Adrian Piper, Kelela, and the necessity of rhythm work

Abstract

This article traces the uses of rhythm and sound across select works from two practitioners: performance artist Adrian Piper and contemporary R&B artist Kelela. Enacting an analysis through the sonicality of both artists, the article uses rhythm to connect the visual plane to that of sound, affect, and vibration—and the vibrations that ultimately coalesce into rhythms. In the article, I theorize a notion of rhythm work, or the use of musical and other kinds of rhythms by the two artists to both amplify their personal experiences as Black women and accentuate the white patriarchal heteronormative rhythms against which they move. Building on work from sound, performance, and Black studies, I explore how both artists’ rhythm work interweaves the bodily and the technological, channelling individual rhythms (such as what Piper calls “the rhythms of sex”) into new collective rhythmic possibilities grounded in Black femaleness and/or femmeness. In the process, this article invites readers to think and feel together with performance art and popular music, two genres that are sometimes (but still not often) written about concurrently in performance studies, by highlighting the extent to which rhythm works as a connector across various genres and disciplinary fields.

Keywords:

• Sound
• rhythm
• Blackness
• femmeness
• performance studies

Acknowledgements

Everything that I have written is always in community with others, and this article is no different. Thank you to the editorial collective and readers for their comments. A special thanks to troizel xx Carr for a 30-minute-long Zoom chat that helped me solidify the final (before letting go) revisions. My frequent collaborator and dear friend Dan DiPiero often reads a draft of whatever I’ve written, and his feedback on the revamped lit review (particularly his knowledge of Rancière) helped coalesce the herstory of from where my theorizations grow. Iris Blake helped me think about rhythm work in terms of labor, which I will continue to expand upon as I grow the idea. My ongoing conversations about popular music and critical theory with Linde Murugan, Alyx Vesey, and Ayanna Dozier always inform my work, and I thank them in every acknowledgements section now. I first read about Adrian Piper in Fred Moten’s In The Break in my first semester of grad school (Summer 2013) in the NYU performance studies MA program—and I have been thinking about the sonics of her work ever since. Finally, thank you to Sabine Dabady for introducing me to Kelela and so much other music that I now love and write about. Let’s make sure to go see Kelela again when I’m in a better health place than before.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Over each of their foreheads, one word is typewritten out: “Every” “thing” “will” “cease” “to” “exist,” an invitation to not look away from six men who were killed for wanting to change American culture.

2 As McMillan notes, Piper expands on this in her essay “Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object.” Piper writes that contemporary events “changed everything for me: (1) the invasion of Cambodia; (2) The Women’s Movement; (3) Kent State and Jackson State; (4) the closing of CCNY, where I was in my first term as a philosophy major, during the student rebellion.”

3 For those of us who are sound studies scholars, this is a familiar process. You listen to a song over and over again, picking out different nuances of its beat or tones or timbres each time. But, even after so many listens, what most often remains is the bass line – or, in other words, the rhythm.

4 The song would earn Franklin two Grammys in 1968 for “Best Rhythm & Blues Recording” and “Best Rhythm & Blues Solo Vocal Performance, Female.”

5 These words on the screen are meant to counter a previous segment in a documentary, when the words “WHITE” “PEOPLE” “CAN’T’” “DANCE” flash on the screen as a white male dancer declares this much. It is one of the, if not the, most comical point(s) in the documentary.

6 In 2016, the four-day SXSW party billed Tory Lanez, the hip hop artist who would later shoot fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion in the foot in July 2020. I write this out here to illustrate the atmosphere of problematic Black masculinity hovering around the festival at some point – and also around hip hop and R&B at large. This is especially troubling given that Black women have their strongest presence in R&B of any musical genre. See: Weheliye, “Rhythms of Relation.”

7 Kelela has commented that “Rewind” is about “when you spot a stranger-bae on the dancefloor and lock eyes for the rest of the night.” See: Michelle Lhooq, “Listen to ‘Rewind,’ the Spiritual Centerpiece of Kelela's 'Hallucinogen' EP.” VICE (2015). https://www.vice.com/en/article/nzmmwx/listen-to-rewind-the-spiritual-centerpiece-of-kelelas-hallucinogen-ep.

8 Occurring at a moment in indie rock, pop, and R&B when many artists were beginning to incorporate choreography into their live sets, the performance both signals back towards Janet Jackson’s performances, channeling the vibrations of electronics of voice into new bodily rhythms. While on tour for A Seat at the Table at this same moment in time, experimental pop/R&B star and friend of Kelela, Solange, brought a color-coordinated, choreography-driven performance to her shows. In the indie rock sphere, meanwhile, everyone from St. Vincent to Mitski began to incorporate choreography into their sets.

9 Having seen Kelela in both Houston and New York City for this particular tour, I can confirm that the choreography at both shows was nearly identical. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that this was the choreography for this song on this particular tour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Capetola

Christine Capetola is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She works at the intersections of queer, Black, sound, affect, and performance studies. Their book project, Sonic Femmeness: Black Culture Makers, Felt History, and Vibrational Identity, theorizes that femmeness is a sonic, felt, and vibrational configuration of femininity that connects Black pop stars from the 1980s and 2010s across shared aesthetics and historical resonances. She is published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books, AMP: American Music Perspectives, Oxford Handbook for Electronic Dance Music, Routledge Companion on Cyberpunk, and Bitch Media. Capetola guest edited “Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis,” a special issue of AMP: American Music Perspectives, with Dan DiPiero. They publish essays about contemporary pop/R&B and emotionality at www.christinecapetola.com.