Sounding Out!

Poptimism and Popular Feminism

Almost 20 years ago, 2 Many DJs and Freelance Hellraiser each released too-clever mashups that laid R&B pop diva vocals over indie rock instrumentals, revealing that the paired songs had exactly the same compositional structure. The former’s “Smells Like Booty” put Destiny’s Child together with Nirvana, and the latter’s “A Stroke of Genius” combined Christina Aguilera with The Strokes. The mashups were clever because they flouted supposedly commonsense views that these these pairings shouldn’t work: how could something as superficial, formulaic, and, frankly, girly as Destiny’s Child and Aguilera have anything in common with something as serious and aggressive as Nirvana and The Strokes? Writing in 2009, Dorian Lynskey explained that “A Stroke of Genius came out when many indie fans still believed that manufactured pop stank of evil and death, and the idea of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes in perfect harmony was strange.” Note Lynskey’s use of the past tense: by 2009, the gatekeepers of elite musical taste generally agreed that commercial, chart-oriented music whose fans were at least thought to be mainly teen girls and/or gay men could be just as artistically valuable as rock and hip hop.

“Tricoteuse” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), Public Domain

That consensus has a name: poptimism. Poptimism upends the hierarchy between rock (and sometimes hip hop) and pop, which is a contemporary variation on a very old hierarchy that privileged fine art over craft. Back in the 18th century, philosophers like Immanuel Kant invented the idea of “fine art” by distinguishing it from craft: craft is subordinate to utility (you don’t want your coffee mug to leak), but art exists for its own sake (think of how unwearable some high fashion is, or of Rosemarie Trockel’s art sweaters). As many feminist art historians have argued, this art/craft hierarchy conveniently maps onto patriarchal gender hierarchies: art, like men, is autonomous, whereas craft, like women, are subordinate to daily needs; art is productive, craft is reproductive. For example, art historians Roziska Parker and Griselda Pollock have shown that there is an “intersection in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the development of an ideology of femininity…with the emergence of a clearly defined separation of art and craft.” The conceptual and institutional structures that confined women to reproductive labor and craft into the service of life’s reproductive needs were manifestations of the same underlying gender system.

“Jennifer Lopez | Pop Music Festival | 23.06.2012” by Flickr user Ana Carolina Kley Vita, CC BY 2.0. A Google image search of the word “pop music” listed this image as one of the top images.

This same system informs the traditional rock-over-pop hierarchy. In her 2001 article “Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular,” Susan Cook argues that “‘the popular’…has been so thoroughly feminized” and “carries with it a staggering cultural baggage, a trunk full of social codes that have been historically attached to womankind and underprivileged men.” In the latter half of the twentieth century, the distinction between rock and pop was largely grounded in the same gender system that organized the art/craft hierarchy: rock embodied all the values and characteristics of ideal masculinity, and that’s why it was superior, whereas pop embodied all the values and characteristics of ideal femininity, and that’s why it was inferior. In the early 2000s, poptimism revises this gender script, putting “thoroughly feminized” pop on an equal playing field with rock. However, instead of more-or-less uncritically cheerleading for pop and/or pop stars, we should be thinking about the institutions and conventions that dole out artistic status.

“Rock Hard Open Air 2009” by Flickr user Elena, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 article “The Rap Against Rockism” brought the fact of rock-conceived-as-art to the general public’s attention. “Rockism” is the idea that rock music is the only kind of commercial recorded music that has artistic merit. According to Sanneh,

rockism isn’t unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices…The pop star, the disco diva, the lip-syncher, the “awesomely bad” hit maker: could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world? Like the anti-disco backlash of 25 years ago, the current rockist consensus seems to reflect not just an idea of how music should be made but also an idea about who should be making it.

Grounded in the idea that rock is superior because it is both made by and for white dudes and expresses the stereotypical features of elite white masculinity, rockism upgrades the gendered (and raced) logics of the fine art/craft distinction into 20th century terms. Meanwhile, poptimism revalues the aspects of pop music that were traditionally de-valued because of their association with stereotypical (often white) femininity: pop is hugely collaborative and rarely written by lone authors; it prioritizes pleasure over deep meaning, beauty and spectacle over substance; its music and its ideas are supposedly simple rather than complex…you get the idea. (Ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Keenan-Penagos explains the gendered implications of poptimism in more depth in this piece about the role of misogyny in critiques of poptimism.)

Sanneh’s article kicked off this millennial round of poptimism, but poptimism’s basic ideas and values go all the way back to the 19th century (which is much later than Michael Kramer argues here). Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of German composer Richard Wagner uses the same basic framework we now call poptimism: Wagner, he argued, was too concerned with deep philosophical meaning and not enough with the beauty and pleasure of the sounds. Saying things like “music is a woman” and that Italian opera is superior to German opera because it’s prettier and more fun (see The Gay Science sections 77-80), Nietzsche also recognized the gender and race dynamics of poptimism: by 19th century standards Italians weren’t fully white, so his prioritization of Italian over German opera subordinates white highbrow culture to not-really-white middle-to-lowbrow culture. In Nietzsche Contra Wagner, he makes his preference for light, unserious art over high culture quite clear. There, he contrasts the “hubbub…with which the ‘cultured’ man and the man about town allow themselves to be forced through art, literature, music, and with the help of intoxicating liquor, to ‘intellectual enjoyments’” with the “nimble, volatile, divinely undisturbed, divinely artificial art, which blazes up like pure flame into a cloudless sky” (emphasis mine). This contrast flips fine art/craft hierarchies and argues that things traditionally devalued as feminine, such as superficiality or sensory pleasure, are artistically superior to all the values commonly attributed to fine art, such as intellectual depth. Though he called it “the joyful wisdom” (die frӧliche Wissenschaft, often translated as The Gay Science) instead of “poptimism,” the later Nietzsche’s music aesthetics articulates the same basic theoretical commitments that inform 21st century poptimism.

The basic idea of poptimism has been around since the late 1880s, but it took more than a century to really take off. In the decade after Sanneh’s article, there was a poptimism bubble: it rose to huge popularity, especially with the publication of Carl Wilson’s 2007 book on fans of cheesy pop music. That bubble started to burst about 9 or 10 years after that book appeared as critics began to sour on poptimism. Though it was initially understood as a radical upheaval of the powers that be, by 2017 poptimism had been co-opted by those powers. Instead of challenging patriarchal gender systems, poptimism reinforced them. Writing in The Quietus, Michael Hann argues that “Poptimism, in practice, has not meant championing those who do not get the acclaim they are due, so much as celebrating the position of artists who don’t need their genius proclaimed” such as Beyonce or Taylor Swift. The oft-noted death of the negative album review suggests that [p]optimism is now the orthodox practice among music critics. (This also coincides with recent trends in academic literary theory, which prize “reparative” readings over critical ones.) Such concerns have led Rob Harvilla to pose the rhetorical question “Have we reached the end of poptimism?” because what began as a feminist revolt now feels like an expectation or obligation to stan for the already powerful, such as corporations and megastars. Hann and Harvilla observe a change in poptimism, at least as it is practiced in the music media and industry: poptimism feels less like rooting for undervalued and underrepresented women and more like cheerleading for The Man. Harvilla speculates about poptimism’s end because this corporate poptimism betrays the movement’s original ideals and values.

Why did the poptimism bubble happen when it did? There were many contributing factors, such as the rise of what sociologists Richard Peterson and Roger Kern call “omnivorous taste,” which is the idea that elites prefer both traditional highbrow culture and a range of lowbrow forms, a.k.a. “I like everything but [usually country or hip hop].” Evolutions in feminist media and activism are another central cause of the poptimist bubble. Because pop is an inherently gendered category defined by its feminization, poptimism’s evolution is closely tied to feminism’s. The poptimism bubble roughly coincides with the period when feminism broke the mainstream and mutated into popular feminism.

This is more than just a correlation or coincidence. “Pop” is a gendered category, so its evolution is inextricably tied to evolving gender norms and politics. Poptimism emerged at the dawn of a broader “woke” turn in popular media and pop culture. The first decades of the 21st century saw the rise of a proliferation of explicitly feminist web publications (Autostraddle, Broadly, Jezebel, etc.) and the circulation of feminist theory outside the academy on social media sites like tumblr. 2014, the year Beyonce brought the big pink “FEMINIST” sign to the VMAs, was the year that feminism broke the mainstream. As media studies scholar Sarah Banet-Wesier argues, around 2014 a variety of white liberal feminism focused primarily on individual economic (and sexual) empowerment; it “became a sort of product” that circulated both as a corporate and individual brand. “Feminism” sold us Tshirts, Spotify playlists, and a couple of Beyonce albums. Banet-Weiser’s term for this feminism as brand or business strategy is “popular feminism.” In 2018, poptimism works more or less like popular feminism: it turns the revaluation of things traditionally devalued because of their femininity into a way to make money.

Screenshot from Beyoncé’s 2014 VMAs performance.

Both popular feminism and corporate poptimism are the result of the same flawed thinking that believes inequality can be fixed just by empowering individuals and not by restructuring the institutions and conventions that structure our relations with one another. This thinking seeks to put formerly low-status things in high status places without reconfiguring the underlying fact that there is a status differential in the first place. 

Banet-Weiser warns that popular feminism is only half of a two-sided coin: “popular misogyny…mimics the operation of popular feminism but flips and distorts the politics.” The incel movement is an example of popular misogyny: arguing that women oppress men by refusing to have sex with them, it takes the language of oppression developed by feminism and uses it to justify the idea of patriarchal sex-right. Similarly, the classical music blog “Slipped Disc” has been described as the “Breitbart of classical music” because its championing of the orthodox Western art music canon is “openly sexist, racist, and LGBT-phobic.” The 2018 Grammy Awards show presented both sides of this coin in stark clarity: as Maura Johnston noted, though the ceremony prominently featured a #MeToo performance from Kesha and other women artists, almost all the awards went exclusively to men.

Screenshot of Kesha’s performance of “Praying” at the 2018 Grammys.

Viewed in Banet-Weiser’s terms, the RIAA seems to be leveraging both sides of this coin to maximize its profits, practicing popular feminism in the streets but popular misogyny on the ballot. Like popular feminism, the RIAA’s poptimism values superficial markers of feminist progress because they obscure patriarchy’s retrenchment. For example, the two most definitive or canonical poptimist texts (the Sanneh article and Wilson book) are authored by cis men, so it may appear that poptimism hasn’t changed those institutions and conventions so much as conformed to them.

I agree with Banet-Weiser that though Feminism™ is certainly limited and insufficient, it can be a helpful gateway for beginners. Poptimism™ is similarly limited and insufficient, but we should think about how we can lead fans brimming with that kind of poptimism to a deeper engagement with the institutions and conventions that continue to value the same kinds of people and the music they make and like above others.

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Featured image: “Pop” by Flickr user Andreas Andrews, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism, published by Zer0 books last year, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. She blogs at its-her-factory.com and is a regular contributor to Cyborgology.

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tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

In Search of Politics Itself, or What We Mean When We Say Music (and Music Writing) is “Too Political”–Elizabeth Newton

Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic–Imani Kai Johnson

Pushing Play: What Makes the Portable Cassette Recorder Interesting?–Gus Stadler

Minor Compositions

A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze

A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze Daniel Colson Translated by Jesse Cohn A provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought Is the thought of Gilles Deleuze secretly linked to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s declaration: “I am an anarchist”? Has anarchism, for more than a century and a half, been secretly Deleuzian? In the guise of … Continue reading →
Sounding Out!

My Time in the Bush of Drones: or, 24 Hours at Basilica Hudson

Ed. Note: We wanted to run this piece in advance of the Basilica Hudson’s SoundScape event taking place this Friday, September 14 – Sunday, September 16, 2018.  Our Amplifying Du Bois at 150 forum will return next week.

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“But why?”

Three weeks into a new semester and I am packing for another weekend of irresponsible travel. Irresponsible financially (because air travel on a graduate stipend is a decadence rarely rewarded) and irresponsibly professionally (because missing an annual department event, grading in a car, and sleeping on the ground for two days is a string of realities that stand sternly opposed to anything like good sense). I am doing all this in order to attend Basilica Hudson’s Soundscape: a wide and ranging line up of musicians and artists whose aesthetic commitments fall, shall we say, considerably aslant from the pop-cultural median. I am doing all this because of something that happened last year at this place, something I am still trying to work out. And this means, amongst concerned colleagues and family and friends, I’m again hearing that familiar, stuttering articulation of disbelief. Phrased, with equal parts confusion and concern, they rejoin:

Why?

This question first started popping up late last March. It came repeatedly, unblinkingly, and, I should add, not-unreasonably. What’s more, this was, in a very real way, my fault. For I had failed to develop a pithy ready-to-hand account of precisely why I was to travel from Chicago to New York City and New York City to Hudson, only to sleep on a thin mat on the concrete floor of a converted foundry while listening to loud, sustained bursts of noise (with varying degrees of harmonic familiarity) for an unbroken period of 24 hours.

Instead, I had only an intuition that failed to pass even the slightest of critical muster: Basillica Hudson’s 24-HOUR DRONE festival seemed weird and extreme and like something might happen there. On this basis, it seemed like a good thing to do.

I can now state with some clarity (though still lacking anything like critical poise) that something did in fact happen there, and it was indeed a good thing to do. Though what that “something” was remains frustratingly elusive.

24-Hour Drone, Image by Alt

This piece thus began as a review, but ended necessarily quite differently. The conventions of a review call for evaluation and normative judgement; they require statements regarding the quality of an event or object. I can offer very little in this vein. I’m still trying to wrest from memory something stubbornly mute and fleeting — still trying to figure out what it was, precisely, that happened there.

The drive up remains clear enough in memory. The usual crackle of reunited conversation between dear friends long-separated by geography; a decision not to listen to the then-new Grouper album (we would have enough heart-dragging ambient texture in the coming hours, we concluded); the sounds of Brooklyn passing into that hushed early-Spring upstate on Route 84. We at one point, for reasons that need not become articulate, listened to the Gin Blossoms. But as we pulled into the graveled parking lot a sense of anticipation and confusion returned. What was this thing?

To begin, we might reasonably call it an event.

Basilica Hudson — an upstate New York-based non-profit for the arts that puts on the event annually — admirably describes it thus:

An immersive event and all-encompassing experience, 24-HOUR DRONE is a roving, international series presented by Basilica Hudson and Le Guess Who?, featuring musicians and sound artists experimenting within the spectrum of drone to create 24 hours of unbroken, uninterrupted sound.

Through this expanded programming, 24-HOUR DRONE strives to break down barriers across borders, offering an opportunity to connect diverse musical communities and traditions, offering a localized snapshot of DRONE within the larger context of an imagined universal sound.

The language here should scan as familiar to anyone accustomed to reading music and arts press. Roving, experimental, barrier-breaking, border-crossing: these terms all call up a restless energy, the excitement of the wholly new, the different, the thoroughly non-normative. As it turns out, all these attributes turn out to be more-or-less (if uninterestingly) true.

24-Hour Drone, Image by Alt

Over the course of the day and night, I heard the ethereal saxophone of PAUL, the whipping clangor of Pharmakon, and — I want to emphasize this — the absolutely breathless New Castrati, January Hunt’s exceptional and mournful work living up to her billing elsewhere as “synth, drones, and the annihilation of man.” A sentence above, though, still merits pause: “a localized snapshot of DRONE within the larger context of universal sound.” Roving energy and shattering experiment here take shape as a snapshot, the whirring and calamitous universal stalling for a moment in a discrete particular. 24-HOUR DRONE attempts to lends form to what was too diffuse to be seen.

So, modestly, in lieu of aesthetic judgement, a proposition: the value of Basilica Hudson’s 24-HOUR DRONE is to offer space to sound.

Indeed, for an event so centrally concerned with sound, 24-HOUR DRONE is as much about the Basilica — a converted nineteenth-century cathedral-esque foundry — as it is about sound. And for good reason: the Basilica has been beautifully repurposed — gutted of its original use and re-asserted as an malleable and improbably elegant arts space. Hundred-plus foot ceilings dwarf individual bodies, it’s begrimed upper windows modulate the midday sun into a speckled and hazy sepia, and the elaborate truss-work grids the scene in an industrial domework. The Basilica is a work of architecture meant to imagine and hold, however briefly, those fleeting shards and fragments of something yearning toward a “universal sound.”

24-Hour Drone, Image by Alt

Though even as stunning a work of architecture as the Basilica can only ever confer a loose limit. These fragments are always clamoring for a more robust scene, always threatening to join the broader universal that awaits. Sound passes through walls, vibrates along concrete, penetrates skin and mingles among bodies. Spaces focalize sound’s capacities for the social and ethereal, by preserving and witnessing its constitutive ephemerality. Different spaces draw our attention to sound’s actually-existing materiality: a materiality that doesn’t quit, one that loosens our grip on our more ready-to-hand material worlds.

Grasping this materiality is not easy; it is maybe impossible. What possible cognitive torque will allows us to grasp at this overtopping universal? One option, it seems, is sheer brute force.

The term “endurance” rightly comes up repeatedly in press-documents and FAQs. For the event is knot of time and space (24 hours at the Basilica) which commands an attention to sound as a given, but sounding too as demanding an economy of attention wholly strange–a fidelity to sound that is without end. Limning out these ambitious parameters, to reign sound in, if for only a moment, requires something added.

Space, then.

Sonic spaces have a familiar, if knotty, history. Cathedrals invoke a beatific space, trussed by elaborate ornament and a spiritualized verticality. Music festivals inscribe traditions of sound and histories of capital — crowds and power, in Gina Arnold’s felicitous adaptation of Elias Canetti. Dwellings and offices, cafes and bars. Spaces arrange us in sound, and sound among us.

24-Hour Drone, Image by Alt

DRONE, then, is a provocation to think about sound — to think it over time, and to do so in a necessarily rarified space. This provocation worked; but I felt it only at an extreme limit.

At the twentieth hour (8 AM) I needed coffee. I had slept (kind of) through the night, rose to a bell ceremony, and walked immediately, groggily outside. As I passed through the door frame into the dewy and drizzly upstate morning, the sound — as if from a vacuum — muted and was voided of weight. I walked through the mostly empty streets.

These empty streets were, as it turned out, raucously loud. Distant cars motoring across country byways, the buzzing of a streetlight long past its prime; my tinnitus — a steadily pitched pulse acquired in those irresponsible salad days standing too-close to a crash cymbal — reminding me of all I may one day not hear. These sounds were, quite suddenly, clamoring for my attention, demanding my thought, straining for distinction. The espresso machine, the door hinges, the bathroom sink. Floorboards and rain and leaves and the Hudson and, and, and.

I walked back, not a little unsettled.

I had breakfast outside the venue among gravel-scraping shoes and overheard conversation.

Finally, I went back inside for what turned out to be the final act: Dronechoir Syllaba. The scene remains hauntingly clear.

A grouping of women entered, dressed entirely in white, each with one earbud in-ear, the other hanging loose. Some, if not all, had a length of yarn tied around their waist and dragging along the ground behind them a screw, nail, metal implement, which, as they walked produced a fragile, slender tone. They congregated in the center of the room and produced a careful and lush chord, its density piling up toward the far reaches of the ceiling. Slowly, the chord broke apart.

Dronechoir Syllaba, Basilica Hudson, 2018, Image by #noamplification

But, then, that’s not true.

I should say: slowly, the women moved apart, the chord remained, stretched and pitched against new and different coordinates, inhabiting the Basilica’s elastic space in a new configuration. Notes moved, their bearers slowly pacing around the exhausted and supine bodies of Droners along the floor.

A choir member approached me, holding out her free earbud. I shook my head, wearing a nervous grin. She insisted; I put it in. Playing quietly in that tinny bud was a reference tone for me to share. I looked at her as though I didn’t understand, and she smiled as if she did. Insisting. I managed a small hum, off-kilter and out of tune, before handing it back to her. Looking around, I saw the relationship I had repeated among others across the room. The chord kept mutating — dilating and contracting, swelling and receding, different tones calibrated along moving spatial coordinates. The choir returned to formation in center.

At noon, silence.

Everyone was smiling, dazed, like milkdrunk babies or punchdrunk lovers. We had slept amongst each other, passing a night in a shared space, while sound had enwrapped and enraptured us. We had borne witness to valences of sound hitherto under-noticed. We had joined a choir, if only for an offkilter moment in a space out-of-joint.

Dronechoir Syllaba, 24-Hour DRONE, Image by Andrew LaVallee via Instagram

***

We thought, my traveling companion and I, we thought the car ride back to the city would be for silence. For what else could you thirst after 24 such hours in the heart of sound? But this turned out to be deafening uncomfortable, weird. We were, in our own private ways, estranged from sound. Which is really another way of saying we were in different relation to sound and to the spaces it fills. There, a foundry. Here, a car. We put on, in lieu of silence, a little slice of magic, the condensation of all groove and beat, the most organized flash of pop brilliance this side of 1980. We of course put on Thriller.

As we roiled down the road to this joyous whispered desire — wanna be startin’ somethin’, got to be startin’ somethin’ — in a vehicle not made for dancing, the force of the Drone event began to take shape.

So, again: why?

To give attention to what we all already share — space and sound, history and music. To be adrift but not asleep in it all.

As for what happened?

I’ll try to grasp that next year.

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Featured Image by Alt

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Robert Cashin Ryan is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has written in various places about literary form and formalism, the relationship between Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, and Christmas as an intellectual problem. He curated and introduced a gathering of essays on music, sound, and noise for Post-digital forthcoming from Bloomsbury 2019.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:tape reel

This is Your Body on the Velvet Underground–Jacob Smith

Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness, and the Trembling Body–Airek Beauchamp

SO! Amplifies: Feminatronic

 

INC

Amsterdam Book Launch of Organization after Social Media, Spui25, Sept. 17 2018, 5 PM

We would like to invite you all for the booklaunch of

Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter, Organization after Social Media (Minor Compositions, 2018)

Spui25, Amsterdam, Monday September 17, 2018, 5.00-6.30 PM

The discussion will be chaired by Thomas Poell (UvA, Mediastudies), with responses by Lonneke van der Velden and activists from various political initiatives, such as Harriet Bergman from Code Rood, who discuss how dominant social media are used by current social movements and what alternative mobilization and communication channels are being used.

—the book will be for sale at the event—

Book info:

Organized networks are an alternative to the social media logic of weak links and their secretive economy of data mining. They put an end to freestyle friends, seeking forms of empowerment beyond the brief moment of joyful networking. This speculative manual calls for nothing less than social technologies based on enduring time. Analyzing contemporary practices of organization through networks as new institutional forms, organized networks provide an alternative to political parties, trade unions, NGOs, and traditional social movements. Dominant social media deliver remarkably little to advance decision-making within digital communication infrastructures. The world cries for action, not likes.

Organization after Social Media explores a range of social settings from arts and design, cultural politics, visual culture and creative industries, disorientated education and the crisis of pedagogy to media theory and activism. Lovink and Rossiter devise strategies of commitment to help claw ourselves out of the toxic morass of platform suffocation.

PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/06/organizationaftersocialmedia-web.pdf.

Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?page_id=16.

Bios:

Geert Lovink is a media activist and theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2001), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) and teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee/Malta.

Ned Rossiter is Professor of Communication in the Institute for Culture and Society with a joint appointment in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. He is the author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (2016).

Lonneke van der Velden is a postdoctoral researcher at DATACTIVE: the politics of data according to civil society and teaches at the New Media and Digital Culture program at the UvA. The DATACTIVE project investigates critical responses to, and engagements with, mass data collection. She is part of the editorial board of Krisis, journal for contemporary philosophy in the Netherlands and is on the Board of Directors of the Dutch digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom.

Thomas Poell is Senior Lecturer in New Media & Digital Culture and Program Director of the Research Master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on social media and popular protest in Canada, Egypt, Tunisia, India, and China, as well as on the role of these media in the development of new forms of journalism. His co- authored and co-edited books include Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave/McMillan, 2017), The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage, 2018), and The Platform Society (Oxford University Press, 2018).

INC

WANTED: Design intern for digital publishing project

For the further development of its hybrid publication strategy – combining digital and print books and other media – the Institute of Network Cultures is looking for an

Design intern with a strong interest in (digital) publishing


4-6 months, 4 days a week, starting November / December 2018 (starting date can be discussed)

You will work on international publications in the field of online media in different formats (print, PDF, EPUB). The internship offers both practical experience and a chance to conduct research in the field of hybrid publishing. A strong command of the English language in reading and writing is necessary, as most of the publications are in English. We are looking for someone with a design background (graphic or interaction design) with keen interest or background in new media, writing & editing and the publishing industry. It is possible to do research for a thesis within this internship.

The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) is a media research center that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications, and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink as part of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). The institute acts as a framework sustaining several research projects, with a strong focus on publications. For more information see http://networkcultures.org/. For an overview of all INC publications go to http://networkcultures.org/publications. For previous work on this topic you could check out PublishingLab, which INC has previously collaborated closely with.

Internship duties include:


    • Researching digital publication methods and tools;
    • working with the hybrid publishing workflow;
    • Designing prototypes and mock-ups;
    • Assisting with the production of new titles, both print and electronic, including editing manuscripts.

The intern will be a part of a small team within a large institution. Other tasks within the team may include:

  • Attending meetings;
  • researching and writing blog posts;
  • collecting and reviewing interesting and relevant literature;
  • assisting with other projects in the INC;
  • being part of the crew at INC events.

We offer:


  • The opportunity to be part of a dedicated, informal, and inspirational organization with extended international networks;
  • experience in the front line of new developments in publishing;
  • a chance to enhance your writing, editing, media, and research skills;
  •  a small monthly compensation.

For further information you can contact Kelly Mostert
 at kelly@networkcultures.org.

Applications: if you are interested please send your resume and cover letter to kelly@networkcultures.org before September 30th.

Sounding Out!

Doubled Double Consciousness and the Sound of New Afrikan Expression

Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth in 2018 by examining his all-too-often and all-too-long unacknowledged role in developing, furthering, challenging, and shaping what we now know as “sound studies.”

It has been an abundant decade-plus (!!!) since Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies “link[ed] the formal structure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to the contemporary mixing practices of DJs” (13) and we want to know how folks have thought about and listened with Du Bois in their work in the intervening years.  How does Du Bois as DJ remix both the historiography and the contemporary praxis of sound studies? How does attention to Du Bois’s theories of race and sound encourage us to challenge the ways in which white supremacy has historically shaped American institutions, sensory orientations, and fields of study? What new futures emerge when we listen to Du Bois as a thinker and agent of sound?

Over the next two months, we will be sharing work that reimagines sound studies with Du Bois at the center. Pieces by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Kristin Moriah, Aaron Carter-Ényì, Austin Richey, Jennifer Cook, Vanessa Valdés, and Julie Beth Napolin move us toward an decolonized understanding and history of sound studies, showing us how has Du Bois been urging us to attune ourselves to it. To start the series from the beginning, click here.

Readers, today’s post by Austin Richey considers the possibilities of Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness, as it applies to the Black Atlantic in general. He approaches “doubled double consciousness” through the case study of two artists: Tendai “Baba” Maraire and Efe Bes.

–Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Liana Silva, Eds.

Efe Bes with his tama at Ohana Gardens, Highland Park, MI – taken by the author

In his 1903 text The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois expresses the “otherness” of Black American identity as a “double consciousness,” an internalized condition whereby an individual’s self is contested by what Du Bois describes as the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls…; two warring ideals in one dark body” (2). This in-between status requires one to negotiate between these dual perspectives, and through the sonic expressions of cultural mediation, we may hear the tactics with which Black American culture creators select and present a particular version of their cultural identity.

In this essay, I argue for a doubled double consciousness that extends Du Bois’s conception into an increasingly interconnected space that Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic, a space which includes the histories and traditions of distinct African cultures, diasporic African communities, and Pan-African ideology. Based on the sonic practices of two artists, Seattle-based Zimbabwean American rapper and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, and Detroit-located Afrikan drummer and storyteller Efe Bes, we may hear doubled double consciousness as a multi-dimensional site of negotiation whereby musicians source from plural geographic, temporal, and cultural springs to compose a sonic “mix” of Black musical histories; this “mix” echoes the space where the hip hop DJ “noisily bring[s] together competing and complementary beats without sublating their tensions” (Weheliye 13). This anti-anti-essentialist tactic, as Carter Mathes describes in “The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom,” demonstrates that “it is the open space of sound that invests the project of black radical thought with the uncanny spontaneity of experimentation.”

“Tendai Maraire of Shabazz Palaces, Sub Pop Silver Jubilee, Pop Stage” by Flickr user Jeff Few, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Importantly, doubled double consciousness is a challenge to the received status of the “other,” and reveals a multiplicity of gazes through which an individual is viewed. As Maraire reflected,

I always felt that America saw us the same; not as African-American, Zimbabwean or even Black. Just Ignorant Negroes. As I got older my friends and I learned we’re all in the same social and economic positions. But I still had American friends who thought I felt better than them because I was Zimbabwean, and friends that were from Zimbabwe who thought I was better than them, or lost my culture because I had a curl and wore Jordans. (quoted in Devriendt)

Maraire assumed a singular, hegemonic gaze, yet his lived experience in America and Zimbabwe exposed him to critiques from black Americans, diasporic Africans, cosmopolitan and rural Zimbabweans, not to mention advocates, and sometimes appropriators, of different cultural lineages in a diverse city like Seattle.

While Du Bois claimed that the doubly conscious individual “does not wish to Africanize America,” the sonic expressions of doubled double consciousness reflect a particular Afrikan perspective, that is, a redefined social discourse which emerged from the intertwining of Black American activist efforts and knowledge derived from plural ancestral histories and African culture. By positioning themselves as Afrikan – not American, not African, but in-between – these artists showcase how doubled double consciousness is not a condition, but a tactic of negotiation and re-presentation.

Screenshot of Maraire playing the nhare mbira, from the video “Chimurenga Renaissance – The B.A.D. Is So Good (Live on KEXP)”

Rapper and multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire has been a staple of the Seattle hip hop scene since the early 1990s. While he honed his lyrical style in the cyphers of Seattle’s Columbia City, his parents Dumisani Maraire and Lora Chiorah-Dye, a renowned Zimbabwean ethnomusicologist and performer, and Zimbabwean dancer and instructor respectively, fostered a cosmopolitan Zimbabwean household; musically, Maraire performed live with his parents’ drum, dance, and marimba ensemble, sung Christian hymns in Shona, and opened for hip hop legends Snoop Dogg and Slick Rick. This provided Maraire with an extensive sonic palette to source from, yet his early attempts to bring these worlds together into an Afrocentric message were met with resistance:

[Audiences] didn’t even know what I was playing when I pulled out an mbira [a Zimbabwean lamellaphone] on stage 20 years ago and rapped with it. No one cared, rappers laughed. The world just wasn’t ready for that. With gangsta music at the time…they didn’t want to accept a dude with an mbira talking about political views out in Zimbabwe.” (Maraire interview) 

Today, as half of the Afrofuturistic hip hop duo Shabazz Palaces, Maraire has continued to incorporate the mbira, ngoma (drums), and hosho (gourd rattles) into his musical production; as Shabazz Palaces toured with artists such as Radiohead and Lauryn Hill, Maraire’s Afrikan hip hop style reached a global stage.

Tendai Maraire and Hussein Kalonji – courtesy of the artists

Doubled doubleness tactics come out forcefully in Maraire’s side project Chimurenga Renaissance, a moniker which connects chimurenga, a Zimbabwe-specific political struggle, to a global Black consciousness movement. Maraire and musical partner Hussein Kalonji, son of the famous Congolese Rhumba guitarist Raymond “Braynck” Kalonji, blend the melodic elements of Zimbabwean mbira and Congolese guitar with the sounds of the Roland 808 drum machine, funk and soul samples, topped by Maraire’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical flow.

Chimurenga Renaissance’s single “Pop Killer,” from 2013’s Defenders of the Crusades EP, exemplifies the power of doubled double consciousness to signify complex ideas to a variety of audiences: through his dismantling of problematic pop musicians who have left their culture behind, Maraire aims his Afrikan hip hop at American and Zimbabwean communities who have critiqued his cultural claims, as well as encourages other black musicians to dig deep and proudly represent their heritage. The video for the track follows Maraire as he travels to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe (11th-15th centuries), with his mbira to confer with his ancestors. Sonically, the song has three distinct sections whose juxtaposition showcases the multiple sound cultures which make up Maraire’s complex identity.

The track opens with sound of wind, followed by a sampled and chopped up boom-bap drum beat. As Maraire improvises on his reverb-drenched mbira he is joined by a sampled walking bassline, while the chorus and reverb effects Kalonji uses for his arpeggiated melodies complement the timbre of Maraire’s amplified mbira. In the second section, the mbira remains while sampled drums are replaced by hand clapping, hosho, and ngoma, signifying a shift from the reproduction of electronic sounds to the liveness of group participation. Over this, Maraire’s unremitting lyrics call out those who reject their histories, telling them, “This ain’t a show, this a sacred ritual. You can’t possess it because your life is hypocritical.” As Kalonji’s guitar re-enters, the track slows to a third section where Maraire’s raps: “The gold on my pinkie represents where I’m from. If you ain’t never seen it then we ain’t close enough. I got some bigots in my wallet, sativa’s in my pocket, passport to touch the world cause the man can’t stop me.”

Jacob Mafuleni, Tendai Maraire, and Martha Thom in a still from Chimurenga Renaissance’s “Pop Killer”

The official video also includes a bonus verse, featuring Maraire rapping live in a field accompanied by Zimbabwean musicians Jacob Mafuleni and Martha Thom; this rural scene, featuring an unamplified mbira and driving rhythms from the hosho, further amplifies Maraire’s connection to ancestral life, while his raw vocals and intense delivery are reminiscent of a rap cypher.

In Detroit, Afrikan drummer and storyteller Efe Bes has used doubled double consciousness as a platform to critique those who have lost a cultural connection to African ancestors.

Efe Bes performing at Dabls’ MBAD African Bead Museum, Detroit, MI – taken by author

His own Afrikan-ness is marked not just visibly by his self-made Afrikan masks but also aurally through his unique musical instrumentation and style: Bes plays a collection of drums from across the African continent, including Senegalese sabar drums, West African tama and dundun, and South African ngoma, as well as a modified kora, balafon, and multiple drum machines. Bes performs complex patterns that source from the polyrhythms of West African music to the shuffle of American Blues, occasionally over instrumental recordings of popular hip hop singles, such as rapper Future’s “Fuck Up Some Commas.” For Bes, these musical traditions are connected by an emphasis on the drum, and his performances are marked by shifting patterns that easily move from the deep swing of the blues to the automated soul of techno, a tactic which he developed while DJing for Aretha Franklin in the early 1990s. Weaving these multiple black musical traditions, Bes creates a soundscape that simultaneously looks back to ancestral sound cultures while pushing the boundaries of what Detroit’s musical legacy will sound like in the future.

In addition to live performances, Bes produces his own music videos and promotes his music through YouTube. His archive of over 200 videos shows the breadth of his musical abilities, ranging from spoken word poetry combined with talking drum, to his most viewed original song, “Gimme Back My Shit,” an Afrikan funk tune in which Bes demands reparations for the devastation of Black culture worldwide.

The song begins with Bes humming and performing the main melody of the piece on electric piano. While his humming is laid back, the insistent rhythms of the piano foreshadows the lyrical intensity of this “real reparation song”; this is highlighted by the piano’s synthesized guitar sound, whose bright, cutting timbre and plucked sound are reminiscent of an amplified kora. This introduction leads to the main groove, where looped samples of syncopated funk drums and guitar accompaniment create a foundation for improvised tama drumming and his soulfully styled yet acerbically lyrical vocal performance.

“Give me back my shit, you done had it for so long you think that you own it.

I’m not talking about some, I’m talking all of it.”

Bes’s lyrics go beyond simple criticism, and instead, demand reparations in the form of cultural repatriation, or as Bes sings, “Give me back my ancestors you grave-robbing bitch.” In the self-produced music video, visuals of Pan-African statues, masks, and Mbuti pygmies are juxtaposed with images of Cecil Rhodes, starving children, and cellphones which rely on conflict materials like coltan; these images are punctuated by the sounds of African languages, such as the clicks and pops of Xhosa, as well as the sound of deforestation, such as gas-powered saws, further emphasizing the degradation and destruction of African cultures through the loss of music, language, tangible culture, and environment.

Through the sonic practices of Tendai Maraire’s Afrikan hip hop and Efe Bes’s Afrikan drumming, we may hear how doubled double consciousness is a tool used to negotiate complex ancestral recall. For these artists, doubled double consciousness is not simply a condition, but a powerful space to negotiate and re-articulate what it means to be Afrikan in America.

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Featured image: Screenshot from video “Pop Killer” by Chimurenga Renaissance

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Austin T. Richey is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His current dissertation research is based in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, where he is exploring the resonances between diasporic African musical, dance, and visual arts and Detroit-specific musical genres, such as techno, in this historically multifaceted American city. 

Richey has published original research in African Music, and has forthcoming articles in the Routledge Handbook of Music in the New African Diaspora and Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction, published by West Virginia University Press. Support for his work has come from the Society for Ethnomusicology’s African Libraries Prize, the Frederick Douglass Institute, as well as the Society for American Music, where he is an Adrienne Fried Block Fellow. Richey is also an active performer, playing regularly in the New York area with Serevende Mbira and Mounafanyi Drum and Dance.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Most pleasant to the ear”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Itinerant Intellectual Soundscapes–Phillip Luke Sinitiere

On Whiteness and Sound Studies–Gustavus Stadler

Unlearning Black Sound in Black Artistry: Examining the Quiet in Solange’s A Seat At the Table–Kimberly Williams

Minor Compositions

Neurocapitalism

Neurocapitalism. Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines Giorgio Griziotti Foreword by Tiziana Terranova Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey Analyzes the changing politics of technology, charting out possibilities for autonomous cooperation Technological change is ridden with conflicts, bifurcations and unexpected developments. Neurocapitalism takes us on an extraordinarily original journey through the effects that cutting-edge technology has on cultural, anthropological, socio-economic and political … Continue reading →
Minor Compositions

Neurocapitalism

Neurocapitalism. Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines Giorgio Griziotti Foreword by Tiziana Terranova Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey Analyzes the changing politics of technology, charting out possibilities for autonomous cooperation Technological change is ridden with conflicts, bifurcations and unexpected developments. Neurocapitalism takes us on an extraordinarily original journey through the effects that cutting-edge technology has on cultural, anthropological, socio-economic and political … Continue reading →
Sounding Out!

“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality

Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth in 2018 by examining his all-too-often and all-too-long unacknowledged role in developing, furthering, challenging, and shaping what we now know as “sound studies.”

It has been an abundant decade-plus (!!!) since Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies “link[ed] the formal structure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to the contemporary mixing practices of DJs” (13) and we want to know how folks have thought about and listened with Du Bois in their work in the intervening years.  How does Du Bois as DJ remix both the historiography and the contemporary praxis of sound studies? How does attention to Du Bois’s theories of race and sound encourage us to challenge the ways in which white supremacy has historically shaped American institutions, sensory orientations, and fields of study? What new futures emerge when we listen to Du Bois as a thinker and agent of sound?

Over the next two months, we will be sharing work that reimagines sound studies with Du Bois at the center. Pieces by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Kristin Moriah, Aaron Carter-Ényì, Austin Richey, Jennifer Cook, Vanessa Valdés, and Julie Beth Napolin move us toward an decolonized understanding and history of sound studies, showing us how has Du Bois been urging us to attune ourselves to it. To start the series from the beginning, click here.

Readers, today’s post by Aaron Carter-Ényì delineates two central strands in Du Bois’s work that have proven key to what we now call sound studies–the historical and affective meanings that sound carries as well as its ability to travel great distances through time and space.

–Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Liana Silva, Eds.

I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. – W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903, p. 253)

W. E. B. Du Bois claimed to “know little of music,” yet his writings offer profound insights into aurality, foreshadowing the transdisciplinary of sound studies, by connecting language, music, sonic environments and aural communication. Du Bois published the souls of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, less than a decade after becoming the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard in 1895. In it, he addresses the color line, reflected in the policy of “separate but equal,” forming arguments that continue in Black Reconstruction in America. He also introduces themes that reappear in his later works including The World and Africa (1947), which formed the seeds of Afropolitanism and many modes of enquiry of Sound Studies. This short essay explores two concepts in Du Bois’s writings: that melodies may last longer than lyrics as cultural retentions; and, that drummed language may travel further than spoken language as communication.

By the time Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, what he termed the “Sorrow Songs” (alternatively Slave Songs or Spirituals) had entered the popular canon of American song. As incipits (or epigraphs) for each essay in the book, he entered the songs into a new literary and scholarly canon, ultimately changing the concept of what a book could be by fusing language and music in a new way. Even in a divided society following the U.S. government’s disinvestment in Reconstruction and the sharp uptick in lynching and other forms of racial terror, the “Negro folk-song” could not help but have a profound impact “as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” (Souls XIV), particularly due to the efforts of Fisk’s Jubilee Singers. Du Bois’s choice to include musical transcriptions without lyrics at the opening of each essay in Souls reflects a view of melodies as having a life–and a value– of their own.

Du Bois paired a quote from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ” by Lord Byron with a musical citation from the African American spiritual “The Great Camp Meeting” to open Chapter III, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.”

Although Du Bois’s work quite clearly accounts for the development of what has usually been called the African American oral tradition, the concept of an oral tradition is credited to Harvard comparative literature scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who popularized the term in American scholarship by establishing a binary theory of orality and literacy, that not only pitted the two against each other, but implied that they were hierarchical, evolutionary phases of “culture” (1960). This divide both widened and became more nuanced with Walter Ong’s recognition of “secondary orality” (1982), acknowledging that aspects of orality persist in literate societies.

But much earlier than these texts, Du Bois offers an alternate theory of how orality and literacy work, and even concepts similar to secondary orality, in the last essay of Souls, “XIV On the Sorrow Songs.” Notably, he describes his earliest experience with African music via a song that “travelled down” from his “grandfather’s grandmother”:

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development. My grandfather’s grand-mother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:

The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music (254).

Du Bois makes no mention of a spoken oral tradition throughout Souls. In fact, quite the contrary. In this passage, he implicitly argues it is not the meaning of the words, but the meaning of the music that survived the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Instead of an “oral tradition”, Du Bois identifies four steps in the development of American Sorrow Songs: (1) African; (2) “Afro-American”; (3) blending of “Negro and Caucasian” (a creolization); and (4) songs of white America influenced by the Sorrow Songs (256). The search for continuity between African and American culture has been a quest for many, including African-born scholars such as Lazarus Ekwueme. It is clear that melody (both pitch and rhythm) is the most idiosyncratic element of a piece, more so than lyrics, and is the most durable when a people and their culture experience extreme duress. As language (and certainly the meaning of the language) can fade (or be violently submerged)  in diaspora, melodies can often hold fast, and be held on to.

At an early date (1903), Du Bois already arrives at a point that is now a consensus: the Gullah-Geechee communities of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia have closely retained African practices, such as the ring shout.

Gullah-Geechee ring shout performed by McIntosh County Shouters (Carter-Ényì, Hood, Johnson, Jordan and Miller 2018)

Du Bois states that the Sea Island people are “touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black Belt” (251­–2). The Language You Cry In (1988), traces a Gullah song passed down back to its origins in Sierra Leone. Though separated by 200 years and 5000 miles, the melody was immediately recognizable to Baindu Jabati, a woman of the village, Senehum Ngola, even the lyrics were “strikingly similar.”

Sheet Music, “Old Folks At Home,” A project of the Digital Scriptorium Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

The Gullah-Geechee are exceptional because of their linguistic retentions, documented by Lorenzo Dow Turner in his 1949 book. The preservation of linguistic features was possible because of relative isolation, but as Du Bois notes, this source of African music is fundamental to American music in steps (2), (3) and (4), of which he offers famous examples of each. It is the recognition of the crossing of the African and African-American influence across the racial divide into the music of white America, in songs such as Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (more popularly known as “Swanee River”) that was the most controversial. Du Bois approaches this matter cautiously: “One might go further and find a fourth step in this development…” (256), but then goes full force: “a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies” (257).

Racist musicologist George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953) fought hard against the position that white hymnody had been influenced by black spirituals for much of his career. In “White and Negro spirituals, their life span and kinship” (1944), he argued just the opposite, that black spirituals were derivative of white hymnody and conducted an early corpus study to prove it. William H. Tallmadge, in “The Black in Jackson’s White Spirituals” (1981), summarizes Jackson’s findings:

Jackson, after examining 562 white items and 892 black items, found only 116 pairs which he thought demonstrated tune similarities, and of these 116, only 70 pairs actually prove to have had a valid melodic relationship… These seventy items represent slightly less than eight percent of the 892 black spirituals (150).

Jackson could not find the empirical support for his claim to of primacy (perhaps supremacy) of white spirituals, even with some ample confirmation bias. In fact, his findings fit well into Du Bois’s account, particularly his identification of step 3 in the development of the Sorrow Songs: “blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land” (256). Essentially, it took a nearly a century for musicology to recognize what Du Bois laid out in 1903.

The aural tradition Du Bois describes, which includes various versions of songs and the steps of sorrow song development, is more sympathetic to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s concept of “orature” than the Parry/Lord dichotomy. In “Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature” (2007), Thiong’o points out that:

What is often arrested in writing is a particular version, a particular rendering, … as performed by a particular performers at a particular moment. Nature, then, in orature manifests itself as a web of connections of mutual dependence … in active communications within themselves and with others (5).

For example, the black and white spirituals with similar tunes in Jackson’s corpus both are and are not the same, which challenges the very notion of intellectual property (IP), and the flawed IP debate over spirituals that Jackson pursued. Even in a segregated society, under which racist laws separated the performers, a mutual dependence developed between black and white spirituals. Despite the affinity of the melodies and common heritage in the aural culture (and perhaps even common sources in either Africa or Europe), divisions were articulated in writing, through different hymnbooks and different words, once again supporting the veracity of Du Bois’s claim that the “music is far more ancient than the words.”

Waves on the Ghanaian Shore, Image by Flickr User Yenkassa (CC BY 2.0)

Later in his life, Du Bois’s attention turned more and more toward Africa. In The World and Africa (1947), he confronts colonialism and Eurocentric history, foreshadowing Afrocentrism and to some extent Afropolitanism. He also, very briefly, reprises his discussion of aurality, citing German musicologist and father of organology, Erich von Hornbostel, as affirmation of the virtues of both African and African American music from the 1928 article “African Negro Music”:

The African Negroes are uncommonly gifted for music-probably, on an average, more so, than the white race. This is clear not only from the high development of African music, especially as regards polyphony and rhythm, but a very curious fact, unparalleled, perhaps, in history, makes it even more evident; namely, the fact that the negro slaves in America and their descendants, abandoning their original musical style, have adapted themselves to that of their white masters and produced a new kind of folk-music in that style. Presumably no other people would have accomplished this. (In fact the plantation songs and spirituals, and also the blues and rag-times which have launched or helped to launch our modern dance-music, are the only remarkable kinds of music brought forth in America by immigrants (60).

Du Bois studied in Germany from 1892–94 before attending Harvard. According to Kenneth Barkin (2005), Du Bois’s “affection” for Imperial Germany has “remained a puzzle to historians” (285). Hornbostel too had a complicated relationship to Germany: though celebrated in his home country for much of his life, in 1933 he was forced into exile because his mother was Jewish; he died in 1935. The passage Du Bois cites from Hornbostel echoes some aspects of Souls XIV Sorrow Songs, particularly the centrality of the spirituals in American culture, but not all. In particular, “abandoning their original musical style … to that of their white masters” is incongruent with Du Bois’s earlier perspective. Though Hornbostel is clearly impressed with the musicality of black people(s), Hornbostel’s summary conclusions stated at the beginning of the same article do not mesh with Du Bois’s own (more insightful) work in Souls: “African and (modern) European music are constructed on entirely different principles, and therefore they cannot be fused into one, but only the one or the other can be used without compromise” (30).

Unfortunately, Du Bois does not contest Hornbostel with his narrative of continuity and “steps” of development from Souls. Du Bois recognized both the happenings and possibilities of creolization and syncretism in black culture of which Hornbostel only captures glimpses. Ultimately, despite a generally positive perspective on black music, Hornbostel’s position is one of not only continental, but racial, division, promoting segregation of musical practice as the only way. It is disconcerting that Du Bois cites this article and Hornbostel as a musical expert with its main argument when Du Bois identified the color line as the singular issue of the twentieth century.

In The World and Africa, Du Bois goal is a bit different: in the pursuit of repositioning Africa and moving towards both a corrected history and post-colonial future, there were stranger bedfellows than Hornbostel. A more pristine vision of recasting Africa and Africana aurality is found on the same page (99), in Du Bois’s mention of an astonishing form of music as communication, the talking drum: “The development of the drum language by intricate rhythms enabled the natives not only to lead in dance and ceremony, but to telegraph all over the continent with a swiftness and precision hardly rivaled by the electric telegraph” (99).

The recent intellectual current within African studies, Afropolitanism, is embodied in Du Bois’s juxtaposition of African tradition with modernity. A recent book on West African talking drums by Amanda Villepastour, Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá bàtá drum also draws an analogy to telecommunication. While Du Bois’s brief 1947 account is only a single sentence, Villepastour’s lengthy 2010 account confirms Du Bois conjecture was not a metaphor or empty comparison, the talking drum and telegraph share the same utility, and while we are keeping track, the talking drum came first and is a lot more efficient in terms of infrastructure.

Yorùbá talking drummers in Ọ̀yọ́, Nigeria (Carter-Ényì 2013)

For those unfamiliar with them, here are some rough calculations regarding how talking drums work. Singing or shouting is about 80 decibels (dB) at one meter. Drumming is over 100 dB at one meter. This 20 dB differential means that a speech surrogate (like a talking drum) could travel up to 10 times the distance under the same environmental conditions. With those intensities at the source, a loud voice could travel one kilometer before becoming inaudible (at around 20 dB), while a drum could reach 10 km, easily communicating with the next village.

Hausa Talking Drum, Image by African Studies Library BU (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Within a regional network of drummers that “speak” the same language—such as in the Yorùbá-speaking region of southwest Nigeria—long distance communication was possible, and much earlier than the telegraph. A recent study (2018) by Frank Seifert and his colleagues on Amazonian Bora drumming, “Reducing language to rhythm,” finds minute timing variations represent the placement of consonants suggesting there is detail in speech surrogacy, beyond the representation of lexical tone previously documented. Seifert’s findings suggest that the “precision” Du Bois described is exactly what talking drummers have (throughout the Global South). Now the “swiftness” part may have been a bit exaggerated (electric signals travel much faster than sound waves).

Du Bois’s practiced a transdisciplinary study of sound and understood Africa as Afropolitan long before most of the West. In addition to foreshadowing the interdisciplinary moves of sound studies—which also connects sound to speech to music and examines their coexistence—Du Bois’s thinking also prefigures the current intellectual (and urban-cultural) vogue of Afropolitanism, which has to some extent displaced the Pan-African movement that drew Du Bois to Ghana.In a 2016 interview, Achille Mbembe positions Afropolitanism as a way “in which Africans, or people of African origin, understand themselves as being part of the world rather than being apart.”    Much like the African cultures he first encountered in melody in the nineteenth century and then heard firsthand as a contemporary when he moved to Ghana in 1961, Du Bois heard beyond Eurocentric disciplinary divides of music and language that served to portray African cultures as somehow always already outside of modernity, yet not the right color of “ancient.”  Du Bois wholeheartedly believed music could change the narrative of Black life, history and culture, a message first crooned to him as a child between his grandmother’s knees, to which he never stopped listening.

Housatonic River, Great Barrington Massachusetts, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Home Town. Image by Flickr User Criana, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Featured Image: Brooklyn African Festival Drum, 2010, Image by Flickr User Serge de Gracia (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Aaron Carter-Ényì teaches music theory, class piano, and music appreciation in Morehouse’s Department of Music.  He holds a PhD from Ohio State University (2016), was a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria in 2013, and is a 2017 fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Recent scholarship appears in Africa (Journal of the International African Institute), Ethnomusicology, Music Theory Online, Oxford Handbook of Singing and Tonal Aspects of Languages; or is forthcoming in Performance Research and Sounding Out! He is the director of the interdisciplinary Africana Digital Ethnography Project (ADEPt) and is currently developing the Video-EASE Toolbox and ATAVizM. During the summer, he is a STEAM instructor for federally-sponsored student enrichment programs including MSEIPand iSTEM for which he provides workshops and courses in the Morehouse Makerspace.

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Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic–Imani Kai Johnson

Black Mourning, Black Movement(s): Savion Glover’s Dance for Amiri Baraka –Kristin Moriah

Troubling Silence: Sonic and Affective Dispossessions of the African Slave Trade–Michelle Commander

 

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