How struggles over Black sound have shaped Oakland’s culture, politics, and geography.
Chicago has house. Detroit has techno. But Oakland slaps.
On Loop explores the role of Black dance music and sonic politics in recurring struggles over race and space in Oakland, California. Insisting on the centrality of sound in everyday social movements—from the mobilization of funk music and boogaloo dance during Black Power to the policing of the Hyphy movement in the 2000s—Alex Werth argues that Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance. Rather, its very sound waves have animated looping clashes over development, dispossession, and Black freedom. Through studies of downtown nightclubs, Lake Merritt, and the Eastmont Mall—geographies rarely considered, yet critical to Oakland’s culture and politics—Werth reveals how the liberatory sonic politics of funk, hip-hop, and hyphy rap have been met with a repetitive "war on nuisance."
As both a means of empowerment and a magnet for policing, Black dance music has transformed not only Oakland's nightlife, but also its streets, parks, and neighborhoods. On Loop is a rousing encounter with the sound that moves urban life.
Alex Werth is a geographer, DJ, and housing justice advocate.
"A pathbreaking exploration of the politics of sound, Alex Werth's On Loop reveals a dimension of power that's as important as it is invisible. Remixing fields and methods, we get to hear the frequencies of the Black freedom struggle emerge from the noise of Oakland's wrenching transformation."—Alexis Madrigal, author of The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City and cohost of KQED's Forum
"The frequencies of On Loop are 'loud and proud,' revealing the complex cultural and political history of Oakland’s Black sounds. Werth explores how these forms of aesthetic speech nurture the social movements of a community’s will to realize a just city. It is a must-read on the audible waves of emancipation that enliven Oakland, past and present, and in turn other American cities."—Roberto Bedoya, writer and former Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland
"Alex Werth’s On Loop is a formidable and breathtaking look at the intersection of Black sonic culture, spatial politics, and urban governance in an iconic city whose significance in American cultural geography and history has long been ignored. Werth offers us a crucial account of Oakland’s dynamic evolution to foreground the indispensability of Black cultural production in the making of the Town."—Brandi Thompson Summers, author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City
376 pp.6 x 9Illus: 16 b/w illustrations
9780520416062$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Oct 2025