I first entered graduate school in 2006 and received my PhD in American Studies in 2013, having completed a dissertation on race and rock and roll music in the 1960s. Since 2014 I have held a joint appointment in the American Studies Program and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Although I am a music scholar and have many close friends in the fields of historical musicology and ethnomusicology, I have never been officially affiliated with a music department, a relatively common situation for many of us in the field of popular music studies. Ours is a wide-ranging and diffuse field that, for most of its existence, has largely been conducted either between or outside of the purviews of more traditional academic ‘disciplines’, a position that can frequently feel both precarious and energizing. The rise of popular music studies as an academic endeavour over the past several decades has coincided with a rise in the scholarly currency of interdisciplinary work across the humanities, as well as an explosion of interest in popular culture as an object of critical and historical analysis more broadly. But popular music studies has also developed as a field during a prolonged moment of crisis for the humanities and the American university, one that has been thrown into sharpest relief by the economic crashes of 2008 and now 2020, but whose origins stretch back at least half a century. Just a few symptoms of this crisis include over-reliance on graduate student labour, a steady increase in adjunctification, and a corresponding scarcity of tenure-track jobs.Footnote 1 The ‘ivory tower’ is no longer what it once was, or at least what we are told it once was; we might even say that said tower has collapsed, specifically the mythic notion of an apprenticeship-based PhD-to-tenure pipeline granting entry to a noble and rarefied ‘life of the mind’.
This collapse began long before I entered graduate school, and, in the roughly fifteen years that I have spent in the academy, I have witnessed many different strategies for grappling with its aftermath. Among the most common and intriguing to me is a steady uptick in the usage of a broad and beguiling term: ‘public engagement’. From what I have been able to gather, no one has yet put forth a standardized or consistent definition of what this phrase means; at the universities where I have studied and worked I have heard it used to describe everything from exhibition curation to community organizing to appearing on television to posting frequently on social media. But the broadest, and loftiest, ideal of ‘public engagement’ is usually framed as some variation of ‘expanding the walls of the classroom’: bridging the divide between the university and the public in order to educate people who are outside our classrooms and scholarly networks. While universities’ own motivations for ‘public engagement’ can often be cynically viewed as more self-interested than this – that is, as something more akin to brand-building – I myself have come to believe in that aforementioned lofty ideal of public engagement, and quite passionately at that. As a frequent contributor to popular mass media venues over the last decade-plus, I have found my own scholarship enormously enriched by my experiences writing for public audiences from an academic vantage point. It has made me a far better writer, for starters, and it also frequently reminds me that there is a great deal of insight and expertise on the subjects I write about that exists far outside the traditional boundaries of the academy.
Popular music studies’ potential role in academic ‘public engagement’ in the twenty-first century is therefore a subject that excites me, and I think that popular music scholars are well positioned to lead such projects. Music scholars, and popular music scholars especially, research and write about a subject that many people are exceptionally interested in. Technological advances in the ways in which we access and listen to music have also made the possibilities for how we teach with and learn from it newly dynamic. Academic books on music now regularly come with Spotify playlists curated by the author, and online venues that reach audiences wider than those of traditional journal publishing can also easily make use of streaming links within essays to enable a more indexical approach to instruction, explanation, and analysis.
This article consists of two interconnected parts and is intended as more of a collection of observations and provocations than a single programmatic statement. The first part considers what engaging with ‘the public’ may have to offer popular music studies; the second considers what the academic field of popular music studies, in turn, has to offer the world beyond the academy. I will begin by ruminating a bit about the uneasy relationship to academia and ‘the public’ as I have known it to exist more generally, before moving to a discussion of some of the many and varied benefits of popular music scholars doing public engagement in a variety of senses. I am particularly interested in the perceived divide between scholars and journalists, which is an admittedly personal concern: before arriving in academia I worked extensively as a music and culture journalist, and I still have many friends and collaborators in that field. As both academia (and popular music studies specifically) and online and print media (and arts media especially) navigate times of profound and unprecedented crisis, I believe that bridging the scholarly/journalistic divide is not only an intellectual necessity but quite possibly also an ethical one. Finally, this article addresses some of the other potential ways that popular music studies should remain committed to bridging the academic/public divide, and why doing so in fact honours and preserves the ever-growing history of the field.
Part one: what ‘the public’ has to offer popular music studies
In 2012, when I was in the later stages of my doctoral program in American studies, finishing a dissertation on the racial imagination of rock music, I had a memorable exchange with a more senior colleague who was advising an undergraduate thesis project on Kanye West. This colleague was not a popular music scholar per se, but a fine scholar in their field whose research interests were sufficiently adjacent to the subject matter that they had been paired with this student. I was interested in the project and asked my colleague how it was going. They responded by saying the student was doing a good job, but the project was presenting a lot of challenges, because, in their words, ‘no one had really written about’ Kanye West.
By 2012, of course, Kanye West was already among the most written-about musicians of the twenty-first century. I share this anecdote because I myself nodded along as it was said, well aware of its absurdity but also effortlessly understanding its implied meaning: at the time of that conversation, there had been almost no academic writing on Kanye West. A search of JSTOR, Project Muse, or Google Scholar for work on West would have likely returned a stray article here and there, some passing references, and not much more.Footnote 2 But the fact is that by 2012 West was already among the most written-about musicians of the twenty-first century; what was in fact happening in this exchange was a judgement of what sort of writing on West ought to ‘matter’ in the context of an undergraduate thesis: what sorts of sources an educator should ask a student to read, what sorts of arguments and claims that student should engage with, and, by extension, what sort of knowledge that student was being taught they should value. This type of a priori judgement occurs all the time in academia, of course, and is often either excused by way of appealing to the universal virtues of peer review or silently endured as a residue of stodgy elitism. I personally tend towards the latter, but in this instance, it also seemed actively counterproductive – an academic bias actually leading to an intellectual failure. By way of a presumption that ‘no one’ had written about West, what was being implicitly conveyed to the student was that none of the voluminous amount of writing on West – profiles, interviews, reviews, appreciations, critiques – was worth reading in an academic context. Leaving aside the glaring way this approach elided the social, economic, and racial disparities between the traditional demographics of academia and those of people who have historically made and chronicled hip-hop music, this also simply did not strike me as a particularly effective way of teaching a student to conduct research.
And yet, in my own somewhat brief time as an academic, I have encountered versions of this sentiment, in similar contexts, more times than I can count. While working on my own dissertation, which later became my first book, I repeatedly encountered the assertion that almost ‘no one’ had written about the Rolling Stones, who are probably one of the two or three most written-about rock and roll groups in history.Footnote 3 While much of this writing is now dated or simply not very good, a significant portion of it remains vital and revelatory, particularly for a historian. When reporters and critics such as Robert Greenfield, Ellen Willis, Dave Marsh, and many others wrote about the Rolling Stones and other rock bands in the 1960s and 1970s, they were creating work of real and lasting value, much in the same way that reporters and critics such as Jon Caramanica, Meaghan Garvey, Craig Jenkins, and many others are doing while wrestling with Kanye West and his contemporaries.Footnote 4 Any and all scholarship that remains to be done on West – or the Rolling Stones, for that matter – should read that work, grapple with it, converse with it, and of course respect it.
There are certainly many academic fields where the volume of scholarly literature is so immense that it is at least understandable that a scholar might not read much outside of it, or fields that are so specialized that ‘non-academic’ writing on them is essentially negligible. Many popular music scholars, on the other hand, are drawn to the field because the boundaries between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ are often fluid; indeed, for many of us, our first exposure to the concept of popular music as an object of serious analysis came through alt-weeklies, zines, or blogs. For a long time, musical styles such as rock and roll, country, or hip-hop were seen as too crass or unruly to warrant inclusion in the ivory tower; while many of us are glad those days are past, I also do not think we want to see them newly confined there.
To ignore work done outside of the academy either unconsciously or consciously is self-undermining and counterproductive and also risks creating adversarial relationships with interlocutors with whom popular music scholars should be forging alliances and kinships, not least of all because our field would not exist without them. In 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a widely discussed essay entitled ‘Erasing the Pop Culture Scholar, One Click at a Time’, in which a pair of tenured professors launched a variety of attacks on contemporary culture journalism.Footnote 5 The article disputed the suggestion that ‘everyone's opinions on popular culture have value’ and scolded journalists for not sufficiently consulting academic sources in the course of their work. I was bothered by this article. For starters, its expertise-fetishism struck me as conservative and narrow in its assumptions about how one attains cultural ‘knowledge’ and who possesses said knowledge. But it also struck me as deeply ahistorical. The authors wrote:
We didn't write this to knock anyone's hustle; to the contrary, this essay is a request for reciprocity. We just want mainstream journalists to be aware: The thoughts and ideas that the news media spotlight as ‘original’ aren't actually all that original. Someone likely wrote something about that idea/era/film/TV show/music before, and it's up to you to find out what's been said and assimilate that knowledge with your initial argument. That write-up you're planning on antiheroes, reality-television history, or the networks’ exploitation of black audiences? It has a scholarly antecedent just waiting to expand your knowledge of the subject.
I remain unsure as to how this constitutes a request for ‘reciprocity’, given the authors’ dismissal of most culture journalism as unoriginal and slapdash. Shortly after the article was published, Lauren Jackson – at the time a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, now an assistant professor at Northwestern – wrote a sharp response for the late online publication The Awl in which she declared herself ‘very much ambivalent about the fate of a scholarship that won't give a fuck about what I have to say the second my proxy access expires’.Footnote 6 But I was particularly struck by Klein and Warner's repeated insistence that they, as pop culture scholars, were, in effect, ‘here first’. The notion that academics were the first intellectual cohort to take popular culture seriously as an object of analysis and historical insight is simply untrue. For the vast majority of the twentieth century almost all the most trenchant observers of American popular culture came from well outside of the academy, including voices as varied as Constance Rourke, C. L. R. James, James Agee, Albert Murray, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Ralph Ellison, and many others.Footnote 7 Anyone who has studied American popular culture since is doing so on a foundation that these writers built.
Academia and journalism have, of course, long looked askance at one another, a rivalry perhaps embedded in the structure of the two professions. Journalism is, by nature, reactive, urgent, and market-driven; academia is deliberate, procedural, and less openly profit-driven. The former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham once famously (allegedly) remarked that journalism was the ‘first rough draft of history’; in this formulation we might imagine journalists emphasizing the word first, while academics might emphasize the word rough.Footnote 8 Many professional journalists have a stereotype of the academy as stuffy, behind-the-times, and full of bad writers who cannot meet deadlines; many academics have a stereotype of journalism as superficial and fleeting, overly beholden to the demands of ‘popularization’, page-views, and commerce. But the attitudes expressed in Klein and Warner's essay gave me worry that, as the field of popular music studies grows in stature, and as more and more students take classes on punk, country, and hip-hop taught by professors who got PhDs while writing dissertations about those musics, the field will risk losing touch with its roots, and by extension with ‘the public’ at large, a common feature of many fields older than our own. The still-too-present tendency of certain journal referees, dissertation advisors, and seminar instructors to discredit or disallow sources not published in an academic venue disincentivizes reading widely. As Jackson herself noted, ‘Plenty of scholars won't think to survey even popular online publications before waxing academic on Beyoncé or Miley Cyrus behind a paywall.’Footnote 9 This tendency towards diminishing or simply disregarding material not published by a university press or a peer-reviewed journal can lead to scholarship that is troublingly blinkered in both context and contribution, not simply in the study of popular culture, but also in the study of any subject that has produced sustained conversation and insight outside the walls of the academy.
The question of where to read and where to write was the subject of another recent flare-up on this subject in the Chronicle, this time over an advice column entitled ‘Which Publications Matter at Which Stages of Your Career’, authored by Manya Whitaker, a newly tenured associate professor of education at Colorado College.Footnote 10 Among other things, Whitaker suggested that faculty wait until they have been on the job for twenty-five years before engaging in a ‘nonscholarly writing project’. ‘Too many early career scholars’, she writes, ‘seem to be investing their time and energy writing a lot for the wrong kinds of publications. By “wrong,” I mean venues that won't lead to tenure.’Footnote 11 Leaving aside the pejorative use of the word ‘wrong’ to characterize an enormous variety of publications, the piece generally seemed to embrace an extraordinarily narrow vision of what constituted scholarly success and failure. In a time when many colleges and universities are ostensibly encouraging ‘public engagement’ among faculty in a wide array of forms, the column seemed to suggest that there was in fact little value in pursuing such work, because it will only distract from the ultimate goal of tenure.
Whitaker's column came under sharp criticism for its one-size-fits-all prescriptivism, as well as its somewhat uncritical embrace of the virtues of peer review and meritocracy more broadly. One of these critiques ran in the Chronicle itself, just a few weeks later. Entitled ‘Public Writing and the Junior Scholar’, the piece was co-authored by media studies scholar Sarah Bond and historian Kevin Gannon.Footnote 12 Citing the changing landscape of academic publishing, the extraordinary demands often placed on recent PhDs in non-tenure-track positions, and the differing expectations and opportunities for publishing depending on the priorities of one's home university, the two authors called for ‘an expansive definition of scholarship [that] more accurately reflects the climate and trends facing higher education now, and begins to confront them’. They closed by writing: ‘Change is coming, and indeed has arrived from below, serving to begin to modify the criteria for what “counts” on the curriculum vitae. As we consider what advice we give about what work is appropriate or counts for more, we must remain cognizant of this reality. To not do so is an a priori marginalization of significant portions of both scholarly work and the people doing it.’Footnote 13
Popular music studies has historically been much better at avoiding this marginalization than many other academic fields. Many of the field's academic pioneers had each foot firmly planted across the public-scholarly divide, such as Simon Frith, who was a widely read rock and pop critic at the same time that he was publishing significant scholarly works such as The Sociology of Rock and its US counterpart, Sound Effects.Footnote 14 The very fact that popular music has only begun to be taken seriously as a field of academic study within the last thirty or forty years has compelled many popular music scholars to be conversant with voices from outside the academy. The Museum of Popular Culture's annual Pop Conference in Seattle is an ongoing, wonderful example of this; I do not know of many other conferences in the humanities in which cutting-edge work in the field is presented by such a vibrant mix of scholars, critics, and journalists. There are of course no shortage of academics who regularly write about music for mainstream venues, including Hua Hsu, Zandria Robinson, Emily Lordi, and Lauren Jackson herself, to name just a few.Footnote 15 And there are many other modes of public-facing interaction outside of writing; consider, for example, the public history exhibitions that Josh Kun has curated and staged in and around Los Angeles, or the popular ‘Bottom of the Map’ podcast series that Regina Bradley currently hosts with music journalist Christina Lee.Footnote 16 On the other side, there is certainly no shortage of critics who are clearly deep and wide readers of scholarly writing, including Ann Powers, Doreen St Felix, Jessica Hopper, Carl Wilson, and many others.Footnote 17 There are also indispensable, exhaustively researched, non-academic public history projects such as Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast on the history of country music, or Natalie Weiner's 1959 Project, a recently completed Tumblr that offered a day-by-day accounting of the year 1959 in jazz.Footnote 18 Going forward, as both the academic humanities and cultural journalism continue to navigate crises of economic and professional identity, this sort of interplay is more crucial than ever before. From this vantage point, ‘public engagement’ does not merely have to be in service of institutional brand-building or miscellaneous lines on a CV; rather, it can be a proactive and vibrant survival strategy for scholars and fields going forward.
Part two: what popular music studies can offer the public
Many of the reasons that the study of popular music – and popular culture more broadly – was marginalized within academia for so long are in fact now the very same reasons that, in the twenty-first century, as our field continues to mature and assert itself among the humanities, we should resist the urge for rarefication. Prior to the later part of the twentieth century, most of academia treated popular culture as a matter of markets as opposed to art, as an aesthetically and intellectually degraded set of forms that were worthy of study only as sociological effects, if even worthy of that.Footnote 19 Well into the 1960s, popular music in particular was widely seen as the province of entertainment journalists – who, themselves, were stereotyped as gossip-mongers – because it was believed that stars and the people who covered them were dining from the same purely commercial trough.
While this caricature may have persisted around certain corners of academia far longer than it ought to have, I think most contemporary scholars and critics of all stripes would reject its narrow-mindedness. But the notion of the popular music ecosystem as being particularly vulnerable to the whims of markets, and to the forces that dictate and extract profit from those markets, is, frankly, correct. While ‘poptimism’ has been the upward trend in music criticism over the last two decades, a development that I think most of us still find welcome, that should not obscure real, growing concerns about journalists’ ability to write openly and critically about the ever-shifting relationship of popular culture, corporate power, and media consolidation.Footnote 20 Like any industry, the music business dreams of uniformly positive coverage for its most popular artists; recent trends have arguably brought them closer to that goal, including a number of developments that should make any impartial observer concerned about equity and objectivity. The rise of streaming exclusives, for instance, has enabled the largest streaming services to act as de facto record labels, as the music of some of the world's most popular artists is made commercially inaccessible to anyone unwilling to pay monthly instalments – the musical equivalent of a premium cable channel. This is particularly disturbing in the case of Apple, which in the last several years has shadow-financed the work of artists such as Frank Ocean, Dr Dre, Chance the Rapper, and others while also starting a streaming service, significant moves towards complete vertical integration for what was already the music industry's most powerful corporation.Footnote 21
This is a difficult situation for music journalism to confront on its own. In August 2019, the departing editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Megan Greenwell, published an essay entitled ‘The Adults in the Room’ about the growing impossibility of practising uncompromised journalism in a world in which more and more media entities are being gobbled up by shadowy private-equity firms whose interests are ‘diversified’ to a point that precludes editorial independence.Footnote 22 There might be any number of in-house obstacles for a publication trying to write critically about, for instance, Spotify, if its parent company relies on the streaming service in order to curate playlists for music coverage or host its podcasts in non-music-related areas (to say nothing of the possibility of Spotify simply owning the publication – in early 2020 the streaming giant announced that it was purchasing the popular sports and culture website The Ringer).Footnote 23 Similar obstacles might be faced by a critic inclined to write a lukewarm or negative review of an album by an artist who has a tie-in deal with an advertiser, or for a publication that shares a corporate home with entities that rely on access to artists. According to a deeply reported 2017 story on the rise and fall of MTV News in Spin, Chance the Rapper's management threatened MTV in 2016 that the musician would not participate in any content produced by its TV wing unless the company pressured its news website to remove a lukewarm review of a Chance concert that the site had previously published. Ultimately, the website did.Footnote 24 Artists having fits of pique over negative coverage is nothing new, of course, but in our current moment of media conglomeration the line between journalism and entertainment content has become increasingly blurred.
All of what I have just described might be characterized as the political economy of popular music's relationship to its various publics, an area in which I think scholars have crucial insights to offer and interventions to make. After all, many popular music scholars have come to the field through legacies of the new social history and cultural studies, and we have been trained to think critically and rigorously about relations of power. Furthermore, as scholars we are not normally in danger of running into the sorts of conflicts of interest outlined previously; for all the massive problems of the modern neoliberal university, most of our institutions are not yet in danger of being run according to the whims of Amazon, Apple, or Facebook. We thus have both insights and solidarity to offer to our journalistic peers, positions that may not be decisive bulwarks against an imperiled media landscape but which we should nonetheless feel obliged to take up. To study popular music should come with an obligation to attempt to fully understand its complexities as both an art and a media industry.
Actively cultivating bonds of solidarity, collegiality, and exchange with journalistic peers will bear real fruit for scholars as well. For instance, in 2018, then-PhD student John Vilanova wrote an insightful post on Guthrie Ramsey's Musiqology blog titled ‘Why Shouldn't I Interview Stevie Wonder?’Footnote 25 In the piece, Vilanova wondered why more academics do not try to interview the artists that they write about, identifying ‘a model of scholarship … where our own readings and translations are effectively spoken into truth without giving our subjects the opportunity to affirm or deny the veracity of our claims’. Drawing from the language of journalism, he wrote that ‘academic writing sometimes feels like one big universe of write-arounds’.Footnote 26
As a former journalist I was intrigued by Vilanova's argument, even if I stop short of wholly endorsing it. I do believe popular music scholars should interview people if it serves the conceptual needs of their projects, but interviewing can also complicate methodology, particularly since many artists (rightly) understand interviews as vehicles for publicity and promotion, neither of which are normally the goal of scholarly work. Furthermore, interviewing is a skill that requires specialized experience and training, as my ethnomusicologist colleagues will surely attest. But I do think that it greatly benefits popular music scholars to be conversant with people who do interview musicians, and famous ones at that, because I think it is important for popular music studies to maintain an awareness of the changing shape of stardom and the industry of celebrity. In recent years, artists’ ability to use social media to directly determine their own relationship to their fans, coupled with economic crises in online and print media, has left the independence of many publications compromised when it comes to artist coverage. While the line between profile and infomercial has always been a blurry one in the entertainment industry, in an age where access has become newly scarce, more and more publications looking for a splashy cover feature seem to be compromising their own editorial standards in order to ensure the cooperation of their subjects. We have seen a growing trend of stars openly controlling editorial content or sitting for interviews only if they are conducted by friends or business associates.Footnote 27 These are developments that are important for scholars to be familiar with, and the people who have the most intimate experiences with them are journalists themselves.
And of course, academics do have real insights and value to add to the public position of popular music. For instance, in spring 2019, as the juggernaut song ‘Old Town Road’ was upending a host of pre-conceived notions about genre, race, markets, and many other seemingly inviolable industry truisms, I was heartened by the centrality of academic voices in the public conversation. I read social media scholars discussing the role of new social networks such as TikTok in the song's popularity; I read intellectual property scholars helping to explain how Lil Nas X had managed to give Trent Reznor his first number one Billboard ‘Hot 100’ hit, without any involvement or even prior knowledge on the part of Reznor himself.Footnote 28 Most satisfyingly, early in the song's run a notorious music-industry gadfly wrote a viral Twitter thread about country music history that was rife with misrepresentations and outright fabrications. But then a number of academic historians of country music, most prominently Charles Hughes, patiently and methodically corrected the thread's many errors. Hughes went on to become one of the most commonly interviewed voices on ‘Old Town Road’ throughout its historic run atop the ‘Hot 100’ chart.Footnote 29
Less happily, perhaps the most disturbing and urgently important piece of music writing of 2019 was Jody Rosen's New York Times Magazine cover story about the 2008 Universal vault fire and its subsequent cover-up by the Universal Music Group.Footnote 30 According to Rosen's reporting, the fire had destroyed the master recordings of towering artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Joni Mitchell, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and many, many others. According to a confidential document circulated by Universal in 2009 that Rosen obtained, ‘Lost in the fire was, undoubtedly, a huge musical heritage.’
The catastrophic fire itself was the centrepiece of the story, but running underneath Rosen's main narrative were a number of other stories that were far more wide-ranging and complex. For starters, the reason that Universal had all these masters in its vault in the first place was the result of late twentieth-century corporate consolidation and conglomeration. As Universal had swelled to become the biggest record label in the world, it had acquired the catalogues of many other, smaller labels, including Decca, Chess, Impulse, A&M, and Interscope, many of which are effectively synonymous with whole, hugely significant periods of American musical history. Huge stores of these labels’ master tapes were destroyed, the original recorded materials of some of the most significant popular musicians in history forever lost. Rosen's was also a story about media formats; many casual listeners do not understand that much of the music they consume has been dramatically altered from its original form, through processes such as the digitization that went into compact discs and, later, the file compression that goes into MP3 files and streaming audio. These masters represented the sole remaining link to this music as it was originally recorded, and yet, as aging, analogue, physical artefacts in a digital age, they were not as immediately profitable to Universal as the facsimiles wrought from them, which surely played a role in the company's negligent archival and storage practices, as well as their ability to conceal the extent of the fire's damage from the public.
Rosen published a number of follow-ups to his article, and his subsequent revelations were picked up by industry and industry-adjacent publications such as Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter.Footnote 31 But I was struck by how relatively little continuous traction his story received in the mainstream music press, in publications such as Pitchfork, Stereogum, and even Rolling Stone. Or perhaps I should not have been surprised; after all, in 2019 headlines about Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald do not drive traffic in the ways in which headlines about Drake and Ariana Grande do, both of whom also happen to be signed to Universal. The same sort of hyper-presentist devaluation of history that had been so complicit in the fire's damage in the first place was thus repeated in the story's circulation, or lack thereof, in venues that rely on pageview-driven advertiser revenue and, in some cases, the continued cooperation of Universal Music Group itself, which is currently owned by the French media conglomerate Vivendi. The history of popular music in America is too important to be left in the hands of profit-driven media corporations, lest we risk losing the very materials of that history. As popular music scholars know better than almost anyone, the collections of master tapes like those lost in the Universal fire are not simply repositories of intellectual property and past and future royalties; they are also vital and thoroughly priceless archives of twentieth-century culture, recordings whose value as art and history only enhances even as their value as mass-marketed commodities might wane.
There is no real popular-musical equivalent of the film archives at universities such as UCLA and Harvard, where hundreds of thousands of physical film prints have remained stored and protected in the Netflix era. One reason that these archives came to exist is that the movie studios themselves had time and again proven indifferent to the value and preservation of their own archives for anything other than profit. As any film historian will tell you, a startling amount of movies from the early decades of Hollywood had already been lost or destroyed before these archives came into existence.Footnote 32 I am not an archivist and do not know what this project would look like, but I do think there is a strong case to be made for university libraries and other archival institutions to start to treat popular music recordings as not simply sonic history but as a matter of historical material. The protection of physical materials such as master tapes strikes me as one of the most pressing causes to be championed by historians and archivists going forward, and one that ought to be executed outside the purview of the labels themselves.Footnote 33
Concluding thoughts
Obviously, expecting popular music scholars to play a decisive role in the preservation of the American popular musical tradition writ large is a somewhat unreasonable request and a blue-sky aspiration if ever there was one. But I want to end this article on a more manageable historical project, one that comes back close to where I began, specifically the origins of popular music studies as a field. As the field continues to grow and age into something resembling respectability, I think it is important that we remain a big tent, and that we continue to honour our history as such. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, our field has been disproportionately shaped by voices from outside the academy who were writing in times when one simply could not write a dissertation on rock and roll music, let alone become a professor after doing so. To give just one example dear to my heart, while I was working on my dissertation I came across a review of a book by a journalist named Phyl Garland called The Sound of Soul.Footnote 34 The book was published in 1969 and is, to my knowledge, the first book-length attempt to grapple with the subject of ‘soul music’ as it was understood in the late 1960s. The book is magnificent; much like Amiri Baraka's far more famous Blues People, which came out six years earlier, The Sound of Soul explores black musical expression as a direct outgrowth of political and social history.Footnote 35 But unlike Blues People, The Sound of Soul is almost entirely concerned with black music's present; also unlike Blues People, it is deeply reported, featuring interviews with B. B. King, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, assorted members of Booker T. and the M.G.s, and many others. Taken as a whole, it is an early and remarkably successful attempt at writing the rock and soul tradition, predating more widely known books such as Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City and Greil Marcus's Mystery Train.Footnote 36
Like many popular music chroniclers of her time, Garland was not exclusively a music journalist. After graduating from Northwestern she worked for over a decade as a reporter at the Pittsburgh Courier, mostly covering the Civil Rights Movement. She then moved to Ebony magazine before taking a position at Columbia University in the 1970s, where she later became the first tenured female faculty member in its Graduate School of Journalism, where she fittingly taught classes on the importance of arts journalism. She passed away in 2006, at the age of 71.Footnote 37 Garland obviously led an incredibly impressive and varied life, but she is not often mentioned as a pioneer of popular music studies, maybe because much of her career does not square with what we now associate with a music writer. For Garland, studying music was a passion and a career in a far different sense than it is for many of us now. But she was great at it and wrote a book that anyone interested in the history of 1960s popular music should read. Fostering and maintaining a commitment to ‘public engagement’ in popular music studies will help to honour and highlight the legacy of a trailblazing figure such as Phyl Garland, as it seemed to have been an animating force behind her own teaching and writing, even if her career largely predated the term's ascendance to buzzword status. Garland, after all, really did get here first.
