ABSTRACT

A Matter of Death and Life: Necrographies of Hip-Hop in Contemporary Detroit

By

Alex Blue V

This dissertation is a necrographic study of how musicians 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. My research orbits around narratives of death and dying and numerous ways they are addressed by Black Detroiters; I am primarily interested 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. I make use of various methods to interpret the myriad ways both practitioners and participants in Detroit use the creation, performance, and consumption of hip-hop for identity formation and reification in a rapidly-changing city. This dissertation is the first ethnomusicological work on Detroit hip-hop, contributes to a growing Black studies intervention into ethnomusicology, and offers new insights into the connections between sound, race, and death in Detroit and beyond.