Abstract
Music can function as a powerful technology of the sexual self. Especially with the advent of music streaming platforms such as Spotify, musical playlists are used in instrumental ways to regulate the self and the social in intimate situations. However, something puzzling is going on with these sex playlists, as they are typically aligned with black performers, whereas “love” playlists in Spotify tend to be dominated by white artists. In this chapter, we look at ways to understand this curious alignment of ethno-racial categories with playlists on sex and love, and we argue that these are tied with music genres and relatively stable ideas about racialized bodies, which bear consequences for how the sexual self is musically “composed.”
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anshel, Mark H., and Dan Q. Marisi. 2013. “Effect of Music and Rhythm on Physical Performance.” Research Quarterly. American Alliance for Health, Physical Education and Recreation 49 (2): 109–113.
Bergh, Arild, Tia DeNora, and Maia Bergh. 2014. “Forever and Ever: Mobile Music in the Life of Young Teens.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 317–334. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berkers, Pauwke, and Merel Eeckelaer. 2014. “Rock and Roll or Rock and Fall? Gendered Framing of the Rock and Roll Lifestyles of Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty in British Broadsheets.” Journal of Gender Studies 23 (1): 3–17.
Bryson, Bethany. 1996. “Anything But Heavy Metal”: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes. American Sociological Review 61 (5): 884–899.
Bull, Michael. 2005. “No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening.” Leisure Studies 24 (4): 343–355.
———. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.
Clay, Andreana. 2003. “‘Keepin’ It Real’: Black Youth, Hip-Hop Culture, and Black Identity.” American Behavioral Scientist 46 (10): 1346–1358.
De Laat, Kim. 2019. “Singing the Romance: Gendered and Racialized Representations of Love and Postfeminism in Popular Music.” Poetics (online first): 1–14.
DeNora, Tia. 1997. “Music and Erotic Agency: Sonic Resources and Social-Sexual Action.” Body & Society 3 (2): 43–65.
———. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edworthy, Judy, and Hannah Waring. 2006. “The Effects of Music Tempo and Loudness Level on Treadmill Exercise.” Ergonomics 49 (15): 1597–1610.
Evans, Adrienne, Sarah Riley, and Avi Shankar. 2010. “Technologies of Sexiness: Theorizing Women’s Engagement in the Sexualization of Culture.” Feminism & Psychology 20 (1): 114–131.
Finnegan, Ruth. 2003. “Music, Experience, and the Anthropology of Emotion.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 181–192. New York and London: Routledge.
Fiske, John. 1998. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. 2003. “Music and Everyday Life.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 92–101. New York, London: Routledge.
Gabrielson, Alf. 2011. Strong Experiences with Music: Music Is Much More Than Just Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gomart, Emilie, and Antoine Hennion. 1999. “A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users.” The Sociological Review 47 (1): 220–247.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.
Hamilton, Jack. 2016. Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hancock, Black Hawk. 2008. “Put a Little Color on That!” Sociological Perspectives 51 (4): 783–802.
Hennion, Antoine. 2003. “Music and Mediation: Toward a New Sociology of Music.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 80–91. New York and London: Routledge.
———. 2015. The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. Farnham: Ashgate.
Hesmondhalgh, David. 2008. “Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion and Self-Identity.” Consumption Markets & Culture 11 (4): 329–343.
———. 2013. Why Music Matters. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.
Hughey, Matthew 2012. White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Juslin, Patrick N., and John A. Sloboda. 2010. “Introduction: Aims, Organization, and Terminology.” In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, edited by Patrick N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda, 3–13. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Karageorghis, Costas, I., Peter C. Terry, and Andrew M. Lane. 1999. “Development and Initial Validation of an Instrument to Assess the Motivational Qualities of Music in Exercise and Sport: The Brunel Music Rating Inventory.” Journal of Sports Sciences 17 (9): 713–724.
Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Lieb, Kristin. 2013. Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars. London: Routledge.
Lynch, John. 2018. Spotify’s 10 Most Popular ‘Love,’ ‘Sex,’ and ‘Anti-Valentine’s’ Songs for Your Valentine’s Day Playlist. Retrieved October 17, 2019, from https://www.insider.com/spotify-most-popular-love-sex-anti-valentines-day-songs-2018-2.
Mahon, Maureen. 2004. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Marshall, Lee. 2019. “Do People Value Recorded Music?” Cultural Sociology 13 (2): 141–158.
Nash, Jennifer. C. 2014. The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Neal, Mark A. 2013. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge.
Negus, Keith, and Patria Román Velázquez. 2002. “Belonging and Detachment: Musical Experience and the Limits of Identity.” Poetics 30 (1–2): 133–145.
O’Dair, Marcus, and Andrew Fry. 2019. “Beyond the Black Box in Music Streaming: The Impact of Recommendation Systems Upon Artists.” Popular Communication (online first): 1–13.
Prior, Nick. 2014. “The Plural iPod: A Study of Technology in Action.” Poetics 42: 22–39.
Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Roy, William G., and Tim J. Dowd. 2010. “What Is Sociological About Music?” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 183–203.
Schaap, Julian C. F. 2015. “Just Like Hendrix: Whiteness and the Online Critical and Consumer Reception of Rock Music in the United States, 2003–2013.” Popular Communication 13 (4): 272–287.
———. 2019. “Elvis Has Finally Left the Building? Boundary Work, Whiteness and the Reception of Rock Music in Comparative Perspective.” Doctoral dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Schaap, Julian C.F., and Pauwke Berkers. 2019. “Maybe It’s… Skin Colour?” How Race-Ethnicity and Gender Function in Consumers’ Formation of Classification Styles of Cultural Content. Consumption Markets & Culture (online first): 1–17.
Schippers, Mimi. 2002. Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. New Brunswick, Canada: Rutgers University Press.
Sloboda, John. 2005. Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spracklen, Karl. 2013. “Nazi Punks Folk Off: Leisure, Nationalism, Cultural Identity and the Consumption of Metal and Folk Music.” Leisure Studies 32 (4): 415–428.
Torrens, Marc, and Patrick Hertzog. 2004. “Visualizing and Exploring Personal Music Libraries”. In Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, 421–424.
Turner, Jacob S. 2011. Sex and the Spectacle of Music Videos: An Examination of the Portrayal of Race and Sexuality in Music Videos. Sex Roles 64 (3–4): 173–191.
Van Bohemen, Samira, Luna Den Hertog, and Liesbet van Zoonen. 2018. “Music as a Resource for the Sexual Self: An Exploration of How Young People in the Netherlands Use Music for Good Sex.” Poetics 66: 19–29.
Van Bohemen, Samira, and Anouk Roeling. 2020. “Techno’s Sexual Counter-Space: Ecstasy and Electronics as Technologies of White Sex.” Cultural Sociology 14 (1): 42–60.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van Bohemen, S., Schaap, J., Berkers, P. (2020). The Sex Playlist: How Race and Ethnicity Mediate Musically “Composed” Sexual Self-Formation. In: Tofalvy, T., Barna, E. (eds) Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44659-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44659-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-44658-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-44659-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)