THE MUSIC & SOUND STUDIES RESEARCH COLLABORATIVE is hosting “We Can Conquer the World”: Stevie Wonder and the Synthesize in the 1970s on Friday, October 26 at 4:00 PM in Ferguson Hall Room 280. For more information, click here or see below.
Please join the Music & Sound Studies research collaborative on Friday, October 26th, at 4:00PM in Ferguson 280 for Professor Jack Hamilton's (UVA) talk:
“We Can Conquer the World”: Stevie Wonder and the Synthesizer in the 1970s
The five albums made by Stevie Wonder between 1972 and 1976 won him an unprecedented three Album of the Year Grammys and placed him at the critical and commercial vanguard of Seventies pop. This talk explores Wonder’s use of synthesizer technologies during the 1970s to create cutting-edge soundscapes that offered vital windows into black American life at the dawn of the “post-civil rights” era, and argues that Wonder’s political commitments were often intertwined with his musical commitments to destabilizing race, place and genre through technological innovation. In Wonder’s hands the synthesizer became a musical vehicle for emphatic statements about the precarious political and social condition of America in the 1970s, as well as a tool for dismantling longstanding stereotypes of black music as anti-technological, anti-modern, and anti-intellectual.
Professor Hamilton is the author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard).
On Saturday, Oct. 27th, we will also be hosting a graduate student lunch with Professor Hamilton where we will discuss publishing work on popular music.
