The Trouble with the Sociology of Pop

(i entirely agree, btw: more later maybe when i have gathered my thoughts)

I read the (huge) Vibe Book of Hip-Hop and by far and away the best pieces were those about artists not generally taken seriously, such as MC Hammer.

In this hand, we have the entire mass of critical theory about pop music and its relevance to life during the last 50 years.

In this hand, we have Moulin Rouge.

Miller: your request for more examples is OTM. My term 'sociology' may well not be. I'm probably talking about 'cultural studies', really - not, for instance, The History Of The Blues, or whatever. I can well believe that serious sense of political urgency could make a pop story more compelling, though I think that in many pop narratives the urgency is too contrived and implausible (punkers vs the vicious dictatorship of... Jim Callaghan, blah).

I think this could be the seed for a bit of cultural studies, but you'd have to keep quiet about the fact that people were spitting at Big Audio Dynamite too and perhaps they just liked spitting.

Perhaps this goes some way to illustrating why 'important' things are more popular for serious study than Big Audio Dynamite.

Another reason might be that 'important' things are more likely to attract readers, and cultural studies is as market based as anything else.

Mark S: I don't really know the texts that you helpfully mention - have only flicked E's Dr (though I do own it) - so I am backward re. that question, sorry.

Miller: hooray for a) flicking the V's and b) the BAD point.

Why is it a problem? Well, it's not an earth-shattering one, but it's an anomaly. 'The academy' (vague phrase) likes to think that it can give cogent and reliable accounts of physics, geology, how the sun works, how metals differ from one another; and also, why the Irish famine or Easter Rising started, and how many working-class people there were in Doncaster in 1952. And also, maybe (but we're pushing the envelope), how literature works, or what we do when we read it (I don't say that the academy DOES have all these things sewn up, but that to do so is, in principle, part of its function, its job-description.) So we reach popular fiction or Hollywood (of which there have been reasonably cogent, though not definitive, academic accounts) - and then, at the last outpost, we reach --

POP MUSIC.

It is the fact of pop's place on this map - its seemingly anomalous status - that makes the problem, or the issue, or the question, real and worth pondering.

but, there is an equally large schism in the pop writing world. if pop writers stray too far from a discussion of the music itself, most people who aren't pop writers themselves tune out (same reaction as pinefox prob #1: it's too boring/irrelevant). in my experience, people like greil marcus and jon savage are not much praised on these boards. on the other hand, people who focus exclusively on describing and judging the music are also ignored on ILX (see pinefox prob #2: trivial and shallow).

the idea of pop music as approached from a sociological standpoint is a farily recent one, even more recent than pop reviews thenmselves (i think). perhaps the great books on the subject have simply not yet been written?

(mark s chime in please)

Actually if 'sociology' was all Fact it would maybe be OK. eg: Mark S has said in the past that punk rock was kind of really middle-class. If true, this is a 'sociological' observation, and maybe a useful one.

The trouble is when a 'factual' history gets 'values' stirred into it. It's not sheer factuality that's the problem, but the wrong mix of fact and value. (How about that?)

Obviously

>>> "i think the pinefox is OTM as usual"

is valuable talk, as well as factual.

I am fond of the idea that pop music is more anti-theoretical/anti-systematic (in the sense of its susceptibility to being 'gotten' by a theory) than any other kind of cultural product or artform or etc. I even eye warily some reasons for backing this idea up, from time to time.

I think there is a place, a gap in the market, for a sociological music criticism that investigates much more fully the relationship between music makers and their audiences - from the point of view of the 'user' esp. - although its difficult to know exactly how this cld ever be quantified through research, or 'participant observation' ...

>>> pinefox, you mention that there have been 'cogent though not definitive' academic accounts of hollywood, popular fiction, etc. why do you set them apart from pop music?

probably 2 reasons:

a) they are more long-running and established (film theory since Cahiers --> 60s --> Screen, etc; pop fiction since QD Leavis, Hoggart, through to Radway et al) - whereas pop theory has always seemed stunted and hesitant (eg; Frith is still the only name! and this after his Mercury Music fiascos!)

b) I have a stronger emotional investment in pop, so I am more inclined to see deficiencies in theories of it (cf Hopkins above). This of course carries the corollary that I could well be WRONG re. theories of popular fiction, cos I don't know so much about pop fiction itself.

>>> I'm not nearly as familiar with academic pop music theory as I should be, but I have the impression that its academic accounts currently stand a lot like those of other popular/mass arts.

(see, here I disagree: as above)

>>> but like pop music, I never feel as if the ones you set apart - hollywood and popular fiction - have really gotten that OTHER part right that you're talking about. did you mean to imply otherwise?

No, probably not. Maybe I am saying that a sufficiently impressive discursive structure has been erected to make that seem less important.

>>> I am fond of the idea that pop music is more anti-theoretical/anti-systematic (in the sense of its susceptibility to being 'gotten' by a theory) than any other kind of cultural product or artform or etc.

I'm not theoretically fond of this idea - but for me, when I think about it (eg now), it kind of *feels* true. I think the key must be not so much in pop itself as in the nature of fandom / the kind of investments we make in it.

haha where is zizek when i need him?

then how do you explain visual art theory?

maybe the reason it's so hard to pin down is that no matter what the subject, at some point in the book the writer has to grit his teeth and describe what is important in this music, not only in a general sense but also how it specifically relates to his argument. i think sociologists simply aren't very good at doing it in a way we're interested in, and/or familiar with, and pop writers become so focused on emphasizing their new-found use of theory that they trip up in the actual writing.

i want to root the problem about writing about music in things to do with music itself, not (for example) other kinds of sociology => yes pf course for some writers the quality of their writing is to do with their inability to write well, but i think there's a general issue with music — it may or may not obtain in other art forms, though plainly it DOESN'T in literature or movies, or anywhere where storytelling is front-central — where the urge to pin it down and the inability to pin it down are both intertwined, forming a fundamental nexus of appeal

urge to pin down what cannot be pinned down is the definition of appeal in itself - what is that new style i don't understand? i still don't see what this has to do with music specifically - is it the mode of consumption? (ie. sheer volume in our case, the fact that you can have music on at work whereas you cannot watch movies all day)?

Pop songs take three minutes to listen to and require no effort. I think this must have a bearing on their 'acceptance' in academic circles, which thrive on difficulty, so much so that they often invent difficulty where there is none.

I realise I am infringing FAQ no. 36 about the mind-body divide, but it's Friday afternoon.

Is this really true?
Does it matter that Freaks & Geeks is set in the 80s?

Well, actually, I have to remember to think that - but it's really funny when I do.

The main point in Chapter One of Performing Rites: The essence of social practice is the making of value judgments. (Example: Ladonna in the letter pages of Metal Mania: "There is no way that Poison can EVER be on top. Them little underdeveloped chromoshoes don't got cock enough to fuck an ant. So all you fucking whores out there who praise the ground Poison walks on are in shit. METALLICA RULES and that will never change." Footnote: "Thanks to Frank Kogan for this quote.") But academia almost across the board refuses to raise questions about the value of what it studies. (The value and importance of what we study are assumed; otherwise we wouldn't be studying it.) Therefore, for sociologists and people in cultural studies, the explicit practice of their subject matter is forbidden in the classroom and in academic writing.

Comments by me: One reason for this proscription is that to practice the subject matter - that is, to make value judgments as you would as a music fan - means to make invidious social judgments about people. (By the way, The L.A. Times yesterday published as a fact [based on a year's worth of research, they said] the claim that Biggie paid for the murder of 2pac and supplied the gun and bullets himself, wanting the satisfaction of knowing that it was his bullet that killed 2pac. I just thought I'd bring that up.) The message in this proscription is that you can either live your lives or you can study a subject matter, but you can't do both at once. And the further message, to quote Frith (though it was from a different essay on a different topic), is that "everything real is happening elsewhere." In other words, the message that sociology sends to you, if you are a student, is that you are not as real or as important as what you are studying (or why would you be studying it?). But pop throws a monkey in the works by being something that you know how to practice well but whose value hasn't been established. Academia fends off the monkey (and the frug and the mashed potato and the boogaloo) by having the student not study pop but merely pop's importance. So maybe you can study it for its artistic merit and you can certainly study it for its social use and social effects, but you can't study it whole, any more than you can be whole when you study it. So sociology and cultural studies alienate you from your life and then engage you in endless methodological discussions about how to approach it.

By capitalizing "Big Important things" the pinefox is very cleverly challenging their importance (that's how I interpret those capitals, anyway). Very good.

Richard Meltzer (who wrote most of the Aesthetics of Rock in academia, even if he and the Aesthetics were thrown out before it was published), 1972, from the introduction to Gulcher: "The structure [people have] been fed of late has tended towards the delineation of youth culture as meaning-laden and quality-oriented. This is indeed strange for a culture whose cutting edge has begun and ended with rock and roll, crucial for its collapse of such dichotomies as the trivial and the awesome, the relevant and the irrelevant, the interesting and the boring, the topical and the eternal, the polar and the continuous, the _____ and the _____."

Comments: Well, Meltzer's prose here is too contaminated by philosophy, and he's never thought through what he means by "meaning-laden" (I would guess it would be something like "socially important as my seventh-grade social studies teacher would define social importance"), and relevant/irrelevant et al. aren't dichotomies, just comparative judgments, hence aren't eligible for collapse, since in normal usage they're already as flexible, contingent, and ad hoc as need be. But let's say that - though this makes rock 'n' roll less extraordinary and world-important - ha! - than Meltzer made it seem - that rock music esp. c. 1964-1966 was a lot more fluid and less stable in its judgments of what counts as important and unimportant than academia was, so if I'm a sociologist back then, I'm going to want to run rock against sociology, to analyze sociology through the lens of rock rather than to analyze rock sociologically; or I might play the two off against each other, since by not sticking to standard "importance," rock forces the intellectual question that sociology has been afraid to bring up - the question of value, of what's important - and so rock in this regard is intellectually superior to sociology. (Meltzer'd written that "Rock is the only possible future for philosophy and art"; he later derided himself for his misplaced faith in rock. I'd add that he was far too generous to philosophy in believing that it deserved a future.)

Anyway, that's a short vague sketch of things, and it's probably not all that intelligible. I haven't been in academia in 25 years so I don't know the state of affairs. I'm waiting for Meltzer's honorary degree from Yale.

I don't think we're required to kowtow to the way pop mixes around and mixes up its sense of importance, or that instability in one's ideas is necessarily better than stability. But if we're not willing to test the stability and value of our practices by running them against counterpractices, then how can we do sociology? How else can we examine and test our social practices? So my question would be: can we use pop music - the way we engage in it - as a means of studying society (and sociology) rather than merely using sociology as a means of studying pop music? (But given that I like ILE more than ILM, we might want to start somewhere other than music.)

By the way, if you're subjected to massive propaganda all your life that tells you that you can either use your intellect or live your life but that you can't do both at once, this is going to affect how you behave as a musician and as a fan, what the music you make is going to sound like, what the music you like is going to sound like, how you judge and justify it.

"Calling all gorgeous guys on Earth who are 14 or older. We are two 15 year old chicks who are absolutely in love with Guns N' Roses, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Poison, and stax more! Interested?"

Now there simply must be disagreement over the value of Guns N' Roses et al. For if everyone liked Guns N' Roses, this call would be worthless.

To say that value judgments are crucial to social practice is to say that disagreements are crucial to social practice. Of course, that would be so obvious as to be a platitude except that the social "sciences" tend to imagine that agreement will or should be the ultimate goal of the social-science discourse, that disagreements will eventually be resolved. Whereas in pop, agreement is not expected and is not the goal.

>>> relevant/irrelevant et al. aren't dichotomies, just comparative judgments, hence aren't eligible for collapse, since in normal usage they're already as flexible, contingent, and ad hoc as need be

and

>>> To say that value judgments are crucial to social practice is to say that disagreements are crucial to social practice

In many ways I strongly agree (!) with this last point - just as I agree with Tom E when he says we should talk about how we hate things as well as how we like them (cos 'taste' includes both). BUT I also have a suspicion that at some kind of Habermasian meta-level, Agreement really IS the goal of human discourse - odd as it may sound in this pop context.

The idea that pop = instability, and we should run sociology etc vs it, seems to me to take too much for granted. (For instance, pop for me = stability, maybe; whereas a serious engagement with sociological tradition might, for me, be demanding and relatively destabilizing.) Admirably, you make this point yourself (I think.)

I tend to agree that the question of value is at the heart of all this - and that there is sth irresolvable and irreducible about it. "We (we?) are never really going to agree about pop music" - a discourse on value probably needs to take that statement into account.

But another question: is there sth specific about Education / the Research that accompanies it which differentiates it from eg what Tom E does? I disagree with a lot of what Tom E actually says, but he seems to have found the right genre for saying it - and we don't find ourselves arguing about fact & value in relation to it (do we?).

But, perhaps more in this context than most any other, that agreement with a peer group (largely self-defined) is vital only in that it also defines a disagreement with others. I have no better examples to offer than Frank's metal bands one, but almost any coherent selection, whether of house DJ, rappers or rock acts, serves similar purposes. The kind of list many ILE posters might offer (I might mention Al Green, Pulp, Daphne & Celeste and Louis Prima, for instance) is a less clear example, but I think we are doing the same thing, except instead of a particular genre we are declaring our open-mindedness, breadth of knowledge and eclecticism - and maybe implicitly distancing ourselves from those who like one genre to the exclusion of others. The ILE usage of the term 'rockist' (see FAQ, or probably not yet) is maybe one example of this.

Oh No! Years of declaring my narrow-mindedness, intolerance and simmering hatred of great swathes of music that other people love - only to be misrepresented in this way! Oh NO! [Sob]

mark s said, "music *itself* is anti-systemic by virtue of having evolved wordless logics of construction..."

josh said, "there are certain facts about music in general (sort of metaphysical/ontological ones?) and pop music in particular (as opposed to say art music/classical; sociological, economic, etc. etc. facts) that make that importance of being a listener possible in ways that are distinct from literature, film, etc..."

well, film, literature, and art are representational in a way that music is not. even with abstract things, it seems like you have to struggle not to interpret them literally or derive their meaning by comparing them to things in the world. with music it's not like that: there's no correspondence, or only ones that the listener makes up. you have to struggle to pin things down. so it seems interpretation, i.e., the role of the audience, would be more important with music.

mark s, on another thread, said, "pile of books = taller and more stable than pile of all music formats i have so far encountered" and i think this comment is related to what he has said here.

at first, i resisted taking lit courses with books that i liked on the reading list. with music, i think it would be worse.

sociology = guaranteed to deflate soufflés

This is my long way of saying that I don't think that there are facts about music in general. There may be facts about "pop" in general, just as there could be facts about "physics" in general or "France" in general; which is to say that (vaguely) "pop" is a form or discourse or something without being a subset of "music."

But I think that distinguishing music as something perceived as more tonal than everyday speech is still useful, even if four or five words in this sentence need to be more clearly defined. The fact that this means music overlaps with a bunch of other art forms, as well as cultural categorisations, doesn't worry me. "Pop" and "music" can have an intersection, so although they cover very different territory, they can still have a shared subset of "pop music". More importantly, "pop music" then necessarily has interacting cultural and artistic components. If you think this way, it's harder to ignore "pop" at the expense of "music" or vice-versa.

So if you want to talk about "pop", talk about pop, and if you want to talk about "music", talk about music - I'm fascinated by both these subjects. But if you want to talk about "pop music", bring that interaction.

clue: the word "popist" is completely unnecessary, since any meaning it has is perfectly well covered by the word "rockist"
clue two: sex: sexist <=> rock: rockist DO YOU SEE??!!

"reviving old popist/rockist dualisms" = meaningless phrase historically AND aesthetically

ok but mea culpa: i'm gunna get the 96 THESES done this week if i can, since frank's strength of expression will otherwise totally distort the field of argument

if people don't like the word "rockist" used in the sense i'm using it it's THEIR JOB to find a better one: so far only ArfArf has been down this road (he said rockism = romanticism: i don't really buy this, but the effort was appreciated, thankyou ArfArf)

Unfortunately this may well be on principle.

I don't think the popist/rockist dualism is meaningless, Mark (and I think your response is a bit patronising DO YOU SEE?). For example: the early 80s NME new-pop disputes about Dollar etc. And then the mid-80s MM revalorisation of rock as a site of differance. Both of these encounters contrasted depth models of meaning and history with pleasures of texture, surface and presence: pop and rock as philosophical categories. In my dopey old way, I think of them as popist/rockist debates.

please state what you find unclear abt what i have already said about this (clue: use SEARCH at bottom of page) (pinefox: ask someone to do this for you) and i will then perhaps be able to be clearer

i suspect that i consider the 90s MM usage to exhibit some of the failings suggested (i never read it, so i'm not a good judge there): the 80s NME new-pop disputes weren't dualist => excactly the opposite (hence my annoyance at a word coined as a crit/collapse of dualism being co-opted by people who dislike dualism to beat dualists abt the head)

as far as i'm concerned, rockism is required as what frank wd call a "superword", because its contestation — ps have i made up *word* — is key to the aufhebung blah blah

Actually, debates are like this are why I get frustrated with ILx and go away for long periods - you can't respond to non-verbal cues/tone of voice (esp if you are writing hurriedly at work, and your tone comes out wrong - 'dreary', with it's langourous disdain was the wrong word, in retrospect) and so things get too heated too rapidly and everyone shouts BUNDLE. And someone gets buried at the bottom of a pile.

I disagree with Tom about the politically incorrect thing. Rockist has become a kind of ILx "superword" (Superword sounds like what Barthes called a "manna word", I think) and it seems to embody lots of things I disagree about with the FT pro-pop contingent (ie see last week's comment box debate on the charts). Maybe I should just write an article about it.

The first thread about rockism on Greenspun was started by somebody (Patrick, wherever he is) saying I dont understand what it is, with the perception that we were using it all the time. That was also the first thread mark s ever posted to! By the time Lord Custos' thread about it ("The Scourge Of Rockism") rolled round there was a perception/assertion that it was mostly used jokily anyway. The "Rockism" thread on ILE shows the various types of use pretty well - frivolous batting around of the word as an in-joke, bafflement, vaguely serious definitions, aggreived and defensive interventions and responses to same.

tom you also called nate the "acceptable face of rockism"!!

1. The charts are complete rubbish always and even paying attention to them is idiotic.
2. The charts are bad and have been spoiled by marketing.
3. The charts are neither a good or bad thing; pop is good but the charts at the moment might not be/are not.
4. The charts are pretty much the same as they always have been and are a good thing as a reflection of public taste regardless of what you might think of the records.
5. The charts are great right now!
6. The charts are great right now and pop is a mystical and beautiful force which animates them and which some individuals can understand more than others.

Mark - yeah I did but that's after it had been established as a disputed joke-word super-word thing on the boards so I was ignoring any subsequent uses of it.

i also tht last week's chart was GREBT — i listened to it v.loud while driving back from shropshire to london — tho this year's have been v.sluggish, yes: the 4-fold effect i was arguing for in that glenn macdonald thread HAS EMERGED but interestingly enough — i'm not surprised at this, actually, but i didn't expect it — hasn't yet been exploited much by the PopIdols uber-lizards => tho in a sense the Appletons were always already PopIdol-zoners

i never properly explored or expanded it, even when frank tried to make me: KymMarshinMarkSinkahland was going to be part of it but i got derailed on that (when is her fkn solo LP?)

btw edna the tolkien piece is "finished" (pending complete rewrite): wd u like to see it in first-draft form?

It's true - 'The Power Of Love', 'Back In Time', 'Stuck With You', 'The Heart Of Rock'n'Roll'...

Brief sketch of what I mean by Superword: A Superword is a word like "punk," which is, among other things, a battleground, a weapon, a red cape, a prize, a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag. To put this in the abstract, a Superword is a word or phrase that not only is used in fights but that is itself fought over. The fight is over who gets to wear the word proudly, who gets the word affixed to himself against his will, etc. So the *use* is fought over, and this - the fight over usage - is a big part of the word's use. That is, we use the term in order to engage in arguments over how to use the term. Meta use is use!

So a Superword is a controversy word, and so far “rockist” would qualify, at least as a controversy word, except that it hasn’t surmounted the threshold into nonboringness. But what makes a Superword really super is that some people use the word so that it will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment. Like, no one and nothing is good enough to bear the word "punk," and I wouldn't join a band that would have someone like me as a member anyway. (Supposedly, in the late ’80s I once claimed that Michael Jackson and Axl Rose were the only two punks going at the time.) So “rock,” “pop,” “punk,” and many other genre names sometimes act as Superwords, but “rockist” doesn’t.

If we must have a term for whatever it is that "rockist" is supposed to represent, I'd prefer some other words, since I'd want words that reference our own (often admirable) tendencies towards the meaning-laden and the quality-oriented, not merely the other guy's. Also, I'd want words that rock.

I’m sad that the most interesting part of this thread petered out (particularly that there was little discussion of my and the pinefox’s ideas, of the potential of sociology to analyze pop and the potential of pop to analyze sociology), though that’s partially my fault, since I didn’t get back to it. In any event, let’s make this argument: Whether you want it to or not, your liking or disliking something – e.g., a song – involves making a social commitment, at least if the like or dislike becomes known to others. Even if the like-dislike remains in the privacy of your own mind, that mind still lives in a social world. Sociology (as I barely knew it and hardly remember it) intellectually cripples itself by forbidding the question of whether something is good or not. If you want to engage in social commitments, you’re supposed to do it somewhere else than in sociology (and you’re not supposed to acknowledge that when doing sociology you’re making social commitments yourself). I assume that sociologists have raised the issue of sociology’s political commitments, but I’m thinking more or its mundane and everyday social commitments: like, does the writer of a work in sociology come across as a sk8ter? a prep? a dweeb? a rockist? a pussy? Does his writing swing? Does it rock? If so, what are the consequences for him?

But what compelled me to seek out that book in the first place was that I've been thinking about how popular music is generally neglected in the academy -- apart from the now-cliche, ideology-driven, cultural-studes investigations into things like "the image of Elvis." And as Josh suggested upthread, I do think there are substantial reasons for why music is treated differently from popular film/literature/art.

I think a lot of what it comes down to is this: Popular film/lit/art were accepted as valid fields of study once they could be considered properly "intellectual" -- the notion of the "auteur theory," for example, totally jump-started film studies. But it is much more difficult to see pop music as "intellectual."

Viz:

1. Unlike novelists and visual artists, who study the history of their discipline as a matter of course, popular musicians themselves are not seen as intellectuals participating in an unique discourse. (e.g., Beck is not reviewing Bjork in the NY Review of Books.)

2. There is a relative absence of legitimizing institutions (like the gallery complex) or gatekeepers (respected novelist-critics) to isolate significant works for study. (This is partly why writing about the Wonder Stuff, in the Pinefox's example, seems trivial: among all the music ever recorded, that band seems arbitrary to spotlight.)

3. While the lines between popular and high-culture art and literature are quite blurry (cf. the Jonathan Franzen debacle), thus giving more leeway for popular works to sneak into syllabi, they are much more stark with respect to music (composition or bust) -- and thus easier to justify pop music's exclusion.

4. Compared to literary and artistic "themes," the focus of much academic inquiry, it is not always obvious what popular music is "about" (it is often more functional).

I realize that some of these might be symptoms rather than causes. It's hard to say. But I'm curious to know if any of these thoughts make sense. Please pick 'em apart!

>>> Unlike novelists and visual artists, who study the history of their discipline as a matter of course, popular musicians themselves are not seen as intellectuals participating in an unique discourse. (e.g., Beck is not reviewing Bjork in the NY Review of Books.)

That's a good point, but they do TALK about each other all the time. So, I suppose, do footballers. I guess different levels of discursive elaborateness are involved.

>>> 2. There is a relative absence of legitimizing institutions (like the gallery complex) or gatekeepers (respected novelist-critics) to isolate significant works for study. (This is partly why writing about the Wonder Stuff, in the Pinefox's example, seems trivial: among all the music ever recorded, that band seems arbitrary to spotlight.)

But who legitimates a legitimating institution? The distinction between galleries and rock venues, or art magazines and pop ones, itself seems 'arbitrary' to me. (But we may be able to agree that 'The fact that the divide is a construct doesn't make it less real'.)

I'm not sure why it would be esp. 'arbitrary' to write about the Wonder Stuff. If you take pop 'seriously' (a dubious, un-Morleyesque word), then you might be interested in the Wonder Stuff - or violently uninterested.

>>> 3. While the lines between popular and high-culture art and literature are quite blurry (cf. the Jonathan Franzen debacle), thus giving more leeway for popular works to sneak into syllabi, they are much more stark with respect to music (composition or bust) -- and thus easier to justify pop music's exclusion.

I think that's true. But I would have thought that the last couple of generations of pop institutionalization - Sir McCartney, Dylan And The Poets, etc - have changed that. Or more generally, the post-Q / CD idea of the Back Catalogue. (Perhaps this is standard Rockism.)

>>> 4. Compared to literary and artistic "themes," the focus of much academic inquiry, it is not always obvious what popular music is "about" (it is often more functional).

Really? I think it's usually much clearer what pop music is about than what abstract painting is about.

I suppose that novels - White Noise, Lolita, The Trial - are about things. But they are usually about more things than pop songs (watering cans, sprinklers, queues): so it is less clear what they are 'finally', or 'ultimately', about.