Call for Participants: AMS/SMT Alternative-Format Joint Session on Hip-hop Studies

In the introduction to his 2004 book Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop, Joseph Schloss notes the relative absence of music studies:

“It does no disservice to previous work to say that [hip-hop studies] has tended to focus on certain areas (such as the influence of the cultural logic of late capitalism on urban identities, the representation of race in popular culture, etc.) to the exclusion of others (such as the specific aesthetic goals that artists have articulated). Nor is it a criticism to say that this is largely a result of its methodologies, which have, for the most part, been drawn from literary analysis. We must simply note that there are blank spaces and then set about to filling them in.”

While hip-hop studies has continued to grow into a formidable interdisciplinary force covering a wide range of repertoire from multiple disciplinary angles, the situation Schloss describes still persists 17 years later, and music studies remain relatively uncited in broader hip-hop scholarship. Since the early contributions of Robert Walser (1995) and Adam Krims (2000), a second generation of scholars have contributed to discussions of hip-hop and race (Kajikawa 2015), religion (Miyakawa 2005), flow (Adams 2009), postcolonialism (Rollefson 2017), and gender and sexuality (Kehrer 2017). The purpose of this proposed alternative-format session for the 2018 joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory is to present the plurality of current research in music theory and musicology that engages with a range of hip-hop topics, and additionally, to have a productive dialogue between participants on our role within the wider area studies and how we can better collaborate.

If the proposal is accepted, participants would need membership in either AMS or SMT at the time of joint meeting in San Antonio in November of 2018. While we envision that the session will comprise of multiple short (5-10 min) position papers or presentations of original research that focus on methodological issues, we are very much open to other ideas as well as variations in format.

Please submit the following to mohriner@gmail.com by the deadline of 15 December:
–100 word proposal.
–AMS and/or SMT affiliation/intended affiliation (and institutional affiliation, if any)
–3-5 Keywords or themes
–(optional) any other ideas for alternative format

Length of the panel proposed will be dependent on the cohesion of papers and direction that the session takes based on who applies. The aim in ‘crowdsourcing’ the session in this way is to try and get a wide range of perspectives from a diversity of backgrounds. Please note the session is subject to approval by the AMS and SMT committees.

We look forward to seeing you in San Antonio.

Sincerely,
Lauron Kehrer and Mitchell Ohriner, conveners