Kyle DeCoste

Kyle DeCoste (he/him) is a scholar of popular music from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. He specializes in U.S. popular music. His work, which is often collaborative and (auto)ethnographic, examines how sound—and popular music in particular—is used to articulate and contest ideas about race, gender, class, and childhood. He received his PhD in Music from Columbia University where his dissertation, Imagining Freedom: Black Popular Music and the Poetics of Childhood, explored the poetics of childhood in contemporary Black American popular music to make a case for an imaginative twenty-first-century abolitionism.

He is the co-author with the Stooges Brass Band of Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game a twenty-year retrospective of New Orleans’ brass band scene, for which he received the 2021 Zora Neale Hurston Prize from the American Folklore Society. His writing has been published in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of the Society for American Music.

In addition to his dissertation book, Kyle is working on two other book projects. The first which he is co-authoring with Alex Blue V, is an ethnography of country rap (a.k.a. “hick-hop”) that examines issues of race and place in the Southern United States. The second is a history of New Orleans’ only all-woman brass band, the Original Pinettes Brass Band, which applies a Black feminist lens to brass band performance.

Kyle’s research has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Society for American Music, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and the Newcomb Institute. He is a recipient of the Social Justice Paper Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology as well as prizes from the U.S. and Canadian branches of the International Association for Popular Music Studies (the David Sanjek Prize and the Peter Narváez Prize, respectively).