Stuart Hall Response: Iesha Bailey

Within his speech entitled Ethnicity: Identity and Difference, Hall explores identity. More specifically, he focuses on how identity is a constantly changing entity with no stable basis or definition. From Hall’s description, it appears that his argues for the idea that identity is fluid, changing constantly and unceasingly.
People persistently try to set boundaries for the definition of identity, limiting it to a few categories that the majority of society deems appropriate and sufficient. In Hall’s speech, he reasons that this is practiced because people want to establish identity as something that is unwavering. It allows people to find stability in life. Despite this, the components that we use to stabilize identity have changed and will continue to do so. This is one aspect that relates music to identity. Much like identity, music is constantly changing. In order to classify music, it is put into genres. Music can be categorized into various different types, from hip hop and country to folk and techno. The list of musical genres can go on forever because as time has progressed, songs have out grown their specified fields. Artist began to incorporate different beats, rhythms, and melodies that are familiar to a certain genre into their songs. These conflicting components make it hard to classify a song into one specific category. For example, the eccentric Cowboy Troy merges elements from both country music and hip hop to form his own personal style. Fort Minor incorporates alternative and hip hop to make its unique sounds. Countless bands, groups, and solo artist allow their music to spill into multiple genres, just like our identities fall into different designated categories.