Help me figure out what I mean by "social class"

[koganbot]

Help me write my next column figure out what I mean by the phrase "social class"!

--What do people mean when they say "class"?
--What do I mean when I say "class"?
--What should I mean when I say "class"?

I do not necessarily mind that my own and other people's use of the term is vague and inconsistent and contrary, but I do think I should be more specific about the various different species that my inconsistency and contrariness suggest and my vagueness covers up.

--Mapping one way of classifying stuff (stuff?) onto another. E.g., mapping musical genre ("rock 'n' roll") onto a group of people ("teenagers" or "working-class" or, um, black people? white people? Southerners? urban dwellers? hicks?)
--Do people belong to classes, or are classes just roles they play? Or some mixture? "White person" is supposedly a role I play 24/7, whether I want to or not, but is this true? What about roles I was playing ten years ago: "technical editor"? "Support staff"? "Office temp"? Twenty years ago I'd divided punks up into two broad categories: "office-temp punks" and "bike-messenger punks" (obv. each was a synecdoche (??) (er, metaphor) for a bunch of similar ways of earning money).
--You know, power and stuff: people who pay wages and earn profits as opposed to people who are paid wages and are told what to do. But actual roles don't divide up so easily. Anyway, most people are in the latter category (the category "are told what to do"), but the Get-Tolders, being the vast majority of human beings, divide up into classes themselves.
--Etc.
--Do you know any good books or articles I should read on this subject - not just that discuss "class" but that notice that the term is problematic?

Comments

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

important-seeming elements of 'class', or whatever you want to call it:

how the group imagines itself
how the group imagines itself ideally
how the group imagines its antagonists and enemies

- allows for variance from reality (e.g. overinflation of some problems, ignorance of real causes of problems)
- allows for examination of 'how the group imagines...' in terms of the imaginative constructions inside the songs, and in terms of what they use the songs for
- might reflect the complexity better by having all three together?

frank, i know i neglected to say anything to you in my email earlier today, but here's one thing that struck me about my country music adventure: i swear that between the songs and the radio station presentation of them (commercials with testimonials from listeners e.g.), it felt like the music which above all today most aggressively defines its audience, directly, at almost every turn, within the songs. and i think it seemed so strong to me because it hit all three of the above elements of 'class' so hard, at the same time. i am aware you will immediately provide counterexamples. but i think a lot of them are either more indirect about defining their audience, or leave a great deal indeterminate so that it's up to the listener to decide that they count as 'an X listener', or that the music is for them, or the singer is talking to them, or about them.

another good element of koganian 'class': what you have to do to become an X (if it's up to you at all). or to stop being one.

survey of favored koganian classes:
any group term that other people can use as an insult
any racial or sexual category (which has a name)
names of certain musical genres (but not just any)
professions and job titles

[koganbot]

Country is also obsessed with defining what "country" is at least as much as indie/undie hip-hop goes on about what real hip-hop is. Rather interesting that a music that is doing so well commercially still (sometimes) views itself as a put-upon, minority taste.

One thing though is that country often creates a real tension between proclaiming "what we're like" and proclaiming "what we value." Treatment of alcohol in country music is crawling in complications; on Eric Church's Sinners Like Me alcohol leads both to rambunctious roughhousing (good, shows our spirit) and sin (bad, but human).