ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways a cross-section of late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century musicians refuse both political and aesthetic conventions in their work and explicitly connect their music to social, political, and economic issues. Jack Halberstam refuses conventional thinking about musical genres, while documenting the emergence of queer consciousness in late 1960s and 1970s music. As scholars writing about musical genre have convincingly demonstrated, genre categories are easy shorthand for recording industry gatekeepers, but they group songs and artists in ways that mask important connections. Conventional wisdom held that the most common reason for lynching, a form of vigilante violence, was reprisal against a black man who had raped a white woman, but this was not always the case. Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist based in Memphis, conducted research and reported that in most instances, rape was neither the cause nor the charge for the lynching.
