The Ontology of Idol: Towards a Situated Aesthetics of Popular Music

In the original invitation to the constructively titled colloquium ‘Renegotiating Musicology,’ of which this article is a result, organisers suggested that participants should feel free to think as broadly as possible about their particular places in the discipline. This is an unusually fraught request with regard to the musicological study of popular music. As several respected scholars have noted, the field of popular music studies has quite simply failed to craft a coherent and cohesive body of theories and methods for the analysis of its chosen objects of study. Further, for some, this lack of coherence constitutes a full-blown disciplinary crisis.1 As Lawrence Grossberg has noted in a scathing essay—in which he registered his disappointment with the entire field—we have a lot of theoretical problems, but not a lot of theories to solve them. Worse, according to Grossberg, few of the explanations we do have are specific to a discipline that lacks a common analytical language.2 While Grossberg might rightly criticise a familiar array of trans-historical, de-contextualised, apparently universal concerns for a field he seems to suspect may not actually exist, his existential angst is ultimately misleading. The distinction ‘popular music’ upon which so many of his careful ruminations are based is itself a false analytic category. There is no unifying process, principle or set of common materials that anyone can point to that all versions or iterations of what we call popular music share. Significant exceptions to the standard array of definitions can always be found within music that is nevertheless broadly recognised to be firmly within the family. Too often social categories such as ‘popular music’ masquerade as aesthetic facts reinscribing essentialist notions of music that precede