Introduction: Locating the Popular Music Text

Abstract

Abstract Open any popular music paper and you will find interpretative comment on pop singers, records, and concerts. Tune in to any pop radio or TV programme and, again, opinion and evaluation frame the music. In a myriad less documented encounters, people of every kind and taste engage every day in dialogues about popular music’s meanings and effects. And, as Simon Frith has pointed out (Frith 1996, chapter 1), academics—in their role as music consumers—are just as likely to be involved as anyone. Yet if we ask how far this involvement has fed through into the academics’ professional work, the answer is surprising. Textual analysis has been a subsidiary strand in the expanding field of popular music studies; at the same time, much of the work has been marked by methodological hesitations which suggest deep-lying doubts about the viability of the enterprise itself. There are several reasons for this state of affairs, many of them to do with the particular histories of musical scholarship and of the way in which the study of popular culture has entered the academy. Underpinning all of them, however, is the simple issue—simple, but running deeply through the tissue of modern societies—of the interrelationship of elite and vernacular values. The threat of Pseud’s Corner awaits anyone who dares to mention, say, ‘aeolian harmonies’ or ‘pandiatonic clusters’ in connection with a popular song; yet a street-conscious ‘switch off your mind and boogie’ is hardly more likely to succeed in closing the cultural rift. At the same time, the claims of ‘the popular’, as an ideological category, exert an inescapable pull on the analytical enterprise, outlawing any yearning for disinterested objectivity; a song, once identified as ‘popular’, cannot avoid having this effect (of course, there may be other claims made as well—of ‘art’, of ‘politics’, of ‘entertainment’, etc.).