Loving, Talking, Being Music : Fan Discourse and Its Role in Identity Construction in Different Music Genres

Abstract

Which kind of music do I listen to and which not? Can I go to a classical music concert if I have never been to one? Can I, as a pop music fan, attend a heavy metal concert? Which music do I talk about with my friends? How do I communicate my preferences? And what does it even mean to be a jazz fan? In light of the fundamentally social function of music, this book tries to answer the question of how identity is constructed by discourse about music and whether there are different identities being constructed in the different genres pop, jazz and classical music. By looking at written online settings in the form of YouTube comment sections and applying a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this publication examines various facets of music fan discourse, such as representations of the music fans and the artists, as well as underlying desires to appear sophisticated or to be ‘different’, always discussing similarities of and differences between the three genres in question.