Abstract
Music has long been described as the prime mover of Black culture, the first and most durable of all Afrodiasporic arts. Yet musical meaning is also produced by literary and critical discourse, which has the power to definitively illuminate as well as obfuscate Black artists’ craft, vision, and impact.
I suggest that close readings of pop songs performed by women artists, combined with the singers’ own commentary, provide the ground for any serious reevaluation of artists’ lives and work. These readings of neglected sources animate my current biography of Whitney Houston, a singer who has been widely celebrated but rarely studied; lamented but not listened to.
They help us to build a new narrative about Houston’s genius and impact—one that overturns the dominant, reductive image of the singer as a pop princess-turned-victim, while also yielding new insights into the nexus of agency and contingency, visibility and invisibility, talent and craft.
I suggest in closing that such a reconsideration is made possible by a redistribution of cultural, discursive power that Houston herself helped to advance.
Emily J. Lordi Bio
Emily Lordi is the Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, a writer-at-large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and the author of three books on Black music and culture: Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (Rutgers, 2013); Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury 33 series, 2016); and The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (Duke, 2020).
She is at work on Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves and Art of Whitney Houston, forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2025.
She also writes about arts and culture for several national publications, for which she has profiled iconic figures such as FKA twigs, Queen Latifah, and Dolly Parton.
Organizer
The lecture is organised by the research project Word, Sound and Power, funded by Research Project for Young Talents (FRIPRO).
The project is led by Louisa Olufsen Layne.