Liner Notes for the Revolution

By Daphne A. Brooks,

Book cover of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound

Book description

Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award
Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award
A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year
A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year

"Brooks traces all kinds of lines, finding unexpected points of connection...inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Liner Notes for the Revolution as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Daphne A. Brooks’ book is a revolutionary work, centering more than a century of innovations by Black women in popular music who have been marginalized, overlooked, or erased.

Situating Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer and Lorraine Hansberry as a cultural critic alongside blues pioneers such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith and contemporary artists like Janelle Monáe and Valerie June, Brooks doesn’t merely fill in blind spots.

She exposes how those blind spots reflect the partial, subjective view of white male critics and historians.

Showing us a different way of seeing and listening to culture, Brooks…

From Allyson's list on music that put women center stage.

Black feminist scholar and cultural critic Daphne A. Brooks has a solution to the vexing conundrum of the simultaneous centrality of African American women to the development of 20th and 21st-century music and the persistent devaluation of their contributions: she listens closely to their work in its historical, social, and aesthetic context. In her dazzling discussions of the cultural productions of an expansive array of musicians, artists, and critics—Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Valerie June, Janelle Monáe, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Beyoncé, Carrie Mae Weems, and Wangechi Mutu make appearances—Brooks offers incisive and provocative readings that…

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