In the early 1980s, when I was fourteen and fifteen and still finding out about my own queer self, my friends and I would gather at Medusa's on a Saturday night. Medusa's was a juice bar, which meant that you could get in if you were sixteen or, like me, if you looked sixteen. It was not officially a gay bar, but it was queer-friendly, frequented by young aficionados of new wave and house from Chicago and the surrounding suburbs – and the people who loved them. As I remembered in my essay ‘Are We Still Fabulous’:
Big leather-clad bouncer with bleach-blond hair (and am I remembering right, handcuffs?), house and new wave music: Depeche Mode, Bowie, New Order, Yazoo, Ministry, Frankie Knuckles, a little Prince. Stuff you couldn't hear on the radio. And Grace Jones, of course … It wasn't like the teen house music club started by the same owner, Dave Shelton, on 161 West Harrison, which was black and very gay, with the windows steamed up every Friday and Saturday night until it was closed down for being too ‘wild.’ What I remember was entering a sea of white, even if it was white cast in purple and blue and black lights. I remember dancing until I sweat, and the hot August Chicago air felt cool again when I stepped outside, until my feet, stuffed into vintage cowboy boots shaped like someone else's feet, cried for mercy. …
I could listen to this music, this white boy dance music, and reorder my body to its tight muscularity, become new. The funk of my own family, warm and messy and also watchful, was a different kind of sound: the deep feeling of soul – Al Green and Stevie and Whitney and Michael, cut by the no-nonsense of Mavis and Pops Staples. But this music let me think about sex and bodies and even death in a way that felt safer, because it was not-me. In my mind, this was the music of the white gay men I saw walking down Broadway, who captured my curiosity. It was about white men and some women, facing loneliness and their desires, and sometimes their deaths. “For fear your grace should fall / for fear tonight is all,” as Bowie said. I could borrow the music, try it on for a while as a mask. This music was both me and not me. This music was not my uncle David, who had disappeared and would return to us decades later, body ravaged and dying, his story cut off from us. His music might be Donny Hathaway or Curtis Mayfield or Luther or even Tupac. The music of black men lost. No one in the family would say that David died from AIDS. But in the tense silence, it was clear.Footnote 1
It may have been a risky business to look for reflections of my own queer self in spaces such as Medusa's as a precariously middle-class black girl in the 1980s. No matter its pleasures, though the queer world that Medusa's offered was never not quite enough to help me understand my own queer life, which had everything to do with Uncle David's life, with my parents and my cousins and my friends. For that, I needed the soundtracks that I had grown up with: the Jackson 5 dancing in formation, John Coltrane on my father's earphones. I needed those posters torn out from Right On! magazine of Prince and Foster Sylvers, whose lashes were so long, you could imagine he was a girl; of Stacy Lattisaw and Whitney and Little Janet and the other black girls that I both wanted and wanted to be. It took queer theory to help me to hear the music of my family as queer, too – this music that I loved and where I heard my own heartbeat. In time, in my own queer theorizing, I learned to include those lessons of my sister and aunties teaching me the Spank and the Freak and the Worm, to include school dances, family reunions, and our dining room table as queer spaces. I learned how to use home spaces and stories to meditate upon my own odd, off kilter, strange way of ‘making sense’ out of this music and this life. I also found other writers searching to articulate a queer of colour sensibility: E. Patrick Johnson, Audre Lorde, Cathy Cohen, and especially José Esteban Muñoz.Footnote 2 And that work helped me find the music that would continue to sustain me, the music that would bring together all kinds of sounds to hear a future of many textures.
In this article, I would like to create a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I am bringing together Christopher Small's notion of musicking as social event with the queer of colour theorist José Esteban Muñoz's notion of queer utopia, and with Afrocentric notions of non-linear time to argue that music can be a means of activating our desires to create a future world.Footnote 3 An embrace of black queer strategies of listening and musicking adds a new layer to the music we study, contributing the element of dream space to the artefact of the score or record, the event of a performance, and the social fabric around that event. This music-inspired dream space, combined with the writerly work of storytelling and self-reflection, provide rich ways of understanding music's impact in everyday life, and may bring us closer to creating the world that we want to live in.
I am writing this during the tenth anniversary of Muñoz's groundbreaking 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. In those ten years, black queer musicians have found an unprecedented space within pop to come out and to create work that is queer, to experiment with sound, personae, and storytelling in ways in which a multitude of listeners might see themselves, and to use their music to make their own fabulous route into new futures. There are many different black queer dreamscapes created through hip-hop, pop, rock, punk, spoken word, soul, and even country music: Frank Ocean, Janelle Monáe, Meshell Ndegeocello, Big Freedia, Azealia Banks, Shirlette Ammons, Shea Diamond, and yes, Lil Nas X. There are the divas who mean everything to queer listeners – Lizzo, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, and Nicki Minaj. And as special journal issues dedicated to queer hip-hop edited by Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Jessica Pabón, and C. Riley Snorton have documented, there is a growing crew of queer and trans hip-hop performers pushing binaries of gender and race and sound.Footnote 4
But it still seems true, as Muñoz suggested back in 2009, that to be queer – to touch and feel and hear queerness – is to always be propelled into a future, because the present still fails us. He writes, ‘Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.’Footnote 5 That is to say, queerness is itself a site of mourning that gives way to reinvention. As the writers of the Forward to the 2019 edition of Cruising Utopia point out, even as Muñoz's work has been celebrated as a way of thinking about and dreaming about the future, it is also a call to think and write and dream and live ‘in the wake of heartbreak’.Footnote 6 This world is one where you might be able to get married and be referred to by the right pronoun, but where you can still be surveilled and arrested or brutalized for being a person of colour or poor or undocumented or black or brown or queer or trans or just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Homelessness for queer youth of colour is still at an all-time high. Violence against LGBTQ folks, especially trans women of colour, continues at epidemic rates.
To me, the most significant black queer music of this moment speaks of joy at the same time that it makes room for grief. Both of these aspects speak to the ways in which music sonically transports us to the past, though memory, and can articulate yearnings below the surface of consciousness. Queer music also helps us find places of connection, though listening to a performer articulating our own inchoate desires, by joining in an act of mourning or celebration through listening, dancing, singing, imitating, lip-syncing, and even writing about music. In these ways, at a concert or dancing in bars such as Medusa's, or at a drag king show where the 1980s boy band New Edition is reinvented for our own queer purposes, or in a classroom where I share a Little Richard song with my students to mourn his passing, or at a #BlackLivesMatter protest where Janelle Monáe's music energizes us to march further, or here at my desk, listening to Brittany Howard's new solo album in my earphones as I write about a memory I had long forgotten, music becomes an action, possibly a utopic action, a way to dream up a future world. These communal and perhaps utopic aspects of music might be added to the ways in which Christopher Small describes musicking as a social action:
To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what's called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is musical performance.Footnote 7
To take Small's definition a little further, beyond a single event, a song or performance remembered, rebroadcast, reinterpreted can help us build a vision of home connected to others. This can include our blood as well as our chosen family; it can include our children and our parents; it can include the folks that we do not know. And among those that we are connecting to are the dead – those who lived, created, and died so that we might also do so – our ancestors included and beyond blood.
This process – of thinking through our future by linking to and travelling to our past through music – is a central tenet of Afrofuturism. As many before me have discussed, Afrofuturist sound is a central survival tool for all of us, queer and otherwise.Footnote 8 Time is central to sonic interventions in Afrofuturism – reworked, re-experienced through sampling and remixing and retelling, slowing down and speeding up voices or tempos, or the dream space of the break, for example.Footnote 9 And it adds grief – the marking of loss, felt deeply in our bodies and their movements. We are always in the wake of chattel slavery, as Christina Sharpe reminds us, and so to survive that undertow, we connect ourselves to our ancestors and try our best to speak to them: through divination, poetry, music, dance, jamming, the very sweat of funk.Footnote 10 Queer Afrofuturist writer Kiese Laymon offers the notion of ‘stank’ as this marking of survivor of work, trauma, and labour, as well as the ability to create a powerful style from it.Footnote 11 This ‘stank’ is what Laymon recognized in his Mississippi grandmother's creation of top church-worthy fashions out of a collection of castaways after a week of hard work at a chicken processing plant, and stank is what he found captured for the first time in the Afrofuturist sounds of OutKast.Footnote 12 Afrofuturism might be inherently queer in this embrace of multiple and possibly simultaneous frequencies of embodied knowing, represented in music, perhaps, by the ways in which the grain of the voice and sense of time is stretched, transformed but still also present in P-Funk's vocoder, for example, and Bootsy's ever-expanding rubber band of a bass, still on the One; Janelle's syncopated dance of survival on the tightrope or Brittany Howard's snaky voice; and the ways in which this thinking takes the top off of our minds, letting the change come in, opening us up to an always becoming self. Octavia Butler, foremother of Afrofuturism, wrote, ‘All that you touch / You change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is Change.’Footnote 13 And it may be queer, too, if we choose to think about our connections to the past as well as to the future as one where one commits passionately to others outside of blood.
Brittany Howard's Jaime (2019): a blueprint for dreaming change
Brittany Howard's 2019 solo album Jaime is music to listen to right now for its queerly Afrofuturistic ability to take us in and out of time.Footnote 14 Jaime connects us to the past that sustains us and to understand with feeling and the need for new solutions to injustice, especially along race, gender, and power. In that way, Jaime is part of a long line of black queer women's Afrofuturistic music, or what Gayle Murchison identifies as black women's ‘quare afrofuturism’, music which seeks to ‘flip the scripts’ of sexuality, gender, race, and power queerly (whether or not the artists identify as such).Footnote 15 Murchison includes the work of Labelle and Janelle Monáe who, even while they are performing fashions, sounds, and storylines about new futures, are also taking in hand their own creative futures and challenging assumptions about black women's creativity. Howard's process, as well as her message, flips scripts of power and creative control.
One aspect of the past that Howard is mourning and then re-envisioning is the ways in which the music industry has underestimated black women as creative forces. With Jaime, Howard exercises unprecedented control over its sound, vision, and shape by writing songs, singing, playing drums, producing, and leading her band. While doing so, she has had to speak out directly against her listeners’ assumptions about her creative capacities as a black woman. She tells Pitchfork senior editor Jillian Mapes that she considered calling the album Black Björk. Mapes writes:
What the two composers share, besides their big scale visions and hurricane voices, is a deep desire for their rightful due. After the Alabama Shakes’ second album, Sound & Color, captured a far more ambitious almost-Afrofuturistic side of Howard's songwriting, compared to their debut, she got used to people wrongly assuming that Blake Mills, the band's co-producer, must have written the songs. ‘Now I have to be adamant about what I did,’ she says. ‘So I'll just say I'm very excited, as a woman in 2019, to have produced this record.’Footnote 16
Howard, by claiming herself as a black Björk (an icon of eccentric musical exploration and inventiveness) and clarifying to her interviewer her role as the primary creative force behind Jaime, acknowledges that her critics, fans, and perhaps even music executives have underestimated her creativity. Even as she confidently claims her strength and creativity in the interview, she also suggests that racism and sexism may have limited her career in the past.
Howard's interrogation of black women's role in music, especially rock music, goes beyond Jaime. There is something deep in Howard's sound that acknowledges the contentious role of black creative production in American popular music and that marks and acknowledges the love and theft of blackness. In her work with Alabama Shakes, Howard's voice reminds us of the deep debt that rock, but especially southern rock, owes to black blues traditions, particularly black women's blues. In songs such as ‘Hold On’ and ‘I Don't Want to Fight’, belting out lyrics while standing barefoot, Howard holds rock accountable, while also pushing it to become something new, something that invites new listeners in. She draws deeply upon blues artists such as Bessie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as the soul men such as Al Green, Marvin Gaye, the Stylistics, and the Chi-Lites – that yearning, sometimes pleading, always seductive falsetto that was then turned out (and inside out) by Prince. Howard brings out the butch command of the blues women, the reflective songwriting of folk and women's music in particular, and the genderfuck falsetto sexiness of the soul men to create her own brew of strength, vulnerability, and swoonably sweaty, beautiful singing.
Howard's final decision to title the album after her big sister Jaime both salutes the person who first taught her how to make music and write poetry and commemorates the loss of her. As Howard has shared frequently in interviews, her sister Jaime died at thirteen from retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer, when Brittany was only eight. While none of the songs seem to be written directly to Jaime, the album is shaped by this spirit of creative potential for a growing self-awareness, as well as ongoing struggles with pain and loss. This twin marking of creative inspiration and loss shapes the album, from the epic, prophetic songs – such as the opening cut, ‘History Repeats’, and ‘13th Century Metal’ – to the smaller, more intimate songs such as ‘Georgia’, ‘Goat Head’, ‘Stay High’, and ‘Short and Sweet’. Howard uses those gifts from her sister to lift up experiences of challenging, often difficult subjects, including race, sexuality, and power. She encourages her audience to address their own everyday but life-changing moments as well as bigger struggles of God, church, and politics. In this way, Howard's album is shaped by what Jill Dolan calls ‘utopian performatives’:
Utopian performatives describe small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking and intersubjectively intense.Footnote 17
Drawing from Marxist philosophers Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, Dolan demonstrates the ways in which art, including music, can help us imagine an ‘alternate world’.Footnote 18 By bringing in the losses of the past while reinventing sound for the future, Howard is creating a queer utopia, one that is infectious and inclusive.
Jaime feels groundbreaking to me as a queer black woman. Not just because of the fact that Howard very insistently mentions her wife in every major interview that she has given for the album. And not just because of the ways in which Howard claims blackness at the same time that she gives visibility to her embodiment as a biracial woman, a disabled woman, a working-class woman, and a lesbian. And not just because of the ways in which she so clearly and convincingly steers the reins creatively as songwriter, producer, guitarist, and singer, drawing from relatable stories of her family and past to create lyrics that make powerful connections to her listeners. Jaime is powerful for all of these things and also because of the subtle ways in which Howard shows a path to cruising utopia without leaving out where you come from – your history, your hometown, your family, the people you have loved as a child, your friends, your lovers, the music that you have always loved (even the corny stuff), and the church that may or may not love you back. Jaime's depiction of a queer childhood and coming of age is also grounded in everyday struggles of racism and poverty. Queer theorists E. Patrick Johnson and Cathy Cohen argue for an intersectional notion of queerness, one that reflects the lived experiences of queers of colour and that also acknowledges the ways in which all black sexuality has been deemed as non-normative by white culture. Howard puts this theory into action by making black queer music that does not leave behind those that she grew up with: other black people (including men), working-class folks, and her own family.Footnote 19
The result is music that is both future-looking and rooted, all the while creating a space for mourning as well as playfulness, creating the queer utopia that José Esteban Muñoz writes about. As Zandria Robinson writes, ‘Jaime feels like that elusive and mystical other side of grief, where tears, no longer happy or sad but something much greater and far more satisfying, surprise and amuse.’Footnote 20 She goes on to describe the album as one that ‘rings up Meshell Ndegeocello's Bitter from the future’.Footnote 21 On Bitter (1999), Ndegeocello – also a black queer Afrofuturistic musical artist – is sonically and lyrically ruminating, spanning musical genres as well as moods. Likewise, Howard's Jaime explores the range of her songwriting from elegiac to seduction to protest to prophesy. We hear her own beautiful and ‘snaky’ voice (as she describes it herself in the podcast Song Exploder), synth and vibraphone, guitar and harp, drum set and chopsticks.Footnote 22 Jaime also reflects the fruits of the labour of collaboration with her community of musicians and back-up singers. Together, they make use of the acoustic and the electronic, what is written down and remembered, and what is improvised.
Queer black girl dream space: ‘Georgia’
Throughout Jaime, Howard examines black queer yearning in ways that open up how rock and other forms of pop music often represent desire. In ‘Georgia’, for example, a love song from a younger girl to an older one, we hear the vulnerable, obsessive, erotic pleading of an earlier era, usually sung by men to women, such as ‘Bernadette’, ‘Angie’, ‘ Cecilia’, ‘Roxanne’, ‘Rosanna’, ‘Lola’, ‘Suzanne’, and let's not forget, ‘Darling Nikki’. These are all songs sung by men to unattainable, heart-breaking women, objects of frustration and distant desire. While these songs might be meaningful for those who love across genders, the stories they tell centralize the desires and inner lives of men. With Howard's portrait of a childhood crush – fictional, she says – that also happens to be of a black queer girl, Howard claims a space for young black queer girls’ yearning. Howard tells her audience for her October 2019 Tiny Desk Concert that the song is about ‘a little young, black gay girl having a crush on an older black girl and not knowing what to say and how I was feeling’.Footnote 23 She tells Billboard's Hilary Hughes that she wrote the song precisely because she had not heard one like it before.Footnote 24 And in her vocal performance, she sounds to me to be particularly southern and black and queer, maybe in the three-syllable pronunciation of ‘Georgia’, expanding Ray Charles's nostalgic yearning of place to a much more visceral one; and in the butch swagger underneath the insecurity (‘I ain't no little boy’, she sings). Howard tells Apple Music:
People say songs on this record have a double meaning. To me, a lot of them have a triple meaning: there's the world, then there's me in the world, then there's the little me inside me. It's like a Russian doll. I wrote “Georgia” from the perspective of myself as a child. It's a love song to an older girl when you're a little girl and you don't understand what it means to be gay. It's just an innocent infatuation, the way crushes become your whole world when you're young.Footnote 25
As I will explore, ‘Georgia’ is not just about a crush. It is also about wanting to be seen fully and to understand oneself – a yearning that connects the song to the rest of the album. Like the rest, this song is a dream for the future.
‘Georgia’ opens with a sing-song chant, guided by gentle prodding of synth and bass:
Howard's voice is an almost-whisper, young and as sweet as Now and Laters. A prayer to a forbidden idol charged with sour stomach and yearning. Listening, I return to a memory I am not sure I want to remember, the rhythm of my sneakered feet as I negotiated the crowded halls of my junior high school, head down, the singing voice in my brain creating a buffer between my own thoughts and the world, my shoulders and toes turned in so that I would take up as little space as possible. I remember that contradictory desire to be both invisible and to be noticed.
On one such day, my reverie was broken by the song of girls coming from the bathroom, voices high with emotion, and the ‘Woot! Woot!’ of a cheering female audience. Not quite sure what I would see, I opened the banged-up metal doors to see Stephanie, my own idol, wrestling with another girl. Stephanie had the girl in a headlock. Both were crying, snot and tears streaming over their furious faces. A hall monitor came in to break up the fight, and at the sound of her voice, Stephanie released her. When she was freed, the girl reached up and slapped Stephanie. ‘Don't you ever. Don't you ever touch me again’, she said, one hand pointing in Stephanie's face, the other cupping a spot just above her own collarbone. As the monitor led Stephanie to the principal's office, the girl who had been headlocked pulled her blouse back for another girl to see the spot. A hickey. A mark so passionate it seemed to throb. ‘She knows my grandmother will kick my ass for that.’ Later, at lunch, the other girls speculated. Did Stephanie force herself on her? Were they an item? One girl whispered, ‘Lovers’ spat’, and snickered. I was disturbed by the violent scene, but also intrigued. This was before I found queer spaces such as Medusa's, and before I had the chance to act on my own yearnings. Sometimes, in the music that I heard in the playground of my all-black junior high school before school, I heard glimmers of how I felt, like Diana Ross's disoriented pleasure in ‘Upside Down’ or in Michael Jackson's crazed laughter at the beginning of in ‘Off the Wall’. But never before in the hubbub of lip-gloss and note passing and grinding boy–girl dances in the gym had I heard anyone else acknowledge the possibility of girl-on-girl love. Even though it was the love that shaped my own dreams.
Stephanie was the tough girl to my nerd, the girl I was not sure if I wanted or wanted to be. She was good enough to play on the boys’ basketball team, thigh muscles like solid trunks that flexed as she pivoted with the ball. She was a gruff hoodie with the relaxed hair more or less mandatory for black girls at my school, but always pulled back into a ponytail held by a simple red or green rubber band, the kind you might find on a newspaper. She wore a Pittsburgh Steelers cap turned to the left, like the toughest boys in our school, which may have been a sign that she belonged to one of the two neighbourhood gangs. But I could also see past her toughness to her vulnerability. How she would trip over the vocabulary words in our dog-eared English workbooks, cracking jokes to distract the teacher from her struggles to read. The sting at the basketball game when Otis slapped her butt before stealing the ball away. Her eyes cast down, she seemed to shake it off and no one seemed to notice. But I did. Stephanie never wore a dress or skirt except on picture day, and when she did, her broad shoulders and neck turned that lovingly clingy striped mini dress into something else entirely: an ode to muscle. But did she notice me? Probably not in the way that I wanted. Listening to ‘Georgia’, I remember Stephanie, but I also remember a yearning that ran even deeper, that desire to fully understand myself. ‘Georgia’ takes me back to the memory of what it felt like to be queer and not be seen. Now as an adult living a full and out queer life, listening to ‘Georgia’ creates a community of sorts between Brittany and I, both of us carrying within us these little brown queer girls yearning to be seen. The drive to connect to other queer girls ultimately saved me. ‘Georgia’ reminds me of the importance of connecting to others like me, but also of protecting that yearning girl within me.
Towards the song's climax, Howard moves past this yearning to be noticed to something else, something more. ‘Is it unnatural? Georgia, is it cool?’ The speaker in the song wants to tell Georgia that she loves her, but she also expresses something harder to name, the desire for something that even the speaker is not quite sure how to express. Ushered in by a pulsing, churchy organ and an insistent drumbeat, ‘Georgia’ explodes into an orgasmic dream space. We are initiated into the space of the erotic, what Audre Lorde has described as the space between our strongest yearnings and the chaos of the not yet known.Footnote 26 Howard describes the ways in which she structured the song to create that sense of yearning and chaos:
The chord structures during the verse, the big overwhelming ending – the whole song explains the feeling. It's supposed to sound really minimal and juvenile and innocent because that's what the song's about: it's about a young girl having a crush on an older girl and not understanding what that even means. She really keeps it to herself. In the end, when it gets big and blown out and reverb-y, that's [us] revealing how that feels, that soundscape. It's a cool subject, what the song's about, and the way it's displayed is really unique.Footnote 27
I have felt music like this – the invitation to go inward, to match my breath with bass and drums. To move as if I were a cell inside my own body, heated and moved by some flow larger than myself. It is the job of music to speak to those whole worlds, to help in the search for them, to take us inward to find them when we cannot see them right away. This is not the coy toying with girl-on-girl love of Katy Perry's ‘I Kissed A Girl’ or even the deep dive into lesbian drama of Ani DiFranco or Melissa Etheridge. Instead, this is a song expressing a desire that is more slippery, more porous. It is a song about a yearning to know the queer self, to explore the shape of desire, to travel its promised routes.
In contrast to Prince's expansive instrumental sections in songs such as ‘I'm Yours’ and ‘Darling Nikki’, songs which name the subject of sex before launching into these orgasmic, virtuosic performances, this moment in ‘Georgia’ is brief, letting us feel it too and remember that elusive moment of promise of something else before it slips into a different kind of feeling. I find Howard's short take on black queer girls’ sexual exploration to be feminist in that it acknowledges the difficulty of nurturing sexual self-knowledge when the world contradicts your own vision. In that way, I am reminded of the song's black feminist literary precedents of black-girl-on-girl love: Audre Lorde's portrait of her first crush on a little girl named Toni, their sharing of peppermints and the desire to see underneath one another's coats in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; Toni Morrison's friendship between Sula and Nel, digging holes, stripping sticks, and keeping one another's secrets with the silent holding of hands, in her novel Sula.Footnote 28 These episodes are also brief, quickly interrupted by the realities of eager-eyed mothers and the pressure to be somewhere – to run errands, do housework or homework, watch after siblings. The stretching of time and the exploration of self for little black girls, queer or not, is often protracted and domesticated. Yet there is also a persistence in Howard's return to this little-girl self, her commitment to carrying it with her, a source of erotic energy nestled as a Russian doll inside to be called upon when needed.
The continuum of grief and joy: ‘Goat Head’ and ‘Stay High’
At the same time that Howard offers a frank expression of what it felt like to be a queer child in ‘Georgia’, she also expands her vision of love and yearning to consider the lives and struggles of her parents, to think about race and class as other prohibitions that yearn to be named and transcended. ‘Goat Head’, also penned by Howard, begins with a jazzy, laid back hip-hop call-and-response between drummer Nate Smith and keyboardist Robert Glasper. Howard enters the second verse as if in mid-conversation, then sing-raps (with a hint of Billie Holiday snarl) to claim her own deeply complex blackness:
‘My heroes are black’, she tells us earlier in the song, using the story of a goat head to explain why. One night, someone in her very small hometown in Alabama left a severed goat's head in the backseat of her father's station wagon, a protest against his loving and public commitment to his white wife and multiracial children. When I was watching Howard's performance of ‘Goat Head’ during her NPR Tiny Desk Concert, as she and the band chant the lines ‘Goat head in the back / Goat head in the back’, I heard it as an echo of Jim Crow's segregated busses and other public spaces, ‘Go ’head in the back.’Footnote 29 The still present pressure of white supremacy.
In many ways, Howard's stubborn willingness to look for joy in the face of grief is queer, especially as she links her parent's past to her own queer life. In ‘Stay High’, Howard conveys the power of joy and the desire to protect it. This is a song that is both world-weary and tender, speaking of the ‘grind and hustle’ of everyday life, but also the rejuvenating power of love and sex and home:
In the music video for ‘Stay High’, directed by Danny Clinch, Howard tells this story as one about her black father, coming home from a brutal day at work and being lifted by the idea of family that he carries with him.Footnote 30 But in her discussion of the song on the podcast Song Exploder, Howard also links the song to herself, to the transformative power of her own relationship with her wife, to her connection with her band mates, and to the power of making music.Footnote 31 The music video stars Terry Crews as her father, embodying weariness, joy, and a particularly black, southern, working-class manhood as he navigates the public space of small town life. We watch him wearily trudge from his work at a factory to punch out the clock, his feet barely moving from the floor, suggesting a day spent on his feet. We watch his face open and his body relax in the sanctuary of his car as he listens to a song on the radio and sings along. But the voice here and throughout is Howard's (Crews is lip-syncing throughout the video, singing in Howard's voice). It is a lovely queer twist that plays along with Howard's sometimes gender-ambiguous voice, and which also connects and twins her father's struggles and pleasures with her own: ‘I already feel like doing it again, honey.’ This is no mere expression of martyrdom. This line speaks of the almost addictive joy of love and love-making and its necessity for surviving all that ails us, including racism and homophobia.
There is a flirtation underlined by Howard's playful delivery of ‘Stay High’, which slides up and down and all around the notes. Through those queer bends and twists, Howard articulates the almost impossible way that love – erotic love, romantic love, familial love – can renew us, lift us, bring light, change our vision. Robert Glasper's spare but poignant use of the celeste to hit the high notes instils the song with deep feeling (evoking the sound of Marvin Gaye's ‘Mercy, Mercy Me’), and Howard's switch to triple claps as the song moves to the second verse lends it a sense of gospel testimony. In this way, Howard claims earthly, everyday, and queer love and joy as holy.
In Afrofuturist novelist Octavia Butler's time-traveling novel Kindred, her heroine Dana, a contemporary black woman, time-travels to slavery times, becoming, she discovers, one of her own ancestors. In the process, she understands more deeply her ancestors’ drive to survive that made it possible for her to live.Footnote 32 In ‘Stay High’, Brittany travels to her past, becoming a childhood version of her own father (in voice, if not in body) and then makes multiple reappearances as one of her father's co-workers, and then a member of a friendly crowd at an ice cream stand, singing next to smiling police officers. This vision is made possible by the technologies of video cutting and pasting and syncing, of course. In the best Afrofuturist spirit, Howard's video uses technology to remind us that struggle continues, even as it gives us relief from struggle. Perhaps through this time travel, too, Howard better understands her father, her own ancestor, whose love sustained the family despite the draining quality of his job and the town itself, which we know through Howard's testimony in ‘Goat Head’ was not quite as friendly as we are seeing here. As Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, we know that we are not quite in the world that we want, but we can imagine it, we can cruise and flirt with it, and that joy is a necessary tool for our survival.
Even as ‘Stay High’ explores the promise of renewability, it also seems to be aware of love's limits, the realities of constraint in real space and time. In her interview with Pitchfork, Howard says that another inspiration for many of the songs on Jaime was a cross-country road trip with her wife that reminded her of still-existing racism and homophobia. She describes searching for a space to settle down to live together and to create the album's songs, and finds herself in a small, sweaty, borrowed greenhouse in Topanga Canyon, CA.Footnote 33 Even as we dream of queer utopia as in ‘Stay High’, we also need real spaces to feel safe.
We might think of the optimism of ‘Stay High’ and the anger and grief of ‘Goat Head’ as a continuum. Throughout Jaime, Howard powerfully braids grief and protest with glimpses of beauty, yearning, and sweetness. I felt this viscerally when watching her Tiny Desk Concert performances of ‘Stay High’ and ‘Goat Head’.Footnote 34 Howard's sonic interactions with her back-up singers Shanay Johnson and Karita Law, the tenderness and delicacy with which Lloyd Buchanan and Paul Horton play the keyboards, the deep listening felt in Nate Smith's drums, and the warm, conversational, almost freestyle feel of the performances create a sense of joy in the face of grief.
Jaime contains within it those moments of intimacy and self-revelation of a sister-to-sister late night car ride conversation, the kind that wanders from story to story lazily and associatively, meandering between the metaphysical and the earthly, shored up by inside jokes and sips of a Wendy's frosty or a diet coke. There is, in this conversation, a kind of yearning to connect and make sense between past, present, and future, to reveal the multitudes that Howard has become in her journey from girl to woman, the complexity of living in this time, and maybe also a question or two: How do we keep making the world that we want to live in, despite our disappointments? How do we find what lives within us to keep going?
If, in Cruising Utopia, Muñoz speaks of the ways in which queer joy might be courted and ‘cruised’, teased out of the ‘not-yet-conscious’ articulation of feeling in art, then Brittany Howard cruises utopia too, in the exploratory cries of the young queer lover in ‘Georgia’ and in the freestyle riffing on mourning and anger in ‘Goat Head’. But Howard also brings an insistence on acknowledging beauty and connection in the midst of our imperfect world. Maybe this is Howard's offering to a queer future of popular music, in its collaborative spirit, in its snaky, wayward routes to knowing, in its powerful ways of tapping into memory and the unspoken; the perfect tool to both cruise and struggle with utopia, and to change our everyday world in the process of its discovery.
Concluding thoughts
I am writing this from home, quarantined along with my partner, Annie, and our eight-year-old daughter, Cece, for the past many weeks, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. I am writing this in the wake of death, unnecessary death, which reflects the deep inequalities still with us. Where, for example, the US president has proposed a rollback of the Obama administration's ruling that the Department of Health and Human Services protect people from discrimination in health care on the basis of gender orientation and sexual orientation.Footnote 35 Where nurses, social workers, folks who clean up hospitals, and other essential workers – including my own family – are treated as expendable. In the midst of the pandemic, George Floyd was murdered by ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who held him down with a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes while he begged for mercy. We are all reeling from this combination of brutality and neglect. We share our outrage on the streets through protest, by sharing information through social media, through hushed phone conversations so our children do not overhear us, during hurried front porch visits while wearing our masks. We want to know what is next. Will there be a future that answers the call of our present outrage? Through all of this, I am sustained by the company of my family and calls and texts from my friends, a thoughtful care package left by my neighbour Nancy, the privilege of tenure, and a home. I am sustained by the writing that takes my mind off of things, the poetry and novels in a growing stack by my bed, the awkward but thoughtful Zoom conversations with my students, the everyday laughter of my daughter, and music.
The future of pop music might well rely on our ability to consider a tomorrow in the midst of grief. Music such as Brittany Howard's Jaime inspires us to create the world that we want, to move that dream from our isolated heads and bodies to share with others. Perhaps music writing that is both critical and personal might be one way of capturing this journey, and, if successful, a way of continuing the journey with others. We need multiple strategies of listening, performing and creating to make a blueprint of the future that includes all of us – one that privileges imagination over commerce, vulnerability over hardness, shared memory over erasure.
