African American Studies | Open Access Articles

Bronx Soundscape: Reflections On The Multicultural Roots Of Hip Hop In Bronx Neighborhoods, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Street-Ball: The Myth Of The Ghetto Basketball Star, Vincent F. Mcsweeney

Honors Scholar Theses

In recent decades, countless scholars have examined the developing trend of African American dominance in United States’ professional sports. Many have hypothesized that this over-representation is caused by the presumed reliance on sports as an avenue out of poverty for the African American youths. This trend, it is believed, has a highly detrimental effect the African American community. In actuality, this argument is flawed because it works under the stereotypical assumption that the overwhelming majority of African Americans come from abject poverty. To dispel this fallacy, the author has analyzed the upbringings of each All-National Basketball League First Team player …

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Crooning On The Fault Lines: Theorizing Jazz And Pop Vocal Singing Discourse In The Rock Era, 1955-1978, Vincent L. Stephens

Vincent L Stephens

The critical boundaries drawn between pop crooning and jazz singing are less discrete than commonly perceived by critics and historians. Commercial choices rather than clear-cut aesthetic differences have influenced classifications of non-improvisers like Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee as “jazz” singers, a category presumed to represent the ultimate in vocal interpretation. Comparatively, singers like Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand are aesthetically similar to prerock crooners (PRCs) but typically understood as pop singers and thus on a lower interpretive tier. This article interrogates the binary by examining the overlaps and divergences between PRCs whose recording careers (mostly) began during the big …