- Daphne A. Brooks – “Of Ultralight Beams & Other Radiant Weapons: Black Sonic Vitality on the Freedom Struggle Front Lines”
This is a paper about the ethical and aesthetic anatomy of African American protest songs—past, present, and future. It takes as its point of departure an exploration of the ways in which classic vernacular songs born out of the long Civil Rights Movement campaign, songs like “Get on Board Little Children,” “If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus,” “Sweet By and By,” “Keep Your Hand on the Plow,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round,” “Guide My Feet,” “I’m Going to Sit at the Welcome Table” were, at their core, songs that faced and rejected the threat of social and material annihilation by way of a kind of spiritual and moral defiance that manifested itself in terms of form as well as content. This kind of resistance is inextricably linked to black music genres and traditions across the centuries, but at its essence, this thing that we might call black sonic vitality is a secret weapon that artists and grassroots activists have put to use during both key revolutionary moments and seemingly minor-key and fleeting pop events. In both cases, the exuberant black musical gesture—from Nina’s 18-minute plus medley of “My Sweet Lord/Today Is A Killer” to Kanye’s extravagant ensemble SNL piece, “Ultralight Beam”—has drawn on the ethos of the canonical protest song, the assertion that the insurgent rejection of anti-black dispossession, displacement, and destruction can be actualized in sound. Framed as a conversation with students in my 2017 freshmen protest music seminar, this paper moves toward a reflection on how to write songs of dissent in our present age of peril and precarity, and it ultimately builds a playlist of sounds and sights from disparate sources—concert footage, film clips, mega-hits and deep cuts from artists as varied as Sweet Honey in the Rock and Aretha to Algiers and Esther Phillips—that constitute the radiant weapons of our ongoing, new world-making battle to claim the value and potency of black life in the face of structures insisting on its negation.
- Jason King – “A Voice That Could Wake the Dead: Loleatta Holloway’s Fire-Relighting Vibrational Vocal Superpower”
Chicago-reared singer Loleatta Holloway is mostly known for her explosive 1970s and early 1980s Salsoul disco dancefloor stompers like “Hit and Run” and “Dreaming” —to say nothing of her jaw-dropping vocals on two classic Dan Hartman productions, “Vertigo/Relight My Fire” and “Love Sensation.” By the late 1980s, as hip-hop and house producers turned samplers into instruments, Holloway’s outsize wailing became a burnin’ hot commodity on hip-hop and house tracks like Black Box’s “Ride on Time” and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations.” The buoyantly energetic, astonishing vibrational resonance of Holloway’s spectacularly rangy and pyrotechnical larynx—in tandem with her love for joyously sassy monologues—has always offered a thrilling and erotic counter-aesthetic to the grim, harsh realities of black / queer unfreedom in the 1970s and AIDS-defined 80s. Holloway’s queer sense of phrasing/timing met its match in songs like “I May Not Be There When You Want Me (But I’m Right on Time),” that were themselves thematically focused on timing. And her vivacious hits songs are full of metaphors of ignition, locomotion and erotic explosiveness. At its best, Holloway’s badass gospel-inspired vocalizing was the vital, authoritative, ferocious sound of life itself, beating away anerotic death at the door.
- Sonnet Retman – “Animating Cab Calloway’s ‘Minnie the Moocher’: Talkartoons and Trickeration in the Archive of Modern Black Performance”
For all of Cab Calloway’s popularity as an entertainer in the 1930s and 40s, he has not made much of an appearance at the Pop Conference. Yet we find the trace of him everywhere, in swing’s hep and bebop’s hip, in Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, in Janet Jackson’s rhythm nation, in Prince’s sartorial splendor, in Outkast’s sampled hooks and even a Tupac cover. By all accounts, Calloway’s presence was “larger than life.” I take up that claim by exploring his charismatic stage persona and his literal animation in the Talkartoon, the rotoscope talkie cartoon invented by the Fleischer brothers in the late 1920s. How might we think through the contradictions of early recording technology for black performers by examining the particular ways in which Calloway haunts this machine?
Praised by animators for their innovation and condemned by ethnomusicologists for their “remarkably racist” content, the Fleischer Studio’s jazz cartoons constitute a fraught archive. The earliest existing film footage of Cab Calloway appears in “Minnie the Moocher” (1932), a Talkartoon co-starring Betty Boop, a year after Calloway recorded his hit song. The song provides the soundtrack and loose storyline for the cartoon, an interpretation of Minnie’s descent into an opium-fueled dream of Swedish Kings, gold houses and diamond cars and most likely, addiction. In this version, a teenaged Boop runs away from her strict immigrant German Jewish parents only to find herself in a phantasmagoric forest haunted by black and grey haints, rendered primitive, sexual, criminal and perverse. She hides in a cave where she encounters an undulating walrus-ghost—none other than Cab Calloway in rotoscoped form--who serenades her with the cautionary tale of Minnie. Boop flees home chastened by the deathly perils of an erotic, exotic black underworld shaped by the bodily traces and musical sounds of Calloway and his band, the Missourians. As the film cuts from live footage in its opening titles to animation, attempting to bottle Calloway’s charisma in cartoon form, it both enacts and contains his “body magic.” What exceeds the cartoon’s narrative? What remains? What kind of hauntology is this? In its opening frames, we see a young Calloway in “mesmerizing slow motion” on the cusp of stardom and a long career. We also see and hear the trace of his sister Blanche Calloway’s performance repertoire that so influenced his stage show, including the scatting and call and response routine immortalized in “Minnie the Moocher.” In this paper, I attend to the afterlife of these images and sounds to think expansively about the archive of modern black performance in the early moment of recording technology.
- Zandria F. Robinson – “Sonic Asé: Black Folks Making It So in Life, Death, and Beyond”
Black folks across the Diaspora have used art and sound to "make it so," to manifest the Yoruba concept of asé, which in part encapsulates the human ability, through God, the orisha, and the spirits of the ancestors, to transform one's circumstances. Sound as a pathway to asé takes tremendous effort, as a seeming cacophony of sounds from drums to yelps to shouts are required to conjure this personal power and vitality and, where necessary and possible, transfer it to the collective. This paper considers what it means to achieve asé through sound, focusing on how black artists theorize and celebrate the transition from death to spirit. Did Jesus raise Lazarus, or was it the thick, braided sound of Aretha Franklin's voice on
Amazing Grace that brought him back to life? Were the Notorious B.I.G.'s
Ready to Die and
Life After Death albums extended prayers for safe passage to the other side? How did Erykah Badu's "Telephone" ensure Jay Dilla's eternal life, and how does Frank Ocean's trip across a black River Styx increase his power to make things so? These and other artists sound a pathway to the other side, to other possibilities, and to the eternal; in tandem, they offer to us methodologies for vitality and make-it-so-ness on this side.
