THE OLD DOMINION IN SONG

Online culture magazine PopMatters very generously hosts a series of my essays examining the history and culture of Virginia via contemporary pop songs.

The first essay, Clipse and the Virginia Schism, looks at the Hampton Roads based hip hop duo's song "Virginia," the rhetoric of the crack trade and its unacknowledged roots in the ideologies of early Tidewater slavemasters.

The second essay, Lamb of God's "Hourglass" and Virginia's Brand of Violence uses the Richmond based Heavy Metal band's bellicose magnum opus Ashes of the Wake as a doorway to explore a state saturated in war, honor and defeat.