Performing Race and Gender

In the song ‘… & On’, from the 2000 album Mama’s Gun, Erykah Badu sings about an “analog girl in a digital world”. Even though the world had become digital by 2000, Badu’s music testifies to the continuous presence of the analogue. So, what does this mean? When it comes to musical production, her presence is primarily staged by way of an interaction with computer-based music, where the voice becomes the human or analogue presence in a machine-like or digital context. However, on a more general level, it is also about the negotiation of musical genres and, thus, of developments in the history of popular music from the 1970s onwards. Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant Than The Sun claims that disco is to be seen as the audible moment where the 21st century begins: “Disco remains the moment when Black Music falls from the grace of gospel tradition into the metronomic assembly line” (Eshun 1999, -006). ¹ Eshun’s interpretation is particularly related to the proposed connection between the human and the soul. If the rhythms become too mechanical or machine-like – “the metronomic assembly line” – then, so it seems, the human is removed from the equation. For Eshun, this marks the entry of the posthuman, a move he seems to celebrate. For too long African Americans were denied their status – as slaves they were reduced to animality or even biological machines – and both the gospel tradition and an understanding of soul seem to have been later consequences of this same set-up by which Christianity and, particularly, the story of Egyptian bondage justifies African American slave-existence. To become truly free from this heritage, then, one would leave Christianity – and the related idea of the soul – behind. As a result of disco, the posthuman, thus, becomes the equivalent of ‘post-soul’, a term often used to describe a particular African American postmodernism (George 1992).