ABSTRACT
Different understandings of music and its potential sacred or transcendental qualities accrue a pronounced importance in contemporary times of global migration and religious or spiritual plurality. Various forms of popular music in the conventional sense do provide a useful point of departure, as do different types of religious music. The general lack of interest towards the religious or the sacred within popular music studies is indicative of the trend to treat popular culture, and popular music in particular, as separate from and in many cases even antithetical to religious ideologies. The inevitable multidimensionality and conceptual fluidity of both the popular and the sacred necessitates an analytical approach that foregrounds the socio-cultural context of the phenomenon under investigation. The formulation “people making music” is treacherous inasmuch as it alludes to the division between the musical ones and those who merely consume the sounds and whatever surrounds them.
