Author: Daphne A. Brooks
Title: Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Year: 2021
Type: Academic book (Harvard University Press)
Brooks’s claim is that the canon of popular music criticism — who gets to write about music with authority, which frameworks define what counts as “serious,” which records and artists are treated as historically important — was built by and for white men, and that this construction has distorted how American music history is understood and narrated. Against it she recovers a long tradition of Black women writing and listening with critical authority, a line that runs from Pauline Hopkins and Zora Neale Hurston through Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, and Nikki Giovanni to the present, a tradition the critical establishment has systematically pushed to the margins.
Brooks is a literary scholar as well as a music critic, and the book operates on two levels. It is an archival recovery project, surfacing writing and listening practices that have been overlooked, and it is a theoretical argument about the relationship between race, gender, and critical authority. Her claim is not simply that more Black women should be included in existing conversations about popular music. It is that the conversations themselves — their assumptions about what constitutes musical seriousness, their privileging of certain genres and performance modes over others, their definition of expertise — are shaped by the same racial and gendered hierarchies that organize the music industry.
Hear the thesis on “Be My Baby”. The wordless “whoa-oh-oh-oh” runs that thread the record were Ronnie Bennett’s own invention, worked out in the tiled ladies’ room at Gold Star she preferred for its echo; on the master she is the only Ronette singing at all. Yet the label read Spector, who took the third writing credit, claimed the runs came from old Frankie Lymon sides he had played her, and in 1974 divorced her out of every dollar the records earned. Brooks names exactly this erasure, the Black woman authoring a sound while the archive files it under a white man’s name. Where she would push further: the runs survived. Fifty years of Ronnie performing them on her own terms turned the theft into a counter-record the credits could not hold.
Key contributions
- Recovers a tradition of Black feminist music criticism that has been overlooked by mainstream music journalism and academic musicology, demonstrating that Black women have been active interpreters and theorists of popular music from its earliest decades.
- Argues that the critical canon — the hierarchy of genres, artists, and records that constitutes “music history” — is itself a product of racial and gendered power, not a neutral reflection of artistic achievement. The privileging of rock over pop, albums over singles, self-authored material over performed material all track racial and gender lines.
- Provides a framework for understanding why certain music (girl groups, disco, contemporary R&B) has been critically undervalued, connecting that undervaluation to the exclusion of the listeners and critics who valued it most.
- Reframes listening as a form of cultural production, arguing that how audiences hear and interpret music is active meaning-making, and that Black women’s listening practices constitute an intellectual tradition with its own history and methods.
See also
- The color line in pop — Brooks’s argument anchors the “Who tells the story” section
- Girl group — A form that Brooks argues has been critically undervalued because of the racial and gender biases embedded in the canon
- Authenticity and its discontents — The authenticity framework as one of the mechanisms through which Black women’s musical contributions are devalued
- Pop as craft — Brooks’s argument for taking pop seriously overlaps with the craft argument, but adds the dimension of race and gender to the analysis
- Brill Building — The critical dismissal of Brill Building pop as “manufactured” is, in Brooks’s framework, partly a racial and gendered judgment
