Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Over the past 50 years, popular music has received increasing editorial space in American and European newspapers and has apparently gained in status and artistic legitimacy, though the degree of change varies across countries (Janssen et al., 2005). Some have argued that popular music criticism has assimilated the evaluative criteria traditionally associated with high art aesthetics, while others have claimed that popular music discourse opposes the evaluative principles of high art worlds in favor of a “popular aesthetic”. Just as increases in editorial space for popular music vary across countries, we expect that the presence of “high art” and “popular” aesthetic criteria in popular music reviews also varies cross-nationally. In this paper, we compare the prevalence of various high art and popular evaluative criteria in popular music album reviews in American, Dutch, and German newspapers. In the US, the boundary between high art and popular aesthetics appears to be weakest, with most popular music reviews drawing on both types of criteria. We find that German reviewers generally take the most high art approach to popular music reviews and use the least popular aesthetic criteria, while Dutch reviews clearly favor the popular aesthetic over high art criteria.