“Check Out the Hook While My DJ Revolves It”

Author(s):  
Amy Coddington

During the late 1980s, Top 40 radio stations in the United States considerably increased their programming of rap, facilitating hip hop’s crossover into the mainstream. Concerned about potential negative responses from advertisers and listeners based on rap’s sound as well as the presumed racial identity of rap’s performers and audiences, these stations primarily programmed songs that mixed hip hop aesthetics with the more traditional sounds of pop, disguising some of the sonic qualities of rap that programmers worried were offensive to their audiences. These songs did not just change the generic makeup of Top 40 radio; instead, they profoundly influenced the newly interconnected futures of pop and rap music.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-59
Author(s):  
AMY CODDINGTON

AbstractThis article examines the racial politics of radio programming in the United States by focusing on the development of a new radio format in the late 1980s. This new format, which the radio industry referred to as Crossover, attracted a coalition audience of Black, white, and Latinx listeners by playing up-tempo dance, R&B, and pop music. In so doing, this format challenged the segregated structure of the radio industry, acknowledging the presence and tastes of Latinx audiences and commodifying young multicultural audiences. The success of this format influenced programming on Top 40 radio stations, bringing the sounds of multicultural publics into the US popular music mainstream. Among these sounds was hip hop, which Crossover programmers embraced for its ability to appeal across diverse audiences; these stations helped facilitate the growth of this burgeoning genre. But like many forms of liberal multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, the racial politics of these stations were complex, as they decentered individual minority groups’ interests in the name of colorblindness and inclusion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Yi Wang

When it comes to American hip-hop music and rap music, people always think of the African American singers in loose clothes, the flashing lights on the dirty stage, all kinds of alcohol and cigarettes, as well as many drunken scenes. However, such a familiar scene is indeed an authentic portrayal of the United States. If you have heard about hip hop music, it is not difficult to find that many hip-hop lyrics are often full of dirty abuse, cold ridicule and sharp criticism. In a sense, hip hop music and rap music can be considered a kind of 'voice resistance' from the lower class of American society. However, it has not changed their current situation, and hip hop music and rap music are still regarded as inappropriate for children and teenagers. It is noteworthy that in recent years, with the popularity of hip-hop music, people from all over the world have gradually paid attention to this unique music style. At the same time, more and more people from the lower class of the United States are also be concerned by the U.S. government.


Author(s):  
Maxwell Williams

An emergent hip hop genre, which this chapter terms “neo-bohemian,” is characterized by its destabilization of hip hop’s established aesthetic categories. Focusing on three underexplored aspects of flow, this chapter examines how music by neo-bohemian artists, including Kendrick Lamar of Black Hippy, disruptively engages with the elitist, high art aesthetic and bourgeois racial politics of 1980s and 1990s “jazz/bohemian hip hop” while recovering the earlier genre’s unstable connection to 1940s bebop. This “cultural genealogy” is best understood in relation to the historical aesthetic of “hipness” while necessitating new understandings of black hip expression that account for experiences of hybridity and double consciousness. From this perspective, neo-bohemian hip hop emerges as an expressive space capable of accommodating the fluidity and diversity of black subjectivity in the United States. Analysis of neo-bohemian flow provides a model for an integrated, social-musical engagement with rap music that is lacking in hip hop scholarship.


1998 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard H. Dana

This paper describes the status of multicultural assessment training, research, and practice in the United States. Racism, politicization of issues, and demands for equity in assessment of psychopathology and personality description have created a climate of controversy. Some sources of bias provide an introduction to major assessment issues including service delivery, moderator variables, modifications of standard tests, development of culture-specific tests, personality theory and cultural/racial identity description, cultural formulations for psychiatric diagnosis, and use of findings, particularly in therapeutic assessment. An assessment-intervention model summarizes this paper and suggests dimensions that compel practitioners to ask questions meriting research attention and providing avenues for developments of culturally competent practice.


Author(s):  
Mitchell Ohriner

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.


Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Chacón ◽  
Susan Bibler Coutin

Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ‘national origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primacy of purported security concerns over the equal protection concerns raised by racial profiling in routine immigration enforcement activities. This, in turn, promotes racially motivated policing practices, reifying both racial distinctions and racial discrimination. Drawing on textual analysis of judicial decisions as well as on interviews with immigrants and immigrant justice organization staff in California, this chapter illustrates how courts contribute to racialized immigration enforcement practices, and explores how those practices affect individual immigrants’ articulation of racial identity and their perceptions of race and racial hierarchy in their communities.


Author(s):  
Prema A. Kurien

Chapter 5 shows how negotiations and disagreements between generations shape the civic engagement of Mar Thoma American congregations in the United States and India. Recent studies have demonstrated that participation in religious institutions facilitates the civic incorporation of contemporary immigrants. These studies have focused on either the immigrant generation or on the second generation. In one way or another, these studies indicate that concepts of identity and of religious obligation play an important role in motivating civic participation. Not surprisingly, given the different models of religion of immigrants and their children, definitions of community and their perceived Christian obligations toward this community varied between first- and second-generation Mar Thomites. There are no academic studies that examine how intergenerational differences in the understanding of religious and racial identity affect the civic engagement of multigenerational congregations. This is important to understand, however, as most religious institutions of contemporary immigrants are multigenerational.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling

In the early 1950s, country music was a cottage industry in Nashville, supporting a handful of small recording studios, publishers, and managers, and Nashville was known primarily as the home of The Grand Ole Opry. By the mid-1960s, however, Nashville had become “Music City, USA,” a bustling town known around the world as the epicenter of country music production and dissemination. As Nashville underwent this transformation, popular music consumption in the United States also underwent a radical change, as disc jockey programs replaced live performance on radio stations across the United States. Drawing upon recent academic work in the musicology of recording, the Introduction considers how these changes affected the ways that audiences heard country music during the 1950s and 1960s. In its focus on recorded country music, the Nashville Sound era begs for a musicological inquiry examining the creative decisions of session musicians, recording engineers, and record producers and the impacts of those decisions on the listeners who engaged with their work.


2018 ◽  
pp. 160-184
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Appert

This chapter shows how palimpsestic practices of hip hop genre produce diasporic connections. It describes how hip hop practices of layering and sampling delink indigenous musical elements from traditional communicative norms to rework them in hip hop, where they signify rootedness and locality in ways consistent with hip hop practice in the United States. It demonstrates that this process relies on applications of hip hop time (musical meter) as being fundamentally different from indigenous music, whose local appeal is contrasted with hip hop’s global intelligibility. It outlines how hip hop concepts of flow free verbal performance from lyrical referentiality to render it a musical element. It argues that these practices of hip hop genre, in their delinking of sound and speech, reshape understandings of the relationship between commercialism and referentiality, and suggests that voice therefore should be understood to encompass artists’ agency in pursuing material gain in the face of socioeconomic struggle.


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