Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

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

This year’s International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) conference took place one week ago, as of this writing. The conference was in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the White House, and in a grim coincidence the United States began an illegal and impetuous war against Iran on Saturday night, just as the conference attendees walked past the White House and ventured out to dinner.

The orders to begin the war, perhaps aptly, did not emanate from inside the White House itself, or from anywhere in D.C., but rather from a private club in Florida, far from the seats of government, where grave decisions such as a declaration of war are constitutionally required to be collectively rather than unilaterally made. (Even fifteen months into the American fascist experiment, we should not be so afraid of being labeled naïve as to avoid calling this out.) The fact was a reminder of how thoroughly the American government has been cleaved from the work of governing.

Nonetheless the White House—and the whole district, really—teemed with actors, quite actually armed, performing security theater. Mobs of National Guardsmen clogged escalators to the Metro; Secret Service agents rode their bicycles in tight, endless circles near 17th Street; men with cell phone holsters and wraparound shades warily patrolled the tarps and holes of the erstwhile East Wing. Impunity and violence, work from the permanent collection, were on public view in the public galleries of the city, from which the actual government seemed to have long since absconded.

This is what we study, isn’t it? Performance? The presentation of symbolic systems, for power, survival, critique. Artifice does real things, we know. IASPM explained the performances of Ellington/Roan/Veloso, the threading of impossible needles through brilliant stagecraft and persona-building, the doing of politics through artifice. Savvy to it, we stepped outside and became compulsory audience to the performance of police whose stagecraft was very really trained upon us, political power growing from (the display of) the barrel of a gun.

Jones, writing as a Washingtonian, observes that the city in which IASPM-US gathered is itself a sonic archive of power and its refusals. Washington is routinely staged as the symbolic center from which imperial decisions are launched outward, yet it is also a city where the sounds of the disenfranchised have long been treated as threats to order. The criminalization of go-go music, the policing of protest chants, and the regulation of street sound all testify to a deeper anxiety about what collective listening might reveal. In Washington, the sounds of Black life have too often been treated as public disturbance rather than public culture. Such disregard for the city’s own indigenous soundscapes is not incidental; it rehearses a broader political disposition.

When the everyday sonic life of local communities is met with intolerance or erasure, it signals a learned disregard for people whose lives and lifeworlds lie elsewhere, beyond the immediate field of power. The long struggle over go-go’s place in the city’s public life—where music that has animated neighborhoods for decades has at times been treated as nuisance rather than heritage—offers only one example of how local sonic worlds become sites of political contestation. Womanist listening practices teach us to hear these tensions differently. They ask us to attend not only to the spectacular performances of authority but also to the quieter, more enduring sonic worlds cultivated by communities who refuse disappearance.

Listening in this way is neither passive nor neutral. It is a method of attention that recognizes how people compose meaning, memory, and possibility within structures that would prefer silence. Writing now from the United Kingdom, Jones notes that the performances staged in Washington reverberate far beyond the District’s ceremonial boundaries. The city’s decisions—its declarations, deployments, and displays—travel outward like sound, reaching ears and shaping lives at distances the spectacle itself rarely acknowledges.

From this vantage point, Washington appears not only as a stage of authority but also as a resonant chamber whose policies echo across borders, institutions, and everyday life. The metaphor of reverberation is not merely figurative: policies crafted or performed in the capital alter the conditions under which people move, travel, gather, and listen across the globe. To attend carefully to Washington’s sonic politics, then, is also to recognize how power circulates outward from the city in ways that reshape the soundscapes—and the possibilities—of life elsewhere.

Tausig reflects that nothing could make him prouder during the conference than to keep doing exactly what JPMS does. This issue’s articles examine musical keepsakes (Lauren Alex O’Hagan); musical labor and artificial intelligence (Will Mason); Peloton instruction (Rachel Allison and Braden Leap); and cassette tapes in East Bay punk scenes (Sean L. Peters). Each piece is politically attuned, and each is intensely curious. Authoritarianism does not look kindly on curiosity. We are not supposed to ask about AI, about capital, about memory and selfhood, or about the expressions of marginal kids, as these pieces respectively do. It is dangerous to recognize power as performance, performance as power. That is precisely why we must do it.

Alisha L. Jones

Benjamin Tausig