Popular Music, Culture and Identity
UndergraduateGRF-SGY3552024
Course information for 2024 intake View information for 2025 course intake
Explore how popular music has become an essential part of culture and everyday life. You’ll use sociological theories like postmodernism to understand its significance. Study popular music in depth. Get critical about the impact of music on society.
Enrolments for this course are closed, but you may have other options to start studying now. Book a consultation to learn more.
- Study method
- 100% online
- Assessments
- 100% online
- Entry requirements
- No ATAR needed, No prior study
- Duration
- 13 weeks
- Loan available
- HECS-HELP and FEE-HELP available
Popular Music, Culture and Identity
About this subject
The subject encourages students to discuss popular music as a medium that, through its aesthetic qualities, becomes bound up with and informs identity, politics, taste and belonging in contemporary society.
At the conclusion of the subject you will have acquired skills that will allow you to:
- Discuss popular music’s dual significance as an industrial product and cultural artefact.
- Explore and analyse modes of mass production, mediatisation and global culture in enabling interactions with popular music.
- Critically apply knowledge of popular music to the evaluation of its socio-cultural meaning as this has evolved since the 1950s.
- What is Popular Music?
- City to City
- Genre-mania
- This is My Song
- Listening Pleasures
- Who's Got the X-Factor
- The Band is (Not) My Life
- Can you Sign this Please? Music Fandom
- Halls of Fame
- Plugged or Unplugged - but live!
- Remembering the Moment - Music and Memory
- Course Review
The aim of this subject is to apply critical perspectives to popular music as a key form of cultural production, consumption and leisure in contemporary everyday life. In doing so the unit will apply a range of sociological concepts and theories ranging from Marxism and cultural Marxism through to more recent post-structuralist approaches including postmodernism, reflexive modernity and risk. The unit will also draw on approaches applied to the study of popular music in corresponding disciplines such as cultural studies and media studies.
- Critical Analysis, Reflection (40%)
- Critical Analysis (60%)
For textbook details check your university's handbook, website or learning management system (LMS).
With a network of campuses spanning three cities in South East Queensland, Griffith University is committed to progressive multidisciplinary teaching and research and a valuable online provider with Open Universities Australia. Already attracting students from over one hundred countries, Griffith's dedication to academic excellence is available across Australia through OUA.
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- QS Ranking 2024:
- 18
- Times Higher Education Ranking 2024:
- 20
Entry requirements
No entry requirements
Study load
- 0.125 EFTSL
- This is in the range of 10 to 12 hours of study each week.
Equivalent full time study load (EFTSL) is one way to calculate your study load. One (1.0) EFTSL is equivalent to a full-time study load for one year.
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What to study next?
Once you’ve completed this subject it can be credited towards one of the following courses
UndergraduateGRF-ART-DEG
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