Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between. Przybylski is an awardee of the National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams, and reported the following:
In book-length writing, of course there are a lot of strands of ideas that weave together over time. While a single page cannot convey them all, page 99 of Sonic Sovereignty does play with several key points of the book. This page opens with the idea that the radio station Streetz FM, an Indigenous music broadcast and streaming station out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, provided opportunities for Indigenous hip hop artists to be broadcast on-air in the late 2000s and into the 2010s. It continues to argue that the media that circulates in a city both reflects and creates peoples’ ideas of themselves as a collective.Visit Liz Przybylski's website.
This quotation from the middle of page 99 hits on a theme that unfolds throughout the book: “Sonic sovereignty entails taking control of narratives of what constitutes Indigenous cultural production and, to a greater extent, what constitutes contemporary Indigenous cultural identities, letting this be a dynamic process and allowing these narratives to change over time.” The focus on change over time, and the power of Indigenous popular music in particular, is key.
From just this page, a reader also understands that media professionals and musicians shape the book. A quotation from an interview between the author and a radio station music supervisor is the piece that conveys how listeners get inspired to make their own music, and even names some of the Indigenous artists (Inez Jasper, and A Tribe Called Red, now The Halluci Nation), who have shaped popular music through their output. The interviewee, Miss Melissa, is the expert who shows this here.
This page does not contain any of the listening segments woven throughout the book. In these, I offer ways to listen and re-listen to the same passage, encouraging readers to reflect on their own situated perspective, and to be receptive to other ways of listening. These also engage with hip hop ways of listening, such as moving through time by experiencing the memories you have with a snippet of music that gets sampled, or getting into a loop by listening or dancing to a repeated groove. I play with descriptive writing and different kinds of narrative to encourage a variety of reading-listenings from the book’s audience.
Other pages also do a more thorough job of asking and answering questions about media circulation: how do policies, like those in Canada, Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, that privilege music made in-country, impact licensing and listenership? How does streaming audio change audibility, especially for female or nonbinary musicians, or members of other equity deserving groups? And in terms of funding, what kinds of expressions are made possible when musicians are able to move to non-unit-based revenue? These topics are designed to help policy makers and funders, in addition to other segments of the book’s readership.
Listen to the playlist for Sonic Sovereignty. The cover art of Sonic Sovereignty is a piece by visual artist Marc Kuegle, and the featured musician on the cover is Sly Skeeta.
--Marshal Zeringue
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