From Spirituals to Hip Hop:
American Music of the African Diaspora
(MUS 113)
SUNY Broome Department of Music
and Theater Arts
Dr. Julia Grella O’Connell

  • 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?…

  • Girls in Cars

    Aside from the cheerful candy-colored queer eroticism of Janelle Monae’s video for “Pynk,” one of the things that strikes me is the way Monae flips the trope of women in a car into a narrative of black female pride and empowerment. Women in cars are, of course, a well-worn visual feature of many rap music…

  • 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…

  • Romantic Frenemies

    The conflict between Brahms and his posse, and Wagner and his, resulted in a “manifesto” written by Brahms and published in the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo in 1860: The undersigned have long followed with regret the proceedings of a certain party whose organ is Brendel’s Zeitschrift für Musik. The said Zeitschrift unceasingly promulgates the theory that the most…

  • Funk and Futurism

    Earth, Wind and Fire as part of the cycle of creation. What is Afrofuturism? Briefly, the term denotes an African American ideological current associated with aesthetic references to outer space, non-Western cosmologies, religious and historical revisionism, and a stringent critique of the socio-economic plights of African Americans (and diasporic and continental Africans more broadly). Earth,…

  • 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,…

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