Charles Kronengold, faculty member at Stanford University, presents "The Chaka Khanplex, 1977-78." This paper focuses on R&B singer Chaka Khan to argue that theorists should move from the causal models of actor-network theories toward Black feminist concepts of friendship, relationality, and what Jennifer Nash calls “the side-by-side-ness of the beautiful and loss.”
Abstract
"The Chaka Khanplex, 1977–1983"
Centering this singular musician in an account of popular-music practice can help us theorize a dense network of people, institutions, technologies, sounds, techniques, and ideas at a moment of rapid change. This paper draws on an archive of about 200 songs and videos and nearly 100 articles, interviews, reviews, news items, advertisements, and liner notes. In methodological terms the “Chaka Khanplex” shows why we should move from the causal models of actor-network theories toward Black feminist concepts of friendship, relationality, and what Jennifer Nash calls “the side-by-side-ness of the beautiful and loss.”
Speaker Biography
Charles Kronengold writes and teaches about music, film, and aesthetics. He is the author of Living Genres in Late Modernity: American Music of the Long 1970s (University of California Press) and, with Adrian Daub, The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford University Press). His recently-finished second monograph is entitled Crediting Thinking in Soul and Dance Music. Since 2008 he has taught music history at Stanford, where he has also been a faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and affiliated faculty of the Program in American Studies, the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.
Series Background
THEME: A colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education held on select Friday afternoons during Autumn Quarter.
Upcoming Events in This Series
Nov. 18: Sarah Bartolome, (Northwestern University):
"From Idea Incubation to Implementation: The Trauma, Music, and the Breath Initiative"
Dec. 2: James Currie (State University of New York); Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University); Frederick Reece (University of Washington):
"Forgery in Musical Composition"