Date: Friday, October 25, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
Free – open to the public
Our weekly Friday afternoon colloquia feature current research presentations by distinguished visiting scholars, as well as by our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education.
Following each session, receptions offer a valuable opportunity for social interaction, helping to foster a strong sense of community, camaraderie, and mutual support within the department.
About the Talk
“Viral Hip-Hop Remixing and the Performance of Black Millennial Humor”
Sponsored by the Center for Popular Music Studies
In this paper, I frame DJ Suede as a Black male millennial satirist and social commentator whose music-making practices provide a unique perspective to investigate the intersections of popular music, race, and Internet humor in the 21st century. I demonstrate how DJ Suede’s work is situated within a broader tradition of African American humor and reflects the resonances of 1990s and 2000s Black stand-up comedy, sitcoms, and sketch shows. Drawing from African American humor scholarship, hip-hop production, and Internet studies literature, I argue that Black musical remixers like Suede play a crucial role in contemporary popular music production, using humor as a tool of resistance, coping, and reclamation for everyday Black people. By analyzing Suede's production practices, YouTube video remixes, and conducting in-depth interviews, I illustrate how hip-hop musical humor serves as an exploration of Black American experience and navigation of the racial hypocrisy and contradictions in the United States.
About the Speaker
Jasmine Henry (she/her) is a musicologist and sound engineer specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century African American popular music, with research interests in Black electronic dance music and club cultures, DIY and independent music production, Afrofuturism, and the historiography of African American music. Her teaching and research intersect with musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, performance studies, critical race theory, and urban geography, and her recent work appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. Henry has presented widely on topics including critical race issues at the GRAMMYs, Frank Ocean's sonic aesthetics, DIY hip-hop studios, and Jersey Club music performances, earning multiple awards such as the Graham Phipps, Mark Tucker, and Clara Henderson prizes. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork for a book on contemporary Black club music in Newark, New Jersey, expanding on her dissertation, Jersey Club: Race, Place and Black Independent Music-Making in Newark, New Jersey, to explore how participants reclaim Black club music amid the mainstream EDM industry's appropriation. Her scholarly work is informed by her experience as a live sound engineer on productions like Blue Man Group, HBO’s The Newsroom, and Broadway's Chicago the Musical, and her roles at M2P Records and the Newark School of the Arts. Henry holds degrees in sound engineering, music management, and musicology from William Paterson University and Rutgers University, and has served as a Predoctoral Teaching Fellow at William Paterson University and a Future of Music Faculty Fellow at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
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