When we acknowledge that an idea, history or tradition is not ours, we distance ourselves from it. When we then proceed to use, incorporate or represent it, we arrogate the right to employ what we acknowledge as not ours. It is not something we do despite the foreignness of our subject; it is something we do because of our perception of it as other. The implicit hierarchical nature of otherness invites seemingly innocuous practices of representation that amount to (often unknowing) strategies of domination through appropriation. (Dominguez 1987, p. 132)

In attempting to evaluate the subversive potential of popular culture generally, and rock music specifically, much recent Marxist theory has been caught in a dichotomy. At one pole has been a structuralist view of the subject as always already constructed (Althusser 1971): a notion leading to an analysis of popular culture as – yet another – agency of co-optation. At the opposite pole has been a view of popular culture as a set of subcultures, capable of expressing resistance to the dominant culture. Here, the subject is seen as pre-existing its construction through various modes of representation. Both sides of the dichotomy have therefore been implicated in a kind of holism that proves debilitating to cultural criticism: the one sees the (co-opted) subject as a coherent, albeit coherently written support for the system which has constructed it; the other sees the subject as a unitary resisting agent, unified through its class constitution and expressing its resistance in and through subcultural forms.

Simon Frith (1982) once bemoaned the fact that students would rather sit in the library and study popular music (mainly punk) in terms of the appropriate cultural theory, than conduct ethnographic research which would treat popular music as social practice and process. Ten years later the literature on popular music is still lacking in ethnography.

During the coffee break at a recent conference, I described myself to a new acquaintance as ‘a social historian of music’. He replied that he was glad to meet me as he now knew all four of us. The ‘club’, of course, has never been quite that exclusive, but the joke highlighted the essentially submerged and inchoate nature of work in this field. What follows is a decidedly personal article, designed not as a polished, final argument but as a review of some recent developments within the social history of popular music and as a stimulus to further work and argument. Aimed most particularly at those, whether they define themselves as musicologists or historians, taking relatively early steps into this field, it reflects the biases and preoccupations of a social historian with decidedly Anglo-centric interests and for whom history tends to ‘begin’ about 1750; I have a sense, however, that some of my comments may be relevant to the study both in and of other countries and of other historical periods. ‘Popular’ music is broadly defined here to accommodate both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘social’ usages of the term, but given my particular interests, and perhaps because of the methodological imperatives of social history, the latter application undoubtedly receives the closest attention.

Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything that needs changing for girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture that excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished to celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw an embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had good reason to be wary of feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography shows the considerable work that has been done by feminists on popular music, and the problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within both feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that the work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in ‘reclaiming’ the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does have parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girl-groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of the mechanisms through which men exclude women from participation in rock bands, while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels other sociological work on how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audience research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women's experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators of meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990).

Since their beginnings, popular music studies have conducted an implicit (sometimes explicit) dialogue with musicology. To be sure, the musicological side of this conversation has more often than not been marked by insult, incomprehension or silence; and popular music scholars for their part have tended to concentrate on musicology's deficiencies. But musicology is changing (more about this later); at the same time, recent work on popular music suggests a new confidence, manifesting itself in part in a willingness to engage with and adapt mainstream methods. I believe each needs the other.