Digital Flows

Reviews / Votes

Internet studies and creator studies are integral to the ways in which we look at contemporary media studies overall. However, there has yet to be a defining text that has highlighted how musicians are early adopters and first movers of both the web and social media platforms. Gamble's text tackles this task in a very refreshing way. His interdisciplinary ethics of care towards theorizing musicians as innovative creators makes this text very accessible and necessary. * Jabari "Naledge" Evans, University of South Carolina and Institute for Rebooting Social Media, Harvard University * Digital Flows places hip-hop at the very heart of the contemporary internet landscape. This wide-ranging and rigorously researched book provides a forward-looking cultural framework to help scholars untangle the deeply intertwined and ever-changing relationship between hip-hop and the internet. Deftly navigating various digital media platforms, Gamble brilliantly explores hip hop's new online frontiers, including memes, streams, virtual cyphers, and dance crazes. Digital Flows makes a timely and lively contribution to our understanding of music, media, and culture in the Internet age. Considering that hip-hop continues to shape and be shaped by the online landscape, this book will be critical to any scholar researching digital music-making and foundational to thinking about the potential futures of hip-hop and the internet. * Jasmine A. Henry, Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania * More praise for the author

"intuitive and accessible [...] Gamble's weaving together of how individual listeners, musical communities, and genre conventions interact with each other marks an interesting intervention into sticky debates over the relationship between popular music and social change. * Olivia Lucas, Louisiana State University, from a Popular Music review on How Music Empowers * Intuitive and accessible [...] Gamble's weaving together of how individual listeners, musical communities, and genre conventions interact with each other marks an interesting intervention into sticky debates over the relationship between popular music and social change. * Olivia Lucas, Popular Music * By combining extensive research with diverse case studies, Digital Flows provides scholars and researchers alike with a fresh look at hip hop music, media, and culture in the internet and digital media age. * Choice * By bringing together aesthetics, digital infrastructure, and social experience, [Gamble] argues that hip hop, in its connected manifestations, not only responds to contemporary transformations but actively participates in the invention of modern cultural life. The book thus moves beyond the description of a single phenomenon, offering an interpretative framework for understanding how subjectivities, technologies, and musical practices intersect in the production of possible worlds amidst the turbulence of hypermodernity ... The result is a work that functions both as a recent historical record of the relational dynamics between hip hop and digital culture and as an interpretative mosaic of contemporary life. * Sid Landarini, Music & Letters *