The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music

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.

Eric Weisbard is Professor of American Studies at University of Alabama and author of such books as Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music and Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music. Cofounder and longtime organizer of the Pop Conference (including three edited collections), he has also co-edited Journal of Popular Music Studies, been Village Voice music editor, and edited the Spin Alternative Record Guide.