‘Rock, roll and remember?’
Addressing the legacy of jazz in popular music studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v1i2.125Keywords:
jazz, music genres, art musicAbstract
This article addresses the under-representation of jazz within popular music studies and canons of popular music. It asks why a popular genre which shared so much with rock and roll--regarding its implication in American race relations, youth, leisure, mass media, etc.--came to be treated as something separate from post-war popular music. I argue that jazz’s musical and social parallels with rock and roll have been neglected because, on the one hand, jazz criticism and scholarship has been so invested in raising jazz’s status to an art music that its most commercial forms have been given little serious coverage. On the other hand, many popular music scholars have been invested in portraying rock and roll as a ‘revolutionary’ genre, and have therefore sought to show disjuncture, not parallels, with popular music from before 1950. Through this historiographical analysis, this article urges scholars to critically address the ‘received narratives’ which inform popular music studies curricula, and consider how these narratives are formed along generational, subcultural, and regional lines.
References
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Waksman, Steve. 1999. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Glencoe: Free Press.
Bergeron, Katherine, and Philip V. Bohlman. 1992. Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Blake, Andrew. 1997. The Land Without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Carby, Hazel V. 1990. ‘ ’It jus be’s dat way sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues’. In Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, eds. Ellen Carol Dubois and Vicki L. Ruiz. New York: Routledge.
Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist. 1999. Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DeVeaux, Scott. 1991. ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography’. Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3: 525–54.
Erenberg, Lewis A. 1998. Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Evans, Nicholas M. 2000. Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism and Modern Culture in the 1920s. New York: Garland.
Friedlander, Paul. 1996. Rock and Roll: A Social History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Frith, Simon. 1983. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable.
Garofalo, Reebee. 2002. Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson. 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson.
Hamm, Charles. 2004. ‘Popular Music and Historiography’. Popular Music History 1, no. 1: 9–14.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.
Horner, Bruce, and Thomas Swiss, eds. 1999. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kodat, Catherine Gunther. 2003. ‘Conversing With Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz’. American Quarterly 55, no. 1: 1–28.
Kofsky, Frank. 1998. Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz. New York: Path?nder.
Laing, Dave. 1969. The Sound of Our Time. London: Sheed & Ward.
—1985. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keyes: Open University Press.
Leonard, Neil. 1962. Jazz and the White Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lipsitz, George. 1990. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
McClary, Susan, and Robert Walser. 1994. ‘Theorizing the Body in African-American Music’. Black Music Research Journal 14, no. 1: 75–84.
McLeod, Kembrew. 2000. ‘*1/2: A Critique of Rock Criticism in North America’. Popular Music 20, no. 1: 47–60.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Moore, Allan F. 1993. Rock: The Primary Text. London: Open University Press.
Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music In Theory: An Introduction. Hanover: Wesleyan.
Peretti, Burton W. 1997. Jazz in American Culture. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Pleasants, Henry. 1969. Serious Music – And All That Jazz. London: Victor Gollancz.
Rubin, Rachel, and Jeffrey Melnick, eds. 2001. American Popular Music: New Approaches to the 20th Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts.
Starr, Larry, and Christopher Waterman. 2003. American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stavenhagen, Iris. 2003. ‘Crafting Sounds, Creating Meaning: Making Popular Music in the U.S’. RPM: Review of Popular Music 31/32: 18–19.
Stuessy, Joe, and Scott Lipscomb. 2003. Rock & Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Szatmary, David P. 2000. Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 4th edn.
Thornton, Sarah. 1990. ‘Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past’. Popular Music 9, no. 1: 87–95.
Waksman, Steve. 1999. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Published
2004-02-10
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
McDonald, C. (2004). ‘Rock, roll and remember?’: Addressing the legacy of jazz in popular music studies. Popular Music History, 1(2), 125-145. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v1i2.125
