That technique is among the most remarkable aspects of another Smith project: “Black Girl Songbook,” the Spotify-sponsored podcast that she launched in 2021 to “give Black women in music the credit we are due.” To discover from her interview with Brandy that the singer maintains her voice by drinking a certain kind of tea and avoiding talking on the phone is to be granted a small miracle of information a revelation similar to the one Smith produces as she names a litany of Black-women publicists who helped launch singers’ careers. Her own experiences with a racist, sexist media industry attune her to the trauma as well as the training that are often elided by Black women’s success stories-so she asks artists about these subjects, and opens up new dimensions of pop history. I found that, in “Shine Bright,” Smith creates an innovative form of music writing in which long passages of memoir, reportage, and history are deftly interlinked and shown to be co-constitutive. (Her 2016 oral history of Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl performance of the national anthem is still, to my mind, the best thing ever written about the singer.) Upon seeing her book’s working title change over time, from “She’s Every Woman: The Power of Black Women in Pop Music” to “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop,” I wondered how Smith was navigating the trend in music writing toward autobiographical accounts of listeners’ relationships with Black artists and away from historical (or, indeed, musical) appraisals of their work. These are artists who collectively created the sounds and styles of American pop.Īlthough I had not met Smith prior to our conversation, I had admired her writing and anticipated the publication of “Shine Bright” for many years. It is an experiment in intertwining her own stories of self-doubt, love, and ambition with those of the Black-women artists she profiles-from the nineteen-sixties hitmakers the Dixie Cups to icons such as Jody Watley and Mariah Carey. If I tell you Danyel Smith is a writer and editor who grew up in Oakland, California, in the nineteen-seventies, and went on to become one of the nation’s most astute chroniclers of pop and hip-hop culture-especially through her leadership of Vibe magazine, in the nineties-how much am I actually telling you? How much am I leaving out? “To say I ‘became’ editor-in-chief of Vibe in 1994-and the first woman and the first Black person to have the job, and the first woman to run a national music magazine-is a criminal abbreviation,” Smith writes in her new book, “ Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” Although the book gives us her backstory, it is not primarily a memoir.

Shine Bright by Danyel Smith