This concluding chapter considers the dynamics of music and place, issues of diversity, and the impact of Indigenous artists on building bridges to a whole history of music in this place. Reflecting on the four interlinked themes guiding this Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia: Continuities, Encounters, Diversities, and Institutions, it takes up musical threads not covered elsewhere in the volume, discussing pub rock and hip hop to consider dynamics of exclusion, inclusion, and identity. In advocating for a move away from anthropocentrism toward ecocentrism in considering the relationships between music and the place now known as Australia, it simultaneously foregrounds unresolved tensions associated with Indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and prejudice in music that are ultimately intertwined with concepts of place and belonging.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

This chapter examines the emergence of hip hop in contemporary South Korea. Drawing on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of “signifying” and Achille Mbembe’s idea of “becoming black,” it looks at hip hop as a phenomenon where “Blackness” has gained a fungible agency that counters neoliberalism. The chapter explores the ways hip-hop performers in South Korea draw on their own experiences of social marginality in the ghetto-like world produced by unrelenting academic and economic competition to create their work. It also considers how the Korean language obliges rappers to experiment with its syntax and prosody in order to generate the rhymes and repetitions associated with hip-hop poetics. The author argues that rap in the South Korean context has become a successful adaptation of a foreign musical genre, in a manner that recalls the discovery and mastery of Western popular music by Korean musicians in the years following the Korean War. The recent popularity of hip hop reestablishes ties to premodern and precolonial practices of oral musical storytelling that were neglected and overlooked during the period of modernization.

This chapter begins by charting the way the area upriver from the French Quarter became a part of the city, and then takes up each of its major neighborhoods – the Garden District, the Irish Channel, the University District, and Central City – through the major writing associated with them. As major family fortunes began to develop in this area toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a literature about the forms of violence by which such fortunes are made and held inevitably followed. Anne Rice, Sister Helen Prejean, and John Kennedy Toole, but Shirley Anne Grau, Ellen Gilchrest and Dean Paschal share them too. These themes turn up in the writing of the University District through poets interested in extremes of religious devotion (Peter Cooley), alcoholic self-destruction (Everette Maddox), and political paranoia (Brad Richard). They arise in Central City through the Hip-Hop and Bounce empires known as No Limit and Cash Money, and also in the legacies of racial violence associated with Robert Charles in the early twentieth century and Mark Essex in the 1970s, and the database created by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall that potentially overturns the erasure and alienation that is the long-term consequence of white supremacist violence.

Serialism is often canonically pinned to a few mid-century acoustic pieces, but this textbook definition is unnecessarily narrow. Would it be possible to consider computer music, EDM, and hip hop as serial, in some way? This essay argues that a ‘serial attitude’ emerges in the dialectic between analogue and digital ways of musicking. Electronic technologies – from generators to drum machines – crucially mediate such attitudes and behaviours. In sum, serial attitudes shape and are shaped by technological affordances. Case studies include the analogue electronic studio of the WDR, early computer music laboratories at Utrecht, Bell Labs, and Columbia-Princeton, and the vernacular musics of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Afrika Bambaataa. I explore resonances between these disparate scenes, while also arguing for their particularity. This essay rethinks serialism as a practice imbricated with technology, extending beyond the narrow confines of high-art academic institutions.

The concluding two chapters take up cultural responses to the ongoing violence perpetuated by mass incarceration and the global cycles of warfare and terror. Dennis R. Childs examines narratives of immobility based on police and state violence, imprisonment, and detention and deportation at national borders. He argues that “anti-carceral hip-hop” is the “aesthetic practice [that] represents the quintessential storytelling method for those most commonly targeted for police killing and imprisonment.” Reading hip-hop narratives within a “long twenty-first century” of radical literary, political, and musical practices since the 1970s, he links recent works by Dead Prez, Reyna Grande, Ann Jaramillo, Kendrick Lamar, Monifa Love, Main Source, Invincible, and Askari X to those of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Public Enemy, Chester Himes, George Jackson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X.