Evaluating the Unsettled: Critics, Uncertainty, and the Construction of Value in the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 2. The Institutionalization of "Marginal" Music

Abstract

Sociologists have long understood critics as central to the construction of value, positioning critics’ evaluative practices as key mechanisms through which the worth of a cultural object is constructed. Yet existing theories often presume relatively settled objects, professionalized evaluators, and established standards of judgment. How are evaluative processes organized when the standards of judgment, the authority of evaluators, and the status of the object itself are simultaneously unsettled?

While prior work has illuminated how fields generate shared standards and how critics reduce quality uncertainty, less attention has been paid to contexts in which multiple constraints are destabilized at once—when standards of evaluation are emergent rather than institutionalized, when evaluators lack settled professional authority, and when the object under evaluation is itself contested and in formation. In this paper, I examine how critics evaluate the case of object uncertainty: the genre of hip-hop in the 1990s, as it transitioned from a subculture into mainstream cultural and economic life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with critics who were writing about hip-hop during this period and primary source analysis of over 200 evaluative texts (1990–2000) across generalist and hip-hop–specific publications I reconstruct the patterned organization of hip-hop criticism in practice.

Author

• Shirin Purkayastha, Yale University