Popular Music

This module introduces students to a variety of methods to interpret, analyse, and understand popular music and its impact on society. Each week focuses on a selected genre or thread in modern popular music, from rock and roll to hip-hop to underground and dance music; by examining these genres and threads, students are encouraged to use theoretical frameworks that help reveal the cultural and musical significance of the chosen examples. These frameworks include media theory, gender and performativity, and the critical examination of race and identity. We also focus more broadly on how popular music propagates itself over time via its relationship to technology, cultural and subcultural movements, and political currents. Although the course does introduce and employ a few musical-analytical concepts, it is an elective course and has no prerequisites.