How is a field of scholarship or research configured, or how does it achieve self-consciousness? In the case of popular music studies (PMS), the nodal points have included the formation of a professional association (IASPM in 1981), the launch of specialist journals (Popular Music & Society in 1972 and this publication in 1981) and the establishment of university posts, courses and departments. Among the earliest of the last of these was the Institute of Popular Music at Liverpool University in 1988.
Another important vector is the publication of texts that offer a comprehensive introduction to the field, construct its genealogy or proffer a canon of key writings. The evolution of PMS over the past three or four decades can be traced through the sequence of such projects.
The introductory surveys of PMS began, I think, with Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music (Reference Middleton1990), which was eventually followed by a considerable number of books that implicitly delineated the disciplinary field, of which Roy Shuker's Understanding Popular Music Culture (1994) has been the most durable, having reached its fourth edition in Reference Shuker2013.
The story of genealogies and canons also begins in 1990, when Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin created On Record, which confirmed Theodor Adorno as the progenitor of PMS. Over a decade later, in 2004, Frith alone compiled a four-volume Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies for Routledge. More recently, Sage published a similarly sized collection by Chris Rojek, whose disciplinary orientation was announced in its subtitle: ‘Social science perspectives on popular music since the late 1970s’.
Now, two decades after On Record, here is the Library of Essays on Popular Music (hereafter LEPM). Comprising eight volumes of writings, it is twice the size of Frith and Rojek's efforts and dwarfs the modest 490 pages of On Record. The present review covers only seven volumes, as the final book, From Soul to Hip Hop, had not appeared at the time of this writing. The expansion – or inflation – of this project can perhaps be explained by the growth in PMS itself over the past two decades. To my knowledge, nobody has charted this growth systematically, but the editor of the Rock Music volume refers to ‘hundreds’ of academic articles on that topic, and I have seen the British and Irish branch of IASPM grow in numbers from a couple of dozen in the mid-1980s to almost 200 at present.
Before discussing each volume in turn, I want to present the results of some crude content analysis of the provenance of the 162 items included in the seven volumes. First, the gender balance of the authors chosen for inclusion. While On Record contained work by only nine women out of 44 contributors (20 per cent), the proportion of LEPM articles by female writers is 40 per cent, although seven of the eight volume editors are male. Among the individual volumes, the one with least female representation is (you've probably guessed it) Rock Music. The only book with a majority of women authors is that on Popular Music and Multimedia, also the sole item in the Library with a woman editor.
From gender to place: the majority of Library writers (57 per cent) are based in the USA. Of the remaining 43 per cent, the largest group of authors consists of those domiciled in the UK. Similarly, of the eight volume editors, five are US based. US authors overwhelmingly dominate the volumes on Rock Music and Roots Music, but are a minority in Electronica, Dance and Club Music and Non-Western Popular Music. The writers whose work is chosen to appear in Jazz and Pop Music and Easy Listening are more or less equally split between the US and the Rest of the World.
Turning to the publications from which these 162 pieces have been sourced, specialist music journals are in the majority, with 62 per cent of the total. If extracts from specialist books on music are added, this figure becomes 75 per cent. Cultural studies and media studies periodicals supplied a further 15 per cent. Among the journals, Popular Music has provided far more than any other, 33 papers or 20 per cent of the LEPM total.
Finally, in this number-crunching exercise, the vast majority (91 per cent) of the items in the seven volumes were first published after 1989, with almost two-thirds (64 per cent) being the product of 21st-century scholarship. Roots Music is the only volume in which most articles originated in the last century, although Non-Western Popular Music is almost equally split between post- and pre-2000 papers. The most venerable item in the Library is Richard Dyer's 1979 ‘In Defence of Disco’ (in the Electronica volume), which is also the only paper here that was included in On Record.
The relative youth of the contents of LEPM is puzzling, since the field is at least 40 years old and some vital contributions were made in the early years. One explanation may lie in the fact that the sources for LEPM were limited to ‘journal articles, essays and previously-published shorter material’, to quote from the Series Preface by Allan F. Moore. In the event, some editors ignored this injunction and included extracts from books, feeling, I suppose, that to exclude these would be to weaken the overall quality or range of their volume.
Moore's mission statement, published in every volume, presents a different lineage from that presented in this review, citing his own Critical Essays in Popular Musicology as the precursor of LEPM, which ‘is intended to develop’ the earlier volume by recognising that ‘the study of popular music is necessarily inter-disciplinary’. This location of the root of the LEPM project in musicology is significant, notably in its contrast with the Frith, Goodwin and Rojek collections, whose authors had a social science background. Moore's insistence that LEPM's ‘interdisciplinarity’ is a development of the critical musicology project suggests that his vision for LEPM is of musicology-plus.
As the titles of most volumes indicate, the governing principle behind LEPM's segmentation of PMS is that of genre, or more precisely, the genre definitions consensually accepted in Anglophone discourse about popular music, including that of the music industry. Thus, we have a big five of the post-Elvis domain – Rock, Pop, Dance, Folk and what used to be called Black Music. Interestingly, Jazz is now brought within the PMS fold, after a long period when its principal academic and journalistic figures preferred to keep their distance from both pop and classical music. With the final two volumes, however, this generic approach is jettisoned, as the remaining genres are negatively defined as ‘non Western music’ and, more acceptably, a volume is devoted to music's imbrication in a range of other media and audiovisual cultural forms.
Moore claims that LEPM ‘provides comprehensive coverage of the world's popular musics’, but this is self-evidently not so. The carve-up of genres omits country music, a major North American genre, if one generally unloved in PMS. Country has to find its place in the Roots volume, in a solitary but excellent piece by Aaron Fox, alongside two articles on a much smaller genre, bluegrass. Punk, too, is conspicuous by its absence, as is almost all mainstream pop music from continental Europe and from Latin America.
Moore has anticipated criticism of his ‘categorisation’ by claiming ‘it is no worse than any other’, which is a plausible (if feeble) defence but, strangely, the Series Preface inadvertently includes another type of categorisation. Moore writes that the volume editors have been asked to ‘keep an eye’ on some diverse issues when selecting items for inclusion. These issues are the music industry, history, theories and methodologies, ontologies and hermeneutics, technologies, markets and audiences and (somewhat mysterious) ‘aspects of the repertory without which there would be no popular music to study’. While the categories on this list are a secondary feature of LEPM, it is possible to envisage their formation of an alternative way of organising a library of essays that would undercut the conventional genre set. Indeed, some LEPM editors use some of these, or similar, categories to subdivide the contents of their volume.
That is enough of the road not taken. I will now accentuate the positive and turn to the individual volumes under review. The approach here is to consider the substantial (15–20 pages) editor's introduction to each book, and to pick out some of the articles for comment. I have tried very hard not to discuss papers not chosen for inclusion!
In his introduction to Electronica, Dance and Club Music, Mark J. Butler provides an admirably concise definition of his field. He cites four features shared by the musical practices discussed in the volume: the centrality of recording, dance-centricity, site-specificity and a common history. Butler is also alert to the history of the study of his field, including Richard Dyer's article and an excerpt from Sarah Thornton's foundational text Club Cultures. As this is a genre whose scholars have brought gender and sexuality to the centre of PMS, many of the articles deal directly with female or gay identity formation or expression. The chosen papers range geographically across five continents, including a study of kwaito by Gavin Steingo and of the Mexican EDM genre Nor-Tec by Alejandro Madrid. These are complemented by studies of the role of the DJ in New York (by Kai Fikentscher) and in Berlin (Sebastian Klotz). Aesthetic and technological aspects of EDM are addressed respectively in articles by Philip Tagg and Tara Rodgers.
While Butler can feel confident that he reflects a consensus in defining the topic of his volume, Roots Music offers more of a problem for Mark F. DeWitt. After admitting that this term is more or less chosen by ‘the industry’, he determines to resolve its problematic status by structuring the volume in a tripartite division inspired by the Hegelian dialectic. The ‘thesis’ is five articles under the heading of ‘Roots, Deconstructed’; the ‘antithesis’ is titled ‘Roots, Experienced’, while the synthesis section is termed ‘Offshoots’. This structure does not stand up to very close scrutiny, but it contains some very valuable articles. The first section has two contrasting but illuminating papers by Gerhard Kubik and Eric Lott. The Experienced segment provides exemplary ethnographies by Sara Cohen (Jewish music in Liverpool), Hazel Fairbairn (traditional dance in Ireland) and Michelle Kisliuk (a bluegrass festival jam section). The final section of this volume goes further to redress its US bias by the inclusion of studies from Eastern Europe by Donna Buchanan (Bulgarian state folk orchestras) and Svanibor Pettan (gypsy musicians in former Yugoslavia).
In his Keywords, Raymond Williams (Reference Williams1976) remarked that ‘culture’ is one of the most complex terms in the language and that in the world of PMS, ‘pop’ has the same reputation. This is recognised in the introduction to Pop Music and Easy Listening, where Stan Hawkins observes that ‘etymologically, the term has created decades of debate and is bound up in the prevailing rock-pop dichotomy’. Nevertheless, Hawkins, understandably, sidesteps the issue by simply laying out various examples of the confusions surrounding ‘pop’, before moving on to introduce his choice of articles. It should be added that his own title adds to the confusion by yoking ‘pop’ to a term that immediately evokes one of the most despised commercial genres, even if Hawkins wants to wrench its meaning in an Adornian direction. The introduction also errs in stating that ‘Pearls Before Swine’, a piece by Simon Frith and Jon Savage, is a ‘critique’ of the work of British cultural studies scholar Jim McGuigan, when the authors explicitly praise it. The inclusion of this intemperate polemic against a long-forgotten pop cultural magazine is questionable, especially as this volume deserves praise for the inclusion of a high proportion of case studies or close analyses of recordings by individual artists. There are valuable contributions on Sinatra (by Albert Auster), Madonna (two pieces, by Barbara Bradby and by Anne Danielson and Arnt Maaso), Prince (Robert Walser), Spice Girls (Dafna Lemish), Pulp (Eric Clarke and Nicola Dibben) and Britney Spears (by John Richardson and the editor), making this one of the volumes that most closely resembles a direct successor to Critical Essays in Popular Musicology.
If Hawkins' volume title suffers from a plenitude of meaning, there is an opposite problem with Non-Western Popular Music, edited by Tony Langlois. I suspect the adoption of this negation was caused by an unwillingness to use the term ‘world music’, which causes many a lip to curl in ethnomusicological circles. Langlois himself uses the term twice, but only to inform the reader that his volume will not ‘dwell upon world music per se’, and only one essay includes the phrase in its title. Jocelyn Guilbault's 1997 article ‘Interpreting World Music’ offers a cogent discussion of the phenomenon but in the context of concepts of globalisation rather than music industry or audience consumption. Nevertheless, the volume is elegantly organised, with articles covering music scenes in every continent, with a predominance of material pertaining to Asia: there are four papers on Central Asia and seven on East Asia. These articles are distributed within the volume according to four general thematics. ‘Pop, Power and Identity’ begins with Martin Stokes's classic essay on Arabesk; ‘Global Perspectives’ features not only Guilbault's essay but also a paper by Thomas Turino on Zimbabwean music; ‘Music Industries’ opens with another classic, by Peter Manuel on the cassette industry of the 1980s in northern India; ‘Historical Approaches’, the shortest thematic section, has the volume's (and almost the Library's) only coverage of Latin America, Suzel Ana Reily's essay on ‘Tom Jobim and the Bossa Nova Era’.
Julie McQuinn's introduction to Popular Music and Multimedia makes a few uncontentious points about new technologies before providing a helpful literature review of music and visuals in film, television, videos and games. These four media provide the structure of the book, and are preceded by a scene-setting essay by Robyn Stillwell that uses the video, television and advertisement contexts of the Phil Collins hit ‘In the Air Tonight’ to discuss ‘text, intertextuality and the construction of meaning’. The essays on film mainly derive from the discipline of film studies and its various journals and edited collections, which will make this volume especially useful to those of us cocooned within PMS. Cinema themes include films by Tarantino (the appropriately titled ‘Torture Tunes’ by Lisa Coulthard), Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing by Victoria Johnson and a general article on Bollywood by Natalie Sarrazin. In addition to a piece on Pop Idol by Su Holmes, the television section includes essays on children's television (‘Chewing Gum for the Ears’ by Karen Lury) and Ally McBeal (by Julie Brown). The much briefer sections on music video and games have essays on Tatu (remember them?) by Sarah Kerton, on the Dixie Chicks by Lori Burns and Jada Watson, on Dance Dance Revolution (by Joanna Demers) and Grand Theft Auto by Kiri Miller.
Introducing Rock Music, Mark Spicer offers a brisk survey of the literature on the pop/rock dichotomy, eventually plumping (with reservations) for Motti Regev's notion of a ‘rock aesthetic’. Spicer's volume is divided into only two parts. The first, ‘Histories, Aesthetics, Ideologies’, is historical and sociological in orientation, while ‘Sounds, Structures and Styles’ is heavily text based and musicological. The first section includes Mark Mazullo's enjoyable analysis of Greil Marcus's classic book Mystery Train, which Mazullo places in the lineage of American studies and the rhetorical category of jeremiad. There are also some exemplary ethnographies of musicians by Mary Ann Clawson (female instrumentalists) and Deena Weinstein (backing group members). The section closes with Fred Maus's admirable study of ‘“Losing my Religion”, Intimacy and Distance: on Stipe's Queerness’. For the most part, the second segment of Rock Music is a celebration of the methodologies applied by those whom Richard Middleton once disapprovingly called ‘North American music theorists’, such as Walter Everett (whose work is included here) and John Covach (whose work isn't). Spicer feels able to reference Middleton's and Dai Griffiths' critique of the NAMTs, but is not so magnanimous as to include an example of such critique in his volume.
‘Jazz has always been at the heart of popular music discourse’ is the bold assertion that opens the Introduction to the Jazz volume of the Library. While ‘always’ may be an exaggeration here, the editor, Tony Whyton, is right to indicate that jazz has moved closer to the heart of PMS since the arrival of the New Jazz Studies (NJS). For the most part, the essays chosen for inclusion by Whyton exemplify this ‘new type of interdisciplinary studies’. A number of the main practitioners of NJS are here, such as Ingrid Monson, Scott DeVeaux and Krin Gabbard. Uniquely for LEPM, there are also two essays on education, by David Borgo and Sherrie Tucker, who writes about the effect of NJS on both her understanding of jazz and gender, and her classroom practice.
One striking feature of this volume is what I am tempted to describe as an obsession with the television series on the history of jazz (also titled Jazz), produced by Ken Burns in 2001. The volume index has 26 page references to Burns, more than either Duke Ellington or Ornette Coleman (but not Miles Davis or Jon Coltrane). DeVeaux's essay is concerned solely with this topic, while Tim Wall and Paul Long compare Burns's effort unfavourably with a BBC series on British jazz. The reason for this (over?)-emphasis on the series is, I suppose, that its ideology and approach is directly opposed to that of NJS, and that its aesthetic is that of the most powerful figure in US jazz, Wynton Marsalis.
In concluding this review, I should pay tribute to the monumental material character of the Library of Essays on Popular Music, which surely will be the last of its kind. It is hard to imagine that in 10 years' time, a publisher will underwrite 16 (or more) printed and perfect bound volumes of essays. By then, surely, cultural intermediaries such as Moore and his team of editors will be guiding us to recommended reading that is only virtual and online.
