Cosmopolitan preferences: The constitutive role of place in American elite taste for hip-hop music 1991–2005

Sociology has long identified place as an important theoretical category, and a basic element of social life, but the discipline has largely left implicit the role of place as a structuring element of social perception. We reinterpret two debates in cultural sociology—cosmopolitan omnivorism and cultural reception—to show how place has been used as a static category, not a productive source of meanings, in these fields. We then introduce how scholars can further develop an analysis of place meanings, and apply this fresh perspective to our empirical study, a discourse analysis of elite music critics’ taste for rap music. We find that critics base their judgments of the genre on three place-based criteria, that: (1) rap must be “emplaced” to be meaningful, (2) “ghettoes” are central to rap's meaningfulness and (3) international scenes are privileged as politically and aesthetically more important than American scenes. These data suggest that the omnivorous taste pattern among American elites follows an intra-genre logic of appropriation that incorporates or rejects cultural objects influenced by the meanings associated with their context of production. We conclude by highlighting the analytic benefit of recognizing place as a constituent element of social perception in cultural sociology.