This dissertation theorizes a contemporary hip-hop genre that I call "neo-bohemian," typified by rapper Kendrick Lamar and his collective, Black Hippy. I argue that, by reclaiming the origins of hipness as a set of hybridizing Black cultural responses to the experience of modernity, neo-bohemian rappers imagine and live out liberating ways of being beyond the West's objectification and dehumanization of Blackness. In turn, I situate neo-bohemian hip-hop within a history of Black musical expression in the United States, Senegal, Mali, and South Africa to locate an "aesthetics of existence" in the African diaspora. By centering this aesthetics as a unifying component of these musical practices, I challenge top-down models of essential diasporic interconnection. Instead, I present diaspora as emerging primarily through comparable responses to experiences of paradigmatic racial violence, through which to imagine radical alternatives to our anti-Black global society. Overall, by rethinking the heuristic value of hipness as a musical and lived Black aesthetic, the project develops an innovative method for connecting the aesthetic and the social in music studies and Black studies, while offering original historical and musicological insights into Black metaphysics and studies of the African diaspora.

Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -- and continues to influence -- America's view of itself, and provides an incisive account of hip's quest for authenticity. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Making the Scene is a history of 1960s Yorkville, Toronto's countercultural mecca. It narrates the hip Village's development from its early coffee house days, when folksingers such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell flocked to the scene, to its tumultuous, drug-fuelled final months. A flashpoint for hip youth, politicians, parents, and journalists alike, Yorkville was also a battleground over identity, territory, and power. Stuart Henderson explores how this neighbourhood came to be regarded as an alternative space both as a geographic area and as a symbol of hip Toronto in the cultural imagination. Through recently unearthed documents and underground press coverage, Henderson pays special attention to voices that typically aren't heard in the story of Yorkville - including those of women, working class youth, business owners, and municipal authorities. Through a local history, Making the Scene offers new, exciting ways to think about the phenomenon of counterculture and urban manifestations of a hip identity as they have emerged in cities across North America and beyond.

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

This book presents an investigation and assessment of an artistic community that emerged within Philadelphia’s Fishtown and the nearby neighborhood of Kensington. The book starts out by examining historical and sociological work on bohemia, and then provides a detailed history of greater Philadelphia and the Fishtown/Kensington region. After analyzing the ways in which Fishtown/Kensington’s artistic community maintains continuity with bohemian tradition, it demonstrates that this community has decoupled traditional bohemian practices from their anti-bourgeois foundation. The book also demonstrates that this community helped generate and maintains overlapping membership with a larger community of hipsters. It concludes by defining the area's artistic community as an artistic bohemian lifestyle community, and argues that the artistic activities and cultural practices exhibited by the community are not unique, and have significant implications for urban artistic policy, and for post-industrial urban society.

This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.