Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

232 Pages·2022·2.081 MB·English

by  Mark Anthony Neal

Black Ephemera
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
Black Ephemera
Te Crisis and Challenge
of the Musical Archive
Mark Anthony Neal
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N NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2022 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the au-
thor nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed
since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Neal, Mark Anthony, author.
Title: Black ephemera : the crisis and challenge of the musical archive / Mark Anthony Neal
Description: New York : New York University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
.d Identifers: LCCN 2021027741 | ISBN 9781479806881 (hardback) | ISBN 9781479806904
e
vre (paperback) | ISBN 9781479806911 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479806935 (ebook other)
se Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Music—History and criticism. | Popular music—
r sth United States—History and criticism. | Sound recording industry—United States. |
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
Contents
Introduction: The Crisis and the Challenge of the Archive 1
1. Love in the Stax: Death, Loss, and Resurrection in
Post-K ing Memphis 11
2. “I Got the Blues of a Fallen Teardrop”: Erasure, Trauma,
and a Sonic Archive of Black Women 39
3. “Promise That You Will [Tweet] about Me”: Black Death
in the Digital Era 75
4. “I’ll Be a Bridge”: Black Interiority, Black Invention, and
the American Songbook 105
5. Decamping Wakanda: The Archive as Maroon 144
Coda: Writing and Living with Black Ephemera 185
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kroY About the Author 225
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
Introduction
The Crisis and the Challenge of the Archive
I was thirteen years old when my mother gave me my first boom box, as
a Christmas gift. It was relatively small in comparison to the one Radio
Raheem carried around in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. As with
Radio Raheem, though, the boom box— as well as the Walkman that
would replace it a few years later— offered me the opportunity to carry
my music with me. Indeed, one of the stories I heard frequently about
my father was that, as a teenager, he went nowhere without his transis-
tor radio. I am my father’s son. The boom box’s best feature by far was
that it allowed me to record programs from my favorite New York City
radio stations, WABC-A M and WCBS-F M. In the years before I had the
money to start collecting music, or the confidence to begin siphoning
from my father’s rather formidable collection, those over- the- air radio
recordings constituted an archive of my musical tastes— even with the
voices of Harry Harrison, Dan Ingram, or Chuck Leonard tagged on to
the intros of so many of the songs.
When I had my frst part-t ime job as a teen, I devoted more than half
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r sth Records on 4th and Broadway and J&R Music World, and Bondy’s Re-
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.sse collecting vinyl but crafing and curating pause-b utton mixtapes. For
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vinU that went into constructing these sonic representations of my passions,
kroY desires, and moods. Like deejays who worked for months on the mixes
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
2 | Introduction
tion of songs thrown together randomly or sequenced by some record
company executive, they represented attempts at meaning- making that
surpassed the intent of the artists or their producers and distributors.
What I didn’t understand as well at the time is that, in making those
mixtapes, I was also functioning as an archivist, as much of my own
taste as of the transition from analog to digital.
I still have many of those tapes, though I rarely listen to any of them
anymore, if only because car manufacturers no longer equip new ve-
hicles with cassette players. Te emergence of both handheld digital
devices that can store thousands of sound recordings— my iPod Clas-
sic once held more than sixteen thousand songs—a nd, more recently,
of music streaming platforms, has radically transformed my relation-
ship to my sonic archive. Instead of dutifully “crate- digging,” as early
hip-h op producers and deejays referred to the act of locating obscure
vinyl source material, or rifing the cut- out rack at a record store to fnd
that one track to complete my mixtape, I can retrieve material almost
instantly. I can still remember the look on my late father’s face when I
showed him my frst iPod and explained that there was music on it. For a
man who could remember listening to 78s, and who ignored the 8-t rack
and cassette revolutions, maintaining his commitment to his beloved 33
1/3s, it became a challenge maintaining a connection to the sonic world.
For the multibillion-d ollar music industry, the question is simply how
to build a better delivery system to consumers. For example, hip- hop artist
and entrepreneur Shawn Carter (Jay- Z) and his Roc- Nation label signed
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.sse its ofcial release. Indeed, the innovative nature of the deal forced the Re-
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vinU toring of gold and platinum sales, since those one million Galaxy owners
kroY didn’t actually choose to purchase Magna Carta Holy Grail.1
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.
Introduction | 3
data”— is unprecedented. Te fact that we can, with relative ease, access
earlier iterations of Black visual forms like Bert Williams’s 1916 silent
flm short A Natural Born Gambler, or any number of Josephine Baker
performances from the 1920s (an archive that Beyonce Knowles Carter
is quite familiar with) via YouTube, for example, has transformed what
it means for scholars to teach and research Blackness in the digital age.
While I celebrate the new availability of these archives of Blackness and
have contributed to them myself, I am ambivalent when it comes to the
question of who holds the responsibility for curating them. Te foot-
prints of those who lef archival vestiges of their fugitivity, like Maroons
feeing plantations, serve as vital lifelines of freedom and survival for
those whom the archives have been obscured and distorted. In addition
to logical and theoretical concerns around intellectual property— can
there be ownership of a historical commons of Blackness, for example?—
old- fashioned citation practices apply less in the more amorphous digi-
tal realm, particularly with regard to Blackness.
Before I settled on the working title for this project, Black Ephemera,
I consistently worded the subtitle as the “crisis” or “challenge” of the
archive. In many ways both are accurate: what I might call the crisis
of the archive responds to the general state of Black cultural criticism
today. In becoming more available to the general public—a s opposed
to resources such as Negro Digest, its successor Black World, Libera-
tor Magazine, or the frst decade of Essence, which are more difcult
to locate—B lack cultural criticism has become defned, in part, by the
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.sse criticism renders the archive disposable, truncated, and in many ways
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vinU can access Black culture without bearing responsibility for its care and
kroY sustenance. Tis proves a challenge to the Black cultural critic invested
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Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera : The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, New York University Press, 2022.