Listening, Elsewhere and Otherwise

A visionary keynote accompanied by an expansive pop-music mixtape played in real time, Shana L. Redmond’s presidential address at the American Studies Association’s conference in New Orleans in late 2022 imaginatively explored the soundtracks and listening practices that might plausibly have enlivened and sweetened the “unremarkable, expansive moments of repair, diplomacy, curiosity, and affection” that preceded historical instances of anti-Black police violence. Alongside erudite discussions of topics ranging from Black motoring to AM radio, the talk, titled “The Dark Prelude,” proposed an experimental, speculative listening-with as a method for insisting on the vitality of “Black living as a visionary rehearsal for futures assembled over lifetimes.” The Five Satins’ buttery-smooth “In the Still of the Nite,” Roberta Flack’s introspective “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” Gladys Knight and the Pips’ yearning “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye),” Leon Bridges’s mournful saxophone-twined “Sweeter”: these songs, among others, faded up and reverb’d away between the paragraphs of Redmond’s talk as her collaborator and friend Kwame Phillips activated the clips, sonically inviting the audience into scenes of quotidian tenderness and attention that were amplified by the address.The text of Redmond’s talk was first published in American Quarterly last year, where it was joined by vital responses from Erica R. Edwards and Kimberly Juanita Brown. Their short essays highlighted how Redmond’s talk entailed “a collaborative listening,” one “where to hear in detail is to grieve in detail the lives these scenes index,” while also locating itself in “the thick Black anterior, where what comes and lies before the black death that preconditions white life…is held and holding, and beheld and beholding” (Edwards 220, 219, 220); and how the talk, as a presidential address to an academic association, constituted a “scholarly engagement steeped in the ethics of care” and staked out “an enclosure—a circular refrain where what was lost could conceivably be found” that “emphasiz[ed] the multivalent possibilities for American studies” (Brown 227, 226).With this recognition of contributions to American studies and Black study still ringing in our ears, we can also pick up on another invitation in the resounding musicality of Redmond’s address: a call to a conversation that takes sound and music, especially popular music, as key points of departure and areas for exploration. In light of this, and of the impact Redmond’s scholarship (including Anthem: The Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora [2013] and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson [2020]) has had on popular music studies, JPMS invited a group of scholars who work on popular music to engage with the multimedia texts of Redmond’s talk. The forum participants contributed their annotations to a shared online document, responding both to the talk and to each other. In so doing, they created a crackling network of sonic attunement that investigates what deep and intimate attention to popular music can turn up in Redmond’s intervention, an intervention that has grown no less urgent in the months since its clarion call was first sounded.—Sara Marcus“Dark Prelude”: A Preliminary Playlist (In Order of Appearance)I cry a lot for what I’m learning and those things that I’m being forced to acknowledge that I already knew. I’m in the throes of something risky; every nerve has risen to the surface. Paper cuts draw blood, a pinprick might bring me to my knees. Devastation has become a companion, and for its presence “I [, like Kendrick,] grieve different.” The inventory that I’m tasked with is composed of the deleted details of kin. Reading their names is enough for the corners of my mouth to turn down, inhalations through my nose to quicken, my cheeks wet. This too is a part of my process; navigation of Black Study’s thick emotion.The work tonight is not an indictment of the state of the field. Like the 2022 CFP, it is an indictment of the state of the world [1] and the state of our hearts. It’s about the feelings of desire and need that guide our pens without concern for the gatekeepers and their aspirants who lie in wait. It’s about what the work forces us to do and forces us to become. When you write, do you laugh a lot, love a lot, tear up a lot, liberate a lot, take cues from emcees a lot, think about the people not on the page a lot, find wonder in it a lot, get hot with anger a lot, play a lot, create a better world a lot? Are those who haunt your thought hours pleased or furious for the truth you’ve told? Do you live with them as they live with you?[1] Matthew D. MorrisonThe use of this phrase “state of the world” also conjures Janet Jackson’s 1989 album, Rhythm Nation. Like Janet’s musical call to arms (which also functioned as a watershed moment in pop music history), Redmond’s address virtuosically weaves musical, cultural, and political statements to reveal the complexity of cultural and that the to in the of and in the of death by I’m to the details to to the we I’m to become an for a have to the of and is a in the of the for a might be as to the refrain of a as to the of the the the of the of the into the on what might it to as to that its on the of political in the to and not also a in the in its its in the our of listening practices as of in the the the Redmond’s the and that and Black sound and the and of through of Redmond’s (which is part of the sound to the and complexity of the about Black people the of this about Black people the the too I’m from the expansive moments of repair, diplomacy, curiosity, and to the of and in to a away from Black to Black living as a visionary rehearsal for futures assembled over no how short or how that 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