Category: MUS 113

  • Selling Cars and Feeling Good

    Pianist, singer, and activist Nina Simone’s 1965 recording of the song “Feeling Good” was used in a fascinating 2018 ad for a Buick model made in Shanghai. The song begins with Simone’s unaccompanied voice, and gradually adds instrumental parts verse by verse, becoming a big-band anthem with a full horn section. The Buick ad uses…

  • Roll and Tumble

    White Tears begins with an epigraph: I rolled and I tumbledCried the whole night longWoke up this morningI didn’t know right from wrong The earliest recorded version of these lyrics are from Hambone Willie Newbern’s “Roll and Tumble Blues,” on a 1929 Okeh Records 78. Alan Lomax recorded Delta blueswoman Rosa Lee Hill singing a…

  • Hauntological Remixing

    DJ Shadow’s 1996 Endtroducing was the first album produced entirely from samples, and, as such, is considered not only a landmark of instrumental hip-hop, but also one of the greatest albums of all time. What do you think makes it great? How does an album made up entirely of samples advance musical creativity and innovation?…

  • Something Good

    On December 12 of this year, the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry added a 30-second film from 1898 to its collection. The film, known as “Something Good — Negro Kiss” is the first screen kiss between African-Americans in film history, and it is remarkably free from the racist stereotypes with which African-Americans had been…

  • Fight the Power: From Message Rap to Hardcore

    Sylvia Robinson (above), CEO of Sugar Hill Records and the so-called “Mother of Hip Hop,” released “It’s Good to Be The Queen” in 1982. Robinson, in the tradition of MC boasts, raps about her success and the material comfort it conveys. But she samples the “Black national anthem,” “Lift Ev’ry Voice,” which suggests something deeper…

  • “Doing 55” Playlist

    Hoodie (David Hammons, 1993). Trigger/Content Warning: Disturbing subject matter, police brutality, racism, profanity, racist language including the n-word. Read Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s article “‘Doing Fifty-Five in a Fifty-Four’: Hip Hop, Cop Voice and the Cadence of White Supremacy in the United States”: Stoever notes: As African American theorists, writers, artists and musicians – from Frederick Douglass in…

  • Wild Style

    A bankrupt New York was the incubator for rap in the early 1970s. The ethnic demographics of the formerly predominantly Jewish and Irish South Bronx had changed, in part due to the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the 1960s, which displaced thousands of people from their homes and destroyed many Bronx neighborhoods. Steeply declining…

  • Soul and Funk: Some Historical Background

    Kitchenette buildings on Chicago’s South Side, 1950. The turbulence of the 1960s was as much a response to the domestic situation in the urban United States as it was to Vietnam. One of the effects of the Great Migration was to turn northern cities into unofficially segregated spaces — segregated in fact, if not by…

  • Soul as Protest

    Content/Trigger Warning: Racist language in original sources. Soul was a stream of rhythm and blues that engaged overtly with social issues. Where 1950s and early 1960s R&B was primarily dance music, in the mid-60s, certain artists began marrying the R&B musical sensibility to lyrics that dealt with pressing political topics. In the Civil Rights Movement,…

  • Freedom Now?

    The “Greensboro Four” sitting in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, 1960. Read about the protests here. The cover of drummer Max Roach’s 1961 album We Insist! was an explicit reference to the Greensboro protests. We Insist! drew analogies between social and political freedom, and the aesthetic freedom of Roach’s music. The Max Roach Quintet performing “Driva…