Looking Back, What I Learned, and What I Hope to Accomplish

While this project really only came together over the last month starting with when I came up with the idea and the abstract truly hours before the abstract was due, in a way, it has been two years in the making. I’ve wanted to do some type of big project on Black women in music for a while now. I’ve always been interested in music and writing about it for fun — growing up I wanted to be a music journalist and I’ve been playing the guitar and bass since middle and high school respectively — but my interest in it academically was piqued when I took the “Beyoncé class” with Professor Tinsley my freshman fall. It was taking that class simultaneously as Alex Corey’s HL90 “Contemporary American Literature and Popular Music,” that made me realize that I can study and write about music without being a music concentrator. Taking the “Beyoncé class,” I learned a lot about Black feminist theory and how to apply it to analyses of popular music and taking Alex’s class first taught me how to do close readings of non-traditional literary sources (music and music videos). It was then, during my freshman year, that I decided that for my senior thesis I wanted to write about the history of Black women in music from a Black feminist lens. 

 

Obviously, I am not a senior and this is not my senior thesis; but this project is a product of both my initial interests in Black women in music and everything I learned specifically about musical resistance this semester in “Music and Resistance in the Modern United States.” This class truly gave me the space to further develop my interests in this topic and this creative project is a culmination of those interests. In a way, I’m very grateful that this isn’t my senior thesis because I would not have been able to do a creative project if that was the case. 

 

So what exactly does this project have to do with the themes of this course? Well for starters, the basis of this project, the grounding history and theory, came from Week 3 of this semester “Blues, Jazz, and Gender” and, in particular, Angela Davis’s “I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama.” This semester was not the first time I’ve read this text or listened to selected Ma Rainey songs (shoutout to Andrew Pope and his HL90 “Queering the South” that I took sophomore fall). However, I was eternally grateful to be able to dive deeper into this text and the work of Ma Rainey this semester. Reading Davis’s text this semester made me think about how the blues women of 1920s and 30s truly set the stage for Black women musicians for the next century to come — from Nina Simone to Janet Jackson to Missy Elliot to Nicki Minaj to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. Reading about how the blues women expressed their sexuality in their music as a means of celebrating liberation made me think about the history of Black women being hypersexualized. I realized that because of the stereotypical perceptions of Black women as being hypersexual beings, when Black women express sexuality in their music, whether they are aware of it or not, they are participating in musical resistance. 

 

Making this realization, I thought about both the last century of Black women in music through today and how these expressions of sexuality have changed through the years but still remained powerful. I thought about Ma Rainey’s queerness and Nina Simone’s protest music that we discussed in class and the music by Black women that I personally like such as the works of Janelle Monae, Missy Elliot, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé. It was interesting to just sit and think about how, as I said before, the ways in which Black women expressed sexuality in music have changed over the last one hundred years and Black women continue to find new and innovative ways to do so.

 

I had originally planned to map out the last century of Black women in music expressing sexuality decade by decade, but during my final project workshopping session with Callia during class, I realized that that was just a lot of work. I decided instead to split the last century into five eras that just made sense to me, had different historical significance, and for which I can think of at least one prominent Black woman popular music artist to examine in the context of said era. I used the 1920s-40s blues women in conjunction with the Davis and the 1950s-60s protest music of Nina Simone from the Civil Rights Era that we discussed in class as my starting point. Then I thought about what was post-Civil Rights and what was prominent in the 1970s-80s and realized that disco and funk would be the move for this next era. Next I thought back to the Beyonce class and how I learned about hip-hop feminism there. I went back to that class’s Canvas page and reread “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built” by Brittney Cooper and realized that hip-hop feminism would be the perfect basis for the 90s-2000s as hip-hop got bigger at the turn of the century and women rappers like Missy Elliot, Salt n’ Pepa, and Lil Kim became big. Finally, I thought of the 2010s-today and what it’s been like living during this last decade as a Black woman myself. I thought of the music I’ve been listening to for the last ten years and the reactions that Black women musicians garnered on social media, and I knew I had to do something by either Nicki Minaj or Beyoncé. I had also considered working with Janelle Monae again for this last decade and tying her queerness back to Ma Rainey’s but I realized that A) that would be too easy of a connection to make and B) I already did a critical karaoke on Monae this semester and maybe I should do something different.

 

While coming up with the eras and the songs for this project was honestly pretty easy, coming up with secondary sources for all of them and learning to cut back was not. The 1920s-40s era was easy, I went in knowing that I wanted to just do a Ma Rainey song and use the Davis reading. Same for 1990s-2000s and hip-hop feminism and Missy Elliot. Finding text on Nicki Minaj and “Anaconda” after choosing to work with this song wasn’t that hard either: Jstor is a powerful site and Black feminist theorists have been writing about Minaj since she first debuted. Oddly enough, the Nina Simone was incredibly difficult for me. I had originally thought that I was going to work with “Four Women,” but I realized that this song didn’t express sexuality in the way I needed it to for the arc of this project. Going back to Jstor, I found the text “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone’s Africana Womanism” and read about “Marriage Is For Old Folks” and thought that song sounded interesting. I was right, it was interesting and the perfect song for this project. Reading that text and using that song made connecting the Simone back to the anti-assimilationist anti-marriage ideals of the 1920s-40s blues women and the Davis very easy. The most difficult song to work with was “Nasty” by Janet Jackson. I love that song so much and I knew I had to do it but I just could not for the life of me find any secondary sources on Jackson, the song, or feminism and funk that would work with what I was trying to get at. It was when I stumbled upon the story of how “Nasty” came to be and happened to immediately read the Brinkley article that I realized that “Nasty” was a song about not being hypersexualized and that’s what I needed to talk about in my analysis. 

 

I think, looking back at this project, the hardest part was honestly that it was very ambitious and a lot of work. I’m glad I realized quite early on that I bit off more than I can chew when I was hoping to do a song a decade and backtracked on that idea. But still, finding unique and new things to say about songs that I genuinely really liked in a way that makes sense to people who aren’t me and don’t necessarily know all the tracks or the theories and history I was working with was hard. Quite hard. Having to sit down and listen to these tracks over and over again, write cohesive scripts that weren’t too long or too short, record my voice, listen to my voice, and edit my voice, was HARD. And also kind of annoying, if I’m being honest. And looking back, it was also probably a lot more work than just writing a ten page paper would have been. But I don’t regret any of it. I’m so excited about how this project turned out and to have this product to share with people in a way that just isn’t possible with an academic paper. I love creative multimedia projects and I’m glad that I got to combine my research interests in Black feminist theory with my love of music, art, and writing. I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to do such a cool project and to have this final product that I’m genuinely proud of and I’m very excited to be sharing it with everyone who sees it.

 

I hope that everyone who finds their way to this site learns something new and develops a newfound appreciation of the work of Black women in music. I also hope y’all like the sound of my voice because if you listen to all five critical karaokes, you’ll be hearing a lot of it.

 

Annie

 

PS: Also shoutout to Ernie Mitchell for letting me take a project I was cultivating for a different class and submit it as my final project for our junior tutorial. Not having to do a separate final project for tutorial gave me the space to put all of my energy into this project and I’m very grateful for that and very happy with the way this project turned out. 

Also also shoutout to the Spotify user who made the playlist “Anaconda Walked So WAP Can Run” for pretty much synthesizing my argument on how Black women exhibiting sexuality in music throughout history opened the doors for upcoming Black women to do the same...in a playlist title.