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Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we perceive ourselves to be and of how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others? After an introduction that discusses the key theoretical concepts to be deployed, Categorizing Sound presents a series of case studies that range from foreign music, race music, and old-time music in the 1920s up through hillbilly and swing music in the 1940s, soul music in the 1960s, country and rhythm and blues in the 1980s. Each chapter focuses on the process of “gentrification” through which these categories are produced and how these are articulated to categories of identity (especially those of race and gender). This process is traced by an analysis of the discourses through which ideas about genres circulate, the institutions that either support and sustain genres or withhold their support, and the sounds that become identified with a particular genre and a particular demographic group. The conclusion discusses the pertinence of the approach to genre used in the book to the changes brought about by the internet and file sharing to the circulation of popular music genres.

K-pop offers a history of South Korean popular music and charts the rise of K-pop as a distinct genre. In so doing, it probes not only the cultural transformation of South Korea but also the political-economic context of the music industry and the export-oriented innovation economy in South Korea.

During their thirty years of existence, the Grateful Dead produced a musical as well as a cultural heritage that invites and rewards exploration and evaluation. This book engages critical theory in order to understand the band’s status and achievement, and what the cultural and political significance of the music as well as the wider phenomenon was, and is. The band and its music are studied in the tension between culture industry and self-organization. The first chapter looks at the dialectic of avant-garde and tradition in the mass cultural phenomenon that the Grateful Dead became. The second chapter builds on that analysis by directly engaging the political importance and legacy of a self-declared ”apolitical” band, assessing what ”politics” could mean in both the practices of the band and its audience as well as in the way mainstream America and law enforcement saw the band. The third and final chapter listens to the Grateful Dead improvising, presenting improvisation as the key element for any understanding both of the band’s music as well as its socio-political profile. A short coda summarizes the argument in a discussion of the band as an example of ”charismatic authority.”

This book presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the first and most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. The festival’s stylistically diverse programs ranged from Soviet-sponsored socialist realism to the modernism of the Western avant-garde. It also facilitated encounters between people (performers, composers, critics, arts administrators, government functionaries, and general audiences) from both sides of the Cold War. Drawing on Howard Becker’s model of the art world, and Stephen Greenblatt’s model of cultural mobility, the book contends that the performance of social interactions in particular institutional frameworks (such as music festivals) have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with “new” music (or “contemporary” music). Moreover, the book contests static notions of East-West division and challenges the metaphor of an impermeable “Iron Curtain.” Chapters 1-3 examine the Warsaw Autumn’s institutional organization, negotiation, and reception in socialist Poland during the post-Stalin Thaw. Chapters 4-6 consider the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the performance of cultural diplomacy, engendered international and transnational ties, sparked change within the Eastern Bloc, assisted the globalization of avant-garde ideas, and facilitated the cross-border circulation of people, objects, and ideas. The epilogue briefly considers how new music is being defined and disseminated in post-socialist Poland.

The Persistence of Sentiment is a critical account of a group of artists in American popular music who have met with commercial success but also critical disdain. This book examines the specific musical features of some exemplary pop songs and draws attention to the social contexts that contributed to their popularity as well as their dismissal. The artists under consideration were all members of more or less disadvantaged social categories: members of racial or sexual minorities, victims of class and/or gender prejudices, and/or advocates of populations excluded from the “mainstream.” Perhaps unexpectedly, it was the complicated commercial efflorescence of pop music in the 1970s that allowed the greater promulgation of musical styles and idioms that spoke to and for exactly those stigmatized audiences. Furthermore, the additional layers of interpretation created by the “Seventies Revival,” which took place beginning in the early 1990s, allow not only a deeper understanding of these songs’ function when they were first popular but also an appreciation of how their significance has shifted for American listeners in the succeeding three decades.

I’ll listen to anything but country. This popular phrase allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive, “omnivore” musical tastes, with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how US provincial white working people have emerged, since the 1970s, as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that render white working folk a perpetual bigot class. With rigorous class analysis, Hubbs traces changes in American tolerance over time and demonstrates that the working-class homophobe is a figure with a recent history. For most of the twentieth century, middle-class respectability rested on rejecting as “deviant” both queer people and the working-class acceptance of them. Today, homophobia is attached to the working-class “masses,” and middle-class Americans affirm their distinguished individualism by rejecting country music and the working-class bigotry it symbolizes. Skillfully weaving together historical inquiry, an examination of classed cultural repertoires, and a close listening to country songs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics.