Pandora and the “genes” of music genres
Hello, it’s been a while since I blogged. You may remember me as the music Ph.D. student who was last heard from pondering the uses of Google Scholar. I’m on a new mission this semester, studying for my comprehensive exams. One of the topics I am researching and preparing an essay on is about genre in popular music. The concept may seem initially so self-evident, you may wonder what there is to write about it, per se. Oh, but there’s lots. This is because the issue of genre always involves the issue of classification, which inherently provokes debate. Take, for instance, a star performer like Beck. His music often includes acoustic guitar, and he’s covered Mississippi John Hurt. So he must be a folkie. Oh wait, but he also apes Prince on some funky jams. So maybe he’s a pop star. But he also headlines a bunch of big rock festivals, and we find his music in the “Rock” section at the record store (wait, what’s a record store?). So I guess we’ll call him a rocker.
My point being, popular music can be difficult to pin down using genre tags. You’ll find this evidenced in any number of press interviews with musicians who, when pressed by a journalist, pull out that time-worn chesnut that their sound is “unclassifiable”. Genre tags, be it pop, country, rock, hip-hop, salsa, what have you are almost like identifying pornography: I’ll know it when I see it. It’s often somewhat easier to identify what a genre isn’t than what it actually is. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Scholar: Neglected Corridors of the Interwebs
Welcome to my first post here on the Scholars’ Lab blog. My name is Jason Kirby and I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in the Music department at UVa. I’m in the “Critical and Comparative Studies” track of my program, which means I look at musical sound and musicians through a cultural studies lens. I’m planning a dissertation on intersections between country and rock music over the past thirty years, and when considering the wide spectrum of academic musicology, I’m squarely a pop music studies guy. I’ve written about artists ranging from Lucinda Williams to Throbbing Gristle—artists about whom there’s a fair amount of popular-press ink spilled, but not necessarily much scholarly writing (yet). This brings me to the subject of today’s post.
Google Scholar: I enjoy it, and not for reasons which are necessarily immediately apparent. Read more…
