“You Are the Lord, The Famous One”

By: Joshua Kalin Busman (University of North Carolina at Pembroke) // On New Year’s Day 2013, I filed into the lower deck of the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia, along with more than 65,000 young evangelical Christians from all over the United States. We were all there to attend a four-day concert known as the Passion …

Poetic Protest: Women, Hip-hop, and Islam

Felicia Miyakawa (Round Rock, TX) When we think about protest music, we tend to think about music sung at political rallies or music created for a cause—the labor movement for example, or anti-war songs. But sometimes protest music is subtle. Sometimes performance itself—the getting up on stage in front of people, the very act of …

DJ Kool Herc: The Man with the Master Plan

By: Jeff Chang (Stanford University) // From What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History, Fourth Edition, by John Covach and Andrew Flory (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) When Cindy Campbell and her brother Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell threw a party in 1973, they had no idea what they were about …

Hip-Hop Diplomacy, Part 1

By: Felicia Miyakawa (Austin, TX) // Earlier this year, Hisham Aidi published a book (Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture, Pantheon) that drew public attention to a new phenomenon: U.S. cultural diplomacy that uses Hip-hop as a “weapon.” Cultural diplomacy is not new, of course. During the Cold War, for example, …