Introduction

In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance’.Footnote ¹ Today, exactly fifty years later, the position of popular music studies within the academy is far removed from Browne's experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted solely to popular music, scholars regularly present papers on popular music topics at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of popular music courses. Popular music has even become a viable area of interest within music scholarship.

Yet popular music studies’ viability within ethnomusicology, musicology, and music theory remains tenuous, as many academic programmes still consider it ancillary. As Martin Cloonan notes, within music scholarship, popular music studies remained marginalized even well into the twenty-first century, with critics a priori questioning its quality, relevance, and rigor.Footnote ² Kimberly Kattari, in her introduction to a 2019 roundtable on the state of popular music studies within ethnomusicology, similarly suggests that ‘stigmas about popular music and its scholarship remain problematic in the [music] academy’.Footnote ³ But, as Andrew Flory's Afterword in this Forum makes clear, these stigmas are more than mere aesthetic debates – they have also entrenched ‘an oppositional stance against the people who value this music’. These tensions are not unique to the United States or North America but are experienced worldwide, even outside the West, where the continued privileging of Western art music in colleges and universities – what Loren Kajikawa, following George Lipsitz, has previously called a ‘possessive investment’ – perpetuates white supremacy.Footnote ⁴

Popular music studies is inherently interdisciplinary, and other disciplines – among them, American studies, Black studies, communications, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, and others – have been better at integrating and institutionalizing the field and valuing its contributions. Indeed, popular music scholars trained in music programmes are often outnumbered by those in other disciplines where popular music studies has gained more traction and resonance, both in the United States and globally. But popular music scholarship increasingly fails to preserve its own interdisciplinary foundations. Steve Waksman, a past president of the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, argues that popular music studies has undergone a disciplinary re-entrenchment as it has become increasingly institutionalized: ‘people do popular music studies as part of their home field or discipline, rather than engaging in popular music studies as a field unto itself’.Footnote ⁵

These observations prompt two central questions. First, to what extent should popular music studies emphasize, celebrate, and even protect its interdisciplinarity? Waksman muses that disciplinarity within popular music studies may not necessarily be problematic, yet the contributors to this Forum all demonstrate that popular music scholars’ analyses and interpretations are enriched by an interdisciplinary toolkit of theories, methods, and discourses. Second, what value does popular music studies hold for music scholarship writ large? Or, to put it another way, how might a better awareness of its contributions help resolve ongoing tensions over representation and inclusivity within music pedagogy and research? While the first question is best suited for an interdisciplinary dialogue outside the scope of this Forum, the second question suggests that conversations among music scholars could generate strategies for working towards a more just and equitable world.

To reflect on the evolving role of popular music studies, we organized the symposium ‘The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century’ in November 2019.Footnote ⁶ Our goal was to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary coalition of popular music scholars to discuss the state of the field and collectively envision what directions it should take going forward. Ultimately, the scholars at the symposium identified three pressing questions about the future of popular music studies: How can we approach history, analysis, and interpretation in new ways? How might we more productively engage with audiences and voices from outside of academia? Finally, how can we make popular music studies more inclusive, representative, and accessible? As an extended meditation on these questions, this Forum is an attempt to demonstrate their relevance to popular music studies and to music scholarship more broadly. Our objective throughout is to contribute to ongoing conversations between music scholars who study popular music and those who do not. Music scholarship and popular music studies are no longer distinct, if they ever were; as our contributors eloquently argue and demonstrate, popular music is an integral component of ethnomusicology, musicology, and music theory. Our broader disciplinary and pedagogical goals should reflect a shared commitment to improving the work we all do. We hope that this Forum can foster renewed dialogue among the readers of Twentieth-Century Music about how we can all work towards a better future together.

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Twentieth-Century Music's editors have long positioned popular music as an integral component of twentieth-century music scholarship – a field of study, according to this journal's founding editors, Christopher Mark and Allan Moore, as ‘too socially interconnected to exclude any style/genre/category/use of twentieth-century music by definition’.Footnote ⁷ Robert Adlington and Julian Johnson, co-editors at the journal's decennial, suggest that ‘for “twentieth-century music” to be a meaningful historical idea, as opposed to a merely chronological label, we would need some frameworks by which to understand the period as some kind of distinguishable entity, however messy, contested and porous’.Footnote ⁸ Doing so demands examining a diverse range of repertoires, regions, and research methods, representing a broad array of musical and material practices. David Clarke took up this ontological question in a Twentieth-Century Music Forum only a few years later, expanding it to address what, if anything, distinguishes the category of twentieth-century music from that of twenty-first-century music. Popular music plays an important role in his discussion, not least because the boundaries between (what Clarke terms) ‘the classical and vernacular’ have even less significance now than they did at the turn of the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁹ If one goal of this journal is to understand twentieth-century music better, then Adlington, Johnson, and Clarke collectively suggest that enforcing aesthetic and/or epistemological boundaries is counterproductive.

Dai Griffiths, in his contribution to Clarke's Forum, argues that popular music has decentred Western art music's archetypal location within music scholars’ reckoning of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰ It has done so thanks, in part, to the rapid development of technologies that not only democratized the production and consumption of music throughout the twentieth century but also preserved the ‘vernacular’ and made it accessible to listeners, scholars, and professional appreciators, separated by time and/or space, in ways unknown and unavailable in earlier eras. If the serious scholarly and critical attention long paid to Western art music finds its provenance in written scores that transcend composers’ and audiences’ lifetimes and places, no longer can popular and vernacular musics be justifiably dismissed as ephemeral.

Yet, the ongoing marginalization of popular music studies within music scholarship persists. We believe this is largely the result of an undue emphasis on popular music scholars’ objects of study, rather than their approaches and methodologies. By rejecting singular conceptions of aesthetic hierarchy, this journal has long found value in prioritizing music scholars’ common approaches over the different genres they study. In Mark and Moore's aforementioned founding editorial, they ask, ‘Do intergenerically applicable critical tools and standards exist? If so, why have we not made them explicit? If not, is it possible to develop them?’Footnote ¹¹ To take these questions seriously requires us to make a dedicated effort to move our discourse out of specialist circles, look for wider resonances and solidarities across music scholarship as a whole, and envision future scholarship that is relevant and responsive to a wide array of audiences.

In short, popular music studies has been – and remains – as important to Twentieth-Century Music's goals and identity as other fields and disciplines of music scholarship.Footnote ¹² But this Forum's value is not only that of performing a tradition of scholarly pluralism. We intentionally positioned the ‘Future of Pop’ symposium as a space of respite and reflection for interdisciplinary popular music scholars. In moving the conversation from that constituency to these pages, however, we have explicitly reframed both the audience and the objectives for this work. If, in our planning for the symposium, we sought to ask questions about the state of popular music studies and the directions it may take in the coming years, then upon reflection it is clear that the complex questions facing popular music studies are, in reality, facing music scholarship as a whole. Issues of accessibility and inclusion, engaging with a broader public, and approaching history to inflect intersectional ways of being-in-the-world pose important and productive challenges no matter what aesthetic or epistemological spheres ground the discourse. The future of music scholarship, it turns out, is the future of popular music scholarship – the two are inseparable.

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In the remainder of this introduction, we return to the three central questions raised at the ‘Future of Pop’ symposium. The first three articles, by Francesca Royster, Jack Hamilton, and Loren Kajikawa, focus most directly on a single question, but they share a common engagement with all of these central themes: looking to our own identities to reconsider how we engage with the world through our scholarship, how we communicate as scholars, and how we actively make space for additional perspectives. Together with Andrew Flory's concluding Afterword, our contributors encourage a renewed dialogue across music scholarship about the better futures we can envision and the steps required to make them a reality. We acknowledge that this Forum may reflect a US-centric bias, as its editors and contributors are all based in the United States. But the issues and strategies our contributors articulate and model, and the questions we raise here, have wider resonance. In other words, although localized conditions have shaped our concerns, they are global in scope.

Popular music studies came of age alongside the advent of New Musicology, a disciplinary turn that advocated for ‘new breadth and flexibility’ in how we examine music, as Joseph Kerman wrote in an early essay advancing his hope for the field.Footnote ¹³ Popular music studies came to be one of these areas of new breadth, alongside other topics and methods that drew influence from a variety of disciplines. But what about the second part of Kerman's hope, the flexibility? William Cheng has recently accused musicologists of tending towards ‘paranoid readings’, a term coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe scholarship which ‘desires authority’ and, in response, pre-emptively sets up defences against any possible attack.Footnote ¹⁴ With its grounding in interdisciplinary methods, how might popular music scholarship model how to open up these defensive ramparts, creating space for methodological or creative flexibility? In other words, how can we create and cultivate new approaches to history, analysis, and interpretation?

In a 2003 reflection on New Musicology, Lawrence Kramer described the disciplinary turn as one which accounted for the ways that ‘music both reflects and helps to produce historically specific forms of subjectivity in the sense of lived positions’.Footnote ¹⁵ Francesca Royster's piece does just this, offering a thrilling reinvention of what music scholarship might look like if we centred our own subjectivity. Weaving autobiographical narrative with an analysis of Brittany Howard's Jaime (2019), Royster theorizes how Howard's album imagines a queer future without abandoning the musician's past, demonstrating how writing about music can help to ‘make a blueprint of the future that includes all of us – one that privileges imagination over commerce, vulnerability over hardness, shared memory over erasure’. Royster's article invites readers to think about how their personal narratives and identities might intersect with the work they do, and how much richer and more flexible scholarship might be were we to take our own stories into account. Kajikawa and Hamilton's articles also advocate for flexibility by embracing new sources of knowledge: both highlight new modes of scholarship made possible by looking beyond the current epistemological boundaries of the academy.

Music scholars, perhaps more so than scholars in other disciplines, are often tasked with sharing their work beyond the confines of the ivory tower. These moments of public engagement happen accidentally in quotidian life – sitting down on a plane so often leads to a lengthy conversation debating, say, the merits of The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones that we have occasionally considered lying about our occupation – but we are also encouraged by employers and publishers to engage in what has come to be known as public musicology: writing op-eds, testifying in court cases, cultivating a Twitter following, or contributing to podcasts or documentaries. This impulse towards educating those outside our disciplines and our classrooms is nothing new – ethnomusicology has long embraced public-facing scholarship in the form of applied ethnomusicology, and many early popular music scholars were both critics and academics. Today, these impulses are compounded by multiple external forces, including the rise of promotional culture in the academy and the increasing precarity of higher education. Given all of this, how might scholars more productively engage with audiences and voices from outside academia?

In his article, Jack Hamilton advocates for academics to acknowledge and support the work of music journalists, many of whom have been foundational to popular music studies but are barely recognized and rarely cited; his article compellingly argues for writing these influential thinkers into the stories we tell. As he cogently points out, the precarity of the academic labour situation – pre-, during, and post-pandemic – should be understood alongside the precarity of music-related labour more generally, as academics, artists, and critics all find themselves unable to make a sustainable living. As we experience the neoliberal dismantling of all these fields, how and, perhaps more practically, where can we make space for each other? Hamilton proposes nurturing a symbiotic relationship between scholars and journalists, in which both parties work together not only to better understand music's ‘complexities as both an art and as a media industry’ but also to utilize institutional resources to help preserve the musical past. This may seem like an obvious point of intersection for popular music scholars, but scholars whose research and teaching interests do not include popular music might also productively write, speak, and collaborate outside of the traditional boundaries of the academy – particularly when the precarity of all of our cultural institutions is increasingly clear. Kajikawa and Royster gesture towards other potential spaces for public engagement: Royster's use of autobiography to ground critical theory and engage in the complexities of musical identity models a way of making scholarship accessible to broader audiences; Kajikawa advocates engaging with musicians to open up collaborative – and, importantly, equitable – possibilities, pointing to the work of A.D. Carson, Shannon Dudley, and Mark Katz.

But rethinking public engagement is not enough, as it fails to account fully for the legacy of systemic white supremacy in music studies, a past and present with which we have yet to fully reckon. In her recent work on the history of the American Musicological Society, Tamara Levitz openly questions whether writing and speaking for a broader audience can actually break down existing hierarchies of knowledge production; after all, as her work reveals, musicology as a discipline gained credibility in the early twentieth century by deliberately excluding public knowledge, creating a discipline ‘forged and maintained by white patriarchal privilege’.Footnote ¹⁶ And this history in no subtle way affects the future of our field. While many of us teach undergraduate courses that reflect the diversity of the communities from which our students come, Matthew Morrison has recently noted the starkly white statistics of recent PhDs in music studies: only about 10 per cent of the nearly 250 PhDs in musicology, ethnomusicology, or music theory in 2017 were awarded to scholars of colour, according to statistics compiled by the National Science Foundation in 2017; by contrast, domestic students of colour made up around 45 per cent of undergraduates and 32 per cent of graduate students in all fields in 2015–16.Footnote ¹⁷ Morrison writes that unless something drastically changes, we will ‘continue to find these scholarly voices and their intellectual concerns and topics marginalized or silenced rather than located within the core of music studies’.Footnote ¹⁸ How, then, do we work towards making academic studies of music more equitable, inclusive, and accessible?

Loren Kajikawa argues for introducing ‘significant difference’ into music departments and schools of music, writing that diversity efforts in these institutions – including the incorporation of popular music courses into their curricula – have failed to challenge the legacies and contemporary manifestations of white supremacy in music studies.Footnote ¹⁹ Like all academic disciplines, music scholarship incorporates new genres and styles by aligning them with pre-existing discourse. As a result, music scholars’ analyses of Western popular music have often been rooted in Western art music-based intellectual frameworks. In the case of music theory scholarship on hip hop, Kajikawa argues, this intellectual framework reinforces its systemic racism and ignores the influential work of scholars of colour in other fields writing about this same music. Kajikawa prompts us to consider what the musical analysis of hip hop might look like if we restructured our citation practices to centre foundational work from other fields, such as the work of early hip hop scholar Tricia Rose, who received a PhD in American studies and wrote the first academic monograph on the genre.Footnote ²⁰ Ultimately, he contends that music departments and schools of music must rethink their diversity efforts, writing that ‘musicologists and music theorists, especially those of us with tenure, should ask how we can be proactively involved in initiatives that offer more inclusive ideas about what counts as essential knowledge and essential music practices’. Similarly, Royster and Hamilton point towards imagining what our discourse might look like if music scholarship were to foreground interdisciplinarity rather than disciplinarity.

In response to the three previous article, Andrew Flory's Afterword contextualizes these questions within wider changes in US musicology and, more specifically, the American Musicological Society. While acceptance of popular music studies has increased over the past two decades, he points out that there is still much work left to do, especially if we are to move towards a better, more inclusive future – one that does not simply repeat the problems of the past.

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In David Clarke's ruminations on the pluralism of twentieth-century music(s) in this journal's second issue, he suggests that the spirit of inclusiveness which intentionally places differing musical tastes and methodological approaches in conversation with each other gestures towards a productive way of being-plural-in-the-world: ‘Ways of thinking through the apparent intractabilities of difference in the aesthetic and epistemological sphere are of a piece with approaches in the wider political sphere.’Footnote ²¹ The idea that scholarly pluralism might inflect social and political pluralisms is, for Clarke, not metaphorical: ‘By publicly negotiating frameworks for pluralism and difference within our symbolic practices, we might also gain insights that are not wholly irrelevant to wider cultural and political a(nta)gonisms.’Footnote ²² Taken together, Royster, Hamilton, Kajikawa, and Flory envision an aspirational pluralism that moves beyond one of tokenized interdisciplinarity to one that is instead inherently intersectional. Much as an individual's scholarly work can reflect the many identities they embody, as Royster so eloquently demonstrates, music scholarship as a whole should reflect the contributions of a hugely diverse constituency. But prioritizing pluralism in music scholarship is not only about the racial, ethnic, geographic, and stylistic diversity of the music we study and teach. All our contributors re-imagine pluralism to involve amplifying and integrating voices and ways of knowing that have not been traditionally valued in music scholarship. Such methods not only make our discourses richer but can also enhance our potential to impact the lives of our students and society at large.

As we write this introduction in June 2020, COVID-19 has claimed over 500,000 lives worldwide, and the World Health Organization is reporting that the pandemic is worsening despite months of mitigation efforts. The corresponding global economic downturn has been officially defined as a recession. At the same time, Black Lives Matter protests, rallies, and vigils meant to draw attention to the police violence that killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and countless other Black people in the United States are increasingly met with further violent retaliation by the police. In the face of the combined traumas of public health mismanagement, financial instability, and systemic oppression, the questions posed in this Forum may seem both figuratively and literally ‘academic’. Yet, in their small ways, they are part of the larger reckonings going on all around us: the world is not as it should be; the future must be different.

For scholars, these crises are compounded by the academy: higher education remains an exclusionary and unwelcoming space, as well as a precarious place of employment, and its failures are now even more obvious. In asking questions about the future of popular music studies specifically, our contributors model pathways and methodologies for thinking through and working towards a broader, more just future. At their heart, each of these questions is a recognition that popular music scholarship – like all music scholarship – has been built on a system of exclusion, and that real change demands a fundamental epistemological re-orientation. To become more equitable, to begin to repair some of the damage we have done, and to speak to an increasingly tumultuous world, music scholars must recognize, value, and support knowledge that comes from outside the academy – as well as the vulnerable and marginalized people who so often hold and embody that knowledge.