Center for Ethnomusicology
2960 Broadway
701C Dodge Hall, Columbia University
Tuesday, October 13, 5:30PM
Abstract: I Bet You Won't Get Crunk! analyzes Atlanta's hip-hop party culture framed through Atlanta's history of aggressively surveilling and silencing black youth. In response to patterns of targeted policing, Atlanta's black youth created party cultures and music that explicitly focused on being loud and taking up space, yielding a kind of resistance through performance and participation. This resistance manifested in the city's roller rink culture, in a signature hip-hop dance style known as yeeking, in the public impositions of Freaknik, and in collective catharsis of getting crunk. By emphasizing semiotic analyses of gestures, images, dances, and performance choices, Kevin C. Holt makes a case for the political interventions of party culture. In doing so, I Bet You Won't Get Crunk! offers analytical tools that elucidate non-lyrical meaning within hip-hop music broadly and the underlying meaning of crunk music specifically, pushing back against early 21st century moral panics that considered crunk and its connected party culture vacuous and, by extension, a threat to hip-hop's political potency.
Bio: Kevin C. Holt is an assistant professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, SUNY. He was an Andrew W. Mellon fellow for Wesleyan University's African American Studies Department (2020), a member of the inaugural cohort of Cleveland Institute of Music's Future of Music Faculty Fellowship (2021), and a recipient of the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research (2024). Holt's disciplinary specialties include ethnomusicology, Africana studies, hip-hop studies, performance studies, and gender & sexuality studies.
His book, I Bet You Won't Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music, focuses on Atlanta hip-hop party culture, specifically crunk, yeeking, and Freaknik, as performative responses to the hypervigilant policing of black bodies in public spaces in the US South.
He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University, an MA in African American Studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Africana Studies and a BMus in classical performance on double bass from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, respectively.
If you are not affiliated with Columbia, here is how to gain access:
- Send your full name to [email protected] (or any Columbia student, faculty, or staff member) to be registered.
- The host will register you on the Guest Registration portal by 5 PM, Mon. Oct.12. Same-day registration is limited to two guests per host.
- The portal issues a QR code. Have it on your phone (or printed) and use the 116th St. & Broadway gate (guest QR line open until 7 PM).
Presented by Columbia University's Department of Music and Center for Ethnomusicology
