Fringe or Middle? Assessing Rock as Late Twentieth-Century Middlebrow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter assesses the cases for and against rock as a late-twentieth-century middlebrow cultural form. Keightley and Michelsen make the case that rock played a role for middle-class and upwardly mobile working-class American youth that was similar to the middlebrow orchestral pop of their parents’ generation, but replaced the “middlebrow-from-above” paradigm that mediated high culture for society’s middle layers with a “middlebrow-from-below” approach that raised the intellectuality and respectability of lowbrow and folk forms. The chapter explores the merits of the argument and considers counterarguments that theorize rock as a cultural form valorizing a fringe (not middling) identity; it also notes that middlebrow culture’s mediation, aesthetics, and goals through the early and middle twentieth century contrast those of rock and make the middlebrow a theoretical frame for rock somewhat difficult to reconcile. Rock flourished during an era in American history when the sense of a “broad middle” in political and social terms was eroding and fragmenting. As an artifact, rock played a cultural role in American society’s transformation from the “expanding middle” of the postwar era to the “fringes against the middle” ethos that marked the neoliberal era.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".