ABSTRACT
Popular music was a central component in the modernization and survival of the Welsh language. Welsh popular music arose out of a particular identity formation, for a specific political and social need, and was nurtured in that environment in a protective and autonomous way. While Welsh popular music is not the only tool by which one can identify 'Welshness', the communities which have been organized around its production and consumption, and the contestations surrounding its relationship to Anglophone popular music, deserve to be re-evaluated here as 'ruptures and continuities' in the process of Welsh identity. The crisis of Welsh identity in the 1960s was resolved to a degree by the indigenization of popular music, and the language of popular music modernized the Welsh language. Welsh identity is created in opposition, or relation, to English identity, regardless of linguistic qualification. Anglophone-Welsh 'affective alliance' hinges on linguistic affiliation and challenges the implications of the descriptor 'Welsh'.
