Scholars of this type always want to see pop music as the emanation of an entity called popular culture, rather than as music that happens to have become popular. As a result, songs and bands become fungible commodities in the intellectual marketplace. In the anthology "Popular Music Studies," the hip-hop scholar Ian Maxwell asks the significant question "How can our analyses avoid reducing the objects of those analyses to desiccated cadavers on a slab?" His solution - a "more rigorous understanding of what an ethnographically informed approach might offer the study of popular music, nuancing that approach through Bourdieu's reflexive criticality" - gets us only so far.

Roger Beebe, one of the editors of the "Rock Over the Edge" anthology, even looks at music as purely a media phenomenon, inseparable from image and marketing. Analyzing Kurt Cobain's appearances on television, he says that Cobain mattered to his fans mainly as a disembodied entity, not as an individual with a voice, and that he exemplified something called "the postmodern dispositif." Such McLuhanesque musings have been rendered obsolete as MTV has more or less stopped showing videos in favor of frat-house documentaries. Meanwhile, the Internet has become the main avenue for the spread of music. The mania for downloading music may be wreaking havoc with artists' careers, but it is interesting to see how the ear trumps the eye when the computer takes over. Excellent point, dude.

Pop music is music stripped bare. It is like the haphazard funeral portrayed in Wallace Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream": a woman laid out with all her flaws intact, covered with a sheet from a chest of drawers that is missing three knobs, her horny feet protruding. Boys bring flowers in last month's newspapers, but she is noble to look upon. Twentieth-century music, the empire of ice cream, lies before us in all its damaged majesty.