This addition to Ashgate's substantial and wide ranging Research Companion series is a weighty collection of 26 original essays written by an impressive range established popular music academics . The essays are organised in groups three or four, under seven focal areas: film, video and multimedia; technology and studio production; gender and sexuality; identity and ethnicity; performance and gesture; reception and scenes; the music industry and globalization. The target readerships are scholars and (post)graduate researchers. Authors were asked to write, as the dust cover notes “with a view to helping graduate students with research methodology and the application of relevant theoretical models”.
As a scholar from the media studies/contextual tradition of popular music studies, my first concern when approaching a collection with term “musicology” in the title was that the contents would focus predominantly on textual or content analysis in a more traditional musicological sense. I was relieved to discover that this book takes a broad and inclusive editorial approach balancing text and context in generally satisfying, accessible and often innovative way. Given the number of essays in this volume, it would be impossible to say anything substantial about all, or even most of them. Nevertheless, I'll try and convey something of the richness of this book over the next few paragraphs.
One of the research areas that volume editor Derek Scott suggests has been neglected in popular music studies is the reception and use of music in the everyday. Here Alf Björnberg's chapter on hi-fi culture uses, amongst other things, material Swedish specialist hi-fi magazines to discuss privatisation of listening, gendering of space and aesthetics of listening – by 1980 the notion of ‘fidelity’ to an original is, Björnberg argues, being supplanted by notions of ‘mediatized music’, perhaps even what Peter Wicke describes later in the same section as ‘the art of phonography’.
Elsewhere everyone's favourite socially constructed value, authenticity, is addressed in a number of chapters, both directly and obliquely. I particularly liked John Richardson's discussion of K.T. Tunstall's use of looping pedals in a Jools Holland live TV performance. Looping has fascinated me since the technology made it onto the pedal boards of performing musicians – I first saw it in the late 1980s when loops were very short. The ‘authenticity’ here is particularly problematic situated as it is in Tunstall's ‘nu-folk’ milieu. Nicola Dibben tackles the ideology of ‘authentic emotional expression’ across a range of artists including Pulp, Amy Winehouse, Björk and Sigur Rós, focussing on body movement in performance, a theatricality with conceptual links to Richardson's chapter.
Of the four essays addressing gender issues, Susan Fast's discussion of genre and subjectivity in back-up singing is fascinating, indeed essential. Given the near ubiquity of the use of back-up (or backing in the UK) vocals in recorded and live popular song, there is remarkably little work addressing practices and performance of these supporting musicians. Fast's essay situates their relative absence from literature in broader arguments around performance of gender and power in pop and is hopefully the first in a strand of research that foregrounds the contributions of marginalised figures in popular music production.
From the start, this volume is unlike other similar collections. Scott's introduction is significantly more ambitious than the usual brief summary of the content and structure of the book. Rather it is a densely cited critical and thematic review of many of the key arguments in a broad and inclusive “popular musicology”. Yes, of course there are references to some of the material in the book itself but its accessible momentum functions very much as well stocked a shop window on the field of popular music studies as a whole. If any researcher needed encouragement to develop ideas and arguments of their own, I would suggest they start here. I wouldn't want to be accused of hyperbole (it wouldn't be the first time) but it's the kind of this that makes me very happy to be part of this field of academia. It is the inclusiveness that makes it work. The lines in the sand between the textual approach of musicologist and the contextual approach of sociologists, anthropologists, urban geographers and others are not, by any stretch, ignored. Scott correctly suggests that we are all pulling in (mostly) the same direction, even if we have sometimes quite serious disputes about the routes we take to get where we're going.
The material in this book is pretty much essential to any popular music scholar, regardless of disciplinary background. If your library hasn't already ordered this volume, request it now.
