Pop Convergence 2021

Black Music at its Interstices: From “Coon Songs” to Hip Hop (Room B: Oscillator)

The diverse topics presented on this panel explore the interstitial nature of Blackness, Black people, and Black sounds within popular music in the United States. Spanning from the 1890s, a key moment transition to the modern music industry, through the contemporary moment—as we find ourselves in a continuous state of political, cultural, and technological flux— each of the authors provide analyses and raise questions that unsettle normalized understandings of what is at stake in popular music making. From the “coon song” craze of the 1890s, to early 20th- century Black Pentecostal revival circuits, and culminating in 1970s soul (Minnie Riperton) and contemporary R&B/hip hop (and conceptions of the “ho” figure), we consider the following questions: how were Black children and adolescents (girls, in particular) formative and formed by Black Pentecostal revival circuits during the Great Migration?; how might sampling elicit resistance and temporality through its mechanisms of performance and improvisation?; how do the affective logics of horror, desire, and pleasure impact the spectatorial conceptualization of the ho figure’s corporeality and ontology?; and finally, how did the invention and employment of early recording technologies that coincided with the explosion of the “coon song” shape the making of the commercial music industry in its infancy?
                                   
  The paper order will be: Dromgoole, Fekade, Ibaorimi, and Morrison.