Towards the Study of Latin American Popular Song

A lecture from Professor Juan Pablo González discussing the intermedial study of Latin American popular song of the late 20th century.

Over the last three decades, urban popular song has attracted growing interest in Latin American musicology. Yet the field lacks well-established frameworks to address its full complexity. Late twentieth-century popular song calls for a broader approach, as it brings together musical, literary, and performative dimensions, and also the sonic qualities of recorded music.

Since the 1960s, visual elements such as album cover art and music videos have also played an important role. This lecture draws on Dick Higgins’s concept of intermedia, originally developed to describe crossings between artistic media, and adapts it to the study of mass culture. From this perspective, Latin American popular song can be understood as a complex cultural unit shaped by regional networks, collaborations, circuits, and shared influences at the end of the twentieth century.