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Critical Popular Music Studies: Interrogating the Methodological Meanings and Discursive Politics of ‘Critical’ and ‘Popular’

image of Critical Popular Music Studies: Interrogating the Methodological Meanings and Discursive Politics of ‘Critical’ and ‘Popular’

This chapter advances critical popular music studies (CPMS) as a transdisciplinary methodology that challenges canonical epistemologies by radicalizing alterity and interrogating institutionalized hierarchies of knowledge. It resists the performative and teleological tendencies in employing established critical paradigms for examining popular music, challenging categorical limitations imposed by concepts like genre, identity and sensory experience in music curricula. By examining the evolution of CPMS since the 1980s and its pedagogical praxis, the authors address institutional(ized) anxieties around its disciplinary legitimacy, demystify its methodological meanings and critique emerging tendencies towards canonization to main its critical edge. Building on these interventions and informed by anarcho-punk's anti-establishment ethos – particularly its destabilization of authority and transgression of normative evaluation – the chapter ultimately imagines more disruptive work of popular music studies and explores unique possibilities through an expanded framework.

Keywords: Anarcho-punk ; Critical musicology ; Critical theory ; DIY punk ; New musicology ; Popular music pedagogy ; Practice-Based, Experimental, Epistemology, Research Lab ; Radical embodiment ; Radical sensory studies ; Transdisciplinary methods

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References

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     [Google Scholar]
  2. Beaster-Jones, Jayson (2011), ‘Re-tuning the past, selling the future: Tata-AIG and the Tree of Love’, Popular Music, 30:3, pp. 351–70.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Bennett, Andy , Shank, Barry and Toynbee, Jason (eds) (2006), The Popular Music Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Conquergood, Dwight (1991), ‘Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics’, Communication Monographs, 58:2, pp. 179–94.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Debord, Guy ([1967] 1994), Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Dunn, Kevin (2016), Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Eidsheim, Nina Sun (2015), Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Fink, Robert (1998), ‘Elvis everywhere: Musicology and popular music studies at the twilight of the canon’, American Music, 16:2, pp. 135–79.
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  9. Fish, David L. (n.d.), ‘History of APME’, The Association for Popular Music Education, https://www.popularmusiceducation.org/about-apme/history-of-apme. Accessed 20 February 2022 .
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  16. Mahon, Maureen (2017), ‘Expressive culture: Sounds’, NYU College of Arts & Science, https://cas.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/casCore/documents/syllabi20172018/CORE-UA%20730%20EC%20Sounds%20Fall%202017%20Mahon.pdf. Accessed 28 December 2024.
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  20. Rancière, Jacques (2013), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (ed. and trans. G. Rockhill), London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
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