Everyone with an interest in pop has opinions about it - about its meanings, value, effects and significance. But some opinions - those of critics and academics, for example - claim more attention than others, largely because they have access to the public ear; and, actually, surprisingly little is known about ordinary fans’ interpretations. Does this matter? Articulate description of musical responses is always rare; but more is at stake here than the familiar ‘mystery’ of music.

The announcement of the 1994 Mercury Music Award, by a panel chaired by noted pop music scholar Simon Frith, led trade magazine Music Week (6 August 1994) to bemoan the involvement of ‘egghead academics and journalists who think too much for their own good’. Thirteen years earlier, the first international conference of the recently formed International Association for the Study of Popular Music was greeted with mocking incredulity in a London Times feature (16 June 1981), as was the first issue of the Cambridge University Press journal Popular Music. There seemed, evidently, to be an obvious incongruity here - high-value educational capital invested in the study of worthless music, rationality applied to the obstinately irrational, articulate discourse to the wantonly dumb; and this incongruity runs deep through the academy's involvement with pop. There are often suspicions that pop is being used. Thus male leftists, with the radical political commitments of the ‘1968 generation’, largely drive the shape of the early waves of scholarship, ‘rockist’, ‘masculinist’ and anti-establishment as it is.