808s and Heartbreak

Taking on heartbreak, one of the principal themes of R&B music, Track 9.0 threads quotations from R&B songs about heartbreak throughout with the aim of enfleshing the supposedly abstract mechanical technology of the 808 drum machine through the conceptual lens of the generalized heartbreak of Black life. As a result, heartbreak does not function in the frequential key of individuated and privatized neoliberal affect but as a far-reaching condition of Black life in an anti-Black world that nevertheless acts on different groups and individuals gathered under in this umbrella unevenly.