Synopses & Reviews
"Simply one of the best works of popular music scholarship I have ever read. Blending close analysis of specific musical examples with sophisticated social theory and nuanced historical context, Kajikawa explores not only what music does in terms of race, butand#151;perhaps more importantand#151;how it does it. This book is a must-read not only for hip hop fans and scholars but for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between music and identity."and#151;Joseph G. Schloss, author of
Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop "A tour de force, an insightful, original, and immensely generative book. Through clear, concise, and convincing analyses of iconic rap songs, Kajikawa teaches us how racial difference is re-created every day through sonic practices that make our identities heard as well as seen and forged as well as found."and#151;George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place
"Kajikawa does what I have not seen before in hip hop scholarship. By combining archival research, ethnography, critical theory, history, and musical analysis, he is able to illuminate the cultural power and sonic subtleties of the music in a way that few others have. A major scholarly achievement that will change the way we hear and think about hip hop."and#151;Mark Katz, author of Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ
"Loren Kajikawa returns us to the sound of rap! While thoroughly conversant with the sprawling body of trenchant critical work that addresses hip hop and rap as powerful social movements, Kajikawa returns us to musical sound in all its dense referentiality. He reconfigures formal musical analysis by infusing it with the lessons of critical race theory, and the result is stunning. I wonand#8217;t ever hear breakbeats in the same way."and#151;Deborah Wong, author of Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music
Review
and#8220;Essential.and#8221;
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and#8220;Intriguing and provocative.and#8221;
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and#8220;Reveals a hidden history of racial segregation on the United States' first television program centered on the teenage population. . . . Provocative.and#8221;
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and#8220;Well-researched, tightly-written. . . . Impressively bright, clear, and comprehensive.and#8221;
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and#8220;Excellent. . . . Offers a valuable understanding of the . . . melding of African Americans into the national youth culture.and#8221;
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and#8220;The study illustrates how . . . nostalgic representations of the past . . . can work as impediments to progress in the present.and#8221;
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and#8220;The Nicest Kids in Town counters the (false) mythology of American Bandstand with valuable descriptions of and#8216;forgottenand#8217; cultural productions.and#8221;
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"Magnificently written and researched . . . lays fertile ground for future scholarship by offering a rich and nuanced account of the shared struggles and victories of Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles."
Synopsis
In Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, Gaye Theresa Johnson examines interracial anti-racist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and the cultural expressions and spatial politics that emerge from the mutual struggles of Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present. Johnson argues that struggles waged in response to institutional and social repression have created both moments and movements in which Blacks and Chicanos have unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing the strategies, cultures, and politics of each others' experiences. At the center of this study is the theory of spatial entitlement: the spatial strategies and vernaculars utilized by working class youth to resist the demarcations of race and class that emerged in the postwar era. In this important new book, Johnson reveals how racial alliances and antagonisms between Blacks and Chicanos in L.A. had spatial as well as racial dimensions.
Synopsis
and#147;Johnson's book illustrates how sonic affinities between black and brown provide a way of thinking about urban race relations that transcends the limited categories of conflict and cooperation.and#8221; and#151;Daniel Widener, author of
Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Black Los Angeles, 1942-1992and#147;From record stores to radio, from East L.A. punk to South Central hip hop, Johnson puts her ear to the post-WWII city and in a lucid, impassioned voice tells us what she hears: invaluable stories of struggle, conflict, and alliance that continue to shape the political stakes of the contemporary moment.and#8221; and#151;Josh Kun, author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
"Gaye Theresa Johnson had to ignore all the noise about black-brown conflict, seek out archives that were never supposed to be found, and develop new ways of seeing and hearing. In so doing, she has produced a truly magnificent account of the world African Americans and Chicano/as made togetherand#151;a world of sound, style, and subversion that serves as both a window into social crises and a vision for social change."and#151;Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
"Beautifully written, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity offers us a new and imaginative way of thinking about relations between Chicanas/os and African Americans. With her concept of "spatial entitlement," Johnson shows us the many ways, including those we cannot see, in which Black and Brown communities forged solidarities."and#151;Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
Synopsis
As one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness. Sounding Race in Rap Songs argues that rap music allows us not only to see but also to hear how mass-mediated culture engenders new understandings of race. The book traces the changing sounds of race across some of the best-known rap songs of the past thirty-five years, combining song-level analysis with historical contextualization to show how these representations of identity depend on specific artistic decisions, such as those related to how producers make beats. Each chapter explores the process behind the production of hit songs by musicians including Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Sugarhill Gang, Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, and Eminem. This series of case studies highlights stylistic differences in sound, lyrics, and imagery, with musical examples and illustrations that help answer the core question: can we hear race in rap songs? Integrating theory from interdisciplinary areas, this book will resonate with students and scholars of popular music, race relations, urban culture, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and beyond.
Synopsis
Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genresand#151;including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian musicand#151;and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.
Synopsis
"It is rare that one scholar can write so meaningfully and authoritatively about so many different styles of music. Garrett's knowledge of his subject is deep and refreshingly informative, and each song or composition serves as a gateway to a fascinating universe of connections. There is no question that this will be a work of singular importance to our understanding of issues of nationality, ethnicity, and race as embedded fabrics in American music, even in music not typically thought of in this way."and#151;Michael Pisani, author of Imagining Native America in Music
Synopsis
There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in file-sharing, and includes an expanded conclusion and bibliography. Find illustrative sound and film clips on the new companion website at www.ucpress.edu/go/capturingsound
Synopsis
"In
Capturing Sound, Mark Katz focuses on the overwhelming technological transformation that changed music from a medium of elite and canonical performances to a mass-consumed fashion-object experienced privately. Underneath the wealth of scholarship and insight about how new recording techniques continue to change our experience of music, Katz wonders how we ourselves have been changed by the successive recording technologies that emerged since Edison. This is a one-of-a-kind book. It will change your mind about why and how we listen to music."and#151;Giles Slade, author of
Made To Break"I only wish I had put as much thought into making records as Mark Katz does in appreciating and analyzing them. I've always said that what I do is not rocket science, but critques like this make it sound like it has a place in modern culture."and#151;Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, composer, producer, DJ
Synopsis
American Bandstand, one of the most popular television shows ever, broadcast from Philadelphia in the late fifties, a time when that city had become a battleground for civil rights. Counter to host Dick Clarkand#8217;s claims that he integrated American Bandstand, this book reveals how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination. Matthew F. Delmont brings together major themes in American historyand#151;civil rights, rock and roll, television, and the emergence of a youth cultureand#151;as he tells how white families around American Bandstandand#8217;s studio mobilized to maintain all-white neighborhoods and how local school officials reinforced segregation long after Brown vs. Board of Education. The Nicest Kids in Town powerfully illustrates how national issues and history have their roots in local situations, and how nostalgic representations of the past, like the musical film Hairspray, based on the American Bandstand era, can work as impediments to progress in the present.
Synopsis
and#147;By challenging Dick Clarkand#8217;s claim that he helped integrate American popular music and culture, Matthew Delmont puts the lie to Clarkand#8217;s air-brushed history of American Bandstandand#8217;s role in racial desegregation.
The Nicest Kids in Town shows how the nexus of sound, place, race, and space operated together to create and reinforce a myth of national memory and belonging. Just as importantly, this compelling cultural history demonstrates the importance of the youth market as a theater of struggle where brave young men and womenand#151;outraged by the discrimination and racism they faced for the simple act of enjoying musicand#151;refused to have their bodies, tastes, or desires policed. Delmont shows how the music moved them, and how in turn they moved the music onto television screens across America.and#8221;and#151;Herman Gray, author of
Cultural Moves.
and#147;The Nicest Kids in Town speaks simultaneously to several significant current lines of inquiry among historians of the United States after World War II. Delmont takes on issues that we thought we already knew completelyand#151;the social and cultural history of the 1950s and and#145;60s, the Civil Rights movement, the birth of televisionand#151;but he brings original material to his story and connects these issues in new ways. Delmontand#8217;s work proves him to be a talented, careful, and thorough scholar, and in a large body of work on these topics, his book stands alone.and#8221;and#151;Jay Mechling, author of On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth.
About the Author
Charles Hiroshi Garrett is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance. He is Editor in Chief of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, second edition.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Making Philadelphia Safe for and#147;WFIL-adelphiaand#8221;
Television, Housing, and Defensive Localism in Bandstandand#8217;s Backyard
2. They Shall Be Heard
Local Television as a Civil Rights Battleground
3. The de Facto Dilemma
Fighting Segregation in Philadelphia Public Schools
4. From Little Rock to Philadelphia
Making de Facto School Segregation a Media Issue
5. The Rise of Rock and Roll in Philadelphia
Georgie Woods, Mitch Thomas, and Dick Clark
6. and#147;Theyand#8217;ll Be Rockinand#8217; on Bandstand, in Philadelphia, P.A.and#8221;
Imagining National Youth Culture on American Bandstand
7. Remembering American Bandstand, Forgetting Segregation
8. Still Boppinand#8217; on Bandstand
American Dreams, Hairspray, and American Bandstand in the 2000s
Conclusion
Everybody Knows about American Bandstand
Notes
Index