Contemporary literatures in African American culture reflect a preoccupation with the ‘boundaries of blackness’, as articulated by political scientist Cathy Cohen in her groundbreaking work fifteen years ago. From scholarship that challenges histories of black charisma to popular non-fiction attempts to substantiate ‘postblackness’, scholars and citizens appear to be deeply invested in troubling and/or reshaping what it means to be black in the United States. Francesca Royster continues in this vein with Sounding Like a No-No, a book that investigates ‘a group of [post-soul] maverick performers who push the norms of blackness as they get entangled with sexuality and gender through the powerful platform of popular music’ (p. 3). Royster's investment in performances of complex sexualities sets her work apart; while a number of her artists are widely recognized as queer, whether as out performers or as icons of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, questioning and intersex (LGBTQI) communities – such as Grace Jones, Michael Jackson and Meshell Ndegeocello – she also challenges us to imagine Stevie Wonder as ‘quare’, a theorization borrowed from performance scholar E. Patrick Johnson, defined as that ‘excess incapable of being contained within useful conventional categories of being’ (p. 65). Indeed, Royster's readings of Wonder's ‘cross-species collaboration’ in Journey through the Secret Life of Plants (1979) combine his disability and powerful freedom grooves to highlight his rebellious dreams of humanity (p. 68). His ‘strategically vulnerable masculinity’ is convincingly argued as the method for his erotics and contrary politics of pleasure (a thread connecting all of the No-No artists), positioning him within Royster's eccentric, which she marks as ‘not only out of the ordinary or unconventional performances but also those that are ambiguous, uncanny, or difficult to read’ (p. 72).
Royster provides intriguing descriptions of these artists’ sound projects in her six-chapter treatment, which also includes Eartha Kitt and George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic. Yet it remains unclear how she situates these performers in relation to the conditions that precipitated their challenges and critiques of blackness. For example, in the final chapter, which discusses Ndegeocello's 2007 album The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, Royster argues that she performs a ‘transgendered transnationalism’ in the wake of 9/11, yet this claim is not followed by analysis of the ‘post-9/11 moment of violence, terror, surveillance, and the destruction of communities’ that, Royster contends, organizes Ndegeocello's efforts (pp. 177–8). An elaboration of the structures that shape how blackness is experienced around the world would strengthen her argument about their influence on the performers and performances under study.
The rich readings of performance that Royster conducts detail these artists’ departures from a soul-era aesthetic that often centralized leadership and community models no longer applicable to contemporary black political cultures. That valuable contribution makes Sounding Like a No-No appealing to scholars and students of sexuality, popular music, and cultural and performance studies.
