Musicians who work in underground music scenes enjoy an aesthetic and cultural freedom that allows them to challenge and subvert the status quo in myriad ways. The cost of this freedom is that they also must struggle with significant hardships that often threaten their ability to survive as working artists. In adopting as a lens this tension between artistic freedom and survival, the course will look at how underground musicians are able to influence and reflect back to mainstream culture a more inclusive conception of race, gender, and class identities. In addition to providing cultural and historical context for the emergence of underground music scenes, students will learn to listen critically to a set of cross-disciplinary and transnational practices developed by underground musicians from diverse musical genres and cultures including jazz, punk, performance art, minimalism, and hip hop. Grading will be based on reaction papers, one presentation, and a final research project into a present day underground music scene.