This article challenges readers to relisten to rock ’n’ roll, a musical genre that has often been synonymous with postwar American culture and ideology, via the nuclear Pacific; in doing so, it proposes an Archipelagic American music studies that decenters the primacy of “the narrative of continental America (which has been a geographical story central to U.S. historiography and self-conception),” as well as U.S. musical historiography and American music studies.1 Accounts of rock ’n’ roll locate its genealogy, primarily and understandably, in African American music. Similarly, rock ’n’ roll is often considered to be an American export that has become a global phenomenon. By amplifying erasures of Indigenous lives, lands, and listenings that retain spectral presences in the grooves of rock ’n’ roll (and the systems that produce them), this article begins to map a genealogy of rock ’n’ roll that critically engages the term “America” as an imperial...

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