Questions of symbolic classification have been central to sociology since its earliest days, given the relevance of distinctions for both affiliation and conflict. Music and its genres are no exception, organizing people and songs within a system of symbolic classification. Numerous studies chronicle the history of specific genres of music, but none document recurrent processes of development and change across musics. In this article, we analyze 60 musics in the United States, delineating between 12 social, organizational, and symbolic attributes. We find four distinct genre types—Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist. We also find that these genre types combine to form three distinct trajectories. Two-thirds originate in an Avant-garde genre, and the rest originate as a scene or, to our surprise, in an Industry-based genre. We conclude by discussing a number of questions raised by our findings, including the implications for understanding symbolic classification in fields other tha...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25472554.pdf

Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres

This article focuses on the emergence of what I shall refer to as “global illliteracies,” that is, the hybrid, transcultural linguistic and literacy practices of Hip Hop1 youth in local and global contexts (Alim, 2006; Alim, Ibrahim, & Pennycook, 2009; Androutsopoulos, 2003; Ibrahim, in press; Pennycook, 2007), as well as the pedagogical possibilities that scholars open up as they engage these forms (Desai, 2010; Fisher, 2007; Hill, 2009; Kinloch, 2009; Low, 2011; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2004). By reviewing a broad but focused range of literature in education, literacy studies, Hip Hop studies, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, I focus my attention on research that examines the ways that engagement with Hip Hop cultural practices mediates a variety of social, cultural, linguistic, and educational processes that impact youth. In doing so, I work toward the development of a theoretical framework of ill-literacies by integrating, critiquing, and advancing the insights of this new body of work, which I refer to throughout as illliteracy studies. After a brief introduction of the concept of ill-literacies, I review several studies on the poetics of global ill-literacies to demonstrate how scholars have engaged the inventive linguistic and literacy practices of Hip Hop youth. Then I examine the politics of global ill-literacies to show how youth literacies have been studied in relation to local configurations of race, class, gender, and language in the United States and globally, as well as the challenges these pose for schools and for language and educational policymakers. Third, I survey the pedagogies of global ill-literacies and

Global Ill-Literacies Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Literacy

This article addresses issues that lie at the intersection of debates about language, Hip Hop Culture, and globalization. Critically synthesizing a wide range of recent work on Hip Hop and foregrounding issues of youth agency as evidenced by Hip Hop youth’s metalinguistic theorizing, the article presents an empirical account of youth as cultural theorists. Hip Hop youth are both participants and theorists of their participation in the many translocal style communities that constitute the Global Hip Hop Nation. Highlighting youth agency, the article demonstrates that youth are engaging in the agentive act of theorizing the changes in the contemporary world as they attempt to locate themselves at the intersection of the local and the global. The article concludes by calling for a linguistic anthropology of globalization characterized by ethnographic explorations of and a theoretical focus on popular culture, music, and mass-mediated language as central to an anthropological understanding of linguistic processes in a global era.

https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/elanguage/pragmatics/article/download/805/805-1370-1-PB.pdf

Translocal style communities: Hip hop youth as cultural theorists of style, language, and globalization

People have to understand what you mean when you talk about Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop means the whole culture of the movement. When you talk about rap, you have to understand that rap is part of the Hip-Hop Culture. That means that emceeing is part of the Hip-Hop Culture. The Deejaying is part of the Hip-Hop Culture. The dressing, the languages are all part of Hip-Hop Culture. So is the break dancing, the b-boys and b-girls. How you act, walk, look and talk is all part of Hip Hop Culture. And the music is from whatever music that gives that grunt, that funk, that groove, that beat. That’s all part of Hip Hop. (Afrika Bambaataa, interviewed by Davey D [1996])

Glocal Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Culture(s), Identities, and the Politics of Language Education

How do outsiders negotiate participation within a subculture when they are deemed inauthentic by that subculture’s insiders? To explore this question, I examine the underground hip-hop scene in Chi...

Shūhei Hosokawa

Papers

Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization