Soul Music

In this thesis I aim to contribute to the topic of genre trajectories by researching the genre trajectory of soul music. I have investigated how changes in the genre trajectory of soul music are reflected in two national newspapers in the United States of America. The goal has been to answer the following question: How is the genre trajectory of soul music reflected in changes in media attention on this genre in the L.A. Times and N.Y. Times? To answer this question I studied news reports on soul music in two national newspapers (the N.Y. Times and the L.A. Times), in two timeframes (1954-1975 and 1995-2009). In this research I placed the soul genre in its historical context by explaining how the genre originated from rhythm and blues and gospel music. The genre trajectory model of Lena and Peterson (2008) has been leading throughout this thesis. Where many genres follow the AgSIT-trajectory, soul is a deviant genre trajectory that has not been researched before. From a hundred articles about soul music from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times I derived nine constructs using Grounded Theory, to be able to explain which frames and discourses are present in this data and describe the differences between timeframes. When comparing the theoretical genre trajectory to the constructs that were inductively derived from the data, it seems that the model of Lena and Peterson (2008) needs revision and elaboration. The attributes that classify a genre are not exclusive or exhaustive and the explanations of the stages are often not translated to attributes. In conclusion: This study shows how the attributes of the genre trajectory model only partially apply to soul music and offers suggestions for elaboration of the theoretical idea of genre trajectories.