Classifying Popular Music in the United States and the Netherlands

This article focuses on the classification of popular music by newspaper critics in the United States and the Netherlands. By using the "mentions technique" of Rosengren, the author investigates cross-national differences in the use of commercial, aesthetic, and racial logics in the classification of popular music artists, relating them to field-level and macrostructural differences between the United States and the Netherlands. U.S. reviewers are found to mention commercially successful artists more often than their Dutch counterparts. Racial boundaries appear to be strong in both countries.