A.D. Carson Drops New Album, "For Immediate Release"

A.D. Carson, Associate Professor of Hip Hop and the Global South at the UVA Department of Music, announced the release of his brand new album, "For Immediate Release," on June 2, 2025. The five-track EP is available through his Bandcamp at a name-your-own-price option. Here is what Dr. Carson says about his newest music:

"CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA (June 2, 2025) — I made an album called “For Immediate Release” while preparing my forthcoming book for publication with Oxford University Press. I was awarded a Shannon Center Fellowship for Advanced Research in 2023. I used the fellowship to put together a studio and record a project to show how hip hop music and culture can be helpful tools for critical engagement and why it should be one of our current cultural filters for looking at the world.

Media and hip hop are currently rife with clickbait and misinformation. My work as an artist and scholar is at the intersection of culture, community, credibility, and communication, so this project is an offering of my expertise and analysis. It’s a mixtape, like my previous music. I use sampled and live instrumentation; repurposed music and news clips; and original lyrics in a project that is both artistic and academic. The album slightly differs from past projects because most of the audio I repurpose is from me. I sample my own voice and music in the same ways I previously sampled others. The 5-track album is an EP and a press kit.

The stakes are personal, professional, and far-reaching. In the book, I write, “Hip hop’s documentation should not repeat the same flaws of the recording of American history, which can omit important people and events, and which can misrepresent the legacies of racism and systemic violence.”

The album uses audio to explore this and other ideas. Some people prefer information as audio rather than text—or in addition to it. The album mixes my artistic and scholarly approaches to being a professor of hip hop—a job I believe should engage publics with pressing questions about hip hop and through hip hop. I talk about the ways the media portrays hip hop and hip hop artists, generally, and I also speak to frustrating personal experiences like my commissioned work with the Charlottesville Symphony being lazily compared to former Public Enemy member Professor Griff’s antisemitism controversy. The outlet that published the story later revealed that the comparison was made because he and I are both called “professor.” Equally frustrating, and addressed on the album, are the seemingly un-fact-checked stories about academic hip hop “firsts” that ultimately do disservice to hip hop, academia, and the people who have dedicated their careers as artists and scholars to fostering the educational opportunities that currently exist through hip hop. On “Re: Poser,” I update a song I recorded before becoming a professor of hip hop by sampling KRS-One to take myself to task for my own complicity in this area.

“Bouquets” features clips from an interview with Tavis Smiley about my doctoral journey. “Everybody” incorporates an interview with NPR “Code Switch” about a specific kind of media scapegoating and weaponization of hip hop I call “rapwashing.” “Grace” includes the interview with 60 Minutes Australia about accusations against Sean Combs. “Flight Risk” features part of my discussion of digital Blackface and A.I. with Gizmodo. “Re: Poser” also repurposes audio from an interview with an Australian national radio program about the life and death stakes in the rap battle between Drake, J. Cole, and Kendrick Lamar and their historical contexts.

My dissertation album shows how composing, listening, and analysis shaped by hip hop art and scholarship can document the past, articulate the present, and shape the future. The book, Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, builds on the dissertation, the albums I’ve released since, public writing that I’ve published, essays, and interviews, to address questions that are academic, historical, political and personal. “For Immediate Release” is an audio introduction to some of the questions the book engages—with me as artist, analyst, academic, and commentator.

I appreciate you listening.”

Visit A.D. Carson's biography page to learn more.

Photo credit: Miguel Martinez