Unit 6 Summary

During the 1960s, advancements in civil rights and social justice, a greater awareness of inequality, and legislation promoting concerted efforts towards ensuring fairness for all Americans, particularly African Americans, helped to launch a new era in America. Often regarded as postmodernism, one can argue the 1970s through the 1990s represent a time of social conditioning, where people behave in a manner approved by society; a time of self-consciousness, where individuals focus on how they may appear to others; or a time when movements in contemporary art, literature, and, of course, music signaled a different era.

Without doubt the aforementioned advancements and postmodern thinking, which surfaced in philosophy, architecture, criticism, and most relevant here, the arts, it seemed African Americans were becoming emotionally unshackled from the not-so-distant past of slavery, Jim Crow, job and housing discrimination, just to name a few, to a mindset of a new beginning of unconstrained creation. This cannot be any truer and recognizable than in music, as there has never been as many styles of African American music within a thirty-year period in American history prior to the current millennium. These styles include funk, disco, go-go, new labels for rhythm and blues, urban contemporary, jazz-rock, soul-jazz, jazz-funk, fusion, smooth jazz, neo-soul, and hip-hop.

Interestingly, the 1970s denotes a time when mainly young people were most responsible for a style of African American music that has shaped and continues to shape American society, and the world-namely hip-hop. Its beginning, unlike previous styles, was not a continuation of African American music styles based on its progenitors' music, but rather a creative and innovative approach to music that was due in part to postmodernism.