I start every semester in my Sociology of Hip-Hop and Rap Music course by asking the students to tell me a story about the origins of this musical style. The collective narrative that emerges, cobbled together from episodes of VH1’sBehind the Music, Vibe Magazinearticles, and song lyrics, is that rap music’s origins lie in the desire of inner-city, poor, black men to document their lives and critique the social order that blocks progress for our nation’s minorities. In criticism of this, a second group of students argue that this political narrative is a smoke screen, masking and justifying...

Music histories are full of hints that there is a pattern to the evolution of communities of sound. In an early history of bluegrass music I find one such allusion:

[bluegrass] Musicians . . . share certain characteristics. Growing up in areas which were the source of mountain music, the men were taught to pick and sing by friends and neighbors. Some first gained reputations over local radio shows, then moved to larger stations, and finally found national prominence. Timing played a crucial part in success: being at the right time at the right place led to joining “name” bands...

Musical communities take on differing characteristics as they ebb and flow, and these changes are directly related to the range of problems or opportunities the group encounters. To bring these characteristics into sharper focus, I have demonstrated that there are four analytically distinct genre forms. In the Avant-garde genre, music practitioners come together to share their concerns over the state of music, but do so often without conceptualizing a set of goals or identifiers for the group. While most Avant-garde genres wither or merge with other genres, a few grow in size and develop a more focused and coherent group...

Thus far, I have focused on documenting musical genre forms in the United States. In this chapter, I expand our view to include music produced in other countries. A preliminary survey of the popular music of countries with widely differing political economies, music cultures, and levels of development revealed that the four genre forms (Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist) do exist to greater or lesser degrees across the globe, but there proved to be another widely distributed form that I did not find when I initially examined twentieth-century U.S. musical styles.

In a number of countries, popular genres receive substantial...

Writing inHarper’s Magazinein 1941, Irving Kolodin reported the maturation of “big band” jazz ensembles into an Industry-based genre form:

Those with a finger on the pulse of this capricious industry have an amazing instinct for estimating the moment when a band is truly ‘hot,’ in a sense unrelated to the kind of music it plays. It is at such a moment, when sales of records suddenly swing upward, and a fan club is started in Baton Rouge, and another leader tries to buy off the hitherto obscure arranger who has given the band its distinctive personality, and radio...