Rock this way : Cultural constructions of musical legitimacy / Mel Stanfill.

Court cases listed in "References" (page 201).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-221) and index.

In order to analyze how transformative musical works are culturally understood, this book examines how mainstream press discourse talks about them. According to professional journalistic norms, press discussion is supposed to be neutral and balanced. This is, of course, a fiction, because press is to study social power relations, this is a benefit, not a drawback. In particular, norms of explaining "both sides" of an issue mean that a cross section of mainstream thought is available in the press, at the same time that more marginal perspectives are systematically excluded. Moreover, in addition to conveying what the journalist perceives to be a neutral account of a situation, the press helps frame public understanding of issues, thus contributing to making this the default understanding through presenting a hegemonic view as the truth. For these reasons, Stanfill uses press coverage to examine social beliefs circulating widely about transformative musical works. In doing so, she specifically abstracts away from particular journalists and their identities (racial, gender, or others) because, by those same professional norms, individual perspectives are supposed to be suppressed in the name of a (white and masculine) construct of universality. Moreover, an individual journalist presenting an opinion (whether they are aware of doing so or not) is not in itself meaningful, but when there are patterns in opinions across multiple articles, by different people, in different locations and at different moments, they become suggestive of a broader hegemonic formation.

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Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Rock This Way, or the Shape of Musical Norms -- 1. Judge a Song by Its Cover: Cover Songs between Transformation and Extraction -- 2. Stir It Up: Remix and the Problem of Genre -- 3. Monstrous Mash: Mash-Ups and the Epistemology of Difference -- 4. Fight for Your Right to Parody: Parodies and the Cultural Politics of Kindness -- 5. Feels like the First Time: The Politics and Poetics of Similarity in Soundalikes -- Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Ethical Transformative Musical Works -- Data Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index

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