160061 VO Popular Music and Society (2020S)

The course provides an introduction to the study of popular music and society. It aims to situate the popular music text—the recording, the performance, the music video—in its wider social, cultural and material contexts. It covers all the main theories about popular music, illustrating them with a variety of case studies.

Popular music is not simply a collection of songs existing in the aether; instead it is a complex process comprising numerous actors involved in diverse, often conflictual, social practices. These practices are mutually influential and cannot be separated from one another. However, for the sake of simplicity, the course breaks the study of popular music into four categories.

Music Industry—While many in the music industry surely care about music, the primary motivating factor here has to be seen as profit. Amongst other things, we will consider patterns of ownership, the nature of the markets, how rights are used to generate revenue, and the effects of digitization and globalization.

Production—Many bands or songwriters like to portray themselves as romantic geniuses, however, apart from the commercial pressures exerted on them by the music industry, numerous other factors and people play their part in the creative process. We will look at the social backgrounds of musicians, the ever-increasing role of the producer, the effects of technology, and forms of amateur and local production.

Texts—In this part of the course we will investigate the structure and content of popular music recordings and performances. We will think about the extent to which such texts (including lyrics and video) can be considered a form of communication and the different ways in which they embody and shape social attitudes to politics, gender, sexuality, race, and social status.

Audiences—The popular music process does not stop with the text but continues with consumption, which itself feeds back into production. We examine how music is used and developed by different scenes and subcultures (considering various theories of fan and celebrity culture), how the border between consumer and producer is being eroded in the digital age, and finally how people incorporate popular music into their everyday life.