Danielle Davis

“Virginian Hip-Hop in Hampton Roads” is a digital dissertation project documenting Chad Hugo’s, Shay Haley’s and Pharrell Williams’s Afro-Filipino musical collaboration in Tidewater, Virginia, a primary site for Southern Hip-hop. Using a combination of digital humanities, record production, and musical analysis, the digital experience primes listeners to sense how the Trio’s music reveal interracial intimacies in US historical narratives that play out in the interpersonal politics of Southern Hip-hop festivals and concerts and in a distinct production style based in Afro-Asian collaboration. This project proposes expansions to contemporary listening practices in Southern popular and global musics, The dissertation case studies explore Black and Filipino American histories in the US South by developing a theory of music production as place through the creation of original recorded tracks and multimedia.