Black Noise from the Break: Ma and Pa’s Black Radical Lyricism

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an original and fascinating article.  My one concern is that I think the introduction can be a bit more clear.  Additional contextualizing between Kendrick Lamar and Lemming/Windrush literature would be helping in clarifying the dimensions of the subsequent discussion.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

As I understand it, the article’s argument is really a critical intervention. The author argues that Kendrick Lamar’s song “We Cry Together” was misheard as a performance of an abusive relationship and broader Black pathology and that with proper theoretical grounding, it can be better understood in the context of Black radical art. Specifically, the author engages theories about “the break” and racialized listening in order to use the framing of “Black noise” to better hear Lamar’s song.

 

The main evidence offered for this critical intervention beyond the theoretical grounding is essentially an interpretive overlay. The author takes an exchange from Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and explains its “Black noisiness,” then essentially slides Lamming out of frame so that the reader is listening to Lamar with the same attunement the author used for Lamming. It’s a really creative listening praxis that, as the author notes, is not quite comparative in nature. Rather, the author points the reader to a passage that doesn’t read as “noise,” positions it as noise in the context of “the break” and racialized listening, then turns the reader back to the more “difficult” Lamar song, the noise of which is now more properly contextualized in a Black radical tradition.

 

The three major things I think the author needs to address for this article to resonate with readers involve argument, structure, and evidence.

 

1.     The argument isn’t clearly stated in the introduction. Assuming I’ve summarized it correctly above, I was only able to do this after reading the introduction twice, then reading the entire article, and then going back and reading the introduction a third time. It was after the third reading that I could really parse what the author was driving at. If the author can spend some time with the introduction, starting with a clear, one-sentence statement of the argument (this is where I recommend the author starts, not where the introduction should necessarily start), then building out the introductory framing from there, this will go a good ways toward helping the reader understand the argument the first time through.

2.     Structurally, the article starts and ends with “We Cry Together,” but in the middle, the song is largely absent. The title, meanwhile, focuses on Ma and Pa from Lamming’s Skin, but the article doesn’t center them until around the 35-40% mark, at which point Skin becomes the primary focus. It’s unclear from the structure exactly what the focus is intended to be, as each of Lamming and Lamar suggest themselves as the primary text in different ways, but neither fully takes up that space. The author analyzes Ma and Pa’s exchange as a kind of call-and-response, and I wonder if it might be helpful for the author to think of Lamming and Lamar as engaged in a call-and-response, too. If so, then the structure of the article needs to place the two works in clearer dialog with one another. I think the non-comparative analysis could still work, but the practice of tuning the reader’s ears to hear Lamar the way the author hears Lamming can be done in a less siloed way. [While on the topic of call-and-response, the author might consider Samuel A Floyd Jr’s “Ring Shout” article, which engages Black aesthetics, centers call-and-response as a hallmark of Black arts, and theorizes that hallmark as “Call-Response”]

3.     Addressing #1 and #2 can hopefully help with this next part, but the author’s critical intervention would land better if the author were to more directly engage the stuff of “We Cry Together,” whether it’s the song’s sound, lyrics, structure, or all of the above. The reader needs a clearer roadmap for what to listen for and how to listen to it. To a lesser extent, the same advice applies to Lamming; here, a few sentences providing a clear synopsis and roadmap for the work can better situate the reader in the moment of the exchange between Ma and Pa.

 

A more minor suggestion is that the author can work to make the style of the writing more accessible in two specific ways. The first would be to take some care around sentence structure; some are long and winding and require a couple of reads to understand. The second—and this may be related—is that there are several pull quotes sprinkled into the middle of sentences. In some cases, the way a source phrases something is important to relay word-for-word (usually because that wording is going to be fundamental to one’s critical framework), but it’s often crucial for an author to paraphrase or summarize (while still assiduously citing) other scholars’ work. The process of having to paraphrase or summarize commits the author to a particular reading of a source that aids in future readers’ ability to engage those sources. It also makes the article at hand easier to read.

 

At its core, this article can provide a critical intervention that places Kendrick Lamar in dialog with another artist in the diaspora and tune readers’/listeners’ ears to how noise and the break work in the Black Radical Tradition. In its current format, though, it’s not quite ready for publication and would benefit from being resubmitted after addressing the above suggested revisions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article offers a convincing close reading of a dialogue/duet in chapter four of George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin with respect to its aural qualities, its connection to 'black noise,' and its creation of a break within a break within a break. The paper references relevant scholarship on the topic of black (radical) noise/sound ranging from Fred Moten to Douglas Kearney and Zadie Smith. It is overall clearly structured, well-researched, and I am looking forward to seeing it published. Therefore, I have only a few suggestions for minor revisions/additions.

The connection to Kendrick Lamar's "We Cry Together," which also stages a couple's intimate conversation is intriguing and could  be explored further. While I agree that a full-fledged comparison (which the author explicitly states is not the goal of the article) may lie beyond the scope of the current paper, it could still be sketch out a bit more - especially with an eye to the fact that the two texts/performances emerge from different historical periods as well as cultural and medial settings.

I'd also suggest to offer further contextualization for the literary text that serves as primary case study. Readers who are not familiar with Lamming's debut novel - even though it certainly is a "staple of Windrush literature" (48) - might benefit from a  brief outline of the context for the text's production and reception, including the scholarly discourse on Lamming's oeuvre. 

Finally, the article makes an important point about the "performances of radical Black lyricism" (378) and highlights Lamming's and Lamar's respective contributions to the "corpus of lyrical Black noise" (412). While the scholarly discourse on black noise/'the break' is neatly summarized and explained, this corpus may remain a little vague for readers without a pronounced background in Black Diasporic Literature(s) and Critical Race Theory. I'd thus consider to name a few additional examples to make this corpus more tangible to readers and to situate the article's case studies firmly within it.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The rewriting of the introduction clarifies a lot about the goal of this essay. In my original report, I noted that it was hard to find the specific focus of the essay, and I in fact misread the author's aim. The introduction now clearly sets up the paper's argument and framework. The analysis of Lamming was already sharp, and I feel that tightening the frame as the author has done here allows that analysis to really pop. I commend the author on their work and am hopeful my original feedback was helpful.