Eric Harvey's article The Soundtrack of Our Lives addresses Hitchcock's use of popular music as a narrative and thematic element in Rear Window.
Here's an excerpt:
"This highlights Hitchcock's approach to his audience: as passive viewers seeking manipulation and needing their strings pulled at just the right moments for maximum impact-- the same view he took toward the passive radio and record listeners in the film. Rear Window is arguably Hitchcock's most intellectual film; a biting, artful work of social comment on what he saw as a true horror-- the quickly creeping influence of mass culture on postwar urban American society, something which threatened his reputation as a master showman in the theatrical tradition."