About

Elliott H. Powell is an Associate Professor of American Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Minnesota. His academic work focuses on American popular music and culture, with a particular emphasis on critical race theory and comparative ethnic studies. Powell's research explores intersections of music and politics, music and globalization, and sound studies, contributing to a deeper understanding of how music shapes and reflects social and cultural identities within American and global contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Art history
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Visual arts
• History
• Media studies
• Literature
• Law

Selected publications

• 1. Ladies Night: On Missy Elliott, Collaboration, and Black Queer Feminist Relationalities

  2026-02-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Editors’ Note

  Journal of Popular Music Studies · 2024-05-29

  articleSenior author
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• Editors’ Note

  Journal of Popular Music Studies · 2024-03-01

  articleSenior author

  Editorial| March 01 2024 Editors' Note K.E. Goldschmitt, K.E. Goldschmitt Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Elliott H. Powell Elliott H. Powell [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2024) 36 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation K.E. Goldschmitt, Elliott H. Powell; Editors' Note. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 March 2024; 36 (1): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search 2024. A new year, and a new volume and issue of JPMS. But this volume and issue, 36.1, are bittersweet for us, as they mark the countdown to the end of our term as JPMS co-editors (with 36.4 being the final issue of our tenure). While we are beyond excited about the future of JPMS and all the new articles and editorial members that will follow next year and in coming years (more on those announcements in this volume's forthcoming issues), we have already started the process of fondly recalling all the wonderful essays that, and people who, have been a part of our run as co-editors. We bring up the topic of reflection not to detail certain memories (those, like the announcements of JPMS's editorial future, will be outlined in future issues). Rather, it's the theme of recollection that resonates with so many articles published in this... You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Missy Elliott tours as a headliner − and it’s about time

  2024-08-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Black Arts, Black Women, Black Politics

  American Literary History · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract This essay-review examines Emily J. Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (2020), Sharrell D. Luckett’s African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity (2019), and Kimberly Mack’s Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (2020). Although differing in scope and form, the three books are recent works that are invested in explicating Black, and especially Black women’s, artistic creation as sites of and spaces for alternative Black world-making. This review argues that these works share a demand to consider how Black expressive culture is personal and political, singular and social, and how it can offer creative, collective, and intersectional strategies for living in a more liberatory world. Indeed, this review illustrates how, for past and present Black artists, and Black women artists in particular, cultural production is a key site of struggle in grappling with multiple and concomitant oppressions as well as developing alternative formations of Black living and being, inevitably showcasing the importance of Black cultural production in our contemporary world of anti-Black racism. Although differing in scope . . . and form, the three books are recent works that are invested in explicating Black, and especially Black women’s, artistic creation as sites of and spaces for alternative Black world-making.

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• Editors’ Note

  Journal of Popular Music Studies · 2022-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies is one that marks and announces a series of transitions in the JPMS editorial team. This is the first issue where we, K. E. Goldschmitt and Elliott H. Powell, officially start our term as the new co-editors of JPMS. We want to express deep gratitude to our immediate JPMS co-editor predecessors, Robin James and Eric Weisbard, for their mentorship and guidance as well as their significant leadership contributions to JPMS during their tenure—namely, reimagining the Field Notes section and providing new digital outlets for popular music knowledge production during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (like the lecture series in our 33.4 issue and the Books in Process series). We are happy to announce that Robin and Eric will be staying on the JPMS editorial team as associate editors. Additionally, we want to acknowledge and thank Esther Morgan-Ellis, Roshanak Kheshti, and David Suisman for their tireless and exceptional work as JPMS managing editor, Field Notes editor, and book reviews editor, respectively; all three are outgoing JPMS team members. And to that end, we want to welcome Eric Harvey, Kavita Kulkarni, Alyx Vesey, and Antonia Randolph as JPMS’ newest managing editor, Field Notes editor, book reviews editor, and associate book reviews editor, respectively. K and I are excited to work with you all, we are excited to continue to build on the work by the previous editorial teams, and we are excited to share and advance our own vision for JPMS to our current and future readers.Indeed, as scholars who take transnational approaches to popular music studies (e.g., Brazil, Latin America, UK, South Asia and the South Asian diaspora), we are interested in boosting work about the Global South and by scholars from the Global South. In particular, K and I share scholarly commitments to Afro-diasporic popular music, and as such, we welcome submissions centered on transnational, diasporic, and other spatial analyses of Black expressive culture; this can include, but is in no way limited to, critical regionalities and Black popular music, comparative Afro-diasporic music studies, and cross-cultural Black music studies (Afro-Asian, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Indigenous). Lastly, we are invested in popular musics by marginalized communities, and are thus, equally invested in centering those working in disability studies, queer and trans studies, critical and comparative race and ethnic studies, and/or those who are disabled, queer and/or trans, scholars of color, and whose identities sit at the intersections of these and other vectors of difference and belonging.Coincidentally, while the previous/outgoing editorial team overwhelmingly curated this JPMS issue (and we are grateful to them for shepherding these manuscripts through the editorial process), the essays featured in this issue touch on many of the themes that are part of our visions as new editors. The Field Notes section starts us off with Philip Gentry’s assessment of the dueling sound systems during Philadelphia’s 2020 presidential election voting process—the Trump and Republican led “stop the steal” side playing songs like Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of” and the Village People’s “YMCA;” and the liberal Democratic side playing Motown and Philadelphia Soul. For Gentry, both sides, to different ends, find strategic uses of Black music to achieve a set of political objectives (a purposeful elision of Blackness, and Black queerness, on the Trump side to shore up white heteropatriarchy; and a centering of Blackness on the liberal side as an espousal of racial egalitarianism that has yet-to-come). On the heels of this identitarian logics of genre, the next group of essays in Field Notes offer a reassessment of Miles Parks Grier’s 2013 JPMS polemic “Said the Hooker to the Thief: ‘Some Kind of Way Out’ of Rockism.” Part of the Field Notes “From the Vault” series, in which scholars reflect on a notable JPMS article, Kate Grover uses Grier’s critique of rockism, the exclusionary logics of canonization, and the problems of canon expansion to think through Grier’s analysis of sex work and to proffer what it might look like to think of rockism, and anti-rockism, as an everyday engagement from the side of a fan rather than critic. Grier’s response to Grover gives him an opportunity to address the promise and pitfalls of his original essay as well as powerfully note that while rockism might not hold the same kind of mainstream foothold of decades prior, its problematic legacies around canonization endure in many other genres and must therefore still be addressed. Field Notes concludes with an insightful interview between scholar Jillian Hernandez and queer Chicanx DJ Sad Boy. In it, DJ Sad Boy outlines their live mixing and curatorial practices that seek to create a Black, Latinx, queer, femme, and sex positive coalitional experience through sound.On the peer-review side of things, this issue’s featured articles are concerned with aesthetics, politics, and community formation. Ayo Adeduntan’s manuscript starts things off, and situates Yoruba hip hop within larger history of Nigerian popular music forms like jùjú and highlife. In so doing, Adeduntan argues that Yoruba hip hop is a cultural site of hidden transcripts that critique the dominant milieux. Continuing the theme of rap and nationalism, Alena Gray Aniskiewicz explores works by Polish rapper Mister D, the hip hop persona of writer Dorota Masłowska. Specifically, Aniskiewicz posits that Mister D draws on the sampling logics of collage and pastiche in order to critique norms of authenticity and tradition that have come to frame Polish national identity. Moving from one rap technique to another, Ben Duinker’s article analyzes the work of flow and timing. Importantly, Duinker reads the performance of flow in rap as not only a part of, and informed by, other African American musical vernacular traditions, but one that also taps into the long history of Black people and Black culture’s relation to the human. And it’s on this topic of relationality and the human that we find John R. Eperjesi’s article on famed techno group Drexciya. Bridging Black popular music studies, Afrofuturism studies, blue cultural studies, and eco-criticism, Eperjesi locates Drexciya as a groundbreaking band that uses themes and sounds of the ocean in ways that trouble the human/non-human binary and that offer “an aquatopian civilization” through which to imagine and make possible “offshore tomorrows.” Lastly, Bradley Rogers closes out the peer-review section with an exploration of the racialized, gendered, and sexual dimensions of Lawrence Welk. Through an analysis of Welk’s earlier “champagne sound” to his later “big band sound,” Rogers illustrates how Welk’s work both dovetailed with and deviated from national political norms of the family.We, of course, end the issue with our book reviews section, which extends the issue’s main threads of power and identity. In Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, Runchao Liu finds a meditation that’s not simply, or solely focused on music, but instead a book that considers food, kinship, gender, and death in Korean American identity formation. Amber Musser’s astute reading of Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds lays bare the ways in which sonic and vibrational forces can produce and make space for Blackness’s radical and liberatory potential. And finally, James G. McNally praises Felicia Angeja Viator’s To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America as a book that provides a nuanced account of the relationship between race and power in the development and popularity of gangsta rap.As a way to introduce ourselves as new co-editors, and as a way to thank you for your continued support of JPMS, this will be freely available for one year from the publication date. So, we ask that you read, share, and assign these incredible articles. We look forward to our tenure as JPMS co-editors, and we welcome all inquiries and submissions from scholars and non-scholars alike. Collectively, in the words of Tracy Chapman, “we can learn, we can teach,” and ultimately “make a new beginning.”

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• Are you entertained?: Black popular culture in the twenty-first century

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2021 · 33 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  In his classic essay, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall opens with a question: “What sort of moment is this in which to pose the question of black popular culture?”. Hall...

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• Getting Freaky with Missy

  Journal of Popular Music Studies · 2021-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article analyzes the music of Black female rapper Missy Elliott in order to consider performative challenges to the politics of visibility and visuality of Black queerness in hip hop. While mainstream media lauds the recent increase in and representation of out Black LGBTQ rappers, scholars such as C. Riley Snorton caution such praise for the unique ways visibility and surveillance are entangled formations that render Black queer communities vulnerable to violence. This article draws on Elliott’s songs “Get Ur Freak on” and “Pussycat” to present alternative ways of navigating the violence of visibility for Black queers and queerness. It argues that Elliott musically inhabits, expresses, and produces queerness through a set of cultural practices that this article calls the “musical aesthetics of impropriety.” The musical aesthetics of impropriety are performative expressions that are developed and deployed at the level of the sound recording, and that exploit the gaps and fissures of what qualifies as proper sexual subjects (e.g., LGBT) and how we come to perceive them as such (i.e., “evidence“) in order to produce alternative sexual and sonic formations. It is, thus, through the musical aesthetics of impropriety that we might imagine and articulate racialized queerness in hip hop differently.

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• Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

  Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2021-02-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  supposed to motivate Harold's own expressivist account.Keren Gorodeisky has developed the most sophisticated version of neo-sentimentalism with respect to aesthetic value, arguing that aesthetic judgments are necessarily accompanied by a sentiment she refers to as aesthetic pleasure.Harold acknowledges that much of what he says in favor of expressivism is compatible with this sort of sentimentalism (p.110), but he does not clearly articulate the reasons to prefer his own expressivist views.This concern is especially salient in Chapter 8, when Harold develops his argument for autonomism.As Harold himself notes, 'autonomism is compatible with expressivism, though it does not require it' .If this is the case, and if one could be an autonomist without endorsing expressivism, then why should one prefer expressivism to its realist competition?As Harold defines it, autonomism is the view that 'a person who reaches a moral verdict μ and an aesthetic verdict α of the same object or event is not rationally required to adjust α in light of μ or to adjust μ in light of α' (p.147).Note first that this is a very attenuated form of autonomism: Harold still allows that we may adjust our aesthetic verdicts in light of our moral verdicts and vice versa.His point is simply that doing so is never rationally necessary.Harold's targets are so-called interactionists like Carroll or Berys Gaut, who argue that, in cases where artworks like narrative fiction have explicitly moral aims, it is appropriate and reasonable for our moral evaluation of these works to influence our aesthetic evaluations of them.Harold's chief argument for autonomism is the claim there is no 'norm (or set of norms) regulating how we make evaluations of art that all of us must accept, no matter what our values are' (p.152).It would follow from this that there is no rational error committed if one does not adjust one's aesthetic evaluation of an artwork in light of one's moral evaluation of it.It may be plausible that there are no universal rationally binding principles of art evaluation, but I think we can make a case that there are such principles that are central to the practice of the appreciation and evaluation of Western art.Start with the common idea that genres or art-kinds establish expectations and purposes that are relevant to evaluation.Now consider the principle that our evaluations of an artwork ought to be sensitive to the particular art kinds or genres to which the artwork belongs.Carroll, Stacie Friend and others have argued that such a principle is a hallmark of criticism and of the appreciation of art more generally.If this principle is correct, and if some genres aim at morally salient ends, then perhaps our aesthetic evaluations of works in these genres should be sensitive to our moral evaluations of them.Harold might respond by arguing that no one is rationally required to adopt this principle-but I think that anyone who has an interest in participating in the practice of appreciation and evaluation of Western art has strong reason to adopt it.On the whole, I think that Harold's book represents an important contribution to the philosophical debate over the moral evaluation of artworks.His skeptical challenges to existing approaches are paired with useful suggestions about how to move the debate forward.Harold also deserves high praise for drawing on a diverse set of examples and philosophical perspectives; his serious engagement with ancient Chinese philosophers as well as Alain Locke and W.E.B. DuBois is a welcome departure from the usual suspects of Western analytic philosophy.Although I have raised a number of concerns about Harold's arguments in the second half of the book, I think that his expressivism and autonomism-positions which are too often neglected in analytic aesthetics-merit serious consideration.

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• On Breathlessness, Afro-Asian Relationalities, and Black Liberation

  Amerasia Journal · 2020-09-01

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  As a way of entering into this conversation on what I find to be most significant or transformative about 2020, I want to think through and with the protest song “I Can’t Breathe” by Afro-Filipina ...

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Frequent coauthors

• K. E. Goldschmitt

  3 shared

• Shanté Paradigm Smalls

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• University of Minnesota Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching…
• Woody Guthrie Best Book in Pop Music Award from the US Branc…
• Phillip Brett Book Award from the LGBTQ Study Group of the A…
• Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem Grant (2020)
• University of Minnesota Imagine Fund Award (2020 - 2021)