What is Popular Music Studies?
2: A Reading List
Apr 04, 2025
Hi all,
Welcome to the second installment of this series on popular music studies. I’m still brainstorming topics and approaches for it, so please do get in touch if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to try and tackle. But one idea that occurred to me right away was that it might be useful to compile a reading list. Surely one of the best ways to get to know a field is to understand some of its representative texts, for in some ways a list of agreed-upon reading material is all there is, fundamentally, to a discipline. But before I get into it, let me explain my thought process a little. Of course, all lists are designed in particular ways for particular purposes. The same applies here, which means that a little discussion is required.
First, this list doesn’t aim to exhaustively or definitively represent popular music studies, but rather to serve as a basic foundation for a current graduate student who is preparing for qualifying exams.1 What that means, (a) is that the presumption would be that this list would get edited (both trimmed, perhaps, and definitely expanded) based on the student’s research interests. If one was focusing on Afro-Cuban music, for example, I could see a third or more of this list getting replaced by material on that tradition. It also means (b) that there’s a bit of a recency bias here, in an effort to capture current thinking in the field. On my own exam reading list, I had older books too (e.g. Josh Kun’s Auditotopia, George Lipstiz’s Dangerous Crossroads), which are here de-emphasized in order to make room for newer material. But that doesn’t mean that older texts aren’t still valuable; anyone starting here would ideally look backwards as well, again particularly based on their area of interest.
Second, I tried to keep this tightly focused around popular music studies, with a few key selections that fit more firmly in ethnomusicology (e.g. Feld and Gray), musicology (e.g. McClary), jazz studies (e.g. Chapman and Mueller), music theory (e.g. Doll and Temperley) and sound studies (e.g. Thompson and Sterne). Some of these books naturally straddle fields, while most blend disciplines into whatever approach best fits their topic. That is in and of itself pretty characteristic of work in popular music studies.
Third, the list is mostly books; if there are articles, they are focused on methodological questions, debates in/histories of a field, or else articles that preview important forthcoming books.
Fourth, if I were working with a grad student on an exam list for an eventual dissertation in popular music studies, there would have to be an additional list—at least as long as this—entirely dedicated to what we might group under the umbrella of critical theory: feminist and queer theory, poststructural theory, political economy, Black studies, postcolonial theory, and more. In other words, though each of the works on this list utilize critical theory, they themselves aren’t important texts in those adjacent fields. For a student to likewise learn how to utilize the critical contributions from those fields, another reading list would have to be made. Indeed, I don’t think it is or should be possible to work in popular music studies without understanding the contours of these fields and the histories from which they emerge.
What would you add?
A Sample Exam Reading List in Popular Music Studies
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance
David Ake, Jazz Cultures
Stephen Amico, “‘We Are All Musicologists Now’; or, the End of Ethnomusicology,” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (2020): 1–32.
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music
Philip Auslander, In Concert: Performing Musical Persona
Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music
Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s
Dale Chapman, The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture
Amy Coddington, How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race
Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music
Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture
Dan DiPiero, Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl
Jane Desmond, “Ethnography as Ethics and Epistemology: Why American Studies Should Embrace Fieldwork and Why it Hasn’t,” American Studies 53, no. 1 (2014): 27–56.
Stephanie Doktor, “Finding Florence Mills: The Voice of the Harlem Jazz Queen in the Compositions of William Grant Still and Edmund Thornton Jenkins,” Journal for the Society of American Music 14, no. 4 (2020): 451–479.
Christopher Doll, Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era
Eric Drott, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture
Steven Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” Ethnomusicology vol., 28, no. 3 (September, 1984): 383-409.
Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor
Kaleb Goldschmitt, Bossa Mundo Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries
Lila Ellen Gray, Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life
David Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording
Mimi Haddon, What Is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82
Mack Hagood, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control
Jessica A. Holmes, “Billie Eilish and the Feminist Aesthetics of Depression: White Femininity, Generation Z, and Whisper Singing,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 76, no. 3 (2023): 785–829.
Dean Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music
Robin James, Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism
Robin James, The Future of Rock and Roll 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence
Loren Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs
Lauron Kehrer, Queer Voices in Hip Hop
Roshanak Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music
Johnathan Leal, Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop
Tamara Levitz, “The Musicological Elite,” Current Musicology 102.
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
George Lipsitz, “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies,” American Quarterly vol. 42, no. 4 (December, 1990): 615-636.
Emily Lordi, The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s
Maureen Mahon, Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race
Maureen Mahon, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll
Sara Marcus, Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
Corey Miles, Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South
Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
Celeste Day Moore, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France
Matthew D. Morrison, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
Darren Mueller, At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz
Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology.
David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation
David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds,. Keywords in Sound.
Elliott Powell, Sounds from the Other Side: Afro–South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music
Liz Przybylski, Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams
Guthrie P. Ramsey J.R., Race Music.
Guthrie P. Ramsey J.R., Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present
Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora.
Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
Richard T. Rodríguez, A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Tara Rodgers, ed., Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound
Francesca Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
Francesca Royster, Black Country Music
Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, eds, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies
M. Myrta Leslie Santana, Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba
Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop
Barry Shank, “From Rice to Ice: the face of race in rock and pop”
Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas
Barry Shank, The Political Force of Musical Beauty
Ryan Thomas Skinner, Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music
Ryan Thomas Skinner, Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country
Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History
Johnathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Pavitra Sundar, Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema
Greg Tate, Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader
Benjamin Tausig, Bangkok after Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.
David Temperley, The Musical Language of Rock
Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism
Alyx Vesey, Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century
Steve Waksman, Live Music in America
Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
Eric Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy, The Rival Mainstreams of American Music
Eric Weisbard, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste
Brian F. Wright, The Bastard Instrument: A Cultural History of the Electric Bass
Multiple, “From Anarchy to Institution: An IASPM-US History Roundtable,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 26, no. 4 (2014): 521–533.
Multiple, “Musical Beauty and Top 40 Democracy: A moderated conversation,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 29, no. 1 (2017): 1–11.
Let me know what I forgot (and cry hard).
Additional recommendations from readers:
Jerome Camal, Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics
Adriana Helbig, Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration
Siv B. Lie, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France
J. Griffith Rollefson, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality
Maria Sonevytsky, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine
Nicholas Tochka, Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania
[1] In north American PhD programs, qualifying exams take place after coursework and before the dissertation process. In other words, after all your required classes are finished, you take a big exam. If you pass, you are considered “ABD” (all but dissertation) and a PhD “candidate” rather than “student.” Everyone’s exams are slightly different, but basically involve some demonstration of engagement with the history of your field. In the past, most humanities programs would sit you in a room for eight hours and ask you to answer a few essay prompts. These days, it’s more common to be able to choose between that format and a take-home exam, which is more extensive (but with less pressure on any given day).
In my case, I opted for the latter, and answered one essay question per week, for a total of three weeks. I had all my notes and books available to me, so these were more like term papers that included full citations, etc. In either case, once the written portion is finished, there is also an aural component, where you talk with your committee about your exam answers for an hour or two, kind of like a warm-up to your dissertation defense. To prepare for these exams, a giant reading list is compiled in advance, and you basically have a semester to work your way through the material. I had two reading lists for my exams, corresponding to two essay questions: one comparing methods in ethnomusicology and American studies, and one investigating my interest in “contingency” across continental philosophy. The third exam question asked me to prepare a draft dissertation prospectus so I could hit the ground running after candidacy began. This all happened at the end of a spring semester that I spent studying my reading lists. Three questions, three weeks, and then the summer to get my dissertation prospectus approved.
