Popular Music History 2

This course explores the history of popular music (primarily in the United States and Britain) from roughly 1960 to the present day. As a matter of course, we will distinguish between music that is popular and a more refined notion of popular music (that is, music that manipulates reproduction and commodity culture to achieve widespread distribution). From 1960 to today in the world of popular music, there were explosions in the visibility of racial, gender, and identity issues in what we might call the politics of aesthetics. Meanwhile, technology moves from the reification (the “thing-making” element) of the LP and cassette to the intangibility (information-driven ontology) of the MP3 and streaming. We will examine the impact of developing technologies (radio, television, LP, cassette, CD, MP3, streaming services) not only in the “sound” of popular music but also in the very birth and development of our more specific notion of popular music. Music ranging from early Rock and Motown to the music of Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé will be discussed with respect to cultural developments, uses of technology, the economic considerations of the music industry, and the political climate in which such music participated and was produced.