The lecture explores how the concept of aliveness—of a living presence inhabiting Black sound—emerged as the defining principle of Black musical value. It illustrates how the music’s seemingly enlivened character—variously identified as spirit, soul, groove, etc.—developed not simply from the act of performance but from Black music’s unique participation in capitalist market economies.

Conceived during the slave era as an audible materialization of the laboring Black body, Black music took form as a structural refusal of White laws of ownership: in its embodied attachments to the enslaved worker, Black music arose as an animated property always partly under Black control, despite laws prohibiting slaves from possessing valuable things. White efforts to capture and reclaim this illicit possession heightened its value, all the more so once Black music began to circulate in commercial markets.

In its modern iterations, Black music coalesces as something peculiarly double in form: an exchangeable commodity that simultaneously retains the inalienable presence of Black being. This double structure drives Black music’s distinctive counterhistorical motion, constantly shifting from commercial markets back into Black worlds. Slavery’s seminal contests of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music.