“He’s calling his flock now”: black music and postcoloniality from Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans to Sefyu’s Paris

Abstract

This article constitutes a close reading and sonic analysis of the Senegalese-Parisian rapper, Sefyu’s “En noir et blanc.” It performs an intertextual and musical analysis as a way to bring into form the historical and discursive continuities between double consciousness and postcoloniality that we can hear in the sonic contours and performed histories of “black music.” The article makes the argument that by listening closely to European hip hop we can hear that double consciousness is the particular African American form of the global experience of postcoloniality. By tackling such a large question through the lens of a single piece of music, we can see in detail how, through musical performance, hip hop births a new consciousness both attuned to this continuity and calibrated to undermine the asymmetries that both double consciousness and postcoloniality describe.