A couple weeks ago a message popped up on my Twitter account from someone who’d heard my name dropped during a talk at Harvard on black youth culture and Web 2.0. The speaker was Wayne Marshall, a writer, DJ, ethnomusicologist, and probably the only person on staff at Brandeis University who’s been written up by the Fader. Turns out we share an addiction to YouTube footwork videos and DJ Nate, and a blog post I wrote about the bedroom-production juke wunderkind landed me in Marshall’s presentation. I looked him up and we bonded via e-mail over our mutual obsession and a few other things. Finally I asked him to get a little formal and tell me about what he shared with the scholars that day.
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When I think of black youth and Web 2.0, I think of creativity. The sites that come to mind are perhaps the obvious ones: YouTube, MySpace, imeem. These are places where the ability to upload, share, and comment on content has fostered a great deal of visible and audible (and shareable) activity—and that’s true across the board, not just for young people of color. But for me—and perhaps this says as much about my own interests as anything—the examples that often best illustrate the vibrancy of digital youth culture are being generated by black kids. The remarkable efflorescence of regional African-American dance scenes, which were of course rooted in nondigital culture, is perhaps most striking. You can go to any of these Web sites and browse your way through hours of DIY, P2P, distinctively local (yet recognizably familiar) music/culture: Chicago juke, Detroit jit, Memphis buckin, Harlem’s “Chicken Noodle Soup,” Philly’s Wu-tang, not to mention stuff like Soulja Boy’s viral video dance routines or the countless and/or nameless routines of dancehall reggae (in Jamaica and the diaspora).
For a number of socioeconomic reasons, young African-Americans came sort of late to the Internet game but then seemed to come online almost en masse. Can you tell me more about that?
User-content-driven sites have also accelerated the speed at which the mainstream absorbs elements of black youth culture, with things like “Chicken Noodle Soup” going from a Harlem neighborhood thing to a worldwide pop phenomenon more or less in a matter of days. What do you think the effects of this have been so far, and what do you see happening in the future?
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