Popular Music Theory

-Theory underpinning the study of popular music is musicology.
-Howard Goodall- The comparisons between modern and classical.
-In "Look! Hear! The uneasy relationship of music and television (2002) Simon Firth argues that the defining feature of popular music is 'televisual aesthetic'
-"The Sociology Of Rock"-Simon Firth - The emanting from the social influences.

Theorists have tended to focus on issues to do with audiences of popular music and the representation of performers, (Age, race, sex, class)
Emanting from this is a school of media and culture known as Madonna Studies. Influenced by the Queer Theory and the work of Foucault Madonna.
-Judith Butler

-Pamela Robertson - Guilty Pleaures Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (1996)
>"Is Madonna a glamorised fu*k doll or queen of parodic critique?"

Popular Music and Post Modernism
-Faith in grand narratives have collapsed (science, religion, history, human progress)
-Identity is fluid
-Consumerism is a creative endeavour in which the self is constructed "You are what you consume"
-No distinction between real and the simulated.
-Convergence of information technology and society.