La recerca en música popular contemporània en el marc dels estudis culturals: una fórmula viable?
Research on Contemporary Popular Music in the Framework of Cultural Studies: a Viable Approach?

Summary/Abstract: When Bob Dylan became the first songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, it was a great achievement for those who understand the lyrics of popular music as literature. In Spain, this approach has been used as the basis for many academic works, which generally have minimized the musical aspect of the artistic piece and, in some cases, even the historical, political and cultural context in which the given piece aroused. On the other hand, works on sociological and historiographic aspects of genres, periods and performers or musical groups, adopting the perspective of cultural studies, have been published. Most of this research is really praiseworthy because it has been able to rise up against the silence around the phenomenon of contemporary popular music in the field of humanities in Spain, although, at the same time, the reduced amount of such works indicates that the interest in this matter has been considerably lower than in the Anglo-Saxon area. In this article, the aforementioned problems will be presented and some ways of applying perspectives of cultural studies in the works on contemporary popular music will be considered, taking into account not only the intertextual and interdisciplinary dimension, but also the role of sound(s) in creating meaning(s) in the process of reception of a work of musical art.

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