Listening for the Interior in Hip-hop and R&B Music

• In Event: 2376 - Race and Intersectionality (Cosponsored with the Association of Black Sociologists)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the ways that four Black musical artists make quiet, or the inner life of African-Americans, legible (Quashie 2012). Specifically, we consider ways that the quiet found within the lyrics of recent acclaimed albums from two hip-hop artists and two neo-soul artists—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017) and Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017) and Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Maxwell’s blackSUMMERS'night (2016) respectively—offer subtle, quotidian challenges to oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. We find that quiet occurs as artists describe the use of metaphysical space, or how place is used to make and take space for the self and to find peace; the protection of the interior self; and the gifts of quiet to the struggle for resistance.

These lyrics speak to the interior safe space that Blacks seek as refuge from oppression by the dominant culture and demands from within their community (Collins 2000). We contend that Blacks exercise power through their dominion over their interior self, which in turn expresses their humanity. It is their control of the content of inner life, whatever those contents may be, that is an expression of sovereignty (Quashie 2012).

Authors

• Tennille Allen, Lewis University

• Antonia M. Randolph, Winston-Salem State University