This talk is an extraction from the forthcoming monograph I Bet You Won't Get Crunk: The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music. The text draws on methodologies from African American studies, musicology, and performance studies to argue for crunk and other body/movement-centered Southern hip-hop music styles as performed responses to the hypervigilant policing of black youth in public spaces. The discussion begins with Atlanta’s fraught race relations during the Jim Crow era, extends through the establishment of a signature hip-hop culture in the 1980s known as yeeking, and arrives at crunk, the subgenre that came to represent Southern hip-hop authenticity in the early 2000s. Participants on Atlanta’s evolving hip-hop party scene manifested political resistance through composition and dance by emphasizing performative and embodied facets of sociomusical participation that elude straightforward textual analysis. I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! offers both context and analysis for elucidating the interventions posed by Southern hip-hop party music, which resists traditional lyrical/poetic analysis. 

Kevin C. Holt is an assistant professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, SUNY. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University, an MA in African American Studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Africana Studies and a BMus in classical performance on double bass from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, respectively. Holt was an inaugural Andrew W. Mellon fellow for Wesleyan University’s African American Studies Department (2020), was a member of the inaugural cohort of Cleveland Institute of Music’s Future of Music Faculty Fellowship (2021), and is a recipient of the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard University (2024). Holt’s disciplinary specialties include ethnomusicology, Africana studies, hip-hop studies, performance studies, and gender & sexuality studies. His current monograph project (contracted to Oxford University Press), entitled I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music focuses on Atlanta hip-hop party culture, specifically crunk, yeeking, and Freaknik, as performative responses to the hypervigilant policing of black bodies in public spaces in the US South.