This article is a study of the musical style of Randy Newman, one of the most intriguing singer–songwriters in the United States today. Since Newman's is hardly a household name, let me begin with a biographical note. Born in New Orleans in 1943, Randy Newman moved to Southern California at the age of five and has lived there ever since. While still a teenager he became staff songwriter for a small publishing company, and in 1966 achieved his first commercial success with a song recorded by Judy Collins, ‘I Think It's Going To Rain Today’. He began recording for Warner Brothers/Reprise in 1968, and has released an album every two or three years since then. Except for one hit, ‘Short People’ (1977), his music has appealed to a relatively small but devoted following. Unlike many contemporary songwriters, Newman is classically trained, and is a skilled orchestrator who writes his own arrangements, as well as arrangements for other artists and occasional film scores.

Naturally, in appealing to so many consumers, pop music admits of little formal complexity. Whatever a song's concern, it occurs stringently within the demotic constraints of verse, chorus, middle eight and their like. So often is the familiar blast of Bob Dylan's harmonica an end in itself that he is able to contradict this expectation by withholding the true final verse. Describing Handel's practice within the formal convention of recitative and aria in eighteenth-century opera seria, Winton Dean observed: ‘His care for dramatic values led him to modify the formal scheme to express not only states of mind but character in action; and here most of all the stiffness of the convention enabled him to bring off all manner of surprises’ (Dean 1969, p. 171).

In a recent interview, Bob Dylan said that he has learned never to ‘give one hundred per cent’ – a person, particularly a public artist, should always hold something in reserve. Somewhat taken aback, the interviewer pressed for a follow-up to this puzzling statement. Wasn't Dylan giving 100 per cent on those great albums of the 1960s. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on blonde? All right, Dylan finally admitted, maybe he was. The reporter dropped the question and went on to other subjects, leaving the readers, like Mr Jones, wondering just what is going on here. Most people who have followed Dylan's work throughout his career would agree that, in his work of the 1980s, he seems to be holding something back. There are flashes of brilliance, of the old verbal acuity, the ability to come up with the startlingly perfect phrase to fit his needs in a song. There have been truly great songs, like ‘Jokerman’, ‘Dark Eyes’ and ‘Brownsville Girl’. But there have also been embarrassingly awful songs, like ‘Never Gonna Be the Same Again’, lacklustre singing and woefully inconsistent production values on his records. We know what he is capable of – he knows what he is capable of – yet he doesn't give us his best. Why? In our view the answer, like most aspects of Bob Dylan, is not simple but may well involve a complex combination of factors all pertaining to the attempt to balance the dialectical forces pulling upon him from both the public and private areas of his life.

According to the schemata normally used by critics, jazz ceased to be ‘popular music’ with the arrival of bebop in the mid-1940s. While this statement has some truth to it, it also requires a good deal of qualification. Like blues, jazz remained economically viable in black neighbourhoods until driven out by the slicker pop sounds of the late 1960s. That jazz (with the exception of the ‘cool’ style played by Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, etc.) had a primarily black audience is confirmed by Joe Fields, currently with Muse Records and formerly employed by Prestige and Columbia:

Our records sold to some white college kids, but our sales (at Prestige) were overwhelmingly to blacks – not just tenor and organ stuff but hard bop too. That's why what we sold in Boston was nothing compared to Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Cleveland … Our sales in Los Angeles were much better than in San Francisco.

For the music industry the age of manufacture is now over. Companies (and company profits) are no longer organised around making things but depend on the creation of rights. In the industry's own jargon, each piece of music represents ‘a basket of rights’; the company task is to exploit as many of these rights as possible, not just those realised when it is sold in recorded form to the public, but also those realised when it is broadcast on radio or television, used on a film, commercial or video soundtrack, and so on. Musical rights (copyrights, performing rights) are the basic pop commodity and to understand the music business in the 1980s we have to understand how these rights work. In this article, then, I begin and end with record companies' uses of copyright law and ideology to defend themselves against current technological and political threats to income, but I also want to ask questions about how the law itself defines music and determines the possibilities of musical ‘exploitation’. And this means putting contemporary arguments (for and against the blank tape levy, for example) in historical perspective.

Uruguay is a country of immigrants. By the middle of the last century little remained of its original inhabitants or their culture. To Spanish influences were added others, mainly of European origin, which together formed the hybrid culture which is twentieth-century Uruguay.