Amiri Baraka
Black Music Essays by
The essential collection of jazz writing by the celebrated poet and author of Blues People--reissued with a new introduction by the author. In the 1960s, LeRoi Jones--who would later be known as Amiri Baraka--was a pioneering jazz critic, articulating in real time the incredible transformations of the form taking place in the clubs and coffee houses of New York City. In Black Music, he sheds light on the brilliant young jazz musicians of the day: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. Combining firsthand immediacy with wide-ranging erudition, Black Music articulates the complexities of modern jazz while also sharing insights on the nature of jazz criticism, the creative process, and the development of a new way forward for black artists. This rich and vital collection is comprised of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. "In Black Music, Baraka wrote with ecstasy--highly informed and intricate--about ecstatically complex music."--Richard Brody, The New Yorker
ISBN: 9781936070725Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Regina Bradley
- Regina Bradley's WebsiteHer website contains her biography and CV, published works, course descriptions/syllabi and upcoming events.
- Chronicling Stankonia : the rise of the hip hop South\ byPublication Date: 2021
Daphne Brooks
- Daphne Brooks's WebsiteThis link contains Daphne's biography, a list of books she's written, upcoming events and more.
Liner Notes for the Revolution by
An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians. With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music--and who should rightly tell it--Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.
ISBN: 0674052811Publication Date: 2021-02-23
Jayna Brown
- Babylon Girls: Black Women Performing and the Shaping of the Modern Publication Date: 2011
A. D. Carson
- Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions Digital Album by A. D. Carson
Angela Y. Davis
- Angela Davis's WebsiteThis site, through Speak Out Now, contains Davis's biography, testimonials, speeches, and media.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by
From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published here in their entirety for the first time--Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
ISBN: 9780679771265Publication Date: 1999-01-26
Daphne Duval Harrison
Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s by
Throughout the 1920s, in tents, theaters, dance halls and cabarets, and on "race" records, black American women captivated large audiences with their singing of the blues. University of Maryland professor Harrison examines the subjects and texts of their songs, the toll these performers paid for their right to be heard, and what they did to transform a folk tradition into a popular art. She describes the singing and lifestyles of Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson and Alberta Hunter to illustrate how they introduced a new model of the black woman: assertive and sexy, gutsy yet tender, bereft but not downtrodden, exploited but not resentful, independent yet vulnerable. The author shows that their choice of performing style, inflection, emphasis and improvisation provided a perspective and expressiveness that profoundly affected later American popular music.
ISBN: 0813512794Publication Date: 1988-03-01
Samuel A. Floyd Jr
- The HistoryMakers video oral history with Samuel Floyd. Musical educator Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. was born on February 1, 1937, in Tallahassee, Florida. He received his B.S. degree from Florida A&M University in 1957, before attending Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he received his M.M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in 1965 and 1969, respectively. Between 1957 and 1983, Floyd taught music and directed research for Smith-Brown High School in Arcardia, Florida, and later at Florida A&M University, Southern Illinois University, and Fisk University. In 1983, he began working at Chicago's Columbia College, where he directed the Center for Black Music Research and served as academic dean, interim vice president and provost. In 2002, Floyd became director emeritus and consultant for the Center for Black Music Research. Floyd participated in many professional and civic organizations, wrote a variety of articles published in professional journals, and authored and edited books on musical theory and research. Floyd passed away on July 11, 2016 at age 79.
Kyra Gaunt
- Kyra Gaunt's WebsiteKyra's website has her past publications and biography alongside her blog.
The Games Black Girls Play by
2007 Alan Merriam Prize presented by the Society for Ethnomusicology 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Book Award Finalist Explores how the traditions of black music are intertwined in the games black girls grow up with When we think of African American popular music, our first thought is probably not of double-dutch: girls bouncing between two twirling ropes, keeping time to the tick-tat under their toes. But this book argues that the games black girls play--handclapping songs, cheers, and double-dutch jump rope--both reflect and inspire the principles of black popular musicmaking. The Games Black Girls Play illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earliest games African American girls learn--how, in effect, these games contain the DNA of black music. Drawing on interviews, recordings of handclapping games and cheers, and her own observation and memories of gameplaying, Kyra D. Gaunt argues that black girls' games are connected to long traditions of African and African American musicmaking, and that they teach vital musical and social lessons that are carried into adulthood. In this celebration of playground poetry and childhood choreography, she uncovers the surprisingly rich contributions of girls' play to black popular culture.
ISBN: 0814731198Publication Date: 2006-02-06
Farah Jasmine Griffin
- Farah Jasmine Griffin at Columbia UniversityThis is Griffin's page at Columbia University. It contains her bio and selected works.
If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery by
Singer, composer, actress, lover, wife, writer, pleasure seeker, drug addict, icon, commodity, myth and mystery: Billie Holiday is still one of the most famous jazz vocalists of all time. But Holiday's image -- the gifted torch singer with insatiable appetites for food, sex, alcohol and drugs -- is not the full story. Farah Jasmine Griffin's enchanting investigation of Holiday, her world and how she is remembered, at last fully liberates Lady Day from the tragic songstress myth. Griffin argues that the stereotype of a black woman who can always take center stage to command an audience because of her incredible ability to feel, but not to think, continues to hide the real Holiday from public view. Instead of a mindless "natural" with incredible talent but no discipline, Griffin's Holiday is a jazz virtuoso whose passion and technique made every song she sang forever hers. Instead of being helpless against the racism, sexism and poverty that dominated her life, Holiday is an artist, willing to pay a tremendous price to change the sound of jazz forever. And far from being a victim of overwhelming obstacles, Lady Day is an independent spirit whose greatest legacy is that all hurdles can be overcome, whatever the odds. Holiday's voice has permeated American music from Frank Sinatra to Macy Gray. But, until now, Holiday's influence has never been reconciled with her image. Farah Jasmine Griffin unravels the threads that make up the Holiday mystique and weaves together a new, true Lady Day that jazz fans will both love and respect.
ISBN: 0684868083Publication Date: 2001-05-14
Ellie M. Hisama
- Ellie M. Hisama's BiographyThis link gives an in depth background of who Ellie M. Hisama is and lists all of her works.
Gendering Musical Modernism by
This book explores the work of three significant American women composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It offers information on both their lives and music and skillfully interweaves history and musical analysis in ways that both the specialist and the more general reader will find compelling. Ellie Hisama suggests that recognizing the impact of a composer's identity on the music itself imparts valuable ways of hearing and understanding these works and breaks important new ground toward constructing a feminist music theory.
ISBN: 052164030XPublication Date: 2001-02-22
bell hooks
- bell hook's page at Berea CollegeThis page lists Bell's past publications and biography.
Black Looks: Race and Representation by
In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship--in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film--and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert." As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that's exactly what these pieces do.
ISBN: 9781317588498Publication Date: 2014-10-10
Cherie Hu
- Cherie Hu's WebsiteThis is a link to her portfolio of Cherie's work (podcasts and articles).
- Hitting Streaming's Glass Ceiling by Music streaming services are young, data-driven and progressive compared with old-school record companies, so why don't they have more women in leadership? A string of diversity reports and lawsuits reveals familiar problems.Publication Date: Billboard, 2018-10-20, Vol.130 (24), p.22-22
E. Patrick Johnson
- E. Patrick Johnson's WebsiteJohnson's website contains his biography, his performances, and books that he has written
Sweet Tea by
Giving voice to a population too rarely acknowledged, Sweet Tea collects more than sixty life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as "backward" or "repressive" and offers a window into the ways black gay men negotiate their identities, build community, maintain friendship networks, and find sexual and life partners--often in spaces and activities that appear to be antigay. Ultimately, Sweet Tea validates the lives of these black gay men and reinforces the role of storytelling in both African American and southern cultures.
ISBN: 9780807832097Publication Date: 2008-09-15
Rawiya Kameir
- Rawiya Kameir's WebsiteHer website includes stories and articles she has written and edited, interviews she contributed to, and her contact information.
Tammy L. Kernodle
- Miami University's Webpage on KernodleThis webpage contains her biography and lists some of her work and places where her work has been featured.
Soul on Soul by
Pianist, composer, and arranger, Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), was one of the most significant and influential artists in the history of jazz. A versatile musical genius who experimented with and mastered most of the emerging styles in jazz's evolution, Williams wrote and arranged for such greats as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Yet throughout her prolific career of nearly six decades, she battled as an African American woman to achieve recognition, equality, and acceptance in the male-dominated world of jazz.Now Williams's artistic brilliance and lasting legacy are affirmed in this definitive volume, which masterfully interweaves biographical details with incisive commentary on her music, performances, and recordings. Setting Williams's intriguing story against the racial, social, cultural, and musical currents of her times, Tammy L. Kernodle draws on extensive interviews and meticulous research to chronicle the tragedies and triumphs of Williams's stormy life. Included are her struggles with racism, sexism, and age discrimination, and such personal misfortunes as recurrent bouts of poverty, turbulent marriages and love affairs, extreme loneliness, and a string of bad business decisions.Born to an impoverished, unmarried mother in Georgia, and raised in Pittsburgh, the self-taught Williams started performing publicly when she was six-years-old. By the age of twelve, the"little piano girl" was touring on the black vaudeville circuit. Kernodle follows Williams's harsh life on the road, her rise to fame in the 1930s as an arranger and performer for Andy Kirk's Kansas City swing band Twelve Clouds of Joy, her role as matriarch of the bebop movement, her solo career, her blossoming spirituality, and conversion to Roman Catholicism. In her later years, Williams wrote sacred jazz pieces that brought emotional healing to listeners, and worked tirelessly to help and rehabilitate addicted, down-and-out musicians. She was also strongly committed to advancing jazz composition and to educating others about the cultural roots of jazz.This striking portrait untangles the paradoxes of an exceptionally gifted pianist who defied the odds and endured hardships to create innovative music that inspired musicians and fans alike. It celebrates her persistent yet loving spirit, extraordinary talent, and enduring body of work.
ISBN: 1555536069Publication Date: 2004-03-18
Emily J. Lordi
- Emily J. Lordi's WebsiteEmily's website contains a brief biography and extensive list of all her works.
Bettina Love
We Want to Do More Than Survive by
A path to educational justice for all students - one that encourages teachers, parents, and their communities to adopt the rebellious spirit and bold and creative methods of abolitionists Educator Bettina Love argues that the U.S educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education which she calls the Education Survival Complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom--not reform--educators, parents, and community leaders must approach education through the imagination, determination, boldness and urgency of an abolitionist. Drawing on her experiences as a student and teacher, Love highlights young community leaders, artists and activists who are advocating for social change and inclusion. She persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She concludes by showing how young leaders are expanding our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice by using the playbook of abolitionists like Ella Barker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
ISBN: 9780807069158Publication Date: 2019-02-19
George E. Lewis
- Columbia University's page on George E. LewisThis page contains a biography and a list of works from George E. Lewis.
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1 by
Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical ImprovisationStudies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, genderstudies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.
ISBN: 9780195370935Publication Date: 2016-09-19
Maureen Mahon
- Maureen Mahon's WebsiteMaureen's website includes her biography, all of her works, multiple Spotify playlists, projects and events.
Black Diamond Queens by
African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll--from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.
ISBN: 9781478012771Publication Date: 2020-10-09
Kimberly Mack
- Kimberly Mack's WebsiteHer website includes her biography, book, publications and podcast.
- Fictional Blues by The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression. Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency. ISBN: 9781613767955Publication Date: 2020-12-18
Portia K. Maultsby
- Indiana University's Webpage on MaultsbyThis webpage includes her biography, a list of her books, and publications she has written.
African American Music by
American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a new audio CD bring the music to life.
ISBN: 9780415881807Publication Date: 2014-09-25
Christopher Mena
- Christopher Mena's WebsiteChristopher's website includes more information on his profession and pieces he has written.
- 'Atawit Nawa Wakishwit': Collective songwriting with Native American youth by This article chronicles a four-month facilitative teaching collaboration between a music education team from the University of Washington and youth enrolled in a Native American tribal school in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.Publication Date: Journal of Popular Music Education, 2019-04-01, Vol.3 (1), p.11-28
Jessie Montgomery
- Jessie Montgomery's WebsiteJessie Montgomery's website includes her biography, pieces that she has composed and events.
Marcyliena Morgan
- Harvard's Webpage on Marcyliena MorganThis webpage includes her biography, a list of her works, her CV, and contact information.
- 'The world is yours': the globalization of hip-hop language by This article is an analysis of the cultural, linguistic and artistic features of hip-hop that cultures translate into their social world and embed in their culture, language ideology, and performance styles.Publication Date: Social identities, 2016-03-03, Vol.22 (2), p.133-149
Fred Moten
- Fred Moten's NYU PageThis page contains Moten's biography and CV.
In the Break by
In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on OC The Burton Greene Affair, OCO exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performanceOCoculture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itselfOCois improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, MotenOCOs concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, MotenOCOs wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplinesOCosemiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysisOCoto understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in MotenOCOs ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition. "
ISBN: 9780816694525Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Reiland Rabaka
- University of Colorado's webpage on RabakaThis webpage contains a brief biography on Rabaka, but it primarily focuses on his works.
Civil Rights Music by
While there have been a number of studies that have explored African American "movement culture" and African American "movement politics," rarely has the mixture of black music and black politics or, rather, black music an as expression of black movement politics, been explored across several genres of African American "movement music," and certainly not with a central focus on the major soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement: gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll. Here the mixture of music and politics emerging out of the Civil Rights Movement is critically examined as an incredibly important site and source of spiritual rejuvenation, social organization, political education, and cultural transformation, not simply for the non-violent civil rights soldiers of the 1950s and 1960s, but for organic intellectual-artist-activists deeply committed to continuing the core ideals and ethos of the Civil Rights Movement in the twenty-first century. Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement is primarily preoccupied with that liminal, in-between, and often inexplicable place where black popular music and black popular movements meet and merge. Black popular movements are more than merely social and political affairs. Beyond social organization and political activism, black popular movements provide much-needed spaces for cultural development and artistic experimentation, including the mixing of musical and other aesthetic traditions. "Movement music" experimentation has historically led to musical innovation, and musical innovation in turn has led to new music that has myriad meanings and messages--some social, some political, some cultural, some spiritual and, indeed, some sexual. Just as black popular movements have a multiplicity of meanings, this book argues that the music that emerges out of black popular movements has a multiplicity of meanings as well.
ISBN: 9781498531795Publication Date: 2016-05-01
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
- UPenn's Webpage on RamseyThis webpage includes a biography of Ramsey and a list of his books.
Race Music by
This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct--possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities--each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.
ISBN: 0520210484Publication Date: 2003-06-01
Sylvia Rhone
- "Sylvia Rhone Shifts The Tide Of The Music Business"Article by Cam Litchmore.
Tricia Rose
- Tricia Rose's WebsiteTricia's website includes all of her works, her YouTube channel, podcasts, and more.
Black Noise by
Winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1995) From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it. Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men. But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."
ISBN: 9780819562753Publication Date: 1994-04-24
Louis Onuorah Chude-Sokei
The Sound of Culture by
The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers - from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany. The book includes a specially curated playlist, featuring songs mentioned in the book, to help contextualize its arguments.
ISBN: 9780819575760Publication Date: 2015-12-29
Olivia Salhoup
- Olivia Salhoup's Creative Agency "Amethyst"Olivia's website highlights the work that she does, and she also hosts "Boss Talks" where she speaks to other women in the industry.
Amy Wang
- Amy X WangThis link contains a quick biography of Amy Wang and all of the articles she has written/contributed to on Billboard.
Alexander G. Wehiliye
- Alexander G, Wehiliye's WebsiteThis link shows Wihiliye's past publications and lists his teaching experience and curriculum.