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The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop KYRA D. GAUNT New York University Press, New York, 2006 221 pp.
What if we entertained the possibility of considering handclapping games such as "Miss Mary Mack" and jump rope games like "Double-Dutch" a form of black popular music? What if we not only considered these games popular music, but thought about how they have been sampled, borrowed, and appropriated by commercial male artists in genres such as hip hop? What if, in considering the games of black girls, we considered how these games transmit and express notions about race and gender as mutually inclusive factors of African-American identity formation not only through their musical sounds, but also through their physicality and embodied movement? What if we took "gender studies" in music to refer not just to the study of music-making by women, but to an investigation of how men and women interact through and around music? These are some of the provocative and original questions Kyra Gaunt asks in her new book, The Games Black Girls Play. The very topic of Gaunt's study allows her to consider these aspects of African-American musical culture in tandem, while the majority of black music scholarship has considered them separately (or not at all), as Gaunt notes in her introduction.
It is to Gaunt's credit that her book follows through on these questions, giving the reader an insight into the meaningfulness of "everyday" activities like the girls' games, and showing how popular culture is made in local, non-commercial contexts, albeit in continuous dialogue with mass-mediated music and culture. Gaunt does not invoke the "popular" in popular music or culture in a facile way; another important issue she raises throughout her book is the potential mistake of viewing black girls' games as an example of "folk culture" lying outside the realm of popular culturesuch an assumption would reiterate a now...