UC Riverside Department of Music presents:

Amy Coddington: How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop

Over the past half century, hip hop has utterly transformed U.S. culture: look around, and it’s hard to see or hear something that hasn’t been influenced by the young people of color who fashioned, developed, and championed hip hop culture. Hip hop isn’t so much part of today’s mainstream as it is the mainstream. 

How exactly did this happen? How did this minority subcultural movement find its way out of the community center and block parties of the South Bronx and into the ears, eyes, and hearts of people across the United States? This lecture analyzes the critical role commercial radio stations had in this transformation, examining how the racial organization of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop music was sold to the American public. 

BIO

Amy Coddington is an associate professor of music at Amherst College, where she teaches classes on American popular music. Her book How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (University of California Press, 2023) explores how rap broke through to a white mainstream audience in the 1980s and 1990s through programming on commercial radio stations. She has published related essays in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music.

Part of the 2025-2026 Florence Bayz Music Series

The Florence Bayz Music Series offers online concerts, lectures, and presentations of academic research by Department of Music faculty, postdoctoral researchers, students, and international guest artists and scholars.

Dr. Amy Skjerseth (she/her), Assistant Professor of Popular Music, Coordinator

Events are free and open to the public.

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