ABSTRACT
With popular musicology being a young discipline, there is freedom to explore a diverse range of subject areas; these, in turn, can illuminate problems by providing insights that can then be applied to musical texts – so expanding the more traditional emphasis on the music to include, for example, issues surrounding representation, gender and performance. Thus, while it is largely accepted that female innovations in rock, for example, remain mostly at the level of lyrics, self-presentation, ideology and rhetoric, this should not prevent us from observing the interesting divergences and differences that characterise such artists as Kate Bush, Tori Amos and Bjork. The road map for popular music analysis is one that is not simply informed by the music, the biographies and the performances of the artists under scrutiny. Rather, it is the sense of dialogue with other addressees, imagined or real, that gives them their particular relevance – and this includes the media and pornography websites.
