In this talk, I explore the work that is accomplished by centering engagement with Black dance music in urban studies and vice versa. Combining my training as an urban geographer with my practice as a DJ, I argue that mixing insights and methods from urban, sound, and Black studies allows us to appreciate three key aspects of sonic politics in Oakland. First, the political importance of Black dance music comes to exist through brick-and-mortar struggles over urban space in particular places. Second, Black dance music and everyday sonic practices are material forces that shape seemingly more “concrete” aspects of urban political economies and environments. And third, repetition—or non-linear “looping”—is central to not only the repression of Oakland’s Black geographies, but also the musical and movement practices through which Black residents reclaim space and resist dispossession. 

I develop these points through a recursive account of racial/spatial struggle over three successive articulations of music and politics: funk during the Black Power Era, hip-hop during the post–Civil Rights Era, and hyphy during the rise of gentrification. In the end, I argue that thinking, acting, and moving in time with Black dance music requires urban studies to listen for the loops, layers, and echoes that live within the deep grooves of America’s racist order and anti-racist Black geographies.

Alex Werth ('09) is a geographer, movement researcher, and DJ. He is the author of On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland (UC Press, 2025). While living for over a decade in the Bay Area, he served as a Curatorial Fellow at the Matatu Festival of Stories, Public Imagination Fellow at Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and co-curator and resident DJ of a party series called Good Culture. In 2018, he worked on Belonging in Oakland, the City of Oakland’s first plan for cultural equity and development in 30 years. His essays have appeared in Africa Is a Country, Antipode, City, FIELD, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Sounding Out. With a BA in urban studies from Brown and a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, he now works as a policy strategist specializing in tenants’ rights and housing justice in the Bay Area.