In recent years, within both popular music studies and religious studies, an increased interest has emerged towards interrelations between popular music and belief systems. Pop Pagans is a welcome addition to this body of research, as it broadens the scope of analysis beyond institutionalised religions or otherwise explicitly religious movements. For a scholar of popular music, the aims set in the introductory chapter of the collection are intriguing, especially with respect to offering ‘new insights into the production and consumption of popular music’ (p. 4) and proposing ‘new understandings of popular music through approaching it from a Pagan studies perspective’ (p. 7). While I am not entirely convinced that the contributions in the volume provide the reader with a concise ‘Pagan studies perspective’, given also the editors’ emphasis on the methodological multiplicity within this nascent field of study, the collection nevertheless highlights the diverse ways in which the notion of Pagan(ism) may be utilised in the study of popular music. And, regardless of the different takes on Paganism in the chapters, as a whole Pop Pagans compels the reader to (re)assess the interplay between popular music and various belief systems or forms of spirituality.

The collection is divided into four parts that deal with histories, genres, performance and communities, respectively. Each part contains three chapters, which gives the volume a balanced feel. Content-wise, however, the parts appear rather arbitrary in composition; for instance, the temporal dimensions discussed under the rubric histories extend from Andy Bennett's account of the counter-cultural sensibilities and aesthetics of the late 1960s to Rupert Till's archaeologically informed analysis of the roughly five millenia-long existence of Stonehenge, as well as to Donna Weston's more methodologically oriented questions about ‘a collective cultural memory of sacredness of place’, or ‘a Pagan past’ (p. 43). This kind of arbitrariness is of course nothing new in edited volumes, and instead of lamenting on it wilfully, it is more fruitful to accentuate the indefinite formulations used in the part headings and the methodological array the chapters offer. Although none of the authors of Pop Pagans plunges into a detailed formal music analysis, the importance of acoustic and sonorous features is not ignored, but instead is discussed appropriately in relation to broader sociocultural issues more or less throughout the volume. Bennett's commentary on the importance of musical details and ‘aspects of delivery’ (p. 17) in particular is laudable – although here one might have expected to read more about the links and tensions between heavy metal and the counter-cultural critique of technocracy.

Yet I must admit to finding that the amount of references to ethnomusicological research is surprisingly low, which runs the risk of elevating the topic on a questionable methodological basis. In other words, while Paganism may not have been a hot topic within recent ethnomusicology (because of apparent colonialist implications), there certainly would be a lot to learn from the discipline about the interrelations between music and belief systems. To a considerable degree I suspect this kind of neglect is a coincidence of a particular form of disciplinary myopia that is founded on the uncritical conceptualisation and application of the notion of the ‘popular’. This in fact has far more extensive repercussions for the volume than those pertaining to the inattention towards ethnomusicology. There are two sides to this. On one hand, ‘popular music’ serves in the collection by and large as a taken-for-granted shorthand for a vast assortment of musical practices, defined in most cases only implicitly through the use of such sub-category labels as disco, electronic dance music, Goth, metal and rock. Only in Christopher Chase's chapter on sacramental song in the USA is the ‘need to characterise the meaning of the word “popular”’ openly acknowledged, yet the definition offered hardly reduces the ambiguity. ‘The “popular-ness” of Pagan popular music derives from its primary production and consumption at the vernacular level of entertainment and instruction, inscribed within or outside large-scale commercial distribution networks’ (p. 163). On the basis of all this, then, the contribution of Pop Pagans in terms of new understandings of popular music remains methodological rather than epistemological or ontological. Personally, I would have liked to educate myself more on the ways in which the ‘Pagan perspective’ may challenge and broaden the established conceptualisations of popular music.

On the other hand, the insouciant use of the label ‘popular music’ risks conflating it with virtually all forms of music, thus rendering it a mere marketing tag. This problem emerges as particularly pronounced in Andy Letcher's chapter devoted to British folk revival, as if the opening sentence – in which it is maintained that ‘[f]olk music in Britain has never been more popular’ (p. 91) – is self-explanatory and sufficient. More as an aside, and regardless of whether my being a Finn had anything to do with the review assignment at hand, it may be noted in relation to Deena Weinstein's somewhat encyclopaedic (as opposed to analytical) account on Pagan metal that humppa (not ‘hummpa’, as spelled in the chapter) is for instance in the historiography of music in Finland considered categorically not as folk music but as an old-fashioned, originally parodic form of popular music. The folk-related confusions nevertheless raise another issue that is not critically addressed in the volume, namely the racial politics of Paganism.

There are also passages in the volume where ‘music’ and ‘popular music’ become indistinguishable. In the introduction, the editors note quite reasonably that ‘[i]t would be impossible to describe any one style of music that is specifically Pagan’, but then continue with an interpretive leap that equates ‘the diversity of Pagan music and music employed by Pagans’ with ‘the range of popular music in general’ (p. 4). This inevitably raises questions about the extent to which the notion of Pagan(ism) might be used in reconceptualising the ‘popular’ in the context of music, yet these questions remain unaddressed in the Introduction. Some relief to this quandary is offered in Graham St John's chapter on total solar eclipse festivals, where ‘the conflation of religious and leisure experience in the contemporary’ (p. 127) and a multifaceted take on the ‘sacred’ form a backbone for the analysis. In addition, Christopher Partridge's formulation of ‘occulture’, as well as its application in his analysis of industrial Paganism, as a concept with which to tackle the Western ‘confluence of secularization and sacralization’ (p. 191) provides food for thought in this respect.

As a whole, too, Pop Pagans certainly incites a hunger for rethinking the interconnections between popular music and belief systems. While some of the chapters are more introductory and encyclopaedic than questioning or investigative in nature, the collection serves as a worthwhile induction into the multiple dimensions of Paganism as they are operationalised within popular music, and vice versa.