Genres in popular music, particularly post-2000s popular music, are constellations of components that may or may not be active on any given track. As constellations, they can easily be represented visually by webs of interconnected components known as Genre Experience Maps (GEMs). GEMs allow the analyst to convey not only what they feel are the fundamental components that make up a given track, but also how these components are related to and/or support one another. Component nodes can be color-coded to highlight a variety of relationships ranging from extramural to simply conveying which category the component hails from.

The punk and emo genres are two that are intertwined and which serve as fertile ground for exploring the overlap of component constellations because of their Bloomian relationship. Even though emo can be viewed in this light, as reacting to its punk parent predecessor and trying to carve out its own musical space, it has its own musical features that distinguish it from punk. This paper focuses on the two genres, showing how the constellations of the two are intertwined despite their individualities and opposite component presentation.

To facilitate this type of examination, I created Meta-Categorical Frameworks (MCFs) and Genre Experience Maps (GEMs) that approaches the music from the listener’s perspective. These are based on previous work by Thomas Johnson on tonality as topic in post-tonal music. The main purpose of the tool is to allow the listener to track not only what components they hear as propagating the genre of the song, but also allow them to visually depict musical associations they uncover as associational lines connecting nodes and/or color-coding the component nodes themselves.

A corpus study of 50 songs is employed to support the claims of the MCFs and GEMs for punk and emo. Once this foundation is established, a brief examination of AFI’s “Torch Song,” and “Sacrilege” from their 2009 album Crash Love serves as a culmination of these findings, demonstrating how different combinations of components results in the emphasis of different genre characteristics.

Beneath the surface-level performance of feminism, autonomy, and empowerment in Reggaetón lies a perpetuation of misogynistic stereotypes that hyper-sexualize women and offer little in terms of agency (Díaz Ferndández, 2021). In fact, Reggaetón artists engage in performative inclusion by adapting their products to current social norms without altering their music or lyrics, profiting off the sexualization of women (Meave Ávila, 2023). Karol G and Young Miko appear to empower narratives of sexual freedom for women, with their musical performances acting as feminist commentary on the limits of women in the genre. While scholars have explored how Bad Bunny purplewashes his music (Hoban, 2021; Robles Murillo, 2021), there's been limited analysis of female artists regarding this topic. In this paper, I analyze how women are represented or sexualized in lyrics, visual cues, and vocal timbre to explore the nuances between feminism, sexuality, socio-cultural power dynamics, and purplewashing in a genre that is incredibly popular and influential today. As Mulvey (1973) points out, women’s appearances in film are heavily coded with eroticism and their bodies serve the purpose of engaging the heterosexual male gaze, all of which are heavily influenced by a society that values patriarchal power. Similarly, in order for women to be successful in male-dominated fields they must adhere to a male-dominated agenda (Davies, 2001). This paper acts as critical commentary on commodification of women’s bodies, exploring the notion that “sex sells.” Using a decolonial lens, I shed light on how colonial values of capitalism, sexuality, and women inflluence current artists in the genre. This highlights the gendered political climate of Reggaetón, emphasizing the dichotomy between sex-positive self empowerment and purplewashing for financial gain in a capitalist market.

James Yancey (J Dilla) was an innovator in hip hop production in the 90s & 00s. He was a virtuoso sampler and master of “microchopping” famous songs to create instrumental loops. Notably, when chopping and stitching, he incubated an organic rhythmic style in his beats that was unshackled from the constraints of the quantized metric grid: “What Dilla created was a third path of rhythm, juxtaposing [swing and straight] time-feels, even and uneven simultaneously, creating a new, pleasurable, disorienting rhythmic friction and a new time-feel: Dilla Time” (Charnas & Peretz 2022, p. xii). Dilla’s creative sampling process results in the deliberate juxtaposition of layers that express different rhythmic profiles, consistently looping individual elements that independently and collectively resist the metric grid.

This project has two parts: First, I systematically analyze the rhythmic details of a corpus of Dilla tracks to precisely detail what is going on within and between rhythmic layers. I use AI stem separation on 38 tracks from Dilla’s Another Batch (1998) to isolate each instrumental component, then I use music information retrieval techniques to detect onsets times. By visualizing these, we may discover, for example, that: Within each bar, there are locations where instrument layers coalesce and locations where they pull apart; across bars, there are (in)consistencies in repetition within instrumental layers. Through this analysis, the multiplicitous details of Dilla’s “feel” can be codified and thereby providing novel insight into how such “loose” playing can afford a consistent metric experience and enhancing our ability to recreate this effect in our own performances and compositions.

The second part of this project is translating this analytic work and making it musically meaningful and experientially accessible through using the language of the musicians and fans. I talk about the rhythmic construction in terms like “laid back” and “loose,” replicating the language of musicians and valorizing the rhythmic craft of experts instead of describing the performance in relation to strict temporal grids (as terms like “late” or “off” do). This project’s combination of precise analytic work with emic, musical descriptions enables the music to be spoken of accurately and artistically.