Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance at the 2016 Country Music Awards Show sparked unprecedented backlash on digital media spaces. For some viewers, the performance challenged the perceived boundaries of country music as fundamentally wrapped up in white identity. Consequently, white fans’ digital dialogue surrounding the performance attempted to maintain country music’s whiteness through surveillant rhetorical tactics. In this chapter, Hutten develops a theory of genre surveillance to describe how the boundaries of country music are policed not only by significant country music institutions but by a faction of country music fans. Hutten situates Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance, and the digital reactions to it, within the history and politics of country music’s sonic color line. Additionally, Hutten mobilizes Browne’s (2015) theory of dark sousveillance to demonstrate how the performance functions as an act of musical resistance.

One of the most important recent developments in practices of recording and listening to digital audio has been the documentation of police violence against marginalised communities, especially African Americans. Prior to the digital, audio-visual technologies served to document similar forms of racist violence as in the killing of Emmett Till (photography) or the beating of Rodney King (home video). But the increasing ubiquity of handheld recording devices has intensified and expanded those dynamics of documentary, creating new modes of witnessing race, bodies and power. In turn, these new forms of witnessing, which have played a central role in the Black Lives Matter movement, call for equally new forms of reception – ways of listening, viewing, sharing, and, in turn, recording, that amplify and disseminate that multimedia witnessing. Key examples of such witnessing, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade and recordings of police killing Philando Castile, offer sober reminders of the stakes of digital cinema.