Traversing the Urban Soundscape: Black Sonic Geographies within The Minneapolis Sound

Abstract

AbstractThis paper illuminates The Minneapolis Sound's emergence from the urban soundscapes of late 20th century Minneapolis. Turning to the 1960s and 1970s, I trace the genre's geohistorical emergence to a Black diasporic community who found within marginality the possibilities to spatialise an experimental world across the urban margins. Disclosing how this experimental world was upheld by improvisatory musical ensembles and their dynamic reaffirmations of a Black sense of place, the paper reveals how The Minneapolis Sound was insurgently pioneered as a Black sonic counter culture amidst unequivocal oppression. I then temporally propel the paper into the 1980s and 1990s and explore how the artist Prince and band The Time radically re‐imagined the city's anti‐Black spatial histories towards more just ends. This elucidates how, after emerging from the spatiality of the racialised metropolis, The Minneapolis Sound provided a speculative avenue of decolonial poetics through which alternative Black futures were made imaginable.