The text is a reaction against the prevailing ahistoricity in popular music studies and its Anglo-centrism, in which popular music is implicitly understood as Anglo-American, coexistent with the global capitalist market, self-evident, and timelessly, eternally “present”. These assumptions can nevertheless be made explicit and be subject to a historical examination of their validity, which then leads to an examination of historical conditions for the emergence of various popular music types across the non-Western world. These conditions are shown to be much more diverse and much less self-evident than usually assumed in popular music studies.
