We were never cool: Investigating knowledge production and discourses of cool in the sociology of music.

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Author(s)
Haynes, Jo
Nowak, Raphaël
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2021
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This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co-constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the ...
View more >This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co-constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the example of aging music researchers as a departure point, we examine how the cool connotations of music function as a mode of discourse that legitimates particular knowledge, practice, and taste, demarcating insider/outsider status. We explore how music acquires social connotations such as "cool" and whether that alters music researchers' approaches to it. We argue that apart from the disclosure of inclinations, social characteristics, and relationships to the object of research (music scenes, preferences, fandom, and so on), the tradition of reflexive empirical perspectives in music sociology should incorporate further deconstruction of the transformative dimensions in the relations between music and researcher. Music, as a complex and dynamic object, thus, requires sociology to produce accounts that both encompass people's enjoyment and experience as well as its boundary-defining capacity.
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View more >This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co-constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the example of aging music researchers as a departure point, we examine how the cool connotations of music function as a mode of discourse that legitimates particular knowledge, practice, and taste, demarcating insider/outsider status. We explore how music acquires social connotations such as "cool" and whether that alters music researchers' approaches to it. We argue that apart from the disclosure of inclinations, social characteristics, and relationships to the object of research (music scenes, preferences, fandom, and so on), the tradition of reflexive empirical perspectives in music sociology should incorporate further deconstruction of the transformative dimensions in the relations between music and researcher. Music, as a complex and dynamic object, thus, requires sociology to produce accounts that both encompass people's enjoyment and experience as well as its boundary-defining capacity.
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Journal Title
British Journal of Sociology
Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Sociology
aging
cool
cultural sociology
insider
knowledge production