Free, Confused and Lonely: On Age, Pop, Fashion and Incompatibility

Elliott says there is a strong sense of distinction in popular music studies between aesthetic pleasaure and "academic" value. While youth-marketed pop is still seen as sociologically significant, there is still an assumption that it has little or no aesthetic value. Performers such as Taylor Swift reamin difficult to engage with in musicology because their sociological worth eclipses the brilliance of their craft. Another issue surrounding popular music studies is the ways in which notions of fashion and faddishness continue to be used as ways of denigrating or belittling research that does not adhere to particular observers' ideas of what scholarly work should be and do. Elliott says he wants a musicology that embraces the fashionable and the radical but is able to do so without seeing either one as a negative quality.