Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by Daphne A. Brooks (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by Daphne A. Brooks Shanice Wolters Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne A. Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 2021. 598 pp. Daphne Brooks professes that “Black women of sound have a secret. Theirs is a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and yet mis-hears them, celebrates them, and yet ignores them, heralds them, and simultaneously devalues them” (1). Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Thought is an astonishingly extensive monograph dedicated to Brooks’s interrogation of the secret histories of Black women’s sounds, and consequently, the intellectual labor that engages with these Black women’s sonic cultural histories. This silenced history of Black women’s sounds, and the intellectual labor that created it, Brooks asserts, has resulted in what she calls as a “grossly unacknowledged revolution” (7) in Black women’s sonic culture. Liner Notes for the Revolution is drawn from Brooks’s lived experiences as an avid music fan, student, teacher, scholar, and critic. In her contextualizing introduction, Brooks describes herself as someone “who grew up making regular pilgrimages to the now-defunct Tower Records and loitering at the magazine rack reading rock rags” (34). Brooks’s palpably passionate approach to her research objectives is evidenced by the breadth of historical knowledge she draws on to craft the “first extensive archival interrogation” of the “musicking” of “women who have been overlooked or underappreciated, misread and sometimes lazily mythologized, underestimated and sometimes entirely disregarded, and–above all else–perpetually undertheorized by generations of critics for much of the last one hundred years” (2). While this counter-history cannot be told without acknowledging the hegemonic structures that give acclaim [End Page 112] to the (mostly) white male critics while simultaneously silencing the paramount cultural contributions of Black women, Brooks makes it unmistakably clear that Liner Notes for the Revolution is not about these critics. It is a story about the “remarkable sisters who have both made and have been thinking and writing about Black women’s music for over a century” (2). Brooks argues that these women are the culture makers “who often labor right before our very eyes and ears without our recognition of the magnitude of their import” (2). Liner Notes for the Revolution builds upon a myriad of canonical Black feminist scholars and theorists such as Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Kara Keeling, Said-iya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe. However, Brooks also gives space to lesser-known individuals whose voices often exist on a lower frequency: the women who have been trivialized and minimized but who push the boundaries of musical experimentation and invention to produce daring expressions of Black womanhood. For example, Liner Notes for the Revolution beautifully engages with Jackie Kay’s use of critical speculation in her memoir of Bessie Smith, Bessie, to explore the revolution of Black feminist speculative art. Further, Brooks builds on the contributions toward Black music criticism by the early twentieth-century Black novelist Pauline Hopkins, who Brooks asserts is the “progenitor or style and theory about Black women and modern sound” (67). Brooks’s thoughtfulness and impassioned approach to these topics are further exemplified through the structure of the text. The composition of Liner Notes for the Revolution is inspired by that of the vinyl record. In the introduction Brooks explains how musicians throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s created liner notes in the space lining their record sleeves. Brooks proposes broadening our traditional understanding of this “now nearly dying form” of writing (7) to give access to the voices of women and, more specifically, women of color. Therefore, Brooks establishes a new connotation of “liner notes” by compiling, piecing together, and reconstructing the work of women artists and critics who, as she explains throughout the duration of this book, revolutionized popular music. Just like a long-playing record, Liner Notes for the Revolution is composed of two parts: an A side and a B side. While the A sides of records often consisted of tracks that were predicted to be commercial hits...