“This ain’t the same place it was / different space and buzz.”-Gift of Gab, “The Gentrification Song” (2018)1America is abuzz with gentrification. The archives of media, academia, and Hollywood2 are now replete with images, ranging from triumphant to melancholic, of urban change. Indeed, the symbology of gentrification has become iconic. From café seating on sanitized sidewalks to roving security “ambassadors,” from alien architectural styles to a rushed coat of paint (“flipper gray” is currently in vogue3), gentrification appears to be scrawled across the visual landscape of American cities. It thus seems to be inextricable from an optical epistemology, a way of knowing by seeing. According to this common sense, if it looks like gentrification, then it probably is (fig. 1).In this special issue, we offer a different take, starting with the lyrics from Gift of Gab, the recently deceased stalwart of Oakland’s underground hip-hop scene.4 In “The Gentrification Song” (2018), Gift of Gab laments the way the commodification of Oakland has dislocated not only longtime residents and communities, but also what geographer Katherine McKittrick calls a “Black sense of place.”5 “It was a place I used to call home,” he raps. “I try to chase the energy / but now it’s all gone.” Musically, the somber mood of the beat—which is constructed from a nostalgic, guitar-laden soul sample—seems to seep into his vocals. The once-notoriously rapid-fire lyricist sounds tired and contemplative. “The Gentrification Song” is a record of exhaustion. Here, it offers us critical tools to listen and think with. In the first lyrical bar, quoted above, Gift of Gab links three ideas: place, space, and buzz. He succinctly states that a change in the local vibration, including the soundscape, has emerged along with new spatialities that alienate him and other marginalized residents from the communities that made life meaningful (“the only place they’ve lived for all their days / where they learned all their ways and spent a thousand holidays”).Building upon Gift of Gab’s perspective, we convene this special issue around the idea that—for the residents, organizers, musicians, and dancers who experience the material and emotional impacts of displacement—the power of gentrification lies, in part, in the ways that it sounds. Cities, in other words, have an acoustic buzz that’s remade through redevelopment, and these changes produce a sense of spatial disorientation and dispossession. According to Brandi Summers, scholar of urban and media studies, “gentrification is a process in process,”6 creating locally specific, but generic, patterns of sound and silence. What, then, does gentrification sound like? The clamor of construction and traffic congestion. Crackdowns on block parties, buskers, and neighborhood nightclubs. Light music emanating from rooftop lounges and other so-called “legitimate” venues. More English. Less patois. Less kids in the street. Real-estate agents and tour guides narrating the neighborhood over the sonic lifeworlds of residents still struggling to stay put. But this isn’t a one-sided process of repression. Gentrification is also the sound of friction, endurance, and resistance. At Oakland’s Lake Merritt (see Werth, this volume), for instance, it sounds like drum circles, protest chants, and the high-pitched whine of a dirt-bike motorcade. It sounds like house music and hyphy rap, renegade vogue balls and barbecues. It sounds like the solicitations of panhandlers, the lonely distress of the unhoused and unwell, but still unvanquished.It would be wrong to assume we can read people’s race, class, and gender identities and experiences off of these soundscapes, for sonic positionalities elude simple generalization. But it would be equally wrong to overlook the deep ties between social and sonic dynamics. Indeed, soundscapes allow people to orient, both socially and affectively, to the space around them. For instance, in Spike Lee’s classic film Do the Right Thing (1989), the tensions of cohabitation among Black, Puerto Rican, Korean, and Italian residents and business owners in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn are animated by what Gabriel A. Peoples calls the “racialized erotics of sound” embodied in the character of Radio Raheem.7 The everyday struggle between community and conflict—or “love” and “hate,” in Radio Raheem’s famous parable—is rendered at the scale of the neighborhood as he moves across space carrying a boombox that plays Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (1989) on repeat. For Radio Raheem, these mobile soundscapes create what Joseph Schloss and Bill Bahng Boyer call “spaces of familiarity and comfort out of thin air.”8 But among others—in particular Sal, the owner of an Italian pizzeria that’s seen as an anti-Black space within a mostly Black neighborhood—Radio Raheem’s sonic and spatial production is derided as “noise” and “jungle music.” In the film’s climactic scene, Sal’s violent muting of Radio Raheem’s boombox metaphorizes and portends Raheem’s murder at the hands of the state. This alerts us to the fact that sound and listening contour, in the words of Jennifer Stoever, a “sonic color line.”9 Matrices of identity, power, and spatial sovereignty are made and remade through struggles over sound that take place—literally—amidst racial and political economies of policing and property. The meaning of urban soundscapes are thus never self-evident; they emerge, instead, in how sonic matters interact with these matrices to reproduce or subvert them.This is why we think it’s so important to presence the sonic within scholarship about and struggles against gentrification. Still, soundscapes are rarely considered in dominant debates about the topic. Over the last several decades, “gentrification” has transformed from an esoteric concept in Marxian urban studies to a popular way of talking about everyday urban life, at times in ways that are quite “chaotic” or divergent.10 Indeed, gentrification has become a “buzz”-word. According to Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr., poet, producer, and host of the podcast Resistance, “the way we talk about gentrification feels gentrified.”11 At its most extreme form of overuse, the term has come to stand in for almost any process of urban change. And this waters down and naturalizes what Tejan-Thomas Jr. calls “the actual violence of it all.” Similarly, we argue that the constant buzz of gentrification discourse threatens to drown out the ways that contemporary modes of dispossession connect to longstanding patterns of racial violence, spatial exclusion, and theft that mark the geographies of American White supremacy.12 But as we discuss below, and our contributors show, attuning to the sonic politics of gentrification is a strategy to avoid these oversights. It’s a way to center the enduring role of racism in the making and remaking of our cities, but also the ways that residents resist dispossession and reclaim space through practices that are often not seen, but heard.In creating this special issue, we considered both the sonic and geographic scope of this topic. As indicated, invoking the term “soundscape”13 allows us to embrace not only music but a range of sounded activities, including the listener’s perception of the sonic environment. Indeed, our authors engage with ambient sound, recorded music, musical performance, and what Imani Kai Johnson calls the “aural kinesthetic.”14 This “acoustically attuned”15 project also allows us to bridge between our respective disciplines—ethnomusicology and urban geography—as soundscapes articulate and animate particular geographic spaces. These spaces aren’t necessarily coherent. Rather, for Matt Sakakeeny, soundscapes connect “irresolvable yet coexistent” sounds, people, and cultures, and thus “underscore the significance of sound less as a point of consensus than of negotiation.”16 Indeed, all of the articles in this issue engage with the ways that spatially and racially dispossessed communities are sonically policed and silenced, while still contesting gentrification through sonic practices.In terms of geography, we limit this conversation to U.S. cities—Oakland, Washington, Los Angeles, Detroit, Brooklyn—as this reflects our own personal, musical, and academic emplacement and expertise. The geographic scope of “gentrification,” as both a process and a concept, is a topic of thorough debate in urban studies. On one side, scholars and activists argue that gentrification has transformed into what the late geographer Neil Smith termed a “global urban strategy” for the reproduction of capital.17 On the other, postcolonial scholars contend that it’s contingent on the social and spatial relations of select Northern and Western cities, such that its conceptual travel threatens to obscure the modes of dispossession and resistance that contour a “world of cities.”18 So in this special issue, we avoid imposing gentrification theory outside the U.S. But we also attend to the ways that localized struggles are resoundingly global—enmeshed in geographies of imperialism and slavery, fixities/flows of global capital, and diasporic movements of people, cultural products, and especially musical sounds.It’s important to note that this focus on the U.S. leads to a disproportionate attention to Black/White racial politics. This is a symptom of the polarized way that the color line, whether visual or sonic, is often viewed and heard in this country. Admittedly, this focus runs the risk of missing the diverse and uneven ways that gentrification is experienced among different ethnic and racial groups as well as the nuances of class within Black/White relations. Still, U.S. Black urban geographies—what sociologists Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson call “Chocolate Cities”19—are uniquely marked by disinvestment, discrimination, and state violence, and thus particularly targeted for displacement. So too are cultural industries singularly focused on commodifying the musical and aesthetic lifeworlds of urban communities around the Black Atlantic.20 Still, we’ve worked to include articles that listen for Latinx communities, diasporic connections, and queer of color sonic practices (see Alvarez and Kulkarni) as well as Black orientations to sound and gentrification that resist simple classification (see Martin).As editors, we arrived at this collaboration through our attempts to overcome the limits of our own academic disciplines in addressing our respective research topics. For Christina Zanfagna, ideas from urban studies and geography served to situate holy hip-hop practitioners in Los Angeles as agents of spatial production amidst a landscape marked by racist inequalities. For Alex Werth, ideas from sound and critical race and ethnic studies attuned him to the long and looping histories of pleasure and policing that reverberated within the struggles of Black musicians, dancers, and venue owners to resist displacement in Oakland. After seeing several presentations on sound and gentrification at the 2019 Pop Conference that traversed these same theoretical borderlands, we decided to convene this special issue. We’re inspired by authors who read across literatures on music and sound, race, and space, and, in the next section, we situate our contributors’ ideas in relation to what we see as some important antecedents. But we also recognize that much of this work is emergent, and we see a need for more attention to the intersections that integrate and complicate academic categories. So we’ve aimed to work with our contributors to resist seeing music and sound, race, and space as distinct “topics,” but rather formations that co-constitute one another and the cities in which they take place. In that sense, we’ve sought to advance work that, after Sakakeeny, “politicize[s] soundscape studies” and “acoustif[ies] theories of public space.”21 Next, we discuss three core themes that emerged in the process. We use this to introduce each of the articles in this issue in conversation with the scholarship that precedes them.As mentioned, we are ambivalent about the dominance of gentrification in debates about urban change. Still, for this special issue, we retain it as a keyword in recognition of its popular significance and emotional resonance across U.S. cities. For us, however, it’s a common and current way to talk about the dispossession of marginalized communities from the spaces that sustain them. Gentrification, in other words, is racial dispossession. And the longue durée of U.S. racial capitalism reveals that racial dispossession is spatialized.22 Indeed, the couplet of race/space is more than just a convenient rhyme; it’s an analytic that identifies the way that space has been weaponized for White supremacy as it’s remade the terrain of “America.”This issue starts from the conviction that gentrification is racial/spatial dispossession. It extends new theoretical contributions, especially from women of color geographers, who argue that these politics play out through struggles over which sounds, and thus which bodies, belong in the city. According to Summers, gentrification involves a remaking of “what and how sounds are heard.”23 This process often reflects White desires and capitalist directives, backed by the violence of the police, in ways that silence or mute Black life. While Summers connects these patterns to the recommodification of the “Post-Chocolate City,”24 Magie Ramírez, writing from Oakland, notes that criminalizing Black and Brown sounds operates to restore Whiteness as the spatial norm. For Ramírez, the normalization of the soundscape—in particular, policing the line between “sound” and “noise”—is a means to manage the affective “friction” of what she calls “borderlands space,” or the “relational co-existence of a city’s ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ inhabitants.” “[I]n the borderlands,” she writes, “worlds and soundscapes grate against each other.”25 The result is irritating, raw, brutal.In this issue, Werth proposes a new way of listening to struggles over soundscapes in gentrifying cities. Specifically, rather than treat these matters as new and emergent conflicts between Black and White residents, he conceptualizes them as “racial reverberations…looping forms of racialized dispossession, cultural (re)production, and resistance that disturb bounded notions of time and space.” Starting with the case of “BBQ Becky,” when a White woman called the police on two Black men for barbecuing at Lake Merritt, leading to outcries of gentrification, he goes back in time to trace the recursive struggles over Black public culture in Oakland since World War II. For Werth, the prevailing notion of gentrification is too recentist to account for the “long decay time” of White supremacist modes of racial/spatial dispossession, in part because of its myopic focus on changes to the visual landscape. By contrast, centering the sonic serves to attune us to the “rhythmic returns and energetic residues that continue to haunt contemporary spatial struggles.” And this requires us to rethink some of the assumptions of the gentrification narrative. “[T]he racial reverberations of anti-Blackness,” he concludes, “have prevailed through periods of disinvestment and reinvestment, White Power and Black Power, pre- and post-Civil Rights eras,” thus requiring a more expansive political imagination that starts long before BBQ Becky.Here, Werth agrees with Ramírez, who writes, after geographer Ananya Roy, that dispossession in Oakland is connected to “forms of racialized violence such as slavery, Jim Crow, incarceration, colonialism, and apartheid, that cannot be encapsulated within sanitized notions of gentrification and displacement.”26 Similarly, Allie Martin, whose article we discuss in more detail below, states that gentrification isn’t a “linear” or “gradual process of development,” but rather a “cyclical process of sonic violences,” one that “traffics in…histories of silencing and suppression” that extend from the nineteenth century Black Codes to today.27 The reverberant nature of sound-in-the-world is thus a means to link space with time—in particular, the recursivities of racial/spatial dispossession and resistance—in ways that exceed what Werth calls the “limited spatio-temporal and visual scripts” of most gentrification studies. And given the role of sound in longstanding struggles over the American social order, it’s no surprise that the sonic is not only a site of urban regulation, but also individual expression and communal endurance. Indeed, urban sonic politics, whether in times of gentrification or before, emerge from what geographer and music scholar Rashad Shabbaz calls a dialectic of “containment and creativity.”28Amidst processes of racial/spatial dispossession, residents engage in sonic practices to not only resist containment, silencing, and erasure, but also reclaim and reshape urban space. In her research on the #DontMuteDC movement, Summers advances the concept of “reclamation aesthetics” to demonstrate how go-go music29 practitioners use popular sounds to enact a “spatial politics of reclamation” meant to “[resist] capitalist dispossession” in the form of gentrification. These reclamation aesthetics “[disrupt] structures governing and managing normative space,” and are thus a form of situated Black geographical place-making through sound that “makes claims for cultural rights to the city viable.”30The act of making sonic and spatial claims to the city has been at the center of research by other Black feminist scholars, such as Tricia Rose and Gaye Theresa Johnson. In her classic Black Noise (1994), Rose describes how young people of color developed the four elements of hip-hop—MCing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti-writing—to deconstruct and reconstruct the South Bronx of the 1970s and ‘80s as a landscape of racialized abandonment. These creative and collaborative practices reimagined and reclaimed territories of neglect, turning them into spaces of resilience and invention.31 Johnson might call these musical and embodied acts of “spatial entitlement”—ways that “marginalized communities have created new collectivities based not just upon eviction and exclusion from physical places, but also on new and imaginative uses of technology, creativity, and spaces.”32Sakakeeny provides another account of spatial reclamation through sound in his work on jazz funerals and second line parades, in which Black New Orleanians create provisional spaces that contest the ways they’ve been “marginalized through various projects of urban planning, gentrification, and disaster profiteering.” In the process, residents “[stake] claims on the built environment through displays of expressive culture in which sound is a primary mode of expression.”33 Similarly, Zanfagna examines the intersection of allied sonic/spatial practices in her study on holy hip-hop in Los Angeles. She argues that—amidst racialized policing, systemic segregation, and economic foreclosure—gospel rappers enact musical and spatial improvisations that produce new kinds of social arrangements and sacred space, or “geographies of conversion.” These practices enable alternate and unexpected uses of urban space, forming part of an “often invisible but audible city that holy hip-hop sound[s] out.”34In this special issue, Alex Blue V. also foregrounds the ways that hip-hop artists “flip” space through sonic practices. He traces the performances of MC Mic Write across the uneven geographies of Detroit to argue that the “Black techniques of sounding and performance”—in particular, multiple modes of producing echo—work to counter the White spatial imaginary of gentrification. Drawing on the common hip-hop aphorism “flippin’ the script,” he theorizes this struggle over space, meaning, and urban identity as a politics of “flipping”—one in which local artists, residents, and real-estate interests claim and reclaim contested terrain through a range of cultural and spatial strategies.Finally, Kavita Kulkarni’s essay argues that the haptic arrangements created at Soul Summit, an outdoor house music festival, produce and preserve Black, Brown, and queer of color socialities that resist the “alienations and hostilities” of gentrification in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Engaging with the social infrastructure co-produced by DJs, dancers, and video archivists, she shows that the collective rituals of Soul Summit refuse not only the commodified consumption of Black space, but also the premature mourning of the political possibilities of Black Atlantic popular music. This is a struggle over space. But it’s also, inextricably, one of epistemology. “We might think of gentrification,” she writes, “as part and parcel of a way of being that directs away from somatic forms of knowledge…that celebrates and values difference primarily through its abstraction—e.g., marketing, mythology, mediated representations—absent the intimacy required of more haptic entanglements with the neighborhood, its textures, and traditions.” Ultimately, she calls for us to love and care for sites like Soul Summit, which counter the “spatial foreclosure” threatening Black cultural production and the social lives it sustains.In the past decade, the field of sound studies has foregrounded listening as central to the production of knowledge and modernity as well as the politics of everyday life.35 In the context of this issue, we argue that attuning to the sonics of gentrification and displacements calls for listening for not only the presences, but absences, of urban soundscapes—communal histories that often, and sometimes only, reside in genealogies of sound. At the same time, listening is a highly individuated experience shaped by one’s social positioning and spatio-temporal emplacements. How we listen matters, not just what we listen to and for. Along these lines, Sakakeeny theorizes sound and music as sites of “orientation,” aligning certain people and bodies in geographic space and historical memory, but only depending upon their aesthetic orientation toward those sounds (e.g. familiar vs. strange, pleasurable vs. disturbing).36 While Stoever argues that the “listening ear” determines “the sonic color line’s norms,”37 Sakakeeny notes that orientations toward sound render racial and class categories unstable, creating provisional in- and out-groups that cut across boundaries often considered rigid.38Similarly, in this issue, Allie Martin complicates the notion that a person’s orientation toward sound and gentrification can be read off of their visible identities. In her study of the fight over the Amplified Noise Act, a racist attempt to regulate street musicians in Washington, DC, Martin challenges simplistic accounts of gentrification by attending to the complex identities and antagonisms that animate the everyday sonic tensions amplified by urban redevelopment. Rather than reduce gentrification to the single axis of Black/White victimization, she analyzes the “opaque” moments in which the sonic positionalities of Black Washingtonians resist easy classification. For Martin, this practice—which she calls “intersectional listening”—is about “linger[ing] in the exchanges between sound and gentrification,” rather than latching onto the false comfort of racial generalization. It’s about cultivating a capacious both/and ethnography that creates the “space to hear gentrification as anti-black but also to hear the black people that support these transformations.” And ultimately, it’s about “amplifying a multitude of black lives” and “engag[ing] with the possibilities of black sound.”Like Martin, Eddy Alvarez argues for “listening intersectionally across race, gender, class, space, and time” as a method to excavate sonic and social meanings. Recounting the LA Queer Posada,39 Alvarez reconstructs a “sonic trail” through queer and Latinx Silverlake in Los Angeles—a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that’s been the site of struggles around “racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, transphobia, and economic injustice” since the 1970s. He argues that the spectral constellation of pop songs, quotidian sounds (e.g. clinking glasses, raucous laughter, animated chatter, background music, etc.), and cultural expressions that emerge along this route allow Latinx listeners to recover joyful memories of queer relationships and communities that have been dislocated by gentrification. According to Alvarez, this mode of “jotería listening”40 is both a method and an everyday means for residents to re-member the past and imagine possibilities for life amidst the space of dispossession. The meanings that are conjured through this practice delimit a community, drawing a series of audible connections that—like the social worlds that predate gentrification—are unintelligible to outsiders. In this sense, “jotería listening” is a way to “hear with queer ears,” to commemorate embodied experiences and possibilities muted by a normalizing discourse that categorizes them as mere “noise.”These works of intersectional listening reveal the multitudinous and complexly layered experiences of pleasure and dispossession that occur amidst, but are often drowned out by, the buzz of gentrification. They sit with longer histories of raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized power, and thus imagine futures that aren’t just non-gentrified, but free of interlocking forms of social and sonic violence. In that sense, intersectional listening is not merely a means to make theories of gentrification more nuanced, inclusive, or comprehensive. It is not a means to hear gentrification more clearly. Rather, it requires us to radically reconsider how we hear the sonic lives, collectivities, and struggles that resound in the context of gentrification, and whether what we are hearing is best categorized as “gentrification” at all.