Kevin C. Holt is Assistant Professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, SUNY. 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 BMus in classical performance on double bass from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music respectively. In 2020, Holt became the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon fellow for Wesleyan University’s African American Studies Department, and in 2021, he became a member of the inaugural cohort of Cleveland Institute of Music’s Future of Music Faculty Fellowship. Holt’s disciplinary specialties include ethnomusicology, Africana studies, hip-hop studies, performance studies, and gender & sexuality studies.
Fellowship Project
I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music
I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! draws on methodologies from African American studies, musicology, and performance studies to argue for crunk and other body/movement-centered Southern hip-hop music styles as performed responses to the hypervigilant policing of black youth in public spaces. The discussion begins with Atlanta’s fraught race relations during the Jim Crow era, extends through the establishment of a signature hip-hop culture in the 1980s known as yeeking, moves through the battles over public space that defined Freaknik in the 1990s and arrives at crunk, a subgenre that came to represent Southern hip-hop authenticity in the early 2000s. Throughout, I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! argue that participants in Atlanta’s evolving hip-hop party scene manifested political resistance through composition and dance by emphasizing performative and embodied facets of sociomusical participation. I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! offers both context and analysis for elucidating the interventions posed by Southern hip-hop party music which resists traditional lyrical/poetic analysis.