On a Sunday afternoon in early July 2020, I drove with my family to the Powderhorn neighbourhood of southeast Minneapolis to see the memorial for George Floyd. The murder that incited an international rebellion against police brutality had happened only two weeks before. The intersection at 38th and Chicago was still blocked off to traffic, and there were thousands of people occupying the site every day. Teams of volunteers led everything from food delivery and security to distribution of hand sanitizer. Huge names of dozens of Black people who had been killed by police in recent years were painted in bright colours in the centre of the street. Local law enforcement was nowhere in sight.

We came to the rear side of a portable stage with a large sound system directed at the memorial. A speaker was concluding his remarks as we approached the scene, then a DJ took over. At the very moment my family passed the threshold of the stage the first sounds of music filled the air. The scene was already surreal. The world had been shuddered due to a global pandemic, bringing life to a halt in a manner that none of us had ever experienced. A Black man had recently been brutally murdered by a public servant in broad daylight, in a neighbourhood very close to our home. Protest and rebellion had ensued, destroying hundreds of buildings in the area, including a police precinct. Much of the wider white world had caught a glimpse of its colonialist foundation for the first time.

The music that flowed from the speakers started with a spoken segment, seamlessly and intentionally blending live speech into a piece of recorded music. I had heard these words before. ‘Yet, our best trained, best educated, best equipped, prepared troops refuse to fight’, the voice proclaimed. ‘As a matter of fact, it's safe to say that they would rather switch than fight.’ The distinct sounds of Public Enemy's ‘Fight the Power’ followed.Footnote ¹

As a musicologist who knows this track mostly as an object of study, the lived experience of this music was an overwhelming experience that day.Footnote ² At a scene so fresh, so relevant and raw, the record synthesized so many historical and sonic elements that spoke to the moment. James Brown, Trouble Funk, the Dramatics, Branford Marsalis, and dozens of samples forming a bricolage of Black musical history. The opening salvo announcing the date of the track (‘1989 / the number / another summer’), once a mark of currency and newness, more than thirty years later standing as a reminder of the long history of Black oppression in the United States. The powerful lyrical element labelling Elvis and John Wayne racists and calling for revolution and awareness. The Civil Rights history and Black militancy embedded in the music video, with Chuck D and Flavor Flav performing on a stage in front of a large image of Malcolm X and the group's S1W security team. The context of the song in the film Do The Right Thing (1989) and the fictional but all-too-real death of character Radio Raheem – murdered by a white policeman using a chokehold while onlookers beg the officer to stop.Footnote ³ Even the opening spoken-word segment, taken from a speech by Civil Rights activist Thomas ‘TNT’ Todd, was itself a reference to a well-known Tareyton cigarette advertisement from the time – played that day in front of the convenient store where George Floyd had driven expressly to buy menthols.

Popular music can be so powerful. It can move us to action, remind us of history, introduce us to the lives of others, provide a sense of identity and belonging, and so much more. And it does this for wide swaths of people from differing backgrounds all over the world. For many academics who study popular music, there is a paradoxical nature to working as a specialist on subjects enjoyed by the masses. Why should it require a PhD to write about music known, loved, and understood on a meaningful level by so many? And how do we navigate the issues of class and power that emerge from a group of heavily educated scholars writing and teaching about records made by ‘untrained’ musicians?

Popular music studies is a loose, interdisciplinary moniker at best. In fact, popular music is central to the work of scholars in such a wide range of disciplines and fields that to list them here would run the risk of boring the reader. There is therefore great irony that departments and schools of music in many locations around the world have been loath to consider popular music seriously when so many other areas of the academy have developed generations of literature on the topic. I write mostly from a North American perspective, but tensions between music scholarship and popular music studies happen everywhere that the latter is given any credence at all. It is endemic to the field. Music-oriented divisions of most colleges and universities formed as bastions for the study of art music and the promulgation of classical performance through lessons and ensembles; from this perspective, popular music is an enemy.

For example, the role of popular music studies within the American Musicological Society, the oldest music-oriented academic society in North America, has long reflected this viewpoint. Browsing through the pages of the Society's flagship journal while in graduate school, it was not at all apparent that the subjects I was most interested in studying would be welcome within the organization. I could count the number of articles that focused on modern popular forms using one hand. There was a slightly better sense of growth in presentations at the national meeting every year, and an even better indication of a burgeoning interest when the Society published figures detailing the categories of abstracts proposed for these meetings. In 2005, according to the Society's own published statistics, there were more presentations proposed in the area of ‘Mass Media’ (which included popular music and film) than in the categories labeled Medieval, Renaissance, and Seventeenth-Century.Footnote ⁴ Glimpses like this offered hope. In the end, however, fewer popular music papers were actually accepted for the national meeting. This sort of disproportionate rejection was clear evidence of an active interest in bolstering the legitimacy of Western art music.

Since then, however, things have changed dramatically in US musicology.Footnote ⁵ Comparing the programmes from my first AMS conference, the 2001 meeting in Atlanta, and the most recent 2019 gathering in Boston shows a stark difference in representation. At the first, a session called ‘Topics in Rock’ was offered in an unpopular slot on Thursday afternoon, before many conference-goers even arrived; few other papers of the sort occurred during the remainder of the meeting. Nearly twenty years later, I attended session after session at the annual conference that included significant commentary on popular forms throughout much of the four-day event. In many instances these presentations were integrated within panels on larger topics. Entire sessions, with titles such as ‘Borrowing and Crossing in Pop and Rock’, ‘Humor and Satire in Popular Music’, and ‘Guitar Cultures’, reflected a growing engagement with issues commonly discussed in popular music studies. Many AMS initiatives were indicative of these changes. During the era between those two conferences, an AMS Popular Music Study Group (AMS-PMSG) was established and had been active for more than a decade; the Society had launched an ongoing lecture series in conjunction with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives; and recent issues of the Society's journal have even begun to feature work that deals with popular and vernacular forms, with notable articles within the last year on gospel, R&B, and country music.Footnote ⁶ These developments would have been unthinkable two decades before.

Despite these incremental gains, the place of popular music studies within US musicology at large is still not ideal. Mapping the potential for ways forward was the goal of the ‘Future of Pop’ symposium organized by Amy Coddington, Andrew Mall, and Brian F. Wright. The event was sponsored by Amherst College, Northeastern University's College of Arts, Media and Design, and the AMS-PMSG. The gathering occurred before the 2019 AMS national meeting in Boston, deepening the discussion of popular music at the conference even further. In keeping with the study group's goals, the organizers sought to bring resonant voices of scholars working on popular music from both inside and outside musicology. These thinkers were tasked with developing a question about the future of studying popular forms, using their external perspectives to help reflect on possible paths forward.

A dozen papers and hours of discussion ensued during the day-and-a-half set aside for the meeting. The urgency of the questions these scholars developed is especially clear to me now, in the months following the gathering. We all know that the world transformed dramatically during the spring and early summer of 2020. Yet, the issues raised in the three keynote papers included in this Forum seem all the more prescient when taking these once-in-a-generation shifts into account.

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Many of the questions raised by these scholars are reflective of musicology's well-known and anachronistic resistance of popular music studies. Edited versions of several are printed in the preceding Forum. Francesca Royster asks about inclusivity and accessibility, framing her understanding of the music of Brittany Howard and how it reflects her queer identity. Royster's position elicits the call for ‘inclusion’ in a number of realms. On the surface, she calls for ‘embrac[ing] black queer strategies of listening and musicking’ within popular music studies, of simply trying to better understand how Howard's music creates meaning for many listeners tied to a mode of self-reflection derived from issues surrounding gender and exclusion. But at a deeper level, her work is concerned with bridging the disciplinary gap between current musicological methodologies of studying popular music with modes of inquiry often tied to African American memoir and queer studies, and of bringing these voices into the larger scope of musicological thinking. Musicology has certainly been a leader in the latter, but work relating to the former is still sorely lacking.Footnote ⁷ As Royster so beautifully explains through her own biographical reflections, there is so much to be gained by listening to queer Black voices as they pertain to modern modes of musical expressivity.

Jack Hamilton's discussion of the challenges of dialogue between popular music scholars in musicology and the foundational work of music journalists often writing about the same subjects also connects to the issue of these historic exclusionary practices. His work centres on the divide between academia and music journalism, and the reticence of the former to acknowledge the latter. As Hamilton argues, there should be far more interplay between the vast array of journalism about popular musicians and the new spate of musicological research about popular music. But methodological gaps – the use of the interview, reliance on paper-oriented data, a lack of common vocabulary to discuss music and sound – impede these interactions in a manner far more extensive than those between academics and journalists who write about art music. Journalists exist in an ecosystem far closer to the music industry and thus have increased access to living artists in a manner unlike most academics, and their manner of understanding large-scale culture shifts as they relate to musical trends should be invaluable to those within the academy. Nevertheless, as Hamilton writes, the chasm between dialogue and methodology remains.

One of the lasting effects of the large-scale musicological resistance to popular music discourse during the last thirty years has been the development of approaches in other music-related fields without a counterbalance of historical context. Loren Kajikawa discusses this in relationship to the work of hip-hop by music theorist Kyle Adams, a scholar working in a sub-field that embraced the study of popular music far before historical musicology did. The reticence of musicology to embrace these types of discussions has created an unfortunate vacuum for many analysts seeking to forward studies of Black-oriented popular forms. Kajikawa's astute observances of connections between context, musical subject, and ethnic and racial diversity within music scholarship help to bridge this gap and begin a more holistic dialogue about hip-hop studies within the academy.

If the future of popular music studies requires new forms of inclusion, methods of achieving dialogue with constituencies outside of academia, and new modes of analysis within the academy – the challenges laid out by the scholars in this Forum – a broadening of voices within musicology would surely offer significant steps towards all these goals. Musicology's resistance to popular music studies has translated into an oppositional stance against the people who value this music, a disproportionate number of whom have perspectives on race, class, and ethnicity sorely lacking from the field. Kajikawa cites the now-classic Guthrie Ramsey article ‘Who Hears Here?’, which so perfectly isolates a catastrophic breakdown in the cycle of teaching, research, and mentorship needed to infuse musicology with voices of scholars from the Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities.Footnote ⁸ But, as with Public Enemy's ‘Fight the Power’, this article is now two decades old, and little has changed in the interim. Musicology does not seem to be listening.

It is not an easy task. The AMS, for example, has supported a number of initiatives focused on increasing racial and ethnic diversity, such as the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship to support graduate study and the Eileen Southern Travel Fund sponsored by the Committee on Cultural Diversity. With a plethora of options, however, young BIPOC scholars often rightfully steer away from music-oriented humanities disciplines. One reason may be the level of discomfort and continual exhaustion that accompanies the type of trailblazing needed within the field. Another surely surrounds the instability of the job market and the perceived lack of support for musical scholarship outside of the Western art music tradition within musicology.

As I reflect on my experience at the George Floyd memorial, the role of popular music within musicology, and the directions offered by this Forum, I see the need to dismantle class hierarchies as perhaps the clearest issue binding together the past, present, and future of popular music studies and musicology in the United States. This is certainly also true in many other countries around the world. The reticence towards including popular styles within musicology stems from a pointed instance of class warfare. Whether explicit or not, popular music's connection to mass culture is at odds with the preservationist impulse of an elitist Western art music tradition and has been a central component of the historical resistance to popular music studies within musicology. In the present, understanding the voices of marginalized people of colour – who have been so often subjugated to the lower- and working-class strata within US society since ‘emancipation’ in the mid-nineteenth century – is often best achieved through the study of popular forms. Like ‘Fight the Power’, this music so commonly amplifies their voices and we can no longer continue not to listen.