1. Pride and Prejudice: The White Working Class Tradition of American Country Music

Every Sunday afternoon on AFKN Radio, you can hear "American Country Countdown," a syndicated radio program that counts down the top 40 country music hits of the week. Listening to the program, I was struck by how uniform most of the songs are, not only in their sound but in their content; except for sentimental love songs (which are common to every form of popular music), almost all of the hits either celebrate old-fashioned rural/small town lifestyles and values, or express patriotism and national pride.

2. Who remembers the Beatles? The collective memory for popular music

How well do we remember popular music? To investigate how hit songs are recognized over time, we randomly selected number-one Billboard singles from the last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each song, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized it. Plotting the recognition proportion for each song as a function of the year during which it reached peak popularity resulted in three distinct phases in collective memory.