Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Journal of Popular Music Studies (2025) 37 (3): 1–2.

A rush of sensory memories flooded my mind, when I learned that I would be co-editing the Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS). I found myself reflecting on the importance of curating the research journal genre and the significance of co-editing quality emerging research. In my research career formation, peer-reviewed journals have been a symbol of inheritance, institutionalization, and innovation.

As I set up my office in my first professorate, for instance, one of my predecessors, Dr. Portia K. Maultsby, meticulously distributed her journals to her mentees from various guilds across disciplines, leaving me with a core library to launch my career. Among the journals were tomes of her dissertation and that of her collaborator, Dr. Mellonee V. Burnim, who mastered the co-edited volume genre with the precision they both practiced in their successive tenures as senior journal editors for the Archives of African American Music & Culture (AAMC) journal. In addition, there were also pretty much the entire collection of now defunct volumes from two beloved journals of Black music research, publications whose impact continues to haunt me: The Black Perspectives in Music, edited by Dr. Eileen Southern, and the Black Music Research Journal, edited by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.

The life and afterlife of those journals remind of me of the research exemplars that defined and redefined what was not only eligible for peer review but also what genres of writing could be included in JPMS to advance the culture.

At stake for me is the institutionalization of popular music research on the margins, particularly musics that are widely consumed but draw little documented analysis of the nature of that reach. Furthermore, I am eager to experiment with various genres to enable scholars to perform and transmit their work as they perceive and feel it.

Such efforts are done best with a team. My “yes” to the assignment is due in part to the caliber of the immediate past editorial team—Elliott Powell, Kaleb Goldschmitt, and Eric Harvey—and in part to the current team—my co-editor Benjamin Tausig and Managing Editor Matthew Jones. Through the years, these colleagues have embodied the kind of research to which I aspire. I look forward to publishing work that lives up to that aspiration.

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Last fall, when I told my colleague, SUNY-Stony Brook Professor Emeritus Peter Winkler, that I would be co-editing the Journal of Popular Music Studies, he offered me several boxes of correspondence from the journal’s early years in the 1980s. Peter had been centrally involved in the founding of both JPMS and its parent organization, the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. The boxes sit in my office now, a welcome archival obligation as well as a reminder of the heavy institutional histories that ground a project as towering as a journal.

Editing a journal is humbling. You might and maybe should have a vision—the needs of scholarship and scholars change, and your task is to adapt to that change—but the stuff in the boxes will always be a counterweight against moving too hastily. Others, too, have and have had visions for the journal.

My co-editor, Alisha Lola Jones, and new Managing Editor Matthew Jones have been extraordinary partners in developing an editorial style, collaboratively and organically. For roughly six months, we worked closely with the previous editorial team—Elliott Powell, Kaleb Goldschmitt, and Eric Harvey—who were generous and patient. We have gotten to know the fine folks at UC-Press, as well as the incredible book review and Field Notes editors. We have felt out the texture of correspondence with junior, senior, and independent scholars along with reviewers, a process that takes take time and delicacy to handle well. But despite those efforts, in many ways, we remain beginners.

From the beginning Alisha and I agreed on a few guiding principles for our time in the editorial chair. Topping our list is an increased emphasis on publishing scholarship on Black music.We also wanted to publish work on popular music outside the United States, including by scholars based outside North America. Thanks to the foresight of the previous editorial team, we’re already showing progress toward both of these goals, which is reflected in articles appearing in the current issue—De Angela Duff’s Field Notes segment on Prince’s Purple Rain era; Sophie Brady’s article on Angélique Kidjo and the Talking Heads; Paul David Flood’s “Performing Afro-Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest”; and Olive Shao’s “Rapping Against Asian Hate.” That these pieces had their genesis with our predecessors is a reminder of the overlaps that characterize editorial work and contribute to its strength.

This is the fourth issue published on our watch, and yet the first for which we’ve felt enough in control to write an editorial introduction. The full year that it’s taken to get here is a testament to the connections that we will honor even as we push forward with our own vision. We are delighted with the excellent contributions we’ve seen so far, and look forward to many more.

Alisha Lola Jones

Benjamin Tausig