Between rock and a hard place: narrating nona hendryx's inscrutable career

Abstract

Elaborating on the imperialist grasp of rockism, Kelefa Sanneh writes ‘There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers—just so long as they, y‘know, rock.’ What's striking is how closely Nona Hendryx's career fits within these categories—doo-wop singer, disco queen, rocker—yet, she still hasn't received her due, even within that flawed, proverbial rockist Hall of Fame. Building on Mark Anthony Neal's rich analysis of the proto-disco trio LaBelle and their prophetic collaboration with singer/songwriter Laura Nyro in the early 1970s, this paper traces the lengthy and varied solo career of former-LaBelle, Nona Hendryx. My argument takes as a point of departure the challenge of telling a ‘non-rockist’ story about how Hendryx rocks, how she doesn't, and why issues of legibility and legacy rest on these questions. I investigate the consolidation of race, gender and genre in the formative period of the 1970s, when rock and disco were situated within popular media as warring sub-cultures. In particular, I track the ways that the purported artifice of disco and its associations with blackness, gayness and overtly performative, ‘feminine’ modes of display render Hendryx's later experimentation with other genres of music illegible, even to her most devoted fans.

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