Welcome!

I'm Amy Coddington, an assistant professor of music at Amherst College. In 2017, I received my PhD from the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. My interdisciplinary research explores how the media affects American popular music's potential to sound racial identity. In my current book project, How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Rap, Race, and Crossover on Top 40 Radio, I investigate how hip hop broke through to a mainstream audience in the late 1980s and  1990s via programming on Top 40 radio stations. I'm particularly interested in how radio airplay complicated the relationship between rap, racial identity, and commodification and how deregulation and other structural changes in the radio industry influenced rap's sound.