Hi hi! HP here, as I have been for a few years now, to present some tunes in celebration and contemplation of Black History month in America. We’ve made it another year, and that is something!
For this 4th outing, I’d like us to ‘look’ at various images, performances, and music videos by, about, and for Black Americans. But I also want to see if we can ‘hear’ these images as well. And you’re thinking ‘but HP, these are all musical performances or music videos, OF COURSE we can hear them!’ And you’d be right. But the ‘listening’ I’m interested in here in 2024 is a kind of active project where we are just as interested in how the music and images are situated as we are in the way in which they can be understood. If we just ‘look’ at these images, we’re not challenging ourselves to engage with them in a meaningful way. And if we just ‘listen’ to the song or the performance, we’re also not mobilizing what has become an important way to understand the Black experience. This attentiveness is done by ‘hearing’ an image, by taking in not just the singular performance, but thinking about its production, about its reception, about how it feels to bear witness to the confluence of sound and image, etc. In other words, experience is key!
I know this seems very high minded, and maybe a little abstract, but I’m hoping it becomes clearer as we move through the things I’ve selected (and I hope it works-this is quite the experiment for me!).
First and foremost, I hope you like what you hear and see! I hope you love the new stuff, I hope you reconnect with the old stuff, I hope you open yourself to the other stuff! Your engagement is always appreciated- it doesn’t have to be anything high falutin’, even just vibes works for me. 🙂
A new post will appear in the comments every evening in February around 7pm CST.
(Header image: Gordon Parks- Outside Looking in, Mobile, Alabama, 1956)
Previous years:
2023- https://the-avocado.org/2023/02/01/28-days-of-blackity-black-songs/
2022- https://the-avocado.org/2022/02/11/black-women-making-music/
2021- http://disq.us/p/2ms05wf (link to individual posts!)