Black Music Research Journal最新文献

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"C. Wilkinson","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2010.0291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2010.0291","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131890051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Emergence of Jesus Rock: On Taming the \"African Beat\"","authors":"J. Haines","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0229","url":null,"abstract":"What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes --I John 1:1 On March 4, 1966, the London Evening Standard published John Lennon's now infamous words: \"Christianity will go.... We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first--rock \"n\" roll or Christianity\" (P. Norman 2003, 268). Some five months later, when the last part of this citation was printed on the cover of the popular American teen magazine Datebook capped off with an exclamation point--\"one of the most influential marks of punctuation ever fixed in print\" (quoted in \"Rock 'n' roll according to John\" 1966, 50) according to Devin McKinney--all hell-fire broke loose, in the words of Time magazine (2003, 141). Two days after Lennon's \"rock 'n' roll or Christianity!\" threat hit newsstands on July 29, public burnings of Beatles records were held in Birmingham, Alabama. Soon anti-Beatle frenzy had spread from the South to the rest of the United States. By September of 1966, Americans from New York City to Reno were burning and banning Beatles' records; John Lennon feared for his life as manager Brian Epstein tried to \"quell the storm over the remark on Jesus,\" as one newspaper put it; \"Are the Beatles Safe in America?\" wondered the New Musical Express; \"Is Beatlemania Dead?\" asked Time (\"Beatles Manager ...\" 1966, 13; Spitz 2005, 627-628, 924). So what had happened? Only two years before, Beatlemania had swept the United States with the overnight success of the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan Show; the following year saw the release of both films A Hard Day's Night and Help! and their critically acclaimed Rubber Soul, an album that took Beatles music to a new level of maturity. Had America suddenly grown tired of the Beatles? Was Beatlemania threatening to supplant American Christianity? Some might have thought so. A year before the storm broke, one parent worried that his daughter and her friends had developed \"a real cult over the Beatles,\" complete with \"Beatle prayers\" uttered before a \"Beatle altar\" in one girl's bedroom (McKinney 2003, 142-143). In reality, the wind stirring up the 1966 \"storm in a teacup\" (Spitz 2005, 627) was not John Lennon, nor even Beatlemania, but rock 'n' roll itself. As detailed in this essay, many in the United States viewed rock as plagued with two principal problems: its African roots and its stimulation to dance. These two problems were related, since rock's presumed Africanness gave it dangerous rhythm. The racist denunciation of rock was not unique to the sixties; it went back a decade to rock's earliest moments, as Shane Maddock has shown (1996, 181-202). In 1956, for example, the White Citizens Council of Alabama denounced rock's sexual overtones, accusing the \"basic, heavybeat music of the Negroes\" of seducing unsuspecting white youth. Racist antagonism against rock only increased with the battle for civil rights and the \"blanching of rock,\" as David Szatmary has called it (2000, 21-25; see also Romanowski 1996, 211-212). Racist preju","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"97 3-4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114278514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System","authors":"Matt Sakakeeny","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0291","url":null,"abstract":"This essay provides a roughly chronological history of a single musical tradition in New Orleans, the brass band parade, as a case study that supports a more expansive proposition. The first half of this proposition is specific to New Orleans: I note that the city has become largely identified with African American musical practices and repertoires and, further, that the associations between music, race, and place can be adequately subsumed under the categorical term New Orleans Music. While New Orleans Music includes an amorphous collection of interrelated styles--brass band, jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, soul, and funk, to name the most prevalent--they are bound together through an association with race (African American), place (New Orleans), and functionality (social dance) to such a degree that even a disaster of immeasurable consequences, which disproportionately affected that race and dislocated them from that place, has not threatened its cohesiveness. The consensus about the overall attributes of New Orleans Music is so pervasive that naming them as such seems redundant. The second half of the proposition raises a more sweeping question: By what processes do specific musical forms and practices become linked to particular people and places? This essay pursues the role of discourse and media--including eyewitness accounts, historical and musicological studies, musicians' autobiographies, fictional writings, media reports, images, films, and sound recordings--in solidifying the connections between people, places, and musical traditions. New Orleans Music is broadly synonymous with African American music, but this affiliation is by no means timeless and was facilitated, in part, by the writing of jazz history since the 1930s. The claim made most resoundingly in the book Jazzmen (1939) that jazz began \"just [in New Orleans], not somewhere else\" (Ramsey and Smith 1939, 5) changed the characterization of New Orleans as a musical city, altering understandings not only of where jazz came from but what constitutes the entirety of New Orleans Music. Prior to being nominated the birthplace of jazz, New Orleans's musical reputation was based on a multitude of offerings, including ballroom dance and French opera, street criers and organ grinders (Kmen 1966). The marching bands that led parades and funerals with music represented numerous ethnicities and races, but as jazz emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, African Americans, mixed-race Creoles, and European Americans reconfigured the brass band as a black music ensemble, performing syncopated and improvised dance music in burial processions that came to be called jazz funerals and in community parades known as second lines (Schafer 1977; White 2001). These parades wound through an extraordinarily heterogeneous urban center, led by a diverse set of musicians that embodied the city's complex history of interaction, but in narratives of jazz and New Orleans Music they are often narrow","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125391169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"So Contagious: Hybridity and Subcultural Exchange in Hip-Hop's Use of Indian Samples","authors":"Sarah E. Hankins","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0193","url":null,"abstract":"This is part of a larger cultural trend within hip-hop of finding the next beat. It's widening the palate, looking for something different. It's part of the rise of Bollywood globally.... There has been a long fascination within black culture with the Orient. It's easy to say culture is being stolen, but actually this is part of a larger dialogue. --DJ Rekha (2008) Every hip-hop record got an Indian sample / Do your research. --Wyclef Jean (2007) Gimmie some new shit. --Missy Elliott (2001) In the spring of 2001, producer Timbaland and hip-hop artist Missy Elliott released \"Get Ur Freak On,\" which featured tabla, tumbi, and two male vocal snippets in Panjabi. This chart-topping release represented a turning point in an \"east-west\" sampling experiment that began in the 1990s with hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z and A Tribe Called Quest, and its success opened the floodgates to sonic possibilities previously unrealized by hip-hop's producers and performers. The music of South Asia, especially Bhangra and Bollywood, has become a familiar sound in American hip-hop? In 2008, hip-hop, pop, rap, and rhythm and blues (RB in this light, their creative production is distinct from that of a hegemonic Western popular culture or, in Edward Said's words, from an \"accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness\" (1978, 6, emphasis mine). This complicates any reading of Indian samples in hip-hop as a neo-Orientalist fad or trend in the mold of, for example, Madonna's use of Bollywood-inspired dance moves in concert or mehndi and bindis on sale at Urban Outfitters. In this essay, I argue that hip-hop's use of Indian samples, rather than exemplifying appropriative action by one culture upon another, is better understood as part of a subcultural exchange of commodities, one result of which is the creation of hybridity as a means to negotiate a relationship between both parties, as well as to a dominant culture. …","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126327078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing on the Wall: Some Speculations on Islamic Talismans, Catholic Prayers, and the Preparation of Cuban Bata Drums for Orisha Worship","authors":"Michael Marcuzzi","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0209","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the use of script in the preparation and consecration of Cuban bata drums. (2) The writing of esoteric markings on the interior walls of these double-headed drums as a practice is not particularly secretive--many devotees outside the drumming fraternity are either aware that such a custom takes place or can at least imagine it being so. Nonetheless, the markings themselves remain one of the most guarded mysteries of the drumming fraternities in Cuba. Though the denotative meaning of most of these esoteric markings has seemingly been lost, this essay looks to how this writing, both the practice and its content, might index a north-of- Yorubaland provenance of Cuba's sacred bata drum complex. Fieldwork has demonstrated that this argument is supported among some of Cuba's bata drumming experts, notwithstanding the pervasive link made between the bata drums and Yoruba heritage among orisha worshippers in Cuba. Claims made by Cuban drummers regarding historical links with the regions north of the Niger River are made independently of any reference to the esoteric markings inside of the drums: though they may be connected, and it is in part the thesis of this study that they may indeed be related. Cuban informants do not make any overt connections between non-Yoruba cultural groups and the script that appears inside the sacred Cuban bata drums. I speculate here, however, that these markings and the north-of-the-Niger origins of the bata may be connected, and that this \"writing\" on the interior of the drums is the result of an amalgamation of protective-medicine technologies at play in Yorubaland prior to and throughout the period of the trans-Atlantic separation. Furthermore, it seems appropriate to suggest that this also lends credence to the notion of a vibrant intercultural, trans-Niger dialogue that was not simply motivated by the trade in commodities and slaves, but also by religious and spiritual expertise. Though speculative in nature, I would suggest that, if my case is compelling, it should contribute greater confidence, albeit in small measure, in the claims of those Cuban bata experts who purport that in their antiquity the bata drums, or at least elements of their construction, traversed the Niger River into Yorubaland. In terms of its implications for future research on Cuban bata drumming, this study is both preliminary and speculative, though not without potential fruit to bear. The central questions that motivated its structuring emerged from the seemingly congruent connections between particular Cuban claims of a Hausa provenance of bata drumming and those historical studies that also highlight a religious and cultural overlap between the Old Oyo polity and the Nupe and Hausa to the north of Old Oyo (e.g., Nadel [1942] 1973; Agiri 1975; see also the travel journals of Clapperton [1829/1966] and Lander and Lander [1832/1965]) My methodology, however, looks to an arena of religious expertise seemingly unrelated to wri","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116819597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Orleans in the World and the World in New Orleans","authors":"G. Lipsitz","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.2.0261","url":null,"abstract":"New Orleans became another crossroads, where the river, the bayous, and the sea were open roads, where various nations ruled but the folk continued to reign. They turned inhospitable swamplands into a refuge for the independent, the defiant, and the creative \"unimportant\" people who tore down barriers of language and culture among peoples throughout the world and continue to sing to them of joy and the triumph of the human spirit through the sounds of jazz. --Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992, 87) ... so my people's still scattered Ain't like we ever mattered So I ain't surprised both poverty level and black death on the rise. --Truth Universal (Patterson and Truth Universal 2007) Unless we can control the space we occupy, we will not be able to really love one another. --Kalamu Ya Salaam (Senter 1991, 37) The complex culture of New Orleans offers us an opportunity to rethink the concept of diaspora, to discern the ways in which New Orleans is always African--but never only African. The social history of New Orleans helps us understand that diasporic models of exile and return home to a motherland tell us less about the way African identities are lived in the world than do frameworks based on Afro-diasporic practices of world-traversing and world-transcending citizenship. We owe a great debt to past scholars for proving the persistence of African beliefs, practices, and processes in North America. African retentions helped black people to counter the dominant culture's racist erasures of the African past and its presumptions that Africans in America lacked any enduring or meaningful connections to their native lands. Yet in the United States, African retention has always been paired with New World invention (Buff 2001, 31). Cut off from ancestral homelands in Africa and denied full franchise and social membership in the United States, many blacks forged ideals of world-traversing and world- transcending citizenship and cultural production. Some retained hopes of return to Africa, not just by participating in black nationalist back-to- Africa movements, but also by instantiating memories of Africa in everyday practices of household decoration, healing, craft work, and religious rituals (Thompson 1984; Smith 1995). As Charles Joyner notes, even when slaves were compelled to work exclusively with American or European tools, they nonetheless employed them in African ways (1986, xxi). These practices could not function the same way they did in Africa, however, because of the grim realities of slavery and white supremacy in the United States. Instead, these African retentions provided the basis for New World inventions, evidencing not so much a literal desire to return to Africa as much as demonstrating a commitment to living and working In African ways in the New World. They helped produce a diasporic imagination that affirmed that wherever Africans are, Africa is. New Orleans is a special place. People all over the world revere it as a significant center of","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124539866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Back to the Heart of Worship: Praise and Worship Music in a Los Angeles African-American Megachurch","authors":"Birgitta J. Johnson","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0105","url":null,"abstract":"It is five minutes after ten o'clock on a Sunday morning, and half the Great Western Forum's parking lot is full. As one approaches the fabled sports arena's doors, the faint sound of a live band playing a mix of gospel, jazz, and funk seeps out into the parking lot to meet people hurriedly trying to get inside. With Bibles in hand (or in uniquely designed carrying cases), they quickly greet each other, barely taking their eyes off which of the large doors they can enter the quickest. Upon entering the building's inner corridors, the groove-based rhythms are even louder, but are joined by the sounds of an audience of thousands singing along with a small vocal ensemble. The call-and-response style of music is evident as people in the hall begin singing along with those in the main room before they enter a series of openings adorned with deep-blue curtains. They've been welcomed by a half dozen greeters on their way in and are now seeking the assistance of one of the legion of ushers, quickly finding empty seats among the standing, swaying, singing, dancing, and clapping thousands who've been in the 17,000-seat arena since ten o'clock. The atmosphere inside the arena is electric and rivals anything that occurred during the building's heyday during the 1980s, hosting the Los Angeles Lakers or the Rolling Stones. One could assume this gathering in Inglewood, California, was some type of religious crusade, complete with spirited group singing, pleading to convert as many lost souls at one time as possible. However, the mood of the room is celebratory in a markedly different way. Less like a crusade, it is more like a big party after a family reunion; the people high-five and hug each other at the mere suggestion of the lead singer, who, with his small group of nine singers, are standing over twenty feet away from the nearest audience member. From the vantage point of midlevel loge seats, which are over thirty feet from the main floor, one sees a large rectangular platform where a fifty-voiced choir stands, rocking in rhythm with the small vocal ensemble and a quintet of head-bobbing musicians. Hanging from the ceiling on both sides of the large platform are two projection screens, which show the lead singer and the lyrics to the song that have the attention of nearly every person in the room. Had one not noticed the lyrics on the screen or dozens of people bringing Bibles into the arena, this event could easily be mistaken for a rhythm-and-blues review or soul music concert. The people singing to each other and lifting their hands acknowledging a deity greater than themselves are not a group of pop music fans. Rather, they are members of the Faithful Central Bible Church and the high-spirited, Jesus-centered praise they are taking part in is only the beginning of their weekly church services. The congregation will continue in this mood of reverence and celebration for at least twenty more minutes before sitting. This narrative represents some of my fi","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117040710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jazz in Los Angeles: The Black Experience","authors":"D. Dickerson","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0179","url":null,"abstract":"Los Angeles has long been recognized as an icon in the United States from the perspective of its social, economic, and historical contributions to American life. The city has provided the United States--and, indeed, the world--with a model for urban development in the areas of assimilation, integration, and diversity. Yet some of the developments, especially those impacting blacks, have had results that can be questioned, particularly from the vantage point of those who might be considered progressive. Jazz in the United States has succeeded as an art form, but does this include Los Angeles--the Mecca of the entertainment world? And what is the definition of success? Further, if we consider jazz as an art form rather than entertainment, competition with other musical genres has proven to be a formidable obstacle in Los Angeles; the overriding demands of commercialism--as advocated and practiced by the film industry--congeal to make all forms of dance music more accessible to the public than jazz. The tangential questions are these: (1) Has jazz succeeded as entertainment or an art form in Los Angeles? (2) What is the real contribution of jazz to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to jazz? How Do I Know This? I write this essay from the perspective of a professional jazz musician, with over forty years experience, who lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years. My parents migrated to Los Angeles in 1943 so my mother could finish nursing school. She was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and my father from Jacksonville, Florida. I was born in the Japanese ward of White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles because this Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) institution wouldn't allow a black baby to be born in any other ward. When my mother graduated from nursing school, we moved back East, eventually to Philadelphia, where we lived until I was fourteen. I started piano lessons at age five--hating it; European classics just weren't for me then. We lived in a row house, and it wasn't until a neighbor, hearing me practicing sorrowfully, took me to his house next door and put on an Erroll Garner record. I was about ten years old, and my life \"turned on a dime.\" I spent every waking hour studying and playing (as best I could with SDA parents) the music--jazz, the music of the masters--and have done so, virtually exclusively, ever since. In an interview with Arthur Taylor ([1977] 1982), Nina Simone perfectly describes my life as a jazz musician: Max Roach defined the word technically. Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. I think that the Negro in America is jazz. Everything he does--the slang he uses, the way he walks, the way he talks, his jargon, the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things--all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play. Jazz is not just music. It's the definition of the Afro-American Black. (156) My family and I returned to California in 1959, wherein I furthered my commitment to jazz ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130482051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Context and Creativity: William Grant Still in Los Angeles","authors":"J. Djedje","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"William Grant Still (1895-78) is one of the most well-known composers of art music in the United States. Since the mid-i920s, music critics and writers have noted both his talent and creativity. In addition to the numerous awards and commissions he has received, the elaborate manner in which music organizations across the United States celebrated the diamond (1970) and centennial (1995) anniversaries of Still's birth also demonstrates his seminal importance to art music (Spencer 1992; Southern 1997,431). His significance becomes even more apparent each February during Black History Month in the United States, when conductors of major symphony orchestras choose compositions by Still to commemorate the occasion. As an established composer, many publications document his life history; see works written by himself (W. G. Still [1972] 1995); his wife, Verna Arvey (1984); his daughter, Judith Anne Still (J. A. Still [1972] 1995, 2006b); music scholars Jon Michael Spencer (1992), Catherine Parsons Smith (1996,1997, 2000, 2008), Beverly Soil (2005), and Gayle Murchison (2005); and others (see J. A. Still, Dabrishus, and Quin 1996). In addition, histories, articles, dissertations, and other publications on African-American, American, and European art music include discussions of Still (see Southern 1997; Machlis and Forney 2003; de Lerma 2006-7; and ProQuest 2009). Nevertheless, like most celebrated individuals, those who write about them pick and choose their emphases. Much is known about Still's early life, formative years in the South, and musical training and early successes on the East Coast. However, his time in Los Angeles, the place where he permanently settled (in 1934), spent the majority of life, and died (in 1978) at the age of eighty-three, has been only briefly researched, and never as a topic that had a major impact on his development and creativity as a composer. Yet, living in Los Angeles was one of the most fulfilling aspects of Still's life. His comments in a 1967 interview provide insight: STILL: Prior to coming here, I thought that I would only be satisfied living in the East, but after coming here,. .. California did something to me. BROWN: What do you think it was? The [climate] or something else? STILL: I don't know, [but] I think [that] it was something more than that. And I can't tell you what it was. There was just something about this section of the country that seemed to satisfy me, more so than any [other part of the country]. I had never been anywhere [else] that felt like home. When I came here, it was like coming home. Now don't ask me why, because I don't know. But I was perfectly well satisfied here. (Brown 1984,10) Catherine Parsons Smith (1996, 2000,2008) is one of the few scholars to include discussion of Los Angeles when focusing on Still. In fact, Smith's Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular (2007) provides an excellent portrayal of Los Angeles's sociocultural and musical environment. However, very ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"139 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134542024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Something 2 Dance 2”: Electro Hop in 1980s Los Angeles and Its Afrofuturist Link","authors":"Gabriela Jiménez","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0131","url":null,"abstract":"Los Angeles's hip hop culture developed in the early 1980s. Marked by the dynamism and diversity of the city's residents (DjeDje and Meadows 1998, 1), Los Angeles-based hip hop belongs to a rich black cultural legacy. Like the jazz created during the Golden Era (1920-29), the gospel innovations of the 1960s, and the soul explorations of the 1960s and early 1970s, electro hop is part of a trajectory where innovation in black Los Angeles contributes constantly to American culture. Electro hop, or techno hop, is a subgenre of electro and hip hop--a fusion of both--cultivated almost exclusively in Los Angeles during the 1980s; primarily dance music, it derived from electronic music and forms of production. Granting its relative short popular existence, roughly from 1983 to 1988, electro hoppers formulated a subculture comprised of an impressive list of artists, recordings, independent records labels, and widely attended events hosted at high schools, clubs, skating rinks, sport arenas, and coliseums. Furthermore, electro hop's notoriety played a formidable role in the restructuring of KDAY-1580 AM in Los Angeles. As with hip hop on the East Coast, electro hop was created and enjoyed primarily by marginalized young people of color--although, in both cases, young black males figured most prominently. Unlike East Coast hip hop, which experienced national visibility through the 1980s, electro hop remained largely a regional musical style--even when groups like the L.A. Dream Team recorded and released studio albums with major record companies such as MCA. Whereas East Coast hip hop producers sampled primarily disco, funk, and soul, electro hop artists focused initially on making their own beats with minimal sampling. And, just as hip hop took the shape of a multifaceted subculture during its nascency in mid-1970s New York--comprised of four elements: DJing, MCing/rapping, break dancing, and graffiti writing--electro hop, too, involved derivations of similar art forms. As gangsta rap's direct precursor, electro hop lacks visibility in formal academic circles. Celebrated accounts on hip hop and its subcategorical manifestations mention electro hop in passing, if at all, when discussing gangsta rap (Kelley 1996, 95; Chang 2005, 301-302). Los Angeles's electro hop community demands consideration. Most accessible information on electro hop comes from the artists themselves and dedicated fans. Some influential electro hop artists like Egyptian Lover and Arabian Prince continue to produce, DJ, and/or perform in the electro genre, thereby expanding upon the music they created in the 1980s. Electro hoppers take advantage of the Internet's potential and use interactive websites like MySpace to share music, memories, and other information. Electro hop fans, too, in both the United States and Europe dedicate time and resources to the dissemination and collection of information by way of the Internet. Loyal fans have formed communities through hip hop web forums and ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"16 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125916985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}