Link to issue 4.2

 We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest issue 4.2 of the Journal of World Popular Music, an academic peer-reviewed journal that welcomes interdisciplinary perspectives and is dedicated to the dissemination of research on popular musics in different international and sociocultural contexts. Over the last four years in its existence, JWPM has sought to bring together the critical voices of people from around the world, placing specific emphasis on contemporary, interdisciplinary and international perspectives on international popular musics. The success and popularity of JWPM within and beyond the academic community is evident in our growing subscription rates and its inclusion in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)/Thomson Reuters, and SCOPUS, which is clear testament to our commitment to the highest possible publishing standards.

 Issue 4.2 of JWPM brings together contributions by outstanding academics and younger scholars for a sustained exploration of popular musics in two South American countries in a special issue entitled Music and Subalternity in Argentina and Brazil. Guest-edited by Pablo Alabarces and Felipe Trotta, the special issue explores the question of “the aesthetics of the periphery” and, in that regard, provides discussions as to how popular music in countries such as Brazil and Argentina mediates issues of social class, ethnicity and gender.

 In the second part of issue 4.2 of JWPM, we are pleased to present three Disciplinary Perspectives on Popular Music, written by prominent academic colleagues from ethnomusicology and popular music studies. Opening this section is Michael B. Bakan’s engaging keynote paper, “The Moral of the Story: Making Ethnomusicology Matter in the Twenty-first Century”, which he presented at the Annual Conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in April 2017 and kindly agreed to publish in our journal. Following is Bruno Nettl’s “Notes on Popular Music in my (Professional) Life”, which sketches the author’s fifty-something years of experience with popular music as a student of music and ethnomusicology in the United States, and as a professional in this field. The final paper by Motti Regev, “Pop-Rock as Musical Cosmopolitanism”, explores the concept of cultural cosmopolitanism as it manifests itself through the “pop-rock aesthetic”.

 To end the issue we present a series of reviews on the theme of Popular Music and National Identity, written by  Iván Darías Alfonso, Nabeel Zuberi, Ben Green, Dijana Jelača, and Peter Mills.

 We hope you enjoy and learn from this marvellous and rich panorama of papers about a wide range of fascinating and important topics on world popular music. Please consider how you might contribute to future issues of Journal of World Popular Music, with articles, interviews, reviews, position papers, audiovisual essays, or else. Our next regular issues will come out in summer 2019, with a double special issue on Global Hip Hop planned in 2018, so please submit material in mid-2018 to allow plenty of time for editing and publication. And as always, please do recommend JWPM to your peers, students, librarians, friends, and others with an interest in world popular music. Thank you for your continued interest and support!