The historical significance of music-makers, music scenes, and music genres has long been mediated through academic and popular press publications such as magazines, films, and television documentaries. Media Narratives in Popular Music examines these various publications and questions how and why they are constructed. It considers the typically linear narratives that are based on simplifications, exaggerations, and omissions and the histories they construct - an approach that leads to totalizing "official" histories that reduce otherwise messy narratives to one-dimensional interpretations of a heroic and celebratory nature. This book questions the basis on which these mediated histories are constructed, highlights other, hidden, histories that have otherwise been neglected, and explores a range of topics including consumerism, the production pressure behind documentaries, punk fanzines, Rolling Stones covers, and more. Media Narratives in Popular Music is a transformative collection of powerful chapters. It shifts the trajectories and tributaries of melody and memory, counterculture and compromise, loss and location. This remarkable book reveals how we are all exiles in our pop present, demanding accuracy and authenticity and yet valuing tweets and TikTok. As our affinities and belongings fray and decay, Media Narratives in Popular Music reveal the longing in our nostalgia for 'Classic Albums' but our potential for change, alternatives and defiant difference as we welcome alternative rhythms.