Conference Agenda

The contemporary songwriters who draw praise for their raw expressions of battles with inner turmoil, and the growing ranks of musicians who cancel concerts citing mental health concerns, form only the latest chapter in a long story of American popular music’s consequential enmeshment with bad feelings. It's long been established that songs can make negative affect shareable while also amplifying scenes of empowerment aimed at countering the structural conditions that contribute to personal suffering. This keynote address will inquire into the historically specific means of these transformations at different moments in time and in relation to different audiences and networks of circulation: How do bad feelings travel from particular works of music to particular communities of listeners? Through what techniques of performance, transcription, and listening, and by what forms of media and promotion, has this transmutation been effected across the history of American popular music? Through attention to the labor of choral transcriptions of African American music in the post-Reconstruction era, to early blues marketing and the case of “Crazy Blues” (as well as its latter-day echoes in punk-feminist songs of anger and depression and the zine culture that promoted them), and to David Wojnarowicz’s practices of active listening that brought him into unlikely collaboration with Tracy Chapman, this talk will explore how a range of practices and technologies, from written scores to handheld tape recorders, served as resources in popular music’s ongoing mediations between individual and collective emotional experience.

In 2023, the Ghanian-Swiss-English singer-songwriter RAYE released her album My 21st Century Blues to great acclaim. Its third single, “Escapism. [sic],” describes post-breakup substance abuse and sex, graphically enough that RAYE apologized for her lyrics when her mom attended a gut-wrenching acoustic performance. This slowed-down version of “Escapism.” contrasted with two faster versions: the single release has everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production, and the sped-up TikTokable version pitch-shifts RAYE’s voice into chipmunk territory. These three versions speak to the many sides of RAYE’s industry-induced depression. In June 2021, RAYE tweeted in tears about her former record label Polydor, “Im [sic] sick of being slept on and I’m sick of being in pain about it […] I’m done being a polite pop star. I want to make my album now, please that is all I want.” The singer was sidelined into making singles for white European producers, stoking her anxiety and body dysmorphia, but no topic was off-limits when she was released from her contract and debuted her 15-track album.

In this talk, I argue that RAYE’s “Escapism.” versions relay distinct creative and commercial approaches to presenting her mental health struggles. Their three tempos transcribe paradoxical feelings. Through close musicological and medial analyses of these different sound worlds and their associated imagery, I show how RAYE depicts the speed we believe escapism provides, but also the infinitely slow present of inescapable dread (Fisher, 2014). RAYE’s lyrics and the versions’ varied accompaniments outline her attempts to process years of disappointment in the recording industry—for example, examining substance abuse as a coping mechanism that has been taboo for women. Even while RAYE relies on “sound’s apparent powers of escape” (Marcus, 2023, p. 7), the different tempos of her escapism acknowledge the paradox of unceasing yet moment-to-moment survival for minoritized figures in the music industry.

Over a stripped back beat, Black-British rapper Dave closes his sophomore album with a confessional entitled Survivor’s Guilt:

“The truth is, I got really bad anxiety, I’m on the motorway, cryin’ in the driver’s seat…”

He grapples with the knowledge that money and status cannot reckon with the systems of institutionalised oppression that continue to marginalise his loved ones (“I feel the worst at my happiest/’Cause I miss all my niggas that couldn’t be in this life I built”). His pain intermingles with anger, at both the government (“the government ain’t gonna help with all the issues that I’m tacklin’”) and his peers, who deride discussions of men’s mental health (“[S]eein’ them laugh at me, cah I’m vulnerable”). This bubbling over of depressive disdain is echoed by similar admissions from rapper Stormzy, who takes jabs at far-right nationalism (“Tell the EDL we didn’t come to march”), before delving into more personal struggles (“The last time I linked depression was a while back…”). These are only a few examples of Black-British rappers using their work not as a call to political action, but to make space for themselves to be disabled by their mental health conditions, and disillusioned into an anxious sense of stasis by the British political landscape. Drawing on concepts such as Xine Yao’s Disaffectedness, and building on the work of Black-British music scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Richard Bramwell, this paper will consider Black-British rap as a self-contained space in which Black men give themselves permission to feel: to feel depressed, anxious, and helpless. I ultimately argue that these admissions of mental adversity act as an effort to request for and reimagine institutions of care amongst Black men, whilst concurrently processing the reality of the politicised and racialised systems of oppression that continue to fail them.

In January 2024, Universal Music Group failed to renegotiate its contract with TikTok, announcing that it would be removing their catalog from the platform at the end of the month. As a result, the many artists that have promoted their music on TikTok found themselves in need of a new marketing plan, while everyday users braced themselves for what TikTok would look like without their favorite music. This mass removal of popular music was met with a myriad of bad feelings on TikTok: frustration from artists signed to UMG, fear and despair from music journalists whose content had been muted, and deep disappointment from everyday users who were mourning the loss of songs from the content they created as well as the content they consume. One month later, UMG announced that, in its capacity as a music publisher, it would also be removing songs written or produced by UMG-signed artists from TikTok. Further bad feelings appeared as independent artists found their content muted due to collaborations withUMG-affiliated individuals—not to mention the erroneous silencing of content that did not involve any UMG-affiliated artists at all.

The absence of UMG’s catalog from TikTok brings into relief the importance of music and sound on the platform. In this paper, I analyze the many bad feelings that resulted from the removal of UMG-affiliated music from TikTok, including examples from musicians, music journalists, content creators, and everyday TikTok users to better understand the importance of music on TikTok (and vice versa.) In considering how these new bad feelings reveal more clearly the original good feelings that music on TikTok created, I demonstrate how emotion and affect are valuable resources for understanding how the music industry functions on TikTok from the various perspectives of artists, music journalists, content creators, and fans.

The world is ending—but how does it feel? Who feels climate’s pasts, presents, and futurities most keenly, and what is at stake in amplifying the politics of their emotions (Ahmed 2004)? While the relatively new interdiscipline of climate emotion studies has investigated such questions through both humanistic and social-scientific methodologies, as well as postcolonial, feminist, and critical pedagogical perspectives (Pihkala 2022; Ray 2020; Noorgard 2011), little has been said on whether formal musical analysis has a place in this conversation.

This paper, in thinking through the racialized feelings mediated by Childish Gambino’s “Feels Like Summer,” articulates a methodological agenda that brings multimodal, music-theoretical analysis (Burns 2017) together with the minor-aesthetic frameworks developed by Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings (2005). The animated music video for “Feels Like Summer,” I argue, renders a cogent climate politics by moving affective materials through multimodal space, producing (through classically Ngasian techniques) a “climate Afro-dysphoria” that attempts to sound what it means—and how it feels—to be Black in the summertime. Without rigidifying Black life and geography (McKittrick 2021, 2006) into a deterministic narrative of environmental racism, Gambino’s soundworld nevertheless speaks to the constraints and vulnerabilities borne by Black communities in an unevenly-warming United States, thereby joining a deep current of environmental lyric and song traceable to Black Star, Marvin Gaye, Alice Walker, and Langston Hughes, among many others. My analysis thus suggests that “Feels Like Summer,” beyond critically signifying on the sonic tropes of the carefree summer bop, belongs in both a genealogy of Black ecocritique (Benz 2022) and a broader tradition of racialized (under)performance and minoritarian affective strategy with transnational resonances (Post 2022; Hong 2021; Berlant 2022, 2015). I use these insights to make the case for an affect-attuned sensibility that rejects the political effeteness of both minor feelings and musical analysis.