Traversing the Urban Soundscape: Black Sonic Geographies within the Minneapolis Sound

Abstract

Music is inseparable from place. The Minneapolis Sound, an iteration of Black diasporic music typically associated with the musician Prince, is no different. Honing in on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, this paper traces how The Minneapolis Sound, against the backdrop of a racialized soundscape, emerged as a Black sonic counterculture. Despite remaining frustratingly elusive across academia, The Minneapolis Sound emblematises the dialectical relationship between urban containment and Black creativity that Black musical aesthetics constantly navigate and, indeed, irrupt across (Brar, 2021; Shabazz, 2021). Working in dialogue with the bourgeoning field of Black geographies, I elucidate how attempts to constrain the spatiality of Black musical life across the city simply produced a positional insularity from which Blackness could be counter-spatialized in ways that decalcified the racially divisive structure of the soundscape itself. I mobilise the term "Black sonic de/stabilisations" as a heuristic device to illuminate how these counter-spatializations of Blackness concurrently reaffirmed a Black sense of place (McKittrick, 2006) across the urban soundscape whilst destabilising the territorial operations of anti-Black logics. This illuminates how the urban soundscape operates not as a site of static exclusion but a protean terrain of creative negotiation constantly being reconfigured. With such insight, I illustrate how the pathologization of Blackness across Minneapolis' urban soundscape merely operated as a constitutive element of Blackness, rather than a definitive one which, in trying to delimit the parameters of Black musical life across the city, ultimately produced the conditions for its own subversion (Wynter, n.d.; McKittrick, 2016).