Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives.

Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women’s reproductive justice to the subtext of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics.

In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s best-selling cultural histories, Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.

In Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters, songwriter, scholar, and dramatist Masi Asare explores the singing practice of black women singers in US musical theatre between 1900 and 1970. Asare shows how a vanguard of black women singers including Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, and Leslie Uggams created a lineage of highly trained and effective voice teachers whose sound and vocal techniques continue to be heard today. Challenging pervasive narratives that these and other black women possessed “untrained” voices, Asare theorizes singing as a form of sonic citational practice—how the sound of the teacher’s voice lives on in the student’s singing. From vaudeville-blues shouters, black torch singers, and character actresses to nightclub vocalists and Broadway glamour girls, Asare locates black women of the musical stage in the context of historical voice pedagogy. She invites readers not only to study these singers, but to study with them—taking seriously what they and their contemporaries have taught about the voice. Ultimately, Asare speaks to the need to feel and hear the racial history in contemporary musical theatre.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries. With her covers of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and others, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that come with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade genre-bending career—from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae—and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.

In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre’s decline and death. He shows how R&B remains a thriving venue for the expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment. Among other topics, Weheliye discusses the postdisco evolution of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, Prince and David Bowie in relation to appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s, how the BlackFem voice functions as a repository of Black knowledge, the methods contemporary R&B musicians use to bring attention to Black Lives Matter, and the ways vocal distortion technologies such as the vocoder demonstrate Black music’s relevance to discussions of humanism and posthumanism. Ultimately, Feenin represents Weheliye’s capacious thinking about R&B as the site through which to consider questions of Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.

An oral history with the women of Parliament-Funkadelic, from forming the band to landing the mothership.

Parliament-Funkadelic is perhaps the greatest funk band ever assembled. Yet at the time of the group’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, none of the women who helped create the sound and performed in P-Funk were invited to the ceremony and their contributions have been largely overlooked.

Mothership Connected tells the story of Mallia Franklin, Lynn Mabry, Dawn Silva, Debbie Wright, and Shirley Hayden, all of whom were instrumental in making Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as the spin-off groups Parlet and the Brides of Funkenstein, into the legends they are today. Assembled by Seth Neblett, son of the “Queen of Funk” Mallia Franklin, and filled with the voices of funk icons like George Clinton, Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and the women themselves, this oral history makes clear why these “architects” at the “core” of P-Funk were both essential—and erased. From Franklin introducing Bootsy Collins to Clinton, to the Brides’ top-10 hit “Disco to Go,” to the drugs that helped destroy the group, this book reveals the hidden lives and uncomfortable truths of life in P-Funk. More than sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Mothership Connected is about Black women navigating a tumultuous era and industry to become musical pioneers. Now, after decades in the shadows, these genre-defining women are finally telling their story.

Mary J. Blige is an icon who represents the political consciousness of hip hop and the historical promise of soul. She is an everywoman, celebrated by Oprah Winfrey and beloved by pop music fans of all ages and races. Blige has sold over fifty million albums, won numerous Grammys, and even played at multiple White House events, as well as the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Displaying astonishing range and versatility, she has recorded everything from Broadway standards to Led Zeppelin anthems and worked with some of popular music’s greatest artists—Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Sting, U2, and Beyoncé, among them.

Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige tells the story of one of the most important artists in pop music history. Danny Alexander follows the whole arc of Blige’s career, from her first album, which heralded the birth of “hip hop soul,” to her critically praised 2014 album, The London Sessions. He highlights the fact that Blige was part of the historically unprecedented movement of black women onto pop radio and explores how she and other women took control of their careers and used their music to give voice to women’s (and men’s) everyday struggles and dreams. This book adds immensely to the story of both black women artists and artists rooted in hip hop and pays tribute to a musician who, by expanding her reach and asking tough questions about how music can and should evolve, has proven herself an artistic visionary.

Growing up in the shadow of her superstar sister, Solange Knowles became a pivotal musician in her own right. Defying an industry that attempted to bend her to its rigid image of a Black woman, Solange continually experimented with her sound and embarked on a metamorphosis in her art that continues to this day.

In Why Solange Matters, Stephanie Phillips chronicles the creative journey of an artist who became a beloved voice for the Black Lives Matter generation. A Black feminist punk musician herself, Phillips addresses not only the unpredictable trajectory of Solange Knowles's career but also how she and other Black women see themselves through the musician's repertoire. First, she traces Solange’s progress through an inflexible industry, charting the artist’s development up to 2016, when the release of her third album, A Seat at the Table, redefined her career. Then, with A Seat at the Table and 2019’s When I Get Home, Phillips describes how Solange embraced activism, anger, Black womanhood, and intergenerational trauma to inform her remarkable art. Why Solange Matters not only cements the place of its subject in the pantheon of world-changing twenty-first century musicians, it introduces its writer as an important new voice.

Finalist, 2024 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture
Winner — Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award, 45th Annual American Book Awards, Before Columbus Foundation

A queer, Black “biography in essays” about the performer who gave us “Hound Dog,” “Ball and Chain,” and other songs that changed the course of American music.

Born in Alabama in 1926, raised in the church, appropriated by white performers, buried in an indigent’s grave—Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton's life events epitomize the blues—but Lynnée Denise pushes past the stereotypes to read Thornton’s life through a Black, queer, feminist lens and reveal an artist who was an innovator across her four-decade-long career.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters “samples” elements of Thornton’s art—and, occasionally, the author’s own story—to create “a biography in essays” that explores the life of its subject as a DJ might dig through a crate of records. Denise connects Thornton’s vaudevillesque performances in Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue to the vocal improvisations that made “Hound Dog” a hit for Peacock Records (and later for Elvis Presley), injecting music criticism into what’s often framed as a cautionary tale of record-industry racism. She interprets Thornton’s performing in men’s suits as both a sly, Little Richard–like queering of the Chitlin Circuit and a simple preference for pants over dresses that didn’t have a pocket for her harmonica. Most radical of all, she refers to her subject by her given name rather than "Big Mama," a nickname bestowed upon her by a white man. It's a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation, because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience.