My blog is my space to highlight academic work outside of my formal publications. Posts vary from short essays to album reviews to exemplary student work to small sample-digs that I use as warm-ups for my courses. This blog also contains the burgeoning archive of artist interviews that I am collecting for my dissertation, "Writing in the Break."
On Tuesday, October 8, 2019 Malcolm "Molly" Duncan, the saxophonist and vocalist of the legendary Average White Band, passed away. This...
In 2018 Beyonce performed a legendary Coachella headliner set that used black Greek life as its central motif. In 2019 she released a...
Missy Elliott's debut album contained the hit single "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)." The Virginia emcee's video for the single was directed...
Cardi B's "I Like It" (2018) became an instant hit and soared to the top of the pop and hip-hop charts. "I Like It" features...
In 1996, the Fugees (Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras) dropped their second full-length album The Score. The album featured a cover of...
Syl Johnson is an American blues and soul singer whose relatively obscure track "Different Strokes" (1968) has found a significant...
Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 in Tryon, NC. Simone grew up playing church music and aspired to be a concert...
Clyde Stubblefield drummed in James Brown's band from 1965 to 1970 and played on iconic James Brown tracks from "Cold Sweat" to "Say It...
2018 has been a big year for the work of Slick Rick. The British-born American rapper's work has been sampled and signified upon by...
Hip-hop has been using rock samples since its party days in the early Bronx, but the first group to really take advantage of rock's...
The following music video was banned on MTV in 1990. Can you guess why?* *Just a caveat, this is not the original video which seems to...
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul (that's right, there was a queen before Mrs. Carter), passed away on August 16th, 2018. Franklin, the...
Listen from 4:08 Don't recognize the voice? If you were born pretty much any time after 1985, you most likely don't recognize the name...
"Apache" was first performed by The Shadows in the early 1960s. Their song was a #1 hit and inspired by the 1954 American Western film...
Today we're digging into Drake's sample of Lauryn Hill's "Ex-Factor" in "Nice for What." The sample is from Hill's "Ex-Factor" Which is...