On Loop is an exciting, entertaining, and thoughtful advancement of the literature on sound and space. The book draws upon ‘musical, archival, and ethnographic research, and a decade of personal experience as a DJ and dancer’ and argues that ‘Black dance music—from blues to funk, hip-hop to hyphy—has animated the looping struggles over development, dispossession, and self-determination that have come to define Oakland’ (p. xv–xvi). Werth sees ‘music as an active force’, and argues that the ‘fields of urban studies, planning, and geography…tend to literally overlook the ways that popular music and sound cultures animate the brick-and-mortar politics of race and space’ (p. xv).

By ‘looping’, Werth refers to an element that blurs the line ‘between start and end, now and then’. By studying these loops, Werth’s aim is to create a ‘more acoustically attuned perspective on the ongoing Black freedom struggle in Oakland’ (p. 2). The book’s perspective is from both insider and outsider voices. In part, Werth is a cultural and geographic outsider, but he also finds connection to the locale by closely following 2000s rap culture and by DJing and dancing locally while enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. The book’s content is driven by his practitioner experience, extensive research, and interviews with over 50 people. Werth also notes that the book is not a ‘comprehensive history of Black dance music in Oakland’ (p. 33).

The locational scope of the book is Oakland in general, with focus areas such as downtown’s Lake Merritt, West Oakland’s DeFremery Park and Sixteenth Street train station, and East Oakland’s sites of sideshow activity and anti-cruising campaigns. Meanwhile, the temporal scope covers the last 100 years of ‘struggle over Black freedom in Oakland’ (p. 13). Topically, there is a focus on social, cultural, economic, and geographical change as ‘attempts to control Black sounds loop from one period to the next’ (p. 14). When Werth writes that conflicts ‘are never new’, the core framework seems similar to the concept of ‘intercurrence’ in the American political development (APD) scholarship – which holds that institutions and cultures are never created anew, but are instead forged on top of existing institutions and cultures (p. 14). Werth sees tone, volume, repetition, and reverberation at the ‘locus of conflict and regulation’ (p. 9). Regulation is matched by artisan innovation, creating an ongoing looping cycle. On Loop shows this to include ‘intergenerational poverty, repressive policing, incarceration’, while repetition is also a ‘sonic, temporal, and even spiritual resource’ used to free Black residents ‘however momentarily—from the strictures of structural oppression’ (p. 19).

Chapter 1 begins with the World War II mass migration of Black workers from the US South, who were met with cultural and residential segregation. The new arrivals sought freedom and play in places like bars and poolrooms but were met with a swift response as ‘politicians condemned these spaces’ (p. 41). There were permits and fees on ‘movie theaters, cabarets, carnivals, jukeboxes, and buskers’ as there was an effort to uphold the city’s ‘new social and sexual color lines’ (p. 42). Black musicians were effectively barred from playing in White venues as Seventh Street ‘came to house dozens of Black-owned bars and clubs’ (p. 47). In Chapter 2, the focus turns to funk music and boogaloo dance aligned with Black Power. Werth argues this ‘next generation of migrant youth rebelled against the social, spatial, and sonic constraints of West Coast Jim Crow’ (p. 20). These ‘musicians, dancers, and radio DJs’ represented youth growing ‘disillusioned with the carefully crafted gloom of the Oakland Blues’ and who instead wanted music formed around the new ‘downbeat’ (p. 68). The chapter also discusses links between funk and The Lumpen, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense band. As the Panthers drew large crowds, they were met with new forms of control.

Chapters 3 and 4 add a great deal to our current knowledge of sound culture in Oakland. Chapter 3 examines ‘strategies of governance and development promoted by a rising cohort of Black political elites’ in an environment marked by disinvestment, unemployment, and drug wars which led to crusades against ‘crime and grime’ using ‘broken windows’ policies (p. 21). This war on nuisance ‘targeted Black youth culture, including Black dance music and soundscape’ in streets, parks, concerts, and nightclubs (p. 96). Chapter 4 explains how a new relationship between ‘crime, grime, and rhyme’ allowed regulators and venue owners to create ‘new restrictions that culminated in a de facto ban on rap concerts’ (p. 21). The ensuing crackdown on music venues and boomboxes ‘disrupted opportunities for local artists to develop their microphone skills and market at the precise moment that rap came to dominate American popular music’ (p. 121). Artists such as Shock G, Too $hort, and MC Hammer faced a ‘total moratorium on rap music’ because of the ‘rising war on nuisance among local regulators and venue owners’ (pp. 124–125). As the city council prohibited stereo use in public, there was a shift to mobile audio and sideshows, producing an ‘iconoclastic’ and ‘independent’ streak among artists and fans.

In Chapter 5, Werth illustrates how the hyphy movement and sideshows ‘ratcheted up the tension between young men of color and police’ and how more crackdowns confined the ‘scene to the margins’ and within the ‘regional bubble’ (p. 22). The sideshow’s call-and-response between youth and police is seen as a ‘circular process’ (p. 143). Rap music responds to the needs of this sideshow culture, shifting toward the sped-up tempo that led the Hyphy movement (pp. 159-161). All actors are then caught in a loop, or a ‘cat-and-mouse game.’ Activists are met with ‘new surveillance technologies,’ then create a new mode of expression, and the loop starts again (p. 176). Chapter 6 centres on new regulations ‘meant to control an apparent scourge of nuisance and crime in and around Black owned nightclubs’ (p. 23). A focus here is on ‘the let out’ or the area near the club after it closes. Werth argues that ‘the dispossession of Black nightlife was driven by the mundane and bureaucratic regulation of black crowds and sounds’ (p. 23). The number and composition of nightclubs in the area changed dramatically; in 2001, there were no White-owned clubs spinning ‘rap, R&B and dancehall’. By 2016, half of the clubs spinning those styles of music were owned by Whites (p. 216).

In Chapter 7, the fallout from ‘BBQ Becky’ is examined, an incident in which a ‘White woman called the police on two Black men for barbecuing at Lake Merritt’ (p. 23). Werth explains that when music is deemed ‘noise’, it ‘authorizes forms of state control and racial violence that reassert White norms throughout the urban environment’, reproducing ‘discriminatory patterns of regulation and policing’ (p. 230). Werth also documents roller-skating, cruising, and sideshows as forms of ‘circling and circulation’ and as paths ‘out of oppression’ as youth ‘used looping as a means to remediate and reclaim spaces that were adverse to Black life’ (pp. 249–250). The Conclusion notes that ‘sound has become entangled in struggles over segregation, redevelopment, antinuisance campaigns, broken-window policing, nightlife, the management of public space, and more’ (p. 256). Werth concludes that ‘Oakland’s Black geographies tend to be structured by an experience of repetition rather than progression’ (p. 259).

On Loop’s overall metaphor is particularly strong and the argument is extremely compelling. It also raises questions for future research. In Werth’s framework, local Black youth agency in the loop seems to be in active response to authorities. But how do young Black people begin to control the loop (or get out of the loop) and not merely act in response to power? This seems to be an important question for future works locally and beyond, and On Loop will be a key resource in helping drive this discussion.