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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory

Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory

Radano, Ronald

Paperback

Series: Refiguring American Music

Black American StudiesMusic ReferenceWorld Music

ISBN10: 1478032170
ISBN13: 9781478032175
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Aug 29 2025
Pages: 576
Weight: 1.70
Height: 1.34 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
In Alive in the Sound, Ronald Radano proposes a new understanding of US Black music by focusing on the key matter of value, manifested musically in its seemingly embodied qualities--spirit, soul, and groove. While acknowledging these qualities are always embedded in Black music, Radano shows they developed not simply from performance but from musicians' status as laborers inhabiting an enduring racial-economic contradiction: Black music originated publicly as an exchangeable property owned by people whose subhuman status granted them--as natural musicians--indelible properties of sound. As a contradiction of the rules of ownership, wherein enslaved property was forbidden the right to own, modern Black music emerges after emancipation as a primary possession, moving dialectically into commercial markets and counterhistorically back into Black worlds. Slavery's seminal contests of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music. By reconceiving US Black music history as a history of value, Radano rethinks the music's place in US and global culture.

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