Andrew Goodwin, a member of the Editorial Board of Popular Music and Society for almost 20 years, passed away on 10 September 2013. Andrew was a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco for 20 years. He received his PhD in cultural studies from the University of Birmingham, England. A Corresponding Editor for Media, Culture & Society, he wrote music and book reviews and other articles for Tricycle and Inquiring Mind. He wrote songs, played guitar and drums, deejayed for KUSF, and played in bands. His blog, “Professor of Pop,” combined his enthusiasms for music, theory, and teaching. While his blog has been taken down, some of his songs are available at https://soundcloud.com/professor-of-pop/clues.
One of the earliest—and most lucid—critics to address music television and popular culture, Andrew authored Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minnesota, 1992). Unlike many early books about music television and video culture, this volume considered the music along with the visuals and showed how each reinforced or countervailed the other in the making of new meaning. Still in print and often assigned, this influential volume sensibly applied the aesthetics of performance as well as subcultural theory to an emerging form. Another of his books, On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (Pantheon, 1990), which he co-edited with Simon Frith, remains a superb and highly relevant overview of popular musical theory.
I met Andrew in an old-fashioned way. He wrote me a letter. Gary Burns and I were co-editing a special issue on music video for a journal and Andrew was interested in submitting an article. Since he was newly arrived on American soil, I invited him to visit if he ever came to Los Angeles. He arrived with his son James in tow. With shared interests in music and theorizing about music, we instantly became friends. I valued his good-natured enthusiasm for pop culture studies and his lack of pretension. His theory was never dull. In Andrew's brain, Immanuel Kant kept ready company with Led Zeppelin.
While I was never able to share his passion for that particular band, I was persuaded by his impassioned—and detailed—arguments for Led Zeppelin's significance in the pantheon and the uniqueness of Jimmy Page's embrace of the “tantric possibilities of the modern recording studio,” as Andrew termed it in an article for Slate in 2007. I do so hope that his book on the band, to be titled Led Zeppelin: Sound, Space, and Structure, will find its way into print.
Andrew's endearingly unpretentious yet piercing intellect can be experienced firsthand in this quote from an article he wrote, called “On Being a Professor of Pop,” for this journal in 1997: “Pop music should be taught not only as an object of study but also as an opportunity to ask questions about what we could say with it, and what we can—and do—learn from it.”
Andrew's USF students were encouraged to post videos on YouTube to illustrate what they had learned from his classes and theories. I am pleased to note that they have continued to do so. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = MgEOK6BvgyM, also http://youtube/HjpUE8Egr6c
Among Andrew's survivors are his son James, his sister Jane, and his fiancée, Sandy Nelson. A virtual memorial is available online at http://www.virtual-memorials.com/main.php?action = view&mem_id = 24979. My understanding of popular music was deepened by Andrew's writings and my life was made rich by his friendship.