Music and Subcultures
Warren Writing 10B
Course Description:
Warren Writing 10B is the second course in the two quarter Warren Writing sequence. The objective of this course is to continue to develop your abilities as a critical reader and writer of academic arguments. While 10A focused on using the analytical terms ‘claims’ and ‘grounds,’ 10B takes your facility with these terms as a given. Thus, this course focuses on developing your understanding and use of ‘stakes, ‘qualifiers,’ and ‘warrants’ in analyzing and writing arguments. Also, while this course continues the critical inquiry into relations between the individual and society discussed in 10A, the focus of this course goes beyond issues of an individual’s placement within (and capacity to resist) the ‘iron cages’ of rationalized business practices, and emphasizes the ways identity is constructed through both music and the cultures that spring up around different musical forms. Specifically, we will explore how specific musically-identified subcultures (e.g. hip-hop, punk, riot grrl, house, banda, etc.) grow out of and respond against mainstream culture and its dominant power structures. Moreover, we will examine how all musical forms and subcultures have historical and geographical contexts. We will be reading texts that trace the spatial and temporal movements of different musical styles to understand how dominant cultures and subcultures communicate, clash, and intersect with each other.
Objectives
- To continue to develop fluency in the discourse of academic argumentation by strengthening work with claims and grounds and introducing use of stakes, qualifiers, and warrants in analyzing and writing arguments.
- To become an active participant in academic discourse by spending time and effort in critically reading and writing academic argumentation in a contemporary field of study, in this case, cultural studies (of music).
- To develop strategies for critical reading and writing by practicing skimming and scanning texts, annotating texts, close readings, writing summaries of academic arguments (focusing on claims, aims, stakes, grounds, and warrants), writing abstracts and writing plans for academic arguments to be written, small- and large-group workshopping of texts-in-progress, evaluating peer work, and revising and evaluating own work.
Required Texts
Film: Style Wars
Warren Writing 10B Reader
- “Rescuer, Persecutor, and Victim”
- Linda Brodkey, “Language & Reality”
- Linda Brodkey, “About Argumentation”
- Linda Brodkey, “On Academic Arguments”
- Dick Hebdige, “Introduction: Subculture and Style”
- David Brackett, “Music”
- Sarah Thornton, “The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital”
- George Lipsitz, “Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sound”
- Tricia Rose, “A Style Nobody Can Deal With”
- Brian Currid, “’We Are Family’: House Music and Queer Performativity”
- Mimi Nguyen, “It’s (Not) a White World”
- Gayatri Gopinath, “’Bombay, UK, Yuba City’: Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora”
- Helena Simonett, “Technobanda and the Politics of Identity”
Prompts
Archive: You are responsible for locating, describing, and sharing with your colleagues one appropriate piece of subcultural music to be assembled into an archive. This archive will be the reference point for many class discussions and it will be from this archive (of both yours and your colleagues’ music) that you will select the piece(s) on which you will focus in the final project. For each piece to be archived (due the first day of weeks 3-7, except conference week), you should 1) briefly summarize the piece and its artists you are considering, 2) locate it, with evidence, within a particular subculture, and 3) briefly provide your analysis of the piece’s location within the theories of subculture and music being used in this class by performing a close reading of the work’s lyrics and/or musical structure. Be as specific and creative as possible in both your summary and analysis, and be sure to stretch yourself in your selection of texts. Surprise and impress us with the range of your musical/subcultural knowledge. Remember to bring enough copies of your archive for the instructor and your colleagues and feel free to bring samples of the music. ½ page
Prompt 1: in class writing 1 piece of music that is important to you. What stereotypes are there about the people who typically listen to this music? What stereotypes are there about the people who typically hate this music? What ways (dress, places you hang out, tv shows or movies you like, etc.) are you identified with this set of people? 1 page
Prompt 2: write a short essay summarizing an argument in Hebdige. Discuss the aim(s), major claims, and primary strategies of grounding in Hebdige’s argument. Ground your summary with paraphrasing as well as appropriately integrated and cited quotations. Remember, do not organize your summary according to Hebdige’s sections, but rather according to the claims you find to be most important. 2-3 pages
Revision
Prompt 3: Using one of the class archives from this week, write a short essay that engages with both our understanding of subculture from Thornton and of music from Bracket’s argument about “music” and “noise.” Support with cited quotations. 2-3 pages
Prompt 4: Write an essay about the ways Lipsitz centers his discussion of hip-hop on a mapping of the global/transcultural influences on and movements of this music. How does this global perspective enrich, complicate, and/or challenge the arguments about music and subculture of Hebdige, Brackett, and Thornton. 3-4 pages
Revision possible.
Prompt 5: Multimedia group project. Use Lipsitz and/or Rose as a model for analyzing the material circumstances out of which musical subcultures arise.
Part I: To do this, on your own write a short summary of the ways Rose centers her discussion of hip-hop on economic and geographical circumstances. How would you categorize the grounds she uses for her analysis? Why does she select them? Also, look back at the ways you described Lipsitz’s focus on mapping the material circumstances surrounding hip-hop globally. 1 page
Part II: Then, with your group, select a subculture identified at least in part through its music, and locate it in its geographical, economic, historical, or other material circumstances. For this, you should 1) identify and describe the subculture and its music generally, 2) summarize the material circumstances affecting it, and 3) show the places these material circumstances are reflected in one piece of music. This project should be fun, so feel free to be creative (visiting a subcultural music scene, doing interviews, making a short film, etc.) 2-3 pages; 10 minutes
Prompt 6:
Part I: proposal/introduction for final project and plan of paper. Be sure to spell out your aim in the paper, as well as your primary claims, and what is at stake in this analysis. Point toward specific pieces of music and aspects of a subculture you will analyze closely. 1-2 pages
Part II research and find two supplementary readings from the Geisel Library that discuss the historical/material context of the musical subculture you are considering in your final project. Use summaries of these readings to ground your assertions about the material circumstances of your subculture. 2 paragraphs
Part III Write an essay reading a subculture through its music. Make a qualified claim about the specific material circumstances and musical genealogy of your subculture and what’s at stake when your subculture appropriates, contests, reinvents, ignores, and/or is co-opted by mainstream culture. Be sure to ground your assertions with reference to theories on music and subculture used in this class and to close readings of specific pieces of music. Remember, your audience will likely not be familiar with either the theoretical or musical texts you use. 7-9 pages
Global revision of Prompt 6, Part II
Edited final draft of Prompt 6, Part II.
Prompt 7 Summarize and evaluate the argument of the final project of one of your colleagues. 1-2 pages
Prompt 8 : Final in-class writing summarizing what you now think about the connections between music and subculture, and about the progress of your writing this quarter.
