This section of English 302 will interpret and theorize a form of everyday culture: popular music. Its centrality to collective memory suggests its power to shape cultural imaginaries, yet its ubiquity belies its power to reflect and refract dominant ideologies. It is by now a truism that the history of U.S. pop music is a history of race. This seminar engages difference after the 1965 Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Immigration and Nationality Act, when sanctioned racism supposedly ended, through an intersectional analysis of pop genres to query histories of the present. Genre, as theorists of race, gender, and sexuality have illustrated, is not a value-neutral description, but is a system of classification that ties taxonomies of art to the taxonomies of people. We will ask: How do genres, despite music’s celebration as universal or transcendent, reveal contexts and tensions that linger in the act of listening? How do genre categories set expectations of what (and whom) we’re hearing as a result of institutions, industries, and social systems? How have artists, critics, and scholars addressed these prescriptive and limiting understanding of genres?
Taking specific genres as flashpoints, we will survey a range of scholarship, journalism, essays, interviews, albums, and music videos using cultural studies as a method toward unraveling how cultural power has been naturalized through constructions of difference. We will apply theoretical frameworks from across the study of language, literature, and culture to which you have likely been exposed, such as cultural materialism, Black feminism, new historicism, queer theory, and postcolonial thought. We will think about how writing about music engages multiple publics through multiple genres, as well as the relevance of cultural and literary studies toward that end. The quarter will culminate in a portfolio of critical thought and critical analyses from across the quarter.