Editors’ Note

Saying goodbye can be difficult when you’re having fun. As with most things in the world of arts and letters, it’s healthy for our institutions such as IASPM-US and JPMS to rotate in new leadership to keep the ideas fresh. Thus, with the final issue of volume 36, we (Elliott and Kaleb) end our term as co-editors of this journal. Fret not—we leave this journal in the capable hands of Alisha Lola Jones and Benjamin Tausig. In the transition period, we have already seen that they will do an excellent job helming this journal.During our time as editors of JPMS, we also had the good fortune to collaborate with Eric Harvey as managing editor. His organizational skills and eye for detail are a big reason why this journal continues to be as good as it is. Alyx Vesey and Antonia Randolph did amazing work as book reviews editor and associate book reviews editor, respectively. We were privileged to collaborate with a regularly rotating team in Field Notes and were inspired by the editorial creativity of John Vilanova, Sara Marcus, Kavita Kulkarni, Jonathan Leal, and Hilarie Ashton. We also benefitted from the wisdom of Roshanak Kheshti, David Suisman, and Esther Morgan-Ellis, all of whom were rotating off their editorial roles as we came aboard. We’re grateful to all of you for your outstanding contributions to this journal. It has been a pleasure.2024 has also been an intense year for popular music studies, with many of us reeling from sudden loss before we could properly say “goodbye.” Over the summer, popular music studies in the United States lost two renowned scholars: Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Christine Capetola. Chuck Garrett helped to establish popular music studies as an integral part of American music scholarship. He had a reputation for mentoring many popular music scholars, most recently in June this year at the AMS Pop Music Study Group’s Early Career Symposium. Christine Capetola was a rising star in the field whose work centered race and affect in popular music. Their article on Janet Jackson in this journal is a clear demonstration of that kind of scholarship.1 There is a photo from the April 2024 meeting of IASPM-US of a bunch of pop music scholars packed into a car with Christine front and center. Many of us will mourn the loss of both scholars for a long time. We feel lucky to have known them.Our final issue is replete with the kinds of scholarship and innovation that give JPMS its unique place in popular music studies. Our Field Notes section features a special treat. Past associate editor Sara Marcus returns for a one-off appearance as guest editor to bring us an innovative project—a sonic textual dialogue about Shana Redmond’s keynote address, “The Dark Prelude,” at the 2022 meeting of the American Studies Association. Redmond’s presentation was sonically engaged, featuring a live mixtape operated by Kwame Phillips as she read her prepared remarks. Although her comments were published previously with responses by two scholars in the ASA’s flagship journal, American Quarterly, Field Notes takes a more sonically engaged, multivocal approach featuring interactions between Derek Baraon, Joshua Chambers-Leston, Maya Kronfeld, Matthew D. Morrison, and Juno Richards. It reads as dialogic and reflects Redmond’s centrality to popular music studies while also bringing new attention to different ways popular music can repair the violence police stops exact on Black bodies.Our peer-reviewed section opens with a theoretical provocation on the question of Afrobeats as a musical category. In “Genre or Hypernym: Deconstructing Afrobeats in the Global Music Industry,” Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe explores the trajectory of Afrobeats as a hypernym to highlight how the music has circulated in West African communities outside Africa. While a vibrant literature exists on genre and popular music, Allotey-Pappoe rightly notes that the term genre is unstable as a categorizational framework due to its ties to the global music industry. Hypernym, in contrast, offers more expansive possibilities. As a way of categorizing a broad category with many smaller units as a type of umbrella category, Allotey-Pappoe argues, “hypernyms such as Black music and Afrobeats reveal the alternative ways people categorize music based on a sense of community and music as culture.” In her formulation, Afrobeats currently operates as both a genre for marketing purposes and as a hypernym because of its roots in multiple communities. This kind of theoretical intervention will be helpful for those of us who study how the global circulation of popular music can exist in tension with its meaning for the communities where the musical style first took root.Brian Conniff follows with an examination of Bruce Springsteen’s reworking of music originally written by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In “‘All Crookedly Blessed in God’s Mercy’: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bruce Springsteen, and Gospel Redemption,” Conniff takes seriously religious faith as a factor in the music—Catholicism for Bruce Springsteen and Pentecostalism for Sister Rosetta Tharpe—and argues that vocational discernment is a way to understand Springsteen’s musical choices in his middle and later career. The case study at the center of the article is the twenty-year process that went into developing “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a type of reimagining of Springsteen’s signature song “Born to Run” from the perspective of “adult faith.” Since the song resembles Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “This Train,” Conniff explores the differences in faith between these two musicians and how knowledge of faith can transform our understanding of Springsteen’s output as well as his engagement with Black gospel music. This article shows how interdisciplinarity—in this case religion, performance, and music studies—can shed new light on popular music.Francesca Inglese brings a different kind of interdisciplinarity to her study of the musical duo Black Violin. In “‘An Unlikely Pairing’”: Black Violin and the Race of Musical Instruments,” she creates a dialogue between hip hop and her knowledge of classical music and critical organology (the study of musical instruments). Inglese asks us to consider the racialization of musical instruments that are usually associated with Western European Art Music, especially within the context of discourses of race in the United States. Since Black Violin combines classical music and hip hop, Inglese’s study also contributes to the study of Black musicians and composers in classical music. She considers instruments as an expansion of studies of the racialization of sound that have focused on the human voice.2 Moreover, she seeks to make audible the long genealogy of genre-bending Black violinists and the centrality of the violin to Black American musical traditions. It’s well worth the read.Our fourth peer-reviewed article considers Arca, a non-binary, trans woman and musical producer who has found a foothold in electronic dance music scenes based in Latin America. Javier Rivera examines the third in Arca’s Kick series, Kick iii to explore trans expression, sexuality, and subjectivity. Rivera employs the method of “edging-as-listening” to explore the jouissance of anticipation in Arca’s music. This article digs deeply into the listening of songs lacking the release of structural climaxes and textural changes that give the listener a sense of arrival, such as a chorus. Rivera states that this type of sensation persists for some listeners even when returning to the recording with full knowledge that these structural features are absent. It is a negativity of anticipatory release in the music. By highlighting Rivera’s subjectivity as a queer Latinx listener, we as readers can listen along and grasp some of the visceral sensations that come with a musician of this stature. We are asked to consider how discomfort plays out in this kind of listening scenario. What are the consequences? While it is sometimes tempting for popular music scholars to downplay the subjective experience of sounds and listening in real time, this article shows how it can provide powerful new models for bringing the aspects of who we are into dialogue, even when the listening experience is uncomfortable.Our final peer-reviewed article illustrates translocalization and musical borrowing through the case of hip hop styles from the U.S. South in China. Guangbin Shi’s “From Trap to Memphis Rap: The Incorporation and Reconfiguration of American Southern Hip Hop Music in China” analyzes the top Chinese musical producers working with Southern hip hop production approaches and sound. It shows the consequences of reconfiguring these styles in a different context. Transnational research is difficult to pull off and requires reading approaches from scholars who not only come from different disciplinary backgrounds but also prioritize completely different questions. Guangbin Shi’s article shows a sincere effort to bring scholarship of Southern hip hop into dialogue with what’s happening in China to show JPMS readers just how extensive hip hop’s footprint is in the world. Along the way, we meet producers such as Dao Jiao. Both of us hope this kind of transnational research will continue to find a readership in this journal.As always, our book reviews section shows off the stunning breadth of scholarship in our field. The first reviewed book is Yolanda Broyles-González, Francisco González and Rafael Figueroa Hernández’s Mario Barradas & Son Jarocho: The Journey of a Mexican Regional Music, an important study of son jarocho’s border crossings through a study of Mario Barradas, a key figure in the genre. Micaela J. Díaz-Sanchez’s review commends the book for being “a powerful and expansive tribute” to Mario Barradas’s music. Continuing the thread of studies of individual musicians is Margo Price’s Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir. In her review, Leigh H. Edwards focuses on how Price engages with authenticity narratives in country music and with the memoir itself, which repeats some tropes and departs in other ways. Edwards suggests that the memoir “demonstrates the impact that the country music authenticity narrative has on individual artists.” The author’s struggle with the weight of the mythologies around country music’s major figures is palpable in the narrative and will likely be helpful to scholars concerned with the impact of these marketing strategies on the people whom the recording industry molds into larger-than-life figures.Our book reviews take a turn towards considering experimentation in writing with Tracy McMullen’s review of flutist, composer, and creator Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful. According to McMullen, this is not a standard academic book on music. It touches on many genres of writing, including memoir, manifesto, Black speculative novella, and rumination on Mitchell Gantt’s own musical output, this text departs from the standard of the academic monograph or even a memoir to provide us with insights into her process. McMullen describes this book as a “love letter to an ailing world,” which just goes to show just how multivocal this artist is.Protest music is a regular theme in popular music studies, but we rarely get to learn about protest in non-Anglophone music scenes. In her review of Rodrigo Lopes de Barros’s Distortion and Subversion: Punk Rock Music and the Protests for Free Public Transportation in Brazil (1996-2011), Cibele Moura notes that the book is the back story of the public transit protest in Brazil that gained international attention in 2013 over country-wide fare increases and is part of a theory on how Jair Bolsonaro could be elected. Moura notes, “In its attention to the intersecting histories of punk and these protests, the monograph highlights facets of punk culture in Brazil that might otherwise go unnoticed in music-centered narratives of bands and albums.” As helpful as this study is, Moura laments that the book focuses too much on masculine rebellion (with just one chapter talking about feminist and LGBTQ activism in this scene) but notes that it opens the door to future study, especially of gender and sexuality.Our book reviews section (and issue) closes with Barry Shank’s joyous review of Eldritch Priest’s Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreaming, and Other Imaginary Refrains. This book is an auditory experiment, and Shank praises it for providing him with the best intellectual fun he’s had in a long time. It is also a meditation on “earworms’ in our contemporary moment. Shank notes, “I’m not sure, but I think that Priest argues that our world of constantly available musical sound has constructed inside us a habit of listening that reduces our attention to the specifics of musical sound.” What a refreshing framework for considering earworms to bring into dialogue with current meditations on virality!And with that joyous intellectual engagement with earworms, we close out our tenure at the helm of this great journal. It has been an enriching experience. Thank you for reading!