Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer who Reinvented Rhythm. By Dan Charnas. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2022.  Reviewed by Aisha Gallion         “So Far To Go” is likely the first song I ever heard by Dilla. My teenage self recalls it feeling magnetic. I look to it now as a lover’s ode and a labor of love (by Karriem Riggins, D’Angelo, and Common as well). That latter phrase is what comes to mind considering Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time. With love and care, Charnas moves readers through and beyond biography and musicology with this ..read more

Over the week since Nov 24, 2022 when 10 people locked in an apartment building died in Urumqi, Xinjiang, thousands of protesters took to the streets in multiple cities to protest the zero-COVID policy that was still in place then, with no exit strategy. But within two weeks, the Chinese government completely dismantled zero-COVID, leading to a wave of COVID-19 deaths and countless family tragedies that are now ravaging a country with an overwhelmed heathcare system. This essay looks at that earlier moment when a few thousand protestors played a critical role in catalyzing a national policy ..read more

Hip hop culture took root on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in the 1980s, a former French colony where a sugar plantation economy based on slave labor was established during the 18th century Atlantic slave trade. Slavery ended in 1848 and gave ground to a complex colonial society based on a class-color hierarchy. In 1946, Guadeloupe became an overseas department of France, a status somewhat similar to non-contiguous states in the United States, such as Hawaii. Since then, authors and cultural activists have addressed postcolonial issues such as binary oppositions (good/bad, civilization ..read more

The "In Progress" series is an academic colloquium workshop created and organized by graduate students in the School of Music. The series was designed to address the needs of the musicology department's graduate students, though it is open to all faculty, staff, and graduate students in the UCLA School of Music who wish to participate and present their work (in progress). Their goal is to create a collaborative, supportive, and encouraging space for graduate students to showcase their work or research (in progress), work through ideas, receive feedback, and (most importantly) eat food.  ..read more

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE ETHNOMUSICOLOGY ARCHIVE ON ITS 60TH BIRTHDAY! On 13 October 2021, the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive celebrated the 60th anniversary of its official opening. We had hoped to be able to plan a large-scale event to mark this momentous occasion, but the pandemic ensured that we had to substitute smaller-scale Zoom events throughout the year. Our large-scale event for this academic year is now a rich panoply of testimonials, published below, from over a hundred current and former students, alumnae/i, and other researchers, musicians, and specialists on the value of the ..read more

Wednesday March 30th, 2022 kicked off the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative’s (HHI) series, “Rap, Race, and Reality with Public Enemy’s Chuck D.” The series, will run the entire Spring Quarter and culminate with a public event at the California African American Museum on the evening of June 8th. In addition to Professor H. Samy Alim, Bunche Assistant Director Tabia Shawel, and Ethnomusicology doctoral student Samuel Lamontagne, Chuck D will be in conversation with many of the all-star Hip Hop Studies faculty at UCLA, including Professors Bryonn Bain, whose new book, Rebel Speak, on UC Press’s Hip Hop ..read more

The 1952-born Canadian artist, photographer and poet Marlene Creates has been exploring “the relationship between human experience, memory, language and the land, and the impact they have on each other”1 for over forty years. Creates uses digital media to create and distribute her work2, which over recent years has become a subject of discussion3, as well as interpretation through a feminist framework, by literary critics. In this essay I will take, as an example, a specific composition entitled River of Rain (2010), from A Virtual Walk of the Boreal Poetry Garden4, to study Creates’ conscio ..read more

On Thursday 24 February 2022, the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology was honored to welcome Consul-General Tor Saralamba of the Royal Thai Consulate-General, together with his colleagues Consul Areeya Prajunpanich Forastieri and Mr. Kenny Young, Assistant to the Consul-General. Following an invited presentation the previous week at the Consulate-General by Adjunct Assistant Professor Supeena Insee Adler on the sixty-plus-year history of Thai music at UCLA, Consul-General Saralamba asked to visit the Department of Ethnomusicology and learn more about our renowned Thai instrument collection an ..read more

              It was September of 2019 when the Sheridan Press, a small-town Wyoming newspaper, announced Kanye West’s upcoming Sunday Service at a nearby museum. In a mere instant, Wyomingites across the state did what many rural residents do in times of increased excitement: they flooded the local newspaper’s Facebook page. The post about West’s performance received the largest number of Facebook comments in the Sheridan Press page’s history (Addlesperger 2020).[1] The social media frenzy around his performances transferred into real life: as a white, rur ..read more

              A Tale of Two Artists The reception of Bon Iver is a tale of sequestration in Justin Vernon’s native rural Wisconsin. The result of Vernon’s isolation was For Emma, Forever Ago, a stunning 2008 debut album comprised of cryptic narratives accompanied by twinkling guitars and reverberant echoes. The albums released in the decade since have only strengthened the discourse steeping his work in human-nonhuman relationality. Critic Sasha Frere-Jones highlights how Vernon’s story typifies the narrative that many indie artists rely on for bolstering t ..read more