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Grit & Ghetto: American Pop Music From The '90s To The '00s, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review

Since music became easily accessible through technological advances, the industries progression has been largely dictated by the preferences of middle-class, adolescent Caucasians. When bearing this in mind, the prevalence of pop music that was either made or inspired by African American influences, particularly from an urban setting, or that invokes the persona of the white, suburban "rejects", like Nirvana, becomes an interesting inquiry. This article charts how both members and pretenders of the seemingly unpopular subgroups of black "ghetto" city-folk and awkward, friendless scruffy white males has led to some of the most critically-acclaimed and popularly adored genres of music …