Write a fully original and titled 5 plus page essay (meaning do not kill your discussion exactly at the bottom of page 5— fully introduce, discuss with evidence and conclude your work), based upon your own ideas and evidence, in order to build a 3-way comparison/contrast essay (each genre should be compared/contrasted with each other genre) discussing the relevant spaces (mental, material and social) of popular musical production and consumption within the genre formation and social history of Salsa, Punk and Hip Hop. Your work should concentrate on NYC in the 1970s and 1980s.
Be certain to make use of at least 6 clearly relevant New York Times articles in developing your work. All of these articles should be accessed through our free JJ library database-
New York Times Historical File
No other additional materials beyond our assigned course materials may be used.
Post your work to the POST SECOND ESSAY HERE tab on the left side of our Blackboard page, through our SafeAssign link. Due: Dec. 9th before 11:59 pm.
Rather than retelling details about each genre, your paper should develop evidence-based comparative historical conclusions about the contexts that we have examined in this module. Your ideas and evidence can detail and extend your comparisons and contrasts concern themes and issues that we have probed in our course such as commodification (ex. top-down vs. bottom-up); identity and power (ex. ethnicity, gender, class, race, status, generation, lifestyle…); social/mental/material spaces (ex. visions, stereotypes, neighborhoods); and the transnational (ex. how these musical forms emerge and travel). You do not have to cover all of these suggestions, and can invent your own themes of commonality and/or difference and or literal connections in the same places and times. In general, it will be best to work deeper in fewer topic areas than a wide/shallow survey across many, also work toward emphasizing how your evidence and examples help us to understand social changes over time.
It is strongly suggested that once you have developed your ideas about topics that you will emphasize in your essay, develop key words to search, gather and code your NYT primary sources articles. You are welcome to add as many relevant articles as possible.
Again, no other additional materials beyond our assigned course materials and your selected NYT articles should be used.
As basic advice for how I will grade these essays (34 possible points):
I will be looking for coverage (how well do you demonstrate your ability to understand and make use of our materials); connections (how well are you able to find examples and explanations of how our three contexts are similar and different from one another); clarity (how clearly are you able to represent your ideas and evidence); conclusions (rather than writing about these topics, how well are you able to fully develop and support your conclusions to this challenge).
The kind of work needed to organize your data and ideas for this project is called relational analysis; the composite parts often enables us to make claims and reconstruct with far more rigor than from the information found in a “two-dimensional” comparison/ contrast way of thinking about the past. A memorable and over-simplified starting point for conceptualizing your work here is the children’s game Rock-Scissors-Paper. No single genre should overpower the others in the analysis, and attention to their characteristics in relationship to each other should become a means to explain more about each of them and their overlapping historical context/s than we would otherwise have access to.
