‘Nice Tune, but what does it Mean?’: Popular Music Studies, Ethnography and Textual Analysis

Why was hip hop quickly embraced in places like Campbelltown, western Sydney? Was Kylie Minogue’s Body Language a ‘sexy’ album? How do you know when you’re listening to an ‘authentic’ country song? Although these questions address diverse musics, they have two important threads in common. First, all of them might easily be asked in either the popular or the academic press. Ideas about race, sex, and authenticity are frequently bound up with talk about popular music, whether that talk be on commercial radio or in the pages of Context.1 Second, all of these questions deal with musical meaning. How music comes to mean particular things, why it does so, and what this might tell us about the social world (our identities, power relations, and so on) are questions that have emerged as central concerns in popular music studies.2 This is not surprising: a cultural form which is used in political rallies and in Kleenex advertisements—and which millions of people use as a way of shaping their own identities—must have considerable power. It is only natural that, as music researchers, we should want to explore how popular music achieves some of its effects. However, while it is generally accepted that popular music’s meanings are an important site for research, there is relatively little agreement on the best way to approach this issue. This situation has been exacerbated by the very nature of ‘popular music studies,’ a field that encompasses a wide variety of academic disciplines. In this article, I will review how two different fields of research—musicology and cultural studies—have contributed to popular music studies.3 Musicology and cultural studies are often seen as diametrically opposed; musicology deals with sounds, cultural studies deals with everything else. Here, I wish to