Too Much Too Young by Whiteley Sheila;

Author:Whiteley, Sheila;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1487032
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Part III

Little Boys

Introduction: the rules of the game

While ‘little girls’ have had to both confront and challenge the gendered stereotypes imposed by the media and the more generalised critiques surrounding popular music, ‘little boys’ have had to take on the generic conventions imposed by a 50-year heritage. For each genre, there is an established lineage that has imposed a sense of collective identity, a family tree, which charts the development of bands back to the founding fathers of style and image. While this is most obvious in the dynastic framework of rock, where tradition (blues, country and folk roots), authenticity, originality and self-expression have traditionally provided a larger-than-life arena for its heroes and geniuses, a comparable list of criteria can found for soul, reggae, hip hop and rap. Here process (an emphasis on the open-ended, improvisatory inflections of ‘groove’, an aesthetic of ‘engendered feeling’ [Keil, 1966, 227–49]), intensional development (where the simple entity is that constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony and beat, while the complex is built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflection of the basic beat), nuanced vocal and instrumental style (off-pitch notes and inflections, ‘swoops, ‘bends’ and ‘smears’, call and response, cross rhythms and syncopation) and cultural politics provide defining parameters for what is often defined as ‘black music’ (Chester, 1990, 315–19). The effect has been to impose both cultural and musical criteria, which effectively control what is/what is not acceptable within the stylistic conventions of the respective musical genres.

Although such over-arching definitions provide some indication of generic categories (and clearly one could add dance, to include disco, rave, house and so forth to the list of family trees), it is equally obvious that such categorisation obscures as much as it reveals. Many of the stylistic characteristics not only inform, for example, the repertory of pop music, but equally many of the lineages themselves interact, so creating inter-textual relationships and, by the late 1990s, an increasing hybriditity. As Michael Bakhtin has successfully argued, genres not only define and influence each other through constant interplay (as, for example, in the adoption of rock/soul/rap techniques in pop music), but individual genres are themselves the product of an ever-mutating dialogue between historically contingent features. As such, individual interpretations often exceed generic criteria even as they refer to them, so creating a sense of ‘centre’ and periphery.1

Even so, it is evident that chart pop music (as distinct from popular music as a whole) is perceived as less weighty, less significant, more knowingly formulaic, clichéd and transient than its more elite musical betters. Not least, there is an aesthetic distinction, which juxtaposes knowledge of genealogy and history with knowledge of the star and his/her personal lifestyle (as reflected in the contrast in editorial between, for example, Q, Mojo and MixMag, and Smash Hits, Top of the Pops, TV Hits and Bliss). This distinction is at its most extreme in the more generic magazines such as Blues and Soul, Kerrang, Metal Hammer and Rap Sheet where there is a particular commitment to the genre culture and its associated music.

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