With Kai Arne Hansen (co-author). “Introduction: To Begin Untangling Popular Music.” In On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements, eds. Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen, 1-12. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
The introduction addresses the myriad forms that musical experiences take, and presents the collection as aiming to capture something of the way in which popular music weaves into our society, culture, and lives. We introduce perspectives on how popular music is connected and entangled with other art forms, media, and phenomena, also raising the issue that the category of “popular music” is not necessarily one with stable or impermeable borders. In light of the diversity of current popular music scholarship, we argue for the benefits of introducing dialogue between disparate but mutually supportive approaches to analyzing and studying popular music.