Sonic Sovereignty: G/local Hip Hop and the Shifting Popular Music Mainstream, 2008-2018

FAIN: HB-281490-22

Liz Przybylski
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (Riverside, CA 92521-0001)

Completion of a book and two open-access articles about Indigenous hip hop musicians, media professionals and the concept of sonic sovereignty.

What does sovereignty sound like? The book Sonic Sovereignty: G/local Hip Hop and the Shifting Popular Music Mainstream answers this question through ethnographic research and media analysis undertaken with Indigenous hip hop musicians and media professionals. The research is rooted in Winnipeg, an Indigenous music broadcasting center in Canada whose resonance is heard across borders. It reveals the wide and deep impacts of Streetz FM, the first Indigenous hip hop station, and probes the forces that led to the station’s closure, even as its music continued to find popularity with audiences. I extend research that explores the racialization and gendering of urban-format popular music and detail the implications on how Indigenous artists are heard—and silenced—through popular music distribution. Musicians are actively building what I call sonic sovereignty, navigating the expectations of mainstream airplay while pushing aesthetic and political boundaries.

Associated Products

Look Inside Sonic Sovereignty Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams (Book)
Title: Look Inside Sonic Sovereignty Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams
Author: Liz Przybylski
Editor: Karen Tongson
Editor: Henry Jenkins
Abstract: Sonic Sovereignty considers how contemporary Indigenous musicians champion self-determination through musical expression in Canada and the United States. The framework of “sonic sovereignty” connects self-definition, collective determination, and Indigenous land rematriation to the immediate and long-lasting effects of expressive culture. Liz Przybylski covers online and offline media spaces, following musicians and producers as they, and their music, circulate across broadcast and online networks. Przybylski documents and reflects on shifts in both the music industry and political landscape over the course of a decade: as the ways in which people listen to, consume, and interact with popular music have radically changed, extensive public conversations have flourished around contemporary Indigenous culture, settler responsibility, Indigenous leadership, and decolonial futures. Sonic Sovereignty encourages us to experiment with temporal possibilities of listening by detailing moments when a sample, lyric, or musical reference moves a listener out of normative time. Nonlinear storytelling practices from hip hop music and other North American Indigenous sonic practices inform these generative listenings. The musical readings presented in this book thus explore how musicians use tools to help listeners embrace rupture, and how out-of-time listening creates decolonial possibilities.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://nyupress.org/9781479816927/sonic-sovereignty/
Publisher: NYU Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781479816927
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

honorable mention for the Alan Merriam Prize
Date: 10/26/2024
Organization: Society for Ethnomusicology
Abstract: This award recognizes the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology, published as the author’s second or a later monograph.

Nostalgia for a Time Yet to Come (Article)
Title: Nostalgia for a Time Yet to Come
Author: Liz Przybylski
Abstract: This is a detailed reading of an album by rapper T-Rhyme that includes interviews with the musician and reflection on the album Diary of a Mad Red Woman.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.iaspm.ca/automusicologiesposts/2024/7/2/nostalgia-for-a-time-yet-to-come
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Auto-Musicologies, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Canada

Music Video as Process: “Revitalize” by T-Rhyme (Article)
Title: Music Video as Process: “Revitalize” by T-Rhyme
Author: Liz Przybylski
Abstract: This is a reading with media of the music video “Revitalize” that incorporates ideas of Indigenous storytelling and reflection with the rapper T-Rhyme.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://soundstudiesblog.com/2024/06/10/music-video-as-process-revitalize/
Access Model: Open-Access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Sounding Out!

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