Key Concepts in Popular Music

October 20, 2009 by Tara Brabazon

Rationale

Amongst all the media, popular music summons the most complex and rapid dialogue between change and continuity. Technological platforms resonate between analogue and digital while musical genres offer patterns of historical continuity. Through this perpetual feedback loop, most texts, writing and research into popular music either fixates on the new or commemorates the old.

In response to this problem, this book offers an innovative introduction to the key concepts in popular music. It is interdisciplinary in approach and clearly written, probing, questioning and revealing the assumptions, potentials and problems of popular music. The goal is to make certain that the book is balanced and representative of popular music studies in its many modes of inquiry, while also ensuring that the material is current and able to manage the transformations of e-commerce and copyright triggered through downloading communities.

This book is structured through the selection of forty terms from popular music. Each key concept forms the basis of a two thousand word entry which is both historically aware and relevant. At the conclusion of each entry, five references are included, along with five questions to initiate classroom discussion.

The overarching imperative is not to separate text from context or music from audience. Instead, the goal is to probe how music creates communities. Such a relationship is innovative, building on Lawrence Grossberg’s theory of affectivity, to show how genres shape and frame audience behaviour and identity.

This book is complete and will be published by SAGE in 2010.

Approaches

Listening to music
Visualizing music
Dancing to music
Thinking about music
Writing about music

Music Spaces

Sonic Architecture/Soundscape
City music and urbanity
Recording spaces
Clubs and pubs
Soundtracks and filmic spaces
Music Video and televisual spaces
Radio, podcasting and listening spaces
MP3 and downloading spaces

Instruments of/for study

Guitar cultures
Keyboard cultures
Drumming and percussion
Voice
Turntablism
iPod

Genre and community

Country
Folk
Blues
Rock and Roll
Soul
Reggae and Ska
Salsa
Metal
Punk and indie
Hip Hop
Disco
House and post-house musics
World Music

Debates

Intellectual property
Censorship and regulation
Race, appropriation and commodification
Girl groups and feminism
Boy bands and men’s studies
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgenderist musics
Digitization, user generated content and social networking
Music: politics, resistance and protest

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