I Felt Like Dropping Out of School But Then I Recieved This Email from a TA

Hope everybody is up to a good start for a  Monday.

I don’t know if you are old enough to recall Whitney Houston in her glory days, but I certainly have been in shock for the last 24 hours or more. She was an idol, drawing on the historical repertoire of performances of the black diva and projecting her unique combination of those performances into the very meaning of popular music. We’re talking a lot about landscapes, but Whitney helped define the American-Global and Black Diasporic soundscape from the 1980’s on. Jamaican dubtapes are full of Whitney. She performed at Nelson Mandela’s Birthday celebration. She remade the arrangement of the National Anthem with her 1991 superbowl performance. How can we use Whitney’s sound to think in more textured ways about meta-geographies? On the radio station this morning, listeners were commenting about how Whitney Houston’s records came to define weddings, funerals, and church gatherings. In what ways did Whitney Houston’s sound create continuities in vernacular landscapes/soundscapes across space and time? Of course as the quintessence of 1980’s “popular music” the projection of Whitney’s sound was bound to markets in intellectual property and global capitalism. Simultaneously, however, these sounds drew people together in experiences both within and in excess of the goal of capital production, circulation, and exchange. What do we get from thinking about Whitney’s sound in its resonance and power to create and arrange ephemeral vernacular spaces in excess of the goal of profit for record executives? 

Have a great day.