The Capitalist Imaginaries of Popular Music

Revelations of neoliberal capitalism’s effects on pop music, challenging its longstanding status as defying the status quo.

Traditionally, popular music has long been said to intrinsically contest, resist, and defy the powers that be. This new book challenges this long-standing orthodoxy, arguing that popular music is not so much a form of resistance to authority, but it often perpetuates the very power it is supposed to be raging against: neoliberal capitalism.

This misconception of popular music came to dominance in the mid-1980s and persists today, even when the vast majority of people have been disempowered, impoverished, and marginalized at home, at work, and in politics. This book explains why such a robust, pervasive, and persistent set of ideas about popular music has taken such a tenacious hold despite substantive evidence to the contrary.