"Over(t)singing & Cute Exhaustion: Vocally Eruptive Cuts Out Popular R&B"
117 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
The 2025 Samuel Russell Endowed Chair Lecture will feature a talk by Professor Douglas Kearney from the Department of English.
Kearney’s lecture, drawn from his monograph SANG!: Eruptive Cuts in Black Popular Music, proposes dramaturgical methodologies for reckoning (with) aesthetics of vocal eruption in popular recordings of Black artists. Composed with concentrated analyses via critical listening, SANG! focuses on sudden, sample-like cuts from songs, including: Jennifer Holiday’s chuckle in “And I Am Telling You,” Jojo Hailey’s strained note in a live cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Lately”; a soul hiccup from Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”; and the euphoric, climactic “Ow” in The Emotion’s “The Best of My Love.” SANG!, examines how abrupt shifts in sonic texture transform the storying in Black popular music.
This event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
The Samuel Russell Endowed Chair in the Humanities is made possible through a generous gift from Jim and Teddy Gesell in honor of their fathers.
Featured Speaker
Douglas Kearney has published books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.