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••• Popular Music •••

contested spectatorships’ (ibid.: 368). While both Fonarow and Thornton offer
important advances over the CCCS approach, there is a significant sense in which
they remain committed to analysing the more spectacular dimensions of popular
music consumption, especially among the young.
In recent years there are signs of an increasing dissatisfaction with the neglect
of the ‘ordinary’ and continuing obsession with youth culture. For instance,
Hesmondhalgh (2002) convincingly argues that a youth-centred approach has long
outlived its usefulness, but can only single out three studies that attempt to connect
music consumption to the rhythms of everyday life. These are Crafts et al.’s (1993)
collection of interview transcripts in My Music; DeNora’s (2000) account of how
music is a device of social ordering in Music and Everyday Life; and Bull’s (2000) dis-
cussion of Walkmans and the aestheticization of urban experience in Sounding Out
the City. Likewise, Carrabine and Longhurst (2002) have argued that it is the dynamic
between the ordinary and extraordinary that demands attention in future research
on consumption in everyday life to overcome partial and selective accounts of cul-
tural practice.
Some of these issues are addressed in Andy Bennett’s and Keith Kahn-Harris’s
(2004) edited collection After Subculture, but as the subtitle indicates, Critical Studies
in Contemporary Youth Culture, the focus remains on the young and thus ignores the
ways in which popular music is consumed outside of youth cultural practice. In addi-
tion, there remains a ‘continuing assumption that a girl or a boy with an ostenta-
tiously pierced body is being more “resistant” to dominant culture than if they were,
say, to join a radical political organization or even, come to that, a choir’ (Frith, 2004:
176). Clearly the subcultural terrain is in need of greater revision than has thus far
been attempted. While recent ethnographic accounts of music audiences can offer
sophisticated hermeneutic modes of interpretation, this tends to be at the expense of
situating the findings in a broader context of material relations of power. In impor-
tant respects, these difficulties echo the problems already discussed in relation to the
conflicts between cultural studies and political economy approaches to culture.

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined a number of different approaches in the cultural analysis
of popular music. Inevitably it has barely scratched the surface of what is a dynamic
and lively area of study. However, as will now be obvious, writers have tended to con-
centrate on specific aspects of music production, textual meaning or subcultural con-
sumption at the expense of a detailed consideration of the relationships between
them. This ‘production–text–consumption’ framework is now regarded as the defin-
itive basis of organizing the literature and versions of it can be found in most recent
discussions of the material (Longhurst, 1995; Negus, 1996; Shuker, 2001). For
instance, it has been argued that ‘popular music texts can be analyzed as institution-
ally produced commercial commodities that function as cultural artefacts inscribed
with meanings which are then consumed and interpreted by fans and audiences’
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