This paper examines the emergence and evolution of alternative R&B as a genre that challenges and redefines traditional conceptions of Black musical aesthetics, identity, and cultural consciousness. Rooted in the socio-political legacy of blues and the sonic innovations of contemporary R&B, alternative R&B diverges from mainstream R&B by incorporating elements of electronic music, jazz, and soft rock while adopting introspective and subversive lyrical themes. The genre represents a shift from Contemporary and Traditional R&B’s romantic, hyperfeminine and hypermasculine tropes to a more fluid and experimental articulation of Blackness, gender, and sexuality.

This paper highlights how alternative R&B embodies what is termed ‘New Black Consciousness’—a contemporary Black identity that resists fixed racial, gendered, and sexual boundaries. This concept, influenced by Alexis De Veaux’s theorization of new Blackness and Stuart Hall’s notion of identity as unfixed, illustrates how alternative R&B artists navigate and express multifaceted experiences of Blackness that challenge hegemonic norms.

By situating alternative R&B within the broader historical continuum of Black musical traditions, this study underscores its implications for ethnomusicology. It asserts that alternative R&B is not merely a genre shift but a cultural movement that signifies as a reconfiguration of Black artistic expression, offering a new sonic and ideological framework that resonates with contemporary Black diasporic realities. Ultimately, this paper argues that alternative R&B stands as a radical and necessary intervention in Black popular music, affirming the genre’s role in shaping new understandings of race, gender, and sexuality in the 21st century.

The speculative endeavors of Black Americans have recently gained widespread acknowledgement due to increased awareness of the Afrofuturist movement. Scholars such as Jayna Brown (2021) and Isiah Lavender III (2019) have historicized and expanded upon Afrofuturism by linking it to works that predate and exceed the term, situating it within a centuries-old lineage of Black speculative thought. I connect these speculative practices to the concept of uchronia as theorized by Amy Ransom (2010): postmodern alternate histories whose relationships to the time and history we know are often obscure and subversive. As an example, I take up the work of Swiss avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor. Manuel Gagneux, a Black Swiss-American musician, started the project in 2013 after 4chan users suggested he combine black metal with “nigger music.” The albums Devil Is Fine (2016), Stranger Fruit (2018), and Zeal & Ardor (2022) hybridize Black American spirituals and work songs with menacing heavy metal sounds, scoring a uchronia wherein enslaved Black people rise up against all worldly and divine masters through Satanic rite. Replete with occult imagery, blastbeats, fuzzed-out guitars, and screaming, the songs often seem to speak simultaneously to Black pasts, presents, and futures—as well as to timelines we do not know. I argue that this uchronian slippage between timelines reveals similarly dark speculative visions embedded in the very historical material Gagneux drew upon, illustrating both the historicity of the Black uchronia, and the recursive process at its core.

Among Black Banjo players in the U.S., performing often involves navigating the tension between honoring ancestral memory and confronting the white gaze. Carrying the legacy of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the string band, New Dangerfield represents a new chapter in the Black Banjo Renaissance. Living in the wake of the Drops requires members of New Dangerfield to reconfigure themselves beyond spectacle of a Black string band. For them, songwriting and arranging with the ancestors in the archives evoke a numinous presence, channeling the banjo’s ase —the spiritual power embedded in the instrument and summoned by the musician— to produce sacred musical offerings. This paper presentation builds upon the theory of “Bodylands” set forth by Ana Maurine Laura, which calls for an investigation of the relationships and simultaneous co-constructions of beings and the lands across/through/on which these entities exist. I extend her framework to propose “Black Banjo Bodylands,” arguing that the Renaissance reveals both memories and tensions embedded in the instrument’s fraught history. This presentation focuses on reflections from one of New Dangerfield’s members’ performance. In the performance, her use of the banjo to conjure her own ancestral bodylands, through Raleigh, Brooklyn, Toronto, and St. George’s, are met with palpable frictions of the white gaze. These frictions emerge throughout elements such as culturally insensitive stage decorations and infantilizing audience engagement. This dynamic site sets the stage for my larger project, Black Banjo Bodylands, which examines the places where the banjo, contemporary Black bodies, histories, politics, and spiritual influences converge.