The very existence of popular music research in its various aspects can be considered, with its investment of attention, as a general value judgement on the music's potentialities. Moreover, we should not forget that a serious interest in popular music research would probably not have been possible without the emergence of more ambitious musical products testifying to a need for emancipation. Even so, perhaps because of a bitter awareness of its own roots in the same cultural and political processes, popular music research has somehow more and more tended to ignore ‘quality’ products in the field, whether because of their decline since the 1970s, or for the sake of some ‘scientific’ suspension of value judgement.