Radio and Popular Music Reading Diary Assignment One - Week Four

Assignment One - Reading Diary

Week Four: Popular Music Genres and Narratives

During this week’s lecture, we explored the concept of genre in relation to the music industries. We discussed it as a form of categorising and controlling music, and with that, it’s listeners/fans, attitude and style, how they interrelate and the codes, conventions, contexts and narratives within genres. The first reading attempts to use genre to further develop and understand how meaning can be constructed in popular music (Wall, 2003, pp. 180). On the other hand, the second reading, from Silver, Lee and Childless, challenges the idea that genre is becoming less important, and investigates the complexity of genre and sub-genre structures. Both of these arguments related to music genre were discussed in our lecture, so it is particularly interesting to see which of the readings is most convincing, or if there may be a way that both of these concepts could be correct, and in fact complement each other and work symbiotically.

I agree with a point made Wall’s work that music material is now less able to be categorised into genres for the practice of following musical or stylistic conventions but instead, a genre's main purpose now is for producers to target specific audiences/cultures and for these consumers to then receive it due to the expectations of the encoded genre (Wall, 2003, pp.181). Then the second reading furthers this point by explaining that genres are not just made up of musical components – and even though the non-musical aspects of a genre can be shared with other genres and subgenres that may slightly relate in some way, these aspects still need to be categorised and defined, as for ‘genre’ to exist, some form of expectation must accompany it (Silver, Lee & Childress, 2016, pp.3).

In reflection, I think that the work of Silver, Lee and Childress is the most effective and accurate in researching music genres and their role in the music industry. It allows for the idea of genres to be fluid and flexible, more so than Wall’s study and approaches the idea of genre from many different angles.

These readings have inspired me to challenge the importance and purpose of genre and how it is used in the music industry. If I were to conduct a study of music genres, I would focus it on collaborations of artists from different genres – challenging the expectations of their music and genre. I would research the effects of when artists that are considered significantly different, in both popularity terms and in genre and style terms, coact and produce music together – the reaction from followers of each of the participating genres and any changes to the codes, conventions and culture of the fans of the collaboration/original artists work.

References:

Wall, T, (2003). 'Genre'. In (ed), Studying Popular Music Culture. 1st ed. UK: Hodder & Stoughton Educational. pp. (179-188)

Silver D, Lee M, Childress, CC (2016) Genre Complexes in Popular Music. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155471 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155471