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Focusing on two major forms of popular culture, rock music and sport, this book outlines the key issues involved in the understanding of popular culture in all its different aspects. Rock music and sport encapsulate the contradictory elements of popular culture: the tensions between the commercial manufacture and marketing of popular products on the one hand, and their potential for articulating a resistive independence on the other. Using rock music and sport as case studies, the book explores the contemporary economics, ideology and cultural constitution of forms of popular pleasure. It demonstrates that popular culture cannot be adequately understood without a clear grasp of the ways in which economics, ideology and culture interrelate. This relation is explored through examples such as punk rock music which is examined in terms of its presentation as a product, its practical consciousness and its …