Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music is an attempt to uncover pop music studies within popular music studies, to attach enough of a framework to these webs of lore and lucre to at least conjure a subfield. Popular music studies initially legitimized itself as subcultural studies. Pop music studies, by contrast, offers a place to explore the mainstream as something beyond a scorned other. If affirming a pop music studies perspective is one goal, another is to demonstrate the extent to which research in multiple areas has taken the discussion well beyond opening salvos. This collection aims to outline and detail the origin points, formal staples, identity intersections, and twenty-first-century matriculation of Top 40 music as an increasingly global and self-aware enterprise. The greatest justification for pop music studies, as for pop music in general, is its inherent inclusiveness, with room for groups kept out of different musical canons. But to pursue pop music studies does not require any commentator to fundamentally celebrate pop, whether as music, capitalism, or nation-branding soft power. We should embrace this new multiplicity but then ask what the results represent. Have we witnessed an explosion in seemingly every kind of scholarly and critical approach to pop music? Yes. Does this contain within it the pieces of a connected pop music studies revisionism? Let’s see.</jats:p>