Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

17
http://cus.sagepub.com/ Cultural Sociology http://cus.sagepub.com/content/7/2/145 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/1749975512473461 2013 7: 145 Cultural Sociology David Beer Genre, Boundary Drawing and the Classificatory Imagination Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: British Sociological Association can be found at: Cultural Sociology Additional services and information for http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: What is This? - May 29, 2013 Version of Record >> by guest on June 22, 2013 cus.sagepub.com Downloaded from

description

Beer Piece

Transcript of Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Page 1: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

http://cus.sagepub.com/Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/content/7/2/145The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/1749975512473461

2013 7: 145Cultural SociologyDavid Beer

Genre, Boundary Drawing and the Classificatory Imagination  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: 

  British Sociological Association

can be found at:Cultural SociologyAdditional services and information for    

  http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- May 29, 2013Version of Record >> by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 2: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Cultural Sociology7(2) 145 –160

© The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1749975512473461

cus.sagepub.com

Genre, Boundary Drawing and the Classificatory Imagination

David BeerUniversity of York, UK

AbstractThis article suggests that the vitality of genre, and particularly music genre, is often missing from social and cultural research. This is despite its central presence as a structural force within increasingly popular forms of field analysis. To deal with this absence, the article draws upon conceptual material on everyday forms of classification and new forms of digital data. It is argued that the concept of a classificatory imagination might be used to develop a more contingent and transient vision of genre as a form of everyday cultural classification or as a structuring force in cultural fields. The article describes three problems facing cultural sociology in its use of genre categories. Two are briefly presented whilst the third is developed through a case study of hip hop. The article concludes with some reflections upon what this reveals about cultural boundary drawing and the impact of decentralized media upon genre formation.

Keywordsclassification, cultural boundaries, fields, genre, hip hop, music, music cultures, popular music

The band the Jesus and Mary Chain know a thing or two about genre. When this ‘indie rock’ group, who were at the time known for their rough feedback guitars and subtle vocal melodies, were asked about possible producers for their album Automatic, they responded by using genre as a means of deterrence. In an interview, Jim Reid, one of the band’s founding members, recalled:

We met Daniel Lanois. He said that we could come to New Orleans and wouldn’t need to go to a studio, just hire a big church … He asked what kind of sound we had in mind; we kind of said drum machines, sequencers and hip hop music. The guy practically shat himself on the spot. We never heard from him again. (Jesus and Mary Chain, 2008)

As with other participants in scenes and movements, many musicians are uncomfort-able with genre labels. In many instances, as this example suggests, the boundaries

Corresponding author:David Beer, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. Email: [email protected]

473461 CUS7210.1177/1749975512473461Cultural SociologyBeer2012

Article

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 3: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

146 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

around genre become a means of communicating an artistic identity based upon eclecti-cism, openness and dissidence. As such, these boundaries become the sites of tension, play, demarcation and difference. Genre boundaries become a microcosm or metaphor for the constraining boundaries of societal forces and a personification of the oppressive-ness of culture. For musicians and fans, the ability to communicate discontent with labels – popular culture is not averse to a sound understanding of labeling theory – provides a means for communicating their genre transcendence and super-genre cultural position-ing. In response, new boundaries are drawn and fresh neologisms or cut-and-shut genre classifications are carved out. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) have noted, to ‘classify is human’. In short, the classificatory imagination of the consumer is vital and the participatory media surrounding them is adaptive, mobile and responsive.

Prominent forms of cultural sociology, including field analysis, have a tendency to work with quite rigid and fixed notions of genre and, therefore, tend to gloss over the crea-tive and mobile drawing, re-drawing and imbrication of genre boundaries as they are created and formulated within the context of everyday cultural engagement. Fittingly, Lamont (2010: 132) gently challenges us, in a set of biographical reflections on her drift away from Bourdieu, to accept that there is a need to find ways of ‘studying classification systems comparatively and from the ground up’. To deal with this absence, and to respond to Lamont’s call, the article draws upon conceptual material on everyday forms of clas-sification and meshes these with new forms of digital data. It is argued that we can use the concept of a classificatory imagination in order to work with a more vital and transient vision of genre as a form of everyday cultural classification or as a structuring force in cultural fields. The article begins with a summary of this broader work on everyday clas-sification. It then looks at how this work might connect with the literature on music genre and field. Following on from this conceptual foundation, the article describes three prob-lems facing cultural sociology in its use of genre categories. Two are described briefly as a contextual backdrop whilst the third, and most pressing problem, is developed through a case study of hip hop. In concluding, some reflections are offered with regards to cul-tural boundary drawing and the impact of decentralized media upon genre formation.

The Classificatory Imagination

Perhaps the most influential recent work on classification is Bowker and Star’s (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Given the scale of this influ-ence it is surprising that it has not really been widely incorporated by cultural researchers interested in understanding cultural classificatory systems. It is worth returning to some of the core ideas that they espouse in order to begin to frame genre classifications within this type of science and technology studies approach. Bowker and Star’s text uses a wide range of detailed cases to elucidate the embeddedness of classificatory processes in eve-ryday life. This reveals that classificatory systems are a central part of the ordering of life-worlds. They are crucial to making things operate successfully, whilst also being so familiar and working so smoothly that they are difficult to notice and describe. As they put it, a ‘good infrastructure is hard to find’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 33). The broader argument of their book is that, as the opening line claims, ‘[o]ur lives are henged round with systems of classification, limned by standard formats, prescriptions, and objects’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 1). They continue:

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 4: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 147

Not all classifications take formal shape or are standardized in commercial and bureaucratic products. We all spend large parts of our days doing classification work, often tacitly, and we make up and use a range of classifications to do so. (Bowker and Star, 1999: 1–2)

This reveals their vision of imbrications of classificatory systems operating in the everyday. Some are stable and established. Others are transient, mobile and contingent. Some are built for us. Others we create or adapt through routine practices. And some are hybrids that only ‘appear to live partly in our hands’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 2). These systems of classification, as this indicates, are described as working on multiple levels around and through individual interactions as we ‘rub these ad hoc classifications against an increasingly elaborate large-scale system of formal categories and standards’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 6). The difficulty is that, they suggest, these ‘standards and classifications … are ordinarily invisible’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 2). The good news is that these clas-sificatory systems become more visible, they argue, when they ‘break down’ or become ‘objects of contention’. As Bauman has argued, we can think of boundaries not as barri-ers but as ‘interfaces’ that ‘confront’ and ‘join’ the things that they divide. Bauman (2010: 169) points out that ‘[b]oundaries are thereby subjected to opposite, contradictory pres-sures, turning them into sites of tension and potential objects of contention, antagonism, permanently seething conflict or conflagrations of hostilities’.

Bowker and Star suggest some questions to be considered in understanding how things are sorted and classified. They ask:

What are these categories ? Who makes them, and who may change them? When and why do they become visible? How do they spread? What, for instance, is the relationship among locally generated categories … and the commodified, elaborate, expensive ones…?

For Bowker and Star, these questions allow us to see into systems of classification and the impact that they have. They matter, it is argued, because there is a pressing need to understand the ‘social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 3).

The question is how we might go about such an analysis. Bowker and Star provide a series of techniques or tricks for inverting the study of classification to see these systems from the ground-up. To select the most appropriate for the analysis that will follow, Bowker and Star (1999: 44) propose that one of the ‘tricks’ for making classifications and boundary drawing visible is to focus upon what they describe as ‘practical politics’. This returns us to the earlier point that areas of contention are the points at which these systems and their consequences are most visible. It also returns to the notion that bound-ary drawing occurs within the everyday negotiation of things, people and information. As Bowker and Star (1999: 44) argue:

Someone, somewhere, must decide and argue over the minutiae of classifying and standardizing. The negotiations themselves form the basis for a fascinating practical ontology … Whose voice will determine the outcome is sometimes an exercise of pure power … sometimes the negotiations are more subtle, involving … disparate viewpoints.

What is perhaps changing is the scope of classification, with media moving toward more decentralized forms, user-participation and the general ‘unbinding’ of cultural

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 5: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

148 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

archives (Gane and Beer, 2008: 71–86). The result is that, if we take something like Wikipedia as an obvious example, the ‘someone somewhere’ to whom Bowker and Star refer can potentially be lots of people in lots of places at any time. We might argue that boundaries are more continually redrawn as a result of the technological and cultural changes associated with decentralized social media than Bowker and Star (1999: 45) could have allowed for. Despite these changes, their contention is pertinent: in order to understand boundary work in classification we need to look at these ‘negotiations in action’.

This discussion of negotiations in action speaks directly to Bottero and Crossley’s (2011) recent contrasting of the concept of ‘field’ with ‘networks’ and ‘worlds’. Here they question Bourdieu’s limited acknowledgement of the role of social relations in the shaping of objective or structural relations. They counter Bourdieu’s criticism that this is to mix cause with effect by suggesting that Bourdieu’s arguments ‘make it hard to discern the mechanisms by which “objective relations” to capital generate the effects that he attributes to them … he lacks an account of mechanisms which generate similarities in their habitus’ (Bottero and Crossley, 2011: 101). Bottero and Crossley’s position is that such objective relations cannot simply sit in the background but are part of the recursivity of objective or structural relations – a compelling argument that, when applied to music cultures, leads us to a need to examine the formation of genre rather than treating it as a set of dominant objective forces. Here then, in this regard, we can see a parallel and constructive conversation occurring between those interested in how everyday forms of classification work and those who are attempting to think through Bourdieu’s oeuvre from a more relational or network perspective.

Bowker and Star acknowledge that their position is influenced by Foucault’s The Order of Things: a text that tells of the emergence and power of classificatory systems in the modern world. Foucault (2002: 143) argues, referring to the classificatory sys-tems of natural history, that classificatory systems provided ‘a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse’, and are involved in ‘making history’. Indeed, Foucault provides a powerful account of how classificatory systems feed into methodo-logical appreciations of social worlds. Foucault’s concern is with the ‘experience’ of classification that occurs at the points of tension between existing classificatory systems, and the ways that we create and renew classificatory systems at a more agential level. As Foucault (2002: xxiii) puts it, ‘in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and the reflections upon order itself, there is pure experience of order and of its modes of being’. It is, of course, this experience of order that we find echoed in Bowker and Star’s approach.

Foucault’s work on ‘grids’ and the ‘encoded eye’ is helpful in gaining such a set of insights. Foucault (2002: xxii) says this about the experience of ordering:

It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc.

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 6: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 149

For Foucault, existing classificatory orders are inescapable in our appreciation and understanding of ‘things’. They encode the things we see: we arrive with an a priori set of classifications to work with. We inevitably use these classifications to see and order the things that we encounter. But for Foucault this is not the end of things. The classifica-tory system is powerful in shaping encounters but is not necessarily fixed and immova-ble in the outcomes it might generate. The encoded eye retains some flexibility, agency and reflexivity, whilst still influencing how we code and recode cultural boundaries. Foucault’s suggestion is that we do not encounter things in a way that is entirely defined by the encoded eye and its use of classificatory ‘grids’. As he argues:

Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression. (Foucault, 2002: xxi)

The point we might draw from this is that when understanding cultural boundary draw-ing we need to appreciate the wider processes of classification. In this instance we find the tensions of the ‘experience of order’ that occur as the encoded eye deploys grid type mechanisms to order what might be a flexible and even chaotic social world. For Foucault, these grids are powerful in shaping encounters, but they do not entirely limit the possibility of classificatory imaginings.

The writings of Bowker and Star, Foucault and to a lesser extent Bauman, indicate the tensions of everyday classification as fixed boundaries compete with ad hoc and contingent categories and applications. We are pointed towards what I describe in this article as the classificatory imagination. The classificatory imagination encap-sulates a sometimes active and sometimes more passive engagement with lots of different types of classificatory systems in the passage of everyday practices. The classificatory imagination is deployed in different ways to negotiate these sorting processes. Sometimes the grids of the encoded eye are powerful and defining, in other instances our engagement with cultural boundaries might be playful, resistant, imaginative and highly creative – from forming new boundaries, to placing things, to negotiating the ad hoc from the established, to creating new meanings and so on. But what does this tell us about genre?

Drawing Genre Boundaries: The Classificatory Imagination in Culture

Of course, the discussion of the importance of classifications in culture, which I have highlighted through Bowker and Star and Foucault, would not be lost on Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu (1984: 479) claims, for example, that:

What is at stake in the struggles about the meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization: the evocative power of an utterance which puts things in a different light.

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 7: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

150 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

When reading Bourdieu’s position against the classificatory imagination there are some key questions that are left open for consideration. In Bourdieu’s work we are forced to ask who it is that is drawing these classifications and how rigid these boundaries are. Indeed, the problem of ‘fuzzy’ borders in fields is a long acknowledged problem that Bourdieu himself identified (Thomson, 2008: 78). The problem is perhaps where too great a sense of certainty enters into field analysis and replaces this fuzzyness.

So, although field is based upon ‘struggle’, Bourdieu appears, implicitly, to place a large amount of emphasis on the ‘grid’ and relatively little upon the ‘encoded eye’ and its ability to draw and redraw boundaries (see Bottero and Crossley, 2011; Savage and Silva, 2013). Bourdieu (1984: 480) leaves some small scope for redrawing or ‘free play’ (Thomson, 2008: 74), but this scope appears to occur only when the limits of a field are originally being defined and these limits then subsequently become more concrete. The product of struggles is that these structures are defined by those who are dominant, and as such describes a very particular type of boundary drawing within the ‘dynamics of field’. As Bourdieu (1984: 235) puts it:

When confronted with an object so clearly organized in terms of the basic opposition [which in this case is the opposition between formulaic and experimental theatre performances], the critics, who are themselves distributed in the field of the press in accordance with the structure which shapes both the classified object and the classification system they apply to it, reproduce – in the space of the judgments whereby they classify both it and themselves – the space within which they are themselves classified … The whole process constitutes a perfect circle … As in a set of facing mirrors.

The process here is dynamic and ongoing, but the reflections appear to be one-direc-tional and determinate. We might see then that there is some scope for developing the drawing of boundaries within the struggles of fields in some alternative ways (Savage and Silva, 2013). Not least we find space for thinking about how the classificatory imagi-nation plays out in fields and how it might lead to much more vibrancy and mobility than Bourdieu’s position might suggest, or that in fact has been suggested by much of the work that has followed in his path. We might add to this Nick Prior’s (2008) observation about the way that a lack of attention to technological change creates a problem for the understanding of boundaries in Bourdieu’s concept of field.

As mentioned earlier, one of the problems typical of field analysis, along with a number of other dominant forms of cultural sociology, particularly of quantitative type, is that it tends to work with quite rigid visions of genre. Here sociologists tend to work with a powerful and limited ‘grid’ of cultural classifications, and in so doing exclude the classificatory imagination from the cultural processes of classification and boundary drawing. In these instances cultural grids become all powerful in that they are insur-mountable, stable and, most crucially, universally shared cultural classificatory sys-tems. Genre becomes an overtly limiting a priori organizing tool that enables other forms of analytical insight to be developed, such as the connections between tastes and social class, age, or gender. Although very different from each other, the influential work of both Chan and Goldthorpe (2007) on the one side and Richard Peterson (Peterson and Simkus, 1992; Peterson and Kern, 1996) on the other, are illustrative of this quite rigid and preset approach to genre. Even where we might look to the complex

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 8: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 151

geo-metric spatial analysis, of the increasingly popular multiple-correspondence analysis we need to remind ourselves that we are often, even when examining these clusters of individuals, still looking at the liking and disliking of a few pre-set genre categories (see for example Le Roux et al., 2008). It is not that these are wrong, but that they work with a very specific ontological assumption about genre, an assumption that does not fit comfortably with the broader literature on classification in everyday life with which I have opened this article. Often cultural sociology does not see genre as all that mobile: it sees the encoded eye as limited, it sees cultural grids as being shared and indisputable, and it does not often look at boundaries as contested social interfaces and mobile sites of tension.

It is important to add that this is not simply an argument for qualitative cultural sociol-ogy. Indeed, there have been a number of attempts to engage with such boundary drawing issues through interview techniques (for a recent example see Atkinson, 2011; for a mixed methods account, see Bennett et al., 2009). The problem is that interviews are likely to look for an indexical frame of reference, that is to say, that discussions of music tend toward negotiated meaning, a point of convergence of the encoded eyes of the interviewer and interviewee. This means that it is unlikely that all of the complexities, intricacies and strangeness of genre will emerge in interviews. Additionally, the interviews themselves do not occur at the moments where contentions occur and where genre boundaries are likely to be more visible. As such, in interviews we have genre as a monologue rather than as an interface. We are also forced to consider here how scale might play a part in the formation, mediation and dissemination of genre boundaries. We might need to think about how we might further uncover the classificatory imagination in cultural processes. To apply this directly to field analysis, we might need to think about how the boundaries that we are imagining are structuring the struggles over capital (Savage and Silva, 2013).

To work alongside some of these more stable visions of genre in sociology, we need to develop accounts that engage with the classificatory imagination, of those making and consuming music (building upon work on music and its everyday meanings exemplified by DeNora, 2000). But we should note that by looking across the social sciences and humanities, we are able to find literature that engages with alternative visions of genre drawing. In fact, there is much to be gained from looking away across from sociology towards literary criticism, genre theory and cultural history. In this literature we can see analytical models of genre boundaries that account for various scales of the classificatory imagination. Inside the more rigid conceptualizations of genre, we find those that develop structural notions of genre where boundaries are largely drawn as a part of larger scale economic and industrial powers. So although genre might change and be mobile, it is still the outcome of relatively rigid grids and boundaries. This might include work that is also at the more sociological end of the spectrum such as DiMaggio’s (1987) classic work, Keith Negus’s (1999) book on genre and the music industry or, moving more toward an analytical middle ground, the recent book by Lena (2012) on social ties and genre. In these accounts, boundary lines are largely structural and top-down, and are therefore dif-ficult to re-draw, being a product, as they are, of the cultural hierarchies of artists and industry people. On the other end of the spectrum, we can find less structural, often even post-structural or post-modern, accounts that tend towards seeing genre as something that is unanchored, changeable, plural and protean. Indicative examples are outlined in

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 9: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

152 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

Duff’s overview (2000), and elaborated both in the discussions of genre in an era of postmodern boundary blurring in Dowd et al. (2006), and also in the discussions of rhetoric and genre formation in Freedman and Medway’s collection (1994). It would seem fair to conclude that in this literature there are instances where classifications are more open and others where the grids are more powerful and restrictive (for an overview, see Frow, 2006). It is in this very variability that we find the ‘experience’ of the ‘middle ground’ to which Foucault referred, and it is in this variability of circumstances that we find the individual’s classificatory imagination at work. The classificatory imagination is thus a sensitizing concept intended to think across these different positions. Having established that I am not alone in such calls for an open approach to the vibrancy of genre – and echoing here Hennion’s (2001) vision of genre as performance and Holt’s (1998) observations about the removal of stylistic constraints in genre – let us now focus on the specific analytical issues that are raised as we attempt to envision this classificatory imagination and as we return to Lamont’s (2010) call for us to think of cultural categories comparatively and from the ground-up.

Genre Delineation and the Classificatory Imagination in Action

In this section we return to Bowker and Star (1999: 45) by focusing upon the ‘practical politics’ of genre in order to see how boundaries form through ‘negotiations in action’. To develop this argument further, the remainder of the article focuses on genre boundaries in an empirical and sociological sense. Based upon the discussion of the classificatory imagination in culture, three types of boundary drawing problems can be explored: (1) the drawing of boundaries within fragmented cultural scenes, (2) the drawing of bounda-ries around emergent (sub)genres, and (3) the problem of revealing the tensions of boundary delineation existing around a priori genres. For the purpose of establishing some context I will very briefly describe the first two, both of which require more lengthy investigations of their own, before focusing in more detail upon the third and most rele-vant of these issues.

The drawing of genre boundaries within fragmented cultural scenes

One of the most prominent arguments about contemporary popular culture is that it is becoming more fragmented and, consequently we need to think of culture as being something that can be imagined through concepts that evoke this fragmentation (see Bennett, 1999). If we are to accept this influential account of contemporary music cultures, we are left to wonder how we might imagine genre in an era of apparent cultural fragmentation and splintering. The difficulty will be seeing boundary draw-ing in action when such a high volume of boundaries are being drawn and redrawn, when shared cultural endeavours are limited or small scale, or where genre is so over-whelmingly chaotic. It seems fair to conclude that we need to re-appraise genre in this context, and to think carefully about how it relates to the music scenes and move-ments typical of contemporary culture. The central issue here concerns the emergent relations between music cultures and decentralized or social media forms (see Beer,

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 10: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 153

2008; Robards and Bennett, 2011). There is some evidence to suggest that music cul-tures have been decoupled from the broadcast media that previously shaped the clas-sificatory grids that organized musical forms. Music genres, like the music cultures of which they are a part, have, like the media in which they are organized, become seemingly less centralized. The industry, professionals, journalists and broadcast-ers still – as DiMaggio (1987) influentially argued – play a role in genre formation, but these are sometimes bypassed as their efforts are lost in the cultural cacophony of social media. We know that people can now create and disseminate their own music, can illegally and legally obtain music for free, and so on. This also has a consequence for music genres.

Individuals - or ordinary people as Turner (2010) has put it, can tag music with metadata that classifies particular songs or artists. This means that genre can now more readily emerge from the ground-up. This has always been the case (Fowler, 2008) but now new media forms have expanded the possibilities for the dissemination of genre classifications. Genre is still a product of friendship networks, radio, TV and maga-zines, but now genre is also something of a self-organizing system (Lash, 2007), being drawn and redrawn through the tags that are attached to the music. Here the processes of tagging, searching and recommendation become part of the ‘organized striving’ (Martin, 2003; see also Savage and Silva, 2013) of the musical field. As the classifica-tory imagination is exercised, so music can be tagged in multiple ways and with increas-ingly granular or imaginative labels. The result is the dissemination of genre and the visualization of the integration in fields that, as Savage and Silva (2013) point out, is often sidelined in favour of competition. The problem for sociologists of culture is that genre has always been complex but now it is also less anchored in centralized media formats. It can mutate and evolve, be created or die, splinter and split. In other words, cultural boundaries now appear more open to rapid and unconstrained drawing as a consequence of the media formats through which they are archived, ordered and obtained.

The good news for sociologists is that many of these boundary-drawing practices become visual through the tag clouds on music sites like Last.fm. The difficulty is that we are perhaps not fully set up to cope with vernacular classificatory systems that are so transient. We can also imagine that it is almost impossible to get a sense of movements or the broader picture of what is happening in this overwhelming mass of genres and sub-genres. Returning to Bowker and Star will assist in thinking about how people filter such complexity and asking what their ‘grids’ are and what resources are used to draw their boundary lines. It is necessary to turn to cultural formations like tag clouds, to try to see the chaos and complexity of genres on the ground, as they interweave with processes of cultural fragmentation.

The drawing of boundaries around emergent (sub)genres

The next problem is how we might focus upon new and emergent genres amongst the maelstrom of contemporary culture. On the one hand, we have familiar and well-established genres and the possibility in metadata of studying how boundaries are drawn around these. In juxtaposition to this, we have the problem of identifying new

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 11: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

154 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

genres, where they come from, how they emerge and, most crucially, how we might observe the drawing of boundaries around them as they increase in popularity and as they are shaped by a growing fan base. This is a significant analytical problem. We can’t overlook the presence of new genres in cultural analysis. The boundaries around emergent genres are likely to change rapidly and are often likely to become less coherent as they lose ‘density’ (Crossley, 2009).

If we wish to see genre as changeable, it is important that we understand the emergence of new genres and how these develop, coagulate and achieve wider attention. Those that do not hit the mainstream are likely to remain uncovered, even when they might be genres that have powerful organizing potential amongst certain groups of people. How, for exam-ple, are the boundaries being drawn around a sub-genre known as Seapunk that was emerging in 2012 at the time that this article was being written? We actually know very little about these processes because analysts have tended to focus upon large established genres. The emergence of new genres, how this happens, how boundaries are drawn in the processes of emergence, how they are differentiated from existing genres and sub-genres (within a fragmented cultural scene), how particular sounds and bands feed into the col-lective genre, and even the ways in which scenes and genres coalesce, all remain sidelined questions and issues. The visibility of genres is made easier by some forms of social media, so whilst apparently creating complexity, there are also traces of interactions around genre foci that researchers may explore. For the purpose of this paper, I would like to suggest these as pressing issues. However, at the moment I would like to focus now in more detail upon the way that boundaries are drawn around the established genres that we are most used to studying in sociological research.

The tensions of boundary delineation around an a priori genre

I have indicated that one difficulty in studying genre is the tendency to begin with a set of a priori genre categories. This is to begin with an already drawn genre grid that is then superimposed upon everyday musical encounters. Before we begin researching, it is dif-ficult to know what people might make of our use of certain genre categories, whether they mean anything to them, if people who actually like the music disassociate them-selves from the genre category, and if the genre categories we use are anything like those on the ground. Rather than attempting to side-step such problems, we might turn to look in detail at the tensions of boundaries that are being drawn and re-drawn around the genre categories we may wish to work with. This is an important point because to say that genre is mobile and changeable does not necessarily mean that we need to start solely from the ground-up. Rather, it is still possible to begin with a genre label and see where this might take us. Indeed, it is likely to be very revealing to use some of the well-worn genre categories and to explore exactly what types of tensions shape the boundaries that contain them. This article uses the hip hop genre as an established, familiar and international genre – a genre that sociologists are likely to use.

But how can we take an established and visible genre like hip hop and begin to see the boundaries that are drawn around it? I turn to a piece of software known as a social media data aggregator or listener (Beer, 2012). These devices capture social media content relating to a chosen search term. The search term is entered and then any mentions on

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 12: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 155

Twitter, blogs, forums or public sections of Facebook are captured for analysis. This content can then be analysed in a number of ways (Beer, 2012). In this instance, the software has been used to accumulate content relating to the search term ‘hip hop’ over a two-month period and the word map function has been used to organize the content. The word map provides a diagram of the words most commonly used in association with hip hop (the lines indicate words that are commonly used together). The words can be selected to reveal a list of content in which hip hop has been used with that particular term. Figure 1 is the hip hop word map extracted on 2 April 2012.

Using Figure 1 as a point of departure, we can explore the different commonly used terms to illuminate the types of discussions that are occurring around hip hop. We can pick out some of the boundary-drawing type terms to see how these might open up some interfaces or sites of tension.

Let us begin with the word ‘dead’. It might not be surprising to find that there is a large-scale discussion of whether hip hop is actually still a viable genre. We find here numerous proclamations that ‘Hip Hop is Dead’. There are also speculations about this death that reveal a delineation of insider and outsider genre boundaries. Comments such as ‘this is why mainstream hip hop is dead’ suggest that hip hop is not a coherent monolith but a contested space within which there is a mainstream alongside other

Figure 1. A word map of the words most commonly associated with hip hop in social media content.

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 13: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

156 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

versions of the genre. And of course there are those arguing against this notion: ‘I tell you this much hip-hop is not dead, you gunna see a change just like barack said!’ or ‘How can hip-hop be dead when Wu-Tang is forever?’. Again, further attempts are made from this to segregate insiders from outsiders on the topic of the death of the genre, with the mere questioning of hip hop’s vitality being seen as a wrong step: ‘If your asking “why is hip hop dead?” theres a pretty good chance your the reason it died’.

As well as the separating-out of mainstream hip hop, the discussion of death leads to more pronounced attempts to draw solid boundaries outlining the authentic from the inauthentic, as this excerpt shows: ‘Like I’ve been saying hip hop is 12 feet under ... not dead but UNDERGROUND!!!’. The death of genre discussion is used to suggest that those that think it is dead are not aware of less visible, underground, insider forms of the genre. Another contributor makes a similar point: ‘They Said Hip-Hop dead because all the hottest shit UNDERGROUND’. The tension here is between those who want to work with a broad boundary around hip hop and those who prefer more exclusive boundaries. Here we see boundaries drawn within boundaries within this one genre. This one debate opens up a set of tensions between fans about what the genre is, what is happening within it, what is authentic and who is on the inside of the genuine hip hop music scene. In fact, illustrating its importance, the word ‘underground’ has made it into the word map (Figure 1). The attempt to segregate off these less visible and more esoteric forms of the genre con-tinue as the talk of underground hip hop becomes a discussion of hip hop outside of the mainstream, where insider knowledge is crucial and where specialism and expertise pro-vide the authority for a redrawing of what the genre is.

Similar debates are found in an exploration of other related terms within the word map. For example the terms ‘classic’, ‘true’ and ‘real’ all reveal similar discussions about what hip hop is and how lines might be demarcated around and inside the genre. The term ‘classic’ opens up discussions of classic songs. Artists such as LL cool J and Raekwon are used as points of reference to talk about the history of hip hop, what the music should be and how it should be defined. This is the use of a kind of hip hop canon, with notional rules about the musical form that shape where the boundaries might be drawn. Similarly, the term ‘true’ relates to discussions about what is and what is not ‘true’ hip hop. These lines are again defined by classic eras on one side - ‘if you were born in 96 and after please don’t talk about what true hip hop sounds like … unless your really a hip hop head’- and on the other side by the strength of the discern-able emotional response to the music: ‘You know you’re a true hip hop lover if you want to cry to a beat’.

The selection of content using the term ‘real’ echoes these other observations. What is considered to be ‘real’ hip hop varies somewhat. It is sometimes defined by the classics in hip hop, and on other occasions by what is seen as the enigmatic insider territory of the contemporary underground. The notion of ‘real’ versions of this genre is something that comes up fairly frequently in defining the genre. Focusing on such a term quickly reveals how these lines are positioned quite differently by different actors, with some protesting against the culture industry – ‘DEATH TO COMMERCIAL ASS MUSIC!!!!!!!!! BRING REAL HIP HOP BACK!!!!!’ – and others simply harking back to halcyon days – ‘i remember real hip hop’ and ‘Classic hip hop! I’m bringing that real music back’. Whatever the vision, the claim to be talking of the ‘real’ genre, ‘this is real hip hop’, is a

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 14: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 157

powerful one in cultural boundary drawing, and one that can evoke some tension amongst those with competing visions.

Finally, as a typical marker of taste, we can turn to the term ‘good’. This uncovers dialogue that separates what is considered to be ‘good’ from what is ‘bad’ within the genre, with the potential to reshape genre boundaries, demonstrating at the same time that it is possible, of course, to like and dislike different music within the same genre. Again in some instances this refers back to a perception of a golden era in the genre’s history, such as ‘I forgot how good this song was ... this is when rap was rap and hip hop was hip hop’. Here we see a fine grain differentiation working both historically and in terms of the separation of rap from hip hop. In terms of the discourse around what is deemed good hip hop we find an insider lexicon demarcating where the genre is heading. Terms like ‘grimey’ and ‘raw’ are used to verbalize the sonic properties of the genre which feeds into further discussion of the genre as it is being drawn today.

In this hip hop discourse, there are a number of tensions emerging that feed into the way that boundaries are being drawn around the genre, that in turn illustrate how the classificatory imagination is active in these processes. The complex relations between the past, present and future of the genre are visible, as are the tensions between the visi-ble mainstream and the obscure underground. Competing positions and claims about the health of the genre are evident along with various views of what are real, true, authentic or good versions of the genre. In short, we find that even this apparently stable genre category is in flux as its boundaries are drawn, layered, erased, contradicted and ques-tioned. We even find those with an interest in the genre claiming it to be defunct. This is not an account of clear genre boundaries; rather hip hop’s boundaries are a matrix of relational positionings. This genre is anchored in its history yet it is transient and con-tested. Hip hop’s history provides some form of grid for the encoded eye but this grid is interpreted differently and reanimated in response to changes in how the genre is defined by the music that is placed within it. Not least we are confronted with what appears to be an interesting interweaving of genre with identity formation, distinction and differentia-tion of taste and the projection of cultural know-how. Genres are likely to remain volatile where they are a product of processes of social distinction and differentiation.

Conclusion

This article has suggested that literature on everyday forms of classification, along with new forms of digital byproduct data, might be imported into cultural sociology in order to help us to see genre and cultural boundary drawing as a more dynamic and contingent set of practices. Nowhere is this truer than in attempts to highlight ‘emergent’ structures in field analysis (Savage and Silva, 2013). In applying the concept of the classificatory imagination, this article identified three problems for consideration. These relate to the way in which boundaries are drawn and redrawn in a changing cultural context. By taking the example of an a priori genre, it is possible to make visible the points of contention and the matrix of lines formed at the boundary of genre categories. Hip hop is one of the more stable genres, and yet we still find contention and imbrication here. This is before we even begin to delve into the drawing of boundaries around much less visible genres, or when we start to explore the massive scale of boundary drawing complexity that is

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 15: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

158 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

occurring where genres become a product of much more fragmented cultural scenes. These more visible moments of contention, captured by new social data, provide us with opportunities to see cultural boundary drawing in action.

Implicit in the background of this article are the changes in culture that have occurred in conjunction with the recent emergence of decentralized social media forms. We might need to think more about how the declining influence of centralized broadcast media forms such as TV, radio and magazines might have opened music genre up to proliferation. Social media are decoupling genre from these centralized forms of genre delineation and have turned genre into an increasingly self-organizing system. Genre may be more chaotic because it is less centralized in its formation and dissemination. I am not dismissing obdurate categories, nor am I dismissing the sociological work that anlyses them, but rather I am suggesting the need for us to complement such work by thinking about the way that changes in the media based dissemination of genre might be altering the structures of the musical field. The processes of tagging occurring in music cultures, where anyone can tag music with any label they choose, mean that music genres have the scope to splinter and spiral outwards as different agendas play out. Tagging is the material instantiation of the classifi-catory imagination. Even a single artist or song can be tagged with multiple genres and sub-genres. We can only begin to wonder what this might mean for the structural and objective spaces of cultural fields and the struggles that they define.

The decentralization of music dissemination media and the classification systems that organize their content, provide the conditions for the classificatory imagination to explore new genre possibilities and to differentiate things in new ways. The restric-tion of our analytical gaze away from boundary drawing on the ground has meant that these changes in genre have largely been overlooked. The next step is to take our analysis of genre in new directions by following these boundary-drawing practices and by seeing how the classificatory imagination is working to redraw cultural lines with an unprecedented granularity. It is here that we will begin to see the part that music genre plays in informing identity and difference. It is only by opening the analysis to boundary drawing within these self-organizing systems that now dominate culture that we will see the sociological significance of what is happening. Given this vision of contemporary culture, it seems that we might need to look at existing cul-tural boundaries as well as newly formed boundaries to reveal how genres are played with, subverted and re-imagined. The shift in attention might need to be away from cultural content and toward a revitalized engagement with the ‘practical ontology’ of how culture is organized. It is here that the objective structures of the ‘battleground’ of fields (Savage and Silva, 2013) might be re-energized and where new forms of data might mesh with a revitalized conceptual vocabulary to illuminate genre in action.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References

Atkinson W (2011) The context and genesis of musical tastes: Omnivorousness debunked, Bour-dieu buttressed. Poetics 39(3): 169–186.

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 16: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

Beer 159

Bauman Z (2010) 44 Letters from a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.Beer D (2008) Making friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music culture in the context of Web 2.0.

Cultural Sociology 2(2): 222–241.Beer D (2012) Using social media data aggregators to do social research. Sociological Research

Online 17(3): http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/3/10.html.Bennett A (1999) Subcultures or neo-tribes? Rethinking the relationship between youth, style and

music taste. Sociology 33(3): 599–617.Bennett T, Savage M, Silva E et al. (2009) Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Routledge.Bottero W and Crossley N (2011) Worlds, fields and networks: Becker, Bourdieu and the

structures of social relations. Cultural Sociology 5(1): 99–119.Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Bowker G and Star SL (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Chan TW and Goldthorpe JH (2007) Social stratification and cultural consumption: music in

England. European Sociological Review 23(1): 1–19.Crossley N (2009) The man whose web expanded: Network dynamics in Manchester’s post-punk

scene 1976–1980. Poetics 37(1): 24–49.DeNora T (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.DiMaggio P (1987) Classification in art. American Sociological Review 52(4): 440–455.Dowd G, Stevenson L and Strong L (2006) Genre Matters. Bristol: Intellect.Duff D (2000) Modern Genre Theory. Harlow: Longman.Foucault M (2002) The Order of Things. London: Routledge.Fowler D (2008) Youth Culture in Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Freedman A and Medway P (1994) Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis.Frow J (2006) Genre. London: Routledge.Gane N and Beer D (2008) New Media: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg.Hennion A (2001) Music lovers: Taste as performance. Theory, Culture & Society 18(5): 1–22.Holt D (1998) Does cultural capital structure American consumption? Journal of Consumer

Research 25(1): 1–25.Jesus and Mary Chain (2008) Sleeve notes. The Power of Negative Thinking. Blanco Y Negro:

Rhino Entertainment.Lamont M (2010) Looking back at Bourdieu. In: Silva E and Warde A (eds) Cultural Analysis and

Bourdieu’s Legacy. London: Routledge, pp. 128–141.Lash S (2007) Power after hegemony. Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 55–78.Lena JC (2012) Banding Together. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Le Roux B, Rouanet H, Savage M and Warde A (2008) Class and cultural division in the UK.

Sociology 42(6): 1049–1071.Martin JL (2003) What is field theory?’ American Journal of Sociology 109(1): 1–49.Negus K (1999) Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge.Peterson RA and Kern RM (1996) Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American

Sociological Review 61(5): 900–907.Peterson RA and Simkus A (1992) How music tastes mark occupational status groups. In: Lamont

M and Fournier M (eds) Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 152–168.

Prior N (2008) Putting a glitch in the field: Bourdieu, actor network theory and contemporary music. Cultural Sociology 2(3): 301–319.

Robards B and Bennett A (2011) MyTribe: Post-subcultural manifestations of belonging on social network sites. Sociology 45(2): 303–317.

Savage M and Silva E (2013) Field analysis in cultural sociology: Some critical reflections. Cultural Sociology.

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 17: Cultural Sociology 2013 Beer 145 60

160 Cultural Sociology 7(2)

Thomson P (2008) Field. In: Grenfell M (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen.Turner G (2010) Ordinary People and the Media. London: Sage.

Author biography

David Beer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. His work focuses pre-dominantly upon the sociology of popular culture. He is currently writing a book that explores the material intersections of popular culture and new media.

by guest on June 22, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from