Sights and Sounds

  • Date: February 17, 2022
  • Time: 10:00 am—11:30 am
  • Location: Video Production Studio
  • Speakers
    • Jason King, Chair, The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music – New York University
    • Kai Parker, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies – University of Virginia
    • Katleho Shoro – University of Pennsylvania
    • Tanika I. Williams, Filmmaker and Performance Artist

Visualizing Loleatta Holloway’s Fire-Relighting Vocal Superpower

Jason King

Before becoming one of the most heavily sampled voices in the history of hip-hop and house music, Chicago-reared singer Loleatta Holloway was known for her explosive 1970s and early 1980s Salsoul disco dancefloor stompers like “Hit and Run” and “Dreaming,” as well as her jaw-dropping vocals on two classic Dan Hartman productions, “Vertigo/Relight My Fire” and “Love Sensation.”  By the late 1980s, as hip-hop and house producers turned samplers into instruments, Holloway’s badass gospel-inspired wailing became a “burnin’ hot” commodity on hip-hop and house tracks like Black Box’s “Ride on Time” and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations.” The buoyantly energetic, astonishing vibrational resonance of Holloway’s spectacularly pyrotechnical voice—in tandem with her love for joyously sassy and playful monologues—offered an erotic counter-aesthetic to the grim, harsh realities of black / queer unfreedom, especially in the AIDS epidemic defined ‘80s.

However, producers and DJ acts like Italy’s Black Box fashioned 90s hits from Holloway’s sampled vocals while hiring skinnier and more conventionally desirable models (whose bodies were deemed to be more consistent with MTV’s visual aesthetic) to lip-sync those pre-recorded vocals in videos designed to promote the recordings. And they time and again failed to properly remunerate or credit Holloway for her work. I’ll consider the connection and cleavages between the aural and the visual in Loleatta Holloway’s career as she emerges as a victim of the deceptive industry protocol in (and beyond) the 1980s to exploit the vivacious sound of black women’s vocal genius but to erase and suppress the source of labor that produced that sound. This practice continues, in similar guises, to this day.

Katleho Kano Shoro

In the southern African language, Sesotho, the term lipapali is used to make reference to songs that children use while playing games. Ntšihlele (2003) translates lipapali, in this sense, into “play songs” and argues that lipapali reveal historical data and have educational value. The term, as speakers of the language experience it, has a wider range of meanings. In its quotidian use, it can refer to performances, drama, sports, and entertainment. Pleasure runs as an essential affective thread through all these meanings of lipapali. The moving body is omnipresent, too. At its foundation, this paper seeks to engage the meanings of lipapali; establishing the term as an affective and archival concept as well as a quotidian one. While the concept is in conversation with  elements of “play” it is not translated or defined as “play” in order to open up the possibilities a little more. 

To ground this exploration of lipapali, I use the case of Serurubele: which, in this case is both the concept of “butterflies” as well as the title of my collection of poetry and  related performances. In the first instance, I dwell on “play songs” where the butterfly is central to the conceptualising of games and singing. In the second instance, through the collection of poetry and the performance thereof, I explore how the concept of serurubele attracts “offerings” and reflections from audience members in ways that have transformed the concept into an archive in itself. In both instances, and in a myriad of intricate ways, lipapali and serurubele mutually reinforce each other’s archival and affective characteristics. 

At its core, this paper experiments with making the quotidian archival, and transforming terms into concepts. This gesture attempts to relocate play, pleasure, butterflies, and audience offerings from the surface of research work to the centre of artistic-research and affective work. What seeps from surface to foundation, hopefully, is Sesotho epistemology and ontology – or at least sensibilities – even while English is used as a primary tool for unpacking these concepts and archives. 

Playing in the Shadows of Progress: The Dungill Family Orchestra from Plantation Melodies to Yoruba Gospel

Kai Parker

Based on original archival research, this paper analyzes how the Dungill Family Orchestra, a Black family band from the South Side of Chicago that performed a variety of genres of music from the 1930s through the 1960s, deployed forms of play to trouble, shadow, and subvert U.S. nationalist notions of African American civic progress. The Dungills began playing publicly in 1934 under the moniker Dante and His Shadows with the parents accompanying the eldest four children, who were between the ages of twelve and six; eventually the three youngest children also entered the band. Playing mostly in Black Chicago churches, schools, and bars, Dante and His Shadows gigs featured Negro spirituals, classical songs, novelties, and what they called “plantation melodies.” In New Negro discourse, “plantation melodies” usually meant songs about Black life that white composers wrote for the blackface minstrel stage and its offshoots. They were integral to the Ethiopianist popular culture that Black blackface minstrels promoted around the turn of the twentieth century, epitomized by the Bert Williams and George Walker musicals In Dahomey and Abyssinia. In the early twentieth century, Black performers used plantation melodies in presentations of black progress and racial uplift. In Chicago, New Negro alignment with the New Deal led to the incorporation of plantation melodies alongside Negro spirituals into Black performances of civic inclusion and rituals of American civil religion that sacralized of symbols of American democracy. However, Dante and His Shadows’ performances of plantation melodies critically shadowed New Negro schemas of progress by playfully subverting the claim that Negro spirituals and patriotic anthems authentically represented Black strivings. As plantation melodies fell out of fashion in the evolving politics of racial representation after World War II, the family, now performing as the Dungill Family Orchestra, harnessed its critique of normative logics of civic representation to perform internationalist and ultimately Ethiopianist visions of nonaligned, decolonial Black modes of existence against the grain of Cold Warrior attempts to conform the Black freedom struggle to the prerogatives of U.S. foreign policy. The Dungills elaborated their prewar playful subversion of American civil religion by claiming and performing myriad oppositional racial and ethnic heritages at once, including descent from the French and the Delaware who fought the British colonial army featuring a young George Washington in the Seven Years War, and from an enslaved Egyptian queen who marooned among the Seminoles in Florida. The Dungills’ family band project culminated in the 1963 LP Africa Calling, which featured gospel songs they composed from the Yoruba Bible. The album evinced their conceptualization of the intersection of the struggle for decolonization in Africa with the growth of Protestantism among the Yoruba. With Africa Calling, the Dungills brought the Black implementation of plantation melodies full circle in their resonance with the Ethiopianism of the turn of the twentieth century Williams and Walker musicals.

Memories in Playback: Videos and Jamaican Dancehall Culture

Tanika I. Williams

PART ONE | THE PERFORMANCE: Jamaican dancehall culture is a hybridization of the African and the Anglo, the colonial and the contemporary, the Downtown and the Uptown; the former denied and the latter desired in unstable binaries. Women in Jamaican dancehall culture are fixed in continuous contention to liberate the performing body that is trapped between the secular that is at once defined as slack, yet celebratory and the sacred, which is respected and revered. 

Beginning with the author’s childhood memories of dancehall culture, this paper highlights the performing black female body’s use of the sacred- everything that is white and Christian- to transcend the bounds of the secular- all that is African-informed- in an attempt to validate the authentic experience of urban Jamaican women in dancehall spaces.

PART TWO | THE PLAYBACK: During the 1960s video cameras surfaced in Jamaica’s dancehalls and attendees began documenting their experiences. Within two decades, dancehall culture emerged and along with it, an entire moving-image subculture. Videos cameras, like sound boxes, extravagant weaves, and colorful clothing, have been carved into the dancehall visual landscape and embraced as a means to preserve dancehall’s cultural archive. “Memories” contextualizes the significance of the recordings in Jamaica’s international dancehall community. 

Video became a fixture in Jamaican dancehall and the Diaspora from the 1970s-1990s when the live recordings captured the intensity of the events and were exported to New York, Miami, Toronto, and London. Recordings, shot and edited, to retain all the hype of the dances, facilitated dialogues on language, music, politics, community, and personal history among Jamaicans. 

This investigation charts the history of dancehall recordings and initiates a dialogue on the videos as moving photo albums. The aim of this paper is to understand how Jamaican dancehall subculture maintained relationships across countries and time periods by watching these recordings. 


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