FDP New Faculty Colloquium: Caroline Polk O'Meara

The January 1982 cover of the New York Rocker featured Grandmaster Flash arm- in-arm with bassist Tina Weymouth, each holding a large boom box. Representing "punk rock," Weymouth, the bassist for eh Talking Heads and the Tom Tom Club, looks away from Flash and the camera, while hip-hop DJ Flash stares directly at the reader. In the early 1980s, downtown musicians and audiences of all kinds found in hip-hop the promise of an exciting new attitude towards making music, a radical rethinking of musical form. Looking for a new audience, hop-hoppers from New York's African American and Latino neighborhoods uptown had come to Lower Manhattan's thriving club scene. They influenced rock musicians, who wrote songs inspired by the rhythmic and vocal innovations of hip-hop. This talk explores the moment in the early 1980s represented by the New York Rocker cover, a moment when hip-hoppers from Uptown and the primarily white punk rockers from the Lower EAst Side came together to celebrate the new musical practices of hip-hop. I will focus particularly on the music of the Tom Tom Club.