Tanner, Julian, Mark Asbridge, and Scot Wortley. 2008. “Our Favourite Melodies: Musical Consumption and Teenage Lifestyles.” The British Journal of Sociology 59(1): 117-144.
Studies lifestyle patterns and determinants amongst high school students in Toronto, informed by cultural stratification and adolescent subculture. Use Bourdieu (1984) and Peterson (1996) to frame elite taste, subcultural taste (within dissent). Find that race/ethnicity, school experiences, and cultural capital impact variety that adolescent participants had, in loose relation to existing typologies.
*** Musical tastes and peer group cultural practices are closely linked.
Bourdieu – culture as a means to establish, maintain, reproduce social status of powerful elite individuals and groups (1984, see also Alexander 2003, Swartz 1997). As primary consumers of popular music and educational institutions (also a Bourdieuian site of reproduction of distinction, stratification) – educational patterns may impact musical taste, where educationally successful students may orient selves towards adult-approved peer group activity (or little altogether), less successful students may participate in subcultures where popular music becomes a site of resistance. Subcultural participation related to low academic achievement and delinquency (Tanner 1981); adolescents who prepare themselves as high status adults adopt cultural traits that they believe to be appropriate for future – however, in contemporary times, this means omnivorous cultural/musical tastes (Peterson 1992), unless it is stereotyped or stigmatized as a low-status univoric taste ie rap, country, heavy metal (Bryson 1996). Bourdieu studies monocultural and insulated French culture of the 1960’s, but how does this apply to the multicultural aspects of an North American context of today?
Gendered youth activity and interactions offer different musical tastes – young girls excluded from public, masculinized spaces turn toward popular music (themes of love and romance), where boy involve themselves in hard rock which reinforces masculine identities… but this is several decades old, and who know what patterns could emerge now.
Measures familial patterns, delinquent acts, and genre tastes, with statistical relationships and Likerts.
(kx^typologies and labels become very problematic, these combinations and how they are grouped seem not to be well-defended.)
CITES:
Alexander, V. 2003 Sociology of the Arts, Oxford: Blackwell.
Bourdieu, P. 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Peterson, R.A. 1992 ‘Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore’, Poetics 21 (4): 243– 58.
Peterson, R.A. and Kern, R. 1996 ‘Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore’, American Sociological Review 61(5): 900-907.
Swartz, D. 1997 Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Tanner, J. 1981 ‘Pop Music and Peer Groups: A Study of Canadian High School Students’ Responses to Pop Music’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 18(1): 1–13.
Granola, Grad School and Goffman 