![]() ![]() This, too, is the story of Black women in music often, they are driven to navigate violent disrespect and opposition by becoming their own advocates and friends. It’s not that he made her a writer but that she took his doubt and made it a gift. Describe the fucking sunlight.” (He tells her, “You can’t.”) The moment recasts the descriptive skill that Smith showcases as a technique developed in part to prove Alvin wrong. At one point, Alvin challenges her powers of description: “You want to write something? . . . ![]() Throughout the book, Smith parcels out memories of her mother’s boyfriend Alvin, a source of terror in her home during her adolescent years. A year later, Price’s second cousin Dionne Warwick made her solo-recording début with “Don’t Make Me Over”-a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that, Smith writes, “lingers in the valley between what you wanted and what you got.” Nearly forty years later, Warwick’s cousin Whitney Houston and Houston’s husband, Bobby Brown, arrived at the Rihga Royal hotel (ten blocks south of the Met), where “the air horseradish and butter,” and made a bizarre scene, while Smith watched from a nearby table, pen in hand. 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. 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.
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