On March 24, “Make it Funky” will return for the fifth year. The purpose of the event is to explore connections between popular music and black writers. The keynote Speaker for this year, Sequoia Maner of the University of Texas at Austin, will talk about the impact of Kendrick Lamar’s radicalism on African American culture. 

The program is sponsored by KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of African and African American Studies. The event will take place at Lawrence Arts Center from 7-9 P. M. The first “Make it Funky” in May 2010 covered the development of African American music from before the civil war to the present. Subsequent “Make it Funky” events have explored the two sides of funk: theory and practice (M.I.F. 2), and analyzed the poetics of hip-hop with Adam Bradley, author of The Anthology of Rap (M.I.F. 3).