Abstract
In thinking about how to locate popular music within music history, I start from two propositions. Firstly, that attempts to isolate and define musical types, functions and effects by purely empirical means are likely to be unhelpful. Understanding ‘popular music’ – for example – in terms of a quantitively measured ‘popularity’ (sales figures) is not only methodologically difficult to do coherently but, more important, it hypostatises what is in reality a result of living, historically changing relationships. Secondly: if, then, musical categories should be grasped as part of social processes, it does not however follow that in this relationship (between musical type, concept or practice on the one hand, social group, factor or formation on the other) the relata are in a one-to-one correspondence. Thus – quoting again examples from commonly assumed positions – the idea that ‘popular music’ is ‘really’ confined to authentic proletarian self-expression is no less misleading than the Adornian notion that it is part of an undifferentiated blanket of leisure-goods imposed on the unresisting masses by a monopoly-capitalist ‘culture industry’.
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