The Library of Essays on Popular Music series aims to complement Ashgate's Popular and Folk Music monographs and to develop the volume of Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (2007) through its coverage of the world's popular music. Edited by Tom Perchard, From Soul to Hip-Hop brings together 18 seminal contributions to the academic and musicological exploration of practices within soul, funk, pop, R&B and hip-hop. Chosen for their importance to the field and from a range of publications, these articles have been successfully organised thematically to address style and genre; theory, analysis and historiography; and identity. Perchand's detailed editorial introduction both situates the contributions within the wider field of influential texts and introduces key issues of debate, which have emerged historically and continue to do so in contemporary studies.
In terms of geographical scope and publication date, the inclusions have been well chosen. While the editor himself notes limitations in terms of global scope afforded by such a volume, his choice of Tony Mitchell's chapter encapsulates Mitchell's wider publications, and offers a wide-reaching insight into the ‘local indigenisations of the global musical idiom of rap’ (p. 287). Each of the three themed sections includes publications from the 1990s to those published just before From Soul to Hip Hop's, providing articles that both innovate and stand the test of time, with inclusions from many authors well respected within the field such as Rob Bowman, Paul Gilroy and Robert Fink, to name but a few. While focused upon soul, funk, pop R&B and hip-hop, the chapters by Felicia Miyakawa, Alexander Stewart and Justin Williams also relate to hierarchies and authenticating discourses of classical music and jazz, used by jazz-rap artists, emerging funk bands and scratch turntablists in their pursuit of the authentic and the revolutionary, expanding the debate into a wide range of musical genres.
A musicological approach runs through the chosen papers, placing the music as central to academic understanding in the scores provided and examined by Rob Bowman, Robert Fink's rhythmic teleology analysis and Joseph Schloss's beat-based description of b-boy toprocking floor moves. Such in-depth analysis of music and movement alike across many of the chapters invited a musical accompaniment to my reading, with Charles Kronengold's analysis of Marvin Gaye's What 's Going On read and re-read with the record itself played, and Aretha Franklin's Unforgettable re-visited alongside Michael Awkward's examination of the relationship between Franklin and Dinah Washington. As a researcher of a music-based dance scene, I find such approaches a rarity in the study of popular music and central to my own methodological and theoretical concerns.
While most of the articles live up to their landmark status within black musical scholarship, Richard Rischar's chapter on increased ornamentation in African-American music seems in comparison a comparatively weak and descriptive contribution, not quite exploring the use of such forms by non-African American singers or the tensions between musical genres. Similarly, while Chapman's article seemingly offers a novel way to view contemporary R&B and rap recordings, his application of Paul Gilroy's approach to biopolitics arguably rests too heavily on postmodern assumptions, attempting to escape from troubling elements of current R&B lyrics through an unconvincing ‘eclipse of the human’ (p. 192). Such inclusions do not successfully reach the heights attained by their innovative and theoretically solid neighbours.
As a researcher interested in the personal narratives and experiences of participants within the Northern Soul scene, the articles under the organizing theme of identity were particularly provocative and engaging. Loren Kajikawa's study of the white rapper Eminem reframes claims of racial and class-based authenticity in rap, Joseph Schloss successfully uses the voices of b-boy and b-girls to demonstrate the influence of a musical canon on scene practices and Mark Katz explores the impact of gender-role assumptions on DJ music production and performance. In terms of identity, however, a more explicit consideration of African American music within a multigenerational or retrospective music scene would have added another dimension of debate, offered by writers such as Mary Fogarty (see her Reference Fogarty, Bennett and Hodkinson2012 study of ageing b-boys).
Offering, as the editorial introduction states, access to seminal texts that are not widely available, this volume provides researchers and students alike with a carefully chosen and well-contextualised introduction to the history of African American music and, importantly, the frames and methods through which it has been studied. Perchand's introduction plays a central role in this, not only summarising the chapters but also placing them within the wider field of study and providing a carefully critique in terms of date of publication and the authors' subsequent work within the field. While other publications have focused upon the history of African American music in general and in genre-specific detail, such as Guthrie Ramsey's (Reference Ramsey2003) Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-hop and Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal's (eds) (Reference Neal and Forman2004) That's the Joint!: The Hip-hop Studies Reader, this book provides both an overview of pivotal research and insight into the impact that such papers had upon academic conceptualisations of African American music, identity and, ultimately, the ways in which this can be most usefully framed through academic study.
