In a new series, the Daily sits down each week with a Tufts faculty member and poses a controversial question about art and culture.
In this week's question, Tufts lecturer Joe Schloss, an ethnomusicologist and expert in hip-hop culture, talks about the business of selling albums, social movements in popular culture and music, and whether our favorite top-selling albums are art or music.
Q: Fergie, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera have all recently released new albums. ["The Duchess," "FutureSex/ LoveSounds" and "Back to Basics," respectively]. Undoubtedly these albums will sell well and be high on the Billboard charts. What is this kind of album, the Top 40 album? Can the Top 40 be called music? Can those songs be called art?
JS: I think that the idea of art itself is very much a culturally constructed idea. It's a privileging kind of cultural construct, in the sense that when you call something art, you're saying it's better than things that aren't art.
When you get a group of people to collectively consider something art, that's a social phenomenon. To me, there's no objective way to say something is art or isn't art; it's more a matter of saying a particular group of people in a particular time or place consider this valuable.
Q: Is Britney Spears an artist?
A: That's a question of what other people consider an artist. And then you look to those people: Who are they and why do they think that? An analogy I would draw would be with Madonna. She was a pop figure, very much like Britney Spears, and then a group of people started to take her really seriously.
They began to find messages in what she did that spoke to larger societal issues - and [these people] started to take her more seriously as an artist. To me, that's more [a reflection of] them than of her. It's not like [Madonna] changed; it's more a matter of people thinking about it in a different way.
Q: Do you think that Top 40 is created to sell to the lowest common denominator?
JS: I think almost by definition it's that. But that phrase, especially since it contains the word "lowest" in it, that's putting a moral judgment on it. [Top 40 music] is made to sell to the widest common denominator; it's made to sell to the largest number of people while offending the smallest number of people. It's an economic decision.
Q: You spoke about larger issues in music today, issues that go beyond the artistic merit of songs and albums. What are those larger issues?
JS: It's basically about who is making the music, who's listening to the music; do they agree on what the purpose of the music is, the institutional and economic forces that allow [the music to be made]? It's not just the individual artists; people are seeing them in a larger context. [For example], a lot of people in the hip-hop community were not impressed when the Black Eyed Peas added Fergie [a white woman]. It was viewed as them minimizing their own blackness in order to put a white face on it to make it more popular.
There are people who stopped listening to [the Black Eyed Peas] because of [the addition of Fergie to the group].
There are people who, arguably, started listening to them because of it. [The record company] was assuming that adding Fergie in would make the music more popular - and they were right. They were making that decision on a bottom-line basis: "What's going to make us the most money?"
