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What Are Rappers Really Saying about the Police?
Cross-posted at Racialicious and PolicyMic. Hip-hop music is frequently described as violent and anti-law enforcement, with the implication that its artists glorify criminality. A new content analysis...
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Baby Conductor: Children Absorbing the World Around Them
A few times on SocImages we’ve been tickled to highlight instances of very young children performing adult behavior. In each (adorable) case, they were great examples of how children learn how to a...
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What Does It Mean to be Authentically Cajun?
Flashback Friday. The term “Cajun” refers to a group of people who settled in Southern Louisiana after being exiled from Acadia (now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) in the mid...
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Why Only Women, Wrestlers, and Weight Lifters Wear Leotards.
I am so grateful to reader Emma Farais for recommending that I look into the history of the leotard. It was invented by — well, who else — Jules Léotard. Born in 1842, Jules grew up to be an acrobat....
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Buy a Joe Strummer Replica Guitar with Your Sex Pistols Credit Card Because...
Ah, capitalism. The thing about our time is that we just might value individuality more than at any other point in the history of human life and, yet, at the same time, we have more capacity to mass...
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Why is it so hard to give Taylor Swift credit for 1989?
Musician Ryan Adams recently released an album cover. A cover, that is, of an entire album written and performed by Taylor Swift. Both albums are titled 1989. via TheVine.com. Critical praise for...
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You Think It’s Great, but It’s Probably Just Familiar
Despite the maxim about familiarity breeding contempt, we usually like what’s familiar. With music for example, familiarity breeds hits in the short run and nostalgia in the long run. The trouble is...
View ArticleMasculinity and Fidelity in Pop Music
Originally posted at the Gender & Society blog. Two songs that seemed like they were on the radio every time I tuned into a pop station last summer were Omi’s single, “Cheerleader” (originally...
View ArticleHow LSD opened minds and changed America
In the 1950s and ’60s, a set of social psychological experiments seemed to show that human beings were easily manipulated by low and moderate amounts of peer pressure, even to the point of violence. It...
View ArticlePunk Rock Resisting Islamophobia
Originally posted at Discoveries Punk rock has a long history of anti-racism, and now a new wave of punk bands are turning it up to eleven to combat Islamophobia. For a recent research article,...
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A Data Dive into Competitive A Cappella
Source Photo: Ted Eytan, Flickr CC It’s that time of year again! Fans across the nation are coming together to cheer on their colleges and universities in cutthroat competition. The drama is high and...
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When Data Can’t DJ
More social scientists are pointing out that the computer algorithms that run so much of our lives have our human, social biases baked in. This has serious consequences for determining who gets credit,...
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English/Gibberish
One major part of introducing students to sociology is getting to the “this is water” lesson: the idea that our default experiences of social life are often strange and worthy of examining. This can be...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Mashup Work?
From music to movies and restaurants, genres are a core part of popular culture. The rules we use to classify different scenes and styles help to shape our tastes and our social identities, and so we...
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Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
And the hits start coming and they don’t stop coming. Research published in Royal Society Open Science (thanks to @MattGrossmann for sharing on Twitter) compared music charts in the US, the UK,...
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