Sonic Stereotypes: Jazz and Racial Signification in American Film and Television Soundtracks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the use of jazz in contemporary American film and television soundtracks. Through processes of cultural signification, jazz music frequently maps racialized meaning onto the narrative. Often, a “black” jazz aesthetic signifies social and sexual deviance, while a “white” jazz aesthetic signifies elegance and high-culture. Such associations reinforce racial boundaries and essentialist stereotypes by perpetuating a dichotomy in which “blackness” figures as culturally dangerous (e.g. sexually deviant, unrestrained, threatening, and low-class) and “whiteness” as elite and culturally superior (e.g. civilized, educated, and high-class). To demonstrate this, the soundtracks of Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story: Coven (2013); and, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa’s Homeland (2011) are examined. These examples are then compared to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), a film featuring sympathetic representations of African American identity. In Lee’s film, jazz challenges—rather than reinforces—racial discourse; a characteristic likely linked to Lee’s background as an African American with parents involved in the arts, black literature, and jazz composition. By comparing Lee’s alternative use of jazz to the preceding examples, it is argued that the use of the genre in film and television soundtracks as a stereotyping device reflects racial biases prominent in contemporary culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".