BROWN SUGAR BLUES: THE WHITE SOUNDTRACK OF A BLACK GIRL WHO LOVES ROCK

Professor Mack lived in a family both musical and violent, and her critical memoir, Brown Sugar Blues: The White Soundtrack of a Black Girl Who Loves Rock, examines the ways in which that upbringing impacted her coming of age and musical education. Her mother had a big voice. So did her grandmother. They used their voices to assault each other verbally (and sometimes physically). Hers was small because she was a child, yes. But it was also tamped down by the powerful women around her. Rock rebellion provided an outlet to express her anger, sadness, frustrations, and joy. These fierce sounds and stories helped her locate emotions that she spent much of her childhood trying not to express lest she add to her mother’s heavy load. But if rock music was a refuge, it was also a site of hostility and exclusion. How did she (and her mom, who was also a fan) navigate such hostile rock terrain, replete with racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia? In answering this question, Brown Sugar Blues explores the erasure of Black people from rock, a style of music with Black origins. Race, gender, genre, and cultural gatekeeping all worked together to marginalize Black rockers, fans, and writers. To fully examine these processes, Professor Mack will braid together memoir, biography, and cultural criticism, telling the story of her musical listening and her hard-fought journey to finding her own voice, alongside the stories of the artists who made a different way of being possible for her in spite of the alienation she often felt in rock culture.