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Race, Appropriation, & Lindy Hop: How to Honor our Heroes
Lindy hopper Jerry Almonte sent along a clip of the first place-winning routine in a division at the European Swing Dance Championships. Lindy hop is a partner dance invented by African American...
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Essence Festival Interrupts Racial Segregation in New Orleans
Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog. Essence Music Festival, the “party with a purpose,” is a three-day event in New Orleans, featuring speakers during the day and musical performances at night....
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Fox Calls Obama’s Birthday Party a “Hip Hop BBQ”
Cross-posted at Scientopia. So it’s racist, right, to say that the presence of a handful of black people makes a BBQ a “hip-hop BBQ”? Yes. And yet that is exactly what the folks at Fox Nation, a...
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A Century of Clothes/Dance/Music in 100 Seconds
This video, made as part of a marketing campaign for a new shopping center in East London, is a fun overview of a century of some trends in clothing, music, and dance styles, all in 100 seconds....
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Technological Change and Changing Lives
Brian Spranger gave me a LOL when he sent along this cartoon addressing the way in which technological change changes our lives: Found uncredited at FunnyJunk. If anyone knows who made this, I’d much...
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Gender, Sexualization, and Rolling Stone
For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011. ———————— You often hear that everything is sexualized nowadays, and not just women but men too. In the September...
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The Commodification of the Ghetto
In this minute-and-a-half, sociologist Nikki Jones talks about the way that the idea of the ghetto has been commodified — especially in rap and hip hop — in ways that informs Americans who don’t live...
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Thinking through Korean Appropriation of American Indians with James Turnbull
In an interesting example of cultural borrowing/appropriation sent in by Catherine H., the Korean all-girl pop band T-ara imitates stereotypes of American Indians in their music video for their...
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The Impact of the SOPA/PIPA BlackOut
On January 18th, 2012 many sites on the internet went “black” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), including Wikipedia, Boing Boing, Reddit,...
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Spotlight or Flame? Reflections on Whitney Houston
When I learned of Whitney Houston’s untimely death, I was in the process of re-reading James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Sonny, like so many entertainers struggled with addiction and the...
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How Django Reinhardt Survived World War II
A recent post on Boing Boing discussed the newly discovered “rules for jazz performers during the Nazi occupation.” Jewish and Black people — two groups targeted by the Nazis — were also the primary...
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Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with a Mockery of Mariachi?
Dolores R. sent in a flubbed opportunity to represent Mexicans positively and reach out to the expanding Mexican market in the U.S. In “honor” of Cinco de Mayo, Mike’s Hard Lemonade hired five men —...
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On the Sexualization of Young Girls
Alexandra O’Dell, a student at North Idaho College, does a great job of integrating data, interviews, and images in this 11-minute video about the sexualization of young girls in the media: —————————...
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James Mollison’s Musical “Tribes”
James Mollison, the photographer who brought us Where Children Sleep, has a fantastic series called The Disciples in which he captures die-hard music fans (he calls them “tribes”). The results are a...
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“I Fancy the Lead Singer”: Bands, Fans, and Gender
For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. In “Rock in a Hard Place: Grassroots Cultural Production in the Post-Elvis Era,” William Bielby discusses the...
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Rap, the Creative Process, and Power
Sociologist Jooyoung Lee is writing what sounds like a truly fascinating book. Titled Blowing Up: Rap Dreams in LA, it follows a series of young Black men who are trying to make it as rappers....
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The DJ in American Culture: Resonant, Misunderstood
As a sociologist who happens to DJ — or is that the other way around? — I’m always curious to see how DJing is depicted in popular culture and advertising. Ever since the 1970s, when the disco craze...
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What Are Rappers Really Saying about the Police?
Cross-posted at Racialicious and PolicyMic. Hip-hop music is frequently described as violent and anti-law enforcement, with the implication that its artists glorify criminality. A new content analysis...
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The Difference Between Sex Appeal and Sexual Objectification
Over at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery made a great observation about the conservative response to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show. Conservatives widely criticized her for sexually objectifying...
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The Problematics of the Fake Harlem Shake
Cross-posted at Racialicious.The Harlem Shake is a syncopated dance form that first appeared on the New York hip-hop scene in the early 1980s. Here is what it looks like: In 2012 music producer Baueer...
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