An Introduction to America’s Music

508 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II

the early 1980s the band had been joined by Bad Religion, the Circle Jerks, and

Suicidal Tendencies. To the north, the Dead Kennedys were central to the San

Francisco hardcore punk scene, while in Washington, D.C., Bad Brains held a

similar position in East Coast hardcore.

Local music scenes throughout the United States gave rise to an assortment

of bands whose music lay somewhere between MT V-style mainstream accessibil-

ity and the confrontational stance of hardcore punk and heav y metal. The suc-

cess of R.E.M., originally a group of students at the University of Georgia, made

Athens, Georgia, a mecca for bands who made attractive pop music that man-

aged to project an “underground” sensibility. Because records by groups like

R.E.M., Hüsker Dü, and 10,000 Maniacs received heav y rotation on the playlists

of college radio stations, their sound became labeled college rock. Because those

records generally appeared on small, independent labels, another term widely

used was indie rock. By the end of the decade this music was more often referred

to as alternative rock, an umbrella term for a range of musical tendencies that

would become a major force in the 1990s. One indication of how diverse the non-

mainstream pop scene could be was Sonic Youth, which began as a hardcore

punk band but began to expand its range toward both mainstream pop and the

“downtown” avant-gardism of the minimalists and performance artists.

HIP-HOP

Perhaps the most important musical innovation of the late twentieth century,

hip-hop, also emerged from a local music scene: in this case, black and Latino

neighborhoods of New York City.

Beginning in the 1970s, DJs at dance parties in the Bronx developed a range

of techniques for manipulating records by using two turntables and an audio

mixer, which controlled how much each turntable would be amplifi ed by the

sound system. Those techniques, later dubbed turntablism, include:

• scratching: manually moving a record back and forth under the playback
  stylus to produce percussive rhythmic effects


• cutting or looping: alternating between two copies of the same record to
  repeat one section of a song over and over


• beatmatching: adjusting the speed of one turntable so that the record played
  on it matches exactly the tempo of a record on the other turntable, allowing
  dancers to continue uninterruptedly from song to song and allowing the DJ to
  move seamlessly back and forth between songs


• beat juggling: combining the above techniques to create new music from
  snippets of prerecorded music

In addition to deft turntable skills, expert DJs possessed extensive record collec-

tions and an encyclopedic knowledge of their contents, enabling them to choose

songs to match the mood of the dancers and even to manipulate the dancers’

reactions, shaping a dance party into a coherent musical experience. A key ele-

ment was the use of looping to extend through repetition a favorite part of a

college/indie/

alternative rock

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