News from the Collective

Los Angeles, March 24, 2025

Dear Geert,

Greetings from the Formerly United States of America. It’s almost impossible to understand what’s going on day to day here, and to explain it to old friends in Europe harder still, but I’ll try. We are not even ten weeks in, but Trump’s resurgent administration has drawn from on-again off-again advisor (and convicted & pardoned felon) Steve Bannon’s experience as a keyboard warrior, and flooded the zone with so much shit that the opening months of version 2.0 staggered even those of us who fully expected the worst. Much has been made of the right wing game plan that is Project 2025, but almost no one discusses it as an augur not for the 21^st century, but rather as a reflection on the 20th. Which is to say, Project 2025 wants to return the US to 1925.

The United States in the 1920s had survived a terrible global pandemic (known here as the Spanish influenza), and was run by Republicans like Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding. Both were both avid protectionists in favor of tariffs and isolationism, both were staunch in their opposition to taxes and to regulations. The automobile tycoon and world- famous entrepreneur Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent newspaper to spread his theories of capitalism and antisemitism to as many fellow citizens as he could. The Johnson-Reed Act established a national origins quota system based on the census of 1890 and barred almost all immigration from Asia (the act and its restrictions stood for forty years). 1925 was the year of the Scopes trial (made famous by the play, Inherit the Wind) and was emblematic of the attack on educators for teaching unpopular theories. In 1925, it was not critical race theory, but instead the theory of evolution that challenged prevailing orthodoxies. Historical parallelism is interesting but not always productive, and the fact that the 1920s ended in a world-wide depression that led to the first truly global conflict may mean less than the fact that the present crisis is driven by opposition to the solution the 1930s offered to the 1920s, the New Deal, which moved America closer to a social safety net and real regulation of “survival of the fittest” capitalism (the only Darwinian theory that the right seems to fully embrace).

But back to the present: the last few weeks have overwhelmed people’s capacities for empathy, much less understanding: for a week one expresses a deep concern about the defunding of science; this is followed by grief over the abandonment of Ukraine amidst a sense that 80 years of US alliances was being abandoned for…what?; no time to think about that anymore, as the anguish about the unlawful deportations of immigrants to hellish Salvadorian prisons morphs into dread that the administration’s defiance of court orders will bring on a full-blown constitutional crisis. Then, as an academic, I feel existential anxiety about the attack on American higher education—an attack that can literally strip billions in funding from what just a few weeks ago was considered one of the country’s bulwarks of excellence.

All of this has been happening with, and been supported by, a staggering explosion of meanness. Rage and fury are one thing, but this pervasive meanness embodies a smallness of spirit that circles around spite and acts of petty retribution. A full third of the American people are coming across as not just angry, but “nasty,” to reclaim one of the words Trump uses to define his enemies. Politicos, the chattering classes, intellectuals, assorted liberals, left-wingers and anyone else who opposes what’s happening right now have got to accept that Trump is not stupid. He may have no interest in history, politics, or aesthetics (to name just three realms of knowledge), but he does have a genius for ferreting out what will keep him in the spotlight and how to translate that attention into support and thereby power. He intuits rather than cogitates, but in this he exhibits what Aldous Huxley identified decades ago as post-verbal knowing. His MAGA movement runs on the “feels.” It’s hard to tell how much this aspect of the American experience right now is exceptional, but in this country celebrity has replaced charisma as the central magic of totalitarianism. It’s not that Max Weber and Hannah Arendt were wrong about Mussolini, Hitler and Mao, so much that charisma means less in an era of spectacle triumphant, when the endless scroll of social media rewards only attention.

This evolution from charisma to celebrity began in the televisual era. John F. Kennedy looked like a movie star, and the truth was he was simply better on camera during the 1960 televised debate than the sweating, pinched-faced Richard Nixon. Nixon’s grit and grind, combined with a considerable intellect and a will to power, eventually got him to the Oval Office, and his ruthlessness was an inspiration to Trump from a young age, but the celebrity aspect of American power really accelerated in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, our first actor-president. Reagan had spent decades honing his message to meld seamlessly with his public presentation, and he was able to create a disjunction between his folksy demeanor and the plutocratic policies he enacted. He was also expert at deploying his own celebrity to usher back into political discourse ways of dealing with race that Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the 1960s were to have relegated to the dustbin of history. Reagan started his campaign in the heart of Dixie, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, only a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan only 16 years earlier. Reagan told his almost all-white audience that, “I believe in states’ rights” (long a Confederate and then segregationist dog whistle) and made it though he whole speech without once mentioning the Klan’s three victims. His deployment of the so-called “Southern strategy,” which was predicated upon breaking off the white working class from the Democratic party, continued through his endlessly repeated—and frankly false—anecdotes about a “welfare queen” (always a code for Black women) and a “strapping young buck” (another dog whistle phrase, this time to conjure predatory Black “thugs”) buying “T-bone steaks” while “you were buying hamburger.” The use of “you” as a marker of race and gender is something that Trump turned up to 11 in his extremely successful trans-baiting 2024 campaign ad, which ended with the words,“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Ever since Trump rode down his golden escalator a decade ago, the dog whistles have become megaphones: immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists, Black-majority countries are “shitholes,” COVID-19 is the “China virus” and “kung flu,” trans members of the military are incapable of leading an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,” the list goes on. Yet in the 21^st century media economy that Trump “feels” so expertly, the fact that the meanness never ends is a feature not a bug. The meanness leads to outrage, and the outrage brings attention, not just from the news but even more importantly from social media. The meanness keeps the light burning brightly on Trump and his actions (to call them policies is to fall into the trap of trying to intellectualize instinct).

Trump’s four years out of power had the same effect on him and his supporters as we’ve seen with other autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump honed his mean streak and expanded its appeal via the now separate channels by which Americans are algorithmically fed what we once called news, but which now must simply be seen as content.  Trump has mastered triangulation in our infinitely fractured mediascape. A legendary misogynist, Trump garnered the votes of white women with threats of rapists of color and gay and trans groomers. To men of color, especially the young ones, this out-and-out racist was able to play up their dislike of female bosses, and to caricature his opponent as an avatar of the officious Human Resources professional. To the immigrants he was demonizing one moment, he would pivot to present himself as the only strong man capable of channeling their aggrievement at changing notions of masculinity. To his white base, dispossessed by economic upheavals, he was always able to blame a distant other, from cultural elites who despised them to foreign globalists who ripped them off. His richest supporters, who had benefitted the most from the policies that hollowed out MAGA country, knew that however he retriangulated, he would in deliver tax cuts in 2.0 as he had in 1.0, and that was more than enough.

Trump was defeated in his 2020 reelection campaign because of COVID, but in many ways his successful 2024 return to power depended on the sublimated grief and rage that the pandemic generated in the United States. To understand what’s happening in the first quarter of 2025, it’s vital to think though the intersections of the viral outbreak, the public health response, the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, and the white backlash to all of the above. There was a huge segment of the population that didn’t just chafe at the restrictions imposed by public health professionals and government officials, but saw them as a fundamental attack on freedom itself. The individualism that most Americans see as their core ethos (whether they live by it or not) was fundamentally out of sync with the communitarian impulse to sacrifice to protect others, especially others they didn’t know and who didn’t look like them. A new “feels” emerged about the pandemic—the only people who were actually dying were poor, fat people, which in the MAGA imaginary  translates as Black and/or immigrant. Ignore, for the moment, that almost three-quarters of the American population is categorized as overweight or obese, and that whites accounted for sixty percent of all deaths. What stuck in MAGA’s head was that Indigenous, Black and Latino people were dying at a faster rate than white people, especially when adjusted for age. For a subset of people who were already incensed by the civil unrest that followed in the wake of Floyd’s murder, this was just more grist for a racial assessment of the events of 2020. This reaction is just so mean: to assume that the poor and the dispossessed were responsible for their own deaths in the midst of a global pandemic. Dying in a country simultaneously famous for its wealth and the impossibility of accessing healthcare if you are poor was victim-blaming at its most vicious.

The economy was central to Trump’s comeback after the seditions of January 6^th and the convictions in court, but this election was a game of inches, to use a metaphor football-crazy politicians love, and every grievance stoked, every hatred enflamed, and every blame shifted was going to be important. It was here where Trump’s feral understanding mattered, and he is continuing to ferret out ways to keep these temperatures high as he governs by edict alone. Celebrities exist in the spotlight, and though they have writers, directors, crews and co-stars, their singularity is their appeal. It’s no wonder Trump has shown no interest in the legislative process this time round. Even in aggregate, the whole of the Republican-controlled House and Senate can’t hold a candle watt to Trump’s blinding luminescence. Why shouldn’t the rest of the Republican party fall in line? They are now his Greek chorus, but stripped of tragic sensibility, reduced to fans waiting to take selfies with the star.

The attack on a professional civil service that keeps planes in the air, national forests from lighting on fire, social security payments on time, and nuclear weapons safely stored doesn’t make any rational sense. In a seven trillion-dollar budget, there will be some waste, fraud and abuse, but over decades, the right wing has never been able to identify enough to even make a dent in the US’s two-trillion dollar deficit. But the feels and the meanness explain the gleeful destruction wrought by Elon Musk and his boy army at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a department, and is only using efficiency as a cover). The reality is that government jobs are one of the only sectors of the American economy that really did diversify and become more inclusive over the past half-century, at the very same time that the civil service was a hold-out of unionism and generous pensions. To MAGA, the response to having less secure jobs in right-to-work states (a rebranding of anti-unionism) is not to organize for better wages and worker solidarity, but instead to strip “those people” of their jobs. How dare “they” have it better than “us?” Here the meanness translates as a constriction of ambition, an inability to see the gains of others as anything but a loss for the self in the zero-sum game that is life in MAGA world.

Of course, the Pax Americana that Trump 2.0 is dismantling was not a zero-sum game. For any and all of the myriad problems of extractive capitalism, the period after the Second World War saw the largest reduction in poverty that the world had ever witnessed, and the greatest beneficiaries of all were the American people. Yes, conditions have changed and new sources of inspiration and innovation are required, but to destroy the world order, such as it is, without cogent and thorough planning for what is to replace it, is to substitute feels for thinking, a process that Trump and MAGA drive via a meanness of spirit and inchoate longings for revenge.

I am, of course, writing all of this as a tenured academic at a major research university. This means I am literally despised by the MAGA movement. I’d never felt what has been called town/gown tensions, in part because I live in a metropolitan metropolis, but also because I had enough experience in other jobs before academia to be able to talk to strangers about aspects of what I do, even if the idea of being a “media philosopher” seems beyond esoteric to most (including family, to be honest). But like the majority of people in “the profession,” I’ve been caught off-guard by the meanness that’s emerged around the very idea of higher education. In the comments section of nominally center or even vaguely left legacy media like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and New York magazine, it can seem like a third or more of the posts are cheering on attempts to end tenure, defund academic research, expel student protesters, and denigrate the search for knowledge. Social media is, naturally, even more vituperative in its support for the gutting of campus life. Higher ed has a public relations debacle on its hands, and no discussion about how universities and research labs are where cures for chronic diseases and the Internet came from seems to make a dent in the desire to bring the sector down a peg or ten. In 2024, for the first time, the least informed voters went for Republicans, not Democrats. The Democratic pollster David Schor sees the 2024 election as the new normal, a time in which, “the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.” I might add in mean here as well, but without Schor’s analytics to back me up.

As I was concluding this long letter, I found out that my own alma mater, Columbia University, capitulated fully to Trump’s threat to strip it of almost half a billion dollars of funding. At this writing, there’s no way for me to know if this submission will actually yield anything positive for the institution, but things don’t look good for the rest of the sector in the coming months. My institution is under investigation for exactly the same things that Columbia was accused of, mostly having to do with the handling of Gaza-related protests and statements, as well as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. Universities, particularly the much maligned “studies” departments, are the very origin places for the language and conceptual apparatus needed to analyze and fight this confluence of celebrity-driven meanness. It’s no wonder we’re under mortal attack.

The only solution I can see is solidarity, direct action, and strikes. If the only content we see are feels spotlighted by celebrity, all else will wither into nothingness.

Yours—

Peter

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Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA.

COPIUM

A week after I finished writing the first blog posting You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks,  discussing the incoming C-wave and China’s growing influence, Biden signed a law effectively banning TikTok in the U.S. What followed became the biggest clutch of my creative career, securing a seat in the based department just before everyone else. I’m writing this follow-up as I cope with losing my edginess as a Western Xiaohongshu user, while also bragging that I was China-pilled before it was cool.

XIAOHONGSHU

While 170 million internet users scramble to find an alternative to TikTok, many are choosing to explore new platforms instead of fleeing to familiar ones. This behavior could be driven by several factors: reluctance to compete with established creators on Western platforms, Meta’s suppression of leftist content, or simply the desire for a fresh start. One app in particular, Xiaohongshu (or RedNote, as Americans call it), has seen a massive influx of self-proclaimed ‘TikTok refugees.’ It occupies a unique position as a well-established alternative that is globally available on app stores, does not require a Chinese VPN, and lacks competition from established English-speaking creators.

Initially, Westerners were not welcomed with open arms. Some Chinese netizens criticized them for bringing “American slop content” to the platform. Many explained that Xiaohongshu is valued for its high-quality, aesthetic, and informative content, in contrast to the sensationalist and loud videos posted by incoming TikTokers. Others, however, saw an opportunity to grow their audience and began adding auto-generated English translations to their posts. As American content flooded the platform, many users were upset that their carefully curated for you pages had been disrupted.

Given this, we must reconsider the term ‘TikTok refugees.’ In light of the native user base’s response, their arrival resembles a colonial invasion more than a search for refuge. Much like traditional colonizers, Western creators are drawn to the promises of a ‘new land,’ exploring unfamiliar algorithms, enjoying newfound freedoms, and stepping into a blank slate with little to no regard for its existing occupants. One user wrote “native English speakers already enjoy enough privileges, no need to add another one and change ourselves to make them feel more comfortable.”

In my early speculations on how the app’s developers might respond, possible scenarios included launching a separate Western-oriented version (similar to the Douyin–TikTok split), pulling Xiaohongshu from Western app stores, geo-blocking foreign users, or requiring Chinese ID or phone number verification for sign-ups, as some competitors do. However, given that Xiaohongshu is still young and only saw its rise in Asian markets in late 2023, the West became an attractive target for expansion instead. The app has since rebranded itself on Western app stores as RedNote, adopting its Americanized nickname. Another notable change was the swift introduction of a translation feature to facilitate communication between users. I was waiting for Americans to lose their minds over the app’s name literally translating to Little Red Book, a reference to Mao’s Little Red Book, but everyone was too invested in the LARP to care.

Two days after the big wave, many Chinese netizens began cautiously welcoming Western users to the platform, while urging them not to turn it into another TikTok.  Americans (for once) have also recognized the existence of other people and made efforts to encourage respect for the native user base. In agreement with Chinese netizens, many foreign users embraced a culture of bilingual posts, recognizing that most Chinese users either don’t speak English or aren’t comfortable using it. This helped ease the initial sense of exclusion within the community. However, the trend faded with the introduction of instant translations by the platform’s developers. All things considered, there still is an elevated sense of toxicity and hate, something the community hadn’t experienced before the mass migration.

After the initial shock within the community, the event has facilitated many interesting cultural exchanges, with both parties expressing genuine curiosity about each other’s cultures. The influx of TikTokers, although problematic, has also sparked valuable learning experiences and cultural exchanges that I have long advocated for. Users from both sides of the globe are posting questions about internet censorship, LGBTQ+ rights, personal freedoms, social media trends, memes, and more. If the dissonance among users is alleviated, the situation could provide long-term benefits for everyone involved. Americans (and, by extension, the rest of the Western world) could gain a much-needed understanding of Chinese culture, a country so notoriously misrepresented by Western media. Furthermore, this newfound awareness among younger Americans could prove highly beneficial in strengthening local anti-establishment movements. On the other hand, Chinese users could gain exposure to topics often omitted from mainstream discourse, such as queerness.

With ‘Westoids’ already experiencing early signs of the ‘Place, Japan’ effect in its redefined, Sinic rendition, a Chinese app like Xiaohongshu becoming the new meta in America could seriously claim lives in the Department of Homeland Security. For now, the ban has been delayed by the Trump administration. If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. On January 13th, Xiaohongshu stood as the #1 app on the U.S. App Store, proudly giving legislators the middle finger. Once again, yet another unpredictable turn of events, exposing the rhizomatic nature of internet-era politics and opening up new perspectives. As the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu famously said: “All warfare is based […]”

EVERYONE IS GETTING MORE CHINESE

On January 27th, 2025, we witnessed yet another instance of Xi Jinping’s aura-farming. A shocking advancement in Chinese AI, DeepSeek, sent U.S. stocks plunging. Contrary to Sam Altman’s appeals to the government, this competitive model was developed with only a fraction of OpenAI’s claimed budget. Outperforming GPT-4 in response time, DeepSeek has challenged America’s narrative, which seeks to downplay China’s technological successes. Judging from the US’s reaction, apparently the free market is not always good.

At this point, the frequency of China’s wins has caught everyone’s attention. Newly established online exchanges between users from the opposing superpowers have sparked a wave of pro-China sentiment among younger generations. ‘China-posting’ — the practice of sharing memetic images that depict the country in a positive light — was already circulating in less-frequented corners of the internet, but the state’s recent media presence has pushed it onto mainstream feeds. Trending memes, such as an image of the U.S. stock market crash remade into a Chinese flag (see above), reflect the frustration of young Western users who feel misled by their governments’ portrayal of China as a totalitarian, poverty-ridden ‘third-world’ country. While undeniably authoritarian and still grappling with poverty and human rights issues, the civilization-state boasts state-of-the-art infrastructure, high-speed rail networks, and ambitious housing initiatives—luxuries that many Americans can only dream of.

With this newfound resentment toward Western neoliberalism, users began engaging in a practice of weaponized data sharing. Many signed up for multiple Chinese-run platforms and apps, proudly flaunting their willingness to share data with the CCP. This shift wasn’t just about rebellion, it was about seeking alternatives. Disillusioned by Western platforms’ data privacy scandals, censorship, and corporate greed, many users found a strange sense of agency in embracing China’s digital ecosystem. The argument was simple: if all tech giants collect data, why not choose the one that isn’t aligned with the Western status quo?

Freed from Western propaganda, a new perception of China is emerging on social media, perhaps driven by young people searching for signs of hope for the world’s future. As Generation Beta is born into the most uncertain decade since World War II, they may be the first generation to see China as the world’s leading power. While it’s crucial not to blindly praise an imperialist state, we can ask ourselves a question: who’s imperialism would you rather have? With hatred towards the U.S., often driven by personal experience, many young people would pick China. Gen Z and younger are often referred to as ‘digital natives,’ will the first generation rid of resentment towards China be the Gen Xi?

MADE IN CHINA

Trump’s foreign policy is becoming increasingly hostile — whether through his executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, claims to the Panama Canal, or the ‘final solution’ in Palestine. Beginning with remarks about the EU being “too woke,” the administration has even threatened to impose sanctions on European countries. Taking many by surprise, it’s hard to imagine the once-inseparable NATO partners having their trade relationships severed by economic warfare.

China’s growing dominance in international trade is primarily reflected in its exports to South American, African, and Asian markets. While the country’s exports to the EU have grown substantially, existing systems still prioritize trade partnerships with the U.S. over China. However, recent exceptions have been made, most notably for the sale of Chinese EVs, which outperform the competition in safety, efficiency, and affordability. If the U.S. imposes tariffs on European countries, it could push the EU to strengthen ties with China, further cementing its status as a rising economic leader. Such newly formed trade partnerships could help shift the fear mongering narratives, helping form new channels for exporting cultural products.

China is already dominating foreign gaming markets, with Tencent owning Riot, 40% shares in Epic Games, and many popular titles like Final Fantasy, Genshin Impact etc. As of now, the country’s cultural exports differ greatly from those of Korea or Japan. Two major examples that come to mind — K-pop and anime — are often products carefully crafted to fit both local and Western markets, with Japan’s government even aiming to artificially boost new anime productions for export. Series like My Deer Friend Nokotan are getting injected with Western references, K-pop distributors have entire business plans centered around the U.S. market and there is a growing dissonance between Japan’s pop culture for the local and global market. On the other hand, China is less interested in tailoring their output to a global audience, and when they do, it’s made more culturally-universal by stripping any semblance of local cultures (e.g. gaming industry). Conversely, China’s culture is inconspicuously leaking through online channels, like aesthetic trends, brainrot or other social media phenomena, as I discussed earlier in You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks.

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The passing of Quincy Jones has left a silence that feels almost impossible to fill. Every time I play Thriller at home now, it’s no longer just a celebration of his unparalleled artistry. It’s a ritual to sit with his legacy, listen more closely, and honor how his music shaped the sound of memory itself. With each spin of the record, my family and I find ourselves inside his arrangements, held by their richness, precision, and sense of story as though the music is breathing with us, speaking back across time. Jones’s work was never just production; it was communication. A language of sound connected us to melody and beat and the fuller spectrum of emotion, culture, and memory that lives in Black music.

This piece joins a tradition of Black sonic remembrance that Sounding Out! has previously offered in moments of profound cultural loss, from Regina Bradley’s remembrances of listening to Whitney Houston on the radio with her mother to Ben Tausig’s reflection on Prince’s passing to Kristin Moriah’s meditation on Savion Glover’s tap dance tribute to Amiri Baraka. Such pieces remind us that mourning Black artists is not only about personal grief; it’s about listening to the soundscapes they left behind, tracing how their artistry shaped how we collectively move, mourn, and remember. Houston’s voice, much like Jones’s production, was a vessel of Black sonic innovation, shaping how we collectively move, mourn, and remember. Like Prince, Jones’s catalog is a vast archive of Black sonic innovation, where every horn line, bass groove, and percussive hit tells part of a larger story about Black life, joy, survival, and creativity. Jones, like Baraka, understood the radical potential of sound to entertain and agitate, educate, and summon history into the present. Writing about Jones now in the quiet left by his absence is a mourning and a celebration, an offering of flowers in the form of careful attention, deep gratitude, and collective remembrance. This is a way of honoring him as a producer or composer and as a practitioner of sonic rhetoric, a storyteller who spoke through sound and whose language of rhythm and harmony shaped how we feel, remember, and belong.

Two new books published in 2024, Matthew D. Morrison’s Black Sound and Earl H. Brooks’s On Rhetoric and Black Music, arrived at a particularly poignant moment, offering critical frameworks for understanding sonic rhetoric as a vital Black cultural practice. Morrison positions Black music as a vessel for cultural identity and history, emphasizing how it carries narratives that transcend mere auditory pleasure. Brooks extends this argument, demonstrating how Black music functions as a living, breathing rhetorical form, shaping and reshaping cultural identity and narrative with each performance, each recording, and each arrangement. That these books emerged in the same year the world lost Quincy Jones feels deeply significant, a reminder that his life’s work embodies precisely what they describe. Jones mastered using rhythm, melody, and arrangement to shape cultural memory and invite reflection. His genius does not reside solely in his ability to create captivating music but rather in his ability to layer each note with history, emotion, and meaning, sound as storytelling, sound as cultural conversation.

As I reflect on Quincy Jones’s legacy, I realize that his production and compositional skills have profoundly changed my understanding of sound. My admiration for Jones’s mastery of sound and his unique way of using music to communicate drove me to explore sound rhetoric more profoundly, especially how his work became the foundation of new sonic storytelling. His work allows me to imagine myself as a young Black boy, playing with sound and allowing it to communicate in ways that speak to the world. I am grateful for his inspiration, enabling us to envision the possibilities of sound and its power to connect us all. To honor Quincy Jones in rhetoric and sound, we must recognize his pioneering contributions to music as a form of communication. By studying his innovative approaches and the sonic landscapes he crafted, we can deepen our understanding of how sound shapes cultural narratives and personal identities. Engaging with his work encourages us to appreciate music’s profound impact on our lives and the stories it tells, ensuring that his legacy continues to inspire future generations of artists and listeners alike. 

For readers who may not be as familiar with his legacy, Quincy Jones is one of the most influential and celebrated figures in music history. His career spans more than seven decades, marked by numerous Grammy Awards, groundbreaking collaborations, and an ability to shape the sound of entire musical eras. Jones’s journey into music began with a chance discovery that would define the course of his life. As a young boy, he broke into an armory and found an upright piano, sparking his lifelong passion for music. This serendipitous moment led him to explore various instruments, from percussion to trombone, sousaphone, and eventually the trumpet, which would become his instrument of choice. These formative experiences gave Jones a diverse and rich understanding of sound that he would later weave into his compositions. His journey through different musical styles, be it jazz, R&B, or orchestral arrangements, allowed him to develop a unique ability to merge genres and cultures, creating works that resonated on a global scale. Jones’s work as a producer, composer, and arranger redefined what it meant to be a producer in the music industry, elevating the role to that of a creative force, an artist in their own right. Most famously known for his work with Michael Jackson, Jones’s sonic contributions to Thriller transformed pop music and how producers and artists interact to create timeless music. His groundbreaking approach to music production changed how the world listens to music, showing how sound can transcend entertainment and become a powerful form of cultural communication.

For example, celebrating the Thriller album with my children has been an ongoing discovery. I am captivated by their responses to the music. They quickly catch specific sounds, anticipate instrumental flourishes, and react to subtle details, proving the immersive quality of Quincy Jones’s work. His production goes beyond entertainment; it engages listeners, inviting even young ears to feel part of the experience. The power of sonic storytelling is the ability to craft a narrative or evoke emotion purely through sound without relying on visuals or lyrics alone. Quincy Jones’s genius lies in how he layers instruments, sound effects, and vocal textures to create mood and atmosphere, building stories that listeners can feel unfolding around them. Sonic storytelling turns production into a cinematic experience, where a sudden bassline shift, a carefully placed synth, or an eerie silence all contribute to the larger emotional arc of a song. Jones doesn’t just produce songs. He builds immersive worlds through sound, showing how music, at its best, can tell stories as vividly as any film or novel. Songs such as “Thriller,” “Beat It,” and “Billie Jean” epitomize Jones’s mastery of this craft. Thriller is a prime example of his brilliance, each track meticulously balancing complex soundscapes with universal appeal.

With eerie beats, haunting synths, and Vincent Price’s chilling monologue, “Thriller” has become synonymous with Halloween, transforming it into an auditory icon that reshapes how we experience the holiday. It has a layered, cinematic arrangement, where Jones fuses a creeping synthesizer line with lush orchestral swells and Vincent Price’s velvety horror monologue. Each sonic element functions as a narrative device, placing the listener inside a haunted space where sound, the creak of a door, and the hiss of wind become part of the story. Brooks’s On Rhetoric and Black Music reminds us that sound arrangements can evoke emotion and memory, and Jones’s work exemplifies that power.

Then, consider the storytelling pulsing in the bassline of “Billie Jean,” a throbbing heartbeat grounding the song’s tale of obsession, fame, and denial in something bodily, felt in the chest and gut before the mind catches up. With every layered texture, from the crisp snap of the drum machine to the soaring, wordless vocal harmonies, Jones does not simply produce music; he scripts sonic stories where Black creativity and cultural history converge in every beat.

Jones’s approach to production embodies this idea, transforming how we listen and engage with music. Take “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” where layered percussion, call and response vocals, and a pulsing bassline create a sonic landscape that feels alive, constantly shifting and evolving. The song’s now iconic “Mama say mama sa mama coo sa” chant reaches back to the Cameroonian makossa tradition, embedding a diasporic history within a global pop hit (listen to the opening seconds of Manu Dijbango’s 1972 “Soul Makossa” to hear the resonance).

Then, in “Human Nature,” Jones works in the opposite direction, crafting an atmospheric, dreamlike arrangement where gentle synth pads and delicate electric guitar melodies wrap around Michael Jackson’s voice like mist, evoking a sense of vulnerability and wonder. These tracks, like so many in Jones’s catalog, do not merely present melodies and rhythms. They create spaces where memory, emotion, and history converge.

Jones’s ability to craft soundscapes has long extended beyond Thriller, both backward and forward in time. His track “Soul Bossa Nova” (1962), famously featured in the Austin Powers films, evokes nostalgia and joy, transporting listeners to memories of sunny beach days and family vacations. But there’s a deeper story behind this piece that’s often overlooked that spoke volumes in its original context. Originally released on Jones’s album Big Band Bossa Nova, the track arrived when the genre and the term “bossa nova” were being culturally sanitized and marketed to white audiences, particularly in the U.S. As scholars have noted, Black Brazilian musicians whose innovative work laid the foundation for bossa nova, were often erased from the story as the genre’s global fame became linked to lighter-skinned artists palatable to international audiences. 

Jones’s decision to title the track “Soul Bossa Nova” at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and during the global rise of Bossa Nova was not merely clever branding. It bridged the emerging coolness of Bossa Nova with the distinct sensibilities and innovations of African American music, at a time when both the U.S. and Brazil were grappling with deep racial segregation and the commodification of Black art.  It was also a subtle reclamation, insisting on Black presence in a genre already experiencing the erasure of Black Brazilian pioneers such as Johnny Alf. In “Soul Bossa Nova,” Jones fused the light bounce of Brazilian rhythms with a brassy, big-band jazz sensibility, centering Black sonic playfulness and cultural hybridity at a time when both were under threat from the forces of segregation and global anti-Blackness. The track’s instantly recognizable piccolo flute riff, playful, mischievous, and a little sly, becomes, in this light, not only catchy but also defiant, a declaration that Black sound is limitless, able to traverse continents and contexts while carrying the weight of memory, history, and joy.

And the story did not end there. Decades later, Ludacris and various hip-hop artists paid homage to Jones’s legacy in Jones’s last album, the 2010 project Q: Soul Bossa Nostra. This playful yet reverent tribute sampled and reimagined Jones’s catalog for a new generation. Soul Bossa Nostra is a clever play on “Cosa Nostra,” merging the sonic underworld of Jones’s orchestrations with the familial pride and intergenerational respect that defines hip hop’s tribute culture.

This interweaving of “Soul Bossa Nova”‘s history, from its quiet defiance in 1962 to its unexpected resurgence through Austin Powers to its embrace by Ludacris, exemplifies the lasting power of Jones’s compositions to connect across eras and genres, all while telling a much larger story about race, ownership, and the endurance of Black sonic innovation.

In Thriller and “Soul Bossa Nova,” Jones’s compositions offer listeners an immersive experience that connects personal and cultural narratives, proving that his work is more than entertainment. It is a powerful form of artistic communication that resonates across generations. I have experienced this firsthand, listening to these songs with my children, not just once or twice, but as an ongoing, evolving family ritual. Their responses, the way they anticipate certain flourishes, react to subtle shifts, or sing along with total abandon, remind me that Jones’s work does not sit still in time. It moves through us, binding my children’s joy to my own memories of discovery, just as it ties us all to the larger, unfolding story of Black sonic creativity. Through Jones’s soundscapes, we are not only hearing songs. We are participating in cultural memory, shaping it anew with every listen.

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Being known as an unparalleled intergenerational sonic storyteller is already a feat, but Quincy Jones’s influence is embedded in the DNA of contemporary music production in other important ways. From the way producers are now seen as creative equals to artists to the expectation that producers bring their signature sound to every project they touch, every time a contemporary music producer is celebrated as a vital voice in shaping a record, they stand on the foundation Quincy Jones laid. Long before the term “producer” carried the weight and cultural significance it does today, Jones redefined what it meant to hold that title.

In today’s music landscape, the constructive collaboration between an artist and producer can be a defining force, shaping careers and setting entire musical eras into motion. This reality exists in large part because of Jones, who was not just arranging instruments or overseeing technical sessions but building entire sonic worlds, shaping the emotional architecture of songs, and helping artists translate their most personal visions into soundscapes that could speak to the world. His work with Michael Jackson epitomizes the collaborative alchemy possible when a producer steps into the role of creative partner, cultural interpreter, and sonic architect all at once. With Thriller Jones did not merely produce an album, he co-authored a cultural phenomenon. Jones and Jackson’s collaboration  not only redefined pop music but also set a lasting standard for artist-producer dynamics, showcasing the brilliance that can arise when two creative minds align. Jones’s legacy as a producer is one of vision, trust, and translation, helping artists hear possibilities in their work they could not fully imagine and giving the listening public music that defined moments and movements.

Hip Hop, in particular, has carved out a prominent role for music producers in the style of Quincy Jones, something that Nas pays homage to in his track “Michael and Quincy” from King’s Disease III (2022). In doing so, Nas directly parallels the collaborative genius between Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson with his recent creative collaboration with producer Hit-Boy, now running 6 albums strong.

This is not just a passing reference. It is part of Nas’s more prominent, ongoing project of honoring hip hop creators and the artistic lineages that shaped his career. Across the King’s Disease trilogy and in his The Bridge podcast (which he co-hosts with Miss Info), Nas has taken deliberate care to uplift the cultural architects of hip hop, weaving their stories into his narrative and preserving their legacies for future generations. On “Michael and Quincy,” Nas celebrates the power of collaboration, positioning the artist-producer relationship as a crucible for innovation and cultural impact. The track’s lyrics paint vivid images of creative combustion, with Nas rapping, “Smoke steaming off the microphone,” evoking the almost supernatural energy that fueled Michael and Quincy’s sessions. This imagery extends to Nas and Hit-Boy, capturing the intensity and urgency they bring to their creative process.

Sonically, “Michael and Quincy” also mirrors this spirit of collaborative innovation. Hit-Boy’s production constantly shifts, blending classic boom-bap drums with more atmospheric textures, creating a soundscape that feels both reverent and forward-thinking. The beat morphs beneath Nas’s verses, never settling into predictability, much like how Quincy Jones infused “Thriller” with unexpected sonic twists. Nas and Hit-Boy’s sonic interplay echoes the Jackson-Jones dynamic, where the producer’s vision expands and amplifies the artist’s voice. In its lyrics and production, “Michael and Quincy” serves as a sonic tribute, not just to a legendary duo, but to the transformative power of artist-producer partnerships, a lineage Quincy Jones helped define and one Nas is determined to carry forward. The era-defining success of Thriller still ripples through music today.

Nas’s tribute serves as a powerful reminder of these partnerships’ enduring impact, bridging genres and generations. The image of “smoke steaming off of the microphone” is one I carry with me, embodying the intense, creative spirit that Michael and Quincy brought to their collaborations, a legacy now celebrated and extended through Nas’s words and music. Nas draws from their example to remind us that great partnerships, whether in music or other creative endeavors, are often the spark that ignites monumental cultural shifts. Their combined energy was undeniable as they pushed each other to new artistic heights. The success of their work was not only about the music; it was also about the more profound connection to culture, identity, and collective memory.  Like the tracks he produced, his music lives on, inspiring us to reflect on how we listen to and engage with the world around us. By revisiting the breadth and depth of his work and the many sonic creations it has inspired, we continue to discover new layers of meaning and artistry, ensuring that Jones’s influence will be felt for generations to come.

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Featured Image: SO! Screencap from Nas’s performance at Rolling Loud, November 11, 2024
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Jaquial Durham is a multi-hyphenate social justice champion. The South Carolina native has spent over a decade actively engaged in various outreach initiatives to uplift and empower marginalized communities. He is also a passionate cultural enthusiast dedicated to exploring the rich tapestry of African American history, which drives him to continue making a meaningful impact in the lives of those around him. His advocacy for social-political issues that encompass race, prison culture and gender have been at the forefront of his work.

As the CEO of Public Culture Entertainment Group, an entity focused on raising public awareness about the myriad of components that influence culture, Durham spearheads the company’s TV/film projects and cultivates unique apparel capsules that showcase prominent African American figures, organizations and landmarks often absent from historical dialogue. The ambitious, young go-getter prolifically uses creative activism to amplify the voices, stories and experiences of those often overlooked. His
visionary brilliance can be seen in the groundbreaking documentary Southern Prison Culture, a cinematic film highlighting the challenges individuals face within the system and fiercely advocating for much-needed reforms. As a result of the film’s success, Durham has received prestigious awards like the Milan Gold Award, the Austin Lift-Off Film Festival Award and the London International Film Festival Award.

Durham has been a driving force behind various social justice reforms, calling for equitable and inclusive policies and practices. His unwavering dedication to helping others earned him widespread recognition that included opportunities to lecture at colleges such as American University, Benedict College, Claflin University, Clemson University and Texas State University. Durham was honored by Grammy-Award Winning rapper Killer Mike, who has respect and credibility within the culture. His dedication to the development of higher education institutions in America has led him to refine his intellectual and creative genius relentlessly. While Durham received a bachelor’s in African and African American Studies with a minor in Women and Gender Studies from Winston-Salem State University, he is pursuing a Ph.D.from Clemson University in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design.

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The MS Sound Forum invites papers for a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Toronto, Canada in January 2026. The session responds in part to the MLA Executive Council’s refusal to allow debate or a vote on Resolution 2025-1, which supported the international “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” (BDS) Movement for Palestinian rights against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In light of the Council’s suppression of debate, some of the Sound Forum Executive Committee members decided to resign in protest while others remained to hold the MLA accountable for its undemocratic procedures. To acknowledge and respect the decision of those who left, the remaining members chose not to immediately fill the vacancies to let the parting members’ silence speak.

At MLA 2026, the Sound Forum seeks to provide a space for dialogue and meditation on silencing, censorship, and the role of organizations like the MLA in systemic violence and suppressing academic freedom. Sound studies scholars have long articulated listening as a practice for critical interventions, especially in the face of oppression. For example, Sonali Chakravarti’s Sing the Rage—written in the wake of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—argues for an engaged and good faith reception of anger in the aftermath of colonial and institutional violence like apartheid and genocide. Chakravarti posits listening as the ground of recognition and a key path for attaining justice in the aftermath of mass violence (123). Drawing on Chakravarti, Naomi Waltham-Smith in Free Listening insists that listening “isn’t restricted to a power of relief but is precisely what enables catharsis to transform into a vehicle for justice because it promotes trust” (67). 

To entrust MLA with the task of upholding one of its core values—the commitment to champion intellectual freedom—does not come easy. Indeed, Waltham-Smith reminds us that “Rage—and especially Black rage—is figured as an excrescence to the European rational logos. It’s too loud or too dissonant for the ears to parse” (55-56). The MLA Executive Council’s justification for their pre-emptive silencing of debate on Resolution 2501-1—as chronicled by our colleagues Anthony Alessandrini, Raj Chetty, Cynthia Franklin, Hannah Manshel, David Palumbo-Liu, Neelofer Qadir, S. Shankar, Rebecca Colesworthy, Chris Newfield, and others—remits to this noise-logos dichotomy, appealing to legalistic and fiduciary logic as a rationale for denying debate.

Waltham-Smith develops this argument in dialogue with Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, asserting: “Rage is also connected with aurality in that a lack of listening—a feeling of going unheard—is itself a spur to anger, which is further compounded when the expression of that anger and, hence, its legitimacy is denied through silencing of one kind of another. It is this double injury that Jean-François Lyotard articulates in The Differend with his notion of the différend, whereby the original damage is compounded by the fact that it cannot be brought to the attention of or recognized by others. […] The assumption here is that listening has always already softened the blow” (63). This double injury occurs when one’s rage is discredited, deemed to be out of proportion to the weight of the wrong, or simply unheard, thus compounding the rage and shutting down avenues for multiracial collectivity when “white people remain unable to hear black rage, if it is the sound of that rage which must always remain repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable” (hooks, Killing Rage 12).

It is no accident that we are invoking studies of Black rage when discussing the plea of our Palestinian colleagues. Indeed, one of the seminal sound studies monographs, The Sonic Color Line, was written by Jennifer Lynn Stoever in part to historicize the state and police violence Black Americans were subjected to in the 2010s by positioning these instances of brutality—often triggered by disputes or disagreements over what a soundscape of the public space ought to be—within a larger history of the racialized listening practices. Those of us who experienced the Ferguson uprising in 2014 witnessed Palestinian allies sharing—over Twitter and in solidarity against the state violence—their first aid strategies when assaulted by the police tear gas for standing up for the dignity of Black and brown lives.

It is within this context of the MLA’s refusal to listen that we organize this panel. Beyond the immediate confines of the MLA, we also bear witness to contemporary practices of silencing, such as CEO Elon Musk tweaking X’s algorithm to penalize posts he deems to be “negative”; the Trump administration’s defunding of research on marginalized communities on the basis of flagged terms like “historically” and “female” (Palmer); and anthropocentric disregard for the more-than-human in enacting environmental policies, among others. At this juncture, resisting the erosion of democratic decision-making procedures and the freedom of expression is imperative.

While the panel theme is motivated by our collective desire to hold the MLA to account for its undemocratic procedures and to improve the Association’s processes from below, we also invite proposals thinking capaciously about questions of silencing, censorship, or free expression—as well as the role of listening and sound in these dynamics—through a sound studies framework. Topics might include: silencing of the more-than-human; AI and social media censorship (algorithmic black boxes); scholasticide and epistemological imperialism; ableism as silencing; authoritarianism and political censorship, etc.

Please submit your 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by March 20, 2025 to:

• John Melillo, johnmelillo@arizona.edu
• Setsuko Yokoyama, setsuko_yokoyama@sutd.edu.sg
• Tamara Mitchell, tamara.mitchell@ubc.ca

Please note that all speakers must update their MLA membership by April 7th, 2025 to participate in the conference. We look forward to receiving your proposals.

While the MS Sound Forum has decided to hold this guaranteed session at MLA 2026, we acknowledge and respect the decision of many of our colleagues to resign from their MLA-affiliated positions and withhold their membership, financial contributions, and labor in protest.

The MLA Sound Forum Executive Committee

John Melillo, Tamara Mitchell, Julie Beth Napolin, Setsuko Yokoyama

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Featured Image: Photo by Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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