Currents and Contradictions in the Ethnomusicology of Popular Music

Abstract

The status of popular music research in North American ethnomusicology has changed significantly in the last 25 years. Expanding rapidly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, popular music research in ethnomusicology was part of a set of broader intellectual developments that challenged the liberal inclusionism that dominated the discipline during this period, developments that, as other writers have observed, included the growing prominence of critical approaches to humanistic inquiry, new ideas about media and culture, and the rise of the neoliberal university. This article tracks the shifting reception of popular music research in ethnomusicology during this period and the place that this work held in these wider transformations. Taking institutional history as its starting point, the article discusses the position of ethnomusicology among other music disciplines in the North American academy, the debates that surrounded the formation of the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology (PMSSEM) and the relationship between PMSSEM and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Examining the interplay between residual and emergent elements of intellectual culture in today’s discipline, the article explores the reciprocities and tensions between liberal inclusionism and radical cultural critique, the ethnomusicologist’s productive resistance to defining the notion of popular music, the charges of ethnocentrism that have recently been levelled at the ethnomusicology of popular music, and the differing approaches to the question of populism at play in contemporary ethnomusicology’s politics of culture.