Unedited] Focusing on R&B neo-soul singer D’Angelo’s 1999 album Voodoo, this article explores the relationship (both real and imagined) between African American popular music and Afro-Caribbean religion. While most songs on the album do not use traditional Caribbean rhythms, the album’s imagery appears to equate Voodoo’s blend of funk, soul, and gospel with Afro-Diasporic religious practices such as Santeria or Vodou. Not only do D’Angelo’s own statements about the album affirm this connection, but his fans also contribute valuable evidence supporting the link. Surveying the reception of Voodoo by music critics as well as hundreds of online customer reviews of the album via Amazon.com, I argue that D’Angelo’s listeners characterize the album as an inner-directed musical experience approximating spirit-possession. By consicously linking the repetitious, circular grooves of black popular music with the form and function of Afro-Diasporic religious traditions, D’Angelo and his fans testify to the value of black spirituality and offer a critique of the hypermasculinity and materialism pervading contemporary hip-hop and rap music. Voodoo refocuses our attention on the spiritual qualities of African American music that persist even in an age of mass-mediated global capitalism.
Around the beginning of the 20th century the codes for representing masculinity in opera began to change. This essay focuses on how the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry (for example, African American, Caribbean, Moorish, or African) and shows how masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. The first section examines Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) and focuses on a critical moment near the end of the opera that links orchestral developments in Italy at the end of the 19th century with the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. A broader overview considers four operas written in the first half of the 20th century: Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Britten's Peter Grimes (1945). Two of these operas (Wozzeck and Peter Grimes) feature white European title characters, while the other two feature African American protagonists.
Unedited] The conference took place 18–24 February, 2008. The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: Kam-Au AMEN, Entertainment and cultural enterprise management (RILM ref]2012-19744/ref]); Peter ASHBOURNE, From mento to ska and reggae to dancehall (RILM ref]2012-19730/ref]); Erna BRODBER, Reggae as black space (RILM ref]2012-19729/ref]); Louis CHUDE-SOKEI, Roots, diaspora and possible Africas (RILM ref]2012-19739/ref]); Brent CLOUGH, Oceanic reggae (RILM ref]2012-19741/ref]); Carolyn COOPER, Reggae studies at the University of the West Indies (RILM ref]2012-19743/ref]); Samuel Furé DAVIS, Reggae in Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean (RILM ref]2012-19733/ref]); Cheikh Ahmadou DIENG, Reggae griots in Francophone Africa (RILM ref]2012-19738/ref]); Teddy ISIMAT-MIRIN, Reggae in the French Caribbean (RILM ref]2012-19734/ref]); Ellen KOEHLINGS, Pete LILLY, The evolution of reggae in Europe with a focus on Germany (RILM ref]2012-19732/ref]); Amon Saba SAAKANA, The impact of Jamaican music in Britain (RILM ref]2012-19731/ref]); Roger STEFFENS, Reggae music in the bloodstream (RILM ref]2012-19736/ref]); Marvin Dale STERLING, Gender, class and race in Japanese dancehall culture (RILM ref]2012-19740/ref]); Michael E. VEAL, Dub: Electronic music and sound experimentation (RILM ref]2012-19742/ref]); Leonardo VIDIGAL, Reggae music documentaries in Brazil (RILM ref]2012-19735/ref]); Klive WALKER, The journey of reggae in Canada (RILM ref]2012-19737/ref]).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Unedited] Jazz is a music formed from a combination of influences. In its infancy, jazz was a melting pot of military brass bands, work songs, and field hollers of the United States slaves during the 19th c., European harmonies and forms, and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean. Later, the blues and the influence of Spanish and French Creoles with European classical training nudged jazz further along in its development. Jazz has always been a world-music in the sense that music from around the globe has been embraced and incorporated. This dictionary covers the history of jazz through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on significant jazz performers, band leaders, bands, venues, record labels, recordings, and the different styles of jazz.
Ake,David A., (Ed.And Intro.), Garrett,Charles, (Ed.And Intro.), and Goldmark,Daniel, (Ed.And Intro.)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
01/01; 2012
Published:
Berkeley: University of California Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: David AKE, Crossing the street: Rethinking jazz education (RILM ref]2012-05841/ref]); Tamar BARZEL, The praxis of composition-improvisation and the poetics of creative kinship (RILM ref]2012-05838/ref]); Jessica BISSETT PEREA, Voices from the jazz wilderness: Locating Pacific Northwest vocal ensembles within jazz education (RILM ref]2012-05840/ref]); Charles GARRETT, The humor of jazz (RILM ref]2012-05833/ref]); Daniel GOLDMARK, 'Slightly left of center': Atlantic Records and the problems of genre (RILM ref]2012-05837/ref]); John HOWLAND, Jazz with strings: Between jazz and the great American songbook (RILM ref]2012-05836/ref]); Loren Y. KAJIKAWA, The sound of struggle: Black revolutionary nationalism and Asian American jazz (RILM ref]2012-05839/ref]); Eric C. PORTER, Incorporation and distinction in jazz history and jazz historiography (RILM ref]2012-05831/ref]); Ken PROUTY, Creating boundaries in the virtual jazz community (RILM ref]2012-05834/ref]); Sherrie TUCKER, Deconstructing the jazz tradition: The subjectless subject of new jazz studies (RILM ref]2012-05842/ref]); Elijah WALD, Louis Armstrong loves Guy Lombardo (RILM ref]2012-05832/ref]); Christopher J. WASHBURNE, Latin jazz, Afro-Latin jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, Cubop, Caribbean jazz, jazz Latin, or just...jazz: The politics of locating an intercultural music (RILM ref]2012-05835/ref]).
Crossroads populate religious and folkloric beliefs all around the world. Stories of an intersection of dimensions, as well as of roads where a guardian-trickster deity awaits to carry human desires to the gods, are widely encountered in European, Caribbean, and West African lore (as well as the legends formed around blues and rock stars). The symbolism of the crossroads speaks directly to one's innate recognition of a charged metaphorical space; a space that is liminal, betwixt-and-between. This notion of the crossroads serves as inspiration for examining the relationship between U2's music and listeners' progressive political awareness—the marriage of critical consciousness and action for social justice and change. To this end, an in-depth study is carried out of six listeners' experiences at the potent crossroads of their developing progressive awareness and their encounters with U2's music.
Unedited] Blues scholarship has offered a number of interpretations for the haunted desperation of the souls of Delta blues musicians, their deals with the devil, and the magical acquisition of musical skill. The association of 1920s and 1930s blues musicians with the supernatural may have been fed by those rediscovered blues musicians sharing what their mid-20th c. white interlocutors wanted to hear, but they may also have resonated with a more metaphorical belief in the role of the supernatural. Robert Johnson’s diverse recordings, specifically “Crossroad blues,” “Preaching blues” and “If I dad possession over judgment day,” illuminate connections between blues and African Diaspora of the circum-Caribbean. The lyrical content, with its images of prayer and desperation, musical construction, with connections to common practices in religious musics in the circum-Caribbean, and ascribed primitivist elements in these songs suggest that Johnson’s invocation of the supernatural may also have been the metaphorical presentation of a widely known legend. Therefore, beliefs about spirituality in the blues, and the interconnection of blues and religion, have bases beyond religious or commercial sources.
The third album by the Clash, London calling captured the zeitgeist of its time with references to various domestic and international news items that had captured the attention of Joe Strummer (née John Mellor) and Mick Jones as they composed the songs. Many seek to represent the state of Britain in the late 1970s, where an inflation rate of 25 percent and high unemployment fueled anger at the government and sparked attacks on minorities who were blamed for taking jobs that might otherwise have employed Britons. The album tackles such issues as racial disharmony, police brutality, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and the sense of alienation felt by many working-class youths and contextualized these social ills in a broader international frame with references to similar political and social crises in Spain, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Unedited] During the second half of the 20th c., the Caribbean island of Barbados emerged as a key player in the creation and nurturing of Caribbean popular music. And, yet, despite its vital role in the popularization of tuk music, the rise of spouge, and the Barbadian contribution to and transformation of other Carribean music traditions, there is still relatively little sustained critical literature that discusses the various strands of the island’s music culture. This book provides a survey of the development of Barbadian popular music and entertainment culture by focusing on pivotal phenomena, artists, and movements in the evolution of Barbadian popular music and culture. It concentrates on transformations since 1980 and 2000 respectively, each of which marked the ushering in of new opportunities and challenges to the creation and dissemination of Barbadian popular music. It considers the telling roles played by the expanding influence of western popular culture, the Internet, post-dancehall and post-soca aesthetics, cyberculture, digital culture, and the subterranean lure of traditional culture. It includes analyses of selected artists, musical genres, and phenomena, such as Gabby, Rihanna, Jackie Opel, Alison Hinds, Rupee, Red Plastic Bag, Lil’ Rick, spouge, tuk, ringbang, gospel, dub/dancehall, calypso, soca, folk, alternative, hip hop, Crop Over, Jazz Festival, National Independence Festival of Creative Arts, BajanTube, party politics and entertainment, popular bands, music technology, the Internet and new frontiers of cultural expression.
