Rhythms of Relation: Black Popular Music and Mobile Technologies

This chapter focuses on the singular performances of the interface between (Black) subjectivity and information technologies in popular music, asking how these performances impact definitions of the technological. To this end, after a brief examination of those aspects of mobile technologies that gesture beyond disembodied communication, I turn my attention to the multifarious manifestations of techno-informational gadgets (especially cellular/mobile telephones) in R&B from 2000 to 2010, in both content and form, a genre acutely concerned with the conjuring of interiority, emotion, and affect.