Listening for the Interior in Hip-Hop and R&B Music

Sorrow Songs and Quiet Resistance

In the concept of quiet, Quashie (2012) calls for an intervention in how we conceive of Blackness. In this, rather than focus on the pronounced and spectacular instances of African American protest that have become the controlling narrative of Black resistance, Black people, and Blackness, quiet compels an examination of how African Americans also deploy more subtle, quotidian challenges to “a social system organized around practices, mechanisms, cognitions, and behaviors that reproduce racial domination” (Bonilla-Silva 2019:2) that actuates the oppression, dehumanization, and objectification of structural racism. Attending to quiet allows for recognition of its existence along with more familiar and pronounced forms of dissent. Quashie (2012) identifies a need to consider quiet—“the inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, abilities, fears” (p. 6)—in offering a more in-depth exploration of the reality of African American lives. As Quashie (2012) points out, “the determination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist . . . and is a practice intended to dehumanize black people” (p. 4). Amid this, claiming an inner life is an act of sovereignty entailing a certain autonomy. This focus on African Americans’ interiority is consonant with sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s recent call to understand emotions as fundamental to understanding, resisting, and undoing racism (Bonilla-Silva 2019). In centering quiet, a new framework emerges that allows for a more expansive understanding of African American interiority that reveals more of the fullness of African American and African American humanity. This new framework explicitly calls for greater gender inclusivity, shifting from a paradigm where issues of import within African American communities are often those centering African American men. We pointedly note that rather than describe a disempowering silence, we detail an empowered quiet with mechanisms that produce validation, regeneration, and self-determination within the inner lives of its possessors.

Contemporary social scientists are called by anthropologist Andrew Irving (2011) to attend to how interiority is lived and expressed in private and public. Given the impossibility of observing one’s interiority or one’s engagement in quiet, social scientists can employ qualitative content analysis of song lyrics as a route through which what is internal may become more known by those outside the self (Crawley 2017; Irving 2011; Jackson 2005). As African American interiority is “black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination . . . a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday toward power” (Alexander 2004:x), song lyrics are ripe with possibilities for exploring quiet. In understanding interiority as a metaphysical site where African Americans can create, maintain, and rebuild “complex black selves, real and enactable black power” (Alexander 2004:x), Quashie’s (2012) quiet is cultivated.

While much of the work that does exist on the inner lives of African Americans in general and African American women in particular comes from the humanities, the social sciences can and do contribute to this area. Indeed, two early and formative works on the inner selves of African Americans come from social scientists whose analyses incorporated African American music. The research of W.E.B. Du Bois—whose work is now being recognized as foundational to American sociology (Morris 2015)—and Zora Neale Hurston—who, while known for her novels, was trained as an anthropologist by Frank Boas and Ruth Benedict and studied with Margaret Mead—demonstrate both social science perspectives and the importance of recognizing the interior of African American lives as it is shaped through internal and external forces. More recently, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000, 2004, 2006) has similarly drawn sociological insight from everyday folk knowledge, literature, poetry, film, and music as they reflect and refract the inner lives of African American women in particular. In connecting the sorrow songs Du Bois ([1903] 1996) theorized to the current analysis of the presence of quiet in contemporary neo-soul and hip-hop, we contend that, as with the spirituals sung by the enslaved and their immediate descendants, these “songs are indeed the sifting of centuries” (p. 190). They are a recent manifestation of a lineage of songs both rife with pain and replete with hope. They are songs that reveal aspects of the inner lives of African Americans as the lyrics mine the depths of human emotions, such as those that fuel Quashie’s (2012) quiet and its “desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears” (p. 6). This is seen in educational researcher Bettina Love’s interrogation of this framing of quiet in an analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, a hip-hop album released just before the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s beginnings. She uses Lamar’s declarations of self-love and affirmations of Black humanity to ponder the significance of attending to Black interiority, which allows “a generation of youth who are coming of age under the loud publicness of Hip Hop, racism, state violence, and domestic terrorism to know that resistance also can be found in the act of stillness” (Love 2016:1). In focusing on a Black interiority that navigates harmful interactions, conditions, and structures, music is deeply sociological (Roy 2010).

African American music remains an avenue for African Americans to resist oppression. Griffin (2004) reminds us that the African American musical tradition is foundational to the United States yet “because it develops alongside and not fully within the nation, it maintains a space for critique and protest” (p. 119). Rhythm and blues (R&B) and its subgenres, including neo-soul, speak (or sing) to this impulse. Though it is not as evident as in hip-hop, R&B can be political when it addresses issues of power and protest as well as when it addresses its stock-in-trade: love (Iton 2010; Neal 1999, 2003). In his analysis of R&B love songs, Iton (2010) issues a powerful reminder that for the marginalized and oppressed, love is deeply political and deeply subversive. In addition, recent scholarship focuses on how R&B artists such as Beyoncé and Mary J. Blige articulate interiority in their declarations of desires, dreams, and sovereignty (Lindsey 2013; Lordi 2017). Neo-soul further politicizes R&B music in the social consciousness that infuses its song lyrics and album themes, a distinction of the subgenre (Rabaka 2013). As a result, the neo-soul genre allows for liberatory possibilities “to shift personae in ways that counteract the limitations of identity imposed by the hegemonic gaze of race, class, gender, sexuality, or religion” (David 2007:697).

Given both are informed by the same historical, economic, and social realities that inform Black life in America; share cultural and musical traditions; reference the same jazz, soul, and funk artists; and the numerous collaborations of neo-soul artists like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Jill Scott with hip-hop artists like Common, Lil Wayne, and The Roots, neo-soul and hip-hop are not as removed from each other as genre—and marketing—classifications indicate. The shared musical DNA of live instrumentation and introspective lyrics of neo-soul and this brand of hip-hop depart from the themes and sounds of their contemporaries. The Soulquarians, a genre-spanning musical collective that collaborated on several influential rap and neo-soul albums at the turn of the twenty-first century, exemplified this style of music, a tradition Solange and Kendrick Lamar are credited with continuing (Howard 2018).

Still, hip-hop is the contemporary African American musical genre with the more assertive political consciousness. Hip-hop artists in particular activate their lyricism and performance in “reshaping the public gaze in such a way to be recognized as human beings—as functioning and worthwhile members of society—and not to be shut out of or pushed away from the public sphere” (Pough 2004:17). African American music thus acts as a hidden transcript embedded in African American cultural practices that obscure the everyday forms of dissent utilized by the oppressed against the powerful (Kelley 1993; Rose 1994; Scott 1990). Codedness and hiddenness within African American musical traditions emerged during enslavement. In both content and location, enslaved Africans took great care to protect their music from the visual and auditory surveillance of Whites and any others who could use their activities and words to further harm them. One mechanism that facilitated this was the hush harbor (Crawley 2017; Nunley 2004; Pattison 2013), carved at night by the enslaved away from the eyes of slaveowners and overseers. Communities of enslaved people would go into hush harbors, where they reaffirmed their connections to themselves, each other, and the cultures they were creating as they syncretized life before and after the Middle Passage. Within hush harbors, the enslaved could communally pray, worship, and sing away from the White gaze. When they could not hide from watchful eyes and open ears, they encoded these practices to subvert surveillance with an artful cloak of innocuousness. Today, iterations of the hush harbor are found in predominantly Black spaces like living rooms, porches, churches, and barber and beauty shops where some shelter from Whites and other agents of a repressive dominant culture remains (Harris-Lacewell 2006). In the evolution from the sorrow songs of the enslaved to their descendants’ gospel, blues, jazz, and soul, the hush harbor can be found within contemporary African American musical forms including neo-soul and hip-hop. Within these sites, African Americans have intraracial conversations and continue to create and deploy resistive strategies against harsh and punitive gazes (Hartman 2011; Kelley 1993; Neal 2003; Nunley 2004; Pattison 2013; Randolph 2016). While the hush harbor, barbershop, church, and other sites where hidden transcripts are communally written might be safe from the White gaze, these are still public (Scott 1990). In that sense, the hush harbor and its hidden transcripts are closer to being part of the public, albeit hidden, sphere of traditional politics (Quashie 2012). Moreover, hush harbors and the like are intentionally public spaces. Contrastingly, the songs we examine are like journal entries that audiences discover. The conceit of the albums we chose is that they are private musings we happen to overhear. Thus, the albums are inner looking, even when talking about social issues.

African American music is also an avenue for resistance as it allows one to negotiate and claim sovereignty of the self. Messages of escape permeate Black music from the sorrow songs through contemporary neo-soul. This escape offers possibilities for Black people to find and create new spaces—whether geographic or metaphysical, real or imagined—where freedom is more available (Crawley 2017; David 2007; Lordi 2017; Shaw 2015; Winters 2013). Gender is another factor here. Davis (1998) contends that African American women’s songs might help us understand the social conditions that forged them as well as a collective consciousness of African American women. As Hobson (2008) illuminates, African American women’s musical traditions contain

a multilayered and emotionally rich vocality that confounds the listening audience as much as it speaks a subaltern language that inspires marginal voices to emerge from the historical void. Once this silence has been broken, their singing transcends as an act of resistance, altering the political soundscape. (P. 448)

Quashie (2012) explains that interiority is often a gendered concept that is associated with women and the private sphere they are expected to occupy and thus too often is dismissed as apolitical. At the same time, “though it is important to honor the ways that ideas from black women’s culture inform this concept of quiet, the meaningfulness of quiet is not exclusive” (Quashie 2012:130). Interiority helps illuminate ways that African American men’s musical traditions challenge expectations, cultural understandings of masculinity, and their structural positions within a society that actively represses them. This is particularly the case within hip-hop, where “rap’s largely first-person narratives capture the longings, desires, and aspirations of Black men that are not often expressed in dominant culture” (Randolph 2006:204). While there are some explorations of Black men’s musical expressions of their inner lives that center emotional pain, vulnerability, and other feelings (Oware 2011; Winters 2013), many understandings of hip-hop hinge upon the genre’s hypermasculinity and its reinforcement of the larger patriarchal and misogynistic culture from which it derives. Such understandings elide how hip-hop also stretches the possibilities for a multiplicity of acceptable performances of masculinity (Randolph, Swan, and Rowe 2017). Ignoring these expressions of feelings also exemplifies the dehumanization that occurs with failures to recognize African American interiority. As Imani Perry (2004) illustrates, Black men’s lyrical offerings in neo-soul and hip-hop in particular allow for a reading of “the double voice [that] resides in the fact that this character who is so easily cast into White night terror fantasies, also says something complex about his psychology, emotions, and life” (p. 126).

We analyze how four Black musical artists make the concept of quiet legible. Specifically, we consider ways that the quiet found within the lyrics of recent acclaimed albums from two hip-hop artists and two neo-soul artists—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017) and Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017), Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Maxwell’s blackSUMMERS’night (2016), respectively—offer subtle, quotidian challenges to oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. We find that quiet occurs as artists describe the use of metaphysical space, as place is used to make and take space for and in the self and to find peace; the protection of the interior self; and the gifts of quiet to the struggle for resistance.

In this, we capture how the artists imagine the interior safe space that provides refuge from threats from Whites and other Blacks and that expresses the ineffable humanity of Blacks (Bonilla-Silva 2019; Collins 2000). The ability of Blacks to cultivate inner lives under hostile conditions is a form of quiet resistance that is easily overlooked because it is internal. While we tie the preservation of Black interiority to more overt forms of resistance, we suggest that Black inner life is an inherently worthwhile object of study.

Methods

We used qualitative content analysis to examine lyrics from four albums by neo-soul and hip-hop artists (N = 61 songs). Unlike its quantitative counterpart, qualitative content analysis interprets the meaning of texts rather than just categorizing their content. Qualitative content analysis allowed us to go beyond the manifest meanings to uncover the latent feelings, beliefs, and attitudes embedded in lyrics (Cho and Lee 2014; Hsieh and Shannon 2005). As Black cultural productions are often encoded with resistance and subversion (Kelley 1993; Perry 2004; Rabaka 2013; Rose 1994), qualitative content analysis is particularly well-suited to mine their depths. Through an iterative process of reading and rereading the lyrics, we came to identify themes in the songs that expressed the inner lives of the artists we examined.

Though the scholarly literature on neo-soul as a whole is sparse, some scholars (Clay 2008; Fulton 2015; Hartman 2011; Shaw 2015) note the politics of neo-soul artists like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Meshell Ndegeocello. As previously noted, hip-hop is more associated with political themes than soul music and its derivatives (Neal 1999). Still, we might expect more themes about the Black inner life in neo-soul music than in hip-hop, given that genre’s association with practices of bragging to others (Rose 1994). Scholars have not associated hip-hop with the emotional vulnerability that we expect from lyrics about Black interiority. Indeed, much of the research on politics within these musical forms has focused on overt, public forms of political resistance. Here, we recall Quashie (2012) in attending to the inner world of emotions as a form of resistance. This is also in keeping with Bonilla-Silva’s challenge to sociologists concerned with understandings and challenges to racism, as he posited a need to understand how the impacts of structural oppression are not just lived and observed but how they are felt (Bonilla-Silva 2019).

In exploring Black interiority, we employed critical case purposeful sampling (Miles, Huberman, and Saldana 2014; Patton 1990) in the two neo-soul albums—Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Maxwell’s blackSUMMERS’night (2016)—and the two hip-hop albums—Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017) and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017). As Miles et al. (2014) note, “the critical case is the instance that ‘proves’ or exemplifies the main findings. Searching deliberately for confirming . . . and typical cases serves to increase confidence in conclusions” (p. 32). We chose these artists due to their critical acclaim and the recent nature of their albums. Each album was nominated for at least one Grammy Award, and all but Laila’s Wisdom won at least one Grammy (Atkinson 2018; Flanagan 2017). We selected the two neo-soul albums as representative of the genre in its contemporary state and for their emphases on a range of emotional states. Solange’s album references Shirley Chisholm’s edict, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair,” grounding her work in a legacy of Black women’s challenges to repression. Maxwell’s album comes 20 years after his neo-soul debut, during the genre’s emergence, and is a continuation of his writing and singing of desires, urges, and love. We chose the specific hip-hop albums because they were more likely to have themes about Black interiority in them. Rapsody’s album was an homage to her late grandmother, while Kendrick Lamar’s album dealt with the aftermath of fame through a sequence of songs that were almost all named after emotions (e.g., “Feel,” “Lust,” “Pride”). While perhaps not representative of rap as a whole, these albums are exemplars of hip-hop that deals explicitly with the inner life of the artists.

We also chose male artists (Kendrick Lamar and Maxwell) and female artists (Rapsody and Solange) for our sample because we wanted to see how gender affected the expression of Black interiority. While women historically have been given more permission to openly express emotion than men, those guidelines are racialized and gendered. Thus, Black women have been taught to repress emotions such as anger, lest they reinforce the controlling image of the Sapphire, or the Angry Black Woman (Collins 2000). At the same time, Black men have been taught to overemphasize hypermasculine expressions of violence and sexuality at the expense of developing and demonstrating rich inner lives. As feminist scholar Imani Perry (2004) observes, an alternative reading of masculinity through Black men’s music illuminates “black male subjectivity and . . . reveals the complexity of black male identity” (p. 118).

We downloaded the album lyrics from song transcription website Genius.com. This website features song lyrics transcribed by fans that are often verified by the artists themselves. In listening to and reading these lyrics, we manually coded each of the songs in our sample. Each author coded the lyrics of two albums, then we shared our work to achieve reliability in our codes. Following other researchers (Oware 2011; Randolph 2006), we analyzed each song for themes about the artist’s inner life or his or her emotional world, threats to his or her inner life, sources of emotional peace, and ways that emotional explorations and reflections gave the artist power to resist oppression.

Findings

Quashie (2012) offers the quiet as an antidote to double consciousness’ preoccupation with the White gaze. In Du Bois’s rendition of Black interiority, White supremacy functions as a limit on what Blacks can feel and think; it is a force that turns what should be a safe harbor (e.g., one’s own thoughts and feelings) into a hostile environment (Du Bois ([1903] 1996). In contrast, Quashie believes that Blacks can find solace within their inner lives because they are not completely suffused by the White gaze. Certainly, Blacks internalize White supremacy and all other systems of oppression; yet the effect is not totalizing. Blacks retain subjectivity that is shaped, but not determined, by White supremacy. Rather than being apolitical or naïve, Quashie locates politics within the status of being a subject rather than an object. He restores Black subjectivity by viewing Black interiority as a space of possibility and relative freedom to dream, feel, and wonder (Quashie 2012). He examines the idiosyncrasies of private reflection, deliberation, and attention to counterbalance the emphasis on spectacular, public, collective action that characterizes the study of Black life (Quashie 2012).

Like Collins (2000), Quashie (2012) attends to how scholars have overlooked Black interiority due to its association with the feminized private sphere (Fraser 1990). Following Quashie and Collins, we document the musings of the artists in the study, not because they are overtly political, but because they are private. This inner-directedness, which implies an inner life that is separate from White supremacy, is the key political aspect of Black interiority. Feminists have long proclaimed women’s ability to protect their inner world from the demands of family as a form of politics (Radway 1991). Likewise, we find politics within the interior nature of the songs, separate from any overtly political action that the songs endorse. Moreover, in keeping with feminist conceptions of politics, we treat demands by friends, lovers, and family on the inner world of the artists as political. Following Quashie, we view the artists’ social identities, as Black men and women, as only part of their web of power relations (Quashie 2012). They also experience power struggles in their intimate lives, as demands of fans, community members, and romantic partners threaten their peace of mind. For this reason, we label as threats to their interior any behavior that destabilizes the artists’ sense of emotional safety and well-being.

We mean interior in at least three ways. We identified songs as exemplifying the interior when they were self-reflective, confidential, or invoked hidden feelings or places. Songs are self-reflective when artists seem like they are talking to themselves. These songs are structured like an inner dialogue that we are overhearing. Frequently, these songs feature the artists’ asking questions of themselves. Thus, we coded songs that featured inner dialogues as evidencing Black interiority. We also coded songs as interior when artists sounded like they were giving advice to a friend. These songs position listeners as conspirators, not eavesdroppers. They are letting us in on secrets they have discovered for how to get by. These songs take the listeners into their confidence. This is not Public Enemy declaiming “Fight the Power”; this is knowledge that is sometimes unsure of itself. It is knowledge that is hard won and that should be passed from mouth to ear. Finally, we coded songs as interior when artists talked about parts of themselves that they wanted to hide and protect. The interior is about things we keep hidden (as emotions and thoughts can be) and ways we protect our inner selves. Thus, the interior is about emotions, but not just any emotions. These are emotions that we keep to ourselves.

Following Quashie (2012) and Collins (2000), we contend that Blacks exercise power through their dominion over their interior selves, which in turn expresses their humanity. It is their control of the content of inner lives, whatever this may contain, that is an expression of sovereignty (Quashie 2012). Collins (2000) argues that Black women create interior safe spaces by being in community with other Black women and through retreating into their own minds. We build on Collins by documenting how the performers describe interior safe spaces in their songs. Specifically, we are interested in what they perceive as threatening their interior selves and in where they claim safe spaces to experience their inner lives. Finally, we examine what the artists gained from the practice of cultivating their interior. We find that the artists tied reflective time to their ability to see power dynamics more clearly and their ability to resist.

Threats to the Interior

The artists show that their inner lives are threatened from the demands of their community as well from ideologies of the dominant culture. Concepts like double consciousness reflect the kind of threats that Black interiority faces from the outside world (Du Bois [1903] 1996). Yet interior safe space recognizes the multiplicity of forces that could threaten Black peace of mind. Coming as it does out of the Black feminist tradition, the notion of the interior safe space acknowledges that home is not always a safe space for Black women (Collins 2000). Extending that thought, the artists in this study point to external forces like politicians and the media as encroaching on their sense of self but also indict lovers and fans as threats to their inner lives.

Genre matters since the two rap artists in the sample both talk about how the dominant culture threatens their inner life. On “Nobody,” Rapsody says:

Nobody smart enough would ever say racism ended

I get winded by the weight of it all

’Cus everybody talkin’ shit but don’t know nothin’ at all

“The weight” of all the racism takes her breath way, making her uncomfortable in her body, but also taxing her mind with the illogic of believing that racism has ended. Rapsody is likely referring to Whites who practice color blindness when she mentions people who are “talkin’ shit” about racism, but “don’t know nothin’ at all.” This is the classic example of a Black person expressing double consciousness by knowing how Whites see the world.

However, she also suggests that Blacks could threaten her peace of mind by copying the views of the dominant culture. On the song “Black & Ugly,” she says:

Talking appearance ain’t no diss to me

No one dissin’ me

I been to hell and back

And came back up here screaming victory

While the opinion that racism has ended was likely voiced by White people, these lyrics seem more intimate, as though they reflect interactions with Black people. Rapsody repels the judgment of Blacks who have internalized racist ideas about beauty, saying that “talking appearance ain’t no diss to me.” Her ordeals (“I been to hell and back”) protect her sense of self from criticism by misguided Blacks. Double consciousness would draw our attention to the first set of lyrics, but not to this set, as double consciousness looks out toward the White gaze. We provide a fuller account of Black interiority by studying how Blacks enact the White gaze on other Blacks and how that affects the psyche of Black people.

The interior is where Blacks can acknowledge the difference between how they view themselves and how others (White or Black) see them. Listening to the quiet draws our attention to Rapsody’s awareness of what people think of her appearance, rather than only focusing on her resistant scream of “victory.” The power of the interior is in attending to how Blacks feel and think about the various slights and injustices in their lives. This regard to the inner world itself, not the actions that may or may not come from it, is at the heart of studying the interior (Quashie 2012).

Rapper Kendrick Lamar also talks about how double consciousness affects his inner life. In the song “XXX,” he indicts America for the negative images it portrays of Black people, saying:

Look what you taught us!

It’s murder on my street, your street, back streets

Wall Street, corporate offices

Banks, employees, and bosses with

Homicidal thoughts; Donald Trump’s in office

You overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us

Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera

America’s reflections of me, that’s what a mirror does

Politicians like Donald Trump and media corporations like Fox conspire to teach Whites to fear Blacks. Yet Blacks get these messages, too, as evidenced by his use of “us” in the first line. Like Rapsody, Kendrick Lamar shows that he knows how Whites see him (“America’s reflections of me”). Yet he invokes the consequences for his interior by talking about how the dominant culture teaches all people, not just Whites, to fear Blacks. Though he does not elaborate about how these negative portrayals affect his sense of self, it is likely that he seeks to protect his inner world from the dominant culture.

While we might expect rap music, as a politicized genre, to describe how the dominant culture threatens Black interiority, it is the album by neo-soul artist Solange that has the most references to protecting the Black psyche from the White gaze. In songs like “Mad,” “Don’t Touch My Hair,” and “F.U.B.U.,” Solange describes her need to withdraw from the White gaze. Her desire for autonomy is far-reaching; she wants to be free from White touch (“Don’t Touch My Hair”) and from White appropriation (“F.U.B.U.,” an acronym for For Us, By Us). Most tellingly for our analysis, she wants to protect her inner world from Whites and asserts her right to be “Mad.” Moreover, Solange likens touching her hair to touching her feelings. She sings:

Don’t touch my hair

When it’s the feelings I wear

Don’t touch my soul

When it’s the rhythm I know

Don’t touch my crown

They say the vision I’ve found

Don’t touch what’s there

When it’s the feelings I wear (“Don’t Touch My Hair”)

These lyrics meld bodily autonomy with emotional autonomy. Solange argues that no less than Black women’s “vision,” “feelings,” and “soul” are endangered when Whites touch their hair without permission. By asserting the right to determine who touches her hair, she is asserting the right to control access to her inner life.

The artists also seek protection from threats to their interiority posed by other Blacks. They talk about taking time off from romantic relationships and hiding their true selves from old acquaintances who judge them now that they are famous. At first glance, these retreats into the interior do not seem political in the same way that retreating from the White gaze does. However, it is always a triumph when Blacks exercise control over their inner lives since enslavement intended to rid Blacks of all traces of humanity and agency (Spillers 1987). In that sense, Blacks behave politically whenever they determine who affects or has access to their innermost selves.

Several of the artists talk about protecting their interior from the judgment of people who knew them in the past. They resist being told to stay the same and demand to be allowed to grow. On the song “Laila’s Wisdom,” Rapsody says:

Look don’t worry ’bout anything they told you

Remember what she SAID about winter and what the cold do

Everything’s a season and some things you gotta go through

Believe me I don’ seen it all, you’re young talking to the old you

When haters come around look ’em down tell ’em “we don’t owe you”

You gon’ lose some friends but those circles are better than the ovals

Rapsody draws on the wisdom of her late grandmother Laila to understand that her old friends may want to trap her in the “old you.” Solange puts it more simply in “Don’t Wish Me Well” when she says, “They say I changed / But a pity if I stayed the same.” Both Rapsody and Solange want the right to evolve so that their outer selves match the growth in their inner lives.

Similarly, Kendrick Lamar reveals on the song “Fear”:

At 27 years old, my biggest fear was bein’ judged

How they look at me reflect on myself, my family, my city

What they say ’bout me reveal if my reputation would miss me

What they see from me would trickle down generations in time

What they hear from me would make ’em highlight my simplest lines

He is worried that he would be misunderstood and that his legacy would be lost when future fans focus on his “simplest lines.” At the base is his worry that his reputation would not reflect his true self (“my reputation would miss me”). He, too, wants to protect his inner life, as expressed in his songs, from misinterpretation.

Kendrick Lamar dedicates many of his songs to the fear of being judged by hostile audiences. In songs like “Element” and “DNA,” Lamar shows that he needs to protect his inner self from malicious critics. On “DNA,” he imagines a world where no one has good intentions toward him and thus requires him to hide his true self. Lyrics like “See, my pedigree most definitely don’t tolerate the front” and “Watchin’ all the snakes, curvin’ all the fakes” suggest that he anticipates dishonesty. In response, he protects his sense of self from the judgment of others, saying “And pessimists never struck my nerve” and “I’d rather die than to listen to you.” He is determined to not be affected by other people. This leads him to withdraw from interactions: “Phone never on, I don’t conversate.” Lamar stands out in our sample for creating a pervasive sense across songs that he could not risk showing his interior to others, not even his romantic partner. The phrase “Ain’t nobody praying for me,” which he repeats on multiple songs, reflects the sense that Lamar does not see his community as a safe space for emotional vulnerability. He best illustrates the notion that Blacks experience threats to their interiority from without and within their community.

Finding Safe Space

Artists manage the threats to the inner life by finding safe spaces to express their interior. Previous research shows that these safe spaces can exist through being in community with others and by taking refuge inside oneself (Collins 2000). Similarly, analysis of Black music lyrics and themes allows for transcendence of oppressive conditions in their rejection of physical boundaries (David 2007; Hartman 2011; Shaw 2015). We find that artists identify physical and metaphysical (internal) spaces where they seek peace of mind. They also find inner peace in community with others, often through romantic or familial relationships. Finally, artists seek safe spaces in practices that deaden their feelings, implying that the inner life was itself unbearable.

Artists identify places that give them interior safe spaces. These places are sometimes physical. In “Cranes in the Sky,” Solange says:

I tried to run it away

Thought then my head be feeling clearer

I traveled 70 states

Thought moving round make me feel better

Neo-soul artist Maxwell hopes that swimming in a “Lake by the Ocean” with his romantic partner would give him peace. Likewise, Rapsody reports in “Sassy” that she renews herself by returning home to Snow Hill, North Carolina, where “beef, it don’t get that deep” because it is a small town. She cites ties with the community (“Homie, I know your whole family”) as helping keep peace in the area and in preserving her home as a safe space.

More often, though, artists describe metaphysical spaces, places inside of themselves, where they seek inner peace. Searching for peace inside oneself is a theme in many of Solange’s songs. On “Weary,” she pursues refuge from the world in her metaphysical body, saying:

I’m weary of the ways of the world

I’m gone look for my body, yeah

The fact that she has to look for her body suggests that she is not talking about her physical self, but a more quintessential form of her body. Later lyrics support this metaphysical interpretation, such as when she says:

I’m gone look for my glory

I’ll be back like real soon

Both her “body” and her “glory” are abstract concepts in this context. She will escape her weariness with the world in a transcendent place.

Solange argues that it is only in experiencing the full range of her emotions that she will gain inner peace. Her song “Mad” is a manifesto about Black people’s right to interiority, particularly Black women’s right to feel anger. She reclaims anger from the Angry Black Woman trope to assert her right to any emotion that she feels. She says:

They say you gotta let it go. . . .

I ran into this girl, I said, “I’m tired of explaining”

Man, this shit is draining

But I’m not really allowed to be mad

The last lyric speaks to the specificity of the feeling rules that regulate Black women (Wingfield 2010). Most of “Mad” features Lil Wayne rapping about the reasons he is angry. That is, Solange gives space to a Black man in this song to vent his frustration, as she gives space to Black men throughout the album, like her father and the rapper Master P, to express their emotions. Yet Solange highlights the gendered struggle for Black women to be “allowed to be mad” in this song, suggesting that Black women face raced and gendered threats to their interiority.

The artists also identify practices they use to protect their interior. Often these are solitary behaviors. Rapsody goes “Ridin’,” saying:

She ridin’ (where you goin’?!)

Went searching for myself

And I ain’t find shit

She hopes to find herself on her rides (“went searching for myself”), though she is not always successful (“ain’t find shit”). She emphasizes the behavior itself as having the potential to bring her peace, since she does not know where she is going.

Other artists describe different actions they have taken to find inner peace. Kendrick Lamar refers to otherworldly sources of peace when he raps on “DNA” that he does

Yoga on a Monday, stretchin’ to Nirvana

Watchin’ all the snakes, curvin’ all the fakes

Phone never on, I don’t conversate

These deeply considered practices might help Lamar avoid that which contributed to Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide. Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” lists her peace-seeking quest. Like Rapsody, the behaviors are more important than consequences since none of the actions seem to have helped.

I tried to keep myself busy

I ran around in circles

Think I made myself dizzy

I slept it away, I sexed it away

I read it away

Away

Yet earlier in the song she notes all her behaviors “just made me even sadder.” The artists suggest that while doing something is a path to soothing their inner selves, it does not necessarily confer relief.

The artists also seek refuge from the inner life through getting high and becoming numb in other ways. This tack has them retreating from emotions themselves, rather finding a safe space to experience emotions. Solange talks about getting high as one of her strategies for dealing with her inner life in “Cranes in the Sky,” saying that she “tried to drink it away.” Rapsody also talks about drinking to retreat from her inner life, saying on “Ridin’”:

Tryna survive it

Liquor so dark (dark)

And the club so lit (lit)

And my mind so gone (gone)

And my soul so sick (sick)

She is trying to cure her inner life (“soul so sick”) through a combination of drinking and dancing.

Kendrick Lamar has the most lyrics about dealing with his inner life by retreating from emotions. He raps about getting high to avoid his feelings on “Fear,” saying:

If I could smoke fear away, I’d roll that mothafucka up

And then I’d take two puffs

I’m high now, I’m high now

I’m high now, I’m high now

His description of using drugs to suppress emotions is consistent with previous research that shows that rappers’ frequent reference to drug use masks depression (Bailey 2013). On other songs, like “Pride,” Lamar retreats from interiority more directly, saying “My feelings might go numb, you’re dealing with cold thumb.” Likewise, on “Lust” he describes responding to fame by having mindless sex, saying “Both in the trance, feelings are dead—what a fast life!” As we saw earlier, Lamar felt his inner life was threatened by people within his community. Thus, it is no wonder that he raps on “Feel”:

Feel like you wanna scrutinize how I made it

Feel like I ain’t feelin’ you all

Feel like removin’ myself, no feelings involved

Kendrick Lamar is an extreme case in his need to numb emotions. Yet we see that across artists, one form of self-determination is the right not to feel.

Finally, artists talk about finding peace in the love that other people felt for them. Unlike the other forms of safe spaces, this type of refuge is social, not solitary. It depends on another person’s making space in his or her heart for your interior life to thrive. Neo-soul artist Maxwell exemplifies this strategy in his lyrics about romantic love. In “All the Ways Love Can Feel,” he says of his romantic partner “I know you can heal me.” According to “III,” he is searching for a “Michelle Obama lady / To hold me down when the world’s crazy,” invoking the solace from the demands of being president that Barack Obama found in Michelle Obama as his own ideal. The lyrics from “Hostage” summarize Maxwell’s conceptualization of romantic love as safe space. He says:

Stay within the confines of your warmth

I’m free inside the cage of your heart of gold

The heart of his romantic partner is the peaceful place where he can feel free to be his true self.

Other artists find refuge for their inner lives within the protection of familial love. Indeed, Rapsody’s album Laila’s Wisdom is a tribute to the emotional sustenance she gained from her grandmother Laila. On the song “Laila’s Wisdom,” Rapsody says:

Laila’s Wisdom, rest in peace. I love you dear . . .

Yo, we good over here, here (here)

Her late grandmother’s love still sustains Rapsody even after her grandmother’s death, symbolized by the line “we good over here.” Kendrick Lamar also finds strength in his love for a family member, saying in “Yah” that “My latest muse is my niece, she worth livin’.”

Gifts of the Quiet

Protecting the interior and finding safe spaces is enough, since Black interiority was not meant to survive slavery. Yet we want to outline some of the gifts that the artists gained from the chance to cultivate their inner lives. Specifically, we point to how the artists challenge power because their inner lives are strong. In keeping with our theme of quiet resistance, we highlight political acts that are personal and intimate rather than organized movements against oppression.

Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair” shows quiet resolve in her refusal to allow Whites to touch her hair. She explains:

You know this hair is my shit

Rolled the rod, I gave it time

But this here is mine

As we mentioned earlier, she combines bodily and emotional autonomy. She declares ownership of her hair (“this hair is my shit”) as a microcosm of her control over her entire body (“this here is mine”). Moreover, her refusal of White touch is a refusal to grant Whites access to her inner life.

Kendrick Lamar resists through his music. On the song “Fear,” he wonders “if I’m livin’ through fear or livin’ through rap.” If his music is his legacy, then he wants it to capture his inner life. He says:

And I can’t take these feelings with me, so hopefully they disperse

Within fourteen tracks, carried out over wax

Protection of his interior is key to his ability to serve his community. On “Pride,” he says that he would act differently if he could perfect his emotional life. He says:

See, in a perfect world, I’ll choose faith over riches

I’ll choose work over bitches, I’ll make schools out of prison

I’ll take all the religions and put ’em all in one service

He would behave in more enlightened ways if he could master his pride. The connection between feeling and action is clear. Lamar suggests that having the right relationship with his inner life is a precondition for his taking political actions like “mak[ing] schools out of prison.” Of all the artists, Lamar struggles the most to find interior safe space, yet he sees that a healthy emotional life is key to political action.

Discussion

In addition to the forced labor of the enslaved that is foundational to the United States and an indomitable spirit that actively works to perfect the nation toward its promise, Du Bois ([1903] 1996) asserts that African Americans have long endowed the United States with “a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land” (p. 196). We further assert that this “gift of story and song” is reflective of African American musical artists’ cultivation of an inner life that prioritizes them and those within their communities while also subverting the power and repression of others. In the songs that we analyze, though the content and performance of these lyrics might be widely available, that which is contained within them might not be, further enabling their ability to challenge and resist oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. Jackson (2005) acknowledges that as one’s interiority can never be fully comprehended by others, it is a useful and powerful instantiation of agency and subjectivity for Blacks. While the work of recording artists is certainly consumed by audiences, it is also the case that artists derive internal pleasure and reward through their work. Singers and rappers can and do sing in service of themselves, an important point to remember when considering the vocal performances of African American women in particular (Hobson 2008). This too is a form of resistance.

In her discussion of the historical importance of home for African American women, hooks (1990) notes how it has served as both a physical and symbolic site of refuge for African American women in particular. Home has been where they would be “affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world” (hooks 1990:42). This form of interiority offers material and metaphysical space to find places where African Americans could realize the fullness of their lives and some measure of freedom. Collins (2000) similarly describes the use of interior safe spaces as refuge from objectification.

As there are questions about the presence and character of communalism within the contemporary Black community (Dawson 1994; Robinson 2011; Touré 2012) that fostered the kinds of safe spaces hooks (1990) and Collins (2000) documented, we might ponder the continued availability of the safe spaces that sustained African Americans and their capacity to exercise control within their lives for so long. The notion of the physical home as a safe space also is complicated when we recall that it is within the home where draining or abusive relationships may be present, where too many demands coupled with too few benefits are de rigueur, or where space limitations might mean that private areas may be at a premium. As such, African Americans’ inner selves are places that they fully control and that can serve as bulwarks from the ravages of racism, sexism, poverty, and other social storms. We see this in our qualitative content analysis of four albums by neo-soul and hip-hop artists. Regardless of gender, the cultivation and protection of one’s (meta)physical space by the artists analyzed here reflect a “Black feminist project of using cultural production to question dominant ideologies” (Shaw 2015:47). Extending hooks’s idea of the sanctity of the home into the self, we posit it as another sanctum where persistence—that which allows us to continue difficult tasks—and revolution—that which allows us to upend the status quo—can be generated through quiet.

While quiet paves the way for other, more disruptive forms of liberation, it serves a rather quotidian yet still powerful purpose in fostering persistence. As Ahmed (2014) argues, “persistence can be an act of disobedience. . . . Persistence can be a deviation from a trajectory, what stops the hurtling forward of fate, what prevents a fatality” (p. 10). This persistence is often overlooked as a subversive strategy, but for those living under precarities fashioned through the intersections of their race, class, gender, and other salient social identities, institutions, and structures, it speaks to their agency in the face of multiple and connected oppressive weights. Certainly, as African Americans’ inner lives are influenced by, though not fully determined by, contexts and circumstances, there is a politicalness and agency to them—a decided sovereignty (Bonilla-Silva 2019; Harris-Perry 2011; Quashie 2012). This is clear as African Americans exist, persist, live, love, dream, and struggle in contexts that ensure that they seek and wrest as much power as they can to define and live their lives based on their terms rather than on those imposed by others (Harris-Perry 2011). The marginalized economic, social, and political positions they occupy necessitate the development of an arsenal of interior resources, such as the use of metaphysical space, or how place is used to make and take space for the self and to find peace; thoughts and feelings about one’s inner life; the relief and rejection of stress; the protection of the interior self; seeing power; and creating quiet through one’s practices and resistance. While other Black cultural productions can and do reflect the possibilities of interiority, music is a particularly salient medium for this, given its importance in Black popular culture, potency in transmitting messages, and ripeness for use across a range of political activities (Lordi 2017; Love 2016; Perry 2004; Pough 2004; Rabaka 2013; Rose 1994; Shaw 2015). Sociological inquiry reveals that music can subvert cultural domination, encourage social movements, and accompany revolution (Roy 2010). Kevin Quashie (2012) also signals the potential of quiet for analyses of music. In one such analysis, Bettina Love (2016) posits that considering quiet allows for examinations of how artists, like Rapsody and Kendrick Lamar, who engage interiority, “create an interesting informal educational space to learn, discuss, vent, heal, resist, and escape from the stress and fatigue of subtle and overt racial hostility toward Black and Brown bodies” (p. 1). Indeed, even as “urban noise . . . leaps out of hip hop lyrics, sounds, and themes” (Rose 1994:22), quiet is also present. In this work, we find that quiet—the ever-changing, ever-expanding collection of dreams, aspirations, and hopes that coexist with anxieties, reservations, and doubts—operates as a buttress and empowers survival and success despite the structural and intersecting realities of racism, sexism, violence, and other oppressions that inscribe African American lives.