Index mp3 music

Both scholars and observers agree that the field of popular music studies is far too interdisciplinary to be considered a "discipline." Practitioners come from departments of communication, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, sociology, English, linguistics, economics, philosophy, and, yes, even sometimes music schools. The methodologies employed by the scholars are as varied as their backgrounds, and yet their basic information needs are similar. The fact that most academic libraries, and music libraries in particular, have paltry popular music holdings forces researchers to be self-reliant and imaginative in acquiring necessary resources. Librarians and other information providers could better serve scholars' needs by acknowledging the vitality of the field, developing core collections of recordings, journals, and books, and seeking to acquire personal collections of recordings and memorabilia. As the twenty-first century continues, waves of music librarians will enter the workforce having grown up surrounded by popular music and culture, and this generational shift--coupled with advances in information technology--should prove beneficial for popular music scholars. Although popular music studies can be an expensive passion, its practitioners soldier on doing whatever they must to procure the information necessary to reveal the role the music plays in society and to analyze its musicological significance.

Popular music has long been derided as frivolous and ephemeral, but it has proved to have a lasting cultural impact worthy of scholarly work. Just as rock and roll is here to stay, so are the academics devoted to studying it and all the other sounds contained under the "popular music" rubric. Sheila Whiteley has highlighted curious parallels between the genesis of popular music as a field of study and the emergence of rock music, claiming both are rebellious, eclectic, and sexy (xiii). The study of popular music in university music departments has been steadily shedding its pariah status over the past three decades, and has even come so far as to be acceptable in some musicology programs--such as the one at UCLA (Robert Walser, personal communication, 11 July 2002). (1) Music faculties still tend to be weighted in favor of traditional musicologists focused on the canon of Western art music and engaged in rigorous score reading and theoretical analysis, but popular musicologists continue to gain entry to the academy by waging a war of attrition. As a result of music departments' reluctance to include popular music scholars, the common practice of maintaining a home discipline in a field such as communication or media studies, while studying popular music on the side, continues. For example, the self-proclaimed "Professor of Pop" Andrew Goodwin is a professor of communication at the University of San Francisco, and he maintains that understanding cable television, or radio, or Hollywood cinema demands considering popular music (47). The eclectic lot of popular music scholars sometimes focus on the musical text, and sometimes on the music's position within a range of social contexts, but no matter what angle they take on the topic they all need sound recordings.

The combination of performance taking precedence over composition and the general lack of scores to analyze dictates that sound recordings are the essential information need of the popular music researcher. Necessary recordings include both audio and video, studio and live, and multiple versions of the music by the same performer or a variety of performers (Bonna J. Boettcher, personal communication, 11 July 2002). In developing a musicology of rock, Allan F. Moore, Professor of Popular Music--certainly one of the few in the world to have that title--at the University of Surrey, UK, has labeled the sounds themselves the "primary text" (1). B. Lee Cooper mandates that "immersion in music" is necessary for popular music scholarship, and warns that excessive specialization in music analysis is dangerous and can result in too much sociological/literary/ethnographic theorizing and too little discussion of the music (104). Popular music scholars make use of libraries and archives to find and listen to recordings, but the lack of ready resources in their home libraries frequently forces scholars to practice what might be called personal collection development. (2) Most scholars who decide to write about popular music are already collectors, making it possible for them to rely on their own holdings to a certain extent for research purposes, but this adds an additional financial burden not experienced by academics in other fields. The thousands of dollars spent annually on materials is accepted as a given by some researchers, along with the tactics of prevailing on friends and using interlibrary loan (Gary Burns, personal communication, 11 July 2002; Walser, personal communication).

Journals are another crucial information need for popular music scholars, important enough for Popular Music and Society editor Gary Burns to proclaim them "the main entities around which a discipline of popular music studies might coalesce" ("Interdisciplinary" 50). They allow practitioners to stay informed about current research topics and trends, and seeing as how there are only four significant academic journals in the field--Popular Music and Society (started 1971), Popular Music (started 1981), the Journal of Popular Music Studies (started 1988), and the Australian journal Perfect Beat (started 1992)--it is feasible that the average scholar could keep up with all the titles on a yearly basis. (3) In addition to the academic journals, researchers also need consumer magazines and trade journals such as Billboard to keep abreast of what information the public is being offered and what is happening behind the scenes within the recording industry. These sources are rarely found in academic libraries, and when they are it is usually in microfilm, which irks some scholars because it is not the same as having the hard copies to browse (Burns, personal communication). Scholars who frequently and happily use microfilm of journals and magazines still find it hard to locate many titles, including the long-standing British periodical Melody Maker as well as more obscure publications from the 1950s and 1960s (Donald C. Meyer, personal communication, 12 July 2002).

Books are obviously necessary resources, from general reference sources and collections of scholarly essays to biographies and discographies, and practitioners use libraries and archives--in addition to more personal collection development--to fulfill these needs. Many popular music sources fall under the loose heading of ephemera: fan-generated publications, mass-marketed, fan-oriented publications loaded with photos, publicity photos, press releases, newspaper clippings, concert programs, scrapbooks, correspondence, buttons, lunchboxes, etc. (Boettcher, personal communication). Finding ephemera often requires trips to archival collections such as the Bowling Green State University (BGSU) Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives, which William Schurk started in 1967 and still maintains. He acknowledges that what they have and how he gets to use it is a special privilege, and he wishes others could enjoy such a "perk" in their home institutions (William Schurk, personal communication, 13 July 2002). Luckily for many eager researchers, Schurk is glad to share the collection and help steer them in the right direction if he does not have what they need. Using interlibrary loan is a common practice for accessing books and journal articles, but few libraries are willing to circulate sound recordings or rare archival material. At Middle Tennessee State University's (MTSU) Center for Popular Music, no materials circulate (Wells 872). Most archival collections, like the ones at MTSU and BGSU, are open to researchers, but the time and travel expenses involved in doing onsite work make this a limited option for scholars operating on shoestring budgets--should they be fortunate enough to have budgets at all.