Abstract
Aesthetics, Evaluation, and the Unity of Popular Music looks at criticisms that popular music is homogeneous and standardised and argues that these criticisms are false. Aesthetic distinctions between high art and popular entertainment underpin these criticisms. The same distinctions underpin arguments that some popular music is good because it is relatively artistic, complex, authentic, or innovative. We need new standards by which to evaluate popular music on its own terms, for despite its diversity popular music since rock-‘n’-roll is a unified cultural form with a number of standard features. The chapter asks whether popular music should be evaluated politically or socially rather than aesthetically and argues that aesthetic evaluation is unavoidable.
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Stone, A. (2016). Evaluation, Aesthetics, and the Unity of Popular Music. In: The Value of Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46544-9_1
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