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I am a musicologist specializing in US popular music and culture. I'm especially interested in hip hop and the ways it is sounded across regions, locating itself in specific places even as it expresses transnational and diasporic ideas.
I am Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, where I teach in the school's Popular Music and Culture program. I helped design the degree, which launched in the fall of 2012, and am proud to be able to work in such a unique program.
My book-length project - AudioFiles - blends my interests in hip hop and technology by engaging contemporary popular music through the lens of posthuman theory and Afrofuturism.
Recent and forthcoming publications include an exploration of the Mozart myth as it is presented in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus and then parodied in an episode of the Simpsons (Journal of Popular Culture 46:3, 2013), an examination of the earliest iPod silhouette commercials and the notions of freedom they are meant to convey (Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies), and a long comparative review of Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne and the Roots' Undun (Journal for the Society of American Music). I am also co-editing with Ali Colleen Neff a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies titled "Sounding Global Southernness."
I currently serve on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch and am working on an oral history project of the organization. From June 2011 through May 2013, I served as Editor of the IASPM-US website, expanding the site's offerings with the cutting edge work of popular music scholars from around the world.
You can contact me at justindburton [at] gmail [dot] com.
