Tyler Bickford

My article about the current state of children’s music, “The New ‘Tween’ Music Industry: The Disney Channel, Kidz Bop, and an Emerging Childhood Counterpublic,” was recently accepted in Popular Music, published by Cambridge University Press, where it will appear in revised form. A PDF of the current version is here. Here’s the abstract:

This article examines the expansion of the U.S. children’s music industry in the last decade. It considers the sanitizing of Top 40 pop for child audiences in the Kidz Bop compilations, the entrance of Disney into the popular music market, and the meteoric rise of “tween” music products such as High School Musical, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Justin Bieber. Children increasingly consume mainstream musical products and, in the converse dynamic, children’s artists themselves play an increasingly prominent role in popular culture. In many ways they have taken the lead both in commercial success and in stylistic innovations. Examining public expressions of age-based solidarity among celebrity musicians associated with children, this article argues that children’s music is increasingly articulated through tropes of identity politics, representing the emergence of a childhood counterpublic.

I’ll be presenting a paper in Montreal at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association, called “Intimacy and Inarticulateness: Entertainment Versus Literacy in Constructions of Age-Based Identities at a Vermont Primary School.” It’s on an exciting panel about age identities, language ideology, and language socialization, organized by Elise Berman (I don’t think this link will last very long). My paper’s abstract:

This paper argues that age-based identities in US schools are constructed through a contrast between classroom-based literacy practices and communicative repertoires linked to entertainment media, building on extensive ethnographic research about popular music consumption and media use among schoolchildren at a small primary school in rural Vermont. “Literacy” is often seen as the dominant language ideology in school, emphasizing decontextualized, monologic, and non-indexical modes of communication in essayist writing and Interaction-Response-Evaluation classroom interactions. This paper argues that entertainment media, by affording repertoires for communication that strongly contrast with literacy education, occupy a privileged position in constructions of childhood and adult identities in school. When schoolchildren listen with friends to music on portable devices, they go out of their way not to talk about music in descriptive or denotative modes, and instead they creatively explore the possibilities for intimate, embodied, and indexical interactions that arise in social contexts involving media: practices such as sharing headphones with friends that emphasize communicative layering, physical contact, and bodily coordination, and devalue descriptive language. Theorizing such practices using Ray McDermott’s account of the oppositional power embedded in “inarticulateness”—while emphasizing the intimacy and solidarity among children that inarticulateness makes possible—this paper argues that children actively politicize the communicative ecology of school as a site for articulating age difference, setting media consumption and indexical communication in opposition to decontextualized classroom communication, connecting the one to childhood solidarity, and the other to bureaucratic, institutional, and ultimately adult identities.

I completed my PhD this spring. I’ve uploaded a PDF of my dissertation here.

I also received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University this year, for my teaching in the Core curriculum. Columbia’s Record profiled me for the award, here.

In the fall I’ll be back at Columbia as a full-time Core Lecturer, continuing to teach Contemporary Civilization.

pdf; scribd

My 2007 article in Ethnomusicology, “Music of Poetry and Poetry of Song,” has been added to the JSTOR archive, here. Under the previous 4-year “moving wall,” this would have come online at JSTOR in 2012, which has been a source of some inconvenience. Until 2011 Ethnomusicology‘s current issues haven’t been available in any form online, making new scholarship in the field difficult to find and cite until it’s already several years old. The journal is participating in JSTOR’s new “current scholarship program” (which includes many other journals) that brings all their issues up to date.

I think access to current issues requires a separate library subscription (my access through Columbia is still limited to pre-2006 issues). The piece is also up here and on scribd.