Liner notes for the revolution The intellectual life of black feminist sound

Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University, offers in this enlightening survey a fresh perspective on more than a century's worth of Black female musicians. "Critics have casually glorified them as unparalleled innovators of popular vocalizing and yet rendered them unworthy of serious and sustained intellectual care for their creative labors," she writes. What follows is a mix of analysis, storytelling, and history. Brooks pays homage to early blues legend Ethel Waters, who could not read music but used her innate musicality to survive a racially discriminatory and male-dominated music industry for decades. Jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln is recognized for incorporating social commentary into her lyrics, style, and sound. Brooks also gives a nod to contemporary innovator Janelle Monáe, who in 2013 came out as pansexual and incorporated her sexuality into her work via a classic literary scene of female seduction, Homer's temptation of the sirens from the Odyssey. Brooks combines an impressive archive of musical works and the artists' own words to convincingly reveal how they each impacted popular culture. Music aficionados should take note. (Feb.)

A spirited study of how Black women musicians and writers have informed each other despite gatekeepers' neglect and dismissals. Brooks, a professor of African American Studies at Yale, ranges from early blues icons like Bessie Smith, who created "jams that revel in the complexities--the affective ambiguities--of a Black woman's inner lifeworld," through contemporary phenoms like Janelle Monáe and Beyoncé. But it's not all about the musicians. Women writers on Black music--Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, blues and jazz historian Rosetta Reitz--are crucial to Brooks, but this book is not strictly about music writing, either. By synthesizing both groups, the author develops an engrossing and provocative secret history of Black artists developing their own modes of history and celebration, exploring "the myriad ways that Black women have labored in and through sonic culture." Hurston, an anthropologist before she was a celebrated novelist, made the case for blues music as central to American life; Hansberry's defense of her own work and Black culture in general established a model for future writers; blues duo Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas opened up questions of Black (and perhaps queer) defiance of expectations to this day and how history is often warped by self-declared White keepers of blues history. The supporters for Brooks' thesis aren't exclusively Black; she writes rhapsodically about music critics Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, and Reitz, who reissued the work of Black blueswomen. However, the author emphasizes a culture in which "Black women are rarely in control of their own archives, rarely seen as skilled critics or archivists, all too rarely beheld as makers of rare sounds deemed deserving of excavation and long study." Brooks writes with a scholar's comprehensiveness, only occasionally overly fussy and digressive; her record-geek's enthusiasm is explicit, and her book is a powerful corrective. A sui generis and essential work on Black music culture destined to launch future investigations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.