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In a 1987 interview with BBC Radio 1 DJ, Mike Read, members of the British pop group Five Star collectively stated that their hopes and wishes for 1988 were to crack America that is, to achieve comparable success in the US music market to what they had in the UK. Formed in 1983, the five-sibling group had a string of highly successful UK releases between 1985 and 1987, including six Top 10 hits. In 1987, they received a prestigious Brit Award for Best British Group, largely based on the success of their second album, Silk and Steel. Yet following the release of Five Stars fourth album, Rock the World, in August 1988, the groups highest-ranking song would reach a paltry Number 49 on the UK Singles Chart. This article centers, Rock the World, as the key hinge in Five Stars dramatic decline. The group never cracked the US market their highest Billboard Hot 100 song being the 1986 single, Cant Wait Another Minute (peaking at Number 41) and remain virtually unknown to most American music fans. By combining a production of culture approach to organizational sociology, a musicological examination of the history and boundary maintenance of key genres, and a critical assessment of how the groups Black Britishness was presented and received, I argue that Five Stars short-lived visibility in the UK and invisibility in the US had little to do with the quality of their music and can be attributed to industry politics and the transnational impacts of prevailing notions of race, genre, and authenticity on popular music reception. ; Published version

This article examines the politics of cross‐gender interview recruitment in popular music scene ethnography. It specifically focuses on how complexities surrounding gender, race, and presumed intention impact efforts to build rapport and recruit interviewees. To do this, I present a series of accounts from my dissertation research—conducted twenty years ago—and reflect on the challenges I faced as a straight, cisgender, Black male researcher interacting with (non‐Black) women within various hip‐hop nightlife settings. In the process, I introduce the concepts of intimate counterpublics and aggregate counterpublics as means to spatially mapping different degrees of subcultural investment (based on levels of familiarity, intimacy, and trust) and the types of connections they enable. I conclude by offering suggestions, for researchers working within popular music scenes or other youth‐oriented spaces, on how to negotiate such challenges. I also propose that ethnographers should be more attentive to nuances of interview requests and how embodied situational research transactions can serve as bases for ethnographic understanding.

"SOMETIMES RAPPIN' AIN'T ENOUGH" In the opening verse to its 2011 song "Sunshine; Power Struggle lead vocalist Nomi enounces that "political rap is like a trap sometimes." As an African-diasporic orature form, forged within the collusive cauldrons where the trials of postindustrial disenfranchisement mix with the resiliencies of subaltern innovation, hip hop lyricism is inherently ambiguous and political. The trap that Nomi (possibly) refers to is set along the well-worn path between artistic intention and public reception. Whereas questions of multiple interpretations dominate music of any sort, and art more generally, the brilliance of the "Sunshine" lyric lies in its spotlighting how such concerns are amplified within a hip hop form that is characterized as deliberately and pointedly political. ; Published (Publication status) ; ; This chapter looks at the resurgence of political consciousness and embrace of community organizing in underground hip hop during the age of Obama. It does this by focusing on one particular group of hip hop artists/culture workers. Since 2000, a distinctly Filipino American hip hop music movement has emerged on the U.S. West Coast. The scene was founded on a critique of the historical and contemporary implications of U.S. imperialism for people of color and the working class. This music, authored by members of a highly politicized ethno-racial minority who stand outside the traditional black/white binaries that characterize U.S. race relations and hip hop's racial politics, aspires to expose injustices in U.S. domestic and foreign policies, undermine existing structures of power and inequality, and mobilize local grassroots communities to protest and political action.

Embracing the trope of ethnography as narrative, this chapter uses the mythic story of Bronislaw Malinowski's early career and fieldwork as a vehicle through which to explore key aspects of ethnography's history and development into a distinct form of qualitative research. The reputed "founding father" of the ethnographic approach, Malinowski was a brilliant social scientist, dynamic writer, conceited colonialist, and, above all else, pathetically human. Through a series of intervallic steps -- in and out of Malinowski's path from Poland to the "Cambridge School" and eventually to the western Pacific -- I trace the legacy of ethnography to its current position as a critical, historically informed, and unfailingly evolving research endeavor. As a research methodology that has continually reflected on and revised its practices and modes of presentation, ethnography is boundless. Yet minus its political, ethical, and historical moorings, I argue, the complexities of twenty-first-century society render its future uncertain. ; Published (Publication status) ;

This article examines how structural and symbolic forces combine to produce racialized discourses of belonging and geographies of exclusion in and around downhill skiing. Drawing from literatures in Whiteness studies, sports sociology, leisure studies, and environmental history, I advance the concept of racial spatiality to illustrate how processes of everyday racism work to secure skiing's social spaces as predominantly White, thereby restricting the participation and representation of Black skiers. Skiing's hegemony of Whiteness is discussed in relation to parallel integration strategies of Black ski organizations, racialized representations of extreme skiing and snowboarding, and exclusionary residential development tactics. As a provisional effort to promote research on racism and leisure–sports–tourism, I argue that skiing offers a valuable site for considering the ongoing and overlooked saliencies of race and racial segregation in America.

AbstractThis article reviews the history of scholarship on racial authenticity within studies of rap music and hip hop. The concept of authenticity currently enjoys a central place in sociological work on popular music, subcultures, and racial identity. As a music and cultural form that straddles all three of these fields, the debates surrounding authenticity within rap and hip hop are as contentious as any. Using the year 2000 as an arbitrary dividing line, this article presents the late 20th century foundations of research on authenticity and race within hip hop, then moves on to discuss more recent developments in the academic literature. Despite hip hop scholars' increased emphases on discourses of space and place, and processes of culture and identity formation, the field continues to be framed through notions of essential blackness, and critical interrogations of white hip hop legitimacy. After providing an overview of the state of the field, it is argued that greater attention to language use among hip hop enthusiasts, and a particular emphasis on hip hoppers who fall outside the black–white racial binary will prove fruitful in reinvigorating these longstanding debates. Ethnographic studies of local underground hip hop scenes within the Unites States are recommended as a logical place to begin.

In this autobiographical piece, I reflect on my twenty-year history as an emcee working at the intersection of hip hop and environmental awareness. Since summer 2000, I have recorded and performed environmentally situated hip-hop music under the moniker Mad Squirrel. This includes co-founding two groupsthe San-Francisco-based Forest Fires Collective and Washington DCs The Acornsas well as releasing various solo projects and taking part in a handful of performances. In what follows, I explain the origins of my nature-based performance identity by, first, recounting my experiences growing up as an avid hip-hop fan in a rural New England (USA) mountain village and, then, expounding on how Mad Squirrels forest narratives marked a return to the Black diasporic tradition of animal stories that align with my West African heritage. I go on to describe how this identity and approach became the springboard for a small circle of Bay Area artists to produce a series of critically heralded releases in the early 2000s. After relocating to the East Coast of the United States, I continued to create nature-based hip hop and, notably, performed at several fundraisers and political rallies organized around the movement to stop Mountain Top Removal coalmining in Southern Appalachia. Underlying these narrative accounts, in this piece, I critique hip hops presumed urban-rural divide by highlighting its longstanding presence in in rural communities; I compare and contrast the effectiveness of using didactic versus coded environmentalist lyrics/themes; and I draw attention to the underappreciated connections between environmentalism and anti-racism. While acknowledging hip hops failure to thoroughly embrace an environmental justice agenda, through this personal case study, I draw attention to some of the groundwork that has been done in alternative hip-hop spaces and advocate for fruitful directions through which to move forward. ; Published version

In this autobiographical piece, I reflect on my twenty-year history as an emcee working at the intersection of hip hop and environmental awareness. Since summer 2000, I have recorded and performed environmentally situated hip-hop music under the moniker "Mad Squirrel." This includes co-founding two groups—the San-Francisco-based Forest Fires Collective and Washington DC's The Acorns—as well as releasing various solo projects and taking part in a handful of performances. In what follows, I explain the origins of my nature-based performance identity by, first, recounting my experiences growing up as an avid hip-hop fan in a rural New England (USA) mountain village and, then, expounding on how Mad Squirrel's forest narratives marked a return to the Black diasporic tradition of animal stories that align with my West African heritage. I go on to describe how this identity and approach became the springboard for a small circle of Bay Area artists to produce a series of critically heralded releases in the early 2000s. After relocating to the East Coast of the United States, I continued to create nature-based hip hop and, notably, performed at several fundraisers and political rallies organized around the movement to stop Mountain Top Removal coalmining in Southern Appalachia. Underlying these narrative accounts, in this piece, I critique hip hop's presumed urban-rural divide by highlighting its longstanding presence in in rural communities; I compare and contrast the effectiveness of using didactic versus coded environmentalist lyrics/themes; and I draw attention to the underappreciated connections between environmentalism and anti-racism. While acknowledging hip hop's failure to thoroughly embrace an environmental justice agenda, through this personal case study, I draw attention to some of the groundwork that has been done in alternative hip-hop spaces and advocate for fruitful directions through which to move forward. ; En esta pieza autobiográfica reflexiono sobre mis veinte años de historia como rapero trabajando ...

In this autobiographical piece, I reflect on my twenty-year history as an emcee working at the intersection of hip hop and environmental awareness. Since summer 2000, I have recorded and performed environmentally situated hip hop music under the moniker "Mad Squirrel." This includes co-founding two groups—the San-Francisco-based Forest Fires Collective and Washington DC's The Acorns—as well as releasing various solo projects and taking part in a handful of performances. In what follows, I explain the origins of my nature-based performance identity by, first, recounting my experiences growing up as an avid hip hop fan in a rural New England (USA) mountain village and, then, expounding on how Mad Squirrel's forest narratives marked a return to the Black diasporic tradition of animal stories that align with my West African heritage. I go on to describe how this identity and approach became the springboard for a small circle of Bay Area artists to produce a series of critically heralded releases in the early 2000s. After relocating to the East Coast of the United States, I continued to create nature-based hip hop and, notably, performed at several fundraisers and political rallies organized around the movement to stop Mountain Top Removal coalmining in Southern Appalachia. Underlying these narrative accounts, in this piece, I critique hip hop's presumed urban-rural divide by highlighting its longstanding presence in rural communities; I compare and contrast the effectiveness of using didactic versus coded environmentalist lyrics/themes; and I draw attention to the underappreciated connections between environmentalism and anti-racism. While acknowledging hip hop's failure to thoroughly embrace an environmental justice agenda, through this personal case study, I draw attention to some of the groundwork that has been done in alternative hip hop spaces and advocate for fruitful directions through which to move forward. ; En esta pieza autobiográfica reflexiono sobre mis veinte años de historia como rapero trabajando en ...

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This article excavates the ethos surrounding hip hop, starting from the proposition that hip hop represents a distinct yet pervasive expression of contemporary black subjectivity, which crystalized in 1970s New York City and has since proliferated into a potent ethos of the subaltern embraced within socially marginalized youth communities throughout the world. The article begins by outlining the black diasporic traditions of expressive performance that hip hop issues from, as discussed through the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Amiri Baraka. In the remainder of the article, a blueprint of hip hops ethos is presented based on five fundamental tenets: (1) properties of flow, layering, and rupture; (2) a principle of productive consumption; (3) the production of excessive publicity or promotionwhat hip-hop affiliates refer to as hype; (4) embracing individual and communal entrepreneurship; and (5) a committed politics of action and loyalty. While acknowledging hip hops malleability and refusal to be neatly characterized, the article maintains that its characteristic spirit embodies these core doctrines. ; Published version