Are Blackness and Whiteness useful concepts in the study of popular music?


Popular music is a broad category dominated by no singular sub-genre of music, a mixture of musical influences from across all genres. The terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’ music does not appear be a useful ideology when classifying music as a type. It can evidently loosely define the stereotypical origin of the music because of how society is shaped into thinking through the surge of globalisation and exposure to issues of race. We are therefore trained into thinking that so-called ‘Black’ music is Rap and Hip Hop and conventional ‘White’ music is Opera and Classical pieces. However if you analyse artists such as rapper Eminem you can see that this is only loosely a convention inforced by a majority that narrows the idea of music, as a whole is perceived. Jazz music before the forties was notably a black-American style of music, however the commercialisation and increased consumption of this style of music accompanied by the emphasis of issues such as race, class and gender has progressed into a dominantly White upper-class music style.