Conclusion

Soul in Seoul ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Crystal S. Anderson

This chapter uses Korean indie groups to reveal the diversity of music under the K-pop umbrella and the ramifications of such diversity for music aesthetics, authenticity, and globalization. Placing K-pop within a global R&B tradition highlights K-pop as a diverse style of music largely informed by African American popular music. It reveals the extent to which Black popular music has informed K-pop. Technology enables fans to access a wide array of K-pop, foster fan communities, and act as critics and arbiters of taste. K-pop’s place in a global R&B tradition also reveals the diversity of global influences, challenging the focus on a generalized West and United States that obscures the impact of African American culture.

Author(s):  
Abraham Smith

The chapter explores the motivations for the use of the Christian Bible in distinctive temporal arcs within African American culture. Initially, the chapter acknowledges the oddity of an African American affinity with the Bible because that Bible was deployed to support the enslavement and perpetual exploitation of African descendants in the British colonies that later became the United States. Then, it articulates three reasons for the aforementioned affinity: the availability of the Bible (especially the King James Bible) to provide a language world for personal and collective expression; the versatility or pliability of the Bible in the imagination of African Americans as they repeatedly and creatively read their own identities through the struggles of the characters of the Bible; and the perceived persuasiveness of the Bible in some of the heated debates with which the larger US public has been engaged since its inception.


Author(s):  
Crystal S. Anderson

Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop examines how K-pop cites musical and performative elements of Black popular music culture as well as the ways that fans outside of Korea understand these citations. K-pop represents a hybridized mode of Korean popular music that emerged in the 1990s with global aspirations. Its hybridity combines musical elements from Korean and foreign cultures, particularly rhythm and blues-based genres (R&B) of African American popular music. Korean pop, R&B and hip-hop solo artists and groups engage in citational practices by simultaneously emulating R&B’s instrumentation and vocals and enhancing R&B by employing Korean musical strategies to such an extent that K-pop becomes part of a global R&B tradition. Korean pop groups use dynamic images and quality musical production to engage in cultural work that culminates the kind of global form of crossover pioneered by Black American music producers. Korean R&B artists, with a focus on vocals, take the R&B tradition beyond the Black-white binary, and Korean hip-hop practitioners use sampling and live instrumentation to promote R&B’s innovative music aesthetics. K-pop artists also cite elements of African American performance in Korean music videos that disrupt limiting representations. K-pop’s citational practices reveal diverse musical aesthetics driven by the interplay of African American popular music and Korean music strategies. As a transcultural fandom, global fans function as part of K-pop’s music press and deem these citational practices authentic. Citational practices also challenge homogenizing modes of globalization by revealing the multiple cultural forces that inform K-pop.


Soul in Seoul ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-42
Author(s):  
Crystal S. Anderson

This chapter defines K-pop with a focus on hybridity that reveals citational practices that draw on African American popular music and are confirmed as authentic by fans functioning as K-pop’s music press. This definition goes beyond “idols,” or Korean performers who sing and dance, to capture the diversity of K-pop artists that share characteristics that transcend genre. Hybridity, K-pop’s most salient characteristic, is largely informed by African American popular music. It reflects intertextuality through the emulation of R&B genres and improvisation spurred by Korean popular music aesthetics that expands those genres. K-pop’s music citational practices are deemed authentic by a transcultural fandom that produces critical cultural production and, in doing so, function as part of the music press for K-pop.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Fleming

The effort to preserve African American history is firmly grounded in the struggle for freedom and equality. Black people understood the relationship between heritage and the freedom struggle. Such struggles in the pre and post Civil War eras spurred the preservation of African and African American culture first in libraries and archives and later museums. The civil rights, Black Power, Black Arts and Black Studies movements helped advance social and political change, which in turn spurred the development of Black museums as formal institutions for preserving African American culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 417-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Remster ◽  
Rory Kramer

AbstractWhile prisoners cannot vote, they are counted as residents of the often rural legislative districts where they are incarcerated rather than their home districts. We examine the extent to which incarceration shifts the balance of a representative democracy by considering its impact on legislative apportionment. Drawing on data from the Census, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, and Pennsylvania Redistricting Commission, we develop a counterfactual framework to examine whether removing and returning prisoners to their home districts affects equal representation. Because prisoners are disproportionately African American, we also employ this counterfactual to assess racial differences in the impact of prison gerrymandering. Findings indicate that incarceration shifts political power from urban districts to suburban and rural districts through legislative apportionment. Moreover, non-White communities suffer the most. We conclude by considering how our findings fit a growing literature on the role of mass incarceration in [re]producing racial inequalities in the contemporary United States.


Popular Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-41
Author(s):  
David Temperley

AbstractThe origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory character. In an earlier study I presented evidence suggesting British roots for second-position syncopation. in contrast, fourth-position syncopation – the focus of the current study – seems to have had no presence in published 19th-century vocal music, British or American. It first appears in notation in ragtime songs and piano music at the very end of the 19th century; it was also used in recordings by African-American singers before it was widely notated.


1998 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 1471
Author(s):  
V. P. Franklin ◽  
Jack Salzman ◽  
David Lionel Smith ◽  
Cornel West

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