Brackett — Categorizing Sound

Author: David Brackett
Title: Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music
Year: 2016
Type: Academic book (University of California Press)

A history of the practice of categorizing rather than of any category’s contents. Brackett’s claim is that a genre is never a stable grouping of sonic traits waiting to be described: it is produced, and kept alive, by the circulation of labels among musicians, fans, journalists, and the industry, with critic-and-fan genres and music-industry categories operating as two different grouping systems whose interplay makes a genre legible at all. A record participates in a genre the way an utterance participates in a language — by citing conventions that precede it — and the label is a working part of the music’s identity rather than a sticker on its surface. His formulation of when a genre comes into being is the book’s most useful sentence: legibility “could only be attained via the gradual assembling together of musical sounds, the social connotations of performers and audience, and a shared sense of affect and physical movement that cut across demographic divisions, along with a term or concept that could function as a label.”¹ No label, no genre — whatever the records sound like.

The case studies run the century’s sorting machinery from the inside. The 1920s chapters watch “race records” and “hillbilly” being assembled as market categories, against the hindsight that treats early blues as a natural kind waiting for discovery; the 1940s chapter tracks a chiasmus in which swing dissolves upward into pop while Black popular music is re-fenced as novelty; and the chapter called “The Dictionary of Soul” follows the 1960s renaming of rhythm & blues, including the strangest event in the whole lineage — Billboard’s suspension of its R&B chart from late 1963 to early 1965, the one interruption in an industry category that had run continuously since race records and runs on today as R&B/Hip-Hop. Brackett reads the renaming and the gap as a struggle over racial classification conducted through musical classification: “soul” moving from adjective to genre name exactly as integrationist confidence gave way to Black cultural self-definition. The crossover chapter completes the argument with its asymmetry: country’s style markers could blend into unmarked pop while Black genres read as transgressive at the same border, and after Thriller “the whole idea of the mainstream underwent changes that led to a new way of conceptualizing the hierarchy of genres that might participate in it.”²

The book is the theory that the chart-rename history runs on, and one 1949 case shows the fit. When Billboard replaced “race” with “rhythm & blues” that June, nothing in the grooves changed and the music’s category changed anyway, because the label is part of the genre — Jump blues lived the consequence, keeping its sound while its commercial identity moved to a chart with a different name. Where the model strains is its symmetry. Everyone circulates labels in Brackett’s account, but the parties were never equal: the industry’s labels came printed on the trade charts that decided airplay and royalties, while audiences’ counter-labels traveled by mouth, and the difference between those two circulations is roughly the difference between naming and being named. Nelson George’s rhythm-and-blues world was dismantled by decisions made in offices; a theory in which categorization is everyone’s practice accounts elegantly for how genres become legible and more quietly for who pays when they do. Reviewers noted the blind spots (funk and hip hop pass by in asides; the long threads can vanish into the microscopic detail), but the framework has become the standard reference for the constructedness of genre, and it won the Society for American Music’s Irving Lowens Book Award.³

Key contributions

• The circulation model: genres are produced by labels moving among industry, audiences, and critics, with critic-fan genres and industry categories as distinct systems whose overlap makes a genre legible.
• Participation over belonging: records cite generic conventions rather than possessing genre identities, which is why a genre’s sound can change completely while the category persists.
• The legibility assemblage: sounds, social connotations, shared affect, and a workable label must converge before a genre exists — the label is a constitutive ingredient.
• The 1963–65 suspension read as classification politics: the only gap in the century’s continuous Black-music category, interpreted through the struggle between integrationist convergence and Black cultural self-definition.
• Crossover’s circular logic and its racial asymmetry: the concept requires stable charts to cross between, and the border polices Black genres harder than white ones in both directions.

See also

• The color line in pop — Brackett supplies the general theory of the line’s central mechanism: categories drawn by label-circulation, with the industry holding the printing press
• Segregating Sound — Miller documents the 1920s sorting as history; Brackett builds the theory of how any such sorting works and keeps working
• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — George’s institutional world and Brackett’s discursive categories are the same story at different depths; the world was dismantled partly by relabeling
• R&B — the family whose eight-decade renaming chain is this book’s central case run at full length; its “genre or ledger” debate is decided on Brackett’s terms

Footnotes

1. Thomas Johnson’s review of Categorizing Sound, Current Musicology no. 102 (accessed July 4, 2026). The quoted legibility passage is Brackett at p. 77, cited in the review; the critic-fan/industry distinction at p. 11 and the citational apparatus at pp. 12–13. ↩

2. Thomas Johnson’s review, Current Musicology no. 102 (accessed July 4, 2026). The post-Thriller mainstream passage is Brackett at p. 314; the country-blends/Black-transgressive asymmetry at p. 293. ↩

3. Professor David Brackett wins the Irving Lowens Book Award, McGill (accessed July 4, 2026). The Society for American Music’s citation called it “a watershed publication that sets a new standard for how scholars can and must examine the ways we categorize all forms of music.” ↩