Class and Reading Schedule
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8/28: Introduction
9/2: Labor Day (no class)
9/4: Taking Popular Music Seriously, Studying Popular Music Historically
Readings
- John Storey, “What is Popular Culture?” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2001), 1-14.
- Alex Ross, “Listen to This: A Classical Kid Learns to Love Pop—And Wonders Why He Has to Make a Choice,” New Yorker, February 16, 2004.
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Unit I: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Class in Popular Music
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9/9: Race & The Question of Authenticity
Readings
- Benjamin Filene, “Creating the Cult of Authenticity” in Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 47-75.
- Richard Wright, “Huddie Ledbetter, Famous Negro Folk Artist, Sings the Songs of Scottsboro and His People,” Daily Worker, August 12, 1937, 7.
9/11: Gender & Sexuality
Readings
- Hazel Carby, “‘It Just Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” in Robert G. O’Meally ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9-24.
- Matt Guterl, “Josephine Baker’s Colonial Pastiche,” Black Camera (Summer 2010): 25-37.
9/16: Class
Reading
- Daniel Cavicchi, “Introduction” and “Listening and Learning,” from Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3-21, 108-133.
9/18: Race, Gender, Class and Nation in Hamilton the Musical
Reading
- Renee C. Romano, “Hamilton: A New American Civic Myth,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (2018), 297-323.
9/23: Understanding Your Least Favorite Musicians and Their Fans
** Ethnographic Essay Assignment Due**
In class, we will discuss what you learned through this ethnographic exercise.
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Unit II: Popular Music and Social Change
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9/26: Ragtime, Jazz, and Racial Uplift
Readings
- James Weldon Johnson, “Preface” to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), 9-22.
- Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” Saturday Review (July 28, 1962): 47-49.
Photographs
- “Cultural Expression” in the Digital Schomburg: Images of 19th Century African Americans.
9/30: Folk Revival, Rock & Roll, and Racial Integration
Readings
- Anthony F. Macias, “Come On, Let’s Go: The Rock and Roll Era,” in Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 173-191.
- Jack Hamilton, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, 26-85.
10/2: R&B, Motown, and the Civil Rights Movement
Readings
- Ruth Feldstein, “‘More Than Just a Jazz Singer’: Nina Simone’s Border Crossings,” in How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84-112.
- Jack Hamilton, Just Around Midnight, 121-168.
10/7: Musicals and Asian Immigration
Readings
- Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 145-179.
- Flower Drum Song fact sheet on Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, on American Musical Theater History.
- John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Flower Drum Song: The Reviews Are In; Critics Clueless about Emergent American Sensibility,” AsianWeek, Dec. 13-Dec. 19, 2002.
Movie
- Flower Drum Song (1961)
10/9: Vietnam War and Protest Music
Readings
- Hamilton, Just Around Midnight, 213-245.
- Sojin Kim, “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America,” Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, May 2011.
10/14: Fall Break (No Class)
10/16: Girl Groups and Second Wave Feminism
Readings
- Susan Douglas, “Why the Shirelles Mattered,” in Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994), 83-98.
- Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Selling an Image: Girl Groups of the 1960s,” Popular Music 22, no. 2 (May 2003): 173-193.
- Hamilton, Just around Midnight, 169-212.
10/21: Disco and Gay Liberation Movement
Reading
- Randy Jones and Mark Bego, “Stonewall, the 1970s, and Bisexual Chic” and “The Birth of Disco and the Formation of Village People,” Macho Man: The Disco Era and Gay America’s ‘Coming Out” (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), 49-64, 77-106.
10/23: Rap as Social Protest
Reading
- Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, 1-85, 127-139, 231-297.
10/28: Midterm
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Unit III: Popular Music and the United States in the World
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10/30: Jazz as Cold War Diplomacy
Reading
- Penny Von Eschen, “‘Satchmo Blows Up the World’: Jazz, Race, and Empire during the Cold War,” Here, “There and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000), 163-178.
11/4: The British Invasion
Reading
- Jack Hamilton, Just Around Midnight, 86-120, 246-276.
11/6: Rock ‘N’ Roll and Transsexuality across Borders
Readings
- Joanne Meyerowitz, “‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’,” in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 51-97.
- Uta G. Poiger, “American Music, Cold War Liberalism, and German Identities,” in Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger eds., Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (2000), 127-142.
Movie
- John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
11/11: Classical Music and Border Crossings
Readings
- Mari Yoshihara, “Roots and Routes of Asian Musicians,” in Musicians from a Different Shore: Asian Americans in Classical Music (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 62-99.
- Suki Kim “A Really Big Show: The New York Philharmonic’s Fantasia in North Korea,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2008), 61-70.
11/13: Music at the US-Mexico Border
Reading
- Deborah Vargas, “Giving Us That Brown Soul: Selena’s Departures and Arrivals,” in Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of la Onda (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ), 179-215.
11/18: Global Hip Hop
Readings
- Jeff Chang, “It’s a Hip-Hop World,” Foreign Policy, October 12, 2009.
- H. Samy Alim, “Verbal mujahidin in the transglobal Hip Hop umma: Islam, discursive struggle, and the weapons of mass culture,” Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), 20-50.
- Ian Condry, “The Social Production of Difference: Imitation and Authenticity in Japanese Rap Music,” in Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger eds., Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (2000), 166-182.
11/20: K-Pop in the United States
Readings
- Michelle Cho, “Three Ways That BTS And Their Fans Are Redefining Liveness,” Flow Journal, May 29, 2018.
- Elise Hu, “How Asian-Americans Found A Home In The World Of K-Pop,” NPR, April 14, 2015.
- Simon Denyer and Min Joo Kim, “For Young North Koreans, K-Pop Provides an Awakening-And an Inspiration to Defect,” Washington Post, August 20, 2019.
11/25: Music as Music
Readings TBD
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