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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music

The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music

Weisbard, Eric

Hardcover

Series: Oxford Handbooks

Pop/Rock

ISBN10: 0197760252
ISBN13: 9780197760253
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jun 15 2026
Pages: 776
Weight: 2.88
Height: 2.41 Width: 7.20 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
Pop music, by definition, is commercial music: motivated by profit more than artistry, changing to fit the needs of audiences and industry, not codes of genre, seeking a mainstream appeal that forbids too much fussiness about aesthetic absolutes. This resistance to firm definition beyond ledger sheets has left no precise field of pop studies to glean from. Nevertheless, academics and writers continue to pursue this shifting field of study, approaching pop music with a rigorous and critical eye. Famously, these studies have yielded the phrase poptimism, a disposition to correct for the anti-mainstream biases of what, by contrast, is deemed rockism.

The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music uncovers pop music studies within popular music studies. Featuring an international roster of authors from academic and non-academic disciplines, it tracks the origin points, formal staples, identity intersections, and 21st century matriculation of Top 40 music and all its kindred forms as an increasingly global and self-aware enterprise.

This volume features chapters on racy 19th-century sheet music, Thailand's pleng string 1980s, Eurovision, the coded influence of Black gay men on pop, disability and pop, Spanish-language pop's breakthrough, streaming's consumer politics, TikTok virality, and much more. Overall, the wide-reaching genre of pop has long represented the easiest entry points for outsiders to sanctioned taste and cultural capital. Non-white performers, women and LGBTQ artists, immigrants and amateurs: pop has welcomed them all to the stage and the spotlight.

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