By Jean Burgess

The study of popular music has been carried out on the margins of various humanities and social science disciplines for decades, and is only just beginning to claim institutional space in its own right. Regardless of whether or not this will be a good thing in the long term, life in the margins has made popular music studies a particularly good example of the benefits of interdisciplinarity. More than anything else, it is the confident synthesis of methods for understanding popular music drawn from cultural studies, sociology, and musicology that makes Shuker’s Popular Music: The Key Concepts a significant contribution to the available literature.

Key Concepts in Popular Music presents comprehensive definitions and explanations of some of the main terms and concepts used in the field, covering key musical genres, musical subcultures, methodologies, musicological terms, and musical phenomena. As is to be expected in a work of this sort, each entry includes suggestions for further reading and listening and is cross-referenced with related concepts. Part of the now extensive Routledge Key Concepts series (which includes similar volumes on equally broad topics such as economics, language and linguistics, eastern philosophy, and cinema studies), this book was first published as Key Concepts in Popular Music in 1997 and has since then become established as a core undergraduate reference text in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. Whether intentionally or not, the book functions in some ways as a concise companion to Shuker’s popular undergraduate text book on the same subject, Understanding Popular Music, first published in 1994, with a new edition released in 2002.

The usefulness of this book lies primarily in Shuker’s concise and perceptive explanations of key theoretical terms and categories. The entries are as lucid and accessible as they are dense with references to key theoretical and empirical works on particular topics: most undergraduate students would benefit from being able to access a clear explanation of the way cultural studies practioners have used and understood the terms subculture, homology, fandom, bricolage, or the culture industries. There is even an especially brave two-page exploration of the meanings of the term “popular music”.

Reference works on popular music risk re-inscribing the Rolling Stone canon, but Shuker successfully avoids, or at least backgrounds, this effect by listing particular artists not on their own, but only as exemplars of particular genres or subcultures, which are in turn included on the basis of their social or cultural significance. In accordance with his emphasis on the cultural over the aesthetic, Shuker deals with various aspects of consumption in some depth – for example, there is a fascinating section on the cultural politics of the mix tape. While Shuker does pays lip service to the relevant aspects of cultural policy, the music press, and the recording industries, their lack of integration with the sections on subcultures and audiences is a little disappointing.

It is, of course, notoriously difficult to provide depth to any particular topic in a reference work, particularly one with as much scope as this. However, there are two areas where certain silences make the book appear quite dated. The first of these is the general topic of music technologies and digital media. I was disappointed to find that the most recent technology-related shift in the politics of music consumption – MP3 and peer-to-peer filesharing – has been entirely omitted. Any future editions will most certainly have to engage with this phenomenon and the debates around it. Likewise, it is becoming vital that academic work on popular music acknowledges in greater depth the displacement of the “band” as the central category of popular music performance in the face of relative dominance of DJ culture, in and beyond dance clubs, and now extending into “live music” spaces and contexts.

Secondly, the book is regrettably (but familiarly) anglocentric and masculine in its range of topics. Even more worryingly, there is insufficient engagement with the areas of identity politics that, one could argue, much of popular music’s self-representation and cultural politics is actually “about” these days, and that have accordingly been the key topics for debate within studies of popular music cultures in the last five years: gender and sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity, the global and the local. Gender and ethnicity are treated in brief and as special topics, and are therefore quarantined from the discussion of the majority of popular music genres, allowing whiteness and masculinity to continue to enjoy the privileges of exnomination.

Nevertheless, the book will continue to be a useful addition to the reference sections of university libraries as well as the bookshelves of students and academics alike. Cultural studies scholars who do not specialise in popular music will consult the entries on genres to establish some sense of what work has been done on them already, while undergraduate students of popular music will be able to clarify the meanings and utility of some of the most apparently difficult and amorphous theoretical concepts used in cultural studies work on popular music.

Details

Popular Music: The Key Concepts
Roy Shuker
London: Routledge, 2002, 2nd edition
Paperback, $18.95 US
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