Pop Music, Pop Culture (review)

The efforts of a few notable individuals notwithstanding (I have in mind, particularly, Richard Middleton, Philip Tagg, Keith Negus, and Jason Toynbee), the disciplinary divide between ‘sociology’ and ‘musicology’ (to use gross generalizations) and the ways they address ‘the popular’ seems almost as wide as ever. Some adopt an interdisciplinary approach as a way of recognizing disciplinary blinkers and attempting to circumvent the false, because incomplete, picture that can otherwise be presented. In Pop Music, Pop Culture, Chris Rojek chooses not to take this tack, but to resort to a more entrenched position. Curiously, the book’s blurb suggests it offers ‘a comprehensive guide to understanding pop music today. It provides a clear survey of the field and a description of core concepts’ and, as far as ‘survey’ goes, it seems to me this marketing material is entirely accurate. What is impressive about this book is its seeming comprehensiveness. But, that said, it is important to try to discern exactly the field whose coverage we find.

The opening pages are, of course, key. There are two perspectives outlined here that cause one to question the nature of that inclusivity. Right from the outset, Rojek decides simply to replace one discursive term—‘popular’—with another, the ‘pop’ of his title. While he discusses the differences between these terms that he believes people hold to, nonetheless in practice (‘to use the term “pop” to refer to [various examples] . . . does not trivialize them’; p. 7), I think ‘replacement’ accurately conveys what he’s doing. The sphere of reference of ‘popular’, with all its connotations, seems for Rojek to apply to ‘pop’, thereby evading some of the (certainly unhelpful) connotations he finds the latter term has for some commentators, but I’m not sure this gets us any further than other attempts to readdress the popular. Foremost among these commentators, I was astonished to find, are ‘traditional musicologists’ (p. 1, the book’s very first sentence). I struggle to work out just who these people are, and even who the author thinks they are, especially when he uses Simon Frith to exemplify the position he wants to attack. Rojek is a Professor of Sociology and Culture—I can only guess that perhaps holding a Chair in Music qualifies you as a ‘traditional musicologist’? This is not a minor point for, if you are a musicologist, of whatever stripe, then you will find yourself so frequently misrepresented by this book (and I put this as mildly as I can) that you may be inclined to give up in disgust. That would be something of a shame for, through much of it, it offers comprehensive coverage of what many would call popular music studies, and is frequently insightful and fully conversant with a range of theoretical positions. My chief problem, I guess, lies in the way the author chooses to construct ‘musicology’—the opening sentence of his first chapter takes the definition offered by the OED. Not a considered perspective that pays heed to the richness of the field (i.e. the depth of perspective elsewhere evident in the book), but a reduction to twenty-one words: ‘[practising musicology] is like studying a fish without water’ (p. 15). As a result of this dismissal, we end up with a study of water without the fish. Something of a missed opportunity, perhaps. I guess that if your horizon is bounded by a dictionary definition, it is no wonder that your critique lacks any nuance.

Rojek divides his text into three large sections. His first addresses musicology (rather unevenly, as I have suggested), but the space and position he gives it is interesting, for it certainly implies that he perceives a norm (that of the predominance of textuality) that he wants to capsize. From where I sit, if there is a norm it lies elsewhere, but that’s perhaps an inevitable matter of perspective. The questions he raises to demonstrate the inadequacy of the musicological are, I would claim, squarely musicological...