Events › Meet the Author - Alex Werth - On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland

Join authors Alex Werth and Rickey Vincent in conversation about Werth's new book On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland. 

Chicago has house. Detroit has techno. But Oakland slaps.

On Loop explores the role of Black dance music and sonic politics in recurring struggles over race and space in Oakland, California. Insisting on the centrality of sound in everyday social movements—from the mobilization of funk music and boogaloo dance during Black Power to the policing of the Hyphy movement in the 2000s—Alex Werth argues that Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance. Rather, its very sound waves have animated looping clashes over development, dispossession, and Black freedom. Through studies of downtown nightclubs, Lake Merritt, and the Eastmont Mall—geographies rarely considered, yet critical to Oakland’s culture and politics—Werth reveals how the liberatory sonic politics of funk, hip-hop, and hyphy rap have been met with a repetitive "war on nuisance."

As both a means of empowerment and a magnet for policing, Black dance music has transformed not only Oakland's nightlife, but also its streets, parks, and neighborhoods. On Loop is a rousing encounter with the sound that moves urban life.

Alex Werth is a geographer, movement researcher, and DJ. His first book, On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland (UC Press), explores the centrality of Black dance music and soundscapes in the everyday social movements that have made and remade this iconic and contested city. Werth researched On Loop while living, working, and making art in the East Bay from 2009 to 2022. He served as a member of the curatorial team at Oakland’s Matatu Festival of Stories, a fellow at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the co-curator and resident DJ of Oakland’s Good Culture. In 2018, he worked on Belonging in Oakland, the City of Oakland’s plan for cultural equity. He now lives in his hometown in Western Massachusetts, but continues to work in the Bay Area as a policy and research specialist for housing justice.

Dr. Rickey Vincent is a scholar, educator, radio host and author. He obtained his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2008, and lectures on black music history, black power and social movements, the cultural politics of Hip Hop, and issues of African American culture and globalization. He is the author of Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of The One (St. Martin’s Press 1996), a definitive study of the culture and politics of funk music; and Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band, and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music (Lawrence Hill Books 2013). Party Music tells the story of The Lumpen, the short lived R&B band comprised of rank-and-file members of the Black Panther Party in 1970. The interaction of soul music aesthetics and black power politics is central to Party Music, and is embedded in Dr. Vincent’s research and practice. He hosts The History of Funk on KPFA radio.