Black Resonance by Emily J. Lordi

Emily J. Lordi—an English professor at UMASS Amherst, who writes critical essays about Bilal and Beyoncé in addition to her scholarship—pursues several potent agendas in her new book.
First, she tries to complicate and reexamine the academic discourse around a group of important black authors and their connection with music. Second, she attempts to show that black pop music merits the same respect as black literature—and, of course, literature more broadly. Third, she hopes to illustrate that when we examine the relationship between literature and popular music with scrupulous care, our understanding of both deepens and changes.
Each chapter of Black Resonance pairs an author with a musician (sometimes two): Richard Wright and Bessie Smith. Gayl Jones alongside Billie Holiday. The author usually writes—in fiction, poetry or criticism—about his/her paired musician.
Lordi’s approach complicates received notions. When it comes to Ellison, for example, Lordi “aims to correct the critical bias … of reading his work only through his writings on secular male musicians” by connecting him to the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Jackson, the subject of Ellison’s only article “on a female (sacred) singer,” gives Lordi the opportunity to attempt a “more sincere vision of [his] modernist novel [The Invisible Man] … and a more complex vision of Jackson’s music.”
Black Resonance blends academic theory with musical analysis, emphasizing the diverse meanings contained in lyrics and in their delivery. Ambivalence as a form of resistance to oppression becomes crucial.
“If resistance is always the sign of a counter-story … ambivalence is perhaps the state of holding on to more than one story at a time.” Listening for ambivalence changes the way you hear—and appreciate—Mahalia Jackson’s blurring of words like “mourn” and “moan” in her signature song “Move Up A Little Higher.”
The insistence on the importance of ambiguity in Black Resonance connects with ideas also articulated by musicians (in a different context). Brian Eno—onetime member of Roxy Music and the producer of canonical albums from the Talking Heads and David Bowie—once wrote, “[R]ock music is built on distortion: on the idea that things are enriched, not degraded, by noise. To allow something to become noisy is to allow it to support multiple readings.”
Black Resonance not only applies academic techniques to popular music—it treats pop with respect, suggesting that it rewards the same close reading usually reserved for literary texts.
Lordi’s analysis of Nikki Giovanni’s poems in conjunction with Aretha Franklin’s covers allows each artist’s work to illuminate the other’s. Giovanni’s technique—she breaks lines “in odd ways” to stimulate movement—“elucidate[s] Franklin’s approach to song text.” Franklin “adds several new lyrics into [Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’] … by the time she gets to the bridge, she is singing twice as many lyrics as Cooke … performing a kind of rhythmic and harmonic enjambment whereby each repeated phrase leads directly to the next.”
Music also plays a central role in Giovanni’s poem “Dreams.” By referencing the Raelettes, who were an important part of Ray Charles’s sound, and the Sweet Inspirations, who aided Franklin, Giovanni embeds her poem in an R&B matrix, with an additional layer of significance.
“Dreams” ends with a decision: