan (and who isn't) you may sit in a movie theatre three times a week listening to the symphonic background scores which Hollywood composers concoct. What happens? Your musical tastes become moulded by these scores, heard without knowing it. You see love, and you hear it. Simultaneously. It makes sense. Music suddenly becomes a language for you, without your knowing it. (Thomas 1973, p. 171).

Discussion of the 1960s generally identifies progressive rock as the prime organ of communication within the counter-culture. At the same time, musical analysis of the genre is an underdeveloped field of study, including only an identification of musical characteristics (Willis 1978), Mellers' analysis of the Beatles (1973) and Middleton and Muncie's analysis of five representative songs in the Open University's course, Popular Culture (1981). As a particularly heterogeneous genre (compared with, for example, rock 'n' roll and r&b), definitions of progressive rock equally raise problems: to what extent does the variety of styles reflect the variety of radical movements contained within the overall term counter-culture; alternatively, given the variety of styles, can progressive rock be considered a single phenomenon and, if so, to what extent does it have musical codes in common?

Since Thailand's Copyright Act became law in 1979 an indigenous music industry has emerged. In the past, the small recording business was concentrated on two aspects: the sale of imported records and the manufacture of popular, mainly Lukkroong music, and classical records. However, the organisation of the Association of Music Traders – an immediate reaction to the enforcement of the Copyright law – coupled with the advent of cassette technology, has transformed the faltering gramophone trade. Today, middle-class youngsters appreciate Thai popular music in contrast to the previous generation who grew up with western pop and rock. Young people in the countryside have begun to acquire a taste for the same music as well as enjoy a wider range of Pleng Luktoong, the country music with which they identify. How did this change which has resulted in the creation of a new pleasure industry come about? And what are some of the consequences of this transformation.

Acculturation is the adaptation of a group or individual to a foreign culture with which they are in contact. In the case of immigrants, however, not only contact is involved. There is a state of immersion in the host culture which, if not total, is at least partial.

One of the things that distinguishes music from other forms of popular culture is that its consumption is accompanied by so much comment. Neither TV nor film, for instance, has accrued the volume, diversity or specialisation of the books and magazines devoted to music and read by people without a professional investment. This literature poses particular problems for historians of rock'n'roll, rock and pop. What are its main methods of ordering the popular past? Which musics and events does it privilege? How should scholars read the music press as sources? How can the pop histories contained in New Musical Express, Billboard or The Face be interpreted for histories of pop? This article is derived from work-in-progress concerning the history of discotheques and club cultures from the late 1950s until the present day. As such, it offers no tidy solutions or complete narratives, but rehearses a few dilemmas relevant to writing about popular culture.

At the time, 1929, 1939, 1945 and 1968 all seemed important turning points in the track of our civilisation. By contrast, as anyone alive at the time will attest, 1955 seemed like an unexceptional year in the United States at least. Right in the middle of the ‘middle-of-the-road’ years of the Eisenhower presidency, 1955 hardly seemed like the year for a major aesthetic revolution. Yet it was in the brief span between 1954 and 1956 that the rock aesthetic displaced the jazz-based aesthetic in American popular music. Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Patty Page, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Kay Starr, Les Paul, Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Frankie Lane, Johnnie Ray and Doris Day gave way on the popular music charts to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and the growing legion of rockers.

Considerable time and print has been expended in attempting to define and date the first British brass band. This controversy should take a subordinate place to the more interesting questions that can be applied to the topic of brass bands when, unambiguously, they do exist as a fairly widespread activity and can reasonably be regarded as the active embryo of the standard ensembles which eventually formed the brass band ‘movement’.