GENRE IN POPULAR MUSIC

By FABIAN HOLT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-35037-0

Contents

Illustrations............................................................................ix
Acknowledgments..........................................................................xi
1. Introduction..........................................................................1
2. Roots and Refigurations...............................................................30
Double Session I: Reactions to Rock  A Model of Genre Transformation.....................53
3. Country Music and the Nashville Sound.................................................63
4. Jazz and Jazz-Rock Fusion.............................................................81
5. Jeff Parker and the Chicago Jazz Scene................................................105
6. A Closer Look at Jeff Parker and His Music............................................129
7. Music at American Borders.............................................................151
Appendix: The Jeff Parker Discography....................................................181
Notes....................................................................................185
References...............................................................................201
Index....................................................................................213

Chapter One

Introduction

This is a book about the work of genre categories in American popular music. I explore the diversity of musics subsumed under the category of popular music and deal with its boundary areas with folk music, art jazz, and world music. Popular music is a powerful cultural and economical force in modern capitalist societies. Individual genres and artists have been strong symbols of social groups, places, and time periods. In recent decades, rock/ pop has become a cultural mainstream and increasingly functions as a discourse for articulating public memory of peoples and nations at major official events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Princess Diana's funeral, the Soccer World Cups, and the media spectacle ahead of the G8 summit in 2005. The growing acceptance of popular music in the twentieth century and its power as a marker of a new era in music history generate tremendous optimism (think of the jazz boom in the 1930s or the rock boom in the 1960s), but there are also reasons for ambivalence. Some forms of popular music accompany racism, sexism, and political disengagement, while others have had unparalleled power in struggles against these social problems and succeeded in overthrowing cultural hierarchies. Popular culture is really one of the major domains of social life for which academia has a responsibility to act as a humane and critical voice (as opposed to merely embracing or ignoring popular taste). This was a central concern when the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) was founded in 1981, and it is still pertinent today even though the field has become more established institutionally.

The field is not very organized, however. It has developed from such diverse traditions as British cultural studies, German musicology, East Asian media studies, and American folklore studies, and that partially explains the absence of a common methodological ground. Although this ensures some diversity, stronger integration of the field could above all reduce some of the discursive and institutional gaps between music-centered and culture-centered approaches. The concept of genre is taking on a new centrality, as we shall see, and it has precisely this potential to strengthen our common ground without sacrificing diversity. Popular music studies may indeed turn to genre for ontological reasons, to lay claim to a musical and cultural raison d'être.

The very term genre emerged in the mid nineteenth century when the processes of modernity were accelerating and new forms of popular culture were beginning to emerge, including what became known as genre fiction and genre painting ("Genre" 2006; Neale 1995, 176). Bourgeois aesthetics valued the notion of the unique and organic art work with a life of its own (Solie 1980), and that mind-set informed images of popular culture as trivial mass culture derived from mechanical formulae. Genre has since become part and parcel of the vocabularies for many musics, and it should be clear that generic categories underpin all forms of culture. Human agency is never formless, and even the simplest cognitive functions depend on categories and typologies. At a basic level, genre is a type of category that refers to a particular kind of music within a distinctive cultural web of production, circulation, and signification. That is to say, genre is not only "in the music," but also in the minds and bodies of particular groups of people who share certain conventions. These conventions are created in relation to particular musical texts and artists and the contexts in which they are performed and experienced.

Genre is a fundamental structuring force in musical life. It has implications for how, where, and with whom people make and experience music. Without paying attention to genre, we would be poorly prepared to discuss a number of important questions: How is rhythmic and melodic variation regulated? What do we listen for in music? How do musicians communicate? What are the functions of rituals in a musical tradition? What do various people understand music to be and how do they use it? How can we think comparatively about music?

Genre is also fundamental in the sense that the concept of music is bound up with categorical difference. There is no such thing as "general music," only particular musics. Music comes into being when individuals make it happen, and their concepts of music are deeply social. Humans are enculturated into particular musics and ways of thinking about musical difference. For me, and probably many others, this began in childhood, when I was introduced to the musics of my family and encountered a distinction between music for children and music for adults. My immediate surroundings taught me that age and gender are determinants of musical preferences, and these are also articulated on the level of genre. As teenagers, my peers and I got spending money and became consumers, conscious of the role of musical taste in defining identities. The music I heard then now evokes memories of particular people and places. Genre thus continues to create cultural and historical horizons over the course of life. It is also a tool with which culture industries and national governments regulate the circulation of vast fields of music. It is a major force in canons of educational institutions, cultural hierarchies, and decisions about censorship and funding. The apparatus of the corporate music industry is thoroughly organized in generic and market categories. From the moment an artist starts negotiating with a major label, he or she is communicating with a division specializing in a particular kind of music, and the production then follows procedures of that division before finally the music is marketed and sold as a product with a label and registered with a generic code in the database of retail stores. These various agents can use the same term and be interested in the same music for different reasons. Sociability and musical passion may be important factors in private life, whereas professional music makers also have to think about the business side, and governments are concerned with institutions and politics.

Genre not only appears in many areas of musical life; it also has the capacity to connect them. A piece of music is created and heard in the context of others, but the contextual dimension is much broader than that. Genre is always collective, musically and socially (a person can have his or her own style, but not genre). Conventions and expectations are established through acts of repetition performed by a group of people, and the process of genre formation is in turn often accompanied by the formation of new social collectivities. A typical example is how music scenes are organized around particular musics.

Discourse plays a major role in genre making. A genre category can only be established if the music has a name. Naming a music is a way of recognizing its existence and distinguishing it from other musics. The name becomes a point of reference and enables certain forms of communication, control, and specialization into markets, canons, and discourses. This process also involves exclusionary mechanisms, and it is often met with resistance. Alternatives to dominant names and definitions are proposed, and some people are skeptical of categories and refuse to deal with them. "There are only two kinds of music, good and bad," goes an old saying that evokes a general skepticism toward categorization. Some cultures of categorization are excessive and narrow-minded, and many people feel that genre boundaries create artificial divisions between things they love. But it is problematic to replace genre with taste and suggest that there are universal standards. Nor does it help to counter one rigid distinction with another or to discard all labels and leave an undifferentiated mass. Struggles about names and definitions are often an integral part of the histories of individual musics and their cultural dynamics. Why do people have different names for the same music? What happened when "hillbilly music" became "country music," when jazz was defined as art music, and when zydeco was presented as world music? Did such changes in nomenclature create or reflect musical changes? Why have people debated whether salsa is a distinct genre or nothing more than Cuban music in new clothes? Who fought the battles, where, and what were the stakes?

Framing the Project

If genre is fundamental to understanding musical culture, one might ask why there is relatively little scholarly writing about it and why it has been relatively marginal despite the growth of interest in issues of identity and culture in music studies over the past couple of decades. Hamm has also noted that genre has been ignored (2000, 298). Several explanations can be offered for this.

One reason genre has been ignored is that although genre is important, it is more difficult to establish useful genre theories for music than for other art forms. Genre theory is most firmly established in film studies, and a comparison with music studies can begin with differences in production and signification. When film studies arrived at the conclusion in the late 1960s that genre is a necessary conceptual tool, it was argued that popular American cinema required a different approach than the traditional arts because it is more standardized, in part as a result of the enormous investments in real estate, personnel, technology, and marketing (Ryall 1998, 328 and 337). The forms of production in music are more diverse. In popular music, major labels do enforce a high degree of standardization, but there are also many specialized independent labels, and many different live music venues, not to mention amateur music making. "Nowhere," says Walser, "are genre boundaries more fluid than in popular music.... musicians are ceaselessly creating new fusions and extensions of popular genres" (1993, 27). In much popular music, a great deal of creativity and genre negotiation occur on the level of the individual performing artist. Many artists perform "their own music" in the sense that songs and arrangements are frequently made specifically for them or by themselves. Performers can, moreover, make the material their own by performing it in their own style and negotiate or even challenge generic boundaries in the course of a performance. Individuality is also valued in many genre discourses. Fans praise their favorite artists for having a unique style, and artists applaud their colleagues for this and encourage young aspiring artists to "find their own voice."

One could also argue that music genres are more difficult to theorize because of the nature of musical signification. Music is not referential like literature or film, for instance. From a Peircean perspective, musical sound is a symbolic form of representation. Music does not have the precision of iconic or indexical representation even when it accompanies words. Born has argued that because music's representational meanings lack denotative "back-up" they need to be established through other sociocultural dynamics (2000, 32 and 46). As a result, the connotations attached to music are potentially more labile and unfixed. This means that musical meaning is highly contingent, and that the ontologies of the semantic codes that form the musical basis of generic categories are fragile. The argument is supported by the fact that a mimetic relation to reality is less central to music genres than to film genres. In a process unique to the photographic arts, the film image is in a sense produced by means of reality itself, and that affects how the film "text" is evaluated. Incidentally, the specificity of musical signification is one of the reasons for the strikingly limited success of semiotics in musicology compared with film and literary studies.

A more direct explanation for the limited interest in genre in contemporary cultural theory of music is that the strong interest in hybridity has drawn attention away from categories. The erosion of cultural hierarchies and the massive increase in the circulation of cultural products have created new forms of categorical complexity and given rise to critical reactions against the large philosophical systems of Western modernity. The paradigms that emerged in the Age of Discovery and evolved in the greater Enlightenment movement were characterized by detailed universal systems of classification and by imperialism. The narratives of modernity dominated the first hundred years of the social and human sciences (ca. 1850–1950), as evidenced by the paradigms of evolutionism, positivism, and structuralism that also had a great impact on music studies. Influential postmodern thinkers have criticized these paradigms and claimed that the world has arrived at a new condition. Much writing about "late modernity" and "postmodernism" has been preoccupied with diagnosing a general social condition and has in effect created new forms of reductionism. Moreover, the antifoundational stance of postmodernism and the fetishization of hybridity do not get us very far. In popular music studies, Hesmondhalgh has recently stated: "We need to know how boundaries are constituted, not simply that they are fuzzier than various writers have assumed" (2005, 24).

Popular music categories have gained some attention among scholars, and interest in genre has grown since the mid 1990s. In 1982 Fabbri proposed a general scheme for popular music genres, but it was never really followed up, and the concept of scene stole the show in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the mid 1990s, Fornäs (1995) presented a general discussion of genre formation in rock, applying perspectives of contemporary cultural studies and focusing on discursive mechanisms. Frith included a chapter on genre in his book Performing Rites (1996), a work that represents a move away from the somewhat distanced theoretical gaze of early popular music studies toward amore textured insidership. Informed by Fabbri, he discusses how collectivities are organized around individual genres and adopts the term genre world to indicate that a popular music genre constitutes a distinct sphere with a "complex interplay of musicians, listeners, and mediating ideologues" (1996, 88). That genres are rooted in their own distinct social spheres is perhaps not particular to popular music, but it is an important feature and one that is less prominent in, say, Western art music. For one thing, popular musics have amore direct relation with everyday life and emerge from a wide array of contemporary lifestyles and social formations. One might get the sense from reading Frith that genre worlds are somewhat self-contained entities and freestanding ontologies. The boundaries between genres and the broader field of popular musics, however, are fluid, and there is much interaction between them. It should also be mentioned that popular music cannot be portrayed merely as a series of genre-specific cultures. Other specialized cultures, occasionally crossing genre boundaries, are organized according to musics of a particular culture area (such as heritage music) or an instrument (such as choirs and fiddle societies, and even deejay competitions). A highly visible form of specialized collectivity is celebrity fan culture. Louis Armstrong, Dolly Parton, and Flaco Jim&0233;nez are examples of artists who crossed over from genre-specific cultures to a broader mainstream characterized by less generic and cultural specialization.

Negus, in Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999)—so far the only advanced-level book on genre in popularmusic—draws on Neale and Frith in his development of the termgenre culture. It includes not only the aesthetic debates on which Frith concentrates, but also the organizational structures of the music industry, and Negus's focus is on the latter. His book is an excellent account of how categories of major musical formations and markets structure corporate agency. Popular Music Genres (Borthwick and Moy 2004), another British book, provides rudimentary introductions to eleven popular categories, some of them genres, others sub-genres. The book has little theory and can be viewed as a somewhat conventional genre history of popular music since the mid-1960s. A few briefer studies of more recent date also deserve mention: Toynbee has suggested in Making Popular Music (2000) that genre is central to popular music studies, and the chapter he devotes to the concept indicates that the agenda in the emerging discussion centers on the relation between music and collectivity. Brackett (2002) has examined the relation between various types of categories in mass-media contexts, and Hesmondhalgh (2005) has discussed musical collectivities, rejecting the concepts of tribe, scene, and subculture, claiming that genre is a more useful concept. Finally, genre has been assigned a significant place in the canon of critical concepts, as defined by a monumental handbook from Routledge (Frith 2004).

The present book broadens the field of inquiry and refigures the critical toolbox in a number of ways. Above all, I wish to bring genre scholarship closer to musical practice and experience. Several of the above-mentioned scholars have noted that the relation between music and the social is important, but they have focused heavily on the social. This is understandable: they all have a background in the social sciences or in media studies (except Brackett, whois a musicologist but has published little on the subject). Writing about the musical dimension of music requires a serious engagement with particular musical performances, but it is possible to communicate nuanced listening in a meaningful way without using very technical language. Furthermore, although I present analytical observations on performances or recordings thereof in every chapter, readers are not expected to have extensive knowledge of music theory.

(Continues...)


Excerpted from GENRE IN POPULAR MUSIC by FABIAN HOLT Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.