Genre theories

The different types of music genres 

In today's lesson we learnt about four different theories what we can apply to genres in our music video coursework

John Hartley (1994) - argues that 'genres' are agents of ideological closure and they limit the meaning potential of a given text.

Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1988) - say that genres control the behavior of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential consumers.

Both theorists suggest that genres limit creativity.

John Fiske (1987) -  asserts that generic conventions 'embody the crucial ideological concerns of the time in which they are popular'.

Rick Altman - argues that there is no such thing as "pure" genre anymore. Genre is progressive in that it will always change. He also argues that genre is only surviving due to hybridisation or genres 'borrowing' from one another and being more difficult to categorise.