MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Black social movements in the United States have frequently used popular music to challenge racialized state violence, the inequities of capitalism, and other antagonisms faced by black diasporic subjects. Among the many parallels between the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s and the contemporary organization Black Lives Matter is the way in which both movements associate with rich musical discourses that articulate their politics. The musicians associated with these movements, in addition to directly expressing socio-political commentary, also engage with modernity and mediate this concept in a way that is unique to the black Atlantic subject. In this paper, I will consider the music of the Black Panther Party and the Black Lives Matter movements, paying particular attention to the Panther Party’s funk band The Lumpen and to the music of Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce Knowles – especially their respective performances at the Grammy Awards, the BET Music Awards, and the 2016 Superbowl Halftime Show. In addition to considering the relationship between music and tactics in these social movements, I will describe the ways in which these artists smuggle radical politics into popular culture and everyday life. Drawing on ideas about blackness, music, and double-consciousness from Paul Gilroy (1993) and W.E.B. DuBois (1903), I will argue that these social movements and musicians appear as “dangerous” and “threatening” to modernity – not because they are hostile to the notion of modernity as such, but because they mediate it in ways that reveal the slippages between its supposedly universal values (such as full citizenship and equality) and its real-life exclusions and violences.