Review
"Genre is the hot topic in popular music studies right now, and Fabian Holt's book could not appear at a more critical moment, nor could it respond to that moment more forcefully. Fresh and innovative, Holt brilliantly takes readers across a multisited cultural landscape, gathering interviews from musicians and producers in Nashville and Chicago, radio-station owners in the rural South, and record shop clerks in the urban North, to uncover the complex role of genre in popular music." - Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago"
Product Description
The popularity of the soundtrack to the motion picture "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album's inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn't bluegrass, but "roots music," a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? "In Genre in Popular Music", Fabian Holt provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, Holt embarks on a wide-ranging and ambitious collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to "O Brother", but also the impact of rock and roll's explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, Holt finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture - fundamental both to musical practice and experience and to the social organization of musical life.
About the Author
Fabian Holt is associate professor of music and performance at the University of Roskilde, Denmark.
