Wild Tongue

Jonathan Leal is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.

• dear x— 1 00. a mix for open wounds 3 when the sun sets and the songs begin 14 01. magic // valley: notes on names, fantasies, and refusals 15 02. flooded: on crises real and imagined 28 i think of our endless wanderings 41 03 the art of sonic place-making: song as autohistoria-teorÍa 42 04. heirloom: una memoria 62 toward the horizon 66 05. the archive is a promise: notes on preservation 67 06. one hundred searing dawns: un cuento 75 07. rocket debris: resisting astro-capital 80 on loop 80 08. beat theory: home, chopped and flipped 90 09. infinite set: DJs beyond category 108 10. platform sickness: dispatch from the digital maw 122 i find myself reaching 128 11. review corner: five records for transport; or, a music-critical interlude 129 12. toward freedom: microprofiles in self-consonance 136 in the spaces between 146 13. the world becomes as we dream it 147 for us, together again 154 14. a mix that won't be tamed 155 Acknowledgments 157 Notes 163 Bibliography 181 Index 203

“Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape is an exuberant, taste-scrambling, and joyful book. Through its deep cuts, distorted notes, genre leaps, and potent longings, Jonathan Leal reminds us of our power to read, listen, write, sing, and create our lives, and worlds, anew.”—José David Saldívar, author of Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love