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In this article, we describe general features of popular music coverage in elite newspapers in the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1955 to 2005. Drawing on data from content analysis of over 4,000 newspaper articles sampled in four reference years (1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005), we document broad changes and continuities in the extent, focus, and form of popular music coverage in mainstream media outlets of each country.In any art world, media discourse plays an important institutional role in distributing recognition and prestige to certain types of people and productions (Becker). Through such discourse, music critics act as "gatekeepers of taste" (Shuker 92), operating as cultural intermediaries who shape opinions and perceptions about different types of music and musicians through the evaluations and interpretations they offer. As such, media discourse represents a valuable resource for musicians and the actors involved in producing their music. Indeed, musicians recognize the impact that such media attention can have in helping them sustain nascent musical careers (Brennan 222) and record company publicists often measure success in column inches of press coverage (Negus 124). Moreover, beyond the impact that media discourse can have on individual actors within the field of popular music, it can also provide a legitimating ideology that elevates the status of the entire field (Baumann).Yet, despite its widely recognized significance, Steve Jones (1) notes that popular music discourse has been the subject of little systematic study and scholarly publication. Although recent years have seen more attention to the popular music press (Atton; Jones; Lindberg et al.), much of this research focuses on American and British rock criticism in specialty magazines or fanzines (for exceptions, see Pires; Schmutz "Social and Symbolic"; van Venrooij and Schmutz). While such studies have

Acts of cultural consecration set sacred cultural producers and products apart from their profane counterparts. Some acts of consecration occur retrospectively, such as Allen and Lincoln’s examination of the retrospective cultural consecration of American films. In this article, the author extends Allen and Lincoln’s findings to the field of popular music by considering the effects of popular, professional, and critical reception on the likelihood that a popular music album was retrospectively consecrated by Rolling Stone magazine.

Popular music has apparently gained much in status and artistic legitimacy. Some have argued that popular music criticism has assimilated the evaluative criteria traditionally associated with high art aesthetics to legitimate pop music as a serious art form, while others have claimed that popular music discourse opposes the evaluative principles of high art worlds in favor of a ‘popular aesthetic’. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Lamont, DiMaggio and Bourdieu, we compare the critical discourse on popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands and expect that the presence of ‘high art’ and ‘popular’ aesthetic criteria in popular music reviews published in elite newspapers varies cross-nationally due to differences in the hierarchy, universality and boundary strength of their respective cultural classification systems. We compare the prevalence of various high art and popular evaluative criteria in popular music album reviews in American, Dutch, and German newspapers. In the US, the boundary between high art and popular aesthetics appears to be weakest, German reviewers take the most high art approach to popular music, while Dutch reviews clearly favor the popular aesthetic over high art criteria.

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