Most notably, the image of Asbury Park and its denizens have been used as cover art and fuel for songs about hard times and dead end jobs. New Jersey punk rockers The Gaslight Anthem and The Bouncing Souls, much like Springsteen before them, have appropriated the working class images of Central New Jersey. So you almost feel that you want to win for everybody- that you’re carrying on a lot of people’s concerns, and their hopes, and their stories,” (Hiatt, 86). “There’s a lot of parallels between Bruce Springsteen’s younger life and mine We came from the same area, and there’s a certain sense that everybody loses down there. In the Apissue of Rolling Stone, Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem talked about similarities the music press has made between his band and the work of Bruce Springsteen. This dissertation centres on three Gaelic song genres: milling/waulking songs, puirt-a-beul (“mouth music”), and heavy/deep songs, and examines how these three genres are performed and represented in the Cape Breton Gaelic recording industry. Genres are contested as people seek to assert their definitions as the most authoritative and legitimate while simultaneously protecting their definitions’ distinctness. At the same time, social status is based on distinction.
Different definitions of particular genres have differing degrees of social acceptability and cultural authority. Cultural capital is socially recognized and accepted cultural knowledge. Bourdieu argues that any given social order is based on several types of capital, including both economic and cultural capital. I use Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to understand how genres are learned and deployed strategically. Each song genre has a different value depending on who defines it and how. I therefore suggest that genres exist within a value-laden hierarchy. Genres are contested which indicates that they are more than just words or labels. There are reasons that genres are defined in particular ways and I assume those reasons are significant for understanding important features of the culture that creates, inherits, and uses them. I also assume that the genre classification of songs is not a neutral act but one of purpose. There are many genre systems to which different groups of people subscribe for different reasons, at different times, and/or in different contexts. The way in which a song is categorized often depends on who is categorizing it.
However, genres are not universally agreed upon. Genres are socially constructed concepts that are often used as convenient means to organize many things into similar categories contrasted against unlike categories. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Cape Breton, Toronto, and Scotland, and using methods of participant-observation and interviews, I explore who defines Gaelic song genres, on what basis, and for what purpose. In this dissertation, I investigate how concepts of musical “genre” in Cape Breton serve to negotiate social distinctions (such as status, linguistic competence, or various degrees of insiderness), and articulate socially shared systems of value.
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