Beyond the Beat: Musicians Building Community in Nashville - Hardcover

Cornfield, Daniel B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691160732 ISBN 13: 9780691160733

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

At a time when the bulwarks of the music industry are collapsing, what does it mean to be a successful musician and artist? How might contemporary musicians sustain their artistic communities? Based on interviews with over seventy-five popular-music professionals in Nashville, Beyond the Beat looks at artist activists—those visionaries who create inclusive artist communities in today's individualistic and entrepreneurial art world. Using Nashville as a model, Daniel Cornfield develops a theory of artist activism—the ways that artist peers strengthen and build diverse artist communities.

Cornfield discusses how genre-diversifying artist activists have arisen throughout the late twentieth-century musician migration to Nashville, a city that boasts the highest concentration of music jobs in the United States. Music City is now home to diverse recording artists—including Jack White, El Movimiento, the Black Keys, and Paramore. Cornfield identifies three types of artist activists: the artist-producer who produces and distributes his or her own and others' work while mentoring early-career artists, the social entrepreneur who maintains social spaces for artist networking, and arts trade union reformers who are revamping collective bargaining and union functions. Throughout, Cornfield examines enterprising musicians both known and less recognized. He links individual and collective actions taken by artist activists to their orientations toward success, audience, and risk and to their original inspirations for embarking on music careers.

Beyond the Beat offers a new model of artistic success based on innovating creative institutions to benefit the society at large.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel B. Cornfield is professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Becoming a Mighty Voice and coeditor of Worlds of Work.

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"An emerging generation of musicians and artists in Nashville, Tennessee is drawing on a dynamic peer community that encourages activism, collaboration, and cross-promotion. Cornfield's illuminating and insightful Beyond the Beat skillfully chronicles the cohesive culture of this highly engaged and often inspiring community, and offers an encouraging take on creativity in the wake of digital disruption."--Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center

"This illuminating investigation into the restructuring of the Nashville music scene provides an insightful look at how artists seek to recreate occupational community in an era of precarious work. The sociological theory of artist activism developed here makes an important contribution to cultural sociology as well as the new sociology of work."--Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"In this graceful and committed book, Daniel Cornfield sings a song for us about the Nashville music scene, Emile Durkheim, and understandings of worker and artist agency. Drawing on rich interviews with music professionals, Cornfield develops a nuanced theory for their artist activism. Those who are interested in contemporary forms of changing art worlds, and those who are interested in the new sociology of work in an increasingly individualized era should listen with open ears."--Marek Korczynski, University of Nottingham

"This insightful and original book looks at how participants in the changing world of Nashville music are creating new ways of organizing careers that are more entrepreneurial and collective than earlier bureaucratic and corporate modes. Cornfield is clearly onto something important about music careers and epochal transformations in the music industry. His talent as a sociologist of work shines through."--William G. Roy, University of California, Los Angeles

"With an amazing range of scholarship, this engaging and thought-provoking book intertwines biography and context to examine emergent patterns among musical change agents in Nashville. Distilling complex arguments and concepts in a straightforward fashion, the book is not only about art worlds and their dynamics, but also about workers in the twenty-first century."--Timothy J. Dowd, Emory University

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Beyond the Beat

Musicians Building Community in Nashville

By Daniel B. Cornfield

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16073-3

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments, ix, 
Chapter 1. Creating Community in an Individualistic Age, 1, 
Chapter 2. Artist Activism: Building Occupational Communities in Risky Times, 17, 
Chapter 3. Self-contained, Self-expression: The Transformative Generation of Enterprising Artists, 34, 
Chapter 4. Identities in Play: The Contemporary Generation of Enterprising Artists, 65, 
Chapter 5. Creating Social Spaces for Artists: Pathways to Becoming an Artistic Social Entrepreneur, 93, 
Chapter 6. Artist Advocates: The Corporate and Entrepreneurial Generations of Arts Trade Union Activists, 121, 
Chapter 7. Community, Agency, and Artistic Expression, 150, 
Appendix. Interview Schedule, 166, 
Notes, 173, 
Bibliography, 191, 
Index, 203, 

CHAPTER 1

Creating Community in an Individualistic Age

Artist activists are re-creating a musician community in Nashville. These visionary peers of a musician community are transforming their community as they enter a risky era of entrepreneurial music production and artist self-promotion. As their careers increasingly unfold outside of the unionized corporate confines of major-label artist rosters, new generations of enterprising artists themselves bear the risks of production and distribution, an instance of Ulrich Beck's "individualization of risk." In this post-bureaucratic moment, artist activism in re-creating peer community is an act of occupational self-determination for new generations of enterprising artists. Their activism is directed at minimizing risk by creating social spaces — such as production companies, studios, and performance venues — and a new arts trade unionism that promote their own and their peers' artistry and livelihoods.

Nashville artist activists have been initiating a wide range of individual and collective actions in re-creating a peer community over the last few decades. For example,

• In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor Josh Eells, recording artist Jack White explained how he conceived of the new building for his label Third Man Records, whose Nashville presence had been established two years earlier: "When I found this place ... I was just looking for a place to store my gear. But then I started designing the whole building from scratch." Eells reported in the New York Times that the building "[n]ow ... holds a record store, [Jack White's] label offices, a concert venue, a recording booth, a lounge for parties and even a darkroom. 'The whole shebang,' White said. It's a one-stop creativity shop." At Third Man Records, the guitarist-singer-songwriter produces his own and others' music, and has many of the label's vinyl records pressed just a few blocks away at Nashville's legendary United Record Pressing, the nation's largest vinyl record plant located in the emerging Wedgewood-Houston arts district.

• In 1987, recording engineer Mervin Louque partnered with businessman Rick Martin to establish Douglas Corner, "a music venue aimed at showcasing new singers and songwriters in Nashville. It soon grew to become a well-known 'Home Away From Home' for Nashville's top songwriters and future music stars," including the likes of Alan Jackson, Trisha Yearwood, Marc Collie, The Kentucky Headhunters, Billy Dean, John Berry, Blake Shelton, and Garth Brooks.

• In 2008, insurgent candidate Dave Pomeroy defeated eighteen-year incumbent and iconic Music Row co-founder Harold Bradley in an unusual and hotly contested election for the presidency of Nashville Local 257 of the American Federation of Musicians. Labeling it a "power shift," Nashville Scene writer Brantley Hargrove wrote that "To onlookers on the coasts, Local 257 had become a battleground far larger than Nashville's city limits, in a sort of proxy grudge match for control. At stake was leadership of the fourth largest local in the world's largest trade organization for professional musicians. That's in a town where music, according to a Belmont University study, is a $6.4 billion industry." Union leadership change also signaled a new approach for revitalizing Local 257, whose sagging membership, like that of many unions in all economic sectors, had declined over the previous decade.

Artist activists have arisen throughout the post-1980 musician migration to Nashville. By the mid-2000s, Nashville had become the U.S. city with the third highest concentration of musicians and, by 2011, it was proclaimed the nation's "Best Music Scene" by Rolling Stone magazine. Artist activists have arisen as the steady stream of musicians created an increasingly genre-diverse pool of "indie" enterprising artists of diverse social backgrounds in Nashville. Over the last half-century, Nashville's established musician community had crystallized around a group of "A-team" recording musicians, songwriters, producers, arts trade unions, and recording artists on the rosters of a few corporate major labels that distributed commercial country music through mass broadcasting. The established community, according to music historian Robert Oermann, "was insulated from the pop-music world as well as from mainstream Nashville. As the booking agencies, publishers, and record labels clustered on Music Row in the 1960s, the personalities who populated them became friends as well as competitors." Contemporary artist activists are reconstituting the musician community as the genre-diversifying musician migration moves Nashville into a post-bureaucratic, entrepreneurial era of music production and artist self-promotion in risky niche consumer markets.

Beyond the Beat is about the artist activists themselves. How do individualistic, entrepreneurial artistic peers sustain their occupational community during a competitive phase of what sociologists Richard Peterson and David Berger called the "concentration-competition cycle" of popular-music production? This book, and the new sociological theory of artist activism derived from the Nashville case, address this question of re-socializing risk by recreating occupational community for an individualistic, diversifying, and entrepreneurial art-making era. I define artist activism as an act of occupational self-determination that is directed at minimizing risk by creating social spaces and a new arts trade unionism for promoting artist activists' and their peers' artistry and livelihoods.

The changing Nashville music scene has spawned three types of artist activists. I refer to these ideal-typical, artist activist roles as "enterprising artists," "artistic social entrepreneurs," and "artist advocates." The sociological theory of artist activism addresses how artist activists fashion their roles as artist activists. Together, the three artist activist roles constitute a repertoire of individual and collective action for re-creating a peer artist community. The theory attributes variations among artist activists in their assumption and enactment of individualistic and collective roles to the artist activist's subjective orientations toward success, audience, risk, and career inspiration.

Jack White, Douglas Corner, and the power struggle within Local 257 illustrate the emergent ensemble of artist activist roles — "enterprising artists," "artistic social entrepreneurs," and "artist advocates," respectively. I define...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691160732
• ISBN 13: 9780691160733
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar