5 Questions with Daphne A. Brooks, Author of Liner Notes for the Revolution
Daphne A. Brooks is the author of Jeff Buckley's Grace and Bodies in Dissent, and winner of the Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American performance studies. A professor at Yale University, she has written liner notes to accompany the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell, and Prince, as well as stories for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Pitchfork.
Daphne Brooks is in conversation with Ann Powers discussing her new book Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Wednesday, February 24
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Where are you writing to us from? I am writing to you from?
I am writing to you from New Haven, CT… but my heart, and I’m not kidding about this, is in San Francisco—and Berkeley and Oakland and Menlo Park/Palo Alto—my hometown turf!
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Baking, late-night television (Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon—watched in the 2AM hour), I May Destroy You (more episodes, please!), The Forty-Year-Old Version, the Childish Gambino record nobody listened to but me, the Fiona Apple record that everybody listened to early in the pandemic, Arlo Parks’ debut album, our beloved and beautiful young chocolate lab Gibson who, so incredibly sadly, we just lost . . .
What are 3 books you always recommend to people?
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Toni Morrison, Jazz and/or A Mercy; Crime and Punishment (had to read it in the 6th grade)—plus one short story: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues"
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
- Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century; - Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century; - Ann Powers, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music; - Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues & assorted essays; - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man & assorted essays; - Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals; - Toni Morrison, Jazz, Beloved, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; - Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; - Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe; - Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America; - Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, The Universal Machine, Black and Blur, Stolen Life
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, full coffee bar, turntables and listening booths, extensive newsstand, extensive music books section, BIPOC sections, critical gender studies and queer theory sections, performance space, public library/donations space, extensive children’s lit area. It’s called: Words In Stereo. Bestseller: that’s a tough one! Maybe some kind of a book that hasn’t been conjured up yet, a collaborative endeavor by Amanda Gorman and Greta Thunberg.
