Literally the best lecture of all time - Part II
Picking up where we left off in Part I of this post, exploring Sean Paul’s long (and successful!) history working with other artists across genre lines is a great way to understand the differences between a research question and a research hypothesis. Seriously, it is!
In my CMN2101 lecture last week, titled “Starting a Research Project”, we looked at this by asking the question: Why does Sean Paul do (so many) collaborations?
In particular, students were asked to think about the type of data (or information) that would need to be gathered in order to answer this question. To a room of silent but intrigued faces, I said that the best source of information would be the man himself - but unfortunately he hasn’t returned my phone calls (just kidding, I don’t have his number - but S-Peezy, if you’re reading this...).
I then asked what other sources of information could you look to.
One of my students suggested that you read interviews that reporters, magazines and other people had done with Sean Paul. Yes! Exactly - and then we spoke about some of the limitations of that kind of data.
We also talked about how interviewing other artists in the music industry could shed light on this topic and allow us to make generalizations about why Sean Paul might choose to collaborate based on their answers.
Finally, research into the structure of dancehall music, which is based on riddims used in multiple songs as a backing track, could encourage a collaborative culture (see, for example, about 9 minutes into The Story of Sean Paul “Get Busy” documentary by VICE media).
See, I told you, A LOT to unpack here - and lots of potential for research inquiry, based on a research question, that could generate a theory.
But, what about a research hypothesis? Instead of exploring the “why”, we can also investigate other aspects of Sean Paul’s musical career. Knowing that Sean Paul does a lot of collaborations, we could make the following hypothesis:
As I explained, this hypothesis suggests that there is a relationship between two variables: fame (being famous) and the number of collaborations that Sean Paul has done. One of my students immediately raised their hand and jumped right to one of big conclusion pieces by asking
What if the relationship works the other way - the more famous you are, the more collaborations you are asked to do?
What a great question! This allowed for a tangent into the importance of defining variables and the possibility that research could invalidate or disprove your theory.
We also spoke about data again and considered what information a researcher would need to test this relationship. Some great ideas came out of this discussion:
Reach (i.e. number of views, number of records sold, number of awards earned) - although you would need to compare collabs and non-collabs to test the relationship theory;
Recognizability and/or Popularity - through surveys or experiments by
Asking participants to name their top 5 Sean Paul songs and see how many are collaborations
Actually playing the music to Sean Paul songs and assessing how awareness of the songs, and then comparing collabs to non-collabs
Audience Interviews - Assessing audience reactions through the collection of opinion data (again, comparing the collabs and non-collabs), like in this video with Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland on Unpopular Opinion (Tip: For the segment on Sean Paul, fast forward to 3:22).
So what?
All jokes, music videos, and fan-girling aside, the final question that we discussed as part of my class - and the moment where I knew I’d nailed it - was when I asked my students to think about why a study on Sean Paul’s collaborations matters. In other words, what can we learn from doing this kind of research?
The answers that they provided were right on the money:
You can make recommendations to new artists trying to break into the music industry
We might be able to identify trends in the music industry and predict the direction it is moving in
In addition, I asked them if this study could be applicable other cultural sectors, like television and film, and whether there are “collaborations” that exist in these spaces too. Yeah, crossover episodes could be a form of a collaboration.
“What about other economic industries?”, I asked. In the fitness space, local gyms and studios partner with apparel companies and other small businesses; is that a collaboration? Heads nod. Yep, studying Sean Paul is applicable to many aspects of daily life.
what else can be taken away from this experience?
Plain and simple, popular culture is a very effective tool for storytelling and information-sharing, and what is teaching not those two things?