"Crossover" and the politics of "race"

This paper critically examines the discourse of “crossover” in the music industry. It argues that the term has been used in ways that tend to conceal the power relations involved in the music industry’s handling of certain musical forms and traditions, particularly African-American, Caribbean, Latin, African and other “ethnic” and “world” musics. But the term “crossover” also conceals a number of important questions about cross-cultural processes and appropriations, for example how black American, African and Caribbean musical forms have acquired a resonance for non-black social groups, both for musicians and audiences, and how racial and ethnic identities are negotiated in, and through, musical practices.