Kyle DeCoste is a popular music and sound scholar from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. His work focuses on articulations of race, gender, and childhood in popular music. He earned his PhD in Music from Columbia University in 2024 and is currently on the faculty at Tulane where he is jointly appointed in Music and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Kyle is co-author with the Stooges Brass Band of Can't Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). His work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. He also has a forthcoming chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Pop Music (Oxford University Press, 2026). He has a growing resumé as a creative producer, having creatively produced and written the liner notes for the re-release of the Free Agents Brass Band's Made It Through That Water (2025). He is currently working on three books. The first, based on his dissertation, is an autoethnographic study of childhood and race in U.S. popular music. The second is an ethnographic study of the genre of country rap (aka “hick-hop”), which he is co-authoring with Alex Blue V (McGill University). The third is a group biography of the Original Pinettes Brass Band that applies a Black feminist lens to brass band performance.
