Let’s See If We’ve Been Missing Out!: Affect, Reactivity, and the Middlebrow in Popular Music Podcasting

Contemporary music analysis podcasts are engaged in an ongoing project of deconstructing pop songs and recoding them as valuable cultural objects. In this article, I understand podcasting as an extension of the popular music press and trace the affective strategies hosts use to elevate and evaluate pop songs new and old. I argue that music podcasts have seen a slow but steady departure from the conventions of critical distance and affectless, disembodied engagement to adopt an embodied, emotive response to the music that moves them. Drawing on theories of feminist affect, fan studies, and reactivity, I read the incorporation of fannish affect and the celebration of male creators’ emotive response to pop music as a continuation of a middlebrow sensibility that informs the popular music press writ large. Popular music analysis podcasts, on their surface, are a project of taking pop music seriously. When we scratch this surface, however, what we find is a mixed bag of tactics that seek to affirm the majority white, majority male creators as uniquely positioned to analyze, evaluate, and respond to music, much of which they are encountering considerably after it has already achieved the success that codes these songs as “popular” in the first place.