Full Description
In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music's continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre's decline and death. He shows how R&B remains a thriving venue for the expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment. Among other topics, Weheliye discusses the postdisco evolution of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, Prince and David Bowie in relation to appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s, how the BlackFem voice functions as a repository of Black knowledge, the methods contemporary R&B musicians use to bring attention to Black Lives Matter, and the ways vocal distortion technologies such as the vocoder demonstrate Black music's relevance to discussions of humanism and posthumanism. Ultimately, Feenin represents Weheliye's capacious thinking about R&B as the site through which to consider questions of Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.
Contents
Track 0.0 Good Days: R&B Music and Critical Fabulation in the Frequencies of Now 1
Track 1.0 Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness / A Response to Tavia Nyong'o 23
Track 2.0 "Feenin": Posthuman Voices in R&B Music 37
Track 3.0 Rhythms of Relation: Black Popular Music and Mobile Technologies 75
Interlude 1. Calling My Phone 98
Track 4.0 My Volk to Come: Specters of Peoplehood in Diaspora Discourse and Afro-German Popular Music 100
Track 5.0 "White Brothers with No Soul": UnTuning the Historiography of Berlin Techno / Interview with Annie Goh 121
Interlude 2. Don't Take It Away 135
Track 6.0 New Waves, Shifting Terrains: Prince's and David Bowie's Transatlantic Crossovers 140
Interlude 3. #BeyondDeepBrandyAlbumCuts 153
Track 7.0 "Sounding That Precarious Existence": On R&B Music, Technology, and Blackness / An Interview with Nehal El-Hadi 158
Track 8.0 "Scream My Name Like a Protest": R&B Music as BlackFem Technology of Humanity in the Age of #Blacklivesmatter 178
Interlude 4. Songify Your Life 198
Track 9.0 808s and Heartbreak / Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Katherine McKittrick 201
Track 10.0 Wayward Shuddering, Beautiful Tremors (AGW's Quiet Storm Remix) 237
Sources 245
Index 275
