How does one tell the history of an art form? Looking at classic examples like Gombrich's The Story of Art (London, Phaidon Press, 1950) or Read's A Concise History of Modern Painting (London, Thames and Hudson, 1959), it seems that, at their core, such projects conventionally consist of annotated lists: extended commentaries on a long line of works and artists, in other words a canon. These works are typically presented as peaks of the aesthetic power of the art form in question, as ultimate manifestations of aesthetic perfection, complexity of form and depth of expression which humans are capable of reaching through this art form. Such presentations hide an implicit promise that, with proper knowledge, encounters with these works will result in extraordinary experiences.

This article applies the processes of canon formation suggested by Philip V. Bohlman in The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World to the historiography of popular music. Bohlman distinguishes between at least three different types of folk music canon: a small group canon, a mediated canon and an imagined canon. Adjusting Bohlman's ideas to the case of popular music, a reformulation is proposed in the form of an alternative canon, a mainstream canon, and a prescribed canon. The unstable power relations implied by the juxtaposition of different canons are considered, as well as the cumulative aspect of canon formation. The article also looks for each type of canon in the media through which historical knowledge is transmitted, and considers the tendency to narrate the historiography of marginal musics with more ephemeral media than the printed word.

For this article the authors analysed thirty-eight lists of ‘The 100 greatest albums of all time’ type. As the findings demonstrate, a canon of popular music has evolved which shows strong tendencies towards stability in featuring albums from the late 1960s (especially those by The Beatles), while only a few albums from the 1990s have gained ‘classic’ status. The canon's contents and exclusions are explained by the social dispositions of the participants, predominantly white males aged twenty to forty. Influenced by efforts of the cultural industries, these actors also evaluate certain albums for the purposes of distinguishing themselves from the ‘mainstream’. Furthermore, aesthetic and artistic criteria underlying the esteem of the ‘masterworks’ are identified by analysing reviews. The authors suggest that future research on canonisation should interlock sociological and aesthetic perspectives. Findings from such an approach might initiate reflection among music fans about their own exclusions, and result in an opening up of the meaning and significance of the canon.

We show how the Grammy award ceremony played a central role in influencing the US popular music industry through two important inter-organisational processes. The ceremony served as the vehicle through which the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) interlinked with commercial interests in the field: the distributors, wholesalers and retailers who are represented by the National Association of Record Merchandisers (NARM). As music became a more visual medium and television coverage of the ceremony became prominent, merchandisers came to rely on the Grammy awards as their sales cue, and began to aggressively promote nominees and winners. As a result of the retailers' selective attention, Grammy award-winners began enjoying greater popular appeal through increased album sales. Second, attempts made by various constituents of NARAS to influence award decisions resulted in the surfacing of, challenges to and, finally, the resolution of occupational conflicts and normative concerns about the legitimacy of genres in the popular music industry. In the process, NARAS succeeded in championing the Grammy awards as the hallmark of peer recognition. We contend that the unique ability of the Grammy awards to mingle both peer and popular recognition makes them a significant arbiter of canon formation in the popular music industry.

Since the 1997 reissue of the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, journalists, scholars and musicians have promoted this collection as the ‘founding document’ (Marcus 1997) and ‘musical constitution’ (Cantwell 1996) of the urban folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. This reception differs markedly from that of its original issue, which sold few copies and attracted only minor critical attention. This article provides an account of the transformation in the Anthology's cultural status – showing that the canonisation of the Anthology stems not just from its content, but from the interplay of its content and its sociohistorical context. I identify some of the factors that influenced the retrospective consecration of the Anthology, including the important work of key people, the growth of a new field (‘Americana’ music) and changes in the organisational structures of the recording industry.

Indie alternative rock in the 1980s is often presented as authentically autonomous, produced in local scenes, uncaptured by ideology, free of commercial pressures, but also of high culture elitism. In claiming that the music is avant-garde, postmodern and subversive, such accounts simplify indie's historical, social and cultural context. Indie did not simply arise organically out of developing postpunk music networks, but was shaped by media, and was not just collective, but also stratified, hierarchical and traditional. Canon (articulated through practices of archivalism and connoisseurship) is a key means of stratification within indie scenes, produced by and serving particular social and cultural needs for dominant social groups (journalists, scenemakers, tastemakers, etc.). These groups and individuals were mainly masculine, and thus gender in indie scenes is an important means for deconstructing the discourse of indie independence. I suggest re-envisioning indie as a history of record collectors, emphasising the importance of rock ‘tradition’, of male rock ‘intellectuals’, second-hand record shops, and of an alternative canon as a form of pedagogy. I also consider such activities as models of rational organisation and points of symbolic identification.

This paper is a study of prestige and boundaries in Quebec French-language popular music. Based on interviews with artists, producers and critics conducted in the early 1990s, I argue that popular music in Quebec at that time remained divided along a symbolic boundary established in the 1960s between a highly prestigious group of songwriters/rock artists, who wrote and sang their own material, and a less prestigious group of interpreters/artistes populaires, who sang light pop songs or songs written by others. As predicted by Bourdieu, I show that artists in the most prestigious category were associated with privileged social groups and gained material and symbolic advantages from their prestige. They are more likely to receive honorific awards, to be invited to perform at special cultural events, to see their work recognised as ‘important’, and to persist over time. In opposition to Bourdieu, however, I argue that in the context of emerging nationalism, their songs were also perceived as providing collective benefits over and beyond class and gender divisions.

The electromagnetic recording system came to Brazil in 1927 – just about two years or so after its establishment in Europe and the United States. With its higher technical specificities and capabilities, the electromagnetic system provided an opportunity for high-pitch and low-voice interpreters of song to be recorded. It seems likely that these artists would not have been recorded at that time had the mechanical system still been in vogue. At least in Brazil, this was the ‘revolution’ associated with the electromagnetic recording system: a new artistic generation emerged from the poor and middle-class inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro – then Brazil's capital city – to help produce what most prominent popular music critics and historians dub the ‘Golden Age’ in Brazilian popular music (see, for instance, Vasconcellos 1974; Tinhorão 1981; Cabral 1996). In my view, this Golden Age coincides with and is tantamount to the inception of a field of cultural and artistic production of popular music. Despite an obvious contrast in proportion and impact, there are nevertheless clear sociological similarities between this decisive moment in the history of Brazilian popular music and those moments Bourdieu (1993) describes in nineteenth-century French literature, theatre and impressionist painting.

Some ten years ago, a group of graduate students in South Korea started reading ‘canons’ of popular music studies, such as those by Simon Frith, Iain Chambers, Keith Negus, Tony Mitchell, and Roy Shuker, among others. No formal discipline, be it music, communication, sociology or economics, embraced the group with open arms. Its members did not even know of the existence of IASPM until a few years later. Being ‘local’ without global connection, at the margins of academia in the periphery of Anglo-American cultural/intellectual centres, was an uneasy position to say the least.