Urban - a code word?

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Urban" would seem to be a carefully chosen substitute for the decidedly less favorable-sounding and perhaps ethnically narrower "inner-city."

JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: Urban - a code word?
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On Oct 10, 2004, at 4:41 AM, James A. Landau asked about "urban" as a
code for 'black'. Paul Frank supplied some recent cites with this
meaning, and Dave Wilton notes that earlier cites seem to appear only
in musical contexts. This is probably not an accident; "urban
contemporary music" has been in use for twenty years or so as the name
of a radio format (a format called, long long ago, "race music").
Here's what the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online has to saw about urban
contemporary music:
-----
also known as _urban music_: musical genre of the 1980s and '90s
defined by recordings by rhythm-and-blues or soul artists with broad
crossover appeal. Urban contemporary began as an American radio format
designed to appeal to advertisers who felt that “black radio” would not
reach a wide enough audience.

Responding to disco's waning popularity in the late 1970s,
African-American-oriented radio created…
-----

To judge from more recent musical citations, the sense of "urban music"
has extended from r&b and soul to take in all varieties of African
American pop music, including rap, funk, and hip-hop. (I see that the
"urban" radio streams offered by I-Tunes on my Mac offer, variously,
funk, hip-hop, and "R&B Dance", and combinations of these; no "urban
contemporary" stream is available.) I *think* that "urban
contemporary" sometimes retains its older narrower sense (this is true
for KISQ in San Francisco, which offers "R&B and classic soul"),
sometimes not (KMEL in San Francisco, listed as playing "urban
contemporary hits", offers "hip hop and R&B").

then there's "adult contemporary"...

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)


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