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 | Banding Together: |
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. Jennifer C. Lena is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Barnard College. "Jennifer Lena's Banding Together unleashes a fierce and exacting take on the scattered and freewheeling territory of music, offering a soothing order to the wild scufflings of performers and fans alike, and inspiring a smarter, more forthright think on a crazy untrammeled scene. In other words, it has a beat and you can dance to it."--Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket and accordionist with The Magnetic Fields "With the world of rap as its entry point, Banding Together presents important and fresh insight into the way art is categorized in society. Jennifer Lena gives readers a smart, well-researched look at interaction and meaning in communities of music makers that will deepen our understanding of race, corporate power, identity, and social stratification."--Bill Ivey, director of the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and two-time chairman of the board of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences "Banding Together is an original account of twentieth-century American musical styles and a thoroughly fascinating read. Through careful listening and shrewd analysis, Jennifer Lena identifies the subtle distinctions between different musical genres and the groups that produce them, as well as the surprising similarities in the behavior of their fans. The result is an intellectually exciting variation on a key theme in cultural studies, and a major contribution to the sociology of music."--Eric M. Klinenberg, New York University "Bringing together a rigorous formal approach and a dazzling mastery of a wealth of substantive cases, Lena creates a theory of the natural history of musical genres: how the social constellations that carry new styles are born, develop, mutate, and die. This innovative work is a must-read for all students of culture."--John Levi Martin, author of Social Structures Subject Areas: | |||||||
Prices subject to change without notice File created: 1/24/2012 | |||||||
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