Just Around Midnight by Jack Hamilton

Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

A critical cultural history that argues rock music’s identity was shaped as much by racial narratives and anxieties as by sound, tracing debates and controversies from the 1950s to today to show how whiteness was constructed as the genre’s default even while Black musicians originated and continually transformed it; through case studies of performances, covers, media coverage, and policing of bodies, the book examines how claims of authenticity, cultural appropriation, and institutional practices erased or reshaped Black contributions and stabilized popular ideas about genre, youth, and race.

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