The Two O'Clock Vibe": Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness In and Out of Its Everyday Context

"The Two O'Clock Vibe": Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness in and out of Its EverydayContextAuthor(s): Kyra D. GauntSource: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 372-397Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600895 .

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American Musics

"The Two O'Clock Vibe": Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness In and Out of Its Everyday Context

Kyra D. Gaunt

The field and the people who make music in the everyday are not out there, beyond the classroom, in ethnomusicology courses. The people we study and the experiences we write about also occupy our classrooms as students and faculty. Learning and writing about musical experience in classrooms, and about the ethnic and social communities therein, is as critical to the study of music, culture, and social identity as more conventional studies of the Balinese learning to play gamelan or female jazz musicians in the Big Apple.

This essay describes the phenomenological encounters that shape learning about African American popular music in a course where the majority of participants were African American. The social and musical interactions discussed are taken from those I observed and participated in along with my students in a black popular music course offered at the University of Virginia (1996-99). Touching on intellectual issues many who teach popular culture face everyday, the essay is a critique of the ways race, gender, and embodiment affect how we teach and learn African American musical culture in academic settings and examines dimensions we often overlook or take for granted. Narration and strategies from creative nonfiction writing complement my academic prose1 to direct readers' attention to concerns about home turf (how and what we teach as music), warring tribes (the politics of black musical aesthetics, identity, and representation), and the social construction of embodied musical language when dealing with African American popular music such as hip-hop.2 This musical ethnography not only describes my classroom, a cultural context, it also serves as a form of critique about social relations and matters of racial and gender difference that arise in popular music classrooms.

Music 208, "African American Popular Performance," was a medium-large lecture course offered at the University of Virginia devoted to understanding hip-hop as music and as an extension of earlier African American traditions. To truly understand hip-hop, one must

The Musical Quarterly 86(3), Fall 2002, pp. 372-397; doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdg017 ? 2004 Oxford University Press 372



Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness 373

consider the individual and communal ways DJing and dancing, rather than MCing (rapping), serve as the foundation of its musical aesthetics. The MC (master of ceremony), also known as emcee or microphone checker, is the primary subject of media attention. But even MCs' style is significantly influenced by the compositional and improvisational techniques associated with mixing prerecorded and found sounds. The DJ's equipment-two turntables, a mixing board, and a mike-serves as the basis not only for MCing, but for break-dancing, human beat-boxing (mouthed percussion), and digital sampling (a high-tech version of DJ turntable aesthetics).

Students in Music 208 participated in a range of everyday popular practices shared (in unequal ways) by boys and girls, men and women; everyday practices that the African American composer-whether a corn shucker or a preacher, a protester or a dancer, a singer or a DJ- learns to exploit when making music in or for social occasions. From this students can explore the communal ethics of call-and-response, improvi- sation, and embodied languaging that sustain black musical cultures.

Once, after spending an entire class session literally having a dance party, emulating one of the key phenomenological experiences that contributes to and justifies belief in a communal African American musical and nonmusical identity, two female class members tagged their final project "the two o'clock vibe." Ever since I've used the tag to refer to Music 208 and the live, in-class party planned each semester. Though not a new term, "vibe" re-emerged as a popular colloquial expression among African American youth and young adults beginning in the 1980s. By 1992 the emerging recording artist R. Kelly had an urban hit in a new style known as "new jack swing" titled "She's Got That Vibe" (Jive Records), and by 1993 Vibe magazine had been launched, the brainchild of the music mogul Quincy Jones, who teamed up with Time Warer to cover the traditionally black music genres that Rolling Stone often overlooked (http:// www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/1999/april/ profile.html). "Vibe" remains a key term in youth cultural expression associated with hip-hop.

As was customary, I hired an experienced DJ from among the student population to spin records for our afternoon event. According to the anthropologist Michael Jackson (not to be confused with the pop icon), "the phenomenological method involves 'placing in brackets' or 'setting aside' questions concerning the rational, ontological, or objective status of ideas and beliefs in order to fully describe and do justice to the ways in which people actually live, experience, and use them."3 This was the goal of the course and the party.

Academic courses about black music tend to undo the concept of music as or in culture, and thus sustain the common fallacy that black



374 The Musical Quarterly

people are solely by nature musical. While multiculturalism requires de- partments and schools of music to be more inclusive of diverse musics, experiencing that difference has merely involved exposing students to a new body of literature (complemented by sound and video recordings) that is often free and devoid of embodying the African American practices that supply black music cultures-with the contested and subjective ways of being, behaving, thinking, and feeling difference as a person of African descent in American culture and society. Although courses devoted to jazz or popular music that discuss rhythm and blues as a precursor to rock and roll or hip-hop as a postmodern phenomenon are commendable, this does not precipitate the kind of social change some scholars and many African Americans desire in representing difference or otherness in the academy.

As the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, and the cultural critic bell hooks urged in previous decades (to paraphrase John Gennari),4 the academy cannot merely open itself up to the "difference" of black music or literature by black scholars, it must also find not-so-usual ways, new habits, to teach students how African American women and men experience that difference. The evidence of difference lies not in the body of reading and listening to music, nor even in learning how to play or sing a blue note in private lessons or academic ensembles, per se. This difference-shaped by his- torical inequalities of race, gender, and class-is an embodied difference inhabited and passed down differently than is Western art music or jazz as classical music.

We must learn to inhabit moments of this difference or run the risk of erasing (de-racing and de-gendering) black musical experience. If students are not held accountable for learning black cultural aesthetics, such as learning to embody multiple expressions of time (polyrhythms, claves, syncopation, and swing) and to improvise both sound and movement simultaneously, students (as well as scholars) will not appreciate how African American ways of being musical are learned. Without learning how African American musical discourse and expression are products of social practice, we sustain the racism that produces perceived ethnic difference in music, whether perceiving musical blackness or European classical musicianship.

Setting the Scene of Social Practice

At the University of Virginia, a predominately white public university situated between two cities (Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Vir- ginia) with large African American populations, undergraduates are rel- atively familiar with the mediated sounds and images of black popular




music-soul, R & B, reggae, hip-hop, and gospel. Attracted in ambivalent ways to African Americans and their music and dance, many undergraduates are oblivious to the existence of an alternative contemporary culture of black music making, one that is not as popular or widely broadcast and marketed to the American public.

This alternative black popular culture precedes playlists on urban radio, video rotations on Viacom-owned MTV and BET, or slick ad campaigns by Burger King, the Gap, or Budweiser that re-deploy black- inflected music and language from the past with and without black people.5 The sounds of blackness on commercial television and radio eclipse the everyday music making of African Americans. They significantly privilege the music without its African American actors just as prime-time sitcoms, one of the prevailing visual representations of urban blackness since the 1970s, have increasingly transmitted black language, dress, and embodied style without its prime-time people (a point Spike Lee's film Bamboozled drives home). This mode of sonic and visual representation has the potential to disenfranchise African Americans from the value(s) of their own popular music cultures-perhaps this is the legacy of blackface minstrelsy as mass entertainment.

In the face of such mass media, I asked myself how students can learn about the translocal musical phenomena shared by African Ameri- cans themselves. Here I mean the popular musical activities shared during children's musical games, house parties, or in black public venues that cut across the diverse ethnic and class identifications that contribute to an African American culture. If the contemporary, everyday culture of African Americans is but partially glimpsed, is there another route to accessing this alternative culture in the academic classroom to lessen the gap (the "participatory discrepancies," if you will) that is per- petrated by commercial popular media?6

Convinced that the bulk of African Americans' social discourse could be lived or, at the very least, approximated in the classroom, I armed myself with our oral and the kinetic expression, the gendered interactions we express through movement, and the sexually coded dialec- tics of rhythm and embodiment that produce a subjective identification with blackness or African American culture to lessen the participant discrepancies between loving black music and living blackness in the United States.

At the University of Virginia, black dance parties ordinarily were held in the Student Activities Building near the stadium parking lot or in houses owned and rented from white fraternities on Rugby Road. Black students were integrated into the College of Arts and Sciences in 1961, decades after most white fraternities were invested in the multiroomed southern mansions adjacent to the university grounds on




Rugby Road. Black public spaces exist in the local community; however, African American students at the University of Virginia are unlikely to have any interactions with the local community of working-class African Americans who party at community centers or the local Elks Clubhouse quietly tucked into Charlotteville's historic downtown mall.

Dancing at black students' parties involves sexually coded behavior to music and lyrics that typically suggest heterosexual relationships, though interactions also occur among circles of women. Given the dimly lit and subversive nature of dancing at black parties, the idea of having a party at two o'clock in the afternoon, as part of an academic course, is an unusual and highly transgressive act for black and nonblack students. It upsets the objective and proscribed roles of and relationships between the teacher and student, disrupts the ideal of individual learning and merit, and blurs the apparent divide between lived and academic experience, auditor and practitioner. College life reinforces the false and paral- lel dichotomies associated with metaphors about night and day, black and white, male and female.

Twice a week at two o'clock, for seventy-five minutes, Music 208 tries to emulate the black experiences of a late night college party, among other practices, where "gettin' down" (social dancing) instead of getting drunk (social intoxication) on Rubgy Road reigns supreme.

Bringing the Noise to Old Cabell Hall

When I first started offering Music 208 in the fall of 1996, it was known as "Black Popular Music." By the spring of 1999, it appeared in the course directory as "African American Popular Performance." The evolution of the title was due to several concerns.

First, in the age of multiculturalism and anti-affirmative action sen- timent among whites and blacks at the University of Virginia, students tended to associate "black" with the misconception of race as skin color, so I adopted the term "African American." Second, the lived experiences shared among people identified as African American-the communal language, memory, and behavior, the generational values and conflicts, the terror of racism-were not evoked by the word "black" as skin color. As the white South African Rose-Lee Goldberg has written: "It's like Americans can't get beyond the slave complex-slavery cut off black culture from serious white consideration. Yes, there are a couple of pop venues for white appreciation of black culture [in the United States], but in the end there is no real curiosity [about the culture itself]."7 Despite the presence of mass media, commercial representa-




tions of black people and their music are read quite differently in African American communities. The multicultural classroom offers a unique opportunity to stimulate curiosity, to begin to precipitate a critical consideration of the phenomenology of African American experience unknown to many other students.

While "popular music" has been a widespread designation for academic courses devoted to the vernacular music of the "vulgar" or common folk, or the lower classes (cf. The Oxford English Dictionary), in public cultures it has been associated with a crass market-driven economy of music targeting youth culture, consumable gear, and the highest-selling recording artists and labels. I did not want to mislead prospective students shopping for such a course. By tinkering with its title, I wanted students to at least ask themselves what Music 208 was or was not about.

Faced with the liberty of teaching one of the first music courses devoted entirely to hip-hop culture at a university founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, I was confronted with certain dilemmas as an ethnomusicologist interested in race, gender, and musical socialization in a

place not only where race and gender matter, but also where history is alive. Discovering a hidden slave burial marker on the grounds forces a postcolonial subject of African descent to face the colonial past that is my workplace, a place several African American faculty irreverently call "T. J.'s plantation" or "Uncle Tom's Place."

As the architect of the Declaration of Independence and a major landowner and holder of African slaves who many believe loved and had children with Sally Hemings (one of his slaves and his wife's half sister), the contradictions of the way Jefferson's life was remembered juxtaposed my pedagogical interests.8 At its worst, his legacy was an affront to the innovations of black music making, to the very soul of black folks. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson argued that whites were cultured, refined, and blacks were inhuman, primitive. At its best, he penned the language of democracy that Martin Luther King Jr. once quoted: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal." As the course outgrew the restrictions of an ordinary classroom, the contradictions of Jefferson's life, among them race, place, equal- ity, and privilege, would be met head on when Music 208 began to meet on the stage of the historic Old Cabell Hall auditorium. Designed by the architect Stanford White (and surely built by the hands of ex-slaves) in 1898, the auditorium seated nearly nine hundred.

In the evenings Old Cabell was used for concert performances, student recitals, and university events. By day it doubled as a lecture hall for courses in music, history, and anthropology, among others. The acoustic features of the hall were originally designed to meet the natural




voices of lecturers (Abraham Lincoln once gave an address there). No one ever imagined Old Cabell catering to the "noise" produced by a twentieth-century innovation where turntables and stereo playback sys- tems, "the everyday technology of consumption," were redefined primarily by self-taught black youth as "an instrument with which music can be produced."9 DJs spun records on "the wheels of steel" while MCs checked the mike ("one, two, one, two") with sounds blasting a "soul sonic force of bass" heavy enough to break the woofers of your sound system. And woofers we did break once, to the chagrin of my eighteenth- century-specialist colleague who monitored the hall. Playing recordings of Beethoven for music appreciation never demanded such volume.

On the back wall of the stage hung a replica of The School of Athens completed by Raphael in 1510, which is on display in the Vatican. The university's slightly smaller version of the 400-square-foot mural, with its sandal-footed philosophers, European men draped in chitons, was created in 1902.10 For those who teach contemporary African music, feminist musicology, or jazz in the hall, and for those whose identities represent a non-European and nonmale past at the University of Virginia, the replica of The School of Athens is a continuous reminder of the ways Europe and whiteness loom over our present musicological pursuits.

While the setting of Music 208 raised certain concerns, students' perception of their relationship to hip-hop was another. The hip-hop experience I had in mind would differ from what students experienced on BET or read in popular magazines such as the Source or Vibe. Though I am African American, students from various backgrounds, including my own, do not perceive hip-hop to be the music of a thirtysomething black woman from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. (rather than the South Bronx, its place of origin), of a woman wielding a Ph.D. instead of MC or DJ credentials. Popular representations of hip-hop culture in mainstream and alternative media since the 1990s have allied hip-hop with youthfulness, predominately male icons, and an "authentic" underground (antiacademic, read "mainstream") mentality known as "keepin' it real."

In order to gain some "props" or legitimacy, I politicized these tensions in a poetic verse or rap that has become part of my first lecture. This allowed me to position myself within the hip-hop aesthetic by localizing popular rhymes and quoting familiar hooks I had learned from the subculture of black parties and dances during graduate school at the University of Michigan. I also imitated familiar gestures to connect the moment to the kinetic culture of African Americans and hip-hop. Per- haps to conquer my own fears of acceptance, I rapped about giving the first hip-hop course offered at Virginia. I figuratively wrapped myself in




hip-hop from start to finish, from head to toe. I inspired vocal interjec- tions (Hoooo!) and choral responses from songs by L. L. Cool J ("Your jingling baby / Go 'head baby") from the black members of the crowd and others who recognized the localizing aesthetics of hip-hop:

Hip-hop's come to the Lawn: kn'a'- mean?11 The Central Grounds No more margins to front or center African American Popular Performance is the name of this record

From Eileen Southern to Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.,12 black musicologists and others write of the disintegration between the audience and the perform- ers. There I was enacting what Paul Gilroy called a "valuable intersubjective resource," the "ethics of antiphony." He writes, "The use of music provides the most important locations" in which "the relationship of identity is enacted in the way that the performer dissolves into the crowd."13 I concluded in my rap:

I'm truly professin' hip-hop I am truly a professor of hip-hop That don't mean I know everything Just means I got a ... jo-b to represent.

My job included asking students to relinquish their gaze on the replica of The School of Athens and join me onstage with chairs we bor- rowed from the orchestra. I wanted to further lessen the divide between teacher and student, performer and audience. The students needed to learn to practice and think from the space reserved for talented and important folk.14 The average non-music major was intimidated by the idea of performing on that stage for a grade, not to mention being graded on musical blackness in a department dominated by Western art music.

Gender and Community: Learning Black Musical Identity from Girls' Play

In the class, before any party can be emulated, I problematize the politics of identity-ethnicity, gender, and sexuality-by exploiting our own embodiment, our own modes of representing difference within the class. Accepting that the course is devoted to hip-hop, most students do not anticipate learning about hip-hop from black female culture; learning about "his-story" through "her-body," so to speak. I wanted to inspire a




new kind of critical thinking that fostered an appreciation for hip-hop as musical relationships between gendered sounds and bodies and as an outgrowth of the everyday gendered musical phenomena that African American girls also experience dialectically with commercial music media produced in many cases by male artists.

I prepare non-majors to appreciate the elements of music and black musical aesthetics by immediately teaching them how to be musical through an embodied formula, an oral-kinetic etude, that I developed based on the practice of black girls' hand-clapping games and cheers.15 Once they master the etude, or lesson in black musical style, called "Check One," we analyze the now embodied formula to learn how to understand the internal as well as communal sensibilities of melody, black linguistics, rhythm, meter, and texture (polyphonic gestures and call-and-response), that signify sex, gender relations, racial differences, and sexuality.

Making use of black girls' play as a means to learning about hip- hop seems peculiar given the increasing masculinization of blackness found in public culture throughout the twentieth century.16 Performing ethnic and gendered ways of being black as a collective experience is a critical dimension of the phenomenological learning process I am culti- vating. Students should begin to ask themselves why they are able to learn so much about hip-hop as music, and about black music making in general, from black girls' games, and why hip-hop as a commercial phenomenon is so sexist and misogynist.

Let me discuss the demographics of Music 208 for a moment. African Americans usually represented at least 40 percent of the class, but the rest of the demographics included a mix of national and international students: up to 40 percent were white American and the remain- ing 20 percent was made up of Latino or Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and international students from Nigeria, Turkey, Ivory Coast, Russia, Korea, and Jamaica.

In order to bring forth the diversity not only of the class participants, but also of our different musical experiences and heritage, the first homework assignment invited students to creatively craft and play with an autobiography to discover their interactions with black music and, more importantly, African American people. Their autobiography could take the form of poetry, informal prose, a video or audio narrative, or hypertext with sound files on their own Web site. A key requirement of the assignment was that each student include a brief interview (usually by phone or e-mail) with an elder member of her or his family or an intimate family friend about their interactions with and observations of African American people and their music. The interviewee had to be at least ten years older than the student.




Initially, students from racially segregated backgrounds in the United States or students from other nations such as Russia assume their elders will have nothing (or nothing good) to say about black people or their music. To their surprise (and mine initially), they returned with previously unknown and revealing stories, insightful quotes, and occasionally taped interviews. They shared stories of a mother once in love with Motown records aired on the radio of an army base in Russia; a conservative churchgoing father who was a disc jockey while a student at a historically black college; a white hippie mother who remembered doing the bump (a black dance from the 1970s where partrners' hips kissed on beats two and four) with her kids, and a mother, a black Trinidadian immigrant to the United States, who recalled her first West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. Stories that come from the students' own families teach them the intra- and international movement of African Americans and the global dissemination of recorded and live music. Students also discovered tales of men and women from previous generations from various nonblack backgrounds who crossed the barriers of racist social segregation at home and abroad. The phenomenon of diversity and border crossing did not begin with their own hip-hop and X generations, as many students assumed.

It is critical for students to discover through autoethnographic in- quiry, from their kith and kin, that the discussion of blackness can begin at home as opposed to in the multicultural classroom, where black students are designated the authentic and often sole bearers of experience with difference. Thus, students can begin to deconstruct the imagined and projected borders of their identity relative to blackness while they simultaneously learn to question the limitations of their previous educa- tion and their preconceptions about black music in America and black people in the world.

In the experiential world of Music 208, what is perceived to be a norm about black people and their musical ability is bound to be disrupted by the presence of a black person who does not have rhythm or loves rock more than R & B; by a white male who grew up rapping or break-dancing in the suburbs; by an Asian male who is a house DJ (that is, one who plays a black style of club music); by a black female who rhymes better than the males in the class; or by a white female who crafts beats digitally. As the anthropologist Michael Jackson writes in Things as They Are:

Any theory of culture, habitus or lifeworld must include an account of those moments in social life when the customary, given, habitual, and normal is disrupted, flouted, suspended, and negated. At such moments, crisis transforms the world from an apparently fixed and finished set of rules into a repertoire of possibilities.17




Such crises do not disrupt the veracity of the translocal phenomenon of black musical experience. The significant presence of African American students in a classroom at the University of Virginia signals a difference from the norm and consequently effects a meaningful shift in the kinds of interactions that will emerge. Black students, who represent less than 10 percent of the undergraduate population, have the opportunity to sincerely act "black," to be as they are around African Ameri- cans, which happens chiefly outside the classroom. Too often black behavior and linguistics are relegated to the informal spaces of the dining hall (inspiring complaints from white students about "self-segregation") or what is known as the B.B.S. (the "black bus stop"). The B.B.S. is a bus stop at the University of Virginia where black students hang out and share information about the next party, about the time of the next Black Student Union meeting, about who is dating or sleeping with whom, and about other communal issues confronting the African American community on grounds, regionally, and nationally. It is this kind of local knowledge that many nonblack students discover for the first time in Music 208.

The Two O'Clock Vibe: The Cultural Politics of DJing and Dancing

A live, in-class performance allowed students to witness DJ practice and interaction while we emulated one of the primary contexts in which DJs thrive-a party. In previous semesters, I relied on DJ Cobalt 60 or Pete Colot, a white DJ. Pete's whiteness was rarely an issue among the hard- core, predominately black and male, hip-hop heads at Virginia. At the time, Pete was considered the resident DJ of choice among the few student DJs who spun hip-hop. He DJed at the local club that featured hip- hop (Tokyo Rose, a Japanese restaurant offering alternative music nightly), and he served as the house DJ for a student-run event known as Lyrics Cafe, a weekly venue for MCs to rap and freestyle.

Pete and I had an unspoken agreement that he would visit Music 208 each semester as long as his schedule was open. I paid him a small fee for his time, and he would bring along members of the African American crew of MCs known as Rising Sun. I was delighted when he brought Toure to class. Toure went by the pseudonym Kobayashi. I had witnessed Kobayashi perform lightning-fast nonstop freestyle (extempo- rizing rhymes without written aid), creating rich lyrical narratives out of the moment-to-moment chaos as it happened.

As fate would have it, Toure and Pete had a required engineering course one semester, and I had to find replacements. I scouted for a black




female MC I had witnessed at Lyrics Cafe one evening. The Lyrics Caf6 was in the campus eatery. Black male MCs dominated the scene (with less than a handful of nonblack males), despite the fact that the student event was run by two black women at the time. The previous semester I had seen this MC rhyme; she was introduced simply as Jennifer. Unlike the regular participants at Lyrics Cafe, Jennifer was not a student. She worked at the smoothie counter next to the Lyrics Caf6 stage, and she was extraordinary. She fearlessly rocked the house, worked the crowd, and rhymed more furiously than the hordes of brothers who claimed to be MCs at Lyrics Cafe. She was among the best I had heard in the region -the clarity of her diction matched the intense flow of her rhymes. She lit up in front of an audience. I went to the dining facility to entice Jen- nifer to sit in on Music 208, but she worked days and could not afford to take the time off. This called my attention to the socioeconomic divisions among black hip-hop heads of the same age from Charlottesville versus the university. The town-gown divide had reared its ugly head.

Finding no MCs, I decided to fall back on social dancing as an ac- companiment to the DJing, for I had a DJ in mind. I informed the class by the second week of the semester of the date and time of our upcoming party. The party would feature a DJ, Kreamy, also known as Kareem Maddison, a black Trinidadian student from Brooklyn who was enrolled as a member of the class. I could not pay him since he was part of the course, but I told him I could provide a mike and speakers. All he needed to do was bring his DJ equipment, which he lugged by car from his dorm room to Old Cabell: two Technics SP-1200 turntables, a mixing board, a mike, and two crates full of popular LP discs, including the essential go-go style for the university crowd from the Washington, D.C., area. A former Music 208 student had recommended Kareem. But when we were first introduced, he was a first-year student who had not yet developed a reputation among his peers. While I was excited to learn of another DJ, I had no sense of how "creamy" (or smooth) a DJ he was. So I asked him to sit in with Pete in the spring of 1998.

Previous semesters, I had invited an additional DJ to show off his novice skills alongside an experienced DJ. Multiple DJs were a practical way to compare and contrast the evolution of the skills required to master the innovative tradition of spinning, selecting, and cutting beats out of recorded vinyl. Once they witnessed it, awed students earned a new- found respect for the labor and virtuosity involved in weaving musical beats together into a mix. When Kareem opened for the more experienced Pete or DJ Cobalt 60, I was impressed with his skills. He practically upstaged Pete's subsequent performance of demonstrating various DJ techniques such as scratching, cutting, blending, mixing, and juggling beats. After that class, I noticed a difference. Whenever Pete had DJed




for Music 208, he inspired little or no social dancing. Kareem, on his first occasion, which lasted just five minutes, had students on their feet with his irresistible grooves.

This comparison is not about skin-color difference, but about differences in black and white cultural experiences in hip-hop. Pete was a deft, creative mixer of beats. But Pete was not familiar with the vocabu- lary, syntax, and styles of mixing associated with playing at parties. He was an MC's DJ, and he himself was not a dancer. It became apparent that Pete was not in sync with the dance aesthetics expressed by black class members, and he seemed oblivious to the discrepancy between inspiring nodding heads and inspiring dancing. He would derail the "sacred" requirement of keeping the beat flowing from one record to another. His performance caused dancers to stop in the middle of their tracks to catch the new downbeat his "mistake" would make. There is nothing worse at a black party than feeling out of phase with the music because the DJ or you yourself as a dancer lose the metronomic flow of time. This kind of rhythmic disruption happens at an actual party (with a good DJ) when someone dancing or passing by the DJ accidentally bumps into the table supporting his equipment. The turtable needle stutters in the groove of the record, the music skips, and the dancers as well as the DJ will vocally express their displeasure and seek out the of- fender. The best party DJs keep the house rocking with a nonstop groove through the latest hits using the turntable's pitch control in conjunction with the perfect beat selection of their records.

Party DJs have to keep up with the latest music and dance styles and are often dancers themselves (as was Kareem), not unlike the relationship between master drummers and dancers in many African drum traditions. Puff Daddy started out as a party DJ in New York City, and his style as a producer of record-breaking hip-hop singles reflects this aesthetic. Unlike Pete, Kareem moved the crowd by his ability to be in dialogue with the dancers through his selection of LPs and choice of styles. This revealed that he was more or less a member of the social community of black dancers and that he had played for a lot of parties. I acknowledge this racial and cultural difference to students whenever possible to distinguish between racist assumptions and racial or cultural differences. The contrast also points to a phenomenological reality that students might not gather from experiencing hip-hop outside of live contexts; there are several kinds of DJs in hip-hop, different DJs for different settings and needs.

As DJ Kreamy, now serving as the experienced DJ, deftly displayed his techniques for rockin' a party, the two o'clock vibe was in full effect. In the spotlight, Kareem described how we would "drop some science" (perform his aesthetic skills) on the crowd. He spoke over the microphone:




I thought I'd do a demonstration of the different DJ techniques, but first know there are several kinds of DJs.... I'm a party DJ. So I'm gonna give you a five-minute sample of what a party would be like. I'm gonna do some hip-hop and a little dancehall because I'm from the Caribbean. That's where a lot of DJ practice comes from.

The students in the class had already discovered in a reading by Robert Farris Thompson that at least five different ethnic groups from the African diaspora-Afro-Jamaicans, English-speaking blacks from Barba- dos, Puerto Ricans, Afro-Cubans, and North American blacks-had contributed to the formation of hip-hop.18 But reading this does not prepare them for knowing how to dance socially, not just as individuals, to Kareem's smooth beats.

Students in a music course, non-majors or majors, are never pre- pared for partying in the classroom. While DJ Kreamy spun his web from recorded songs, students clumsily followed my lead to dance. I invited them to experience and enter into the "life-making womb" or channel of experience known as a Soul Train line.19 Spotting their reluctance, I suggested they travel across the stage, down the center of the two lines, in groups of two or three dancers. This did not lessen their agony. A Soul Train line may seem life-giving to those conditioned to respond to it, but I watched the students awkwardly stagger down the center of the lines, clueless about the potential energy they could create. Their social

jitters and the unfamiliarity of dancing in an academic course made them timid and uncomfortable. Yet I still felt this was an effective way for students to discover the social complexities of black musical experience, to experience musical participation differently than they perhaps experienced it at Rugby Road parties or at karaoke gatherings.

Despite the unusual setting and time of day, several black participants were actually feeling the vibe, particularly a couple of black women. The two were about five feet, seven inches tall, with similar slender frames but with distinct differences. Mari was caramel-complexioned with long, straightened auburn-brown hair. Julie was a dark-chocolate

Nigerian sister with tresses of synthetic black hair. They were showing off-challenging each other's motional skills, calling up every dance

they could remember. They were embodying the playful nature of several

popular dances through their apparent friendship, a significant feature of black dance culture.

DJ Kreamy then threw on one of Mari and Julie's favorite jams, and

they immediately "got off" (strutting and stalking the stage-turned- dance-floor) to the ever-fresh, two-year-old sounds of a party song from 1996, the rapper Lil Kim's "Crush on You." Next, DJ Kreamy treated the crowd to the newly released underground version of Jay-Z's "Jigga My




Nigga" (the single was not officially released until 1999). Mari and Julie bounced to the new groove available exclusively on vinyl, heard locally on the radio program "The Boombox" (WNRN-FM, Charlottesville) and surely downloadable through the new phenomenon called Napster. Later, the ladies lip-synched the 1998 R & B duet "The Boy Is Mine," performed by R & B/pop icons Brandy and Monica. The single was jointly released on each artist's solo album-an unusual collaboration given their separate record labels, Atlantic (owned by Warner Music Group, a division of AOL Time Warner) and Arista (owned by BMG).

As the dynamic duo continued, I spontaneously exclaimed "Look! It's Monica and Brandy!" and folks doubled up in laughter because the women truly resembled the stars. Others slowly joined in the dance. A couple of brothers (black men) nodded their heads and subtly swayed their hips to the beat. Occasionally they would bust a move (dance out- right) mocking their behavior elsewhere before retreating into their more nonchalant posing. No matter, the ice had been broken.

With momentum building, I enticed one of the brothers to dance with me. I had the power to do it, risky as it was. In a split second I won- dered if he might show stuff we really do on the dance floor or not, intimidated by my authority or perhaps out of respect for me as the teacher. He might show off too much, breaking the sexual and social codes that separate day from night, white musical values from black, classroom decorum from party ecstasy. He could even threaten my authority while simultaneously bolstering his own in the eyes of other students. (And what would my colleagues think!) Because I believed in the possibilities of sharing the meaningfulness and spontaneity of the culture African Americans themselves experience, including the social contests of gendered relations, I went ahead with it. As George Marcus and Michael Fischer argue under the heading "Conveying Other Cultural Experience":

Focusing on the person, the self, and the emotions-all topics difficult to probe in traditional ethnographic frameworks-is a way of getting to the level at which cultural differences are most deeply rooted; in feelings and in complex indigenous reflections about the nature of persons and social relationships.20

Brother-man was tall, slender, and attractive, with rich brown skin. He hailed from Jamaica via Brooklyn, New York-a Caribbean enclave. He was giving me the cultural goods as well as the sexy looks. We moved together in a fashion consistent with erotic styles of dancing in Caribbean culture as well as those among postwar African Americans rooted here in the United States. Eroticism is a common feature of many dance




traditions, though it is rarely mentioned in literature discussing the in- separability of music and dance in Africa and the African diaspora.21 Learning what such eroticism means and how it is used in musical relationships is imperative, for it can counter assumptions that black dance leads to the act of sex. Eroticism in black dance contributes to the complex embodied codes of musical and social discourse used to perform gender, sexual identity, ethnic affiliation, power, and, most significant, an ethnic musical identity (barring two left feet). One's embodied prowess is laced with erotic or sensual codes of behavior that may obvi- ously be about sexual desire and/or imply other richly meaningful and mundane interpretations.

Age or maturity does not directly define the quality or level of one's musical expression of sexuality. In black cultures, sophisticated dancing involving codes of sexuality appears among young children as well as adults of all ages. Within their first ten to fifteen years, children may have learned dozens of stylized dances, dances that will emerge and be remembered in social performances at home and in the public sphere as accompaniments to specific styles of music (i.e., hip-hop or R & B) or particular songs.22 Dance, therefore, becomes a vehicle for expressing connectedness to the ethnic group. Remembering new and old styles of dancing is a badge of one's various affiliations within the community and/or the diaspora.

Things were getting too hot to handle for me. I had to find a way to stop, to end the dance, because it felt like Brother-man was trying to flip the script-to reverse the structures of power where my black(female)ness is upset by his black(male)ness. We were at the proverbial crossroads.

In hindsight, I wonder. Would this have happened with a white male student? Probably not. Would things be different if the script of our gender roles were flipped-a male teacher and a female student? Definitely. The question remains as to how. Would I have been as threatened by a black male who was expressing homosexual behaviors of the likes of Ru Paul (a black drag queen and pop icon) as opposed to the heterosexual eroticism of the likes of Buju Banton (a Jamaican dancehall artist)? Absolutely not. Brother-man had threatened my personal sensi- bility as a black woman in a position of power. I had to stop.

I played it off by laughing suddenly (as if we were having so much fun that I lost my concentration). I fell away from the dance, doubled over in a fit of laughter, realizing the class period had nearly expired.

However tense the situation was, this kind of complex phenomenological witnessing, participating, and sensing in a social setting is irre- placeable. It inspires spontaneous performances of the social codes found




in the everyday, including amazement, unique styles of shouting and loud talking, and styles of commentary expressed through patterns of handclapping (i.e., double-time). As Brother-man and I were getting into the dance, other students were egging on our embodied dialogics of gender relations. All this is vital to experiencing musical blackness.

By the end of class, we had all danced hard, warming up to and fully experiencing the musical pleasures and curious danced tensions of a black party. We were exhilarated, perspiring, and out of breath. As everyone was leaving, a black woman came up to me saying she had so much fun that she had to go and freshen up before her three-thirty biol- ogy lab. Working up a sweat is the biological phenomenology James Brown is talking about when he sings "make it funky," and this is a lesson you just cannot teach. It's gotta happen.

New Jack Pedagogy

After witnessing the final performances of Music 208 one semester, John Gennari, then a visiting postdoctoral fellow writing at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, characterized my style of teaching and learning "new jack pedagogy." His reference was not lost on me; new jack swing-an emergent style of black popular music and dance from the late 1980s that blended R & B vocals with hip-hop textures to create a fusion of opposing urban styles and sexual identities, one hard, the other romantic. Perhaps he was alluding to my own set of fusions. Basic elements of music are taught, but practice is how we discover their meaning. Literary concepts are learned through weekly reading and writing, but an understanding of musical concepts as part of social relationships and interactions is the goal. Students are asked to be vulnerable to learning black musical behavior and concepts, while they grapple with and attempt to transcend essentialist notions of race and/or musical ability. Black vernacular discourse dominates our discussion and interaction, but it is fused with lit- erate discourse, which becomes apparent in their final projects. These are fusions I too negotiate as a participant-observer and evaluator in the enacted cultural project of Music 208. All this functions as a kind of radical empiricism or phenomenology that expands the idea of a classroom as a site for analysis or fieldwork.

In addition to emulating black girls' game-songs-calling attention to the similarities between the beats and rhymes black girls make and the beats and rhymes of hip-hop-I teach several songs from the past by African Americans through leader-chorus interchanges. These arbitrar- ily selected songs are found on Folkways and UNESCO field recordings




made in the 1950s. Among them are a field holler sung by Rich Amer- son, a Negro children's game-song of call-and-response about "goin' up north," and a pygmy song entitled "Hindewhu" performed with intermit- tent yodeling and a whistle as if part of a single voice or line but imitat- ing polyphony. This heterogeneous and highly percussive approach to singing is performed by a woman of the Ba-Benzele peoples of Central Africa, which have no apparent connection to African American culture but gain one through the schizophonic mediation of music that samples "Hindewhu."

After we learn to mimic Hindewhu's alternating singing-whistling- yodeling, I introduce students to a fusion jazz recording called "Water- melon Man" by the keyboardist and composer Herbie Hancock. Re- corded on Columbia Records in 1973, "Watermelon Man" was a unique fusion of the conventional head-chorus improvisational structure found in jazz and the highly syncopated attacks of funk. The most distinctive aspect of the song was its sleek, highly syncopated bass line, which crept up a melodic scale in a funky way. The opening motive, sung by a male, mimics the yodeling qualities of "Hindewhu." One might suggest in discovering this connection between a 1950s field recording and a 1970s fusion recording that Hancock's construction of a groove foreshadows the composition of hip-hop sampling as an example of Africanist reten- tions; that the technological practice of sampling is but an extension of earlier styles of music making based on orality or quoting from previous texts.23 But Scott DeVeaux dispelled that possibility when he told me that Oily Wilson had introduced Bill Laswell, a musician on the session, to the folk recording by the Ba-Benzele woman.

Thinking and learning music from recordings and through actual relationships with peers and elders within the bracketed experience of a classroom partially replicates the process of social learning practiced in everyday African American culture. Establishing a shared body of music and dance, one that class members have actually learned to embody together, engenders a unique social and musical consciousness that mirrors the music-making culture and politics of DJs and hip-hop producers. Meanwhile, students gain post-performance insights through re-performed strategies that have shaped ideas of sampling and mixing recordings found primarily in parents' collections.

Students' participation in collective singing and body-music making is also supplemented by reading an eclectic array of scholarship, including Christopher Small, on African and European music making prior to and following colonial contact; Oily Wilson on the tendencies and heterogeneous sound ideals of African American music; Reebee Garofalo on the racial and cultural marketing strategies used to label recordings by African Americans in the twentieth century; Tricia Rose




on the postindustrial roots, geography, and studio techniques of early hip-hop production; and my own scholarship on the gender politics of everyday black music making or musical blackness, from double-dutch to hip-hop.24

Without the obvious commercial culture and the usual discourse about rapping, students in Music 208 are forced to discover the not-so- obvious interconnections and intersubjectivity of"keepin' it real" among a diverse population. They consequently generate an authentic hip-hop reality of their own.

The Classroom as a Dilemma, the Jam as Fieldwork

This is a complex story of an unusual site of cultural ethnography-a music classroom devoted to embodying African American popular culture-and its everyday music making, which is dialectically shaped by the culture industries but often overlooked as an ideological force unto itself. The classroom, a culture elected more or less by young women and men of various cultural backgrounds, has many parallels to the social culture of kin and kith found in both segregated and multiethnic neigh- borhoods where African American families are found. Since there is "no separate, autonomous, 'authentic' layer of working-class culture to be found,"25 why not focus on the classroom as a culture?

The practice of ethnographic fieldwork "brings us into direct dialogue with others, affording us opportunities to explore [musical as well as cultural] knowledge not as something that grasps inherent and hidden truths but as an intersubjective process of sharing and discovering experience, comparing notes, exchanging ideas, and seeking common ground."26 If this is so, why not employ the classroom as an intersubjective phenomenological site, a dialogic site for performance or practical studies of musical blackness among a diverse yet unified population? In this way "our social gumption and social skills, as much as our scientific [or academic] methodology, become measures of the limits and value of our understanding."27

Embodied social experiences in Music 208 give students from diverse backgrounds a feel, more or less, for what it means to be in the thick of the cultural and generational dynamics of an African American community where some members have more experience than others owing to their age and status. By accessing the oral-kinetic culture that is scattered through the youth and adulthood of many African Ameri- cans, the everyday social activities that are not particularly relevant to the big scheme of things in popular culture, students can get a vibe for



Embodying the Jam.of Musical Blackness 391

certain negotiations of musical identity that are the basis of many racial discussions of music, authority, and cultural difference relative to African American music. They also get a sense of the reality that musical blackness is not merely a by-product of race or genetic transmission.

The classroom can offer participation in a microcontext in which one learns the musical lifeworld of African Americans, rather than func- tioning as a way of guaranteeing a spectator knowledge that allows pejo- rative conceptions of culture and race, the radical divisions between an "us" as rational, knowing, modem, technological and "them" as weird and wonderful, impulsive, pre- or illiterate, unskilled, to remain.28 My use of narrative description as scholarly writing is meant not merely to focus attention on my pedagogical approach but rather as a call for music scholars to "recover the sense in which experience is situated within relationships and between persons if the lifeworld is to be [truly] explored as a field of intersubjectivity."29 The black music studies to which I have been a contributor have tended to privilege a static subjective, yet dis- embodied and nongendered, analysis of heterogeneous sound ideals and the power of black musical aesthetics.30

Based on embodiment and gendered social dynamics, experiential or situated learning becomes a means of discovering how black musical identity and culture are negotiated through a multiplicity of social identities and interactions rather than simply given. As the anthropologist Michael Jackson eloquently writes, "Human life is seldom a blind reca- pitulation of givenness, but an active relationship with what has gone before and what is imagined to lie ahead."31 The act of improvising the social skills of a musical blackness not only disrupts the mass-mediated understanding of a black popular culture, but also deconstructs a primarily black and male view of hip-hop culture.

When a more local and communal approach to popular musical experience is situated at the center of the learning process, we can chal- lenge the fallacies of race and gender; for example, the performance of black girls' hand-clapping games which have their own forms of rapping and beat-making from previously composed idioms, challenges the idea that males and masculinity alone inform the musical discourse of the dominant black popular sphere.32

In many ways my teaching project is a feminist interpretation of Herderian folk ideology as it is discussed in Gene Bluestein's Poplore:

Herder's folk ideology implied that a society was not simply an undifferen- tiated whole but rather consisted of a dominant culture and an assortment of subcultures. Folk song is the product of a subculture that exists contem- poraneously with the dominant culture rather than in a distant past. The




idea that a subculture [girls' musical games] might not only contribute to the dominant one [black male culture or hip-hop] but actually define its major outlines remains a startling conception.... Folksong [or contemporary popular culture] was not to [Herder] the remnant of an antique and outmoded system of expression and values; it lives in contemporary society and speaks directly to the needs of women and men in their contemporary circumstances.33

Hip-hop functions as a kind of dominant culture in the black public sphere as well as in American culture. But the use of girls' musical games in Music 208 reminds students that African American music culture must be understood as involving multiple and interlocking contexts of race and gender.

Conclusion: Black Popular Music and Ethnography

Whether myths, histories, or ethnographies of experience, the extraordi-

nary stories told about what it means for a people to be musical "grow out of the patterns of our everyday movements in the lifeworld."34 The

patterns of this story grow out of my experiences as a member of various African American musical communities since childhood, my formal ed- ucation as a singer of Western classical art song and opera, a time full of

suspicions that gospel, jazz, or popular music might ruin my voice, and

my professional daily experiences as an ethnomusicologist teaching from an African American woman's perspective.

Theoretical discourse is profoundly shaped and haunted by mythical and narrative forms ... the very comprehensibility of theory depends on pretheoretical narrative forms [or social interactions] that are common knowledge. In other words, the argument that scientific theory and traditional storytelling gain legitimacy or assert authority in radically different ways is questionable.35

Scholarship devoted to the local and everyday musical phenomena of African Americans seems almost nonexistent. Scholars of ethnomusi-

cology and musicology have devoted little attention to the contemporary performances of the young, of the less formally educated, and of the more physically demonstrative; their unskilled or laborless (also read "natural") music making, discussed in American studies, English, and culture studies, has not yet been legitimized in the disciplines of music.

I try to provide students with evidence of at least two different popular cultures available for examination relative to hip-hop music. One culture is produced to serve regional and national markets of consump-




tion which includes not only Top 40 radio and music television, but also in part the underground economy cassette tapes and MP3 files that still lie beyond the distributive control of the major record labels. The other culture, perceived by some as an alternative black popular culture, and by many African Americans as its epicenter, is created out of the daily social interactions of African Americans for local use and feeds the commercial system. Often these two popular worlds of black music share objects of pleasure and consumption; they share appreciations for musicians and ignorances about ways of being musical; and they may even share the effects of gender and embodiment in black musical discourse. Yet, the agents and contexts of these experiences, the temporality and locality of their interpretations, can differ noticeably.

One way of discovering the multiplicity of these popular realities is to embody musical blackness, to approach black music through performance studies, through the phenomenology that shapes a belief in a dis- tinctly lived African American experience, which in the end anyone has the ability to access. But we must begin to realize that African Ameri- cans have limited access to their own popular music in dominant institutions, in arenas of higher learning such as the University of Virginia. We continue to have limited access to the intellectual and cultural distribu- tion of knowledge about the musical blackness not captured on record or in books. Let me conclude with some creative writing that captures a bit of myth and a bit of reality about the jam or predicament of black musical culture in the world.

Once upon a time, there were a people whose song could fill the soul as if it could raise even the dead. People delighted in their songs and dances and often spoke of their power to heal any illness. But their neighbors thought the people's healing ways were magic, and magic was feared in the land.

The people's hair would grow as dark and dense as the midnight sky and the neighbors spread awful rumors about it: Their magic would grow like their hair and cover the land in a mantle of never-ending darkness. This fear spread so intensely that some of the people began shaving their children's heads.

Braiding and twisting a child's hair had been the vehicle for teaching the songs that accompanied the dances, but from fear the people's children and their children's children were cut off from the songs and dances and their music lost its charm.

Then one day a child with a crop of midnight hair was born singing an old familiar song that astonished the elders. Her parents were so awed they didn't touch a hair on her head. So, it was decided that an elder, a former song leader of the people, would raise the child.




Night after night, before bed, the song leader placed the girl between her knees singing and twisting songs through her hair. Their joy in each other enlivened the old songs.

When the young girl came of age, the fear of the mantle of darkness remained and the performance of the songs had faded. The girl, now a woman, traveled to other lands gathering others' songs and dances along the way. In exchange, she shared her people's songs.

Now the, magic of music lies in its ability to cross boundaries, outlast fear, to defy ignorance and loss. The songs and dances returned to the land when the woman's children returned to the land singing and dancing in old ways without fear. And the elders proclaimed, "Every goodbye ain't gone."36

Notes

1. See George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, eds., Anthropology as Cultural Cri- tique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 67-68.

2. African American scholars and literary writers often deploy or deliberately instigate autobiography (or autoethnography) as social critique, as a way of activating "sites of memory" in order to frame larger social questions; see Kamala Visweswaren, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 137. Recent work by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (1987, 1994), the cultural critic bell hooks (1990), and the legal scholar Derek Bell (1992, 1996) are among the most recent exam- ples. Patricia J. Williams, for example, offers a fascinating critique of the ideology of race and social life in a case she encountered as a professor of law that involves Beethoven's arguable African ancestry; see Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 110-15. Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), explains how "autobiographical reference continues to be a mode of theory... in a period where personal history is a means toward self-questioning as well as self-justification.... All these things have been present in earlier black autobiography [i.e., slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson] but only in their contemporary feminist guise are they, themselves, central to understanding the category of race" (194). Anthropologists substantiate this theoretical practice in postcolonial ethnographic representation concerning identity and culture. The use of the autobiographical is not merely a reflection of the self; it is another "entry point into history, of community refracted through self" (Visweswaren, 137). Charlotte Aull Davies, Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), suggests the use of autobiography remains within "the conventional ethnographic model of researching others, albeit with close attention to the inherent and informative reflexivity of any such endeavor.... The focus seems to be on the self, but the self as acted upon and fundamentally altered by contact with others, thus studying such changes becomes a way of providing a [refracted] view of these others" (180). Given my emphasis on embodied knowledge, respecting the positive intentions of multiculturalism, I offer genuine critique of the social factors that shape and restrict our models of learning about music cultures in the classroom in a unique way. The creative construction of this essay would have been impossible without Ada Garrison and her family in




Toronto; Ardell P. Hilliard, my mother; and the insightful criticism of the anonymous readers of this essay. I thank them all for pushing me to improve the representation of my ideas and interpretations.

3. Michael Jackson, "Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthro-

pological Critique," in Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropol- ogy, ed. Michael Jackson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 10.

4. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1986); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1989); bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); and John Gennari, "Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies," Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 448-523.

5. For example, the Gap commercial where sounds invoking Harlem's Savoy Ballroom accompanies white San Franciscans performing beautiful "neo-swing" aerials in khaki pants and tennis shoes [Eric Usner, personal communication with author, 15 June 2001] or the craze over the minimalist speech stylistics of black (and perhaps biracial) men saying "Whassuuup!" in Budweiser commercials. Visit Whassup?! Language Program at http://www.budweiser.com/whassup/index.html# to observe how African Americans are erased as the voice of their ethnicity tours the global culture of maleness from Japan to Denmark to Nepal. Note that the language program is not available in any African language or black dialect, unless pig latin counts. Trademarked corporations continue to sonically brand their products with the musical sounds of black speech and song, boost- ing their sales particularly among white youth as well as various lower- and middle-class consumers.

6. Christopher Small wrote that music involves not only the relationship between sounds, but the relationship between people; see Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (New York: Riverrun Press, 1987). Few studies of black popular music seriously discuss the ambivalent interracial and inter- ethnic relationships that surround hip-hop for instance. Often studies look at whites' involvement or, conversely, blacks', but little scholarship maps and compares a broader view of the relationships between various social identities that surround rap and hip-hop. I utilize Charlie Keil's term "participant discrepancies" not in its initial meaning, but to highlight the tension not only between relationships and sounds but also between people and their possession of musical experience (musical meaning and identity politics). See Keil, "Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music," Cultural Anthropology 2, no. 3 (1987): 275-83. Also see Kyra D. Gaunt, "Got Rhythm?: Difficult Encounters in Theory and Practice and Other Participatory Discrepancies in Music," City & Society 14, no. 1(2002): 119-140.

7. White South African Rose-Lee Goldberg after emigrating to the United States; quoted in Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 59.

8. Coincidentally, at the time I began this course Tupac and Biggie Smalls were killed and two significant national debates erupted: the first was over the use of Ebonics in teaching English as a second language in Oakland, California, and the second was

sparked when President Bill Clinton proposed America apologize as a nation for slavery. The majority of white Americans flatly rejected the latter.

9. Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 211.




10. Interestingly, the Vatican does not allow identical reproductions of its artwork, so Breck's version is four inches smaller in scale than the original 400-square-foot mural.

11. "The Lawn" is a metonym for the University of Virginia. The Lawn, the heart of "the central grounds," symbolizes the landscape and lore of the university, an historic in- stitution established by Thomas Jefferson. The implied meaning of this line followed by the colloquial contraction of hip-hop lingo translates to: "Hip-hop's come to U.Va. as a course, do you realize what I mean?"

12. See Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: Norton, 1971); and Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

13. Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (New York: Ser-

pent's Tail, 1993), 200.

14. Old Cabell had hosted a range of distinguished musical artists and speakers since 1996: Pat Metheny, Dalton Baldwin, Joanne Brackeen, Herbie Hancock, Cindy Black- man, the Manhattan String Quartet, and nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

15. See Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Music, Body, and "Soul" (Ann Ar- bor: UMI Press, 1997).

16. See Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture 7, no. 1(1994): 107-46.

17. Jackson, 22.

18. See Robert Farris Thompson, "Hip Hop 101"; originally published in 1986; reprinted in Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, ed. William E. Perkins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 211-19.

19. The popular televised dance show Soul Train often featured a segment called the "Soul Train line." Two lines of dancers facing each other step side to side to the latest hit. At the head of the line, individuals and pairs of dancers successively do their own thing down the center of the onlooking lines of dancers, expressing their individual flair, and reenter the line at the end. This is a fine example of individuality within collectiv- ity: the rows of dancers share the same rhythmic step, while soloists strut their stuff down the center.

20. Marcus and Fischer, 46.

21. I.e., Oily Wilson, "The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African American Music," in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 327-38; Floyd; Portia K. Maultsby, "Africanisms in African American Music," in Africanisms in Ameri- can Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Small. See also Susan McClary and Robert Walser, "Theorizing the Body in African America Music," Black Music Research Journal 14, no. 1 (1994): 75-84, for discussion of taboos of the body in black music literature.

22. In my experience, the line dance called the "electric slide" often accompanied any playing of the single "My Eyes Don't Cry No More," by Stevie Wonder, whether in Los Angeles, Detroit, or Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s.




23. See Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold: Popmusic in the Digital Age of Repro- duction," in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon, 1990); and Kyra D. Gaunt, "The Veneration of James Brown and George Clinton in Hip-Hop Music: Is It Live or Is It Re-Memory?" in Popular Music: Style and Identity, ed. Will Straw et. al., International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Seventh International Conference on Popular Music Studies (Montreal: Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1995).

24. See Small; Wilson; Reebee Garofalo, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994); Gaunt, "The Veneration of James Brown," and The Games Black Girls Play.

25. Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'," in People's History and So- cialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 229.

26. Jackson, 8.

27. Jackson, 8.

28. Jackson, 6-7, 8, 18.

29. Jackson, 26.

30. See Wilson and Floyd.

31. Jackson, 11.

32. Ultimately, I am applying the ethnographic concept of defamiliarization to the social practices experienced in Music 208. Defamiliarization, in ethnography, is the art of making readers conscious of difference; the "disruption of common sense, doing the

unexpected, placing familiar subjects in unfamiliar, or even shocking, contexts"; Marcus and Fischer, 137.

33. Gene Bluestein, Poplore: Folk and Pop in American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 35-36.

34. Paul Ricoeur, "On Narrative," quoted in Jackson, 39.

35. Jackson, 40.

36. I used this myth to open an earlier version of this paper at a presentation for the In- ternational Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) at the 2000 Musical Intersections mega-meeting of fifteen organizations in Toronto. For obvious reasons, it did not work as well as a lead-in to the written text, and I found it difficult to weave into the body of the narrative. So I present it here to close my interpretative essay. The construction of this myth is an adaptation of a process described by Jean Houston in The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology (New York: Putnam, 1987), 110-13.

My myth emphasizes the effects of misunderstanding racial or ethnic difference upon the

people who are the subjects of difference. We often change our ways to quell our "neigh- bor's" fears; to make ourselves more acceptable in contexts. We also may shun a "native"

understanding of culture from fear of violence in the form of racism. This myth is about

my own path as I "write up" African American everydayness and educate others about the local economies, from double-dutch to hip-hop, in African American musical life.



The Two O'Clock Vibe": Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness In and Out of Its Everyday Context

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