What Is Popular Music Studies?

A new series

Since starting this newsletter in October of last year, one goal I’ve had is to use it to help consolidate a community of folks who are interested in the same things I’m interested in—and at least professionally, for me that’s all got to do with popular music studies. Unlike musicology or music theory, popular music studies is a relatively young field that doesn’t have a whole lot of grounding in the traditional institutional structures that might help one learn about it, make sense of its concerns, and participate in it. There are precious few jobs out there in “popular music studies,” for example, and no degree programs that I know of.¹ You can focus on popular music from within a different program (ethnomusicology, for example, or even English); but in and of itself, it doesn’t have a defined program in most university settings.

Adding to that difficulty is the fact that, as I’ve written about before, popular music studies (PMS, if you like—and I do) has been emphatically interdisciplinary from the jump. Some of its leading thinkers teach in departments like American studies, English, (ethno)musicology, gender studies, philosophy, critical theory, sound studies, media studies, African American studies, sociology, music theory (a little less so), and often combinations of these—not to mention the fact that they have been trained interdisciplinarily as well, in fields that may or may not line up with their current official designations.²

So at first, it seems like a good understanding of PMS might be that it’s about your research subject, rather than your method; you’re doing popular music studies if you’re studying popular music, no matter how you choose to approach it.

There’s certainly some truth in that, and it’s not a bad way to think about the field (such as it is). But it’s also true that the histories of various academic disciplines and the conventions those histories produce have created certain tendencies that we have to grapple with. One of those is around the difficult of defining popular music itself; at least in north American academia, “popular music” still doesn’t signify quite the same thing as “vernacular” or “world music,” even though music we might more readily identify with the latter categories (bomba, let’s say) is massively and by any objective measure literally popular music.

In other words, there’s a U.S. music industry bias in popular music studies, at least in north American institutions, which in some ways makes sense (since we’re here and were trained here), and in other ways is a holdover from the fact that the field really got started in an era where mostly white male scholars were writing about mostly white male musicians in the American rock and roll scene.³ This has been changing for decades now, and though there is still a prominent north American bias, that bias itself has sprouted into all kinds of genres and the diverse communities that compose them.

Also related to this bias is the fact that for better and worse, there already has been a discipline where people who want to study musical cultures from around the world have gone—so ethnomusicology problematically and productively remains the place not only where cultural ethnographers of music train, but also scholars who want to study what used to be understood (again from a Western and I would say colonial viewpoint) as “ethnic music.”⁴

PMS doesn’t prioritize or value any one of these methods over another; instead, it welcomes any and all means of studying popular music, understanding that some methods are going to be better and worse for answering certain kinds of questions. Researchers who want to know how people use popular music in their daily lives are going to get more mileage out of sociological surveys and ethnographic interviews than someone who is interested in how unconscious ideologies are formed by the shape of popular culture. (Those folks are more likely to take recourse to critical theory and semiotic analysis.)

This wide-open approach is tremendously invigorating, because it means we constantly get to learn from people who know things that we don’t. On the other hand, it makes navigating a career in academia difficult, because at the end of the day, we all need to get hired in departments that actually exist (i.e. musicology or English).

Another way of thinking about PMS is through the scholarly societies where its scholarship is shared. I don’t know as much as I’d like about the histories of these organizations, a deficit I’m hoping this little series will provide me an opportunity to correct. What I do know anecdotally is that the Pop Conference has been particularly influential in expanding PMS into new areas, bringing together academics, journalists, and other industry folks at the same time that doing so encouraged an expansion of methods, from a more traditional musicological focus on archives (or more traditional literary approaches to lyrical content) to capacious interweavings of Black studies and queer theory that were needed to make better sense of a figure like Missy Elliott, for instance.

The American Studies Association has had a sound studies caucus and strong representation in PMS for a long time, in part because the former has been so central for linking scholars across queer, feminist, Black, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, who have developed methods from beyond music studies that are nevertheless critical for studying music. Less so for the Cultural Studies Association, which comes from the Stuart Hall/ Raymond Williams approach to theory, and didn’t have a music study group until I started one in 2022.

In any case, this is all rather recent insofar as popular, mass, and vernacular culture writ-large had to be advocated for, vociferously, as topics worth studying in the first place: the academy as constituted excluded these topics from serious consideration until basically the 1980s. Today, you can find scholars talking about popular music at places like ASA, PCA, AMS, SEM, SMT, IASPM (US and many other branches) and many more. There are specific gatherings around genre (Hip Hop Literacies, Punk Scholars Network) and innumerable others. But it was a long time coming.

For my part, the U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) has been the scholarly community where I’ve felt most at home since entering the field in earnest. IASPM is on the small side , between 200 and 300 members, and tends to skew younger given its strong support of graduate students. Its journal (JPMS) has been the most exciting place for keeping up with where the field is moving. Recently, we’ve been trying to advance popular music studies through a range of new initiatives and awards, for example, like the event sponsorship program. The Greg Tate and Woody Guthrie awards are great places to look for a sense of the kind of work being done in this space, the kind of work being recognized for opening new directions in the scholarship.

Going forward, I’m thinking about continuing this series with some deeper dives into method. But that said, what would you like to see out of it?

Rec

I don’t know anything about this 20-something Swedish kid who plays the accordion. But damn. This album hits all kinds of favorite combinations, for me. There’s the kind of contemporary fusion that’s more influenced by EDM/house/hip hop than funk; the harmonic language of Midwestern emo, plus sparing but sinewy jazz solos throughout. (Like, I know this sounds weird. But hear “girl in my dreams” for example, which literally starts with a glistening emo-guitar riff that then strangely gets backed by EDM synths and a ferocious drum&bass groove—ALL BEFORE THE ACCORDION ENTERS. It’s improbable and works perfectly.) There are just enough guest artists to keep the album feeling fresh all the way through its ten short tracks. When it comes out, the accordion always puts things over the top. It’s weird and uncompromising and reeks with a little too much talent. 10/10.

(cry

hard)

1. There are some jobs in popular music (full stop), but these are more about applied programs like songwriting and industry practices than they are about research. The “studies” in popular music studies indicates something of that distinction, though confusingly “jazz studies” continues to mostly mean the opposite (i.e. a job in “jazz studies” is usually an applied position, where you’re conducting a big band and teaching private music lessons).

2. Ack. OK. There’s a lot of generalizing going on here, because many of these methods are also interdisciplinary—in other words, I hope you’ll read my gloss of these diverse fields as exactly that: general characterizations. I know there are some folks who read this who aren’t in academia or else might not be familiar with the distinctions here, so I’ll just say briefly that, while I’m not going to necessarily get into the disciplinary perspectives that characterize all these fields, the music studies disciplines are relatively easy to distinguish, at least as they are stereotypically understood.

On that front, musicology has been traditionally organized around archival research, and because that research turns up sheet music as often as diary entries, music theory has been at least one important aspect of musicology in the past. (It’s not a requirement, though; musicology is first and foremost is a synonym for music history.)

Ethnomusicology, on the other hand, is ethnographically oriented, meaning that it’s based around participant observation of the kind developed in anthropology, where researchers embed themselves within a community, learn as much about it as they can, and then translate their own understanding of the significance of a musical practice within that community for audiences outside of it. The effort here is to bridge emic (insider knowledge) with etic (outsider perspectives on that knowledge) in an ethically responsible and transparent way, such that the mediations and effects of the researcher’s own subject position on the studies is accounted for and disclosed.

Music theory, finally, is a particularly challenging field to fit with popular music studies. This is the case in my view for a bunch of reasons, but primarily because the methods that dominated the field until very recently were developed to analyze music from the Western European canon specifically—and while those theoretical tools can technically be used to think about hip hop, for example, it’s neither culturally nuanced/sensitive nor is it necessarily the most useful exercise. (It shouldn’t be any surprise that theories developed for the specific purpose of analyzing Beethoven wouldn’t be a great fit for A Tribe Called Quest, in addition to representing yet another colonial imposition that inserts itself too often to the exclusion of the robust tradition of music theorizing that exists within the hip hop community, already! This dynamic mirrors music theorists’ similar dismissals of the blues from the 1930s or the Black avant-garde from the 1960s, or, or, or…). For another example, rock music often doesn’t obey the laws of functional harmony, so music theorists need to literally invent new systems for doing the analysis before the analysis itself is done.

This hints at a broader challenge facing music theorists: the questions music theory is designed to answer are typically not the questions that either music practitioners or the fans who participate in the culture are asking. All this may account for the fact that there are still relatively few music theorists who make careers out of studying popular music (though there are, of course, exceptions!). My general view is that music theory can be a tremendously useful perspective to deploy from within a study so long as that study is not organized around music-theoretical questions, which I’m largely uninterested in for the reasons outlined above. The challenge there, however, is: How are you going to learn those useful music theoretical methods without diving into the very field that I’ve just suggested isn’t asking—by and large—good questions? There are definitely music theory departments that are changing things, doing good work. I just think that all fields have problems, and the challenges in music theory are (again from my biased perspective) particularly significant.

3. Is this accurate? It’s what’s been told to me, but I haven’t done a kind of corpus study of early publications.

4. The problematic history and ongoing slippage between “ethnography” as a method and “ethnic music” as a subject for that method is one reason why some scholars argue for the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries between musical subfields and/or the dissolution of ethnomusicology as such. It’s still mostly the case that the field indicates white/Western scholars going someplace non-Western and/or majority non-white to conduct field research which then helps those academics advance their careers, a problematic dynamic on a number of fronts. On the other hand, to not study and discuss musics from other parts of the world and to remain isolated within a north American bubble is also untenable and undesirable.