ABSTRACT
While ‘little girls’ have had to both confront and challenge the gendered stereotypes imposed by the media and the more generalised critiques surrounding popular music, ‘little boys’ have had to take on the generic conventions imposed by a 50-year heritage. For each genre, there is an established lineage that has imposed a sense of collective identity, a family tree, which charts the development of bands back to the founding fathers of style and image. While this is most obvious in the dynastic framework of rock, where tradition (blues, country and folk roots), authenticity, originality and self-expression have traditionally provided a larger-than-life arena for its heroes and geniuses, a comparable list of criteria can found for soul, reggae, hip hop and rap. Here process (an emphasis on the open-ended, improvisatory inflections of ‘groove’, an aesthetic of ‘engendered feeling’ [Keil, 1966, 227–49]), intensional development (where the simple entity is that constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony and beat, while the complex is built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflection of the basic beat), nuanced vocal and instrumental style (off-pitch notes and inflections, ‘swoops, ‘bends’ and ‘smears’, call and response, cross rhythms and syncopation) and cultural politics provide defining parameters for what is often defined as ‘black music’ (Chester, 1990, 315–19). The effect has been to impose both cultural and musical criteria, which effectively control what is/what is not acceptable within the stylistic conventions of the respective musical genres.
