In recent work in film and cultural studies, the set of social configurations, practices of everyday life, and ideological formations that constitute twentieth-century ‘modernity’ have been increasingly the subject of research and debate. Fuelled by a renewed interest in critical phenomenologies of modernity, most prominently the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, scholars have focused the debate on the specific historicity of visual culture in the early years of the twentieth century, in order to illuminate the contradictory and fragmented nature of modern mass cultural experience. Fusing the theoretical traditions of critical theory with the empirical and theoretical interest in contradiction and contestation typical of cultural studies, not only does this debate open new perspectives for considering the problem of mass and/or ‘popular’ visual culture, it can also contribute to rethinking the way we discuss the historicity of popular music. Conversely, a more precise understanding of the historicity of popular music practice in modern mass culture, its institutions and modes of experience, can broaden the scope of this debate beyond the spectacles of visual culture to the ‘attractions’ of the acoustic.