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Subjects: Music

Music

Black Skin, Mask Off

Future, Aesthetic Nihilism, and the Radical Possibilities of Trap

by Dallas Donnell

“Future’s work offers a necessary reckoning with the limits of hope, the permanence of loss, and the urgent need to imagine new paradigms for Black liberation.” In April 2017, Future released “Mask Off,” the hypnotic, menacing anthem that would become one of his biggest hits and the centerpiece of his self-titled album, Future. Built around a »

Music

“We Live in the Blue Note”

A Conversation About the Hip-Hop South

by Regina N. Bradley, Taylor Crumpton, Aisha S. Durham, Fredara Mareva Hadley, Zandria F. Robinson

“The blues tradition is what makes something southern hip-hop, and that can be aesthetically, but mostly it’s about substantive articulations. What is the substance of the thing?” Regina N. Bradley: This is a milestone year for us in the Souf. I want to start off with an underappreciated question. What is your definition of southern »

Essay

Cadillactica, by Way of the Underground

Big K.R.I.T.’s Transformative Southern Waters

by Justin D Burton

“As K.R.I.T. works to survive the mainstream, he marks what buoys him, leaving a record for viewers and listeners to consult when they, too, might need to survive a flooded zone.” The unknown underground artist. The Afrofuturist who transcends place and time. The brief skit at the end of the eponymous second track on Big »

Music

Down in the Hip-Hop South

by Corey J. Miles

Shh . . . I hear a siren sound. I’m walking down Long Street in Cape Town with two Black South African women I met while visiting the local university. I’m in my work clothes on a Friday night more than eight thousand miles away from anything that looks familiar. The last thing I expect »

Essay

“Pop Stars Don’t Die, They Move to Nashville to Record”

The Alliance Between Country and Pop

by Amanda Marie Martínez

In 1986, singer Dobie Gray released From Where I Stand, an album identified as “country soul.” Because Gray, a Black man, had principally been marketed in pop and R&B, reviewers felt the need to address skepticism he might face about an entry into country music. “When they transition with Gray’s grace, then such moves should be »

Music

What’s Happening in Country Music

by Jocelyn R. Neal

Each fall, the Country Music Association presents an awards show that it pioneered in 1967, a once-a-year opportunity to celebrate musicians and industry personnel with titles such as Entertainer of the Year and Song of the Year. Celebrating one winner in each category, these awards suggest to audiences that they summarize the state of country »

Music

Don’t Sneak

Lessons from Lavender Country

by Brendan Greaves

Almost exactly two years ago, on October 31, 2022, one month after suffering a stroke on a flight home from Oakland, where he had been performing, Patrick Ambrose Haggerty, the visionary seventy-eight-year-old songwriter, singer, and embodiment of the band Lavender Country, died at his home in Bremerton, Washington. Beside him on both passages was Julius »

Essay

“To Darkness, Fire, and Pain”

Sacred Harp Singing, Ruralness, and the Southern Gothic

by Jonathon M. Smith, Smith

On a late autumn evening in 2005, I drove an hour out of Atlanta to Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church near Bremen, just a few miles east of the Georgia-Alabama border. The building sits only a few hundred feet from I-20, but the route to the church—about a half-mile past a gas station and through »

Interview

“The blues look like me”

by Leroy F. Moore Jr., Charles L. Hughes

“Krip-Hop really stems from our ancestors, saying that we’ve been here and that hip-hop artists with disabilities matter. We’ve been here since the blues, [since] jazz.” Leroy F. Moore Jr. has long stood at the intersection of disability arts, advocacy, and activism over a wide-ranging and influential career. He cofounded (with Keith Jones) the Krip-Hop »

Essay

“Up on Cripple Creek”

Limb Loss, Difference, and Disability Spectacle in Southern Roots Music

by Simon Buck

Summer 1964. Downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. Jim Scancarelli, staff member at local radio and television station WBT, spots “Uncle” Frank Rayborn sitting with his banjo on a poplar-wood chair on the sidewalk of South Tryon Street. He rushes to his office to grab a tape recorder. For this banjoist is truly unique: he only has »

Interview

Speech Melody

An Interview with Sorrel Hays

by Julia Brock, Jennifer Sutton

In the mid-1970s, Sorrell Hays, a composer of electronic music, took her synthesizers, sound equipment, and contact mics to Dougherty County, Georgia. She was there to introduce children in newly desegregated classrooms to experimental forms of music-making. For Hays (1941–2020), it was a return to the South after almost two decades away and a confrontation »

Music

Hearing Waycross

by Abigail Greenbaum

“I’d started to doubt the Gram Parsons myth, but I could still feel its narcotic lull.” Like many white Xennials, I learned about Gram Parsons late at night in a college dorm room, stoned and listening to somebody’s hippie parents’ records. Parsons played in the Byrds and taught the Rolling Stones about country music. He »