Popular music in the field of aesthetics and analysis

In popular music studies both aesthetics and musical analysis are still regarded with reservations, which have to do on the one hand with the long-standing condescension toward popular music in traditional aesthetics of music, on the other hand with the rootedness of musical analysis in the aesthetics of the autonomous work. This paper shows alternative concepts of an aesthetics of popular music, methods of its analysis and representation that are considered appropriate for popular music genres. With Martin Seel's Asthetik des Erscheinens [Aesthetics of Appearing], the sensuous and atmospheric qualities of popular music can come to the fore. These qualities reach beyond the character of music as an art, but also offer approaches for popular music studies from the cultural studies and social sciences. Exemplified with a piece of the genre Dub Reggae, some analytical methods and demonstrations of the shaping of sound and rhythm (formal schemes, transcriptions, spectrograms) are discussed and eventually correlated with the aesthetic approach of Seel.