Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Journal of Popular Music Studies (2026) 38 (1): 1–2.

Whatever notions of globality we may have recently entertained—as scholars and as citizens of the world—have been utterly upended in the 2020s. From the Covid pandemic to war, famine, and genocide, from tightened borders to the ascendancy of new geopolitical blocs, the economic and political order of our world is entering unknown territory.

As editors of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, we see the effects of these transformations directly and routinely. Their consequences are mixed. On one hand, places that were once marginal to a Europe- and America-centric academy are plainly committing more resources to publication and making bids for influence. We do not claim the expertise to explain all of the relevant funding flows, but we can say that the balance of submissions to JPMS now comes from China, Korea, parts of Africa, and Turkey, among other places. Given that one of our editorial goals was to consider popular music in a more global frame, this has been energizing. For decades, music studies has sought to move beyond its historically Western focus (as well as the predominantly Western citizenship of its scholars). Shifts in global power and scholarly resources are catalyzing this process in ways that various initiatives within the Western academy never seemed capable of doing.

On the other hand, the rapid decline of the American academy—the increased precarity of its scholars and the rise of fascistic censorship on its campuses in particular—is a tragedy. And we do not yet know what kinds of freedoms and strictures may emerge as this global scholarly realignment comes into focus. We can only speculate what the new global academic order will look like.

The current issue of JPMS reflects some of these changes. The old order of popular music studies has been provincialized.

As co-editors of JPMS, we are witnessing these shifts not only geographically, but also in the very sonic and epistemic frameworks that have long shaped our disciplines. Recent scholarly convenings reflect this turning point. In our collective reflections at the American Musicological Society roundtable, “Re-Engineering Belonging”—offered in the wake of October 7, 2023—we considered how sound and silence function as institutional technologies. Policies that manage “noise,” for instance, often operate as quiet technologies of exclusion, policing improvisation, collectivity, and cultural presence under the guise of decorum.

Likewise, through engagement with the Society for Ethnomusicology (via the British Forum for Ethnomusicology) roundtable, “Who Can Be an Ethnomusicologist?”, we urged the field to confront the myth of absence that obscures the intellectual labor of culture bearers as theorists and archivists. Afro-descended musical researchers—whose scholarship is often enacted sonically and communally rather than textually—have long met the criteria of the discipline, even when not formally recognized.

Taken together, these interventions resonate with what this issue of JPMS suggests: popular music studies is not merely expanding its geography but recalibrating its listening practices. As scholarly power shifts beyond historically Western centers, so too must the frameworks through which we authorize sound, scholarship, and scholarly identity. In this moment of retuning, JPMS has the opportunity not only to document these changing musical worlds but also to help re-engineer the conditions for belonging—sonically, disciplinarily, and globally. The question is no longer only what we study, but who we are prepared to hear.

This issue contains an extraordinary piece from Laura Sikes, “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture,” which examines a classic popular music studies phenomenon, Rolling Stone magazine, but in opposition to its usual hagiography. Meanwhile, we have two exciting full-length articles focused on Africa—Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola’s “Moaning Music: Gender, Sexuality, and Queering Nigerian Soundscape” and Katherine Mooney’s “One Zambia, One Nation, One Zamrock: How Zamrockers Challenged Kaunda’s Humanism.” Lastly, Alex de Lacey’s “Analyzing DJ Performance in the Dub Diaspora: Case Studies in Grime and Dubstep” examines the influence of dub and reggae on early-2000s DJ culture in London. The totality of the issue suggests a critical turn away from the people and places that JPMS centered in its earliest decades and toward an era of popular music studies that may not be routed through the U.S. or Europe at all.

Alisha L. Jones

Benjamin Tausig