Introduction

They Never Even Knew

A New Yorker cartoon depicts an elderly couple crossing a line from a territory marked "pop" to one marked "easy listening" with a territory labeled "rock" receding into the background, the couple having evidently already crossed from "rock" into "pop" at some indeterminate time in the past. The caption reads, "They Never Even Knew" (figure 1).

This cartoon, even in a single frame, compresses many ideas about the relationship between genre and identification. Boundaries separate the categories of "rock," "pop," and "easy listening," yet consumers regularly traverse these boundaries. Categories of music are often associated with categories of people, but these associations often change over time. In one possible reading of the cartoon, the associations change because the tastes of a particular group shift as the members of the group age: the couple is crossing over to easy listening because pop music now seems just a little too wild. The caption — "they never even knew" — suggests another, more likely interpretation: associations change because the way that the music is categorized has changed. In other words, the couple has continued to like the same type of music, but the music that was once "pop" (and before that "rock") is now classified as "easy listening." In either interpretation, the couple remains oblivious to the reclassification of their taste: they never even knew.

Categories, or genres, of popular music exist in an odd kind of limbo in public and scholarly discourse. On the one hand, musicians and consumers often resist requests to categorize themselves, insisting that their tastes are unclassifiable. It is common to hear discussions that have invoked the idea of genre end with the declaration that musical genres do not really exist, that they are mere fabrications of the music industry. Yet despite these disavowals, in addition to the cartoon just discussed, the use of genre labels to describe taste continues to return in a wide variety of contexts. For example, on an episode of the television series Glee, the character Mercedes (who is African American) explains to the character Puck (who is white) that a romance is simply not in the cards: "It's never going to work. You're Top 40 and I'm rhythm and blues." Even songs confirm the quotidian value of genre: Lonnie Mack proclaimed in 1988 that he was "too rock for country, too country for rock 'n' roll" in a recording with the same title. And no listing of "musicians wanted" ads (i.e., musicians looking for other musicians to play with) could function without an extensive listing of genre labels in order to indicate the musicians' interests to one another.

These anecdotes illustrate that the issue of genre is complex, possibly contentious, and difficult to escape. The New Yorker cartoon, the exchange from Glee, Lonnie Mack's song, musicians wanted ads, and many other texts suggest that the question of genre in popular music is often inextricably tied to how people identify with different types of music. Such genre designations indicate or imply the assumed audience for a particular type of music, and frequently raise questions about who produces and consumes the music. At the same time, much of the resistance encountered in discussions of genre implies an awareness of the instability of genres over time (e.g., music with similar stylistic traits is reclassified — and, even if "they never even knew," occasionally participants in popular music dimly sense this impersonal process), of the porousness of boundaries (despite the clear lines drawn in the New Yorker cartoon), and of the way in which no two people define a genre in the same way. Similarly, something seems to be amiss in how categories of people are associated with categories of music in that these relationships are constantly changing and never seem to accurately describe all those who participate in a particular type of music. This lack of a tight, unwavering fit occurs at least partly because categories of people are subject to the same type of transience that affects categories of music. The ability of popular music genres to evoke a demographic group also seems odd in that some categories, such as country music and rhythm and blues, evoke a category of people much more clearly than do others (Top 40 or mainstream popular music, for example).

Despite many contradictions, however, genre labels for popular music continue to be used in numerous contexts, and they continue to evoke connotations of particular types of people (albeit some more than others). Contradiction and inconsistency need not signal the undesirability of a critical enterprise. In my case, they sparked the beginning of an odyssey, which has consisted of the search for answers to a series of questions, beginning with the most basic: What is a popular music genre? This chapter will also consider in turn what I term the "relational" quality of genre; the role of scale or level; the process of iterability or citationality in the emergence, stabilization, and transformation of genres; the issue of authorship; and the nature of the relationship between categories of music and categories of people.

WHAT IS A POPULAR MUSIC GENRE?

The term "genre," in its most basic sense, refers to "type" or "kind" (in French the word is synonymous with one of the most basic ways of classifying human beings, namely gender). This definition may seem straightforward until we inquire about the basis of the similarity of texts that are grouped together. Doubts arise because inspection of an individual text in terms of style, form, or content inevitably raises questions as to genre identity: the more that we examine a given grouping of texts, the more dissimilar individual texts begin to appear. The obverse of this situation lies in the impossibility of imagining a genre-less text — that is, a text so dissimilar to other texts that it could not under any circumstances be grouped with another. Similarly, the more closely one describes a genre in terms of its stylistic components, the fewer examples actually seem to fit. And although the range of sonic possibilities for any given genre is quite large at a particular moment, it is not infinite. Simply because a musical text may not (to paraphrase Jacques Derrida) belong to a genre with any stability does not mean that it does not participate in one, a distinction that emphasizes the temporal, experiential, functional, and fleeting quality of genres while nonetheless retaining the importance of the genre concept for communicating about texts. Put another way, genres are not static groupings of empirically verifiable musical characteristics, but rather associations of texts whose criteria of similarity may vary according to the uses to which the genre labels are put. "Similar" elements include more than musical-style features, and groupings often hinge on elements of nation, class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

Indeed, while musical style traits may alert us to general tendencies that differentiate artists and recordings at a given moment, without other types of information about producers, consumers, critical discourse, and the music industry (to name but a few other factors), these traits will not suffice, as it will be possible to find musical examples with these traits that were categorized some other way, or, as in the New Yorker cartoon, to find clusters of musical texts that were categorized differently at some point in the past. In other words, the "effects" of genre cannot be traced to the "cause" of musical style in a direct, one-to-one relationship.

Another question (or difficulty) emerges in the relationship between popular music genres such as rock, pop, and easy listening, and the notion of genre as it has existed previously in musicological study or in the scholarship in other media, such as literature or cinema. In studies of Western art (classical) music, the large category of music with which the discipline of musicology has been primarily concerned, genre has tended to refer to formal and stylistic conventions, focusing on textual distinctions between the symphony, concerto, opera, character piece, et cetera. Other types of groupings do occur in the study of art music, such as those by historical period (Baroque, classical, Romantic) or nationality or geography, or, in post-Romantic music, by compositional approach (serialism, neoclassicism, minimalism), but these are not generally conflated with the idea of genre.

Classical studies of genre in literature began with Aristotle's formulation of a tripartite scheme for analyzing poetry in terms of syntactical schemes: epic, lyric, drama. Subsequent discussions of genre until the mid-nineteenth century regarded Aristotle's model as sacrosanct; in the words of the film scholar Rick Altman, "By accentuating poetry's internal characteristics rather than the kinds of experience fostered by poetry, Aristotle set genre theory on to a virtually unbroken course of textual analysis." Altman's dire prognosis may be contradicted by recent activity on the subject (including his own), especially in the fields of literature and film studies, but it must be said that musicological studies have tended to follow the traditional literary emphasis on style traits. Emphasis in these situations tends to rely more on retroactive grouping based on what is already known or assumed to be the contents of a genre rather than on the emergence of a category during a particular historical period and the conflictual contemporaneous understandings that often compete while a genre is becoming established. The study of epic, lyric, and drama lends itself to a focus on syntactic processes and semantic content due to their historical distance, and the resulting difficulty in recovering whatever social connotations these genres may have possessed at one time.

In cinema, to take a different medium in which scholars have extensively debated the issue, genres have often been retroactively fitted to formal characteristics and conventions of plot, setting, and character. Cinematic genres would seem to lend themselves to formalist groupings, as genres such as the musical, action-adventure, and biopic do not raise connotations of identity in the same manner as does, say, foreign music, a category of popular music prominent in the early twentieth century. This is not to say that these genres do not suggest different audiences; however, due to the production and distribution costs associated with films, most film genres of necessity overtly court audiences that transcend demographic divisions, and promotional materials often seek to blur generic boundaries for that reason. Cases in which types of film are explicitly matched with types of people are rare, as in the case of the early-twentieth-century form Yiddish cinema, or in the 1970s with Blaxploitation. The latter notwithstanding, few cinematic parallels exist to the various categories of popular music that have existed since the 1920s and that have evoked communities of participants, often with great specificity. This is the case even though action-adventure movies filled with high-tech explosions, animated features filled with adorable fuzzy animals, and "women's films" all clearly connote a demographic slice of the pie. Beginning in the late 1970s, film studies underwent its own questioning of formalist and presentist approaches to genre. Unlike cinema studies, however, popular music studies has not displayed the same attention to issues of genre, and, despite scattered attempts to address the issue, has not generated anything approaching a sustained, theoretically informed debate around a series of shared issues.

What Does It Mean to Write a History of Genre?

Recently, a turn away from retroactive grouping and toward a more historicist approach has appeared in the work of music and film scholars. The opposition between presentist and historicist approaches contrasts the retroactive grouping of texts into a genre based on a presumed stylistic consistency and critical consensus with the study of the conflictual meanings of categories via a reconstruction of a historical horizon of meaning. Mikhail Bakhtin stressed the interdependence of the two concepts, and made the following description of the effect they have on interpretation: one approach, the historicist, "encloses" the work "within the epoch," while the other, the presentist, reads the work on the basis of one's scholarly disposition, in the process "modernizing" it. Neither of these approaches, according to Bakhtin, is particularly valuable by itself.

This book, in addition to explicitly contrasting historicist and presentist concepts, also employs an approach toward categorization that could be described, following Michel Foucault, as genealogical, in that such a method attends to a period's historical accidents and forgotten trivialities and to the role of these in struggles in cultural production. Rather than focusing on what constitutes the contents of a musical category, the emphasis here falls on how a particular idea of a category emerges and stabilizes momentarily (if at all) in the course of being accepted across a range of discourses and institutions. The point is to question the "self-evident" aspects of a genre that bind together different instantiations of it over time, and thus to emphasize the conditions that support the singularity of the function, use, and meaning of particular genres. At the same time, long-range historical narratives, with their tendency toward a unitary view of genre, are reread here in terms of the struggles over categorical labels that dominate accounts of a category's emergence. The purpose of using the concept, genealogy, is not to contrast simply a presentist view of history — a role that might be filled by canonical narratives in which a cause-and-effect teleology leads from a point of origin to the present in order to confirm contemporary beliefs about a subject — with a historicist approach that reconstitutes the historical horizon in which events and texts emerge. Rather, such a genealogical approach seeks both to analyze the conditions that make it possible for an event to occur and, at the same time, to not occlude the current events to which an interest in the past is responding, what Foucault termed a "history of the present."

Franco Fabbri and Genre as a System of Difference

If the study of genre has not attained as high a profile in popular music studies as in the study of cinema or literature, this is not due to a lack of trying on the part of several scholars of popular music. Perhaps the first, and certainly one of the most celebrated, salvos was fired by Franco Fabbri in two articles published in 1982. The more extensive of these, "A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications," maps out a rigorous approach to the study of genre. Most accounts of the study of genre in popular music studies begin here and focus on elaborating one of Fabbri's opening statements: A musical genre is "a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules" (52). Fabbri divides these rules into five categories: 1) "formal and technical rules"; 2) "semiotic rules"; 3) "behavior rules"; 4) "social and ideological rules"; and 5) "economic and juridical rules."

From the foregoing summary, it is clear that Fabbri regards as indivisible what are usually divided into the musical and social aspects of genre — that is, he argues implicitly that it is impossible to understand a given genre without consideration of both (what are conventionally divided into) social and musical elements (even as he divides the musical and the social into separate categories for heuristic purposes). Rules, however, give the appearance of something fixed. They invoke the law, a set of strictures that may be interpreted but which appear to be outside of history. In a word, the idea of multiple sets of rules conjures up something cold and forbidding.

A piece of scholarship is a product of a specific time and place. Fabbri initially wrote "A Theory of Musical Genres" for presentation at the first conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in 1981. The almost scientistic quality of some of the passages in the article may be ascribed to the powerful sway over the humanities and social sciences held by structuralism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Another, and perhaps more convincing, line of defense for Fabbri's article against criticism of its being overly deterministic is suggested by a close reading of the article itself, which reveals that these rules are not quite as austere and static as they might appear at first sight. The article may, at times, give the impression that identifying a given genre and the texts that participate in it is synonymous with toting up how a given text does or does not correspond to a genre's rules. However, a careful examination of Fabbri's discussion of a test case — the system of canzone in Italy today — and the transformation of a particular subgenre of canzone — the canzone d'autore — makes it clear that genres exist in a system of difference operating during a specific period of time, and that the rules are derived inductively after the analyst has already observed the arrangement of genres within the system. This inductive method may beg the question as to how one is able to identify a given genre in the first place, or how one is able to delimit the system, but what is possibly a tautological problem does not negate the observation that these rules are thus descriptive rather than prescriptive, inductive rather deductive, a heuristic tool rather than a series of rigid containers. This relational quality of genres within a system enables Fabbri to avoid an essentialist approach to the description of genres, and his account of generic transformation clarifies that genres are not static entities with stable boundaries.