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The article focuses on Nigerian singer, songwriter, record producer and Grammy-award winner Burna Boy. Topics include the success of his live concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York and the O2 Arena in London, England, his nomination for the 2024 Best African Music Performance for the song "City Boys," a description of his musical style, his activist persona, and an analysis of his Afrobeats song "Monsters You Made."

This paper examines the trajectory of the Black cantador Zé Limeira from the point of view of his insertion in the cantoria de viola in Brazil, comparing evidence of his real existence with the fictional construction of his identity as « poet of the absurd » by Orlando Tejo. In this reading, we focus on understanding how racism factored into northeastern cantoria throughout the 20th century.

Works of art consciously or unconsciously reproduce or reject of the societal norms from which they emerge. Reading artists and creatives as bodies which articulate the social and political experiences (affirmation or rejection implies that the body can also construct and deconstruct particular social readings of itself. In this paper, I explore feminist corporality, aesthetics and gendered performativity in the translation of selected songs ,by South African popular music icons Brenda Fassie and Busiswa Gqulu, into music videos. I argue that both artists construct "the self" and engage gendered narratives of "the self" through audio-visual form. I firstly employ the notion of homology, to compare the common thread in their articulation of black feminist discourse through their lyrics and the self-performativity of their music videos. I then focus on the aesthetic and performative elements of Gqulu's music videos, notably the queer performativity of the Vintage Cru dancers and the staging of post-apartheid urban spaces. Through this intergenerational analysis I illustrate how popular audio-visual form participates in the representation of multiple iterations of queer and feminist performativity emerging out of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the relationship between Lagos and Nigerian cinematic practice often focuses on the video film, emphasising the city's symbiotic relationship with Nollywood. This article is an attempt to expand the purview of the debate by arguing for the music video as a significant cinematic product capable of yielding a more complex picture about the city and the forms of cultural expression it fosters. Using Brymo's "1 Pound (The Documentary)" as a specific example, this contribution explores the appropriation of the city into the performer's image. Through a close reading that takes into account the different components of the music video form, I highlight the ways its multisensory qualities are deployed to engage several narratives about the city while simultaneously creating a unique image inextricable from that of Brymo, the star. Lagos, I argue, ultimately transcends a one-dimensional background for the enactment of the video's narrative and becomes a character itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When African American concert singers began to perform German lieder in central Europe in the 1920s, white German and Austrian listeners were astounded by the veracity and conviction of their performances. How had they managed to sing like Germans? This article argues that black performances of German music challenged audiences' definitions of blackness, whiteness, and German music during the transatlantic Jazz Age in interwar central Europe. Upon hearing black performers masterfully sing lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others, audiences were compelled to consider whether German national identity was contingent upon whiteness. Some listeners chose to call black concert singers "Negroes with white souls," associating German music with whiteness by extension. Others insisted that the singer had sounded black and therefore un-German. Race was ultimately the filter through which people interpreted these performances of the Austro-German musical canon. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and when audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Simultaneously, it offers a musicological intervention in contemporary discourses that still operate under the assumption that it is impossible to be both black and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Puerto Rican musician and jazz singer Lucy Fabery. The author comments on the relationship between Puerto Rican music, literature, and society, and examines her influence on the arts in Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean region, including Cuba. Her ethnicity as a black Puerto Rican woman is also explored.

This essay derives from an oral history project on Brazilian Black women singers whose careers are not exclusively confined to samba and other musical genres usually identified with blackness in the Brazilian imaginary. The interviews challenge the widespread notion that Black musicians should concentrate on samba, and demonstrate features of the lifepaths and struggles shared by a number of successful women singers who succeeded, despite the obstacles they encountered, in creating a new field for themselves and for their artistic peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenny Lynch was the first successful black British pop singer. Lynch moved from singing jazz standards to popular music in 1960. By the mid-1960s, when his popularity as a singer declined, Lynch was on his way to becoming the most well-known black, British-born, all-round entertainer in Britain. He worked as a song-writer, an actor in films and as a stand-up comedian. As Lynch developed his successful career, Britain was in the grip of a race-based scare about West Indian, and South Asian, immigration. There has been little work published on post-Second World War British-born popular singers before the era of the post-1948 West Indian migration. This article explores the racial context of Lynch's success and explores the positioning of Lynch as a British-born black man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]