If you’re in the know, there’s a kinda secret but incredible curated playlist of over 150 songs that stands as one possible companion soundtrack to the equally marvelous and expansive yet incisive writing in Daphne Brooks’s new book. It leads off with recorded blues pathbreaker Mamie Smith, her showbiz vocals serving the good kind of crazy, and closes out nine hours later with the uncompromisingly glam truth-teller “our Lady of Lemonade” (9). Bessie and Nina and Eartha and Aretha (or ReRe, in Brooks’s preferred sobriquet), Abbey and Billie and Sarah and Dinah shout and croon, melismatize, rasp, and declaim. The sisters with instrumental prowess are also here, Mary Lou swinging jazz “automotivity” (90) on gas-pedal keys, and Sister Rosetta wielding her Gibson Les Paul like a blessed knife beside fellow travelers of the fretboard including the elusive 1930s blues duo Geeshie Wiley and Elvie (L.V.) Thomas. On to the new vanguard whose “fade to black” sounds (369), after visual artist Carrie Mae Weems’s insight into Black women’s potentiality, rise with Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, and Cécile McLorin Salvant — artists Brooks follows through reclaimed minstrel song, strains of “Affrilachian” (550) mysticism, and the jazzwoman’s cool regard for the monstrous. This playlist streams online ^{Footnote 1} as testament to the ongoing shimmer and breathtaking breadth of Black women in popular music, and to Brooks’s arms-in-open-embrace practice of archival engagement. To encounter this text, one must also encounter the music.

In her tour-de-force book Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, Brooks invokes the promise of a popular music criticism “imagined otherwise” than prevalent narratives scripting Black women musicians and their work as fetish objects in a record collector’s possession. With admirable patience, good humor, and unflagging fervor, she clears a spacious pathway to understanding the modern world as definitively shaped by the sounds of Black feminist thought. Clocking in at a hard-packed 445 pages before endnotes, this epic contribution holds space as the signal scholarly consideration of Black women’s sonic critical practices. These feminist practices of curatorial command have been, Brooks notes, consistently devalued while Black women and their sounds remain romanticized “and — above all else — perpetually undertheorized by generations of critics” (2).

The book’s impressive scope, engaging over a century of sonic Black feminist critique, allows for the author’s remarkable fluidity of prose tonal shifts. Her savvy as a music journalist and finesse as the writer of acclaimed album liner notes for artists from Aretha to Prince shine in her quicksilver way with words. An irrepressible pop culture essayist and lyrical Black feminist historian “doing more with less” through the gaps in official histories, she is also a shrewd ivory tower academic as deft with her capacious textual citations as with her listening. She steps easily among popular music, sound, literary, performance, women’s, queer, American, cultural, and Black studies. And she sounds an urgent call for pop music criticism to grapple with the radical thinking these fields have surfaced, certain that “to go to the site where blues and rock criticisms can better handle, better care for the sisters making marvelous sound, we’re going to have to lean deep into Black study” (41).

Liner Notes for the Revolution is structured in eight chapters, divided across two “sides” in the manner of an LP record. Side A delves into the intellectual labor of feminist authors writing and speaking on sonic Black womanhood, the work of those only rarely invited to get in on the “hustle” of penning formal album liner notes. Brooks hears Black women musicians — including that intrepid song collector Zora Neale Hurston — as critics and culture workers aligned with the work of Jewish white women music critics such as tireless blues record producer and second-wave feminist Rosetta Reitz. Side B operates as the “deep cut” of Brooks’s increasingly speculative thought, advancing a counter-history of the blues that engages Black women as both music-makers and music connoisseurs. She proposes a method that “listens out for” and “looks after” artists like the little-known but much-mythologized blueswomen Geeshie Wiley and L.V. Thomas, rather than searching for their capture in ways that fail to account for the afterlives of slavery and Jim Crow–era oppressions. Brooks insists that we understand this music as the labor and solace of Black women in specific sociohistorical conditions. Sounded within and despite the subjugations of the carceral state, the music is the material residue of Black women’s “profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another” (12).

A key theoretical contribution of the book is Brooks’s assertion that Black women labor as “sonic curators” who arrange experiences of music in the revolutionary act of living Black life. Brooks thus lays out the terms by which we may understand her own labor — each chapter a curated set of women artists and thinkers linked through their forms and methods of Black feminist sound culture work. The initial chapter places “turn-of-the-century proto-Afrofuturist thinker” (10) Pauline Hopkins side-by-side with the android punk energy of liner note-scribe Janelle Monáe, jazz singer Abbey Lincoln on the 1960s lecture circuit, and Ebony music critic Phyl Garland. Subsequent chapters yield speculative meditations including those sparked by a lone item among rock critic Ellen Willis’s archived papers that attests to a meeting with Lorraine Hansberry; and the record collecting practices of teen Black girls in the early 20th century evoked in interviews with Brooks’s mother, Juanita Watkins Brooks, and in the exploits of literary archaeologist Toni Morrison’s heroines. Of a striking vintage postcard that may or may not depict Wiley and Thomas, two blueswomen on the road with pistol and guitar, she writes, “We want this relic of lives not known to us to serve as the ‘proof,’ the evidence of butch and femme sisters who played guitar duets in country suppers off the beaten path […] while packing heat” (271). But Brooks asks us, the would-be critics and collectors, to question what it is that we demand from Black women musicians in recorded history and take care that we both “respect their right to disappear and recognize the structures of violence that accompanied their disappearance” (262).

Rather than proffer a conclusive history or comprehensive theory of the aesthetics of Black feminist music, in Liner Notes for the Revolution Brooks works from the principle that Black women musicians are intellectuals. And the women whom she elects to study alongside operate, she asserts, as sonic archivists as well as archives of sociocultural memory, “women who are both the records and the recorders” (10). Hers is a heroic critical and curatorial work that, like the assembled tracks on the companion playlist, attests eloquently to the sweep, specificity, and intellectual heft of Black women’s sonic interventions.