AMS Lecture Series: Country Rap in the Dirty South

Oct 15, 7PM

Join the AMS Lecture Series: Country Rap in the Dirty South with Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste as they reveal the inner and outer workings of the genre, making a case for country rap’s centrality in understanding the politics of race and place in the United States.

Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” is a genre performed primarily by white people in the Southern U.S. It encapsulates many seeming discrepancies, offering images and sounds associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the U.S. Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world. As opposed to simply being a blending of rap and country genres, country rap is a distinct generic formation shaped by mutually enforcing and contested notions of the rural and urban, Blackness and whiteness, the authentic and the inauthentic. Within the highly racialized discourses that hold country music and hip-hop in opposition, country rap is frequently heard as an unwelcome outlier.

The American Musicological Society and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF) in Cleveland, Ohio, collaborate on a lecture series that brings scholarly work to a broader audience and showcases the musicological work of the top scholars in the field. The AMS / Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lectures provide a public forum that brings music research to a broader audience.

Alex Blue V’s research examines the intersections of race, sound, space, and place, often employing heavily ethnographic methods to demonstrate the influence of race on sound, and the influence of sound on race. Additionally, he is interested in narratives of death, dying, and afterlives in relation to Black sound and musical culture. Blue is currently working on two book projects. The first, titled A Matter of Death and Life, is an ethnographic (or “necrographic”) study of the narratives of death and dying in contemporary Detroit hip-hop, and how artists employ various forms of death as praxis in music making. The second, which he is co-authoring, is an ethnographic study of country rap, also known as “hick hop,” that examines issues of race, gender, class, nationalism, and identity, primarily (but not entirely) in the southern United States.

Blue received his MM in Jazz Studies from University of North Texas, and his PhD in Ethnomusicology from University of California – Santa Barbara. Prior to joining the AHCS faculty at McGill, he was an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at William & Mary, the Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, and a Predoctoral Fellow in Music at Ithaca College.

Kyle DeCoste is an ethnographer of popular music and a lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. His work, which exists at the intersection of Black feminisms and critical childhood studies, examines how popular music is used to articulate and contest ideas about race, gender, class, and childhood. He received his PhD in Music from Columbia University where his dissertation, Imagining Freedom: Black Popular Music and the Poetics of Childhood, looked to popular music to make a case for an imaginative twenty-first-century abolitionism.

He is co-author with the Stooges Brass Band of the book Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (2020, University Press of Mississippi), and his writing has been published in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society for American Music and the Oxford Handbook of Pop Music.

In addition to his dissertation monograph, Kyle is working on two other book projects. The first is a co-authored ethnography of country rap (a.k.a. “hick-hop”) that examines issues of race and place in the Southern United States. The second is a history of New Orleans’ only all-woman brass band, the Original Pinettes Brass Band, which applies a Black feminist lens to brass band performance.

PARKING: Paid meters and parking lots are available around the museum on East 9th St., Erieside Ave., Alfred Lerner Way (in front of FirstEnergy Stadium) and at the Great Lakes Science Center. You can also use these links to park in other downtown lots, reserve your parking spot in advance or to take public transportation. All sales final, tickets cannot be exchanged or refunded after purchase unless the event is canceled.