Popular music studies and the problems of sound, society and method

Abstract

Building on Philip Tagg's timely intervention (2011), I investigate four things in relation to three dominant Anglophone popular music studies journals (Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies): 1) what interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity means within popular music studies, with a particular focus on the sites of research and the place of ethnographic and/or anthropological approaches; 2) the extent to which popular music studies has developed canonic scholarship, and the citation tendencies present within scholarship on both Western and non-Western popular musics; 3) the motivations for two scholarly groups, Dancecult and ASARP, to breakaway from popular music studies; 4) the forms of music analysis and the kinds of musical material commonly employed within popular music studies. I suggest that the field would greatly benefit from a true engagement with anthropological theories and methods, and that the "chaotic conceptualization" of musical structuration and the critical discourse would likewise benefit from an attention to recorded sound and production aesthetics.

Mainstream popular music research: a musical update

“…2015), could be supportive in this regard, as can ethnographic methods. For example, Pruett (2011) states that ‘the need for an ethnographic approach to mainstream popular music in the United States is particularly strong, but examples are few’ (Pruett 2011, p. 3), and Eliot Bates notes, in his 2013 analysis of popular music studies journals, that ‘few ethnographic articles concern the music of Western Europe, Canada and the US’ (p. 19). Remarkably, none of the studies in his review examines mainstream currents.…”

Looking Beyond the Republic of Love or Hate in Turkey: Studies in Popular Music

“…It is important to note that one of the criticisms of popular music studies in the Anglophone world, namely, the lack of ethnography Bates 2013), seems to be less valid for studies in Turkey. No doubt, in order to make such comparison a statistical analysis is necessary.…”