Just a few years ago, the Oakland Museum of California hosted an exhibition titled RESPECT: Hip-Hop Style to explore popular memory, we must look and listen.On Loop succeeds in many of these ways, leveraging the relationship between music and everyday social movements to trace the history of Black Oakland.The book begins with an exploration of Black westward migration during World War II, examining the history of blues venues and other hubs of Black entertainment culture in West Oakland. In the 1940s and ’50s, in the rapidly growing communities near the Oakland shipyards, music connected a people who had left Jim Crow oppression behind, while it also created justification for re-segregation. “The moral panic over migration often focused on opposition to the cultural practices of Black Southerners,” Werth writes, “causing regulators to crack down on working-class entertainment venues and commercial districts” (20). From these postwar roots, Werth moves forward to trace this tension between movement and containment from the era of Black Power, when a younger generation embraced the percussive “slap-bass” sounds of funk, to the era of the sideshow, the unsanctioned, stunt-centric car culture with a renegade, anti-authority aesthetic that fueled the Bay’s early 2000s hyphy movement (arguably rap’s most inventive subgenre).By connecting, for instance, Black Panther Party rallies to funk and soul euphoria, and boogaloo dance crews like the Black Resurgents to 1970s revolutionary dreams, Werth argues that music and performance made political messages “an exciting and accessible part of everyday life” and laid the groundwork for collective action (66). Yet, as the author’s first chapters portend, the music cultures created and shared in Black Oakland would inevitably be treated as noise nuisances to be contained, while the people who enjoyed them would also be policed. Werth reveals how this friction shaped the cultural and political landscapes of Oakland, from the days of Slim Jenkins’ Club on Seventh Street to the sideshows at Eastmost Mall.On Loop is strongest when it offers vivid descriptions of community members who navigated Oakland’s transformations, including rap legend Stanley “MC Hammer” Burrell. In stories like these, Werth reveals the complex responses to the policing of noise, the displacement that urban renewal set in motion, and the generational, socioeconomic, and cultural divides within Oakland’s diverse Black population. The book also provides careful connections between the explicit politics represented by the music of a group like the Lumpen and the implicit but no less emancipatory politics signaled in the practice of playing E-40 on full blast from the speakers of a tricked-out Buick LeSabre.At times the narrative suffers from methodological imprecision. The author inserts moments of memoir and personal observation throughout, which distracts from the well-researched history. Werth identifies himself as “a White man who interacted with and relied upon a lot of men of color to complete this research” (32). Intentionally or not, he reminds us of this often, by recounting his intimate hangs with, for instance, documentarian Yakpusua Zazaboi, writer and activist Gino Pastori-Ng, and storied Oakland nightclub owner Geoffrey Pete. These anecdotes are evocatively told, but they blur the line between historical analysis and sentimentality.In spite of this, On Loop is a persuasive examination of Black music as a site of resistance. Werth’s work will put him, as a geographer, in the good company of the many historians who have considered sound central to the study of everyday social movements, including Robin D. G. Kelley (Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, 1994), Suzanne Smith (Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, 1999), and Mark Anthony Neal (Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, 2001). Plus, Werth adds meaningfully to a still limited body of work historicizing West Coast rap—a serious gap in hip-hop scholarship given the tremendous influence California’s rap cultures have had on popular music across genres, regions, and eras.Certain to be a worthy addition to any syllabus or reading list exploring movement histories, On Loop provides a resonant takeaway: A nightclub, a party, a car show, or even a picnic is no “antithesis of politics.” Indeed, it may be the very definition of resistance and protest.
Felicia Angeja Viator (Thu,) studied this question.