In Defense of Textual Analysis: Resisting Methodological Hegemony in Media and Cultural Studies

Media and cultural studies are currently experiencing a renewed and intensifiedengagement with sociology and sociological methods, with studies of popular musicespecially affected by attempts to make media and cultural research "more sociological."This paper explores recent methodological debates in media and cultural studies bycritiquing the ethnographic turn in popular music studies, as well as the growingantipathy toward textual analysis methods. It argues that while sociological popularmusic studies may rhetorically privilege "real" experience over abstract textualism, itsmethods are often limited to the dimensions of experience that can be readily observedand verbalized, or resort to the kind of abstract theorizing its practitioners claim to reject.Using examples from heavy and extreme metal music, this paper argues that while allresearch methods are inevitably partial, textual analysis can offer creative ways toarticulate experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible to empirical research methods,and that the use of text-based approaches can improve, rather than weaken, ourunderstanding of popular media and culture.