Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roger Beebe is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida.

Denise Fulbrook is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.

Ben Saunders is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

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"Smart, provocative, contradictory, suggestive, irritating, inspiring, exhaustive, exhausting and over the top--"Rock Over the Edge" takes the imperative of its title seriously, though often with a welcome sense of humor. Anyone who cares about popular music will find much in here to react to--either by shouting out in affirmation, or hurling the damn thing against the wall."--Anthony DeCurtis, author of "Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters"

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Rock Over the Edge-CL

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Every once in a while, people invested in a particular body of scholarly work should take stock. They should stop and ask themselves what they have accomplished and what they have failed to accomplish. And they may even need to ask whether the questions that they have been asking, the questions that propelled their (collective) research project, need to be reevaluated. There are a number of different reasons why the questions might need to be reconsidered: perhaps what we have already learned has redefined and reconstituted the relevant domain; or perhaps theoretical arguments have raised different issues; or perhaps the field of practices and relations have themselves changed as a result of other forces. Of course, different individuals will end up with different conclusions, not least because they understand the project of their (collective) work differently, or care more about one aspect of the project than another, or because they have different approaches to intellectual work in general.

I think it is time to take stock of the work of the past decades in what has come to be called "popular music studies"; more particularly, that subset of the field that addresses what I have always called, using the term in the broadest possible sense, rock culture. In this brief essay I only want to offer some preliminary judgments, and I do not intend to try to cover the full range of work of which account should be taken. I intend to point to three interrelated problems or, even stronger, "failures" within the discourses of popular music studies. In taking up these three problems, I do not intend to dismiss the writing that has been done both inside and outside of the academy. I don't want to deny that this work is often full of insights or that it is often valuable, fun, and so forth.

In fact, I think it is important to accept that different kinds and sites of writing about popular music-considered as an everyday cultural practice within specific and multiple contexts, in definite relations with other practices and relations-can and should serve lots of different functions. It would be interesting to know something about these differences, differences concerning the questions they attempt to answer and their relationships to or places within the cultures of popular music. Consequently, I am not demanding that all writing about popular music be defined by a single definition or project, least of all by my own. In fact, I think that my view of the project and responsibilities of popular music studies is probably a minority view at best. But I do think that there are specific-empirically, theoretically, and politically inflected-questions that have yet to be significantly addressed in anything like a sustained or collective way. This is not only a matter of one's theoretical paradigm or empirical research practice; it is not only a matter of knowing more but of understanding better. And I do think that the project that I had in mind when I entered the field has been shared over the years by many others who have attempted to take up the challenges of popular music studies.

My own interest in the study of popular music, and therefore the shape of my current misgivings about it, derives from my commitment to and my understanding of cultural studies. In another context I twice tried to define it in the following terms:

If there is no fixed definition of cultural studies, perhaps the terrain on which it operates can at least be identified: cultural studies is concerned with describing and intervening in the ways "texts" and "discourses" (i.e., cultural practices) are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday life of human beings and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against and perhaps transform the existing structures of power.

And again,

Cultural studies is about mapping the deployment and effects of discursive practices and alliances within the context of specific social spaces and milieus. It is about the relations or articulations between (1) discursive alliances as the configurations of practices that define where and how people live specific practices and relations; (2) the practices and configurations of daily life (as the sites of specific forms of determinations, controls, structures of power, struggles, pleasures, etc.); (3) the apparatuses of power that mobilize different practices and effects to organize the spaces of human life and the possibilities of alliances.

My own researches have attempted to theorize and analyze the relations among popular music, popular culture more broadly understood, popular politics, and the systemic structures and forces of inequality and domination (or the balance in the field of forces as it were). Consequently, I have argued for over twenty years (and I have certainly not been alone in this) that rock music cannot be studied in isolation, either from other forms and practices of popular culture or from the structures and practices of everyday life. Studying rock for me was never about further carving up the field of popular culture into media and genres, or the field of cultural studies into increasingly narrow and less-relevant disciplines. But I did think that it was important to legitimate the study of popular music, not only because of its obvious social and economic power, but also because I believed it was an especially exciting and unique entrance into the world of the popular and the quotidian, that it offered (to echo Richard Hoggart) unique insights into and perspectives on the question of how people live their lives in a particular time and place. I thought it was important to recognize the specificity of musical expression and culture, especially in relation to its role in youth cultures in the second half of the twentieth century. I was convinced that popular music studies could force the most radical demands of interdisciplinarity onto the agenda because I was sure it would be impossible to study it in any serious way without a serious critique of the limits and constraints of disciplinarity. And finally-and why I went back to it again in the 1970s after my initial frustrated attempts in the late 1960s-I was certain that it was the most powerful pedagogical tool we had to try to teach new generations of students to take a critical and self-reflective look at the culture they live in and consume. I must admit that I do not think I would give the vast majority of popular music studies very high grades on any of the dimensions I cared (and still care) about. (There are probably lots of scholars who would reject these dimensions entirely, and others who, while accepting one or more of them, might come up with an entirely different set of judgments.)

Obviously, I am disappointed in popular music studies. I wonder whether the academic disciplinization (through organizations, journals, etc.) of popular music studies-by which I mean the identification of popular music as an object of study and specialization equivalent to literature, film, television, and so forth-has taken on such a force of its own that it has now become a serious stumbling block to the kind of work I wanted (and want) to do. I am no longer confident that the academic study of popular music is a particularly useful place from which to begin the sort of project-the project of cultural studies-that has always driven my work. Too...