Gospel songs traditionally feature lyrics that glorify God. However, there is music by contemporary gospel artists that addresses pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and pornography. The fact that these topics are being lyrically confronted by some of the genre's most recognized performers invites exploration into the content, purpose, and impact of the songs.

This article places these lyrics into categories: those that are testimonial narratives about the spiritual deliverance the singer has received after transgressing sexual mores of the Black Church and those that encourage the avoidance of specific sexual practices. These songs contribute to gospel music on several levels, providing a platform through which the artists can testify of their sexual journeys while giving listeners a format through which they can find direction regarding sexual steps, missteps, and spiritual realignment.

The article delineates the changes within US culture that led to less silence about sex and support for the LGBTQIA+ community from some within the Black Church. The major analysis involves the lyrics, the differences in what men and women tend to address, and the fact that despite breaking new ground, in virtually every instance, they reflect traditional Biblical interpretations.

“Oprys” are public musicking events found in Appalachia and beyond. They facilitate regular embodied sociality between strangers and friends in a region often characterized by the social fallout of neoliberal economic trends. Drawing on ethnographic research in Tennessee and elsewhere, I show that oprys constitute rural working-class public space where participants negotiate a precarious cultural order through the affordances of live country music performance. But political discourse in these spaces is articulated primarily through embodied, performative, and aesthetic realms which are not captured in a delimited and classed notion of discourse as primarily text or talk. As such, oprys offer a corrective to our understanding of what counts as discursive contestation. I foreground two particular cultural imperatives that structure oprys: participation and accommodation. These imperatives produce a socio-cultural event that characteristically refuses the monetization of space and privileges dialogic sociality over the production of artistic sound. Approaching oprys through the frame of “counterpublic” reveals a different way of imagining public space, public music making and sociality, and the terrain of political discourse.

Between 1988 and 1991, the rap album took flight. Under the dual impetus of innovations in sampling, and of the album form itself, an explosion of youthful creativity ensured the rap album, mined for more self-consciously artistic potential, emerged as a multi-layered artform that revealed a similarly multi-layered Black genius. For innovators like the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Son of Bazerk), Prince Paul (De La Soul) and others, the rap album was now often “more” than just a rap album. It could at once take on the characteristics of a radio show, a simulated game show, a talking comic book, a picaresque novel, an Afrofuturist vaudeville, or a visit to the movies—and, through any of these, invoke a multitude of stories and critiques from marginalized young Black perspectives.

Drawing on a variety of ideas from Black American cultural studies, particularly those focused on creative transformation as a form of transcendence, this article analyzes the multi-layered creativity of one of this period's most unsung, yet ultimately important albums: KMD's showpiece of sampling transformation and satiric narrative wit, Mr. Hood. Best known as the album that initiated the career of the MC/producer later known as MF DOOM (arguably the most revered figure in underground rap post-1999), it also initiated his surreal approach to sampling non-musical material from sources in popular culture and envisagement of rap as a kind of modern-day folklore. Attempting to find a new way of working across the layers of the rap album—the magical interplay of mood, beat, references, verbal samples, storytelling, etc.—the article argues that such sample-based flights of the imagination represent a continuation of the Afro-magical tradition Theophus Smith calls Conjuring Culture.

“How can America import ‘American’ jazz?,” asked the music editor of Good Housekeeping, George Marek, in 1956. Marek answered, “Singers, particularly if they are very female, give the home-grown music the allure of a foreign aura.” Taking these statements as a starting point, this article gives an account of the US careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente. Gender, class, and ethnicity were key elements in the US construction of Babs's and Valente's musical personae, which was especially heard in their vocality, with an emphasis on high-pitched vocal stylings, melismas, and “white” timbres to signify gender and European exoticism. The US careers of Babs and Valente show us that musical Americanness or Europeanness are not created separately on either side of the Atlantic. Their European identities were not created in Europe and then imported to the United States but were created in the process of transmission into the United States. Importantly, the article argues that race and ethnicity were used by musicians, critics, and listeners to position Babs and Valente as Europeans. Their whiteness was transposed in a US context and their stories tell us as much about US ideologies of whiteness as it does about European ethnicities.

In a recent virtual talk at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, music theorist Philip Ewell considered how music educators and researchers might begin to “undo the exclusionist framework of our contemporary music academy.” Ewell's enterprise resonated with me not only as one who teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, history, performance, and ear training, but also as an instructor in a recently adopted Popular Music Studies program at the City College of New York (CCNY). The CCNY music department's shift in focus from a mostly white, mostly male, classical-based curriculum towards a more diverse and polystylistic repertory of popular music chips away at the exclusionist framework to which Ewell refers.

I was formally introduced to antiracist pedagogy in the spring of 2016, several months before I traveled for the first time to the Rosedale Freedom Project (RFP) in Rosedale, Mississippi, to teach a course on music and politics to high school students. Oft romanticized as the place where blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, Rosedale is a small town in the Delta region. The majority of its population is Black, and consistently, more than half of this population has lived below the poverty line. The RFP seeks to help send its students, the majority of whom are Black and profoundly underserved by the state of Mississippi, to and through college. In preparation for the summer (and at the request of the director of the RFP), I read a number of foundational texts on antiracism and critical pedagogy including Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), and Beverly Daniel Tatum's “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (1997). As a white woman with no prior experience in Mississippi, I also read Nan Elizabeth Woodruff's history of the Delta region, American Congo: The African American Struggle in the Delta (2003) and Jesmyn Ward's novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008), among other texts, and reflected on how to design a course that would further the RFP's mission of “supporting the Mississippi Delta's young leaders in the development of critical consciousness and the practice of justice.”

One moment from the much-discussed 2017 curriculum reform in the Music Department at Harvard University has stuck with me and transformed the way I approach teaching music in higher education. In one of the meetings leading up to the revision, graduate students in the department led an activity in which attendees—who included undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty alike—got into small groups and discussed the relative merits of three hypothetical models for the new undergraduate curriculum. Each of the models involved decentering to some extent the existing curriculum's emphasis on the history of Western European music and dominant music theoretical approaches to it. After a short while, we all gathered back together and one person from each group shared a bit about what had transpired. From the circle of desks nearest the door, an undergraduate student rose to speak and expressed enthusiasm for a broadening of curricular coverages. But, they said, their group also had some reservations about jettisoning the overall focus on Western European concert music altogether. “We still need to learn about our history,” they said, while a faculty member nodded behind them.

In the teaching of history, oversimplification is, perhaps, unavoidable. In certain cases, however, that oversimplification can be deadly. There are some lessons that are too complex, some stories that are too nuanced, to be reduced in such a way. By their contours and particularities, they resist easy digestion. In the spirit of this particularity, my contribution to the colloquy is specific, but hopefully applicable to contexts beyond its specificity: I argue that the US Black Freedom Movement (or civil rights movement) and its music is a story that must be taught in all its complexity, for oversimplifying it does concrete harm to the ongoing struggle against white supremacy in the present. Teaching the US Black Freedom Movement and its music is also vital if we hope to enable our students to be forces of understanding, healing, and justice in the world, and should be an integral component of any undergraduate music curriculum that hopes to be antiracist.