Defining qualities: making a voice for rock and pop music in the English quality news press

This article examines how the politically charged newspaper environment of the mid‑ to late 1980s prompted broadsheet arts editors to radically reconfigure the scope, style, and critical vocabulary of their popular music coverage. Drawing on previously unpublished interviews with long‑serving broadsheet music critics, the study first identifies the professional and ideological tensions that shaped attempts to establish a critical lexicon distinct from that of the specialist rock press while remaining compatible with long‑standing traditions of classical music criticism. A discourse analysis of selected broadsheet popular music reviews then illuminates the ways in which this underexplored corpus contributed to the construction and consolidation of audiences for popular music. These findings are situated within broader debates that alternately valorise or repudiate popular culture, revealing how the experimental critical practices of this volatile period ultimately unsettled the hegemonic position of classical music within the broadsheet arts hierarchy. The article argues that these shifts laid the groundwork for the more pluralistic, genre‑spanning approaches that now characterise contemporary broadsheet music journalism.