Pop Convergence 2021

Black Critics Matter (Room B: Oscillator)

This roundtable session focuses on the indispensable role that Black critics have played in telling the story of Black music, and it brings together a cluster of multigenerational pathbreaking thinkers whose work has transformed critical writing about popular music culture. I am seeking to curate a session that documents this era of racial reckoning through the heightened recognition of Black cultural arts criticism—its vitality, its originality, its pioneering experimentalism and the daring interventionist role it has played (now as well as across the 20th and 21st centuries) in how we think about, theorize, and engage with Black sounds.

If 2020 has reminded us of anything, it’s that the struggle for African American autonomy in the American body politic is a multifaceted one tied to necessary and interlocking social, political as well as cultural revolutions in valuing Black life. Culture critics, we know, play a pivotal role in identifying and narrating the dimensions of that value. But in the history of popular music culture across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how often have we extensively imagined Black folks as critics, as knowledge producers in relation to their own expressive cultures? Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Chi-hui Yang remind us that such questions “matte[r] because culture is a battleground where some narratives win and conversation about our collective imagination has the same blind spots as our political discourse.” Adds the venerable Black feminist culture critic Margo Jefferson, the “role of the critic of color is to unveil and unearth the structures that lie behind and underneath and propel these narratives which always star the same figures.” Arts criticism is, in effect and as they suggest, ultimately world-making. It has the power to both reflect and expand a community’s relationship to the expressive modes of being that saturate our quotidian lives and inform our communicative lexicons. Or, as Toni Morrison once put it bluntly, “as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.”

As we consider the potential for radical transformation in this era defined by flux, we might take evermore seriously the ways that Berry and Yang urge the public to “think of cultural criticism as civic infrastructure that needs to be valued not based just on monetary impact”—that is, which artists receive the most exposure and reap the most revenue (though this is important, too, in a world of institutional inequities)—but also based on criticism’s “capacity to expand the collective conversation at a time when it is dangerously contracting. Arts writing,” they contend, “fosters an engaged citizenry that participates in the making of its own story.” From Harlem Renaissance era ballers like Sylvester Russell, Lester Walton and Nora Holt to post-Civil Rights era pioneers like Phyl Garland and Lorraine O’Grady, from Village Voice breakthrough geniuses like Thulani Davis and Greg Tate to break-the-glass-ceiling-at-Vibe- and-Billboard Danyel Smith, from New York Times early aughts trickster K Sanneh to the 2010 Black queer visionaries of the Times, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story” since Black folks gained entrance to the segregated recording industry. They were the ones long beckoning us to “turn and face the [gloriously] strange...” before, in the time of, and after our dear Starman...