The first thing that occurs to me is that the format introduced in Popular Music 6/1, after the first five hardback volumes, has stood up well and is still looking good visually after 25 years (with the welcome addition of colour to the covers). A journal should always be a pleasure to open and handle! Looking at 6/1 now, it seems to strike a note of confidence entering what the editors called ‘a new phase of influence and appeal’. Whether any of the editors of the time, or indeed we two ‘founding editors’ five years before, anticipated that the journal would establish itself quite so strongly over time I cannot say. I think it unlikely, however, as the aim of providing the growing-but-still-emerging field of popular music studies with its own space in the world of academic journals was part of a larger and more contested one of establishing popular music studies itself. If the journal could play a part in achieving that aim – which, thanks to the efforts of a great many people, it has no doubt helped to do - it was also dependent on the vision and energy with which that major aim itself was pursued. So no reflection on what happened ‘all those years ago’ can be made without a wider acknowledgement of all those who participated in that endeavour.
Just why there was such a groundswell of activity (and activism) towards this goal, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is also a hard question to answer. It is clear, however, as indeed it was at the time, that this activity was very disparate, and it was perhaps as a consequence of this that two initiatives of 1981, the first appearance of Popular Music and the international conference in Amsterdam that would beget IASPM, were broadly welcomed as offering possibilities beyond providing a platform for the products of individual study.
Not everyone agreed that an academic journal (published by a long-established academic press), and an ‘association’ were the way forward, given the propensity of such institutions to narrowness and specialisation (among other things). And indeed, Philip Tagg, speaking of the official formation of IASPM two years after the initial event, strongly exhorted everyone involved to recognise and avoid the pitfalls set by ‘the heritage of bourgeois institutional divisions’ and to ‘take into account a common field of studies as perceived by the people, that is, as a whole, as an intrinsic part of everyday living’. To that end, Philip continued, ‘cooperation should be the order of the day, mutual respect and the absence of professional or disciplinary egotism our ethical strategy.’ Journals do not perhaps need such rallying calls in the way that organisations sometimes do, but had a manifesto for Popular Music ever been needed, we could have done worse than adopt the spirit of this one.
Like Richard, I too celebrate this anniversary and congratulate all who have been involved in its production for their contributions – the by-now huge list of authors, the tireless (and often long-serving) editors and, by no means least, the staff of Cambridge University Press who have served the journal so well.
