How we got into popular music studies and where do we go from here?

The British Critical Musicology Group, a forum conceived in West London, in the early 1990s remains a watershed in popular music studies. As with Joseph Kerman’s ‘How We Got into Analysis, And How to Get Out’ (1980) a decade or so earlier, The British Critical Musicology Group was key in the transformative methodological approaches in popular music studies from the 1990s onwards, not least through its drawing upon of key concepts around postmodernism, cultural studies, critical theory and post-structuralism. This paper looks at the formation and on-going debates around critical musical, new musicology and popular musicology. Using the recent call for papers for the Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies – and the subsequent submissions as a framework – this paper provides a brief overview of the history of popular music studies, raising questions as to the future of popular musicology. It then draws upon specific chapter submissions from the Handbook as a means of providing suggestions for future discourse within this field.