Summing up the course on popular music, I came to the conclusion that popular music ultimately cannot be classified either as a tool of emancipation or as a pure form of domination. Its power lies instead in ambivalence—in its ability to simultaneously sustain the existing order and make life possible within its cracks.
It is a space where standardization coexists with the negotiation of identity, where the commodity coexists with affect, and where the music industry intersects with grassroots practices. For this reason, popular music today is neither a promise of the future nor its negation, but rather a mode of existence in the present: a way of being audible, visible, and present in a world that increasingly offers fewer alternatives beyond the logic of the commodity.
Its political dimension no longer consists in producing utopias, but in organizing experience—of the body, memory, community, and affect. It seems to me that it is precisely within this contradictory and dynamic space that the contemporary significance of popular music unfolds.
At the same time, however, affirming popular music as a “mode of existence” carries a certain theoretical risk. It threatens to naturalize a system in which the possibility of “living within it” begins to replace the question of whether it can be transcended at all.
When visibility, representation, and affective intensity become the primary stakes of musical practices, it is easy to overlook the fact that they are increasingly managed, monetized, and optimized by the very same mechanisms that once constrained cultural imagination.*
*That is to say, the same system that today declares inclusivity and diversity has long defined the boundaries of what can be thought, imagined, and recognized as possible within culture.
Syllabus:
Marek Jeziński, Popular Music as a Form of Cultural Memory, “Kultura Współczesna” 3(96)/2017
Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music, “Res Facta Nova” 2015, no. 16
John Fiske, Reading the Popular, Chapter 5a: Madonna, 1989
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Introduction), 2014
The Unstoppable Rise of Reggaeton (Jhoni Jackson) / A Love Letter to Reggaeton (Eddie Cepeda), Crack Magazine 2018–2019
Tomasz Lada, Everything Goes: Polish Pop 1990–2000, in 1990, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2025
Paweł Klimczak, Radically Inclusive Creativity – Polish Hyperpop Without Borders; Jagoda Olczyk, Transitional Forms: Pop and the Avant-Garde in the Work of Transgender Artists, Glissando, 2023
