Street Music

Eight years ago, Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow, forming an unconventional intercultural family. That family has weathered extreme challenges—each of its three members carried the scars of a painful and dangerous history—but has stuck together with tenacity and love (and a little help from some friends). Now that family is in jeopardy: the birth of Poke and Rose’s newborn son has littered their small apartment with emotional land mines, forcing Poke to question his identity as a dad and Miaow to question her identity as a daughter. At the same time, the most cantankerous member of the small gang of Old Bangkok Hands who hang out at the Expat Bar suddenly goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Engaged in the search for the missing American, Poke is caught completely off-guard when someone he thought was gone forever resurfaces—and she has the power to tear the Raffertys apart.

"Displacement, relocation, dissociation: each of these terms elicits images of mass migration, homelessness, statelessness, or outsiderness of many kinds, too numerous to name. This book aims to create opportunities for scholars, practitioners, and silenced voices to share theories and stories of progressive and transgressive music pedagogies that challenge the ways music educators and learners think about and practice their arts relative to displacement. Displacement is defined as encompassing all those who have been forced away from their locations by political, social, economic, climate, and resource change, injustice, and insecurity. This includes: - refugees and internally displaced persons; - forced migrants; - indigenous communities who have been forced off their traditional lands; - people who have fled homes because of their gender identity and sexual orientation; - imprisoned individuals; - persons who seek refuge for reasons of domestic and social violence; - homeless persons and others who live in transient spaces; - the disabled, who are relocated involuntarily; and - the culturally dispossessed, whose languages and heritage have been taken away from them. In the context of the first ever book on displacement and music education, the authors connect displacement to what music might become to those peoples who find themselves between spaces, parted from the familiar and the familial. Through, in, and because of a variety of musical participations, they contend that displaced peoples might find comfort, inclusion, and welcome of some kinds either in making new music or remembering and reconfiguring past musical experiences. Contributors are: #4459, Efi Averof Michailidou, Kat Bawden, Rachel Beckles Willson, Marie Bejstam, Rhoda Bernard, Michele Cantoni, Mary L. Cohen, Wayland "X" Coleman, Samantha Dieckmann, Irene (Peace) Ebhohon, Con Fullam, Erin Guinup, Micah Hendler, Hala Jaber, Shaylene Johnson, Arsène Kapikian, Tou SaiKo Lee, Sarah Mandie, David Nnadi, Marcia Ostashewski, Ulrike Präger, Q, Kate Richards Geller, Charlotte Rider, Matt Sakakeeny, Tim Seelig, Katherine Seybert, Brian Sullivan, Mathilde Vittu, Derrick Washington, Henriette Weber, Mai Yang Xiong, Keng Chris Yang, and Nelli Yurina"--

HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism explores a fast-growing and transnational movement of street bands—particularly brass and percussion ensembles—and examines how this exciting phenomenon mobilizes communities to reimagine public spaces, protest injustice, and assert their activism. Through the joy of participatory music making, HONK! bands foster active musical engagement in street protests while encouraging grassroots organization, representing a manifestation of cultural activity that exists at the intersections of community, activism, and music. This collection of twenty essays considers the parallels between the diversity of these movements and the diversity of the musical repertoire these bands play and share. In five parts, musicians, activists, and scholars voiced in various local contexts cover a range of themes and topics: History and Scope Repertoire, Pedagogy, and Performance Inclusion and Organization Festival Organization and Politics On the Front Lines of Protest The HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands began in Somerville, Massachusetts in 2006 as an independent, non-commercial, street festival. It has since spread to four continents. HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism explores the phenomenon that inspires street bands and musicians to change the world and provide musical, social, and political alternatives in contemporary times. Visit the companion webiste: http://www.honkrenaissance.net/

It is common to hear talk of how music can inspire crowds, move individuals and mobilise movements. We know too of how governments can live in fear of its effects, censor its sounds and imprison its creators. At the same time, there are other governments that use music for propaganda or for torture. All of these examples speak to the idea of music's political importance. But while we may share these assumptions about music's power, we rarely stop to analyse what it is about organised sound - about notes and rhythms - that has the effects attributed to it. This is the first book to examine systematically music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, at how musicians from Bono to Lily Allen have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks too at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, whether in the classroom or in the copyright courts, whether as focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together a vast array of ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, from Adorno to Deleuze) and new empirical data to tell a story of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At the heart of the book lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other.

In this first musicological history of rap music, Cheryl L. Keyes traces the genre's history from its roots in West African bardic traditions, the Jamaican dancehall tradition, and African American vernacular expressions to its permeation of the cultural mainstream as a major tenet of hip-hop lifestyle and culture. Rap music, according to Keyes, is a forum that addresses the political and economic disfranchisement of black youths and other groups, fosters ethnic pride, and displays culture values and aesthetics. Blending popular culture with folklore and ethnomusicology, Keyes offers a nuanced portrait of the artists, themes, and varying styles reflective of urban life and street consciousness. Drawing on the music, lives, politics, and interests of figures including Afrika Bambaataa, the "godfather of hip-hop," and his Zulu Nation, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Grandmaster Flash, Kool "DJ" Herc, MC Lyte, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Ice-T, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and The Last Poets, Rap Music and Street Consciousness challenges outsider views of the genre. The book also draws on ethnographic research done in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and London, as well as interviews with performers, producers, directors, fans, and managers. Keyes's vivid and wide-ranging analysis covers the emergence and personas of female rappers and white rappers, the legal repercussions of technological advancements such as electronic mixing and digital sampling, the advent of rap music videos, and the existence of gangsta rap, Southern rap, acid rap, and dance-centered rap subgenres. Also considered are the crossover careers of rap artists in movies and television; rapper-turned-mogul phenomenons such as Queen Latifah; the multimedia empire of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; the cataclysmic rise of Death Row Records; East Coast versus West Coast tensions; the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace; and the unification efforts of the Nation of Islam and the Hip-Hop Nation.