Interpreting contemporary cultural ideas and themes through popular music

[Truncated abstract] The aim of this thesis is to use a selection of albums by various artists as a means to explore the ways in which popular music can be understood as enabling new and different perspectives on some well-established cultural themes. Thus, the first chapter will look at Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) in relation to the idea of ‘the city’ as it has evolved throughout various twentieth-century discourses and art forms, focusing specifically on the notion of the ‘postmodern metropolis’ (or “postmetropolis”) as it has been theorised by writers such as Edward Soja, Paul Virilio, and Celeste Olalquiaga, amongst others. The second chapter explores Tom Waits’ Bone Machine (1992) as a musical registration of the Apocalyptic theme, once again attending to how various ideas of the Apocalypse put forward in the work Frank Kermode and Jacques Derrida can be illuminated through reference to Waits’ album. My final chapter will study Bjork’s all-vocal album Medulla (2004) in relation to a range of theoretical writings on ‘the voice’ (Steven Connor, Joseph Auner, Michel Poizat and Simon Frith), in order to discuss the way in which the album can be understood as calling attention to the voice as a ‘gesture’ – that which both articulates and displaces the threshold between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.