“How is it possible for Black women popular musicians (an Aretha, a Whitney, a Beyoncé) — some of the most widely imitated artists in the world — to exist simultaneously at the fringe and yet at the center of the culture industry?” That’s the question at the heart of Liner Notes For The Revolution: The Intellectual Life Of Black Feminist Sound, the exceptional new book by Daphne A. Brooks, writer and professor at Yale University. It’s a fascinating read that centers Black women as artists, archivists and critics in the making of American culture. In this interview, we asked her a few questions about how the project came to be and what music fueled her writing sessions.
NPR Music: Let’s start with the title. You talk in the introduction about how liner notes help develop canonical perspectives on popular music, using the exquisite phrase “a discursive dialectical jam session” to describe the book itself. How did the project come to be? Daphne A. Brooks: In many ways, this is a project that’s been living inside of me since I was 12 years old growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and spending all of my time at Tower Records hunting for records and reading Rolling Stone magazine. I was obsessed with rock music criticism, in part because as an African American tween interested in a broad swath of popular music culture, I was hungry for critical conversations about the music that I was hearing outside of my family’s home (the place where I was surrounded by a dreamy elixir of my parents’ beloved big-band records and my older siblings’ passion for soul and disco). No one was listening to The Clash at my house. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t find myself in that criticism, nor could I find any extensive, sustained, rigorous and passionate interest in Black women’s groundbreaking musicianship. The book I ended up writing was an attempt to explore not only the astonishing work of Black women artists across the centuries but to also account for the feminist critics who cared for their work. I also knew that I would have to address some of those lingering blindspots in popular music criticism that I’d first encountered all those years ago.
We’re curious: What music soundtracked your trips to the archives and long writing sessions? I’ve been working on this book for so long that I’ve ultimately cycled through many playlists. But one album that I lived inside of for a very long time was (and still is) Don’t Fight the Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live at the Fillmore West, the multi-disc recordings of Aretha Franklin’s historic concerts at that legendary venue. I went back to it again and again — not only because of its wide and majestic sweep, the palpable energy and improvisatory abandon of Aretha Franklin working in the round with saxophonist Curtis Ousley (King Curtis, who would die tragically later that same year), Ray Charles and Billy Preston but because it conveys this warm, communal energy. It reminded me of the worldmaking powers of the women in my book. Nina Simone’s 1959’s Little Girl Blue was and is another favorite because it’s just such a dazzling statement about the nature of virtuosity. Much of Liner Notes is about Black women creators who were – and weren’t – in dialogue with each other, within their own historical moments and also across time. Whom do you picture your book being in conversation with? Artists as well as fans. I suspect my fellow critics will likely be conversing with me about this book, and I welcome that! But what I’ve loved watching across the years as I’ve been writing this book is the number of Black women musicians who’ve asserted their love for reading about the history of Black women in popular music culture: the late jazz genius Geri Allen read the work of and collaborated with scholar Farah Griffin (author of books on Billie Holiday and Mary Lou Williams); the brilliant folk and roots music wonder Valerie June has talked about reading Gayle Wald’s pioneering work on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; and I watched Toshi Reagon swoon over Maureen Mahon’s new book on African American women and rock and roll. I wrote this book with a belief that a whole range of Black women musicians are some of our most prodigious grassroots intellectuals and public historians. I hope that it might speak to them. I also hope that it will speak to the next generation of feminist music fans — women of color and their white allies — who might draw inspiration to write about the sounds that they care about, the records they collect, the archives that they are building for themselves and for others. Also, of course, there are key interlocutors who figure prominently in this book: critics like Greil Marcus, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Griffin, Gayle Wald, Sonnet Retman, Kara Keeling, Jacqueline Stewart, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Black studies heavyweights like Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison are huge influences on my work as well. The book focuses both on Black women performers and Black women critics, highlighting what you call “the urgent need for rock lit and Black studies to ‘speak’ to each other.” Why does this feel so critical for you? The history of popular music culture in America is inextricably linked to the matter of Black life. From the blackface minstrelsy sounds that informed the 19th-century folk Americana songbook and the world of early musical theatre to the blues forms that constitute the DNA of our sonic world today, this country’s racial catastrophe, its brutal subjugation of Black peoples from the time of captivity through the long era of Jim Crow segregation and the fraught battles waged by a people to achieve social and political equality are the reasons why we have these musical forms. African Americans miraculously made music in spite of and oftentimes because of the gross insult of systemic racism. Rock and roll (as well as our other signature popular sounds — from jazz to hip hop) is soaked in this history, emerged out of this history. The stories that rock lit likes to tell about this music could be enlivened, sharpened, deepened, widened, in my opinion, by having to account for all of this. Black studies enables rock lit to go deep.
Overall, what do you hope readers will take away from Liner Notes for the Revolution? The history of taste-making and cultural criticism in this country is an undemocratic one. In spite of this, however, Black women musicians as well as the feminist critics who showed serious interest in them and the fans who adored them — all matter. | 
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