Music and Media Culture syllabus

Music and Media Culture

Course Description

This class explores the significance of personal and mass media technologies to contemporary music culture, as well as the centrality of music to present-day media culture.  The aim of the course is to foster an understanding of the historical developments in the mediation of music, and how certain media forms (radio, television, film, video, and, most recently, the Internet and video games) have been influential in shaping musical production, distribution, marketing, and consumption.

Despite the pivotal role music continues to play within and across converging media industries, music remains a neglected area of study for many media scholars.  Nevertheless, phenomena such as American Idol and Guitar Hero demonstrate that popular music—its artists, fans, and genres—are becoming more intertwined and important to “visual media” industries than ever before.  Additionally, music occupies a central position in recent changes brought about by “new media” technologies, particularly those concerning the impact of digitization on media content, markets, audiences, and delivery technologies. Thus, the study of music and its relationship to media culture cuts across a range of topics and categories long central to media studies scholars (e.g. industry, text, stardom, audience, identity, ideology, genre), while also providing insight into an increasingly complex and changing media landscape.

Course Schedule

Week 1: Mediated Music, Culture

• Keith Negus, “Mediations” in Popular Music in Theory:  An Introduction
• Christopher Small, “Music and Musicking” and “Socially Constructed Meanings”

Week 2: Industry and Commerce

• Simon Frith, “The Popular Music Industry”
• Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry:  The Growth of a Mass Medium”
• Martin Scherzinger, “Music, Corporate Power, and Unending War”
• Mark Fox, “Market Power in Music Retailing:  The Case of Wal-mart”

Week 3:  Music/Media Markets

• Keith Negus, “The Business of Rap:  Between the Street and the Executive Suite”
• Jeff Smith,  “Taking the Music Supervisor Seriously”
• Elizabeth Wollman, “Men, Music, and Marketing at Q104.3 (WAXQ-FM New York)”
• David Hesmondhalgh:  “Indie:  The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre”

Week 4:  Music, Meaning and the Moving Image

• Anahid Kassabian,  “How Music Works in Film”
• Andrew Goodwin, “From Anarchy to Chromakey:  Developments in Music Television”
• Nicholas Cook,  “Music and Meaning in Commercials”

Week 5:  The Televisual Economy of Popular Music

• Simon Frith, “Youth/Music/Television”
• Keith Negus, “Musicians on Television:  Visible, Audible and Ignored”
• Norma Coates, “Elvis From the Waist Up and Other Myths:  1950s Music Television and the Gendering of Rock Discourse”

Week 6:  Performance, Authenticity, Stardom

• Philip Auslander, “Tryin’ to Make It Real:  Live Performance, Simulation, and the Discourse of Authenticity in Rock Culture”
• Andrew Goodwin, “Metanarratives of Stardom and Identity”
• Kiri Miller, “Schizophrenic Performance:  Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity”

Week 7:  Mediated Music, Identities

• Tricia Rose, “Soul Sonic Forces:  Technology, Orality, and Black Cultural Practice in Rap Music”
• Norma Coates, “Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques:  Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s”
• Sarah Thornton,  “The Media Development of ‘Subcultures’”

Week 8:  Technologies of Re-production

• Simon Frith, “Art vs. Technology:  The Strange Case of Popular Music”
• Andrew Goodwin, “Rationalization and Democratization in the New Technologies of Popular Music”
• Steve Waksman, “Black Sound, Black Body:  Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar, and the Meanings of Blackness”

Week 9:  Technologies of Listening

• Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”
• Jody Berland,  “Radio Space and Industrial Time:  The Case of Music Formats”
• Michael Bull, “Filmic Cities:  The Aesthetic Experience of the Personal-Stereo User”
• Jonathan Sterne, “The MP3 as a Cultural Artifact”

Week 10:  New Media/Music Networks

• Steve Jones, “Music that Moves:  Popular Music, Distribution, and Network Technologies”
• Tom McCourt & Patrick Burkart, “When Creators, Corporations, and Consumers Collide:  Napster and the Development of On-line Music Distribution”
• Gilbert Rodman & Cheyanne Vanderdonckt, “Music for Nothing or, I want My MP3:  The Regulation and Recirculation of Affect”