The Value of Popular Music

In this book, Alison Stone argues that popular music since rock-'n'-roll is a unified form of music which has positive value. That value is that popular music affirms the importance of materiality and the body, challenging the long-standing Western elevation of the intellect above all things corporeal. Stone also argues that popular music's stress on materiality gives it aesthetic value, drawing on ideas from the post-Kantian tradition in aesthetics by Hegel, Adorno, and others. She shows that popular music gives importance to materiality in its typical structure: in how music of this type handles the relations between matter and form, the relations between sounds and words, and in how it deals with rhythm, meaning, and emotional expression. Extensive use is made of musical examples from a wide range of popular music genres. This book is distinctive in that it defends popular music on philosophical grounds, particularly informed by the continental tradition in philosophy.
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Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of books on Hegel's philosophy of nature, Luce Irigaray, feminist philosophy, and motherhood, and numerous articles on topics in continental philosophy. She edited the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy and is co-editing the Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy.