ABSTRACT
In the parlance of doo-wop performers, there is a phenomenon known as the "channel." For singers, the channel offers the opportunity to break free from a song's predetermined text and affix upon its performance their own unique signature. To step back from the subject of African-American popular music performance traditions to the scholarship about them, we can see the accumulation of a body of knowledge that, like the channel, offers an opportunity for inspiration as much as for enervation on the part of analysts. Jones laid the groundwork for the racially driven analysis of African-American musical expression; he asserted, "Negro music is always radical in the context of formal American culture". Ellis Cashmore The Black Culture Industry (1997) endeavors to amend this conundrum by attending to the manner in which Cashmore believes the commodification of African-American culture, regardless of the racial ownership of those commodities, invariably serves to uphold inhibiting, destructive relationships and perpetuate cultural myths.
