“Shout It Out :” Patrice Rushen as polyphonist and the sounding of black women's affectability and genius

Abstract

This article considers how Patrice Rushen's jazz‐funk album, Shout It Out (1977), implicitly works as a punctum that indexes the irreconcilable relationship between black women's affectability and black women musicians’ transgressive sonic praxis. Consequently, I consider how Rushen's use of sound technologies (i.e., multitracking, the clavinet) on Shout It Out attempts to reorient black women's affective and material labor to the end of sounding black women musician's multifaceted genius. As polyphonist, Rushen speaks to the expropriation of black women's affective and material labor and the vexed relationship black women musicians have with musical traditions and industries.