Music Is a World: Stevie Wonder and the Sound of Black Power

Abstract

In this chapter, I want to consider the sonic culture of the Black Power movement, specifically, the discourse on blackness in music recorded live or in studio, or recordings of speeches, poetry, film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, and other artifacts dating from the 1960s and 1970s. Insofar as Black Power is known to successive generations, it is often seen—through visual iconography, fashion, and political spectacle, as depicted in film footage and documentary photography. Nevertheless, as a substantial body of critical writing and scholarship has shown, African American writers, activists, and visual artists of the era were often inspired by black music.1 The sonic culture of Black Power, through commercial recordings of speeches, poetry readings, spoken-word performances, interviews, radio broadcasts, and most prominently, music, offered a crucial means by which local information and messages about liberation struggles reached national and international audiences. During the 1960s and 1970s, popular music became a critical site for reflection on the meaning of blackness, on the historical relationship of African Americans to the United States, to the African diaspora, and to the world.2 The global reach and influence of the Black Power movement was arguably achieved through the era’s recorded music, as much as the iconography of images of US black liberation struggles brought by documentary photography, film, and television to overseas audiences, or the international touring of black and African activists and musicians.KeywordsBlack StudyPopular MusicSonic CultureBlack ConsciousnessBlack Power MovementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.