I would say “when I was a teenager,” but the truth of the matter is that I am still a teenager. I look at the songs I listen to, the new and more seductive Brittney, Beyonce, Secondhand Serenade, My Chemical Romance, Mae, and I wonder how it compares to the music my brothers listened to when they were my age. Although we are less than ten years apart, I feel like the gap within our own generation is huge. I would like to research the difference between the current teen scene and the teen scene of the past. I’d like to be as general about what particular genres of music were listened to because I feel that there is a larger variety of scenes now than there were ten years ago. But, if I had to specify a scene that I want to focus on it would probably be “mainstream,” or hip-hop. I’d like to use Brittney Spears as an example of how “mainstream” music has changed over time.
My planned approach to research for this project is to look up the most popular songs during the early 90’s. I’ll listen to some of the songs and research some of the reviews of them online, looking at the lyrics of the song as well as the feeling the song invokes, and then I’ll look at the artists themselves and the type of ideas that they portray and support. If I incorporate multiple scenes in my research I will take note of the different scenes that were popular at the time. For the interview portion of my research I can interview other people my age and possibly interview graduate students to represent people from the same generation as me, but possibly influenced by a different youth scene when they were teenagers.
Some of the guiding questions for my research are:
• Are there differences between the teen scene of the early 90’s and the early 2000’s? If so what are they?
• What could have caused these differences?
• Why do you think there is a gap within a generation over such a short period of time?
• How does this difference compare to previous generations? For example, is the difference between the 90’s and 00’s more or less dramatic than the differences between the 70’s and 80’s?
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Your topic seems like it's going to be a very interesting one to cover, especially if you cover what the "mainstream" music of the 2000's is/was vs. what it was in the 1990's. Maybe a look at the cultural differences between the two decades could be helpful. By that I mean, I feel that culturally more risque attitudes and lyrics are acceptable than they probably were back in the 90's, so maybe that plays into why certain artists have changed over the years, or why other genres have become more popular. I think the questions you have already posed will certainly lead to a great project though.
ReplyDeleteAllie, I agree that you have raised some really intriguing questions in this post. I'm a little concerned about the scope of the project, though, and how you will identify a coherent community for your ethnographic work. While you can use industry statistics to determine some top songs from any particular time period, it is much more difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about why these particular songs were so popular and what they meant to their listeners. Making a broad generational comparison is an even tougher task -- how can you convince your readers that the people you interviewed accurately represent "their generation" in a broad sense? Based on my past experience, the most successful field projects tend to be focused on a very specific musical group, fan community, performance venue, or perhaps a specific genre in a well-defined geographic area (for example, "the Providence noise scene"). I'd like to see you think about a way to reframe your topic in a more focused way, or take some aspect of this topic and go in a different direction. (You could also choose to work with another student on a totally different topic, of course.) Please be in touch (via office hours or email) about your ideas.
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