Prep

• Benedict Carey, ‘In Music, Others’ Tastes May Help Shape Your Own’, New York Times (14 February 2006)
• Audio: ‘How to Listen to Music in 4 Easy Steps’, Switched on Pop 50

Zoom Session

1. Attendance
2. Small Group Introductions
3. Overview: Final Project
4. Q&A/Introductions: How to Listen to Music
5. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Video: Style Wars (Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver, 1983). The seminal documentary of graffiti and b-boying’, writes Jeff Chang in one of our upcoming texts (‘Zulus on a Time Bomb’). You should be able to view this film for free on vudu.com, but if there’s a problem, here’s a link that’s currently working on YouTube. 

Prep

• Interviews: Andrew Nosnitsky’, lebronjames.co (August 2018) 

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Review: Story Maps Final Project
   1. Examples
      1. What Female Rap Renaissance? (Sketch)
      2. Jazz and Hip-Hop
      3. Compton

For Next Time

• Revise and resubmit your final project if you’ve received any notifications from me to that effect!

Prep

• Tricia Rose, ‘Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile’, in Forman and Neal (2004). keywords: dialogic criticism; feminism; heteronormativity; intersectionality (pp. 303-304); signifying.

• Audio: ‘Saweetie, City Girls, and the Female Rapper Renaissance’, Popcast (29 November 2020) 

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Q&A: T&A
3. Review: Story Maps
4. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Interviews: Andrew Nosnitsky’, lebronjames.co (August 2018) 

Prep

• Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (1936). First published in French as ‘L‘oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’, in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung V (1936). Published in English here as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’. A classic work on art and politics; Petrusich’s anticapitalist critique of ‘chill beats’ as a soundtrack to modern work is very much in this tradition.

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Q&A: Keywords
3. Story Maps Workshop
4. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Tricia Rose, ‘Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile’, in Forman and Neal (2004). keywords: dialogic criticism; feminism; heteronormativity; intersectionality (pp. 303-304); signifying.
• Audio: ‘Saweetie, City Girls, and the Female Rapper Renaissance’, Popcast (29 November 2020) 

Prep

• Amanda Petrusich, ‘Against Chill: Apathetic Music to Make Spreadsheets to’, New Yorker (10 April 2019)
• Audio: ‘Why Lo-Fi Is the Perfect Background Music’ Switched on Pop (19 May 2020)

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Q&A: Lo-Fi Brouhaha
3. Reading Notes for Next Time

I’ll try to reserve some time at the end of class for more small group discussion, since we only did that for twenty minutes on Wednesday.

For Next Time

• Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (1936). First published in French as ‘L‘oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’, in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung V (1936). Published in English here as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’. A classic work on art and politics; Petrusich’s anticapitalist critique of ‘chill beats’ as a soundtrack to modern work is very much in this tradition.

Prep

• Finish reading Joseph Schloss, ‘Sampling Ethics’, in Forman and Neal (2012). keywords: biting; chopping; ‘digging in the crates’; ethnography; flipping; looping.

• Video: ‘How J Dilla Humanized His MPC3000’, Vox Earworm (6 December 2017). 

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Q&A: TBA
3. Story Maps Workshop
4. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Amanda Petrusich, ‘Against Chill: Apathetic Music to Make Spreadsheets to’, New Yorker (10 April 2019)
• Audio: ‘Why Lo-Fi Is the Perfect Background Music’ Switched on Pop (19 May 2020)

Prep

• Joseph Schloss, ‘Sampling Ethics’, in Forman and Neal (2012). keywords: biting; chopping; ‘digging in the crates’; ethnography; flipping; looping. 
• Video: Mark Ronson, ‘How Sampling Transformed Music’ (9 May 2014). At once a documentation of the Slick RIck’s influence, a deft appreciation of the art of sampling, and a virtuoso demonstration of how it’s done! keywords: pastiche; interpellating vs. sampling.

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Review: Which sources are good ones?
3. Q&A: Chopping, Screwing, Sampling
4. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Michail Exarchos, ‘Boom Bap Ex Machina: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and the Akai MPC’, in Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, and Mark Marrington, eds., Producing Music (Routledge, 2019)

• Video: ‘How J Dilla Humanized His MPC3000’, Vox Earworm (6 December 2017). 

Prep

• Charles Holmes, ‘“He Shook the World”: George Floyd’s Legendary Houston Legacy’, Rolling Stone (2 June 2020). 
• Audio: ‘Big Floyd and the Rise of Houston Chopped N Screwed Music’, Switched on Pop (9 June 2020)

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Q&A: TBA
3. Story Maps Workshop
4. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Joseph Schloss, ‘Sampling Ethics’, in Forman and Neal (2012). keywords: biting; chopping; ‘digging in the crates’; ethnography; flipping; looping. 
• Video: Mark Ronson, ‘How Sampling Transformed Music’ (9 May 2014). At once a documentation of the Slick RIck’s influence, a deft appreciation of the art of sampling, and a virtuoso demonstration of how it’s done! keywords: pastiche; interpellating vs. sampling.
   

Prep

•  Andrew Nosnitsky, ‘Gray Matters’, Pitchfork (4 March 2013). On the legacy of Houston’s DJ Screw– possibly the most influential hip-hop DJ of this century– and how his impact goes way beyond simply slowing things down.
• Audio: ‘Big Floyd and the Rise of Houston Chopped N Screwed Music’, Switched on Pop (9 June 2020)
• Audio: ‘DANCING_ ECSTATIC USA, HOUSTON 1971-2000, DJ SCREW SPECIAL’ (DJ Purple Image, 31 March 2015). Something to listen to while you’re cruising the beach over Spring Break.

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Review ASA Style
3. Q&A: Big Floyd, Chopped ‘n’ Screwed
4. Story Mappable Houston
5. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Charles Holmes, ‘“He Shook the World”: George Floyd’s Legendary Houston Legacy’, Rolling Stone (2 June 2020)

Prep

• Matt Miller, ‘Rap’s Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture’, in Forman and Neal (2012).  keywords: commodification; Dirty South, the; imagined community; trap.

In Class

1. Attendance
2. Annotated Bibliographies Review: Sound Bites, Real Simple Sources, and ‘Sociology for Dummies’
3. Story Maps Workshop
4. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Jesse McCarthy, ‘Notes on Trap’, n+1 (Fall 2018). A world where everything is always dripping. Note: This is quite a heady and ‘literary’ take on the genre, written in a somewhat paratactic style (that is, the author’s propositions appear to exist ‘side by side’, as it were, since the order in which they’re arranged doesn’t seem to be determined by the unfolding of a unifying argument). This is more of a reading to puzzle over, pick through, and maybe find some nuggets of insight — I know I’ve said that about a number of our recent texts, but it’s really true of this one. I think this is a good one to look at right now because you can read it in little bits and pieces, and maybe it’ll spark an idea for your final project. Here’s the link to my annotations on Hypothesis. keywords: motivated signifying (#3); neoliberalism (#8).