Refiguring American Music

Examining singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as vocal synthesis technology, Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which the voice and its qualities are socially produced and how listeners assign a series of racialized and gendered set of assumptions to a singing voice.

Focusing on the hemispheric circulation of South American musical cultures, Kirstie A. Dorr examines the spatiality of sound and the ways in which the sonic is bound to perceptions and constructions of geographic space, showing how people can use music and sound to challenge and transform dominant conceptions of place.

Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in huapango arribeño, a musical genre from north-central Mexico that helps Mexicans build communities on both sides of the US border and give voice to the transnational migrant experience.

Using a theoretical framework built on Lacan and Foucault, Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic female Puerto Rican singers to explore how their voices, performance style, physical appearance, and subject matter of their songs challenged social and cultural norms.

In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identity, publics, and politics as well as challenge dominant racial stereotypes.

Audible Empire's contributors rethink the mechanisms of empire, showing how musical practice has been important to its spread around the globe. The volume's fifteen interdisciplinary essays cover large swaths of genre, time, politics, and geography to put forth music as a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation.

In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores how Cuban raperos (black-identified rappers) in Havana craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship in the face of continuing racism and marginalization during an era in which the Cuban economy, society, and nationhood have been under constant flux.

Allison McCracken charts the rise and fall of crooners between 1925 and 1934, showing how the backlash against crooners' perceived sexual and gender deviance created stylistically masculine norms for white male pop singers that continue to exist today.

Oliver Wang chronicles the history of the San Francisco Bay Area Filipino American mobile DJ scene of the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. He shows how DJ crews helped unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave its members social status and brotherhood, and drew huge crowds.

In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres—including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk—Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

Roll With It is a firsthand account of the contradictory lives of New Orleans brass-band musicians. They are celebrated as cultural icons within the music scene; outside it, they are treated as faceless black males—subject to poverty, racial marginalization, and urban violence.

Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it.

In Unfree Masters, Matt Stahl examines recording artists' labor in the music industry as a form of creative work. He argues that the widespread perception of singers and musicians as free individuals doing enjoyable and fulfilling work obscures the realities of their occupation.

Drawing on his ethnographic research at powwow grounds and in recording studios, Christopher A. Scales examines the ways that powwow drum groups have utilized recording technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the unique aesthetic principles of recorded powwow music, and the relationships between drum groups and the Native music labels and recording studios.

The life story of the outstanding jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin sheds light on South African jazz history, women in jazz, and American music as a transnational art form.

The best of the cult-favorite music magazine Roctobers conversations with overlooked or forgotten artists, from the Outlaw Country singer David Allan Coe to the frustrated interstellar glam act Zolar X.

An analysis of the emergence, reception, and legacy of fusion, experimental music that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as musicians combined jazz, rock, and funk in new ways.

Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaetón.

An ethnography exploring the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists.

A cultural history describing how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a "musical color line" in the South, associating certain genres with particular racial and ethnic identities.

This fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten is an elegy to his mother and an inquiry into language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical tradition.

This collection offers the first critical assessment of the music and culture of reggaeton, a popular genre that blends reggae and rap, Spanish-language lyrics, and Latin-Caribbean aesthetics.

A study of the creation of jazz, swing, and R&B music within the multicultural, multiethnic terrain of Los Angeles during and after World War II.

Collection of essays on the role of gender in jazz studies.

Industry history of the country music business.

Cultural and literary study of the construction of racial and artistic identity in soul cover albums of three popular artists--Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow.

Study of how systems of power and domination have shaped representations of otherness in music.