Autoethnographic and qualitative research on popular music: Exploring the blues, jazz, grime, John Cage, live performance, SoundCloud and the masculinities of metal

This special edition of Riffs focuses on autoethnography and qualitative research in relation to popular music. The journal publication is twinned with a forthcoming book entitled: Popular Music Ethnographies: practice, place, identity. The intention of these studies is to uphold the principle that ‘music is good to think with’ (Chambers 1981: 38). Riffs was founded in 2015 to promote experimental writing on popular music, with a strong DiY ethos and space to offer flexibility and diversity of outputs through challenging interdisciplinary boundaries. At the same time there is a degree of similarity with specialist popular music magazines including Mojo, fRoots (1979-2019), Rolling Stone, Record Collector, Prog, Mixmag, and Uncut, through a focus on visuals and creative images. This suggests that there has been an increased growth at the ‘popular’ end of biographical and autoethnography within popular music. Critically, popular music autoethnographies work across and within disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, social anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and popular music studies.