On listening to music with someone you love.
Shoutout to everyone that’s ever listened to a song with someone and participated in the telepathic collective applause at music’s extraordinary, sonorous canvas.
Sweet groves to the record of my heart,
Can we talk about the sweetness of listening to a song with someone?
Those moments when neither you nor the one you’re listening with are speaking but presence with the music unfolds as its own conversation. When everything we hold unspoken is given a body through a song’s notes. When you and a homie take the hand of a record and walk alongside it to the rhythm of its beat. When the song opens like a mouth with a question and beacons you onto the temporary porch it’s made of its notes. When you can listen and just be, together. Listening to music together is one of my favorite acts of intimacy.
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Moment of delight. When you’re playing music and the person listening alongside you asks: “What song is this?”
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Music gives my spirit language for what was previously thought ineffable. So what a delight it is when someone else is portaling in that ineffable space alongside me! Sharing a song with another can feel so vulnerable. It’s like my spirit’s tiny way of saying, “oh hey, here’s a sonic capturing of what makes me, me.” And listen, I say this with the gentle hands of detachment. I never hold an expectation to how someone should react to a song I share (I think back on the many times I’ve queued up a track to meet the quizzical brow of a homie). But those moments when someone passes me the aux and the others around me vibe with it? Or vice versa, when I’m grooving to a track a homie plays? When a loved one and I are both hearing a song for the first time and our spirits collectively respond: YES! When we turn to each other and say: Who is this? Acoustic miracle. Songs can be a compass to the cosmic mush of our consciousness. So it means something I think when you and another person’s spirit find one another in a shared love of a song. Listening to music with someone you love is an unspoken: I see you! I’m beside you! We’re here together!
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Moment of delight. When someone shows you a song they think you’d like. Yes, a small window into what makes their soul leap/dance/cry/shimmer. Also, an offering of careful attention. “I heard you in these notes.”
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If there is a space where joy lives for me, it’s in a car listening to music with a loved one. Music just hits different over a car’s speakers. The car becomes a tiny stadium on wheels, and we’re the world’s most eager audience. The car is taking me someplace and so is the track so together they gift me a drifting towards somewhere that sounds like free. I’ve screamed the lyrics to Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten with loved ones on country-wide road trips. Sobbed to Frank Ocean while my homie drove us to get McFlurry’s when my high school boyfriend broke up with me. Fallen asleep to Stevie Wonder in car rides around my neighborhood as a baby cause my young overwhelmed parents figured out it was the only sure fire way to soothe me from crying. In the car music gets wings and you become its passenger, together gilded by acoustic reckoning.
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Shoutout to every crush I’ve ever had where the way I communicated that I had feelings was: “Hey I found this song I think you’d like.”
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For the record, I always advocate for sending crushes songs, alongside perhaps more direct measures (follow the mystery baby! give the daydream scenarios a runway to possible).
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Spotify Wrapped is out today. Ima be honest, I get really hype about this. Where I don’t care much for the Grammy’s, I’m way more interested in learning about the music that makes up my friends' personalities. To the folks that say: Nobody cares about your Spotify Wrapped, I say: Bestie, I do. A day of people collectively talking about the music that got them through a hard ass year? Wholesome! Show me all the places you found yourself sonically.
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At the same time (because I think we always need the reminder that many things can be true at once) I think about how major music streaming services fail to support artists. How streaming services have been necessarily and repeatedly critiqued for years over their failure to pay artists fairly. How labels pay music streaming services for placement in playlists, so that these platforms become more of a digital space for algorithmic sonic ads than anything close to crate digging. Streaming services are just one leg to the larger structural table of the music industry where the vast majority of musicians cannot earn a living wage through music-related work. I’m wary of methods where the action to mend systemic carelessness is placed on individual consumer responsibility rather than collective actions. And in that, I believe there are many ways that we can and should support causes that advocate for a more equitable and inclusive music industry. Support platforms like Bandcamp or Resonate that advocate for transparency with musicians. Learn about and share the work of organizations like Music Workers Alliance. Invest in spaces like Junior Hi LA, P0STBINARY, Future Music Industry, dweller or Discwoman that lift up marginalized artists. There are ample opportunities to show my love for music beyond consumption. We can hold the larger musical ecosystem more thoughtfully.
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One of the most impactful talks I’ve watched was a conversation between writers Hanif Abdurraqib and Harmony Holiday on the art of sampling in Black poetry and music. My homie Vanessa showed it to me on a friend date they’d (spectacularly) curated for us. There was so much held in that conversation but one of the lessons I return again and again were their words on liner notes. Liner notes began as descriptions in the “lining” of the sleeves of records that listed the record’s meaning or credits to who created it. A now dying art form within the digital age, liner notes offer lineage. They point to how memory is woven into citation and credit.
So what does it mean then if liner notes are disappearing?
Who are the hidden figures behind the song?
How are you holding the memory woven into the frequencies you’re listening to?
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A moment of applause. I want to extend the most abundant, shimmering, and full gratitude to Black women musicians for shaping the modern world (head nod to Daphne A. Brooks).
Thank you Mamie Smith, Big Mama Thorton, Josephine Baker, Missy Elliot, Ma Rainey, Patti LaBelle, Merry Clayton, The Blossoms, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Zora Neal Hurston, Loleatta Holloway, Nina Simone, LaVern Baker, Queen Latifah, Anne Brown, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Whitney Huston, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Muriel Ringgold, Eartha Kitt, Betty Davis, Anna Mae Bullock, The Supremes, Poly Styrene, Beyoncé, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitgerald, and so so so many others for the culture, politics, and spirit you’ve woven from your music.
(Reader - if you scanned over this list and met names you didn’t recognize, I gently implore you to learn about the artist. They’ve done more for music and culture than we can ever offer enough flowers).
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A gentle music challenge for those curious to explore music, lineage and history. Adapt anytime, as needed:
Look up the hometown of 5 of your most often played artists. Can you hear their home in their music?
Find out what the parents of 5 of your most often played artists were listening to.
Learn 5 of the favorite songs of an elder in your life.
Make a playlist of the favorite artists of your favorite artists.
Read the wikipedia of one of your most loved artists. Open each hyperlink. Keep following the rabbit hole.
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Shoutout to every car and bedroom floor and house party and random bar and street corner where I’ve gotten lost to a song when standing beside a homie/lover/stranger and we both find our way to a fuller heart in the notes of the track.
Shoutout to everyone that’s ever listened to a song with someone and participated in the telepathic collective applause at music’s extraordinary, sonorous canvas.
5 things that made me feel sonic joy 💿
1. The film Summer of Soul on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
2. An online archive of endangered sounds
3. This poster of Alive Coltrane performing in Los Angeles, California, 1982
4. The Black Music History Library
5. A website that lets you create the sonic atmosphere of your favorite bar
4 reads on music 🎹
1. In Praise of John Coltrane’s Smile by Harmony Holiday
2. What Is “Escape Room” And Why Is It One Of My Top Genres On Spotify?
3. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by Daphne A. Brooks.
4. Creative Work: A Self Sufficiency Primer’s Guide
3 sounds that make my brain hum sweet songs 🎼
1. The Flamingos Performing “I Only Have Eyes for You” live in 1959
2. Sonic Sunday School: Soulful Music of the Black Atlantic with Lynnée Denise.
3. Underground and Black radio show with Detroit native Ash Lauryn.
2 music initiatives to support 🎧
1. Black Girls Make Beats, an organization that helps Black girls further their careers as music producers, DJs, and audio engineers.
2. Sins Invalid, a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.
1 piece of nonsense 🎺
RSVP for my book launch online event on tenderness and Black queer imagination!
In celebration of my book launch, I'll be in digital convo on dimensions of tenderness with Abdu Ali of as they lay & Kamra Hakim of Activation Residency, hosted by Mandy Harris Williams with the Feminist Center for Creative Work. Register below. Thursday December 9th, online at 7pm est. RSVP here.
Bucket hats are here!
I designed these “school of softness” bucket hats in celebration of my book! Order yours here (it makes for a very cute holiday gift).
Sending you much love 🕊.Drink a glass of water after reading this email
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Playlists/mixes (both giving and receiving) are my love language. I adore this post!