Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.

中文翻译：

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一起变老：今天的流行研究和音乐社会学

早在联盟正式成立之前，流行音乐和社会就被认为是密不可分的，起初是流行音乐的原始学术期刊（1971 年），后来是一本教科书（1995 年）。在世纪后期的许多人心目中，音乐社会学就是流行社会学：西方艺术音乐的真正信徒仍然可以很容易地想象存在于另一个层面的曲目——历史文献致力于对其肮脏的创作背景进行细微的细节描述，但事实并非如此。不必重要——而且具有批判性思维、受过社会科学训练的流行学者通常不会在意争论。然而，音乐社会学在接近古典经典方面实际上已经采取了第一个暂停步骤，1980 年代和 1990 年代的新音乐学运动之所以显得激进，正是因为它为社会打开了许多大门。这就是二十年前的情况，至少在英语国家是这样：流行音乐研究达到成熟，但仍主要嵌入社会学和媒体/传播部门，而音乐学逐渐转变为音乐更多的学科公开地与它制造的世界和解。