Crunk, Trap, and Compositional Representations of Embodied Experiences | Kevin Holt

ACTOR Speaker Series
Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration presents:
Crunk, Trap, and Compositional Representations of Embodied Experiences
by Dr. Kevin C. Holt (Stony Brook University, SUNY)

Kevin C. Holt is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Stony Brook University, SUNY, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses focused on the music, culture, and sociomusical interventions of hip-hop. His research interests include American popular music and issues of race class & gender as they manifest in popular culture. He was selected as a featured contributor to the inaugural Transcultural Hip Hop Conference hosted by the University of Bern (2021). His current book project is an ethnographic study that draws heavily on Africana studies, musicological analysis, linguistics and performance studies in order to discuss crunk, a subgenre of Atlanta hip-hop, as a performed response to hypersurveillant policing of black youth in the city’s public spaces in the 1990s. This research has direct implications for analyzing contemporary hip-hop subgenres like trap and political movements like #blacklivesmatter. The title of his presentation is “Crunk, Trap, and Compositional Representations of Embodied Experiences”.

The Sub-Saharan Africa/Diaspora Subgroup of the Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) invited all for the third talk of the Speaker Series: Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration. It was presented by Kevin C. Holt (Stony Brook University, SUNY) on 18 January 2023 from 12:00-1:15pm (EST).