Brackett — Categorizing Sound

Author: David Brackett
Title: Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music
Year: 2016
Type: Academic book (University of California Press)

Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music is a book by the McGill University musicologist David Brackett, published by the University of California Press in 2016. It argues that a popular-music genre becomes recognizable only when musical sounds, the social associations of its performers and audiences, a shared feel and way of moving, and a label come together, and it asks when, how and why such labels become legible among musicians, fans, journalists and the people of the music industry. Its evidence is a series of case studies from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1980s, each comparing how the music industry and the press classified a body of music with analysis of the recordings themselves. The Society for American Music gave it the Irving Lowens Book Award. Thomas Johnson, reviewing it in Current Musicology, wrote that its introduction should be required reading in any course on popular music, and also that its long historical threads are sometimes lost in its detail and that it says little about funk and hip hop.

Brackett, a professor of music at McGill University, published the book with the University of California Press in 2016.¹ Thomas Johnson, reviewing it, describes it as a history of “the practice of categorizing” popular music in the twentieth century that asks when, how and why labels and classification schemes become legible among musicians, fans, journalists and music-industry personnel, told through seven case studies that each compare the music industry’s dealings and the press’s discussion with analysis of the music.² Its introduction distinguishes two systems of grouping music, the genres used by critics and fans and the categories used by the music industry, and treats a recording’s relation to a genre as citation: a record participates in a genre by repeating conventions that existed before it.² In Brackett’s account a genre becomes legible only through the gradual assembling of musical sounds, the social connotations of performers and audience, a shared sense of feeling and physical movement across demographic lines, and “a term or concept that could function as a label.”³

The first case studies run from the turn of the century to the 1920s. Brackett argues that “foreign music,” the record industry’s early category for the music of immigrants, prepared the ground for its later categories for the music of marginalized groups, and that it linked kinds of music to kinds of people in ways that mixed real audiences with stereotypes.⁴ The chapters on race music and old-time music in the 1920s argue against histories of early blues and country written from later knowledge of what those genres became.⁴ In the 1940s chapters, swing carried Black styles of improvisation and groove to mixed audiences at the start of the decade, while by the end of the decade Black popular music needed the conventions of the novelty record to reach the mainstream. Country, in the same decade, moved from an ill-defined position outside the mainstream to the new category “country and western.”⁵

The chapter “The Dictionary of Soul” starts from Billboard’s suspension of its R&B chart from 1963 to 1965, the only break in an industry category for Black popular music that had otherwise run without interruption since the race records of the 1920s.⁶ Brackett reads the gap, and the change of “soul” from an adjective into the name of a genre, as part of the 1960s struggle over racial classification, between an integrationist outlook and an assertion of Black cultural independence.⁶ The final chapter defines crossover, which Brackett argues becomes possible only once industry categories and charts are stable. It finds that in the early 1980s the style markers of country blended into mainstream pop while Black genres were treated as transgressive, and that after Michael Jackson’s Thriller “the whole idea of the mainstream underwent changes.”⁷

The Society for American Music’s citation for the Irving Lowens Book Award called the book “a watershed publication.”⁸ Johnson wrote in his review in Current Musicology (2018) that the introduction “should be required reading in any course on popular music.” It identified two weaknesses: the long historical threads sometimes get lost in the detail of the research, and the book says little about funk and hip hop, with the 1950s and 1970s serving only as context.⁹

Key contributions

• Genre legibility as an assembly of sounds, social connotations, shared feel and movement, and a label, with the label one of the necessary parts.
• The distinction between two systems of grouping music: the genres of critics and fans and the categories of the music industry.
• Genre as citation: a record participates in a genre by repeating conventions that came before it.
• The 1963–65 gap in Billboard’s R&B chart read as part of the 1960s struggle over racial classification.
• Crossover as dependent on stable charts, and unequal by race: in the early 1980s the style markers of country blended into pop while Black genres were treated as transgressive.

See also

• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Nelson George’s 1988 history of the Black music business
• Segregating Sound — Karl Hagstrom Miller’s 2010 history of the division of Southern music by race
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• Rhythm & blues — the genre
• Soul — the genre