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.

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 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.

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.

I’ve got a piece up (with some photos) about kids’ MP3 players as material culture over at NYU’s Material World Blog, which is a nice place. Thanks to Heather Horst for inviting me to contribute.

• Benjamin J. Harbert, “Blood in My Eyes: The Inspiring Principles of Musicians at Louisiana’s Hunt Prison”

• Anita Høyvik, “How to Prescribe a Healthy Listening? Music Listening in Terms of Medical Efficacy at Rivington House”

• Jennifer A. Woodruff, “‘Girl, you nasty!’: Policing the Boundaries between Inappropriate Dancing and Moral Character”

• Tyler Bickford, “Musical Consumerism in School: Expressive Negotiations of Institutional Authority During Classroom Lessons at a Vermont Elementary School”

Abstracts below the jump.

“Music in ‘Total’ Institutions”

This panel considers musical practices in four non-musical institutions in the U.S.: a Louisiana prison, a New York City residence for people living with AIDS, a Durham, N.C., Boys and Girls Club, and a Vermont elementary school. Each of these sites fits on a spectrum of what Goffman calls “total” institutions, which voraciously claim authority over all aspects of their subjects’ lives. These institutions are intimately organized around their subjects’ totalizing identities as children, prisoners, and the chronically ill and indigent, which locate individuals in problematic relationship to “human rights.” The papers in this panel identify musical practices and expressivity—cultural fields often seen as outside the normal reaches of governmental or institutional authority—as central sites in negotiating the boundaries between individuals and institutions. In prison, inmates’ music is balanced between politics and catharsis; medicine claims particular access to AIDS patients’ emotions and affect through discourses of “healing”; girls’ dancing bodies become central to an after-school club’s justification to funding agencies; and schoolchildren’s everyday vocalizations negotiate the pedagogical authority of teachers. In each of these cases music is an intimate resource with uncertain potential: it affords individual expression and affiliation, but it may also provide an anchor for these institutions to discipline their subjects’ private lives. Identifying “total” institutions as important sites of ethnomusicological inquiry, these papers reorient a perspective on cultural politics toward the interactions and routines of everyday life, where expressive practices are constitutive of individual rights and identities in institutional and bureaucratically structured environments.

Tyler Bickford, “Musical Consumerism in School: Expressive Negotiations of Institutional Authority During Classroom Lessons at a Vermont Elementary School”

With children’s increasing access to portable devices like MP3 players, the widespread installation of Internet terminals in schools, and educators’ progressive turn toward corporate-produced “edutainment” for lessons, over the last generation U.S. elementary schools have become a central location for children’s media consumption. Traditionally understood as community spaces that shelter vulnerable children from dangerous public environments, with this shift schools increasingly confront a vision of children as an emerging public of legitimate, active, and independent participants in consumer society with increasing demographic and market influence. This paper considers how this tension emerges in everyday musical interactions between students and teachers at a small rural primary school in Vermont. Students at this school would often vocalize melodies, sound effects, and fragments of popular and silly songs from recorded music, television, the Internet, and video games to disrupt, comment on, or shift the social frame of the lesson. Such moments reveal distinct stylistic, textual, and generic differences between the interactional modalities of musical media consumption and the communicative and expressive modalities with which primary education is especially concerned to cultivate and discipline among children. Because elementary school’s pedagogical emphasis on literacy and communication already privileges expressivity as a field of social action, repertoires from musical media provide a powerful resource for children to engage adults on equal terrain. As they command expressive repertoires from both education and entertainment, children negotiate contrasting visions of childhood from media and school, setting empowered consumerism in dynamic tension with bureaucratic constructions of passive, sheltered childhoods.

The 2009 Lise Waxer Prize from the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, recognizing the most distinguished student paper in the ethnomusicology of popular music presented at the SEM annual meeting in Wesleyan, CT, October 2008, for my paper, “Media Consumption as Social Organization at a New England Primary School” (pdf or scribd).

and

The 2009 Hewitt Pantaleoni Prize from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (MACSEM) for the best student paper presented at the Middle Atlantic SEM Chapter meeting in New York, March 2008, for my paper, “The Social Economy of Headphone Use in a New England Primary School.” That paper turned into my “Earbuds Are Good for Sharing” for the Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music (pdf or scribd).

Needless to say I’m pleased and grateful.