<i>From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics</i>, by Alexis McGee

Alexis McGee’s From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics amplifies the rhetorical work of Black women music artists, situating them within a long tradition of Black women who have acted as advocates, changemakers, public intellectuals, and, as McGee emphasizes, mentors for younger generations. McGee’s project is ambitious. As indicated in her title, the music artists whose work she examines span American music history from roughly the 1930s to today, and she includes a range of artifacts for analysis, such as vocal performances, music videos, and autobiographies. Like most work in sonic rhetorics, this project draws from an interdisciplinary mix of influences from musicology, sound studies, and rhetorical theory. However, this book is firmly situated in a tradition of Black feminist rhetorical theory, following scholars like Jacqueline Jones Royster, Tamika Carey, Brittney Cooper, and others who center Black women’s rhetorical and literacy practices. One of the major contributions of this book as I see it and as McGee argues in her introduction is in her use of Black feminist and Afrocentric rhetorical theories to analyze and theorize Black women’s sonic rhetorics as means of survival, liberation, mentorship, and healing.From Blues to Beyoncé is especially interested in the ways in which Black women enact “generational sonic rhetorics,” that is, how, through music, language, and visuals, they pass on shared lessons, ways of knowing, and ways of claiming agency and personhood. In the introduction, McGee defines “generational sonic rhetorics” as “collective moments of sound that act as methods for communicating knowledge that can be used to persuade or inform (younger) generations” (6). She argues: “[W]e can understand Black women’s sonic rhetoric as audible advice, or iterations of mentorship in sound, aimed at connecting and transmitting generational meaning. . . . We can expand our understanding of Black women’s contributions as rhetorical agents by discussing various ways Black women operationalize sound into action. We can recognize Black women’s rhetorical innovation to retell our stories across media sounding out many methods for surviving, navigating, healing, and imagining ways forward” (10–11). Thus, she teases out the practices of these generational sonic rhetorics by putting music artists past and present into conversation with each other and with Black women rhetors working in other modes—whether giving speeches, writing essays and autobiographies, or offering advice.In chapter 1, “Sonic Sharecropping,” McGee begins by sketching out the material and discursive landscape of Black women music artists. She theorizes exploitative practices of mid-twentieth-century recording labels as “sonic sharecropping” and explores the ways Black women “push[ed] back on the recording industry’s attempt at ‘ownership’ of their public and sonic identity” (28). She foregrounds the story of Ruth Brown, the famed rhythm and blues singer and advocate for musicians’ rights, as the primary case study of this chapter. She guides readers through the early history of Atlantic Records, explaining how Brown’s hits of the 1950s and early 1960s built the foundation for the label’s success. She argues that Atlantic’s treatment of Brown echoed and reinscribed the same exploitative and dehumanizing logics and practices of sharecropping in the Jim Crow American South. Finally, she tells the story of the lawsuit Brown brought against Atlantic in the 1980s that ultimately won her and a number of other artists some repayment. Ultimately, this chapter’s project is to show how artists like Brown have, in the context of exploitative labor conditions, advocated for recognition of their own and others’ valuable creative labor.From here, From Blues to Beyoncé progresses thematically, drawing connections between rhetorical performances from roughly the mid-twentieth century to the 2010s, theorizing how the artists take up the rhetorical work of resistance and freedom; of claiming agency, personhood, and time; and of offering advice. In chapter 2, “Strange Fruit Sonic Rhetorics,” McGee traces the continued resonance of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” through Missy Elliott’s and Janelle Monáe’s uses of sonic and visual rhetoric to resist anti-Black discourses. The chapter begins with a brief history of lynching, drawing on Ersula Ore’s 2019 analysis of lynching discourses as part of the making of American identities and citizens, and describing in detail the lynching and the photograph that eventually inspired “Strange Fruit.” McGee emphasizes Holiday’s ability to use her voice to move her audiences and “[tap] into people’s (specifically Black folks’) generational relationship with the changing same and calling for change more broadly” (90). Finally, she analyzes Missy Elliott’s “I’m Better” and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, analyzing how—through their music videos (or, in the case of Dirty Computer, emotion picture)—both artists enact and showcase resistance to anti-Black discourses using visuals that recall “Strange Fruit.” She shows how the sonic and the visual work together in these music pieces and how contemporary artists like Elliott and Monáe make use of the affordances of newer technologies to “highlight the commonality of the changing same while also reinterpreting how antiBlack violences have mutated in more recent times” (94). This chapter, then, offers a theorization of generational rhetorics of resistance through music.In chapter 3, “Queer(ing) Sound, Time, and Grammar: Black Women’s Methods for Generative Prosodic Rhetoric,” McGee argues that Black women music artists use sound—particularly voice and prosody—to “reclaim time” and temporality in order to theorize and enact “personhood, survival, and even healing” for themselves and for younger generations (138). Analyzing songs such as Nicki Minaj’s “Beez in the Trap,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing),” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body,” she details how the use of particular sonic rhetorical tactics (repetition, stress, duration) and especially repetition of linguistic elements from Black linguistic traditions (such as the habitual be) function as “part of our Black grammar, to disrupt racist ideas or problematic understandings of Blackness as a monolithic identity, particularly one bereft of a history and future,” and also as “instruments for transmitting lessons of survival, resistance, and liberation” (107).Chapter 4, “Audible Advice, or Mentorship in Sound: A Black (Feminist) Practice of Care through Sonic Rhetorics,” the final chapter, reads advice giving—whether in conversations reported through autobiographical writing or recorded on an album—as a generational sonic rhetoric. The chapter opens with Queen Latifah’s reflections on advice from her mother published in her autobiography and returns also to autobiographical writing by Ruth Brown. In addition to these written accounts, McGee analyzes interludes included on recent albums by Solange Knowles (A Seat at the Table, 2016) and SZA (Ctrl, 2017). These interludes—short tracks between the albums’ songs—transmit advice from family members, friends, and/or mentors. McGee argues that, relying on the voice, these interludes emphasize the “audibility of advice, or mentorship in sound,” and “carry on the pedagogical public intellectual blueprint for Black feminist rhetorics” (161). Throughout this chapter, McGee draws on a number of theoretical concepts but especially that of “hush harbors” to theorize interludes, gossip, and “audible advice” as integral to the generational sonic rhetorics of these artists. This chapter and the conclusion that follows solidified for me the project of the book, which is interested in teasing out and theorizing the ways in which Black women music artists perform as public intellectuals, offering (younger) listeners ways of theorizing experience and navigating the world.This book demands careful attention from its readers. It is theoretically rich, drawing on concepts from Black feminist theory (as noted above), from queer studies (especially Bettina Love’s work), from Afrocentric rhetorical theory (using concepts such as Sankofa and Nommo), from sociolinguistics (particularly Geneva Smitherman), and more. It thus offers readers an important entry into conversations about how music functions not only as rhetorical expression for the artists but also as a rhetorical resource for listeners, particularly for Black women. Because of its theoretical richness, From Blues to Beyoncé is a book that would need careful scaffolding in the classroom, helping students unpack and understand how McGee pulls these theoretical threads together. Though there were moments when, as a reader interested particularly in sound and music, I wanted more situation of the songs within their particular musical context, I came to realize that McGee’s project here is more holistic. This is a book about feminist rhetoric and about the sonic as part of rhetorical practices that blend oral and written, aural and visual. Ultimately, as McGee writes in her conclusion, the important “generational work Black women have been putting in for centuries” is “amplified when we put [Black women] in conversation with each other; when we excavate their rhetorics; when we care to engage with them on their terms; when we follow our imaginations to new possibilities, as they have shown us; when we allow ourselves to be motivated by their presence--even on quiet, lower frequencies” (180–81). And that is the project and contribution of this book, which centers, analyzes, and amplifies Black women’s sonic rhetorics with care for them and for their listeners.