Like most popular music educators, I believe in the power of popular music education (PME) to foster joy, belonging, meaning, and purpose in students’ lives. However—for all the benefits of PME—in what ways does it reproduce social inequities? Further, how is PME implicated in perpetuating injustice? And from these questions, how might a critical popular music education paradigm work toward a more equitable and just future?
A Political Pedagogy
Throughout the modern and contemporary histories of Western societies, schooling is largely concerned with reproducing the status quo. As such, schooling typically privileges dominant groups while marginalizing others through the systems and structures of race and colonialism, gender and patriarchy, and class and capitalism. The same is true for PME, whether we are conscious of it or not (Wright, 2015).
For example, how do discourses of whiteness and masculinity normalize who is “allowed” to play electric guitar in a rock band? How does gender, sexuality, and desire frame how popular music is produced, experienced, and interpreted? In what ways do misogynistic and sexualized popular music lyrics construct PME as a gendered space?
These questions demonstrate that all forms of education—including PME—are inherently political because they are always framed within particular discourses and imbued with certain values. Therefore, popular music educators should embrace this politicality in pursuit of a more socially just world. More specifically, I propose that we embody an explicitly and unapologetically political stance of criticality.
Toward a Critical Popular Music Education Paradigm
By criticality, I am referring to the process of exposing and challenging power structures and discourses that oppress, exploit, and exclude. Moreover, critique functions as an emancipatory device that can be exercised for the purpose of transforming ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Within a critical popular music education paradigm, students are encouraged to critique sociohistoric relations of power as they work to transform unjust social conditions. As such, this critical paradigm rejects the training-focused and industry-centric manifestations of PME. Instead, a PME paradigm that centers criticality is explicitly anti-oppressive as it uses popular music as a medium to pursue equity and justice.
Power, Privilege, and Positionality
Repertoire choices, learning goals, and teaching strategies reflect our values, cultural backgrounds, and lived experiences. These values are transmitted through our teaching, both explicitly and implicitly. As a result, we first need to critically reflect on how our values, identities, biases, and beliefs potentially legitimate oppressive structures and discourses within PME (Hess, 2017).
For example, we might ask ourselves the following critical questions: How do my values and beliefs shape my perceptions and practices of PME, especially in relation to the social, cultural, political, and economic world around me? How does my race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other identity markers frame how I experience and teach PME? Turning toward pedagogy, we might ask ourselves the following: How does my power, privilege, and positionality shape both how and what I teach? More specifically, whose musics and musical practices are represented and privileged through my teaching? Conversely, whose musics and musical practices are marginalized or silenced?
Through this critical self-reflection, we can begin to reimagine our pedagogical practices. This might mean that we select entirely different repertoire, learning goals, and teaching strategies that are not only more representative of the diversity of our students, but also disrupt oppressive structures and discourses naturalized within PME.
When enacted uncritically, PME has the potential to reify the patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial status quo. Therefore, the embodiment of a critical music education paradigm must be rooted in the ethical responsibilities of educators to critically reflect on their power, privilege, and positionality (Spruce, 2017).
Critical Practices
What might a critical popular music education paradigm look like in practice? Drawing on Freire (1968/1970), students must first be able to name the oppressive conditions of the world before they can transform them. Therefore—enacted through critical musicking, dialogue, and reflection—raising students’ consciousness about the political, social, cultural, and economic conditions of their lives is fundamental to disrupting the status quo.
One way to practice consciousness-raising is by analyzing, critiquing, and deconstructing song lyrics that either express oppressive themes or advocate for social justice. Through this lens, popular music is not merely an object to be studied but rather a conduit for critical understanding. Practically, this might include critically analyzing popular songs that deal with themes such as racism, police brutality, and white supremacy; settler colonialism, truth and reconciliation, and Indigenous resistance; or the relationships between the climate crisis, capitalism, environmentalism, and eco-justice.
Expanding on PME’s songwriting and composition focus, we need to move beyond the capitalist logics within popular music and their emphases on entertainment, commercialism, and entrepreneurialism. Social justice, activism, and popular music have a long shared history. Therefore, developing students’ critical creative musical skills to challenge systemic issues and offer hopeful and imaginative visions of the future affords students opportunities to use their voice as the practice of power and agency. Not only can students share their critical compositions in formal concert venues, but they should also be encouraged to share their original music in coffeehouses, street corners, and community spaces. Ultimately, a critical popular music education paradigm is centrifugal in that it embodies a critical energy that cannot be contained by the walls of the classroom—nor should it be.
Reimagining Futurity
If we are not actively challenging structures and discourses of oppression, then we are complicit in the reproduction of the inequitable and unjust status quo. In the pursuit of a fairer, more equitable world, how might we center criticality in all that we do? How might we engage in a critical popular music education paradigm in the pursuit of justice?
As popular music educators, we are incredibly privileged to have the medium of popular music to bring people together, inspire communities, speak truth to power, and imagine a better future. Through criticality, let’s take this opportunity to construct a more equitable and just future both in and through popular music education.
Recommended Resources:
Music Education for Social Change: Constructing an Activist Music Education by Juliet Hess
References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Herder and Herder. (Original work published 1968).
Hess, J. (2017). Equity in music education: Why equity and social justice in music education? Music Educators Journal, 104(1), 71–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432117714737
Spruce, G. (2017). The power of discourse: Reclaiming social justice from and for music education. Education 3-13, 45(6), 720–733. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2017.1347127
Wright, R. (2015). Music education and social reproduction: Breaking cycles of injustice. In C. Benedict, P. Schmidt, G. Spruce, & P. Woodford (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of social justice in music education (pp. 339–356). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199356157.013.47