Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds & Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era by Francesca T. Royster (review)

Conjure in your mind the first time you listened to (the artist formerly known as) Prince. Was it sensual? Shocking? Sexy? Chances are that something stirred, somehow. What about your relation to, or your understanding of, other Post-Soul musicians? What iteration of Michael Jackson do you lean into, and with what meaning? Is your Stevie Wonder aligned with black rights or is he absent a specific politic? Is Grace Jones a fierce gay icon or does she symbolize black power? Through what lens, how, and toward what end do we know and utilize the artist-performers we turn to again and again, or know differently through the years? How do we open to artist-performers to whom we are introduced? Music is a powerful site of subject formation, identity and identification, and imaginary and belonging.

In Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds & Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era, Francesca Royster delves into the politics and practice of musical production and reception. Royster de-familiarizes popular cultural narratives of Post-Soul musicians/artists/performers and relocates the performative doing of black music and artists through radically contextual subjugated knowledge. She realizes more nuanced and different considerations of blackness than the popular imaginary of whiteness allows as she centers through music and artist-musicians the formations of black history and futurity through deeply situated and at times highly personal historicizing and theorizing. Royster’s use of the personal, with which she opens and weaves through each chapter, functions as an embodied site of the kind of historicizing and theorizing the book does as well as the politics it espouses. In this way, Royster locates herself as part of the belonging, the historical, and ongoing doing of and through music/ians. Through Royster’s narrative skill, readers may find themselves transported into the music as well as their own relation to each artist. Royster performs her political and theoretical accomplishment through the lens of the eccentric.

Eccentricity—the reading of black performers as eccentric—holds the cool edge of risk. Eccentrics and eccentricity are reserved for those who move with social and economic privilege. To move as an eccentric is to be given license to be strange, at the edge of recognition, reflecting back dis-ease with normalcy. At the edge of recognition, the threat of eccentricity is diffused through this calling. The dynamic produced through eccentricity between dismissal and threat is precisely what Royster harnesses. For at the precipice of a contained threat, those who occupy it can pry open alternative imaginaries for themselves and the larger collectivities to which they belong. Royster writes that, “In my appropriation of eccentric, a term that, unlike queer, pervert, or even freak, has been depoliticized in most popular discourse, I explore a particular and underreported aspect of black experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries . . . . Eccentric performances are fueled by contradictory desires for recognition and freedom” (8–9).

Royster’s reclaiming of eccentricity is a productive move that locates queerness and blackness in alliance against the structures of whiteness and (hetero)normativity. Though queerness and blackness are often parsed apart through mainstream rhetorics that separate these politics, in fact, as Royster demonstrates, queerness and blackness interanimate one another; they can be simultaneously powerfully mobilized within individual bodies as well as modalities of collective resistance and imaginaries. Though not each artist-performer under consideration might identify with a queer sexual politics, they individually and collectively occupy a space of queerness and blackness to route the labor of tapping history through their music into present moments. One of the useful tactics readers might consider through a reading of Sounding Like a No-No would be to contemplate such reappropriations and how we might continue to think through the relation between blackness and queerness.

In each chapter, Royster introduces...