Full Description
Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? "Banding Together" explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles - ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States - Jennifer Lena uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music. What are the common economic, organizational, ideological, and aesthetic traits among contemporary genres? Do genres follow patterns in their development? Lena discovers four dominant forms - Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist - and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the Government-purposed genre, which she examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile.
Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, she looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: Music Genres 1 What Is a Theory of Sociocultural Classification? 4 What Are Genre Forms and How Are They Identified? 8 Organizations and Money 10 Genre Ideals and Style 15 What Genres Are Not 20 Outline of the Book 22 Chapter 2: Three Musics, Four Genres: Rap, Bluegrass, and Bebop Jazz 27 Avant-garde Genres 28 Scene-based Genres 33 Industry-based Genres 41 Traditionalist Genres 46 After the Tradition 52 Conclusion 55 Chapter 3: Music Trajectories 65 Two Genre Trajectories 69 Scene-based Origins 74 IST Trajectories 76 On Genre Trajectories 84 Inhibiting Factors on Musical Trajectories 86 Absorption into Other Musics, Other Streams 86 Niche Music 91 The Racist Organization of Musical Production 98 Conclusion 109 Chapter 4: The Government-purposed Genre 117 Attributes of Government-purposed Genres 119 China 120 Chile 128 Nigeria 132 Serbia 136 Conclusion 139 Chapter 5: On Classification Systems 145 Classification in Music 146 Toward a Model of Classification Systems 156 On Science, Markets, and Memory 160 The Future of Music 164 In Closing 168 Notes 171 References 205 Index 233
