Music journalism has been acknowledged as an important space of mediation between artists and consumers. Journalists and critics have played an historical role in the creation of discourse on popular music and are acknowledged by the music industry as an important referent in promotion strategies. Research on the subject has been mostly focused either on the relationship between music journalism and the wider music industry in which it operates or on its status as a field of cultural production. Little consideration has been given to the role played by music journalists in articulating popular music with wider political, social and cultural concerns. This thesis will examine the case-study of Portuguese popular music journalism. It will address its historical evolution and current status by taking into consideration some dimensions, namely, the wider institutional contexts that frame the status of music journalism and how they work upon it, the ideologies and values realised in journalistic discourse, the journalists’ relationship to the music industry (as represented by record labels/companies and concert promotion companies) and issues of interactivity with readers. The thesis will draw on theories of the public sphere and, to a lesser extent, on Bourdieu’s notions of field, capital and habitus to assess the possibilities for music journalism to create reasoned discourse on popular music and, therefore, contribute to wider debates on the public sphere of culture.

This thesis focuses on a relatively under-researched immigrant-descended group: the second-generation Irish in post-war England. Taking popular music as a case study, the thesis examines some of the key ways in which the second-generation Irish have been discursively managed in both academic and journalistic discourses. To this end, the thesis develops a critical dialogue with particular aspects of Irish Studies, British Cultural Studies, and the discourse of popular music journalism. Much of this dialogue is, in turn, refracted through the prism of specific themes and issues, especially those pertaining to assimilation, essentialism, and 'white ethnicity'. In addition to these considerations, the thesis also addresses the question of musical 'routes', examining the variegated aesthetic strategies that have been mobilised by second-generation Irish rock musicians such as John Lydon, Kevin Rowland, Shane MacGowan, Noel Gallagher, and The Smiths. Throughout, the thesis is infonned by a desire to challenge the invisibility of the second-generation Irish in academic and journalistic discourses; to highlight the diversity and complexity of second-generation Irish experience and identity-formation processes; and to point to the productive and diverse ways in which second-generation cultural practitioners have reconfigured popular culture in England.

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