Looking Towards the Future: Popular Music Studies and Music Scholarship
Co-authors: Brian F. Wright, Amy Coddington
Twentieth-Century Music
Vol. 18, no. 1: pp. 3–11 (2021)
Abstract
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’. 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.
In this forum, we have collected articles from participants in a recent symposium on the future of popular music studies to reflect more deeply on the challenges we all face in in an increasingly diverse and divided world -- challenges of teaching, studying, comprehending, and embodying pop music in all its richness. The field must reckon with these challenges if it is to remain relevant, and in doing so (we argue) it perhaps models a way forward for music scholarship as a whole.
Contents
This forum in Twentieth-Century Music includes the following articles:
Cruising Utopia with Brittany Howard: Jaime's Queer Afrofuturism, by Francesca Royster
Across the Great Divide: Popular Music Studies and the Public, by Jack Hamilton
Leaders of the New School? Music Departments, Hip-Hop, and the Challenge of Significant Difference, by Loren Kajikawa
Afterword: The Expense of Exclusion – US Musicology and Popular Music, by Andy Flory