Assignment 1: Genre As Musical
Annotated Playlist/Listening Guide
Create a curated playlist comparing your artist with an influence, with detailed annotations explaining specific musical elements (instrumentation, vocal style, chord progressions, etc.).
Submitted as a digital document with embedded audio clips and/or timestamps, or a Spotify/YouTube playlist with corresponding annotations and timestamps in a text document.
This is a formative, additive assessment. Upload tracks to your playlist as you discover them. Add to your analyses every week. Start simply, with observations in your own words, e.g., "I hear a similarity between my artist and their influence in the drums, especially. How can I describe that similarity?" and aim to gradually fill in the terminology and insight as your ideas mature. You will be assessed not only on the final annotations, but on the prior weeks' question asking and research behind the final annotations.
Prompt
How does the influence from [Another Artist or Genre] upon [Your Artist] reinforce, challenge, or relocate genre boundaries? Provide an analysis using genre-appropriate terminology that explains how that particular influence used/challenged Your Artist's current generic musical conventions.
Research Questions
Does this influence reinforce or challenge your artist's genre's expectations?
- How? In what way?
- What are the genre(s) of your artist and of the influence?
Does the influence generically relocate your artist? To what extent?
Can you describe this influence in genre-specific music terminology? Be as specific as possible.
- Is it a question of:
- what instruments are used?
- vocal style?
- samples?
- groove/feel?
- theme of the lyrics?
- what chords are used?
- how the melodies are formed?
Do other people (scholars, critics, fandom) have ideas about specifically musical aspects of this influence?
- Do you agree with them? Why/why not?
Assignment 2: Genre as Social
Class Presentation and One-On-One Talk
Deliver a low-stakes 10-minute work-in-progress presentation, and conduct a 20-minute one-on-one conversation with me at a later date. Treat the relationship of your artist to the music industry as the subject of analysis. The idea is to situate your ideas from the Genre as Musical assignment in their Social context.
Prompt
In Assignment 1, you argued that [artist] reinforced/challenged/relocated genre boundaries. What social/economic/political factors made that possible? Who benefited from it? Who resisted it? Based on your analysis of how [artist] used/challenged [genre]'s musical conventions (Assignment 1), what social/economic/political structures made those musical choices risky, or necessary? How did the market/fandom/media respond?
Research Questions
What are the systems of power in/with which your artist had to negotiate?
- How well did they interact with these structures? Did they take advantage of them?
- (How) did they challenge these structures?
Who paid for the production and distribution of this music?
- What were their political leanings and other investments?
- Was the work commissioned?
Was your artist "discovered"?
- Was your artist "lucky" at all?
- How?
- Who discovered them and why did they like them?
Who distributed it? Is/was it on a record label? Was it a relatively large or small record label?
- Who runs the record label? What's their agenda, aesthetically, politically, culturally, economically?
How was the work distributed? Which media formats?
- What material merchandise was made and sold?
- Was it pirated a lot?
- What are the streaming statistics?
How do people discover this music?
- How do they learn about the genre, more broadly? Word of mouth? Music institutions?
To what extent does your artist's appearance factor into their brand/career?
To what extent does sex and controversy factor into their career?
To what extent does a particular theme(s) or politics factor into the artist's career?