Fight Songs and Fighting Words: Writing about Conflict through Popular Music Genres
When a punk fan denounces a popular band as a sell-out, what’s happening? When an old-time musician explains that they don’t play bluegrass, what’s happening? When a hip-hop artist asserts that they, and not their competitors, are “underground,” what’s happening? In each of these cases, something surprising is happening: a musician is making meaning and winning value for their music by enacting a conflict. “Conflict” reads as a negative word—we “resolve” it, or “avoid” it. But, in academic and popular writing on music, discourses (from “discursus,” or “argument”) characterized by conflict can be profoundly productive. In this course, we’ll write about both conflict and popular music genres, and in so doing, we’ll enter the productive fray of academic discourse ourselves.
We’ll begin by rewriting for ourselves the many keywords for “conflict” that characterize social theory on conflict. We’ll read Marx’s classical theory of conflict, in which a world characterized by conflict is imagined; and Bourdieu’s contemporary theory of conflict, in which culture (music!) is central. We’ll write our own accounts of “conflict” in these texts. By writing close readings of complex and foundational texts, we’ll practice paying close and creative attention to the words a writer chooses so that we can redeploy those words for our own projects.
We’ll then use the writings of others to lay foundations for our own position in the debate on popular music genre. We’ll write accounts that read a set of writings, each of which defines genre, against one another. These writings use different kinds of music to define genre: singer-songwriters (Fabbri), top-forty popular songs (Frith), and (subcultural) rave music (Thornton). So, in addition to close readings of texts, we’ll also listen to these musics, asking: what is it about these sounds that makes for a particular concept of genre? We’ll put our accounts and listening to use in a paper that borrows its ideas from these writers to synthesize our own understanding of genre.
Finally, we’ll pursue a research project that takes its cue from the sensitivity to keywords that characterizes academic writing, constructing our own picture of a genre conflict as it “happens” in popular journalistic literature. Following Adam Krims, a writer on rap who suggests that we pay close attention to the words that review and letter-writers use to compare musical genres to one another, we’ll search popular texts (posters, websites, album covers, lyrics, reviews and letters in pop-music magazines) for the “fighting words” through which musical value is sometimes made. By pursuing research on these primary texts, we’ll construct pictures of musical conflict in action and, through that picture, throw our own version of “conflict” and “genre” into the ring. In so doing, we’ll have begun to put into practice something we’ll use throughout our careers as writers: we’ll have taken advantage of the profusion of words accompanying conflict to make something new.
|
