Jordan R. Brown, 'The Black Alternative: A Cultural and Musical Phenomenon'

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Jordan R. Brown is an ethnomusicology doctoral candidate at Harvard University with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. Her current research interests include Black underground politics, Black feminist theory and queer theory, Black alternative music, and video game music, all specifically in the late 20th century. With her upcoming public-facing work spanning Black popular music, posthuman video-game cultural theory, Kenyan soundscapes, and BIPOC activist spaces, Brown advances an innovative ethnomusicological lens on Black gender and sexuality studies.

Jordan Brown’s Hutchins Center Fellowship Project is focused on her dissertation tentatively entitled “The Black Alternative: A Cultural and Musical Phenomenon.” Particular focus within her research is Black alternative music’s overlap as a refuge for Black queer communities in the United States. Originally used to describe punk rock music in the mid-1980s, the word “alternative” at its core associates new music with familiar popular music genres while also simultaneously acknowledging its divergence into the sonic unknown. Brown’s dissertation explores “alternative” as an adjective rather than as a noun, acknowledging its representation towards progression in genres and, congruently, subcultures of music. Special emphasis throughout the dissertation is given to genres that are commercially coded as “Black,” specifically alternative R&B and alternative hip-hop. Rooted in the initial Black alternative music movement in the 80s and 90s under different aliases such as “urban alternative,” Brown theorizes, due to the nature of genre hybridity, that there is a mixture of jazz, soul, and funk influence surrounding “alternative” sonic signifiers, with some examples of these artists including The Roots, Erykah Badu, OutKast, N.E.R.D., Gorillaz, India.Arie, Musiq Soulchild, Prince, and Floetry, to name a few. Moreover, Brown speculates that this fluid approach to Black musicking provides a safe haven for intersectional minorities within the Black identity such as those belonging to the queer community. Brown proposes through her dissertation that, just as Black genres have been presented by Western executives as catch-all terms for Black musicking, the re-emergence of commercial Black alternative music in the twenty-first century represents a dumping classification for modern sexually deviant, politically resistant or altogether experimental Black sounds. Just as genre shifts have mimicked societal shifts, this iteration of Black alternative music has become a cultural hub for those excluded from current expected ideations of Black life.