Popular Music Studies and Interdisciplinarity

Recent trends suggest that the interdisciplinary character that defined popular music studies in its formative stages has been supplanted by retrenchment along lines of disciplinary or sub-disciplinary alliance. In this article, I briefly survey some of the signs of the field’s realignment in the past two decades, drawing upon my experience as president of the US chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and my longer career as a popular music scholar. One of the primary signs of the vitality and strength of popular music studies is also, somewhat paradoxically, a source for this shift in the field: namely, that popular music studies has a much wider variety of institutional homes today than it had in the early 1980s, when IASPM as an international organization was founded, or in the late 1990s, when I first began to attend popular music conferences on a regular basis. Most major North American music organizations of standing—the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology and Society for Music Theory among them—now have sections or interest groups dedicated to popular music studies. This proliferation of settings where popular music scholarship finds support is no doubt a positive development, but I would argue that it has fostered a move away from the more dedicated sort of interdisciplinary space for popular music studies represented by IASPM-US. I consider some of the structural factors within academia that would lead scholars to prefer conducting popular music scholarship under the rubric of a more finite disciplinary affiliation and argue for the continued value of an interdisciplinary popular music studies.