Jessica Baker: Music and the Labor of Legacy

This talk emerges at the intersections of two nascent projects. The first concerns music and end-of-life care, in which I examine how a legacy-the sum of what endures after a life has ended-is constructed and maintained, particularly through sonic practices. The second, not entirely unrelated, examines Black middle-class aesthetics and, specifically, aspiration as a set of legacy-ensuring practices with inherently sonic dimensions. Braiding these threads of inquiry, this talk focuses on Beyoncé's 2024 country music album, Cowboy Carter, as a collaborative collage of songs and sounds that stages a re-narrative of personal and genre legacies. Offering something notably different from her previous projects, Cowboy Carter centers on the struggles and labor of aspiration rather than strictly dancefloor celebration. It's this emphasis on effort, sacrifice, and hard work toward the explicit goal of being remembered that ties Cowboy Carter to broader questions about the context of contemporary legacy-building-specifically, the role of women's structural labor and global middle-classness. Drawing on ethnography, deep listening, and ethnomusicological readings of Black liberation theology, I situate Beyoncé and the sonic techniques of Cowboy Carter within a history of what political theorist Joy James has referred to as "the rise of Black women through Empire." In doing so, I suggest that we can hear strains of what the distribution of the social weight of legacy-building sounds like across the Black diaspora.

Jessica Baker (University of Chicago) is an ethnomusicologist specializing in contemporary popular music of and in Circum-Caribbean. Her research interests include tempo and aesthetics, coloniality and decolonization, and race, gender, and respectability. As a Caribbeanist, she engages Caribbean theory related to small island nations, including representation, invisibility, vulnerability, and sovereignty. Her book project, Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis, examines relationships between tempo perception and gendered and raced legacies of colonization. Through historical and ethnographic analysis, she argues that colonial ideas of femininity and Enlightenment notions of musicianship shape perceptions of wylers as "too fast." Her article, "Black Like Me: Caribbean Tourism and St. Kitts Music Festival," explores music tourism and diasporic travel through American soul music. She holds a PhD from University of Pennsylvania.