These are some of the reasons why I believe that we, as popular music scholars, must continue to study rock and all popular music in a messy, interdisciplinary, and not especially systematic fashion. I've wrestled with how to refer to what I'm talking about throughout this essay. I decided to leave it messy, but it wasn't an easy decision. Film and television have very strong visually iconic aspects that tend toward certain readings, methods of analysis, and theoretical vocabularies. Popular music is a much harder nut to crack in that there is a strong subjective element to its reception, despite anyplace where music videos may tend to lead reception.
Popular music is much more threaded through everyday life than film or television.
As we all know, it's hard to escape it. And because of the identification of popular music with youth culture, it is hard to pass through the teenage years without cultivating some relationship to it or coming under its influence in some way. It is somewhat easier to avoid film or television. For example, although I've been railing against rock's gender politics in this essay, rock has been important and integral to my life for 30 years, despite my awareness almost from the start that I was an outsider to it. Rock music may indeed be the only form of popular culture that has as many outsiders as insiders who love it.