How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race By Amy Coddington. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023.

Research Article| December 01 2018 “Young, Scrappy, and Hungry”: Hamilton, Hip Hop, and Race Loren Kajikawa Loren Kajikawa Loren Kajikawa is an associate professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. His book Sounding Race in Rap Songs (University of California Press, 2015) explores how hip hop beats contribute to the production of racial meanings. Kajikawa serves as editor in chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music and as a coeditor for Tracking Pop, the University of Michigan’s book series on popular music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (4): 467–486. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0467 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Loren Kajikawa; “Young, Scrappy, and Hungry”: Hamilton, Hip Hop, and Race. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (4): 467–486. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0467 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Contributors’ Notes

Scholarship on metal always seems a little bewildered or put on the defensive by the genre's profoundly adversarial nature. Metal certainly opposes something, and to a large extent is defined by this opposition rather than by any obvious message of its own, but what exactly does it oppose? Certain political values? Certain kinds of music? Certain religions? Or does it represent a vague opposition to "things in general;" is it the music of rebellion without a cause? The short answer, judging by the academic treatments under review here as well as earlier attempts to censor it, is that it opposes whatever its interpreters want it to. Thus its critics site accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, while supporters praise its supposed opposition to capitalism, strict gender roles, and even the concept of order itself. Many of these metal partisans, especially those whose primary concern is the rehabilitation of an art form often perceived as ethically problematic, spend so much time explaining away its disturbing features that they ignore the possibility that disturbance is precisely the point. Even those who do recognize disturbance as a fundamental aim of metal and call attention to the specific forms that that disturbance takes, such as expressions of animosity toward certain groups of people, often fail to explain why listeners are attracted to these sounds. That the appeal doesn't lie only in bigotry is clear from the growing number of fans who come from the very groups that have been the most stigmatized in metal-women, ethnic minorities, religiously observant people, and queer women and men. The following essay will not fully explain either the genre's lust for enmity in all forms or the perverse attraction that this spirit of antagonism holds for fans, but it will at least review current scholarly thought on these subjects and suggest some possible avenues for future exploration. I will provide a brief overview of the scholarship that first legitimized the study of metal and consider three recent books that each turn the notion of metal's enmity toward other things into an analytical methodology; that is, they attempt to define it by what it is not and by what it opposes. The books cast metal in opposition to certain political values, kinds of music, and religious/philosophical worldviews. Out of our discussion-imbued with the recognition that metal exists only in opposition, enmity, and negativity toward something else-will emerge a sense of the elusiveness of this art form as a subject of inquiry and the difficulty of finding a methodological approach that fully captures its strangeness, darkness, and hostility toward analysis.

Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City

The Rock History Reader. Edited by Theo Cateforis. New York: Routledge, 2007. [xvii, 360 p. ISBN-10: 041597500X; ISBN-13: 9780415975001. $95.] Bibliographic references, music examples, index. As Theo Cateforis acknowledges in his preface to The Rock History Reader, teachers of courses on popular music have a wealth of materials at their disposal in the form of anthologies. Whether it be the history of jazz, of hip hop, or even of rock criticism itself, chances are that an anthology exists that can serviceably guide students through the relevant issues and introduce them to some of the significant personalities involved. Cateforis's new collection is geared specifically towards the history of rock, and while it therefore intersects with several existing alternatives-the most relevant being David Brackett's The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)-it holds its own among the competition as a thorough, conscientious, and engaging guide to rock's history since the 1950s. The Rock History Reader includes fifty-nine readings in total, arranged by decade in six sections (the 1950s to the 2000s). These readings take a variety of forms: first-hand accounts from within the music industry, academic analyses of musical repertories and cultural formations, newspaper and magazine editorials, serious criticism from the popular press, reminiscences by fans, primary-source legal documents, and so on. The range of topics is equally broad-from issues of censorship and piracy, to rock's aesthetics and formal content, to the politics of identity, to rock's relationship to capitalism, to questions of race and cultural imperialism. Such breadth was of course carefully worked out: in the preface, Cateforis makes clear his desire to provide a relevant and useful pedagogical tool for instructors from a variety of disciplines within the fine arts, social sciences, and humanities. He is also fully engaged with issues of diversity and multiculturalism: welcome entries on such topics as Chicano rock, country-based rock, reggae, queer identity in rock, and several articles offering feminist perspectives on rock will surely make significant headway in getting future students to challenge the lingering whitemale authority of rock culture. Because of this collection's breadth, an instructor wishing to stress any single perspective over others would likely want to supplement it with additional readings. Those with deeper historical inclinations, for instance, might balk at the fact that the anthology includes little that contextualizes early rock and roll within the diverse music industry from which it sprang; rock's most important progenitors are strangely absent. A reading from Philip H. Ennis's still relevant study, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Middle town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992) would be useful in this regard. Music historians trained in classical music might wish to expand upon the aesthetic dimension. I personally missed the voice of Brian Eno on questions of production, and a discussion of Buddy Holly's innovative recording techniques in the section covering the 1950s. On the same subject from the academic side, I often thought that excerpts from Albin Zak's insightful essay Sound as Form, from his book The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berke ley: University of California Press, 2001) would have made an excellent addition (or at least a relevant citation). But it is easy to make such complaints with any anthology. Far more important is this one's well-roundedness and the inspired creativity that clearly lay behind its selection process. Cateforis again admits that supplementation of the kind suggested above was a necessary part of his thinking while compiling his excerpts. Interestingly, none of the pieces that bring musical issues to the fore would be especially alienating to students without a background in traditional music theory. …