Nadine Hubbs | University of Michigan (original) (raw)

Books & Volumes by Nadine Hubbs

See project-related work on this site: > Selected Media Work > 7/24/24. Pollstar, “Border Blast... more See project-related work on this site:
> Selected Media Work > 7/24/24. Pollstar, “Border Blasters.”
> Selected Media Work > 5/27/24. New York Times, “Carin León ... Música Mexicana.”
> Journal articles > “Is Country Music Quintessentially American?” (2023).
> Book Chapters > "Country-Loving Mexican Americans" (2023).
> Journal articles > “Is Country Music Quintessentially American? Or White?” (2022).
> Book Chapters > "Vaquero World" (2019).
> Selected Media Work > 12/1/22. Oxford American, “A Night at Hillbilly’s: Summer 2017."
> Selected Media Work > 1/3/19. The Nation, “Country Music Is Also Mexican Music.”
See also project website: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/country-mexicans/

Award-winning collection of 16 new pieces by the most diverse group of authors ever assembled in ... more Award-winning collection of 16 new pieces by the most diverse group of authors ever assembled in a country music volume. Scholarly articles, country-themed memoirs, queer song lyrics, and a megamix tracking one rhythm through 120 years of recorded country/R&B. Groundbreaking work on BIPOC, LGBTQ+, global, and Jewish topics and ragtime, Latingrass, Mexilachian, and "Blackbrown" sounds, all in relation to country music.
See the introductory essay for an overview of contents, current context, and significance: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/32/2/1/110764/IntroductionUncharted-Country-New-Voices-and

*The volume received the Ruth A. Solie Award for the Best Edited Collection, November 2021: see commendation below.

*Deborah R. Vargas's essay, "Freddy Fender's Blackbrown Country Ecologies," received Honorable Mention from the American Studies Association's Sound Studies Caucus' inaugural Best Essay Prize, April 2022. https://www.facebook.com/groups/asasoundstudies/permalink/5081025558661101/

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class ... more In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics.

In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase “I’ll listen to anything but country” allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive “omnivore” musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class.

With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible.

Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520280663

How did a circle of gay composers become the architects of America's national sound during the mo... more How did a circle of gay composers become the architects of America's national sound during the most homophobic period in U.S. history? In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a group of Manhattan-based homosexual composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" in the mid-twentieth century, and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification—especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality—in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520241855

Journal Articles (selected) by Nadine Hubbs

American Music 40.4 (special issue: Marking Forty Years of American Music: 2022): 505–510. (See also web version, below.)

Musicology Now, blog of the American Musicological Society. December 13, 2022

With Francesca T. Royster, co-author. In Nadine Hubbs and Francesca T. Royster, eds., Uncharted Country: New Voices and Perspectives in Country Music Studies, special issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies 32.2, 2020

Journal of Popular Music Studies 30.1–2: 15–26, 2018

INTRODUCTION by Diane Pecknold, University of Louisville. In retrospect, Nadine Hubbs’s keynote... more INTRODUCTION by Diane Pecknold, University of Louisville.
In retrospect, Nadine Hubbs’s keynote address for the 2017 IASPM-US annual meeting seems almost prescient. Its title, “Country Music in Dangerous Times,” reflected the sense of crisis progressives felt in the wake of Donald Trump’s election four months earlier, and its central concerns presaged the fatal racist violence that would erupt at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville six months later. In response to the intensifying racial and class polarization in American life at that moment, Hubbs issued an urgent call to recuperate the legacy of post-Civil Rights working-class progressivism by listening more closely to country music’s anti-bourgeois dissenters.

The address builds on one of the central arguments of Hubbs’s influential book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. In that work, she showed how the dominant culture’s longtime depiction of the working class as a bastion of queer-loving sexual deviance had been replaced by the contemporary image of retrograde working-class homo- and transphobia. Despite their contradictions, both constructions use the purported aberrance of working-class attitudes toward sexuality to legitimate middle-class dominance.

A similar logic, she argued in her keynote, can be applied to understandings of working-class attitudes toward race. By reading a handful of pivotal moments in the hard country of the “long seventies,” Hubbs recovers the elements of working-class culture that have historically rejected white racial solidarity to embrace “identifications within and across society’s margins: between racial, carceral, and sexual minorities and various poor and working-class folk.” Johnny Cash’s prison recordings, David Allan Coe’s “Fuck Aneta Briant,” Merle Haggard’s “Irma Jackson,” and Johnny Paycheck’s “Colorado Kool-Aid,” she asserts, contribute to a robust chorus of voices in country music that “scorn dominant power and identify with marginal positions beyond their own.”

While “Country Music in Dangerous Times” certainly responded to its political moment, Hubbs’s critical analysis of class cultural conflict and her reclamation of white working-class tolerance and progressivism seem, if anything, more necessary now than they did in 2017.

How did a circle of twentieth-century queer composers around Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson man... more How did a circle of twentieth-century queer composers around Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson manage to forge a long-awaited American national sound during the most homophobic period in U.S. history? The answer given in my 2004 book, *The Queer Composition of America's Sound*, is homophobia—along with hard work, talent, and certain other factors. This 2013 journal article is the closest thing I've written to a single-essay distillation of *Queer Composition*.

What is lost and gained in "Establishing Identity"? Undoubtedly music education has compelling re... more What is lost and gained in "Establishing Identity"? Undoubtedly music education has compelling reasons to institutionalize LGBT studies. Variously queer and proto-queer children and adolescents flock to music as a place of (relative) safety, solace, and catharsis. It is incumbent on teachers and researchers to recognize the presence of these students and the many queer adults in music.

This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at disco's 1970s prime a... more This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at disco's 1970s prime and subsequent bursting. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of disco's multiracial ‘gay’ revellers and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago’s Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, today a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated power to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and is among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.

Genders 23: Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance (1996): 266–96.

See link below re Spanish translation, ‘Música del «cuarto género»: Morrissey y la política sexua... more See link below re Spanish translation, ‘Música del «cuarto género»: Morrissey y la política sexual del contorno melódico,’ translated by Fruela Fernández. In Fruela Fernández, ed., The Smiths: Música, política y deseo. Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2014.

Book Chapters & Other Formats (selected) by Nadine Hubbs

In Paula J. Bishop and Jada E. Watson, eds., Whose Country Music? Genre, Identity and Belonging i... more In Paula J. Bishop and Jada E. Watson, eds., Whose Country Music? Genre, Identity and Belonging in Twenty-First Century Country Music, 210–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

In Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell, ed., Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, 75–96. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020

This essay is based on fieldwork in Las Vegas and Chicago at queer vaquero (cowboy) conventions c... more This essay is based on fieldwork in Las Vegas and Chicago at queer vaquero (cowboy) conventions centering Mexican regional music, food, and ranch culture and Latin American stage performers and audience-attendees. By contrast to U.S.-centric interpretations of Mexican and Mexican American queer identities and practices in terms of a premodern and working-class subaltern, I draw on scenes from ‘Vaquero World’ to argue that these identities and practices bear the imprint of cosmopolitan transnationalism and reveal cultural logics of sexual and gender nonessentialism—logics rooted in Latin America’s nonessentializing uptake of eugenicist ideas in the twentieth century, and more deeply, in its nonessentializing uptake of colonial racial and gender classifications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the light of such interpretive tensions, I read the conventions’ Mr. Vaquero pageant as a liminal space where nonessentialist “digital” (in Susan Stryker’s sense) transgender and transnational performances by gay male contestants and their gender-nonconforming collaborators challenge both Mexican and Anglo-white “analog” notions of what constitutes mexicanidad. Through description and analysis of queer vaqueros’ racialized and gendered performances, constructions, and contestations of mexicanidad, my essay seeks to intervene in Chicane/x, Latine/x, and performance studies, and in LGBTQ+ musicology.

*The volume received the Ruth A. Solie Award for the Best Edited Collection, November 2021: see commendation below.

Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520280663

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520241855

American Music 40.4 (special issue: Marking Forty Years of American Music: 2022): 505–510. (See also web version, below.)

Musicology Now, blog of the American Musicological Society. December 13, 2022

Journal of Popular Music Studies 30.1–2: 15–26, 2018

Genders 23: Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance (1996): 266–96.

In Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell, ed., Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, 75–96. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020

In Mark Allan Jackson, ed., The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.

In William I. Wolff, ed., Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Essays on Rhetoric, Social Consciousness, and Contemporary Culture. New York: Routledge, 2017

Since the 1970s critics have celebrated Springsteen’s characters and themes—including cars and hi... more Since the 1970s critics have celebrated Springsteen’s characters and themes—including cars and highways, desperation and redemption, young lovers and keeping faith—and credited his music with universal appeal. This essay reassesses Springsteen’s music in terms of its particularity, identifying heterosexuality as a central and extraordinarily powerful theme here. I analyze the social-cultural effects of larger-than-life heterosexuality in Springsteen, trace how these have changed over time with broader societal changes in sexuality and gender, and consider all this in the context of globalization and neoliberalization.

Springsteen electrified listeners with his ability to render exhilarating and soul stirring the most overworked theme in popular music, that of love between a boy and a girl. No musician of the past half-century has brought more potent drama to heterosexual love and life. I analyze music and lyrics in four classic Springsteen songs to illuminate his poetics of epic heterosexuality in settings of both triumph and desperation and discuss this in relation to U.S. political economy. Springsteen’s heterosexual epic percipiently registered historic changes in working-class life: the early heterosexual exuberance mirrored America’s long wave of postwar economic expansion, and a bleak turn to melancholic and ailing heterosexuality telegraphed the economic contraction of dawning globalization and crisis.

Such spectacular representation had real-world consequences. Situating Springsteen’s heterosexual epic in the context of totalizing heteronormativity and placing sexuality itself in political-economic perspective, I argue that Springsteen’s classic songs contributed to the forces of heteronormativity and thus (however unconsciously) stifled prospects for queer love and life. In dialogue with social and pop-musical history, queer theory, and prior commentaries on Springsteen’s sex-gender politics and performance, I also offer new readings of his vaunted emotionalism and homosociality that are attentive to pivotal factors of class, race, and ethnicity. Ultimately I underscore the contingency of pop music’s meanings and effects. Today, more expansive gender practices may allow Springsteen’s epic heterosexuality to serve purposes of queer inclusion in social life and cultural representation—even if mainstreamed, marketed, middle-classed LGBTQ identities grow ever less queer.

Reprinted from Genders (1996), translated into Spanish by Fruela Fernández. In Fruela Fernández, ed., The Smiths: Música, política y deseo. Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2014

In David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, eds., Gay Shame, 111–16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

In Walter Everett, ed., Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, 217–39. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Routledge., 2007

Includes critical discussion of Radiohead, "Exit Music (for a film)" from *OK Computer* (1997). A... more Includes critical discussion of Radiohead, "Exit Music (for a film)" from *OK Computer* (1997). A different version of the essay appeared in the volume's 1st ed., 3–29. New York: Garland Press, 2000.