The presentation stems from the eponymous paper published on TISMIR in Feb. 2022. It was initially asked for by Steinberg in the context of their Aug. 2022 “State of the Art” sessions. Contemporary popular music amounts to more than 75% of the global music market. Yet, involving contemporary popular music in research pertaining to music, technology, and creativity is not always without difficulties. Scholars and, therefore, reviewers are typically unaware of the specificities of contemporary popular music, be it the way it’s made or the vocabulary and syntax it uses. As a result, context and justification amount to half of the above paper. The problem is related to the so-called “Western bias”, according to which researchers have a tendency to model all music as Western classical music. One possible way out of this problem may be agnosticism. It can be productive to model contemporary popular music according to what it is, instead of trying to make it fit the forms derived from Western classical music.