A conversation with Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He writes and publishes widely in cultural criticism, with particular focus on the cultural production and African American musical history of soul and rhythm and blues music. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, published in 2013 by New York University Press, and the 2015 publication of the tenth anniversary edition of his classic text New Black Man with Routledge. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between African American music, mourning, cultural politics, and mobilization in the digital age after our analogue moment. His book Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, the occasion for our conversation today, was published by New York University Press in early-March 2022.