Oeioei you just have to listen : Rock criticism in Hitweek. A categorization model for evaluation domains in rock music.

Abstract

Rock criticism plays an important role in the formation of rock music as a cultural field in the 1960s. Criticism provides legitimization of taste, canonization and consecration. Nevertheless, the arguments and evaluations within rock criticism have been marginally studied, if at all in the Netherlands. Especially when you compare how literary criticism in its turn is studied as part of Dutch literary theory (see among others Van Rees 1985, Janssen 1994, and Van Dijk 2006). Rock criticism is mostly studied in cultural and music sociology. This research focuses on rock criticism as part of a cultural field (Lindberg et al. 2005). Within the humanities, the study of rock criticism offers an opportunity to map out which arguments are used in criticism and how they are applied. In research into literary criticism, Mooij, Boonstra, Praamstra, and, following them, Op de Beek and Linders, among others, categorize evaluative statements by critics. I will elaborate on their work in the categorisation of evaluative statements by rock critics. In this article, the categorization model of Op de Beek and Linders is applied and adapted to rock criticism. The corpus of this paper is the archive of Hitweek (1965). A Dutch magazine that appears weekly between 1965 and 1969 (in approximately 190 editions) and pays ample attention to Dutch rock music as part of youth culture. Hitweek is the first critical music magazine for rock music in the Netherlands and is therefore important for the formation of the cultural field of rock music in the Netherlands. For this study, the evaluative statements in the reviews of singles and albums by Dutch bands were examined. The statements are categorized and grouped to provide a picture of what criteria the reviewers of Hitweek used and how the model can help determine these criteria. This article is one of the few studies into evaluation criteria within Dutch rock criticism. For the time being, it is the only research into the evaluation criteria in Hitweek.