From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarly provocative Invasion of Privacy almost thirty years later, and more , Kiana Fitzgerald's book Ode ...
Sep 30, 2023•45 min•Ep. 412
July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers competed, with an unprecedented $1,000--and their reputations--on the line in a highly anticipated rap battle. The show drew hundreds of fans to settle a question that still dominates hip hop circles: Who's the best? In Harlem World: How Hip Hop's Super Showdown Changed Music Forever (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), journalist J...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 203
The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up , released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid . Time's Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as varied as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger. The clash of sounds and styles don't immediately fit. The confrontational hardcore-thrash metal -...
Sep 19, 2023•59 min•Ep. 202
In Old Town Road (Duke University Press, 2023), Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption and the ways race influences how the music industry categorizes songs and artists. By both lionizing and satirizing genre tropes—it’s a country song built...
Sep 15, 2023•48 min•Ep. 164
The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her mysterious disappearance in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Developed in partnership with Sothea’s family. There is a saying in Cambodia: Music is the soul of a nation. Perhaps no one embodied that spirit more than Ros Serey Sothea...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 1356
In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and fo...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 201
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter , founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities...
Sep 12, 2023•33 min•Ep. 109
Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023) examines the creative and complicated evolution of the musical artist. In the 1990s, Carey perfected blending pop, hip-hop, and R&B and drew from her turbulent personal life to create introspective, sonically sound masterpieces like “Vision of Love,” “Make it Happen,” and “Butterfly.” There is no doubt about Carey’s star power, as she has sold over 220 million albums globally and has the most Billboard chart-topping singles of any so...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 200
In this episode we speak with Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness core faculty, Jack Bagby about his engagement with the philosophy of music, from Socrates, to Schopenhauer, and Bergson. We discuss Jack’s recent PCC class called The Philosophy of Music and the Attunement of the Soul and dive into the complex ideas of these thinkers regarding the transformative powers of music. Jack explains how the ancient Greek’s developed a complex set of tuning systems and alternative temperaments with po...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 37
Who was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music , Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of the leading lights of the New American Cinema. He created paintings that attempted to transcribe bebo...
Sep 03, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 124
While there is little doubt that women were active participants in medieval musical culture, their role has nevertheless been variously obfuscated, undermined, and overlooked, in large part because of the relative absence of named women composers. Work from recent decades has sought to re-insert women into our music-historical narratives, often by broadening their scopes and shifting away from strictly author-focused surveys. Female-Voice Song and Women's Musical Agency in the Middle Ages (Brill...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 199
Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed t...
Aug 31, 2023•57 min•Ep. 197
Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (Oxford UP, 2022) looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could f...
Aug 31, 2023•52 min•Ep. 198
The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. In Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness (Duke UP, 2023), musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-p...
Aug 30, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 196
K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called ‘gestural point choreography’ – front-driv...
Aug 28, 2023•38 min•Ep. 4
In this episode of High Theory, Brian Fairley tells us about Polyphony, a concept from music that describes multiple melodic lines sounding at once. The many voices of polyphony have an ancient and colonial history, which has reappeared in some key reverberations in twentieth century criticism and theory. In the conversation, we discuss several texts, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929); James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture The Poetics and Politics of ...
Aug 24, 2023•20 min•Ep. 127
Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free. Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America (Oxford UP, 2023) explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the ...
Aug 14, 2023•53 min•Ep. 195
In his new book B-Sides: Pop History Via Its Greatest B-Sides, 1917-2017 (Headpress, 2023), Andy Cowan explores a century of music b-sides. Pop music would be a different beast without the B-Side. Music history is riven with songs deemed throwaway that revolted against their lowly status and refused to be denied. Be it rock'n'roll's national anthem ('Rock Around The Clock'), disco's enduring game-changer ('I Feel Love') or hip-hop's most notorious dis track ('Hit 'Em Up'), all three started life...
Aug 04, 2023•49 min•Ep. 163
In Grebo! The Loud & Lousy Story of Gaye Bikers on Acid and Crazyhead (Headpress, 2021) Rich Deakin explores West Midlands 1980s, home to heavy metal. Black Sabbath and Judas Priest are household names, but over the smoking chimneys and factory yards something new and equally ugly forms... 'Grebo' was a media constructed music genre that even today sends a shudder down the spines of discerning music fans and critics. A homegrown proto-grunge -- counterpart to the likes of Butthole Surfers, M...
Jul 23, 2023•46 min•Ep. 162
Howard Fishman's T o Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse (Dutton, 2023) is a fascinating hybrid biography that weaves together Fishman's own odyssey of research with the surprising life story he uncovers. Connie Converse was a gifted songwriter whose music came to public notice more than fifty years after it was recorded. Her album How Sad, How Lovely has taken its place alongside albums by rediscovered artists like Karen Dalton, Kath Bloom, and Sibylle Baier. I...
Jul 22, 2023•54 min•Ep. 121
Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego (Billingsgate Media, 2023) is the untold story of a sleepy Navy town that became the unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their time. The late 60s arrival of Harry Partch -- hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum -- jump started a revolution that was as much social as it was musical, drawing...
Jul 09, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 194
Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. Future Imperfect: The Past Between My Fingers.. . (2021), Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events and moments recalled without a diary with the verification and sometimes undermining effects of ne...
Jul 02, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 145
In her book, Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023), Marie Arleth Skov examines the punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s. Through archival research, interviews, and an art historical analysis, Skov situates punk as an art movement. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art p...
Jun 30, 2023•38 min•Ep. 159
Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” ( Rolling Stone ) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” ( London Review Bookshop ) and "The definitive critical work." ( Evening Standard ). Author Michael Gray is recognized as a world authority on the ...
Jun 22, 2023•53 min•Ep. 193
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip...
Jun 12, 2023•40 min•Ep. 192
What are the latest developments in the sociology of the arts? In Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Arturo Rodríguez Morató, a Professor of Sociology and current Director of the CECUPS (Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society) at the University of Barcelona, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña , an Associate Professor of Sociology at Whitman College , bring together 12 leading researchers to present new empiric...
Jun 11, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 384
The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album. When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,” as Dylan puts it in “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—and something about that original recording led him to a studio in ...
Jun 11, 2023•58 min•Ep. 191
Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro ( Wesleyan University Press, 2022) tells the story of neofanfarrismo , an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Ill...
Jun 09, 2023•59 min•Ep. 21
In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous range of genres and artists while being staunchly committed to local independent art and media. In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone 's "Last Great Independent Radio" stations. The station projected a philosophy that prioritized suc...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 190
How can sociology help us understand art and music? In The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music: New Directions and New Discoveries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), the editor Lisa McCormick, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh , draws together the latest research in cultural sociology that examines art and music. Global in scope, and eclectic in choice of subjects and methods, the book is united by the shared approach of the strong programme in cultural sociology. As a resul...
May 28, 2023•43 min•Ep. 380
