ABSTRACT

In June 2002 I was writing up the theoretical background to work I’d been doing since the early 1980s. One major issue was the epistemic standoff between the music is music and everything but the music camps in popular music studies. With my musical background in institutions of formal education as well as in pubs and clubs, I was able to deconstruct the first of those two – musical absolutism and its contextless texts – but I needed help with the other of those two entrenched positions, with the notion that music could be studied as musically textless contexts. That’s why I, as a muso, asked trusted friends and colleagues with non-muso backgrounds to explain why so many popular music scholars had been so reluctant to engage with music as text.