What does it mean to start and chart a revolution—a Black feminist revolution—through liner notes? Put in the hands of Daphne A. Brooks, liner notes are an aspect of care and attentiveness to the revolutionary spirit to be found in Black women’s music. Black women have always been authorities on the importance of music—their own, as well as others’—as worldmaking. Their authority is demonstrated through performance, essays, books, reviews, album covers, public speeches, private notes, personal collections and libraries, and adjacent forms of art—all themselves liner notes of sorts to a Black feminist revolution now in progress. Liner notes are the place where the boundaries between fan, critic, and musician sometimes blur. Take, for example, the liner notes from Janelle Monáe’s album The Electric Lady. With humor and a bit of (Octavia) Butlerian insurgent energy, Monáe writes as herself, exploratory Black feminist music maker from Kansas City, from a long line of Black feminist music makers. She is the voice of both the ArchAndroid Cindi Mayweather and her community of Electric Ladies servicing the fictional dystopian future. She is Max Stelling, vice chancellor of the Palace of the Dogs Arts Asylum, keeper, critic and, upon listening to The Electric Lady itself, an eager fan. Within these notes, Monáe performs and critiques her own art while engaging in the traditions that matter to her, the times in which she lives, and the future. As Brooks puts it: [A]s a masterful phonographer, the kind of artist who performs at the intersections of the sonic and the discursive, Monáe catalogues and critiques the material experience of Black folks’ history by way of sound and her experimental liner notes. Her work reminds us of the critical force of Black women artists who often had little more than sound performances to rely on as sites of counter-information and self-making. Monáe is, then, a way into the way back, so to speak, the portal (she would no doubt insist “the time tunnel”) through which we might imagine the future of Black feminist intellectual labor in relation to sound (115).Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound is a love letter to Black women musicians, writers, theorists, and sometimes all three, including Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Mary Lou Williams, Janelle Monáe, Mamie and Bessie Smith, Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Geeshie Wiley and L.V./Elvie Thomas, and others, as well as white feminist writers who have worked beyond boundaries of race to make visible Black women’s music in new ways, including Rosetta Records founder Rosetta Reitz and, to a limited extent, rock critic Ellen Willis. The book is also a “Don’t Hurt Yourself”-style call-out (and call-in) to the rock critics, canon makers, mad collectors, and rainy-day fans who fetishize Black women’s music but who don’t credit Black women’s power and agency. In this way, Liner Notes for the Revolution is a clarion call for a new ethics in rock criticism and other forms of popular music writing to offer “care” for Black women and the music we make, particularly as it is marginalized, sensationalized, or erased.The first part of the book, Side A, demands a critical re-attunement to what counts as criticism, artistry, and archive, and who gets to be counted. What would the story of pop or rock writing look like if we centered the work of Black women music writers, such as Pauline Hopkins, Lorraine O’Grady, and Phyl Garland, who were developing their own theoretical traditions for Black feminist music criticism in Black publications such as the Progressive Era’s Colored American Magazine and in popular twentieth-century magazines such as Ebony and Jet? What if we included Zora Neale Hurston in rock and blues writing’s origin stories for her efforts to commemorate the music in everyday Black life as both a phonographer and herself a “phonograph” (as Brooks puts it), stepping up the mic, singing and dancing the music she found, and flipping the script on anthropology forever? And what if we also included the musicians themselves, such as Monáe, Abbey Lincoln, and Mary Lou Williams, who in their music and writing are both theorizing and performing Black feminist sound? In this section, Brooks offers an alternative origin story for what we think of as the modern age by centering Black women’s music-making and by examining their complex ability to mourn the past, to speak to the tastes of their eras, and to create new and sometimes uncharted sounds for the future.In Side B, Brooks turns “from the stories of critics who are artists and artists who are critics” to enlist readers in the work of Black feminist listening and theorization in order “to take a chance on listening to Black women’s sonic histories that often tests the boundaries of obscurity and that, likewise, do the kind of bold, sonic curational work that thinks through and beyond obscurity” (265). In order to make obscure Black women’s music more visible, to care for it properly so that it doesn’t “fade away” from cultural memory, we must rely on new analytical tools. Such methods include critical speculative writing of “what might be” that we find in the work of scholars Saidiya Hartman and José Esteban Munoz, visual artist Carrie Mae Weems, and poet Jackie Kay. In some of the most breathtaking sections in the book, Brooks takes us to these moments of the unknown and erased, using a critically and historically informed imagination to hear them differently. At the center of this enterprise is the elusive archive of blueswomen L.V./Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley, who have also been the muses of prominent white male music critics and collectors such as R. Crumb, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Greil Marcus. In two separate chapters, Brooks carves out an ethics of care for these artists. First, she contends with their opaque archives and the epic desire, and sometimes prurience of some critics, to uncover the details of their lives, whether or not they want to be found. Then, she thinks about how we write about and attend to the artists’ music, including their best-known songs such as “Last Kind Words” and “Pick the Robin Clean.”Brooks seeks to keep queer and feminist time with Thomas and Wiley’s music by recognizing the extraordinary but unexceptional stories of Black struggle and survival through artistic exploitation, incarceration, and domestic violence in “the undercommons” underlying their lyrics. She also considers the role of the duet as a means of outsmarting and resisting the carceral logics of the state. In order to do so, Brooks imagines herself in their place. While listening to “Pick the Robin Clean,” Brooks reflects on Wiley’s probable recollection of a recent imprisonment and her dank, isolated, and likely frightening trek in 1930 during the dead of winter from Jim Crow Texas to Paramount’s recording studio, located in the all-white town of Grafton, near Milwaukee: In this place that some say featured walls as well as covered windows “to conceal the artist from the local people,” in this place where Black folks were hidden like contraband and milked for economic value of their talent, here two women share a “signifying riff” about fate and sacrifice, about playing slow-witted foes for their foolishness, about Black social life and, above all else, the work of the ensemble (368).Her own writing about her search to know and understand Wiley and Thomas leads to other examples of Black feminist carework of music and memory, including the everyday worldmaking of Black women and girls who listened to and collected Black music in the 1930s and 1940s in record stores, including Toni Morrison and her own mother.Brooks’s final chapter, “‘Slow Fade to Black’: Black Women Archivists Remix the Sounds,” focuses on historically minded musicians Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, and Cécile McLorin Salvant. Giddens and June are engaging and commenting on the archives of the past with their songwriting and their engagement with their instruments, such as the banjo, and ancestor artists to evoke lost stories, or what she calls Valerie June’s “séances.” Salvant’s performance of Jelly Roll Morton’s 1938 “Murder Ballad” storms Lincoln Center’s velvet-seated approach to jazz as a sign of Black respectability with a graphic, no-holds-barred performance that explores violence, anti-Blackness, incarceration, and lesbian inmates’ desire in her own quirky cadence. Fittingly, Brooks ends the whole book with Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, Queen Bey’s deep dive into physical and psychic spaces of Black suffering and survival from the sugar plantations of Louisiana to the sites of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath—flooding us, but also taking us with her to come up for air. Brooks describes Lemonade as Beyoncé’s Black Feminist “Basement Tapes,” alluding to and perhaps countering Bob Dylan’s beloved archive. In the spirit of recent calls to abolish the prisons that bind Black lives, physical and psychic, Liner Notes for the Revolution arrives right on time, rattling the cages of popular music writing and sound studies to invite us to hear, feel, and understand Black women’s sonic insurrections.