Middleton-Manuel. 2001. Popular Music. New Grove

Popular music
Richard Middleton and Peter Manuel
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.43179
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001
updated and revised, 13 January 2015
A term used widely in everyday discourse, generally to refer to types of music that are considered to be
of lower value and complexity than art music, and to be readily accessible to large numbers of
musically uneducated listeners rather than to an élite. It is, however, one of the most difficult terms to
define precisely. This is partly because its meaning (and that of equivalent words in other languages)
has shifted historically and often varies in different cultures; partly because its boundaries are hazy,
with individual pieces or genres moving into or out of the category, or being located either inside or
outside it by different observers; and partly because the broader historical usages of the word
‘popular’ have given it a semantic richness that resists reduction. The question of definition is further
discussed in §I, 1, below.
Even if ‘popular’ music is hard to define, and even if forms of popular music, in some sense of the term,
can be found in most parts of the world over a lengthy historical period, in practice its most common
references are to types of music characteristic of ‘modern’ and ‘modernizing’ societies – in Europe and
North America from about 1800, and even more from about 1900, and in Latin America and ‘Third
World’ countries since the 20th century, and even more strongly since World War II. The focus in this
article is on these musical types; the emphasis is on the main themes, debates, and historical trends,
and, in particular, on the USA and Britain, since 20th-century styles and practices originating in the
USA (together with styles originating in Britain since about 1960) have come to dominate popular
music worldwide. The period after about 1955 is discussed in more detail in Pop and in other entries on
specific genres. Further information will also be found in articles on individual countries.
I. Popular music in the West

Richard Middleton
1. Definitions.
A common approach to defining popular music is to link popularity with scale of activity. Usually this is
measured in terms of consumption, for example by counting sales of sheet music or recordings. While
it seems reasonable to expect music thought of as ‘popular music’ to have a large audience, there are
well-known methodological difficulties standing in the way of credible measurement, and – perhaps
more seriously – this approach cannot take account of qualitative as against quantitative factors: for
instance, repeat hearings are not counted, depth of response does not feature, socially diverse
audiences are treated as one aggregated market and there is no differentiation between musical styles.
Thus sales figures, however useful, measure sales rather than popularity.
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Another common approach is to link popularity with means of dissemination, and particularly with the
development and role of mass media. It is true that the history of popular music is intimately
connected with the technologies of mass distribution (print, recording, radio, film, etc.); yet a piece
that could be described as ‘popular music’ does not cease to be so when it is performed live in public,
or even strummed in the amateur’s home, and conversely it is clear that all sorts of music, from folk to
avant garde, are subject to mass mediation.
A third approach is to link popularity with social group – either a mass audience or a particular class
(most often, though not always, the working class). In the first case, the theory is usually ‘top-down’,
portraying the group as undifferentiated dupes of commercial manipulation; this tends to accompany
pessimistic scenarios of cultural decline. In the second case, the theory is ‘bottom-up’, representing the
group as the creative source of authentic (as opposed to ersatz) popular music; this tends to
accompany populist scenarios of leftist opposition. The distinction is between production for the people
and production by the people. This catches a real tension in the concept of popular music, not to
mention the fact that so often it is defined by negation, that is, in terms of what it is not (e.g. popular
music is not folk music, art music, commercial music, and so on). Always positioned as subordinate in
the musical field as a whole, popular music seems condemned to be an ‘other’. But musical categories
commonly cross social boundaries (e.g. jazz could be described as ‘popular music’, as could arias by
Puccini when sung by Pavarotti, or the music of Jimi Hendrix when played by Nigel Kennedy, or Elton
John’s Candle in the Wind, sung after works by Verdi and John Tavener at the funeral service of Diana,
Princess of Wales, in 1997). Even if ‘the masses’ or particular classes can be given precise sociological
definitions, which is doubtful, the structure of the musical field cannot be mapped straight on to the
social structure, and musical categories do not walk on to the historical stage in socially or musically
pure forms.
These three approaches identify important tendencies. Yet all are too partial, too static, too prone to
essentialism. For most popular music scholars, it is better to accept the fluidity that seems indelibly to
mark our understandings of the ‘popular’. From this perspective popular music has no permanent
musical characteristics or social connections; rather, the term refers to a socio-musical space always in
some sense subaltern, but with contents that are contested and subject to historical mutation. Stuart
Hall, drawing on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, insists that it is impossible to understand the popular
in any given moment except by placing it in a broader cultural context (the other categories it is
working alongside and against) and that it possesses no essential content or social affiliations; rather,
‘it is the ground on which the transformations are worked’ (Hall, 1981, p.228). Frith (1996),
emphasizing that the discursive formation of the popular is itself marked by internal distinctions and
hierarchies, adds that the criteria for these are often drawn from neighbouring musical categories
(notions of aesthetic value from art discourses, for example).
It follows from this argument that understandings of popular music have changed with time. Indeed,
while all but the simplest societies probably have some sort of hierarchy of musical categories (as pre-
modern Europe certainly did), the resonances now attached to the term came to the fore during the
late 18th century (with the beginnings of late-modern society), and sedimented themselves into general
awareness during the 19th. During this period a gradual but ultimately dramatic reshaping of the
socio-cultural topography brought into being, in symbiotic interrelationship, hugely increased
audiences for music; publicly accessible apparatuses for musical education, criticism, and propagation;
an emergent canonic repertory of ‘classics’; and (as an apparent mirror image of this) a sense of low-
class, ‘trivial’ genres as being problematic. On the one hand, this constructed what is now commonly
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known as classical music as, in a sense, the first modern popular music, laying the foundations for
what would subsequently be its installation as the core of middlebrow taste; on the other, it imposed a
new, explicitly moralistic pressure on ‘low’ music. Research by DiMaggio (1982), Levine (1988),
Broyles (1992) and others has revealed many of the ways in which, in the USA, an earlier, easy,
populist mixing of tastes was replaced, through the influence of the institutions of ‘good music’, by a
sense of hierarchy, linked to social class. In Britain Haweis arranged the whole field into a moral-
aesthetic ladder, with German symphonic music at the top and street entertainers at the foot (with
ballads just above them) (Music and Morals, 1871). In the early 20th century the split intensified, the
modernists defiantly esoteric, the emergent Tin Pan Alley defiantly commercial; the macabre dance of
the Modernism–mass culture couple can now be seen as ideologically self-sustaining. On a broader
front, the drive by the new mass media, especially radio, to identify and supply a fully national market
brought all the musical categories into the same socio-technological space and also, as a result,
revealed their differences: the BBC, for example, ‘undertook the standardisation, classification and
placing in rank order of the whole field of music’ (Scannell, 1981, p.259). By the 1920s the now familiar
highbrow–middlebrow–lowbrow model was fully in place. This ‘sandwich’ structure (a bifurcation with
variable middle-of-the-road or light music fillings) remains fundamentally intact, even if by the late
20th century the boundaries blurred easily, crossovers abounded, new sub-terms (pop, rock, beat, etc.)
appeared, and the content of particular categories became increasingly unpredictable. The
‘globalization’ of the cultural economy may engineer a further shift – perhaps, as all music is further
commodified and deracinated, towards an erosion of category distinctions. However, so long as
cultural capital remains an important tool of social positioning within capitalist society, the principles
seem unlikely to change significantly.
The history of popular music, then, can be described in terms of a sequence (somewhat variably dated
in different societies) of three spatial metaphors. First there is an ‘each to his own’ model, with
different musical categories located in different social spaces, though in some circumstances mixing
unselfconsciously. Then these spaces start to be connected to a ladder, which may be climbed through
techniques of social mobility and moral self-improvement. Finally, this ranking is consolidated into a
unitary ‘virtual space’. What is striking is how late, relatively, this final stage – the one we tend to take
for granted – occurred. It was established fully only in the first half of the 20th century; in Britain, the
restructuring of BBC programming into highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow channels after World War
II marked its complete acceptance. In most European countries, it coincided with the first large-scale
incursion of American styles, in the shape of the new products of Tin Pan Alley (in Britain this process
had begun somewhat earlier); indeed, in the USA itself it is these products that often are associated
most closely with the term ‘popular music’, the characteristic post-1955 styles being covered by ‘rock’
or ‘rock and roll’. Significantly, during the same early 20th-century period, translations or equivalents
of the English-language ‘popular music’ appeared, taking over wholly or in part from previous
terminologies. In German, for instance,Populärmusik gradually replaced the older Trivialmusik and
Unterhaltungsmusik. By the 1960s, throughout Europe and North America, interrelated terminologies
focussed on equivalents of ‘popular’ and ‘pop’ music reflected the consolidation of a socio-musical field
that was increasingly internationally unified.
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2. Mass media and the cultural economy of popular music.
(i) The main historical shifts.

The most significant feature of the emergent popular music industry of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries was the extent of its focus on the commodity form of sheet music. During the 19th century
music publishers’ catalogues and output grew enormously, and the products – many of them in
‘popular’ genres – were disseminated increasingly widely. Demand rocketed as an expanding,
ambitious middle class (joined in due course by more affluent sectors of the working classes) bought
pianos, which were falling in price and increasingly targeted at a range of social groups, and
entertained themselves in the home. A variety of educational institutions and strategies promoted
musical literacy. Song sheets, instrumental pieces and arrangements, cheap editions, music
supplements in magazines, albums, and part-works poured from the presses. New transport networks
created national markets and speeded up supply, carrying the latest pieces quickly around Europe and
much of America. At the same time, the provision of and access to public performances also increased.
In pleasure gardens and dance halls, popular theatres and concert rooms, ordinary people – no doubt
for the first time, in many cases – could enjoy music commercially provided by professionals. The first
‘star’ performers promoted publishers’ products, for example through the British ‘royalty ballad’
system; one of the earliest, Jenny Lind, toured the USA in 1850–51 to great acclaim, a beneficiary of
the pioneering publicity techniques of P.T. Barnum. Amateur choirs and bands mushroomed. Copyright
legislation was in place or came into being in most countries, though enforcement was difficult and
piracy abounded. Yet publishers profited from most of these activities, and thus, with the emergence of
incipiently symbiotic music businesses, centred on the sale of compositional products and their
performance to large markets, themselves marked by a variable balance between ‘listening’ and
‘participation’, consumption of musical pleasures and mastery of musical knowledge, and linked to the
spread of ‘leisure’ as both a concept and a reality, a new kind of musical economy came into being.
In the 1880s and 90s American music publishing became centred in New York, in an area of the city
later called ‘Tin Pan Alley’ (see Printing and publishing of music §II 4.). These publishers developed a
new method of production: aiming to construct a national market, they surveyed potential taste,
contracted composers, established successful compositional formulae and assiduously promoted songs
through ‘plugging’ techniques. As Charles K. Harris, one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley
composers, wrote (1926, pp.39–40): ‘A new song must be sung, played, hummed, and drummed into
the ears of the public, not in one city alone, but in every city, town and village, before it ever becomes
popular’. Within a decade or two the American model was copied in European countries. Copyright
protection and royalty collection were tightened, especially in relation to performing rights (in the USA
the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and in Britain the Performing
Rights Society (PRS) were both formed in 1914: see Copyright).
Automatic player pianos (which, at the peak of their popularity, before succumbing to competition from
radio and records, accounted for 56% of American piano production; Theberge, 1997, p.27) spread
home music-making even more widely. The expansion and streamlining of sheet music production
(American sales were around 30 million annually by 1910; Sanjek, 1988, iii, p.32) were linked to
growing demand from vaudeville and variety theatres, to the popularization of dancing across all social
classes (especially after World War I) and to the emergence of the gramophone record as a new
medium of musical dissemination (see Recorded sound §I). After the success during the 1890s of
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publicly operated coin-in-the-slot machines, record players for home use took over from around the
beginning of the 20th century, and the growth of production – much of it centred on ‘popular’ genres –
was extraordinary. By 1920 there were almost 80 record companies in Britain, and almost 200 in the
USA. American production reached about 27 million records in 1914, and peaked at 128 million in
1926, before the Depression devastated it (ibid., 27; Chanan, 1995, pp.54, 65–6). From the start radio
transmitted music, from both recordings and live performances (see Radio). In the USA radio
broadcasting was organized commercially (the first station, KDKA, opened in Pittsburgh in 1920), while
in Europe public monopolies were the norm (the BBC was formed in 1922). By 1927 there was a radio
in about a quarter of American homes; the number increased by about 10% on average each year
during the 1930s, and by 1950 virtually every household possessed at least one radio (Sanjek, 1988, iii,
p.87; Ennis, 1992, pp.101, 132). Electrical recording (introduced by record companies in 1925)
transformed sound quality and increased the appeal of the new media. The first sound film (The Jazz
Singer) was released in 1927, and thereafter many films (and not only musicals) incorporated popular
songs (see Film music §2 and Film musical). By the mid-1930s 60 million cinema tickets were sold each
week in the USA.
Home music-making, c1830: engraving by Victor Bernstrom after Arthur Burdett Frost, late 19th century
Mansell / Time Pix / Katz
These inter-war developments reconstructed the economy of popular music. Radio and film were now
at its centre, supported by records and music publishing, and the market was re-imagined in terms of
anonymous consumers populating a space that spanned classes, regions and even nations. The same
star performers appeared on film, radio and recording. Turnover of songs accelerated, as did media
permeation of almost all corners of society. Record sales and radio plays became more important to
revenues than sheet music, and the first ‘charts’ appeared, in trade magazines; so too did the first
radio chart show, ‘Your Hit Parade’, in 1935. The interdependence of the various sectors is clear (even
if their interests did not entirely coincide), and took institutional form: for instance, in Hollywood,
Warners took over Tin Pan Alley publishers Witmark in 1928, and later, in Britain, EMI bought into
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leading music publishers Chappell. Similarly, in 1927 the Columbia record company set up CBS, and in
1929 RCA bought the record company Victor. The trend towards oligopoly drove the mergers that
created EMI in 1932; by the outbreak of the war EMI and Decca between them controlled all record
production in Britain, and in the USA the entire record industry was in the hands of three giant
companies, RCA Victor, American Record-Brunswick, and Decca. The entertainment conglomerate,
with transsector and transnational interests, had arrived.
Intrinsic tensions within this symbiosis led to several conflicts in the 1940s, for example, between
ASCAP and the American radio corporations, and between the American Federation of Musicians and
the record companies. This led to new opportunities for publishers and composers from outside the
mainstream (especially in the fields of country music and rhythm and blues), and, along with a
reduction in production costs following the introduction of recording tape and cheap vinyl, also
facilitated the emergence of a new wave of small, independent record companies, often aimed at new
markets. At the same time, the general hegemony of the big corporations continued, increasingly on a
global stage; by the 1970s, this dominance was in the hands of five huge transnational organizations,
three American-owned (WEA, RCA, CBS) and two European-owned (EMI, Polygram), who between
them probably covered about two-thirds of the world market, slightly less (on average) in North
America and European countries. Within a general picture of startling and continuous growth (British
sales increased from 60 million units in 1955 to more than 200 million in 1977; the value of American
sales increased from just over $100 million in 1945 to $3·5 billion in 1977; Harker, 1980, pp.223–6), the
vicissitudes of the relationship between the large companies (‘majors’) and the smaller independent
ones (‘indies’) became an important feature.
After World War II television began to take over some of radio’s role, and, partly in response, radio
(first in the USA, then elsewhere) cultivated new functions, notably specialized music channels
(including ‘chart radio’), whose presenters were increasingly prominent disc jockeys (DJs). The
transistor increased radio’s portability and ubiquity. The economic ‘long boom’ (1945–73) resulted in
widespread increased leisure and spending power, disproportionately so among the young of the
postwar ‘baby boom’ generation, at whom much of the expanded record production and its radio,
television, and film mediations were aimed. Musical production was now centred on the recording
studio. Multi-track recording (from the late 1950s) and the development of more sophisticated
equipment in the 1960s placed producers and engineers at the centre of the process, and the
requirements and potential of this process increasingly affected the sounds and textures of the music.
A plethora of charts on radio and television and in magazines focussed attention on record sales. The
role of specialist composers was reduced as producers and performers increasingly wrote their own
material, with the requirements of recording in mind. Increasingly, too, a performance was judged by
its ability to reproduce the sound of the recorded version through which it was first known. As the
sounds of recorded pop music permeated the soundscape, especially in cities, a further step towards
the complete commodification of leisure was taken, and a new sort of virtual aural space – created
through highly technical mixing together of varied sounds and musical products into inescapable
media flows – started to come into being.
From the 1970s the tendency towards conglomeration and globalization intensified. The musical
products of the majors continued to be dominated by American (and to a lesser extent British)
performers, but although these companies were responsible for 90% of American record sales in the
1990s (Burnett, 1995, p.18), only Warner remained American-owned, the others being based in Japan
(CBS-Sony, MCA) and Europe (EMI, BMG, Polygram). In 1994 total world sales of recorded music were
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valued at about $33 billion (ibid., 3), of which the majors took the lion’s share; yet for them, both
capital and markets were transnational. Moreover, all the majors were part of much larger media-
entertainment conglomerates, and increasingly sought synergy between their activities (tie-ins
between recording, radio, television – including terrestrial and satellite music-video channels –
publishing, merchandising, and advertising for other leisure products), if possible unified around a
‘mega-star’ performer and creating what has been called a ‘total star text’. In the 1990s
‘entertainment’ accounted for a huge proportion of economic activity in developed societies, and its
products were pushed into almost every social and geographical corner. And because music could be
re-used so easily in different media contexts, recordings became not just commodities but ‘bundles of
rights’; back catalogue items were reissued in new formats (on cassette or compact disc or in ‘greatest
hits’ compilations), and well-known recordings were used in television commercials, in movie
soundtracks and for ‘background music’ in places such as supermarkets and airport lounges (see
Advertising, music in,Television and Environmental music).
At the same time, the introduction of digital equipment (mixing desks, synthesizers, samplers,
sequencers) not only offered new sound worlds and new ways of creating music, accessible to people
with little conventional musical training, but also drastically reduced production costs. As a result, ‘do-
it-yourself’ home recording studios, tiny independent labels, and small (often illegal) community radio
stations formed the opposite extreme of the music economy.Sampling technology and the ease with
which records could be remixed (see Remix) raised questions about the very identity of a composition
and about its ownership. Similarly, the audio cassette made home taping easy, and cheap production
technology prompted a huge increase in pirate compact disc and tape copies of commercial recordings.
The potential threats to the existing structure of the music industry and to the hegemony of big capital
and the potential for democratization of music-making were clear. Yet most ‘indies’ depended on the
majors for manufacture and distribution, or, if successful, were bought by them or contracted as
independent suppliers; alternatively, their innovations were copied and ruthlessly exploited on a bigger
economic stage. The basic picture in the 1990s was of large and small, global and local, in uneasy but
mutually advantageous co-existence. Thus the homogenized global pop style and the ‘underground’
dance club, the international multi-million seller and the niche market (catering for specific age
groups, ethnic or regional tastes, or youth subcultures), seem to behave like different aspects of a
single system.
These developments seem to represent a new stage in the aural compression of time and space. A
constant search for novelty rubbed up against back-catalogue nostalgia; individualized consumption
through the personal stereo threw into relief the global exploitation of markets and musical materials
in ‘world music’. Unprecedented amounts of exchange value streamed out of musical labours; yet the
ease with which fans, performers, and entrepreneurs could, using new technology, exchange roles
offered at least the possibility of a new relationship between listening and participation.
(ii) Issues.
Even if the main contours of the history of the mass media and popular music are reasonably clear,
much of the detail of the developments, and their implications and effects, is less so, and has been the
subject of lively debate among scholars, performers, and listeners. Several arguments draw on the
central idea of ‘technological determinism’ – that particular cultural practices owe their character to
the nature of the technology they use. Marshall McLuhan’s proposition (The Gutenberg Galaxy,
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Toronto, 1962; Understanding Media, New York, 1964) that different media, especially the broad
categories delineated by oral, written, and electronic modes of transmission, have intrinsic properties
that condition diverse forms of consciousness and culture has been developed by John Shepherd and
others in an attempt to explain distinct approaches to musical structure and process. To many, such
views seem to allow too little room for other factors, including political struggle and human agency. Yet
it is plausible to suggest, for example, that the ‘rational’ structures of many 19th-century popular-song
genres and their explorations of major–minor tonal harmony are at least connected to their notated
form; that this helps to differentiate them from orally transmitted folksongs (which are often
monophonic, modal, and more iterative in structure); and that the recording process facilitates the
recontextualization of some techniques typical of oral cultures (particularly performed nuance – tiny
pitch and rhythm inflections that cannot be notated – hence the success of such genres as black
American blues), and at the same time introduces new approaches to sound, texture, and form (e.g.
montage, or repetition through computer-sequenced ‘loops’). The historical model, rural (folk memory)
– urban (sheet music) – cosmopolitan/global (electronic pop), makes some sense described in these
terms, even if it is often too crudely drawn.
In an argument more sociologically sensitive than that of McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, writing about
film in the 1930s (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1936, repr. in
Illuminationen, Frankfurt, 1961; Eng. trans., New York, 1968, pp.216–53), suggested that mechanical
reproduction had drastically changed the status of the work of art, by destroying the ‘aura’ of the
unique, authentic object, creating new processes of ‘distracted’ reception and thus empowering the
viewer. At the same time, technically and collectively highly organized production demystified
creativity, and turned passive consumers into critics. Applications of this analysis to music have
become common. It is certainly clear that owners of a record, who can listen to it when, where, in
whatever mental state, and as often as they want, stand in a different relationship to the music from
that of traditional concert-goers. Some, following Adorno, point out the ease with which new forms of
‘aura’ can be created – through the fetishizing of the musical commodity or the glamorizing of stars –
and argue that, in actual musical practice, passive listening is still the norm. Similarly, while digital
technology has the potential to democratize production and ‘de-throne’ the stars, it can also be used to
create new stars, such as producers and DJs (see DJ) as well as performers. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s
inspiration continues to be evident in the stream of work that began in the 1970s on music subcultures,
and in subsequent research on the ‘active fan’.
Adorno believed that mass production is an adjunct of what he took to be the main ideological function
of the ‘culture industries’ (including the music industry) in late capitalism, namely tying standardized
products to equally standardized consumer (listener) responses; this maximizes profits (homogenized
pieces can reach huge markets) and keeps people in their place. Many writers (for instance, Jacques
Attali, in his concept of ‘repetition’) have advanced similar arguments. Given the financial rewards
record companies gain from a large international ‘hit’, their desire to use the full array of mass media
and marketing techniques to achieve the maximum possible market control is understandable.
Nevertheless, research makes it clear that the market is not fully controllable (most record releases
lose money); that music industry operations inhabit a field of conflicts among the various sectors, many
of which mirror conflicts among musicians and fans; that new agents, new styles, and new tastes can
never be outlawed – indeed, the logic of the economy requires them; and that, in any case, musical
values cannot be regarded as mere epiphenomena of economic exchanges: interpretation and use
cannot be fully policed. In this context the most influential model for the popular music economy draws
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a relationship between the balance of industry concentration and diversity on the one hand and the
degree of musical standardization or innovation on the other; the history is viewed in terms of cycles:
periods of oligopoly and conservatism are broken up by new energies coming from independent
sources, which are in turn incorporated and made safe by the major players. Some qualifications are
necessary: late 20th-century technology loosened somewhat the connection between industry structure
and musical innovation; there are numerous examples of innovation in the outputs of major companies;
and the model does not necessarily apply in the 1920s and 30s before the tendency to oligopoly really
developed. Nevertheless, given that musical production here takes place in the context of the
imperatives of a capitalist industry, the basic perspective of the model seems persuasive, suggesting
that the history might be pictured as a spiral in which each stage strives to achieve an equilibrium that
is nevertheless inevitably unstable.
Implicit in all these arguments are diverse views of what modern society is and what part mass-
mediated music plays in it. It is a commonplace that each expansion in the scope of music markets,
each increase in the speed of turnover, tends to intensify a process whereby metropolitan norms
replace or absorb older, indigenous and peripheral styles and traditions. The trend is to rationalize and
democratize by flattening out difference. Thus the promotional discourses around many 19th-century
genres focussed on talk of fashion, the ‘latest’ composition, the ‘talk of London’ (or New York, or Paris,
etc.), performed ‘with great success by …’. In the early 20th century J.B. Priestley described the
appearance of ragtime as ‘drumming us into another kind of life in which anything might
happen’ (Baxendale, 1995, p.138). Throughout Europe, American influences were associated, then and
again after World War II, with modernization and the loss of old worlds. In the late 20th century the
technophiliac futurism of club-dance styles seemed to threaten pop traditions and to signal the birth of
a new transurban ‘jungle’. But cultural geographers point out that while such processes may destroy
and restructure communities, they can also create the possibility of new ones (real or imagined), for
instance people coming together round a newly discovered music style accessible to them only
electronically. At the same time, as the size of the geographical unit within which activity is organized
expands, so in a paradoxical way norms associated with intermediate levels (the nation-state, for
example) may weaken, allowing local ‘scenes’ to flourish; increasing compression of time and space
makes plentiful musical materials available. In any case, the industry is adept at inventing traditions or
adapting them for sale to consumers alienated from their own. The British case – from early 19th-
century stereotypes of Irish and Scottish music, through English folk revival ‘peasants’ and a music-
hall ‘golden age’, to lovable rock and rolling cockney teddy boys and assorted adherents of (black
American or Afro-Caribbean) ‘black roots’ – is a good example. Modernity has an insatiable appetite for
irrational tradition, and most European traditional musics, most American ethnic styles, not to mention
world musics from further afield, have been drawn into the net. The best overall model, then, may be
some sort of network of levels of activity, continuously evolving in shape and dynamics, such as the
matrix of (global) ‘superculture’, (local) ‘subculture’, and (cross-cutting) ‘interculture’ proposed by
Slobin (1993).
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3. An outline history.
(i) Before Tin Pan Alley.

As suggested above, it seems safe to assume that in all socially stratified cultures there is some sort of
hierarchy of musical categories. While there may be a few remote regions where this seems barely to
have obtained until relatively recently (the Scottish Highlands, Serbia, parts of the American frontier
before the late 19th century, for example), in most of Europe and the New World distinctions between
‘popular’ and ‘élite’ types of music have a lengthy history. However, before about 1800 there is little
sense of this being considered a problem. When the medieval theorist Johannes de Grocheio (De
musica, c1300) wrote that the motet was not suitable for ordinary people ‘since they do not grasp its
subtlety or delight in hearing it … [it] should be performed for the learned’, he seems simply to be
stating an obvious fact. It was the growth of social mobility, the increasing effects of capitalist social
relations and the appearance of commercialized leisure activities that led to anxiety about the culture
of the people. This process can be dated to the 17th and 18th centuries: J.G. Herder’s statement, late in
the 18th century (cited in Burke, 1978, p.22), distinguishing an acceptable vernacular from the horrors
of the contemporary vulgus – ‘The people [Volk] are not the mob of the streets, who never sing or
compose but shriek and mutilate’ – may be taken as conveniently encapsulating the beginnings of the
modern ‘problem’ of popular music.
The subject of popular music in medieval and early modern Europe is one of the weakest parts of its
historiography. This is partly because the sources are scanty and often unreliable; partly because of
insufficient research; and partly because the work that has been done often exists as an ‘aside’ in
music-historical literature that is focussed elsewhere, or in the literature of highly specialized
disciplines, notably folklore studies (see Folk music). Redfield’s model of ‘great tradition’ and ‘little
tradition’, the former accessible only to the educated élite, the latter to both the élite and the rest, but
with two-way traffic in content and style, still holds good as a starting-point (see Burke, 1978, pp.23–
64); but the task of placing data about the popular traditions within a picture of the development of the
musical field as a whole is in its infancy (but see Maróthy, 1966; Ling, 1997). In some ways the
interpretative difficulties intensify when more commercially orientated activities, often aimed at an
embryonic middle class, increased during the 17th and 18th centuries. Broadside ballads (see Ballad §I
7.) and the tunes to which they were sung had already been socially mobile for some time, but in the
second half of the 17th century printed collections of songs and dance-tunes were published (in
England, for example, John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, 1651, Apollo’s Banquet, 1669, and
A Choice Collection of 180 Loyal Songs, 1685, and D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge
Melancholy, 1699), followed by individual songs, perhaps drawn from the theatre or, increasingly,
specially composed for the growing domestic market. By the 18th century, simple instrumental pieces
were being aimed at the domestic market too, and the first collections of ‘folk’ music (mostly ‘Scotch’)
appeared. Popular tunes, previously used by, for example, Elizabethan composers of virginal and
consort music, were used in 18th-century English ballad opera, German Singspiel and French opéra
comique. Town bands, such as the English waits, were joined by more commercially organized groups
performing in taverns and, later, in pleasure gardens and concert rooms. The new urban tunes
percolated out into the countryside, for instance through the travels of itinerant fiddlers, pipers, and
singers, while many dances, from the saraband and country dance to the early 19th-century waltz,
made the opposite social journey.
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The essential background to the history of popular music in the 19th century is its industrialization. As
this process gradually brought most of society within its orbit, the effect in some ways was to narrow
the stream of musical practice: the range of activities was broad but, leaving aside older rural
repertories, the stylistic range became less so. Much of what we think of now as art music was widely
available through cheap editions, through transcriptions and arrangements (which often simplified
difficult works), through the spectacular virtuoso recitals pioneered by Paganini and Liszt, and through
‘popular concerts’. A similar repertory was central to the activity of the mass amateur choral
movements that developed in most European countries (stimulated in part by the invention of sol-fa
notation systems); and art music (especially opera) also featured strongly in the repertory of the
equally popular wind bands, such as the British brass bands which first appeared around the middle of
the century and quickly coalesced into a unique working-class movement (see Band §IV 3.). Many of
these activities were part of consciously pursued attempts to tie the lower classes into the norms
(aesthetic and behavioural) of bourgeois society.
At the same time, it is often difficult to draw a clear dividing-line between these activities and more
‘down-market’ spheres. Weber (1975) shows that many early 19th-century concerts in London, Paris,
and Vienna cultivated a rather vulgar appeal to the nouveaux-riches. Similarly, in the 1820s, 30s, and
40s in these cities (and later in others) a new breed of composer-conductor, with a flamboyant,
‘marketable’ personality, appeared: Louis Jullien in London, Philippe Musard in Paris, the two Johann
Strausses in Vienna. Their promenade and outdoor concerts included not just dances (the Strausses, of
course, owed their fame initially to the waltz) but also pieces for listening, and these performances
(which themselves emerged from earlier pleasure-garden traditions) laid the ground for the ‘popular
concerts’ that developed in the second half of the century. Large-scale dance halls were another new
phenomenon, and dances (as well as marches) were also popular with wind and military bands. The
flood of music written for domestic performance also shades stylistically from art norms into what has
tendentiously been called Trivialmusik; the distance between Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte and the
salon pieces of, for example, Gustav Lange and Sydney Smith, or between the simpler lieder of
Schubert and the songs of Adolf Jensen and F.W. Abt, is not large. Much the same point can be made
about French mélodies and British drawing-room ballads: prevailing norms are simplified for a mass
market. The relationship between the core operatic repertory – from which many overtures and arias
in any case found their way into orchestral and band concerts, dance and domestic arrangements, and
even barrel organ transcriptions – and new lineages of light opera and operetta (from Ferdinand
Hérold and Offenbach to Gilbert and Sullivan and Lehár) is not dissimilar.
Even in the British Music hall (and equivalents elsewhere, such as the French café chantant; see Café-
concert) ‘serious’ music was sometimes included, especially extracts from operas and ballets. But the
sources of these new institutions, which emerged during the mid-19th century, were socially and
musically more diverse. Early audiences seem to have been predominantly working- and lower-middle-
class, and the songs derived from existing folk, street, and urban comic-song repertories. By the 1860s
distinct song styles had been established, and the first star performers, such as ‘swell’ George
Leybourne, had made their mark. Towards the end of the century, however, increased investment, a
tendency to split the drinking from the entertainment, and a broadening of the audience turned the
halls into something more like variety theatres; there is still an observable difference in type of appeal
and musical character between them and contemporary musical comedy (see Musical), Cabaret, and
Parisian vaudeville-operetta, but it is not a chasm. Further still down the socio-musical ladder lie
resilient traditions of street, industrial, and political song, which, as folklorists have shown, drew on
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and developed older tunes and styles, often using them in new contexts such as industrial disputes.
Here is the place where striking musical difference (for example, in the form of modal tunes) may still
be found.
The history of 19th-century popular music in the USA is similar in some ways to that in Europe, and
different in others. The ideological gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ developed more hesitantly and
patchily. There were exceptionally strong and active folk traditions among both rural white
communities (notably in the South) and black slaves and ex-slaves; these assumed great importance in
the early 20th century, since their modes of performance were far better suited to transmission by
recordings than by notation. However, commercial music publishing in the USA drew at first on
European (especially British) sources, initially broadside ballads and the 17th- and 18th-century
collections of Playford and others, then the ballad opera and pleasure-garden and domestic song
repertories. Irish songs (especially those published by Thomas Moore) and Italian opera were also
popular. Many European musicians, such as the English singer and composer Henry Russell, visited the
USA. Singing schools and other educational initiatives led to increased musical literacy (see Psalmody
§II and Shape-note hymnody), and to the growth of domestic markets for vocal and instrumental music
similar to those in Europe. At the same time, ‘singing families’ such as the Hutchinsons generated
distinctive song repertories, as did the Civil War; and, much more significantly, the minstrel show –
emerging as an identifiable genre in the 1830s, and soon an enormous success in Britain as well as
throughout the USA – evolved in ways that were unique not only in relation to its negotiation of racial
issues but also to its musical fusion of Anglo-Celtic, Italian, and (to some degree and in diluted forms)
black American elements (see Minstrelsy, American). The fusion is heard at its most influential in the
songs, for both minstrel show and domestic parlour, of Stephen Foster.
Foster is notable for his ability to identify successful song formulae and exploit them. This tendency is
seen even more clearly in the output of subsequent song composers, including H.P. Danks, Henry
Tucker, Septimus Winner, Will S. Hays, and David Braham, as well as in the production of drawing-
room ballads in Britain from the 1870s by Arthur Sullivan, Frederic Cowen, James Molloy, and others.
Mass production techniques emerged at exactly the same time in the music hall: Felix McGlennon, who
was self-taught, claimed to have written 4000 songs, Joseph Tabrar 17,000 (sometimes 30 in a day).
McGlennon said that he would ‘sacrifice everything … to catchiness …. If a rowdy song takes the ear of
the public, and rowdy songs set in, why, I must needs write them. [The] music hall songs of all time run
in clear grooves’ (Bennett, 1986, pp.9–10). The stage for Tin Pan Alley was set.
(ii) From Tin Pan Alley to rock and roll.

Tin Pan Alley may have established itself in response to the growing demand for songs from the
vaudeville theatres (which had replaced the minstrel show, just as variety replaced music hall in
Europe, and which had their organizational centre in New York); but it quickly developed a commercial
momentum of its own (see Tin Pan Alley). Many of the songs of the 1890s and early 1900s – by Paul
Dresser, Charles K. Harris, George M. Cohan, Harry von Tilzer, and others – are not radically different
stylistically from their immediate predecessors; but the vibrant, punchy demotic manner of Irving
Berlin’s first hits (from 1909, and especially Alexander’s Ragtime Band, 1911) may be taken to
represent both a new phase and the multi-ethnic ferment in turn-of-the-century New York out of which
the new music emerged. With the advent of records (George Gershwin’s first big success, Swanee,
1919, sold over two million copies), then radio and films, the Tin Pan Alley composers between the
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wars were the hub of American popular music. The up-tempo, dance-orientated, novelty focus which
was a feature of the period from 1900 to the early 1920s tended to shift subsequently to more
introspective and sentimental moods, particularly in the 1930s as the Depression took hold, and
compositional technique became somewhat ‘denser’ (involving more complex harmonies, phrase
patterns, motivic relationships, etc.). Nevertheless, a handful of celebrated composers – Jerome Kern,
Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, in addition to Berlin and Gershwin – dominated the
entire period, even though notable songs were also written by many others, including Harry Warren,
Vincent Youmans, Duke Ellington, and Frank Loesser.
The connections between popular song and the theatre remained close. At the turn of the century,
operetta and musical comedy composers such as Victor Herbert used a more sophisticated musical
style than their Tin Pan Alley contemporaries, but, as American musical theatre left European models
behind, the Revue and the musical became important contexts for ‘breaking’ new songs. Many of the
composers mentioned above wrote for musical shows, and their songs thus had a double life (indeed
more than that, if arrangements for dance bands and performances by ‘silent’ cinema musicians are
taken into consideration). In due course, a similar relationship developed between such composers and
the Hollywood film industry. While songs for stage shows and musical films were often clearly intended
for a subsequent independent, commercial life, there was also a counterbalancing tendency towards
more dramatically coherent musicals, Kern’s Showboat(1927) and Oklahoma! (1943) by Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein II being the most celebrated examples. In any case, the best songs of this Tin Pan
Alley–Broadway–Hollywood nexus have justifiably been considered as among the creative peaks of
20th-century popular music.
The new media disseminated a broad range of genres: novelties, old-fashioned vaudeville songs,
religious music, and a variety of traditional or ‘ethnic’ repertories (e.g. Polish, Jewish, Irish) adapting
to 20th-century urban existence in the USA. Of these ethnic musics, two were to be of wider historical
importance: Country music, at the time known as Hillbilly music, and black American music, put out on
‘race’ records. Each of these tended to have its own listing or label within record company catalogues,
and eventually its own dedicated sales charts (hillbilly soon acquired its own radio programmes on
certain Southern stations, too); and each was marketed primarily to its ‘home’ audience. However,
from an early point in the century black American music was becoming more widely known and
influential; indeed, this process can be traced back to the 1890s (if not, in a certain sense, to
minstrelsy).
The Coon song and Cakewalk, deriving both their musical style and their portrayal of black stereotypes
from minstrelsy, were among the most popular song types of the 1890s and early 1900s. They were
followed by the astonishing commercial success of Ragtime, which lasted until World War I, then
Jazz(the first records appearing in 1917) and, at roughly the same time, the first commercially
disseminated Blues (the earliest sheet music, by W.C. Handy among others, appeared in 1912, and the
earliest recordings, by Mamie Smith, in 1920). Jazz bands enjoyed considerable popularity during the
1920s ‘jazz age’, and in the mid-1930s the big band jazz style known as swing (see Swing) achieved a
national (and international) prominence that lasted until World War II. Many historians and critics have
tried to draw clear boundaries around these terms, and to privilege certain strands, often associating
these with the ‘authentic’ styles of black musicians, which they have wanted to distinguish from white
‘dilutions’. It is easy to agree that the piano rags of Scott Joplin, the blues of Bessie Smith, Charley
Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leroy Carr, and Robert Johnson, the small group jazz of King Oliver,
Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, and the big bands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and
Page 13 of 77

Count Basie were distinctive and usually superior to the music in similar styles, or styles derived from
these, produced by white musicians. Moreover, much of this white music certainly offers a ‘smoother’,
‘sweeter’ alternative, in the quest for mainstream appeal. Nevertheless, the practices of black and
white musicians were thoroughly intermingled. None of these categories was tightly defined at the
time. ‘Ragtime’ encompassed not only the classic piano pieces but also songs and band music; and any
music could be ‘ragged’. Its origins lie in syncopated guitar, banjo, and string band styles played by
both black and white rural musicians, and in the march tradition represented most famously by J.P.
Sousa. ‘Blues’ settled definitively into the structure we now associate with it only in the late 1920s
(perhaps as a result of the influence of records); before that, the term seems to have applied more to
an emotional character and to certain technical features, which might appear in a range of vocal and
instrumental genres, including Tin Pan Alley songs; it could also denote a type of dance. ‘Jazz’ was
used to describe novelty groups such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the ‘symphonic jazz’ of white
bandleader Paul Whiteman, ‘sweet’ big bands like the Casa Loma Orchestra, and indeed any mildly
syncopated dance music or ‘hot’ singing styles. Blues singers often included other types of song in
their repertories and played rags; and white country musicians sang blues, and, in the 1930s, were
influenced by jazz (in Western swing), dance-blues and Boogie-woogie(in Honky tonk music). Early jazz
musicians had their own repertory, but soon added Tin Pan Alley songs to it. Blacks working in the
margins of the mainstream music business – ‘society’ dance-band leader James Reese Europe,
songwriters such as Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, Eubie Blake, and Noble Sissle, jazzmen such as
Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller – drew on a range of available genres, a tendency given a particular
point in the lineage of black musical shows, from Will Marion Cook’s In Dahomey (1902–3) through
Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921) to the various Blackbirds revues of the late 1920s and early
30s. Finally, melodic shapes, rhythmic patterns, and blues-derived harmonies infiltrated much of
mainstream popular song, most clearly in the ‘jazz age’, but – if often in subtle ways – permanently.
Arguments that this represented no more than a veneer (e.g. Hamm, 1979, pp.358, 385), while
appropriate in some cases, would seem to mistake hybridity for superficiality, and to underestimate its
long-term historical significance. A somewhat parallel case – the ‘Latin’ influences on mainstream
Euro-American popular music generated by successive fashions for Tango, Rumba, and Mambo – is
perhaps more susceptible to Hamm’s critique; but even here superficial exoticism is only a partial
explanation for what, more carefully considered, may be a symptom of deep-rooted cultural
ambivalence.
This is not to deny the need for distinctions, between white and black audiences and the musical styles
that they typically favoured, nor that black musicians were other than heavily constrained in the
activities open to them. Cultural and social relationships were no less complex than the psychology of
the white reception of black music (welcomed as ‘modern’ and at the same time tantalizingly
‘primitive’; attacked for its ‘barbarity’ and ‘immorality’). Economic exploitation of black musicians was
commonplace. Thus the biggest beneficiaries of the craze for swing music – based on musical
innovations developed by blacks – were white bandleaders such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey,
and Glenn Miller. Similarly, a succession of dance fashions, from ragtime dances such as the bunny hug
through the foxtrot and charleston to jitterbugging, all originating in black American practices, was
‘cleaned up’ for respectable white consumption, notably through the publications and educational
projects of the dancers Vernon and Irene Castle (see Dance §7).
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In a period marked by a growing cult of musical ‘personality’ it was white composers, singers, and
bandleaders who by and large enjoyed the greatest commercial success (not entirely, however: Ethel
Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong all achieved
considerable popularity). In particular, star singers such as Al Jolson, Rudy Vallee, Ethel Merman, Ruth
Etting, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Dinah Shore, with the benefit of new singing styles such as
Crooning and more intensive publicity techniques, were associated with songs more than their
composers were; record companies vied with each other to achieve this tie-up through multiple covers
of new songs. Characteristics of voice and nuances of performance became at least as important as the
notes on the page. At the same time, bandleaders, from Whiteman to Miller, could also become
celebrities; songs, it was discovered, could be danced to (and tailored rhythmically for dancing), while
conversely most dance bands had a vocal soloist. Social dancing was a major pastime, and could be
pursued at home as well, to records or the radio. Most of the stars also benefited from film
appearances. Increasingly, musical practice became multi-functional, musical success constructed
through a concatenation of aural, visual, and behavioural images.
In Europe, late 19th-century traditions of musical theatre, variety, dance music, and domestic song
survived into the next century for some time, but the vigour of the new American styles, transplanted
to a context marked often by political and cultural self-doubt, led quickly to their popularity, forcing
older practices to give way or adapt. Many American musicians visited Europe – Sousa, Cook, the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Whiteman, and Armstrong – and the black singer Josephine Baker settled
in Paris. Ragtime revues (e.g. Hullo Ragtime, 1912) brought both the music and the new dances. Most
major New York musical shows went to London. Dance bands on the American model sprang up across
Europe (along with small nuclei of jazz aficionados); dancing – in dance halls, hotels, and restaurants
and at home to broadcasts – was cultivated by all social classes; bandleaders such as Jack Hylton and
Ray Noble were as well known as singers following the American style, such as Al Bowlly and Vera
Lynn. American films, including musicals, placed their stars before the gaze of Europeans. Native
songwriters (in Britain, Horatio Nicholls, alias Lawrence Wright, Tolchard Evans, Will Grosz, Ray
Noble, Jack Strachey) copied the American form and style.
Differences survived, however. Local theatre composers such as Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, and Kurt
Weill hybridized indigenous and transatlantic lineages; some singers resisted American models: Gracie
Fields and George Formby, for example. In French chanson and variété, German Schlager, Italian
canzone, and some British songs in the music-hall tradition, native gestures and structures of feeling
survived, intertwined with new rhythms. In more peripheral regions, old-established genres and
practices changed less, and everywhere, it should be remembered, there was a less obvious network of
vernacular musical activities, under-researched as yet. In Britain, for example, these included
middlebrow ‘light classical’ and ‘palm-court’ music, played in upper-class hotels and spas, accordion
and banjo bands, old-fashioned ballads, and ‘romantic’ operetta, alongside still older traditions of brass
band, pub sing-song, and choir singing.
However, World War II and its aftermath, which brought US troops to Europe, with their records and
radio stations, and established the USA as the leading political and economic world power, laid the
ground for a new phase in the rise of American popular music to global dominance.
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(iii) Rock and roll and after.
Rock and roll entered American public consciousness in 1955 (with the success of Bill Haley’s Rock
around the Clock, first released in 1954, when it was included in the film Blackboard Jungle), and
threw up its first big star, Elvis Presley, in 1956 (with Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog). Its popularity,
and the controversy that accompanied it (falling into a pattern set by the reception of ragtime and
jazz), quickly spread through Europe, including (via illicit routes) communist eastern Europe.
Musically, however, it was not new. It was derived from the driving, small-group rhythm and blues that
had been developed by black ‘jump’ and city blues bands and vocal groups during the 1940s and early
50s, with an admixture of influences from the blues-influenced country music performed in the same
period by such singers as Hank Williams. What was new, though, was that this music was ‘crossing
over’, being heard and taken up by mainstream white (mostly young) audiences, and that it contrasted
in style with the big band accompanied ballad singing that still dominated popular music immediately
after the war. Several interacting factors were involved in this shift. In the USA huge numbers of
Southern whites and blacks moved to northern cities during the war. Their musical tastes began to be
catered for in larger-scale, more obvious ways, especially through a rash of new independent record
companies and radio stations. New technology (described above) facilitated new modes of musical
practice and dissemination. A postwar surge in births (the ‘baby boom’) coincided with the start of the
economic ‘long boom’, leading to substantially increased disposable income and leisure time,
disproportionately so by the mid-1950s for young people. A gradual shift in moral atmosphere revealed
growing social tensions and made possible more public expression of cultural and generational
differences.
All subsequent types of what became a new popular music mainstream, ‘pop’ or ‘rock’ music, can be
traced back to rock and roll. Its historical significance is therefore obvious, but it is also manifold. It
established black American traditions as central to popular music throughout America and Europe. It
enthroned youth as the principal market for the music industry, and as the decisive arbiter of taste. It
shifted the cultural politics of popular music: it was from this point on, for example, much more clearly
about physical pleasures – indeed, sexuality – and about ideals and choices of life style. It was
exceptionally well suited to dissemination in recorded form (conversely, sheet music could not capture
its textures, rhythmic dynamics, and vocal inflections), and, as musicians realized this (Buddy Holly
being, arguably, the earliest), it became the first popular music to be designed for recording.
The intricate history of pop music after rock and roll (intricate in terms of its chronology and its
geographical variants) is recounted in detail elsewhere (see Pop). The emphasis in this article is on
laying out the pattern of major shifts that articulate this history and relating them to the longer-term
popular music narrative. Three such shifts are apparent. The first relates to the emergence of Rock as
a self-standing stream distinct from its antecedents; this dates from the mid-1960s. The second is
associated with the brief flowering of Punk rock in the late 1970s, which was a symptom of a broader
process of fragmentation in the popular music field. The third revolves around the appearance in the
late 1980s of a new wave of highly technically mediated, club-based dance music styles, which seemed
to some to threaten much of the basis on which the previous popular music apparatus operated (see
Dance music (popular music genre)). It is important to note, however, that through these successive
shifts existing styles rarely disappeared; on the contrary, the history shows a cumulative process and
an expanding style-reservoir. Moreover, many pre-rock-and-roll styles also continued, in the margins, to
be joined by a host of adaptations, hybrids, and revivals associated with ethnic and indigenous
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traditions particular to many distinct regions of both Europe (from Irish show bands to Russian rock)
and North America (from Louisiana swamp rock to Jewish klezmer). Indeed, there is an argument that,
as media saturation brought all corners of these societies into the same electronically mediated space,
the very concept of cultural centres and margins became doubtful, making the historiography of
popular music a politically charged enterprise.
The assimilation of rock and roll by the music industry and mainstream taste in the late 1950s and
early 60s (in the form of blander adaptations) was rudely upset by a constellation of new
developments: from Britain,Beat Music, led by the Beatles, and a native derivative of rhythm and blues
associated most influentially with the Rolling Stones; from the American West Coast, new hybrids of
folk, blues, and rock and roll, leaving Californian ‘surf music’ behind and developing into Psychedelic
rock; from New York (mainly), modernizing Folk Music Revival and Folk-rock styles led by Bob Dylan,
and the incipient Art Rock of Velvet Underground. In a context of rapid economic growth, an expanding
college population, youthful protest (especially over the Vietnam War) and widespread changes in
social values, all amounting (it has been suggested) to a crisis of legitimacy for existing political
regimes, the music took on a rebellious edge and serious aesthetic aims. Rapidly changing studio
technology, the growth of FM radio, and the emergence of LPs (sometimes in the form of ‘concept
albums’) as a rival to singles shifted the basis of production and enormously expanded the available
musical means. By the later 1960s ‘rock’ was established in general discourse – with several variants,
including (in addition to those mentioned above) Progressive rock, Hard rock, and Country rock – and
was separating (in terms of audience, production, and aesthetic) from more chart-orientated ‘pop’.
Alongside these developments, distinctive black American styles, notably Motown and Soul music,
sometimes interplayed with rock currents (through such performers as Otis Redding and Aretha
Franklin, for example) but by and large stayed relatively separate, in market and musical practice.
In 1976–7 the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and others pioneered British punk rock. Some of its sources lay in
earlier pop (for example, the Who and David Bowie in Britain, American garage bands and art-rock
punks from New York such as Patti Smith and the New York Dolls), but by tying a stripped down
musical revisionism to a pseudo-situationist philosophy and deliberately outrageous behaviour, British
punk caught the mood of economic recession and social unrest among working-class youth and
exposed the gargantuanism of progressive rock as pretentious. Perhaps most significantly, it offered an
approach that was both aesthetically and organizationally democratic: anyone could make music, it
was suggested; a huge number of new, often tiny, independent record companies, distributors, and
shops sprang up, in opposition to the established music business; and new production technology made
very cheap recording possible. By laying bare the seams in their own music, behaviour, and visual
style, punk musicians and fans made the point that rock, for all its aesthetic claims, was really a
branch of entertainment, with its own modes of artifice. Their insistence on organizational control
galvanized the further fragmentation of popular music, laying the ground for the emergence of Indie
music (the US equivalents were ‘alternative’ or ‘college rock’), electro-pop (using synthesizers, drum-
machines, etc.), Grunge (a punk–heavy metal hybrid originating in Seattle), and world music, each with
its own audience and (often) organizational network. These joined chart pop, Heavy metal, the Singer-
songwriter, and various black genres (Disco, soul,Funk, Reggae), as well as older styles and hybrids
(rock ballads, rock musicals, etc.), to make what was by this time an exceptionally broad pop field. The
effects took institutional forms, bringing a diversity of performance contexts (clubs and discos, as well
as concerts and festivals), of radio channels and programme formats, and of music magazines;
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similarly an intensification of merchandising and of star promotion occurred, but alongside an
increasing acceptance of the legitimacy of serious pop journalism and critical writing. The
international influence of punk, and of its effects, was enormous.
For some, these effects threatened ‘the end of rock’ (at least as an ideology), but arguably a more
tangible threat was the rise in popularity of club dance music. With roots in disco (dance music
designed for records to be played in discotheques, at the peak of its popularity in the 1970s), in funk,
in dub (remixed reggae records; see Dub) and in Hip hop and Rap (originally New York street musics
using intermixed rhythm tracks, drum machines, manually ‘scratched’ records, and ‘rapped’ vocals),
the new dance music was clearly based in black music traditions. Starting in the mid-1980s with
Chicago House and Detroit Techno, and moving through British Rave, a host of continually hybridizing
styles had developed by the 1990s, in centres in North America, Britain, and many parts of continental
Europe. Dance had its own institutional networks (clubs, illegal raves, record companies, magazines,
radio stations), its own production system (centred on producers, mixers, and DJs, making music
through techniques of sampling, sound synthesis, computer programming, and live mixing, with few or
even no performing musicians directly involved), its own approach to musical form and texture and its
own social ambience, associated with lengthy (often all-night) dance sessions and recreational drugs.
While crossover into the mainstream market became commonplace in the later 1990s (usually
involving the incorporation of more conventional elements – instrumentalists, vocals, pop forms), dance
music posed a clear challenge to the previous popular music paradigm.
Rock and roll is often seen as marking a radical shift in popular music practice, from literate styles
clearly related in their musical techniques to broadly accepted norms of 19th-century European and
Euro-American musics, to more corporeally exciting styles made for records and derived mainly from
black American norms with strong orally transmitted elements. While there is a good deal of truth in
this view, it is possible that it both underplays the strength of black American influence before rock
and roll (see Van der Merwe, 1989, esp. p.286; ‘with the publication of the first blues the materials of
the 20th-century popular composer were complete. Since then popular music … has striven to maintain
a sense of breathless novelty. But it has come up with nothing that, fundamentally, cannot be traced
back to 1900 or earlier’) and overplays its triumph since (Tin Pan Alley musical forms and long-
established ballad singing styles survived, for instance, and one of the best-selling albums worldwide
since the 1960s is the sentimental Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music). Post-rock-
and-roll pop might better be seen as the striking culmination of a lengthy process, going back at least
to minstrelsy, whereby mainstream white society has come to terms with an internal cultural ‘other’.
But by this argument, a stronger claim to musical revolution might be made for late 20th-century
dance music, which, in its most extreme forms, abandons the presentation of sung feeling, the
portrayal of expressive character, in a way that rock music, any more than Tin Pan Alley songs and
19th-century ballads, does not.
It is clear, however, that the moments associated with the constellations of rock and roll on the one
hand and Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, and early jazz on the other do represent important historical shifts.
They also map rather well onto contemporaneous and similarly important shifts in the technology and
economy of musical production (which in turn are no doubt related to broader adjustments, routinely
noted by historians, in the organization of Western capitalism). Whether or not technological
digitization and economic globalization imply an analogous status for the post-punk period, and
especially for dance music, is a question perhaps best left for further historical assessment.
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4. Genre, form, style.
(i) Genre.
In a broad-brush analysis, popular music may be regarded as a single generic system. Its distinctive
practices emerge from related sets of conventions organizing form, style, function, audience, meaning,
and appropriate discourse. It is at this level that popular music as such tends to be defined: for
example, as normally comprising short pieces, accessible to large audiences, in familiar (rather than
experimental) styles, and requiring no great quantity of theoretical knowledge for its appreciation (or,
often, for its production). Within this system, most popular music falls into one of three main functional
categories: dance, entertainment, or background, although there are also subsidiary categories,
notably those to do with functions of drama (e.g. music theatre; film or television soundtrack). The
three main categories often overlap (as, for example, with dance-songs treated as background music
from a pub jukebox). This generic simplicity may be connected to the need of a commercial cultural
system to maximize organizational stability, market size, and stylistic flexibility. Its secular and
vernacular qualities mark it as a product of modern, post-Enlightenment society, in which direct social
functions tend to weaken and artistic practice strives towards a certain autonomy. Contrary to common
assumptions about the nature of entertainment (the German term U-Musik has even stronger
pejorative overtones), this function does not preclude intensive listening, a point supported by the
aesthetic stance of many 19th-century listeners to domestic ballads or brass band performances of
operatic arias or of many 20th-century listeners to jazz or rock singer-songwriters; indeed, certain
strands in popular music have constantly implied claims to the status of art, from Scott Joplin’s view of
ragtime as a serious American music, to John Lennon’s claim that rock and roll has ‘something in it
which is true, like all true art’ (Wenner, 1971, pp.100–01). At the same time, older, quasi-ritualistic
categories have survived to some extent, in residual or adaptive forms: hymns and carols, used in
secular contexts; civic songs (e.g. national anthems); marches associated with particular military
organizations; war, propaganda and political songs (from those of the British Chartists and the
American Civil War to the Nazi ‘Horst Wessel Song’ and the Internationale); and songs and chants used
by football crowds.
The big generic categories of the popular music mainstream break down into a large number of
smaller ones. The pioneering Tin Pan Alley composer Charles K. Harris listed the following (Harris,
1906, p.13):
a. – The Home, or Mother Song. b. – The Descriptive, or Sensational Story Ballad. c. – The
Popular Waltz Song … d. – The Coon Song … e. – The March Song … f. – The Comic Song… g.
– The Production Song (for interpolation in big Musical Productions … h. – The Popular Love
Ballad. j. – High Class Ballads. k. – Sacred Songs.
Similarly, categories in rock and pop songs include ballads (of a variety of types), up-tempo dance-
songs, confessional songs (associated with singer-songwriters), character songs (dramatic or narrative
presentations of a character), songs of social or political comment, songs about themselves (i.e. about
pop music, ‘rock ’n’ rolling’, dancing, etc.), novelty songs, and song cycles (on concept albums). 19th-
century social dance may be subdivided according to differences of tempo, rhythmic gestures, typical
social contexts, and typical semantic associations; the same is true of late 20th-century dance music,
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which is particularly prone to generic splitting and hybridization. The proliferation of subgenres is
probably the corollary of the large-scale systemic simplicity, the one providing a necessary stability, the
other a desirable level of flux and novelty.
Elements of commonality are important at several levels. Romantic and sexual relationships provide
easily the most frequent types of subject matter; indeed, this generic feature might in one way be
regarded as subsuming many of the subgenres. Similarly, self-expression, taking a variety of guises, is
fundamental to popular song throughout its history, marking its secular trend. The effects of
commodity-form status (on dissemination, content, performance) are so general that they are only
revealed when put in question, as in folk clubs or in the free rock concerts of the late 1960s. One of
these effects is a tendency to multi-functionality: for example, songs appearing in the theatre, in
recorded form, for dancing, on television commercials, and on film soundtracks. (As classical music
became more thoroughly commodified in the late 20th century it was affected by this tendency as well;
by this criterion it turned into a type of popular music.) However, such recycling of material (e.g. tunes
migrating from one context to another) has a much older ancestry in vernacular musical practice.
Throughout the history, there is on the level of musical style and technique a sense of a generic centre,
surrounded by, and from time to time refreshed by and interacting with, marginal genres (such as folk
music, blues, reggae, world music, etc.).
Some genres have seen significant change. Thus the popular ballad, starting in the 19th century as a
narrative genre with roots in the folk ballad, came, in the Tin Pan Alley–Broadway song system, to
combine narrative with (and often subordinate it to) the characteristics of a reflective romantic song;
by the time of the development of the rock ballad the genre can be defined simply as a slowish pop
song, with subjectively orientated and often romantic themes and a personal mode of address. At the
same time, certain aspects of some genres seem to change very little. From the early British music-hall
song Bacon and Greens to popular successes such as Yes, we have no bananas (1923) and Barbie Girl
(1997, referring to a popular brand of doll), many of the features of the comic novelty song are
remarkably stable.
(ii) Form.
One way of writing the history of popular music forms would be in terms of an interrelationship
between iterative and additive modes on the one hand and the principle of sectionality on the other.
The folk music forebears tended to privilege the first, through stanzaic song forms and repeating
dance-tunes; and to a greater or lesser degree popular music in the 20th century returned to similar
techniques, derived for the most part from black American influences. In between, sectionally
orientated structures increased in importance, perhaps because of the closeness of much 19th-century
popular music to contemporary art music norms. An additional factor to be borne in mind in the case of
songs is the role of Lyrics. Through the demands imposed by setting existing words, or through mutual
interaction, or sometimes through the effects of producing both together, the patterns of verbal form
(rhyme scheme, line length, stanza structure, etc.) and those of musical form are always interrelated.
Most 19th-century popular songs use a strophic form. The roots of such forms go back not only to
folksong but also to theatre and pleasure-garden song, broadside ballad and Gassenhauer, romance
and lied. Commonly (though not universally) each stanza ends with a short refrain. The phrase
structure is generally made up of regular two-, four-, and eight-bar units, phrases are often repeated,
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either immediately or after a contrasting phrase, and there is an important role for open–closed
(antecedent–consequent) relationships between adjacent phrase-endings, produced melodically or
harmonically, or both. Sir Henry Bishop’s Home, Sweet Home (1823) exemplifies all these tendencies,
illustrating the way in which the additive strophic principle is infiltrated by elements of a developing
sectionalism. Perhaps under the influence of contemporary art song, some composers went further in
this direction, especially in drawing-room ballads, into through-composed, modified strophic, or other
sectional forms. From the middle of the century refrains of American songs were often intended to be
sung by a group (hence use of the term ‘chorus’) and, similarly, British music-hall songs often have a
chorus in which the audience can sing along. Eight- or 16-bar sections were by now the most common,
for both verse and chorus, and in both repertories a variety of phrase-structure patterns can be found,
for example AABA and (the music-hall favourite) ABAC. The folding of repetition into lyrical shape
through sequence and the rhyming effect produced by permutations of symmetry and contrast
between phrases and by open–closed relationships between cadences create a sense of balance, of
quasi-narrative movement balanced by degrees of closure, which is typical of this period.
The sectional principle was even more prominent in the instrumental dance music of the 19th century
(including marches, which could be used for dancing the quickstep or galop). From quadrille, waltz,
galop, and polka to two-step and cakewalk, practice oscillates and permutates between two types of
pattern, each based on sections of (normally) eight or 16 bars: the string or set pattern (a sequence of
different themes) and the minuet-and-trio or ABA pattern (the trio generally being in a contrasting key,
often the subdominant). Both tendencies were taken over into instrumental ragtime. Most piano rags
use a two-part form, the first section having a ternary arrangement of sections (or ‘strains’), the
second introducing new strains and perhaps recapitulating an earlier one, but in any case being in a
contrasting key, usually the subdominant (and often closing there – a peculiarity of ragtime). Common
patterns are ABA/CD, ABA/CA and ABA/CDC, many of the strains being repeated.
In the later 19th century song choruses tended to expand and, increasingly, to become the focus of the
form. This tendency continued in Tin Pan Alley song, and at the same time the verse section shrank in
both size and number. By the 1920s one verse (in any case often omitted in performance) was the
norm, and the chorus was generally 32 bars long, the whole approximating to a recitative-and-aria
structure. Various chorus patterns were used but by far the most common is the ternary variant AABA,
known as ‘standard ballad form’, with the bridge (the B section) providing contrast melodically,
harmonically and sometimes in key. Such an expansive, well-organized structure can function as a self-
standing entity (hence descriptions of the mature Tin Pan Alley–Broadway song as the lied of popular
music), and would seem to mark the triumph of the sectional over the additive principle. However, on a
micro-structural level many songs take over from ragtime and blues techniques of building form
through repetition of short figures; from Joe Howard’s coon song Hello! ma baby (1899) through Lewis
F. Muir’s Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (1912), Walter Donaldson’s Yes, sir, that’s my baby (1925) and
George Gershwin’s I got rhythm (1930) to Joe Garland’s In the mood (1939), this technique points, at
least incipiently, away from sectionalism, towards open-ended iteration.
12-bar blues form, which emerged during the same period, strings together a variable number of
verses (often, confusingly, called choruses), each one marked internally by a good deal of phrase and
smaller-scale repetition, call-and-response between voice and accompanying instrument(s) and the use
of riffs (see Riff). Early jazz musicians not only improvised on the 12-bar harmonic sequence (I–I–I–I–
IV–IV–I–I–V–V[IV]–I–I[V]) but applied the same approach to the choruses of Tin Pan Alley songs. From
this point ‘chorus form’ refers to pieces built on iteration (potentially open-ended and usually with
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variation) of a structural unit. This constitutes a principal resource for all black American genres, and
also influenced the additive strophic forms typical of country music; from both traditions it entered
mainstream pop music from rock and roll onwards.
Post-rock-and-roll, pop song used 12-bar blues, together with variant and equivalent chorus-form chord
sequences, and drew on folk revival for simple additive strophic patterns; but it also retained elements
of the standard Tin Pan Alley form, both the overall pattern itself (especially in ballads) and the verse–
chorus–bridge sectional principle (more widely). By the later 1960s these lineages were thoroughly
combined, and generalization is possible only to the extent of observing first that songs are usually
constructed from a sequence of sections of variable length, which, depending on their function and
interrelationships, may be termed ‘verses’, ‘choruses’, or ‘bridges’; and second that at the same time
processual links are often created across sectional divisions through the use of riffs, interrelated
musical figures, harmonically open chord progressions, or foregrounded rhythmic continuities. The
impulse to avoid closure often results in fades at the end of recordings or performances. Riffs may be
melodic (as in the guitar riff of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction, 1965), but more commonly comprise a
short chord sequence, a pervasive technique from the I–IV–v–IV of Richard Berry’s ubiquitous Louie
Louie (1957) onwards, even in clearly sectional forms. The contrasting temporalities of short harmonic
cycle and larger sections can intertwine in powerful ways: in REM’s Losing my religion (1991) lyrics
and musical content indicate an unorthodox sequence of verses, choruses, and short bridges, but
virtually all the music pivots around a two-chord riff (A minor–E minor), which, however, grows varied
harmonic ‘limbs’ in the different sections of the song.
This pop form mainstream is broadened out by two divergent tendencies. Some progressive rock
groups explored more extended forms (especially on concept albums), sometimes partly through-
composed, sometimes partly improvisatory. While subsidiary, the influence of this strand can be felt in
the fluidities and irregularities characteristic of the work of some indie bands and of the more
experimental singer-songwriters. At the other extreme, hip hop and dance-music producers in the
1980s and 90s, using sampling, computer-sequenced rhythm-loops, collage, and remixing techniques,
developed a concept of form based on arbitrary cuts between a series of repetition-rich textures, each
piece being potentially endless; articulation points seem to be largely local, and form is heard more
like process.
Some scholars have connected the impulses towards form as process (iteration, variation) and form as
organized structure (sectionalism) to non-Western (or specifically African and Afro-diasporic) and
Western practices respectively. Thus Keil (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1966) distinguished
between a tendency towards ‘engendered feeling’ in the former and ‘embodied meaning’ in the latter,
while Chester (1970) distinguished between ‘intensional’ and ‘extensional’ forms. A dichotomy is
established between pre-planned composition on the one side and moment-by-moment nuance and
inflection, based on received frameworks, on the other. As ideal types, these provide useful models;
however they are both better regarded as principles, variably active in all music, on both of which
popular music practice draws, in continually changing proportions, manifestations and
interrelationships.
Adorno (1941) connected formal moulds and frameworks in popular music to the pressures exerted by
commodification, and grouped them all under the pejorative label of ‘standardization’. From music-hall
formula and Tin Pan Alley mass production to the ‘hit-factories’ of pop, it is clear that a tendency to
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structural predictability grows directly out of the imperatives of a capitalist industry. Yet the Adornian
critique misses not only the productivity of formula (in stimulating variative invention) but also the
range of formal designs and processes.
A further question is whether ‘the piece’ is the most appropriate unit for formal analysis. Two
developments, one in cultural theory, the other in musical practice, have added extra charge to this
question. Theories of intertextuality suggest that relationships between pieces or performances are of
structural significance, and thus throw into relief the importance of covers, of recycling material, of
‘tune families’ that link songs together and of formulaic processes. Similarly, techniques of sampling
and remixing raise queries about the boundaries normally placed around a singular musical event. The
theory of ‘Signifyin(g)’ drawn by scholars from black American literary studies places the roots of Afro-
diasporic formal thinking in the concept of a ‘changing same’, which generates intertextual
relationships both historically and synchronically, through continual variation of formulae. The
pervasiveness of repetition in popular music, at all structural levels, suggests that such a perspective
may be at least as relevant here as European formal moulds and quasi-industrial standardization
techniques.
(iii) Style.
It is impossible to discuss in detail here even a few popular music styles, and the most that can be
attempted is a sketch of some important trends. As with musical form, many aspects of 19th-century
styles are linked to or contiguous with contemporaneous art-music techniques, while in the 20th
century these were at least in part supplanted by, or mixed with, approaches drawn from black
American (and to a lesser extent folk, country, Latin, and world) musics. This shift happened in
conjunction with a different one, a move from norms moulded by the demands of performance, often in
intimate surroundings, to techniques designed for large-scale performance, often with the aid of
amplification, or for recording, radio, or film, and at the same time shot through with the effects of
enormous changes in the resources and processes of sound production. This was accompanied too by a
gradual transition from a relative separation of song and dance genres to a situation in which their
attributes are thoroughly intertwined.
Tune-and-accompaniment textures, simple diatonic harmonies (with a variable admixture of chromatic

elaboration), melodies conditioned by harmonic progression and its rhythm (often arch-shaped, with
frequent use of phrase repetition and sequence, though sometimes affected too by volkstümlichtraits) –
the ‘home-and-away’ melodic and tonal processes of ‘bourgeois song’ have been described often
enough, and they provide the basic attributes of many 19th-century popular song styles (though
obviously with differences of detail between styles lying closer to, say, lied, Italian aria or English
theatre song). Our knowledge of performing style is thin for this era before records, but many
celebrated singers (in Britain, John Braham, Sims Reeves, Antoinette Sterling, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby,
and Adelina Patti, for instance) straddled the divide between art and popular music, and no doubt
amateurs tried to imitate their pure tone, secure intonation and clear phrasing. Performance in the
music halls and minstrel shows was much more theatrical, portraying character, inciting audience
response and including speech-like effects and even patter. Street singers took such tendencies even
further.
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Similar melodic, harmonic, and textural characteristics are found in much of the instrumental music,
too, such as salon pieces for piano, though here typical instrumental figuration might feature. Many
such pieces are in a dance genre, and, while the dance music of the period also shares the same overall
stylistic framework, in this repertory rhythm, often a background feature in the songs, is of course
more sharply etched. In the second half of the century especially, typical dance rhythms often invaded
vocal music as well – in minstrelsy, for example, or the waltz songs so popular towards the end of the
century, or in music hall, where the contours of galop, polka, or waltz rhythms generate much of the
sing-along impetus. So important is this influence in music hall (frequently both tempo and rhythmic
character change for the chorus, introducing a more dance-like swing) that Bennett (1986) refers to
the ‘gestic’ quality of the style – a memorable figure, pregnant with rhythmic character, embodies the
song’s basic gesture (it is here, perhaps, that the device of the ‘hook’, so important in later popular
song, was born). Throughout this 19th-century repertory textural principles differ little, whether the
accompaniment is in the hands of piano, small orchestra of strings and wind, wind band or the small ad
hoc groups of the music hall; but the banjos and guitars used in minstrelsy and the ‘traps’ (elementary
drum kit) introduced in the later music hall and in vaudeville are pointers to the future.
With ragtime, blues, and early jazz, rhythmic features moved more into the foreground, notably
ragtime’s half-beat syncopation and ‘secondary rag’ (three-note groups over a duple beat), the
rhythmic flexibility of blues singing, the before-the-beat and after-the-beat phrasing against a strong
regular beat (producing swing) that is typical of jazz, and sometimes the 3+3+2 metrical patterns
characteristic of many Latin genres. Other important techniques in these styles include pentatonic and
circling (rather than linear, goal-directed) melodic shapes; pitch inflection (including blue notes, i.e.
variably tuned thirds, sevenths, and sometimes other scale degrees); small-scale repetition, including
riffs; call-and-response; a more natural type of voice production, manifesting itself often in speech-like
singing styles and ‘dirty’ tone – techniques that, when imitated by instrumentalists, result in ‘vocalized
tone’; and a semi-improvisatory approach to performance.
Many of these techniques seeped, to variable extents and in variable ways, into the styles of Tin Pan
Alley song, which in other respects continued to develop along lines already existing in the 19th
7
century. Harmonically, circle-of-fifth and (from blues) I–IV progressions are typical additions to the
basic diatonic framework, though by the inter-war period some chromatic chords (dominant
extensions, added 6ths, augmented, and diminished chords) were also common, as were passing
modulations (especially in bridge sections). Similarly, in the more sophisticated songs of Broadway
shows a denser motivic texture developed, along with longer-breathed melodic lines. At the same time,
dance-band performance norms were influential: for example, there are the beginnings of a distinct
rhythm section stratum in the texture; and sometimes strong bass lines suggesting top–bottom
thinking; elements of call-and-response, riff, off-beat accents, parallel voicing, and counter melodies
owing more to jazz polyphony than to European textbook counterpoint infiltrate accompaniments. This
applied across the range of performing groups, from small dance bands to large, string-dominated
orchestras. Singing styles too were sometimes influenced by jazz (though bel canto norms remained
important as well), and the novel intimacies, nuances and flexibility made possible by the microphone
(in crooning, for instance) pointed towards the coming revolution in sound.
In rock and roll and subsequent pop styles, techniques derived from black American sources were
developed further, notably shouted, ‘dirty’, dramatic, and jazz-influenced singing, top–bottom textures
with foregrounded percussion stratum, widespread use of riffs as a textural as well as a structural
device, and instrumental techniques organized around expressiveness and rhythmic bite. The standard
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performing group (guitars, drum kit, lead singer, perhaps with some group singing as well) emerged
from the small-band lineages of rhythm and blues and country music, though additions (keyboards,
brass, synthesizers) and larger groups were also used as the range of styles expanded. The ‘standard
rock beat’ (kick drum on beats one and three, heavily accented backbeats on two and four, usually on
snare drum, plus decorative cymbal patterns) was established, with a spectrum of variants in different
genres (Moore, 1993, p.36). The harmonic language, while drawing on blues-type progressions and on
Tin Pan Alley for circle-of-fifth and other diatonic progressions, is often modal, and favours short,
repeating harmonic riffs; such sequences as I–♭VII–IV, I–vi and i–♭III–♭VII are common. Above all,
perhaps, a new sound world was opened up by amplification (resulting, for example, in a range of
electric guitar styles and in the deliberate use of feedback), by electronic effects (such as wah-wah and
echo), by sound synthesis, and by multi-track recording, which made available techniques of layering,
balancing, blending, and stereophonic spacing of voices that are impossible by any other means, thus
radically changing conceptions of texture.
Texture and sound took on even greater importance in hip hop and subsequent pop dance styles. With
the aid of digital technology, layers of sound, each one often created by looping rhythms, short figures
or sampled noises, are assembled into montages. While the techniques were incipiently present in
earlier black styles (disco, funk, dub), the tendency in much rave, techno, and drum and bass music
virtually to abandon tune, to shrink periodicity to very short units and to constrict harmony to short,
minimally directed (and often modal) sequences radically reconstructs the stylistic paradigm. A fast,
metronomically regular beat supporting syncopated, short-note figures is standard, and a contrast
between rapped lyrics and brief, soulful sung phrases is common. These dance music styles represent
an extreme in the broad stylistic spectrum of popular music at the end of the 20th century; but their
popularity, and even more their influence on more mainstream styles, points to a perhaps decisive
historical significance.
(iv) Popular music and the musical field.

It is easy to see that in the first half of the 19th century there were close links between a good deal of
popular music and contemporary art music, in terms of genre, form, and style; that in the second half
of the century these links weakened, as distinctively popular genres appeared; and that, with the
beginnings of Modernism, this parting of the ways turned into a clear split, which subsequent
developments in the 20th century tended to deepen (Hamm, 1979, in particular, argues this view
persuasively). However, the story is not quite as straightforward as it might at first seem.
One common way of seeing the popular styles of the 19th-century bourgeoisie is as dilutions of the
contemporary art music; but the whole field may also be viewed in terms of divergent tendencies
within broadly accepted norms. The popular styles and the immense educational and critical efforts to
popularize the classical styles then appear as sociologically interconnected; we can see ‘the rise of the
musical masters as an early form of mass culture’ (Weber, 1977, p.6), and by the 20th century it is
clear that their works ‘speak equally, or almost equally, to listeners in many countries because their
native accents have been naturalised in an international musical idiom’ (Parakilas, 1984, p.10). At the
same time, it should be remembered that the favoured musics of many 19th-century Europeans and
Americans – folk and folk-related styles – lie outside this idiom: it is here that clearly articulated
difference is to be located in this period. But the interplay between art and popular strands did not
disappear in 1900. The popularization of classical music continued, from the work of the music
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appreciation movement to the commercial success of recorded compilations of classical ‘greatest hits’
in the 1980s and 90s. Basic 19th-century techniques and effects continue to inform the composition of
cinema and television music and the repertory of light music. The ease with which classical pieces can
be ‘ragged’, ‘jazzed up’, or given a rock beat is instructive. Mainstream popular music has often drawn
on art music for material, from such Tin Pan Alley songs as I’m always chasing rainbows (1918, from
Chopin) and Avalon (1920, from Puccini) to Procol Harum’s rock recording A Whiter Shade of Pale
(1967, based on a J.S. Bach chord sequence) and Sweetbox’s 1998 hit Everythings gonna be alright
(which makes use of Bach's Air from Suite no.3 in D, or ‘Air on the G string’). Many progressive rock
musicians have recorded arrangements of art music pieces or used art music techniques and textures,
and some heavy metal guitarists consciously draw on Baroque virtuoso instrumental styles (see Classic
rock).
In the 20th century, admittedly, the relationship between art and popular strands became more
complex. Early Modernists sometimes used elements of ragtime and jazz (and of folk music too), but
they treated them as raw material, to be transformed and distanced. From the other side, symphonic
jazz (in a variety of guises – Whiteman, Gershwin, Ellington, the Modern Jazz Quartet) is also
permeated with stylistic and structural tensions. It has been suggested that more complete and less
selfconscious crossovers emerged under the influence of postmodernism (from the 1960s). It is
certainly often difficult to assess, on the level of style (and sometimes that of audience too), whether,
within the avant garde, such musicians as LaMonte Young, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson,
Frank Zappa, ambient dance group the Orb, or drum ’n’ bass musician Roni Size produce ‘popular’ or
‘art’ music.
The story is so complex that generalization is extraordinarily difficult. Two points can perhaps be
accepted: that attempts to discuss popular music in isolation, that is, without taking account of its
variable relationships (positive and negative) with other musical categories, will inevitably be
weakened in their analytic scope; and that these variable relationships are closely connected with
shifts in social relationships and in associated broad cultural patterns. An example of the ground
opened up by acceptance of the second point is provided by Paul Gilroy’s concept of the ‘black
Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1993) and W.T. Lhamon’s parallel history of blackface performance (Lhamon, 1998). If,
as Gilroy argues, the presence of a slave and post-slave Afro-diasporic culture within late-modern
bourgeois society is not marginal but significantly constitutive for that society, then the emergent role
of black American music becomes important not just for popular music but for our understanding of
the musical field in this society considered as a whole. If Lhamon’s provocative argument is accepted,
namely that blackface, for all its racist caricatures, constitutes a core site for the negotiation of a
cross-race Atlantic popular identity, with a history traceable from early 19th-century New York through
the performance styles of such figures as Al Jolson and Elvis Presley to that of the 1990s rapper M.C.
Hammer, then the ethnic mediations of social class become central to an understanding of modernity
and its musical culture. Against the background of such post-colonial critiques, the periodic incursions
into mainstream popular music from outside its apparent geographical base, from tango in the early
years of the 20th century through Afro-Cuban influences during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s to reggae and
world musics in the 1980s and 90s, suggests that the geo-cultural boundaries of ‘the West’ itself are as
porous as its social identity is multi-faceted. The very concept of a mainstream might begin to come
into question at this point, especially if, to the importance of the ‘marginal’ musics just mentioned, is
added consideration of the historical significance of the other musical ‘outsiders’, for example Gypsy
music (especially in 19th-century central Europe) and Jewish music (for instance, in the ethnic ferment
out of which the formation of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway song styles emerged). It is not necessary to
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accept Constant Lambert’s élitism or his unsavoury espousal of ‘racial characteristics’ in music to note
the pertinence of his argument, in Music Ho! (1934), that, to many critics of musical change, ‘the Jew is
just as much an enemy of the British and Holy Roman Empires as the Negro’ (3/1966, pp.177–8).
Negotiations of difference and identity, representation and self-representation, relating to the full
range of racial, ethnic, class, and cultural hierarchies, have been a constant factor in the way that
popular music has been located within the musical field as a whole.
5. Social significance.
(i) Politics.
Art music in the West is generally portrayed as apolitical, and the contrast with popular music in this
sphere is striking. Bob Dylan’s protest songs of the 1960s may stand as key examples of one sort of
popular music politics. Song lyrics with overt political content have not been uncommon in subsequent
pop music, though in mainstream 20th-century popular music before the 1960s they are quite rare. In
the 19th century there were songs about wars, campaigning songs (supporting the abolition of slavery,
for instance), and songs of social comment (on such issues as the evils of alcohol), though often their
aim was to affirm rather than protest, as in British music-hall songs with enthusiastically imperialist
themes. Pop music protest stands more in the tradition of strike ballads and other politically motivated
workers’ songs, which in turn can be related to folksongs containing political comment (a trait
surviving in blues and country music, and passing into pop through the influence of such American
neo-folk and folk-revival singers as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger).
There is also a history of political movements making use of songs for campaigning purposes, and, in a
linked though distinct way, some pop musicians have tied their music to political campaigns, such as
Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s and in the mid-1980s the Band Aid and Live Aid movement in
aid of the relief of world poverty. Similarly, the rather inchoate political demands of the 1960s
counterculture were often seen as carried above all by the rock music of the time. In these cases,
however, lyric content is relatively unimportant to the political effects; and arguably the politics of
most popular music have generally had more to do with its sounds, contexts, and uses than with its
words.
Many popular music styles have been subjects of controversy. In the 19th century, theatres and
pleasure gardens were often seen as morally suspect, and there were frequent attempts to clear music
off the streets. New dances, starting with the waltz, had a habit (so it seemed to their critics) of
infringing the canons of respectability. Music halls responded to efforts to control and censor them by
becoming blander and less risqué. Ragtime, jazz, rock and roll, and rap were each greeted by a chorus
of condemnation which combined musical criticisms with a moral panic focussed on allegations of
violence, sexual immorality, and uncivilized ‘jungle rhythms’. It is often difficult to disentangle musical
dislike (frequently couched in terms of a discourse of ‘noise’) and fear of social disorder. Thus rock
music was resisted by communist state authorities both because it was felt to be musically aberrant,
indeed, primitive, and because it was seen as a symptom of bourgeois capitalism; conversely, to
dissidents and alienated youth it represented freedom on both levels. Even claims to no more than ‘fun’
can be regarded as threatening by defenders of social (especially work) discipline.
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For participants in popular music, it often represents ‘community’ at least as much as it does ‘threat’.
Pete Townshend of the pop group the Who wrote: ‘When the music gets so good … everybody for a
second forgets completely who they are and where they are, and they don’t care. They just know they
are happy’ (Frith, 1983, p.80). Such a politics of community takes particularly overt form at a few
specific moments (at the Woodstock rock festival in 1969, for instance, or in all-night ‘raves’ in the
dance clubs of the late 1980s and early 90s), but forms a continuous thread in the appeal of pop music,
a thread that appears to be derived ideologically from the myth of a ‘folk community’ constructed by
folk revivalists and folklorists (and before them by the Romantics). It may manifest itself in some
earlier proto-folk situations too – for example, in the relationship of brass band music or music-hall
song to particular 19th-century British working-class communities. It constantly intertwines, however,
with popular music’s role in what Raymond Williams (1961) called a ‘long revolution’: the gradual
extension of democratic opportunities (in this case, access to music, both its production and
consumption) to more and more sectors of society. The politics of this shift are those typical of mass
society, and their effects are variously construed (as, for example, alienation or empowerment; cultural
flattening or cultural pluralism), depending on the observer’s political point of view.
What most observers might agree on is music’s power to ‘place’ people in society. For Adorno, this
pointed to the way that popular music in mass society acts (he thought) as ‘social cement’, confirming
consumers as passive units performing (willingly) their allotted roles in an incipiently totalitarian
capitalist system. Still less tendentious critiques may refer to, for example, the escapism in Tin Pan
Alley song; and similarly the historian Gareth Stedman-Jones (1974) describes late 19th-century music-
hall song as a ‘culture of consolation’, its small convivialities (its ‘fun’) compensating for the seeming
impossibility of real social change. For most popular music scholars, however, the ideological effects of
the music are far more variable than Adorno allows, and more subject to negotiation. At the opposite
extreme, subcultural theorists such as Willis and Hebdige argue for the possibility of particular music
styles to act as vehicles of resistance to dominant cultural and social values, through the meanings
read into them by consumers. It is nevertheless impossible to describe the politics of production as
anything other than vitally important, for they greatly affect what music consumers will hear. The
imperatives of commodity form, of intellectual property law, and of growing corporate power explain
the appeal of neo-Marxist portrayals of the music industry as a monster. Theories of ‘cooption’ describe
how musical innovations are often stripped of any power to upset, as they are incorporated into
mainstream styles; one major record company enthusiastically promoted the radical musics of the
1960s counterculture under the now notorious slogan ‘The revolution is on CBS’. As, through the 19th
and 20th centuries, the cultural industries became more and more significant both to the economy and
to social behaviour, the role of the state became increasingly important as well. Under fascist and
Stalinist dictatorships it was overtly oppressive and directive, but in liberal democracies the concerns
of state agencies are mostly to do with encouraging orderly consumption and profitable production,
along with social tranquillity. Legal regulation of performance, broadcasting and copyright, taxation
and subsidy policies, censorship and educational strategies form a network of official involvements.
The systemic integrity of the whole production apparatus, especially by the later 20th century, can look
impressive. Nevertheless, most popular music scholars would want to point also to the faults in this
system (see §2(ii) above), to the impossibility of eradicating these and, above all perhaps, to the intense
difficulties in controlling the meaning of music.
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(ii) Social identities.
Whatever the political context or ideological mechanisms, it is widely agreed that participation in
popular music genres and styles is intimately connected with how people (listeners and producers) see
themselves – that is, with their sense of social identity. A dramatic example is the way that the social
category of youth has been configured since the 1950s, in large part through the images, values, and
behavioural possibilities made available in pop music. But social identity is an amalgam, standing at
the meeting-point of various axes, including not only generation but also social class, gender, nation,
and ethnicity.
There is good empirical evidence to link many popular music genres with particular social classes, both
working-class groups (street music, industrial song, brass bands, music hall, blues, and country music
up to the 1960s, hard rock styles and heavy metal) and middle-class groups (parlour and salon music,
operetta, and progressive and art rock styles). Such links tend to be obscured in the first half of the
20th century by discourses of mass culture, which assume an incipient universality of social
positioning; and these discourses retain some importance subsequently, if only because, in societies
with increasingly blurred class boundaries and in fluid mediascapes dominated by large organizations
and with socially mobile audiences, theories of class ownership of and class expression through
specific styles seem simplistic. Homology models, derived from anthropology, in which musical content
and class position are mapped one to the other, raise difficult epistemological issues (they seem to
require an analytical first cause), and, for most scholars, need to be written on a very coarse scale, to
be modulated by theories of negotiation, or to focus on use and consumption rather than on musical
form and content. The last two are the favoured strategies of subcultural theorists, such as those who
have identified resonances between particular pop styles and the values of punk, mod, teddy boy,
hippie, or other class-based subcultures. Even in the 19th century, when class-linked musical
differences are relatively easy to spot, norms originating in bourgeois traditions gradually spread their
influence through large swathes of popular music practice, so that a model based on the variable
articulation of a core stock of techniques seems the most convincing one. Despite these qualifications,
however, it remains important to place popular music in its class contexts. Whatever its exact
definition, it is always in some sense culturally subaltern; from this point of view, all popular styles are
‘people’s music’ (in a broad sense), positioned against whatever is defined as élite. At the same time,
social distinctions have affected access and responses to musical resources, resulting in a multitude of
differences in taste, practice, usage, and interpretation, both within popular music and between it and
other categories, but always in some sort of relationship with people’s sense of their place in the social
hierarchy.
Such differences are always mediated by other factors, however, notably inscriptions of gender, nation,
and ethnicity. Throughout its history, in both production and consumption, popular music has generally
been gendered in quite clear ways. Domestic performance has been available to women, but public
performance (increasingly the norm in the 20th century) has been overwhelmingly in the hands of
men, a division that extends to all production roles in the music industry. On the whole, female
musicians have been confined to singing, and to singing of particular sorts – in backing groups (women
as support), of ballads (women as caring and naturally emotional), in erotically explicit personae
(women as sex object). There have been exceptions to this pattern, however – female singers who have
broken the rules, for instance, some blues, country, and music-hall singers – and the 1970s saw the
beginning of a more dramatic shift, with the number of female pop bands, songwriters, and stylistically
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uncompromising singers increasing significantly. Popular music styles themselves, and their
consumption, seem to have been gendered in similar ways to production. ‘Softer’ styles are often
thought of as being disproportionately intended for women, ‘harder’ ones for men, and subject matter
(particularly in songs about love and romance) is generally organized, narratively and in its
presentation, to appeal differentially to male and female listeners. Similarly, performance styles often
seem designed to facilitate predictable patterns of identification and desire on the part of fans. Yet
while lyric themes, performer images, and listener tastes cannot be isolated from the structure of
gender relations in society at large, research (though it is as yet limited) suggests that the two spheres
may not be entirely coextensive. It is possible, for instance, that for women an evening dancing or at
the music hall may represent an escape from feminized domesticity; that a seemingly ‘romantic’ female
vocal group such as the Shirelles or the Crystals may be interpreted as giving women advice about
managing men; and that, conversely, men identifying with flamboyant, passionate male performers
(such as Al Jolson, Elvis Presley, or Freddie Mercury) may view listening to their music as an
opportunity to imagine ways of acting not normally available to them. Long vernacular traditions of
‘camp’ performance, including cross-dressing, provide the historical context for the emergence of
explicitly gay or bisexual performance imagery in pop (with artists such as Little Richard, David Bowie,
Madonna, and many more; see Gay and lesbian music), suggesting that to some extent popular music
may represent an arena where gender roles and relationships can be queried, if only (for most
listeners) in the imagination.
The relationship between ‘black music’ and ‘white music’ is another example of an apparently clear
distinction that is in practice blurred. Historically, the extent of interplay and hybridization between
styles, materials, and techniques associated with black Americans (and Afro-Caribbeans) on the one
hand and Euro-Americans on the other renders attempts to define a separate ‘black music’ problematic
(as well as potentially racist). Yet many black people would defend such attempts, and with good
reason (to mark their presence and defend their identity, against great pressures), and so would many
whites, for reasons often connected with the appeal of the exotic – the attractions of ‘black difference’
as an alternative to the blandness associated with mainstream music. The complications are intensified
by the facts that white investments in this relationship have often led to stereotyping (from the
grotesqueries of minstrelsy to the macho posturing of some white blues-rock); that black musicians
and their genres have largely been kept separate by the music industry, and their difference
maintained; and that, at the same time, they have been ruthlessly exploited, their innovations taken to
fuel the mainstream’s need for novelty. In this context, ‘white music’ occupies a blank space: it
represents the norm (that is, what is not defined as ‘black’). Yet it has never been a monolithic
category. In the USA, for example, country music has represented ‘the South’ in opposition to the
cosmopolitanism identified with the north, while Polish, Jewish, and other ethnic repertories have
maintained a symbiotic but uneasy relationship with the mainstream. In Europe, American styles have
been on the one hand welcomed, as symptoms of modernization or vehicles of rebellion, but on the
other hand resisted, on behalf of local identity and heritage, an attitude sometimes institutionalized
through broadcasting quotas or the promotion of local production, as in the San Remo song festival in
Italy. Regional differences, still strong in the 19th century but declining as national music markets
were consolidated, re-emerged in the second half of the 20th century, often linked to indigenous folk
traditions. In Britain, for example, expressions of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh difference, with their long
histories, were joined by assertions of English provincial identity (the Liverpool of the Beatles; the
London of the Kinks or Blur). Such strategies may draw upon local material and styles, or, often, just
on characteristic patterns of diction. Some British punk rock bands cultivated an aggressively anti-
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American, English diction. For musicians in continental European countries, whether to sing in English
or not is itself an issue, as it is for French speakers in Quebec. In many countries such complications,
both in tendencies of musical practice and in possible patterns of identity, are intensified by the
presence of new or greatly expanding ethnic minorities since World War II: Hispanics and Asians in the
USA, Asians and Afro-Caribbeans in Britain, North Africans in France.
Whether considering class, gender, or ethnic identity, much writing on popular music has tended to
look for direct links between music and ‘real life’. But, as some of the examples given above suggest,
there is reason to think that music acts less as a mirror reflecting pre-existing patterns of identity than
as an arena for their negotiation, or even their construction, as more recent work drawing on discourse
theory and post-structuralist perspectives would indicate. In this latter approach subjectivity is seen as
fluid, provisional, and endlessly constructed in cultural practices, and from its application to popular
music has come research into ways in which musical interests can support imaginary communities,
transient subcultural taste distinctions, geographically virtual ‘scenes’ focussed on shared musical
identifications, and searches for roots in styles originating far away, perhaps in one of the many
manifestations of world music. This does not alter the fact that constructions of identity offered in
music often confirm dominant positions already in existence rather than subverting them. Much
depends on how listeners relate to their favoured performers, how they position themselves within
lyrics (for example, which pronoun they take to represent them), which ‘voice’ (lead vocal, backing
singers, guitar riff, etc.) they identify with, what connotations they attach to the particular style, and so
on.
(iii) Aesthetics.
Any attempt to raise even the possibility of an aesthetics of popular music must somehow bypass the
scepticism of mass culture critics (e.g. Adorno: ‘The autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-
psychological function’; 1941, p.3) and of liberal musicologists (e.g. Dahlhaus: ‘it is uncertain whether
… the surprisingly elusive qualities that determine a “hit” deserve to be called aesthetic at all’; 1989, p.
312), not to mention the weight of a longer intellectual history extending back to the emergence of
music aesthetics as a separate discipline in the 18th century. As Adorno’s comment suggests, the
underpinnings of this discipline lie in the doctrine of music’s autonomy, and, while the insistence by
popular music scholars on their music’s social significance may seem unwittingly to support its
reduction to a sociological datum, their more important achievement has been to show how popular
music helps to reveal autonomy itself as a social construction. The sociological critique of aesthetics
links all cultural practices, tastes, and judgments to social, institutional, and discursive conditions; thus
the transcendent qualities attributed to autonomous music, and the disinterestedness allegedly
required for its appreciation, are, by this argument, tied to specific interests of the Western
bourgeoisie at a particular moment in its history. To be sure, the decidedly ‘impure’ production and
consumption practices of popular music do not seem to suit it to the standard criteria of aesthetic
worth (even though in its own way its emergence is linked to the wider spread of leisure time, which
arguably also gave rise to the discourse of autonomy), but popular music scholars tend to work with
theories of relative autonomy, which, while grounding taste in social conditions, insist that this rules
out neither the integrity and irreducibility of that level of activity and meaning which is specifically
musical nor the distinctive pleasures attaching to its appreciation.
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In one of the most influential sociological critiques of aesthetics, Bourdieu (1984) made a clear
distinction between the ‘aesthetic disposition’ (with its ‘pure gaze’) and the ‘popular aesthetic’ (which
is ‘realist’, ‘earthy’, grounded in function), and linked these to taste differences between the
bourgeoisie and the working class. Most popular music scholars have preferred a model with
categories that are more fluid in both their contents and their interplay. Frith (1996), for example,
argues for three distinct discursive frames, each with its own values, institutions, and social practices
(and all arising at about the same time, around 1800): that of ‘art’, organized around ideas of creative
truth-to-self and educated knowledge; that of ‘folk’, centred on ideas of authenticity and community;
and that of ‘the popular’, focussed on ideas of commercial success (i.e. popularity), entertainment, and
fun. He suggests that none of these categories has any intrinsic musical content, so that ‘popular
music’ (in fact, any music) can be, and is, placed in any category, or indeed in more than one. Of
course, definitions of ‘originality’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘entertainment’ vary historically and socially; but
this approach enables us to understand how a single piece – John Lennon’s song Imagine, for example –
can function variably, as a skilful and effective expressive statement (‘art’), as a political cri de coeur
around which a sense of community can be assembled (‘folk’), or as a hit record, often transplanted to
all sorts of routine situations including background music (‘popular’). It also enables us to make sense
of the ways in which performers and listeners talk about popular music in terms of musical skill, formal
relationships, emotional truth, rhythmic power, original sounds, and so on, without needing to deny
that the criteria will differ historically (compare a Victorian parlour ballad performance and a rock
concert), without forgetting that the criteria will often be at odds with those common for classical
music (e.g. noise, incessant repetition, and seemingly out-of-control vocalism are positive aesthetic
qualities in much rock music), but also without wanting to erase the music’s social and political
significance.
This significance is vital. To think of a parlour ballad parody in a music hall, of Chuck Berry’s rock and
roll classic Roll over Beethoven, of the Sex Pistols’ irreverent punk anthem God Save the Queen, or of
the rap group Public Enemy’s Fight the Power is to see that their political charge, in specific social
conditions (including, arguably, the large audiences delivered by their commercial success), is part of
their aesthetic achievement. Equally, however, their political significance is dependent on the appeal of
their musical qualities. While these examples are extreme, the point can be generalized for all popular
music. In the end, then, the most important argument made by theorists of popular music aesthetics
may be that aesthetic experience is not necessarily extraordinary but can be found in musical practices
intimately enmeshed in (and indeed contributing to) the patterns of ordinary people’s everyday lives in
modern societies.
6. The study of popular music.

A good deal of 19th-century writing about popular music consisted of reportage, reminiscence, or
polemic. Serious study started with the publications of antiquarians such as William Chappell and folk
music collectors such as J.G. Herder, the brothers Grimm, and Cecil Sharp, though they were rarely
interested in contemporary musics, their preferences being often driven in fact by a pessimistic
certainty of cultural decline. There is useful journalistic comment on contemporary, commercially
produced popular musics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a continuing stream of
memoirs, biographies, and popular books on the emerging music business, but scholarly work on this
repertory really began (aside from the beginnings of a literature on jazz) with the mass culture critics,
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of whom the most important was Adorno. More empirical sociological publications started to appear
shortly after World War II (Riesman, 1950), and the influence of the British mass culture critic F.R.
Leavis can be seen in the 1950s and 60s in the work of Hoggart (1957) and the young Stuart Hall (Hall
and Whannel, 1964).
There was as yet no ‘popular music studies’. The discipline emerged in large degree as the offspring of
a meeting between the impact of rock music on young scholars beginning their careers in the 1960s
and 70s and their reception of a wave of new cultural theories that were beginning to transform the
existing humanities and social science disciplines. From the start, though, the study of popular music
was a broad (and at times uneasy) coalition. It drew on several fields: social studies (especially the
sociology of youth, institutional sociology, and communication studies); radical strands in musicology
(notably what has sometimes been called cultural or critical musicology, but also the pluralistic
approach to American music represented by the work of such musicologists as Chase, Mellers,
Hitchcock, and Hamm); cultural studies (in particular the movement originating in the Birmingham
University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the encounter of British culturalism – the
tradition of Leavis, Hoggart, and Raymond Williams – with continental Marxist, structuralist, and post-
structuralist theory, subsequently exported to North America, Australia, and elsewhere);
ethnomusicology (e.g. Keil, 1966) and, to a greater extent, progressive folkloristics (e.g. the work of
Oliver on blues and of Green, D.K. Wilgus, and Charles Malone on country music, in a tradition going
back to American collectors of the early 20th century); and pop music journalism (especially in the
USA, e.g. in the work of Greil Marcus). These varied strands did not so much coalesce as ferment
(though at times they ignored each other, too). By the early 1980s the new discipline had a well-
regarded academic journal (Popular Music, published by Cambridge University Press) and scholarly
society (the International Association for the Study of Popular Music), both founded in 1981; research
papers were presented at conferences and in journals associated with established disciplines; and the
subject was starting to be taught in some universities. During the 1980s and 90s a substantial
literature accrued and new generations of scholars emerged.
A variety of issues troubles the new discipline. Among the most important are the following:
(a) Research resources are generally scanty or inaccessible. Good library collections and archives (of
printed literature, sheet music, and recordings) are rare. Much of the relevant material is ephemeral.
(b) The context within which popular music studies emerged has led to a strong research emphasis on
Western pop and rock, the industry that produces it, and its youth audiences. This bias (sometimes
criticized as ‘rockism’) has been at the expense of the study of other popular musical tastes in Western
societies, of historical developments before rock and roll, and of popular musics elsewhere in the
world.
(c) The most active, best populated, and most strongly supported research strands have, on the whole,
been identified with predominantly social and cultural studies interests. At its most reductive, this
appears as ‘sociologism’, and, while there have also been excellent interpretative work and first-class
studies of the industry and audiences, this focus has somewhat overshadowed the study of musical
practices, structures, and meanings.
(d) At the same time, the musicology of popular music has been troubled over methodology. It seems
clear to most of the scholars concerned that, for a good deal of pop music and most genres of black
American music, the technical differences between this music and mainstream Western art music (e.g.
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the emphasis on sound quality, the distinctive singing styles and treatment of timbre, the relative
importance and complexity of rhythm, the significance of pitch inflection, the valorization of harmonic
simplicity and structural repetition) raise questions about whether conventional analytical method,
designed for study of the art-music repertory, is always appropriate. Even for some other genres, such
as Tin Pan Alley song or music-hall song, where congruence with art music practice is greater, the
importance of performance, and disparities between performance and text, mean that the question still
arises. The lack of recorded evidence for the pre-1900 repertory compounds this problem. Analysts
have thus tried to develop methods that can take account of timbre, complex rhythms, pitch and
rhythm effects that are impossible to notate, and textural effects that are only possible on recordings.
The issue of notation is itself difficult, with some arguing that it distorts much of this music, turning
subtle aural process into a reified approximation, and others supporting the use of notation (of various
sorts, including transcription) for particular purposes.
This methodological debate can be pursued on deeper levels, for it seems to be rooted in the
difficulties that most popular music scholars have with the formalism and immanentism that they take
to permeate much of the mainstream musicological approach. Dealing with genres whose techniques,
uses, and effects seem to be grounded in emotional and bodily activity and response, in culturally
defined meanings and in the particulars of distinctive social conditions, these scholars have tended to
reject not only the privileging of score-based formal analysis and disinterested contemplative listening
but also the philosophical underpinnings of this in the doctrines of autonomy, genius, and ‘the
masterwork’. Partial resolution of this dispute may be visible in the move within mainstream
musicology itself towards more interpretative and culturally contextualist approaches. Musicologists of
popular music have also looked towards semiology (notably in the work of Philip Tagg and Dave Laing)
and towards discourse theory (e.g. in the work of Robert Walser and David Brackett). One limitation of
such perspectives may be their analytic focus on verbal connotations or discourse surrounding music
or, in some cases, a tendency almost to equate music with words about it. The semiotic privileging of
language over music was subjected to thorough critique by Shepherd and Wicke (1997), and, as they
suggest, the other side of a resolution to the dispute may lie in the development of a method that,
while maintaining the sense of music’s cultural constructedness on which popular music studies has
always insisted, is also able to reveal the specificity of musical processes. There are signs, on both
sides, that such moves may be leading to a recognition that popular and art musics are not always so
very different, or not in every way, or at least that they live in the same world.
A further issue debated in popular music studies – often prompted by attacks on the scholars by
practitioners and critics, and sharpened by the impact of complex cultural theory – is the relationship
between theory and practice. This was placed in even higher relief by the introduction in the 1980s of
the teaching of popular music in some universities, conservatories, and schools. While it can act as a
catalyst to the opening up of issues concerning educational aims and relative cultural values, popular
music placed in such contexts raises questions about the desirability and implications of its own
legitimation. On one level the questions concern whether to teach the music’s production or its
understanding, and the wisdom of teaching either aspect to young people who may well be closer to
the music, as consumers or as practitioners, than their teachers. It is not obvious whose terms should
be used, for example, or what should be the relationship between academic and vernacular theory. But
on a broader level these questions are symptoms of problems that affect the study of popular music in
general. The questions are not just tactical (how to attain the best understanding): given that the
situation presents itself in terms of ‘ordinary’ culture under the gaze of ‘experts’, the people
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interpreted by the intellectuals, they must also be epistemological (how to define what is a ‘true’
understanding of this music) and even ethical (who is entitled to speak about this, and in what terms).
The quandaries are akin to those surrounding the interplay of etic and emic modes of interpretation,
much discussed by ethnomusicologists. For the encounter of musical science with the popular musics
of its own hinterland, no less than for its dialogues with musics of other cultures, they are at the heart
of the matter.
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S. Hall: ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’, People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. R. Samuel
(London, 1981), 227–40
A. Hennion: Les professionels du disque (Paris, 1981)
J. Shepherd: ‘A Theoretical Model for the Sociomusicological Analysis of Popular Musics’,Popular Music, vol. 2
(1982), 145–77
P. Tagg: ‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice’, Popular Music, vol. 2 (1982), 37–67
D. Horn, ed.: Popular Music Perspectives II: Reggio nell’ Emilia 1983
S. Frith: Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (London, 1983)
P. Bourdieu: Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 1984)
J. Parakilas: ‘Classical Music as Popular Music’, JM, vol. 3 (1984), 1–18
R. Lax and F. Smith: The Great Song Thesaurus (New York,1984/R)
J. Attali: Noise: the Political Economy of Music (Manchester, 1985)
D. Laing: One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes, 1985)
N. Shapiro and B. Pollock, eds.: Popular Music, 1920–1979: a Revised Cumulation (Detroit, 1985) [with
annual suppls.]
P. Wicke and W. Ziegenruecker: Handbuch der populaeren Musik(Leipzig, 1985)

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A. Huyssen: After the Great Divide: Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London, 1986)
R. Iwaschkin: Popular Music: a Reference Guide (New York, 1986)
G. Born: ‘Modern Music Culture: on Shock, Pop and Synthesis’, New Formations, vol. 1 (1987), 51–78
J. Horowitz: Understanding Toscanini (New York, 1987)
P. Tagg: ‘Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music’, Semiotica, vol. 66 (1987), 279–98
P. Van der Merwe: Origins of the Popular Style: the Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular
Music(Oxford, 1989)
P. Hardy and D. Laing: The Faber Companion to 20th-Century Popular Music (London, 1990/R)
P. Wicke: Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology (Cambridge, 1990)
R. Middleton: Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990)
P. Gammond: The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (Oxford, 1991)
M. Parker: ‘Reading the Charts: Making Sense with the Hit Parade’, Popular Music, vol. 10 (1991), 205–17
J. Shepherd: Music as Social Text (Cambridge, 1991)
P. Tagg: ‘Towards a Sign Typology of Music’, Analisi musicale II: Trent 1991, 369–78
S. Jones: Rock Formation: Music, Technology, and Mass Communication (Newbury Park, CA,1992)
P. Gilroy: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993)
A. Moore: Rock, the Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Buckingham, 1993)
M. Slobin: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH, 1993)
R. Walser: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover,
NH, 1993)
J. Baxendale: ‘“… into another kind of life in which anything might happen …” Popular Music and Late Modernity,
1910–1930’, Popular Music, vol. 14 (1995), 137–54
D. Brackett: Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge, 1995)
R. Burnett: The Global Jukebox: the International Music Industry (London, 1995)
M. Chanan: Repeated Takes: a Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London, 1995)
M. Christianen: ‘Cycles in Symbol Production? A New Model to Explain Concentration, Diversity and Innovation in
the Music Industry’, Popular Music, vol. 14 (1995), 55–93
C. Hamm: Putting Popular Music in its Place (Cambridge, 1995)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (Oxford, 1996)
K. Negus: Popular Music in Theory: an Introduction (Cambridge, 1996)
L. Green: Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge, 1997)
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T. McCourt and E. Rothenbuhler: ‘SoundScan and the Consolidation of Control in the Popular Music Industry’,
Media, Culture and Society, vol. 19 (1997), 201–18
J. Shepherd and others, eds.: Popular Music Studies: a Select International Bibliography (London,
1997)
J. Shepherd and P. Wicke: Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge,1997)
P. Theberge: Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH,1997)
T. Swiss, J. Sloop, and A. Herman, eds.: Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary
Theory (Oxford, 1998)
T. Swiss and B. Homer, eds.: Popular Music and Culture: New Essays on Key Terms (Oxford, 1999)
G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh, eds.: Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation,
and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley,2000)
Britain and Europe

W. Chappell: Popular Music of the Olden Time (London, 1855–9/R1965as The Ballad Literature and
Popular Music of Olden Time, rev. 2/1893/R by H.E. Wooldridge as Old English Popular Music)
J. Abbott: The Story of Francis, Day and Hunter (London, 1952)
C. Dahlhaus, ed.: Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1967)
H.P. Hofmann and P. Czerny: Der Schlager: ein Panorama der leichten Musik (Berlin, 1968)
K. Young: Music’s Great Days in the Spas and Watering Places (London, 1968)
E. Lee: Music of the People: a Study of Popular Music in Great Britain (London, 1970)
R. Pearsall: Victorian Popular Music (Newton Abbott, 1973)
G. Stedman-Jones: ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the
Remaking of a Working Class’, Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), 460–508
R. Pearsall: Edwardian Popular Music (Newton Abbott, 1975)
W. Weber: Music and the Middle Class (London, 1975)
I. Keldany-Mohr: ‘Unterhaltungsmusik’ als sociokulturelles Phaenomen des 19. Jahrhunderts

(Regensburg, 1977)
W. Weber: ‘Mass Culture and the Re-Shaping of European Musical Taste, 1770–1870’,IRASM, vol. 8 (1977), 5–21
P. Burke: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978)
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Trivialmusik’,Die Musik des 19 Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1980; Eng. trans., 1989)
N. Temperley, ed.: Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–1914 (London, 1981/R)
P. Scannell: ‘Music for the Multitude? The Dilemmas of the BBC's Music Policy 1923–1946’, Media, Culture and
Society, vol. 3 (1981), 243–60
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A. Bennett: ‘Music in the Halls’, Music Hall: Performance and Style, ed. J.S. Bratton (Milton Keynes, 1986),
1–22
D. Russell: Popular Music in England, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 1987/R)
D.A. LeMahieu: A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in
Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988)
D. Scott: The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing-Room and Parlour (Milton Keynes,
1989)
R. Fiske: ‘Music and Society’, Music in Britain: the Eighteenth Century, ed. H.D. Johnstone and R.
Fiske (Oxford, 1990), 3–27
O. Edstrom: ‘The Place and Value of Middle Music’, STMf, vol. 74 (1992), 7–60
I. Spink: ‘Music and Society’, Music in Britain: the Seventeenth Century, ed. I. Spink (Oxford, 1992), 1–65
S. Banfield, ed.: Music in Britain: the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995)
J. Ling: A History of European Folk Music (Rochester, NJ, 1997)
USA
Dichter-ShapiroSM
O.G.T. Sonneck: A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (Washington, DC, 1905, rev. and
enlarged 2/1945 by W.T. Upton, repr. 1964with preface by I. Lowens)
C.K. Harris: After the Ball: Forty Years of Melody (New York, 1926)
I. Goldberg: Tin Pan Alley: a Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (New York, 1930)
E.B. Marks: They All Sang: from Tony Pastor to Rudy Vallee, ed. A.J. Liebling (New York,1934)
I. Witmark and I. Goldberg: The Story of the House of Witmark: from Ragtime to Swingtime (New
York, 1939/R)
S. Spaeth: A History of Popular Music in America (New York, 1948/R)
J. Mattfeld: Variety Music Cavalcade: a Chronology of Vocal and Instrumental Music Popular in
the United States (New York, 1952, 3/1971)
G. Chase: America’s Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955, 3/1987/R)
P. Oliver: Blues Fell this Morning: Meaning in the Blues (London, 1960, 2/1990)
D. Ewen: Popular American Composers (New York, 1962, suppl. 1972)
L. Jones: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963, 2/1988)
W. Mellers: Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Development in the History of American
Music(London, 1964)
A. Green: ‘Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 78 (1965), 204–28
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D.K. Wilgus: ‘An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 78 (1965), 195–
204
B.C. Malone: Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin, TX, 1968, 2/1985)
H.W. Hitchcock: Music in the United States: a Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969,
3/1988)
E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971)
A. Wilder: American Popular Song: the Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York, 1972, 2/1990)
R.A. Fremont, ed.: Favorite Songs of the Nineties (New York, 1973)
H. Pleasants: The Great American Popular Singers (London, 1974)
P. Charosh and R.A. Fremont, eds.: Song Hits from the Turn of the Century (New York, 1975)
G. Marcus: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York, 1974, 4/1991)
I. Whitcomb: Tin Pan Alley: a Pictorial History (1919–1939) (New York, 1975)
R. Jackson: Popular Songs of Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1976)
D. Ewen: All the Years of American Popular Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978)
C. Hamm: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979)
N. Tawa: Sweet Songs for Gentle Americans: the Parlor Song in America, 1790–1860 (Bowling
Green, OH, 1980)
P. DiMaggio: ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: the Creation of an Organisational Base for
High Culture in America’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 4 (1982), 33–50
A. Shaw: The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (New York, 1987)
C. Small: Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music
(London, 1987)
L. Levine: Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA,

1988)
R. Sanjek: American Popular Music and its Business: the First Four Hundred Years (New York,1988)
N.E. Tawa: The Way to Tin Pan Alley: American Popular Song, 1866–1910 (New York,1990)
M. Broyles: ‘Music of the Highest Class’: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven,
CT, 1992)
P.H. Ennis: The Seventh Stream: the Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover,
NH, 1992)
S.A. Floyd: The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States
(New York, 1995)
A. Forte: The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (Princeton, NJ,1995)
W.T. Lhamon: Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
Page 40 of 77

II. World popular music
Peter Manuel
Several interrelated developments in global culture since the latter 1900s have had a substantial effect
on world popular music and its study. These include the phenomenal increase in the amount of
recorded popular music outside the developed world, as a result of the expansion of extant modes of
musical production and dissemination and the advent of new technologies such as cassettes, CDs,
video compact discs, and the Internet; the effective compression of the world by intensified media
networks, transport facilities, diasporas, and the globalization of capital, which has increased the
transnational circulation of world popular musics and their availability in the West; and an exponential
growth from the 1990s in the number of scholarly and journalistic studies of world popular musics.
Some of the major conceptual approaches that have informed modern scholarly studies of world
popular musics are reviewed in the following sections. The term ‘popular music’ is used here to
connote genres whose styles have evolved in an inextricable relationship with their dissemination via
the mass media and their marketing and sale on a mass-commodity basis. Distinctions between popular
musics (defined thus) and other kinds of music, such as commercialized versions of folk musics, are not
always airtight. The scope of the present section of this article is limited to popular music idioms that
are stylistically distinct from those of the Euro-American mainstream. The significant role that Euro-
American popular music styles play in many non-Western music cultures is discussed only tangentially
here, and is addressed more specifically in Pop §V.
There is at present no satisfactory label for popular musics outside the Euro-American mainstream
(just as designations such as the ‘third world’ or even the ‘developing world’ are increasingly
problematic). Terms such as ‘world music’, ‘world popular music’, ‘world beat’, and ‘ethnopop’ are too
imprecise to be taxonomically useful, unless clearly defined for specific publications. The term ‘non-
Western’, if applicable to many musics, is hardly a satisfactory label for genres such as reggae or salsa,
which, although peripheral to Euro-American mainstream culture, are certainly products of ‘Western’
societies. The increasing globalization of world culture and the proliferation of syncretic hybrid musics
also blur the dichotomy of Western and non-Western world musics, and intensify the terminological
challenges.
For further information see articles on individual countries and regions.
1. Growth of studies.
If commercial popular music in general was long ignored by the academy, the scholarly study of
popular music outside the Euro-American mainstream began even later. Notable publications from the
1970s include Bruno Nettl’s Eight Urban Musical Cultures (1978) and the informative, if somewhat
more journalistic, works of authors such as John Storm Roberts (1972, 1979). The amount of scholarly
literature on world popular musics greatly increased in subsequent years, with the belated academic
recognition of the sociological importance of popular culture, the spread of multiculturalism as an
academic paradigm in the West, and the active interest of a new generation of scholars who had been
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personally immersed in popular music since adolescence. The journal Popular Music (founded in 1981)
and other subsequent journals devoted to cultural studies have since provided broad forums for
published research in world popular music.
Popular music literature since the early 1980s, whether scholarly or generalist, has included a number
of descriptive overviews, some attempting more or less comprehensive global perspectives (e.g.
Manuel, 1988; Broughton and others, 1994; Shepherd and others, 2003) and some surveying a given
region, such as Africa (e.g. Graham, 1988, 1992; Bender, 1991; Collins, 1992). Of greater detail and
depth are ethnographic studies of individual genres or music cultures (e.g. Coplan, 1985; Peña, 1985;
Perrone, 1988; Waterman, 1990; Erlmann, 1991; Stokes, 1992; Jones, 1992; Guilbault, 1993; Hill, 1993;
Loza, 1993; Webb, 1993; Pacini, 1995; Savigliano, 1995; Austerlitz, 1996; Averill, 1997; Simonett, 2001;
Perna, 2005; Garcia, 2006; Hope, 2006; Veal, 2007; Madrid, 2008; Booth 2008; Wallach, 2008;
Washburne, 2008; Ragland, 2009; Weintraub, 2010; Stokes, 1992, 2010; Baker, 2011). Also of interest
are the handful of works that incorporate cross-cultural perspectives in exploring the musical
ramifications of global networks of capital, media images, and diasporic communities (e.g. Wallis and
Malm, 1984; Garofalo, 1992; Lipsitz, 1994; Gopal and Moorti 2008; Slobin, 2008).
Much literature on world popular music has been written outside the Euro-American academic world,
in languages other than English and for predominantly regional readerships. Prominent in this
category, for example, are the numerous Spanish-language works published in Latin America (e.g.
Matamoro, 1969; Rondón, 1980; Acosta, 1982, 1993; Lloréns Amico, 1983; Quintero-Rivera, 1998).
Language and geographic barriers and the ephemerality and obscurity of many developing-world
publications mean that much of this literature remains relatively inaccessible in the developed world.
Many useful English-language works produced outside the metropoles, such as Rohlehr’s magisterial
study of calypso (1990), are scarcely disseminated even in their countries of origin, not to mention
elsewhere. Conversely, the Western, predominantly English-medium scholarly world, with its networks
of presses, libraries, funding sources, and research institutions, has perhaps inevitably constituted a
scholarly mainstream, and has accordingly attracted many of the best non-Western scholars to its own
institutions.
Representing a somewhat different category is the voluminous and growing body of generalist
literature on popular music, including not only music journalism found in newspapers and magazines
but also various accessible books on popular music which, although not academic in orientation, are
often colourful and richly informative (e.g. Kanahele, 1979; Andersson, 1981; Díaz Ayala, 1981, 1994;
Reuter, 1981; Davis and Simon, 1982; Malavet Vega, 1988; Barlow and Eyre, 1995; Calvo Ospina,
1995). Also worthy of mention are the increasing numbers of documentary films and videos on world
popular music, such as Jeremy Marre’s series Beats of the Heart, made in the 1970s and 80s. Lastly, of
course, the Internet—from Wikipedia to fanzine websites—has come to provide an unprecedented and
previously inconceivable abundance of information and discourse on world popular music. Taken as a
whole, the growing body of world music literature and research material has immeasurably enhanced
the documentation and potential understanding of global culture. At the same time, the processes of
musical evolution, innovation, and cross-fertilization continue to provide fresh challenges to scholars
and students of popular culture.
The vast majority of scholarly literature on world popular music has been oriented towards socio-
musical themes such as are addressed in the remainder of this entry. Only a handful of studies have
focused on the formal aspects of popular musics outside the Western mainstream. Several authors
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have presented basic analytical descriptions of the distinctive features of individual styles and genres,
such as African guitar music (Eyre, 2003), norteño accordion playing (Ragland, 2009), and salsa piano
improvisation styles (Manuel, ‘Improvisation in Latin Dance Music’, 1998). Detailed formal analyses of
popular music styles, however, remain scarce. It is true that much popular music, whether ‘simple’ or
not, is designed to be accessible rather than recondite and may constitute a less obviously productive
subject for detailed technical analysis than, say, a Schoenberg piano sonata. At the same time, the
aesthetic appeal of a commercial popular song or genre may rely – no less than does art music – on
expressive nuances whose workings could be revealed by close analysis. However, formal analyses of
popular musics have been impeded by the reliance of many such musical styles on expressive features
that are resistant to staff notation – or, in some cases, to any sort of extant or even imaginable
notation. For instance, conventional notation would be of little use in analysing a performance by the
Jamaican vocalist Buju Banton of a dance-hall song, much of whose affective power may derive not
from its easily notated two-note ‘melody’ or even from the semantic meaning of its lyrics, but rather
from Banton's micro-rhythmic nuances, ingressive vocalizations, guttural growls, dramatic timbral and
dynamic variations, and other untranscribable and verbally indescribable effects. It remains difficult to
conceive what sorts of graphic notation could do justice to such expressive techniques and be
intelligible at the same time. Other aspects of text settings may be more amenable to analysis; an
exemplary study is Manabe’s exploration (2006) of how Japanese rappers construct musically
expressive lyrics in a language that lacks either inherent syllabic stress or a tradition of rhyme.
Among scholars of Western popular music, Middleton (1990, p. 117) articulated with particular clarity
the need to develop new terminologies and notational approaches, and to explore innovative
approaches to transcription and analysis, rather than perpetuating a ‘retreat into sociology’. In
ethnomusicology Keil (1966, 1987, 1995), recapitulating Jairazbhoy’s interest in notating micro-
rhythmic variations (1983), emphasized the importance of processual, often spontaneous interpretative
nuances, which he called ‘participatory discrepancies’ (‘PDs’). Opinions have differed as to whether
such features correspond to what Leonard Meyer (1956) would term ‘syntax’, understandable in terms
of formal tensions, resolutions, and ‘simultaneous deviations’, or whether they, like ostinato-based
dance-orientated musics in general, call for a qualitatively different form of analysis (see Keil, 1995,
and responses). The advent of digital technologies that show waveforms has made graphic
measurement of such micro-rhythmic nuances incomparably simpler than before, enabling analysts
like Washburne (1998) to describe with precision what is meant, in salsa, by notions of playing ‘on top
of the beat’, ‘behind the beat’, or ‘in the pocket’. (Related technologies also enable producers of
synthesized drum patterns to program such nuances into their beats.) On the whole, however, scholars
of world popular music have not responded to Middleton’s exhortation, but rather have continued to
orient their work overwhelmingly towards socio-musical themes.
2. The mass media.

The evolution of modern popular musics has been closely associated with certain broader socio-
historical developments, particularly urbanization, the emergence of modern social classes, the
general context of late modernity as a whole, and, most directly, the advent of the modern mass media.
Incipient popular song genres can be said to have emerged in 19th-century Europe in connection with
sheet music, player pianos, and musical boxes. Similarly, in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868),
commercial publishers mass-produced cheap songbooks and pamphlets that, while serving to
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document pre-modern song genres already weakened by print itself, also initiated a commodification
process characteristic of commercial popular music industries (Groemer, 1995–6). However, the advent
of popular music per se is better linked to the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, in which electricity and
industrial techniques were applied to cultural production, primarily in connection with capitalist
patterns of development. The invention of the phonograph in the 1880s and its mass marketing from
around 1900 were the primary catalysts in stimulating the emergence of modern popular music.
The effects of mass mediation on music have been varied and profound, encompassing such
phenomena as the detachment of performers from their products; the introduction of new dimensions
of commercial considerations into music; the emergence of new links and barriers between audiences
and performers; a tendency for mass-mediated music to become detached from ritual and life-cycle
performance contexts; an unprecedented emphasis on the solo ‘star’ performer; the emergence of the
studio recording as an autonomous art form rather than a copy or rendition of a performance; and the
subjection of music production in general to the same processes of commodification, rationalization,
and bureaucratization as other aspects of modern economic production. If in the West such musical
developments proceeded largely in the wake of broader processes of social, economic, and
technological modernization, in much of the developing world popular music industries emerged and
flourished alongside musical genres, social practices, and technological infrastructures that remained
essentially pre-modern.
During the 20th century the core mass medium for popular music was the phonogram (shellac and
subsequently vinyl discs), supplemented by cassettes from the 1970s, and compact discs from the
1980s. While imported records from the West initially dominated many regions, in other areas
production of records for local markets commenced early in the century, with the British-owned
Gramophone Company producing over 14,000 recordings in Asia and Africa alone by 1910 (see
Gronow, 1981). Records produced during this period consisted primarily of genres marketed towards
élites, among whom ownership was concentrated. Public exposure to phonographs greatly increased in
the 1920s and 30s, as middle-class ownership grew and less affluent listeners acquired access to
records in local cafés and on jukeboxes, or, in countries like India, from itinerant entrepreneurs who
carried spring-driven turntables around villages, playing requests for a small fee. In response to
market demand, production came to include an eclectic variety of genres, with increasing emphasis on
syncretic popular musics that evolved in connection with the new medium. The advent of magnetic
tape recording and LPs in the 1950s reduced production costs and overcame the time constraints
associated with 78 r.p.m. records, although most popular song genres worldwide continue to adhere to
three- to five-minute formats.
Uses of technologies like vinyl records have varied in different locales and genres. In many genres,
from salsa to highlife, recordings served primarily as supplements to or mediated representations of
music that was ideally heard, or danced to, at live performances. In other genres, from Hindi film song
to Jamaican reggae, live performance was not considered essential or even ideal, such that they
evolved largely as studio art forms, disseminated primarily in mediated forms – in the case of Hindi
film songs, via cinema and radio, and in the case of Jamaican reggae, via mobile sound systems. In
some cases, records could form the basis for music subcultures far from their places of origin; thus, for
example, in the 1970s and 80s, in Cartagena, Colombia, Central and West African popular music
records enjoyed prodigious vogue as dance music played by ‘picó’ sound systems (Pacini, 1996).
Page 44 of 77

The spread of phonograms in the 1920s coincided with the advent of Radio, whose reach soon
extended at least as far. As with phonographs, access was not entirely dependent on private ownership,
but could involve various forms of communal listening in public places. Throughout much of the
developing world, as in many European metropoles, radio during the 20th century remained under
state control, operating as a public service and/or as a vehicle for propaganda. Dependence on electric
power, whether external or battery supplied, continues to limit access in poorer communities.
The spread of sound films from around 1930 introduced a new mass medium for music that was
particularly effective in reaching consumers who were too poor to purchase radios or phonographs but
could afford occasional cinema tickets. Because of cinema's accessibility, its inherent appeal and its
ability to add a new visual dimension to music, several popular music genres became closely associated
with cinematic musicals, including the tango, Turkish arabesk, Indonesian dangdut and mainstream
Egyptian and Indian popular music (see India, subcontinent of §VIII 1.). In most cases, star singers
were thus obliged to act (and often dance) as well, although in the 1940s Indian films adopted the
‘playback’ system, in which actors would mouth words in ‘lip-sync’ to songs separately recorded by
professional singers. Meanwhile, film-related musics were marketed independently as phonograms. In
some regions, such as Latin America and the Near East, television came to largely replace cinematic
musicals as a medium of musical dissemination. Thus, in Egypt, popular music eventually became
disassociated from melodramatic films while in other respects becoming linked to television, so that,
for example, Sunday evening broadcasts of concerts by Umm Kulthum became national events
throughout the 1960s and 70s.
In the 1980s the spread of video technology intensified the production and accessibility of visually
contextualized music. To some extent, consumer video players served to supplement and extend
cinema and television, offering users greater choice and control over selection, storage, and retrieval.
Their use also tended to privatize consumption, bankrupting many cinemas and further replacing live
performance attendance with atomized domestic viewing. The founding of MTV (Music Television) in
1981 inaugurated the cultivation of music video as an independent art form, with videos largely
produced to promote recording sales rather than as independent commodities themselves. As with
phonographs and cinema, the developed West, and especially the USA, monopolized production at first.
Satellite transmission of MTV International, and of Western television in general, provided an
additional means of extending American penetration of global viewing markets. By the late 1980s,
however, music videos were being produced around the world, for dissemination on local television, in
independent video formats, or on MTV International. Although many music videos outside the
developed West during this period were unpretentious, low-budget productions, others – for example in
Indonesia – were slick and sophisticated, using picturization techniques that were distinctively local
and yet characteristically modern or even postmodern in style. Meanwhile, television shows featuring
amateur singing competition – typically modeled on the ‘American Idol’ format – were enlivening
popular music scenes throughout the world.
In the late 20th century two contradictory trends in the financing of mass-mediated music intensified.
Music production, especially as conducted by the multinational record companies, became increasingly
capital-intensive, with expenditure on production and promotion of individual recordings routinely
running into millions of dollars; accompanying this trend was the spread of compact discs, which,
especially in the West, were retailed (with or without justification) for prices considerably higher than
records or cassettes. At the same time, with the advent of new micro-media, especially cassettes, it
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became increasingly possible and common for small-scale, local entrepreneurs to produce recordings
for negligible sums; this development contributed greatly to the unprecedented ability of subcultures
and social minorities to represent themselves.
The trajectory of the international record industry in the 20th century tended to follow the general
pattern of monopoly capitalism and domination of the developing world by the West. By the 1930s the
world's major music companies had rationalized the industry and divided the world into distinct
spheres of interest and control: RCA dominated the Americas, Philips controlled northern and central
Europe, the British-owned Decca and EMI (including products marketed as ‘His Master's Voice’)
dominated the entire British Empire, while the French company Pathé-Marconi monopolized markets
in France and its colonies. In the decades after World War II, the oligopoly coalesced into the
dominance of the ‘Big Five’: WEA, CBS, RCA (then all US-owned), EMI, and Polygram (the Dutch-
owned heir to Philips). Multinational ownership became further concentrated, if less American-
controlled, in the 1990s with the purchase of CBS by Sony and of MCA by Matsushita, and by Philips’s
acquisition of an 80% stake in Polygram.
Independent (and often regional) recording companies, which first emerged in the 1930s, became
more numerous and active from the 1960s. Such companies operated in an uneasy relationship, at
once symbiotic and competitive, with the Big Five, which could draw on more extensive resources,
technology, and marketing and distribution networks (see Wallis and Malm, 1984). The multinationals
were allegedly responsible for roughly two-thirds of world (non-pirate) record sales at their peak in the
mid-1970s. In addition to producing local musics for local markets, the multinationals marketed
Western popular musics throughout the world; in a few cases, as with the Argentine tango in the 1920s
to the 40s, developing-world genres were disseminated for cosmopolitan audiences in Europe and the
USA.
The multinationals, while introducing technology and distribution systems to underdeveloped

countries, have been criticized for stifling competition in their domains, extracting huge profits from
developing countries, and promoting standardization by superimposing Western pop or regional
common-denominator genres. The tendency towards homogenization is conspicuous in some countries,
such as India, where EMI was able to dominate the music industry for some 70 years by means of a
single, albeit eclectic, mass genre: Bombay-based film music, produced by a small coterie of artists and
music directors. In other cases, however, multinationals have been fairly active in promoting musical
diversity. In the first half of the century, US-owned record companies marketed a wide variety of
genres to consumers in Latin America, including the Argentine tango, the Mexican ranchera, the
Colombian bambuco, and the Cuban son, bolero, and danzón, as well as Euro-American foxtrots,
waltzes, polkas, and the like. Records produced by multinationals such as HMV in Africa covered an
even richer diversity of local and regional genres.
Accordingly, patterns of music industry ownership have differed from place to place, especially in the
post-colonial period. Newly independent African countries, for example, exhibited several distinct
forms of development (see Graham, 1988). In some countries, such as Kenya, South Africa, and Côte
d’Ivoire, local music industries failed to develop, allowing the continued domination of multinationals
and the predominantly foreign musics (typically Western or Congolese) that they marketed. By
contrast, in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Zaïre, resilient local producers emerged that, often
in tandem with multinationals, energetically recorded and marketed a wide variety of local musics. A
few quasi-socialist countries, notably Tanzania and Guinea, kept multinationals out by nationalizing
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music sectors; such policies succeeded in promoting lively local music scenes, but the financially
constrained national governments were unable to fund the development of dynamic state music
industries. Meanwhile in other countries, such as Mozambique and Angola, persistent poverty and war
served to discourage both local production and foreign investment.
The communist countries constituted a distinct category, being the only ones rigorously to restrict
multinational penetration while constructing indigenous music industries. The performance of socialist
popular music industries under state ownership was generally mixed. On the one hand, popular musics
under socialism avoided most of the negative features of commercialism, including the link to
corporate sponsorship and consumerism, the fetishism of stars and fashions, and the deforming
pressures exerted on musicians by the market. At the same time, most communist countries – which
were underdeveloped to begin with – were unable to devote adequate financial resources to
entertainment industries and related sectors such as consumer electronics. Bureaucratic inefficiency
and authoritarian cultural policies exacerbated problems of creative innovation and material
production. Patterns and policies of popular music production varied from country to country, with
results ranging from the moderately successful to the disastrous. Perhaps the most egregious example
of the latter was provided by China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when all types of formal
music production were disrupted, and music disseminated through the mass media was limited almost
exclusively to selections from the five ‘model operas’ and three modern ballets. Music production in
communist Cuba, although equally centralized in control, was more satisfactory in the 1970s and 80s,
with moderate state support, the richness of the inherited popular music tradition and prevailingly
pragmatic rather than dogmatic cultural policies to some extent offsetting the continued bureaucratic
bungling, unresponsiveness to popular demand, and a generally phlegmatic economy (see Moore,
2006; Acosta, 1991; Robbins, 1991). A different, more idiosyncratic sort of socialist production was
practised in Yugoslavia under Tito, where decentralized local production and state subsidies of less
commercially marketable musics managed to sustain a fairly lively and diverse popular music culture.
Ultimately a more significant revolution in music industries came with the spread of new technologies,
especially cassettes, from the early 1970s. Cassettes (like video, photocopy machines, personal
computer networks, and cable television) are a form of micro-media whose patterns of control,
production, and consumption are dramatically less centralized and capital-intensive than those of the
‘old media’ of cinema, television, and radio. Cassettes and cassette players are inexpensive, portable,
and durable, and they have simple power requirements; most importantly, the mass production of
cassettes is incomparably cheaper and simpler than that of records or compact discs. By 1990,
cassettes had come to constitute over half of world phonogram sales; their impact was most dramatic
in the developing world, where they almost entirely replaced vinyl records, thus extending and
restructuring music industries.
The initial impact of cassettes was most conspicuous in the endemic spread of cassette piracy (the
unauthorized duplication of commercial recordings), which effectively bankrupted legitimate music
industries in countries from Ghana to Tunisia and inhibited their development in many other regions.
However, as cassette players spread and several countries enacted and enforced copyright laws, piracy
in those and other nations was brought within manageable limits, allowing legitimate cassette
production to flourish. While cassette technology served to further the dissemination of mainstream
hegemonic musics, it also encouraged the emergence of innumerable small, local cassette producers
worldwide, who were able to energetically record and disseminate genres whose commercial markets
were in many cases too localized or specialized for record companies to represent (see El-Shawan,
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1984; Harris, 2002; Manuel, 1993). Several popular music genres emerged in close association with
cassettes, including Sundanese jaipongan, Andean chicha, Thai luktoong, and Israeli ‘Oriental rock’.
Cassettes also served to disseminate musics, such as Latin American nueva canción, that were formally
banned or discouraged by authoritarian governments.
Complementing the cassette revolution were other contemporaneous developments involving new
technologies and associated socio-musical practices or, in some cases, new and alternative usages of
pre-existing technologies, some of which provided new forms of access to music, or constituted hybrid
formats combining aspects of production and consumption. In urban Japan, low-powered ‘mini-FM’
stations served to diversity local radio programming, compensating in numbers for their limited
broadcast ranges of only a few hundred metres (Koguwa, 1985). From the latter 1970s ‘turntabling’ –
using the turntable essentially as a musical instrument – became a basic performance technique
accompanying singing and vocalizing in Jamaican reggae, preceding by a few years the adoption of
similar techniques in Afro-American hip hop. At Mexican ‘sonidero’ (sound system) dances in the USA,
disc jockeys shouting into microphones animatedly read greetings supplied by attendees in which they
hail their friends and relatives in Mexico; in the pre-digital 1990s, audiences would then purchase
cassettes of the event, complete with music and their own ‘shout-outs’, and send them by post to their
loved ones (Ragland, 2003).
A particularly distinctive usage of recordings has been the karaoke format, in which amateur solo
singers, in pubs, rented parlours, or private homes, croon familiar pop songs, backed by commercially
marketed recordings of ensemble accompaniments, often with the song lyrics and romantic video
scenes projected from a video monitor. Karaoke emerged in Japan in the early 1970s, functioning as an
extension of the extant practice of informal singing, especially of enka songs, by men at social
gatherings. It soon became a widespread and even focal form of socializing and music-making among
East and Southeast Asians in their homelands and diasporic communities in the USA and elsewhere
(see Lum, 1996; Mitsui and Hosokawa, 1998).
While the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ of the 20th century brought electronic and industrial modes of
production to music, the new millennium inaugurated a third revolution based on digital technologies,
especially involving personal computers and mobile phones. Digital technologies had impacted music
industries since the mid-1980s, when CDs rapidly replaced vinyl records and cassettes as the dominant
format in the developed world (while remaining too expensive to have such impact in poorer
countries). However, it was not until the years around 2000 that a dramatic new wave of digital
technologies came into wide usage, with revolutionary effects on every aspect of popular music
production, dissemination, and consumption, both in the developed and developing worlds.
Some of the new technologies involved new formats for physical phonograms. In much of the
developing world, cassettes and CDs quickly came to be replaced by mp3 discs, which are considerably
cheaper to produce and duplicate, offer good fidelity, are playable on inexpensive devices, and can
contain more than nine hours of music apiece. In general, MP3 discs perpetuated and intensified the
processes of diversification and decentralization of music production (including music piracy) that the
cassette revolution had inaugurated a few decades earlier. A more seminal new format was the VCD, or
video compact disc, which, like the formerly more expensive DVD, accommodates moving pictures and
sound. VCDs did not provide an entirely new performance format – music videos having already existed
– but rather made this entity incomparably cheaper and thus suitable for production, dissemination,
and consumption on an unprecedented scale. Despite being a modern digital technology, VCDs –
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typically showing low-budget music picturizations that are not (unlike promotional ‘music videos’)
broadcast on television – became common primarily in the developing world, and especially in
association with lower-class genres within those countries. Commercial VCD productions, while
occasionally drawing on extant forms of music videos or cinematic song-and-dance scenes, in many
cases emerged as conspicuously new art forms, variously slick or sloppy, and innovative or adhering to
quickly established conventions and clichés. From around 2005, the advent of cheap DVD players
enabled VCD producers and consumers to shift to DVDs, which can accommodate four or five times as
much content.
Digital technologies have also come to be widely used in music production per se. ‘Software
instruments’ such as Ableton and Logic Pro are employed not only by Euro-American electronic dance
music composers but also by desktop producers of reggae ‘riddims’ and hip-hop ‘beatmakers’ around
the world. Auto-tune – whether used to subtly correct errant singing or to provide its own distinctive
sound – has become a familiar feature throughout much of the world. Skills for such ‘DIY’ (do-it-
yourself) techniques, as well as mastering of multi-track recordings, creative re-mixes, and ‘cut-and-
paste’ editing of footage for VCD clips, can be acquired by amateurs using desktop computers at
minimal expense.
The effects of digital technologies have been perhaps most dramatic in the realms of dissemination and
consumption, especially as involving the ‘P2P’ (peer-to-peer) transmission of audio MP3 files and
audio-video clips via the Internet, together with sharing of files via USB drives and mobile phones.
Internet dissemination, whether licensed or unauthorized, has enabled producers, amateur
enthusiasts, and consumers to bypass state media and commercial music industries, making an
unprecedented amount and variety of music (and videos) accessible to global audiences. Most such
dissemination also bypasses the artists themselves, though savvy performers and producers around the
world also use Internet sites (such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and their own websites) to
promote their own music. These techniques can also be used for political activism, as in the case of the
several music videos – in hip hop and other styles – which provided soundtracks for the Arab Spring
uprisings of the years around 2010. As is often noted, Internet dissemination of music also generates
innumerable online ‘virtual’ communities, typically comprising geographically dispersed enthusiasts of
particular genres, who share songs and engage in vituperative ‘flame wars’ in comments on YouTube
and other forums. Meanwhile, even the most unpretentious YouTube music picturization may, for
whatever reasons, go ‘viral’, garnering millions of ‘hits’ and making superstars of its performers (who
might, however, earn nothing from the video itself). Video picturization itself has thus emerged as an
amateur art form, as enthusiasts combine popular songs – whether arabesk tunes or Bollywood hits –
with video footage of their own choosing, whether cut and pasted from extant sources or filmed
independently.
With the expanded capacities of mobile phones, Internet dissemination of music is no longer dependent
on access to computers, but is accessible to broad sectors of populations even in the developed world,
where mobile phones have become central technologies for music consumption (not to mention other
uses). Throughout much of the world, cellphone owners can easily download songs from various
unlicensed (as well as licensed) websites. In countries like India, even phone ownership is not
necessary for access to pirated music, as consumers can purchase cheap USB drives which can be
loaded, at kiosks, with hundreds of songs, and then played by plugging the drive into an audio device
(Manuel 2014). The attendant vast unlicensed dissemination of music has gravely weakened
commercial music industries – large and small – around the world, exponentially intensifying the
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problem of music piracy earlier precipitated by cassettes. Ironically, the new ease with which
independent artists have been able to produce and disseminate music has gone hand in hand with an
increasing difficulty in profiting from sales of music, as consumers have grown so accustomed to
downloading music for free. In retrospect, the existence of commercial music industries based on
physical phonogram sales seems to have constituted a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon. Now, as
during the dawn of the recording era, musicians in many genres – from pop flamenco to arabesk –
again derive most of their income from live performances, with recordings being made primarily for
prestige and promotion. For their part, commercial music producers and businesses worldwide, while
unlikely to match the profits earned in the 1990s, are exploring various strategies to monetize Internet
consumption and generate new sources of revenue, including purchases of downloads (as via iTunes),
streaming radio services involving advertisements or paid subscriptions, and sales of song snippets as
mobile phone ringtones. The latter practice has become particular widespread in East Asia (Manabe,
2009).
3. Urbanization.
The development of modern popular musics is intimately tied to the phenomenon of urbanization.
Cities, with their concentrations of wealth, power, heterogeneous social groups, and institutionalized
forms of musical patronage, have naturally constituted focal environments for the emergence,
production, and consumption of popular musics. The depth and range of the effects of urbanization on
culture and social structure in the 20th century were unprecedented, owing to the intensification of
urban growth and the qualitatively new and distinct processes accompanying it.
One of these processes is the development of new forms of mass entertainment, including popular
musics. As well as providing the necessary technological infrastructures for commercial music
industries, urban environments, with their dense populations and cash economies, present
concentrated, easily accessible markets for music producers and for the mass media in general.
Perhaps more significant, if less tangible, are the ways in which the urban milieu has stimulated the
creation of syncretic popular musics by generating new social identities and aesthetic sensibilities. City
dwellers are generally exposed to diverse ideologies, music styles, and media discourses. Such
exposure invariably colours attitudes towards and presents new alternatives to traditional folk musics,
many of which, in pre-modern and especially rural societies, flourished partly by virtue of being the
only forms of music known to their patrons and practitioners. By contrast, most urban dwellers enjoy
several kinds of music and develop multiple social identities. While exposure to alternative art forms
may occasionally provoke a self-conscious revival of traditional musics, more often it alienates listeners
from them and stimulates the development of new syncretic genres.
Popular music often plays a crucial role in the process of adaptation to the new environment. As
Coplan (see Nettl, 1978, 1982) has discussed in relation to West Africa, this adaptation involves not
only reactive adjustment but also the formation of new identities and their metaphorical articulation in
new, syncretic forms of expressive culture. In such situations, popular musicians can become important
agents of syncretism and innovation, serving as cultural brokers who articulate new metaphors of
social identity and mediate traditional/modern, rural/urban, and local/global dichotomies. As rapid
urbanization brings together people of diverse regional, linguistic, or ethnic backgrounds, popular
music can serve as a vehicle for social differentiation, mediation, or homogenization. In many cases,
popular music becomes a focus for the maintenance or construction of discrete social subgroups, who
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congregate at their own music clubs, form taste cultures around certain genres or performers, and
celebrate favoured idioms as unique expressions of their distinct identity. Some urban genres may
maintain strong associations with particular ethnic groups, as is the case with Nigerian Jùjú , which,
despite its broad popularity, remains thoroughly Yoruba in its orientation. In such instances music may
play an important role in the maintenance of ethnic, regional, racial, and generational heterogeneity.
In other cases music may serve to mediate differences between people of different backgrounds, or
even to unite them, especially as commercial music industries attempt to create and exploit mass
homogeneous markets. Hindi film music in North India has certainly functioned in this manner, serving
as an aesthetic common denominator for urban dwellers of varied linguistic, regional, and caste
backgrounds. Certain social formations also intensify processes of aesthetic homogenization. The
centripetal, unifying possibilities of popular music are particularly clear in situations where socially
diverse communities, thrown together in neutral urban settings, develop more inclusive identities
based on occupation, class, or nationalism rather than on regional or ethnic origin. Such, for example,
was the case to some extent in Zaïrean mining towns in the mid-20th century, where the
proletarianization of migrant workers created a precondition for the emergence of the pan-Congolese
pop music that evolved into what Westerners call Soukous, with its lyrics in the lingua franca Lingala
(wa Mukuna, 1979–80). Similarly, as Coplan (1985) has documented, South African Marabi music,
performed in proletarian beer gardens, became an important vehicle for the development of a pan-
ethnic urban identity. Whether popular music serves to reinforce social distinctions or to negate them,
many contemporary idioms, with their idiosyncratic combinations of various local and global style
features, can be seen to reflect fairly explicit strategies by which artists and communities discursively
position themselves in their socially heterogeneous surroundings.
While genres and songs associated with urban migrants or the urban experience generally eschew
references to particular locales, some individual cities have played such central roles in cultural life
that they are chronicled in song lyrics. Hence, various Puerto Rican plenas, Trinidadian calypsos,
Dominican merengues, Jamaican dancehall songs, and Newyorican salsa songs narrate various stages
and vicissitudes of the New York migrant experience. Similarly, Stokes (2010) explores how different
1990s versions of a song about Istanbul reflect contesting conceptions of the character of that city and
its status as an icon of Turkish national culture in general.
Patterns of urban popular music evolution vary, in accordance with the diverse histories of cities
themselves, ranging from millennia-old metropolises such as Baghdad, to conglomerations that have
emerged in recent times, often from virtual vacuums, as was the case with Karachi, a former sleepy
fishing village that is now home to over 21 million people. In some older cities, early-modern
professional entertainment musics provided core sources for the subsequent emergence of commercial
popular genres. Thus, Marathi theater music in early-20th-century Bombay played a seminal role in the
evolution of the Hindi film music that evolved from the 1930s.
In many cases, the exponential growth of modern cities has resulted primarily from the massive influx
of rural migrants, especially from the mid-20th century as agricultural economies grew increasingly
unable to sustain exploding populations. While such migrants may join the ranks of the assimilated,
wage-earning proletariat, more often they come to constitute an underclass working in the economy’s
informal sectors. Migrant underclasses often make distinctive and original contributions to urban
musical culture, from Dominican bachata and Brazilian música sertaneja to Thai luktoong (Pacini, 1995;
Carvalho, 1993; Siriyuvasak, 1990). Migrants generally bring rich traditions of rural folk music with
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them, whose perpetuation or reconstruction, in however stylized a form, may provide some sense of
stability and identity in the otherwise disorienting urban experience. At the same time, migrants,
especially of the second generation, often become at least partially alienated from traditional rural
musics as a result of ambivalence towards their parents’ humble backgrounds, exposure to new musics
and the general acquisition of new social identities. In response they may cultivate modernized forms
of traditional rural musics, as in the case of Turkish pop türkü, or they may idiosyncratically
rearticulate other pan-regional genres that they encounter in the cities. Such, for example, has been
the case with Turkish arabesk, which draws from mainstream Egyptian pop styles, and Dominican
bachata, which developed not as an adaptation of folk genres like mangolina or carabiné but as a
distinctively local reincarnation of the pan-Latin bolero. While the sentimental lyrics of early bachata –
at that point called canciones de amargue or ‘songs of bitterness’ – did not specifically address the
migrant experience, their frequently angry and machista tenor seemed to reflect the tensions attending
the disruption of extended family networks in the urbanization process (Pacini, 1995, chap.5). In the
subsequent decades, as bachata became at once more polished and broadly popular, it largely shed its
rough and recriminatory aspect, focusing more exclusively on the genteel pangs of heartbreak and
loss. Often, as in the case of Turkish arabesk, migrant-based genres embrace urban modernity in their
stylistic syncretism while at the same time criticizing in their lyrics the anomie it can entail (Stokes,
1992). Such musics, disseminated by the mass media and migrant networks, often circulate back to the
countryside, mediating rural–urban distinctions. As with certain genres of black American music, some
traditional genres seem well suited to mass-mediated dissemination, albeit in stylized forms, by virtue
of their association with exclusively oral transmission and their aura of alienation from modernity (see,
for example, Middleton, 1990, p.72).
The history of urban popular music in the city of Lima, Peru, illustrates a sequence of chapters with
counterparts elsewhere in the developing world. In the first half of the 20th century, limeños (longtime
Lima residents) prided themselves on their Spanish pedigree, their superiority to rural Andean Indians,
and their genteel urban culture. The iconic expression of the latter was música criolla (‘creole music’),
consisting largely of salon versions of waltzes and tangos, often with lyrics eulogizing familiar
neighbourhoods (such as Felipe Pinglo’s De vuelta al barrio [‘Returning to the Neighbourhood’]). From
the 1950s the stable, familiar, quaint character of Lima barrios began to change radically, as Indian
and mestizo migrants poured in from the countryside, settling in squalid shantytowns and filling the
streets as ambulatory vendors and vagrants. The migrants soon developed their own urban popular
music, in the form of stylized versions of the Andean huayno, with pentatonic melodies in AABB form
and standard chordal harmonizations. Lyrics of these urban huaynos typically recalled the forsaken
village, or – like Picaflor de los Andes’s Por las rutas del recuerdo (‘Through the Routes of Memory’) –
narrated the vicissitudes of the migrant experience, often with a self-consciously proletarian
perspective (Llorens Amico, 1983). By the 1980s the adult children of this first generation of migrants –
at once alienated from Andean culture and still disparaged by Caucasian limeños – cultivated a new,
more cosmopolitan-sounding popular music in the form of chicha, fusing familiar pentatonic tunes with
the rhythm of the cumbia, a common-denominator genre cultivated everywhere from Texas to
Argentina. In the 1990s chicha itself gave way to techno-cumbia, which, with its retinues of scantily
clad girls lip-syncing to karaoke tracks, extended its popularity to urban Peruvian and Ecuadorian
youth in general (Romero 2002).
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4. Modern social class structures.
The new socio-musical identities generated by urbanization are inseparable from the emergence of
modern social classes, with their own distinct roles in the evolution of commercial popular musics. Of
these classes, the urban bourgeoisie, although often proportionally small, in many cases plays the most
conspicuous and influential role because of its affluence, its domination of the mass media and
patronage institutions, and the access of its professional performers to formal musical training.
Popular musics cultivated by bourgeois audiences often evolve as commercialized and perhaps
simplified versions of light-classical genres; these intermediate forms may retain some of the prestige
of their élite antecedents while at the same time becoming accessible to emerging bourgeoisies less
steeped in aristocratic tastes. In North India and Pakistan, for example, a pop, cassette-based version
of the light-classical Urdu ghazal became widely popular in the 1970s among bourgeois audiences,
combining simplified diction and standardized melodies with some of the expressive mannerisms of its
aristocratic antecedent (Manuel, 1993, chap.5). Elsewhere in the developing world, comprador
bourgeoisies are often the first social classes to cultivate local popular musics, typically by indigenizing
musics associated with colonial or post-colonial élites. Thus, for instance, West African brass band
Highlife developed in part out of local renditions of foxtrots, mazurkas, and marches played for
Christian élites.
Nevertheless, despite the economic, ideological, and aesthetic hegemony exercised by élites, it is often
the lower classes that play the most important role in creating modern urban popular musics, such as
Afro-American rhythm and blues, Greek laika, Texas-Mexican conjunto music, Indonesian dangdut, and
Colombian porro. The general categorization of such diverse entities as ‘people's music’, however (Keil,
1985, p.119), may not do justice to the heterogeneity of urban social formations, in which a number of
distinct social classes, even within the realm of subaltern groups, can be seen to play their own
qualitatively distinct roles in musical culture.
In several cases, ‘people’s musics’ have emerged not from the working class (an assimilated, wage-
earning proletariat) but from more marginal sectors of society. Particularly notable is the musical
influence sometimes exercised by lumpen proletarian groups. While often including some rural
migrants, lumpen subcultures are generally wholly alienated from rural society, knowing and
celebrating no other home than the urban underworld, in all its bohemian perversity. Such diverse
musics as Indonesian kroncong, Greek Rebetika, the early Tango, South African marabi, and
Trinidadian Steel band music have emerged primarily from this otherwise most peripheral and liminal
part of society (see, for example, Becker, 1975; Holst, 1975; Castro, 1984, 1986; Erlmann, 1991;
Steumpfle, 1995). As mentioned above, other forms of ‘people’s music’ distinct from those of the
assimilated working class can arise in association with rural migrants to cities. Such genres rarely
develop in isolation, however, but are rather the products of mutual and ongoing interaction with
dominant groups. Processes of hegemony and resistance are invariably conditioned by the complex and
contradictory dialectics of the social configurations involved. Some lower-class idioms eventually
percolate upwards to become accepted by the middle and even upper classes, as the new genres grow
in sophistication and attract the input of trained bourgeois musicians, music industries recognize the
profits they potentially offer and urbanites belatedly acknowledge them as aesthetically valid
expressions. Such interactions often involve a ‘stereotyping and reappropriating’ dynamic (Keil, 1985),
wherein dominant groups co-opt and stylize subaltern groups’ music. Such appropriations by élites
may involve complex mixtures of enthusiastic patronage, paternalistic exoticism, and opportunistic
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exploitation. More subtly, as some have argued, élite appropriations may serve as strategies by which
dominant groups reformulate hegemony and preserve core values by regulating and incorporating
elements of subaltern expressive culture. For their part, subaltern performers, conditioned by the
‘doubleness’ of minority identities, may participate in this process in order to gain access to markets.
In some cases, however, they are eventually able to transcend such house-of-mirrors deformations and
to popularize more vital versions of their music. The emergence of Cuban dance music in the early
20th century, for example, involved complex dynamics of white Cuban racism, bourgeois cultural
nationalism, the influence of foreign interest in Afro-Cuban music, and the successive white acceptance
of Afro-Cuban music in parodic, diluted, and eventually dynamic forms (Moore, 1997). As Turino (2000)
has discussed in relation to Zimbabwe, nationalistic elites outside the developed West may cultivate an
aesthetic cosmopolitanism that inspires them to support not only Western musics but also syncretic
forms of local popular music, especially if the latter – such as the music of Thomas Mapfumo – enjoy
some appeal in the West itself. Similarly complex social dynamics in a popular music’s development
may obtain in relation to horizontal dialectics between groups in different geographic regions within a
country.
However, many of the most widespread popular musics do not bear exclusive class affiliations,
especially in developed countries such as the USA where mass-media culture, middle-class values, and
an ideology of individual opportunity are pervasive. Further, in many countries, such as in most of the
Caribbean, notions of class are inseparable from racial or ethnic distinctions, which may be
accordingly more significant as emic constructs. In much of Africa, ethnic and linguistic differences
and urban/rural (or ‘urban/bush’) dichotomies may inhibit class consciousness and constitute more
essential analytical categories. Even in some monolingual countries, such as Trinidad and Guyana,
preferences in popular music are less likely to be determined by class than by race (East Indian or
Afro-creole), illustrating how socio-economic classes are only potentially rather than inherently
constituted. Furthermore, as has often been noted, social classes are porous entities, and their forms
of expressive culture are invariably conditioned by processes of mutual, incessant, and often
contradictory interactions with other classes. Such considerations do not negate the importance of
class as an analytical construct, but illustrate its inseparability from other parameters and perhaps
explain the tendency of modern studies of popular music to focus on other aspects of identity, including
gender and ethnicity.
5. Modernity.
Many aspects of the development of modern popular musics are best understood as ramifications of
the advent of modernity in general. Urbanization, the mass media, and the rise of modern social
classes (considered in §§2–4 above) are important components of modernity, along with more general
processes of commodification and the emergence of modern bureaucracies and the concept of the
nation-state. In most of the world these phenomena have tended to be associated, directly or indirectly,
with capitalism and westernization, although distinctly non-Western forms of modernization have
certainly evolved. Equally important to the rise of popular musics are more subjective features of
modernity, including the spread of secular rationalism, a sense of individual responsibility and
freedom, and the diminished social and ideological realm of inherited religion, dogma, and habit. The
undermining of traditional identities may itself generate neo-fundamentalist revivals of sectarian or
religious identity, which, while reacting against modernity, are at the same time firmly embedded in it.
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The spirit of modernity, however locally experienced, pervades most world popular music, whether in
the parameters of style or in song lyrics. This spirit is most typically expressed as one of two reactions
– angst or exuberance – to modernity’s disruption of traditional beliefs, social relations, and modes of
production: as noted in §4 above, a sense of loss and dislocation is often particularly explicit in musics
associated with lumpen proletariats and migrant underclasses, from rebetika and arabesk to the early
tango; alternatively, modernity’s erosion of tradition may be experienced as liberating and exhilarating,
and is celebrated as such in various world popular musics, however modulated through local cultural
configurations. Political songs denouncing social or political oppression represent a third expression of
this spirit, one that is characteristically modern in its links to concepts of human rights and
Enlightenment values.
In most of the world, popular music’s celebrations of freedom appear in the somewhat more subtle but
no less profound form of songs about sentimental love. Romance and desire are hardly new phenomena
or lyric topics, but the portrayal of a relationship indulged in for its own sake by two socially
autonomous beings is a distinctly modern entity, linked to the detachment of love and marriage from
kinship and economic considerations, the liberation (however incomplete) of women, and the
disassociation of sexuality from procreation. Modern sentimental love has become the single most
prominent theme of popular music around the world, contrasting markedly with more traditional
portrayals of heterosexual relationships as embedded in and often constrained by specific social
circumstances. In South Asia, for example, the traditional Urdu ghazal, like medieval troubadour
songs, portrays the lover pining for a woman whom he has only glimpsed, while folk genres such as
rasiya (Manuel, 1993, chap.9) typically focus on the tensions and frustrations associated with village
life and watchful relatives. By contrast, commercial Hindi film songs tend to depict the more
distinctively modern form of ‘pure’ relationship, wherein the only factors involved are the emotions of
the two individuals. In Mexico, the emergence of a distinctively modern perspective is epitomized, in a
different manner, by the contrast between, on the one hand, the traditional corrido, narrating tales of
war, banditry, and heroic struggle, and, on the other, the romantic bolero and ballad, which, like most
modern popular song, rigorously avoid reference to any social contexts or constraints, portraying
instead an amorphous, private world of the emotions (Pedelty 1999). Although neglected by
ethnomusicologists, international versions of the pop ballad, from pop Java to the songs of Julio
Iglesias, have become central features of world music cultures.
Sentimental pop songs have been criticized as being complicit with the most overtly commercial
aspects of capitalist music industries. In their rigorous avoidance of social contextualization they orient
themselves towards passive fantasy (often focussed on the idolized star performer) rather than social
action, and both exploit and help to create the homogeneous mass audiences sought by record
industries. At the same time they may constitute expressions of hope and utopian affirmation of a
private emotional sphere uncontaminated by the commodifying and dehumanizing forces of modernity
(see Giddens, 1992, p.44).
The message of emotional and sexual freedom, whether conveyed in pop ballads or disco-type dance-
songs, may be experienced as especially liberating by women in rigidly patriarchal societies. Popular
musics embodying such themes have been perceived and even repressed as threatening and
subversive by conservatives in such societies; for example, militant fundamentalist Muslims have
banned the music of pop singers such as Gougoush in Iran, and have even assassinated Algerian rai
artists. A different sort of backlash against the female liberation implicit in the sentimental love song is
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represented by numerous songs in male-dominated genres such as Jamaican dance-hall that objectify
women in the most explicit terms, deny any sense of male vulnerability or commitment and cynically
reduce human relationships to sex and money.
6. Socio-political significance.
The tendency for scholarly literature on world popular music to focus on sociological rather than
formal musicological aspects has derived both from the difficulties of conducting meaningful technical
analysis (discussed in §1 above) and, more importantly, from the recognition of popular music’s
undeniable social significance. Whether or not popular music is seen as aesthetically rich and
profound, its pervasiveness and popularity indicate the importance of its role in contemporary culture.
Much scholarly interpretation has focused on the nature of this role, and especially on its relation to
interrelated questions of hegemony, manipulation, alienation, resistance, and agency.
The socio-political significance of popular music is most overt in the case of explicitly political musics,
such as have occupied limited but influential and dynamic niches in various international popular
music scenes since the 1950s. In general, popular music has assumed particular political significance
under repressive governments, and dictatorships of both left and right have often found reason to
attempt to regulate, co-opt, exile, or otherwise silence outspoken popular musicians, generating
complex dialectics of accommodation and resistance in music cultures. Openly political popular song
genres have been typically associated with disaffected members of cultural élites who have sought to
create musical idioms that transcend hackneyed clichés and commercial packaging, yet are accessible
in style and media dissemination to dominated groups with whom solidarity is sought. Such musics
have naturally been diverse in form and in the socio-political contexts that condition them. At the same
time, from the vantage point of the present, many such genres could be seen to cohere to a historical
moment, spanning roughly from the 1950s to the 1980s, characterized by a set of international socio-
political movements which, although diverse, were animated by a shared commitment to the
rationalist, secular, universalist, liberal values of the Enlightenment, whether inflected with Marxism
or other local liberation struggles.
In Latin America, the ‘singer-songwriter’ nueva canción (new song) movement flourished as the
quintessential expression of this progressive sense of idealism, social justice, and opposition to
(primarily American) imperialism. The ferocity with which such music was repressed by right-wing
military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere only lent it greater appeal, urgency, and
socio-political importance where it did manage to be heard. During the same period, a small but
vigorous minority of salsa songs also articulated a commitment to social themes, whether Latin
American solidarity and pride, the vicissitudes of barrio life, or, in the case of several songs by Ruben
Blades, explicitly progressive political commentary. In Jamaica, a similar spirit of optimism, idealism,
and mobilization was particularly intense during the same heady decade of the 1970s, when
innumerable roots reggae songs celebrated the ‘sufferers’ and movements for social reform, whether
linked to prevailing socialist rhetoric or the idiosyncratic Afrocentricity of messianic Rastafarianism.
Marxist-tinged Enlightenment values also invigorated a musical movement in southern Spain, where a
local ‘new song’ genre and the activist flamenco lyrics of Manuel Gerena and others openly called for
reform, linking struggles for workers’ rights, redistribution of wealth, reduction of military spending,
land reform, and a new celebration of Andalusian culture and autonomy. In India and Pakistan in the
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1950s, such movements found parallels in the progressive Urdu poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911–84)
and others, in musical settings of their verses, and in the leftist film songs embedded in the social-
realist movies of K.A. Abbas, Bimal Roy, and others.
Since the 1980s such musical movements have declined in vigor and popularity, in accordance with
broader transformations in the global political scene. Some of these developments have been
unambiguously felicitous, such as the dissipation of Cold War tensions which precipitated the dramatic
replacements of many repressive dictatorships – whether US- or Soviet-backed – by elected
democracies. In Latin America, this process, coupled with a general disillusionment with the political
left, deprived nueva canción of much of its sense of legitimacy and urgency. For historian Francis
Fukuyama (1989), the exhaustion of structural alternatives (especially fascism and communism) to
democracy and neoliberal capitalism represented the ‘end of history’, with a concurrent decline in
heroic hymns of struggle and idealism. This optimism was echoed a few years later in George Lipsitz’s
Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1994), which sought
to illustrate the sorts of positive roles that popular music could play in a post-colonial, globalized world
where multi-directional, decentered flows of transnational capital have replaced Western imperialism
and weakened the nation-state, and new social movements have replaced Marxist metanarratives,
presenting both new challenges and new opportunities for world popular music.
In retrospect, the optimism of the early 1990s has dissipated somewhat, as the various secular, liberal,
universalist movements that, with their musical counterparts, flourished in diverse forms around the
world have, with a few notable exceptions, been replaced or marginalized by a political quiescence, by
a proliferation of cause-specific new social movements, or, most palpably, by militant neo-
fundamentalist re-tribalisms based on religion or ethnicity. Hence, contemporaneous with the decline
of nueva canción have been the move from socio-politically oriented salsa to the sentimentality of ‘salsa
romántica’; the transition from idealistic, messianic roots reggae songs to the prevailing cynicism,
materialism, and ‘slackness’ (lewdness) of dancehall; the rise of Serbian ‘turbofolk’ songs celebrating
neo-fascistic ethnic chauvinism; and the eclipse of progressive song movements in Spain, India, and
other countries where they had flourished. Many world music observers celebrated the role of the
innovative songs and music videos that, as disseminated via the Internet, provided a lively soundtrack
to the ‘Arab Spring’ movement that erupted in 2010. However, developments in subsequent years have
suggested that the progressive and pluralistic aspects of this movement and its music have been
marginalized by religious sectarianism and fundamentalism.
Many music scholars have noted that the social significance of popular music is best sought in
entertainment musics rather than in the explicitly political songs on the margins of the scene.
Scholarly treatments of these questions have often been informed by neo-Marxist conceptions of
hegemony, while extending Marxism's traditional emphasis on class to include concerns of race,
gender, ethnicity, generation, and community identity in general. Some of the more pessimistic
assessments of popular music, elaborating the concept of mass culture outlined by Adorno (1962),
focus on the ways in which music allegedly serves as a vehicle for the manipulation and stupefaction of
dominated peoples, legitimizing unequal social orders and promoting mindless consumerism, socio-
political passivity and creative atrophy. Indian film music is one genre that has been criticized in such
terms, partly because of its stylistic standardization, oligopolistic modes of production and ties to
escapist and arguably alienating cinematic melodramas (see, for example, Manuel, 1993, chap.3). The
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partnership of big business and popular music has been even more explicit in the case of Japanese
‘image songs’, which function simultaneously as ‘hit’ songs and corporate advertisements (Kimura,
1991, pp.318–19).
Most scholars since the late 20th century have tended to adopt more sanguine perspectives on popular
music culture, however, exploring ways in which it can be seen as empowering, enriching, and
‘subversive’ in the sense of being counter-hegemonic and progressive. The influence of cultural studies
has been particularly notable in the conception of popular culture as neither pure domination nor
resistance but as a site of contestation where contradictory tendencies are symbolically negotiated and
mediated. These processes may be seen not only in overtly political types of music but also in genres
oriented towards diversion, personal relationships, or identity formation in general. In contrast to
Adorno’s concept of passive consumption, contemporary theorists stress the importance of studying
reception, noting that the meanings of a text or song, rather than being immanent and pre-given, can
be co-produced by listeners and idiosyncratically authenticated by distinctive social practices.
Attention has been focused particularly on the way in which subcultures and individuals construct
distinctive identities by selective consumption and resignification of mass-culture artefacts. There is no
simple dichotomy between creative activity and passive consumption (Middleton, 1990, pp.139–40),
but rather a spectrum of social practices, often involving idiosyncratic usages, resignifications, and
new technologies that blur distinctions between production, reproduction, and consumption. In world
music such practices (as discussed in §2 above) include karaoke, the recycling of stock melodies
(parody) in Indian folk and popular music, and the amateur production of original videos accompanying
extant pop songs, which are then posted on YouTube. The emergence of ‘democratic-participant’
micro-media (see §2) has further decentralized music industries worldwide, rendering the Orwellian
vision of media totalitarianism a vision of the past rather than the future. Moreover, as Lipsitz (1994, p.
28) and others have shown, cultural opposition can consist not only of headlong, utopian confrontation
but also, increasingly, of immanent critique from within a given ideological and stylistic culture. Such
considerations both enrich and complicate the interpretation of modern culture, illustrating the
limitations of Frankfurt school critiques and suggesting some of the contradictions and complexities
that must be explored.
This re-evaluation of popular music and culture has inspired newly invigorated celebrations of the
allegedly progressive character of musics such as Jamaican dancehall, despite its often overt
glorification of machismo and violence (see, for example, Cooper, 1993, p.141; Scott, 1990). Some have
questioned this sort of contemporary critical theory, with its tendency to romanticize resistance, its
celebration of discursive subversion that lacks any material counterpart, and its equation of
consumption with agency and of nihilistic subaltern anger with revolutionary fervour. It could be
argued, for example, that while the aggressive, often sexist, and homophobic posturing of some
popular musicians does indeed foreground and valorize proletarian discourse, it may represent less a
subversion of established mainstream values than a hyperconformity to them. In many cases, a
subaltern popular music may be less a pure ‘resistance transcript’ than a contradictory mixture of
progressive and reactionary elements. It may be difficult, as Lipsitz (1994, p.25) observes, to
distinguish these oblique, contradictory ‘immanent’ critiques from collaboration and co-optation. It is
also conceivable that the values and intellectual interests of many Euro-American scholars have been
conditioned by rock music and singer-songwriter idioms that celebrate (or even fetishize) images of
‘authenticity’, individuality, countercultural ethos, and Romantic personal expression (Stratton, 1983).
While such scholars may be struck by the absence of these values in such commercially packaged
genres as J-pop, K-pop, and Cantopop, the fans of these styles evidently have different expectations
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from their music and may be informed by cultural backgrounds that place less emphasis on individual
expression, not to mention pretenses of ‘subversion’ (see, e.g. Jen, 2013). Clearly, a vast amount of
research must be undertaken into the reception of popular music and its associated social practices
before generalizations can be made. The work of Middleton, Erlmann, Frith, Garofalo, Lipsitz, and
others has been exemplary in showing how dynamics of hegemony and resistance generally operate
not in crude dichotomies, but in complex social fields replete with contradictions, ambiguities, and
paradoxes.
7. Globalization and the musical dynamics of transnational cultural flows.

The ethical, ideological, and aesthetic ramifications of regional intersections between popular musics
are particularly complex in the international realm, where they involve interrelated themes of
homogenization and diversity, the roles of diasporas, the significance of ‘world beat’, productions, the
often unequal power relationships between interacting nations, and other issues pertaining to the
contemporary globalization of culture. While music and other aspects of culture have travelled
extensively for millennia, it is widely acknowledged that flows of music, ideas, money, people,
technologies, and media content in general intensified exponentially in the late 20th century, in tandem
with industrialization, increased transportation and trade networks, and other developments. As
Appadurai (1989–90) has noted, the complex and multidirectional movements of these entities are
often characterized more by disjuncture than by adherence to any overarching framework (such as
‘imperialism’). The spread of the Internet and related digital technologies in the 2000s further
enhanced the velocity, ease, and extent of cultural flows, enabling the emergence of a virtual global
ecumene, or a set of ecumenes, that is, virtual transnational zones of constant and mutual interactions.
Popular music, rather than constituting a mere reflection of these developments, has often played a
focal cultural role, constituting a central element in identity construction and contestation, formation
of transnational taste cultures and online communities, cross-cultural ‘affective alliances’, maintenance
of diasporic networks, and other developments.
Since the 1960s, global interactions have led ethnologists and others to voice fears about the
homogenization, and especially the westernization, of world music. Lomax (1968, p.4), for example,
raised the spectre of a ‘cultural grey-out’, with centuries-old expressive traditions ‘being swept off the
board’, leaving whole cultures both alienated and rootless. By the end of the 20th century Western pop
music’s global penetration was indeed vast. Throughout the world, it has been abetted by the quest of
powerful multinationals for mass markets, the extension of Western-dominated mass media to all
regions and peoples, and the widespread association of Western popular culture with modernity,
fashion, and personal freedom. In many countries, from Indonesia to South Africa, Western-style pop
has provided an imported solution to the problem of finding a modern musical idiom with pan-regional,
pan-ethnic appeal. Influenced by these and other factors, entire cultures have forsaken indigenous
music traditions in favour of Western-style idioms. By far the most popular musics throughout most of
East and South-east Asia, for example, are varieties of the Western pop ballad and soft rock (e.g.
Japanese ‘J-pop’, Korean ‘K-pop’, Chinese Cantopop, ‘pop Indonesia’, and Thai sakon) in which
distinctively Asian stylistic features are generally minimal. Such rearticulations of Western ‘light
music’ may be skilful, and may even be seen as forming the bases for authentic music cultures.
Nevertheless, it remains significant that, for whatever complex historical reasons, musical energies in
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these vast societies have been devoted less to the cultivation of distinctive, original styles than to
Western-style pop – especially to what would be seen in the West as the most bland and commercial-
sounding ‘easy-listening’ music.
However, such tendencies towards homogenization and westernization have been substantially
counterbalanced by trends towards diversification and creative hybridity. The advent of cassettes
(described in §2) undermined any hegemonies exercised by Western multinational recording companies
and enabled the emergence of a wide variety of regional popular genres, a few of which, such as
Sundanese jaipongan, do not exhibit any Western stylistic influence. As global communications
networks spread, cross-fertilizations between genres (e.g. Korean rap, Indo-Caribbean chutney-soca)
enrich and diversify the world music scene, and the sheer amount of commercial popular music
available from the late 20th century has enabled trends towards homogenization and diversification to
intensify in tandem. Thus, for example, the popular music scene in Java can sustain not only
Westernized ‘pop Java’ and heavy metal, but also locally cultivated Sundanese jaipongan and the recent
hybrid campur sari, which synthesizes local gamelan music and pop ballad idioms (Barendregt and
Zanten, 2002; Suppangeh, 2003). The ethnic and nationalistic revivals flourishing around the world, in
some cases promoted by national cultural policies, have also promoted local musics, both traditional
and syncretic. Meanwhile, there have been many examples of music genres originating outside the
Euro-American mainstream that have achieved their own international popularity, whether comprising
active local cultivation or mere consumption. In the latter half of the 20th century, Hindi film music
came to be enjoyed (and in some cases, imitated) by enthusiasts everywhere from Russia to Nigeria
(Adamu, 2008); the cumbia became arguably the single most popular genre from northern Mexico,
through the Andes, to Argentina. Congolese urban music was a dominant popular music style in much
of Africa in the 1960s and 70s. Hence, global music spheres are better characterized in terms of
several interacting and overlapping ‘cores’ rather than a single hegemonic core – the West – and the
peripheral ‘rest’. Further, in many cases Western-style popular musics are likely to be perceived as
deriving more from a nearby local culture exporter than from the West itself, as may be the case with
Japan’s role in spreading Western-style light popular music throughout East Asia. Further, even when
local music cultures borrow, adapt, or imitate Euro-American music genres, they invariably do so in a
selective rather than indiscriminate fashion, adopting genres that somehow resonate with their
particular sensibilities. Hence, for example, heavy metal rock music – both imported and locally
produced – enjoys substantial popularity in Indonesia and Malaysia, but not necessarily in other
regions such as the Andes, or East Asia.
In many cases, Western-derived instruments, stylistic features and social practices may be subject to
indigenization, as in the use of electric guitar to imitate mbira patterns by Zimbabwean artists such as
Thomas Mapfumo. Innovative musicians have not hesitated to modify Western instruments to suit
indigenous styles, as in the Near Eastern technique of altering electric organs to accommodate neutral
intervals, or the Vietnamese practice of carving concavities in the guitar fretboard to facilitate fast
vibrato in cai luong music. Similarly the American-derived big band format informed the creation of the
Mambo by Cuban musicians in the 1940s and 50s, and the emergence of similar big-band renditions of
the Haitian méringue, Dominican Merengue, and Puerto Rican Plena. Western-derived music genres
may themselves develop stylistically into distinctively local forms, as in the evolution of West African
adaha from colonial military-orientated brass band music. In places as diverse as Sumatra, Mexico, and
Brazil, brass bands constituted important transitional media for the development of syncretic local
musics. Some transformations follow a process of ‘saturation and maturation’, in which a foreign (often
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Western) music, after an initial period of domination, is eventually absorbed and either stylistically
indigenized or abandoned in favour of syncretic local genres. For example, the hegemony of Cuban
dance music in much of urban Africa declined after the 1960s as performers such as Youssou N'Dour
(Senegal) and Franco (Zaïre, 1938–89) gradually shifted to popular music styles (Mbalax and soukous
respectively) that were more original (although not necessarily achieving such originality through
adoption of elements of local traditional musics). Much of the evolution of modern African popular
music can be seen less as a westernization of extant indigenous genres than as an Africanization of
transplanted Western idioms.
A purely stylistic focus on cross-cultural musical borrowings may obscure the ultimately more
important ways in which communities are able effectively to adopt a given music, regardless of its
stylistic origin, by making it express and resonate with their own experiences and aesthetic
predispositions. Puerto Ricans in New York, for example, resignified, rearticulated, and modernized
1950s-style Cuban dance music as an expression of their own world view in the 1960s and 70s, in such
a way that the music, despite being a largely inherited style, well merited a new name, Salsa (see
Manuel, 1994). Where societies have become alienated from their traditional musics, they may
appropriate foreign music genres as dynamic vehicles for the construction of a new self-identity,
becoming, in some cases, ‘more themselves’ in the process. The popularity of Bob Marley’s music
among dominated peoples of colour around the world is one remarkable example, with reggae being
actively cultivated and effectively indigenized by Hawaiians (under the moniker ‘Jawaiian’), Australian
aborigines, and African performers such as Alpha Blondy (see Lipsitz, 1994). Such resignifications
illustrate how the history of music, and of culture in general, consists not merely of the evolution of
overtly new genres and styles but also of the rearticulation of extant idioms, whether local or
borrowed, to respond to new social circumstances. Thus theorists such as Wallerstein (1984), Hannerz
(1988–9), Hall (1991), and others describe the advent of a new global culture characterized less by
relentless homogenization than by the integration, interpenetration, and rationalization of local and
diverse media discourses into a set of interconnected, if internally diverse, music cultures.
Global musical flows are often conditioned by profound power asymmetries between the cultures
involved, especially in the case of exchanges and interactions between the developed West and poorer
nations. Some commentators since the 1960s have seen as particularly significant world popular
music’s domination by Western stylistic influences and Western-based music industries and its relation
to Euro-American global economic hegemony, whether in the form of direct colonial control or of neo-
colonial power arrangements. Especially in the Cold War decades, it was common in some circles to
characterize these phenomena as instances of ‘cultural imperialism’; while this entity was seldom
defined or expostulated in depth, it generally connoted a process by which political, economic, military,
and cultural power combined to exploit a society economically and to exalt and spread the values and
practices of a foreign culture, particularly that of the developed West, at the expense of local cultures.
Resentment of perceived cultural imperialism was particularly acute in the 1960s and 70s in places
such as Iran and various Latin American countries where American political domination and
intervention seemed to be coupled with an inundation of American popular music.
Critics faulted the alleged deformation and marginalization of music in the developing world, and of
cultural identity in general, by the inundation of commercial Western pop seemingly superimposed by
powerful Euro-American multinational record companies and radio networks. In some cases, the
musical ramifications of cultural imperialism seemed painfully overt, as in the aftermath of the CIA-
supported military coup in Chile in 1973, when nueva canción and even neo-folkloric renditions of
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Andean music were effectively banned, American pop came to dominate the mass media as never
before, and leading progressive musicians were exiled or even, in the case of Víctor Jara, killed.
Indeed, throughout Latin America military dictatorships supported by the USA consistently censored,
exiled, and imprisoned outspoken local musicians while tolerating or encouraging domination of local
media by North American music. Resentment generated by such events was exacerbated by instances
of uncompensated Euro-American appropriation of non-Western songs, especially in cases where
ownership or origin of the music in question was ambiguous. An egregious example of the latter
phenomenon was the commercial success of the South African song The Lion Sleeps Tonight
(‘Wimoweh’) in the 1950s and 60s, as performed by American groups, in such a way that denied profits
to the song’s original composer, Solomon Linda, and his descendants. (Many similar iniquities have of
course occurred within the West itself.)
However self-evident American political imperialism and cultural influence may have been several
scholars (e.g. Tomlinson, 1991; Garofalo, 1992, pp.1–7; Goodwin and Gore, 1990) have argued
persuasively that the cultural imperialism thesis is of little empirical or analytical value. In fact, the
notion of cultural imperialism has been more often invoked in passing than presented as a sustained,
clearly defined phenomenon. Accusations of cultural imperialism often invoke romanticized visions of a
prior authentic, autonomous, and ‘pure’ local culture, uncorrupted by foreign influences. Similarly, the
thesis has difficulty accommodating processes of creative syncretism and transculturation. It fails to
acknowledge the ways that listeners in economically dominated cultures may actually enjoy and feel
enriched by the musics of hegemonic cultures, which may be diverse and progressive in their own
fashions. Hence, for example, the international presence of Western-style popular musics may indicate
their genuine appeal rather than their forcible superimposition. The thesis’s imprecision may further
derive from the conflation of supposed cultural imperialism with the broader spread of capitalism and
modernity in general. Listeners have also been able to creatively resignify imported media images in
accordance with the aesthetics and values of their own interpretative communities. During the Cold
War, for example, in Argentina, local rock music, rather than constituting a vehicle for pro-American
sentiment, became a vehicle for the protest of progressive young people against the US-backed
military dictatorships (Vila, 1987). Local appropriations of black American musics, from ragtime to rap,
by Africans, Maoris, and others, could also constitute meaningful vehicles of self-assertion rather than
passive capitulation to hegemonic cultural industries (Lipsitz, 1994, chap.3; Collins, in Garofalo, 1992).
Since the late 20th century, developments such as the new mobility of capital, the enhancement of
travel and media networks, the prominence of diaspora subcultures, and the rise of reactive, ethnic, or
religious neo-fundamentalisms have made world culture both more fragmented and more
interconnected than ever before. The globalization of world culture has necessitated the formulation of
new analytical approaches to understanding cultural interactions and flows. The limited explanatory
power of the cultural imperialism thesis becomes increasingly apparent in a situation where Western
multinationals no longer dominate the world recording industry, and when direct, palpable American
(or even distinctively Western) economic domination has been replaced by a virtual, amorphous world
of rootless multinationals and global networks of capital, technologies, people, images, and cultures
(Appadurai, 1989–90; García Canclini, 1990, chap.7). The ‘core–periphery’ model of cultural relations,
with its crude Manichean dichotomization of the world in terms of ‘the West and the rest’, is
particularly obsolete. Most importantly, the conventional conception of musical cultures as closed,
organic, geographically bounded entities must be discarded in favour of an approach that recognizes
each society as a crossroads on a matrix of intersecting, interacting local and global cultural flows
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(see, for example, Wallerstein, 1984; Robertson, 1992). The new global economy calls for a new
ethnography of the circuits of global music interactions (Erlmann, 1993). Particularly noteworthy in
this regard is Slobin’s replacement of the core–periphery model with a more fluid web of
‘supercultures’ and ‘intercultures’ (Slobin, 1993), whose shifting interactions involve not only
hegemonic, pan-regional music genres but also myriad ‘micromusics’ representing specific taste
cultures.
Many of the most vital and innovative of the new micromusics are associated not with established
cultural hinterlands but with the dynamic and fluid borders, margins, and, especially, diasporas.
Diaspora subcultures are of unprecedented importance in popular music production in the late 20th
century, because of their increased size, their access to mass media, their self-consciousness as a
group, and their proclivities towards multiple identities and cultural syncretism (see Clifford, 1994).
Migrant communities are thus increasingly recognized as dynamic and distinctive subcultures in their
own right, rather than as mere transplanted homeland fragments. Studies have explored the popular
music cultures of such various groups, including North Africans in Paris (Gross, McMurray, and
Swedenburg, 1994), Puerto Ricans in New York (Flores, 1993; Glasser, 1995), Mexicans in the USA
(Ragland, 2009; Hutchinson 2007), Dominicans in New York (Hutchinson, 2006), Sephardic/Oriental
Jews in Israel (Shiloah and Cohen, 1983; Halper, Seroussi, and Squires-Kidron, 1989; Perelson, 1998),
Haitians in Montreal (Juste-Constant, 1990), Arab-Americans (Rasmussen, 1992), Filipino-Americans
(Trimillos, 1986), and South Asians in Great Britain (Baumann, 1990), in South Africa (Jackson, 1991),
and in the Caribbean (Manuel, Popular Music, 1998). Certain modern cities have emerged as unique
crucibles of world popular music: Paris has been for many decades a centre for African music, for
example, as has New York for Caribbean music (Allen, 1998). Immigrant musics flourish in such places
because of the presence of concentrated ethnic enclaves, media and technological infrastructures,
political openness, and the exposure of musicians and audiences to new ideas and influences.
Popular music has been an active agent rather than merely a reflection of the dynamics of cultural
globalization. As Erlmann (1993) and others have noted, translocal taste cultures have both
compensated for and contributed to the decline of communities based on locality. Overtly postmodern
musical hybrids celebrating fusion and pastiche both express and reinforce consumers' sense of
cultural dislocation and split identities, while more selfconsciously essentialist forms of popular music
are used as vehicles for nostalgic revivals of exclusivist ethnic identity, as in parts of the former
Yugoslavia (Broughton and others, 1994, pp.90–91). In some cases, subcultural popular musics can be
seen to use postmodern techniques of pastiche and blank irony in the service of more essentially
Modernist projects of identity construction and psychic adaptation (Manuel, 1995). In general, the
emerging global culture presents both new obstacles and new opportunities for progressive uses of
popular music (Garofalo, 1992, pp.1–13). As Lipsitz (1994) argues, the global ecumene offers new
possibilities for empowerment and mobilization. In an era characterized by ethnic and sectarian
fragmentation, hybrid popular musics can offer visions of transnational alliances and expressive
strategies of adaptation, opposition, and immanent critique, even if these new sensibilities may have no
impact on material realities of deprivation and exploitation.
As globalization continues to intensify, in the realm of popular music various sorts of borrowings,
adaptations, and recyclings will undoubtedly continue to proliferate, often involving communities or
nations otherwise remote from each other, or linked by asymmetrical power relations or histories of
conflict and exploitation. Ethnomusicologists and others have focused considerable attention on the
sensitivities and ethical implications involved in such musical exchanges. The complexities,
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contradictions, and asymmetries of global cultural interactions are particularly problematic in the
category of what in the USA is generally called ‘world beat’ and, in Great Britain, ‘world music’. These
ambiguous terms generally connote music productions either generated outside the Euro-American
mainstream (whether created by Westerners or by others) or incorporating non-Western elements that
are commercially marketed to Western consumers with eclectic tastes. Reggae is generally regarded as
being the original world beat music, being the first commercial popular music of the developing world
to succeed in Western markets and the first to have been subsequently exploited by Euro-American pop
musicians (such as Sting and Eric Clapton). In its wake many developing-world musicians, from West
African bandleaders King Sunny Ade and Youssou N’Dour to Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,
have oriented much of their output towards the Western market – often, in doing so, finding themselves
juxtaposing different strategies in attempts to appeal to their diverse local and cosmopolitan audiences
(Feld, 1988–9).
The imbalances of power and wealth that condition such interactions are particularly evident in Euro-
American artists’ self-conscious incorporations of elements of non-Western music, sometimes in the
contexts of collaborations, such as those between British rock musician Peter Gabriel and various
African performers. Despite the honourable intentions of many such artists, these musical excursions
can raise thorny questions about the power asymmetries involved. Critics allege that some Western
incorporations of non-Western musics often exoticize or trivialize such musics, and that the related
cross-cultural collaborative productions tend to be disproportionately profitable to Westerners. Such
ethical and ideological considerations involved in Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a collaboration
with black South African musicians and an iconic ‘world beat’ recording, generated a substantial body
of critical literature (e.g. Feld, 1988–9; Hamm, 1989; Meintjes, 1990; Garofalo, 1992, pp.1–7; Lipsitz,
1994, pp.56–61). Feld further explored how ethnographic recordings of Pygmy singing and a Solomon
Islands lullaby were ‘schizophonically’ recycled (e.g. via sampling, cover version, imitation, and tune-
borrowing) in diverse European and American productions (Feld, 1995, 2000). Pervading Feld’s essays
is the implication – made by innuendo rather than explicit argument – that all these recyclings
represent cases of iniquitous exploitation by the West of ‘the rest’. However, it could well be argued
that such a Manichean, resuscitated cultural imperialism thesis cannot do justice to the complex,
contradictory, multi-directional, and multi-dimensional sorts of musical flows and interactions that
characterize the current globalized era.
A thorough analysis of cross-cultural musical interactions would have to comprehend the various forms
of musical borrowings which, in the realm of contemporary popular music, go well beyond those
outlined in the insightful but Western-oriented entry on Borrowing in Grove. Such borrowings would
include: sampling of a recording (as in Deep Forest’s incorporation of snippets of Pygmy singing),
imitation or cultivation of a style (e.g. heavy metal) or a stylistic feature (Pygmy-style whistling-and-
vocalizing hocket technique); adaptation of an ensemble format (e.g. jazz-style big band, as employed
in Cuban mambo); and various forms of tune-borrowing and cover versions. The latter could aim to
precisely duplicate a given recording (as in Zap Mama’s version of a UNESCO recording of Pygmy
singing); it could involve adapting a tune into a quite distinct genre and style (e.g. the use of a Western
pop tune in an Indian film song); it could include singing the original text, or a new text in a different
language (‘parody’). On another level, the borrowing could be effected purely for musical reasons (e.g.
exploiting the inherent appeal and suitability of a given tune). Alternately, it could be intended to evoke
various extra-musical associations (especially if listeners are expected to recognize the original version
of the entity); in the latter case, its aesthetic and emotive effects might include exoticization,
essentialization (e.g. of a given ethnic group), parody, paying homage, or evoking senses of fashion and
Page 64 of 77

modernity. In terms of monetary compensation, most such borrowings could be adequately dealt with
by extant copyright law, if effectively administered and enforced. Borrowing of an idea (e.g. Pygmy
hocket technique, by Herbie Hancock) or a style (e.g. heavy metal music, by a Malaysian band) would
not oblige any sort of material compensation, regardless of whatever power relations might be involved
between borrower and donor. Further, while scholars such as Feld have foregrounded implicitly
unethical appropriations by Western musicians of world musics, in the current global ecumene a vast
amount of ethically complex borrowing bypasses the West. Such interactions may occur within
individual countries (such as a ‘new-age’ Chinese album exoticizing Tibetan music [Upton, 2002]), or
may involve multi-directional ‘south-south’ interactions (such as the use of Hindi film tunes in Hausa
music videos [Adamu, 2008], even as Bollywood composers such as Bappi Lahiri freely borrow tunes
from various parts of the world).
8. Gender.
Since the growth of academic feminism in the 1970s, considerable research has been published on
issues of gender in Euro-American popular music and, more recently, on world popular music. Indeed,
a degree of attention to gender dynamics is increasingly coming to be considered obligatory in any
holistic study of a given world music genre. Hence, for example, in the realm of Caribbean popular
music, notable are the works by Rohlehr (1990), Pacini (1995), Aparicio (1998), and Cooper (2004),
covering gender dynamics and representations in calypso, bachata, salsa, and reggae, respectively.
Published studies relating to gender issues in other parts of the world are fewer in quantity, though are
increasing in number (e.g. Morcom, 2013; Weintraub, 2010; Stokes, 2010; Sugarman, 2003). These and
other publications have addressed various aspects of gender studies, including the ways that gender
dynamics are both represented and actively enacted in song lyrics, music videos, album covers, dance
styles, musical tastes, and other aspects of music culture.
The effects of popular music on the extent to which women play an active role in musical culture are
varied. Women’s musical activities, especially in traditional societies, are often relegated primarily to
private, domestic spheres, with public performance being reserved either for men or for ‘professional’
women of dubious respectability. In some traditional societies the emergence of a popular music
industry has reinforced this form of discrimination by creating a new and expanded sphere of public
discourse from which respectable women are largely barred. Thus, for example, although women have
been active carriers of genres such as Bedouin music and North Indian regional folk rasiya, modest
women have been to some extent precluded from contributing to the cassette-based revivals of these
musics, since it would be unacceptable for them to enter urban recording studios or for their songs to
be heard by strange men (see Abu-Lughod, 1989, p.10; Manuel, 1993, pp.175–6). Instead, female
popular music performers in the Arab world and other conservative societies are often assumed to be
‘public’ women in one way or another; in some cases they come from the ranks of traditional
courtesan-performer castes, such as the Javanese ronggeng or North Indian nautanki theatre
songstresses (Morcom, 2013).
However, there has been a marked trend for popular music cultures to accord increasing space to
female performers of ‘respectable’ (if often colourful) backgrounds. One celebrated example was the
Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, whose humble but honourable social background and rigorous training
in Qur’anic chant elevated her status beyond that of the women who sang only light, commercial songs
(Danielson, 1997). Increasingly, female popular music singers come from urban middle classes, among
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whom female public performance is no longer regarded as improper. As a result, female singers of
Indonesian popular music, Indian film music, and other genres are no longer assumed to be of
disreputable backgrounds. (Female instrumentalists, however, remain small minorities in world
popular music.)
In general, most commercial popular musics worldwide have tended to have predominantly male
performers, to be orientated primarily towards young adult males, and to be dominated by commercial
music industries whose personnel is overwhelmingly male. Many genres were products of distinctively
male subcultures, including the macho, urban underworlds of rebetika and the early tango, the
competitive, rowdy calypso tents, and the lower-class Dominican taverns in which urban migrant men
would gather to listen to bachata. Popular musics emerging from such contexts typically focused on
extravagant male boasting and its counterpart, indulgent self-pity, while either idealizing women as
unattainable objects of longing or disparaging them as sex objects or as corrupted by modernity.
Representing a somewhat different category of male discourse are the innumerable Dominican
merengues, Cuban guarachas, Colombian porros, Trinidadian calypsoes, Indian regional folk-pop
songs, and other genres that foreground whimsical erotic puns and double entendres.
However palpable the sexual politics of some song texts may seem, scholars increasingly recognize the
caution that must be exercised in interpreting them and attempting to generalize about their meanings
to consumers and their relations to social attitudes and practices. Many song texts are polysemic
enough to allow listeners of either sex (or sexual orientation) to identify with the first-person narrator,
regardless of the specific gendering suggested by the grammar or by the identity of the singer or
composer. Thus women around the world are often able to enjoy sentimental male-gendered songs,
even those denouncing treacherous women, by relating to the abstract emotions of longing, desire, and
loss expressed in the lyrics, and overlooking the gendered aspects of the song (Manuel, Popular Music
and Society, 1998). Attempts to ‘read off’ meanings from song texts are further complicated by the
need to contextualize popular musics in their social milieu. Thus, for example, while some West Indian
popular song texts may seem openly sexist, their musical cultures as a whole may be relatively
progressive in the social space they offer to women, who can exuberantly celebrate their independence
and sensuality on the dance floor (see Cooper, 1993, chap.8; Miller, 1994, pp.113–25). It must also be
remembered that lyrics do not indicate social relations per se but rather attitudes about them,
especially male attitudes. Therefore it may be in some cases that expressions of misogyny in song
lyrics reflect less the actual subjugation of women than male resentment of or backlash against
genuine female autonomy.
Such considerations aside, there is no doubt that the increasing presence of female performers and
perspectives enriches popular music’s potential to constitute a democratic vox populi. Performers such
as Lebanese songstress Fairuz, salsa singer Linda ‘India’ Caballero, Texas-Mexican Selena Quintanilla,
and West Africans Angeligue Kidjo and Oumare Sangare have constituted inspiring role models and
spokeswomen for their female audiences. Since the late 20th century more women have entered the
field of popular music around the world, and the trend towards greater representation of women seems
inevitable, however challenged by neo-fundamentalist reaction in places such as Algeria and Iran.
Particularly remarkable is the emergence, especially in the Americas, of a set of flamboyantly sexual
and transgressive female performers, such as the Cuban singer La Lupe and Jamaican dancehall
vocalist Lady Saw. While seen as embarrassments by some women, to others these performers
represent a new breed of emancipated women who, rather than being passive sex objects, are fully in
control of their exuberant sensuality. In a different category – open to different sorts of critical
Page 66 of 77

interpretation – are the various forms of ‘girl groups’, in such genres as Korean K-pop and Andean
techno-cumbia (Wong, 2012), which feature teenage girls who dance and either sing or lip-sync light
pop songs as part of an entertainment act packaged by male producers.
In general, world popular music seems destined to reflect the greater presence of female performers,
the increasing purchasing power of women and the modern trend towards greater sexual openness
and awareness. In conservative societies, even sentimental love songs with no overt feminist content
may be experienced as liberating to women, and accordingly controversial, insofar as they portray
women freely choosing their love partners. Hence, as with other aspects of cultural dynamics, popular
music does not merely reflect prevailing attitudes towards gender, but can often constitute an
important arena where new identities and mores are presented, affectively explored, and negotiated.
Thus, for example, the prodigious popularity of a few transparently gay musicians in socially
conservative Turkey and Russia has arguably promoted a certain sort and degree of tolerance and
openness of homosexuality in those countries (Stokes, 2010). Meanwhile, popular genres such as
calypso, dancehall, and soukous have often served as forums for spirited gender polemics, in which
male and female artists trade ripostes in successive recordings. In such animated and often humorous
exchanges, popular music seems to live up to its potential as a dynamic expression of grassroots
sentiment in all its earthy richness and diversity.
9. Dance
A prodigious amount – and perhaps even a majority – of world popular music has been associated in
one way or another with dance. Scholarship on dance has traditionally lagged behind that on music,
primarily because of the obstacles to notation. Accordingly, it is only relatively recently – and especially
since the 2000s – that scholarly literature on dance in world popular music, whether written by
ethnomusicologists, dance ethnologists, or others, has begun to appear in any quantity. Such literature
is also uneven in scope, as the great majority of it deals with Latin America and the Caribbean,
although studies of other culture areas are starting to appear (e.g. Spiller, 2010). Extant literature has
tended to explore many of the same themes as that on world music, especially involving dynamics of
class, ethnicity, gender, tradition and innovation, and cross-cultural flows. Not surprisingly, such
literature reveals a rich abundance of dance styles, which in some cases may exceed that associated
with a given music genre, especially since the mass media – before the YouTube era – have generally
transmitted music more extensively than dance. Hence, for example, while salsa is cultivated in a
relatively standardized musical style throughout the Americas, its associated dance styles (e.g. in
terms of basic step patterns) vary considerably in such places as New York, the Dominican Republic,
Cuba, and Colombia (Hutchinson, 2013). Similarly, a newly minted music genre, such as Tijuana-based
nor-tec, may be danced to in a variety of styles, whether drawing on neo-traditional Mexican
conventions or Euro-American disco and rave dancing (Madrid, 2006).
Like modern popular musics, some dance styles, such as those associated with Sundanese jaipongan,
Indo-Caribbean chutney, and Greek bouzouki music, have origins in traditional folk genres. Others,
such as Hindi film dance, are best seen as idiosyncratic modern creations. Still others are adapted,
with or without variation, from international styles, especially Western ones. Most styles based on
independent closed-couple dancing have ultimate roots in the 19th-century country dance/contradance
complex, while the swaggering, macho freestyle moves derived from ‘gangsta’ rap have become icons
of disaffected urban youth culture everywhere from Malawi to Mongolia (Gilman and Fenn, 2006).
Page 67 of 77

Meanwhile, a sort of nondescript, loosely Western, freeform couple or group dancing may constitute a
default style throughout much of the world. Thus, for example, many Akan and Ewe Ghanaians would
informally dance in that style to highlife music at a party or nightclub, though they might also be able
to perform traditional dances like agbadza on certain occasions.
International dance styles can be categorized into a set of formats. An initial distinction is between
social dances and presentational ‘stage’ genres performed for audiences. Hindi film dance falls in the
latter category; although occasionally performed live at various sorts of stage shows, it does not form
the basis of a social dance, and is quintessentially viewed in its cinematic setting of choreographed
song-and-dance scenes. Another widespread format is that of a stage show featuring a band or
soundtrack accompanying a small troupe of singer-dancers, as in K-pop or Peruvian-Ecuadorian
techno-cumbia (see Wong, 2012). In many genres, events can accommodate both formats. For instance,
a typical wedding in Sunda might feature a jaipongan troupe, whose professional dancers might first
perform tightly choreographed sequences on stage, and then mix with audience members for informal
social dancing (see Williams, 1989).
Social dancing itself can take a variety of formats. The format of independent couples (whether in open
form or closed, ballroom-style, loose embrace) now so common throughout the world was in fact highly
unusual in traditional, non-Western societies, where most social dances adhered to more collective
formats (line and circle dances, or informal solo dancing amidst a group of onlookers). Closed couple
independent dancing did not spread in Euro-American culture itself until the vogue of the waltz, polka,
and forms of the country dance (contradance) in the decades around 1800. However, the closed couple
format then spread – primarily in association with English and French forms of the contradance –
throughout Latin America, and became the norm in most forms of modern Hispanic commercial
popular music, including salsa, son, bolero, bachata, merengue, cumbia, tango, chicha, and norteña/
tejano conjunto music, as well as the Haitian méringue. Dances within this format vary widely in style,
from the languid, intimate embrace of bolero, to the tightly executed turns and ‘shines’ of salsa, and
the flamboyant acrobatics of Texas-Mexican quebradita.
In modern popular music culture in the Anglophone Caribbean, closed-couple dancing is relatively
uncommon. Instead, a variety of informal formats prevail. Trinidadian soca dancing is distinguished
primarily by the pneumatic frontal pelvic pumping called ‘wining’ (from ‘winding’, i.e. the waist),
executed primarily by women. Wining may be performed solo, by an informal group (as in a Carnival
procession), or by two women, or a woman and a man, front to front or front to back. In Jamaican
dancehall, formats are considerably more varied. A man and woman might sensually ‘grind’ on each
other, the man leaning against a wall, or they might indulge in even more explicitly sexual ‘daggering’.
Alternately, a group of friends – whether all-male, all-female, or mixed, might collectively perform
whatever currently fashionable dance is called for by the ‘mike-man’, featured vocalist, or song lyrics
themselves. Such dances (bearing names like bogle, buttafly, dutty wine, willie bounce, pon de river,
etc.) are constantly being invented, popularized, and then discarded (see e.g. Niaah, 2010).
Much of the extant literature on dance in popular music has focused on ways in which dance expresses
and (literally) embodies gender dynamics and sexual identity. Since the 19th century, dance styles have
indeed provoked considerable controversy, and can be said to have constituted focal sites for the
construction, redefinition, and presentation of gender relations. The bourgeois waltz itself, of course,
was ‘revolutionary’ when it emerged, in its ‘asocial’ detachment of the individual couple from the
broader social collective. In Latin America, popular early-20th-century closed couple dances like the
Page 68 of 77

tango, merengue, and son were denounced by conservatives for their intimacy and their suggestive
hip-swaying. Ironically, as Chasteen (2004) explores, both dances later went on to become embraced
by nationalistic elites. In Indonesia, in the early 2000s the suggestive dancing of dangdut singer-
dancer Inul Daratista became the focus for a national debate about women’s liberation (Weintraub,
2010).
Aside from polemics about the degree of sensuality embodied in dance styles, scholars have
endeavored to interpret the specific nature of male-female relations suggested by dance formats and
styles. Although tightly coordinated closed-couple dancing, as in salsa, obliges one partner – invariably
the male – to lead, analysts have judiciously hesitated to regard such a format as inherently indicative
of sexist, patriarchal domination. At the same time, there is no doubt that some women take explicit
pleasure in dancing independently, in a more ‘liberated’ fashion, whether with a male partner or not.
Such dancing might constitute, in nor-tec, a rejection of patriarchic traditional norms (Madrid, 2006),
or, in the extravagant despelote of women dancing Cuban timba, it might be interpreted as relating to
the new financial independence of women in modern Cuba (Fairley, 2006). And while the vigorous
‘wining’ performed by female soca and chutney dancers has been denounced by moralists as obscene,
it could also be argued – especially when performed by groups of women – to constitute an exuberant
celebration of female sexuality in a way that need not depend on or even involve the participation or
gaze of men. Indeed, regardless of whatever sexism might be present in soca or reggae song lyrics,
women may often thoroughly dominate dance floors in these genres, literally relegating men to the
sidelines.
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Popular music

Richard Middleton and Peter Manuel

I. Popular music in the West

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(i) The main historical shifts.

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Mansell / Time Pix / Katz

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(i) Before Tin Pan Alley.

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(ii) From Tin Pan Alley to rock and roll.

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Subscriber: Universidad Autonoma Barcelona; date: 21 January 2020

Subscriber: Universidad Autonoma Barcelona; date: 21 January 2020

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Subscriber: Universidad Autonoma Barcelona; date: 21 January 2020

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Tune-and-accompaniment textures, simple diatonic harmonies (with a variable admixture of chromatic

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(iv) Popular music and the musical field.

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6. The study of popular music.

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C.K. Harris: How to Write a Popular Song (New York, 1906)

C. Lambert: Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London, 1934, 3/1966)

D. Riesman: ‘Listening to Popular Music’, American Quarterly, vol. 2 (1950), 359–71

R. Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957)

R. Williams: The Long Revolution (London, 1961)

S. Hall and P. Whannel: The Popular Arts (London, 1964)

E. Rogers and M. Hennessy: Tin Pan Alley (London, 1964)

D. Laing: The Sound of Our Time (London, 1969)

A. McCarthy: The Dance Band Era (London, 1971)

J. Wenner: Lennon Remembers (San Francisco, 1971)

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M.R. Turner: The Parlour Song Book (London, 1972, 2/1974)

I. Whitcomb: After the Ball (London, 1972, 2/1986)

R. Pearsall: Popular Music of the Twenties (Newton Abbot, 1976)

R. Williams: ‘Popular’,Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1976, 2/1983)

P. Willis: Profane Culture (London, 1978)