Bars

In hip-hop jargon, the term “bars” refers to the sum of a rap performer's artistic endowments. If their rhymes hit hard and remix your thoughts, if the stress and release of their rhythms organize something inside your body, and if the timbral quality of their voice makes you hear metaphors, then that rapper's “got bars.” What rap artists do over beats, the best scholars try to accomplish in essay form.In her recent publication In Search of a Beautiful Freedom, writer and humanitarian Farah Jasmine Griffin explains the importance of essays to American historiography, particularly among Black feminist literary critics. She writes that the essay provides a forum to “explore ideas, posit theoretical interventions, offer observations, and develop my voice.”1 Griffin sees them “as an invitation to think along with the writer or reader, an invitation to watch an idea unfold.”2In essays, thematic substance, poetic gestures, the way words move rhythmically across—and then jump off—the written page and into the mind of the reader contributes to a writer's “bars.” The writers gathered here responded to a call to talk back to my book Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts & Present. There's some very beautiful writing in this symposium with gravitas, diligence, deep purpose, and heart. It's clear this group understands what's at stake in music and its analysis. Hard-hitting and unapologetically personal, they danced to the book with their prose. They heard and responded with their own bars.I've been asked to read the essays and then respond with a remix: a chop up or flip of some of my old tracks combined with new thoughts. Before moving ahead, I'd like to first say how priceless and rewarding it is for me to ponder the words they offered. I experienced this assembly as improvisers each taking their run at the same jazz standard, or as dancers moving down a Soul Train line, with individual styles and seriousness. The creative energy that happens when individuals work in a collective like this is in full force here. It's humbling to consider that my book was the song in which all these bars take place. These writers are saying what they heard, and as the perennially astonishing George Lipsitz writes here, they show how they heard it as well.The world of publishing among academics has changed substantially since I started in the early 1990s. Attitudes about “weblogs” or blogging, for example, have shifted dramatically among scholars. At one time, intentionally courting a public audience, particularly by way of the personal revelation typical in blogs, was ill-advised. It went against the perceived divisions between journalistic and scholarly accounts. It was akin to when rhythm and blues radio stations would not mix rap music into the rotation. To include personal reflection in one's writing was more in line with that other stuff: popular criticism. How far we've come. Today, professors with prestigious academic appointments can now score lucrative book deals, secured in part because of the number of social media followers they have. Indeed, personal brands and professional profiles have collapsed in ways that were inconceivable twenty-five years ago. It's fascinating to witness what I thought was risky business being accepted now as standard practice.Several themes unite these essays. Some mix elements of what I've called confessional and professional modes of writing. They detail how my earlier work shaped their intellectual growth: they explain, essentially, why they were studying those essays at that time and place. Some write about it in very subjective, moving ways. In fact, my interlocutors report that rereading them inspired a kind of time travel as they recount how that early work informed their socialization into the field, personally and professionally. Their responses are similar to my own. As I tried to remember the original context of each of my pieces, I met earlier versions of myself—with all my missteps, challenges, failures, and triumphs re-emerging. The writers generously express appreciation for what they perceived to be my multimodal inquiry and pedagogy, emphasis on the role of community and communal intellectual production, insistence on interdisciplinary mixture, and cross-genre discussions that span from hip-hop to Western art music.Preceding generations of scholars who worked on Black music were necessarily activists; they knew they had to advocate for their studies’ place in the larger world of music studies. My work fit into that legacy. From the beginning I knew I wasn't writing in a vacuum but as part of a long history of cultural workers. Even so, I wanted it to feel different than what had come before. It was a new day, and the essays needed to do a specific thing tailored to that moment.As I've stated before, I believed this goal could be best achieved by ignoring the recognized hierarchy or separation between historiography, music analysis, and cultural criticism on the one hand, and the “cultural diversity” activism I was doing in the field on the other. It seemed like a risk I had to take if I didn't want to repeat the situation in which other “minority” scholars had found themselves: building a stronger list of service commitments than scholarship. I'd heard horror stories like this when I was coming up the ranks of academia and needed to avoid that particular pitfall.I've never been attracted to pigeonholes or silos in scholarship, teaching, music, or activism. The notion of “community theaters,” as developed in my book Race Music, provided a way to place equal weight, then, on discussions of high theory in the competitive, prizefighting atmosphere of academia and what my mother theorized about the blues culture she experienced in the Deep South in the early twentieth century. I knew from experience that the “peer vetting” valued in the academy also happens outside of it. Ideas and critiques about culture from outside the Ivory Tower can also be trusted as valuable and insightful.This ecumenical view allows one to see connections among a wide range of sources and texts that may not have been obvious at first. I extend this attitude to my thinking on genres like jazz and other popular forms. If criticism, for example, lauded one form of music as superior to others, particularly on the grounds of complexity, I sought to reveal the social histories that made these ideas possible. This proclivity grew as much from reading theory as it did from working with other musicians from different communities throughout my life.Returning to these writers’ bars, I was thrilled to read how George Lipsitz identifies intellectual flexibility in what he notes as my moving between “situated knowledge and abstract theoretical commitments” as well as in how the work engages a “wide range of interlocutors from different demographic groups and disciplines.” Lipsitz, one of two nonmusicologists in this group, leans into the idea that deep listening and careful cooperation are required for musicians to play well in ensembles. And he believes music scholars should model this ethic. When these writers are considered in concert, I can clearly hear their individual bars—but mostly I'm astonished by how this ensemble speaks to each other.Fredara Hadley and Doug Shadle interrogate their personal experiences and research on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the Catholic Church, respectively. In each case they reveal how subcultures can exist within otherwise large, sprawling institutions, among other things. Their archival, historical, and ethnographic methods reveal that these institutions are not monolithic but dynamic and varied. Importantly, each uses self-reflexivity as an entry point and along the way discovers the capacity for diversity in both HBCUs and Black Catholicism traditions. Musically, Hadley theorizes everything from the Black “barbecue playlist” to the wide-ranging pedagogical repertoire in HBCU's traditions. For her, community theater is both theory and practice as it allows her to hear and respect tradition and argue for its ability to shield against unrelenting assaults on the value of Black life. Hadley powerfully insists that HBCUs should be considered historical sites of pioneering thinking on Black music inquiry and not outsiders pleading to be recognized and accepted in this field. She shows us that HBCUs have, indeed, been the drum majors and not the audience cheering on the sideline.As an alumna of an HBCU, Hadley uses her undergraduate experiences to guide her through her subsequent academic pursuits—to hear through it and not check it at the door. Likewise, Shadle shows the productive and unexpected confluence of his conversion to Catholicism, his encountering new scholarly frameworks, and his learning about a local Black Catholic community's dynamic musical history at the outset of his graduate education. He describes the amalgamation of it all as quite the baptism on every front. Shadle's account of interrogating his own racial, religious, and scholarly identities together helped him to be inspired by the work of Black Catholics who were finding a place for their musical traditions in the broader Catholic Church. To evoke a colloquial expression and metaphor here, Shadle theorizes what it means to contribute ethically to Hadley's “barbecue playlist”—the sensitivity and deep listening to one's self and to others in the community theater it requires.3 By contemplating the multivarious aspects of his identity—essentially his “becoming”—in the context of being a white scholar of the complex life and music of a composer like Florence B. Price, for example, Shadle models the kinds of considerations we should all bring to the table with such subjects.Shadle rightly notes my Afromodernism chapter's heavy jazz focus. This prompt gives me an opportunity to say this was the assignment that Samuel Floyd gave me when (due to the serious illness that eventually took his life) he asked me to help contribute to his book The Transformation of Black Music (2017). It was one of the most difficult assignments of my writing career, not only because of my love and deep respect for him, but because I wondered if I could ever live up to his style—his bars, if you will. Thankfully, I'd been listening to and emulating his prose since my graduate school days, and, moreover, his other mentee and primary coauthor, Melanie Zeck, made sure our arrangement worked. The chapter significantly changed for the better when it was vetted by an anonymous reader who noted the (unintentional) lopsidedness of the chapter's gender representation. I took the opportunity to expand it with that critique in mind, and the result shows the ubiquitous role of women who shaped many genres in the Afromodernism aesthetic I outlined. This backstory is a testament to one of the many advantages of being in community with others.Samantha Ege's probing piece explores the Black world-making potential she—like Shadle, Matthew Morrison, and others—hears in my writing and notes the gender inclusivity in Who Hears Here? in both citational practice and topics. As a self-described Black feminist scholar-artist, it's natural that it would be important for her to see other women being cited and women's music being discussed seriously. Ege, who's attracted critical success for both her performances and recordings, points out how she's been able to productively combine her performing and intellectual lives. By considering, for example, the creative and intellectual growth she achieved while “[p]erforming the themes of rage, racial terror, and remembrance” embedded in Undine Smith Moore's piano trio Soweto (1987), Ege theorizes her artist/scholar knowledge in a way that helped me rethink the performance/scholarship relationship in my own practice. My previous work on Bud Powell, for example, would have been significantly enhanced by engaging the disability studies literature. The insights therein would have allowed me to, perhaps, better hear Powell's mental health through Ege's theoretical/practical model. I view her quest for Black world-making in her scholarship and performance as a courageous, lives-changing commitment, particularly in a world in which Ege's proverbial, metaphorical, and literal “guys in the curly wigs” still dominate academic music studies. I'm honored that she hears that impulse in my work as well. Her focus on questioning our reasons for engaging the music of people of African descent offers one route to sustaining a healthy relationship to one's work: indeed, the struggle against emotional, psychological, and physical exhaustion is real, particularly in today's world in which calling out and fighting inequality is itself considered “racist” in some circles.Ege centers her background as a British- and Canadian-trained, African-descended person with transnational adventures in teaching. Her multisited perspectives strongly resonate with Bo kyung Blenda Im's powerfully expressed queries about the global turn (and, by extension, the Black world-making potential) of North American music studies. Also a pianist, Im narrates her finding the original Who Hears Here? book proposal I shared with a class in which she was enrolled. She demonstrates that the Sun Ra quote cited by Lipsitz is true. 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