Popular Music Will Not Save Us: Capitalism and Music Education

In today's globalized landscapes, both traditional and progressive K-12 music education practices, including those associated with popular music, can further capitalism-related inequities. In this context, music educators and students might consider how they position themselves and their music-making practices in relation to capitalist aims and processes and confront the more unethical aspects of capitalism.

Popular Music Will Not Save Us challenges music educators to rethink their philosophical stances in the face of contemporary capitalist values and explores the intersection of music education and globalized capitalism, unveiling how certain practices exacerbate material inequities and erode social responsibility. As author Lauren Kapalka Richerme unravels the complexities of music education, her analysis sheds light on how prevalent practices can inadvertently uphold capitalist ideals and reinforce individualism, unceasing accumulation, and precarity in the workforce. Given that no musical genre inherently challenges problematic aspects of capitalism, Richerme proposes that music educators instead focus on affective flows, or the circulation of sensations within pedagogical spaces, and consider four alternative positionalities: thriving within, surviving under, resisting, and challenging capitalism.

Popular Music Will Not Save Us advocates for a shift away from capitalistic individualism and inequities and toward a more equitable, affective pedagogical mode. Now is the time to transcend traditional boundaries and embrace a new paradigm that prioritizes social impact over commercial gain.

Lauren Kapalka Richerme is Associate Professor of Music Education at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She is author of Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education (IUP, 2020) and (with Peter Miksza, Julia T. Shaw, Phillip M. Hash, and Donald A. Hodges) of Music Education Research: An Introduction.