How can music educators explore the intersections of spirituality, relationships, and music education? The purpose of this paper is to examine how the Pixar film, "Soul," models the transformation that can occur when a music teacher embraces spirituality and the preciousness of everyday life both in and out of the classroom through…

In this article, I examine the potential of social media to meaningfully connect students and educators with First Nations popular musicians. Utilising yarning-as-method under the theoretical frame of storying, I present accounts of attempts to embed the practice in high school classes before exploring how the process was refined for an initial…

Nipsey Hussle is a post hip hop icon. In this essay, we mine popular music and media coverage of Nipsey to describe his artistry and advocacy anchored by his articulation of an African American diasporic identity, his ambivalence as an independent rapper within a mainstream music industry, and his leverage of Black capital in his Crenshaw…

One of the most distinctive musical genres that originated in Cuba over the past century is "cha-cha-chá," which is attributed to Enrique Jorrín during the 1950s. The popularity of this music has grown considerably since its genesis, as evidenced by the vast array of repertoire, the multitude of bands performing it, and its prevalence in…

The popular music performance undergraduate degree is a growing area within UK higher education. These courses carry a vocational emphasis and are popular with students looking to establish professional performing careers. As such, they are often marketed as an intermediary step towards this aspiration but, despite their popularity, there has been…

This article examines curriculum and practice in Australian secondary classroom music education, in order to trace the inclusion of, and provision for, students with learning orientations based on popular music forms. A 60-year period of curriculum reform, matriculation statistics and literature is surveyed with a focus on the state of New South…

Excluding Hip Hop culture and rap music from music education misses opportunities for addressing key aspects of popular culture, society, and students' lives. This article addresses intersections of Hip Hop, gender, and music education to forward potential Hip Hop praxis. After tracing related scholarship, I discuss and problematize…

This article describes a collaborative and emergent approach utilizing Tupac Shakur's "Brenda's Got a Baby" to leverage theory education. This song/video uses a fictionalized account of a pregnant 12-year-old African American girl to chronicle the ecological realities of life in the inner city (e.g., teen pregnancy, drug addiction and…

This research examines the gendered nature of cultural legitimacy and consecration in popular music. We explore two related questions. First, which factors affect the likelihood that female performers achieve consecrated status? Second, how are those decisions discursively legitimated? Using a mixed-methods research design, we find that in both…

The structure of music preferences has been investigated extensively. However, development of music preferences in terms of consistency of music taste is as yet understudied. In this study, intra-individual consistency of music taste was assessed among Dutch adolescents and young adults over three points in time in a 21-month period. An…

A fully realized disability studies (DS) of music is interdisciplinary, qualitative and accessible through common discourse, without jargon, disciplinary codes, or numerology. It embraces DS's social model theory, where "disability" is the social construction of "impairment," analogous to the relationship between "gender" and "sex." The…

This paper explores the issue of motivation in music learning in higher education by contextualising data collected as part of the "Investigating-Musical-Performance" research project (Welch, et al., 2006-2008). The discussion begins with findings which suggest that popular, jazz and folk musicians experience more pleasure in musical…

Argues that the recording of music is both an act of social control and of aesthetics. Suggests that the remixing of previously recorded music to create a new recording is itself a form of artistic expression. Concludes that the possibility of remixing creates unending possibilities for artistic collaboration. (SG)

The practical training of contemporary popular musicians, that is, the preparation of performers, songwriters, and music production personnel for the global popular music industry, is still in its infancy. This article seeks to discuss the specific issue of what musicianship skills should be taught, by interrogating the perceptions of a cohort of…

Synthesizing literature from critical pedagogy, sociocultural psychology, and cultural studies with popular cultural texts and experiences from actual classroom practice, this article conceptualizes the critical teaching of popular culture as a viable strategy to increase academic and critical literacies in urban secondary classrooms. Relying on…