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Genre, Boundary Drawing and the Classificatory Imagination

David Beer
Cultural Sociology 2013 7: 145
DOI: 10.1177/1749975512473461
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473461
2012

CUS7210.1177/1749975512473461Cultural SociologyBeer

Article

Genre, Boundary Drawing and

the Classificatory Imagination

Cultural Sociology
7(2) 145160
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1749975512473461
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David Beer

University of York, UK

Abstract
This article suggests that the vitality of genre, and particularly music genre, is often missing from
social and cultural research. This is despite its central presence as a structural force within
increasingly popular forms of field analysis. To deal with this absence, the article draws upon
conceptual material on everyday forms of classification and new forms of digital data. It is argued
that the concept of a classificatory imagination might be used to develop a more contingent and
transient vision of genre as a form of everyday cultural classification or as a structuring force in
cultural fields. The article describes three problems facing cultural sociology in its use of genre
categories. Two are briefly presented whilst the third is developed through a case study of hip
hop. The article concludes with some reflections upon what this reveals about cultural boundary
drawing and the impact of decentralized media upon genre formation.

Keywords
classification, cultural boundaries, fields, genre, hip hop, music, music cultures, popular music

The band the Jesus and Mary Chain know a thing or two about genre. When this indie
rock group, who were at the time known for their rough feedback guitars and subtle
vocal melodies, were asked about possible producers for their album Automatic, they
responded by using genre as a means of deterrence. In an interview, Jim Reid, one of the
bands founding members, recalled:
We met Daniel Lanois. He said that we could come to New Orleans and wouldnt need to go to
a studio, just hire a big church He asked what kind of sound we had in mind; we kind of said
drum machines, sequencers and hip hop music. The guy practically shat himself on the spot. We
never heard from him again. (Jesus and Mary Chain, 2008)

As with other participants in scenes and movements, many musicians are uncomfortable with genre labels. In many instances, as this example suggests, the boundaries
Corresponding author:
David Beer, University of York, Heslington,York,YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: david.beer@york.ac.uk

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around genre become a means of communicating an artistic identity based upon eclecticism, openness and dissidence. As such, these boundaries become the sites of tension,
play, demarcation and difference. Genre boundaries become a microcosm or metaphor
for the constraining boundaries of societal forces and a personification of the oppressiveness of culture. For musicians and fans, the ability to communicate discontent with labels
popular culture is not averse to a sound understanding of labeling theory provides a
means for communicating their genre transcendence and super-genre cultural positioning. In response, new boundaries are drawn and fresh neologisms or cut-and-shut genre
classifications are carved out. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) have
noted, to classify is human. In short, the classificatory imagination of the consumer is
vital and the participatory media surrounding them is adaptive, mobile and responsive.
Prominent forms of cultural sociology, including field analysis, have a tendency to
work with quite rigid and fixed notions of genre and, therefore, tend to gloss over the creative and mobile drawing, re-drawing and imbrication of genre boundaries as they are
created and formulated within the context of everyday cultural engagement. Fittingly,
Lamont (2010: 132) gently challenges us, in a set of biographical reflections on her drift
away from Bourdieu, to accept that there is a need to find ways of studying classification
systems comparatively and from the ground up. To deal with this absence, and to respond
to Lamonts call, the article draws upon conceptual material on everyday forms of classification and meshes these with new forms of digital data. It is argued that we can use the
concept of a classificatory imagination in order to work with a more vital and transient
vision of genre as a form of everyday cultural classification or as a structuring force in
cultural fields. The article begins with a summary of this broader work on everyday classification. It then looks at how this work might connect with the literature on music genre
and field. Following on from this conceptual foundation, the article describes three problems facing cultural sociology in its use of genre categories. Two are described briefly as
a contextual backdrop whilst the third, and most pressing problem, is developed through
a case study of hip hop. In concluding, some reflections are offered with regards to cultural boundary drawing and the impact of decentralized media upon genre formation.

The Classificatory Imagination

Perhaps the most influential recent work on classification is Bowker and Stars (1999)
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Given the scale of this influence it is surprising that it has not really been widely incorporated by cultural researchers
interested in understanding cultural classificatory systems. It is worth returning to some
of the core ideas that they espouse in order to begin to frame genre classifications within
this type of science and technology studies approach. Bowker and Stars text uses a wide
range of detailed cases to elucidate the embeddedness of classificatory processes in everyday life. This reveals that classificatory systems are a central part of the ordering of
life-worlds. They are crucial to making things operate successfully, whilst also being so
familiar and working so smoothly that they are difficult to notice and describe. As they
put it, a good infrastructure is hard to find (Bowker and Star, 1999: 33). The broader
argument of their book is that, as the opening line claims, [o]ur lives are henged round
with systems of classification, limned by standard formats, prescriptions, and objects
(Bowker and Star, 1999: 1). They continue:
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Not all classifications take formal shape or are standardized in commercial and bureaucratic
products. We all spend large parts of our days doing classification work, often tacitly, and we
make up and use a range of classifications to do so. (Bowker and Star, 1999: 12)

This reveals their vision of imbrications of classificatory systems operating in the

everyday. Some are stable and established. Others are transient, mobile and contingent.
Some are built for us. Others we create or adapt through routine practices. And some are
hybrids that only appear to live partly in our hands (Bowker and Star, 1999: 2). These
systems of classification, as this indicates, are described as working on multiple levels
around and through individual interactions as we rub these ad hoc classifications against
an increasingly elaborate large-scale system of formal categories and standards (Bowker
and Star, 1999: 6). The difficulty is that, they suggest, these standards and classifications
are ordinarily invisible (Bowker and Star, 1999: 2). The good news is that these classificatory systems become more visible, they argue, when they break down or become
objects of contention. As Bauman has argued, we can think of boundaries not as barriers but as interfaces that confront and join the things that they divide. Bauman (2010:
169) points out that [b]oundaries are thereby subjected to opposite, contradictory pressures, turning them into sites of tension and potential objects of contention, antagonism,
permanently seething conflict or conflagrations of hostilities.
Bowker and Star suggest some questions to be considered in understanding how
things are sorted and classified. They ask:
What are these categories ? Who makes them, and who may change them? When and why do
they become visible? How do they spread? What, for instance, is the relationship among locally
generated categories and the commodified, elaborate, expensive ones?

For Bowker and Star, these questions allow us to see into systems of classification and
the impact that they have. They matter, it is argued, because there is a pressing need to
understand the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities (Bowker
and Star, 1999: 3).
The question is how we might go about such an analysis. Bowker and Star provide a
series of techniques or tricks for inverting the study of classification to see these systems
from the ground-up. To select the most appropriate for the analysis that will follow,
Bowker and Star (1999: 44) propose that one of the tricks for making classifications
and boundary drawing visible is to focus upon what they describe as practical politics.
This returns us to the earlier point that areas of contention are the points at which these
systems and their consequences are most visible. It also returns to the notion that boundary drawing occurs within the everyday negotiation of things, people and information.
As Bowker and Star (1999: 44) argue:
Someone, somewhere, must decide and argue over the minutiae of classifying and
standardizing. The negotiations themselves form the basis for a fascinating practical ontology
Whose voice will determine the outcome is sometimes an exercise of pure power
sometimes the negotiations are more subtle, involving disparate viewpoints.

What is perhaps changing is the scope of classification, with media moving toward
more decentralized forms, user-participation and the general unbinding of cultural
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archives (Gane and Beer, 2008: 7186). The result is that, if we take something like
Wikipedia as an obvious example, the someone somewhere to whom Bowker and Star
refer can potentially be lots of people in lots of places at any time. We might argue that
boundaries are more continually redrawn as a result of the technological and cultural
changes associated with decentralized social media than Bowker and Star (1999: 45)
could have allowed for. Despite these changes, their contention is pertinent: in order to
understand boundary work in classification we need to look at these negotiations in
action.
This discussion of negotiations in action speaks directly to Bottero and Crossleys
(2011) recent contrasting of the concept of field with networks and worlds. Here
they question Bourdieus limited acknowledgement of the role of social relations in the
shaping of objective or structural relations. They counter Bourdieus criticism that this is
to mix cause with effect by suggesting that Bourdieus arguments make it hard to discern
the mechanisms by which objective relations to capital generate the effects that he
attributes to them he lacks an account of mechanisms which generate similarities in
their habitus (Bottero and Crossley, 2011: 101). Bottero and Crossleys position is that
such objective relations cannot simply sit in the background but are part of the recursivity
of objective or structural relations a compelling argument that, when applied to music
cultures, leads us to a need to examine the formation of genre rather than treating it as a
set of dominant objective forces. Here then, in this regard, we can see a parallel and
constructive conversation occurring between those interested in how everyday forms of
classification work and those who are attempting to think through Bourdieus oeuvre
from a more relational or network perspective.
Bowker and Star acknowledge that their position is influenced by Foucaults The
Order of Things: a text that tells of the emergence and power of classificatory systems
in the modern world. Foucault (2002: 143) argues, referring to the classificatory systems of natural history, that classificatory systems provided a new way of connecting
things both to the eye and to discourse, and are involved in making history. Indeed,
Foucault provides a powerful account of how classificatory systems feed into methodological appreciations of social worlds. Foucaults concern is with the experience of
classification that occurs at the points of tension between existing classificatory systems,
and the ways that we create and renew classificatory systems at a more agential level.
As Foucault (2002: xxiii) puts it, in every culture, between the use of what one might
call the ordering codes and the reflections upon order itself, there is pure experience of
order and of its modes of being. It is, of course, this experience of order that we find
echoed in Bowker and Stars approach.
Foucaults work on grids and the encoded eye is helpful in gaining such a set of
insights. Foucault (2002: xxii) says this about the experience of ordering:
It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering
of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. Thus,
between the already encoded eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which
liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question,
continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew
at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate
systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding,
organized around increasing differences, etc.
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For Foucault, existing classificatory orders are inescapable in our appreciation and
understanding of things. They encode the things we see: we arrive with an a priori set
of classifications to work with. We inevitably use these classifications to see and order
the things that we encounter. But for Foucault this is not the end of things. The classificatory system is powerful in shaping encounters but is not necessarily fixed and immovable in the outcomes it might generate. The encoded eye retains some flexibility, agency
and reflexivity, whilst still influencing how we code and recode cultural boundaries.
Foucaults suggestion is that we do not encounter things in a way that is entirely defined
by the encoded eye and its use of classificatory grids. As he argues:
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden
network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence
except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank
spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence
for the moment of its expression. (Foucault, 2002: xxi)

The point we might draw from this is that when understanding cultural boundary drawing we need to appreciate the wider processes of classification. In this instance we find
the tensions of the experience of order that occur as the encoded eye deploys grid type
mechanisms to order what might be a flexible and even chaotic social world. For
Foucault, these grids are powerful in shaping encounters, but they do not entirely limit
the possibility of classificatory imaginings.
The writings of Bowker and Star, Foucault and to a lesser extent Bauman, indicate
the tensions of everyday classification as fixed boundaries compete with ad hoc and
contingent categories and applications. We are pointed towards what I describe in
this article as the classificatory imagination. The classificatory imagination encapsulates a sometimes active and sometimes more passive engagement with lots of
different types of classificatory systems in the passage of everyday practices. The
classificatory imagination is deployed in different ways to negotiate these sorting
processes. Sometimes the grids of the encoded eye are powerful and defining, in
other instances our engagement with cultural boundaries might be playful, resistant,
imaginative and highly creative from forming new boundaries, to placing things,
to negotiating the ad hoc from the established, to creating new meanings and so on.
But what does this tell us about genre?

Drawing Genre Boundaries:The Classificatory

Imagination in Culture
Of course, the discussion of the importance of classifications in culture, which I have
highlighted through Bowker and Star and Foucault, would not be lost on Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu (1984: 479) claims, for example, that:
What is at stake in the struggles about the meaning of the social world is power over the
classificatory schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and
therefore of their mobilization and demobilization: the evocative power of an utterance which
puts things in a different light.

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When reading Bourdieus position against the classificatory imagination there are some
key questions that are left open for consideration. In Bourdieus work we are forced to
ask who it is that is drawing these classifications and how rigid these boundaries are.
Indeed, the problem of fuzzy borders in fields is a long acknowledged problem that
Bourdieu himself identified (Thomson, 2008: 78). The problem is perhaps where too
great a sense of certainty enters into field analysis and replaces this fuzzyness.
So, although field is based upon struggle, Bourdieu appears, implicitly, to place a
large amount of emphasis on the grid and relatively little upon the encoded eye and its
ability to draw and redraw boundaries (see Bottero and Crossley, 2011; Savage and Silva,
2013). Bourdieu (1984: 480) leaves some small scope for redrawing or free play
(Thomson, 2008: 74), but this scope appears to occur only when the limits of a field are
originally being defined and these limits then subsequently become more concrete. The
product of struggles is that these structures are defined by those who are dominant, and
as such describes a very particular type of boundary drawing within the dynamics of
field. As Bourdieu (1984: 235) puts it:
When confronted with an object so clearly organized in terms of the basic opposition [which
in this case is the opposition between formulaic and experimental theatre performances], the
critics, who are themselves distributed in the field of the press in accordance with the
structure which shapes both the classified object and the classification system they apply to
it, reproduce in the space of the judgments whereby they classify both it and themselves
the space within which they are themselves classified The whole process constitutes a
perfect circle As in a set of facing mirrors.

The process here is dynamic and ongoing, but the reflections appear to be one-directional and determinate. We might see then that there is some scope for developing the
drawing of boundaries within the struggles of fields in some alternative ways (Savage
and Silva, 2013). Not least we find space for thinking about how the classificatory imagination plays out in fields and how it might lead to much more vibrancy and mobility than
Bourdieus position might suggest, or that in fact has been suggested by much of the
work that has followed in his path. We might add to this Nick Priors (2008) observation
about the way that a lack of attention to technological change creates a problem for the
understanding of boundaries in Bourdieus concept of field.
As mentioned earlier, one of the problems typical of field analysis, along with a
number of other dominant forms of cultural sociology, particularly of quantitative type,
is that it tends to work with quite rigid visions of genre. Here sociologists tend to work
with a powerful and limited grid of cultural classifications, and in so doing exclude the
classificatory imagination from the cultural processes of classification and boundary
drawing. In these instances cultural grids become all powerful in that they are insurmountable, stable and, most crucially, universally shared cultural classificatory systems. Genre becomes an overtly limiting a priori organizing tool that enables other
forms of analytical insight to be developed, such as the connections between tastes and
social class, age, or gender. Although very different from each other, the influential
work of both Chan and Goldthorpe (2007) on the one side and Richard Peterson
(Peterson and Simkus, 1992; Peterson and Kern, 1996) on the other, are illustrative of
this quite rigid and preset approach to genre. Even where we might look to the complex

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geo-metric spatial analysis, of the increasingly popular multiple-correspondence analysis

we need to remind ourselves that we are often, even when examining these clusters of
individuals, still looking at the liking and disliking of a few pre-set genre categories
(see for example Le Roux et al., 2008). It is not that these are wrong, but that they
work with a very specific ontological assumption about genre, an assumption that does
not fit comfortably with the broader literature on classification in everyday life with
which I have opened this article. Often cultural sociology does not see genre as all that
mobile: it sees the encoded eye as limited, it sees cultural grids as being shared and
indisputable, and it does not often look at boundaries as contested social interfaces and
mobile sites of tension.
It is important to add that this is not simply an argument for qualitative cultural sociology. Indeed, there have been a number of attempts to engage with such boundary drawing
issues through interview techniques (for a recent example see Atkinson, 2011; for a mixed
methods account, see Bennett et al., 2009). The problem is that interviews are likely to
look for an indexical frame of reference, that is to say, that discussions of music tend
toward negotiated meaning, a point of convergence of the encoded eyes of the interviewer
and interviewee. This means that it is unlikely that all of the complexities, intricacies and
strangeness of genre will emerge in interviews. Additionally, the interviews themselves do
not occur at the moments where contentions occur and where genre boundaries are likely
to be more visible. As such, in interviews we have genre as a monologue rather than as an
interface. We are also forced to consider here how scale might play a part in the formation,
mediation and dissemination of genre boundaries. We might need to think about how we
might further uncover the classificatory imagination in cultural processes. To apply this
directly to field analysis, we might need to think about how the boundaries that we are
imagining are structuring the struggles over capital (Savage and Silva, 2013).
To work alongside some of these more stable visions of genre in sociology, we need
to develop accounts that engage with the classificatory imagination, of those making and
consuming music (building upon work on music and its everyday meanings exemplified
by DeNora, 2000). But we should note that by looking across the social sciences and
humanities, we are able to find literature that engages with alternative visions of genre
drawing. In fact, there is much to be gained from looking away across from sociology
towards literary criticism, genre theory and cultural history. In this literature we can see
analytical models of genre boundaries that account for various scales of the classificatory
imagination. Inside the more rigid conceptualizations of genre, we find those that develop
structural notions of genre where boundaries are largely drawn as a part of larger scale
economic and industrial powers. So although genre might change and be mobile, it is still
the outcome of relatively rigid grids and boundaries. This might include work that is also
at the more sociological end of the spectrum such as DiMaggios (1987) classic work,
Keith Neguss (1999) book on genre and the music industry or, moving more toward an
analytical middle ground, the recent book by Lena (2012) on social ties and genre. In
these accounts, boundary lines are largely structural and top-down, and are therefore difficult to re-draw, being a product, as they are, of the cultural hierarchies of artists and
industry people. On the other end of the spectrum, we can find less structural, often even
post-structural or post-modern, accounts that tend towards seeing genre as something
that is unanchored, changeable, plural and protean. Indicative examples are outlined in

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Duffs overview (2000), and elaborated both in the discussions of genre in an era of
postmodern boundary blurring in Dowd et al. (2006), and also in the discussions of
rhetoric and genre formation in Freedman and Medways collection (1994). It would
seem fair to conclude that in this literature there are instances where classifications are
more open and others where the grids are more powerful and restrictive (for an overview,
see Frow, 2006). It is in this very variability that we find the experience of the middle
ground to which Foucault referred, and it is in this variability of circumstances that we
find the individuals classificatory imagination at work. The classificatory imagination is
thus a sensitizing concept intended to think across these different positions. Having
established that I am not alone in such calls for an open approach to the vibrancy of genre
and echoing here Hennions (2001) vision of genre as performance and Holts (1998)
observations about the removal of stylistic constraints in genre let us now focus on the
specific analytical issues that are raised as we attempt to envision this classificatory
imagination and as we return to Lamonts (2010) call for us to think of cultural categories
comparatively and from the ground-up.

Genre Delineation and the Classificatory Imagination in

Action
In this section we return to Bowker and Star (1999: 45) by focusing upon the practical
politics of genre in order to see how boundaries form through negotiations in action.
To develop this argument further, the remainder of the article focuses on genre boundaries
in an empirical and sociological sense. Based upon the discussion of the classificatory
imagination in culture, three types of boundary drawing problems can be explored: (1)
the drawing of boundaries within fragmented cultural scenes, (2) the drawing of boundaries around emergent (sub)genres, and (3) the problem of revealing the tensions of
boundary delineation existing around a priori genres. For the purpose of establishing
some context I will very briefly describe the first two, both of which require more lengthy
investigations of their own, before focusing in more detail upon the third and most relevant of these issues.

The drawing of genre boundaries within fragmented cultural scenes

One of the most prominent arguments about contemporary popular culture is that it is
becoming more fragmented and, consequently we need to think of culture as being
something that can be imagined through concepts that evoke this fragmentation (see
Bennett, 1999). If we are to accept this influential account of contemporary music
cultures, we are left to wonder how we might imagine genre in an era of apparent
cultural fragmentation and splintering. The difficulty will be seeing boundary drawing in action when such a high volume of boundaries are being drawn and redrawn,
when shared cultural endeavours are limited or small scale, or where genre is so overwhelmingly chaotic. It seems fair to conclude that we need to re-appraise genre in this
context, and to think carefully about how it relates to the music scenes and movements typical of contemporary culture. The central issue here concerns the emergent
relations between music cultures and decentralized or social media forms (see Beer,

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2008; Robards and Bennett, 2011). There is some evidence to suggest that music cultures have been decoupled from the broadcast media that previously shaped the classificatory grids that organized musical forms. Music genres, like the music cultures of
which they are a part, have, like the media in which they are organized, become
seemingly less centralized. The industry, professionals, journalists and broadcasters still as DiMaggio (1987) influentially argued play a role in genre formation,
but these are sometimes bypassed as their efforts are lost in the cultural cacophony of
social media. We know that people can now create and disseminate their own music,
can illegally and legally obtain music for free, and so on. This also has a consequence
for music genres.
Individuals - or ordinary people as Turner (2010) has put it, can tag music with
metadata that classifies particular songs or artists. This means that genre can now more
readily emerge from the ground-up. This has always been the case (Fowler, 2008) but
now new media forms have expanded the possibilities for the dissemination of genre
classifications. Genre is still a product of friendship networks, radio, TV and magazines, but now genre is also something of a self-organizing system (Lash, 2007), being
drawn and redrawn through the tags that are attached to the music. Here the processes
of tagging, searching and recommendation become part of the organized striving
(Martin, 2003; see also Savage and Silva, 2013) of the musical field. As the classificatory imagination is exercised, so music can be tagged in multiple ways and with increasingly granular or imaginative labels. The result is the dissemination of genre and the
visualization of the integration in fields that, as Savage and Silva (2013) point out, is
often sidelined in favour of competition. The problem for sociologists of culture is that
genre has always been complex but now it is also less anchored in centralized media
formats. It can mutate and evolve, be created or die, splinter and split. In other words,
cultural boundaries now appear more open to rapid and unconstrained drawing as a
consequence of the media formats through which they are archived, ordered and
obtained.
The good news for sociologists is that many of these boundary-drawing practices
become visual through the tag clouds on music sites like Last.fm. The difficulty is that
we are perhaps not fully set up to cope with vernacular classificatory systems that are so
transient. We can also imagine that it is almost impossible to get a sense of movements
or the broader picture of what is happening in this overwhelming mass of genres and subgenres. Returning to Bowker and Star will assist in thinking about how people filter such
complexity and asking what their grids are and what resources are used to draw their
boundary lines. It is necessary to turn to cultural formations like tag clouds, to try to see
the chaos and complexity of genres on the ground, as they interweave with processes of
cultural fragmentation.

The drawing of boundaries around emergent (sub)genres

The next problem is how we might focus upon new and emergent genres amongst the
maelstrom of contemporary culture. On the one hand, we have familiar and wellestablished genres and the possibility in metadata of studying how boundaries are
drawn around these. In juxtaposition to this, we have the problem of identifying new

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genres, where they come from, how they emerge and, most crucially, how we might
observe the drawing of boundaries around them as they increase in popularity and as
they are shaped by a growing fan base. This is a significant analytical problem. We
cant overlook the presence of new genres in cultural analysis. The boundaries around
emergent genres are likely to change rapidly and are often likely to become less
coherent as they lose density (Crossley, 2009).
If we wish to see genre as changeable, it is important that we understand the emergence
of new genres and how these develop, coagulate and achieve wider attention. Those that
do not hit the mainstream are likely to remain uncovered, even when they might be genres
that have powerful organizing potential amongst certain groups of people. How, for example, are the boundaries being drawn around a sub-genre known as Seapunk that was
emerging in 2012 at the time that this article was being written? We actually know very
little about these processes because analysts have tended to focus upon large established
genres. The emergence of new genres, how this happens, how boundaries are drawn in the
processes of emergence, how they are differentiated from existing genres and sub-genres
(within a fragmented cultural scene), how particular sounds and bands feed into the collective genre, and even the ways in which scenes and genres coalesce, all remain sidelined
questions and issues. The visibility of genres is made easier by some forms of social
media, so whilst apparently creating complexity, there are also traces of interactions
around genre foci that researchers may explore. For the purpose of this paper, I would like
to suggest these as pressing issues. However, at the moment I would like to focus now in
more detail upon the way that boundaries are drawn around the established genres that we
are most used to studying in sociological research.

The tensions of boundary delineation around an a priori genre

I have indicated that one difficulty in studying genre is the tendency to begin with a set
of a priori genre categories. This is to begin with an already drawn genre grid that is then
superimposed upon everyday musical encounters. Before we begin researching, it is difficult to know what people might make of our use of certain genre categories, whether
they mean anything to them, if people who actually like the music disassociate themselves from the genre category, and if the genre categories we use are anything like those
on the ground. Rather than attempting to side-step such problems, we might turn to look
in detail at the tensions of boundaries that are being drawn and re-drawn around the
genre categories we may wish to work with. This is an important point because to say
that genre is mobile and changeable does not necessarily mean that we need to start
solely from the ground-up. Rather, it is still possible to begin with a genre label and see
where this might take us. Indeed, it is likely to be very revealing to use some of the wellworn genre categories and to explore exactly what types of tensions shape the boundaries
that contain them. This article uses the hip hop genre as an established, familiar and
international genre a genre that sociologists are likely to use.
But how can we take an established and visible genre like hip hop and begin to see the
boundaries that are drawn around it? I turn to a piece of software known as a social media
data aggregator or listener (Beer, 2012). These devices capture social media content
relating to a chosen search term. The search term is entered and then any mentions on

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Twitter, blogs, forums or public sections of Facebook are captured for analysis. This
content can then be analysed in a number of ways (Beer, 2012). In this instance, the
software has been used to accumulate content relating to the search term hip hop over
a two-month period and the word map function has been used to organize the content.
The word map provides a diagram of the words most commonly used in association with
hip hop (the lines indicate words that are commonly used together). The words can be
selected to reveal a list of content in which hip hop has been used with that particular
term. Figure 1 is the hip hop word map extracted on 2 April 2012.
Using Figure 1 as a point of departure, we can explore the different commonly used
terms to illuminate the types of discussions that are occurring around hip hop. We can
pick out some of the boundary-drawing type terms to see how these might open up some
interfaces or sites of tension.
Let us begin with the word dead. It might not be surprising to find that there is a
large-scale discussion of whether hip hop is actually still a viable genre. We find here
numerous proclamations that Hip Hop is Dead. There are also speculations about this
death that reveal a delineation of insider and outsider genre boundaries. Comments
such as this is why mainstream hip hop is dead suggest that hip hop is not a coherent
monolith but a contested space within which there is a mainstream alongside other

Figure 1. A word map of the words most commonly associated with hip hop in social media
content.

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versions of the genre. And of course there are those arguing against this notion: I tell
you this much hip-hop is not dead, you gunna see a change just like barack said! or
How can hip-hop be dead when Wu-Tang is forever?. Again, further attempts are made
from this to segregate insiders from outsiders on the topic of the death of the genre,
with the mere questioning of hip hops vitality being seen as a wrong step: If your
asking why is hip hop dead? theres a pretty good chance your the reason it died.
As well as the separating-out of mainstream hip hop, the discussion of death leads to
more pronounced attempts to draw solid boundaries outlining the authentic from the
inauthentic, as this excerpt shows: Like Ive been saying hip hop is 12 feet under ... not
dead but UNDERGROUND!!!. The death of genre discussion is used to suggest that
those that think it is dead are not aware of less visible, underground, insider forms of the
genre. Another contributor makes a similar point: They Said Hip-Hop dead because all
the hottest shit UNDERGROUND. The tension here is between those who want to work
with a broad boundary around hip hop and those who prefer more exclusive boundaries.
Here we see boundaries drawn within boundaries within this one genre. This one debate
opens up a set of tensions between fans about what the genre is, what is happening within
it, what is authentic and who is on the inside of the genuine hip hop music scene. In fact,
illustrating its importance, the word underground has made it into the word map (Figure 1).
The attempt to segregate off these less visible and more esoteric forms of the genre continue as the talk of underground hip hop becomes a discussion of hip hop outside of the
mainstream, where insider knowledge is crucial and where specialism and expertise provide the authority for a redrawing of what the genre is.
Similar debates are found in an exploration of other related terms within the word
map. For example the terms classic, true and real all reveal similar discussions
about what hip hop is and how lines might be demarcated around and inside the genre.
The term classic opens up discussions of classic songs. Artists such as LL cool J and
Raekwon are used as points of reference to talk about the history of hip hop, what the
music should be and how it should be defined. This is the use of a kind of hip hop
canon, with notional rules about the musical form that shape where the boundaries
might be drawn. Similarly, the term true relates to discussions about what is and what
is not true hip hop. These lines are again defined by classic eras on one side - if you
were born in 96 and after please dont talk about what true hip hop sounds like
unless your really a hip hop head- and on the other side by the strength of the discernable emotional response to the music: You know youre a true hip hop lover if you
want to cry to a beat.
The selection of content using the term real echoes these other observations. What is
considered to be real hip hop varies somewhat. It is sometimes defined by the classics
in hip hop, and on other occasions by what is seen as the enigmatic insider territory of the
contemporary underground. The notion of real versions of this genre is something that
comes up fairly frequently in defining the genre. Focusing on such a term quickly reveals
how these lines are positioned quite differently by different actors, with some protesting
against the culture industry DEATH TO COMMERCIAL ASS MUSIC!!!!!!!!! BRING
REAL HIP HOP BACK!!!!! and others simply harking back to halcyon days i
remember real hip hop and Classic hip hop! Im bringing that real music back.
Whatever the vision, the claim to be talking of the real genre, this is real hip hop, is a

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powerful one in cultural boundary drawing, and one that can evoke some tension amongst
those with competing visions.
Finally, as a typical marker of taste, we can turn to the term good. This uncovers
dialogue that separates what is considered to be good from what is bad within the
genre, with the potential to reshape genre boundaries, demonstrating at the same time
that it is possible, of course, to like and dislike different music within the same genre.
Again in some instances this refers back to a perception of a golden era in the genres
history, such as I forgot how good this song was ... this is when rap was rap and hip hop
was hip hop. Here we see a fine grain differentiation working both historically and in
terms of the separation of rap from hip hop. In terms of the discourse around what is
deemed good hip hop we find an insider lexicon demarcating where the genre is heading.
Terms like grimey and raw are used to verbalize the sonic properties of the genre
which feeds into further discussion of the genre as it is being drawn today.
In this hip hop discourse, there are a number of tensions emerging that feed into the
way that boundaries are being drawn around the genre, that in turn illustrate how the
classificatory imagination is active in these processes. The complex relations between
the past, present and future of the genre are visible, as are the tensions between the visible mainstream and the obscure underground. Competing positions and claims about the
health of the genre are evident along with various views of what are real, true, authentic
or good versions of the genre. In short, we find that even this apparently stable genre
category is in flux as its boundaries are drawn, layered, erased, contradicted and questioned. We even find those with an interest in the genre claiming it to be defunct. This is
not an account of clear genre boundaries; rather hip hops boundaries are a matrix of
relational positionings. This genre is anchored in its history yet it is transient and contested. Hip hops history provides some form of grid for the encoded eye but this grid is
interpreted differently and reanimated in response to changes in how the genre is defined
by the music that is placed within it. Not least we are confronted with what appears to be
an interesting interweaving of genre with identity formation, distinction and differentiation of taste and the projection of cultural know-how. Genres are likely to remain volatile
where they are a product of processes of social distinction and differentiation.

Conclusion
This article has suggested that literature on everyday forms of classification, along with
new forms of digital byproduct data, might be imported into cultural sociology in order
to help us to see genre and cultural boundary drawing as a more dynamic and contingent
set of practices. Nowhere is this truer than in attempts to highlight emergent structures
in field analysis (Savage and Silva, 2013). In applying the concept of the classificatory
imagination, this article identified three problems for consideration. These relate to the
way in which boundaries are drawn and redrawn in a changing cultural context. By taking
the example of an a priori genre, it is possible to make visible the points of contention
and the matrix of lines formed at the boundary of genre categories. Hip hop is one of the
more stable genres, and yet we still find contention and imbrication here. This is before
we even begin to delve into the drawing of boundaries around much less visible genres,
or when we start to explore the massive scale of boundary drawing complexity that is

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occurring where genres become a product of much more fragmented cultural scenes.
These more visible moments of contention, captured by new social data, provide us
with opportunities to see cultural boundary drawing in action.
Implicit in the background of this article are the changes in culture that have occurred in
conjunction with the recent emergence of decentralized social media forms. We might need
to think more about how the declining influence of centralized broadcast media forms such
as TV, radio and magazines might have opened music genre up to proliferation. Social
media are decoupling genre from these centralized forms of genre delineation and have
turned genre into an increasingly self-organizing system. Genre may be more chaotic
because it is less centralized in its formation and dissemination. I am not dismissing obdurate
categories, nor am I dismissing the sociological work that anlyses them, but rather I am
suggesting the need for us to complement such work by thinking about the way that changes
in the media based dissemination of genre might be altering the structures of the musical
field. The processes of tagging occurring in music cultures, where anyone can tag music
with any label they choose, mean that music genres have the scope to splinter and spiral
outwards as different agendas play out. Tagging is the material instantiation of the classificatory imagination. Even a single artist or song can be tagged with multiple genres and
sub-genres. We can only begin to wonder what this might mean for the structural and
objective spaces of cultural fields and the struggles that they define.
The decentralization of music dissemination media and the classification systems
that organize their content, provide the conditions for the classificatory imagination
to explore new genre possibilities and to differentiate things in new ways. The restriction of our analytical gaze away from boundary drawing on the ground has meant that
these changes in genre have largely been overlooked. The next step is to take our
analysis of genre in new directions by following these boundary-drawing practices
and by seeing how the classificatory imagination is working to redraw cultural lines
with an unprecedented granularity. It is here that we will begin to see the part that
music genre plays in informing identity and difference. It is only by opening the
analysis to boundary drawing within these self-organizing systems that now dominate
culture that we will see the sociological significance of what is happening. Given this
vision of contemporary culture, it seems that we might need to look at existing cultural boundaries as well as newly formed boundaries to reveal how genres are played
with, subverted and re-imagined. The shift in attention might need to be away from
cultural content and toward a revitalized engagement with the practical ontology of
how culture is organized. It is here that the objective structures of the battleground
of fields (Savage and Silva, 2013) might be re-energized and where new forms of data
might mesh with a revitalized conceptual vocabulary to illuminate genre in action.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography
David Beer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. His work focuses predominantly upon the sociology of popular culture. He is currently writing a book that explores
the material intersections of popular culture and new media.

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