Online-Vortrag: ‘Playing it Straight’: Rock ’n’ Roll, Ska, and the swung- to straight-quaver shift

Paper: ‘Playing it Straight’: Rock ’n’ Roll, Ska, and the swung- to straight-quaver shift

Dr Sam Flynn (Lecturer in Analysis and Popular Music, University of Leeds)

Donnerstag, 23.03.2023, 1–2pm (14:00-15:00 CET)

HYBRID: LT4 and Zoom

This paper is a transnational study of Black rhythm in the Americas. Scholarship on popular music privileges ‘American’ music, overlooking the fact that America is not a country. it is two continents. This paper nuances national understandings of popular music by interrogating an overlooked rhythmic transformation through the lens of both the United States and Jamaica. A corpus analysis of 535 chart hits from 1950 to 1965 establishes that a shift from swung- to straight-quaver subdivisions occurred in the popular music of both nations by 1961. This rhythmic transition contributed to the development of two national styles: US rock ’n’ roll and Jamaican ska. Focusing on Little Richard and Prince Buster as case studies, the paper demonstrates three musical influences on this swung-to-straight shift: African-American boogie, African-Caribbean musics, and the ‘metric malleability’ of rhythmic patterns such as the ‘oompah’ percussion of colonial marches. Finally, the paper challenges the received wisdom that the rhythmic shift represents countercultural revolution in the United States and postcolonial independence in Jamaica by exposing the marginalisation of Latinx Americans and Chinese Jamaicans in these narratives.

Dr Sam Flynn is Lecturer in Analysis and Popular Music at the University of Leeds. His research interests include rhythm, musical influence, genre, musical meaning, historiography, as well as the relationship between mass-culture critiques and the politics of race, gender, ethnicity, and age. Sam’s research focuses on the analysis of African-diasporic popular musics of the Americas – namely, African-American styles from 1950s R&B through to 21st-century hip hop as well as African-Jamaican ska, rocksteady, and reggae of the 1960s and 1970s.

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Meeting ID: 831 9982 0325
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