The Changing Same (Part 1) (Preview)

Preview of a two-part Substack post on jazz and hip hop poetics. The next two posts here will explore some background to two book chapters I worked on in the past few years, both just published in edited collections. In the next post, I’ll write more about “A Question of Form: Jazz in Joans, Kaufman, and Cortez”, a chapter in The Cambridge History of African American Poetry, a monumental volume edited by Keith Leonard. This first post, though, focuses on “Nation Time(s): Jazz and Hip-Hop’s Changing Same”, published in Hip Hop and American Culture, also from Cambridge University Press, and edited by academic and Wire magazine columnist Rob Turner. The book chapters themselves will also be available to subscribers behind the paywall.It is—or should be—uncontroversial to say that the criminalized treatment of contemporary hip hop artists is hardly different in content to that of the blues and jazz artists of the past—in itself a continuity, though hardly of a desired or desirable kind.…