Record-Pressed Revolution: Black Auditory Advocacy and the Late Civil Rights Movement

Catalog description

The movement had all but ended--Malcolm and Martin twin Moseses toward the new decade's Canaan, their people at once led to and lost in Equal Right's promised land. Two Kennedys and administrations sat lost to the threshold too. Tribute to the 60s--many hands made the law's lords work. "The Revolution"--now sponsored by Black Power, deep base, and less faith--was underway, and everywhere. It would not, though, be brought to you/ by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions' or show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle. Gil told us. The old revolution was dead, long live the Revolution. Much has been written on the turn charted in Scott-Heron's Black Power anthem, expressing the sentiments of a community left to grapple with the consequences of a "rights" mission seen as, but by no means actually, accomplished. The fight for Civil Rights--at least of the sort a government could give--had ended, in no small part thanks to death, disillusionment, and a right-wing government elected by equality's opponents to trim its imagined excesses. Expressed amidst the violence and propaganda of America's smoldering wars (in Vietnam, on dissent, and on dissenters), Scott-Heron's critique of televised politics reads as a response, in part, to the power asymmetries inscribed in the form, as well as the content, of broadcast images. The Revolution would not be televised, because in truth it could not be. It could, though, be reproduced via other means: through sound. Pressed, packaged, and delivered (cheap!) to a living room near you, thanks to Phillips, RCA Victor, media mail postage (which is to say Uncle Sam), and countless others. No less baggage, just different. The Revolution could not be televised, but it could be played for audiences at home. That Revolution--the type pressed in wax along with ink--is the focus of this course. In this study, the Revolution will be…