Popular Music since 1945
Northeastern University
Semesters taught: Fall 2023; Spring 2023
Course description
This course introduces students to the study of popular music in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day. Instead of presenting a survey of popular music during this period, we consider a handful of selected topics, themes, and genres during these years. Sacrificing historical breadth for analytical depth enables us to dive deeply into specific examples, considering in detail a range of factors that influence popular music’s development and transformation: ethnic and gender identities, music industry practices, race relations, social and political movements, and technological innovations. Students gain a broad overview of the field of popular music studies—with particular attention given to recently-published research—and the field’s methodologies and materials.
Can’t we just enjoy listening? What good is reading about pop music, anyway? Scholarship helps us make sense of the seemingly unending amount of pop music available to listeners and fans, and it helps us—as individuals—situate ourselves with respect to other listeners, artists, their music, and the industry infrastructures in which we all participate. That is, we understand who we are in relation to others in part through the music we enjoy, what that music means, and the conditions of its production, distribution, mediation, and consumption. But we continually refine our tools for comprehending pop music’s complexities as popular music studies, an interdisciplinary field, experiences constant expansion and change. In this course, addressing musical genres grounds our conversations but also clarifies how tenuous genre definitions and associations might be. Pop music history is tenuous, too: never stationary but always changing, both because there is always more historical data to uncover but also because our own social, cultural, and political circumstances are also always changing. By the end of the semester, students will be able to identify and discuss specific social, cultural, and political contexts and movements that have (and continue to) influenced the production, distribution, mediation, and consumption of popular music in the U.S.