On Loop:
Black Sonic Politics in Oakland
Alex Werth,
in conversation with Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers
How struggles over Black sound have shaped Oakland’s culture, politics, and geography.
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.
“The book’s title On Loop refers to the musical rhythms of funk and rap as much as the spinning of a sideshow car, a DJ’s record, a walk around Lake Merritt and the cyclical nature of policing. Through a sound-studies lens, Werth equates sonic presence, and taking up space in its many forms, with Black liberation.”—KQED
Alex Werth is a geographer, movement researcher, and DJ. His work exists at the intersection of anti-displacement organizing, policy advocacy, and public culture. 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 Oakland’s 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. His first book, On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland, came out in 2025 with UC Press. With a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley, Alex now works as a policy and research consultant specializing in tenants’ rights and housing justice.
Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers is an Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia in 2024, Dr. Summers was an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. She is the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City(UNC Press, 2019). Born and raised in Oakland, she recently led the Mellon Foundation–funded Archive of Urban Futures in collaboration with Moms 4 Housing, which was featured in the Black Spaces: Reclaim and Remain exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. Her forthcoming book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming a Black City, is under contract with UC Press.