But I'm still not sure I'm understanding why you think the anticontext is shrinking. Would it be that there's less of an ability for a genre to stake out its claim "This is our music and these are our fans and the rest of you don't get it"? So there are no great Us vs. Them splits as in the days of yore, since They end up being uncooperatively tolerant and curious. Um, you may be right, but I sure seem to have inadvertantly discovered a huge anticontext when it comes to teenpop. But my guess is that many in the primary audience for, say, High School Musical and Hannah Montana and the Cheetah Girls (which isn't the teenpop that's been winning my heart, for the most part, except that an HSM track got into my P&J top ten last year and a Miley Cyrus track will this year) don't particularly have a sense of an anticontext or get affected by it. But I could be all wrong.

Several performers have created major anticontexts for themselves recently: E.g., Eminem in 2000 and Paris Hilton in 2006. As a genre, hip-hop still seems as if it has the biggest anticontext. And what about country? In '99 Kevin John entitled his fanzine "The magazine of rap and country" because he'd read some alternative-leaning magazine that declared, "We like everything except for rap and country."