“All I Do Is Think of You: Notes on Blackness, Music, and Agency”
This panel is comprised of five presentations devoted to distinct concentrations on the affective registers of music, musicians, and becoming. Each paper enacts a sense of how black expressivity can be conceptually addressed by way of interviews, archives, temporality, the anticipatory, gender, and the non-extant. Emily Lordi considers the multidimensionality of Whitney Houston interviews as a way to consider the adept and agential ways that Houston navigated the media and her image. Walton Muyumba sits with his late father’s vinyl collection to consider the legacy of the Congolese rumba. Julie Beth Napolin focuses on the forlorn resonance of Barbara Lewis’s “Hello Stranger” with regards to a history of Black women who wait. By way of an enacted encounter between Tricky and Jacolby Satterwhite, Tavia Nyong’o focuses on their shared restipulations of Black masculinity and the Black maternal. Together this panel will collectively pose a range of considerations of how music and musicians enact generative conceptions of blackness with attention to the sonic, historiography, affect, gender, and performance.
“What Whitney Said”
Emily Lordi
We know Whitney Houston as “The Voice” (a singer whose national emergence is often dated to her televised 1983 performance of the song “Home,” to which this year’s conference title alludes), but this paper addresses her voice not in terms of what she sang but in terms of what she said. Houston’s televised interviews constitute an alternative performance archive in which we can see her trying to explain herself and shape her public image. This meant navigating the erratic, often bizarre lines of questioning that limited what she could say as well as how she would be remembered. (Much has been made of her rhymey throwdown “crack is whack,” much less about the battery of questions Diane Sawyer asked during that 2002 ABC interview, regarding Houston’s addiction, marriage, and weight.) Whitney was accustomed to interviewers ignoring her art—including the recent musical releases that her interviews were designed to sell—and she navigated most exchanges with irritation, grace, and skill. But there were some interviews that revealed just how much she had to say about her music, collaborators, and vision. By showing clips from two different Houston interviews from the nineties, I will signal her power struggles with the white-framed media, whose questions and editing processes reflected lasting assumptions about what consumers wanted to see and hear, as well as some unrecognized dimensions of her art and intellect, which engaged listeners drew out.
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“OK Jazz Archive: Unpacking My Father’s Collection of Congolese Music on Vinyl”
Walton Muyumba
After my father’s death, I inherited his stereo equipment and his recordings on vinyl. Though that collection includes fascinating and weird records, including original pressings of LPs by James Brown and The Beatles, I’m especially intrigued by the LPs and 45s of Franco (Francois Luambo Makiadi) and OK / TPOK Jazz (Tout Puissant Orchestre Kinois de Jazz), the masters of Congolese rumba. In this essay, I discuss this band and mid-century Congolese music at the site of my informal “conservatory education,” my portal into the practices of global Black music from the Trinidanaian calypso and Afro-Cuban guaguancó to blues-idiom creative improvisational music and soul.
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“Hello Stranger”
Julie Beth Napolin
Written by vocalist Barbara Lewis, “Hello Stranger” is a song about return. Lewis said that she first got the idea for the song when traveling the Detroit circuit with her musician father, hearing people shouting the phrase, a warm welcome back to someone whose presence you must admit goes with the wind. As Lewis croons, she places us in time after a break or fissure; we don’t know what happened to break the pair—friends, lovers, or family—only that “it feels so good to have you back again.” It’s sung by the person who’s been in the holding space while the other’s gone away (and perhaps astray). Return promises no punishment or estrangement; just circling back and picking up where you left off. Many pop songs touch on loss and anticipation, but few touch on this particular feeling that is a mixture of both: the lost one has come back home. Though the person is likely to leave again, that hasn’t happened yet. In this paper, I consider that temporality emotionally but also musically. The song places us in the world of Black women who wait for the men who migrate, leaving for other prospects, loves, and places.
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“Brothers from another mother: Tricky and Jacolby Satterwhite Sing the Black Maternal Aesthetic”
Tavia Nyong’o
This talk will explore what happens when an artist turns to his mother’s creative output as a resource and guide for his music. Tricky and Jacolby Satterwhite are from different generations and nations, but both turned to their mother’s poetry (and in Satterwhite’s case her amateur recordings) when composing their debut albums Maxinquaye (1995) and Love Will Find a Way Home(2019). The influence of mothers on sons is a commonplace, but their specific creative legacy is less frequently explored. In particular, when these black mothers were socially discredited as addicts, mentally ill, or otherwise unfit parents, what does it mean for sons to find in music “another mother tongue”? Satterwhite cites Tricky as an influence, suggesting the rhizomatic and polytemporal nature of the black maternal aesthetic. While the son’s homage can serve as a rebuke to misogynoir, there is also a further question about how tropes of maternal sacrifice and a grammar of “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe” must be evaded. At heart, this talk turns to their music for further insight into Hortense Spillers’ well known contention that Black men — regardless of sexual orientation — have a unique opportunity under white supremacist patriarchy to say “yes” to the female within.
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“2000 Brain Cells Ago or Forlorn Tales of Hip-Hop Glory: Notes on Basehead”
Michael Boyce Gillespie
The talk builds upon a cluster of memories related to the 1991 album Play With Toys by Basehead. Centered on the languid verses and production by Michael Ivey coupled with minimalist turntablism and live instrumentation (guitar and drums), the group’s first album was well received but often dismissively noted as “alternative hip-hop” or “slacker rap.” A Howard University graduate, Ivey’s conception of Basehead hints at a measure of hip-hop far removed from the then mainstream emergence of gangsta rap. Instead, Basehead offers hip-hop in a quotidian key of alcohol, depression, heartache, ennui, weed, and relentless cheekiness. Play With Toys sense of keeping it real hints at a precarity of black becoming that pivots from the crack-addled connotations of “basehead” to a meaning closer to a joyfully irreconcilable tension between youth exploration and adult decisiveness. In particular, an ongoing dialogue between two friends that runs throughout the album provides an acute self-reflexive undercutting of the songs as an incessant dialogic dispute around the substance of the songs. My paper briefly considers the brief history of the group with significant attention to “Play With Toys”, the title cut from their first album. As their music is not available on any streaming platforms and hard copies of their releases very rare, my talk is an attempt to manifest my memories against the non-extant trace of a band that attempted to build a Black audience with a familiar yet new iteration of hip-hop.
