Jennifer C. Lena is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has recently published Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton, 2012), a history of 20th century popular music in the United States.  Jenn’s published several shorter pieces about rap music, American country music, music videos, the CIA’s use of music, and immigrant arts, in addition to comparative studies of Chinese, Chilean, Nigerian, and Serbian pop music. Jenn co-commissioned the Grammy award nominated Hilos, a contemporary classical composition by Gabriella Frank, performed by chamber music group ALIAS.  Websites:  http://whatisthewhat.wordpress.com/ and http://jenniferclena.wordpress.com/ Twitter: WITWhat

Here are Jennifer’s first five…

“These are my “favorite five” websites because my “first five” are relatively uninteresting: facebook, twitter, tumblr, my own websites (http://whatisthewhat.wordpress.com/ and http://jenniferclena.wordpress.com/), and then usually the New York Times. I should also note that I often don’t “visit” my favorite five websites because I rarely have time to click through to them from my RSS feed. This means that my preferences don’t reveal my “real life” attraction to design, color, shape, movement, and so forth.”

“My first choice is Belgian Waffle (http://www.belgianwaffling.com/), a blog by a totally charming, witty, and wonderful woman, whose real name I don’t know. When a new post pops up in my RSS window, I put everything down and read.”

“A close second is the long-running blog of Jessica Hopper (http://tiny.abstractdynamics.org/), someone I first read for her music criticism. She scratches the same itch as my first choice: witty, creative, beautiful descriptions of everyday life and culture. Every so often she writes a sentence that is so incredibly original that I stop breathing.”

“There are a cluster of blogs I read that feature sociologists: OrgTheory (orgtheory.net), Scatterplot (scatter.wordpress.com), and Crooked Timber, for example, but my favorite has to be the strange beast that The Soc Shrine (http://thesocshrine.wordpress.com/) has become. It’s one-stop shopping for all kinds of very weird music. E.g. the current post includes a Snoop Dogg aka Snoop Lion song, one by Serge Gainsbourg, an Elton John song about being “young, gifted and black,” and a Steven Seagal (yes, that Steven Seagal) song.”

“The Essayist (http://essayist.tumblr.com/) describes itself as a tumblr with “aggregated long-form essays from the world’s best writers and publications” and that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

“Finally, Unfogged (http://www.unfogged.com/) is like a bag of cats—they’re never decided on whether it is more important to jab at one another or climb out of the bag. The posts are always funny, or honest, or both, but I’d say the selling point is the comments threads which represent some kind of high water mark for the format. They write about sobriety, drunkness, work, the stupidity of kids, the wisdom of kids, books, television, politics, gender, and Domino’s pizza.”

P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…