Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of wallyg.
On my post on hip-hop and academia on Monday, commenters SEK (who teaches on popular and visual culture) and That Fuzzy Bastard got into a spirited discussion about whether popular culture deserves a place in the academy. I recommend y'all read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts about how the debate went. I started off by writing that:
I want to interrogate the need to turn hip-hop into literature a little further, because I think it speaks to deeply internalized beliefs, across racial, gender, and age lines, that popular music is a really inferior form of art. Film studies may privilege art film, but popular movies are very much part of the conversation. Comic books get elevated into literature unapologetically by people like Michael Chabon. But of the 147 music classes Yale is offering for the spring semester, including in its School of Music, only two even come close to addressing popular music: a class on music technologies, and one on Afro-Brazilian music.SEK chimed in to say that:
It might be a disciplinary matter, though, because I don't doubt you won't find people studying hip-hop in music departments, but you certainly will in African-American studies.
And That Fuzzy Bastard said I was totally off-base in the first place:
You'll find loads of writers who will talk about their love of hip-hop, but you won't find a lot of classes at Yale about comic books. What hip-hop has against it in terms of academia isn't that it's popular, it's that it's *new*! At least, in academic terms---how many books, records, or movies from post-1985 are in the standard curriculum? Academia naturally focuses on things that have "stood the test of time", and it's way too early to tell which hip-hop belongs in the academic canon. Cultural Studies classes can and will talk about contemporary events, but for material being treated as art, rather than cultural product, it's just much too recent....Meanwhile, popular music is great, but frankly, even the best of it wouldn't make for rewarding course study. My Girl is very affecting, yes, and that makes it a great song, but it won't reward extended analysis, which is what a class is for. Its simplicity is part of its greatness, sure, but an attempt to do deep text reading of it will sputter out by day two (it begins with images of nature, then more nature, then money, so, er, it's about capitalism overrunning the fields, a sort of Blakean parable?)I wrote back:
You seem to be implying that value judgments in the academy ought to be very different from those in the popular consciousness. I agree, certainly, that universities are a place for unpopular ideas to be explored, and underlooked topics to flourish and be scrutinized. But I'm not sure that means rejecting a popular consensus that pop music matters. I know a number of academic music scholars who bemoan this on a fairly regular basis, and their position informs my thinking.SEK chimes back in response to That Fuzzy Bastard:
That might be true, but that doesn't mean she's wrong: there are, in fact, plenty of courses at Yale in which comics play some role because they have, for the most part, been accepted as an art form worthy of academic study. The fact that they're not devoted to comics actually makes this point more strongly, because they're not ghettoized anymore, just part of the body of material teachers can access when writing syllabi.And adds:
One of the reasons popular music isn't studied more rigorously is that there isn't an institutional affiliation into which its study can easily slot; meaning, in a more careerist vein, that there's no professional benefit to writing about it, so the only people who will are well-established scholars like Dyson who no longer run the rat-race (and are, by definition, older and much more likely to consider as "popular" music that's decidedly not anymore).That Fuzzy Bastard comes back at us with:
No one in the academy is, or can, question that pop music "matters". It's popular so it by definition matters in the sense of impacting current culture. Further, while there are certainly some in the academy who would dispute that, say, Illmatic is any good (and plenty out of the academy who would as well---I think it's a good but wildly overrated album), it's aesthetic quality is really not affected by whether it appears in curriculum....Why not use a class to *expand the range* of what you like or find interesting, rather than flattering students' already-existing tastes?And answering that question, SEK says:
Because it's not all about exposing them to a wider variety of tastes; much of what I do, at least, it reorienting students to look at the world they already live in more critically. If you check out my course, you'll see that I'm more concerned with imparting a critical framework that they can then use in their daily lives. Admittedly, this is part of a larger game, as I honestly believe that the more critical a person is of their culture, the more likely they'll be to crave the more innovative aspects of it (or wander outside of it entirely). Because it's one thing to, say, teach OutKast, another to do so with an eye to getting students to understand that the world in which they live is far more complicated than they've been led to believe.I side with SEK solidly on this debate. But I'd be curious to see what you guys think.