Twenty-five records that were never just records, and room to write down what you actually hear.
Chapters
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This is a workbook, not a book you read. It assumes you have the record on, or can get it on, and that you would rather listen closely to twenty-five albums than skim a list of four hundred.
Every chapter runs the same way. First the year, not the vibe of the year, the actual policy and event and weather of it, because a record made in 1971 was made in a specific 1971 and the difference matters. Then the person who made it, including the parts that are uncomfortable. Then how the thing actually got built, which is usually stranger than the legend.
After that it is your turn. Four listening questions to answer with the music playing, and five longer ones to answer after it stops. There is room to write. Use it or don't, but the ones that ask you to time something, count something, or read a lyric as prose are worth doing literally. They change what you hear.
A note on order: there isn't one. The chapters run chronologically because something has to, and reading them that way shows you an argument being handed forward, Sam Cooke to Marvin Gaye to Public Enemy to Kendrick, each one answering something. But if you know one of these records already, start there. Familiarity is a good place to be surprised from.
Every chapter also carries a box called Where It Comes From: one jazz record that got there first, what to listen for in it, and the thing the chapter's album inherited. Marvin Gaye gets Mingus, whose label made him record a protest without the words twelve years before Motown shelved What's Going On. The Low End Theory gets Kind of Blue. Solange gets Alice Coltrane. You can skip them and the chapters still work, but they are the shortest route to understanding why this music keeps making the same arguments.
Nothing here asks you to like an album. Several of these records are difficult, a few are ugly on purpose, and one or two were made by people who did serious harm. Where that's true, it's in the chapter. Deciding what to do with it is the actual work, and it isn't the kind of work that gets finished.
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Four questions for while it plays. Answer them in the margins, badly, in pencil.
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Five longer ones. Pick the two you'd argue about.
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Sketch it here first
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Three sentences, no more. If you can't get it into three you haven't finished listening.
Twenty-five records is a start, not a canon. The full archive this workbook was cut from runs to four hundred and six: a hundred jazz, a hundred and three hip hop, a hundred and three soul and funk, a hundred R&B, and every one of them has the same treatment waiting: the year, the people, the thing that got built, and what to listen for.
A few threads worth following once you've finished here, because they run through nearly everything in the archive and they are not accidents.
Almost every foundational record in this tradition has someone on it who did not get paid. Bernie Worrell invented the sound of synthesizer bass and died owed for it. Isaac Hayes won an Oscar and was bankrupt within five years. TLC and Toni Braxton each sold over ten million records on the same label in the same decade and both went bankrupt. That is a pattern, not a run of bad luck, and once you start looking for it you will find it on most sleeves.
The women are in this music from the beginning and get written out of it constantly. The Sequence made the first female rap record in 1979 and most histories start with the Sugarhill Gang. Kandi Burruss and Tameka Cottle wrote the biggest songs of two groups more famous than their own. Angie Stone rapped on a 1979 hip hop single and sang on a 1995 neo-soul landmark and is credited for neither in the standard account.
A lot of what feels like magic on these records is a decision somebody made about where a drum lands. Zigaboo Modeliste's displaced snare, Roger Troutman's tube in his mouth, J Dilla programming a hi-hat early on purpose and Questlove learning to play it that way by hand. You do not need to read music to hear any of it. You need to play the thing twice and pay attention the second time.
Every chapter ends with a place because these records came from actual streets. 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx is an ordinary apartment block, which is the point. Muscle Shoals is a small brick building on an Alabama highway. Queensbridge is still standing. Stand on one of them with the record in your headphones and the geography stops being trivia.
Music doesn't just make you dance or feel good. It tells history, it confirms a place, a date, a community, proof that something happened here, to these people, in this exact year, and here's what it sounded like living through it. Streaming buried all of that. This is one way to dig it back up.
Every record in this book was sold across a counter before it was streamed. There were once something like a thousand Black-owned record stores in America and the Smithsonian counts a few dozen still trading. Here are {{ shopCount }} of them.
Ring before you drive. Several of these run on one person's schedule and the hours posted online are frequently wrong. And buy something rather than browse: a fifteen-dollar 45 from the shop beats the same record from a marketplace that keeps the margin.
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A list of the survivors that leaves out the ones that went under tells you the wrong thing about the trade.
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Streaming took the year off the label. This puts it back.
A song shows up on a playlist with no date attached, no city, no idea what was happening outside the studio door the week it got cut. Twenty-five chapters here run the same interrogation: what the artist carried into the room, what the country was doing to Black people that year, and what got made anyway.
Marvin's brother, mailing him letters from Vietnam. Nas at twenty, a window onto Queensbridge and a four-track. James Brown paying for the Apollo recording himself because his label wouldn't. Then four questions to answer with the record playing, five after it stops, and a studio project in the medium the artist actually worked in.
Bring a pencil. Several of these records are difficult, a few are ugly on purpose, and one or two were made by people who did real harm. All of that is in the chapters. Deciding what to do with it is the actual work.
Also available
Teaching Black Music History
The educator edition, a full-year curriculum and a semester elective built on twenty of these albums, with essential questions, listening focus, discussion, assessment and grade-band handling for every unit.
The full archive
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Volume One
First edition