Bring the Noise: Popular Music Studies

What is “Afropolitanism?” For most of its supporters and critics, this neologism in the Africanist lexicon connotes an elite cultural sensibility, celebrated by some as a sign of an artful and urbane African worldliness and derided by others for merely putting a new twist on an old idea of Africa, freshly packaged and adorned for consumption in upscale shops and trendy art galleries from London to Accra.

My first ethnographic fieldwork experience was a short trip to Jamaica, where I interviewed twenty Rastafarians regarding their perspectives on white people and non-Rastas participating in reggae music.

In 2000, Emperor Norton Records released El Baile Alemán, a tribute album of some of Kraftwerk’s greatest hits re-imagined as salsas, rumbas, cumbias, merengues, and cha-cha-chas, performed by Señor Coconut, the suave Latin American bandleader featured prominently on the album cover.

Sam Posner (PKA Sammy Bananas) is a producer and DJ living in Brooklyn, NY.

Martha Velez has had a long career as a musical adventurer. She grew up riding NYC subways to the Bronx High School of Music, and later to New York's High School of Performing Arts.

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [392 p. ISBN 9780822351634. $27.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.

Reviewed by Scott V. Linford

Get On Up. Directed by Tate Taylor. 139 minutes. Imagine Entertainment, 2014.

Reviewed by Ben Doleac

On New Year’s Day 2013, I filed into the lower deck of the Georgia Dome along with more than 65,000 evangelical Christians between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. We were all there to attend a four-day concert event known as the Passion Conference, which occurs in Atlanta each January.

“It’s never been easy being black, British and female in the music industry. . . But in recent years, it’s seemed that black females have been few and far between – and the ones who’ve popped up haven’t been able to stick around.”

Wandering Stars: Songs from Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre, 1906-1910. Renair Records 2013. Compiled by Julian Futter and Michael Aytward. One compact disc (25 tracks) with liner notes (40 pp.).

Reviewed by Jana Mazurkiewicz