Fall 2008

AMS 325 • Black Music and the Media

Course Description

This course will examine the complex relationship between Black music and the media in the United States from the 1920s to the present. While media exposure of Black music has created opportunities for Black artists and performaers, brought attention to Black cultural achievement and been a vehicle for political action and social advancement, it has also been a source of misrepresentation in an unequal society. We will interrogate this complex dynamic in relation to blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, funk and rap and hip hop and their representation in the news and entertainment media, as well as through marketing, promotional and advertising campaigns. Though the mass mediation of African-American music will be our primary subject, we will also devote some attention to the globalization of African popular music and the musical forms of the Black Diaspora. Required work will include a field project that promotes local black musicians or the history of black music at a local level.

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