Putting Popular Music in its Place

Abstract

This volume of essays by the distinguished musicologist Charles Hamm focuses on the context of popular music and its interrelationships with other styles and genres, including classical music, the meaning of popular music for audiences, and the institutional appropriation of this music for hegemonic purposes. Specific topics include the use of popular song to rouse anti-slavery sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century America, the reception of such African-American styles and genres as rock 'n' roll and soul music by the black population of South Africa, the question of genre in the early songs of Irving Berlin, the attempts by the governments of South Africa and China to impose specific bodies of music on their populations, the persistence of the minstrel show in rural twentieth-century America and the impact of modernist modes of thought on writing about popular music.

Youth Music Production and Consumption in Africa

“…In the course of his observation of the development of music in America, Hamm (1995) recognised the advent of popular music from two distinct bodies of music. The first category comprises "composed songs, notated and disseminated in the form of sheet music, aimed at a wide audience of amateur musicmakers" (Hamm, 1995, p. 118), while the second category contains "oral-tradition music stemming from various non-literate sub-cultures in the At the beginning of the twentieth century, dissemination of the first category of music grew with the advent of the phonograph disc, and in the 1920s and 30s through radio and sound film.…”

Sources and Storytelling:Teaching the History of Rock Through its Primary Documents

“…Given the prominence of rock music scholarship within popular music studies, it is surprising that historiographies of rock music writing have been relatively slow to emerge. The few scholars who have taken up the task (Fenster 1990; Hamm 1995; Keightley 2001; Mazullo 1997; Rodman 1999) have identified a number of stories, tropes, and themes central to rock's narrative history. Each of these narrative devices is “hierarchical and exclusionary” in nature (Hamm 1995: 2).…”

“…The few scholars who have taken up the task (Fenster 1990; Hamm 1995; Keightley 2001; Mazullo 1997; Rodman 1999) have identified a number of stories, tropes, and themes central to rock's narrative history. Each of these narrative devices is “hierarchical and exclusionary” in nature (Hamm 1995: 2). Asserted over time, they have come to be taken as essential truths of a near‐mythical quality.…”

“…The first of these is the “narrative of authenticity,” a concept that, as Keir Keightley explains, posits rock as “direct and honest, uncorrupted by commerce, trendiness, derivativeness, a lack of inspiration and so on” (2001: 131). For Charles Hamm, this anticommercial imperative is forged within the folk elements of “ethnic, racial or national groups” (1995: 11). Drawing on examples from the early twentieth century, Hamm specifically points to American popular music's roots in African‐American musical culture, and how black musicians came to represent for critics the most authentic artistry within ragtime and jazz.…”

“…Hamm refers to this as “the narrative of classic and classical popular music.” As he describes, this narrative presumes that “popular music, like classical, can produce superior individual masterpieces and even entire sub‐genres. The identification and preservation of these, and the explication of the differences between them and inferior products, is the responsibility of the critic and scholar” (Hamm 1995: 17). This trenchant narrative first found its way into writing about rock in the mid 1960s with the legitimation and “cultural accreditation” of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, both within the mainstream press and newly formed rock criticism publications like Crawdaddy !…”