Popular Music and American Politics

Hip-hop has long been considered political: as Chuck D. famously observed "rap music is the CNN of the ghetto". Moving beyond clearly political themes, slogans, and acts of alterity at the heart of Hip-Hop, this essay employs the work of the rap-artist Eminem to draw out and identify a further way in which those of us engaged in political analysis might productively conceive of the genre as being political. Drawing upon the European and American existentialist traditions, this essay suggests that the artist's irony, hyperbole, and theatricality are constituents of a political worldview that recognizes both the need for self-creation and the pressure, social, political, and artistic, that make this quest for self-creation both an endless struggle and an opportunity for a vivified care of the self. The aim here is not to seek to valorise the rap genre by suggesting that it might offer insight into the political, but rather to point to the ways in which the cultural analysis of politics, and the political analysis of culture, might move beyond the rote by paying attention to the ethical, political, artistic, and philosophical nuances of the object of study.

My objective with this thesis is to investigate and document the extent to which Jamerson appropriated the skills he acquired in jazz and blues environments into a popular music context, arguably transforming the role of the bass guitar. Biographical information and excerpted transcriptions of his bass lines will inform my analysis of Jamerson’s musical style and evolution. The formal analysis with accompanying transcriptions will be drawn from his career at Motown Records, with mention of his session work for other labels, illustrating both the development of his style and explaining how his recorded output virtually created the model for contemporary electric bass guitar performance. Additionally, this thesis will expand the historical record on Jamerson while correcting errors, creating a selective, centralized and updated source list for the literature on Jamerson while expanding the amount of musical analysis of his specific bass lines and, with the analysis, solidifying the direct connection between Jamerson’s jazz experience and his eventual evolved music persona.