Race and Genre Ambiguity in the Critical Reception of Popular Music

In this article, we link the sociology of culture with the sociology of race and racism to examine how race shapes perceptions of genre ambiguity in popular music. Notable studies in the sociology of culture have recently shown how intermediaries, such as food or literary critics, subtly devalue categories associated with non-White producers and highlighted the obstacles Black musicians and audiences face in spanning racialized genre boundaries. In contrast, we focus on a less visible yet pervasive racial structure that shapes the likelihood that critics identify a musician or group as spanning genre categories. We bring insights from critical race theory (CRT) into direct conversation with empirical scholarship on categorical ambiguity by analyzing 47,230 reviews of 3,252 albums archived on the Metacritic database from 2000 to 2007. We find that critics are less likely to describe Black musicians as category spanners relative to White musicians, and that multiracial music groups are the most likely to have ambiguous genre identities.