Genre in Crisis, Crisis as Genre: Contemporary Disruptions and Constructions in Bodies of Popular Music
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- July 27, 2023
- Creator
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Pabst, Kevin
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication
- Abstract
- During the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, musical activities and practices, from creation to consumption to performance, began to cohere around some distinct trends, and an emergent body of music known as “pandemic pop” came into shape. This research project takes the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism as its contextual focal point, analyzing the relationship between genre and crisis. Specifically, this dissertation asks “what can be gleaned from reading the discursive frameworks of genre and crisis through each other?” In order to answer this question, this project interrogates two phenomena – genre-in-crisis and crisis-as-genre – to suggest new understandings of the narrative dimensions of both genre and crisis. This dissertation unfolds over three case studies across three chapters: Chapter One analyzes the controversy surrounding the removal of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart as an instance of genre-in-crisis; Chapter Two studies the above-mentioned formation of “pandemic pop” during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of crisis-as-genre; and Chapter Three folds these phenomena together through an interrogation of “Lose Yo Job,” a 2020 viral remix of a recording of Johnniqua Charles, a Black woman, as she was being detained by law enforcement. These chapters use a combination of textual, musical, and material analysis, and is informed by scholarship on genre theory, Janet Roitman’s framework of crisis as a discursive formation, and my own framework of “format materialism.” Ultimately I argue that reading genre and crisis through each other opens new possibilities for the popular and critical understanding of both of these concepts. Such understanding, I suggest, could be beneficial to scholars of both genre and crisis, offering new approaches to the study of old phenomena.
- Date of publication
- 2023
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Advisor
- Palm, Michael
- Alexander Craft, Renée
- King Watts, Eric
- Bohlman, Andrea
- Meintjes, Louise
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2023
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