Popular Music Margins Becoming Mainstreams: Amy Grant, Elliott Smith, and the Political Economy of Niche Markets

Brown Music colloquium presentation (2015). What happens when artists transcend the margins and their markets? I examine the ways in which ethics and aesthetics are implicated in crossover success—what Jason Toynbee (2002) has described as “mainstreaming,” and what Dick Hebdige (1979) has identified as the dominant culture’s integration of subcultural style via the commodity form. This paper thus moves beyond comparative or categorical definitions of margins and mainstreams to theorize the process of popular music in transition from one market to another.