![]() ![]() ![]() There is the opera singer Leontyne Price, a figure of “casual splendor and serene strength,” who “wore Afros and tiaras and shimmering press ’n’ curls” at the Metropolitan Opera, and began to make that “beloved and plodding institution her kingdom,” in 1961. These women are both prodigies and products of networks. In “Shine Bright,” her insightful curiosity reveals the genuinely interesting women who are obscured by their own celebrity: Gladys Knight, the genius striver Janet Jackson, the competitive younger sister Mariah Carey, the woman beset by the question of whether she is doing enough. That technique is among the most remarkable aspects of another Smith project: “Black Girl Songbook,” the Spotify-sponsored podcast that she launched in 2021 to “give Black women in music the credit we are due.” To discover from her interview with Brandy that the singer maintains her voice by drinking a certain kind of tea and avoiding talking on the phone is to be granted a small miracle of information a revelation similar to the one Smith produces as she names a litany of Black-women publicists who helped launch singers’ careers. Her own experiences with a racist, sexist media industry attune her to the trauma as well as the training that are often elided by Black women’s success stories-so she asks artists about these subjects, and opens up new dimensions of pop history. I found that, in “Shine Bright,” Smith creates an innovative form of music writing in which long passages of memoir, reportage, and history are deftly interlinked and shown to be co-constitutive. (Her 2016 oral history of Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl performance of the national anthem is still, to my mind, the best thing ever written about the singer.) Upon seeing her book’s working title change over time, from “She’s Every Woman: The Power of Black Women in Pop Music” to “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop,” I wondered how Smith was navigating the trend in music writing toward autobiographical accounts of listeners’ relationships with Black artists and away from historical (or, indeed, musical) appraisals of their work. ![]() These are artists who collectively created the sounds and styles of American pop.Īlthough I had not met Smith prior to our conversation, I had admired her writing and anticipated the publication of “Shine Bright” for many years. It is an experiment in intertwining her own stories of self-doubt, love, and ambition with those of the Black-women artists she profiles-from the nineteen-sixties hitmakers the Dixie Cups to icons such as Jody Watley and Mariah Carey. Visit podcastchoices.If I tell you Danyel Smith is a writer and editor who grew up in Oakland, California, in the nineteen-seventies, and went on to become one of the nation’s most astute chroniclers of pop and hip-hop culture-especially through her leadership of Vibe magazine, in the nineties-how much am I actually telling you? How much am I leaving out? “To say I ‘became’ editor-in-chief of Vibe in 1994-and the first woman and the first Black person to have the job, and the first woman to run a national music magazine-is a criminal abbreviation,” Smith writes in her new book, “ Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” Although the book gives us her backstory, it is not primarily a memoir. ![]() Production Supervision: Juliet Litman, Chelsea Stark Jones Producers: Trudy Joseph and Donnie Beacham Plus, Ella talks about what it was like working with the legendary Kirk Franklin and what it means to have his feature on the album. Blige and Mary’s influence on her as an artist, particularly as it relates to this album. On this episode of ‘Black Girl Songbook,’ host Danyel Smith is joined by sultry and soulful songstress and fellow Alpha Girl, Ella Mai, to celebrate the release of her sophomore album ‘Heart on My Sleeve.’ Ella Mai takes us through her journey as an artist, from sitting in her room in London releasing music via her social media pages through the moment her hit song ‘Boo’d Up’ broke wide open, to penning this latest project. ![]()
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