Week 6 (belatedly) / Fall 2023: Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics

Sometimes, I am listening to Paramore in my car. Loudly. With the windows down. Because that is the only way to listen to Paramore, really. Sometimes—more often than not, I’d say—I am driving and then made aware of the fact that I might be being perceived by someone outside of my car. And, almost instinctively, I lower the volume and I roll my windows up.

Relatedly, I am learning that sometimes I just don’t want to write a thing. Because it makes me nervous or brings me shame. Makes me want to crawl into a hole—often, for how the thing challenges my understanding of my own blackness. The thing that I am gesturing toward here, that I have been avoiding writing about, is my love for Paramore. It seems that the universe has different ideas for me though.

This semester, in a course called Aesthetics of Relation, one of the assignments is to write a conference length paper (about 15 minutes) engaging one of the texts from the course and how it relates to our research. On that first day, a sign up sheet got passed around, and I was displeased with the options I had left: namely, I wanted some black queer shit. And none of those texts were left. So I just chose a random one, even though I wasn’t sure that it exactly intersected with my own interests.

This changed when I attended a talk with Professor Ramos, where he discussed his newly published work: Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics. There, I learned how this text stages a conversation about Mexican and Latinx rock music lovers—about authenticity and dissonance—that compelled me to think about my relationship to Paramore. So, here I am. Halfway through this semester thinking about my love of Paramore—thinking toward the future of my work, toward the papers I have to write for this semester, toward my dissertation project at large. And I think there is something here that I must follow. Something that will nag me if I don’t. Something about blackness and authenticity: and what happens when one “fails” at it and what is made possible in that failing.

NBA Basketball and Paramore worlds collide. Probably one of my favorite social media moments of the summer.

So, the working title for my paper is something like: Why Are All the Black Kids Singing Paramore Alone in their Rooms? I am interested, at this moment, in thinking about what a love of Paramore, or an engagement in this music more broadly, might offer to the person racialized as black. What is made possible by the shame or the embarrassment or the choice to listen alone. What can be learned from the experience of the closeted listener? The person who fails at performing race in the ways we have been taught to expect?

I’m not sure what the answers are yet. But I hope to find something in the writing.