For the previous 4 years, I’ve taught a first-year seminar titled “Race and Place in British New Wave, Okay-pop and Past” at Yale College. Because it’s the start of the Fall semester right here, it looks like an applicable time to share what my course is like.
At Yale, now we have particular seminars which are solely open to our first-year college students. These programs are introductory and supply distinctive content material. First-year seminars give our latest college students an opportunity to work together with different college students from their cohort and their professor in a really intimate setting. Seminars are typically capped at 15 college students. Sophomores, juniors and seniors are usually not eligible to enroll in these programs.
Whereas my course seems like loads of enjoyable – and it’s — it really entails fairly a bit of labor for each the scholars and me. I assign a typical quantity of readings for a lower-division course. Nevertheless, in addition they have to look at about 25 music movies each week. Weekly essays on the playlists are due earlier than our first-class for the week together with opinions of our readings. I’ve compiled a playlist for every week of the course. They’re organized considerably chronologically and thematically. Utilizing fashionable music, beginning with ska and reggae in Jamaica within the Sixties, we speak about problems with race and migration. Whereas lots of the ska, rocksteady and reggae musicians in Jamaica had been Black (Dandy Livingstone, Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, Toots and the Maytals, and so forth.), probably the most well-known producers and document label executives included these of Chinese language and West Indian descent (Leslie Kong, Byron Lee, Vincent and Pat Chin, Lee Gopthal and even Jo Jo Kim). Like Asian immigrants all around the world, they had been extra prone to be small entrepreneurs — they owned small shops and later owned recording tools.
Subsequent, we cowl the migration of Jamaican music to the UK within the late Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, resulting in second-wave ska teams comparable to The English Beat, Insanity, The Specials and UB40. This style is a crucial a part of the British New Wave, represented by its grandfather, David Bowie, and iconic artists like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, New Order, Human League and so forth. These artists benefited from the arrival of MTV in 1981, the place its first broadcast started with the video for “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. As a result of MTV was all in favour of visually-appealing artists, the outlandish clothes of the British New Wave artists suited them. After all, MTV additionally actively promoted white artists over Black artists till Michael Jackson broke the racial barrier.
By way of music, we find out about colonization (Jamaica by the UK), expertise (dubplates, radio, shade TV, digital synthesizers), geography (Manchester sound as represented by Pleasure Division, New Order and The Buzzcocks), the migration of individuals and tradition, race and the nation-state. We are able to focus on problems with race in research of fashionable music. It’s simpler to retain info when it’s fascinating and you’ve got enjoyable studying the fabric. I commonly host a visitor lecture from ’80s pop star Dave Wakeling, chief of The English Beat and Normal Public.
Later within the semester we pivot to Okay-pop. I start with artists earlier than trendy Okay-pop together with songs comparable to “Come Again to Busan Port” by Cho Yong Pil, “Story of Final Night time” by Sobangcha and naturally “Nan Arayo” by Website positioning Taiji and Boys. By the way, there are reggae songs within the Okay-pop record, together with “Excuses” (Pinggae) by Kim Gun Mo and “Cocktail Love” by Marronnier. After that, we talked in regards to the leisure corporations, idol contracts, and the generations of teams beginning with H.O.T. and S.E.S. all the best way to fourth- and fifth-generation teams like Ive, Trendz and Zerobaseone.
Not all of my college students are Okay-pop followers, although normally a number of are conversant in new wave. This semester, I even have college students who like The Beatles, Billy Joel, Elton John and genres like progressive rock – bear in mind Genesis and Sure? Nonetheless, all of them love music and acknowledge the significance of it of their lives. What they may study is the way it displays society and manifests lots of the dimensions of inequality we discover in sociological research.
Neo-Marxists have at all times been attentive to the significance of fashionable tradition as a manner for the elite to regulate the lots — nonetheless, I feel popular culture is a two-way avenue. On the planet of Okay-pop, followers maintain immense energy and management over the content material and habits of idols, and customers are usually not merely passive receivers of cultural merchandise. For worldwide followers, they’re additionally studying about Hallyu, or the Korean Wave.
I’m so lucky to work with sensible younger college students, and I find out about their views of up to date society by way of the lens of fashionable music. They love interacting with different college students, and that’s precisely the educational surroundings afforded by small seminars. Hopefully, they may notice that music didn’t at all times come by way of YouTube and Spotify.
Having mentioned that, readers are welcome to peruse my class playlists on YouTube by trying to find SOCY 081:M1 (for Module 1) after which SOCY 081:M2, and so forth., all the best way to SOCY 081:M14. These lists can be up to date because the semester progresses.
Grace Kao
Grace Kao is an IBM professor of sociology and professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale College. The views expressed listed below are the author’s personal. — Ed.