What is Popular Music Studies?
3: More History and the Jazz Question
Jul 10, 2025
Hi friends,
This is another post in a semi-regular series on popular music studies. The first two are here and here. As always, please be in touch with any feedback, and thanks for reading.
Once More on the Origins
In the introduction to the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music—the last major anthology of writing in popular music studies—editors Steve Waksman and Andy Bennett write that
The institutional foundations of popular music studies were established over a period of ten years between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, punctuated at intervals by the publication of highly influential books such as Dave Laing’s (1969) The Sound of Our Time, R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson’s (eds.) (1972) The Sounds of Social Change, Wilfred Mellers’s (1973) Twilight of the Gods and Simon Frith’s (1978) The Sociology of Rock (republished in 1981 as Sound Effects). (Bennett and Waksman 2015, 1)
As they write, these books were coming out at the same time that rock music journalism was really finding its footing, from about 1966 onward. Since then, “the dialogue between academic and journalistic writing on popular music has remained ongoing, with many key figures – including Simon Frith, the British sociologist who did much to establish the legitimacy of popular music studies as a field – working between the two spheres” (2).
These observations point to and reinforce a couple of the dynamics that I wrote about in an earlier post—namely, that popular music studies is perhaps uniquely caught up in non-academic writing on the subject (since popular music journalism has been an area of significant cultural interest in its own right),[1] as well as the fact that rock (and to a certain extent, pop) music played an outsized role in the early years of the discipline to the degree that it took concerted effort to decenter that focus in the field, to make room for discussions of other genres and concerns.
On this latter point, as Matt Brennan will argue two years later, the handbook’s summary of the origins of popular music studies “position[s] the beginning of the rock era in the late 1960s as ground zero for taking popular music seriously, unwittingly demonstrating how jazz is routinely snubbed as a major form of popular music to which popular music studies owe an enormous intellectual debt” (Brennan 2017, 13). Here, Brennan points to the still-relevant observation that jazz studies and popular music studies are most often separated disciplinarily, each field precluding by some measure a real account of the other. Brennan continues,
A non-rockist, jazz-friendly (and hopefully not overly jazz-snobbish) account of the intellectual roots of taking popular music seriously might include the numerous seminal jazz and blues-focused books on American popular music that predated rock histories. In terms of bridging the academic/journalistic divide of popular music writing, for instance, it would be remiss not to mention Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff ’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, Marshall Stearns’ The Story of Jazz, Amiri Baraka’s (née. Leroi Jones) Blues People, and Francis Newton’s The Jazz Scene. These were among the books (rather than Laing, Gillett, Marcus, and so on) that first grappled with the implications of American popular music being socially and aesthetically significant (2017, 14).[2]
Chiefly concerned with the cleavages separating rock and jazz in US culture (both academic and popular), Brennan’s book When Genres Collide argues that several factors informed this split, including jazz advocates’ concerted efforts to institutionalize the music through campaigns of legitimation (i.e. campaigns that argued jazz was “just like” classical music, and therefore worthy of conservatory-based study), as well as the influence of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the Birmingham School of popular culture analysis that moved away from sociological methods towards a combination of Marxist political economy and semiotic analysis.[3]
The Frankfurt School was actually the first academic impulse to take mass, consumer, and popular culture seriously; even though Theodor Adorno infamously bemoaned jazz’s ostensibly commercial nature, criticizing it vehemently, it’s true that he and others were taking the music seriously well before the 1960s. But by the time that popular music studies was coming into its own, the Birmingham School had succeeded the Frankfurt school as the center of Marxist-informed critiques of popular culture. Rather than criticizing jazz, punk and other subcultural rock music had become the central focus, and critics like Hebdige largely praised the music’s capacity to foster genuine counter-cultural awareness among small groups. Those like Baraka—who argued that jazz was a total social phenomenon, a unique synthesis of African American creativity and the history of chattel slavery, and which therefore held deep insights into the American psyche—were overlooked.
Jazz vs Rock Popular Music
Whatever the reasons, the split between jazz (as a genre and as an academic field) and popular music (likewise) remains pertinent: For example, there are separate “jazz studies” and “popular music studies” interest groups within the American Musicological Society, and despite the fact that many members of each overlap with the other, there are also many who do not, staying firmly grounded in one or the other.
Distinctions between jazz and other forms of popular music make sense, to a certain degree, on a formalistic level, insofar as the music’s construction, genre characteristics, and cultures are today deeply distinct from other popular genres. At the same time, both rock and jazz share common roots in the blues, and rock emerged out of a particular strain of blues/jazz vocabulary pioneered by queer Black women like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and and Big Mama Thornton.[4]
The connections aren’t just historical, however. Interestingly for this conversation, the last time jazz and hip hop have been discussed so thoroughly as related, concomitant musics was also in 2015, when Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly pushed that connection forward in a way that hadn’t been seen since A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 The Low End Theory.
Lamar’s incorporation of live musicians like Kamasi Washington in the recording process—mirroring Tribe’s collaborations with legendary bassist Ron Carter—also link the conversation to a thriving post-fusion scene in LA where Washington is in community with Thundercat, Flying Lotus, and the broader Jazz is Dead phenomenon.
But tracing such connections—between “jazz” and “popular music”—continues to treat the two entities as if they are separate. What can come from treating them as if they are the same?[5]
Adding one final complication into the mix, there is a certain conflation at work in Brennan’s argument between popular music (studies) and rock music (as a genre), a conflation that makes sense given the degree to which the latter implicitly defined the former for several decades. But a) that’s no longer true, given that rock is arguably subcultural again, leaving the top of the charts to pop and hip hop; furthermore, b) rock music itself isn’t what it once was. Arguably no longer analogous with the white/male guitar heroes of the past (Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger), rock is both less hegemonic and more fractured than it ever has been, showing up as an affect across all kinds of genres, even as the idea of genre comes under new scrutiny in the era of streaming playlists.
Following these changes, the time might be right to reappraise relationships between rock—as well as popular music (studies)—and jazz (studies), as disciplines, as genres, as affects. I’m making that case in a new article I’m working on, and that’s where I’ll pick up next time.
Cited
Bennett, Andy and Steve Waksman, eds. 2015. The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music. SAGE Publications, Ltd.
Brennan, Matt. 2017. When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle Between Jazz and Rock. Bloomsbury.
Mahon, Maureen. 2020. Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. Duke University Press.
Wald, Gayle. 2008. Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Beacon Press.
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1 Today, institutions and initiatives that keep this dialogue alive include the well-known 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury and the American Music series at the University of Texas Press—both of which are as or more likely to publish journalists as they are academics—as well as the Pop Conference.
2 I think this is a really important observation that cuts through how accustomed many of us have become to this implicit and explicit split, notwithstanding Brennan’s use of the word “seminal,” which I promise we can stop using.
3 “Still, it is hard to overstate the importance of the scholarly blueprint offered by Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy and others who taught or studied at the CCCS. Hebdige’s (1979) Subculture has especially continued to loom large over the field of popular music studies and subcultural studies remains a primary underpinning to much popular music research, even as the concept of ‘subcultures’ has been subject to repeated challenge…” (Bennett and Waksman 2015, 3). In addition to the influence of the Birmingham School, the authors also point to new musicology—McClary and Leppert’s (1987) Music and Society for example—as exerting powerful influences over the formation of popular music studies, which had started to become organized as IASPM formed in 1981. Though ostensibly tangential to popular music studies (in its focus on mostly Western classical music), new musicology’s “rejection of the ideology of autonomous musical art that had dominated academic musicology, and accompanying recognition that music was shaped as much by questions of power and cultural representation as any other expressive form, was a necessary precondition for taking popular music more seriously as a subject of academic study” (4).
4 E.g. see Wald 2008 and Mahon 2020.
5 This implicitly raises the complications involved in defining popular music; while one understanding of the term “popular” certainly has to do with how many people listen to a given genre of music, that’s never been the only way to understand what we might also describe as vernacular music, what we might have to admit is also mass produced music in the age of too-late capitalism. If it was, there would be a real case to be made that jazz is by definition not popular music.
