Stuart Hall

Jamaica-born scholar Stuart Hall has died, just a week after his 82nd birthday.  While Hall may not be widely known to folks who follow popular music, to those of us who study music as popular culture, his significance is hard to overestimate.  Hall’s academic work focused on cultural studies, and within that, he helped set the table for the rise of the study of popular culture over the last half century.  That work included discussion of music as one of, to borrow the title from his book coauthored with Paddy Whannel, the popular arts.

If you’re interested in learning more about the significance of popular music and of popular culture in general, reading some of the work of Stuart Hall would make a good place to start.