From Little Richard and Chuck Berry to the Dominoes, Ike Turner, and Howlin’ Wolf, rock and roll’s founding figures were African American, yet ‘rock’ as we know and hear it now is coded white…In some of his sharpest passages, Hamilton shows how much rockism’s whiteness depended on [the] confining ideas of blackness…He contributes a new and valuable piece to a larger and still contentious project: the struggle against the essentialization of racial and ethnic identity.
