How to Listen Otherwise

Abstract Music occupies a central role in the Black radical tradition. It is often understood as a mode of radical rebellion, sonic insurgency, and fugitive possibility. In Black music and sound we can listen to the competing rhythms and tempos of a Black world outside the strictures of white supremacist narratives. What is often glossed over in these conversations, however, is how Black music plays an explicitly ecological role. This article thinks about how Black sound is instrumental in refiguring what Brent Hayes Edwards calls the “historical transcript,” while also gesturing toward how Black sound seeks out a worlding between human and nonhuman entities through an endless capacity for reconfiguration and reorganization. Arguing that Black music is both historical archive and futural conjecture, this article examines a series of records that materialize worlds outside the locked grooves of anti-Black violence and environmental destruction.