Anglo-American popular music is becoming more prevalent in university-level aural skills pedagogy. However, it remains an open question how best to serve the unique theory and ear training needs of popular instrumentalists and vocalists and how best to foster the musical skills that these students will need in the music industry. Students who want to be excellent popular musicians still often feel as if their needs are overlooked. This workshop presents authentic and inclusive approaches to aural study of the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies of Anglo-American pop styles descending from the blues, including R&B, rock, country, hip-hop, and electronic dance music.Aside from its inherent interest as a content area, popular music has potential for decolonizing the music curriculum and fulfilling DEI objectives. However, for this potential to be realized, it is not enough to include popular repertoire in the standard tonal theory sequence. The conventions of blues-based music are quite different from Western European tradition, and rather than treating this music as a set of exceptions to or deviations from European tonal theory, the study of this music needs to treat it as central and normative. This workshop presents pedagogical techniques that offer practical skills to students in popular idioms and allow for more inclusive participation in the classroom, using principles of universal design to integrate popular musicians with classical musicians and to minimize the friction that can take place when these groups intermingle. In confronting the question of how best to teach aural skills through popular music, we must first ask what the goals of a popular aural skills class are, especially concerning notation reading. Some forms of popular music are score-based (e.g., musical theater and jazz), others use minimal lead sheets and chord charts (e.g., R&B and country), and still others use no notation whatsoever (such as hip-hop and electronic dance music). Popular musicians are often expected to create or improvise their parts. We should therefore give higher priority to aural learning from recordings and improvisation than to traditional notational skills. Timothy Chenette, Stacey Davis, and Stanley Kleppinger observe that “unlike sight singing, improvisation activities benefit from repetition, since the same melodic or rhythmic prompts can yield multiple effective and imaginative ‘solutions’”.It is rare that theory or aural skills curricula include drums, and this is a missed opportunity. Students in popular music are likely to need to create or communicate drum parts, or at the very least to be able to hear and follow them. Drum patterns are also effective tools for understanding meter. The workshop offers prompts and exercises that ask students not only to notate drum patterns, but also to be able to replicate them vocally or via hand drumming.