Hit Parade examined contemporary issues of gentrification, eviction, and neighborhood change through an engagement with local music history.

Hit Parade

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Hit Parade

Overview Blog Collaborators Resources Back to Top

What is the sound of your San Francisco?

What is the music of your neighborhood?

 

Led by Josh Kun, Hit Parade is a project of Public Knowledge, a collaboration between SFPL and SFMOMA. Inspired by the musical archives of SFPL, Hit Parade examines contemporary issues of gentrification, eviction, and neighborhood change through an engagement with local music history.

Hit Parade is where San Francisco memories meet musical memories. It is a project interested in community musical storytelling and grassroots musical memory. As the city continues to undergo rapid changes, the Hit Parade team will be gathering musical histories of the Western Addition, Bayview Hunters Point, and Mission neighborhoods.

 

What music has disappeared?

What music lives on?

 

Josh Kun is writer, artist, scholar, and curator who above all is interested in the connections between different cultures. He often works in the sphere of popular music, and if there is a guiding idea that runs through his various activities it is the crossfade. On a standard DJ console, the crossfade slider moves between the music on one input channel and the music on the other without fully fading out either—as Kun writes: “It allows you to mix without erasing, combine without destroying, to juggle and sustain difference, to use what already exists to create something entirely new. You use the crossfader when you want to create a new conversation between disparate voices, a new mix out from the archive, all while moving crowds and shaping publics.” Currently based in Los Angeles, Kun has collaborated with the Los Angeles Public Library on two projects that brought to life archival histories of music and culture in that city: Songs in the Key of LA (date) and To Live and Dine in LA (date). For Public Knowledge he returns to the Bay Area, where he worked as a music journalist for a decade, to explore with others how San Francisco is changing and what kinds of cultural connections have been and may still be possible in this city.

 

Public Knowledge and Hit Parade is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.