Everyone knows pop, everyone recognizes it and has an opinion about it. However, its artistic and philosophical peculiarities remain scarcely studied, as if a taboo weighs on this musical form that was born in the early twentieth century, and whose destiny is linked to the technical conditions of its production and dissemination.

Its historical connection with the world of phonography and, consequently, the cultural industry is generally understood as a reproach, as the shameful stigma of a music that has ceased to be fully music and has compromised with the status of a commodity. The recording and its consequences are considered to have downgraded music, altering exactly what protected it from standardization, and are mass-producing a consumable musical form that is indeed completely accessible, but also utterly mediocre.

In this book, Agnès Gayraud examines the depth and breadth of popular music, starting from the heart of the works, and unfolds all its kinds and paradoxes, to reveal the unsuspected and rich aesthetic extensions of a musical art that may be the most important of the twentieth century.