The Politics of Contemporary Black Popular Music

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to the history of black popular music since the1970s, focusing primarily on sound cultures from the US, Caribbean, and Western Europe. We will begin by studying the mixing techniques developed in Reggae (dub), Disco (remix), and Hip-Hop (scratching and sampling) to discuss how they have shaped popular music since the1970s. We will then survey these genres as well as the histories of R&B, House and Techno and some of their many offshoots (Jungle & Afrobeats, for instance) have developed over the last 30 years to ask how popular music functions as one of the main channels of communication among the cultures of the African diaspora. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology.