[Mus-undergrad-info] Bayz Music Series, Tomorrow, 4/22: How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop (Amy Coddington)

[Amy Skjerseth]

*2025–2026 Florence Bayz Music Series*
*How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop*
Amy Coddington
April 22, 12–12:50pm, ARTS 157

[image: image.png]
*Over the past half century, hip hop has utterly transformed U.S. culture:
look around, and it’s hard to see or hear something that hasn’t been
influenced by the young people of color who fashioned, developed, and
championed hip hop culture. Hip hop isn’t so much part of today’s
mainstream as it is the mainstream. *

*How exactly did this happen? How did this minority subcultural movement
find its way out of the community center and block parties of the South
Bronx and into the ears, eyes, and hearts of people across the United
States? This lecture analyzes the critical role commercial radio stations
had in this transformation, examining how the racial organization of the
radio industry influenced the way hip hop music was sold to the American
public.*


Bio:
Amy Coddington is an associate professor of music at Amherst College, where
she teaches classes on American popular music. Her book *How Hip Hop Became
Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race* (University of California Press, 2023)
explores how rap broke through to a white mainstream audience in the 1980s
and 1990s through programming on commercial radio stations. She has
published related essays in the *Journal of the Society for American Music*
and *The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music*.

Spread the word to your students and friends; Bayz series events are free
and open to the public. For more information about this event and the event
series, please visit
https://events.ucr.edu/event/Amy-Coddington?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=UC+Riverside
.

See you tomorrow!
Amy (Bayz series coordinator)
*Dr. Amy Skjerseth* (*she/her*)
Assistant Professor of Popular Music
University of California, Riverside

Book out September 2026: *Preprogrammed: How Electronic Presets Changed
Music and Media <https://www.ucpress.edu/books/preprogrammed/paper>*

PI, "Defying Defaults in Technology and Culture
<https://uchri.org/awards/defying-defaults-in-technology-and-culture/>,"
UCHRI Multicampus Research Working Group

*I sometimes send emails outside of traditional working hours, but I do not
expect a response outside of your own.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/mus-undergrad-info/attachments/20260421/9bb3523c/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 450169 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/mus-undergrad-info/attachments/20260421/9bb3523c/attachment-0001.png>