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September 10, 2017  

“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature

For the full intro to the forum by Michelle Habell-Pallan, click here.  For the first installment by Yessica Garcia Hernandez click here.  For the second post by Susana Sepulveda click here.

The forum’s inspiring research by scholars/practioners Wanda Alarcón, Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Marlen Rios-Hernandez, Susana Sepulveda, and Iris C. Viveros Avendaño, understands music in its local, translocal and transnational context; and insists upon open new scholarly imaginaries. . .

Current times require us to bridge intersectional, decolonial, and gender analysis.  Music, and our relationship to it, has much to reveal about how power operates within a context of inequality.   And it will teach us how to get through this moment. –MHP

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A new generation of Chicana authors are writing about the 1980s. An ‘80s kid myself, I recognize the decade’s telling details—the styles and fashions, the cityscapes and geo-politics, and especially the sounds and the music.  Reading Chicana literature through the soundscape of the 80s is exciting to me as a listener and it reveals how listening becomes a critical tool for remembering.  Through the literary soundscapes created by a new generation of Chicana authors such as Estella Gonzalez, Verónica Reyes, and Raquel Gutiérrez, the 1980s becomes an important site for hearing new Chicana voices, stories, histories, representations, in particular of Chicana lesbians.

Reading across Gonzalez’s short story, “Chola Salvation,” Reyes’s Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives; and Gutiérrez’s play, “The Barber of East L.A,” this post activates the concept of the “flashback” to frame the 1980s as a musical decade important for exploring Chicana cultural imaginaries beyond its ten years. In Gonzalez’s “Chola Salvation,” for example, Frida Kahlo and La Virgen de Guadalupe appear dressed as East Los cholas speaking Pachuca caló and dispensing valuable advice to a teen girl in danger.  The language of taboo and criminality is transformed in their speech and a new decolonial feminist poetics can be heard.  In Reyes’s Chopper! Chopper!, Chicana lesbians – malfloras, marimachas, jotas, y butch dykes – strut down Whittier Boulevard, fight for their barrio, take over open mic night and incite a joyous “Panocha Power” riot, and make out at the movies with their femme girlfriends. Gutiérrez’’s “Barber of East L.A” recovers forgotten butch Chicana histories in the epic tale of a character called Chonch Fonseca, inspired by Nancy Valverde, the original barber of East Los Angeles.  A carefully curated soundtrack amplifies her particular form of butch masculinity. These decolonial feminist ‘80s narratives signal a break from 1960s and ‘70s representations of Chicanas/os and introduce new aesthetics and Chicana/x poetics for reading and hearing Chicanas in literature, putting East L.A. on the literary map.

East LA Valley, 2010, by Flickr User James (CC BY 2.0)

Gonzalez, Reyes, and Gutiérrez’s work also use innovative sonic methods to demonstrate themes of feminist of color coalition and solidarity and represent major characters whose desires and actions transgress normative gender and sexuality. All three contain so many mentions of music that operate beyond established notions of intertextuality, referencing oldies, boleros, and alternative 80s music as a soundtrack that actually transform these works into unexpected sonic archives.  Through the 80s soundscapes that music activates, these authors’ work shifts established historical contexts for reading and listening:  there was a time before punk, and after punk, and this temporality sounds in Chicana literature.

Alice Bag in The Decline of Western Civilization (1981). Still by Jennifer Stoever

If the classic documentary film The Decline of Western Civilization by Penelope Spheeris was meant to give coverage to the Los Angeles neglected by mainstream music journalists, it also performs an important omission that leaves Chicano viewers searching for a mere glimpse of “a few brown Mexican faces,” as Reyes writes in her poem “Torcidaness.”  Among the bands featured–most male fronted–the film captures an electric performance by Chicana punk singer Alice Bag, née Alicia Armendariz.  In contrast to the other musicians in jeans, bare torsos, and, combat boots, Bag is visually stunning and glamorous.  She dressed in a fitted pink dress reminiscent of the 1940s pachuca style; she wears white pointed toe pumps, her hair is short and dark, her eye and lip makeup is strong and impeccable. In the four brief minutes the band is on camera Bag sings in a commandingly deep voice, slowly growling out the words to the song “Gluttony” and before the tempo picks up speed, she lets out a long visceral yell on the “y” that is high pitched, powerful, and thoroughly punk. It’s a superb performance, yet Bag is not interviewed in this film.

Reyes’s poem draws attention to that omission as the narrator searches for a mere glimpse of  “a few brown Mexican faces.”  This speaks to the longing and the difficulty for Chicanas to see themselves reflected in the very same spaces that offer the possibility of belonging.  Over thirty years since the film, Bag is now experiencing a surge in her career and has sparked renewed interest in histories of Chicanas in punk.  She has written two books including the memoir: Violence Girl:  From East L.A. Rage to L.A. Stage – A Chicana Punk Story (2011) and is sought out for speaking engagements on university campuses.  Bag is able to tell her story now through writing, something a film dedicated to documenting punk music was not able to do.  In retrospect, thirty-five years later, Bag’s current visibility emphasizes the further marginalization of Chicanas in punk the film produces by silencing her speaking voice against the audible power of her singing voice.  Recovering Chicana histories in music may not happen through film, I propose that it is happening in the soundscapes of new Chicana literature.  Importantly, new characters emerge and representations that are minor, marginalized, or non-existent in the dominant literary landscape of Aztlán are rendered legibly and audibly.

Barber of East LA-era Butchlális de Panochtítlan, (l-r) Claudia Rodriguez, Mari Garcia, Raquel Gutiérrez, Image by Hector Silva

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Theorizing the flashback in Chicana literature raises new questions about temporality that invite and innovate ways to trace the social through aesthetics, politics, music, sound, place and memory. Is flashback 80s night at the local dance club or 80s hour on the radio always retrospective? Also, who do we envision in the sonic and cultural imaginary of “the 80s”?  As a dominant population in Los Angeles and California, it is outrageous to presume that Chicanas/os or Mexican-Americans were not a significant part of alternative music scenes in Los Angeles.  This post turns up the volume on the ’80s soundscapes of Chicana literature via Verónica Reyes’s poem “Torcidaness: Tortillas and Me,” to argue that one cannot nostalgically remember the 80s in a flashback radio hour or 80s night at the club and forget East L.A.

“Torcidaness” (Twistedness) speaks in an intimate voice homegirl-to-homegirl: “Tú sabes, homes how it is in—el barrio.” Through this address the narrator describes the sense of knowing herself as different and “a little off to the side on the edge” much like a hand formed tortilla.  In the opening stanza, Reyes introduces the metaphor for queerness that runs through the poem in the image of the homemade corn tortilla, “crooked, lopsided and torcida.” Part of Reyes’s queer aesthetics prefers a slightly imperfect shape to her metaphorical tortillas rather than one perfectly “round and curved like a pelota.”  As a tongue-in-cheek stand-in for Mexicanness, the narrator privileges the homemade quality of “torcidaness” versus a perfect uniformity to her queerness.

homemade corn tortillas, image by flikr user hnau, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Importantly, the narrator locates her queer story that begins in childhood as “a little chamaca” in the Mexican barrios of East Los Angeles. “Torcidaness” names the cross streets to an old corner store hangout and brings East L.A. more into relief:

Back then on Sydney Drive and Floral in Belvedere District

Oscar’s store at the esquina near the alley was the place to be

We’d hang out and play:  Centipede  Asteroids  Pac Man

or Ms. Pac Man (Oh yeah, like she really needed a man)

and even Galaga… Can you hear it? Tu, tu, tu… (very Mexican ?que no?)

Tú, tú, tú (Can you hear Eydie Gorme? Oh how so East L.A.) Tú, tú, tú…”

Coming at you … faster faster—Oh, shit. Blast! You’re dead (22).

This aurally rich stanza rings with the names of classic video games of the early 1980s.  Reyes reminds us that video games are not strictly visual, they’re characterized by distinct noises, quirky blips and beeps, and catchy “chiptunes,” electronic synthesizer songs recorded on 8-bit sound chips.  The speaker riffs off the playful noises in the space game Galaga, asking the reader to remember it through sound:  “Can you hear it?” Capturing the shooting sounds of the game in the percussive phrase, “tú, tú, tú” prompts a bilingual homophonic listening that translates “tú” into “you.”  The phrase is only a brief quote, a sample you could say, and the poem seems to argue that you’d have to be a homegirl to know where it comes from.  The full verse of its source goes like this:  “Me importas tú, y tú, y tú / y solamente tú / Me importas tú, y tú, y tú / y nadie mas que tú” as sung by the American singer Eydie Gorme with the Trio Los Panchos in their 1964 recording of “Piel Canela.”

To some extent the poem is not overly concerned with offering full translations, linguistic or cultural, but the reader is invited to corporeally join in the game of “Name That Tune.”  The assumption is that Gorme’s Spanish language recordings of boleros with Los Panchos are important to many U.S. Mexicans and they remain meaningful across generations.  And importantly, this “flashback” moment is not an anachronistic reference, rather it says something about the enduring status of boleros and the musical knowledge expected of a homegirl.  Reyes’s temporal juxtaposition of the electronic sounds of the video game with the Spanish language sounds of a classic Mexican love song—and their easy, everyday coexistence in a Chicana’s soundscape–is part of what the narrator means by, “Oh how so East L.A.”

As a map, this poem locates the ’80s in part through plentiful references to the new electronic toys that became immensely popular in the US, yet Reyes does not fetishize the technology nor does she abstract Mexican experiences from these innovations as the American popular imaginary does all too often.  Rather, she situates the experience of playing these new toys in a corner neighborhood store among other Mexican kids. The deft English-Spanish code switching audible in lines such as, “Oscar’s store at the esquina near the alley was the place to be,” is also part of the poem’s grammatically resistant bilingual soundscape.  In these ways the poem makes claims about belonging and puts pressure on how we remember.  There is danger in remembering only the game as a nostalgic collective memory and not the gamers themselves.

Galaga High Scores, image by Jenny Stoever

As a soundtrack, Reyes’s poem remembers the 80s through extensive references to the alternative rock music and androgynous and flamboyant artists of the MTV generation.  This musical lineage becomes the soundtrack to the queer story in the poem.  Through the music, the narrator produces a temporally complex “flashback” where queer connections, generational turf marking, and Mexicanness all come together.

No more pinball shit for us. That was 1970-something mierda

We were the generation of Atari—the beginning of digital games (22)

[. . .]

This was Siouxsie and the Banshees’ era with deep black mascara

The gothic singer who hung out with Robert Smith and Morrissey

The Smiths who dominated airwaves of Mexican Impala cars (23)

In these lines the narrator shows no nostalgia for the 1970s and boasts intense pride for all things new ushered in with the new decade. She brags about a new generation defined by new cultural icons like video games and synthesizer driven music. And while this music’s sound discernibly breaks from the 70s, its alternative sensibility isn’t just about sound, it’s about a look where “deep black mascara” and dark “goth” aesthetics – for girls and boys – are all the rage and help fans find each other.  Simply dropping a band’s or artist’s name like “Siouxsie” or “Morrissey” or quoting part of a song conjures entire musical genres, bringing into relief a new kind of gender ambiguity and queer visibility that flourished in the 1980s.  The poem is dotted with names like Boy George, Cyndi Lauper, Wham!, Elvis Costello, X, Pretenders, all musicians one might hear now during a “flashback 80s” radio hour radio or club theme night.

Sandy and Siouxsie, 2007, Shizu Saldamando, Los Angeles.  Courtesy of the artist.  See Shizu’s work through January 8, 2018 at the Pacific Standard Time show “My Barrio: Emigdio Vasquez and Chicana/o Identity in Orange County” at Chapman University.

The complex sense of time-space of the “flashback” as a theoretical concept is part of what links seemingly discrete flashback events: club nights, radio hours, musical intertexts.  What is new about the “flashback” in this context is the unexpected site (literature) and literature’s unexpected Chicana subjects who frame readers’ listenings.  Reyes’s poem represents and reminds me that the reason I go to dance clubs has always been for the love of music, all music, a feeling shared passionately among my stylish and musically eclectic friends (read more in my SO! post “New Wave Saved My Life.”).  The last 80s night I went to was earlier this summer at Club Elysium in Austin, Texas, with my partner Cindy and our friend Max, who says he loves it because everyone there is his age – and for the love of new wave and fashion!  The DJ played requests all night which made some of the transitions unexpected.  But there we were, three Chicanos, less than ten years apart in age, enjoying a soundscape any 80s kid – from SoCal or Texas — would be proud of.  When I got home I added four new songs we heard and danced to that night to my oldest Spotify list titled, “Before I Forget the 80s.” Although the purpose of this list is to stretch my memory of the music as a living pulsing archive, it also recovers the memory of this great night out with friends that extends beyond the physical dance floor.

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Spotify Playlist for “Torcidaness” by Wanda Alarcon

Yet, in “Torcidaness,” remembering this music is mediated by the Chicana lesbian storyteller’s perspective who keenly tunes into these sounds and signs of alternative music and gender from East Los Angeles.  The line, “The Smiths who dominated airwaves of Mexican Impala cars,” has implications that she was not alone in these queer listenings, as Reyes casually juxtaposes the image of lowrider car culture associated with Chicano hypermasculinity with the ambiguous sexuality of the Manchester based band’s enigmatic singer, Morrissey.  Morrissey and lead guitarist Johnny Marr captivated generations of music listeners with their bold guitar driven sound, infectious melodies, and neo-Wildean homoerotic lyrics in the albums The Smiths (1983), Meat is Murder (1985), and The Queen is Dead (1986).

Recalling the song, “This Charming Man” against the poem’s reference to an Impala lowrider complicates how I hear the lyric: “Why pamper life’s complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?” In a flash(back), the gap between the UK and East L.A. is somehow bridged in this queer musical mediation echoing what Karen Tongson calls “remote intimacies across time.”  Although the poem reads like a celebration, there is a critique here in lines such as these.  Chicanos and people of color are never at the forefront of who is imagined to be “alternative” in histories of alternative rock music.  A vexing exception can be found in the Morrissey fandom.  Mozlandia, Melissa Mora Hidalgo’s study in “transcultural fandom” is partly a response to troubling misrepresentations of Chicano fans of Morrissey.  In the important work of Chicana representation where audibility is as needed as visibility, this poem not only remembers but it documents queer Chicana/o presence in these alternative 80s music scenes.

“Embrace Series: Morrissey Night” by Shizu Saldamando, LA 2009, Ballpoint pen on fabric, 72 x 120 inches. Image courtesy of the artist. See Shizu’s work at the LA Japanese American National Museum’s Transpacific Borderlands show through 25 February 2018.

By poem’s end, “torcidaness,” a Spanglish term, comes to mean lesbian, working class, and Chicana of the eighties generation all at once.  Tuning into the poem’s soundscape enables the possibility of hearing all of these queer meanings simultaneously as well as the possibility of hearing Aztlán, vis-a-vis Eydie Gorme, in a video game.  In these ways, Verónica Reyes’s sonically rich poem renders East Los Angeles and the 1980s as an important nexus for recovering Chicana histories and Chicana lesbian representation.

Ultimately “Torcidaness and Me” captures the joy and the struggle of queer Chicana belonging in this new narrative of what Cherrie Moraga calls, “Queer Aztlán.”  Reyes writes, “Yep, this was the eighties and I was learning my crookedness.” At the same time, the compatibility of the term “queer” to tell Chicana stories is challenged by the presence of alternative ways to indicate ambiguity of gender and sexuality.  In this poem, “crookedness,” “torcidaness,” “my torcida days to come,” and “marimacha” all convey “queerness” in forms more audible and meaningful to a homegirl from East L.A.  If there is a sound to gender—to marimachas, malfloras, jotas, butches/femmes, what does using the word “queer” do to how we hear them?   Some meanings are lost in translation, yet I don’t believe that translation should always be the goal.

Theorizing the concept of the flashback in the soundscapes of this generation of Chicana authors rejects the abstract and diffuse notion of 80s themed events deployed in mainstream American culture and resists the erasure of Chicanos and Latinos in the ways we remember this important musical decade.   The stakes involved in representing and remembering such histories are high.  Yet Chicana histories, experiences, sexualities, subjectivities, intimacies, language, style, desires cannot be understood without a deep recognition of Chicana lesbians and butch/femme as subjects of literature and the communities we live in.  As part of a decolonial feminist listening praxis, the flashback becomes an important tool linking listening  with remembering as more diverse Chicana worlds emerge.

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Featured Image: Shizu Saldamando’s Pee Chee LA 2004, courtesy of the artist.  See Shizu’s work at the LA Pacific Standard Time Show Día de los Muertos: A Cultural Legacy, Past, Present & Future at  Self Help Graphics opening September 17th, 2018.

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Wanda Alarcón is a lecturer in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a recipient of the Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2016 –2017). She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from UC Berkeley in 2016, and earned an M.A. in English & American Literature from Binghamton University.  Her research interests lie at the intersections of decolonial feminism, sound studies, popular music, eighties studies, and Chicana/o and Latinx cultural studies. Her interdisciplinary research theorizes “listening” as a decolonial feminist praxis with which to remember alternate histories of Chicana/o belonging within and out of national limits.  In particular, her research argues that queer Chicana/x and Latina/x sonics become more audible in the soundscapes of Greater Mexico.  At home Wanda plays piano almost every day, tinkers with bass guitar, and enjoys singing in her car.  She listens to The Style Council and The Libertines in equal measure and is active on Spotify where she makes playlists for work, play, and sharing with friends.  

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tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Listening to Punk’s Spirit in its Pre-, Proto- and Post- Formations  – Yetta Howard

Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcon

If La Llorona Was a Punk Rocker: Detonguing The Off-Key Caos and Screams of Alice Bag--Marlén Rios

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September 4, 2017  

Hardcore as “Home”: An Etymology of CORE through Chicana Punk Sound

For the full intro to the forum by Michelle Habell-Pallan, click here.  For the first installment by Yessica Garcia Hernandez click here.

The forum’s inspiring research by scholars/practioners Wanda Alarcón, Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Marlen Rios-Hernandez, Susana Sepulveda, and Iris C. Viveros Avendaño, understands music in its local, translocal and transnational context; and insists upon open new scholarly imaginaries. . .

Current times require us to bridge intersectional, decolonial, and gender analysis.  Music, and our relationship to it, has much to reveal about how power operates within a context of inequality.   And it will teach us how to get through this moment. –MHP

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Chicana punk is a Chicana feminist punk rock subculture within a subculture and a countercultural formation. Although ‘Chicana’ identity is typically thought of as a politicized Mexican-American woman shaped by Chicana/o politics, I recognize that there are varying participants that constitute this subculture, its scenes, and/or communities. Punk is in constant movement and formation, especially as its participants come in and out of the scene, contributing to and reshaping the subculture. The same can be said about Chicana punk.

ATRAKO live @ The Smell–by Susana Sepulveda

Chicana/o and Latina/o studies cultural theorist Michelle Habell-Pallán notes in Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture that punk is a “site of possibility” (150), a mode in which Chicanas and Latinas challenge the status quo and “disrupt fixed notions of Chicana identity framed by the dominant culture” (153). Thus, Chicana punk is constituted through different subjectivities, experiences, and imaginings (specifically Chicanisma, or Chicana feminist ideologies and consciousness formations rooted in the Chicana Feminist Movement) that continue to be pertinent for young women in punk today.

In this post, I explore an etymology of “core” and the relationship of this term to Chicanas and Latinas immersed in hardcore punk. I ask: How is “core” theorized as a conception of “home” within Chicana punk? Drawing from Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “making face, making soul” and the sound and performance practice of Los Angeles based Latina/o hardcore punk band ATRAKO, I frame core as home, while considering how a Chicana punk listening practice of hardcore emerges.

ATRAKO is Samahara (Vocals), Irvin (Guitar/vocals), Suzy (Bass), and Cindee (Drums). Although ATRAKO was made up of both Chicanas and non-Chicana Latina/os in 2012, their participation in Chicana punk spaces, events, and adoption of Chicana feminist ideologies help to constitute Chicana punk subcultures more broadly. ATRAKO illustrates this through their performance on Feburary 27, 2015 at Xicana Punk Night. This was to be one of their last shows before their split on July 5, 2015 at the Riot Grrrl Carnival annual musical fundraiser event held at The Smell, an all-ages-volunteers-run, do-it-yourself art and music space. Xicana punk night was a community fundraiser event for Nalgona Positivity Pride, “a Xicana-Brown [and] Indigenous project that focuses on intersectional body positivity, eating disorders awareness and cultural affirmation.” ATRAKO’s lyrics also address issues of gender, racial, and environmental violence; and resonate with Chicana feminist critiques. Moreover, they exemplify how Chicana subjectivities are reconfigured and ‘sounded out’ through hardcore.

Hardcore is a style of punk music and aesthetics that arose in the early 1980s in varying urban geographies including Southern and Northern California, Washington D.C. and New York City, with intensified musical characteristics that differ from the 1970s punk movement. Hardcore is characterized by its aggressive aesthetics typically depicted by its fast sonic tempos, short song lengths, and gritty confrontational vocals. Despite the queer Chicana/o influences on the sound of hardcore by punk artists such as Alice Bag and Kid Congo Powers, it has remained predominantly represented by white, heterosexual, masculine figures of middle class suburbia, epitomized by Keith Morris, Henry Rollins, and Ian MacKaye. But what happens when Chicanas and Latinas engage hardcore? By focusing on the relationships Chicanas and Latinas forge through hardcore, especially in relation to Chicana punk subcultural formations, I argue we can reconfigure hardcore narratives. It is also important to note that not all participants that engage Chicana punk necessarily identify as Chicanas. Yet non-Chicana/o identified Latina/os are entangled and implicated within Chicana punk subculture through their participation and co-production of Chicana punk spaces.

To theorize Chicanas’ and Latinas’ participation in hardcore, I consider an etymology of core–specifically its articulation as ‘heart’ and as ‘coring,’ that is, “the act of removing a core or of cutting from a central part.” These meanings help me to conceptualize core, and by extension, hardcore as home. As early hardcore punks began to distinguish themselves from 1970s punk, they formed new punk scenes, subjectivities, and sound. These new social formations offered new generations of punks another mode, or set of tools, to contest the status quo and articulate new social conditions, like for instance, Reaganism in the 1980s. But more than anything else, hardcore was the result of a new generation of punks creating a niche for themselves, that is, a “home,” within the broader punk movement. Thus, the formation of hardcore was an act of “coring” that produced a new site of belonging. I view these articulations of “core” further, alongside Anzaldúa’s framework and metaphor “making face, making soul” (i.e. making heart). This framework enables me to theorize hardcore as home in Chicana punk.

Xicana Punk Night Flyer– by Gloria Lucas, NPP

Making ‘core’

In Making Face/Making Soul, Anzaldúa writes, “‘making faces’ is my metaphor for constructing one’s identity” (xvi).  In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro, she extends this idea stating “The heart es un corazón con razón, with intelligence, passion, and purpose, a ‘mind-full’ heart with ears for listening, eyes for seeing, a mouth with tongue narrowing to a pen tip for speaking/writing” (153). Within Anzaldúa’s theorizations, “heart” is rendered a part of one’s conocimiento, a self-reflective awareness of how one is cultivating an identity and generating consciousness formations. But through this self-reflective process, one is also creating notions of home and belonging.

Through the notion of coring, self-reflective processes become about de-hearting, decentering and/or disrupting what is presumed to be foundational (i.e. what is central/core), in order to refashion. In other words, coring is a process of making anew. Hardcore demonstrates “coring” in its formation, as it emerged from the early punk movement yet reconfigured its notion of punk sound, style, and identity. In a way, punk ripped out its heart to start anew as hardcore. Similarly, Chicana punk has cored and reconfigured notions of punk and hardcore sound, style, and identity. For instance, ATRAKO offers a queer Chicana feminist representation that disavows dominant hardcore punk portrayals. They spit out lyrics in Spanish only, and use metaphorical language and visuals in their lyrics and album covers addressing gendered violence in relation to environmental abuse. Furthermore, while embodying hardcore’s “traditional” characteristics, ATRAKO dramatizes hardcore sound by performing a more melodic dissonance. The music compliments the lyrical narrations and arguably enacts a call-and-response to the sung lyrics posing its own sonic narration.

The song “Madre” (2014), which translates as “mother,” exemplfies this as the guitarist begins with a lamenting introductory verse, followed by thumping drums and a grito reminicent of a battle cry. In the first chorus Samahra blurts out:

ya es tiempo de entender

quien te dio la vida

es la muxer la encarnación

la esencia de la tierra

ya es tiempo de entender

quien te dio la vida

es la muxer quien tiene el poder. (Madre, 2014)

As Samahra is singing, the drums, guitar, and bass sound out a response to the chorus’s statements. This sonic accompaniment articulates a “coring” of hardcore music through the queer brown bodies animating this sonic experience, the exclusively Spanish lyrics and narrative, which centralize women and their relations to the natural world through the figure of mother, as well as a spiritual activism–what Anzaldúa called “a spirituality for social change” (323). In other words, the song presents all things that are not typically represented in American hardcore. ATRAKO tears up hardcore to make it anew and to speak to their experiences, politics, and identities, creating a “home” for themselves in hardcore.

In addition, Chicana punk reconfigures Chicana feminist politics, experiences, and subjectivities. Punk artists and bands such as ATRAKO articulate, or rather (re)articulate, Chicana feminist discourses through the platform of punk, and more specifically, hardcore. ATRAKO demonstrates a reconfiguration of Chicana feminisim through their sonic expression which shapes a listening practice of Chicana feminist theory and praxis through a “coring” of hardcore. As ATRAKO presents Chicana feminist discourse through non-traditional avenues and hardcore style, they bring visibility to Chicana feminist experiences and subjectivites within punk subcultures. Moreover, given the ethnic heterogeneity of the band, ATRAKO demonstrates how Chicana feminist politics is engaged by non-Chicana Latinas, particulatly punks, who help shape these politics just as much as they are impacted by them. ATRAKO’s hardcore sound reveals how Chicana and Latina punks engage and reconfigure Chicana feminist discourses, positing the political potentiality punk offers Chicana feminism. In considering the conceptual framework of making heart, or rather making ‘core,’ Chicana punk, as exemplified by ATRAKO, sounds out a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Additionally, these continuous processes of reconstruction in punk and more specifically Chicana punk, are made possible though the cultivation of practices and cultural productions of its active participants. For instance, ATRAKO’s sound stems from a variety of musical influences that might not necessarily be typically associated to or rendered Chicana or Chicana affiliated (such as metal, punk, and hardcore). Yet, their coring practices reconstruct hardcore as a Chicana genre. In addition, events such as Xicana Punk Night illustrate how Chicana punk subculture is constituted by varying participants who enact and identify with Chicana feminist politics in one way or another. ATRAKO’s participation at this show, as well as other non-Chicana Latina attendees, highlights how a Chicana punk space and genre is generated through a structure of feeling that extends across ethno-national identities. It might be suggested that the term “Latino punk” may best describe this structure of feeling; however, the fact that participants continue to specify the genre and spaces as “Chicana” or “Xicana” punk complicates such general descriptions.

Future Developments

The theoretical basis I have presented here is a stepping-stone for thinking about Chicana punk listening practices and what can be imagined through Chicana punk sound. Considering the etymology of “core” through the context of hardcore, I have argued that one way of imagining Chicana punk sound is through a reconfiguration and articulation of home. ATRAKO offers a new way to conceptualize how Chicana punk subculture and sound is constituted through varying Latina/o identities and non-Chicana subjectivities, and how it is also a site of home, belonging, and community for such participants, culminated through the act of listening. Listening is performative here, in the sense that it is a part of the “coring” process of hardcore, as Chicana feminist praxis is enacted through hardcore sound. The connection between “core” and listening practices in Chicana punk echoes a structure of feeling and political potentiality that emanates from the scene, music, and sound, exceeding their subcultural formations. Participants engage this structure of feeling, shaped by processes of making anew, that functions as a site of belonging that speaks to new Chicana subjectivities, politics, and experiences in hardcore.

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Featured Image: ATRAKO live–via https://atrakopunx.bandcamp.com

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Susana Sepulveda is a PhD Student in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her developing dissertation project engages Chicana feminist studies, cultural studies, subcultural studies, and sound studies. She focuses on consciousness and subject formations in Chicana punk subcultures, emphasizing the importance of punk for understanding Chicana identities, subjectivities, consciousness, politics, and representations. Susana’s research has received support from the Barnard Library, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) of Arizona, the Women Studies Advisory Council (WOSAC), as well as numerous conference associations including the American Studies Association, the Cultural Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and Feminisms & Rhetorics. She earned her M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies at UA, and her B.A. in Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In addition to her scholarship, Susana is the founder and organizer of the annual music fundraiser event Riot Grrrl Carnival, a punk musician in the Los Angeles based punk band Las Sangronas y El Cabron, zinester, and creator of the zine series “La Sangrona.”

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G.L.O.S.S., Hardcore, and the Righteous White Voice  – Chris Chien

If La Llorona Was a Punk Rocker: Detonguing The Off-Key Caos and Screams of Alice Bag – Marlen Ríos-Hernández

Riot-Grrrl, Punk and the Tyranny of Technique – Tamra Lucid

An Evening with Three Legendary Rebel Women at Le Poisson Rouge, January 27, 2017: Margot Olavarria, Bibbe Hansen, and Alice Bag –Elizabeth K. Keenan

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 28, 2017  

Unapologetic Paisa Chingona-ness: Listening to Fans’ Sonic Identities

For the full intro to the series by Michelle Habell-Pallan, click here.

The forum’s inspiring research by scholars/practioners Wanda Alarcón, Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Marlen Rios-Hernandez, Susana Sepulveda, and Iris C. Viveros Avendaño, understands music in its local, translocal and transnational context, and insists upon open new scholarly imaginaries. . .

Current times require us to bridge intersectional, decolonial, and gender analysis.  Music, and our relationship to it, has much to reveal about how power operates within a context of inequality.   And it will teach us how to get through this moment. –MHP

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Que Buena Epoca Instagram Post (reposted by El Original)

I am a self-identified Paisa, a Paisa Girl from Playa Larga – my home –  in the Eastside of Long Beach, California. The term paisa/s is slang for paisanos (homies) and it references someone who takes pride in listening, dancing, and attending nightclubs where Banda music, corridos, and norteños are performed. I am part of a generation that has been referenced as the Chalinillos; youth with an urban gangsta aesthetic that was influenced by Chalino Sanchez, The Riveras, Saul Viera, Adan Sanchez, Los Dos Grandes, Tigrillo Palma, Los Amos; later came the Alterado, Progressivo (DEL) and now people like El Fantasma, Lenin Ramirez, Alta Consigna, Grupo Codiciado, Jesus Mendoza, and Los Perdidos de Sinaloa.

As they say, “Fierro Parriente!” “Andamos al Millon,” “Pa que vayan y digan” and “Puro Pa Delante!”

In the mid 2000s, besides partying hard in the paisa nightclub music scene, I also partied with several paisa party crews in Long Beach.  The songs, “Las Malandrinas,” “Parrandera,” “Rebelde, y Atrevida,” and “Mi Vida Loca” by Jenni Rivera were my anthems. These songs described the music scene we were a part of,  and how we situated ourselves within a male-dominated subculture. “La Malandrinas” for instance says that we make a lot of noise, we drink, ask for corridos at clubs (a masculine tradition) and do not care about what people say about us.

Thus, Jenni’s participation in this music genre was important because she created paisa sonic identities for the women in this subculture. “Sonic identities”, is a term that I use to describe the process fans engage in when they use a song to create a nickname and identity for themselves. This is a common practice among party crews and fan clubs. For instance, the nickname that I gave myself was “La Yaquesita” which is a title of a song. My participation in this nightlife shapes my analysis of this subculture. The gender dynamics and negotiations I had to engage with in this space made me an unapologetic feminist (although I did not call myself that at the time) who was fierce and defended herself but who—despite the slut shaming—approached this nightlife through a sex-positive attitude. Our attitude was “Fuck Haters!” and having this mentality was liberating. So, it makes sense that now I write about haters –or what Jonathan Gray calls anti-fans. I am interested in analyzing sonic haterism and how it tries to police Latina women-centered and sex-positive spaces like fan clubs and paisa party crews.

Las Malandrinas de Long Beach, 2008

In my dissertation entitled, “Boobs and Booze: Jenni Rivera, the Erotics of Transnational Fandom and Sonic Pedagogies,” the intertwined themes of sound and home emerges via a loud shout-out of my hometown that sounds like “Playa Larga, Baby” or a louder shout out that says “Son Ovarios de Playa Larga, Chaooowww, Baby.” Similar to “Fuck Haters!,” the latter shout-out implies a particular attitude and feminisms rooted in unapologetic paisa chingona-ness. Paisa Chingona-ness is the sonic condition, the rebellious and intoxicating state of being a chingona “rancherota.” Chicana feminists such as Sandra Cisneros and Josefina Lopez have defined and theorized being  a chingona in multiple ways. In her poem titled “Chingona,” Lopez for instance defines a chingona as a sex-positive Chicana who refuses to be slut-shamed for owning her fat body, sexuality (literally she loves to be on top), and agency.  There are overlaps with how Lopez, Jenni and her fans practice being chingonas; however, the added layer with Paisa Chingona-ness is that Jenni’s music and fandom shapes the way they embody it.

Activist and Writer, Raul Alcaraz Ochoa, has written a piece titled “Jenni Rivera y los 9 Puntos del Feminismo Chingona” here he acknowledges that Chingona Feminism is rooted in the barrio, the hood and is born from within and in response to a machista context, where the priority is always given to men.  According to Ochoa, Chingona Feminism is also born from race oppression and class-struggle. Ochoa states that Jenni “dice lo que piensa sin pelos en la lengua, te agrede si eres injusto porque su lengua es una bala que te deja con los huevos estrellados.” My work shows how chingona feminism is also practiced and embraced among fans. I expand on Ochoa’s analysis to think through Paisa Chingona-ness which asks us to listen to the “details” that Chingonas make when they are surrounded by each other.

Heard through my experiences, identifications, and stance toward the world, it makes sense why home manifests itself in the approach that I use to study popular music: that of fandom, that prioritizes fans and their approach to what I call sonic pedagogies. Which is a concept that was inspired by scholars such as Deborah Vargas, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Jillian Hernandez, Anya Wallace, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Martha Gonzalez. These scholars write about the power of music as “sung theory,” the power of music to create “sonic imaginaries,” or inspire teachings between the artists and the listener, that oftentimes creates “an erotic of feminist solidarity.”

For me, sonic pedagogies is a concept that centers the fan and what John Fiske has called their “textual, enunciative, and semiotic productivity.” Sonic pedagogies allows me to think about the affective and corporeal fan-to-fan teachings that are inspired even when the artist is dead and yet their legacy and conocimientos are being used to teach fans to understand each other. Sonic Pedagogies centers the practice that Lawrence Grossberg explains when he states, that fans give “authority to that which he or she invests in, letting the object of such investments speak for and as him or herself” (59).

A J-unit’s Altar: Andrea’s Jenni Collection, photo taken by author, 2015

Listening to sonic pedagogies asks us to write about music from a different perspective, from the perspective of its fans. Oftentimes we listen and write about music from the perspective, the voice, the body, and lyrics of the artist. But what if we start from their re-interpretation of a song in a YouTube video for instance? What if we start from a fan shout-out during a concert? What if we start from the conversations that emerge when fans talk about their favorite songs to non-fans? What if we make anti-fans our starting point to understand an artist or a music genre? Analyzing music in this way allows us to hear the multiple sonic layers that a song and music in general inspires.

I am also a filmmaker, so the way I understand sound and the reception of music is inspired by how I edit sound for a film. When we edit film, we layer the sound, we usually have at least three layers of sound: the interview (main story and Track 1), music (Track 2), and background noise (Track 3). However, sometimes you can have up to 20 sonic tracks layered at once and, actually, is how I have experienced fandom. There’s a song that we usually are listening to because we identify with it (Track 2), then we add our own conocimiento to the song (Track 1), that conocimiento or what many times turns into “archisme” provokes background noise of solidarity (Track 3), either to show the other fan that you understand, acknowledge, and relate to what they are sharing. Fans ask us to listen to the study of music from a perspective of “love” (Duffet), “magic” (Guy) and “erotics.”

Scholars in the field of fan studies such as Daniel Cavicchi have defined fandom as “not some particular thing one has or does. Fandom is a process of being; it is the way one is” (59 ). Alexandra Vasquez, in particular, reminds us of the importance of “listening to details” when thinking about fandom, music and performance. Sonic Pedagogies requires that I listen to the “details” of audience members, fans, and anti-fans that tell me about how Chicana/ Mexicana/Latina women resist structures of governmentality by questioning gender norms, and traditional ideas about sexuality. In Listening on Detail, Vasquez explains that details are “interruptions that catch your ear, musical tic that stubbornly refuse to go away. They are things you might first dismiss as idiosyncrasies. They are…saludos, refusals, lyrics, arrangements, sounds, grants, gestures, bends in voice” (19).  In my work, Jenni chants, removal of clothing, mobile recordings, posters, fliers, fan shirts, and sing alongs, are the details that allows me to examine Jenni Rivera.

For instance, I analyze the deschichadera “removal of bra” ritual that both Jenni and her fans engaged in during concerts. I am fascinated by the deschichadera ritual and Jenni’s concerts in general because these fans are constantly redefining home, embodying Cherrie Moraga’s feminist praxis of “making familia from scratch” (58).

Thus for fans, home is found in the affective, erotic, collective, and intimate aspects of music reception and its sociality. Home is found in fan clubs, fan gatherings, tribute events, living room, and the travels of bumping music in the car. Listening to the details of fans allows me to view audience responses to Jenni’s performance part of Jenni’s own presentation and music, not separate from them. Engaging music through fans allows me to see that songs, concerts, and albums do not end when the music stops.

J-units in Mexicali celebrating Jenni’s Birthday, 2017

In “Boobs & Booze,” home also appears in murals, particularly their visual representations of Mexican music. In the vein of Deborah Paredes’s study of Selenidad, I write about the visual politics of Jenni’s remembering, particularly Jenni Rivera Memorial Park, dedicated by the city of Long Beach in 2015.  Home appears in the fashion that we decide to dress our bodies in, especially the femme challinillo aesthetic, and homegirl/Pachuca/partygirl look that Jenni performed on stage. We also find home in the memories we make when we listen to a particular song.  So for me, listening to” Mi Vida Loca” for instance always bring me back to Long Beach, the barrio that has shaped me as a chingona feminist, scholar, and artivist.

Sergio Ramirez working on the Jenni Rivera Mural (2015) photo taken by author.

Home is the music that we take with us, the music and sounds that we carry in our backs when we enter white or middle-class dominated spaces where our paisa music is not acknowledged or it is even looked down upon and critiqued for being “too Mexican,” “too chunti,” “too low.”   Home and sound makes me think of how people of color co-exist with each other sonically. In the EastSide of Long Beach, for instance, home and sound is black and brown relations, tensions, and solidarity. Home and sound is acknowledging that both corridos, hip-hop, and G-Funk relationally, has formed paisas. I mean, I also get an adrenaline rush when I hear Snoop Dog, Warren G, Nate Dogg, O.T Genasis, and Ladies of Beach City referencing their roots to Long Beach, as Snoop says, “it’s an Eastside thang.”

The recent example of Playa Larga’s black and brown sonic solidarity is Snoop Dog’s recent Instagram video listening to Jenni’s music. Watching two Playa Larga finest artists being fans of each other, despite the differences in music genre, language,  and spatial politics (East vs. West) is powerful, it tells us that we listen to each other even when they try to put us against each other.  In this video, Snoop Dogg embodies the “We have each other” solidarity with which Gaye Theresa Johnson ends Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles (189).

Jenny 🙏🏾🌹

A post shared by snoopdogg (@snoopdogg) on

 

Listening to Chingona-ness pushes me to theorize a new framework for anti-fandom, one that centers race, class, sexuality, and is not only about an artist’s music–  or what Gray calls the “text” – but also about their bodies and the bodies of the fans, their ontologies, and existence.  Focusing particularly on Jenni and her fans allows me to think about gender, sexuality, class, pleasure, music reception in relation to anti-immigrant sentiments, war on drugs, war on poverty, and the war on Latina reproduction and fatness. Jenni as a case study allows me to explore how unapologetic paisa chingona-ness triggers anti-fans, exposes what I am calling agitations  and their “agitated responses.” Agitated responses refers to the hater comments that anti-fans (or non-fans) make towards Jenni, (and there are many), while agitation is the carnal disgust that anti-fans display when they police the behavior of Jenni and her fans. In this anti-fandom framework, agitation is the disaffection – the visceral aggression or enmity – that people who hate Jenni and her fans express when they write, say, or gesture agitated responses towards them, a form of sonic haterism.

I entered academia to theorize my home and write the paisa girl epistemology since there is little literature written on our sonic identities, and to show how sonic haterism, in conversation with fandom, allows me to understand the historical, social, and cultural realities working-class Latinas face.  Here is how Jenni Rivera once expressed this same intersection in the song “Mi Vida Loca,”  which asks listeners to hear what Paisa Chingona-ness sounds like in Playa Larga, her sonic home, and mine too.

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Featured Image: Paisa Party Crews in Long Beach, The Myspace Days , courtesy of author

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Yessica Garcia Hernandez is a doctoral candidate and filmmaker in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her scholarship bridges fan studies, sound studies, women of color feminisms, fat studies, girl studies, and sexuality/porn studies to think about intergenerational fans of Mexican regional music. Yessica earned her B.A. in Chicanx Studies from University of California, Riverside and an M.A. in Chicanx and Latinx Studies at California State University Los Angeles. She has published in the Journal of Popular Music, New American Notes Online, Imagining America, Journal of Ethnomusicology, and the Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Her dissertation entitled, “Boobs and Booze: Jenni Rivera, the Erotics of Transnational Fandom, and Sonic Pedagogies” examines the ways in which Jenni Rivera fans reimagine age, gender, sexuality, motherhood, and class by listening to her music, engaging in fandom, and participating in web communities. She explores the social element of their gatherings, both inside and outside the concert space, and probe how these moments foreground transmissions of Latina power. Yessica’s broader research interests includes paisa party crews, Banda Sinaloense, Contestaciones, and Gordibuena/BBW erotics. She is a co-founder and member of the Rebel Quinceañera Collective, a project that utilizes art, music, photography, creative writing, filmmaking, and charlas to activate spaces for self-expression and radical education by and for youth of color in San Diego.

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tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love   –Shakira Holt

Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio—Dolores Inés Casillas

Feeling Through the Keen and Grind: Team Dresch’s Personal Best –Gretchen Jude

New Wave Saved My Life—Wanda Alarcón

 

July 10, 2017  

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love

Penciles Down3

Here at Sounding Out! we like to celebrate World Listening Day (July 18) with a blog series. This year, we bring your attention to the role of listening when it comes to the sounds of the K-12 classroom, and by extension, the school.

Any day in a K-12 school involves movement and sounds day in and day out: the shuffling of desks, the conversations among classmates, the fire drill alarm, the pencils on paper, the picking up of trays of food. However, in many conversations about schools, teaching, and learning, sound is absent.

This month’s series will have readers thinking about the sounds in classrooms in different ways. They will consider race, class, and gender, and how those aspects intersect how we listen to the classrooms of our past and our present. More importantly, the posts will all include assignments that educators at all stages can use in their classrooms.

Time’s up, pencils down, and let’s listen to Shakira Holt‘s playlists, compiled by three of her high school graduates. –Liana Silva, Managing Editor

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This past school year, in my roles as a high school teacher who likes what music can do for the classroom environment and as a Link Crew Coordinator who oversees student leaders as they host a mixture of freshman-only and schoolwide events, I frequently found myself sternly censoring black female student contributions to musical playlists.  Although I emphasized the criterion of “clean” with increasing exasperation, my students just did not seem to get it. Strangely overlooking “ni**a,” “f***,” and “s**t,” they brought me songs, which, if played, would have gotten me called into the principal’s office, literally. When they triumphantly approached me with “clean” versions, they typically cast not a moment’s thought towards the lyrical content of drugging, drinking, fighting, and sexing, topics no less hazardous for campus play. Clearly, my students and I were working from battling notions of “clean.”

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Parental Advisory label, By RIAA (RIAA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

For them, “clean” was a concept fully bound up in and therefore fully resolved by language alone; in their view of things, to excise the problematic language was to expel the problem. For me, however, “clean” also included ideas such as “not sipping, smoking, popping, or shooting anything,” “not beating, kicking, hitting, shooting, or stabbing anyone,” as well as “not offering a play-by-play of actual or desired intimate activity.”  Then there were some of the songs’ seemingly innocuous but just as troubling projections of sad, turbulent, co-dependent visions of love which often turn on the most toxic, tired iterations of normative gender expectations and almost always wound me up to deliver long, moralistic speeches on relationships.

Feeling every bit the forty-year old school marm that I am, I remain abundantly clear on my objections to these songs for general classroom and campus use. However, I confess that my effectual silencing of these young women never sat quite right with me. It nagged me with worries over what I was really refusing to hear, to make space for by shutting off the voices of these young black women in this way.

However outré, daring, or trouble-making I may fancy myself as a scholar and thinker, when placed within the K-12 context, I am, it turns out, your average, workaday campus censor.  I hypocritically feign alarm at cussing. I fake-clear my throat with loud ahems whenever that blue talk ventures into the X-rated. While I fully respect the creativity and naughtiness of student-to-student speech and spend a good bit of time pretending not to hear what is meant to be conversation among peers, there is a limit I feel compelled to enforce. Whenever the volume grows too loud for me to pretend not to have heard or when the word choice becomes spectacularly adventurous, the expectations of the classroom/campus setting demand my intervention. Dutifully, I step in as judge and censor.

 

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“DSC02583_ep_gs” by Flickr user Erik Parker, CC BY-NC 2.0

Nor is this a singular feature of schools. Places and spaces of all kinds depend heavily upon the extent to which both occupants and itinerants adhere to place-based expected modes of behavior and speech. It is important to note that even when enforced and observed by people of color, these behavior and speech norms remain overwhelmingly middle-class and white in origin and character, which can lead to interesting, sometimes alarming, and even deadly implications for people of color who enter “allegedly public” spaces without observing these norms, as Jennifer Lynn Stoever points out. In the Introduction to The Sonic Color Line: Race & the Cultural Politics of Listening, Stoever argues that in failing to act or speak in ways that reflect the place-based expected modes of behavior and speech governing such spaces, people of color frequently run the risk of falling prey to what she calls “white Americans’…implicit, sometimes violent, control over…an ostensibly ‘free,’ ‘open,’ and ‘public’ space” (2). This risk, as Stoever illustrates, often exposes non-compliant people of color to condemnation, confrontation, and even bodily harm.

Rachel-Jeantel-Zimmerman-trial-star-witness-in-the-spotlightThe collision of place/space, race, and gender is a natural element of life in the U.S. and has become a regular and needful facet of contemporary national discourse. In a brilliant analysis of this collision as it took place in the 2013 George Zimmerman trial, Regina Bradley explores how the presence of Rachel Jeantel laid bare the way in which enforcement of place-based norms is often racialized and gendered. Rachel Jeantel is the young black woman whose body, comportment, and speech set off waves of derision and controversy as she testified in court regarding the last living moments of her close friend, Trayvon Martin. Bradley recalls how critics ignored Jeantel’s anguish, her grief, and her trauma in order to train excessive focus on her “refusal and inability to conform to expected cultural and aural scripts of black womanhood within the confines of the courtroom.”  The courtroom’s “cultural and aural scripts of black womanhood” demand overt demonstrations of respect, if not outright intimidation, passivity, and general humility in tone and demeanor which would typically compensate for any deviations from Standard American English speech norms. Jeantel’s speech played only by the rules of what Brittney Cooper has called “her own particular, idiosyncratic black girl idiom” as created by her “Haitian and Dominican working-class background, her U.S. Southern upbringing, and the three languages—Haitian Kreyol…Spanish, and English—that she speaks,” and not by the rules of SAE. Thus lacking both the gentle mien expected of black women in court and an acceptable mainstream speech pattern, Jeantel suffered a broad range of brutal racist, classist, and sizeist critiques centering not only on her attitude and her speech, but also on her weight, her skin tone, her hair, and her general unfitness for public consumption.

Like the courtroom, the K-12 classroom and campus are place-based contexts that possess their own “expected cultural and aural scripts.” These scripts prescribe and police such speech elements as volume, tone, syntax, diction, and content. Like courtrooms and other spaces, the K-12 classroom and campus can easily become oppositional, and sometimes downright antagonistic, towards the young black female people who occupy these spaces while speaking their “own particular, idiosyncratic black girl idiom[s].” The idiosyncrasies of their idioms can so completely transgress the K-12 cultural and aural script that these young black female people often lose the right of being heard altogether, of achieving any attention at all beyond opprobrium for their transgressiveness. Bradley writes pointedly of Jeantel, “Her emotionally charged question ‘are you listening?’ jolted not only [George Zimmerman’s attorney, Don] West but those watching the trial. Were we listening? What were we listening for?” I find overwhelming resonance here because when I reframe my students’ playlists and song choices as alternative types of “idiosyncratic black girl idiom,” I must also reframe myself as an agent of what Bradley calls “hyper-respectability,” a source of censure and scorn.  I must then answer Jeantel and Bradley’s questions honestly: For most of the year, I was not listening to my black female students. Too preoccupied with listening for speech that matched the cultural and aural scripts of the K-12 classroom and campus, I repeatedly silenced idiosyncratic black girl idiom, enacting an all too-frequent response to black female voices.

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“son of roots” by Flickr user Brittany Randolph, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This sin against my students becomes even clearer when I consider it in the context of terms set forth by Robin James in “How not to listen to Lemonade: music criticism and epistemic violence.” James discusses at length how music criticism can inflict great violence upon “black women’s cultural and creative work” by “recentering [white] men as authorities and experts.” When white men are recentered as omniscient, innately generic, and consummately universal arbiters of culture and artistry, cultural and creative work emerging from outside of their personal and cultural frames of reference become subjected to filters, demands, and expectations often inapplicable or inappropriate to the work but especially to the black female experiences and vantage points from which that work arises.  Hence the “epistemic violence” of which James’ title speaks. Without difficulty, I can replace James’ “black women’s cultural and creative work” with Cooper’s “idiosyncratic black girl idiom,” or even have my own go at it with “black female vision and voice.” I can then also substitute James’ “recenter[ed white] men with “recentered elder/teacher/agent of hyper-respectability.” Having done so, I arrive once again at the epistemic and ontological violence I enacted upon my students—for good reason, of course, but to the same unfortunate end.

My intention is not to intimate that I should have green lighted their every choice and let their music go blaring from the loud speaker at lunch while high school kids enjoyed our classic recess days, during which big kids actually had fun at lunch, dancing and tossing the football (girls, too!) and jumping double-dutch. In retrospect, I see now that there was a way to keep that aural space PG-13 AND to listen deeply to the songs that mattered most to these young women, to hear not only what the songs were saying to them but more importantly to hear what they were saying through the songs. I am saddened that I could have been generating ways throughout the year to center and amplify the very black female student voices I stifled and silenced far too often, for far too long.

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“Afro Punk Fest 2013” by Flickr user J-No, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This post is an attempt at redemption for all my huffy exasperation and my quickness to relieve them of the aux cord this school year. Enlisting the help of the three seniors (now graduates) who bore the brunt of all my aux cord snatching, I have set about putting things right. I asked them to compile playlists of their top five songs, along with the lyrics. I then asked these young women either to come in and speak with me about their songs or to submit written commentary about the music they chose. I took off all restrictions and encouraged them to select whatever songs their hearts desired.

When I first imagined the critical value of engaging in this project, I figured that I might be able to mine their playlists and commentaries for some Patricia Hill Collins-esque crystallization of black female thought as it exists at this moment, late in the second decade of the new millennium, among high school seniors on the cusp of black womanhood in a country which remains steadfastly anti-woman, anti-black, and anti-black woman. That is indeed a worthy project and one which deserves completion. For this post, however, I simply want to listen to my students at long last. I want to listen closely, and I want to listen deeply. I want others to listen to them, too.

Attending fully to the thoughts and words and feelings of black female people, is but one means of expressing a form of love I call philogynoir. Clearly, this term plays with and off of Moya Bailey’s misogynoir, which she defined upon its 2010 inception as a “the particular brand of hatred directed at black women in American visual & popular culture.” Philogynoir is my attempt to rise to the challenge of naming, which Bailey identified as essential to addressing social ills. She told Mic.com last year, “I think we have to refine language in a lot of different ways so we can actually come up with solutions that help the communities we want to address,” she said. “When you use language that’s generic or unspecific you can get at some of the problem, but not all of it.”

If misogynoir calls out racist-sexist hatred aimed squarely at black women so that that hatred can be challenged and ultimately eliminated, then the concept of philogynoir provides a name for conscious gestures of love towards those same people—words, acts, and artifacts of acknowledgement, admiration, and adoration which have the potential to neutralize and ultimately undo the effects of the hatred. Deep listening, as I imagine it, in its potential to affirm, to humanize, to dignify, and to amplify, can be activated as a powerful form of philogynoir.

Other than the chance to redress my teacherly wrongs, the greatest honor I experienced in this philogynoir project was the opportunity to attend to the hurts of my students by listening to their distress, their agony. To be sure, their playlists and commentaries demonstrate that the idiosyncratic black girl idiom is highly equipped to express a full range of feelings, thoughts, experiences, and yearnings, so I hesitate to make any move which might define and confine the black female experience or its idiosyncratic idiom only in terms of pain and trauma, especially when there is such little space for black girl pain beyond its most fetishized pop culture iterations. The pain and the trauma are there, however, and deserve witness and respect.

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“Listen to the music” by Flickr user Ludo Rouchy, CC BY 2.0

I call attention to the pain and the trauma in my students’ idiosyncratic black girl idiom because it is precious. These are sacred hurts, holy injuries—not because they were inflicted by a deity, but because where they touched the lives of these young women, they became creative forces, shaping the signs and symbols by which these young women will know and be known, by which they will call and be called. There is tragedy here, yes, and terrible misery—but there is also mystery and great, thrilling, healing power, as well. My fervent wish for these young women is that with time, they will come to embrace the mystery and to know healing in every hurting place. My prayer is that they will each, in time, wield that creative force of their own accord to make something beautiful and lasting in the genius of their own idiosyncratic black girl idiom.

What follows are the playlists, with commentary, of these three young black women (whose names I have changed), both bespeaking and spoken in the “idiosyncratic black girl idiom” of each individual young woman, articulating each unique voice and vision and innately honoring the experiences that have shaped them. I have included no critiques of the songs or even of their commentaries. For the time being, these playlists represent a sacred line in the sand across which I will not venture with critique.

I am simply listening now. I’m listening to them, and I’m listening for them…in solidarity and in love.

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“Afro Punk Fest 2013” by Flickr user J-No, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Amani’s List

  1. Long Song Away by Kevin Ross

This whole song is jazzy, especially the intro. It’s about a girl in the rush of it all. I connected to it because I had so many responsibilities at home. I never had time for fun. My life was joyless. I was like a robot. I finally had to have a conversation with my mom and let her know that she would have to let me live a little and be young. There had to be some kind of fun in my life. This song is about slowing down and just letting the record play.

  1. Confidently Lost by Sabrina Claudio

This song speaks to me. I’ve been lost before and I got to a place where I was comfortable with my lostness. I love the part about “I don’t need you to find me cuz I’m not hiding anything.” This is a good soul/R&B song about how hard it is to figure out what will bring you fulfillment but that’s not a bad place to be. Being lost is not necessarily anything negative. It means you’re going somewhere.

  1. Redbone by Childish Gambino

This song makes me want to put on some skates and roll-bounce to it. A lot of people like the groove on this song, but they miss the deeper meaning. It’s telling people to wake up and be known for who you are. It has a lot of references to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the dangers involved in being black. When he says “scandalous” and “creep up on you,” he’s talking about police brutality and racism, especially with the president we have now, and when he says “greenlight,” that’s a code for “wake up” as in “be woke.”

  1. Location by Khalid

This one is about early teenage love and it’s talking about how we are all too attached to our electronics, so when he says “send me your location,” he’s talking about using the electronics as a way to get to face-to-face communication.

  1. Put It On Me by Jah Rule feat. Lil Mo & Vita

I like this song maybe because I was born in them days. It’s about a thug and his ride-or-die chick. I like the part when he says, “Every thug needs a lady.” But this song actually means more to me than just the song. In my family, I have many family members who have ties to gangs. I’m looking out for my little brother and doing everything I can to keep him from that life. One of the things we do is perform in the house. We always do this song, like we act it out and everything. So I always think of my brother when I hear this song, especially the part where he says, “Where would I be without you?” I’m that person for my brother. If I wasn’t there for him, he’d be in a gang. I also have a close friend who used to be affiliated, but she’s not anymore. I think about her on the part where it says, “A tear for a tear,” because when she cries, I cry.

 

Rikki’s List

  1. Coming Out Strong by Future & The Weekend

I chose this song because it reminds me that no matter what, I can never give up on myself even if I’m in a bad position in life.

  1. Do For Love by TuPac

I like this song because it tells a story and the way TuPac loves the girl and never gave up on her….I wish someone could do the same for me.

  1. Confidently Lost & Much Too Late by Sabrina Claudio

I chose these two songs by this particular singer because she talks about love in a different aspect compared to everyone else these days. Her take on love is different, like it’s more thoughtful and more mature. It’s not just sex and drama.

  1. Candy by Cameo

I chose this song because I just have to have some funk in my life. LOL

  1. Ride of Your Life by Tinashe

I like the beat of this song and it’s kind of catchy in a way.

  1. Habits (Stay High) by Tove Lo

I chose this song because after my first love broke my heart, I developed bad habits because my heart was traumatized.

  1. Kiss It Better by Rihanna

I wish someone could kiss my heart better, but it seems like everyone is the same.

  1. Party Monster by The Weekend

After my bad habits formed like having sex with no love interest hoping it would make me feel better some type of way….This song talks about sex, drugs, and waking up next to someone and not really knowing them.

 

Zora’s List

  1. The Letter by Kehlani

“‘The Letter’ by Kehlani is featured on her album You Should Be Here. It was released in April of 2015. The song speaks on a loved one who abandoned Kehlani at a young age. She references her mother, and it goes through the motions of abandonment and feeling unwanted. In the song, she says,

And if you weren’t gonna guide me

Why bring me into the light?

Must have done something

To make you want to run and hide

Why oh why didn’t you just live your life?

And every girl needs a mother, and dammit, I needed you.

 

I chose this song because it was the first time I felt like I could personally and truly relate to art. My mother left my life when I was 15. Similar to Kehlani in the song, I had so many things going on in my head for years. But then I heard the song…and it said everything I didn’t know how to say at the time. I blamed myself like she did for a while, and I questioned her motives every day. My mother left during a crucial stage of my childhood, and it’s something I still don’t know how to recover from. The experience in this song plays a role in my story because it showed me that I’m not the only one, and that I had a choice to let the loss make me or break me. I chose for it to make me stronger.”

  1. Keep Ya Head Up by Tupac

“Keep Ya Head Up” by Tupac was featured on his album Strictly for My N.I.G.G.A.Z. which debuted in February of 1993. This song talks about a lot of issues in today’s society but particularly women’s roles. He speaks on rape culture and women’s rights.

I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women — do we hate our women?
I think it’s time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women

And since a man can’t make one
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one
So will the real men get up?
I know you’re fed up, ladies, but keep ya head up

I chose this song because it relates to my womanhood. Tupac speaks on our lesser value in today’s society and our mistreatment. Women are allowed to be raped without any repercussions and we are constantly STILL fighting for our own rights, even today.

  1. 1st of Tha Month by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony

“1st of Tha Month” by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is featured on their 1999 Eternal album. The song centers around receiving welfare checks in lower income areas and how the community rejoices.

Wake up, wake up, wake up
It’s the 1st of the month
So get up, get up, get up
So cash your checks and come up

I chose this song because I know that feeling, of not having much to eat all month. Sometimes you could feel that emptiness and you resort to doing things you wouldn’t normally do if you weren’t put in that situation. Getting those checks brought solace to my household. That economic struggle made me who I am, and made me appreciate so much. But the 1st of the month… The whole hood would feel that deposit.

  1. Weary Blues by Louis Armstrong

“Weary Blues” by Louis Armstrong was released in the year of 1925 and is featured on his Jazz Collected album, collaborating with Hot Five and Hot Seven. The song feels like soul. With the rhythm, all the way to the emotion, you can feel celebration. I chose this song because it reminds me of Louisiana itself. It reminds me of Mardi Gras, the crawfish, the Southern lingo. It reminds me of my Southern culture which plays a huge role in my life.

  1. Wishing by Edo G feat. Masta Ace

“Wishing” by Edo G and Masta Ace is featured on Edo G’s album, My Own Worst Enemy, which released in 2004. The song speaks about problems reflected in the system, that need to be addressed. Being lied to by presidents, lack of healthcare, blacks being murdered, drugs, and many other issues. In the first verse Masta Ace says,

    I wish the president would stop lying
Black babies would stop crying
And young brothers would stop dying
I wish the police would stop killing
Politicians stop stealing and acting like they not dealing
When they know they got bricks in the street

I’ve chosen this song, because it speaks about problems that often are ignored that go on within my community. It also speaks about political corruption, which is something I care about. These issues affect me as an American because they are American issues. Being black and low income, you are subjected to a lot of different deprivations. This song highlights them and throws up a red flag. For change.

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Featured image: “Afro Punk Fest 2013” by Flickr user J-No, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Shakira Holt is a lifelong Los Angeles resident and teaches literature on the secondary level. She earned a doctorate degree in English from the University of Southern California and works primarily in the area of black women’s literature and culture.  o

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