We live in a time of crisis, in an age of calculated cruelty and unapologetic abandonment of the shunned, the silenced, the suppressed, and the segregated. Times like these can make scholars ask exactly what is the value of the articles we write and the books we publish, the classes we teach, and the awards and honors that may be bestowed upon us? Is it enough to write ever more eloquent or ever more indignant descriptions of other people’s suffering while the suffering continues unabated? Do we sit back and watch as things fall apart? Do we scramble to a site that we hope will be a private refuge? Or do we face up to the challenges and demands of history and hear the cries of the excluded and respond to them?

The folklorists and ethnomusicologists whose essays grace Black Lives Matter and Music confront the crises of our time directly. They draw their research objects and derive their research questions from the new archives, imaginaries, epistemologies, and ontologies thrown forth by the Movement for Black Lives that emerged in response to vigilante and police killings of unarmed blacks. True to their training in applied folklore and ethnomusicology, they approach this present historical conjuncture locally and personally by studying forms of expressive culture that resonate with the new social charter envisioned and enacted by masses in motion in the streets. The practices and artifacts of expressive culture they examine are not simple escapes from the hard facts and harsh realities of racial subordination, but rather are activities through which people express what has been done to them and what they wish to do in response. They identify inside black music culture and folkways repositories of collective memory, sites of moral and political instruction, and mechanisms for calling communities into being through performance.

The authors range widely for their research objects, which encompass the songs and stories created by University of Missouri students in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014; teaching about racial inequality at Indiana University through a hip hop music curriculum; and how car customizing and street parades in Houston, go-go music performance and reception in Washington, D.C., and techno and house music in Detroit register particular dimensions of black identity and aspiration at this dire moment in history. Yet these seemingly disparate research objects cohere clearly around a unified series of research questions about the ways in which black lives are lived at the crossroads of both official and alternative archives. The official archive of folklore and ethnomusicology has often constructed black identity through a condescending colonial gaze, yet as the essays authored by Stephanie Shonekan and Fernando Orejuela demonstrate, that is all the more reason to pluralize and democratize the field. They make it clear that their students at the University of Missouri and Indiana University are not blank slates: black students use music as an alternative archive that emboldens and empowers them, and students of all races are hungry for scholarly, curricular, and pedagogical interventions that address the realities of racial subordination and the possibilities of anti-racist practice. Similarly, while commercial culture has long had a predatory relationship to the organic cultural practices of black communities, creative appropriation and repurposing of commercially sold products by black people has often turned the passive processes of consumption into active forms of creation. This dynamic is aired in generative form in this book in splendidly focused chapters by Langston Collin Wilkins on the working class vernacular SLAB car culture in Houston, by Denise Dalphond on sonic black politics in Detroit, and by Alison Martin on go-go music in Washington, D.C. as a learned form of flexibility resisting surveillance, tracking, and gentrification.

Social movements shake up social life. They have reverberations and ramifications far beyond their original sites of enunciation. Emerging archives often find material expression in cultural signs, symbols, practices, and processes before they take on political form. Political challenges to deeply entrenched social hierarchies can make old songs, slogans, and stories suddenly seem obsolete. Black Lives Matter and Music presents reports on these processes from the front lines through dispatches about cultural changes still in progress. It demonstrates how people resisting unlivable destinies go into battle with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them.

As a series of dispatches from the field written in the midst of a vortex of rapid and chaotic social change, Black Lives Matter and Music is necessarily partial, perspectival, interested, and episodic. Its achievements open the door for subsequent works that might focus on the important role that local hip hop cultures played in arming demonstrators in Ferguson with skills for organizing and publicizing events, managing sound systems, and creating evocative and memorable phrases. Future scholarship might also want to focus on the ways in which black musical cultures function as storehouses of knowledge and inspiration suited for countering the threats of figurative social and actual bodily death with an irrepressible commitment to a rich and collective social life. When such studies appear, they will owe a debt to Black Lives Matter and Music. It is a book for our time that is right on time.

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[Review length: 862 words • Review posted on December 12, 2018]