Although many TV shows from the 1950s seem very odd when viewed today, one of the most peculiar relics of all is Your Hit Parade. This is especially true in light of our current understanding of what it means to visualise a song on television. Although music video looked strange when first seen in the 1970s and early 1980s, it is now highly conventionalised and part of the cultural backdrop. By contrast, Your Hit Parade gropes uneasily to connect the radio past with the burgeoning and increasingly estranged record and television industries of the 1950s. As an aesthetic document, Your Hit Parade is instructive in its display of unproductive tensions: narrative and dramatic visualisations clashing with a simpler, non-representational variety style; pop domesticating an inchoate rock and roll; and a lackadaisical parade struggling to become a quasi-eventful countdown.

When we become engaged with a music video, what draws us in? What constitutes craft or artistry in the genre? Theorists of music video have usually addressed these questions from the perspective of sociology, film theory or popular cultural studies. Film theory, in particular, has had a tremendous influence on the analysis of music video, because of the two genres' apparently similar structuring of sound and image. But by the criteria of film, music videos tend to come off as failed narratives; the genre's effectiveness eludes explanation.

The two passages that follow appeared within a few weeks of each other in 1963. At a glance they have little to do with one another:

Between them The Beatles adopt a do-it-yourself approach from the very beginning. They write their own lyrics, design and eventually build their own instrumental backdrops and work out their own vocal arrangements. Their music is wild, pungent, hard-hitting, uninhibited…and personal. The do-it-yourself angle ensures complete originality at all stages of the production. (Barrow 1963)

Early popular and theoretical work in popular music studies often bestowed implicit or explicit legitimacy on forms of music cultivating or preserving a ‘live’, ‘unplugged’, ‘acoustic’ and hence ‘authentic’ sound. Over the past fifteen years, much popular music scholarship (Frith 1986; Goodwin 1992; Cutler 1984) has rightly problematised this approach. It is important to note, however, that interpretations of popular music texts or scenes that depict the electrification or digitalisation of sound as uncomplicatedly pro-social or progressive remain problematic themselves. Within popular music production today, few areas exist where these aesthetics of recorded music have failed to penetrate. But there is one sub-field of popular music where the characteristic sounds of recording studio technology are still relatively new. It warrants the attention not only of those engaged in the study of popular music, but also of those involved in the exploration of virtual environments. This sub-field is the contemporary stage musical.

Both Popular Music and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) have been in existence for almost a generation. Given the radical social and political changes affecting the general spheres of work, education and research since the establishment of those two institutions in 1981, it is perhaps time for popular music scholars to review their own historical position and to work out strategies for the brave new world of monetarism facing those who will hopefully survive another generation after we quinquagenarian baby boomers of the rock era have disappeared from the academic scene. Of course, such a process of intellectual and ideological stocktaking requires detailed discussion of a wide range of political, economic and social issues that cannot be covered in a single article. I will therefore restrict the account that follows to a discussion of one particular set of historical strands affecting the development of popular music studies. This part of our history is virtually unknown in the anglophone quarters that have, for obvious reasons of language and music media hegemony, dominated the international field of popular music studies. It is, however, as I hope to show, a story of considerable relevance to more general problems of music education and research at the turn of the millennium. I shall return to these broader issues at the end of the article.