Sounding Like a No-No : Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era / Francesca T. Royster.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Royster, Francesca T., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Soul music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Other Title:

Sounding like a no-no

Place of Publication:

2012.

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book traces a rebellious spirit in post-civil rights Black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, Black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the Black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of Black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and Black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

Contents:

Introduction : Eccentric performance and embodied music in the post-soul moment

Becoming post-soul : Eartha Kitt, the Stranger, and the melancholy pleasures of racial reinvention

Stevie Wonder's "Quare" teachings and cross-species collaboration in Journey through the secret life of plants and other songs

"Here's a chance to dance our way out of our constrictions" : P-Funk's Black masculinity and the performance of imaginative freedom

Michael Jackson, queer world making, and the trans erotics of voice, gender, and age

"Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no" : Grace Jones and the performance of "Strangé" in the post-soul moment

Funking toward the future in Meshell Ndegeocello's The world has made me the man of my dreams

Epilogue : Janelle Monáe's collective vision.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-472-90415-9

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.1586114