Hip hop VS Rock

Introduction to the Genre

When it comes to music, there is no limit and no doubt of the fact that music by far is the only single handed source that has greatly evolved and continues to improve in terms of the context with which it diversifies and at the same time makes more effective use of the accounts of music and its related fields accordingly.

Sounds have been recorded and played back through media technologies and music objectified in commodity form since the 19th century, yet remarkably, the study of mass-mediated music only became commonplace in colleges and universities during the 1980s and 1990s. Music teaching and research remain, however, scattered across such departments and programs as music, sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, media/communication studies, history, geography, education, and various ethnic and area studies (Tawa, 2005, 227-8). These academic formations have brought their own questions and analytical methods to bear on music as an object of serious study. The discipline of music studies has been shaped by debates within and between disciplines about the relative importance of texts and contexts, social structures, and human agency. Arguably, we still do not share a clearly defined consensus about the direction of music studies.

Musicology

The most obviously music-centered of the disciplines, musicology, has traditionally placed greater emphasis on musical form and style. But critical musicologists have displaced the written or notated score foundational to a Western musicology tradition that privileges classical or art music. Against the notion of music as autonomous art, the so-called “new musicology” has produced semiotic readings that historicize musical texts (Osgerby, 2004, 92-6).

Musicologists have also turned to the performance preserved in the sound recording and applied close reading methods to folk and popular commercial styles such as jazz, blues, rock, soul, funk, and film music. Rhythm and timbre have joined melody and harmony. Many musicologists were instrumental in organizing initial interdisciplinary discussions that resulted in the formation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in 1981. Like sociologists and anthropologists, musicologists who study recorded music agree that musical sounds are linked to social structures, cultural processes, and the histories of particular groups of people (Macan, 1997, 129).

Cultural Studies and Popular Culture

The interdisciplinary formation of cultural studies—fundamentally concerned with the relationship between culture and power—has cannibalized musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology and, in turn, has influenced these older disciplines. The widespread institutionalization of cultural studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s significantly shaped the emergence of popular music studies in the English-language academy.

The term popular music remains a floating signifier that can mean any or all of the following: music liked by many people, music seen to represent particular populations, specific music genres usually derived from American and British rock and soul music, music that sells in large numbers or figures in polls and charts, or simply any music that is recorded and manufactured as a mass-reproduced commodity for the marketplace (Hinton, 2001, 612-3).

Today, popular music studies remain marginal and dispersed in many ...