reading recs #2: brooks, moore, holiday, als
"Toni Morrison remained committed to reminding us that black sound, the original punk rock, had been “historically regarded as illegal.”" -Daphne Brooks
(photo of daphne brooks via yale news)
welcome to issue #23 of “tusk is better than rumours,” a newsletter featuring primers and album rankings of experimental and ‘outsider’ musicians. artist primers are published every other monday, and on off-weeks i publish a variety of articles ranging from label and genre primers to interviews to guest writers.
until the end of the month i’m using this space to highlight african american music critics. hopefully y’all will find a new writer or two to follow through these recommendations. in this issue i’ve picked a few of my favorite pieces from daphne brooks, marcus j. moore, harmony holiday, and hilton als.
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as you may have read in last week’s issue or the one from two weeks ago i’m taking a semi-hiatus for the rest of june to highlight african american music critics. some will be relatively well-known and some less well-known, but hopefully somewhere in these few issues you will find a new writer to follow. regular issues will resume july 6th.
Daphne Brooks, “Toni Morrison and the Music of Black Life” (Pitchfork)
few people know this but writing a weekly niche music newsletter is not my day job. i pay the bills by teaching american literature and so i particularly appreciated this piece from yale professor daphne brooks on music in toni morrison’s life and writings. sometimes you know a thing intuitively but it takes a patient writer to sit down and spell it all out for you before it clicks. this piece did that for me—of course music is important to morrison, and i guess i knew that already, but i needed brooks to explain how and to what extent. for more: brooks has written two books, a scholarly monograph called Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 and the 33 1/3 book on jeff buckley’s Grace. she also penned the award-winning liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia.
Marcus J. Moore, “15 Essential Black Liberation Jazz Tracks” (New York Times)
if you still have some free article views from the new york times i would recommend using one on this great list of black liberation jazz songs, featuring all the usual suspects like sonny sharrock, sun ra, and pharoah sanders but also a couple i’d never heard of, like the pan afrikan people’s arkestra and infinite spirit music. for more: moore has a book on kendrick lamar coming out in october called The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America. you can read more articles from him on his website.
Harmony Holiday, “A Brief History of the Policing of Black Music” (Longreads)
in the brooks piece above she remarks that morrison insisted that black sound was “historically regarded as illegal.” that’s a startling claim at first, until you pause to remember that religious meetings among enslaved african americans (where spirituals would be sung and impassioned sermons given) were made illegal in the 1830s, and this type of targeting has not let up. in this piece, holiday takes up this topic by focusing on specific black jazz musicians (monk, davis, mingus) and the spaces that they tried to, and were prohibited from, building and inhabiting. for more: holiday has published four books of poetry, including Hollywood Forever and Negro League Baseball. you can also read this other great piece on longreads.
Hilton Als, “When the Music Is You” (New Yorker)
hilton als is the most famous writer here because he has been at the new yorker forever so i went digging into his archives to find a piece that y’all may not be familiar with. “when the music is you” is a personal essay about the new york d.j. scene in the 1980s (which inspired him to d.j. himself). it’s a great portrait of the scene that als grew up in, but you can maybe skip the last four paragraphs when he talks shit about d.j. spooky. for more: read the pulitzer-winning White Girls or search through his literally 100s of articles for the new yorker.
oh wait and one more thing: the folks over at dweller have compiled this giant list of articles and interviews about the black history of techno. it’s organized by date so if you start at the top you can get a pretty good education on techno from 1981-2019.
alright that’s all for this week. if you have some extra money consider sending some over to this week’s charity, the formerly incarcerated small business rescue fund. did you know that those with criminal records were excluded from the coronavirus relief package for small businesses? does that seem unnecessarily punitive and cruel? then support this gofundme to help keep some small businesses open:
