The claim that popular music has been transformative has often been made, and critics have tended to point in evidence to ‘fashion’ indicators such as hairstyles and styles of clothing, and to ‘lifestyle’
indicators such as changes in relational and sexual mores. But the enduring
seductiveness of popular music is best understood as a much more general
process of transcendence, when popular music performance opens up diverse
new vernacular spaces and allows us to recontextualise our own identities and
relationships in relation to them.