Words and Guitar: From Rock ’n’ Roll to Hip-Hop
A First-Year Tutorial offered fall 2020, taught by Tyler Roberts, professor of religious studies
Popular music rooted in blues, gospel, and folk traditions has had an enormous impact on American culture. This tutorial will explore the music’s history, consider the different ways we listen to and live with it, and inquire into modes of cultural analysis that illuminate its powers, pleasures, and politics. Where did the music come from? How has it shaped us as individuals and as a society? How do we think, talk, and write about the ways it moves us? What do we learn, and how does our relationship to the music change when we examine it through the lenses of race and gender?
Why I Taught This Topic
I started teaching the course because I love the music and wanted to teach a course on something I know that my students also care a lot about. This gives us the chance to think critically about the music from a number of angles: not only do we examine the social and historical contexts of the music and consider how the music is related to questions of race and gender, but we also think about why we enjoy certain kinds of music and work on articulating what we hear when we listen to it.
– Tyler Roberts