Category Archives: Entertainment

Georgetown sociology course on Jay-Z

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If there are sociology courses on Lady Gaga, why not one on Jay-Z?

Noted educator and author, Michael Eric Dyson, has taken a new spin on generic education. He is now teaching a class at the prominent Georgetown University, based solely on Jay Z. The course, “Sociology of Hip-Hop: Jay-Z” is a 3 credit course offered this semester…

While some speak negatively about hip-hop’s vulgarity and rawness, Dyson sees no point in going against this phenomenon and clearly supports including rap in the cannon of education. “Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it’s futile. The reality is there’s criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius,” he said. “I admire the way in which he carries himself and the incredible craft that he displays every time he steps up to the microphone.”

The course covers Jay-Z’s book “Decoded,” Adam Bradley’s “Book of Rhymes,” Zack O’Malley Greenburg’s “Empire State of Mind,” as well as other articles and films about hip-hop in general. “We look at his incredible body of work, we look at his own understanding of his work, we look at others who reflect upon him, and then we ask the students to engage in critical analysis of Jay-Z himself,” Dyson explained.

Dr. Dyson reiterated that hip-hop is an important subject that people should take seriously and learn about, and the interest level at Georgetown is very high. “Well you know if you have an average size class of 30-40, and then you got 140 students signed up that tells you right there there’s an extraordinary interest,” he said, “I think that’s why it’s important for young people to see that the rhetorical invention of African American culture needs to be taken seriously with one of its greatest artist.”

I suppose it is appropriate that this is being reported on by MTV.

I’m sure some will see the news about this class and say, “Can you believe what passes for a college education today?” But there are at least three defenses for this.

1. The topic is popular. Clearly, college students and others are listening to hip-hop and watching the behavior of its stars so why not address this in a college classroom? Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it is not worthy of study. In fact, taking an academic approach to a popular topic has the potential to hit college students in their everyday activities and tastes.

2. The class could touch on a bunch of interesting topics such as race, social class, city life, culture, lifecourse and generational change, and how hip-hop has evolved from its start in 1970s New York City and has spread far and wide. For example, we could ask how this has spread to the American suburbs – does listening to hip-hop now while driving down leafy suburban streets in a Honda Civic mean something different than when hip-hop emerged? In this argument, hip-hop is just the means by which students can enter the world of sociology.

3. Studying “American” music is important. While classical music might be the high culture standard, it began in Europe and was imported into the United States. Studying blues and jazz, the beginnings of rock music, and hip-hop provides insights into how American culture and experiences, particularly the African-American experience, is translated into music and performances.

Brit Derren Brown to test four sociology (?) theories on TV

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If you search for YouTube videos of the famous Milgram Experiment, you’ll run into an interesting recreation on the BBC hosted by Derren Brown (see part one of three here). When I’ve showed this to students, they tend to ask why a TV performer gets to perform this experiment but no university IRB would likely allow this. I don’t know the answer to this. But, Brown is back with a new show where he is going to test four more sociological theories:

His new show, The Experiment, will see Brown trying out four sociological theories on unsuspecting citizens.

The performer said: “Three of them are relatively dark, looking into the darker side of human behaviour, and one of them is rather positive and jolly. The first one is called The Assassin.”…

He explained: “It’s whether or not it’s possible to hypnotise somebody to kill, to carry out an assassination. This is based on the testimonies given by political assassins who say they were brainwashed by the CIA.”

Some of the theories have their origins in academia, while some of them are developed by Brown himself. Which is even more concerning.

So perhaps this isn’t terribly sociological and is more entertainment/conspiracy theory. What would it take to get an American host to replicate some famous or intriguing sociological experiments on TV? What about things like the Ultimatum Game and how the results can differ across groups and cultures? Instead, we are stuck with weaker shows like What Would You Do. A show that could demonstrate that sociological studies are both intriguing and beneficial for society could go a long way toward boosting the image of the discipline.

Mixing sociology and anthropology: naming Claude Levi-Strauss a “founder of sociology”

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While describing the theme of the Magnificat, a writer mixes sociology and anthropology:

The triumph of the meek is a recurring narrative in all cultures both sacred and secular. One of the fathers of sociology, Claude Levi-Strauss, documented the recurrence of identical consoling myths throughout all cultures. The themes of the Magnificat are echoed in Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling and Forrest Gump and my favourite in this genre, the rom-com Sleepless in Seattle. There is retribution for the wicked and reward for humility and generosity of spirit. This too conforms to Levi-Strauss pattern. He noted that these universal narratives often employ binary opposites — death/life, good/evil, suffering/reward. The main difference between religion compensation myths and the profane ones is that the religious ones often need a magical trigger such as the afterlife or the coming of God. And that of course, is where I must differ with the Magnificat – a minor quibble in the scheme of things.

Comparing the Magnificat and Sleepless in Seattle? You don’t see that every day. Sociology and anthropology share some common foundational thinkers, people like Karl Marx, but Levi-Strauss is clearly an anthropologist. Even Wikipedia knows this!

Claude Lévi-Strauss (French pronunciation: [klod levi st?os]; (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the “father of modern anthropology”.

Come to think of it, I can’t remember a time I’ve seen Levi-Strauss cited in a sociological piece. At the same time, his ideas about binary oppositions can be found in sociology of culture work. For example, Jeffrey Alexander has some pieces working with binary oppositions.

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Suburgatory nears first show; will it offer anything new?

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Yesterday, I ran into a full-page promotional ad for Suburgatory, a new ABC sitcom which first airs on September 28. Here is the ad (image from DisneyDreaming.com):

Suburgatory Full Page Advertisement

Watch the trailer here and also read ABC’s description of the show (these are separate paragraphs but I think they are meant to be two different descriptions):

Single father George only wants the best for his 16-year-old daughter, Tessa. So when he finds a box of condoms on her nightstand, he moves them out of their apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs. But all Tessa sees is the horror of over-manicured lawns and plastic Franken-moms. Being in the ‘burbs can be hell, but it also may just bring Tessa and George closer than they’ve ever been.

Tessa (Jane Levy) and George (Jeremy Sisto) have been on their own ever since Tessa’s mom pulled a “Kramer vs. Kramer” before she was even potty trained. So far, George has done a pretty good job of raising Tessa without a maternal figure in their lives, but suddenly he’s feeling a little out of his league. So it’s goodbye New York City and hello suburbs. At first Tessa is horrified by the big-haired, fake-boobed mothers and their sugar-free Red Bull-chugging kids. But little by little she and her dad begin finding a way to survive on the clean streets of the ‘burbs. Sure, the neighbors might smother you with love while their kids stare daggers at your back, but underneath all that plastic and caffeine, they’re really not half bad. And they do make a tasty pot roast.

As I suggested back in March, this show at least appears that it may cover typical suburban territory: an innocent person moves to a nice-looking neighborhood but finds that the people aren’t what they seem and hijinks or unpleasant events ensue. The suburbs are full of fake people and I’m sure the show will have some commentary about striving for social status, “authentic” living in New York City, and perhaps even takes a shot or two at McMansions and SUVs. Perhaps this show’s twist is that the main characters are a teenage daughter and a single dad but hasn’t this also been tackled by other shows and movies? A new prediction: if it simply updates Desperate Housewives or Revolutionary Road for the teenage set, I don’t think it will last until the end of the first season.

Thinking about this show, it would be interesting to compile a database of television shows that really tackle suburban living. To do this, one would first have to distinguish between shows that take place in the suburbs (say Boy Meets World – not sure why this popped into my mind) versus ones that revolve around suburban themes and issues. I’ve thought about doing something similar for popular music songs in order to look for patterns. In both hypothetical databases, I suspect I would find a generally critical (or perhaps “satirical”) take on suburbs even as Americans have continued to move into these places.

I’ll be tracking the fate of this show and may also have to watch an episode for research purposes…

David Simon, The Wire co-creator, to receive William Julius Wilson award

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The Wire has been used in a number of college courses (one example here) and now David Simon, co-creator of the HBO series, will be awarded the William Julius Wilson award from Washington State University:

David Simon, co-creator of the HBO television series “The Wire,” has been named recipient of the Washington State University William Julius Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice…

Wilson received his doctoral degree in sociology from WSU and is one of the nation’s leading scholars in the fields of African American studies, race, civil rights, poverty and social and public policy issues. He was the first person to receive the award named in his honor in 2009. He is scheduled to attend this symposium…

“We are honoring David Simon with this award because of his significant and innovative contributions to promote social policy, in particular by raising the public’s awareness of systemic social inequality, poverty and the complex way that social surroundings affect individual-level decisions,” said Julie Kmec, associate professor of sociology and chair of the committee organizing the event…

Three Harvard scholars, including Wilson, recently pointed out that the series has “done more to enhance both the popular and the scholarly understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other program in the media or academic publication.”

Several questions:

1. I wonder if this award for Simon, also a former journalist, is part of a larger trend (the ASA has been doing this for a few years now – David Brooks was the latest to be recognized) of sociologists recognizing journalists as key people/gatekeepers for spreading sociological ideas.

2. What other television shows accomplish similar things to The Wire?

3. I had forgotten that William Julius Wilson received his PhD from Washington State since he is more commonly associated with the University of Chicago or Harvard. Of prominent sociologists, how many have received degrees from places like Washington State versus the typical top-ranked programs (Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, Wisconsin-Madison, etc.)?

The sociology of Star Trek

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Occasionally, I run across more unusual sociology courses. Here is a summer class that examines Star Trek:

In order to understand more about why the Star Trek cannon has continued to be popular and respected since its creation in the 1960s, I took a class this summer at Portland State University entitled “The Sociology of Star Trek.”  I learned about how the Trekkian visions of the future offered a lens through which to examine the culture of its time and about the vision of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbarry, who highlighted enlightenment ideals and ‘exploration without conquest.’  Additionally I learned about the obsession and culture surrounding the show.

One of our assignments was to review an event that occurs annually in Portland: Trek in the Park. At this event, a full-length original episode is performed by the Atomic Arts theater company. For one month a year, Portlanders gather to show their Trek Pride.

Big sociological themes that you could play with in such a course:

1. The social change of the 1960s and how this was reflected in popular culture.

2. American fascination with:

a. Technology and progress. Even in space, we can’t escape some basic problems.

b. Utopias or idealized communities. This could be tied to a number of utopian communities that were actually built or perhaps even the suburbs, the space where Americans seek the elusive American Dream.

3. The subcultures that form and are maintained based on objects in the popular culture.

4. Cultural narratives as displayed in television (all the versions of Star Trek) plus movies.

See a draft of the syllabus here and comments from the Internet public about what the class could include here. Apparently, you can cover all sorts of topics through the lens of Star Trek…

Are sociologists more likely than the general population to be Star Trek fans? And is the competition to Star Trek, the Star Wars franchise, too low-brow for sociologists?

Time magazine: “100 Best Nonfiction Books”

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Perhaps you have seen the popular Facebook questionnaire where you are asked how many of the 100 great works of fiction you have read. Now someone can start one of these lists for non-fiction books: Time has put together a list of the “100 Best Nonfiction Books” – since Time first started publishing in 1923.

I would really like to know how these books were selected. Fast Food Nation? Ball Four? No sociology books? For example, The Truly Disadvantaged influenced a lot of policy about inner-city neighborhoods and public housing.

While people probably read some of the best 100 fiction texts in English classes, where would the average student or American run across these non-fiction books? Many are not used in school. Non-fiction books don’t seem particular popular compared to genres like mystery or romance novels.

It would be interesting to see sales figures for all of these books.

The morality of termination rights

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Raustiala and Sprigman over at the New York Times Freakonomics blog take on the morality of copyright termination rights, “an obscure provision of U.S. copyright law…[that] allows songwriters and musicians to…take back from the record labels many thousands of songs they licensed 35 years ago”:

In general, if you decide to sell or perpetually license a piece of property, you can’t later take it back, no matter how much you might want to. So If I sell my house and two years later the city decides to build a lovely public park in my neighborhood, the value of my former house may rise substantially. But no one contends that I can take the house back, or that I’m due a bonus payment from the lucky buyer.  A deal is a deal.

So why the exception for copyright owners?

I have to start somewhere, so it might as well be here:  it’s disingenuous to invoke a home-sy (literally) analogy, show that it fails, and use that failure to “prove” your point.  Raustiala and Sprigman note that “in general,” residential homes are sold outright.  So what?  Equally “in general,” commercial property leases for retail outlets (e.g., stores in shopping center developments) explicitly vary rent payments based on sales (i.e., higher store sales this month/year = higher rent).  Both systems are unobjectionable, assuming one simple fact:  the parties know what kind of deal they are making at the time they make it.

Thus, Raustiala and Sprigman’s analysis falls apart right off the bat.  Termination rights are not a recent phenomenon that nobody knew anything about until a year ago.  Unlike, say, Congress’ decision to re-copyright works that had already fallen into the public domain, termination rights have clearly been a part of U.S. copyright law since 1976.  They may have been “an obscure provision” to the general public reading the Freakonomics blog, but they certainly weren’t obscure to artists and labels.  Raustiala and Sprigman’s characterization is like calling the infield fly rule “obscure”–and then implying that a bunch of MLB players should be out because they didn’t know it existed or how it worked.

They go on:

Think for a moment about the economic effect of the termination provision on the behavior of parties to copyright transactions. Because buyers can expect, on average, to make lower profits when the law contains the termination provision, they will offer less in the initial transaction. Thus, sellers will be more willing to accept less, because they know that if a work later proves valuable, they can terminate and demand some additional payment. So the most likely effect of the termination provision is to force deal prices down across the board….Put differently, the termination provision is a regressive tax.  And in that light, the “fairness” justification for the termination provision is less than overwhelming.

Even assuming this is true, the record labels’ supposed “offer [of] less in the initial transaction” has already happened–35 years ago.  Changing the rules at this point to favor the labels over artists would also seem to invoke its own set of fairness issues.  To put it mildly.

The problems with white stereotypes in movies like The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird

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Here is an interesting take on how the presentation of white people in The Help (and To Kill a Mockingbird) obscures the existence of racial systems in the Jim Crow South:

This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists…

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

Turner is arguing that the Jim Crow South was a system supported by much of Southern society of all social classes. In contrast, movies can portray racism as being the opinion of particular individuals or of people of smaller social groups. This “whitewash” perhaps helps us feel better today – only bad people were racists – and also reflects our own moral calculus where racists can’t be good people.

But we know from American history that this was not exactly the case. Many “virtuous” and celebrated Southerners supposed slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the North is also complicit: “sundown towns” were the norm and segregation were quite high (and still are). Overall, racism and discrimination still takes place within systems that require beginnings and maintenance provided by people living within the systems and also those in charge.

Looking for Chicago in movies and television

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This Chicago Tribune piece reviews some movies and TV shows that have used Chicago as a setting.

Here are a few takeaway points:

1. Movies and TV shows like to draw upon Chicago’s colorful police and politics.

2. Many film elsewhere. Interestingly, the creator of Against the Wall says, “you can’t fake Chicago as well as you can fake other cities.”

3. Many focus on known quantities, like the Chicago River or the El. The writer suggests this ignores Chicago’s real side.

And a few questions:

1. Compared to other American cities, is Chicago over or under represented? If so, why?

2. What are the best movies and TV shows for making use of their setting? It is one thing to have a backdrop (think of the credits of Family Matters which clearly shows Chicago) and another to really anchor the action within a particular place.