How does the concept of musical categorisation relate to notions of identity and various social formations? And how do these categories fare over time? These are just two of the questions addressed by David Brackett in Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-century Popular Music. Genre permeates many areas of everyday life and, as a main means of communication as well as a favoured analytical tool, it plays a pivotal role in media, industry and audience discourses on popular music alike. More often than not these discussions have fed into academic debates on musical meaning, resulting in the knowledge that without an awareness of musical categories and related social, cultural and political circumstances one might be hard-pressed fully to grasp many issues surrounding processes of music production and reception. While genre has appeared as a topic of academic interest at different points in time (notably in works by scholars such as Franco Fabbri, Simon Frith, Keith Negus and Fabian Holt), David Brackett presents a particularly detailed and extended account of the subject that takes up previous points of discussion, points out several new issues and presents a variety of extremely insightful solutions for dealing with the complexities that inform the study of popular music genres.
Drawing on extensive research and a long-standing engagement in the scholarly discourse on popular music genres, Brackett not only presents new methodological concepts and ideas, but also maps the history of popular music genres in 20th century North America with a particular emphasis on socio-cultural tensions and conflicts. The discussion follows a chronological trajectory of genre formation and processes of change that are explained in astonishing detail and set against the backdrop of genre audience demography, developments within the music industry and advancements in many areas of music production. In nine chapters Categorizing Sound traces processes of genre formation, transgression, crossover and decline over a time period of 100 years. Concerned with highlighting the flexibility and polarity to be found amongst musical categories, Brackett shows the breadth of music genres by describing the alternatives to a historical mainstream and their ways into existence. Starting at the very beginning of sound recording, the book moves from early categories such as ‘foreign music’ and ‘race music’ in the 1910s and 1920s (Chapters 2 and 3, respectively) through various instances of American genre history, all the while paying remarkable attention to the many different facets of category formation when faced with the rapid social changes and racial tensions permeating the cultural and political climate at different points in time. An important theme running through the book is the development of African-American music and its changing relationship and struggles with a predominantly white mainstream.
By singling out the notion of different modes of identification as a telling aspect of genre formation, Brackett presents an interesting argument that adds to the ongoing discourse on genre theory in popular music studies. Ideas about genre audiences and related social systems are contrasted against different ways of relating to categories in light of demographic and ideological factors. Brackett distinguishes between ‘homological’ and ‘imaginary’ forms of identification (pp. 16–18) and thus addresses the ways in which group identities may relate to specific categories and affect genre reception. Categorizing Sound highlights the significance of genre levels for a study of genre, which not only includes the recognition of different modes of interpretation for meta- and subcategories but also a frequent distinction between wider ‘marketing categories’ and more specific ‘critic-fan genres’ (p. 11). As a further issue of interest to genre theorists Brackett brings up the concept of ‘citationality’ (p. 11), stating that ‘once the citation (or non-literal quotation) of socio-musical conventions acquires relative stability and is associated repeatedly with a genre label, it can be quoted (literally) out of context with the quotation then being recognized as a generic reference’ (p. 13). With citationality as a basic principle of ‘genre legibility’ (p. 13) Brackett creates the methodological grounds for understanding processes of genre appellation, the development of categories and crossover trajectories that appear in Categorizing Sound.
In addition to its theoretical and historiographical value, one of the book's strongest points is Brackett's distinct awareness of genre temporality and reflection on the development and changes within genre discourse over time. Categorizing Sound is shaped by the notion that all processes of categorisation are necessarily informed by different temporal modes, the time in which a musical moment occurs as well as the time during which it is judged, analysed or interpreted. Brackett pays particular attention to the complications of a retroactive genre historiography, but also to the circumstances that may have affected genre formations and discourse during specific historical moments. For this reason his account of popular music genres in the United States of the 20th century often takes a step back to regard important moments from different historical angles and thus delivers a self-aware and nuanced account.
Categorizing Sound is an intense but nonetheless engaging read, that will be of interest not only to genre scholars. It will certainly be a useful standard work for all students of popular music genres as well as US musical history. As Brackett states in his introduction: ‘Despite many contradictions, however, genre labels for popular music continue to be used in numerous contexts, and they continue to evoke connotations of particular types of people (albeit some more than others)’ (p. 3). Categorizing Sound does not attempt to get rid of these contradictions, but rather recognises and explains genre as the complex and fluid construct that it is.
