In the past ten years, there has been a significant expansion in the provision of academic programmes and units (discrete courses within modular degrees) that deal with the study of popular music. This expanded area of study encompasses work at undergraduate and postgraduate level within disciplines as diverse as sociology, media studies, cultural studies, marketing, English and literary studies, history, and musicology. Despite this expansion (or possibly because of it), no single discipline has managed to claim ‘ownership’ of the field, and the study of popular music relies upon theoretical perspectives and methodological tools that are often seen as being contradictory.

What this contradictory situation tells us is that there is no correct or true method of examining popular music. However, within this heterogeneity of approaches, there are methodological positions that can be rejected. A purely musicological approach will tell us a great deal about the ‘inner meanings’ of particular pieces of popular music, but due to the ‘textualism’ of this approach, traditional musicology cannot tell us much about the relationship between musical texts and the cultures and societies in which they are situated. Equally, an approach that draws exclusively upon a historical method can tell us a great deal about the position of popular music in the societies in which it is situated, but it cannot tell us much about what individual pieces of music or specific musical genres actually mean.

This book rejects such a ‘unidisciplinary’ approach to the study of popular music and promotes an examination that is situated in the interdisciplinary space between a range of separate academic fields of enquiry. By using theoretical positions and methodological tools drawn from a range of disciplines, our approach becomes contextual, rather than textual or intertexual. While we are interested in musical texts, this interest is framed by an examination of the relationship between musical texts and their social, cultural, political and economic contexts. We firmly believe that an examination of the relationship between musical texts and their various contexts tells us far more about music and its importance to the societies in which it is situated than a purely musicological approach. Equally, we believe that the story of popular music cannot be told through charts and statistical data, and we also believe that one should not be overly reliant upon music press hyperbole for source material.