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<aside> ✔️ Presentation Formats

• Oral presentations should be 20 mins followed by 20 mins for questions.
• Performance presentations can be in the form of a lecture recital or performance with reflection, and should be 20 mins followed by 20 mins for questions.
• Pre-recorded Presentations: Oral or performance presentations can be pre-recorded and submitted as digital media. These should be a maximum of 25 mins**.** Prerecorded  presentations will be available to  view before the event and the full 40 mins of the session will be used for feedback and questions.

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<aside> ℹ️ What to expect from this event:

• The course platform will go live on Notion on 2nd June. You will receive a link to access all course materials and information. Before the event you will be able to prepare by viewing digital presentations and find out more about other participants .
• Music4Change event is an international, interdisciplinary learning environment where music-focused researchers from a wide range of fields and methods come together to discuss their work and exchange knowledge. When preparing your presentation please consider how to communicate your project with people who may be outside your specific area of study and/or geographical location.
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George Oliver Speck PhD Candidate, City, University of London

“With Music is Born Power And its Opposite: Subversion”; Entanglements Between African American Protest Music and U.S. Politics in 2020

Keywords: protest, B.L.M, civil rights, hip-hop, jazz

Undertaken in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, this research looks to unpick narratives that surrounded African-American protest music at this time. The focus is on issues of race, politics and how these affect various audiences’ interpretations of the songs. Historical context of musical protest conception and reception is provided through examination of civil rights movement era musicians and hip-hop artists. I then turn to modern day counterparts – Beyoncé, Keedron Bryant and Childish Gambino – to establish how artists convey a black experience within the United States in the context of black scholarship on race by Du Bois, Fanon and Moten.

Entangled with this history of African-American protest is a history of white listening; I use Nichols’s examination Lauryn Hill’s reworking of “My Favorite Things” – and Gridley’s consideration of the Coltrane version that inspired it – as a case study of how messages discerned in song can drastically diverge, before looking at the history of black and white interaction in protest discourse during the 1962 Down Beat debates. I draw parallels with the rhetoric used by conservatives discussing Hip-Hop on Fox News during the 2010s, addressing both how this subtle messaging then supported condemnation of B.L.M protests in 2020 and Crouch’s concerns about black artists reinforcing this message by playing into stereotypes for their personas. I finish by suggesting that Kendrick Lamar’s direct addressing of critique in his 2017 album DAMN. is a potential new avenue for African-Americans looking to protest through song.

References

• Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985)
• Baraka, Amiri, “Jazz and the White Critic”, in Black Music (New York: Akashic, 1968), p. 15-26
• Lewellyn-Taylor, Ben, and Jones, Melanie C., “DAMNed to The Earth: Kendrick Lamar, De/colonial Violence, and Earthbound Salvation” in Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning, ed. by Driscoll, Christopher, Pinn, Anthony, and Miller, Monica (London: Routledge, 2020)
• Monson, Ingrid, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Sullivan, Denise, Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues To Hip-Hop (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011)

About George

George is an early-career researcher and musician. He has a BA from the University of Cambridge, a Master's Degree with distinction from King’s College London and spent a year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he won the conservatoire's Woodwind prize on saxophone in 2016. George’s main research interests are in Performance & Jazz Studies and he is currently investigating the effects that networked music technology has upon live jazz from musicians’ perspective. His past work has looked at the history of African-American protest song and its reception amongst conservative audiences, focusing on Fox News.