Professor Kevin Holt of Stony Brook University will present “Knuck If You Buck: Sounding Crunk Bodies through Timbre” as part of the Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium Series at the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies.
Crunk was a subgenre of Southern hip-hop party music which became a dominant force on the national hip-hop scene in the early 2000s. Crunk music and its successors invite us to think about the establishment of meaning in hip-hop in a way that evades lyrical analysis because of their central vocal techniques (e.g., repeated chant and so-called mumble rap). These techniques speak directly to the sticky work of representing embodied experiences sonically. This talk focuses on crunk and related subgenres as case studies for discussing timbre and embodiment as necessary frames for the analysis of contemporary hip-hop, especially regarding hip-hop music that locates its resistance within party practices, and fits into a much larger conversation about theorizing that which binds what we might understand narrowly or broadly, black musical expression.
About Kevin Holt
Kevin C. Holt is an assistant professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, SUNY. Holt’s disciplinary specialties include ethnomusicology, Africana studies, hip-hop studies, performance studies, and gender & sexuality studies. He is the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University, the Future of Music Faculty Fellowship at Case Western University, and the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
About the Colloquium Series
The Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium was begun in 1992 by Professor Claudia Macdonald to foster an exchange of ideas on music between colleagues in both the Conservatory and the College. The series was expanded in 1997 to include outside speakers as well, and named in honor of Richard Murphy, who taught music history at Oberlin from 1946 to 1978, and was much revered and beloved by his students. He died in 1993.
