Here are a couple of recent articles that look at the changing nature of the “popular” in pop music. The first is a short discussion of how the changing structure of distribution is changing the way that the music charts are designed and, perhaps, speak to a broader shift in the texture of popular culture. At one point the author writes:

As popular music continues to transition from an album-based industry to a singles-based one, a new taxonomy of pop songs may develop. Some songs will be made explicitly for radio, while others will be tailored for streaming, and still others intended for downloading. Radio songs will have thunderous choruses, like “Roar” ’s, that will fill stadium-size emotional needs; streaming songs will be whispery ballads that are best heard in your headphones; and the downloadable music will be aimed at older audiences who have yet to embrace the idea of paying for access.

These are themes that we can keep in mind for the second part of the semester when we start thinking about technology and the political economy in more detail, but it is an interesting approach to thinking about musical culture in general (if suffering from a version of “technological determinism.” 

On a related note, here’s a very different take on the rise of blockbusters in popular culture that suggests that the fragmentation taking place may not, in the end, be taking place at all.

Both are worth thinking about in relation to understandings of popular culture that have been inherited in popular music studies from British cultural studies in the 1970s. Stuart Hall, in his famous essay “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular” (which is probably one of best essays…and you should read it), talks about the popular as a place of both control and resistance. As he writes:

Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is the stake to be one or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture — already fully formed — might be simply “expressed”. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.

Yet, given these discussions of the ‘pop’ in popular music, I’m not sure there’s much space for resistance these days. Or, has the fabric of the popular that Stuart Hall changed with the rise of new forms of cultural production, commodification and consumption? This is a question we’ll return to in a few weeks when we talk about subcultures, but is worth starting to think about as we start talking about music and everyday life.