Pop-Rock, Cultural Cosmopolitanism and the Global Cultural Market of Youth Identities

This article offers a sociological framework for understanding the functioning of pop-rock music, in its plentiful genres, styles and related phenomena through the years, as an agent in thrusting cosmopolitan youth identities, and thereby cultural cosmopolitanism in general. The article develops the notion of a global cultural market of youth identities, created by the structural emergence of ‘youth’ as an age based social category in modern societies. Following a discussion of cultural cosmopolitanism and an elaboration on the nature of pop-rock music as a global meta-category of musicking, the article discusses the functioning of pop-rock as a realm of content and meaning for youth identities across the world. This is developed and illustrated through the concept of aesthetic cultures of pop-rock; and by a focus on the notion of pop-rock knowledge.