Iterpreting 2000s popular music in the context of globalization, fin de siècle, and millenium paradigms: An approach to popular music on the axis of sound ideal through the transformation of hegemony patterns

The subject of interest of social sciences has shifted from ethnographic research to more comprehensive fields of study such as popular culture with the increased rate of industrialization and urbanization. Popular culture, as deemed throughout the history by many as either degenerate or a "product" to be undermined in a meta level, has started to become a significant social phenomenon that possesses a respectable amount of semantic recognition. Popular music, in this context, has failed to to be considered as a subject for comprehensive analyses —which it deserves— under shallow approaches that perceive popular culture as a single entity; has been overshadowed by ungrounded assumptions and sloppy judgements, or from a totally different but equally superficial angle it has been glorified, sanctified, and fetishized. Either way, constrained to the clichés of social scientists or pseudo-intellectuals, popular music becomes a pattern of references that lacks the essential data for study where the fields or auditory reality— timbral characteristic and content, or simply its constituent aspects— are not taken into consideration, within the limitations of its audiences' contemplation and imagination. On the other hand, it is time for musicology that benefits from this diversity of approaches and in certain ways seen to be a sub-branch of social sciences to become subjective in while preserving its interdisciplinary achievements: it has started to become evident that the generic, univalent perspectives of social sciences around the notions of social, political-economic moves, discourse analyses, etc. are hardly satisfactory. The neo-liberal New World Order that now has a much more direct effect on human life in the 21st century, has caused the production and consumption habits of the music industry to change. The styles that were born during this change have imposed upon the music industry the production of popular music pursuant to the notion of sound ideal. Popular sounds, that concern both the production and the consumption spheres of the music industry have solidified their position and assume a more central function regarding music production. In short, although the economic, political, and social movements of the 21st century have indisputable significance for the interpretation of the changes that the world is going through, analyzing musical production merely with respect to these will eventually cause the problem of ill-defining the "object of research". With this in mind, without disregarding the functional deductions of the social scientists—regarding point of reference and context— developing an approach from the perspective of a new musicology and reaching and argument based on sound are among the primary goals of this study. In the study, the transformation that popular music —which has a significant place within the popular culture— has been going through regarding the "millennium myth" is examined with respect to the hypothesis that popular styles/genres are being replaced by popular sound ideals and patterns. The becoming prominent of the primary, characteristic and defining sound patterns that exist at all the stages of popular music in the 21st century is in parallel with the transformation in the production, consumption and distribution spheres of music industry: political-economic, social and communicational phenomena that were shaped especially during the New World Order have triggered the genesis of brand new styles which base their distinctive identity values on sonic data and auditory parameters instead of semiotic features. Regarding the conceptualization of popular music styles, this dictates a study within the discipline of auditory design that will revolve around the timbre and sound pattern matrices which are the complex manifestations of the constituent elements of music —time and sound—, instead of an approach based merely on cultural, social-scientific analyses. This study hopes to contribute to contemporary musicology in trying to bring it closer to the essential objects of music through underlining the aforementioned auditory parameters.