“Musiques populaires”: from cultural exception to anglicism

Abstract

During the past fifteen years or so, French-speaking popular music scholars have
shown a growing tendency to specify that the term musiques populaires should be
understood « in the Anglo-Saxon sense of “popular music” ». This article aims to
explain the latter trend in terms of the semantic shift from « popular music in the
sense of traditional music » to « popular music in the sense of industrial music »
which characterized the Anglo-American world at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.