WGSS 29901 - Race, Gender and Popular Music

Course Credit: 1
RACE, GENDER AND POPULAR MUSIC This course provides the history of popular music since the 1970s, focusing primarily on the concepts of race, gender and to a lesser degree sexuality, to understand the emergence of sound cultures from the US, Caribbean, and Western Europe. We will begin the course by studying Funk, Soul, and R&B of the 1970s; the mixing techniques and sound system culture developed in Reggae (dub), and Disco. We will also discuss various aspects Hip-Hop culture, especially the DJ techniques of scratching and sampling to explore how Hip-Hop has shaped popular music since the 1970s. We will ask, for example: how has popular music functioned as one of the main channels of communication among the cultures of the Black/African diaspora? Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology. Prerequisite(s): WGSS-12000