ABSTRACT
Much is made in popular music studies of the decisive and differentiating role of mediations. Yet almost nothing is made of the most fundamental set of differentiating mediations, without which there can be no cultural transaction at all: the sensorium. The foregoing is intended to break up the terrain of music discourse impacted by the force and weight of cumulative public and academic simplifications. A history of debates about 'popular' would take people a great way towards understanding its politics, but also take them a great way from our present purposes. The terrain referred to by the word is travelled publicly in the media with an almost enviable heedlessness of the barely concealed hazards. It is sufficiently clear in academic scholarship that notwithstanding the untroubled media categorizations, it is not always possible to identify what people mean by the term just by pointing at a text or image.
