Labels and genre labeling

 

 

The R’n’R Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio is a well-known foundation. It also has an original slogan (“Long Live Rock”) and, amongst its meriots, it has invented the “induction” ceremony. Which is an 'invention' premiered in 1986 that has established The RnR Hall Of Fame in the role of official status-provider for rockers. Actually, meaning - in these days - providing "inductions" to - mostly - old performers. Such as (for 2022) Harry Belafonte (95yrs.), Carly Simon (79yrs.) or Dolly Parton (76yrs.)

 

In short, it is propaganda on steroids taking upon itself the task to define “Rock History.”

 

Did I say rock? I meant MUSIC History. In fact Dolly Parton's induction gave us the opportunity to glimpse at The R’n’R Hall of Fame's modus operandi, when she initially refused the nomination because she did not really consider herself “rock” enough.

 

The response of the ‘Museum’? Pardòn Parton!! You must accept the nomination because “from the beginning, rock has deep roots in rhythm & blues and country music” and rock music “is not defined by a single, specific genre but rather is a sound that moves the culture of young people.”

 

The anecdote interested me.

 

From the ‘museum’ archives I extracted a pretty nice 2012 conference taking us back a century, between 1916 and 1924, right to the dawn of 'genre labeling,' that obscure part of the music industry that sticks labels to musical genres. Lecturer David Brackett, music historian at the Schulich School of Music (at McGill University) in Montreal, analyzes in particular the strange mix that united black blues and black and white vaudeville between ’16 and ’20, as exemplified by Sophie Tucker: a white singer who takes lessons from black singers to sing music written by whites in a white musical style conceived in imitation of blacks.

 

All this in conjunction with the success of “foreign music” (records of music produced abroad - then in the USA - by immigrants in dozens of languages, including Italian, Slovak, Ruthenian and… Neapolitan.) In short: “styles” were being born. Above all, names were being defined for the music of native immigrants, African-Americans and (um) ‘white trash’. Liminal classes tossed around by industrial progress throughout the length and breadth of the country, in search of something that represented them. And faced with endemic racism.

 

Brackett considers white Marion Harris the first to have accustomed white people to have women singing the blues. He calls her “the Elvis Presley of classic blues,” and considers her Paradise Blues (’16) as a sort of “gateway drug” towards homologous black-American music, that is, music representing real instances of the singer and his social group, no longer relegated to the extremes of the sacred (gospel) or the profane (minstrelsy.) It meant a genre in which the audience found its identity.

 

The label “race music” (loved by the black population who found in it an aroma of proud belonging) is said to have been born with the publication of the black Maggie Smith in 1920 even if the song was launched as “colored music” and the term “race” began to be used only from 1923 and only in ’24 was it also recognized by the n°1 of the sector. Only in 1949 will the genre change its label to “rhythm and blues”, still used 70 years later, with brief phases of “soul” music (the Seventies) and “black music” (the Eighties.)

 

The other natives in search of a name were “the white people’s negroes”, white trash, who loved a style initially labeled as “old times’ music”, or with the nice but limiting “fiddle music” or the derogatory “hillbilly music”, which will become “Country & Western” in the 40s and then drop half of the label and call itself only “Country” from the 50s. At least in the charts.

 

In short, great labels are born like great wines through a process of refinement. Which, demonstrably in the cases of country and r’n’b, with a reiterative process: progressive approximations that take into account the record companies as well as the specialized media, the critics and the public. A path that takes years and market oligopolists often feel forced to follow. But, once the name of a style has settled through industry's acclaim, they inevitably influence for instance dedicating themselves to weeding out black groups' repertoire from white music hits, thus confirming, by falsifying it, the intrinsic validity of the “race music” label.

 

In studying genre labeling, the most important lesson is that this process creates genres, labels that create a feeling of identity for the listener. Even more so with the development of increasingly contiguous (and therefore difficult to distinguish) sub-styles, the concept of style and “label” depends less and less on sonic boundaries, however vague they may be, and more and more on a peculiar characteristic attached to the label itself: being something that defines what the listener of that style wants or thinks he is. What he feels he belongs to.