Understanding popular music through a rigid framework of genres or artist typologies no longer suffices in a digital era where sonic boundaries blur and music-making becomes participatory, fragmented and deeply entangled with consumer technologies; Tara Brabazon’s Popular Music: Topics, Trends & Trajectories proposes a pedagogically rich and historically grounded perspective that foregrounds the disruptive impact of digitisation on music production, circulation and reception, allowing for a more pluralistic and post-rock historiography that includes electronic dance music, turntablism, remix cultures and niche micro-scenes often marginalised in traditional canons, thereby acknowledging that the mp3, Final Scratch, the iPod and YouTube are not peripheral tools but central agents in reshaping the conditions of music's cultural relevance, access and authorship; in particular, the book’s treatment of EDM spaces like The Warehouse (Chicago) or The Hacienda (Manchester) serves to illustrate how urban geography and historical moment crystallise into sonic identities, while Brabazon’s commitment to placing dance music alongside hip-hop, metal and pop demonstrates a refusal to adhere to genre hierarchy, instead emphasising stylistic fluidity, user-generated content and sampling as emblematic of a post-genre sensibility, where tracks are as likely to emerge from bedroom laptops as from corporate studios; the analysis of turntablism as an evolving instrument, not merely a DJ technique, legitimises hybrid practices such as controllerism and remixing as valid modes of authorship, while inviting students to interrogate the political economy of sound, gendered exclusions in the club scene, and the commodification of rebellion; by threading scholarly insight with accessible structure and key questions, Brabazon transforms the textbook into a launchpad for critical inquiry, encouraging learners to see popular music not just as entertainment but as a site of cultural production, resistance and identity formation in constant negotiation.
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