How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop - by Amy Coddington

About the Book

"How did rap become the most popular genre in the United States, and what were the consequences of this subculture becoming part of the mainstream? In How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop, Amy Coddington examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how this industry facilitated rap's introduction into the musical mainstream. Playing rap on the radio changed the sound of the genre, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs that fit on the radio. But the effects of rap's mainstreaming were not one-sided. The genre altered the radio industry by bringing brought together large multicultural audiences, challenging the racial identity of the popular music mainstream. But within a few years, the very idea of the mainstream would be called into question, as radio programmers unsure of the genre's popularity wreaked havoc on the multicultural coalitions which rap had fostered"--

Book Synopsis

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream.

The author gratefully acknowledges the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From the Back Cover

"Here it is--bam! The definitive story of rap, race, radio, and marketplace during hip hop's Golden Age. Amy Coddington combines an archivist's rigor and a raconteur's wit in documenting what those of us of a certain age remember but, perhaps, never fully grasped: how, amidst expanding racial inequalities and against all odds, rap music became the most popular genre in America."--Anthony Kwame Harrison, author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification

"Making use of trade publications that have received little scholarly attention, Coddington has crafted a provocative and lucid alternative history that tracks how the radio industry's engagement with hip hop in the 1980s and 1990s both reflected and shaped changing ideas about race and music."--Loren Kajikawa, author of Sounding Race in Rap Songs

Review Quotes

"Readers leave this book with a convic­tion that radio mattered in the 1980s and 1990s. And rap music's inclusion on radio--as a marker of mainstream success, as a gateway to the genre's in­creased popularity and economic power, as a means for spreading mes­sages from the primarily Black artists who created it--was something that was heavily advocated for or resisted by various artists, listeners, programmers, and advertisers...Coddington's book provides a well-researched and clearly written examination of perhaps the first time that these questions were addressed."

-- "Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association"

About the Author

Amy Coddington is Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music.