Issue #132 Dark Banjee Aesthetic: Hearing a Queer-of-Color Archive within Club Music

Dark Banjee Aesthetic: Hearing a Queer-of-Color Archive within Club Music

Blair Black

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The Moonwalkers Featuring Ultra Naté, “10,000 Screamin’ Faggots (A Poem),” Vinyl (Strictly Rythym, 1995).  

Issue #132
December 2022










Notes
1

You can listen to the score on Soundcloud .

2

SHOWstudio, “Hood By Air: Trans - Process Film,” YouTube video, March 21, 2014 .

3

SHOWstudio, “Hood By Air: Trans - Interview: Shayne Oliver,” YouTube video, February 7, 2014 .

4

Nico Amarca, “Ghe20G0th1k: Courting Catharsis Through Chaos,” Highsnobiety, no. 14 (2017) .

5

Layla Halabian, “Venus X on the Origins of GHE20G0TH1K, a Club Night that Shaped the 2010s,” Dazed Digital, December 17, 2019 .

6

Eric Shorey, “Hood By Air Is Going on Hiatus,” Nylon, April 6, 2017 .

7

Claire Mouchemore and Juule Kay, “How Electronic Artists Influenced Fashion Soundtracking,” Resident Advisor, February 28, 2022 .

8

Eugene Carolus, “How Total Freedom’s Devastating DJ Sets Changed Club Music,” Dazed Digital, January 11, 2017 ; Zak Stone, “Gen F: Total Freedom,” The Fader, September 16, 2013 .

9

Stone, “Gen F: Total Freedom.”

10

Kembrew McLeod, “Genres, Subgenres, Sub-subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation within Electronic/Dance Music Communities, Journal of Popular Music Studies 13, no. 1 (2001). Though opinions vary about why the label “deconstructed” is nonsensical, the main contentions are that (1) “deconstructed” is a redundant term to describe the overall form and production style prevalent in club music and electronic dance music more generally, and (2) the term was established by the music industry, in particular music journalists.

11

Max Pearl, “The Art of DJing: Venus X,” Resident Advisor, April 20, 2017 .

12

Andra Nikolayi, “The Radical Dissonance of Deconstructed, or ‘Post-Club,’ Music,” Bandcamp Daily, July 9, 2019 .

13

See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003); S. Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. K. McKittrick (Duke University Press, 2015); K. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke University Press, 2014).

14

Tavia Nyong’o, “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions: Black Sound Studies After the Millennium,” Small Axe 18, no. 2 (2014).

15

Owen Conway, “Music, Whitewashing, and Counterculture: An Interview With Make Techno Black Again,” Honey Suckle, 2020 ; and DeForrest Brown Jr., “Decolonizing Techno: Notes From A Brooklyn Dance Floor,” Afropunk.com, February 21, 2019 .

16

Paul Miller, “Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, rev. ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 472.

17

Chandra Frank, “Listening to the Unsung and the Quiet Imagination: A Conversation with DJ Lynnée Denise,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 32, no. 4 (2020).

18

Michael Hanchard, “Black Memory Versus State Memory: Notes Toward a Method,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), 54.

19

madison moore, “DARK ROOM: Sleaze and the Queer Archive,” Contemporary Theatre Review 31, no. 1–2 (2021).

20

Brent Silby, “The Structure of a DJ Mixset: Taking Your Audience on a Purposeful Journey,” def-logic.com, 2007 .

21

Silby, “The Structure of a DJ Mixset.”

22

Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly 59, no. 4 (1984): 387.

23

Alex Hawgood, “Sampling Rap, Salsa and Al Jazeera,” New York Times, April 18, 2012 ; and Andrew Ryce, “Total Freedom: The Hook,” Resident Advisor, March 11, 2015 .

24

See .

25

Michelle Lhooq, “20 Tracks That Defined the Sound of Ballroom, New York’s Fiercest Queer Subculture,” Vulture, July 24, 2018 .

26

Matthew Collin, Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music (Serpent’s Tail, 2018), 324.

27

The Moonwalkers, “10,000 Screaming Faggots (In the Life Extended Mix).”

28

C. Riley Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 6.

29

I use “eccentric” queerly to acknowledge how Black musicians and performers adopt “appropriation, pastiche, sampling, and irony” to satirize, critique, and reinvent heteronormative Black radical traditions of world-making and self-fashioning. Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), 8. See also madison moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale University Press, 2018).

30

Robin James, “Sonic Cyberfeminisms, Perceptual Coding and Phonographic Compression,” Feminist Review 127, no. 1 (2021): 22.

31

For an account for the Memphis rap scene that incubated Lil Noid, see Julia, “Underground & Infamous: Part I,” Future Audio Workshop, 2019 . Julia writes: “At the end of the ’80s, young people were tired of the upbeat electro-funk tunes that had defined the decade so far. The music of their parents’ generation was out of sync with the reality in Memphis.”

32

Julee Tate, “From Girly Men to Manly Men: The Evolving Representation of Male Homosexuality in Twenty-First Century Telenovelas,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, no. 29 (2011): 106.

33

Hari Ziyad, “My Gender Is Black,” Afropunk.com, July 12, 2017 .

34

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diatrics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72.

35

Jared Leighton, “‘All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons’: Gay Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts Against Police Brutality in the Bay Area,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2019), 22.

36

Marlon Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (2011), 382.

37

Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan, 1994), 83.