Meshell Ndegeocello

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2014

This article examines the music and performance of Meshell Ndegeocello, arguing that they are part of a cross-Atlantic conversation that pushes the boundaries of Black feminist thought on masculinity and desire. From the time of her debut album in 1993, Ndegeocello has resisted categorization both in her public personae and in her music. Ndegeocello's refusal to be restricted in her stage performance and in her musical expression has created a rich text through which to read Black female masculinity. Her work has been particularly productive in rethinking (Black) feminist couplings of patriarchy with male anatomy. Ndegeocello's music challenges any one representation of female masculinity, mixing critiques of masculine privilege and violence with celebrations of pleasure and pansexual desire.

Popular Music 32/3 (October 2013): 471-496., 2013

Singer, bass player and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello has inspired a growing body of scholarship addressing her funky, political, 'othered' musical personae. Existing work celebrates Ndegeocello in the context of identity politics (most commonly feminist, Black Feminist/Womanist, Black Nationalist or Africanist). This tactic not only defies Ndegeocello's rejection of identity politics, but also oversimplifies her complex, sometimes divergent musical negotiations of selfhood. This article highlights the discursive tensions of engaging 'Black' with 'queer' with 'woman' with 'musician' by exploring her most contradictory performances of self, particularly those which other scholars argue are 'feminist' or 'queer'. Identifying a scholarly gap around Ndegeocello's strikingly conflicted performances of Black queer gender in songs about same-and opposite-sex relationships, this queer of colour critique explores manner and process over essence, articulating experiential, situational, non-linear and even incoherent perspectives. In doing so, it offers an affect-oriented, politically and musically attentive alternative conceptual frame to identity politics.

Rebel with Rhythm, Shatter with Words: Female Rappers smashing the prescribed image of the "Muslim woman'', 2021

‘In the men’s world, in an industry where male domination is so strong, it takes a lot of energy and courage, as a female rapper, occupying a space where one is able to tell her own stories, and things get even more complicated when the Muslim context is involved. The book focuses on the motivation of these musicians, the subjects they touch and the styles they adopt. While discussing this subject in a narrative language under two main headings as Muslim Majority and Muslim Minority Countries, Hilal Işık strengthens her discourse with the lyrics of the rap songs and quotations from the interviews of the musicians. Being a product of author’s own struggle as a feminist woman who was born into a Muslim family, this book also has the characteristic of a reverence to the rebellious women who identify themselves as Muslim or who were born into a Muslim family, that gain the representation they deserve in the Hip-Hop world, and who not only rap but also make rap music about women with their existence, words, rhythms, and styles, and shatter the prescribed ‘Muslim Woman’ image. This work is a collage of how these women using rap music as a tool to empower, inspire, rebel, fight, claim rights and get them.’

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2021

In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s, Emily J. Lordi reminds us that soul has many directives: to "signify the special resilience black people had earned by surviving the historical and daily trials of white supremacy" (5); to represent "the musical techniques or practices through which artists enacted soul ethos" (11); and, in its most familiar use, to refer to intellectual and artistic productions of Black Americans during the soul or post-soul music movements. Lordi's new book, however, calls for and provides a more expansive discourse of soul, which reveals meanings that have traditionally been overlooked, underrepresented, or disregarded. The Meaning of Soul addresses such slights of soul scholarship not only by analyzing Black American musicians from the late 1960s and early 1970s (and some more recent), but also by positioning soul not as a "discrete thing" but rather "a habit of thinking, a logic" (8). To achieve this, Lordi pushes back against "paradigms that treat soul music as a mere vehicle for civil rights messaging" (4), "mass-marketed representations of soul music (which sideline black women and mystify musical craft)," and "scholarship. .. [that] tends to assume that soul as a concept does not have an aesthetics, but only a politics" (6). Above all, in this book, the stories of soul come to life through soul music and music makers, but their meanings transcend music. The book establishes itself from the outset as representing a disparate discussion of soul, even before the first word. Its cover features Minnie Riperton, the gifted five-octave vocalist and composer known for her pop crossover hit "Lovin' You," which reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1975. As such, Riperton is usually an outlier in discussions about soul music, whether due to her membership in the late 1960s multiracial, psychedelic rock outfit Rotary Connection, or her or others' perceptions of soul artists. As her Rotary bandmate Sidney Barnes wrote in his autobiography, Standing on Solid Ground, "She had attempted to use [her five-octave range]. .. at some of the local black clubs, and [they] often booed her off the stage. They weren't used to that weird sounding shit. They wanted her to belt out like Aretha Franklin or Fontella Bass." i Or as Aaron Cohen writes in Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power, "Besides Riperton's singular vocal range, prowess, and stylistic choices, her background

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2008

2015

This thesis expands on primary field research conducted for my MMus degree. Undertaken in the Saharaui refugee camps of southern Algeria (2004-2005) that research-based on ethnographic data and the analysis of Saharaui music, known as Haul 1-focussed on the musical system, the social context of musical performance and the music culture in Saharaui refugee camps. This doctoral research examines Saharaui Haul music as practised in Spain and is particularly focussed on its entry, since 1998, into the global market by way of the World Music label, Nubenegra records. The encounter between Saharaui musicians and Nubenegra records has created a new type of Saharaui Haul which is different to that played in the refugee camps. This phenomenon has emerged as a result of western music producers compelling Saharaui musicians to introduce musical changes so that both parties may be considered as musical agents occupying different positions on a continuum of tradition and change. Nubenegra undertook the commodification of Saharaui music and disseminated it from the camps to the rest of the world. A musical and social analysis of the relationship between Nubenegra and Saharaui musicians living in Spain will form the basis of the research in this thesis. In particular, Mariem Hassan is an example of a musician who had her music disseminated through the relationship with Nubenegra and she is promoted as the music ambassador of the Western Sahara. I collaborated with her as a composer and performer on her last album, El Aaiun egdat (Aaiun in fire), in 2012 2 and gained first hand insight into the relationship between Mariem and Nubenegra. This thesis reflects on this relationship and my role in facilitating this encounter.

Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2013

What would the 20th century have looked like without Afrodiasporic music? This evocative question—put to me during a late night listening session to the “Annunaki flow” of Killah Priest2—tests the boundaries of even the most dedicated theorist of dystopia. Imagine the alternatives. While the high priests of avant-garde abstraction might have prevailed— satisfying the likes of Adorno, the Frankfurt School critical theorist who notoriously scoffed at jazz—would there have been much good music to dance to?

Daedalus, 2019

The rise of jazz-R&B-hip hop fusions in contemporary Los Angeles offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways jazz matters to black audiences today. Drawing on recent Afrofuturist art and theory as well as on Amiri Baraka's analysis of the "changing same" in black music, this essay traces out the significance of work by artists as diverse as Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and Robert Glasper, positing that their music tells us that jazz matters not only in itself, but also in its continuing capacity to engage in cross-genre dialogues for musicians and audiences who hear it as part of a rich continuum of African American musical expression. We are, it seems, in an age of Afrofuturism. The release of the Black Panther feature film in Febru-ary 2018 was greeted with a spate of think pieces across a range of media, explaining the term Afro-futurism for an unfamiliar audience. "T'Challa, also known as the Black Panther, the title character of the blockbuster movie, wasn't the first person to land a spaceship (or something like it) in downtown Oakland, Calif.," starts one such article. 1 Such pieces point back to bandleaders Sun Ra and George Clinton (and sometimes to Jamaican dub artist Lee "Scratch" Perry) to provide background for the film's mix of the old and the new, technology and the spirit, space-age Africa, and, eventually, a sense of diasporic culture that travels in both directions across the Black Atlantic-in ships in the sky rather than the sea-suturing the fissures rent by the middle passage, by war, and by colonial mo-dernity's many terrors. At the same time, we are in an age of poly-or even omnigenericism in music. That is, in many cases , musicians and their audiences are liable to connect multiple genres, creating new fusions, and gabriel solis is Professor of

African Languages and Literatures in the 21st C., 2019

This chapter examines the language of Muslim feminism as expressed in Senegal’s signature pop music genre called mbàllax. First, it defines and contextualizes Senegalese moderate Muslim feminism vis-à-vis global feminisms and as iterated in the country’s broader literary and artistic discourses. Then, it draws from selected Wolof pop songs to examine how female Senegalese Muslim musicians have used music to negotiate feminist expression and tease out latent patterns of gender inequity in a twenty-first-century majority-Muslim African country. In doing so, the chapter argues that the female mbàllax singers have created a modern musical language articulating a double-edged feminist social commentary that embodies a woman’s self-praise, on the one hand, and an anti-patriarchal satire, on the other.

8th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe , 2022

This presentation aims to elaborate on the potential of sounds and vibrations within the context of Deleuzian-Guattarian understanding of becoming and Braidotti‘s nomadic subject. This philosophical position and conceptual route emphasize the non-hegemonic, dynamic, fluid, transgressing, and transformative potential of creativity. The DeleuzianGuattarian perspective of ―the privilege of the ear‖ will be further argued, extending the discussion to the process of creativity and the process of becoming a vibrant nomadic subject throughout the former. In other words, I propose that sound, and thus music, has a very special and crucial place in terms of the capacity of an artistic creation that is transformative and encompassing. Finally, I argue that the awareness of such a capacity would open grounds of not getting lost in the era of crises, flourishing the ways for coexisting. This presentation aims to contribute to the theme of 'gender‘ from the posthumanist and new materialist viewpoints, especially by tackling the concept of "becoming-woman" and "the nomad".