Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

Questions of symbolic classification have been central to sociology since its earliest days, given the relevance of distinctions for both affiliation and conflict. Music and its genres are no exception, organizing people and songs within a system of symbolic classification. Numerous studies chronicle the history of specific genres of music, but none document recurrent processes of development and change across musics. In this article, we analyze 60 musics in the United States, delineating between 12 social, organizational, and symbolic attributes. We find four distinct genre types—Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist. We also find that these genre types combine to form three distinct trajectories. Two-thirds originate in an Avant-garde genre, and the rest originate as a scene or, to our surprise, in an Industry-based genre. We conclude by discussing a number of questions raised by our findings, including the implications for understanding symbolic classification in fields other tha...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25472554.pdf

Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres

Postmodernism and Popular Culture

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven.

The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle

Earl Grey Back to My Roots As the title implies, this is a personal ride through some of Earl Grey's musical influences. Grey takes jazzy, early morning, Detroit techno and filters it through the least amount of drum and bass essentials needed. It may take a little to come down to this pure high after a night of Ed Rush, but it's worth the descent. Techno producer Dave Angel's B-side mix is my favorite because of its uplifting synths and aquatic house feel. When's the last time, you heard those adjectives used to describe jungle? Roker A record review originally printed in Urb, a magazine that covers electronic/dance music

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=commstud_pubs

Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities

How did the Depression-era folk-song collector Alan Lomax end up with a songwriting credit on Jay-Z’s song “Takeover”? Why doesn’t Clyde Stubblefield, the primary drummer on James Brown recordings from the late 1960s such as “Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat,” get paid for other musicians’ frequent use of the beats he performed on those songs? The music industry’s approach to digital sampling—the act of incorporating snippets of existing recordings into new ones—holds the answers. Exploring the complexities and contradictions in how samples are licensed, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola interviewed more than 100 musicians, managers, lawyers, industry professionals, journalists, and scholars. Based on those interviews, Creative License puts digital sampling into historical, cultural, and legal context. It describes hip-hop during its sample-heavy golden age in the 1980s and early 1990s, the lawsuits that shaped U.S. copyright law on sampling, and the labyrinthine licensing process that musicians must now navigate. The authors argue that the current system for licensing samples is inefficient and limits creativity. For instance, by estimating the present-day licensing fees for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (1990), two albums from hip-hop’s golden age, the authors show that neither album could be released commercially today. Observing that the same dynamics that create problems for remixers now reverberate throughout all culture industries, the authors conclude by examining ideas for reform.

Interviewees include David Byrne, Cee Lo Green, George Clinton, De La Soul, DJ Premier, DJ Qbert, Eclectic Method, El-P, Girl Talk, Matmos, Mix Master Mike, Negativland, Public Enemy, RZA, Clyde Stubblefield, T.S. Monk.

Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling

The phrase “home taping is killing music”—a slogan invented and heavily promoted by major labels to combat the unauthorized duplication of music in the early-1980s—now sounds quaint after the rise of digital distribution. Because the legal arguments surrounding the trading of copyrighted music on file-sharing networks have been extensively debated elsewhere, this article primarily focuses on the way this alternative distribution system poses a very real challenge to major labels. That music monopoly, which has been in place for a century, was able to secure its dominance because it controlled the means of production—something that is no longer the case, because recording, production and distribution costs have radically dropped in price since the 1990s. This article, which operates in a journalistic mode, places into historical context the 1990s compact disc boom and the subsequent rise of digital distribution. The consumer-led file-sharing explosion forced an unwilling music industry into the online mark...

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=commstud_pubs

MP3s Are Killing Home Taping: The Rise of Internet Distribution and Its Challenge to the Major Label Music Monopoly

/pdf/freedom-of-expression-overzealous-copyright-bozos-and-other-4uwhhi946c.pdf

Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity

Owning Culture demonstrates how intellectual property law has expanded to allow for private ownership of a remarkable array of things, from the patenting of human genes linked to breast cancer to the trademarking of the phrases "home style" and "freedom of ownership." This book examines diverse areas of contemporary life affected by intellectual property law, including sampling practices in hip-hop music, the appropriation of Third World indigenous knowledge about the medical uses of plants, the effects of seed patenting on farming, and the impact of copyright law on folk music-making. By placing under scruntiny the individualistic, Western conception of the "author" that grounds intellectual property law, Kembrew McLeod shows how borrowing practices have been - and continue to be - central to cultural production. Additionally, this book highlights how intellectual property law facilitates the privatization of culture and the transfer of power into the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations. Clearly written, thoughtful, and thought provoking, Owning Culture provides an innovative approach to the study of culture and law.

Kembrew McLeod

Papers

Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities

Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling

MP3s Are Killing Home Taping: The Rise of Internet Distribution and Its Challenge to the Major Label Music Monopoly

Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity

Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law