Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2021
Abstract
In an attempt to embody the practices of DJ rhetoric as it relates to sound studies as well as sonic composing, Todd Craig will not speak with his own voice. Instead, this entire SonicText will serve as documentation of a live composition that engages with the theme of "Black Sound Matter(s)." Deploying the concept of sonic lineage (Craig, forthcoming; Polson, 2019), this piece aims to radically transform this intellectual space through sonic and DJ rhetorical practices. Thus, Todd Craig's voice is inconsequential; instead, what is most critical is his collaborators: historical scholars and organic intellectual-musicologists starring as Black Musician-Griots. The idea of Black Life mattering is nothing new. In fact, it has been an ongoing conversation, sampled, interpolated and remixed countless times. The Atlas-like weight this conversation carries is a weight that Todd Craig will not speak on directly. He finds it more appropriate that his musical collaborators tell this story over the course of a series of decades (from 1972–2020). Craig's contribution to this moment is simply his DJ rhetorical savvy at its finest—part of the curatorial process that every good DJ brings to any situation.
This document was created in order to give a textual sense of what is happening sonically. This SonicText emanates from an act of live composing, with elements created in the moment on the spot. This roadmap, however, is given as the closest approximation to what eardrums present in the moment experienced sonically...
Comments
This multimodal article was originally published in Kairos, available at https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/26.1/topoi/aguilar-et-al/todd-craig.html. An embedded video file can be found with the version of record.
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).