AMS Lecture Series:

Last year, hip hop turned 50 years old. And over this half century, it has utterly transformed U.S. culture: look around, and it’s hard to see or hear something that hasn’t been influenced by the young people of color who fashioned, developed, and championed hip hop culture. Hip hop isn’t so much part of today’s mainstream as it is the mainstream. How exactly did this happen? How did this minority subcultural movement find its way out of the community center and block parties of the South Bronx and into the ears, eyes, and hearts of people across the United States? Join Amy Coddington as she analyzes the critical role commercial radio stations had in this transformation, examining how the racial organization of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop music was sold to the American public. 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.

Speaker Bio:

Amy Coddington is an assistant professor of music at Amherst College, where she teaches classes on American popular music. Her book How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (University of California Press, 2023) explores how rap broke through to a white mainstream audience in the 1980s and 1990s through programming on commercial radio stations. She has published related essays in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music.