Inspired by the liner notes that accompany vinyl records, which started as places for advertising and became “potent places for experimentation and critique,” Daphne Brooks places her own book between genres. Liner Notes for the Revolution is at once a “counterhistory of popular music criticism,” archival scholarship on the lost and under-remembered figures of Black women’s music-making, and a manual for how to listen to music in a way that understands singing itself as culture work and intellectual labor. Frankfurt School thinkers make frequent appearances in the bibliography, as do Black feminist scholars from Zora Neale Hurston on, but they’re almost outnumbered by critics, poets, and fiction writers, and they’re all placed on equal intellectual ground with the musicians themselves.
Brooks writes with buoyant passion about the musicians and performances that mean so much to her, intellectually as well as personally.
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