Two new online reviews of the book from two very cool sources:
The Liberator
The Afrobeat blog
About Me
- Joe Schloss
- Joseph Schloss, Ph.D., is a Visiting Scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music at New York University. He is also the author of Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, which won the 2005 Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. His writing has appeared in URB, Vibe, The Seattle Weekly, The Flavor , and the anthologies Classic Material and Total Chaos.
1 comment:
Dr. Schloss, so I read your book, and I was wondering if you could expand on how you locate b-boying as an afro-diasporic dance. A lot of the discussion about this stuff revolves around either anachronisms or neo-Hersovitsian 'African retentions' ('black' people created it so it has to come from Africa). At best the evidence you gave (and you are really good with the secondary literature) leaves it to me as a maybe, because basically the way I read such histories is that there is a continuous link between bboying and 'African' dancing/martial arts. The problem with that is a) what defines bboying and b) what are the historical sources we have that show those links? To be totally arbitrary, lets say that hitting the floor and doing groundwork is the defining feature of bboying (not that it is, this is just an arbitrary definition), which means you would have to locate dances that emphasized the ground in the decades (not centuries) practiced by the inhabitants of New York (and their families) in the early 70s (to say nothing of whether the Bronx created it, which your 7th chapter totally nails). Then you would have to give some sort of evidence showing that X people were doing proto-groundwork in the 1950s or something to that effect. I always thought that old bboying looks just as much like soviet russian dance competitions as it does like capoiera as it does like kung fu etc, and the old heads totally list their influences in popular culture. I would probably situate bboying as an American black and brown dance that assimilated other elements pretty readily. You could make the argument that it was created by peoples of the African Diaspora, but not necessarily by 'African' culture (as an uninterrupted physical expression that makes every black creation the immediate purview of the continent).
Though Ness would probably think I am totally wrong on this :0
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