Changing Blues: The Continued Life and Appropriation of Black Women's Blues in Twenty-First Century Popular Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Changing Blues: The Continued Life and Appropriation of Black Women’s Blues in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture” argues that contemporary creators reimagine or repurpose the politics and methods of 1920s-1930s Black women’s blues music to amplify particular political investments and to attain social value within the twenty-first-century popular culture arena. While specific historical events gave rise to blues women’s tactics, the issues they explored remain relevant today, such as class, sexual expression, and romantic relationships which together make up the sexual-economic. The sexual-economic is a dual concept. It refers to existing systems that oppress Black women through conjoined sexual and economic means and a way of performing resistance that understands the sexual and economic as intertwined concerns for building and imagining radically liberated futures. Focusing on the sexual-economic theme across early twentieth-century blues and twenty-first-century popular culture, this dissertation explores contemporary work from pop stars, blues singers, and filmmakers. While these projects riff on older blues politics, they also reflect their own moment’s concerns. The blues’ sonic slipperiness, I argue, is a double-edged sword: giving it the ability to adapt but also putting it at risk for commodification and codification that waters down or erases its radical provocations. In adopting a moving or unmoored orientation towards blues politics, we can readjust in parallel to the blues’ movements across time and space, simultaneously holding on to blues women’s often-silenced contributions while letting go of how and where the blues must sound. This approach will allow us to understand not only the blues’ functioning today but how Black women’s artistic and critical contributions are put to work within popular culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".