Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance by Lauron J. Kehrer (review)

2023; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2023.a912357

1534-150X

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance by Lauron J. Kehrer Abigail Lindo Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance. By Lauron J. Kehrer. (Tracking Pop.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. [x, 151 p. ISBN 9780472075683 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780472055685 (paperback), $19.95; ISBN 9780472903016 (open access ebook).] Bibliography, index. Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance. By Lauron J. Kehrer. (Tracking Pop.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. [x, 151 p. ISBN 9780472075683 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780472055685 (paperback), $19.95; ISBN 9780472903016 (open access ebook).] Bibliography, index. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance, Lauron J. Kehrer skillfully historicizes queer existence within, adjacent to, and beyond hip hop. Focusing on the identity of creators from the mid-twentieth century to the present, they create a meaningful account of queer creative expression as a necessary dimension of hip hop, originating in earlier genres of African American dance music. From the beginning, Kehron dedicates their effort to navigating masculinity with the deserved nuance sometimes avoided or neglected in previous texts, which have focused on the common associations of toxic masculinity and hyper-masculinity that isolate female and queer perspectives. The author recognizes the potential for a multiplicity of masculine performances among queer and trans performers, significantly addressing female masculinities in hip hop throughout visual and musical cultural production. [End Page 350] Multiple scholars have written about queer performers in hip hop, but none so completely as Kehrer, who actively engages in a productive labor of humanizing each artist within the work. This necessary approach to storytelling furthers the reality of placemaking and self-making that queer and trans hip-hop artists go through to produce their work and their spaces within society. This work builds on Kehrer's direct but palatable writing style found in their previous publications about Macklemore (who is also discussed in this work) and Beyoncé ("A Love Song for All of Us?: Macklemore's 'Same Love' and the Myth of Black Homophobia," Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 4 [November 2018]: 425–48; "Who Slays? Queer Resonances in Beyonce's Lemonade," Popular Music and Society 42, no. 1 [February 2019]: 82–98). Kehrer is present in the work—and beneficially so. They are aware of their positionality and lived experience connected to hip hop, something that adds vulnerability and depth to the discourse they present about the lived experiences of specific artists and key figures. The disclaimer, distancing the work's awareness of intersectional realities in hip-hop studies from the work of decolonizing queer studies, is a reasonable inclusion, although what Kehrer successfully does throughout the work situates the groundbreaking and necessary creative products of queer and trans individuals of color within broader, contemporary discourses about hip hop, gender performance, and identity. The author does not focus on how queer identities at the emergence of hip hop were hidden but rather on openly queer and trans artists in order to shape a narrative of fortitude by examining how they transformed local practices to elevate subaltern perspectives. The text features four chapters on the lives of queer and trans creatives and their spaces of worldmaking. Kehrer additionally addresses the complexities of how the spaces themselves aided in shaping community and the legacy of these communities in contemporary hip-hop performance. In the first chapter, they elaborate on how the sonic and spatial culture involved in disco and house music provided opportunities for queer Black expression that were diverted with hip hop. Kehrer effectively presents queerness as an inherent aspect of hip-hop music and culture since its creation, situating the genre's disco origins as a metric for approaching the collage of musical ideas that were eventually cemented in the genre. The function of musical stimuli for bodily movement—and therefore, the bodily performance of identity—as a form of Black queer liberation mirrors hip hop's evolution as a genre marked by its rejection of this function. The author asserts that many straight, Black hip-hop artists (including Chuck D) distanced themselves from dance genres like house because they believed them to be "inherently gay...