The UC San Diego Department of Music's Integrative Studies program is starting their Spring Quarter Focus series with guest speaker Dr. Alex Blue V, a professor of Black Studies in Media and Technology at McGill University.

 A Matter of Death and Life: Necrographies of Hip-Hop in Contemporary Detroit 
Blue’s book project is a necrographic study of how participants in Detroit’s hip-hop scene respond to various narratives of death and dying about Detroit and in Detroit, how they might use a supposedly dead city as inspiration, how they create from seemingly dead spaces, and how all of these things are colored by both race and place. His work orbits around narratives of death and dying and numerous ways they are addressed by Black Detroiters with a primary interest in responses to various forms of death and dying through the creation and consumption of hip-hop. As this project shows, studying Detroit hip-hop can help us understand more deeply the ways in which Black people navigate, respond to, and live with the various forms of death that are prematurely forced upon us in the US and around the world. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon various methods from ethnomusicology, Black studies, urban studies, sound studies, and more, Blue interprets the myriad ways both practitioners and participants in Detroit use the creation, performance, and consumption of hip-hop in a rapidly-changing city.

Bio:
Alex Blue V is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Media and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His research examines the intersections of race, sound, space, and place, often employing heavily ethnographic methods to demonstrate the influence of race on sound, and the influence of sound on race. Additionally, he is interested in narratives of death, dying, and afterlives in relation to Black sound and musical culture. Blue is currently working on two book projects. The first, titled A Matter of Death and Life, is an ethnographic (or “necrographic”) study of the narratives of death and dying in contemporary Detroit hip-hop, and how artists employ various forms of death as praxis in music making. The second, which he is co-authoring with Dr. Kyle DeCoste (Tulane University), is an ethnographic study of country rap, also known as “hick hop,” that examines issues of race, gender, class, nationalism, and identity, primarily (but not entirely) in the southern United States.
Blue received his MM in Jazz Studies from University of North Texas, and his PhD in Ethnomusicology from University of California - Santa Barbara. Prior to joining the AHCS faculty at McGill, he was an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at William & Mary, the Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, and a Predoctoral Fellow in Music at Ithaca College.

 Tuesday, April 29, 2025 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM

 Conrad Prebys Music Center - Room 231

 FREE