ABSTRACT
The journal Popular Music, the issue of which was themed around "popular and folk," was from the very beginning notable for its significant inclusion of ethno musicological work; and throughout the 1980s it also published a small number of text-oriented essays. In the 1970s, academic engagement with popular music—or rather with its contexts of production, mediation and consumption—mainly came from within the disciplines of sociology and post-Marxist cultural studies, and focused on industry, identity, and "subcultures." Engagement with material practices tended to derive from, or was informed by, ethno-musicology, which however tended to focus on non-Western music and/or blues and folk, rather than on the urban/commercial/industrial popular music of Europe and North America. Ethnomusicological study mainly focused on the texts and contexts of non-Western repertoires. Ethnomusicology and ethnography had increasingly turned its attention either to the contexts of Western popular music or to the role and cross-fertilising impact of musical traditions associated with diasporic communities and place.
