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Remembrance of Things Past: Marxism and the Study of Popular Music

Abstract This article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.