The Routledge research companion to popular music and gender 2016030928, 9781472456830, 9781315613437

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‘Until quite recently, music scholars found the mention of gender or the study of popular music scandalous. This collection of essays by some of the leading figures in both those areas shows how far our disciplines have advanced in the last thirty years. Shedding new light on media, representations of race, sexualities, celebrity, transgender communities, and much more, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Gender is a treasure trove for anyone who cares about popular music, its artists, and its fans.’ Susan McClary, Case Western Reserve University, USA ‘This book is an exciting contribution to the growing, interdisciplinary field of popular music studies. The collection features first-rate music scholarship that is up to date with nuanced gender theory, and it will be valued in and beyond courses on gender and music. The essays cover an impressive range of genres, performance strategies, and cultural practices, always focussed on sophisticated understandings of gender identity.’ Jacqueline Warwick, Dalhousie University, Canada ‘This book expands our understanding of the complex ways in which gender is interwoven with popular music. Within the volume key international scholars offer re-evaluation of existing theorisations of gender and present fresh perspectives on a rich array of case studies. These new essays investigate the ways in which gender is implicated in how we practice, perform, listen to, watch, narrate experiences about, and conceptualise different forms of popular music. The book offers insightful interrogations into the positioning of the gendered subject and is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary debates about music and gender.’ Marion Leonard, University of Liverpool, UK

THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO POPULAR MUSIC AND GENDER

Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What do gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and the images all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry’s impact on fans and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins’s introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are the following: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background. Stan Hawkins is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Agder, Norway. His research fields involve music analysis, popular musicology, gender and culture. From 2010–2014 he led a Norwegian state-funded project, Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context. He is author of Settling the Pop Score (2002), The British Pop Dandy (2009), Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (with Sarah Niblock, 2011), and Queerness in Pop Music (2016). His edited volumes include Music, Space & Place (2004), Essays on Sound & Vision (2007), Pop Music & Easy Listening (2011) and Critical Musico-logical Reflections (2012). He is currently General Editor for the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.

THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO POPULAR MUSIC AND GENDER

Edited by Stan Hawkins

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Stan Hawkins The right of Stan Hawkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hawkins, Stan, editor. Title: The Routledge research companion to popular music and gender / edited by Stan Hawkins. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY : Routledge, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016030928 | ISBN 9781472456830 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315613437 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—History and criticism. | Sex role in music. | Gender identity in music. Classification: LCC ML3470 .R75 2017 | DDC 781.64081—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030928 ISBN: 978-1-472-45683-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-61343-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures and tables List of musical examples List of contributors

x xii xiii

 1 Introduction: Sensing gender in popular music Stan Hawkins

1

PART 1

Masculinities, femininities, community, and transcultural practice

13

 2 Growing up to be a rapper? Justin Bieber’s duet with Ludacris as transcultural practice Barbara Bradby

15

 3 “Where we going Johnny?” Homosociality and the early Beatles Matthew Bannister

35

 4 From throat singing to transcultural expression: Tanya Tagaq’s Katajjaq musical signature Sophie Stévance

48

 5 Spectres of masculinity: Markers of vulnerability and nostalgia in Johnny Cash Eirik Askerøi

63

vii

Contents PART 2

Audiovisuality, sex(uality), women, and the politics of looking

77

 6 “You mean I can make a TV show?”: Web series, assertive music, and African American women producers Anahid Kassabian

79

 7 Holding on for dear life: Gender, celebrity status, and vulnerabilityon-display in Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ Kai Arne Hansen

89

 8 Gender, sexuality and the politics of looking in Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’ (featuring Lady Gaga) Lori Burns and Marc Lafrance  9 ‘Working it’: Female masculinity and Missy Elliott Marita B. Djupvik

102

117

PART 3

Vernacular soundworlds, narratives, and stardom

133

10 High notes, high drama: Musical climaxes and gender politics in tenor heroes and Broadway women Freya Jarman

137

11 The gendered narratives of nobodies and somebodies in the popular music economy Keith Negus

152

12 Staging the ‘street boy’: Transculturalism, realness and hypermasculinity in the Norwegian rapper Jesse Jones Birgitte Sandve

166

13 Fairport Convention: Gender and voicing strategies in a sound signature Tor Dybo

182

14 “I don’t play girly house music”: Women, sonic stereotyping, and the dancing DJ Tami Gadir

196

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Contents PART 4

Gender, race, and the female celebrity

211

15 ‘A woman’s place’: Staging femininity in live music from Jenny Lind to the Jazz Age Steve Waksman

215

16 Beyoncé: Hip hop feminism and the embodiment of black femininity Marquita R. Smith 17 Performing race and gender: Erykah Badu between post-soul and Afrofuturism Erik Steinskog

229

242

18 “Armed with the faith of a child”: Marit Larsen and strategies of faking Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik

253

19 “Singing from the heart”: Notions of gendered authenticity in pop music Bridget Coulter

267

PART 5

Challenging hegemonic practices: New masculinities, queerness, and transgenderism 20 Doing hip-hop masculinity differently: Exploring Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak through word, sound, and image Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns, and Alyssa Woods 21 Express yourself! Gender euphoria and intersections Doris Leibetseder

281 285

300

22 Covering trans media: Temporal and narrative potential in messy musical archives Craig Jennex and Maria Murphy

313

23 Confronting the gender trouble for real: Mina Caputo, metal truth and transgender power Susanna Välimäki

326

Bibliography Index

347 372

ix

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures  2.1  7.1  7.2  8.1  8.2  8.3  8.4  8.5  8.6  8.7  8.8 10.1 10.2 12.1 12.2 18.1 22.1 22.2 23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4

Justin Bieber held in ‘headlock’ by Ludacris, still from the video of ‘Baby’. Maddie Ziegler propped up in a doorway from the ‘Chandelier’ video. Ziegler curtsying in the ‘Chandelier’ video. ‘Video Phone’: The male gaze or slaves of the gaze? Visual Borrowings from T-Pain’s ‘Buy U a Drank’, featuring Shawnna, and Soulja Boy’s ‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’. Images in the Pre-hook. Duplicated images in the Hook. Strobe images in Verse 2. Strobe images in Verse 6. The ‘pornographic imagination’ in ‘Video Phone’. Male rappers in the genre of snap: T-Pain and Soulja Boy. Relationship between voice and orchestra in ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ (Oliver!, 1960). Georgia Brown, original Broadway cast recording (1964). Historical development of vocal timbres. Screen shot from ‘Gategutt’. Screen shot from ‘Kommer aldri inn’. Angel wings and fake tattoo – Marit Larsen in the video of ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’. Silveira performs Wham!’s ‘Freedom’ (2009). Silveira performs Rihanna’s ‘Stay’ (2013). Mina Caputo enters Life of Agony’s first concert after announcing her gender reassignment process (Alcatraz Metal Festival, Belgium, 2014). Moshing, stage diving and crowd surfing at a Life of Agony concert, 5 April 2015, Club Aqua, Jacksonville, Florida. Mina Caputo’s Facebook entry after the Life of Agony concert in Dessel, Belgium, 19 June 2015, including photographs by Tim Tronckoe (above) and Jef Matthee (below).

x

17 95 96 103 105 107 109 110 111 112 113 141 143 174 176 260 318 318 327 330 333

Figures and tables

23.5 23.6

Music video ‘Got Monsters’: Trans woman (Vané) as she experiences herself and her reflection in the mirror (Keith).

341

Tables  5.1  8.1  8.2  8.3  8.4  8.5  9.1 23.1 23.2

Form, music and visual aspects of Hurt Analytic Model Thematic Parameter of ‘Video Phone’ Gestural, spatial and relational parameters in the pre-hook Gestural, Spatial and Relational Parameters in the Hook Gestural, spatial and relational parameters in verses 5–6 (Gaga) Lyrics, musical cues and visual action in ‘Work It’ Structure of Mina Caputo’s ‘Identity’ song and music video Structure of Mina Caputo’s ‘Got Monsters’ music video

xi

71 103 105 106 108 111 119 338 340

MUSIC EXAMPLES

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 5.1

Justin Bieber, ft. Ludacris, ‘Baby’ Intro Dion, ‘Runaround Sue’, Intro Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’, Intro Elton John, ‘Crocodile Rock’, falsetto break Pat Boone, ‘Speedy Gonzales’, Intro vocal, sung by Robin Ward ‘Baby’ rap rhythm 1 ‘Baby’ rap rhythm 2 ‘You know you love me’ Ludacris’s break, bar 4 Ludacris’s break, bars 14–15 Outro in ‘Baby’ ‘Hurt’: Vocal, acoustic guitar and grand piano (0:33–0:42)

xii

24 24 24 24 25 27 27 27 28 28 29 70

CONTRIBUTORS

Eirik Askerøi is Associate Professor of Music at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He holds a PhD in popular music performance from the University of Agder. His research interests include production aesthetics, popular music, cultural theory and discursive analysis. He has contributed with the chapter, ‘No Love in Modern Life: Matters of Performance and Production in a Morrissey Song’ in Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities (2011) and is published in Popular Music. Besides his academic activities, he works as a professional musician and co-manages the recording studio, Parachute Studio, Oslo. Matthew Bannister is a musician and academic. He has published two books, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (2006) and Positively George Street: A Personal History of Sneaky Feelings and the Dunedin Sound (1999). He presently teaches at Waikato Institute of Technology (Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand). His main research interests are gender, memory, creativity and popular music, but he also enjoys writing songs and playing the ukulele. Barbara Bradby is retired from Trinity College, Dublin, where she taught and researched on popular music and gender in the Department of Sociology. Her work in this area started in the early 1980s with close textual and musical readings of the gendered meanings of songs, and went on to address ways in which particular audience groups (pre-teen girls, lesbians and feminists) created meaning out of popular music. Her publications have appeared in collections from Oxford, Ashgate and Routledge, as well as in leading journals in the field. She served on the editorial board of Popular Music from 1990–2001 and was also an advisory editor to Popular Music and Society for many years. She continues to work on the intersections of social and textual meaning around popular music as a site of gender construction. Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary research (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada) merges cultural theory and musical analysis to explore representations of gender in the lyrical, musical and visual texts of popular music. She has published articles in edited collections published by Ashgate, Cambridge, Garland, Oxford, Routledge and the University of Michigan Press, as well as in leading journals (Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, The Journal for Music, Sound, xiii

Contributors

and Moving Image, Studies in Music, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online and The Journal for Music Theory). Her book on popular music, Disruptive Divas: Critical and Analytical Essays on Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music (Routledge Press, 2002) won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2005). She was a founding co-editor of the Tracking Pop Series of the University of Michigan Press and has served as co-editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series since 2015. Bridget Coulter is a PhD student in the Department of Music at the University of Sheffield. Her research investigates the role of music in the lives of girls, exploring how this relates to issues of gender and identity. Her research interests include popular music, gender and the representation of women in popular culture. She currently teaches popular music studies at the University of Sheffield. Marita B. Djupvik holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Agder, Kristiansand. Her research interests are audiovisual analysis, performance analysis, gender studies and ethnicity. Currently she is employed as a secondary school teacher. She has published articles in Popular Music (2014) and Popular Music and Society (2015). Tor Dybo is Professor of Musicology at the University of Agder, Kristiansand. His research field includes jazz and popular music, and he is author of the book, Representasjonsformer i jazz- og populærmusikkanalyse (2013). He has published extensively on jazz analysis, popular music and ethnomusicological topics. Currently he is leader of the PhD program in popular music performance. Tami Gadir is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. She specializes in the participation, sounds and spaces of contemporary, electronically produced dance music. To date, she has explored the impacts of electronic sound on bodily experience, as well as the relationships between musical participation and aesthetic and political ideologies. Her project deals with the experiences of women in dance music, focusing on DJs across international borders. Kai Arne Hansen is a PhD student at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. His current research focuses on matters of gender and audiovisuality in mainstream pop. His work on Beyoncé, feminism and audiovisual aesthetics is recently published in Popular Music and Society. Freya Jarman is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool and works primarily on cultures and ideologies of the voice, especially in relation to gender, sexuality and queer theory. She is the author of Queer Voices (2011) and editor of Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music (2007). Her current research is a wide-ranging monograph project on gendered histories of singing high notes. Craig Jennex is a PhD student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His work is published in Popular Music & Society, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. He was research assistant for the project Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo from 2013 to 2014.

xiv

Contributors

Anahid Kassabian was James and Constance Alsop Chair and Professor at University of Liverpool for many years and is ranked as one of the most distinguished scholars in popular music studies, with her research focus on sound studies and music in audiovisual media. Her books, Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (2001) and Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (2013), and her co-edited collections, Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture (1997) (with David Schwarz) and Ubiquitous Musics: The everyday sounds that we don’t always notice (2013) (with Elena Boschi and Marta García Quiñones) are all groundbreaking works. They have helped articulate significant new areas of research. She is past editor of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and of Journal of Popular Music Studies, and has been executive chair of the IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) for two periods. Marc Lafrance is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Concordia University and holds a PhD from the University of Oxford. Informed by an intersectional approach, his research on popular music culture explores issues of self, body and society and how they are bound up with the cultural politics of gender, sexuality, race and class. Lafrance’s work has been published in refereed journals such as Popular Music and Society and Twentieth Century Music and edited collections such as The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender and Culture, Music and Culture and Music and the Meaning of Camp. Along with co-researcher Lori Burns, Lafrance is the recipient of an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2013–2018). Doris Leibetseder is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden and a Visiting Scholar at University of California, Berkeley since 2013, first as a Scholar in Residence of the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and now at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. She was an IAS-STS Research Fellow at the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt (AAU) in Graz, Austria from 2014–2016 and her current research is a queerfeminist, transgender and critical disability ethics of reproduction. From 2011–2013, she was an assistant at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the AAU and taught courses in Gender Studies/Queer Theory at different universities (Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt) in Austria. Her publications include Queer Tracks. Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music (2012) and “Fem(me) Subversive Tracks: Queer Feminine Strategies in Rock and Pop Music” in Re-thinking Identities: Cultural Articulations of Alterity and Resistence in the New Millenium (2014). Maria Murphy is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work considers the intersection between sound technologies and body politics through the work of multimedia artists Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono and Karen Finley. She examines how sound participates in the production of bodies. Keith Negus is Professor of Musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His books include Producing Pop (1992), Popular Music in Theory (1996), Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999) and Bob Dylan (2008). He has published articles on various topics including creativity, musicians on television, globalization, narrative and the popular song, music genres and cultural intermediaries. His recent research includes a study of ‘Digitisation

xv

Contributors

and the Politics of Copying in Popular Music Culture’ within the UK Research Council’s CREATe programme with John Street and Adam Behr, and a study of songwriting and lyrics with Pete Astor. Birgitte Sandve holds a PhD from the University of Oslo in musicology. Her research interests include identity politics, transculturality and audivisuality in popular music. She was a core member of the research project Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo from 2010 to 2014. She has published in Popular Music (2015) and is currently working for the Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo. Marquita R. Smith is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University (USA). Her research and teaching interests include African American literature and culture, hip-hop studies, gender, sexuality and critical race studies. She has published articles on the intersection of sexuality, race and gender in literature, music and culture in venues such as Popular Music and Society, Postcolonial Text and Michigan Feminist Studies. Erik Steinskog is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. His current research interests include African American music, afrofuturism, and music and technology (particularly the cultural effects of technology of storage and reproduction, voice studies and aesthetics). His publications include chapter contributions to The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology (2015), Danish Musicology Online (2011), Music and Identity in Norway and Beyond (2011) and Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music (2010). He has been Editor-inChief of Popular Musicology Online since 2011. Sophie Stévance is Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Music, University Laval. She is Canada Research Chair in research-creation in music. Her field of study is music researchcreation in music around different projects with creators, particularly about the modernization of Inuit throat singing (with Tanya Tagaq) and the genetic analysis of creative process in music (with Productions SuperMusique). She is also head of Laboratoire de recherché-création en musique et multimedia (LARCEM) and Groupe de recherché-création en musique. She is the author of several books, Quand la musique prend corps, with M. Desroches and S. Lacasse (2014), Les Enjeux de la recherche-création en musique, with S. Lacasse (2013), Musique actuelle (2011), Composer au XXIe siècle (2010), Duchamp, compositeur (2009) and L’Itinéraire du timbre (2006). She received two awards from The Académie Charles-Cros in 2006 and in 2010, as well as research grants (SSHRC and Quebec Research Funds). Susanna Välimäki is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Musicology, University of Turku, Finland, and holds a title of docent in musicology at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of Subject Strategies in Music: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Musical Signification (2005), Miten sota soi? Sotaelokuva, ääni ja musiikki (How Does War Sound? War films, Sound and Music) (2008) and Muutoksen musiikki: Queereja ja ekologisia utopioita audiovisuaalisessa nykykulttuurissa (Music of Transformation: Queer and Ecological Utopias in Audiovisual Culture) (2015). Steve Waksman is Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience xvi

Contributors

(Harvard University Press, 1999) and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), the latter of which was awarded the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the US chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. Currently, he is writing a new book on the cultural history of live music and performance in the USA, tentatively titled, Live Music in America: A History, 1850–2010. Alyssa Woods holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and teaches courses in music theory, music history and popular music studies at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to musical theoretical and socio-cultural analysis, focusing on the study of gender and race in popular music with particular emphasis on hip-hop. She has published articles in Music Theory Online and Twentieth-Century Music, as well as the edited collections Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik currently works as a freelance writer and copy editor. He graduated with a PhD in musicology from the University of Oslo in 2014 and has researched into gender and identity politics in Norwegian popular music. He was part of the core team of the project Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, from 2010 to 2014. He is also a music critic for the Norwegian weekly newspaper Morgenbladet.

xvii

1 INTRODUCTION Sensing gender in popular music Stan Hawkins

There can be little doubt that the debates surrounding gender differ vastly from yesteryear. This is because research into popular music is constantly evolving. The prime objective of this volume is to make sense of ideas that can further contribute to knowledge on the ways in which gender and music are assimilated within culture. For all intents and purposes the perspectives, methods, and theories offered are transdisciplinary and directed towards scholars, fans, musicians, and performers. Theorise gender we must, for excavating the lineages of identity in music is vital for understanding agency, affect, and instantiation. The body lumps together a wealth of entities that are contingent upon vastly diverse phenomena. Gender is performative, as Judith Butler has argued, “insofar as it is the effect of a regulatory regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint”.1 It is likely that not everyone will concur with Butler’s assertion that there is “no subject who is ‘free’ to stand outside these norms or to negotiate them at a distance”.2 Hence, the notion of gender as performative warrants re-evaluation, and it is on this basis that many of the perspectives aired in this volume have materialised. Gender is located in the twists and shapes that construct the subject in music performance. With the reiteration of norms over time, it is their differences and mutations that are as compelling as perplexing to deal with. This Research Companion engages with a vast range of positions on performance, agency, and emerging cultural practices, seeking out the vibrant contexts of musicianship where gender operates as a force of resistance and a carrier of normative identities in musical practice. All the contributors recognise that struggles over equality are as prevalent today as ever before, which prompt an investigation of agency on many levels. Thus, a prime objective is to give thought to the functions of gender in popular music. The matter of interpretation is immanent in such a volume, disclosed by numerous close readings of texts, performances, and experiences.3 In the main, the critical approaches to subjectivity, style, and performativity attend to the intricate aspects of human agency that are mediated by discourses of sexuality and gender. It is evident in many of the interpretive methods employed that close readings exist as a result of distant readings, a point that Allan F. Moore flags up in his edited volume, Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, where the theoretical inclination to larger units “implies another facet, that of a wider view, of being aware of things beyond or outside the immediate focus”.4 Broad contextual consideration (and the oscillation between close and distant readings) defined the contributions to Sexing 1

Stan Hawkins

the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley in 1997, the first anthology of popular music and gender.5 The essays in Sexing the Groove provided a combined account of gender within all styles of popular music, spawning a wealth of studies in years to come.6 Since then, discourses have evolved that seek to identify corporeality in new social contexts as well as attitudes towards gender and sexuality. Music’s convergence with other media in the past decades has ignited interest in the articulation of gendered subjectivities. For instance, audiovisual research is engaged with patterns of human expression not only on the part of the performer, but also audiences, spectators, and users. Undoubtedly, the trends in reception and consumption within emerging media landscapes have had far-reaching implications for popular music scholarship. Gender in popular music has “often been considered to be more ‘social’, and ‘sex’ in turn more natural”, as Keith Negus has argued. One reason for this is that gender is “usually more visible as a series of conventions about dress codes, expected public bodily behaviour, work place organization, manner of speech and so on”.7 Importantly, distinguishing between gender and biological sex is as ideological as cultural, “based on a very specific set of values”,8 evident in the ways people speak, write, and think about music, as well as perform it. The postulation that “men and women ‘express’ some essential masculine or feminine forms of sexuality”9 is by and large recognised as contentious today, though, and has been debated rigorously from a feminist perspective in popular music scholarship.10 Accordingly, that women are repressed by the patriarchal music industry is rigorously researched within popular music studies. There can be little doubt that the move towards greater freedom of expression and equality in sexual pleasure in many popular styles since the 1960s has had repercussions for the emerging ideologies and social practices that steer people’s understanding of gender roles.11 From the 1970s onwards, as women’s rights emerged as a powerful catalyst for female empowerment, scholars would challenge fixed notions of femininity and masculinity by exposing not only the conventions, but also the radical and unruly aspects of crowd-pleasing performativity.12 As well as addressing the impact of biographical details, social relations and cultural identity, the emphasis would fall on how and why gender is inscribed in specific styles and genres. The discourses that have concentrated on rock music illustrate this well. Not only has it been argued that rock had been relegated to the domain of men and masculinity – its very construction comes from within the culture – but also to sexual orientation.13 One of the first studies to assert this was undertaken by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, who explored the aggressive, boastful, and derogatory display of male sexuality in ‘cock rock’.14 In later years, scholars, such as Robert Walser in his study of heavy metal and masculinities in Running with the Devil, would contest many of the norms and prejudices associated with heavy metal.15 Extending Frith and McRobbie’s critique, Walser pointed to the performance practices located in heavy metal that stem from the anxieties and hysteria of masculinity, misogyny, and androgyny. Walser’s discursive approach set out to deconstruct masculinity as a performance through music analysis and hermeneutics. Albeit from another angle, Lori Burns, in her book Disruptive Divas and subsequent publications, connected music theory to cultural studies in a bid to consider female rock ‘divas’ – Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Me’Shell Ndegeocello, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, and k.d. lang.16 The basis of her work was to implement interdisciplinary models for the study of embodied gendered subjectivities in popular music. Another notable scholar, Susan Fast, showed in her book In the Houses of the Holy that women often engage with rock and its artists in ways where sexual attraction is an enabling experience, indeed dispelling the concept of ‘cock rock’ and the simplistic 2

Introduction

binaries of pop/rock, feminine/masculine, straight/gay, and so on.17 Fast’s musicological approach addressed the appeal of music and lyrics, including close readings of Led Zeppelin’s music. Implementing an ethnographic and music analytic approach to phallic rock, Fast’s study also helped pave the way forward for a critique of gendered representations and reception in rock music. Understandably, a degree of sensitivity is necessary when devising theories and methods for gender research.18 Because music furnishes us with a mix of ideals that often break down and contest reactionary social norms, it incites the senses in all of us quite differently. For sure, the theatrics of gender on display in countless musical styles can be risqué, ribald, and provocative. Yet, subversive performances are often tolerated by mainstream, conservative audiences (even when disrupting social class and political orders). In the name of entertainment, controversial acts can feel at a safe distance from our everyday lives even despite the perpetual monitoring of music in the public arena, with cautionary warnings by government, political, and religious bodies under the rubric: ‘protection for the public good’. Moral outrage aside, there are, admittedly, negative aspects to gendered representations in popular music that symbolise violence, pain, extremism, discrimination, racism, and the darker sides of life. Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan have scrutinised the anecdotes used to “consolidate the positive value of music” in terms of being “moving and inspiring” in identity formation, which can indeed be “one-dimensional perspectives on deeply paradoxical” phenomena.19 As their study demonstrates, popular music is built on power relations and inflections of suppression in all sorts of guises. The opening decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed this through the momentous alterations in the mediation of subjectivities via social media. Being tweeted, snapshot, or webcammed has drastically altered perceptions of gendered identity. It is within this context that many of the narratives and methods in this volume are cultivated as we zoom in on the role of gender, race, class, nationhood, and sexuality in the shaping of political agendas through musical performance. Throughout, a rich array of issues is framed by central questions such as: • • • • • • • •

How do artists convey, stage, and contest gender in their music? What sets of politics are activated by genderplay in music, and how? Why does gender shift according to age and generation, and how is the desire for pleasure articulated from one group of people to the next? What are the relationships between gender and other forms of identification, such as class, race, age, (dis)ability, political engagement, religious belief, and ideology? If the singing voice assumes a gendered persona, what are the characteristics that define and shape notions of authenticity? In what ways can popular musicology contribute to the interpretive process of understanding the performance persona? How do optical technologies discipline the musicalised body and totalise the gaze, and what does this imply? Under what musical conditions is gender a formative feature of desire, and how do we interpret the primacy of the gendered body as an object of desire?

It is well worth stressing that music research is conjoined to linguistic conventions that refer to and even subvert identifications of gender. Rules in language, grammar, terminology, tropes, and meta-narratives are integral to gender research, and this calls for some reflection on the etymology of gender. Designating ‘kind’, ‘sort’, or ‘type’, gender emanates from the Middle French (1340–1611) and Anglo-Norman (1066–1204) gendre.20 Grammatically employed to 3

Stan Hawkins

designate masculinity and femininity in the first instance,21 gender has gradually shifted its usage within social and psychiatry studies22 to its inclusion in feminist discourse from the mid-1970s onwards. By the end of the twentieth century, the term was widespread in the social sciences and humanities, designating a vast research area that distinguished itself on the basis of a feminist discourse. Subsequently, with the emergence of popular music studies in the 1980s, feminist theory converged on the study of social, cultural, and gendered subjectivities through music production and expression.23 For the purpose of this anthology, visiting the term ‘popular music’ is equally important. A number of books have attempted this with some degree of consensus.24 In Understanding Popular Music Culture, for example, Roy Shuker claims that “a purely musical definition is insufficient, since a central characteristic of popular music is a socio-economic one: its production for a mass, predominantly youth, market”.25 More precisely, Shuker regards the employment of ‘music’ in popular music studies as “a shorthand for the diverse range of popular music genres produced in commodity form” primarily geared towards an Anglo-American market. Whether recorded, mediated, or documented, popular music needs to be historicised: we tend to ask of the recording when was it performed, recorded, and mixed, and, moreover, by who and for whom? A common assertion in popular music research is that musical styles connote gender. Yet, styles and idioms abound with frictions and anomalies. Derek Scott, in considering “the implication of older arguments about some forms of rock”, has observed that “this music and its performance can also be analysed as a configuration of signs that connote machismo”.26 Indication of this is found in musical styles produced by female, transgender, and queer artists, where structures of identity have to be measured against social groups and communities, individuals, regions and nations, and cultures. In turn, this begs a range of questions relating to context, time, and history. On this note, thinking relationally is based on the act of comparison,27 something gender studies purports to when interpreting norms as they are (re)produced and perpetuated in culture. In recent years, a relational approach has emerged in the research fields of men’s studies, as well as LGBTQ studies and women’s studies.28 As a main objective, such studies critique the regulatory process itself, acknowledging that gender is produced in the service of all forms of patriarchal control. In structuring norms and values (by which certain individuals are subordinated), gender becomes a key agent for distinguishing individuals and groups relationally. Nadine Hubbs has explored the implications of institutionalised subordination in a non-heterocentric survey of American modernist composers.29 Set against the backdrop of American modernism, her studies show that musical style functions as a powerful device for connoting gender and sexual identity. Inspecting the perceived sociosexual differences that are suffused in narratives of homophobia, Hubbs exposes the queer-effacing views that perpetuate myths and grand narratives of cultural and social production, as much as reproduction.30 At all times, gender is institutionalised and integral within structures of power. This tenet forms the foundation of Marion Leonard’s book, Gender in the Music Industry, which situates the rock discourse of indie rock female-centred bands from the US and UK and the gendering of their performance traits and practices.31 In scrutinising the tendencies amongst female performers to negotiate their gendering of rock, Leonard usefully pinpoints a unique, gendered system in operation, specifically in the domain of music journalism, promotion, and production.32 To date, postmodern theories have underpinned the critique of gender roles in popular music. Yet, some postmodern theorists have re-inscribed the very essentialisms they intend to deconstruct, proof enough that working out the gendered subject’s political reach and transgressive potential remains a complicated facet of pop music scholarship. Interpreting 4

Introduction

drag, for instance, discloses the failings and inadequacies of heterosexual disciplining while simultaneously getting us to re-imagine normative constructions of gender. Non-normative experiences of gender are too seldom dealt with, with few labels and names at our disposal for describing how gender is done differently or subversively. In this sense, drag is a stark reminder that gender only becomes subversive when things are unpredictable.33 Frequently, in popular music this is manifested in the act of parodying an inner essence or abiding self. Such a conception of drag is commonly supported by the Butlerian idea that hegemonic conceptions are conditional on doing gender.34 So, if drag denaturalises gender norms, it resists the institutional constraints placed upon the body. Moreover, it intimates displacement by resignifying gender identity. Thus, the arbitrariness of the male/female norm becomes in itself a mechanism for disclosing and disarming regulatory social conventions. This brings us to the matter of tactics of queering and queer theory. Coined by the feminist Teresa de Lauretis in the early 1990s, the term ‘queer theory’ pertains to the study of queerness. Now firmly embedded within popular music research, queer theory is concerned with the recognition of queer sexualities, identities, sensibilities, and diversities. Jodie Taylor describes how queering “has become a widely accepted hermeneutic in many fields of cultural, philosophical and social inquiry”.35 For Taylor, the value of studying queer subjectivities lies in the potential for multidisciplinary theoretical work, enabling scholars “to approach the study of queer subcultures and popular musics from one discipline (e.g. cultural studies, sociology, musicology, anthropology)” while still imbibing “knowledge from other fields”.36 Recent intersections between queer theory and music interpretation indicate the emergence of a vibrant research area that provides a direct line into problematising (as much as celebrating) diversity and normality in music.37 By constituting a system for recognising the configurations of identity on a global scale, music helps shape our overall impressions of the dissident gendered subject. Historically, popular music’s own narratives of emancipation, tolerance, and liberation chart the oppression of LGBTQ people. Albeit predominantly in the form of recordings, music compels us to ask about gender, race, and class in ways that feel far more than just an intellectual exercise. For some time now, popular musicologists have grappled with the interpretive process and what criteria we impose on analysing music. In his book, Song Means, Moore states: “indeed, I find a more realistic (and acceptable) definition of analysis to concern the issuing of an invitation to hear a particular sample of music in a particular way”.38 Undertaking any form of music analysis requires, “first, asking of a musical experience questions like what, how, and why; and, second, asking questions of value, effectively analysing whether a particular aesthetic is achieved”.39 Obviously, assigning meanings to music cannot bypass the persona or what Moore describes as the ‘personic environment’.40 Yet, there are limitations here. Although Moore acknowledges that relevant data is required for evaluating aesthetic properties – vocality and studio production; audiovisuality; emotional charge and affect; stylistic enterprise; agency and engagement; words and lyrics – he veers from the details of gendered subjectivity in his music analyses. Surely, identifying musical experiences in the gendered subject is a logical precursor to fathoming out aesthetic properties in music? So far much has been written on ‘authenticity’ in popular music (my use of quotes here concedes to the complexity of the term and its exhaustive excavations), and Frith’s argument for distinguishing the ‘real person’ from the performer and song’s protagonist has sparked off much debate.41 How do we go about processing vocal immediacy when it comes across as ‘real’? Instinctively, there is a sense that a singer acts out a role or deliberately seeks to impersonate.42 One’s impressions of an artist or band’s persona are predicated upon narrativity and idiolect. More importantly, all musical communication is charged with some degree 5

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of credibility. In order for the analyst to calculate the complex facets of the musical persona, the gendered voice is a useful starting point; its location in a production or performance grounds an audio-imagery presence. All in all, then, it is the voice that enacts gender; an image is provoked in the mind, in some form or other, every time we make sense of vocality. At the turn of the millennium, Richard Middleton claimed that feminism had “insisted most urgently on the inescapable plurality of meanings available for all pop songs, and in particular on the need to excavate the discursive architecture of the text”.43 Scholarship in popular music studies today tends towards this approach.44 Generally it is accepted that gender performativity is far more than a matter of being or becoming; it is rather a way of embodying an order.45 We know that performances draw their authority from established practices that have a regulatory effect, as much as a creative means of gendering the body. The narrative workings of performance demonstrate this constantly in social and cultural contexts where embodiment gains political significance. Indeed, the distinction between the performed and the performative is integral to comprehending embodiment in relation to gender ontologies.46 Invariably, impressions of gender are construed in the form of fantasies and pleasures in popular music. This in itself tests the stability of our own identities as fans and listeners.47 Such an assertion is borne out by critiques of gay and lesbian subjectivities and in the politicisations of queerness in musicology.48 The first collection of musicological essays – Queering the Pitch (1994) – signified a bold step forward in its attempt to engage with a queer epistemology that drew on the plurality of sexualities, genders, ethnicities, and nationalities in all genres of music.49 One of the main forerunners for considering gender across a spectrum of genres, it showed us that the act of queering is a political process, and that all gender performances are culturally and politically charged. Most of all, Queering the Pitch paved the way for Queering the Popular Pitch (2006), a collection that shifted focus from Western art music to popular music. While its predecessor engaged with new gay and lesbian musicology, Queering the Popular Pitch was less fixed in its objective, applying queer studies to popular musicology in ways that addressed the multiplicity of queer sensibility. Invoking new methods for considering people of diverse sexualities, genders, race, ethnicity, and nationality to express themselves when engaging with queerness, the essays in this collection drew on popular music studies, ethnomusicology, Hispanic studies, religious studies, English, and cultural studies. They acknowledge that there is no simple way of looking or listening; gender evolves as a site of contest that refutes polemics in many arenas.

Themes and guises As the contributions in this anthology attest to, gendered performance is integral to understanding celebrity culture in all its curious guises. The ‘cult of the celebrity’ has been a common source of intrigue in popular music studies. Per definition, a celebrity is someone famous and accessible to multitudes of people. A celebrity makes claim to his or her own place in the industry by crafting a unique persona that is rooted in gendered performance. In Performing Glam Rock (2006), Philip Auslander advances this idea through seeking out the mechanisms of gender and sexuality in performance. Examining structures of authenticity alongside queerness, homosexual ‘panic’, and ‘destabilised’ gender roles, Auslander turns to gendered meaning in texts, genres, styles, structures, and discourses. In addition, he addresses the formative dialogue that establishes the boundaries of human agency in musical performance. Similarly, a number of other scholars have pondered over the resignification of gender norms in new contexts. Recent developments in the public recognition 6

Introduction

of transgendered and intersex movements, and their legislative changes, have resulted in a broader awareness of the gains and benefits of difference. For instance, popular music is commonly staged through what I have personally theorised as genderplay.50 This refers to the antics of a singer’s persona, musical idiolect, and strategy in performance. Staging the voice is all about corporeal presence and active participation, involving gestures and emotions that are assembled through highly mediated productions in the form of a personal event. Genderplay in the name of entertainment can enable us to imagine ourselves and others differently. Moreover, through new modalities of gender we are obliged to constantly review the restrictive politics that shape our past. Gender regulation is firmly instituted in our everyday social and cultural contexts. This might explain why the immanence of the norm is often opposed in popular culture (as demonstrated by the interdictions often waged against public figures in the wake of their indisputable triumphs). Reconsidering what lies outside the norm remains one of the most critical aspects of gender research. Butler has stated: “To be not quite masculine or not quite feminine is still to be understood exclusively in terms of one’s relationship to the ‘quite masculine’ and the ‘quite feminine’”.51 It is a restrictive regulation of gender binaries that naturalises and individualises. Hence, the potential for disruption, which is omnipresent in all contexts. At the time of publishing this anthology (2017), a spate of celebrities has attracted international attention on the basis of their gender difference: Ruby Rose (actress and recording artist who stated she did not identify as any gender, while still being alright with the use of female pronouns), Conchita Wurst (drag queen and pop artist, who won the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 and insisted on male pronouns to describe himself but female pronouns to describe his Wurst character), Caitlyn Jenner (Olympic athlete hero who transitioned from man to woman in his sixties), Jaden Smith (Will Smith’s son, a rapper and actor, who at sixteen appeared in gender-fluid tunics and dresses), Miley Cyrus (international pop star, who declared she did not relate to being a boy or girl), and Laverne Cox (LGBT advocate and actress, the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy Award). In the media, disparaging and malicious comments have sprung up; a case in point is Alex Macpherson’s article, ‘Gender fluidity went pop in 2015 – and it’s not just a phase’.52 Proclamations that gender fluidity is a scam, with sarcastic jibes and quips about pop stars appropriating Otherness, as well as opinions that all this is only a ‘phase’, vividly magnify the prejudices that prevail in society. Structurally, this volume comprises five parts: 1) Masculinities, femininities, community, and transcultural practice, 2) Audiovisuality, sex(uality), women, and the politics of looking, 3) Vernacular soundsworlds, narratives, and stardom, 4) Gender, race, and the female celebrity, and 5) Challenging hegemonic practices: New masculinities, queerness, and transgenderism. In each their own way, the chapters consider emerging patterns of gender representation in popular music through the establishment of instructive discourses. Along the way, the reader will encounter gender as a system of empowerment, a form of social organisation that institutionalises femininity and masculinity. Debating the problems of defining gender research in popular music involves robust methodologies. Accordingly, a common goal is to inquire into the politics mediated by performance practice and gendered subjectivity, and how and why new gender systems arise. A principal point of departure in this anthology is the positioning of the gendered subject. The rendering of gender through performance strategies is therefore significant in the relationship to entertainment and having fun. More than four decades since the first research into popular music and gender was undertaken, research is still fraught with arguments regarding musical style and gender performance. In Part 1 we ask: how does gender define groups of 7

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people according to specific categories (class, community, age, race, and nationhood)? Frequently, musicians and fans adapt to hybrid styles and cultural practices that are politically charged. Styles can also be linked to subjectivity. By unpacking masculinity, the chapters draw on established theories and approaches from men’s studies, a field which, since the 1970s, has developed as a response to women’s studies and which constitutes an important component of the larger project of gender studies.53 In Part 2, there is a shift in focus, where analytic methods are employed to introduce the politics of the ‘gaze’ from fresh audiovisual perspectives. Research has come a long way since E. Ann Kaplan’s groundbreaking book, Rocking Around the Clock (1987), one of the first postmodern incursions into gender representations in video texts and MTV.54 Her engagement with the phenomenon of the body-on-display in musical performance opened up debates on the politics of looking when experiencing music. It was with Nicholas Cook’s Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998), Anahid Kassabian’s Hearing Film (2001), and Carol Vernallis’s Experiencing Music Video (2004) that inroads were made into identifying specifically the role of popular music in audiovisual contexts, such as film, commercials, and pop videos, within music scholarship. Because pop videos have served as a primary marketing mechanism for songs and performers, they have fostered cultural and communal affiliations on the grounds of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and so on. The studies presented in this part of the book reflect on gender conflict, revolt, and desire within multiple sites of entertainment and pleasure. Gendered vernacular soundworlds and a critical review of stardom is the broad subject of Part 3, with the music industry critiqued alongside the phenomenon of the celebrity. The collection of chapters here concentrates on questions of production and how pop artists and their music are directly influenced by the circulation of copyrighted sounds and images. All the authors consider the star performer and their specific geographical surrounds and the entanglement of gender, music making, and gender politics in the convergences of community and social justice.55 In Part 4, the authors problematise the intersections of race, nationality, and gender. It is the business of popular music studies to identify the intersections of all identity categories, and, in this part, various perspectives are provided on Beyoncé, Erykah Badu, Marit Larsen, and Jenny Lind. Particularly, the disciplining of the body informs us on the sonic signifiers that objectify and promote the female celebrity. Live and recorded performances are aestheticised in ways that titillate. This notion demands reflecting on the complexities of an artist’s agency: how does the body and its personality gain currency through performativity? And, what about the privilege of invisibility in music that results from the normalcy of whiteness and heterosexuality? Accepting that music remains at the core of explaining an artist’s popularity, all the essays provide fitting examples of how imagery structures ethnicity and race by negotiating the terms of authenticity. Intriguingly, pop artists are rendered popular in terms of identification, and the socio-political process involved help ritualise subjectivity on the grounds of sexuality, gender, and race. Part 5 concludes this volume with an investigation of the dissonances between sexuality and gender from a number of perspectives, exposing gender variants outside the heteronormative matrix. Challenging the hegemonic order of gender norms in a straight world proffer a consideration of non-conformity, queer futurity, utopias, and issues of temporality. The authors in this part interrogate the effects of subordination in their bid to explore emerging trends in the social transformation of gender relations. One case in point is the transgender rights movement that has advanced since the mid-1990s when the term ‘transgender’ was first employed to identify people who change their bodies by crossing gender (grooming, 8

Introduction

clothing, and behaviour patterns).56 Music and its performers regularly show us that there are important alternatives in the performance of subjectivities. Gender is never clear-cut. A prevailing issue that is also taken up in Part 5 is musical embodiment. If emerging corporeal realities defy the norm and threaten its chance of survival, then there is a pleasurable and transgressive dimension to the idealisation of musical expression. Indeed, the chapters in this section purport to reveal patterns of gender as they become circumscribed by ethical means, thus establishing new sets of rights for conceptualising a range of cultural divides. Identifying gender and sexual constraints signals hope for a more egalitarian world, where themes of resistance underpin the necessary gender-baiting strategies of activists. Historically, we know that movements of assimilation have not worked for all: today, countless groups of people still feel relegated to a subculture on the basis of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Yet, gender comprises a set of symbols that has different political agendas, thus underlining the urgent need to lift our gaze above the pervasive confines of normality.

Acknowledgments and thanks Any edited volume is a collective project and comes to fruition only through the input of its contributors. Every chapter included in this volume signals a new piece of work; there were no reprints or reproductions included at any point on the way. First and foremost, it is to each of the twenty-four authors that I extend my thanks and appreciation for all the commitment, reliability, patience, and enthusiasm invested in this project. I consider myself fortunate to have worked with such a group of insightful, creative, and pioneering scholars. Many people have contributed to the concept, design, and production of this book. Gratitude goes to the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, for having supported my work and affording me the space necessary for such an enterprise. At Ashgate, Heidi Bishop and her team have encouraged and assisted me from start to finish throughout the process. During 2016 Ashgate merged with Routledge and numerous people deserve thanks for their efforts, including Annie Vaughan, Kerry Boettcher, and Joanna Hardern. Special thanks also go to all the anonymous peer-reviewers of chapters in this book: Philip Purvis, Anne Danielsen, Kyle Devine, Lori Burns, Yngvar Steinholt, Nina Eidsheim, Susan Fast, Fabian Holt, John Richardson, and Georgina Born. In particular, I must express my gratitude to two of my previous doctoral graduates in musicology: Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik, for his assistance in many of the crucial copyediting procedures that went into preparing the manuscript, and Per Elias Drabløs, for his meticulous work on some of the transcriptions included in the volume. Finally, without our students, research of this kind could never be produced. On behalf of all the contributors and myself, I dedicate this volume to all the generations of popular music students, in whatever discipline they have come from, for their contribution to our classes, debates, arguments, and valid intentions to pinpoint gender as a necessary facet of musical performance.

Notes  1 Judith Butler, “Critically Queer”, GLQ, Vol. 1 (1), 1993, 17–32 (21 – author’s emphases).  2 Ibid., 22.  3 The aims and objectives of ‘reading’ popular music are mapped out by Richard Middleton in his introductions to the anthology Reading Pop (2000) and his monograph Voicing the Popular (2006), in which he identifies the main challenges of analysing music and words alongside modes of gendered representation.  4 Allan F. Moore, “Introduction”, in Allan F. Moore (ed.) Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), xix. 9

Stan Hawkins  5 Sheila Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997). Also see Whiteley’s musicological approach to interpreting gender and sexuality in Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2000).  6 This is evident in the surge of publications dealing with gender and sexuality in the journal Popular Music. Since 2000, there are at least fifty articles that are concerned with gender research. Thanks to my visiting PhD student, Sara Arenillas Meléndez, for conducting this survey.  7 Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 123.  8 Ibid.  9 Ibid., 124. 10 See, for instance, Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Helen Reddington, The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007); Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2007); Laurie Stras (ed.), She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolesecnce and Class in 1960s Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 11 Insightful chapters on this topic by Emma Mayhew, Kay Dickinson, and Jacqueline Warwick, are found in Part 3, “Musical Production and the Politics of Desire” in Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, and Stan Hawkins (eds.), Music, Space, and Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 149–200. 12 For examples of this, see the work of scholars, such as Barbara Bradby, Simon Frith, Angela McRobbie, Susan McClary, Susan Fast, Freya Jarman-Ivens, Richard Middleton, Sara Cohen, Marion Leonard, John Shepherd, Sheila Whiteley, Robert Walser, and Jacqueline Warwick. 13 My thanks to Susan Fast for assisting with this somewhat contentious standpoint. 14 In a later essay, “Afterthoughts” (1990), Frith would re-visit many of their original arguments and acknowledge the subtleties of gender categorisation. See Simon Frith, “Afterthoughts”, in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (London: Routledge, 1990), 360–364. 15 Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). 16 See L. Burns and M. Lafrance, Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music (London: Routledge, 2002); L. Burns, “‘Joanie’ Get Angry: k.d. lang’s Feminist Revision”, in John Covach and Graeme Boone (eds.), Understanding Rock: Essays in Music Analysis (New York: Oxford Press, 1997), 93–112; L. Burns, “Meaning in a Popular Song: The Representation of Masochistic Desire in Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Ice’”, in Deborah Stein (ed.), Engaging Music: Essays in Musical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 136–148. 17 Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 18 For various theories relating musicology and identity politics, see Stan Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Matthew Bannister, White Boys, White Noise (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), who provides a cultural and historical examination of indie guitar rock in the 1980s and its specific production by white men; Freya Jarman-Ivens (ed.), Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music (London: Routledge, 2007), for an understanding of the diversity of masculine identities. 19 Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan, Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 3. 20 Originally, this stems from the Latin word genus. 21 Henry Watson Fowler defined gender as pertaining to female and male sex. 22 In the early 1950s, the concept of gender roles was developed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, with the aid of biomedicine to inquire into the case of conflicting biological sex variables. John Money and his two associates, Joan and John Hampson, developed a new theory of human sexual development that led to practices in intersex care management (ICM) and sex reassignment. Subsequently, this has been harshly criticised by gender scholars and intersex patient activists. 23 In the 1990s, numerous studies problematised musical styles alongside constructs of gender, most notably Lisa Lewis, Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University, 1994), Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross (eds.). Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995). 10

Introduction 24 For instance, Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990); David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Simon Frith, Performing Rites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge, 1999); Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 25 Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music Culture, third edition (London: Routledge, 2008), 7. 26 Derek B. Scott, “Introduction”, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate), 15 (author’s emphases). 27 See Neil R. Nehring, Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy (London: Sage, 1997), where the focus falls on a problematisation of postmodernism and the problematic tendencies in music criticism. 28 LGBTQ is a recognised acronym for communities of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people. 29 Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 30 Other important critiques include are found in Ellen Koskoff’s volume, Women and Music in Cross-cultural Perspective (New York: Greenwood Press,1987); Lucy Green’s Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Tullia Magrini’s Music and Gender, Perspectives from the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Pirkko Moisala and Beverly Diamond’s volume, Music and Gender (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 31 Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 32 See Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: MN, 1991), for a theory of gendered subjectivity that demonstrates how literary criticism is invaluable for interpreting gender in music. In her deconstruction of ideologies and aesthetics, McClary shows that musical processes analogous to femininity are commonly found in the works of men. This idea is expanded on by Marcia Citron in Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), where practices, attitudes, and causes for the exclusion of women composers are examined in the ‘received canon’ of performed musical works. In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), edited by Ruth Solie, debates around gender and sexuality within musicology provide the focus on a comparative study of difference. Highlighting the very complexity of gender, Solie advocates an examination of difference objectively rather than dismissing it or indeed capitalising on it. 33 Butler, Critically Queer, 29. 34 Butler’s theories of performativity and gendered identity are indeed open to criticism. Three commentators, for instance, have made claims that Butler’s concept of agency rejects any individualistic interpretation of performativity and, in so doing, merely rotates Foucault’s trajectory on the ‘constitutive subject’. Her theory of performativity is flawed by a “deconstructive understanding of speech acts and an idealist ontology of performative materialisation” (Geoff Boucher, Parrhesia, Number 1/2006, 112–141 [137]). Charges are made that Butler reduces gender to language by insisting that the body is a major constituent of gender. There is a strong resistance to the idea of gender as performed and the treatment of the body as pure text that produces a “stylish nihilism” (Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 283). There is also a troublesome dimension to Butler’s discourse on the transsexual subject and various assumptions that transgender is not only queer but subversive (Jay Prosser, “Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex”, in S. Stryker and S. Whittle [eds.], The Transgender Studies Reader [New York: Routledge, 2006], 57–281). 35 Jodie Taylor, “Claiming Queer Territory in the Study of Subcultures and Popular Music”, Sociology Compass, Vol. 7 (3), 2013, 194–207 (195). 36 Ibid. 37 For examples of this, see Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (eds.), Queering the Popular Pitch (London: Routledge, 2006); Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Freya Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). 11

Stan Hawkins 38 Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 3. 39 Ibid., 4. 40 Ibid., 188. 41 Frith, Performing Rites. 42 See Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London: Cassell, 2004). 43 Middleton, Reading Pop, 12, author’s emphases. 44 The first major collection of essays on queering appeared in the volume Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology, edited by the late Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, and published in 1994. 45 See Alexandra Howson, Embodying Gender (London: Sage, 2005) for a theorisation of the sociology of the body and a useful discourse on embodiment and feminism. 46 Various positions dealing with the unresolved tensions between theoretical studies of performance and performativity are taken up in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker (eds.), Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995). 47 For a well-articulated thesis on the ‘pleasure principle’ in popular culture (in relation to gay freedom), see Michael Bronski, The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 48 One of the first analyses of the ambiguous figure of the opera diva, from a gay male fan’s perspective, was published by Wayne Koestenbaum in his book, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). Cf. for extended studies of Koestenbaum’s theories in popular music studies: Jarman-Ivens (2006, 2011); Whiteley and Rycenga (2006); Hawkins (2009, 2016); Leibetseder (2012). 49 Because of this pioneering book, scholars have been able to adopt a basic tenet of musical identification and authenticity when investigating topics of performance, reception, experience, education, mediation, subjectivity, and agency. 50 See Stan Hawkins, Queerness in Pop Music (New York: Routledge, 2016). 51 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 42. 52 http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/dec/28/gender-fluidity-went-pop-in-2015miley-cyrus-angel-haze-young-thug (accessed 29 December 2015 at 08.56). 53 The musicological response to masculinity has lagged behind somewhat. Insights into masculinity and how it is negotiated, represented, and staged within operatic practice are presented in Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (eds.), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Ian Biddle, Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History (London: Routledge, 2011); Masculinity in Opera, (ed.) Philip Purvis (London: Routledge, 2013). 54 E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 1987). Kaplan’s concentration on the politics of spectatorship established a means for critiquing the viewing, reception, and marketing tactics within the music industry. In particular, her theorisation of MTV as a postmodernist phenomenon raised concerns about the ideological positioning of the gendered subject in a new era of ‘looking’ at gender, race, and sexuality. Despite the breadth of Kaplan’s cogent arguments, her study largely failed to accommodate any serious discussion of the music in relation to narrative strategies and spectatorship. Essentially, her taxonomy of five types of music videos ignored the very music under discussion due to the absence of music-based methodologies. The terms laid out by Kaplan, however, have spurred generations of scholars to address the omissions of this study. Andrew Goodwin’s study, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, published in the wake of Kaplan’s book, signalled a bold attempt in itself to confront the problems of Kaplan’s critique by advocating a ‘musicology of the image’. Alas, Goodwin’s attempts proved to be frustrating due to his own lack of music analytical training. 55 For instance, see Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music (London: Arnold, 2000); Sara Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: beyond the Beatles (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 56 See Riki Wilchins, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (New York: Magnus Books, 2004).

12

PART 1

Masculinities, femininities, community, and transcultural practice Overview Feminist popular music research has long addressed the gendered body in terms of experience, aesthetics, and politics, especially in Anglo-American contexts. Since the 1980s, a range of approaches have cut across disciplinary boundaries to process practices of identification. The debates in this first part of the book set the stage for further exploring the discourses around gender and transcultural practices. One of the leading feminist scholars in popular music studies, Barbara Bradby, starts off with a critical study of a young male superstar. This builds on many of her earlier ideas on the experiences of girls in a context that is historically marked by subordination. Justin Bieber is the focus of attention as Bradby delves into the gendered arrangements at work in a song that is ostensibly a duet (where one male is marginalised while the other unduly elevated). The significance of transcultural flow through a white Canadian male’s duet with an African American artist, Ludacris, in the hit, ‘Baby’, provides an opportunity to revisit the structuring of male privilege within the pop industry. Intriguingly, the agency of Bieber’s predominantly female fans, ‘Beliebers’, is encoded by the heated engagements of the song’s ‘haters’, which transcends the phenomenon of the song itself. Theorising structures of contemporary masculinity, Bradby turns to sociological methods to interpret the meaning of a pop song through a critique that conjoins men’s studies to feminism and identity politics in a groundbreaking approach. Bradby makes the point that advances in technology during the twenty-first century have created new female fan subcultures that lead to questions of what type of transcultural practices enable a pop song to circulate globally and, moreover, enable white, straight males to succeed. Bradby’s study, which also involves music analysis, measures the aesthetic aspects of the song alongside the heteronormative narrative to shed a critical light on gender relations. This prompts a further consideration of homosociality and questions relating to Bieber’s male fans (for he must have them!) and non-fans. Crucially, attention to response is at the core of Bradby’s project, hence establishing a sociomusicological critique that paves the way for the other chapters. Working out power relations in boy bands and male superstars leads us on to the Beatles. Matthew Bannister, in his chapter, observes homosocial tendencies in relation to the early Beatles. By activating the term ‘homosocial authenticity’, this study includes a critique of

Masculinities, femininities, community

the leader of the pack, John Lennon, and his strategies of becoming both the subject and object of desire to his advantage. Bannister, whose writings on white masculinity and popular music in his book White Boys, White Noise (2006) are pioneering, poses the pertinent question: why did Lennon perform so many songs by women when he simultaneously set out to construct a macho image of himself? Although Lennon’s dominance in the group was at its height during the Beatlemania period (1963–1964), this was encountered again between 1965–1969, during the period that led to their demise. Bannister’s study of Lennon turns to the Birmingham School’s subcultural theories to shed a light on the important subject of working-class male gangs. Moreover, he revisits the idea of rock authenticity in the 1960s and the contradictions inherent in homosociality. As such, Bannister’s approach opens up new ideas on the gaze, as he makes the argument for why Lennon ultimately rejected the gaze. Acutely aware of the politics of looking and marketing, a group of mediators managed the Beatles, something Lennon conceded while remaining detached from the process. The remaining on the ‘outside’ dimension to homosociality, understood through subcultural theory, demonstrates Lennon’s own crisis of masculinity and faltering sense of self-identity. Research into the transcultural practices of musicians has culminated in fascinating findings. As well as mainstream popular musicians, minority diaspora populations reveal much about the intricate operational qualities of gender. This is something Sophie Stévance explores through the gendering of the transcultural space by the Inuit singer, Tanya Tagaq. Activating the term ‘transnational’, Stévance accounts for the movement between established customs from the local to the global. As she observes, Tagaq’s performance practice within interrelated contexts emphasises the artist’s play with clichés from both Inuit and Western cultures. We learn from this that the form of katajjaq tradition Tagaq turns to signifies the liberalisation of normative femininity. Through detailed music analysis (coupled with dance interpretation), Stévance shows how Tagaq’s body movements comprise two stylistic universes and different games in the blend of Western pop music and katajjaq. Both these categories imply individual physical challenges, where someone must seduce and win over the audience. Not dissimilar to Björk, Tagaq, as a pop star/female-subject/femaleobject/traditional singer, expresses a female agency that contrasts with the mainstream pop artist as she situates herself within a vibrant global cultural environment. The importance of Stévance’s study of agency is continued and developed from another perspective in the next chapter by Eirik Askerøi, who casts a light on narrativity and ideology in the form of white, heterosexual male identity. This approach builds on methods already outlined in the preceding chapters. Turning to a musicological examination of the artist Johnny Cash, Askerøi discloses a cunning relationship between white masculinity, authenticity, and vulnerability. Above all, the question of age and generations is integral to the artistic creativity displayed in Cash’s late career, notably through his performance of the song ‘Hurt’. In analysing this song, Askerøi discerns a wealth of paradoxes that helps problematise the veneer of authenticity and imagery. Ultimately, it is a narrative of nostalgia that weaves its way throughout the song and video of ‘Hurt’, and this is triggered both sonically and visually. Gendered representations are measured against vocal performance and Cash becomes an exponent for sustaining masculinity by markers of openness and feelings of hurt by virtue of his first person authenticity. All of this is attainable by the symbolic maturity of age and poignancy of death.

14

2 GROWING UP TO BE A RAPPER? Justin Bieber’s duet with Ludacris as transcultural practice Barbara Bradby

Featuring Ludacris: Justin Bieber, gender, and transcultural collaboration I first became interested in Justin Bieber when I heard my students and others denigrating his teen girl fans, the ‘Beliebers’. They were seen as ‘obsessive’, ‘crazy’, and all the other disqualifying words that have been used to describe female fans of popular music over the years (Garratt 1990; Ehrenreich et al. 1992).1 What was different with Bieber’s rise to fame in 2009–2010 was how his fans had been using the new technology of Twitter to promote their star. Alexy Khrabrov and George Cybenko noted their ‘surprising discovery’ of the ‘Bieber ecosystem’ in an early quantitative network analysis of Twitter: “The most influential person in Twitter mentions in our dataset, each day, every day of the study, is Justin Bieber” (Khrabrov and Cybenko 2010, 292). These authors also affirmed the agency of Bieber’s mainly female fans, who engage in “active and incessant manipulation of the pagerank by constantly mentioning each other. . . . The top beliebers . . . trade shouts and create multiple Twitter accounts for focused subgroups, tending them regularly, and team with other top beliebers to do it, positioning themselves at the head of the pack” (Khrabrov and Cybenko 2010, 292–293). The rapidity with which this technology was exploited by teenage girls on a global scale is remarkable, and has had ramifications for how popular musicians must operate. In December 2010, Billboard launched a new chart, the ‘Social 50’, which rates musical artists on their popularity on a series of social networking sites. Justin Bieber is currently No. 1 on this new measure of success (July 2015) and has spent more weeks at No. 1 than any other star. His early popularity was forged as much by his female fans’ exploitation of the social media of YouTube and Twitter as by his own response. Khrabrov and Cybenko collected their data on Twitter in November 2009, before the release of any actual records by Bieber, so that it is plausible to see ‘Baby’ (and the other songs on his first album) as a response to the fan build-up, rather than the other way around. Seen in the context of this mainly female fan subculture, it may seem perverse to see ‘Baby’ as a song primarily about masculinity, and one which takes the form of a dialogue between a younger and an older man. While regularly billed as ‘Justin Bieber’s “Baby”’, the song is in fact performed by ‘Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris’. I call this collaboration a ‘duet’, because there is an interplay between the parts and the voices as highly contrasting 15

Barbara Bradby

audible elements in the song. Most obviously, Bieber sings the verses and chorus in the treble range of an ‘unbroken’ male voice, while in his ‘break’, Ludacris raps in the deeper range of an adult male. In a basic, formal way, then, ‘Baby’ consists of a sung/rapped dialogue between two males about their respective girlfriends, and the age difference signals that the song is telling us something about how boys become men, or the social process of growing up masculine. Yet it is difficult to speak of the two parties to this duet without invoking the background knowledge of another ‘difference’ – their socially constructed ‘racial’ identies as white and black: Bieber is usually described as ‘white Canadian’ and Ludacris as ‘African American’. If these identities manifest within the song as a dialogue between musical genres generally coded white (pop) and black (rap), then again, this involves social and historical knowledge exterior to the song itself, and different listeners may have different narratives through which to hear such a ‘duet’. Some, for instance, may suspect the expropriation of black creativity by a white pop music industry; others may view black style as ‘cool’, giving credibility to a ‘bubblegum’ performer (Smith 2014). Since the launch of ‘Baby’, Bieber has benefitted from a string of collaborations with African American and Caribbean musicians and rappers.2 What is more, these are popular online: if his YouTube song-videos are listed by ‘most viewed’ to date, then three out of the top five, and ten out of the top twenty, involve such collaborations. It is in this context that ‘Baby’ can be seen as a performance of masculinity (which, though ‘homosocial’ in form, is overtly heteronormative) involving a transcultural journey where one culture is translated into, and perhaps ‘assimilated to’, another. If one looks at how the song ‘Baby’ has been talked about and attributed in various public contexts, however, there is a notable tendency towards the invisibilisation of Ludacris’s part in it. The title of the Wikipedia page on the song (the first item in a search for it) is ‘Baby (Justin Bieber song)’. Similarly, the first seven results of my Internet search for ‘Baby lyrics’ all mention Justin Bieber; and not until result 35 do the words ‘feat Ludacris’ appear. While the official sheet music of ‘Baby’ of course credits Ludacris and includes his publishing rights and a transcription of his part in the song, one must pay to download this, and there are many ‘free downloadable’ versions of the sheet music of ‘Baby’ available, which completely omit Ludacris’s part. I have seldom found any mention of Ludacris in the comments under the YouTube video of the song, though one mention of Ludacris in a discussion of the song’s meaning on another site is examined below. The one consistent area of exception to this invisibilisation of Ludacris is in the music press reviews of the song, where he is invoked to give ‘credibility’ to the song (see below). This inequality of representation raises the issue of the ‘featuring’ of artists in the works of others, which has become an increasingly common practice of contemporary pop culture.3 The current Billboard Top 20, for instance (accessed 10 July 2015), contains nine songs that involve collaborations between artists, seven of them involving the ‘featuring’ phraseology. While there is much diversity in genre and identity among these collaborations, there are two in the top three which conform to the ‘white artist featuring black rapper’ format (Taylor Swift Featuring Kendrick Lamar in ‘Bad Blood’, David Guetta Featuring Nicki Minaj, Bebe Rexha and Afrojack in ‘Hey Mama’). In the history of ‘featuring’ in the pop world, it is perhaps the gendered division of labour between voices that is the more constant feature, and it is particularly common to find the guest appearance of a male rapper, who provides an interlude, or break, in an otherwise female-sung R&B or pop style song. While Eminem provides a precedent for a young white male artist achieving collaborations with the top African American musicians of his day, this could be seen as closer to the collaborations between male rappers that reflect the duelling origins of rap as a form. Justin Bieber, on the other hand, does not rap, but sings melody. Against the convention of the male rap/female melody contrast established in R&B-influenced pop in the preceding years, his voice is therefore cast in the female role.4 16

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

Much of the academic literature on rap and hip-hop has been concerned with its possibilities as a genre of resistance, and there has been a warranted fascination with its ‘transcultural’ spread around the world as an oppositional form, a phenomenon that has provoked diverse theories about the localisation and hybridisation processes involved (Mitchell 2001; Pennycook 2007; Osumaré 2012; Sandve 2015).5 However, probably the way in which the majority of people on the globe have heard rap is simply through its incorporation as ‘breaks’ and ‘featured artists’ in the mainstream pop that circulates globally. It is against this background that I raise the question of what sort of ‘transcultural practice’ is involved in the incorporation of a rap break into a global pop hit, in this case, the duet between Ludacris and Bieber in ‘Baby’. Bieber himself has undertaken a migratory journey from where he grew up in Stratford, Ontario, raised by his mother in a Christian environment, to Atlanta in the USA, where he moved in order to work with well-established African American musicians and producers. Or maybe this statement over-emphasises his own agency, and it would be fairer to stress the way Usher actively adopted him as protegé,6 or Tricky and The-Dream chose to produce ‘Baby’, so giving more agency to the black superstars who have worked with Bieber. Ludacris (Christopher Brian Bridges) was born in Illinois in 1977 and came to Atlanta at the age of 9, releasing his first LP, Incognegro, in 1999. Four of his subsequent albums have gone to No. 1 in the USA, and he has featured and been featured on tracks by many of the hip-hop and R&B aristocracy. If there is something ‘transcultural’ in the way white-identified pop engages with black-identified rap in the song, ‘Baby’, it is not just because of the migratory journeys that converge on Atlanta, but because there is translation of one genre into another and a dialogue between them in the song, which may also be typical of the multiple ‘x featuring y’ attributions of contemporary pop song. While ‘Baby’ references past black-white relations in rock and roll in various ways, it also transcends this history and makes visible a new respect between people and genres constructed along racial lines as ‘white’ and ‘black’. The playful nature of the relationship between the two performers (for example, Figure 2.1 shows the ‘headlock’

Figure 2.1

Justin Bieber held in ‘headlock’ by Ludacris, still from the video of ‘Baby’. 17

Barbara Bradby

with which Ludacris at one point holds Bieber, a well-known still from the video) is strikingly different from, say, that which Bono of U2 established with B.B. King in the 1980s, and in itself seems to point to some relaxation of the weight of historically racialised identities in the North American music business. Nevertheless, in the world outside and the reception of this song, it is Justin Bieber who is the credited star and the focus of attention. Ludacris remains a ‘cameo’ inserted into his scenario, his song – a ‘featured’ artist who, while well-known as a rapper, would not have the global popularity of a pop singer like Bieber without this break. In what follows, I explore how analysis of the song itself can elucidate this relationship between white Canadian Bieber and African American Ludacris. Methods of song analysis remain a matter of much debate. Dai Griffiths, for instance, sees the methodology set out in Allan F. Moore’s Song Means (Moore 2012) as uncomfortably suspended between his rich descriptive musicology of popular recorded song and an extreme ‘relativism’ with regard to interpretation of songs (Griffiths 2012, 397). Personally, I welcome Moore’s embracing of this dichotomy, particularly in his acknowledgement of the subjective basis of his own ‘objective’ descriptions (e.g. Moore 2012, 302). I find it more problematic that he locates interpretation solely within the individual listener, who relates the ‘act of listening’ to a series of past listening experiences, and since “no two listeners’ experiences are identical”, then “exactly what meaning a track has is only for an individual listener to determine” (Moore 2012, 163–164). I am more interested in how listeners create meaning in dialogue not simply with their own pasts, but with other listeners, and in a social basis to interpretation that is not ‘subcultural’ in a deterministic way (Moore 2012, 164, 284) but intersubjective in the sense that Alfred Schutz set out in ‘Making Music Together’ (Schutz 1976). In later sections, I offer some descriptive musical analysis of aspects of the song, but I do so in dialogue with the interpretations already put forward by others, in the mediated conversations of fans and music critics. While Moore objects that fan-posts and music journalism often make interpretations “without adequate anchorage in the details of an actual aural experience of the song” (Moore 2012, 5–6), I hope also to show that in small ways, we can see fans relaying and analysing their listening experience in their conversational posts about the song.

The fans versus the haters: Bieber in the mirror There are currently about 5½ million comments under the song ‘Baby’ on YouTube, and in this vast online ‘conversation’, the topic of ‘hating’ is discussed on an ongoing basis that could be seen as ‘reflexive’. Hating is challenged by fans, and by others who claim indifference and are surprised by its virulence. Haters themselves chat about coming on to the site just to ‘dislike’ the song. Fans in turn send out challenges such as ‘Who’s a belieber in July 2015?’, and the number of replies received, which is listed under each YouTube comment, acts as a kind of ongoing voting system, against others who challenge people to ‘dislike’. It is a fact well known to commenters that ‘Baby’ is the song with the most ‘dislikes’ on YouTube, and the ongoing process of challenge and counter-challenge ensures that the number of ‘dislikes’ keeps on growing. In a recent sequence of comments about these numbers of dislikes, one commenter (MrKrepan, below) gives an interpretation of the numbers in terms of gender: Sherlyn Selwyn 6 days ago 1,196,657,325 views 3,188,314 likes and 4,919,657 dislikes I’m dead. Joey Drago 4 days ago Ok who are the 3 million likers if you like Justin I just want to strangle you 18

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

MrKrepan 3 days ago (edited) Likes – Girls – 3M Dislikes – Boys – 4M (or not) #Boys always won (Comments under ‘Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris’, YouTube. Accessed 11 August 2015)7 I have no way of confirming or denying this speculation about the gendering of likes and dislikes, but I take it as indicative of a wider discourse that says that only girls could like Bieber. My impression from various visits to the comments under ‘Baby’ over the years is that many of the commenters with male-sounding monikers go on the site in order to ‘dislike’ Bieber and the song (as in the above sequence where the defender of Bieber is Sherlyn, a female name, and the apparent ‘haters’ are Joey Drago and MrKrepan, both male-sounding monikers). However, some people with male-sounding monikers also defend Bieber, or attack the ‘haters’, and some people with female-sounding monikers join in the hating. If we go along for the moment with MrKrepan’s speculation that the ‘dislikers’ on the ‘Baby’ site are boys, then we can explore how this gendered dislike takes form in relation to the song, and how it is that the African American collaboration in this song failed to register as ‘cool’ (or perhaps to register at all) with boys like him. Below are excerpts from an episode of ‘hating’ from the time of the song’s release, which occurred in response to a question on the Yahoo! Answers site, from 25 January 2010:8 “What is the meaning of Justin Bieber’s new song Baby?”9 The poster asks for help with her homework, as her teacher has said they can choose a pop song to write about as poetry. Before she receives any serious answers, she is inundated with ‘hating’ messages, and herself posts two ‘updates’ berating the haters and criticising their homophobia. While some of the ‘hating’ comments simply laugh at the idea that the song is poetry, the majority of them involve an ‘ageist’ accusation that the singer is too young, and some of them do this by appealing directly to the title/lyrics of the song, and using ‘baby’ as a term of abuse:10  It means that he looks and sounds like a baby. hockeyfight· 6 years ago  omg gay. he prob didnt even write it . . . i hate when little kids sing about love and stuff. HAH Ivove · 6 years ago  this kid is the biggest fag ever. it means he is a baby 2. i cant wait til’ he actually hits puberty and his voice starts crackling up on stage. no.99385935 · 6 years ago  who knows. that kid is too young to be writing about love, and his voice doesn’t help. he sounds more like a girl than a six year old! sit down. stand up. · 6 years ago (Comments in answer to ‘What is the meaning of Justin Bieber’s song Baby?’, Yahoo! Answers website)11 In these comments, the song is reduced to its chorus, and the chorus-line, ‘baby’, is seen as merging with the person of the singer. The age-ist abuse revolving around the singer’s voice involves also homophobia and misogyny: calling Bieber ‘baby’ merges with feminising him in a derogatory way, as either gay, or a girl. This recalls work on the anthropology of 19

Barbara Bradby

manhood, where David Gilmore has pointed to “the constantly recurring notion that real manhood is not a natural condition . . . but rather a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds” (Gilmore 1990, 11). Now clearly, ‘gay’ is used by young people today more widely as a term of abuse than as a literal reference to sexual orientation, but its use as ‘childish, silly, inauthentic’ only reinforces the age-ism that is the commonest discourse of abuse in these ‘hate’ comments. The use by commenters of the actual word ‘baby’ is itself a form of song interpretation, with close synonyms like ‘kid’ reinforcing this meaning in the discussion. Since the chorus and most of the verse lines of the song address a second person ‘you’, who is the same as ‘baby’, the listener who is keen to avoid being addressed in this way finds a ready way of ‘disabusing’ the singer of the reference by mirroring ‘baby’ back as a term of abuse. As it happens, in the comments above, the two that mirror back ‘baby’ in this way both appear to come from boys (they have male cartoon faces). That girls also join in the denigration of Bieber on age grounds is exemplified by the second comment, from ‘Ivove’ (who has a female cartoon face), though her language is notably less abusive and instead shows concern about the sexualisation of children. We may infer that the fourth commenter is a boy, from his use of ‘girl’ as a term of abuse. The three ‘boy’ commenters here (and several others whose language was too offensive to include here) lend some plausibility to MrKrepan’s gendering of fans and haters; but more importantly, their aggressive throwing back of the word ‘baby’ in Bieber’s face appears as a defensive declaration that they are not the object of another boy’s desire. Fans’ construction of meaning from the song may therefore be seen as formed in opposition to a barrage of abuse from ‘haters’, who are more like ‘negative fans’ than ‘outsiders’, since they are not disinterested – they know the song, or at least its chorus, and interpret it, albeit with different results in relation to their own subjectivities. However, as Al Cohen classically observed, exclusion and denigration only serve to create solidarity among members of the despised subculture; it is as if they are a necessary ‘grist to the mill’ to formulate and defend subcultural values (Cohen 1997).12 So, how do fans respond? One way is by a ‘realist’ interpretation of the lyrics in relation to the singer’s person, which can be found in a post responding to the ‘homework’ question posted on Yahoo, where it appears as ‘best answer’: Best Answer: i think its kind of about caitlin beadles. i mean, don’t hold me to it. but if you put all the facts together it seems like it. or its atleast about one of his ex-girlfriends. i think this because justin says“Are we an item? Girl quit playin’ We’re just friends, What are you sayin’ Take another look right in my eyes13 My first love, broke my heart for the first time” like whenever ludcris says- “when i was 13, i had my first love.” and i think we share the same love for justin. i’m soooo in love with the kid. ? · 6 years ago (Comment under ‘What is the meaning of Justin Bieber’s song Baby?’, Yahoo Answers web site)14 Here, the song is interpreted by quoting lyrics15 (the second verse of the song) and relating them to the singer’s biography and an ex-girlfriend as known through social media. The lines quoted 20

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

also neatly embody the core meaning of the song, since they chart the transition from the apparent conversational style of the ‘scenario’ of wooing back a girlfriend (“Are we an item?” etc.) to the minimal ‘story’ line of the song, “My first love, broke my heart for the first time”.16 The commenter’s misquote of the line before this, which she hears as “Take another look right into my eyes”, very plausibly provides a transitional ‘bridge’ between the direct address to ‘you’/the girlfriend in the preceding lines and this ‘story’ line directed to the external audience. The commenter then omits the famous chorus entirely and directly juxtaposes the story line of Bieber’s song with the first line of Ludacris’s rapped break (“When I was 13, I had my first love”). Her selection of lines from the song is itself an interpretation of the song as a dialogue between the two men, where they exchange stories about ‘first love’ and girlfriends. Her addition of the words, “It’s like whenever Ludacris says”, indicates that she sees Ludacris’s story in the break as illustrating and confirming Bieber’s minimal story in the song. Interestingly, in light of the major part that Bieber’s ‘scenario’ with his girlfriend plays in the song, she interprets this as in the past (“Caitlin Beadles or one of his ex-girlfriends”). This rather closed reading of the conversation enacted in the song leaves an opening for her to declare her own love for him in the final line of her post. A second way in which fans interpret the meaning of the song in the midst of the barrage of hate mail that surrounds Bieber’s online presence is exemplified by a post from ‘Helen Here’, visible at the time of writing17 on theYouTube site of the song: Helen Here You know you love me . . . (Comment posted 11 August 2015 under ‘Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris’, YouTube)18 In this post, Helen simply quotes the lyric of the first line of the first verse of the song (‘You know you love me’) followed by an ellipsis ( . . . ). The short comment is enigmatic, perhaps intentionally so. However, the reading likely to be taken by other commenters is that Helen is singing her love for the singer by repeating his words of love back to him, cleverly implying that she was the ‘you’ addressed by the singer’s words. Her moniker ‘Helen Here’ also puts herself in the moment of answering a phone call, as it were, from Bieber. And since the lyric implies that the singer or speaker knows the second person’s emotions better than they do themselves, she is able to point this slightly accusatory, persuasive speech-act back at Bieber (‘you know you love me’). The three dots of the ellipsis are ambiguous. They can be taken as standing for ‘and so on’, and pointing to the rest of the verse that is left out; or they can be taken to imply a dream-like reverie on the part of the singer/speaker, as if the words were fading out into humming or a smile. Given the words themselves, implying love and intimate knowledge of the loved one, this second interpretation of the ellipsis seems the one most likely to be taken by readers of the comment. Helen received no direct replies to her post. However, on a different site, Song Meanings, where people discuss the meaning of the song below its lyrics, a commenter posts a reply to comments like hers: I’m also sick of all these fangirls bitching and saying “This song was wrote for me!!!!!11111”. Dears, he doesn’t even KNOW YOU. ( . . . ) This little poser doesn’t give two shits about you, so fuck off and stop complaining. (posted by NoPride, 29/8/2010, on Song Meanings web site, under ‘Justin Bieber – Baby’)19 21

Barbara Bradby

Here the commenter voices a common outsiders’ concern about fan fantasies, in the form of ironic ‘advice’, and also implies that there is competition among fans to be the recipient of the song from Bieber – the one addressed by his lyric. This notion of a competitive relationship to other fans in terms of being noticed by the star is helpful in thinking about the form taken by collective fandom on the Internet and the way in which shouting and jumping at a live concert in the hopes of being noticed above others in the crowd is replicated in online posting, producing mass effects through the agency of individuals in expressing their own fantasy desires.20 Helen’s writing can be understood as another form of ‘singing along’ to the lyrics of the song – surely one of the most common forms of song appreciation, and itself a form of interpretation, in that we hear and remember certain parts of lyrics more than others. Through the contextual placing of these words under his song performance on YouTube, and also by the ellipsis, Helen inflects her written ‘singing along’ as mirroring his words back to the singer. By claiming the singer’s words for her own in this way, she implicitly addresses him as ‘baby’, while receiving the address herself with her ‘Helen Here’ moniker. This produces a mirror-effect where both are ‘baby’ to each other, or it is unclear who is imagining whom as baby. While put to different use, then, the mirroring-back of lyrics is common to both the fans and the haters in their interpretative use of the song. This mirroring is encouraged by the predominant second person (you) address of the verses and chorus of the song, which in the heteronormative scheme of things may be accepted by girls and rejected by boys. If the fans see mainly Bieber in the song, and imagine a relationship with him along lines that recall Lacan’s analysis of the ‘mirror phase’ in a child’s learning of language (Lacan 1977), then this imaginary mirroring is also subject to interruption by the narrative of real life, as demonstrated by the commenter who refers to Caitlin Beadles. In exclaiming her own love for Justin Bieber in the comment, however, the commenter seems to retreat into the mirror phase again and discount the triangular relationship she has just acknowledged is involved. This commenter appears in the position of saviour, or pitying mother, in relation to the young boy whose heart has been broken by his ‘first love’, and we can note that she cites Ludacris’s lyric to confirm her interpretation of the song. However, the song ends with a female chorus singing ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ in dialogue with Bieber’s voice, and this is given a clearer meaning by the ending of the video which shows Bieber walking away from the crowd with the ex-girlfriend. This ambiguity around story and scenario in the song helps the listener to continue the imaginary mirror-love relationship while acknowledging the reality of the triangular narrative. If fans are not going to identify with the girl that has left Bieber, they are going to identify with the one he is trying to win back. In the scenario enacted in the song, these are one and the same, but at fantasy level, there is a triangle, and fans can split the two – the one that left versus the one he is wooing back. Another form taken by this triangle is the competitive struggle with other fans shouting out for attention (signified in online writing by various graphic effects – capitals, exclamation marks, emoticons), which is decried in a misogynistic way by the comment from NoPride. Helen’s comment is clever in that it does not involve any ‘shouting’, just an apposite mirroring of the singer’s words back to him in a way that positions herself as in an intimate space with the singer apart from the crowd. However, Helen avoids any of the third person lyrics in the song. The ‘Caitlin Beadles’ commenter, by acknowledging the wider, third person narrative in which the second person address is situated, seems to rule herself out from such a select space. Indeed, her admission of solidarity with the original poster (‘we share the same love for Bieber’) is an act that achieves community, rather than the singularity that Helen seeks. 22

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

Music critics’ meanings: The narrative of black music The Wikipedia page on the song contains a summary of the music press reaction on its release, under the heading, ‘Critical Reception’, which serves as probably the most publicly visible and enduring critical evaluation of the song. In contrast to the fans, the music critics quoted nearly all downplay or denigrate Bieber’s part in the song and contrast it with the contributions of the producers, Tricky and The-Dream, and Ludacris himself, whose part is variously described as a ‘cameo’ and a ‘matchup’. The following table summarises key words in these review excerpts that mark the contrast between Bieber on the one hand, and his producers and featured artist on the other: Bieber

Tricky, The-Dream

no great departure puppy love tween fan base sweet pop fare

big chorus that works

musical anachronism

Vintage aesthetic, doo-wop catchiest chorus ‘Umbrella’ ‘Single Ladies’ catchy chorus

Ludacris maturity welcome urban twist street cred hip-hop chants

goofy

Two of the review excerpts cited situate the song with regard to the musical styles used (‘doowop and hip-hop chants’) – one evaluating this positively, the other negatively (‘a musical anachronism’, ‘all styles at once’). Auteurdom is attributed to Tricky and The-Dream, but none of the excerpts mentions Bieber as having an auteur or significant performance role in the song. In addition, the table shows the discourses that make race visible in a ‘coded’ way – the references to ‘urban’, ‘street cred’, ‘hip-hop’ in the case of Ludacris, which signal his African American identification via the music and style of hip-hop; and in the case of the producers, the mention of two other massive pop hits for Rihanna ft. Jay-Z and Beyoncé respectively, both produced by Tricky and The-Dream, which remind the reader of their African American location. The contrast in the reviews is always between the maturity/ authenticity of hip-hop and the music coded black, as against the immaturity and vacuousness of that coded white. In the context of the subsequent ‘invisibilising’ of Ludacris, this credibility given by music critics to the African American artists and producers may seem laudable. However, the way in which established black musicians are contributing to the massive global fame of a white star is never problematised in these discussions. The UK musicologist, Clemency Burton-Hill, also picked up on the “doo-wop chord progression” when interviewed three years later about ‘Baby’ (Philipson 2013). Now whether or not they know it by that name, this chord progression is accessible to music fans. Hence, the reviewers pick up on the doo-wop sound of the song, as giving it a ‘50s’ feel, or an ‘anachronistic’ sound. By doing so, they place the song implicitly in a narrative of black US music that stretches back to doo-wop and forward to hip-hop. A similar narrative is implied by Burton-Hill when she mentions Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’, and Sam Cooke’s work, as examples of songs that use this chord progression.21 Now, while I can work out the chords of the Intro to ‘Baby’ as I-vi-IV-V when this is pointed out to me, it was actually because of the melody and the non-verbal Oh’s of the Intro, that I landed on ‘Runaround Sue’ by Dion (1961) when I came to look for the song that the 23

Barbara Bradby

Intro to ‘Baby’ (intensely) reminded me of. I can sing or hum Dion’s melody to myself, perhaps also filling in the onbeat syllables of the backing group (written ‘Hayp, hayp’). If I simulate the pitch of these onbeats, I will be implying the I-vi-IV-V harmonies; but my conscious memory is of the ‘tune’ and the non-words (Wo-o-oh etc.) of the lyric. Again, not consciously because of the harmonies, but because I was looking for parallels for the ‘unbroken’ treble voice of Bieber’s ‘Baby’, I also listened to Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers’ ‘Why do Fools Fall in Love?’, and here again I was struck by how similar the Intro was to that of ‘Baby’. After reading about the ‘doo-wop chord progression’ (Moore 2006, 2012, 278–282; Griffiths 2012), I heard Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’ (1972) by chance on the radio, where the doo-wop chord progression is used to evoke the past of rock and roll nearly 30 years before ‘Baby’. But here again, there is much more than a chord progression that is taken from earlier music, notably a very recognisable tune (sung as a break and as Outro to the song), which gave rise to accusations of plagiarism in relation to Pat Boone’s ‘Speedy Gonzales’ (1962).22 The lyric of ‘Speedy Gonzales’ makes comedy that would be seen as obnoxious and racist nowadays, out of a US view of traditional Mexican

Example 2.1 Justin Bieber, ft. Ludacris, ‘Baby’ Intro (vocal only)

Example 2.2 Dion, ‘Runaround Sue’, Intro (lead vocal only, transposed from D into Eb)

Example 2.3 Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’, Intro (lead vocal only, transposed from F into Eb)

Example 2.4 Elton John, ‘Crocodile Rock’, falsetto break (vocal only, transposed from G into Eb) 24

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

Example 2.5 Pat Boone, ‘Speedy Gonzales’, Intro vocal, sung by Robin Ward (transposed down from A into Eb, rubato rhythms simplified)23

gender roles, and it is in this context that the voice is signalled in the spoken Intro as ‘the plaintive cry of a young Mexican girl’. Above, I have included transcriptions from these five songs, where the similar melodic and rhythmic shapes of the tunes can be observed in a way that seems to warrant the free associations that my mind had made across these songs. (See examples 2.1 to 2.5). In terms of the way in which the music reviews had signalled doo-wop as giving some credibility to the song, it is interesting that the ancestry I have traced in a subjective way leads mainly to songs sung by white artists. Frankie Lymon is the exception here, and this may have provided an intentional antecedent to Bieber’s song in that Lymon was aged 13 when he recorded ‘Why do Fools . . .’ in a high ‘unbroken’ voice, the same age as Bieber was when he first went to Atlanta, and the age mentioned by Ludacris in the first line of his break. However, the most similar Intro, to my mind, is that of Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’, and this song is also more similar to ‘Baby’ thematically, in that it complains about an unfaithful girl, whereas ‘Why do Fools . . .’ expresses rather abstract and adult sentiments about love. If the tune that is almost quoted in ‘Baby’ comes not directly from the street-corner traditions of African American doowop but from its pop appropriations by white singers such as Dion or Pat Boone, then once again it seems that we cannot avoid the issue of white appropriation of black innovation in considering Bieber’s fascination with African American music, musicians, and style.

You, me, and Ludacris: The second and third persons and the second and third beats The analysis of the song interpretations contained in two fans’ online comments has shown that there is a tendency to align the fan fantasy with the second person address of Bieber in the song, while to think about the biographical reality of Bieber’s heartbreak brings in Ludacris’s third person narrative as a framing story. This grammatical difference is one of several contrasts between the parts of the two protagonists, such as melody/rhythm, treble/baritone, song/speech, and slow/fast, which are all mapped onto their identities as boy and man. However, as already indicated, Bieber’s part, both verse and chorus, itself shifts quite subtly between a direct ‘I-you’ address, where the audience is the loved one, and a representation of this address, itself told to the audience as third party in the form of a minimal ‘story’. The ‘Caitlin Beadles’ song interpretation by a fan pinpoints exactly this transition from second to third persons in the song when she quotes the lyrics of verse 2 that lead into the chorus (see above). In the whole of verse 1, the singer had appeared to be talking directly to his loved one, but there is little sense of her presence in the scenario – the sentiments are somewhat pious and could be expressed as inner thoughts in her absence (“You are my love, you are my heart”). In verse 2, the girlfriend is clearly present, and the singer represents her voice within his own speech in line 2: (we might punctuate this, “‘We’re just friends’ – what are you saying?”). Then in line 3, the subject-less insertion of “Said” very tentatively and 25

Barbara Bradby

ambiguously shifts the meaning into a narrative of reported speech in the past (the official lyrics are “Said there’s another and looked right in my eyes”). This shift depends on whether we hear the subject of “Said” as still ‘you’, in which case the line is accusatory (of having no shame about being unfaithful), or alternatively, as ‘she’, in which case we hear it as narrative, addressed to an outside audience and appealing for sympathy. Interestingly, the fan’s hearing combines these possibilities, since her “Take another look right into my eyes” is addressed directly to ‘you’, but is also an appeal for understanding on the part of both this imaginary ‘you’ and the wider song audience. If we do hear this shift to the third person in line 3, then it may retrospectively change the mode of address of the previous six lines (i.e. including verse 1), making them all into a report of past conversations – a shift into representational mode from a presentational one, albeit one where the singer has just played the parts of both himself and the girl he is/ was pursuing. What is clear is that line 4 (“My first love broke my heart for the first time”) completes this shift into the third person and narrative form. The minimalist ‘story’of line 4 is addressed to the audience almost like the ‘moral’ of a fable – it is a line that encapsulates the core meaning of the song, which is appropriately quoted by the fan in her ‘realist’ interpretation in terms of Bieber’s biography, but also picked up in a more ‘subjective’ way by Ludacris when he counterposes his own story of ‘first love’ later on. Crucially, this second/third person ambiguity is carried through into the chorus, with its ‘catchy’ hook. While repeatedly addressing a person directly as ‘Baby’’ (this second person address is confirmed in the final line of the chorus, “thought you’d always be mine”), the chorus is actually introduced with the phrase, “And I was like”, i.e. the singer addresses the exterior audience, putting his address to ‘you/baby’ into a report of direct speech for a third party’. The contemporary colloquial expression “(I was) like” in speech has something like the meaning of inverted commas in written language, or the colon of drama script after a personal pronoun as subject (I, you, etc.). But the phrase also conveys the representational performativity of the speaker’s words. By saying “I was like . . .”, he is conveying that he is performing a representation of past presentations. This representational and performative aspect of the chorus is clear if one listens in conjunction with the video, where there is a direct address to the girlfriend as ‘you’ in Bieber’s part in the song, even if we also get that tinge of appeal to an outside audience to sympathise with his plight. If Bieber’s address shifts ambiguously between second and third persons, and never makes a clear transition to telling this love-story to an audience, this can explain why the fans and haters both tend to stick with the second person ‘you/baby’ address, when they respond to it along conventional, heteronormative, gender lines. On the other hand, a fuller song interpretation, such as that where the fan does consciously try to articulate what the song means, has to quote the first line of Ludacris’s rap to make the core meaning of the song clear, i.e. that this is a boy/man telling a story to an audience about his conversations with his girlfriend. It seems, then, that Ludacris’s rap is needed to clarify the ambiguities of Bieber’s shifting person and address (even as it introduces a new ambiguity of his relationship to the other man). Ludacris’s representation as and of a ‘third person’ introduces a point of triangulation that enables us to escape the ‘mirroring’ effect of the ‘I-you’ address in Bieber’s continued repetition of ‘Baby’. By converting the present ‘scenario’ into past narrative, Ludacris provides us with the perspective of both present and past times that is only possible from this ‘older’ future, which Bieber has not yet reached. But if Bieber is somehow stuck in the present tense (and the final repetitions of the chorus are introduced by ‘And I’m like’, rather than ‘And I was like’ as in the first two) this is a present that represents the cusp of a transition between boyhood and manhood. The performativity of the duet lies in instituting this ‘exchange of women’24 between the two male singers. 26

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

There remains a question about what made the fan quote Ludacris to clarify the meaning of the song, given the almost polarised contrasts between the two musical parts. Remembering that she appeared to be ‘singing along’ as she wrote out the lyrics, it may be useful to explore how the rhythm of Ludacris’s break is inserted into the song. In order to do this, it is worth first thinking about how we might read aloud the first line of the break cited by this fan, if we were not singing along to ‘Baby’. I suggest that we might hear it as notated below:25

Example 2.6 ‘Baby’ rap rhythm 1

However, Ludacris’s rap is in fact written and sounds as if shifted back one whole beat, so that it actually sounds as:

Example 2.7 ‘Baby’ rap rhythm 2

This shift-beat rhythm is set against the piano rhythm that emphasises the first and fourth beats of the first bar in a two-bar riff (the second bar is blank). The effect of this beat-shift is that both syllables of ‘thir-teen’ appear as emphasised, and this emphasis on the third and fourth beats of the bar is continued by the singer in the second bar of the phrase. For the listener, this beat-shift is alternately confusing and exciting, at odds with the keyboard riff, and mysteriously coming together with the singing voice of Bieber at the end of the break, as Ludacris leads him into the final chorus. What is made clear, though, by the continuing riff of the piano part is how Ludacris’s voice occupies the third beat of the bar; and the contrast shows up how this beat was empty in the ‘dialogue’ lines of the singer’s verses, where the voice typically anticipates the second beat with a syncopation, and leaves the third beat of the bar empty, as if awaiting a response from the loved one:

Example 2.8 ‘You know you love me’ 27

Barbara Bradby

In fact, the singer’s empty beat during the verses is continually filled in by a ‘Yoh’ sound from a male chorus/Ludacris on the third beat of the bar – the ‘hip-hop chant’ referenced in the Rolling Stone review of the song (Rosen 2010).26 Such syllabic ‘filling in’ of the empty beats of a syncopated lead vocal may be seen as typical of doo-wop groups also, and so forms a material link between doo-wop and hip-hop. The effect of Ludacris’s occupation of the third beat of the bar, started with these ‘Yoh’s’ and continued in his rapped break, is to imply an answer to the series of questions quoted from verse 2 by the fan in her song interpretation (“Are we an item?” and so on). No longer do we just have a gap (rest) after these questions. The flow of the semi-spoken rap fills in this awkward gap on the third beat of the bar, and so provides a steadying effect in relation to the ‘jerky’ sequence of questions from the singer’s anxious voice. The emotional effect is one of reassurance. However, because the beginning of Ludacris’s rap shifts the beat back one beat, this puts his part seriously ‘at odds’ with that of Bieber, and there remains a puzzle (which was a real one for me as listener) as to how he leads Bieber back into the final repetitions of the chorus. (The chorus begins on the first beat of the bar, which is left empty by Ludacris’s beat-shift.) The first ‘line’ (occupying two bars) of Ludacris’s break, sketched above, is followed by two ‘lines’ (occupying two bars) which appear as ‘double-speed’, since he raps on a continuous ‘patter’ of semi-quavers, contrasting with the quavers and crotchets of the previous two bars. The second of these semi-quaver bars is the only one in the first 13 bars of the rap that occupies four emphasised beats of the bar, including the first beat, thus:

Example 2.9 Ludacris’s break, bar 4

All the other of bars 1–13 have three emphasised beats, generally taking up 3½ beats and leaving the first beat of the bar empty (as in the first two lines sketched above). The continuous patter of this bar performs the lyrical meaning of the absence of any gap between Ludacris and his girlfriend, with the emphasised ‘body’ of ‘nobody’ giving a physical twist to this expression of the continuity of the two persons. After something like a second ‘verse’ of the rap, some semi-quaver bars return, though in the 3½ beat ‘line’ of the majority of the break (bars 10 and 12 of sheet music). At the end of the second of these ‘pattering’ semi-quaver bars, Ludacris slows the rhythm to quavers, and lengthens the ‘line’ so that it occupies four beats, with the last beat of the line occupying the first beat of the next bar (see bars 14 and 15 in the sketch below).

Example 2.10 Ludacris’s break, bars 14–15

He sings three phrases like this, ending in “da-zing”, “a-ma-zing”,27 and “break-ing”, respectively. The third of these phrases (bar 15) is the crucial bar emotionally, since in it Ludacris ‘confirms’ Biebers’ emotional ‘story’ line by breaking with the narrative form and 28

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

expressing his own heartbreak as a present feeling. These two bars are close to a sloweddown, half-speed representation of the first two semi-quaver bars (bars 3–4 of the break). If bars 3–4 expressed the excitement of a physical and personal continuity, then bars 14–15 rework this by slowing it down and acknowledging the heartbreak involved in break-up. Ludacris’s ‘heartbreak’ line leads into the final repetitions of the chorus, by way of the final bar of the break (bar 16) where Ludacris introduces the chorus with the words, “And I just keep on saying”. Following the emotional merging of the two performers, these words merge their identities at the transition of rap into melody. They also make the final performances of the chorus into a kind of ‘present reported speech’, bringing together Bieber’s scenario of the present with Ludacris’s narrative of the past, in such a way that Bieber’s scenario is placed within Ludacris’s narrative and as a performance of it. If Ludacris’s break sets up and resolves a rhythmic puzzle for Bieber, one may expect some change in Bieber’s performance after the break (Bradby and Torode 1984; Bradby 2002). This occurs in the Outro to the song, where Bieber sings repeatedly “I’m gone, I’m all gone”, and a female chorus appears as a third voice in the song, singing “Yeah, yeah, yeah”, as if in response to Bieber’s desire.

Example 2.11 Outro in ‘Baby’

Bieber sings on a beat that remains syncopated – it anticipates the third, fourth, and first beats of the bar. The very last two occurrences of ‘gone’, however, shift to a different note on the third beat of the bar, so giving a ‘steadier’ impression in the last bar of the song. The female chorus, which here supplants Ludacris as Bieber’s partner in the song, sings “Yeah, yeah, yeah” several times to a rhythm which is identical to the first bar of the (two-bar) ‘Bo Diddley beat’, so referencing 1950s black music once again, as that which provides the beat against which Bieber’s anticipations are set. If Ludacris himself has disappeared from the song at this stage (or been ‘assimilated’ into Bieber’s identity), the female voice takes on his role as rhythmic foil to Bieber’s syncopated melody. Bieber’s own singing of his disappearing identity (“I’m gone”) serves as representation of Ludacris’s disappearance also, since the two ‘I’s have merged.

Conclusion: Growing up to be a rapper – masculinity as a transcultural journey As suggested by the beat of the female chorus, Bieber’s lyrical and rhythmic relationship to Ludacris in this song is in some ways similar to Buddy Holly’s relationship to Bo Diddley in the 1950s (Bradby and Torode 1982; Bradby 2002). In both these relationships, there is a portrayal of white adolescent masculinity through reference to an adult alter ego who is African American. In both cases, the boy singer addresses a girlfriend in the second person, 29

Barbara Bradby

as ‘you’, while the adult man tells a narrative in the third person about ‘she’ or ‘my baby’. The adultness of the African American musician is also represented in both relationships by the way in which rhythm – the ‘Bo Diddley beat’ in Holly’s songs, or Ludacris’s rhythmic rapping in ‘Baby’ – is used as a steadying influence on the impetuous nervousness of the white teenage boy. In an interview in 2013, Justin Bieber admitted that he was very influenced by black culture, which he sees as “a lifestyle, like a suaveness or a swag”, but stated, “I don’t think of it as black or white” (Halperin 2013). This denial of real social differences seems implicit also in the song, as if the dialogue were simply two boys exchanging stories about girlfriends. The musical quotation of doo-wop and hip-hop elements, however, tells a different story. Any pursuit of the ancestry of the song leads back to the music of the 1950s, coded black, but also, as we have seen, to its appropriation by white rock and roll in a narrative that seems replayed in some ways by this song. However, in terms of the transcultural journey between white pop and African American rap, the song could be said to mirror relations in the world outside. If the pop industry appears to be almost unwittingly appropriating rap and incorporating it into mainstream pop, then this is not least because some of the most important protagonists in pop are themselves African American and are pursuing fairly mainstream careers. Despite the different political and social climate, there are some parallels here with Brian Ward’s revisionist history of the birth of rock and roll, which, he argues was a “genuinely biracial musical phenomenon” (Ward 1998, 42). Even in relation to the notorious ‘covering’ of black R&B artists’ songs by white performers (such as Pat Boone), he argues that: paradoxically, nothing did more than the cover phenomenon to facilitate a mass market for r&b and extend the opportunities for black artists, writers and entrepreneurs. . . . Resourceful blacks refused to become mere victims and strove to transform an oppressive and exploitative situation into an opportunity for personal and collective advancement. (Ward 1998, 44–45) In terms of gender, the message about women is very different from the 1950s. While it is clear that the girlfriend in ‘Baby’ is the one who is leaving, this is no longer seen in the ‘double standard’ terms of the ‘runaround’ girl, the unfaithful or over-sexed vixen of Dion’s imaginary 1960s world. In Bieber’s song, as in Ludacris’s break, the girls have agency and their choices are respected, not discounted. This recalls the agency of the teen girl fans who used Twitter and YouTube to themselves promote Bieber as a star, this song being in some ways a response to this promotion. In addition, the agency of fans is shown in their ongoing engagement with the song, giving it a continued life online in dialogue with the ‘haters’, who appear as obverse fans in their use of the title/chorus-lyric of the song. Nevertheless, as a performance of a musically embodied, transcultural masculinity, the mutual support between Ludacris and Bieber in the song is remarkably similar to that which Buddy Holly derived from his rhythmic relationship to Bo Diddley. In both cases, there is a homosocial solidarity between men that seems to thrive on the transcultural incorporation of the social difference that is ‘race’ in North America, and particularly through music that is coded black. This similarity still begs the question of why Ludacris’s narrative failed to register as ‘cool’ and reshape the song for the ‘haters’ (if indeed they have listened to the song), and as a partial response, we could note that his narrative is not one of wooing, but of being overwhelmed by his ‘amazing’ first love. If his part in his story seems passive, this recalls the 30

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

negative review quoted on the Wikipedia page, which saw Ludacris’s part as ‘goofy’, a word which one online dictionary coincidentally defines as ‘mildly ludicrous’, but which also has connotations of inadequate self-presentation in relation to masculinity. The massive success of ‘Baby’ is an ongoing online phenomenon which possibly transcends the song itself. Nevertheless, the ‘voting’ for and against takes place on the YouTube site of the song, which, if nothing else, is the originator of the social phenomenon. Since fans clearly listen to the song, even if the ‘haters’ do not, the analysis of the rhythmic relationship of the two main protagonists in the song is relevant to its success. The ambiguous shifts from second to third persons, from scenario to story, and the ‘answering’ of questions on the third beat of the bar, all of which are supplied by the participation of Ludacris, show that he introduces reality, narrative, and difference into the song and enables Justin Bieber to avoid being stuck forever in the mirror phase with his ‘first love’.

Acknowledgment My particular thanks are due to Dave Laing and the anonymous readers of previous drafts of this paper, for their very helpful comments, as also to Stan Hawkins for his unfailing encouragement and meticulous editing, and to Per Elias Drabløs for his professional help with the transcriptions.

Notes  1 A recent example which excited much protest from fans about their portrayal was the Channel 4 documentary, Crazy About One Direction, first broadcast on 15 August 2013.  2 Bieber’s subsequent collaborations with other artists are many. He has ‘featured’ the following artists in songs where he is the lead artist: Big Sean, Nicki Minaj (2012); Drake, Ludacris, R Kelly, Chance the Rapper, Lil Wayne, Future, Big Sean (2013); Cody Simpson (2014). And, he has been a featured artist himself in songs by Chris Brown (2011); Far East Movement, (2012); will.i.am, Maejor Ali, Tyga (2013); Sage the Gemini (2014); Jack U (2015).  3 A useful blog entry lists many songs with rap breaks which were also put out in versions without the rap (Soybel 2013).  4 It might be thought that this kind of collaboration would come under the label ‘pop rap’, but it is not mentioned in Matt Diehl’s survey of ‘pop rap’ (Diehl 1999), and there is a tendency for discussion to focus on those white artists who have been commercially successful in the rap genre, notably Vanilla Ice, The Beastie Boys, and Eminem (Hess 2005; Stratton 2008). The Beastie Boys have also been classed as ‘rap-rock’, which provides another sort of precedent for inter-generic collaboration.  5 Birgitte Sandve writes about Karpe Diem, a duo in Norway whose parentage is Egyptian/Norwegian and Ugandan-Indian/Indian, who are described as a rap group. The declaimed words of rap thus become a musical lingua franca for disenfranchised ethnicities who want to proclaim their Otherness to the dominant white class/ethnicities.  6 Bieber has said in interviews (TJ 2009) that Usher flew him and his mother back to Atlanta for a meeting some time after their first visit there early in 2008 (when Bieber says that he spotted Usher in the car park and ran up to him). Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, states that this second meeting was ‘some months after’ their first visit to Atlanta, and in the middle of negotiations with Justin Timberlake (Herrera 2010; see also Hoffman 2009). Bieber was signed to the joint Raymond Braun Media Group, created by Usher and Scott Braun, in July 2008 (Herrera 2010), which then created a joint arrangement with Island Def Jam, via L.A. Reid (Usher’s manager), to which Bieber signed in October 2008 (Mitchell 2009).  7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4  8 The poster says that her homework “is due tomorrow 1.26.10”. ‘Baby’ was officially released on 18 January 2010, so the post is from one week after its release. The Yahoo Answers site dates the answers and comments as “6 years ago” presumably because I was accessing the site more than five calendar years after the posts. 31

Barbara Bradby  9 https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100125152650AAIOAtE (accessed 11 August 2015). 10 I have selected only some of the less offensively abusive comments here. 11 https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100125152650AAIOAtE (accessed 11 August 2015). 12 While online ‘hating’ is clearly the pastime of a self-selecting minority, there is a continuum between the virulent language of these haters and the denigration of Bieber and his fans by the university students mentioned at the outset of this chapter – similar ideas are expressed in a different language. 13 This line is in fact misquoted by the commenter: it should read, “Said there’s another and looked right in my eyes”. The commenter interprets the line that s/he hears, though, so that this line forms part of her interpretation. Her hearing involves a direct appeal for sympathy by the singer to the outside audience, as introduction to the ‘story’ line that follows. Such an appeal is implicitly there in the actual line, though the actual line is more accusatory towards the girlfriend, the internal addressee of the song. 14 https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100125152650AAIOAtE (accessed 11 August 2015). 15 By ‘lyrics’ I mean words and their musical setting in song. That this commenter is ‘singing along’ in her writing is shown by some of her punctuation, which is not present in the official sheet music, but which reflects the rhythm of the sung lyrics: for instance, the comma she places after ‘love’ in the last line of the verse is not in the sheet music, but reflects the crotchet length of this word contrasting with the others in the line; or the way in which she has separated the two halves of each of the first two lines in writing them out, so exemplifying the gap after each question, command, or quotation of the girlfriend’s words. 16 See footnote 15 for an explanation of the commenter’s punctuation here. 17 The massive number of comments under this song makes it difficult to view past comments on YouTube. One cannot search for comments by date, as far as I am aware. To make ‘all comments’ visible would presumably take too long on small computers. 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4 (accessed 11 August 2015). 19 http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858814416/ (accessed 12 August 2015). 20 The form taken by many posts about Justin Bieber on Twitter is very frequently that of a plea to be noticed, and crucially for a response, which in the social conversation of Twitter is that of being ‘followed’. Two random Twitter posts from different contexts illustrate this: • im not sure if Justin Bieber knows my country but i so wish he could also come to Swaziland and perform since we are also his fans. I love you Justin :) • @OfficialFahlo @justinbieber The Beliebers love Falho are the best that could exist in the universe. Do not ignore me follow me please. ILY 21 These mentions were in the longer radio interview with Paul Mason on BBC Radio 4, ‘Broadcasting House’, 10 March 2013 (which can be heard at https://audioboom.com/boos/1258217-paul-masonsings-justin-bieber). 22 The Wikipedia page on ‘Crocodile Rock’ states that a case was brought to court in Los Angeles in 1974 on behalf of Buddy Kaye, composer of ‘Speedy Gonzales’, but that the case was dismissed and an amicable settlement reached (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile_Rock). However, the Songfacts page on the song states that “no legal action was taken” and also quotes Elton John as saying that “it was a really blatant homage to ‘Speedy Gonzales’” (http://www.songfacts.com/ detail.php?id=2037). 23 There are two different versions of this Intro, both apparently dating from 1962, both put out on Dot records and both featuring on many Pat Boone compilations as uploaded online. This transcription is from the EP version, Dot EP 658, as featured on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=O06je4sixec. 24 This concept was famously used by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his analysis of the world’s kinship structures (Lévi-Strauss 1969), but it is fundamental also to his and others’ analyses of cultural products. 25 My transcription here owes something to Constantin Brailoiu’s theory of ‘children’s rhythms’, but I have not followed his notation method here: for a full explanation see Brailoiu (1984), and for its application to rock music, see Bradby (2002).

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Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ 26 These ‘Yoh’s throughout the song are not notated on the official sheet music published by Hal Leonard Corporation (HL.354056). 27 So Amazin’ was the title of a 2006 album by Christina Milian (Christine Flores), who is a credited co-writer of ‘Baby’.

Bibliography Bieber, Justin, featuring Ludacris. 2010. “Baby.” Island/RBMG, single, from the album My World 2.0. Boone, Pat. 1962. “Speedy Gonzales.” Dot, single. Bradby, Barbara. 2002. “Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!): Mutual Desirability and Musical Structure in the Buddy Group.” Popular Music 21 (1): 63–91. Bradby, Barbara, and Brian Torode. 1982. “Song Work: The Inclusion, Exclusion and Representation of Women.” Conference Paper, British Sociological Association, Keele, April 1982. Bradby, Barbara, and Brian Torode. 1984. “Pity Peggy Sue.” Popular Music 4 (1984): 183–205. Brailoiu, Constantin. 1984. “Children’s Rhythms.” In Problems of Ethnomusicology, trans. A. L. Lloyd, 206–238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Albert K. 1997 [1955]. “A General Theory of Subcultures.” In The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, 44–54. London: Routledge. Diehl, Matt. 1999. “Pop Rap.” In The Vibe History of Hip Hop, ed. Alan Light, 121–133. New York: Three Rivers Press. Dion. 1961. “Runaround Sue.” Laurie, single. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs. 1992. “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 84–106. London: Routledge. Garratt, Sheryl. 1990. “Teenage Dreams.” In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 341–350. London: Routledge. Gilmore, David. 1990. “The Manhood Puzzle.” In Manhood in the Making: Cultural Constructions of Masculinity, 9–29. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Griffiths, Dai. 2012. “After Relativism: Recent Directions in the High Analysis of Low Music.” Music Analysis 31 (3): 381–413. Halperin, Shirley. 2013. “Justin Bieber Reveals Will Smith Counsels Him Weekly in Rare, Raw Interview.” The Hollywood Reporter, 20 November 2013. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ justin-bieber-reveals-will-smith-657535. Herrera, Monica. 2010. “Justin Bieber – The Billboard Cover Story.” Billboard (online version), 19 March 2010. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/959001/justin-bieber-the-billboard-coverstory?page=0%2C1. Hess, Mickey. 2005. “Hip-Hop Realness and the White.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22 (5): 372–389. Hoffman, Jan. 2009. “Justin Bieber Is Living the Dream.” New York Times (online version), 31 December 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/fashion/03bieber.html?_r=0. John, Elton. 1972. “Crocodile Rock.” RCA, single, from the album, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player. Khrabrov, Alexy, and George Cybenko. 2010. “Discovering Influence in Communication Networks Using Dynamic Graph Analysis.” Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing, SOCIALCOM ’10: 288–294. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, 1–7. New York: W.W. Norton. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lymon, Frankie, and The Teenagers. 1956. “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Gee, single. Mitchell, Gail. 2009. “Usher Introduces Teen Singer Justin Bieber.” Billboard, 28 April 2009. http:// www.billboard.com/articles/news/268791/usher-introduces-teen-singer-justin-bieber. Mitchell, Tony. 2001. Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Moore, Allan F. 2006. “What Story Should a History of Popular Music Tell?” Popular Music and History 1 (3): 329–338. Moore, Allan F. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Barbara Bradby Osumaré, Halifu. 2012. The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pennycook, Alastair. 2007. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Abingdon: Routledge. Philipson, Angela. 2013. “Clemency Burton-Hill: Why Justin Bieber Is Like Mozart.” The Telegraph, 10 March 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9920427/ClemencyBurton-Hill-why-Justin-Bieber-is-like-Mozart.html. Rosen, Jody. 2010. “Justin Bieber – My World 2.0 – Album Review.” Rolling Stone (online version), 1 April 2010. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/my-world-2–0–20100401. Sandve, Birgitte. 2015. “Unwrapping ‘Norwegianness’: Politics of Difference in Karpe Diem.” Popular Music 34 (1): 45–66. Schutz, Alfred. 1976. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship.” In Arvid Brodersen (ed.) Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Smith, Darron T. 2014. “The Transformation of Justin Bieber from a White Youth to a Black Man.” Huff Post Black Voices, 2 February 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/ the-transformation-of-jus_b_5900958.html. Soybel, Adam F. 2013. “That’s a Rap: The Obligatory (But Disposable) Rent-A-Rapper Break.” Pop! Goes the Charts, 18 January 2013. https://popgoesthecharts.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/ thats-a-rap-the-obligatory-but-disposable-rent-a-rapper-break/. Stratton, Jon. 2008. “The Beastie Boys: Jews in Whiteface.” Popular Music 27 (3): 413–432. TJ. 2009. Neon Limelight Interviews: Usher Protege Justin Bieber: Accidental Star, 11 August 2009. http://neonlimelight.com/2009/08/11/neon-limelight-interviews-usher-protege-justin-bieber-accid ental-star/. Ward, Brian. 1998. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations. London: UCL Press.

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3 “WHERE WE GOING JOHNNY?” HOMOSOCIALITY AND THE EARLY BEATLES1 Matthew Bannister

Existing academic writing about the Beatles and masculinity focuses on them as a mass-mediated phenomenon; there is little discussion of what happened before they were famous. Both Janne Mäkelä (2004) and Martin King (2013) have written cultural histories of the Beatles, dealing with their fame, their cultural context, and to some degree with masculinity. King argues that the group’s “groomed appearance”, long hair, and “pre-metrosexuality” demonstrate “resistance to formal representations of masculinity” (2013, 62), a monolithic, hegemonic masculinity, for which he references Connell (1987). But Connell observes: “For history to become organic to theory, social structure must be seen as constantly constituted rather than constantly reproduced. . . . Groups that hold power do try to reproduce the structure . . . but it is always an open question whether . . . they will succeed” (1987, 44; italics in original). The resistance model tends to assume the ‘normality’ or inevitability of hegemonic masculinity, when in fact it is an ongoing operation. Masculinity in this chapter is discussed in terms of interactions within male groups, in terms of what men do and how they relate to each other. Mäkelä focuses on John Lennon as a product of the “starnet” – the multiple planes and contexts in which representations of Lennon and The Beatles circulate and the multiple discourses they emerge from, transform, and are transformed by. Masculinity is one of those discourses. But Mäkelä does not discuss the relationships of the other Beatles with Lennon, which are surely significant for understanding their masculinity. Instead, he observes how the group represented themselves, or were represented, as an egalitarian “brotherhood” (2004, 75). But, if this was really the case, then why discuss Lennon separately at all? The answer is simple: Lennon was the leader of the group. The body of writing about Lennon far exceeds that about any other Beatle (Hunter 1978; Coleman 1984; Thomson and Gutman 1987; Goldman 1989; Weiner 1991; Riley 2011). Perhaps this is partly because of Lennon’s tragic demise, although even the circumstances of his death could relate to his perceived ‘leader’ status, given the US predilection for assassination. Mäkelä wants to avoid the problem he identifies in biographies, of psychological speculation, of presuming privileged entry into subjects’ minds (2004, 7). But if patriarchy is about relations “between men” (Sedgwick 1985), and if we accept that these relations occur at all levels, from inter-personal relationships to the mediated contexts that Mäkelä discusses, then there is no good reason to discuss one at the expense of the other, as long as reliable sources are available (Mäkelä 2004, 7–8). Moreover, critically investigating The 35

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Beatles’ ‘brotherhood’ in terms of homosociality can explain the paradoxical co-existence of egalitarianism and hierarchy as typical of the power relations operating in homosocial groups, thus demonstrating how patriarchy is never an accomplished fact, but always a process of contestation. In this chapter, I consider the early Beatles in terms of male homosociality, a hierarchical structure in which men compete together ‘as a team’, whilst simultaneously policing themselves and others against and by accusations of effeminacy (Sedgwick 1985). Homosociality can be conceived as a public manifestation of the familial Oedipal triangular structure, first described by Freud, in which father and child desire the mother, but father always wins (Kilmartin 2004). However, by submitting to paternal authority, the child can gain entry to the father’s world of power and achievement (Easthope 1986, 119–120). Gender theory interprets this primal scene as patriarchal (Connell 1995, 10), arguing that it leads to the formation of hierarchical male-male collectivities in the public sphere, which repeat the triangular Oedipal structure in that relations between men (kinship) are mediated by pursuit of a common goal (Rubin 1975; Sedgwick 1985). Their projection of desire, via the gaze, onto a third party avoids (supposedly) the possibility of homoeroticism, members policing each other hierarchically to exclude effeminacy. The concept of homosociality can be applied to the Beatles as a group or ‘gang’ with Lennon as its leader, but also to cultural forms such as rock music, which actively produce themselves as masculine (Cohen 1997). I term this latter construction ‘homosocial authenticity’: the way that the authenticity of music becomes linked to that of the group who ‘own’ or produce it: “the homosocial group is experienced as a place where men can be authentic, while in heterosexual interaction [i.e. with the feminine or Other] more or less pretence is necessary” (Meuser 2004, 397).

Homosocial authenticity According to Middleton, John Lennon is an “exemplary” figure in the development of rock authenticity, that is, ways of musically distinguishing “genuine from . . . counterfeit . . . honest from false . . . original from . . . copy” (2006, 200), and, I would add, masculine from feminine. “Almost as soon as the Beatles became successful, Lennon was beginning to formulate his creative ambitions [as] a search for the ‘real me’ – ‘John Lennon’ as opposed to ‘John Beatle’” (2006, 200). By the time the band broke up in 1970, Lennon’s revisionism was in full flight as he claimed allegiance only to early rock and roll, the ‘primitive’ origins of the form, which mainly meant African American music, using this as a yardstick by which to measure the Beatles’ creative achievements and failings (Wenner 1980). Middleton shows how Lennon’s sense of authentic self or individuality could only be mediated through a series of Others – his single self was always/already multiple – how can you be yourself and African American at the same time? I would agree with this point, but would also draw some different conclusions. Lennon, now a solo artist (he had just released John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band [1970]), needed to differentiate himself not just from the ‘Beatles phenomenon’, but also from the other Beatles, who received notoriously short shrift from Lennon in this period of re-definition (Wenner 1980). He was denying, in effect, that the Beatles had ever been a group, conflating that collectivity with the media and cultural phenomenon it became, and claiming the individual autonomy characteristic of hegemonic masculinity. But the Beatles’ collectivity was essential to both their early impact and also to the very concepts of authenticity that Lennon was now using to deride his own past. Gould notes that they were “the first . . . group in the history of mass entertainment to elicit the sort of romantic 36

Homosociality and the early Beatles

fascination and identification that defined the power of a star” (2007, 10). The Beatles pioneered the concept of the autonomous, homosocial group which became central to rock ideology – writing their own material, presenting themselves (or being presented) as a unit, but also evolving in an apparently individual, organic manner (Willis 1978, 155). The fact that they were a group rather than an individual helped spawn the utopianism of 1960s counterculture – the idea that authentic community (among youth at any rate) was still possible in an age dominated by rational individualism. But now Lennon was singing: “The dream is over” (God 1970). Lennon’s revisionism falsifies the Beatles’ own history in a number of ways – his insistence on individuality deprecates the importance of the group, and his adoption of a primitivistic myth of rock’s origins reduces the Beatles’ own evolution to a “sell out” of their roots (Wenner 1980, 46). Citing a canon of early rock and roll greats, all male, Lennon apparently affirms the same patrilineage of rock reproduced in many standard rock histories and biographies: “without Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles” (Dafydd and Crampton 1996, 4; Gould 2007, 58–68). However, at the same time, Lennon was also touting a new, feminine influence, namely that of Yoko Ono: “I’m influenced by her music 1000 percent more than I ever was by anybody or anything. She makes music like you’ve never heard on earth” (Wenner 1980, 37). So how could he hold both positions at the same time? I want to answer this question by showing how Lennon’s leadership of the Beatles ‘gang’ allowed him to occupy both masculine and feminine positions as a strategy for advancing the group, and then by arguing that the gang was a ‘magical’ solution (Cohen 2005) to his childhood trauma of maternal abandonment, which he re-enacted in music, both his and others’, listening to and responding especially to female voices. Finally, I seek to show that when he found a replacement (Yoko Ono) for his dead mother, he used her to break up the group that he had started: “I maneuver [sic] people, that’s what leaders do” (Lennon quoted in Wenner 1980, 63). This chapter tracks the development of the Beatles, focusing on the early 1960s, a time when the group were peculiarly open to influence – absorbing and experimenting with different musical styles in response to different audiences. In both music and audience, feminine voices were increasingly prominent, especially girl groups, and this chapter considers whether or how such influences problematize the ‘homosocial authenticity’ of the group. Documentation of this vital phase in the Beatles’ career had been sketchy until Lewisohn (2013) went back to primary sources and revealed a wealth of new information. His research debunks some ‘authenticity’ myths, describing in detail the emergent group’s changing repertoire, how they began to approach songwriting, creating a commercially viable image, and setting up structures and networks which would be essential for success. Lewisohn reveals the early interactions among the Beatles to-be and how they related to their social and cultural environment. As I have already suggested, homosociality is a useful way of understanding these relationships, both in terms of intra-group interactions, in how other influences were dealt with and in how or to what degree these processes relate to musical authenticity.

Meet the gang The Beatles, like many popular music groups, and especially rock groups, can be viewed as a male gang, with John Lennon as their leader. Lennon led gangs of boys from his schooldays onwards (Davies 1978, 25; Lewisohn 2013, 55) and forming a musical group was a logical extension of this (Davies 1978, 36). “John didn’t say ‘I am the leader’, he just led” (Quarry Men member Colin Hanton, quoted in Lewisohn 2013, 105). All new members had to be approved by him, as their ability to contribute to the common goal had to be balanced 37

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against the threat they posed to the leader. Lennon comments on Paul McCartney’s joining the group: Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in . . . or not? To make the group stronger or let me be stronger? . . . It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him in, but he was good, so he was worth having. (quoted in Lewisohn 2013, 132–133) George Harrison, according to Lennon, was: “a kid who played guitar . . . I didn’t dig him on first sight . . . I couldn’t be bothered with him; he used to follow me round . . . it took me years to . . . start considering him as an equal” (Lewisohn 2013, 158). Harrison notes of Lennon: “He was very sarcastic . . . but I either took no notice or gave him the same back” (Lewisohn 2013, 159), showing how in homosocial groups, members must give as good as they get. Lennon was a notorious bully – hitting women (Lewisohn 2013, 208, 241) and men: attempting to ‘roll’ a sailor in Hamburg, assaulting Liverpool DJ and friend Bob Wooler, whom Lennon thought had accused him of being ‘queer’ (Davies 1978, 197; Lewisohn 2013, 381–382). Generally, Lennon was more verbally than abusive: “He’d detect any minor frailty in somebody with a laser-like homing device. I thought he was hilarious, but it wasn’t funny for the recipients” (Lennon’s girlfriend Thelma Pickles, quoted in Lewisohn 2013, 191). He verbally harassed band members Tommy Moore and Stu Sutcliffe (Lewisohn 2013, 311, 313, 420) and incited fights between Sutcliffe and McCartney, and Tony Sheridan and Pete Best (Lewisohn 2013, 374–375, 441–442, 445). Of their first recording in 1958, Lennon confessed later: “I was such a bully I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song” (“In Spite of all the Danger”, [1995]) (Lewisohn 2013, 178). However, intimidation is not enough. To become gang leader also requires charisma. Lennon styled himself as a Teddy boy – a simultaneously intimidating and fascinating persona. McCartney has said: “We looked up to him as a sort of violent teddy boy [sic], which was attractive at that time” (Miles 1997, 49); “I wouldn’t look at him too hard . . . in case he hit me” (Lewisohn 2013, 130). At the same time, “I idolized him” (McCartney, quoted in Gould 2007, 45). One gets the impression of these developing relationships as a complex system of glances, each male (but especially Lennon) both inviting the gaze but also disavowing it – assessing each other’s potential desirability. The triangular, Oedipal structure that defines the homosocial group by its projection of desire towards a common goal also works covertly within the group. The leader is both subject and object of desire, thus exogamous homosociality is also an inversion of the incestuous Oedipal familial model. Part of the leader’s role is to manage this system of inward and outward glances to his advantage, and to the group’s, so far as it is in his interest. Male homosocial groups are defined by how they project the gaze outwards, but once a group enters the public sphere by performing music, for example, it becomes subject to the gaze itself. Live performance in Liverpool in this period was a particular focus for violence (although it was a ‘tough’ environment in general) (Lewisohn 2013, 87–88, 98) because one group of men (for example, Teds) would look at other men onstage for an extended length of time. Apart from competition over women, just the fact of looking was in itself enough to incite violence because of the taboo on homosexuality. The paradox of the Ted was that he was spectacular in appearance, a “proletarian dandy” (Hawkins 2009, 46), but at the same time aggressive towards any kind of look (Brake 1980, 73). Media coverage of the subculture, by making it subject to a public gaze, incited further ‘acting out’. Lennon had read in the 38

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papers about the youth violence associated with the film Blackboard Jungle (1955), which featured Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’, and “was all set to tear up the seats too but nobody joined in” (Lewisohn 2013, 99). Banter, which is another characteristic of homosocial groups, can also be a way of managing their relationship to the gaze of the audience. It seems authentic, “a way of affirming the bond of love between men while appearing to deny it” (Easthope 1986, 88), but is also a performative act. The Beatles routinely traded jokes and insults amongst themselves: “Laughing at cruelty was a big part of . . . John and Paul’s shared sense of fun” (Lewisohn 2013, 159). An edited version of banter became key to the group’s image, presenting them in a way that was quite novel in popular music and journalistic discourse, which was organised around the individual star, who was polite and respectful to the press. With the Beatles, as producer-to-be George Martin attested, you had to take them as a group, as they were. “I desperately wanted my own Cliff (Richard). That was how my mind was working . . . looking for . . . the lead singer. When I met them I realised that would never work”. Martin goes on to describe how their collective wit and charm made him change his mind: “I found them very attractive people. I liked being with them” (Davies 1978, 178). As leader, Lennon could not be seen to have ‘sold out’ (Wenner 1980, 46) by acknowledging the importance of the audience, so public relations were managed through a series of intermediaries. McCartney became group ambassador, making early attempts to market them and improve their appearance (Miles 1997, 34; Lewisohn 2013, 333). Another intermediary was Astrid Kirchherr, whom the group met in Hamburg in 1960 and who took famous, definitive photographs of them – she was the first outsider to whose gaze they would willingly submit. She and Jürgen Vollmer also introduced the Beatles haircut, trying it out first on Stu Sutcliffe (Astrid’s lover) (Gould 2007, 96–97). Another transitional figure was Bob Wooler, a closeted gay man who, as Cavern DJ and MC, gave the band access to his extensive record collection (Gould 2007, 109). He describes how Lennon “commanded the stage with the way he stared and stood. His legs would be wide apart . . . very sexual and aggressive. The girls up front would be looking up his legs, keeping a watch on his crotch” (Lewisohn 2013, 499). Lennon’s “rough trade” (Lewisohn 2013, 502) charisma helped advance the band, by attracting gay men like Wooler and manager Brian Epstein, who also had the respectability, knowledge, and business sense the group lacked. The Beatles were prepared to accept Epstein’s gaze if it helped their career (Lewisohn 2013, 503). At the same time, Lennon’s approval of Epstein was key to his acceptance by the group (Lewisohn 2013, 550). Epstein broadened the Beatles’ audience by putting the group in suits and encouraging onstage professionalism. Lennon claimed: “We allowed Epstein to package us, it wasn’t the other way round” (Lewisohn 2013, 554). The supposed corollary of this arrangement was that Epstein did not interfere in the music, which remained the locus of the Beatles’ “homosocial authenticity” (Mäkelä 2004, 66). Lennon’s withering and much-quoted dismissal, “You stick to your percentages, Brian. We’ll look after the music”, would appear to confirm this (Norman 1981, 273). But the quote dates from 1967. In 1962, things were quite different. It was through Epstein’s encouragement that the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, which had been dormant since about 1960, was revived in 1962. Although they had written a few songs, the Beatles did not play them live until after Epstein became their manager (Lewisohn 2013, 513). At the disastrous Decca audition in early 1962, the Beatles played mainly covers. Contrary to received wisdom (“Brian advised them to stick to standards”) (Davies 1978, 146), Lewisohn argues that: “If Brian did have a hand it was surely to impose John and Paul’s songs into the [audition], because they themselves were 39

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still hesitant about playing them” (Lewisohn 2013, 539–540). Epstein’s marketing centred round the group’s novelty – hence original material was essential, despite the contemporary music industry orthodoxy that artists should rely on established songwriters (Lewisohn 2013, 540). Songwriting became part of the developing Beatles brand. Authorial authenticity, usually opposed to the market, is thus revealed as a marketing strategy – musical ‘originality’ becomes a point of difference (Straw 1999). Once again, the splendid isolation of ‘homosocial authenticity’ is revealed as a ruse.

The gang show The Beatles performed a range of cover versions in this period – rock and roll, contemporary R&B, and Tin Pan Alley – but increasingly eschewed the rock and roll they had played in Hamburg; it bored them (Lewisohn 2013, 796). They were building key audiences in Liverpool and environs, especially through regular lunchtime gigs at The Cavern, which was now effectively their home and a safer venue than the suburban halls and Hamburg bars they had been playing in. Their changed repertoire featured more cover versions of songs sung by women, which was apt for the predominantly female Cavern audiences. Prominent in contemporary R&B was the girl group genre, and these numbers were mainly sung by Lennon: ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ (The Beatles changed the gender) (The Teddy Bears 1958); The Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr. Postman’ (1961; Beatles 1963b); The Shirelles’ ‘Baby it’s You’ and ‘Boys’ (Shirelles 1961a, 1961b; Beatles 1963a) (Ringo sang on the recording of the latter, but Lennon frequently performed it live) (Lewisohn 2013, 409); ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Baby’ and ‘The Loco-motion’ by Little Eva (1962a, 1962b; Beatles 1994); ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ (The Shirelles 1960; Lewisohn 2013, 408, 706); ‘Soldier Boy’ (The Shirelles 1962); and ‘Love is a Swingin’ Thing’ (the B-side of ‘Soldier Boy’) (Lewisohn 2013, 621). So, why did Lennon sing so many songs by women, given his reputation as the ‘macho’ Beatle? Homosociality is contradictory – it effectively says ‘do as I say, not as I do’. It is not an absolute ban on effeminacy, because dominant members of the group are defined by their ability to break the rules. Hence, Lennon could identify with feminine subject positions and sing songs by women and girl groups, while policing others for similar practices. Homosocial policing applied more to the genre than the gender of their repertoire: the Beatles’ worship of US R&B probably counted for more than the putative gender of the singer, or the words of the song (Miles 1997, 82). “Gender didn’t stop The Beatles . . . a good song was . . . enough for them” (Lewisohn 2013, 408). Tin Pan Alley, on the other hand, had a lower status. McCartney tended to perform this genre, including show tunes like Dinah Washington’s ‘September in the Rain’ (1961), ‘Till There Was You’ by Peggy Lee (1961), ‘A Taste of Honey’, and ‘Over the Rainbow’ (Lewisohn 2013, 419, 526, 539–540). Notoriously, Lennon would disrupt his performances by mocking and jeering (Lewisohn 2013, 400, 419–420, 706, 733). However, while I have explained how Lennon was able to perform girl group covers through his leadership of the group, the question of why Lennon performed them remains open. For example, ‘I Just Don’t Understand’ (Ann-Margret 1961; The Beatles 1994) was a number “John had to sing” (Lewisohn 2013, 477). This I will address presently. Lennon/McCartney’s songwriting was central to the group strategy from 1962 on, and they drew on cover versions for ideas. However, another influence on the Beatles’ songwriting was that of their fans. During their Hamburg excursions from 1960–1962, Lennon and McCartney became dedicated letter writers, first and foremost to their girlfriends Dorothy (Dot) Rhone and Cynthia Powell. From the latter’s account, Lennon wrote to her daily (Lewisohn 2013, 361). In August 1961, the Beatles Fan Club started (Lewisohn 2013, 472) and the 40

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Beatles encouraged fans to write to them in Hamburg (Lewisohn 2013, 599). Fan Lindy Ness remarked: “They thought we’d forget them and move to some other group! My friends and I split the Beatles between us . . . we all got letters back” (Lewisohn 2013, 611). This “correspondence [had been] openly courted from The Cavern stage on Fan Club night” (Lewisohn 2013, 611). Writing to their fans was good public relations, but also had other benefits: We wrote for our market. We knew that if we wrote a song called “Thank You Girl” that a lot of girls who wrote us fan letters would take it as a genuine thank you. So a lot of our songs – “From Me To You” is another – were directly addressed to the fans (McCartney, quoted in Lewisohn 1988, 9). So there may be some continuity between the Beatles’ letter writing to their fans, and their songwriting. McCartney notes how they incorporated “personal pronouns” (Lewisohn 1988, 9) into their songs, mainly first and second person singular, as you would in a letter. The gender neutrality of first and second person pronouns also broadened the potential audience. The Beatles’ letter writing seemed to mitigate against homosociality – it is a private activity that connects two people, rather than a public relation between two males gazing at a third party. It could suggest an eschewal of the gaze for a more dialogic, aural model of conversation, although admittedly, this is implicit – Beatles’ songs are not dialogic in the way that Barbara Bradby (2005) has characterised girl group songs, although the way Bradby discusses reported speech in the Beatles, “She told me what to say” (“She Loves You”), could fit the epistolary model.

Ganging up A final influence on the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership was the New York Brill Building songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King: “When Paul and I first got together, we wanted to be the British Goffin and King” (Lennon, quoted in Lewisohn 2013, 706). However, this identification also created a split in the heart of the group. By agreeing to share all songwriting credits between them, Lennon and McCartney guaranteed themselves the bulk of publishing royalties, making Starr and Harrison sidemen, who would not receive credit unless they wrote themselves: “An attitude came over John and Paul of ‘We’re the grooves and you two just watch it’” (Harrison, quoted in Lewisohn 2013, 705). McCartney and Lennon also jostled over whose name should come first; Lennon won (Lewisohn 2013, 704, 716, 778). Henceforth, Lennon/McCartney compositions dominated the band’s repertoire. So the ‘homosocial authenticity’ of the group was compromised by the introduction of a second authenticity discourse, that of the auteur or privileged individual. ‘Homosocial authenticity’ seems to ‘speak’ for a particular social group – the ‘folk culture’ or ‘homology’ argument – but authorship invests in the individual voice, which may diverge from or even appropriate the shared values and collective labour of the group (Straw 1999). On the other hand, as long as Lennon remained ‘boss’, and the group served his needs, it seemed unlikely that this would be a problem. However, the success of the group would result in new challenges.

Gang busting Throughout Beatlemania (1963–1964), Lennon’s dominance continued. On Please Please Me (1963a) he sings lead on half the songs and is the main writer on five out of eight originals. On A Hard Day’s Night (1964a), he sings lead and is main writer of nine out of 13 songs, also co-writing George’s vocal contribution ‘I’m Happy Just to Dance with You’. 41

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(The precise question of who wrote what is reasonably accurately established by MacDonald [2005], although Sheff and Golson [1982] and Miles [1997] should also be consulted. There are only a few cases of disputed authorship.) But from 1965 to 1969, Lennon gradually lost and then regained control of his gang, paradoxically, by breaking it up. Once the group attained its goal, its members became isolated, and once touring ended in 1966, they only had regular contact in the writing/recording process. Lennon felt this separation the most: “I have to see the others to see myself. I realize then there is someone like me . . . I have to see them to establish contact with myself” (Davies 1978, 317–318; Brown and Gaines 1983, 193–194; Gould 2007, 321). The group was essential to his sense of self-identity. Taking LSD copiously (Wenner 1980, 76; Brown and Gaines 1983, 193ff; Coleman 1984, 8; Riley 2011, 288–291), increasingly withdrawn and solitary, he created a power vacuum which McCartney increasingly filled, to Lennon’s chagrin (Coleman 1984, 36; MacDonald 2005, 172, 192; Riley 2011, 428). The death of Brian Epstein worsened matters. Yet, everything changed when Lennon’s relationship with Yoko Ono began in May 1968. Why? Lennon framed it this way: “when I met her, I had to drop everything . . . it was ‘Goodbye to the boys in the band’” (Coleman 1984, 28). Lennon effectively enlisted Ono as a new member, admitting her into the recording studio, the last bastion of the group’s “homosocial authenticity” (Brown and Gaines 1983, 261; Coleman 1984, 37; Lewisohn 1988, 135). Ono not only observed, she offered comment, criticism, and participation (Coleman 1984, 37; Gould 2007, 480–481). The other Beatles were “flabbergasted” (Coleman 1984, 37). Lennon and Ono’s inseparability also effectively ended the Lennon/McCartney writing partnership (Gould 2007, 481). For the next year, Lennon and Ono became a media circus, protesting, appearing naked, getting busted, getting married, with Lennon systematically dismantling the Beatles’ collective image. In September 1969, he announced to the other Beatles: “I’m breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels like a divorce” (Coleman 1984, 46; Riley 2011, 463). By bringing Ono into the group, Lennon at once reasserted his control and made it impossible for them to carry on. He began the group, and now, rather than cede control, he was ending it, thus proving once again that only the leader in a homosocial context can change the rules and ‘play’ (literally, in this case) with femininity.

The gang as family But it was not only a power play. Lennon jettisoned the group because it no longer served his psychological needs – hence his repeated use of marital imagery: “I want a divorce [from the group], just like the divorce I got from Cynthia!” (Brown and Gaines 1983, 321). In Ono, he found his new family. Basically an orphan, Lennon’s childhood traumas have been elaborated in biographies and films (Hunter 1978; Coleman 1984; Goldman 1989; Nowhere Boy 2009; Riley 2011). Handed around by relatives as a small child, from 1946, he was raised by his aunt Mimi after she discovered him living with his mother Julia Lennon and her boyfriend in a ‘one-bed’ flat and informed the authorities (Lewisohn 2013, 40). Mimi offered stability, security, and intellectual stimulation, but the adolescent Lennon rebelled and started spending more time with Julia. His youth was scarred by sudden deaths – beloved stepfather George in 1955, birth mother Julia in 1958, and close friend Stuart Sutcliffe in 1961 (Lewisohn 2013, 76, 184, 601). Notably, Lennon’s bullying worsened after each bereavement (Lewisohn 2013, 77–78, 189, 191, 606–611). Gould argues: Like other strong-willed children who have suffered rejection or neglect, [Lennon’s] initial impulse was to dominate any social situation . . . “I was aggressive because 42

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I wanted to be popular . . . I wanted everybody to do what I told them . . . to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss”. (Gould 2007, 48) Lennon’s gang-forming was a way of controlling his immediate social environment and avoiding the neglect he had suffered. The Beatles were his substitute family: “I met an interesting guy . . . and suddenly he’s got all these in-laws” (Ono, quoted in Gould 2007, 480). Birmingham School subcultural theory provides support for this view, being relevant both in its setting (post–World War II British society) and subject matter: working-class male gangs. It provides an alternative perspective to homosociality, theorised in sociological rather than gender terms. Cohen (2005) describes a crisis of leadership in traditional working-class communities, destabilised by the effects of modernity, such as World War II, which destroyed Julia and Fred Lennon’s marriage (Lewisohn 2013, 35). The main impact was on parent/child relationships. “What had previously been a source of support and security for both now became . . . a battleground, a major focus of all the anxieties created by the disintegration of community structures” (Cohen 2005, 88). Cohen notes two related responses – early marriage and the emergence of youth subcultures. The nascent Beatles gang, which went through recognisably Ted, Rocker, and Mod incarnations (Gould 2007, 98, 133) can be viewed as trying to “retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in their parent culture . . . through symbolic structures” such as dress, music, argot, and ritual (banter) (Cohen 2005, 90). Subcultural theory focused on the ‘public’ aspects of resistance to the dominant culture rather than the ‘private’ aspects of subcultures’ attempted transformation of their parent culture, but this latter idea of reproducing familial community in the form of peer relationships is what is relevant to the early Beatles. Cohen theorises subcultures as a holding pattern or ‘magical’ solution, by which members hang on to familial identifications, while making a show of difference from the family: “the Oedipal conflict is displaced from the triadic situation to sibling relations, which then develops into the gang outside the family” (Cohen 2005, 93). Thus he draws a parallel between subcultures and homosociality as types of socialisation – the family model is displaced into the gang – Lennon becoming his own father, the other Beatles functioning as siblings. But finally, Lennon brings in Ono, and the magic triangle is broken. Lennon’s childhood and adolescence can be interpreted both Oedipally and in terms of the subcultural model of family breakdown. He had few ‘father figures’, but many women role models: “There were five women that were in my family. Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women. One happened to be my mother” (Sheff and Golson 1982, 136; author’s emphases). He was raised in a matriarchal setting: Mimi broadly took the paternal role of prohibition and control (while also introducing him to the world of culture and literature); while Julia, his biological mother, was more like an older sister, in fact she was “the girl of John’s dreams”, witty, irresponsible, and sexually attractive, a “source of endless confusion” for an adolescent boy (Lewisohn 2013, 82–83). Lennon even contemplated incest (Lewisohn 2013, 82–83). Julia encouraged him musically – sang to him and with him (Sheff and Golson 1982, 140). She taught him to play the banjo (Lewisohn 2013, 82). As well as early rock and roll, Julia also taught him “sweet songs from her youth” (Lewisohn 2013, 82). Lennon drew inspiration from Julia’s repertoire: ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’ (1963a) was based on her rendition of ‘I’m Wishing’, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) (Sheff and Golson 1982, 140). Her death “was the worst thing that ever happened . . . I thought ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything, I’ve got no responsibilities to anyone now’” 43

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(Lennon quoted in Davies 1978, 52). He addresses her memory in ‘Julia’ (1968), ‘Mother’, and ‘My Mummy’s Dead’ (Lennon 1970; MacDonald 2005, 327). While it is likely that Lennon was sensitised to female voices, he could not necessarily distinguish between them – were they voices to identify with and respect (like Mimi) or voices to fantasise about (like Julia)? Hence his fascination with recordings of songs sung by women. Given that many of his memories of his mother were associated with music, and that music and memory are often connected, Lennon could have heard echoes of her voice (and other women) in female singers and carried these influences into his own work (DeNora 2000). Lennon appropriated melodically from girl group music: ‘There’s A Place’ resembles the Marvelettes’ ‘I Want a Guy’ (1961; Brocken 2005) and ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1971) resembles the Paris Sisters’ ‘I Love How You Love Me’ (1961; Williams 2003). ‘You’re Gonna Lose that Girl’ (1965a), ‘Tell Me Why’ (1964a), and ‘She Loves You’ all show girl group influence (Warwick 2000; Bradby 2005; MacDonald 2005). For ‘Michelle’ (1965b), he borrowed a line from Nina Simone’s version of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ (1965) to supply a middle eight for McCartney’s song (MacDonald 2005, 175). In terms of lyrical personae, Lennon occasionally imitates situations from girl group songs: in ‘It Won’t Be Long’ (1963b) the narrator sits at home, waiting and hoping, like ‘Please Mister Postman’. But more frequent is an insecure ‘I’ in thrall to an all-powerful ‘You’ or ‘Her’. Although seasoned with occasional jealousy (‘You Can’t Do That’ [1964a]), the predominant affect is child-like dependence, with the faint hope of reciprocation. ‘I’ll Cry Instead’ (1964a), ‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’ (1964b), ‘Ticket to Ride’ (1965a), ’Norwegian Wood’ (1965b), ‘Girl’ (1965b), ‘She Said She Said’ (1966a), ‘Day Tripper’ (1966b), ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (1970), ‘Sexy Sadie’ (1968), and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ (1969) all feature powerful but elusive female figures who bully the hapless narrator, just as Lennon bullied his peers. Lennon often sings either about being a child: “When I was a boy” (‘She Said She Said’), “When I was younger” (‘Help’ 1965a), or from a child’s perspective: ‘Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds’ (1967) – the latter especially in his psychedelic period, when LSD was further challenging Lennon’s ‘ego’. To return to Middleton (2006), the emotional authenticity that Lennon talks about in his work, the emergence of an individual voice, is tied to the admission of weakness, for example ‘Help!’ (1965a): “It was just me singing ‘Help’ and I meant it” (Wenner 1980, 115). What Lennon describes as authentic in his work is precisely the moment in which he is a frightened child, looking for his mother. This subject position he adopts is not feminine – it is about the loss of the feminine, suggesting that identity is always incomplete, as Middleton argues. Although Lennon presented his split from the Beatles as traditional individuation – “They remembered they were four individuals” (Wenner 1980, 45) – perhaps he was only swapping one set of dependencies for another: the Beatles’ collective for Ono and rock and roll. This realisation or omission is enacted at the end of “God” on Plastic Ono Band when he sings: “I just believe in me [dramatic pause] . . . Yoko and me”. It’s as if he forgot her for a moment. Lennon strongly identified with loss – he was not singing about his mother, he was singing about her absence, about the past, just as his identification with rock and roll was also about the past – recreating that original, youthful moment when he heard Little Richard and realised that “Rock and roll was real. Everything else was unreal” (Lewisohn 2013, 90; italics in original). But was it still real in 1970? Authenticity only exists in the past. Finally, Lennon’s incompleteness transferred itself to Ono, the woman he henceforth addressed as ‘Mother’ (Coleman 1984, 189), suggesting that part of him would always remain a small child whose 44

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life was saved by rock and roll. The Beatles’ ‘homosocial authenticity’ is revealed as a temporary support structure that allowed Lennon to go on functioning until Ono appeared.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed the phenomenon of Lennon as the leader of a homosocial group and argued that this interpretation allows us to re-evaluate the meaning of the Beatles and Lennon’s role in them. By focusing on their early career, I showed continuities between the adolescent gang they began as and the musical group they became, following a basically chronological approach, while at the same time inserting a loop by which we first encounter Lennon in 1970, revising his history to minimise the role of the group that had been so important both to him and to 1960s culture. I argued that the emergence of the Beatles as a homosocial group intersected in important ways with the idea of rock authenticity – the alliance of homosocial masculinity with the development of the authenticity narrative in 1960s music. At the same time, Lennon’s position was contradictory – allying himself with rock authenticity while disparaging his own group, setting it against the emergence of his ‘true’ individual voice, alternating fighting talk with naked confessions of love and dependence on Yoko Ono, making himself look like the victim of the phenomenon of which he was the main perpetrator. At the same time, it is the right of the leader of the homosocial group to rewrite history – he is the exception to the rules that other group members must abide by, and this is an aspect of the contradictory nature of homosociality – that power does not have to be consistent. If we go back to the Beatles’ beginnings, we find a different story to that which Lennon was presenting in 1970. The Beatles were a gang initiated by Lennon, conforming to the triangular structure of homosociality, projecting their gaze and desire outwards, policing each other for signs of effeminacy. But paradoxically, in order to lead, the leader must become subject to the gaze himself, so that the triangular structure is repeated in an inverted form within the group. Far from being authentically homosocial, the group is riven from the first by a contradictory structure of homoerotic desire. It is a function of the leader to manage these contradictions, thus Lennon’s adoption of a Ted persona – simultaneously fascinating and rejecting the gaze. These contradictions ramify as the group performs in public, making them the subject of a gaze which must be managed through various mediators, permitted by the leader, while he himself seems to be aloof from this process. Distinctions between form and substance, image and music, apparently important to homosocial integrity, are negotiated – musical originality becomes part of the group’s image. Similarly, the homosocial distinction of male artist and female audience breaks down as the Beatles seek to expand their audience and how to write for/to them. A process of collaboration with audiences evolves, the group changing their repertoire to include more ‘female-friendly’ material, both original and in the form of covers. Lennon in particular seemed to relish performing material by women, and, in some ways, this could be seen as the patriarchal dividend – along with the possibility that the group made distinctions about material performed on the basis of genre rather than gender (although these same distinctions were policed homosocially). But although homosociality can explain how femininity is managed and relates to the hierarchical structure of the group, it does not necessarily explain why. It is one thing to say that Lennon’s ‘strong’ position in the group allowed him to be ‘weak’, it is another to explain why he felt that need. Why was Lennon attracted to female voices? Why did he need to form a gang in the first place? There is an ‘outside’ to homosociality, and to explore this I introduce an alternative theory of ‘gangs’ – 45

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subcultural theory that helps tease out the connections between gangs and families, suggesting that Lennon formed a gang partly as a family substitute, as a way of ‘magically’ solving his childhood traumas and consequently shaky sense of self-identity. Finally, my central tenet is that Lennon’s songwriting and lyrics show a hidden history of feminine influence that can be traced back to the importance of maternal figures in his life, and that how, once he found a suitable mother/lover (Ono), he used her to prise the group apart, reasserting his control over the group in order to destroy it.

Note 1 A Beatles catchphrase, adapted from the film Violent Playground (1957), a drama about juvenile delinquency. Thanks to Megan Berry for her assistance with this chapter.

Bibliography Bradby, Barbara. 2005. “She Told Me What to Say: The Beatles and Girl-Group Discourse.” Popular Music & Society 20 (3): 359–390. Brake, Mike. 1980. The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brocken, Michael. 2005. “Some Other Guys! Some Theories about Signification: Beatles Cover Versions.” Popular Music & Society 20 (4): 5–38. Brown, Peter, and Steven Gaines. 1983. The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cohen, Phil. 2005. “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community.” In The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder, 86–93. London: Routledge. Cohen, Sara. 1997. “Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 18–34. London: Routledge. Coleman, Ray. 1984. John Ono Lennon, Vol. 2. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Connell, Raewyn. 1987. Gender and Power. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, Raewyn. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dafydd, Rees, and Luke Crampton. 1996. Encyclopedia of Rock Stars. New York: D. K. Publishing. Davies, Hunter. 1978. The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. St. Albans: Granada Publishing. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Easthope, Antony. 1986. What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture. London: Paladin. Goldman, Albert. 1989. The Lives of John Lennon. New York: Bantam. Gould, Jonathan. 2007. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America. London: Portrait. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Pop Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Kilmartin, Christopher. 2004. “Sigmund Freud.” In Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, A–J, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Amy Aronson, 319–21. Santa Barbara: ABC–Clio. King, Martin. 2013. Men, Masculinity and the Beatles. Farnham: Ashgate. Lewisohn, Mark. 1988. The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. London: Hamlyn. Lewisohn, Mark. 2013. Tune in: The Beatles – All These Years, Vol. 1. New York: Crown Archetype. MacDonald, Ian. 2005. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. London: Pimlico. Mäkelä, Janne. 2004. John Lennon Imagined: The Cultural History of a Rock Star. New York: Peter Lang. Meuser, Michael. 2004. “Homosociality.” In Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, A–J, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Amy Aronson, 396–7. Santa Barbara: ABC–Clio. Middleton, Richard. 2006. Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music. London: Routledge. Miles, Barry. 1997. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. New York: Henry Holt. Norman, Phillip. 1981. Shout! The True Story of the Beatles. London: Hamish Hamilton. Nowhere Boy. 2009. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. UK: Ecosse Films, Channel 4, UK Film Council. Riley, Tim. 2011. Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music – The Definitive Life. New York: Hyperion. 46

Homosociality and the early Beatles Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes towards a Political Economy of Sex.” In Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sheff, David, and Barry Golson. 1982. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Sevenoaks: New English Library. Straw, Will. 1999. “Authorship.” In Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss, 199–207. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell. Thomson, Elizabeth, and David Gutman. 1987. The Lennon Companion. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2000. “You’re Going to Lose That Girl: The Beatles and the Girl Groups.” In Beatlestudies 3: Proceedings of the Beatles 2000 Conference, ed. Yrjö Heinonen, Markus Heuger, Sheila Whiteley, Terhi Nurmesjärvi and Jouni Koskimäki, 161–8. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music. Wenner, Jann. 1980. Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Penguin. Williams, Richard. 2003. Phil Spector: Out of His Head. London: Omnibus. Willis, Paul. 1978. Profane Culture. London: Routledge.

Music Ann-Margret. 1961. “I Just Don’t Understand.” RCA/Victor, single. The Beatles. 1963a. Please Please Me. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1963b. With the Beatles. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1964a. A Hard Day’s Night. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1964b. Beatles for Sale. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1965a. Help! Parlophone, LP. ———. 1965b. Rubber Soul. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1966a. Revolver. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1966b. A Collection of Beatles Oldies. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1967. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, LP. ———. 1968. The Beatles. Apple, LP. ———. 1969. Abbey Road. Apple, LP. ———. 1970. Let It Be. Apple, LP. ———. 1994. Live at the BBC. Apple, LP. ———. 1995. Anthology 1. Apple, CD. Lee, Peggy. 1961. “Till There Was You.” Capitol, single. Lennon, John. 1970. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Apple, LP. Lennon, John, and Yoko Ono. 1971. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Apple, single. Little, Eva. 1962a. “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby.” Dimension, single. ———. 1962b. “The Loco-Motion.” Dimension, single. The Marvelettes. 1961. Please Mr. Postman. Tamla, LP. The Paris Sisters. 1961. “I Love How You Love Me.” Gregmark, single. The Shirelles. 1960. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Scepter, single. ———. 1961a. “Baby It’s You.” Scepter, single. ———. 1961b. “Boys.” Scepter, single. ———. 1962. “Soldier Boy.” Scepter, single. Simone, Nina. 1965. I Put a Spell on You. Phillips, LP. The Teddy Bears. 1958. “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Era/Dore, single. Washington, Dinah. 1961. “September in the Rain.” Mercury, single.

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4 FROM THROAT SINGING TO TRANSCULTURAL EXPRESSION Tanya Tagaq’s Katajjaq musical signature Sophie Stévance

This chapter focuses upon the musical and theatrical works of the Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq and her contribution to a current global artistic discourse.1 In a pop-electronic-experimental music context, Tanya Tagaq practices a form of throat singing (katajjaq), which is representative of a generation of aboriginal artists – across all disciplines – who remain committed to preserving their heritage while also embracing new cultural influences in their artistic productions. Tagaq’s musical intentions extend beyond her Inuit culture, drawing on various influences to create works with transnational artistic appeal (Meintel 1993; Chartier, Pepin, and Ringuet 2006). By implementing the term transnational, I refer to the practice of artists moving seamlessly between the established customs of different cultural spaces (from that of their origins to a more global one), forging social networks across national boundaries where they create unique identities through aesthetic, cultural, and technological exchanges (Portes 1999, 2001).2 In a dynamic of ‘transformative continuity’, aboriginal traditions have “long been accustomed to borrowing without questioning homogeneity or authenticity” (Laugrand 2013, 226). It seems that this process takes on a new form in a world where the combination of contemporary nomadism (Attali 2003) and the ever-present media (Appadurai 1996; Toynbee and Dueck 2011) characterize ‘modernity’. Tagaq, like other Amerindian and Inuit artists, affirms her “right to modernity” (Chartier 2005) through a cultural mélange – a blending of local, aboriginal, native elements with those that are borrowed, non-aboriginal, exogenous. This approach, as also demonstrated by artists, such as Balinese guitarist Balawan (Harnish 2013) or Malian female pop singer Oumou Sangaré (Duran 1996), is part of a new artistic ‘cosmopolitan aesthetic’. According to Beck (2006), this assumes that members, both domestic and foreign, are open to a borderless world and cultural diversity while still remaining connected to their original cultural values. In so doing, they create an artistic space where the mutual (and beneficial) exchange of cultural codes between their heritage and the shared aesthetic conventions of the global stage allow them to distinguish themselves. It is in this context that a new wave of aboriginal artists are emerging, whose multidisciplinary and transnational practices both reflect and feed into a voluntary movement, not a quest, but a re-conquest (or “reverse invasion” [Morley and Robins 1995, 114]) of a new aboriginal cultural balance. Tagaq’s artistic practice is illustrative of this movement, raising some important questions: how is cultural dialogue manifested in her musical and stage performances? And how do we address the enactment of her distinctive identity, of her “unique signature” (Desroches 2008, 2011)? 48

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Musicological considerations As a musicologist interested specifically in the process of musical creation by female artists (Stévance 2004–2013), I have conducted research that sheds light on how Tagaq constructs her improvisations through a blending of the katajjaq tradition and Western cultural and musical codes. My various analyses have considered rhythmic structures, sounds, and melodies within her performances (Stévance 2015a, 2015b). These studies have sought to highlight the structural coherence of her creative process, revealing an improvisation-based framework where the creative process not only follows the rules of katajjaq, but also surpasses them in order to respond to certain formal standards of the Western pop-electronic scene. In this chapter, I intend to address Tagaq’s musical performance practice: her gestures and body movements on stage, her wardrobe, her iconography, and her speech, all of which disclose a specific style, a signature style. Simon Frith has observed: [P]erformance art is a form of rhetoric, a rhetoric of gestures in which, by and large, bodily movements and signs (including the use of the voice) dominate other forms of communicative signs, such as language and iconography. And such use of the body (which is obviously central to what’s meant here by performance art) depends on the audience’s ability to understand it both as an object (an erotic object, an attractive object, a repulsive object, a social object) and as a subject, that is, as a willed or shaped object, an object with meaning. (Frith 1996b, 205) Thus, by situating an artist within this context, we can interpret her appropriation of cultural codes. So, what does this cultural blending reveal? And what strategies does she employ to remain true to herself at the same time she comes across as a multifaceted artist? In short, I set out to take into account the performance aspects of Tagaq’s practice, asking the question: who is she in the plural? Apart from an increasing amount of interest in the media, there has not been done much scholarly work on Tagaq’s musical and performance practice. In addition to my own contributions, Beverley Diamond (2011) has offered a comparative analysis of Tagaq’s Sinaa (2005) and Björk’s Medúlla (2004), addressing the similarities between the two albums, taking into consideration, for example, vocal techniques and the use of technology. Perhaps more importantly, Diamond has posited that Tagaq aroused controversy in the Inuit community because of her transformation and the way she uses traditional songs in her creative work. Certainly, this study is of importance, as are those that recontextualize aboriginal popular and rap music in particular (Ullestad 1992; Marsh 2009), with a focus on transformations within a community and impact on aboriginal identity (Diamond 2012; Diamond and Hoefnagels 2012). However, while these studies are crucial to understanding the deployment of aboriginal music in the contemporary world, they offer little analysis of how these musical practices fit within the transnational artistic movement, while also reflecting on the influences of their native culture. Rather than studying the effects of non-aboriginal Western modernity on Tagaq, my aim is to understand and situate her performance practice within interrelated contexts. Specifically, my focus falls on the singer’s gestures and staging to figure out how she uses images, symbols, and stereotypes related to these two cultures in her practice. I concur with David Le Breton (2008, 97), who has insisted: A body’s appearance is a response to an individual’s situation/context, affecting the manner of presenting and representing oneself. This encompasses wardrobe, the 49

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manner of styling one’s hair and face, of caring for the body, etc., that is to say, a way of being socially involved on a daily basis, as appropriate, and of showing a stylistic presence.3 It is as if Tagaq plays with clichés from both Inuit and Western culture. For instance, she wears an Indian feather on stage and in photographs, assumes hyperstylised poses, exudes sex appeal (a physical attraction that emanates naturally and intentionally), wears traditional clothing (including jewellery) and excessive makeup, and stages herself in a way that is arguably ‘distressing’. In order to interpret Tagaq’s musical strategies as a paradigm of a new cultural generation of aboriginal artists, it is imperative to interrogate the meaning of these signs. The elements that define creativity and eloquence in Tagaq’s practice warrant additional attention, and I want to argue that we cannot simply dwell on the meaning of her lyrics, especially since she does not consider language to be the primary vehicle for her music. In an interview, Tagaq has explained: “I have too many ideas and political views, that’s why I don’t write many texts – rarely, actually: I have too much to say!”4 Despite the fact that she has much to say, words in themselves are used somewhat sparingly in her improvisations. As a result, the way she activates her body in improvised performance carries additional layers of meaning. The movement of Tagaq’s arms, hands, and body on stage, much like the sounds she produces, are a symbolic dimension corresponding to her performance.5 In this respect, the katajjaq Inuit tradition is not merely a playful display of femininity. While often used as a lullaby (aqasiq), this form of singing symbolizes the division of labor during a hunt – while men are out hunting, women play katajjaq to influence the spirits of animals to surrender their lives, imitating surrounding environmental sounds (e.g., breaking ice, animal grunts). My objective, then, is to explore the musical gestures that emerge from Tagaq’s musical improvisations during her performance, focusing specifically on her movements in relation to stereotypes and other socio-cultural markers of Inuit tradition and Western society. I would suggest her musical gestures serve at least three functions: to produce sound, to support or accompany music, and to harness symbolic value and enable communication. The goal of this chapter is not to analyse co-modal gesture/voice relations (that is, the musical gesture in relation to vocal production), but rather to focus on the connections that Tagaq maintains with both Inuit and Western culture. The aim here is to better understand how she rewrites the symbolic dimension of katajjaq according to her wishes and values, which are rooted in two cultures. Tagaq toys with cultural clichés. Diverting katajjaq (in the sense of Deleuze’s deterritorialization, toward reterritorialization) from its context and tradition, she attempts to influence both Inuit and Western societies through a high level of creativity. The short film entitled What We Eat (Kunuk 2009), in which Tagaq took an active role, seems relevant in terms of its political discourse that is tangible and blunt:6 We describe the link between the hunter and his prey. I am sending a ‘big Fuck you’ to self-righteous people like Paul McCartney, Brigitte Bardot or Pamela Anderson, who supposedly defend a pseudo-animal without thinking, without understanding or even knowing anything about my people, of our vital need to hunt seals. Life is hard on the ice floes: you have to kill to eat. Everything is frozen for ten months. So if we did not hunt, what would we do? Eat ice? Anyone who eats meat should have to kill the animal he plans to eat. He should have to look the animal in the eye and kill it. There, then, one can truly speak about and understand Inuits, who themselves are not living in a golden cage. (Tagaq, interview with the author, 8 September 2013)7 50

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This suggests that the form of katajjaq that Tanya Tagaq turns to is the result of an awareness and desire for the liberation of a normalized female character. Moreover, it is also an affirmation of the uniqueness of an Inuit artist who participates in the emergence of a new scene defined as ethno-pop situated within a cosmopolitan framework. Ethno-pop characterizes a generation of aboriginal artists who have inscribed their music within global cultural production, exposing the manifestation of a new social and cultural balance. If we consider this movement as a form of cultural reconciliation, these artists mediate their artistic production within the current movement of globalization, notably through a process of cultural blending that includes gendered stereotypes. Because Tagaq turns to specific gendered norms, the relationship of sexuality and femininity in the representation of these two cultures and the ways in which images are projected on to one another are of relevance (see Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000). In Tagaq’s case though, there is also a question of agency in music, which permits us to better understand why she breaks with the traditional ideologies of the cultures from which she draws inspiration, and how she manages to act more autonomously in the face of particular changes, while all the time remaining constrained by certain cultural and social restrictions.8 In this sense, Tagaq’s play on various cultural ideological norms (both that of the Inuit community and Western society) could be perceived as an expression of agency – not only does she demonstrate greater autonomy, but in so doing she instigates particular changes while being subjected to certain dominant values.

The unconscious body The body is integral to understanding Tagaq’s performance, as is evident in the audiovisual excerpts available on both GRECEM’s website and YouTube.9 The visual movements that accompany (or occur simultaneously during) the singer’s vocal performance are generated unconsciously in her practice. In an interview in May 2011, she responded as follows: S. Stévance: Could you please explain the movements you do while singing? Does it evoke something in particular (animals, maybe)? T. Tagaq: Most of the time I am unaware of my body movements. Depending on the mood I am in, sometimes, I feel more physical with my sounds, sometimes I feel like retreating physically. These movements, or rather, “musical gestures” (since they have a symbolic and expressive dimension), are unconscious and most likely inscribed in her body memory, a process similar to mental memory. According to dance researcher Sylvia Faure (2000, 106): If the body reproduces gestures, it’s because they have been learned throughout the course of social and linguistic relations that made sense in an individual’s past. The nature of these experiences and practices is critical to their incorporation, which can then be more or less assured.10 During her improvisatory performances, Tagaq’s vocal sounds and bodily gestures become a single artistic expression, one that assumes an important symbolic dimension. Within this context, the “musical gesture” suggests a co-modal relation (cross-modality, according to Streri and Gentaz [2003]) between the senses that is procedural rather than functional. This implies an amplification of the voice’s gesture by the movements of the hands or the arms, the intentions of which are intimately connected to body language (Golse 1999, 27–44), or vice versa. Both 51

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physical and vocal gestures become vehicles for exchanging non-verbalized thoughts, something that Deleuze (1978) calls ‘affects’. Hyphenating ‘gesture-voice’ implies a relationship of cause and effect that is not always directly linked to an affect. However, in this sense the affect produces a means of expression, which is beyond the verbal. Whether conscious or unconscious, Tagaq’s musical gesture can be understood as a co-modal relationship between gesture and voice in her musical performance.11 That Tagaq does not consider words to be meaningful reinforces the notion that a significant aspect of a message’s meaning remains outside the verbal world, existing in the quality of voice (volume, pitch, rhythm), body movements, and facial expressions (Koneya and Barbour 1976). And, this is in addition to the multiple layers of symbolism and meaning that are inherent in the katajjaq tradition (Stévance and Lacasse 2016). The significance of the body and its role in Tagaq’s performance practice is evident in the film What We Eat, which was intended to make people more aware of Inuit culture (which continues to rely on seal hunting). This video shows the singer engaged and yet relaxed when imitating the bodily movements of animals (seal or caribou). Wearing animal skins and mimicking them physically and vocally, Tagaq’s throat singing is also distinguishable in voice-over, fulfilling what Serge Lacasse (2006) has described as an extradiegetic function. Notwithstanding the political discourse, this aspect of performance reveals the pertinence of the body in Tagaq’s artistic practice.

Tagaq and the katajjaq tradition Tagaq learned katajjaq from audiotapes that her mother sent her while she was studying in Halifax in the 1990s; she had also seen it practiced in its original context. In some of her audiovisual recordings, her performance of traditional throat singing demonstrates her mastery of the general conditions of katajjaq.12 Even for a woman of her generation (Tagaq was born in 1975), she remains open to Western pop culture. By integrating katajjaq into a hybrid musical context, she links these two cultures, extracting elements from each of them in order to produce another culture – one that is cosmopolitan and transnational. Her practice is, however, compatible with katajjaq conventions; while traditional throat singing requires a certain respect for basic rules, it also leaves space for creative improvisation. Katajjaq is, in fact, a term for competition between two women who strive to destabilize their opponent and make her lose the rhythmic grounding that she is forced to follow. While the playful aspect dominates, the all-female audience expect from the players endurance, inventiveness, and a high quality of vocal sounds. Someone must win, but with dignity and honor. Notably, some rhythms and sounds are considered more difficult to implement than others. Tagaq knows the rules of katajjaq, which she has integrated into a Western musical context. Although she often competes with herself, she is also accompanied by an instrument, affording her greater flexibility in both the duration of the overall performance and in the development of improvised elements (Stévance 2015a). Indeed, on stage, Tagaq’s improvisation sessions can exceed 30 minutes, while in a traditional context the two players can hardly last more than two or three minutes as they challenge one another (rhythm, voice, and so on) and seek to throw-off the other to win the game. Thus, according to Faure it would seem that the less a style of dance (or any other experience) is formalized, the more it can be made an object of multiple appropriations and produce practical conditions and a variety of expertise whose activation does not depend solely on their “degree” of incorporation by individuals, but is heavily dependent on practice context. (Faure 2000, 106–107)13 52

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Hence, Tagaq’s body movements refer to two stylistic universes and different games – the pop scene and the traditional practice of katajjaq – which are quite similar if one takes into account that both insist on individual physical challenges, where someone must ‘win over’, seduce, conquer the audience. The role of the body and its meaning within the domain of artistic cosmopolitanism, and specifically the ethno-pop scene, has yet to be studied. Simon Frith (1996a, 1996b) has addressed the importance of the body and mind/body connection in approaching pop music (notably through IDM [Intelligent Dance Music]). Similarly, both Auslander (2004–2009) and Cook (2012) have considered the physical, gestural, and social dimensions of musical performance. And, besides several studies of the role of the body in music videos, whether from the point of view of ideologies of female sexuality (Oware 2009; Zhang, Dixon and Conrad 2010; Aubrey and Frisby 2011), or the socio-cultural ideals of the perfect body (Bell, Lawton and Dittmar 2007), the pressure of perfection (Thrift 2007), and hyperembodiment in audiovisual contexts (Hawkins 2013), there is little research on the staging of the body in popular music studies.14 In terms of genres of traditional music, the body has been the object of study in the work of Monique Desroches (2008) and Bob White (2008). From Frith to Desroches to Hawkins, such studies suggest an interest in the singer’s body, which raises questions about the cultural preconceptions that shape the relationship between gender and sexuality, ethnicity and identity, artifice and authenticity, charisma and prestige, and body and seduction. Particularly relevant here is the study of ‘body sociology’. For instance, ‘Body Culture Studies’ (see Turner 2008, 42) recognizes the human body as a symptom of social determinations and cultural constructions when presented in public (Le Breton 2008). In this respect, it seems that Tagaq is concerned, if only to a certain extent, with the element of seduction, which is verified in several interviews, including those undertaken with the artist in September 2013. Especially important in Inuit culture is sex. Well, at least that was before missionaries condemned it and imposed their beliefs and aversion to the body on the population (see Lacasse 2013a). Tagaq explains: I’m interested in why people get uncomfortable with these things. What’s the big shame with sex and nudity? Before Christianity came through, in Inuit culture, having sex was as natural as pooping. There was no-one saying: “Oh, you’re dirty because you’ve done this.” Sex is one of the most beautiful things you can be a part of. So, why are people so fucking uptight about it? There are so many strange things today, like why are girls not eating right now? In the animal kingdom, the weakest creatures get the scraps. But women make the people. We have them in our belly. We’re the creators. We’re beautiful. So, why are girls starving themselves? And why are they risking their lives slicing open their tits and putting plastic in their bodies? All of this revolves around sex. Everybody does it. Everybody feels it. You don’t need to be ‘hot’ to have sex. All these things about American culture confuse me. A lot of religions confuse me too. People dying and hurting each other for belief systems freaks me out. [. . .] I keep hearing them say “Why does it have to be so sexual? It’s because sex sells, doesn’t it?” My reaction is: “Should I do what the rest of Inuit women do and wait until I’m drunk and then throw myself at someone? That’s better, isn’t it?” [laughs] Sex is a huge part of my life. And I’m just expressing my life. If they don’t like it, too bad. I don’t get it. Why are they so violently against what I do? I don’t care what they’re doing. If they’re really that concerned about it, then learn traditional Inuit throat singing and teach your kids. 53

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That will keep it alive in a way that’s comfortable for them. Why do they care about what one person’s doing? They’re probably miserable anyway, if they’re carrying those thoughts around. Personally, I have no time to look for things I don’t like. [laughs] That’s not in my personality. There will be naysayers for every situation in the world and there’s nothing I can do about it. I have worked really hard. I didn’t get here for nothing or by just fucking around. Today, I’m hurting. I’ve got the flu, but I’m still going to perform anyway. That’s what you do when you love something. And I love this. Something about it truly heals me. (Prasad 2010) Commonly in Western society, or for that matter in the ‘new’ Inuit society, when a female asserts, proclaims, assumes or displays the body, or reveals sexual appetite, sensuality, or desire, she violates the moral order and transgresses social mores. At the same time, however, this defiantly challenges gendered stereotypes through a critique aimed at pop musicians.

Strategies of agency: Protest and signature Tagaq’s improvisational performance constitutes a strategy of agency, an act of protest at the crossroads of Inuit values and stereotypes of the pop scene. Faupel and Schmutz (2011) have offered critical observations on the gendered stereotypes in the discourse surrounding pop-rock singers in their study of Rolling Stone magazine articles. Their study suggests that these stereotypes clearly affect sexuality and emotional states: The sexual objectification of female musicians takes many forms in the discourse of music critics, ranging from scrutiny of their physical attractiveness or breast size to discussion of their sexual permissiveness or potential as “wife-candidates”. (Faupel and Schmutz 2011, 27) Notably, women of leisure are described as “defiant and vulnerable”, “hysterical” and “pathological”, “flirt[ing] with insanity”, and “schizophrenic”. In short, women are perceived as “emotional creatures, prone to hysteria and even insanity”, while men are idolized as “serious, intelligent, and stoic” (Faupel and Schmutz 2011, 30). Tagaq’s signature style, mediated by strategies of agency, is presented in the form of a bodily expression of pleasure and self-confidence, grace, composure, and exuberance. The singer exploits the constraints of the star system that establishes the terms of success, beauty, owning the stage, and performed hypersexualization and through other media – a style of pop performance that Frith qualifies in terms of virtuosity and ease (1996b, 207). I want to argue that Tagaq’s agency stems from this ability, as a woman, to own her sexuality, to take charge, to express and to positively reaffirm the female body and gender that missionaries have repressed within aboriginal culture. Similarly, she does not appear to be subjected to the pressures of beauty and hypersexualization in Western society, even though she might seem to consent to international standards in order to gain better control (interview with the author, June 2015). Yet, Tagaq also violates Western musical sound conventions through ‘primitive sounds’, through a markedly rough sounding throat singing that could be deemed ugly and strange or even disturbing to the untrained ear. Additionally, she disregards Inuit tradition by performing katajjaq alone on stage, through the sexualized body, sometimes hyperstylized. In terms of the subject rather than the object, Tagaq works against the grain of these conventions by consciously exercising control over them for her own purposes. 54

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Such aspects characterize Tagaq’s singing and performance, thus defining her uniqueness within the context of an industry that pushes for excessive media exposure and the standardization of physical appearance. Her agency is shaped under the guise of autonomy from the cultures she draws her inspiration from as a performer. From this perspective, there is a sense that the star controls every aspect of her image. It is this aspect of agency that Stan Hawkins and John Richardson (2007) identify in their analysis of Britney Spears in her video, “Toxic”. Drawing on the work of Dan McAdams (1993, 134), they outline eight characteristics of agency, designated as agentic: “aggressive, ambitious, assertive, autonomous, clever, courageous, daring, dominant”. In much the same vein, Tagaq declares the importance of sex in Inuit culture (an activity that has long been oppressed amongst her people) through her own personal narrative. Similarly, her discourse concerns women who display similar intentions in their use of katajjaq as a form of female and social emancipation. The heavy burden that Inuit women continue to carry requires serious consideration alongside the laws that dictate behavior and suppress freedom of expression, and also against abuse (Wagner Sørensen 2001; Mancini Billson 2006) and the punishment reserved for deviants (Saladin D’Anglure 1977).15 Situated within this context, Tagaq’s courage, confidence, composure, and determination to be released from these constraints and forge an identity that is deeply her own, and to assert herself as a woman and cosmopolitan artist, seems immeasurable. And, despite criticisms from her community, she continues to transgress these taboos and display an agency that is confident, disclosing an unyielding desire for emancipation and denunciation of such degrading cultures for women.

Conclusion Tagaq’s performance practice underscores the singer’s acceptance of Western pop music’s cultural conventions (set out in terms of seduction), while at the same time denouncing the social constraints of Inuit women. Furthermore, as demonstrated through corporeal studies and popular music studies (Vincent 1989; McClary 1991; Paglia 1992; Dickerson 1998; Burns and Lafrance 2002; Wald 2002; O’Brien 2012), the appropriation of gender norms is endemic to Tagaq’s carving out a place in the field. In this sense, she highlights the importance of sexualization in international pop/media culture by “reinforcing stereotypes of women” on her terms (Grazian 2010, 57). At the same time, by affirming her singularity and agency, she gains autonomy. This happens by her transgressing codes or even exacerbating agency strategies to reinforce her subjectivity. To this end, Tagaq proudly stamps a mark of individuality on her body. Significantly, the tattoo on her right breast becomes a sign of femininity and sexuality and a tool of seduction. Moreover, it becomes a weapon of protest when displayed in several photographs and outfits worn during stage performances. And, her neckline can be understood, according to Le Breton (2008, 19), as a mark of “an individual’s social independence, her determination to make her intentions clear”. All in all, Tagaq’s tattoo makes a bold statement: it tells her audience that she is a free and independent artist rather than a mere product of the ‘world music’ category of the record industry. I want to return to this category, ‘world music’, fabricated by the record industry to qualify traditional musical practices from various regions of the world and not least to target a wide audience. Often hastily grouped under this label, artists such as Tagaq actually represent the emergence of a new genre: ethno-pop. As a paradigm of this new wave of cosmopolitan aboriginal artists, this category characterizes Tagaq’s musical and theatrical work, anchored in a contemporary reality that is created through a mixture and blending of influences. Ethno-pop refers to cultural practices of individuals from isolated communities 55

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who are granted access to an international artistic movement and network that presents a new balance between the values of their communities of origin and those that are transnational. Thus, the tattoo on Tagaq’s right breast (one of several)16 reaffirms and reclaims her membership in an Inuit culture in which young Inuit girls were tattooed at the time of puberty – a tradition that has lost its value through forced contact with Westerners. Within this culture, there was a belief that a woman required a tattoo in order to be considered ‘beautiful’, and that, following menopause, a tattoo alone would distinguish women from men. As such, this enforced tattoo-age of teenagers supposedly strengthened their power of seduction, as well as functioning as a tool for integration into the community and immaterial, supernatural protection. As Krutak Lars (n.d.) explains, Arctic tattoo was a lived symbol of common participation in the cyclical and subsistence culture of the arctic hunter-gatherer. Tattoos recorded the ‘biographies’ of personhood, reflecting individual and social experience through an array of significant relationships that oscillated between the poles of masculine and feminine, human and animal, sickness and health, the living and the dead. Arguably, tattoos provided a nexus between the individual and communally defined forces that shaped Inuit and Yupiget perceptions of existence. As an expression of hesitation or even temptation, Tagaq’s agency denotes several positions: the lure of the West, on the one hand, and a return to one’s origins, on the other. Her position fluctuates in its adherence to diverse values. In Les Ambivalences de l’émancipation féminine, Nathalie Heinich makes the following claim: “To be ambivalent demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to choose between two objects, because choosing one would reject the other” (2003, 12).17 By refusing to choose between Western and aboriginal cultures, Tagaq demonstrates ambivalence. She is relatively critical of the South’s alienation of her community, and even of her community’s self-alienation, against which she seeks to gain autonomy, while proudly claiming her Inuit heritage on the world stage. Although she does not really speak Inuktitut, and she has not lived in Cambridge Bay18 since she was 15 years old, she often returns there to ‘recharge’ and practice Inuit throat singing. This typifies her cosmopolitan vision: Here, cosmopolitanism is understood as a distinctive attitude or a quality of individuals that adopt an open-mindedness toward and engagement with other cultures, in contrast to the local, which adopts a more defensive position. [. . .] The cosmopolitan has [. . .] the ability to disengage and seek, voluntarily, to gain autonomy from a given culture; he feels at home in the world. (Giguère 2009, 54)19 Quite illustratively, the ambivalence inherent in Tagaq’s artistic practice reflects the emergence of a new cosmopolitanism. Tagaq is, at once, a pop star/female-subject/female-object/ traditional singer; she expresses a form of agency that contrasts with the conventional image of a singer whose sex appeal is necessarily present. Indeed, such facets epitomize the cosmopolitan artist. Moreover, her art seems more a matter of ‘expressive isomorphism’ that is multifaceted. Focusing on the pop-rock genre, Motti Regev (2011) has defined expressive isomorphism as a cosmopolitan artist’s mode of creation, borrowing, adapting, and transforming elements of local cultures and integrating them into a transnational musical style for the needs of a more global artistic discourse. This concept can be expanded to include 56

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Tagaq’s music. Depending on the contexts or musical codes that Tagaq adopts for a given project, her music might be better described as electro-experimental-pop. The characteristics I have identified in this study contribute to her uniqueness as a cosmopolitan artist and illustrate how she appropriates tradition; hence, the notion of a multiple isomorphism (which needs further exploration) and the possible relationship between voice and gestures that are produced simultaneously during an improvised performance. Ongoing research is indeed required to explore a symbolic terrain that is often inaccessible due to its metaphorical nature. And, this is because Tagaq integrates into her artistic universe elements derived from both her Inuit cultural origins and transnational culture. As a representative of the aboriginal artistic youth, Tagaq engenders new scenes and artistic practices. Mostly, she participates on the same level as world-famous artists, such as Björk, by striving towards a meaningful global cultural production.

Notes  1 This study is a continuation of my research into the performance practices of Tanya Tagaq (Stévance 2011–2015).  2 Recent research adopting this perspective has focused on either musical genres (e.g., Regev 2013) or specific artists (e.g., Harnish 2013).  3 “L’apparence corporelle répond à une mise en scène par l’acteur, touchant la manière de se présenter et de se représenter. Elle englobe la tenue vestimentaire, la manière de se coiffer et d’apprêter son visage, de soigner son corps, etc., c’est-à-dire un mode quotidien de se mettre socialement en jeu, selon les circonstances, à travers une manière de se montrer et un style de présence”.  4 Interview with the author, 8 September 2013.  5 Furthermore, they seem to coordinate in an expression, as we are trying to demonstrate in our new study already in progress.  6 What We Eat (tungijuq) withTanyaTagaq, directed by Zacharias Kunuk: “talk back to Brigitte Bardot and anti-seal hunting lobby on the eternal reality of hunting”, 2009. See http://www.isuma.tv/fr/tungijuq/ tungijuq720p or http://grecem.oicrm.org/diffusions/from-throat-singing-to-transcultural-popularmusic-tanya-tagaqs-performing-body/  7 “On décrit le lien qui unit le chasseur avec ses proies. Je lance un ‘big Fuck you’ à ces bienpensants comme Paul McCartney, Brigitte Bardot ou Pamela Anderson, qui soi-disant défendent une pseudo-cause animale sans réfléchir, sans rien comprendre ni même rien savoir de mon peuple, du besoin vital qu’il a de chasser le phoque. La vie est dure sur la banquise, il faut tuer pour manger. Tout est gelé pendant dix mois. Alors si on n’avait pas la chasse, on ferait quoi? On mangerait des glaçons? Toute personne qui mange de la viande devrait avoir à tuer l’animal qu’il va manger. Il devrait avoir à le regarder droit dans les yeux et le tuer. Là, alors, on pourrait parler et comprendre les Inuits, qui eux ne vivent pas dans une cage dorée”.  8 The term ‘agency’ developed primarily in feminist studies. The concept emerges in the work of Judith Butler (1990) to highlight the features, various forms, or conditions of female action against male dominance: the agency (female action) arises and is realized through an awareness of oppression and its mechanisms that enclose women within an ideological and patriarchal society. Through the female actor/subject’s speech, agency emerges as a statement that challenges these imposed patriarchal structures and enforces new directions even within this system.  9 See clips on GRECEM’s website: http://grecem.oicrm.org/diffusions/from-throat-singing-totranscultural-popular-music-tanya-tagaqs-performing-body/ or more on YouTube, such as: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI2y5oi8xps or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti72LnfbzOk. 10 “Si le corps arrive à reproduire des gestes, c’est qu’il les a appris au cours de relations sociales et langagières qui ont pris un sens dans le passé pour l’individu. La nature des expériences et des pratiques est donc déterminante pour leur incorporation, qui peut ainsi être plus ou moins assurée”. 11 In our research-creation project, entitled ‘Development of an interactive prototype of the improvised musical performace: Towards an ecosophy of research-creation’, we conducted with a team of musicologists, engineers, technicians, students and professional musicions. In January and February 2016, and building on previous projects (Stévance and Lacasse 2015), we have worked 57

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12 13

14

15

16

17 18 19

with Inuit artist Tanya Tagaq and her team at the Laboratoire audionumérique de recherche et de creation (LARC, www.larc.oi.crm.org), Faculty of Music, Laval University (Quebec City). Our project included the study of the interactions in the studio during the production of two albums by Tagaq (Animism 2014; Retribution 2016), as well as research on voice-body relationships that is now our main subject. Indeed, in February 2016, we managed to record Tagaq’s body movement and vocal sounds during a live performance as the Palais Moncalm in Quebec City using a Vicon motion-capture system kindly provided by our colleague Denis Laurendeau from the engineering department. Results from these studies are expected to begin in the spring of 2017. See http://grecem.oicrm.org/diffusions/from-throat-singing-to-transcultural-popular-musictanya-tagaqs-performing-body/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNb2ZDjeiU4. “moins un style de danse (ou toute autre expérience) est formalisé, plus il peut faire l’objet d’appropriations plurielles et produire des conditions de pratique ainsi que des savoir-faire variés dont l’activation ne dépend pas uniquement de leur ‘degré’ d’incorporation chez les individus, mais est fortement dépendante du contexte de la pratique”. More recently, Barbara Lebrun’s (2013) edited collection on the French song advances approaches through hermeneutics, metaphor, or sociology, yet does not offer a consistent method for addressing the issue and does not incorporate aspects of musical content and structure, unlike other research in the field, such as Burns and Watson (2013), whose analyses are based on aspects of the musical structure as related to the expression. And, as previously mentioned, in a new study already in progress, we are analyzing, according to a well-defined protocol, Tagaq’s practice, which may be characterized by her use of many vocal effects drawn from both the katajjaq and other musical traditions. She seems to coordinate onstage her singing with her movements and expressive gestures, creating a kind of “vocabulary” based on gesture/voice combinations. We might also consider the situation in the framework of Kjellström’s seminal study (1973, 90–92), which explains the subordination of Inuit women through marriage to older men, or Balikci’s discussion (1960, 13–14) about the incidence of suicide among battered wives. Male domination is evident in Inuit society (Kjellström 1973, 174–175). Tagaq also has the names of her daughters inscribed on the inside of both wrists and a flamboyant bird, also hidden from the public, on her right hip. She revealed these tattoos to me in the studio during our research-creation project, which involved collecting ethnographic data around the production of Tagaq’s album Animism (2014). See http://grecem.oicrm.org,(“La voix des autochtones avec Tanya Tagaq et Sophie Stévance”), http://larc.oicrm.org and Stévance and Lacasse 2015. “Être ambivalent, c’est ne pas vouloir ou ne pas pouvoir choisir entre deux objets, parce qu’opter pour l’un serait renoncer à l’autre”. Cambridge Bay, or Ikaluktutiak, is a hamlet located in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, Canada. It is Tagaq’s birthplace and childhood home. “Le cosmopolitisme est ici entendu comme une attitude individuelle ou une qualité́ de certaines personnes qui adoptent une attitude ouverte face aux autres cultures et à l’engagement avec l’autre, à l’opposé du local, qui adopte une position plus défensive. [. . .] Le cosmopolite possède [. . .] cette capacité́ de se désengager et cherche, volontairement, à gagner de l’autonomie par rapport à une culture donnée; il se sent chez lui dans le monde”.

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Tanya Tagaq’s Katajjaq music Portes, Alejandro. 1999. “La mondialisation par le bas.” Les Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 129 (September): 15–25. ———. 2001. “Introduction: The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism.” Global Networks 1 (3): 181–193. Prasad, Anil. 2010. “Tanya Tagaq: Instinctual Invocations.” Innerviews: Music without Borders. http:// www.innerviews.org/inner/tagaq.html Regev, Motti. 2011. “Pop-Rock Music as Expressive Isomorphism: Blurring the National, the Exotic and the Cosmopolitan in Popular Music.” American Behavioral Scientist 55 (5): 558–573. ———. 2013. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Saladin d’Anglure, Bernard. 1977. “Mythe de la femme et pouvoir de l’homme chez les Inuits de l’Arctique central (Canada).” Anthropologie et Sociétés 1 (3): 79–98. Stévance, Sophie. 2004. “Clinamen/Nodus ou l’illusoire musical dans l’œuvre d’Olga Neuwirth.” L’Éducation musicale 517–518 (Novembre–Décembre): 41–44. ———. 2005a. “Joëlle Léandre: La virtuosité au service de la transversalité musicale.” L’Éducation musicale 527–528 (Novembre–Décembre): 32–39. ———. 2005b. “Édith Canat de Chizy: Vivere ou le souffle d’une passion, à corps et à cordes.” Dissonance/Dissonanz 91 (Septembre): 21–27. ———. 2009a. “Réactiver le sens de l’hommage: L’exemple du Festival SuperMicMac au Canada.” Itamar 2 (“Música e Interacciones”): 207–221. ———. 2009b. “La composition musicale et la marque du genre: l’examen conscient de l’’écriture féminine’.” Circuit-musiques contemporaines 19 (1): 43–55. ———. 2009c. “Les femmes dans la création musicale improvisée: l’exemple des collectifs de la musique actuelle au Québec.” L’Éducation musicale 562 (Septembre–Octobre): 25–31. ———. 2010a. “Reprise et intertextualité musicale: l’hommage de compositrices engagées vers l’avant.” Volume! La revue des musiques populaires 7 (Octobre): 59–81. ———. 2010b. “Quelle place pour les femmes dans la création musicale au XXIe siècle?” In Composer au XXIe siècle, ed. Sophie Stévance, 41–60. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2010c. “Être compositeur aujourd’hui: entretien de Sophie Stévance avec Isabelle Panneton.” In Composer au XXIe siècle, ed. Sophie Stévance, 181–188. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2011a. “The Inuit Katajjaq in Popular Culture: The Canadian Throat-Singer Superstar Tanya Tagaq.” Itamar: Revista de Investigacion Musical 3: 79–85. ———. 2011b. “Análisis histórico de la situación de las músicas, de Europa a América del Norte.” In Mujer versus Música: Itinerancias, incertidumbres y lunas, ed. Rosa Iniesta Masmano, 77–105. Valencia: Rivera Editores. ———. 2011c. “Le ‘principe de contrainte stimulante’ dans l’œuvre de la compositrice Isabelle Panneton.” Médecine des arts: Approches médicale et scientifique des pratiques artistiques 69–70: 77–82. ———. 2012. “La réalité socioprofessionnelle des musiciennes au Québec: un engagement vers l’écriture du féminin.” In Loin des yeux près du corps: Entre théorie et création, ed. Thérèse St-Gelais, 151–156. Montréal: Les Éditions du Remue-Ménage. ———. 2013. “L’intuition de/dans l’œuvre de la compositrice québécoise Isabelle Panneton: un défi à la bipartition du genre.” In Le Genre à l’œuvre, ed. Melody Jan-Ré, 221–242. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 2015a. “Les performances d’improvisation de Tanya Tagaq: une analyse descriptive de la culture ethno-pop”, déc. Récits de société, Revues.org. https://itineraires.revues.org/2765 ———. 2015b. “La dimensione del ‘gioco’ di gola inuit secondo Tanya Tagaq nella tradizione della nouvelle vocalité occidentale.” In Le dimensioni della voce, ed. F. Gervasi, 11–48. Nardò: Besa Editrice. Stévance, Sophie and Serge Lacasse. 2015. “Research-Creation in Music as a Collaborative Space between Musicologist, Researchers-Creators, and Musicians.” Media-N, New Media Caucus 11 (3): 78–86. ———. 2016. “Tanya Tagaq, A Cosmopolitan Artist in The Studio.” In Rewriting the Rules of Record Production, ed. Simon Zagorski-Thomas, Katia Isakoff, Serge Lacasse and Sophie Stévance. Farnham: Ashgate, 2017. Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5 (3): 361–375. Streri, Arlette and Edouard Gentaz. 2003. “Cross-Modal Recognition of Shape from Hand to Eyes in Human Newborns.” Somatosensory and Motor Research 20 (1): 13–18.

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Sophie Stévance Thrift, Samantha. 2007. “Beyond Bootylicious: Race, (Post)Feminism and Sexual Subjectification with Destiny’s Child.” In Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music, ed. Patricia Spence Rudden, 105–126. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Toynbee, Jason and Byron Dueck, eds. 2011. Migrating Music. London: Routledge. Turner, Bryan S. 2008. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. Los Angeles and London: SAGE Publications. Ullestad, Neal. 1992. “Diverse Rock Rebellions Subvert Mass Media Hegemony.” In Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, ed. Reebee Garofalo, 37–53. Boston: South End Press. Vincent, Richard C. 1989. “Clio’s Consciousness Raised? Portrayal of Women in Rock Videos, Re-Examined.” Journalism Quarterly 66 (1): 155–160. Wagner Sørensen, Bo. 2001. “‘Men in Transition’: The Representation of Men’s Violence against Women in Greenland.” Violence against Women 7 (7): 826–847. Wald, Gayle. 2002. “Just a Girl?: Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth.” In Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, ed. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook and Ben Saunders, 191–215. Durham: Duke University Press. White, Bob W. 2008. Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Zhang, Yuanyuan, Travis L. Dixon and Kate Conrad. 2010. “Female Body Image as a Function of Themes in Rap Music Videos: A Content Analysis.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 62 (11): 787–797.

Hyperlinks http://grecem.oicrm.org/diffusions/from-throat-singing-to-transcultural-popular-music-tanyatagaqs-performing-body/ http://grecem.oicrm.org http://larc.oicrm.org

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5 SPECTRES OF MASCULINITY Markers of vulnerability and nostalgia in Johnny Cash Eirik Askerøi

If I could start again A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way Trent Reznor, ‘Hurt’ (1994)

Introduction Some fifty years after his initial breakthrough on Sun Records, Johnny Cash released his fiftieth studio album in 2002, American IV: The Man Comes Around. This signalled a peak moment that resuscitated as much as canonised Cash. In this chapter, I want to argue how this extraordinary elevation of Cash can be accounted for through specific sonic markers of vulnerability and nostalgia. I am especially keen to explore the extent to which Cash’s rendition of ‘Hurt’ (originally by Nine Inch Nails) presents an opportunity to identify markers of vulnerability in a pop song.1 It is along three lines of inquiry that I conduct this study: •

•

•

Identity formation and generic anchoring: to demonstrate how Cash’s musical identity was constructed around his voice and style of singing, but also how his voice needs to be read through what has become known as the ‘boom-chicka-boom’ sound, and, moreover, how this sound contributed to stabilising an otherwise contradictory media image. The relationship between white masculinity and vulnerability/nostalgia: to investigate the extent to which the American series in general, and the song, ‘Hurt’, in particular, reinvented Cash by marking sonically what seems to be a clear-cut break with his established sonic trademark. Age and generation: to explore the role of ‘Hurt’ in the broader staging of Cash as an old man reminiscing on his career, and examining the ways in which this process is not only reflected in many aspects of the music and sound production, but also through visual and sonic markers of vulnerability and nostalgia.

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As I will point out, it is Cash’s vocalisation that foregrounds this song’s evocative potential. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to identify the impact of the sonic and visual production and performance of ‘Hurt’ upon Cash’s gendered identity. Through popular music recordings, the voice has become a contested site where the apparent fixity of gender categorisation is confronted, negotiated and developed.2 In popular music, the voice acts as the primary sonic mediator of gendered representations and negotiations. Gendered identity, however, understood as a “process with multiple sites for becoming and being” (Halberstam 1998, 21), should define not only those who place themselves, or are placed, ‘outside’ established identity categories, but also those who would (seem to) be situated comfortably within them. With this I am referring to the notion that the label ‘white male’ is the only identity category that has been exempt from gendering. As Matthew Bannister observes, there “is a regrettable tendency to view ‘white men’ as monolithic, missing the point that if gender is socially constructed, then that applies as much to the ‘dominant’ group as any other” (Bannister 2006, x). Undoubtedly, white men also face a certain turmoil when confronted directly with Western society’s ‘shrillest notions of normality’. And, popular music has become one of the most important arenas for putting this on display and turning it into entertainment. By describing the advent of ‘new male singer/songwriters’, Ian Biddle has observed the following qualities: “A kind of openness to vulnerability, a commitment to social and sexual intimacy, and a tendency to want to avoid the overt spectacularization of masculinity” (Biddle 2007, 125). Illustrative of this, Cash has played on notions of the laconic rather than the spectacular male, thus exempting him from the risky zone of gendered ambiguity. Yet, as Biddle suggests: It seems as if, for men to become gendered (that is, to become marked by the operation of discourse), they must now also entertain danger, an openness to hurt, for without entertaining that danger, the figure of masculinity operates without boundaries, as if it were always already the only position from which to wield a discourse (a non-gender). (Biddle 2007, 129) Stan Hawkins elaborates on this point by insisting that vulnerability, confirmed as much off-stage as on-stage, discloses countless confessionals; it is a prerequisite of stardom to appear to bare all. Such public display sparks off any type of emotional reaction, from outrage, condemnation and protectiveness to heightened empathy with the star. (Hawkins 2009, 186) For Hawkins, then, vulnerability is mainly channelled through temperamental markers of vocal performance, where the act of vocalisation is always framed within a pop aesthetic that is negotiated in terms of both performance and production. When applied to Cash, the show of vulnerability not only increases empathy, but also notions of age as a structure of authenticity.

Genre and sound Few musicians have experienced a career as lengthy and turbulent as Cash.3 And, as his musical fortunes changed, so did his identity. Record releases as disparate as the country singles ‘I Walk the Line’ (1956), ‘Ring of Fire’ (1963) and ‘The Man in Black’ (1971) and the gospel records Hymns from the Heart (1962) and The Holy Land (1969) are part of a 64

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vast musical output. Along a historical continuum, Cash’s career can be divided according to his changing affiliations with four different record companies: Sun (1955–1958), Columbia (1958–1986), Mercury (1986–1993) and American Recordings (1993–2003).4 Such a continuum provides a good basis for tracking the formation and establishment of his characteristic sound, and for understanding how this became fundamental to Cash’s musical identity. Cash’s Memphis breakthrough at Sun Records occurred alongside Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison, to name a few of the famous artists who shared the same label. With Sam Philips as his producer, and accompanied by Luther Perkins on electric guitar and Marshall Grant on double bass, Cash and the Tennessee Two gradually developed a distinct sound: the boom-chicka-boom sound.5 This derived from Cash’s distinct dry-sounding acoustic guitar and rhythmic emphasis on the off-beat, which he achieved by placing a dollar bill between the strings and the fretboard to prevent the open strings from ringing when they were not being fretted. While Grant stuck mostly to roots and fifths on the bass, grounding the sound harmonically, Perkins muted the strings of his guitar using his palm. According to Leigh Edwards, Perkins did this because he believed himself to be a poor player. Whatever the reasons might be, there was something new and different about the sound of this trio. As Grant matter-of-factly recalled: “We didn’t work on that sound. It was all we could play” (Grant, quoted in Edwards 2009, 46). It earned fame for the band and proved remarkably resilient as well; variations upon this sound would serve as the main musical basis for Cash’s work until he teamed up with Rick Rubin at American Records in 1993. As Edwards observes, this characteristic sound, and especially the role of the electric guitar within it, “remained Cash’s touchstone throughout his career” (Edwards 2009, 46). In 1958, Cash left Sun Records for a lucrative contract offer with Columbia Records. Lasting until 1986, this contract allowed Cash to produce records within a wide variety of musical genres, ranging from country and rockabilly to blues and gospel, all built around the boom-chicka-boom sound. In tandem with his major country hit ‘Ring of Fire’ (1963), Cash would also release four records that have since become known as his ‘concept albums’: Ride This Train (1960), Blood, Sweat and Tears (1963), Bitter Tears (1964) and Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West (1965). This series of records encapsulates a period of increasing commercial success; his most productive period, the 1960s, would also be the time in his life when he pushed to the limits aspects of his identity. According to Phil Sutcliffe of Mojo, Cash “feared that achieving success and wealth was an act of treachery against his impoverished origins. And necking pills as if his real musical ambition was to become a human maraca only made everything worse” (Sutcliffe 2004, 1). In 1966, he left Vivian, his wife of twelve years, for fellow performer June Carter. During this time, he began to use amphetamines in order to maintain a gruelling tour schedule of up to three hundred shows a year. His personal life would have a profound effect on his professional career. Norman Blake, who played guitar alongside Luther Perkins on the last two concept albums, recalled: He’d be stumbling around the studio, falling through guitars. Take his knife and rip the furniture. Maybe it doesn’t show in what you hear, but nobody knows how many hours went into some of those cuts . . . I suspect he found it hard to accept the fame and fortune he was handed and it was when things got too nice he made these albums, half-expecting them not to do well commercially. (Blake, quoted in Sutcliffe 2004) Despite his apparent ‘anti-commercial’ death wish, Cash’s concept albums still generated several successful hits.6 These albums would also provide him with credibility among the folk 65

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music audience, culminating in his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. Then, in 1968 and 1969, Cash released two of his most successful albums, containing recordings of live concerts in Folsom Prison and San Quentin State Prison. According to Edwards, these records “cemented his renown and his outsider, rough-hewn persona” (2009, 20). During this period, he released his third gospel album, The Holy Land, whose single ‘Daddy Sang Bass’ reached number 1 on the country charts in 1968. From 1969 to 1971, Cash hosted his own TV show, The Johnny Cash Show, featuring guests who were not often on TV. Most notably, he invited Bob Dylan for the first broadcast, on 1 May 1969, where they performed Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’ together.7 In this way, rather than dissolving into a protean kaleidoscope of different identities, Cash’s contradictory media image paradoxically became his main strength, in many ways thanks to the continuity of his sound and, most importantly, his vocal style.

Cash’s musical paradoxes Cash’s discography (alongside his biopics, documentaries and biographies) reveals certain contradictions, especially with regard to his media image. While often promoting an image of the brutally honest champion of the poor and outcast, Cash would also cultivate a ‘good Christian’ rhetoric. This seeded a potential conflict, as Edwards points out: Distinctive here is Cash’s signature embodiment of saint and sinner, family man and rambler, establishment patriot and outlaw rebel. His manipulation of these opposing images is striking for its longevity and circulation, as he deploys these themes throughout his long career to global popularity. But, again, most distinctive and important about his opposing images is that he does not resolve them. He leaves the diametric poles in productive tension, exploring each side of the opposition and adding a deep sense of complexity and commitment to both sides. (Edwards 2009, 13) As Edwards suggests, the productive tension emanating from Cash’s contradictions becomes a prime mediator of his authenticity. Interestingly, Pamela Wilson addresses similar issues in Dolly Parton’s contradictory navigation of the glamorous star, on the one hand, and the southern working-class woman, on the other: “Parton ‘plays herself’, constructing an image from the very contradictions of her own culturally grounded experience and social identity” (Wilson 1998, 101). Cash’s conflicting image derives from his generic affiliation at an early stage in his career. In keeping with this general profile, he stuck to rockabilly (as with the early Elvis) rather than drifting towards ‘traditional’ country music. In the 1950s, rockabilly was regarded as a threat to traditional values in terms of both race and gender. Michael Bertrand has asserted that the “experience with race is ‘automatically inflected’ by other social classifications, such as gender, class, generation, history, and regional identity. To understand the story of rockabilly is to reconcile these various sectors” (Bertrand 2004, 62). Assuming that this was the case in the USA in the 1950s, it would then appear, as Edwards points out, that this conflict would become one of Cash’s strongest playing cards, and in truth his appropriation of sonic (and visual) markers from rockabilly gave him more musical exposure with a wider audience. For example, ‘I Walk the Line’ (1956) reached number 1 on the country charts, as well as number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. Cash would recall how “[n]ational recognition came with the release of ‘I Walk the Line’. ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ had become a country standard, but ‘I Walk the Line’ was, and is, my biggest selling record to date. It was a seller, 66

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as we like to say, in all fields” (Cash 1975, 80). According to Bill C. Malone, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ became, through its popularity, “a key to the bad boy legend that once surrounded him” (Malone 2006, 136). As such, Cash drew on a unique performative to represent the potential threat of the various dichotomies he straddled. Circumstantial evidence abounds that his rebel image was appealing to most people. This is obvious from the stories that have been told through factual movies and record compilations. James Mangold’s Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005), for example, favoured one particular version of Cash’s life at the expense of all the others: “Walk the Line and similar biographical narratives do not so much ignore Cash’s contradictions as they try to find explanations for them that are ultimately unsatisfying because his ambiguities foil closure” (Edwards 2009, 59). Additionally, platinum and multiplatinum compilations, such as The Essential Johnny Cash (2002) and The Legend of Johnny Cash (2005), respectively narrow the musical story of Cash as well by leaving out his gospel and Christmas music. Significantly, the cultural products intended to present the ‘real story’ of Cash’s life tend to omit elements of his career that did not befit his rebel image. If we return to Cash’s older recordings, two sonic markers stand out. The first and most significant is Cash’s low, baritone voice, which effortlessly slices through the sparse mix of the instruments. Nicknaming Cash as ‘Captain Decibel’, his long-time producer, Jack Clement, described his voice in the following way: “You just can’t hardly cover it up. It’s almost impossible to drown him down. You can put in lots of drums, horns, a roomful of guitars and everything else – he still cuts through. It’s powerful. There’s few voices I’ve ever heard like that” (Clement, quoted in Edwards 2009, 45). In effect, Cash’s singing (and speaking) voice represents the primary sonic marker of his biographical presence; a presence that became all the more distinct as Rubin stripped down the arrangements underpinning it. The second marker is Perkins’s reticent accompaniment on the electric guitar; his subtle variations on the double bass’s tonic-fifth movement stood out in terms of their muted timbral qualities as well as their rhythmic interplay with Cash’s dry-sounding acoustic guitar.8 This style of playing became a signifier of Cash’s sonic past, which, in turn, became a sonic marker, not least through its absence on the American recordings. A refinement of this marker is no better apparent than in his rendition of ‘Hurt’, to which I will now turn.

‘Hurt’: Markers of vulnerability and nostalgia By 1993, Cash had started working with producer Rick Rubin on a series of records, later known as the American Recordings. Rubin was renowned for his genre defiance, and the roster of his label, Def Jam Recordings, ranged from Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys to Danzig, Slayer, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mick Jagger and the Dixie Chicks. Rubin describes his production ideals as literally reductive: “When I started producing [minimalism] was my thing. . . . My first record actually says, instead of produced by Rick Rubin, it says, ‘reduced by Rick Rubin’” (Rubin, quoted in Brown 2009, 3). His collaboration with Cash resulted from Rubin’s interest in ‘rehabilitating’ established artists whose fame had faded. “The first person I thought of was Johnny Cash . . . already a legend, but ripe for something different. I knew I could do something great with him” (Rubin, quoted in Hirschberg 2007, 20). Their first record, American Recordings, released in 1994, featured Cash alone on acoustic guitar. Cash has expressed a sense of relief on completion: What a load that’s lifted from finishing what we feel like is good work. And the frustration of all the years and all the sessions of overproduction and all that jazz, 67

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and to be able to sit down with a tape that I’m proud of. It’s just great. This is what I’ve always wanted. (Cash in Fielding and Rachmell 2007)9 This statement implies that his established sonic trademark (his voice accompanied by the boom-chicka-boom sound) had turned into a type of straitjacket, and that Rubin’s ideals of reduction would eventually produce a new sonic space; a space that helped emphasise the communicative power of Cash’s aging voice. It is worth noting that with his rendition of ‘Hurt’, Cash bypasses not only the initial meaning of Nine Inch Nails’s original version, but also what had become an almost inextricable link to his own boom-chicka-boom sound. He did this via the acoustic guitar and his plaintive, aging voice, both of which exist as powerful signifiers of vulnerability and nostalgia; not only did they evoke the folk singer tradition in popular music, but also the travelling minstrel from long before that. In the American Recordings series, Cash sings mostly cover songs, reinforcing the impression that his new claim to authorship pivots on a powerfully realised sense of nostalgia. The displacement of the original singers of these songs by Cash’s voice and guitar enables him to revisit (and renew) the things that made him ‘Johnny Cash’ in the first place: Cash offers more than another link in a long chain of cultural tradition: his texts build on familiar cultural tensions but also present a more multifaceted exploration of these issues because they question gender constructions. Cash establishes a heroic working-class masculinity and then explores the uncertainties in that identity. (Edwards 2009, 12) At this point I want to draw on Freya Jarman-Ivens’s distinction between narrative nostalgia (‘a nostalgia within the song’) and objectifying nostalgia (‘a nostalgia for the song’; see Jarman-Ivens 2007, 4, author’s emphasis). In her close reading of various renditions of ‘Superstar’ by the Carpenters, Jarman-Ivens discusses the way in which the musical details, mostly in terms of instrumental hooks in Richard Carpenter’s arrangements, have “determine[d] the presence of the Carpenters’ influence on post-Carpenters recordings” (Jarman-Ivens 2007, 3). Later appropriations, then, acknowledge the Carpenters’ version as the ‘original’ through their reinterpretation of certain otherwise identifiable sonic markers. In ‘Hurt’, what is left of the Nine Inch Nails original is only the chords, lyrics and melody, albeit with slight modifications. In the original, the opening chord is an A minor with a diminished fifth (a tritone), while in Cash’s rendition, this chord is replaced by a clean A minor, which reduces the tension created by the tritone. Lyrically, Reznor’s initial ‘I wear this crown of shit’ has been replaced by ‘I wear this crown of thorns’, strengthening the religious connotations in Cash’s performance. In this version, it is the way in which Cash’s biography takes hold of this ‘outsider narrative’ through his intense yet ‘down-to-earth’ performance, all of which evokes profound empathy amongst his listeners. The narrative of nostalgia mobilised by Cash in ‘Hurt’ is evident in the reactions to the cover version by several of his younger colleagues. The song’s writer, Trent Reznor, has said: We were in the studio, getting ready to work – and I popped it [the video] in. . . . By the end I was on the verge of tears. I’m working with Zach de la Rocha [sic], and I told him to take a look. At the end of it, there was just dead silence. There was, like, this moist clearing of throats and then, “Uh, okay, let’s get some coffee”. (Urbanski 2003, 176) 68

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Producer Rick Rubin agrees: “It was beautiful, but it was so unlike any video I’d ever seen before, and it was so extreme that it really took my breath away, and not in a good way. I didn’t know how to handle it” (Rubin in Romanek and Bangs 2005).10 Rubin credits Romanek for its sheer force: “The fact that in a four-minute video, that level of emotion can be brought out of the viewer is incredible. I mean if you felt that much emotion during a two-hour movie, it would be an accomplishment” (Romanek and Bangs 2005). Also, Bono of U2 has declared: “Trent Reznor was born to write that song, but Johnny Cash was born to sing it. And Mark Romanek was born to film it” (Romanek and Bangs 2005). I have included these statements as examples of emotional response; responses that further verify the sense of narrative nostalgia at play in this version. In accordance with Bono, it would seem that this particular version displaces the original. On this matter, Erik Steinskog observes: “Not only can cover versions become new ‘originals’ – in the sense that they become the matrix for future covers – they may also question the presupposed ‘original’s’ originality” (Steinskog 2010, 140). All this points to an important aspect of the performance and production of a recorded song: while there can only be one original set of lyrics, melody and chord progression in a song, it is the peculiarities of the individual performance, both instrumental and vocal, that give the song its meaning. Thus, Cash’s performance of ‘Hurt’ brings to the fore a range of related questions, with regard to both the Nine Inch Nails original and Cash’s persona at the very end of his life. In effect, Cash reinvents the song as much as himself. As far as new originals go, then, Cash’s ‘Hurt’ represents a complex interaction between Rubin’s revolutionary production of him and the long cultural narratives that preceded this. Cash, after repeated listenings, declared it to be the best anti-drug song ever made. Others however have perceived it as a lament of self-denigration. Clearly, these are just some of the ways in which aspects of production and performance interact in the video to further define and comment upon Cash’s identity. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, the meaning of an ‘utterance’ must be sought beyond its ‘grammar’: “Any utterance – oral or written, primary or secondary, and in any sphere of communication – is individual and therefore can reflect the individuality of the speaker (or writer); that is, it possesses individual style” (Bakhtin 1986, 63). In keeping with Bakhtin’s concept, then, I want to look past the words and chords to the sonic constructions of closeness and liveness, and their consequent mobilisation of tropes of authorship and nostalgia. Throughout ‘Hurt’, Cash’s voice comes across as the single primary marker of his biographical presence. It also reveals significant markers of vulnerability, specifically in relation to the lyrics. This becomes discernible already in the first line when Cash sings ‘I hurt myself today’; we hear a dying man lost in introspection, through a geno-song – “the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the space where significations germinate ‘from within language and in its very materiality’” (Barthes 1977: 182) – that has utterly turned the words on themselves. This grain, or bodily presence, in the voice becomes freshly apparent thanks to Rubin’s technological mediation of Cash’s performance. Atop the reduced instrumental arrangement, Rubin’s careful choice of microphones and preamps allows him to record every creak, from the voice or the guitar’s neck or a chair, and achieve a degree of intimacy that notably transcends even the live. During this performance, Cash looms larger than life through a newfound vulnerability that he quite likely did not anticipate. Edwards’ observations of Cash’s media image provide another perspective on the details of musical expression in ‘Hurt’. While her study is not musicological, something she acknowledges, she does point out that the verses consist of three minor chords and the choruses turn to major chords.11 A darker mode indeed characterises the verses due to the way the harmonic progression is structured in time; this arises from an extra moment that 69

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is devoted to the A minor, as opposed to the other two verse chords, which are in fact C major and Dsus2. The vocal line, starting on the C major chord, releases the tension of the preceding A minor. After a two-bar pause on a G major chord, the chorus starts on A minor again, but its prompt turn to F major, then via C major to G major, changes the tonal centre from A minor to C major. The lighter sensibility of the major tonal area could indeed be interpreted as uplifting, hopeful, although the overall gesture is slightly more complicated than the broad shift from minor to major, which is relevant to the star narrative we might be tempted to derive from this performance. But, nothing is ever quite as it seems with Cash, and his rendition of this song takes full advantage of its innate harmonic tensions and ambiguities. I have also noted that in ‘Hurt’ the aesthetics of the production are specifically devoted to Cash’s voice and the sound of the acoustic guitars. The goal is to render the strongest possible impression of an old man with his guitar, and the other musical elements are merely effects that underline and strengthen this narrative. As a framework for identifying narrative aspects of the sonic markers in the music through the video, I have devised a table (see Table 5.1) that maps out the interaction between Cash’s vocal performance and the instrumentation, on the one hand, and the sonic markers and symbolism of the video, on the other. As with many pop songs, ‘Hurt’ is built around a straightforward structure of intro – verse 1 – chorus – verse 2 – double chorus. The harmonic progression responds to this structure, as discussed, while the video arguably uses it as a point of departure as well. These elements are related in significant ways, especially in terms of their complex negotiation of the past and the present. One musical moment in the song demonstrates this well. In the second half of the first verse (Example 5.1), Cash starts singing over the C major chord while the guitars build up towards their return to an A minor chord again, the effect of which is to suggest a sense of exhaling. Describing the narrator’s present situation, the words seem to allude to the past through the numbness he now suffers. The singing style is sombre and plain, and the production is close and intimate. Additionally, there is an entry of a grand piano in the mix, with minor thirds on the first beat of every measure. This bulks up the landing on to the A minor chord, suggesting the clang of church bells.12 As I have mentioned, one of Rick Rubin’s motivations is to think of production in terms of reduction, so that any sounds that survive must be fraught with meaning; in this sense, the piano/church bells seem to toll grimly for what has gone before (or what, indeed, awaits the protagonist).

Example 5.1 ‘Hurt’: Vocal, acoustic guitar and grand piano (0:33–0:42).

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Table 5.1 Form, music and visual aspects of Hurt Form

Lyrics and themes

Harmony

Instrumentation

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Bridge (01:36–01:49)

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Verse 2 I wear this crown of thorns (01:49–02:31) Upon my liar’s chair Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair Beneath the stains of time The feelings disappear You are someone else I am still right here Chorus 2 What have I become (02:31–03:37) My sweetest friend Everyone I know Goes away in the end And you could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt If I could start again A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way

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Mellotron

Chorus 1 What have I become (00:56–01:36) My sweetest friend Everyone I know goes away in the end And you could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt

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Grand piano

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Vocals

Verse 1 I hurt myself today (00:13–00:56) To see if I still feel I focus on the pain The only thing that’s real The needle tears a hole The old familiar sting Try to kill it all away But I remember everything

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Acoustic guitar 2

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Acoustic guitar 1

Intro (00:00–00:13)

Visual narrative

Eirik Askerøi

These musical details are emphasised and yet nuanced by the video. Carol Vernallis notes: “In music videos, images can work with music by adopting the phenomenological qualities of sound: these images, like sound, come to the fore and fade away, ‘stream’, surround us, and even reverberate within us, and mimic timbral qualities” (Vernallis 2004, 177). ‘Hurt’ video director Mark Romanek pursues a visual dialogue between Cash’s present (filmed at his home and in a closed museum) and his past via a substantial amount of documentary material from Cash’s private archive, as well as movies and documentaries to which Cash had contributed. Romanek recalls: [We thought] maybe we should take a look at this archival stuff and see what the hell we have in these boxes. And we pulled out something, and loaded it up into the computer. And I think it happened to be that image of Johnny riding the train. . . . I somewhat randomly dropped it into the cut, and we got . . . chills went up our spine. And there was something about the juxtaposition of Johnny as a young vibrant man and Johnny towards the end of his life. (Romanek and Bangs 2005) In the music video the true ‘present’ does not simply include the more recent images of Cash, but also the unfolding interaction between those recent images and the much older images. As Bakhtin argues, “The present is something transitory, it is flow, it is an eternal continuation without beginning or end; it is denied an authentic convulsiveness and consequently lacks an essence as well” (Bakhtin 1981, 20). Cash’s present/presence in the video is as much a construction as his past. In other words, he is still performing his subjectivity, and in this case reinventing a particularly powerful song with the help of an equally powerful producer. Steinskog has claimed that “[o]ne might understand subjectivity as a staging. It is about presentation, about making present – not least through the voice – a role, rather than some kind of essential being behind the mask” (Steinskog 2010, 144). Conversely, in ‘Hurt’, the music is intertwined with Cash’s narrative on many levels – a dialogic relationship is set up that makes it challenging to merely classify this as a role, a point that Steinskog also makes. As I have indicated, Cash’s clear baritone voice has undoubtedly been established as a powerful marker of his biographical presence in all of his songs. Similarly, in the video, the visual framing of his whole life story further intensifies this strong sense of presence and, arguably, the very identity behind the mask. The first frame presents Cash alone near a breakfast table laden with food. Both in colour and content, this setting evokes Flemish still-life paintings from the sixteenth century; it feels disturbingly resonant – in Spanish the still life is called naturaleza muerta, or ‘dead nature’.13 Even if the viewer is unaware of these connotations, a powerful sense of nostalgia is immediately sensed in the video. During the guitar intro, we see a statue of Atlas (referring to Cash’s legendary stoic endurance?), as well as richly filled fruit baskets.14 These lush images, and particularly those of Cash alone at the table, recur throughout the video to symbolise the ‘present tense’ of the visual (and musical) narrative. When Cash makes his first appearance, he is a conspicuously aging man – even his guitar is black – whose bearing strongly hints that his end might be near. The next frames then introduce the video’s documentary material: collages of old movie clips, private archival photos and concert performances, and short clips from the House of Cash Museum. Musically, the rhythmic drive in piano and guitars shifts from half notes to quarter notes during the choruses. Underlining this visually, the rate of picture shifts also increases from half notes to quarter notes, building tension with the music. This tension continues until we see a couple of clips of Cash in jail,

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with a return to the House of Cash Museum. Already, we have been introduced to a range of spaces that contribute to creating a strong, nostalgic picture of who Cash was and a consequent question mark as to who he has become. In the beginning of the second verse, Cash is back at the table, singing. Old pictures are now combined with more still-life pictures. During the second half of this verse, we observe Cash visiting his old house as the flute sound from a Mellotron sneaks into the soundscape, troubling the relative serenity of the music with its vague, almost backwards-sounding twonote motive. Tension builds up further in the second chorus, twice the duration of the first. At one point, an obviously affectionate June Carter appears behind Cash with what could be interpreted as a worried look on her face. Knowing that June had in fact already passed away by the time the video was released would reinforce the nostalgia (and general sense of vulnerability) of this moment, as would any suspicion that Cash himself had only months left to live. The images then start shifting even more quickly between archival images of June with a child to Cash emptying his wine glass by the table. Glimpses of the crucifixion of Jesus are interspersed with equally brief images of Cash as a young man. The pictures switch all the more quickly as the intensity of the music builds and the sonic surface begins to teeter on the verge of distortion. A final flurry of images of Cash’s life intercuts with religious symbols and the older Cash at the table, anticipating a final visual and musical release: Cash sits still at the piano, then closes it gently as the image fades out. From this analysis I want to suggest that this video resembles what Mark Fenster has labelled as a “performance/concept combination”, a format derived from many early country music videos in which a filmed performance is combined with “various segments that somehow illustrate the message or the plot of the lyrics” (Fenster 1993, 116). In a sense, ‘Hurt’ is more than illustrative – it is propelled by a musical arrangement of emotionally charged imagery in the service of a performer that seems himself uniquely available to this form of representation. It becomes a soundtrack, in short, of Cash’s life. Responding to the song’s entire harmonic underpinning in the acoustic guitar and piano alone heightens our expectations regarding Cash’s singing voice; more importantly, he has nowhere to hide here. Or perhaps we are meant to think that he is now past hiding? His rich yet aging voice, underpinned by the sparse musical arrangement, invites intimacy with the listener. In effect, this resembles what Allan F. Moore has labelled first person authenticity, which arises when “the audience becomes engaged not with the acts and gestures themselves, but directly with the originator of those acts and gestures” (Moore 2002, 214). Cash, then, guarantees his authenticity by acting out, musically and visually, the redeemed sinner – a form of authenticity that could only be reached at a certain age.

Conclusions By referring to Cash’s troubled history, both sonically and visually, ‘Hurt’ triggers tropes of vulnerability and nostalgia on several levels. Cash’s collaboration with Rick Rubin signalled a significant break with a sonic trademark that is traceable to his breakthrough in the 1950s. Musically, Rubin’s choice to strip down Cash’s musical arrangements opened a space for Cash’s aging voice. Ultimately, Rubin’s arrangements resolved Cash’s lifelong contradictions into a complex but coherent image – a musical identity resurrected through a conscious utilisation of sonic markers. In this way, Rubin’s studio imperative – to reduce rather than produce – would also act to expose markers of vulnerability and nostalgia in Cash’s performances.

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So, what does this all say about his gendered representation? In ‘Hurt’, the vocal performance and the version’s sonic production (or reduction) work together to emphasise the biographical presence of the singer as author, directing the focus explicitly to the voice. The voice’s shivering quality exposes a vulnerability that reminds us that time has even caught up with Cash. Yet, I would hasten to point out that these vocal markers of age never threaten to discredit him in any way. While it is true that Cash has ‘entertained dangers’ throughout his life, he regrets them. His openness and feelings of hurt is a confession of this. In this sense, Cash’s construction of masculinity operates without boundaries and thereby upholds “the only position from which to wield a discourse (a non-gender)” (Biddle 2007, 129). By representing an older generation, both visually and sonically, Cash becomes an exponent for upholding masculinity as a non-gender by turning to well-known tropes of vulnerability and nostalgia that have become defining features of country music. On this basis, I would argue that this video’s strength derives from its acknowledgement of his contradictions, that is, from his confession of sorts. As Edwards puts it: The frail present-day Cash juxtaposed with the virile young star jumping trains, for example, speaks to his charged construction of a Southern white working-class masculinity as it appears in country music, which, again, is in tension in his corpus with a postmodern questioning of identity categories. (Edwards 2009, 61) Finally, the narrative of gender conveyed is grounded in the literal closeness of the studio production and the naked arrangements based upon acoustic guitars. In this way, listeners are driven to redeem Cash, even as he reveals himself to be flawed, or possibly broken. It is a momentous statement in an unassuming guise: Johnny Cash will always be around.

Notes  1 Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=related. When I first visited this particular clip in August 2008, the video had about 10.6 million views. On 18 April 2012, it had 40.8 million views. By 29 June 2015, the video had been removed due to copyright issues, having reached 71.6 million views. Another upload of the video is available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt1Pwfnh5pc&list=RDvt1Pwfnh5pc#t=0 and showed just over eight million views in early August 2015. If nothing else, this would indicate that the song and the video continue to affect many people.  2 See for example Hawkins (2009), Jarman-Ivens (2007), Koestenbaum (2001), Lacasse (2000), McClary (1991), Middleton (2006) and Steinskog 2008.  3 See Edwards (2009, 16–24). For more biographical details, see also Cash (1975), Hilburn (2013) and Urbanski (2003).  4 Cash died in 2003, though there have been several posthumous releases of new American material as well, including American V: A Hundred Highways (2006) and American VI: Ain’t No Grave (2010).  5 Philips named the group the Tennessee Two. When W. S. ‘Fluke’ Holland joined on drums in 1960, Cash’s backing band became known as the Tennessee Three.  6 One example is ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ (1964), which peaked at number 3 on the American country charts.  7 Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFk8e1Lg_is (accessed 14 September 2011).  8 ‘Get Rhythm’ is an example where Perkins also pivots around the tonic, altering between I-VI and I-IV-I-II, finding common tones within the harmonic I-IV progression. While this pattern would depart to some extent from his established ground-note/fifth pattern, Perkins’s playing style and sound continued to reinforce the Johnny Cash signature boom-chicka-boom.  9 Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1uxiMHQXI0 (accessed 18 August 2015). 74

Spectres of masculinity 10 Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg8xYSWOFR8 (accessed 1 January 2011). 11 Edwards also states that Johnny Cash performs the song alone with his guitar, though there are in fact two guitars present on the recording. 12 Thanks to Philip Tagg for bringing this point to my attention at the Nordic Musicological Congress at Norges Musikkhøgskole in 2008. Rather than labelling this a sonic marker, though, I would prefer Tagg’s own term sonic anaphone – “the perceived reference to paramusical sound” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 99). 13 Thanks to Cláudia Azevedo for pointing this out at the Nordic Musicological Congress at Norges Musikkhøgskole in 2008. 14 For more on symbolism in Flemish still-life painting, see for example Grootenboer (2005), who takes up the discourse of truth in breakfast painting from a Derridean perspective (61–97). Examples of such motifs can be seen in Willem Heda’s Breakfast Still Life (1634) and Still-Life with Pie, Silver Ewer and Crab (1658).

Bibliography Askerøi, Eirik. 2013. Reading Pop Production: Sonic Markers and Musical Identity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Kristiansand: University of Agder. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bannister, Matthew. 2006. White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bertrand, Michael. 2004. “I Don’t Think Hank Done It That Way: Elvis, Country Music, and the Reconstruction of Southern Masculinity.” In A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, edited by Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, 59–85. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Biddle, Ian. 2007. “The Singsong of Undead Labour: Gender Nostalgia and the Vocal Fantasy of Intimacy in the ‘New’ Male Singer/Songwriter.” In Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music, edited by Freya Jarman-Ivens, 125–144. New York: Routledge. Brown, Jake. 2009. Rick Rubin: In the Studio. Toronto: ECW Press. Cash, Johnny. 1975. Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Books. Edwards, Leigh H. 2009. Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fenster, Mark. 1993. “Genre and Form: The Development of the Country Music Video.” In Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, edited by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg, 94–110. London: Routledge. Fielding, Rory, and Andrew Rachmell. 2007. Johnny Cash: Music from the Album American Recordings. Film: Fast Focus TV. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1uxiMHQXI0. Accessed 8 October 2015. Grootenboer, Hanneke. 2005. The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Still-Life Painting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Hilburn, Robert. 2013. Johnny Cash: The Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Hirschberg, Lynn. 2007. “The Music Man.” New York Times, September 2. Available at http://www. nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all. Accessed November 12, 2016. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2007. “You’re Not Really T/here: Authorship, Nostalgia and the Absent ‘Superstar’.” Popular Musicology Online (5). Available at http://www.popular-musicology-online. com/issues/05/jarman-ivens-01.html. Accessed 29 August 2015. Keil, Charles. 1995. “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report.” Ethnomusicology 39 (1): 1–19. Koestenbaum, Wayne. 2001. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Da Capo. 75

Eirik Askerøi Lacasse, Serge. 2000. Listen to My Voice: The Evocative Power of Vocal Staging in Recorded Rock Music and Other Forms of Vocal Expression. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Malone, Bill C. 2006. Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mangold, James. 2005. Walk the Line. Film: 20th Century Fox. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Middleton, Richard. 2006. Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music. New York and London: Routledge. Moore, Allan F. 2002. “Authenticity as Authentication.” Popular Music 21 (2): 209–223. Porcello, Thomas. 2002. “Music Mediated as Live in Austin: Sound, Technology and Recording Practice.” City and Society 14 (1): 69–86. Rodley, C. 2004. Johnny Cash: The Last Great American. Film: BBC. Available at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xjxFdTTy1hU. Accessed 18 August 2015. Romanek, Mark, and Lance Bangs. 2005. The Work of Director Mark Romanek. Film: Palm Pictures. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVKX1LjosNU. Accessed 4 December 2015. Steinskog, Erik. 2008. “Voice of Hope: Queer Pop Subjectivities.” Trikster 1. Available at http://trikster. net/1/steinskog/1.html. Accessed 2 March 2015. Steinskog, Erik. 2010. “Queering Cohen: Cover Versions and Subversions of Identity.” In Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, edited by George Plasketes, 139–152. Farnham: Ashgate. Sutcliffe, Phil. 2004. “Johnny Cash’s Concept Albums.” Mojo (October). Available at http://www. rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=6964. Accessed 14 July 2015. Tagg, Philip, and Bob Clarida. 2003. Ten Little Title Tunes: Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media. New York: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press. Urbanski, Dave. 2003. The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash. Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Books. Vernallis, Carol. 2004. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Pamela. 1998. “Mountains of Contradictions: Gender, Class and Religion in the Star Image of Dolly Parton.” In Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars, edited by Cecilia Tichi, 98–120. Durham: Duke University Press.

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PART 2

Audiovisuality, sex(uality), women, and the politics of looking

Overview Integrated into audiovisual contexts, music operates in most extraordinary ways. In recent times, technological developments have altered the ways in which we perceive, purchase, and utilise music. Gender will always remain a major consideration point in audiovisual cultures. Anahid Kassabian demonstrates this in her study of web series, notably in the work of African American women. The emergence of new music strategies is particularly pertinent alongside gender when scrutinising the advent of web series as products of fictional audiovisual culture. Kassabian substantiates the claim that these new forms of media and art usher in sets of aesthetic choices. By means of specific examples of web series, she discovers that the politics involved in the brevity of their format serve to open up exciting opportunities for the creative production of art video works. Moreover, the role of women and minority groups in the enabling of self-production in web series has wider implications. Kassabian builds on her groundbreaking theories and methods to draw our attention to the use of sound in this process; how sound in itself creates possibilities extending well beyond the structures imposed by the mainstream Anglophone film and television industry. We learn that representational strategies are crucial to gender research, with the web series phenomenon igniting important questions dealing with the audiovisual practices behind music production. Such issues resonate in Kai Arne Hansen’s close reading of Sia Furler’s hit single ‘Chandelier’ from 2014. Hansen enquires about the performative exigencies of Sia’s act in the video of this song and its compelling video; this necessitates thoughts on authenticity. Considering personal narratives involves thoughts on aestheticisation. Pop expression is frequently authenticated by a high degree of vulnerability-on-display, and in Sia’s case this is communicated in ways that purport to displaying the emotional turmoil of celebrity status. Hansen’s music analytic model inspects the articulative processes of empathy, with specific attention to Sia’s fragile voice, a voice that is in constant threat of breaking down. In addition, audiovisual methods are activated to identify gender representations in both the video and a live performance of ‘Chandelier’ that draws attention to constructions of femininity through sonic and visual stylisation. Hansen’s research locates an expressive range of devices that project powerful emotions in the wake of calculated melancholic and ironic intent. If Sia

Audiovisuality, sex(uality), women, and the politics of looking

offers up a fascinating example of the performative aspects of gendered representation, she gets us to rethink pop subjectivities and the palette of stylistic codes available to the fan. Discourses of gender in popular music are based upon ‘looking’ as much as ‘listening’. Remaining within the confines of the pop video, Lori Burns and Marc Lafrance undertake a close reading of Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’. In their chapter, the emphasis falls on the politics of looking as they examine the strategic interplay of subjectivities in a video that essentially disrupts and complicates heteronormative notions of viewing. An original analytic model is devised to analyse three domains (lyrics, music, images): distinguishable by four parameters: thematic, gestural, spatial, and relational. The prime purpose of these parametrical intersections is to reveal the dynamic relationships in operation within the video ‘Video Phone’. As well as music analysis, an interdisciplinary approach addresses patterns of reception, as Lafrance and Burns strive to interrogate the male gaze within a critique that draws on the work of Connell, Jhally, hooks, Mulvey, and Sturken and Cartwright. The workings of female power versus the male gaze lead to a theoretical conception of gender that contextualises masculinity and hegemonic femininity. Ultimately, it is in the aestheticized landscape of ‘Video Phone’ that a counter-argument to mainstream heterosexual male imaginary emerges, one where the posthuman figure, in all its hyperreality, is musicalised in a way that defies all conventions. Underpinning all of these first three chapters is a common objective to define and critique gender, which is also the subject of Marita Djupvik’s study on the phenomenon of female masculinity. The preponderance of stereotypical gender roles in the music industry warrants critical attention, something Djupvik stresses when she applies Halberstam’s theory to the strategies and attitude of rapper, Missy Elliott, in the video ‘Work It’. This is discussed in direct reference to Elliott and her virtuosic command of the turntable, traditionally a signifier of masculinity. Here the performative effects of Elliott’s use of the studio and production techniques challenge norms associated with male hip-hop and rap artists. As part of her critique on female masculinity, Djubvik turns to theories of hypermasculinity to investigate the numerous strategies behind Elliott’s fight for freedom as a black woman. In tandem with the study conducted by Lafrance and Burns, the white male gaze is problematised in this chapter. Djupvik makes the claim that Elliott knowingly operates as a queer trickster, the strategy of which is to cast a light on (hyper)masculinity as a parodic mechanism for counteracting male stereotypes. Historically, gender inequality is prevalent in rap, as in many other styles, and Elliott’s performativity opens up a space for resisting the objectification and feminisation of women in the music industry. Features of gender representation addressed in this part of the volume underlie a general concern for perceptions of masculinity and femininity through the female star performer. Framed by a performative space, these case studies explore a set of ideas and cultural practices that provoke questions about identities and underlying ideologies. It becomes evident that a progressive approach is required for understanding the ongoing struggle for female rights on a global scale. As well as gender, these studies treat race, class, age, and sexuality as interconnected phenomena in the entertainment domain of audiovisuality.

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6 “YOU MEAN I CAN MAKE A TV SHOW?” Web series, assertive music, and African American women producers Anahid Kassabian

Small objects of digital culture – from app and browser games to uploaded videos on sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion, to smartphone apps and much more – occupy massive swathes of our time. Actually, this is frequently how we think and talk about them: the hubbub around people’s addiction to the game Flappy Bird may have been an easy target for humour, but it exemplifies exactly this issue. In this provocation, I consider web series in particular, by which I mean a planned series of videos with some kind of narrative arc (I shall discuss this further below). My questions are these: why and how do they take up so much of our time? What role or roles might music and sound contribute to them? How are they changing what we know about how music is used in narrative audiovisual contexts? In particular, I focus on series made primarily or significantly by African American women, a group that (Shonda Rhimes notwithstanding) has not had much access to producing mainstream culture, perhaps most notably films and television.1 Because web series do not require massive capital investment or distribution networks, they are more accessible to women and non-white producers than most other forms of audiovisual culture. As is so often the case, no part of this is as simple as it seems. First of all, there is the problem of what actually constitutes a web series. Since this is a very new form of culture – after all, YouTube only began in 2005 – there is not yet a stable vocabulary for the forms that do exist, and then there isn’t even a stable set of forms. We can say with some measure of confidence that we know the basic film genres in North America and Western Europe – romantic comedy, drama, melodrama, horror, thriller, musicals, action-adventure, and so on – and while they change and develop, there is a recognisable core group that is unlikely to disappear. In comparison, there are new genres of YouTube videos and video games all the time, and they are often at the centre of controversy. As just one example, let us consider the nightmare threatfest, colloquially known as Gamergate, occasioned by video game developer Zoë Quinn’s game, Depression Quest. Quinn, Brianna Wu (another game developer and journalist), and Anita Sarkeesian, a cultural critic, were all threatened with rape and various other forms of physical violence, including murder, and they were variously forced to change their phone numbers, move, and have police escorts. The focus of the public discussions around these events was quite rightly on the virulent misogyny that was on display, and I certainly don’t 79

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mean to belittle that in any way. But behind (or perhaps prior to) all of that was another intriguing issue: the nature of the game that set off the whole sequence of events. Quinn has suffered with depression off and on since her high school years, and she developed this game, Depression Quest, in hopes of • • •

raising awareness about depression, helping those struggling with depression feel less alone and isolated, and finally, helping those NOT living with depression to understand people who do a bit better.

Depression Quest is one of a whole world of independent games produced by developers who are expanding the notion of gaming from light entertainment into more thoughtful approaches and challenges to important issues. For just a few other examples, Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia gives players some sense of the difficulties M to F transgender people experience during their transitions; Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil asks players to imagine living in a world in the grips of a sudden oil shock; and That Dragon, Cancer (Green, Green, and Larson) takes players on the journey of raising a toddler diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. These kinds of games, sometimes called ‘serious games’, are stretching the range of video game genres in all sorts of ways. My point in that detour away from web series and into the world of video games was simply to say that there are new things happening all the time in these fields. For one last example, I wrote an article that was published in 2013 on smartphone apps to help one sleep. When I was doing the research in 2009–2011, many sleep apps included binaural beats, which purport to offer entrainment so that you can align your brainwaves as you choose. But in an article in 2015 about the best sleep apps, only one included binaural beats; everything about digital culture, from the content to the genres and everything in between, moves very quickly indeed.2 So, to return to web series, even the definition has been in motion since the very beginning. To take a simple question first, does it make sense to categorise all of Netflix’s series that are only available by streaming as web series? What about series that are shown on TV and then made available on YouTube by the producers? Or by someone else? Presumably most of us would agree these are not ‘web series’ as such. Then, once we narrow our field down to works existing originally and primarily online, is there a difference between a short series of five episodes and a series of 20 or more episodes? Between a single series and a series that is part of a network, as those I will discuss in this chapter may be categorised? Probably not, except in terms of resources available and perhaps PR power. And is there a difference between web series produced by independent networks as opposed to those produced by traditional broadcast or cable networks? This begins to open some more complicated issues. The differences in the scale of resources available to web series of different kinds are mind-boggling. For example, Dexter, a massively successful TV show that ran for eight seasons on Showtime, had a spin-off animated web series called Dexter Early Cuts that ran for three seasons. Similarly, Lisa Kudrow, best known as Phoebe in Friends, starred in Web Therapy, which aired on L/Studio.com (a project of Lexus) beginning in 2008; in 2011, it began a four-season run on Showtime. Obviously, neither of these shows lacked resources. On the polar opposite end of the spectrum are shows like those discussed below, which have used whoever and whatever they could get access to in order to scrape together a production. This is by no means to suggest that they are unprofessional, but rather that they do not have the same budgets for things like sets, costumes, makeup, and hair as those series with ample funding. While that may not at first glance seem like a formula for producing successful 80

African American women producers

series, some of these series have been very well received, even occasionally going viral. Moreover, these issues have ramifications for musical decisions to which I will return below. For the purposes of this study, I have employed a working definition of web series as series that: a) appear only on video uploading sites, and b) are generally no more than 30 minutes in length, and more commonly 2–15 minutes. While this is intended as a viable definition of web series for the purposes of this chapter, it is certainly not a definitive one. For example, it observes a tendency among series in terms of length, but there is no obvious reason why a web series could not be 45 minutes per episode. In addition, from among series fitting this definition, I have used two more criteria in selecting the series to study, which is that they are all fictional, and that they are all produced solely or significantly by African American women. My focus is on fictional series because I am interested in considering the changes that they may or may not be making to routine practices of scoring films and television shows. But there are many, many web non-fiction series, from the controversial but popular pranks series, like Prank v Prank and Jay Karl’s Pranks, to informative and educational series such as SciShow, Vsauce, CGPGrey, and the PBS Idea Channel, to the many Buzzfeed channels and series. However, these do not offer comparative material to the majority of objects that have been studied in the area of music, sound, and moving image studies.3 I have concentrated specifically on the work of African American women for two reasons: first, this is how I got interested in web series to begin with, and second, because they are using important, fascinating new music strategies that make real changes from the mainstream American film and television model that is so often still prevalent, minor variations notwithstanding. My first real contact with web series was through The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl, which went viral early in its production.4 It premiered in February 2011, and in 2012 it won the Shorty (the Oscar equivalent for social media) for Best Web Show. Issa Rae, the creator and actress who played the main character (who also occasionally wrote and produced), has been particularly outspoken about how important the web has been for enabling women and creators from minority races and ethnicities to produce their own works without being blocked by gatekeepers.5 Rae has a number of series she has created herself, as well as works by other writers that she produces, both on her own network and through a non-profit organisation she founded called Color Creative, which helps minority writers produce pilots for their shows that they can then take to potential backers. On the Color Creative site, the organisation pulls no punches. After describing how frustrating the process of trying to get a show from concept to production as a series is, the site states: “For women and minority writers, it can be even more frustrating to realize that the small percentage of writers are mostly comprised of white men”.6 The final phrase – the part that is underlined online (see note 6 for a link to the article) – is a link to a study from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, which found that women and people of colour are underrepresented on both sides of the camera, and crucially that this has no link to profitability; to the contrary, diverse content earns more and is more successful on average than the (white, male) norm.7 Among Rae’s own series, two stand out as fully music based: first, the tongue-in-cheek Ratchetpiece Theatre, in which she discusses the lyrics of gangsta and particularly raunchy rap videos, offering (albeit indirectly) a feminist critique, and second, The Choir, which is 81

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about a small choir in a failing, predominantly African American church, peopled by a range of middle-class ‘types’, including the hyper-religious older woman, the young woman with a little too much R&B in her gospel and her serious brother, the atheist choir member, the sinning pastor, and the gay choir director.8 Other YouTube channels founded by African American women have quite different strategies with regard to music, but in one way or another, it plays a significant role in their overall ‘package’. Black&Sexy TV, another important network that has sold several series to the cable channel BET (Black Entertainment Television), has a group of series (That Guy, Roomieloverfriends, Hello Cupid, Sexless, Chef Julian, Rider, Becoming Nia, The Number, and The Couple) among which characters from one series appear in others, sometimes as minor characters or in a single story arc. Across these series, they use songs by unsigned artists; this was a strategy first developed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then series like Dawson’s Creek, and it has become a staple of drama series addressed to the key 18–34-yearold demographic. Black&Sexy TV, however, has taken this approach even further, releasing ‘mixtape’ on their Bandcamp microsite of the songs used in their various series. This is a creative and innovative way to use music and TV series to market each other to new audiences; those who watch the series will often hear new music for the first time and want to listen to some more, while fans of the bands or DJs who create the tracks will find the show and might well check it out based on the use of music they like. During the 1980s and 1990s, when I was first writing about film music, the compiled score was back in vogue. There had been compiled scores before that; in fact, one might argue that compiled scores were the origin of film music, since silent scores were most often compilations of fragments of various songs, often already well-known pop tunes and works from the classical canon. But we could perhaps say that the situation that prevails today – wherein many genres (e.g., romantic comedies and young adult dramas) are scored significantly with pre-existing music, with original score serving more as filler – was ‘in development’ in that period, for a host of reasons. The one most often mentioned, and that parallels the use of unsigned acts in independent web series, is that the parent companies of film studios owned massive back catalogues through their music labels, and they wanted to maximise earnings by using that material. In Hearing Film (Kassabian 2001), I argued that, regardless of the industrial reasons for such phenomena, it is crucial to set them aside in order to understand how filmgoers become what I called ‘perceivers’. What I mean by this is that in order to understand how people sit down in the theatre and then become involved in the film, it is crucial to understand how audience members get attached not least through musical events and how they identify with characters and scenarios as widely disparate as, say, burial arrangements and family dinners and all the things that happen in films. I offered the ideas of assimilating and affiliating identifications, conditioned (most often although not always) by composed and compiled scores respectively, and I argued that assimilating identifications are more rigid and offer less room for a perceiver’s own experiences than affiliating ones, which are predicated on the personal history that one brings into the movie theatre. However, it is worth stressing that in web series the very short format means that those strategies are simply not viable. The score will not, for instance, have the time or space to use themes of any kind outside of a title song, since themes depend on repetition over time. In some series, even playing a whole song from beginning to end might be a big ask, so they opt, as Convos with my two-year-old daughter (which averages two to four minutes per episode and gets a bit longer each season) did, to use no music at all except a theme song or fragment at the beginning and end.9 At first glance, this may not seem like a major shift 82

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from contemporary TV practices, but if one tries to imagine a sitcom, hour-long drama, or feature-length film without music, it is odd in the extreme. There are, of course, some series that use music more traditionally. For two examples, the series produced thus far for the YouTube channel ThisIsDrama by its founders, Carol Ann and Aileen Docherty, have used both composed and pre-existing music in ways that are quite similar to current practices in film and television. They have created, written, and produced two series to date: 5aside, a huge hit starring both television and YouTube talent, about a casual football (soccer) team and their travails on and off the field; and Steffi, about a young entertainer and how she gets discovered (based on the novel The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride by Andrew [AJ] Crofts). Both of these series set out, as indeed does ThisIsDrama generally, to make broadcast-quality content that is distributed only on YouTube. (In fact, YouTube partnered with them in the production of 5aside, according to the website.)10 Because of this goal, there is no attempt, not even the signs of the consideration of an attempt, to make different kinds of musical or aural decisions than what mainstream narrative film and television has taught us to expect. But a number of web series made by African American women have approached the task differently. With fewer resources to work with, especially in terms of funding, but very strong talent pools from which to draw, many of these artists decided to use approaches that are much more assertive and attention-grabbing than mainstream film and television scoring practices. For example, in each of their debut episodes, Unwritten Rules and Black Actress turn to the musical sound of a record scratch, as is heard prevalently in rap tracks, to mark an important shift in consciousness. Unwritten Rules, the first series produced by inkSpotEntertainment, is based on the novel 40 Hours and an Unwritten Rule: The Diary of a Nigger, Negro, Colored, Black, African-American Woman, written by Kim Williams. Each episode shows a vignette of office life, ending with an unwritten rule, such as “Rule #1: A Black Co-Worker always knows when they are being set-up”, or “Rule #12: A Black Co-Worker must learn that all change isn’t ‘good’ change”. Black Actress is a series created by Andrea Lewis that follows the career of a young black actress, and each episode is framed by an interview with a recognisable black actress discussing the challenges in her career so far. Like Issa Rae, Lewis believes that the web offers opportunities to women and minorities that simply have not been present until now: “I just decided to make it a web series because that’s where I got the freedom to really do whatever I wanted and to make the format something unique and something different to what anybody was seeing. . . . And nobody couldn’t tell me that I couldn’t focus on black women,” she underscored. “I was just allowed to do anything I wanted to do on the internet.”11 Both The Unwritten Rules and Black Actress offer roles to young black women that are substantial, perhaps even ‘meaty’. Roles like these are rarely available to women or non-white actors of any age; for young, black women to have roles like these is, to put it very mildly, unusual. The possibility of self-production makes web series a perfect early career venue for women and non-white content producers. And since both Black&Sexy TV and Issa Rae have works going onto mainstream TV, there is some indication that success online can translate into opportunities in other media. The specific sound that caught my ear, as it were, in the first episodes of both Unwritten Rules and Black Actress was the record scratch. The scratch is an important, powerful sound – first, it went from being a dreaded sound, the sound of a mistake, to being a significant 83

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musical means of expression over the past 30-plus years, and in particular, because of its roots in hip-hop, it has specifically African American roots and associations. Second, despite its musicality, it retains the overlay of error or dread. And, finally, it is a sound that is almost never heard in audiovisual texts, except perhaps as a sound event inside the narrative world; indeed, it is very rare in uses such as these, where the characters do not hear the sound that the perceivers/audience do.12 The scratch is used (in both cases – see below) as a unit of aural meaning, placed on a soundtrack as if it is dramatic scoring, without any other music to contextualise it; this is a radical aural moment. In the case of Black Actress, the scratch is heard in the first episode at 2:54; we are being introduced to Corrie for the first time, having just watched her give herself a pep talk in the bathroom. She steps out to hear someone calling out names, and when hers is called, we hear the scratch, followed by him saying “Hi . . . you’re next. Are you ready? Follow me.” In the case of Unwritten Rules, the scratch appears towards the end of the first episode, in a conversation with a particularly unsettling colleague in the next cubicle. Here’s how the main character, Racy, introduces herself: A: R: A: R: A: R: A: R: A: A: R: A: A: R: A: R: A: R: A:

Hey, Girl! Hi, I’m Racy. [extends her hand, and they shake] I’m Alyssa. I’m a Manager. Finally . . . I’ve been asking for an assistant for months here! It’s so busy and I can’t do everything by myself. [an aside by Racy in her flat addressing us directly . . .] Oh, wait, no. I’m the new manager. Oh, that’s right. They were talking about becoming more diverse in the workplace. Um, so wait. They need two people to do the same job? Oh, yeah. It’s really busy here. I so regret asking Dad to ask Uncle Brendan for a job. Wait, who’s Brendan? Oh, he’s the CEO. Him and my dad are best friends. [aside by Racy . . .] So, have you done this job before? Nope. First time. Oh, great. I’d hate for you to be better than me [in a childlike singsong voice] cuz I might have to get you fired! [Both laugh awkwardly] So where did you go to school? Um, I went to Brown. Oh, you had a scholarship! [aside by Racy . . .] Where did you go to school? I went to Yale. [sound of scratch] Yeah, my entire family went to Yale. Didn’t George Dubya go there? Yes. Yes, he did. [On her wink, there is a bell-sound.]13

The scratch (and the bell tinkle) are much more attention-grabbing sounds than are commonplace in mainstream television. The rules for television sound have historically been quite realist, which is not to say that the original sounds are used in some semblance of the rules of Dogme 95 films, but rather that they aspire to seeming quite like real sounds, without abandoning their ability to draw attention towards or away from particular events or objects through sound choices.14 Instead, these sounds assert themselves quite vividly in 84

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the soundworld of the episodes. It is highly unlikely that anyone watching and listening to either of these episodes will fail to notice the scratches or the tinkle. Such anti-realist uses of sound suggest the opening of a world of possibilities far wider and larger than has been the case in mainstream Anglophone film and television. If sound designers can insert particular sounds without reference to the physical world being displayed visually, then it is a truly major shift that takes these works away from their obvious connection to mainstream US television (and to a lesser extent film), and more towards video art practices. It remains to be seen how these tendencies will develop over time, but there are certainly some exciting possibilities. Web series are a new and quite different form of fictional audiovisual culture, and the role of music in them is turning out to be quite varied and distinctive. While I think there will be much more to say as web series continue to develop, at the very least, it is already possible to conclude the following. First, as is so often the case, web series have changed the way they use music according to the age-old principle that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Because most of the producers I have been looking at closely have been working on shoestring budgets, they have needed to bypass the sometimes exorbitant licensing costs charged by record labels. So, instead of licensing well-known pre-existing music, they have made other choices. As scholars have argued in many different situations – take, for example, Iranian film in the first period after the Khomeini revolution, and how the censorship demanded that an elaborate allegorical film language develop – challenges force artists to find creative solutions, and that has certainly been the case in these web series. Whether they are using unsigned artists or record scratches, the absence of resources for licensing music has set the scene for less common, more radical artistic choices, opening up a world of possibilities for the future of sound and music in web series. Second, it is also clear that the development of new forms of art and media help new aesthetic choices come to the fore: in the case of web series, while the brevity of the form rendered some traditional strategies, such as themes, pointless, it enabled a more assertive, self-assured, conscious use of music and musical sounds that opens up a world of possibilities heretofore used primarily by so-called art filmmakers. When audiences are prepared to accept musical sounds like those record scratches, a whole vocabulary and practice of a more Brechtian critical bent becomes not only possible, but quite likely. Perhaps the brevity of episodes of web series will discourage traditional forms of identification with main characters and offer a more distanced, ‘alienated’ relationship with the text on offer. In particular, it is important to highlight that these more experimental, perhaps even more progressive (artistically and politically) uses of sound and music are not found in better-funded web series. The absence of music throughout these videos means that it can be used, and crucially is being used, more pointedly than in series that opt for more traditional music and sound strategies. The series I have chosen to examine here constitute a tiny subset of what is available, a miniscule fraction of the world of web series in English. In the two examples I have discussed here, Black Actress and Unwritten Rules, the sound designers have chosen very assertive uses of the musical sound of scratching, using the sound in both its meaning of ‘error’ and with its African American roots in hip-hop in play. I have argued that both the lack of resources and the brevity of the form have led to new approaches to sound and music, which have in turn led to these two uses of the record scratch sound, but which by extension have opened up the vocabulary of African American popular music to ‘art’ video strategies. But this brief text has only begun to consider the changes to scoring practices being wrought by 85

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web series. As both the number and kinds of series and their audiences continue to increase, so too will their effect on mainstream film and television sound and music.

Notes  1 Shonda Rhimes is perhaps best known for her work as creator, head writer, executive producer, and show-runner of Grey’s Anatomy, and more recently of the mega-hit Scandal starring Kerry Washington.  2 My article, “Music for Sleeping”, appeared in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Kassabian 2013). I do not mean to suggest here that binaural beats have disappeared from the app world altogether. Instead of sleep apps, they now appear more frequently in apps for relaxation, brainwave tuning, etc.  3 While there are countless examples of non-fiction films and TV series, the preponderance of scholarship in both media has been on fiction. For whatever reason, there is hardly any serious film music scholarship on documentaries. For one of the best sources, see the anthology Music and Sound in Documentary Film, ed. Holly Rogers (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).  4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIVa9lxkbus (accessed 1 November 2015).  5 See e.g., “Issa Rae: The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet”, 2013.  6 http://www.colorcreative.tv/ (accessed 1 November 2015). The autumn 2016 HBO series “Insecure” is loosely based on Rae’s “Misadventures” web series.  7 http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/hollywood-failing-to-keep-up-with-250007 (accessed 1 November 2015).  8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtJOaBer5kk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXBIIA f8E0Y (accessed 1 November 2015).  9 https://www.youtube.com/user/ConvosWith2YrOld (accessed 1 November 2015). 10 http://www.actonthis.tv/2014/08/5aside-online-drama-breaks-viewing-figure-records/ (accessed 13 December 2015). 11 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/degrassi-alum-creates-hilariously-brilliant-black-actressweb-series-n357776 (accessed 22 December 2015). 12 This sound in both examples is what is traditionally called ‘non-diegetic’. I have argued both in Hearing Film and more recently against this terminology (2001, 2013). Other significant contributions to this debate include Robynn Stilwell’s “Fantastical Gap . . .” and Ben Winters’s “The non-diegetic fallacy: Film, music, and narrative space”, Music and Letters, 2010. See also the forthcoming roundtable on narrative in audiovisual media in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (Mera, Sadoff, and Winters, eds., forthcoming). 13 Unwritten Rules Episode 1: “First Day”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbZjKDwy8vE&index= 2&list=PL2DDE670E2E7E4D5D. 14 Dogme 95 was a movement, complete with a manifesto and a ‘Vow of Chastity’, that a group of Danish filmmakers developed as a way of restricting their filmmaking practices in an experiment to see what would happen under those conditions. The rules famously included using only natural lighting and sound that appears within the narrative world of the film. The main filmmakers associated with this experiment were Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, and a bit later, Lone Scherfig. (See later in the chapter for a discussion on Iranian film censorship after the Khomeini revolution; restrictions, intentional or not, are often seen as productive.)

Bibliography Anthropy, Anna. 2012. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-Outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York: Seven Stories Press. Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2013 [2009]. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crofts, A.J. 2008. The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride. London: John Blake Publishing Ltd. Hunt, Darnell, and Ana-Christina Ramón. 2015. “2015 Hollywood Diversity Report: Flipping the Script.” Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. http://www.bunchecenter. ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2-25-15.pdf 86

African American women producers Kassabian, Anahid. 2001. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. New York and London: Routledge. Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. “Music for Sleeping.” In Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, ed. Ian Biddle and Marie Thompson, 165–181. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kassabian, Anahid, et al. 2017. “Roundtable: Current Perspectives on Music, Sound, and Narrative in Screen Media” in Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Benjamin Winters, eds, The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound. New York and London: Routledge. Kim, Jin. 2012. “The institutionalization of YouTube: From user-generated content to professionally generated content.” Media, Culture & Society 34 (1): 53–67. Stilwell, Robynn. 2007. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” In Beyond The Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert,184–202. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Williams, Kim. 2004. 40 Hours and an Unwritten Rule: The Diary of a Nigger, Negro, Colored, Black, African-American Woman. Sherman Oaks, CA: Butterfly Ink Publishing. Winters, Ben. 2010. “The non-diegetic fallacy: Film, music, and narrative space.” Music and Letters 91 (2): 224–244.

Online sources Anthropy, Anna. 2012. Dys4ia, http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/dys4ia/ Black&Sexy.TV, “Becoming Nia”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl4K07ZgyEU&list=PLYgDk-q CESPeRWkzRTMHLLzMqkskTvhsk, “Chef Julian”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Sg_tPZSvZ7w&list=PLYgDk-qCESPcqE64etyUcF8l5_nVYlS3f, “The Couple”, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=WIWxqoBicFg&list=PLE6989290834D7A6A, “Hello Cupid”, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=t0eHcbez_LU&list=PLYgDk-qCESPdLExyrMuCiATtXC4MZqcuR, “The Number”,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MznvuZViIYw&list=PL3C473FF68FB4CC44,“Rider”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OwGrCFptgA&list=PLYgDk-qCESPeZvsnGjDeQ Qt1cTPdtv-s5, “Roomieloverfriends”, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYgDk-qCESPeIv m-2b8PXxz2IbwrYUkgi, “Sexless”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDaK6OodgvA&list= PLYgDk-qCESPf9tFkMa2mZ5xSvAb_K_Abp, “That Guy”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= dhyV-XBEIhM&list=PLF3E3F2DEB300F5DA, “Yellow”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66TvA4BZtM&list=PLYgDk-qCESPejYEV1iF0y-JQibzdV1CGH (all accessed 20 December 2015). Buzzfeed. 2006. Buzzfeed Video, https://www.youtube.com/user/BuzzFeedVideo (accessed 20 December 2015). Clarke, Matthew. 2013. “Convos with My 2-Year-Old”, https://www.youtube.com/user/Convos With2YrOld (accessed 20 December 2015). de Cadenet, Amanda. 2013. “Issa Rae: The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet”, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=1RTI65A2U3c (accessed 20 December 2015). Doherty, Carol Ann, and Aileen. 2013. “Steffi”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YOAlMNKHpM& list=PLWyDMGEiN1VYH86CyZCeIRr4GWFjUcMZ7 (accessed 20 December 2015). Doherty, Carol Ann, and Aileen. 2014. “5aside”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAdCfYqZLU& list=PLCEityMdyK4D5X81Rtbdd1abfrkVjSEaJ (accessed 20 December 2015). Eklund, Ken, J. McGonigal, et al. 2007. “World without Oil.” Free Online Multiplayer. Educational Game, Independent Lens, http://worldwithoutoil.org/ Green, Hank et al. 2012. “SciShow”, https://www.youtube.com/user/scishow/featured (accessed 20 December 2015). Green, Ryan, A. Green, and J. Larson. 2016. Numinous Games, That Dragon, Cancer, http://www. thatdragoncancer.com/#home Grey, CGP. 2010. “CGP Grey Explains”, https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey/featured (accessed 20 December 2015). Griffiths, Mark. 2014. “Flappy Bird Obsession Is Not Necessarily an Addiction.” The Conversation, 14 February, http://theconversation.com/flappy-bird-obsession-is-not-necessarily-an-addiction-22638 (accessed 20 December 2015). Gussis, Lauren, and Tim Schlattmann. 2009. Dexter: Early Cuts, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RJIDuy5_W9c (accessed 22 December 2015).

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Anahid Kassabian Karl, Jay. 2006. “Jay Karl’s Pranks”, https://www.youtube.com/user/pranks/featured (accessed 20 December 2015). Lewis, Andrea, and Issa Rae. 2013. “Black Actress”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TedSIDr_ n-0&list=PLreC8PkyDhxHODx3yjbf8mFrKaTgmw55R (accessed 20 December 2015). Parkin, Simon. 2014. “Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest.” The New Yorker, 9 September, http://www. newyorker.com/tech/elements/zoe-quinns-depression-quest (accessed 20 December 2015). Pearl, Mike. 2014. “This Guy’s Embarrassing Relationship Drama Is Killing the ‘Gamer’ Identity.” VICE, 29 August, http://www.vice.com/read/this-guys-embarrassing-relationship-drama-is-killingthe-gamer-identity-828 (accessed 20 December 2015). Rae, Issa. 2011. “The Choir”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fStvx8HXIK4&list=PLVo7nGo t4fPgDCBZ82pB-UiF52vTUObJG, “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl”, https://www. youtube.com/playlist?list=PL854514FC0EBDCD8E, “Ratchetpiece Theater”, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=JtJOaBer5kk&list=PL2978E9166E2B1329 (accessed 20 December 2015). Rugnetta, Mike. 2012. “PBS Idea Channel”, https://www.youtube.com/user/pbsideachannel (accessed 20 December 2015). Stevens, Michael. 2010. “Vsauce”, https://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce (accessed 20 December 2015). Wellens, Jesse M., and Jeana Smith. 2009. “Prank vs Prank”, https://www.youtube.com/user/PrankvsPrank (accessed 20 December 2015). Williams, Kim, and Aasha Davis. 2012. “The Unwritten Rules”, inkSpot Entertainment, https://www. youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2DDE670E2E7E4D5D (accessed 20 December 2015).

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7 HOLDING ON FOR DEAR LIFE Gender, celebrity status, and vulnerabilityon-display in Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ Kai Arne Hansen

If anyone besides famous people knew what it was like to be a famous person, they would never want to be famous. Sia Furler

It is with this statement that Sia Furler begins her anti-fame manifesto, printed in Billboard magazine in October 2013.1 Around this time, the Australian singer revived her solo career after spending the past few years writing hit songs for many of the world’s biggest artists.2 Sia’s return to the spotlight, marked by the commercial and critical success of her hit single ‘Chandelier’ (2014), was accompanied by an outspoken ambition to remain anonymous. She made this known not only through her own statements, but also by concealing her face in all public settings. This involved being visually absent in her own music videos and performing live with her back to the audience. In this chapter, I will consider Sia’s reluctance towards fame as a point of entry for addressing matters of gender and celebrity in pop. The task ahead is to map a set of identity politics against the audiovisual aesthetics of music video and live performance. To elucidate the performative power of acting out gender, be it visibly or audibly, I investigate Sia’s negotiation of gendered identity in ‘Chandelier’. This occurs within a pop context that upholds gender binaries, as well as granting prominence to naturalised ideas of femininity and masculinity. Gendered identity in pop is experienced musically as much as visually, and I will excavate this through discussions on sonic aesthetics and the processes of production that stylise the artist audiovisually. Underpinning my examination of Sia’s representational strategy is the matter that pop artists partake in a music industry that is constantly undergoing major changes as it adapts to new-media models of pop-culture consumption. This is related to how artist subjectivities are placed under constant scrutiny by a celebrity-crazed Western culture. In a critical examination of the political, economic, and cultural ramifications of the reconfigured industry dynamics of the music industry, Leslie Meier (2013, 1) asserts that popular music has been rendered an exceedingly abundant, instantaneously accessible, and ubiquitously available ‘self-serve’ cultural commodity. In the light of Meier’s central argument that “the ‘artist-brand’, not the sound recording, is the core popular music 89

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commodity today” (Meier 2013, 25), I will consider how Sia’s persona is constituted across platforms. The starting point for my inquiry is based upon Stan Hawkins’s and John Richardson’s theorisation of personal narrative in pop: “[B]y marking certain events in personal histories as significant, while at the same time bypassing others, personal narrators create navigational beacons that enable themselves and others to make sense of the past, while providing points of reference that will inform interpretations of future actions and events” (2007, 607).3 Given that personal narratives contribute to showcasing the star, they generate interest by making visible the attention-grabbing and memorable slivers of an artist’s biography. These ‘navigational beacons’ provide points of reference that can inform interpretations of pop texts (songs, videos, live performances) as meaningful. On this basis, I propose that personal narratives work as cues for interpretations of pop songs and videos by informing audience responses to musical and visual codes. Vulnerability pertains to several aspects of Sia’s biography as it is presented to audiences – it relates to accounts of substance abuse, personal problems, and depression that are the basis of her purported anti-fame agenda and thus ties in with her decision to conceal her face. Simultaneously, her anti-fame agenda makes her stand out to audiences by raising issues with regard to artistic autonomy and agency, which in turn prompts me to consider vulnerability also as something contrived and put-on. Turning to ‘Chandelier’ I will argue that personal narratives permeate pop songs, videos, and live performances via their delivery through musical and visual codes, the aesthetics of audiovisual production and lyrical content. Before demonstrating this through a close reading, I will attempt to trace notions of vulnerability and agency through an examination of Sia’s personal narrative as it is disseminated through media articles and interviews.

Background: Anti-fame, arduous past, and agency Since the release of her sixth studio album, 1000 Forms of Fear (2014), Sia has rigorously hidden her face from the public behind a platinum blonde wig that covers her eyes. The extent to which this signature wig has been integrated into the singer’s promotional material, public appearances, and music videos has in effect established it as her identifying feature.4 Purportedly, this has been Sia’s intention. In a television interview with ABC News, she described the concept of the wig as “creating a brand which is an inanimate object – this bob – you know, being able to put anyone under it: a kid, an adult, a man, a woman, a dog”,5 noting that it allows almost anyone to portray the singer. While ensuring facial concealment, this strategy highlights Sia’s star persona, as represented by the unmistakable wig: her ambition to remain anonymous ends up being what makes her recognisable to a mainstream audience that is bombarded with a multitude of established and new pop artists clamouring for attention. It would seem that Sia’s decision to conceal her face derives from an idea of celebrity and fame as damaging on a personal level. She has voiced her reluctance regarding her newfound fame, and in an interview with David Renshaw in NME in 2015, she described the release of 1000 Forms of Fear as an attempt, ironically, to elude it: Basically, I put this out to get out of my publishing deal. I was planning to be a pop songwriter for other artists. But my publishing deal was as an artist, so I had to put one more album out. I didn’t want to get famous, so I just kept all the songs I

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wanted and had a lot of fun making it. From that necessity I devised a way I could do this anonymously, with as little work – press, touring, the damaging work [sic]. (original emphasis)6 Sia’s desire to remain anonymous contributes to a narrative that highlights her dramatic personal life. In several recent interviews, she has been outspoken about how personal tragedies, substance abuse, and depression have been interwoven into her almost-twodecades-long career.7 The overarching narrative that is discernible in media articles and interviews traces many of her personal problems back to 1997, when her boyfriend was killed in a car accident. Following this traumatic incident, Sia reportedly started abusing drugs and alcohol, which eventually led her to the verge of suicide. Descriptions of this painful past activate a sense of vulnerability as the principal motivation behind her misgivings about fame. Interestingly, while stories of addiction and depression have long been commonplace in rock as part of the mythic representation of the brilliant but struggling artist,8 pop stars who battle with substance abuse or mental health issues are often met with negative reactions or even social sanctions. Milly Williamson (2010, 118–119) points to the media’s treatment of Britney Spears’s 2007 breakdown, which included the artist shaving her head and being admitted to several rehab and treatment facilities within a short period of time, as one of the most visible signs of a cultural trend towards scorning particular kinds of celebrity. Williamson identifies two categories of female celebrities who are particularly persecuted by the media: the female reality TV celebrity and the female pop star who has been on a drug or alcohol-fuelled path to self-destruction. Observing that Spears, as part of the latter category, was actually hounded by the media, Williamson suggests that what “emerges from an examination of the coverage of Britney’s shaved head is a misogynistic attitude towards the pop star, who is judged by a set of paradoxical female norms that she is seen to be failing” (2010, 118). Emphasising the media’s treatment of celebrities as a gender issue, Williamson attributes the harsh reactions to Spears as partly due to the removal of her hair (one of the key signifiers of femininity) and to her reputation as a bad mother (the ultimate female crime). I concur with Williamson that female pop stars are constrained in their image construction by the strictures of gender norms to a greater extent than their male counterparts. This is particularly evident in audience and media reactions to pop artists who fail to fulfil the expectations of glamourous celebrity. Notably, critical or negative comments towards Sia’s admission of substance abuse and breakdown are largely absent. So how does she circumvent the scorn usually directed towards female celebrities or pop artists who are perceived to be self-destructive? Pertaining to this question is artistic autonomy, and how the attribution of this to Sia through her identification as a skilled songwriter and singer raises the issue of perceptions of agency as an empowering factor. On this matter, Williamson (2010, 119–120) asserts that ridicule and denigration on the part of the media first and foremost target the unskilled celebrity who has become famous due to media exposure (such as reality TV stars), and further that ‘talent’ is seen as a redeeming attribute. In a pop context, notions of talent relate to the persistence of conventionalised views of artistic autonomy which are arguably still relevant within a pop culture which exalts the star. In their analysis of Spears, Hawkins and Richardson (2007, 607) point out that agency is a critical factor for fans; artists are commonly perceived and evaluated according to the extent to which they can be shown to be responsible for key artistic decisions. Most certainly this is evident in the ways that Spears has conducted a revisionist

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campaign in her lyrics, visual representations, and music to attribute agency (Hawkins and Richardson 2007, 607). Indeed, the anti-fame position that highlights Sia’s arduous past also signals her re-invention as an artist: agency is attributed to Sia by the depiction of her as forfeiting fame in pursuit of perfecting her craft as a songwriter. The focus on Sia’s creative autonomy and agency is created partly by the depiction of her in a number of media articles which highlight her skill as a songwriter, and is echoed in Sia’s own statements: her purported effortlessness in writing hit songs recurs as a topic throughout her interviews. For example, Sia reports that she wrote the melody and lyrics for David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ in just forty minutes, and Rihanna’s hit ‘Diamonds’ in a mere fourteen minutes.9 The professed ease with which Sia accomplishes professional success provides an appealing contrast to the harrowing tale of her personal problems and becomes a strong marker of agency, highlighting her skill and confidence when it comes to songwriting.1011 In his studies of Gorillaz, Richardson (2012, 211) observes how anonymous performers substitute celebrity status with subcultural capital and gain ‘the right kind of recognition’ by distancing themselves from their obviously commercial contemporaries while aligning their endeavours with the serious side of pop. Richardson argues that a “sublimated authorial role, such as that enjoyed by many musicians working in classical, contemporary avant-garde and contemporary dance idioms, can confer greater approbation on producers than one based on celebrity” (Richardson 2012, 211). Along these lines, the contention put forth by Sia’s personal narrative seems to be that, by stepping out of the spotlight, she is able to fulfill her full potential as a songwriter, and that her talent is evidenced by her critical and commercial success in this regard. I would argue that while the strategy of anonymisation, in Sia’s case, to a certain extent shields her from fame (in terms of being recognised on the street), it also registers as in coherence with narratives that emphasise her artistic autonomy and agency. Inspecting Sia’s agency prompts a consideration of the ways in which her persona and anti-fame agenda relate to expectations about and perceptions of the female pop star. Her conceptualisation of the wig as a representational strategy raises matters of objectification in pop and spectatorship; her efforts to remain anonymous can be seen by audiences and fans as a sign of resistance.12 The conceptualisation of the wig can be interpreted in terms of transgression considering the ways in which it allows for genderplay, as is evidenced by much of Sia’s artwork, videos, and live performances.13 In a pop context where representational strategies that spectacularise and sensationalise naturalised ideas of gender and sexuality are conventionalised, then, one interpretation of Sia’s anonymity might be that it subverts the male gaze. In this sense, Sia’s decision to remain anonymous does not simply mask her identity, but, rather, can be seen as an assertion of her autonomy. Interpreting Sia’s anonymity as a sign of agency and resistance appears to have gained some traction in the media. Helen Brown of The Telegraph proposes that “[i]n an industry that considers women’s bodies as part of the product, [Sia] took a cool stance when she opted in 2014 to [. . .] remain physically anonymous when she performed, staking her fortune on the power of her songs alone”.14 Interestingly, by drawing up a binary between gendered bodies and the ‘power of song’, Brown overlooks how, in pop, the gendered body is constructed musically through “a repertoire of norms [that] disciplines the body through stark imagery and processed sound” (Hawkins 2013, 466). Building upon Hawkins’s assertion, I want to argue that Sia’s gendered representation in ‘Chandelier’ is constructed audiovisually through contesting notions of vulnerability and agency. How is Sia’s ‘vulnerability-on-display’ constituted through musical codes and visual cues? In what way does Sia’s personal struggle become aestheticised through a projection of 92

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emotional intensity in live performance? How are perceptions of ironic agency informed by variations in stylistic coding? These questions form a springboard for my close reading of ‘Chandelier’, which deals with the song in its many guises: lyrics, sound recording, music video, and live performance.

Swinging from the Chandelier: Vulnerability-on-display Written by Sia and Jesse Shatkin and released in March 2014, ‘Chandelier’ was the lead single from 1000 Forms of Fear. Its commercial success was exemplified by Top Ten positions in the record charts of several countries, including Australia, France, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The critical reception of the song was also largely positive, its music video quickly going viral and becoming one of the most-watched pop videos of 2014, reaching 700 million views on YouTube within a year of its release.15 The key of ‘Chandelier’ is Bb minor, with the lyrics describing the melancholic perspective of a ‘party girl’ recounting her self-destructive lifestyle. Taking the lyrics aside, I detect an ambiguity in their literal meaning that is brought to the forefront by the way in which optimistic and bleak outlooks are mapped against one another. Optimistic lines such as “party girls don’t get hurt” are followed by lines like “can’t feel anything, when will I learn?”, arguably undermining the honesty or accuracy of the opening line. Likewise, the chorus’s uplifting and celebratory “I’m gonna swing from the chandelier” and “I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist” lose their sense of triumph and abandon when the narrator then acknowledges her fear (and self-deception) in the post-chorus: “but I’m holding on for dear life, won’t look down, won’t open my eyes”. The words alone imply that ambiguity and irony are key elements of the ‘Chandelier’ lyrics. However, any investigation into lyrics in pop always needs to account for their musical delivery, which relates to how recording aesthetics and the stylisation of the performer impinge upon our structuring of meaning through reception. On this matter, Hawkins (2002, 91) tackles the issue of working out meaning in pop texts by probing at how attitude is mediated through musical performance. For Hawkins, this involves addressing irony and working out how diverse meanings intend something ambiguous. He argues that “to identify codes or markers of irony in a song, we can only assume their function within a specific setting that denotes meaning for us” (Hawkins 2002, original emphasis). Bringing into question the impact of pop aesthetics on how we ascertain meaning through performance, Hawkins’s idea can be applied to Sia’s dissemination of vulnerability, and how this is supported and amplified by aspects of production, vocal performance, and visual imagery. Significantly, the musical articulation of narratives of substance abuse and depression in ‘Chandelier’ takes precedence in forming part of Sia’s vulnerability-on-display. With this concept I call to attention how the video, lyrics, vocality, and production aesthetics intersect with narratives presented by and about Sia to promote an iteration of vulnerability that entices and entertains. Accordingly, self-deprecation and intense emotional display become markers not only of vulnerability, but also of agency as related to ironic intent.16 To focus on the sound recording for now, I would argue that the sonic aestheticisation of ambiguity and suspense successfully underpins the sombre theme of the lyrics. What strikes me in this regard is the instrumentation and production of the verses. Drenched in reverb, with a somewhat ‘distant’ placement in the mix, an arpeggiated synth line outlines the verse chord progression Bbm – Gbmaj7 – Ab – Fm. In the first verse, a deep, rumbling synth bass emphasises the tonic at the start of the first bar. This bass part does not follow the chord progression, and it is a 93

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snare-driven drumbeat that claims the listener’s attention. This syncopated snare pattern has a military feel to it and can be interpreted as tying in with the sentiment of resistance that can be inferred from Sia’s anti-fame agenda. The ominous rumbling of the bass at key points during the first verse – and its absence otherwise – emphasises the feeling of suspension that is provided by the dreamy, reverb-heavy, and distant sound of the arpeggiated synthesiser. The placement of the militant beat and vocals in the foreground of the mix assumes significance, and as they compete for attention, the authoritative snare contrasts markedly with Sia’s delicate voice. Thus, the verses arguably present a suspended tension that evokes Sia’s fragility and vulnerability. In the verses, Sia sings in an affected manner with a voice that squeals and breaks, and arguably comes across as strained. The impression of such vocality as strained supports an interpretation of the vocals as signifying vulnerability through their emotional expression.17 Following up on this assertion, I would also suggest that, in the case of ‘Chandelier’, Sia’s vocals add a certain feeling of urgency or desperation to the lyrics which serves to highlight their darker undertones and reveal the ironic intent of certain key phrases. This is most evident in the verses, where her voice conveys a fragility that matches the melancholy theme of substance abuse in the song’s lyrics. When Sia sings “I push it down, push it down” in the first verse, the “I” is barely audible and comes out more like a squeal. Similarly, her voice breaks on the last, prolonged “down”. The sense that Sia’s voice might break at any second brings with it a certain excitement, because we as listeners recognise, from our own experiences, the emotional stress that can cause a voice to break. The fragility of her voice is further aestheticised through the track’s production. With this in mind, we can consider the voice’s central placement in the mix, and the relative loudness of her voice in comparison to the other instruments. These aspects underpin how the use of compression directs attention towards the way Sia’s voice rasps, squeals, and breaks. As such, the listener is brought closer to these ostensibly involuntary sounds, which can be perceived as emanating from a singer who is on the verge of being overpowered by emotion. In turn, such a sense of powerful emotions resonates with how visual codes contribute to conveying vulnerability in the music video for ‘Chandelier’. The video garnered massive attention on account of the performance of then eleven-year-old dancer Maddie Ziegler, who takes the lead role. Though space does not permit me to discuss questions of age in any detail, it is clear that the juxtaposition of childhood and certain pop aesthetics can be seen as problematic. Some reactions to the ‘Chandelier’ video, particularly evident in the comments section on YouTube, critique a perceived sexualisation of the young dancer. In her illuminating study of age, gender, and popular music, Sheila Whiteley observes that “the uneasy relationship between childhood as innocent and childhood as knowing continues to inform the tensions surrounding the erotic potential of the young body” (2003, 24). This is not least relevant in relation to perceptions of pop culture as increasingly sexualised (see Attwood 2009; Gibson 2004; McNair 2013; McRobbie 2009), and it is a topic which warrants further study. At this stage I focus on how Ziegler’s performance in the video relates to Sia’s persona and constructions of vulnerability, as disseminated through particular visual cues. Dressed in a skincoloured leotard, Ziegler wears the Sia wig and is painted with tattoos that replicate those of the singer. The video opens with slow-roaming shots of a decrepit apartment, before cutting to a wide shot of Ziegler propped up in a doorway as Sia comes in with the vocals at the start of the track (see Figure 7.1). The camera cuts to Ziegler at the exact moment the vocals are introduced, emphasising the link between Sia and Ziegler and blurring the line between them.

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Figure 7.1

Maddie Ziegler propped up in a doorway from the ‘Chandelier’ video.

Eagerly, the camera tracks Ziegler as she navigates the apartment as part of an elaborate and expressive dance routine. Framing Ziegler against the stark and looming walls of the dirty apartment works to highlight her vulnerability. This is also emphasised by her skincoloured leotard, which foregrounds the notion of the child as naked and fragile. The choreography involves dramatic gestures and impressive gymnastics, though it also exhibits an attention to detail that reinforces the distress disseminated by the lyrics. Between pirouettes and somersaults, Ziegler’s pained and angry facial expressions seem to oppose the song’s opening line: “party girls don’t get hurt”. This opposition is particularly evident in the first post-chorus (01:28–01:50) and in the facial close-ups of the second post-chorus (approx. 02:57–03:07), where Ziegler’s incredible variety of emotional facial expressions lends itself to the resigned self-deceit of the lyrics: “I’m just holding on for tonight, won’t look down, won’t open my eyes”. In these instances, the camera hovers around Ziegler, alternating roaming wide-shots, mid-shots, and close-ups that bring her face back into view each time she slips from the frame. The visuals of the video, then – whether through the run-down apartment, the frustration and desperation of the violently beautiful choreography, or the pained facial expressions of Ziegler – support a reading of the ‘Chandelier’ lyrics as a party girl’s cautionary tale of the downsides of living like there is no tomorrow. Employing an eleven-year-old as a visual substitute for Sia bluntly emphasises impressions of fragility and vulnerability through the stark contrast between the child and the theme of the lyrics, a contrast that is further emphasised by the visuals that frame Ziegler in a dirty apartment. Ultimately, the vulnerability-ondisplay in ‘Chandelier’ is achieved in a number of ways but most prominently in the dialogue that it presents between the narrative of Sia’s struggles with substance abuse and personal problems, the visual imagery of the video, and the musical aestheticisation of vulnerability in Sia’s vocals. However, while Sia’s vocals in the verses come across as frail or strained, her singing in the choruses seems to defy any such characterisations. These soaring vocals give off an impression of confidence and virtuosic vocality. The idea of swinging from the chandelier is metaphorically implied musically by the melody leaping a minor sixth from F to Db

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(via Ab and Bb) on the word ‘Chandelier’, and then again from Bb to Gb (via C–Db) before resolving on F. The soaring melodic phrasing is also emphasised by the track production: during the pre-chorus, there are several harmonising backing tracks, but these are subtracted from the choruses to reinforce the prominence of Sia’s vocals in the mix. Thus, the choruses direct attention towards Sia’s vocal performance: the piercing quality of sustained notes, the separation of vocals from the rest of the track, and Sia’s convincing control over glissandos and inflections emphasise her agency. The contrast between vulnerability and artistic endeavour in Sia’s vocals is arguably reinforced by the visuals. Ziegler’s dance performance, while highlighting the fragility and vulnerability of the child, also showcases her talent as a dancer. Perceptions of Ziegler’s skill are also bound to matters of maturity; her acrobatic execution of the choreography is made even more impressive by her young age. In a sense, then, the strategy of visual substitution, where Ziegler functions as a stand-in for Sia, bridges the notions of vulnerability and agency that can be found in Sia’s personal narrative. This is exemplified by the visuals towards the end of the video: as Sia sings “I’m just holding on for tonight” in the final post-chorus, Ziegler curtsies several times for the camera, all the while with a forced smile on her face (see Figure 7.2). This scene raises the matter of spectatorship, reinforcing a sense of ironic agency on the part of Sia.18 In terms of her outspoken reluctance to acknowledge fame, the forced gesture indicates Sia’s conflicted feelings about her role as a performer and celebrity. This, in turn, highlights the ironic potential of the video by drawing attention to the constructedness of pop performance. Simultaneously, Ziegler’s wide-eyed, put-on smile makes the lyrics’ sentiment of barely holding on utterly convincing. As I have tried to illustrate, Sia’s movement between strength (agency) and weakness (vulnerability) is achieved through a careful navigation of audiovisual aesthetics. I will now turn to a live version of ‘Chandelier’ to discuss other means through which vulnerability aligns to emotional intensity and ironic agency. In turning to a performance that differs vastly from the music video both visually and musically, I want to dwell on how alternative articulations of vulnerability can be achieved through stylistic variation.

Figure 7.2

Ziegler curtsying in the ‘Chandelier’ video.

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Live performance of ‘Chandelier’ and emotional intensity Reluctant to go back on tour to such an extent that she negotiated a clause in her contract with RCA that stipulated that she does not have to tour to support 1000 Forms of Fear,19 Sia performed ‘Chandelier’ live mainly on talk shows and award shows. As of August 2015, just two of these performances had been uploaded on Sia’s official YouTube channel. I will discuss one of these in what follows. Appearing on Saturday Night Live in January 2015, Sia performed a mellow version of the song on a dimly lit stage, backed by a pianist and string sextet. The musical arrangement was changed to fit the instrumentation; the electric bass, synths, vocal samples, and drumbeat of the original recording are all replaced by piano and strings. Rather than attempting to emulate the arrangement of the recording by assigning its rhythmic and melodic motifs to the instruments at hand, the entire arrangement was stripped down – the piano repeats a simple rhythmic motif throughout, while the string section employs various changes in intensity to add a dynamic dimension to the transitions between parts. The effect, ultimately, implies nostalgia and sentimentality through musical aestheticisation, which in turn highlights the song’s sombre theme. Underpinning the sadness of the song’s theme visually, both Sia and the other musicians wear black. Joining Sia at centre stage is a mime artist, who interprets the lyrics through a mix of American Sign Language and mime. The focus falls on the mime, where his apparent emotional struggle amplifies the melancholy of the lyrics through affective body language and facial expressions. In this sense, the mime contributes to highlighting Sia’s ironic agency by clearly contrasting some of the more optimistic lines of the lyrics and thus amplifying their ironic impact. For example, the choruses’ celebratory references to swinging from the chandelier lose a sense of optimism in relation to the performer miming: his movements depict him reluctantly grabbing hold of a chandelier in a simultaneously desperate and resigned act of self-deception. Sia’s vocal performance here is also significantly different musically from the sound recording. This relates to the fact that the song is performed at a slightly slower tempo compared to the recorded version, which is further emphasised by the lack of a beat. The slower tempo and the sparse, acoustic arrangement give Sia plenty of room for employing her voice expressively. The slow tempo facilitates microrhythmic and timbral changes in her vocal delivery as Sia sings the verses in a laid-back fashion that somewhat blurs the line between singing voice and speaking voice. The string arrangement and dynamic changes underpin Sia’s vocal performance in this regard. Particularly, the post-choruses stand out: in contrast to the energetic backing in this part of the original sound recording (which arguably facilitates an extension of the celebratory feel of the chorus), the restrained wailing of the strings highlights the self-deprecating tone of the lyrics.20 Self-deprecation is suggested also by Sia’s vocals in this part of the live performance: admitting that she’s actually not having fun swinging from the chandelier, but rather barely holding on and too scared to open her eyes, she settles in a low, almost spoken register and lowers the volume of her voice, as if speaking to herself. In turn, ironic intent is, yet again, emphasised by the mime artist, who at this point closes his eyes, shakes his head anxiously, and extends an arm towards the audience, palm raised as if keeping them at a distance. Sia’s vocal performance draws attention to the ways in which vulnerability can be feminised sonically in accordance with the conventionalised vocal strategies of contemporary

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female pop artists. By activating the term sonic feminisation, I want to draw attention to the voice’s centrality with regard to how we perceive artists in terms of gendered identity.21 Vocal stylisation is at the core of this. For example, the phrase endings in the first verse are marked by the singer moving from the last word into a moan (approx. 0:24 and 0:37, respectively). In one sense, this could signify an eroticisation of the female voice that is in accordance with conventionalised stylistic traits of other contemporary female pop voices.22 Certainly, naturalised gestures of gendered identity permeate pop performance at detail level: commonplace perceptions of the vulnerable as implicit in the feminine resonate throughout the song’s theme of a party girl on the brink of self-destruction, and this link is arguably strengthened by the mapping of Sia’s affected vocal expression against the backdrop of her troubled past. Sia’s vulnerability is articulated both musically and visually through a representation of emotional intensity. I would contend that her affected use of her voice and body language is authenticated as expressive of emotional intensity specifically through the juxtaposition of the song’s theme and the idea of vulnerability that informs her personal narrative. Projecting strong emotions through the voice is a distinguishing musical feature of the live performance, evident at certain points in the choruses (approx. 3:00–3:12) where Sia goes into seemingly spontaneous melismatic embellishments. These can be perceived as the product of emotional expression on the part of the singer, supported by her body language: Sia bends her knees slightly, leans back, and tilts her head during key phrases in the choruses, apparently straining to hit the notes.23 All in all, Sia’s projection of emotional intensity in this live performance can be related to Dibben’s assertion that pop artists often “work within a compositional aesthetic of self-expression in which their musical output is received as though it is the expression of biographical events and reveals the inner life of the performer” (2009, 331). With Sia and ‘Chandelier’, this impression is due to the consistency of the artist’s self-presentation across platforms, which can be related to the aestheticisation of key elements in her personal narrative, both musically and visually. The latter point is exemplified by how vulnerability-on-display is constituted through a bidirectional relationship between personal narrative and musical and visual codes. As I have indicated, Sia’s vulnerability is reinforced by references to substance abuse and personal struggle in the lyrics of ‘Chandelier’. Simultaneously, the lyrics gain additional meaning when read against Sia’s selfpresentation off-stage. The effect of this bidirectional relationship depends on the ability of the artist to skillfully navigate the expressive range of audiovisual codes through stylistic aestheticisation, and Sia achieves this in a way that piques the interest and curiosity of a broad audience.

Concluding remarks Granted, showcasing the star is at the heart of the pop spectacle, and it is often the personal narrative that draws us to the artist’s persona. During this chapter, I have been concerned with the ways in which identity politics and audiovisual aesthetics intersect in Sia’s ‘Chandelier’. I have drawn on Hawkins and Richardson’s (2007) theorisation of personal narrative to facilitate an understanding of Sia’s gendered representation and how this operates performatively. Throughout, I have attempted to elucidate how particular foregrounded aspects of pop subjectivities can be taken to bridge the gap between the private lives of stars and pop performance, by informing how we navigate the plurality of possible meanings to be found in any pop expression. 98

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Notions of vulnerability are reiterated in Sia’s personal narrative to the extent that it is established as one of the most prominent elements of her persona. If we accept, as Hawkins suggests, that pop artists confirm their vulnerability as much off-stage as on-stage (2009, 186), then this is made evident by Sia’s openness about her personal problems through her interviews and public statements. As my examination of ‘Chandelier’ demonstrates, vulnerability-on-display is constituted through visual and musical codes, which involves mapping audiovisual aesthetics onto Sia’s personal narrative. This helps authenticate her pop expression. The relationship between Sia’s personal narrative and ‘Chandelier’, then, is best described as bidirectional – the narrative that highlights Sia’s personal struggle with alcohol and drug addiction is reinforced by its stylistic aestheticisation through lyrics, musical and visual codes, and audiovisual production. Simultaneously, any reading of ‘Chandelier’ must be informed by Sia’s personal narrative as it relates to interpreting one’s perceptions of and attitudes towards the artist. Finally, I would suggest that Sia’s construction of vulnerability through ‘Chandelier’ hits a nerve in contemporary pop culture by purportedly providing an insight into the emotional turmoil of being a celebrity. A desire to remain anonymous is explained by her perceptions of fame as damaging, implying that she considers herself made vulnerable through her very success. At the same time, the decision to conceal her face can be interpreted by audiences as a sign of agency and an assertion of autonomy. I would suggest that audience responses to Sia’s dualistic subject positioning in ‘Chandelier’ as simultaneously empowered and vulnerable are contingent on an acceptance or dismissal of her ironic intent. Whatever the verdict any particular listener comes to, Sia’s self-presentation in ‘Chandelier’ highlights the multitude of ways in which pop artists are scrutinised in contemporary Western pop culture.

Notes  1 See Furler (2013).  2 Sia released her first solo album in 1997, launching a prolific but initially lacklustre career which saw her struggling to connect with a mainstream audience. Since 2010, Sia has co-written songs for artists such as Beyoncé, Celine Dion, Eminem, Flo Rida, David Guetta, Kylie Minogue, Ne-Yo, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Shakira, and Britney Spears, among others.  3 See also Hansen (2015), where I employ a similar approach to examine the feminist argument that Beyoncé presents through personal narrative against the audiovisual aesthetics of the ‘Partition’ (2013) music video.  4 The signature bob wig is used in the artwork for 1000 Forms of Fear, worn by Sia in interviews and live performances (in which she appears with her back towards the camera/audience), worn by dancers portraying Sia in music videos and live performances, and features heavily in Sia’s own app – ‘Bob Job’ – which is a mobile-device game featuring Sia’s songs. The wig was re-conceptualised in late 2015 for the release of Sia’s single ‘Alive’, the first track to be released from the upcoming album This is Acting. The re-conceptualised wig plays on a yin-yang theme, one half being black while the other is blonde.  5 See Sia on Nightline with Chris Connelly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4DMk9BJyY4.  6 Renshaw, David. 2015. “Now You Sia. . . ”, NME, 21 February 2015, 10–11.  7 See Gallo (2013), Knopper (2014), and Murfett (2010).  8 Consider the myth-like status of artists and musicians such as John Bonham, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, and Jim Morrison, whose out-of-control lifestyles and perceived intensity were a huge part of their image and self-presentation. See Whiteley (2006, 330–332) for a discussion on the romanticisation of drug abuse and death in rock culture: “Its heroes are those whose emotions have broken out of prescribed limits, endowing them with a godlike eminence which is curiously enhanced by their often ignoble deaths – the inhalation of vomit being but one example” (ibid., 331). 99

Kai Arne Hansen  9 See Knopper (2014). 10 It is fair to assume that knowledge of Sia’s songwriting is widespread amongst audiences. In addition to her songwriting skill being highlighted through interviews, several online magazines have compiled lists of songs written by Sia (see for example “‘Pretty Hurts’ and 14 other songs you didn’t know Sia wrote” on mtv.com). Also, many fans have demonstrated their knowledge of her songwriting in the comment section on YouTube. 11 Audiences still grant the songwriter a privileged status based on traditional perceptions of authenticity. As Richardson (2012, 209) points out, there is an apparently built-in response in the reception of popular music for listeners to look and listen for an author, and these processes are closely related to perceptions of authenticity and agency. Relatedly, Moore (2001, 199) has observed that, in popular music, authenticity has long been associated with the singer-songwriter. I would add that prevailing perceptions of the singer-songwriter stress the importance of his or her role as author in attributing agency and ascribing a sense of authenticity as well. 12 Strategies of resistance are commonplace in popular music, regardless of genre. For valuble insights into this matter and an in-depth critique of masculinity, see Hawkins (2009) on dandyism. Also see Langman’s (2008) study of the body as a site of resistance and empowerment, and Roberts’ (1991) work on feminist rappers. 13 Transgression, in this case, relates first and foremost to cultural perceptions of gender, sexuality, and age. See for example the artwork for the ‘Big Girls Cry’ single where Sia is joined by two men, both wearing the signature wig and dressed in the same skirt as Sia herself. Also, the portrayal of Sia by Ziegler in the ‘Chandelier’ video raises issues of gender and age. 14 See Brown (2015). 15 Released on 6 May 2014, the video had surpassed 744,000,000 viewings by late May 2015, according to YouTube’s count. By 1 December 2015, the number of viewings had risen above 1,008,000,000. 16 See Hawkins (2009, 39). 17 Serge Lacasse has commented on the pervasiveness of interpretations of Sia’s voice as particularly expressive of emotion (2010, 141–142), and offers a thorough investigation of her ‘creaky voice’ in relation to paralinguistic and phonostylistic features. 18 Ironic agency, in this example, also relates to perceptions of gender: to this viewer at least, entering from the perspective of a male feminist, the cultural connection of curtsying to the feminine (compared to that of taking a bow, for example) brings to the fore and problematises the societal and cultural pressures that are put on children from a very young age to neatly fit into categories of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. 19 See Gallo (2013). 20 See also Hawkins’s investigation into hyperbole and irony in Morrissey’s ‘You Have Killed Me’, where he suggests that “[t]here is nothing more layered and contradictory than self-mockery” (2009, 71). 21 See also Hawkins (2016) and Jarman-Ivens (2011). 22 See Hansen (2015) where I take up these issues in an analysis of Beyoncé’s ‘Partition’ as part of a problematisation of how her performance strategy forms part of a pop style which, through stylistic coding, has much in common with the sonic aesthetics of mainstream pornography. 23 See Dibben (2009, 321–330) for a detailed examination of body movement in popular music performance as related to emotional expression.

Bibliography Attwood, Feona, ed. 2009. Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western Culture. London: I. B. Tauris. Brown, Helen. 2015. “Sia Furler Has Blazed the Trail for a New Kind of Pop Star.” Telegraph.co.uk. Last modified on 2 July 2015. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/11714010/ Sia-Furler-has-blazed-the-trail-for-a-new-kind-of-pop-star.html (accessed 30 July 2015). Dibben, Nicola. 2009. “Vocal Performance and the Projection of Emotional Authenticity.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 317–333. Aldershot: Ashgate. Furler, Sia. 2013. “My Anti-Fame Manifesto.” Billboard.com. Last modified on 25 October 2013. Available at http://www.billboard.com/articles/5770456/my-anti-fame-manifesto-by-sia-furler (accessed 25 June 2015). Gallo, Phil. 2013. “Sia: The Billboard Cover Story.” Billboard.com. Last modified on 25 October 2013. Available at http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/5770521/sia-the-billboard-coverstory (accessed 12 March 2015). 100

Vulnerability in Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ Gibson, Pamela Church, ed. 2004. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute. Hansen, Kai Arne. 2015. “Empowered or Objectified? Personal Narrative and Audiovisual Aesthetics in Beyoncé’s Partition.” Popular Music and Society. doi: 10.1080/03007766.2015.1104906 Hawkins, Stan. 2002. Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2013. “Aesthetics and Hyperembodiment in Pop Videos: Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernalis, 466–482. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Stan. 2016. Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality. New York: Routledge. Hawkins, Stan and John Richardson. 2007. “Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of Intoxication and Mediation.” Popular Music and Society 30 (5): 605–629. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2011. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knopper, Steve. 2014. “Sia Furler, the Socially Phobic Pop Star.” Nytimes.com. Last modified on 18 April 2014. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/sia-furler-the-sociallyphobic-pop-star.html?_r=4 (accessed 16 March 2015). Lacasse, Serge. 2010. “Slave to the Supradiegetic Rhythm: A Microrhythmic Analysis of Creaky Voice in Sia’s ‘Breathe Me’”. In Musical Rhythm in the age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Anne Danielsen, 141–155. Farnham: Ashgate Langman, Lauren. 2008. “Punk, Porn and Resistance: Civilization and the Body in Popular Culture.” Current Sociology 56 (4): 657–677. McNair, Brian. 2013. Porno? Chic! How Pornography Changed the World and Made It a Better Place. London: Routledge. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Meier, Leslie M. 2013. “Promotional Ubiquitous Musics: New Identities and Emerging Markets in the Digitalizing Music Industry.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. London, ON: University of Western Ontario. Moore, Allan F. 2001. Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock. Second edition. Aldershot: Ashgate. Murfett, Andrew. 2010. “Sia Furler: Fame Does Not Become Her.” smh.com.au. Last modified on 18 June 2010. Available at http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/sia-furler-fame-does-not-becomeher-20100617-yjdr.html (accessed 11 June 2015). Richardson, John. 2012. An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Robin. 1991. “Music Videos, Performance and Resistance: Feminist Rappers.” Journal of Popular Culture 25 (2): 141–152. Whiteley, Sheila. 2003. Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender. London: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila. 2006. “Celebrity: The Killing Fields of Popular Music.” In Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, ed. Sue Holmes and Sean Redmond, 329–342. New York: Routledge. Williamson, Milly. 2010. “Female Celebrity and the Media: The Gendered Denigration of the ‘Ordinary’ Celebrity.” Celebrity Studies 1 (1): 118–120.

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8 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE POLITICS OF LOOKING IN BEYONCÉ’S ‘VIDEO PHONE’ (FEATURING LADY GAGA) Lori Burns and Marc Lafrance

With the advent of handheld technologies, music videos have become instantly available to millions worldwide. Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone (extended remix featuring Lady Gaga)’, directed by Hype Williams and released in 2010, points to the awe-inspiring accessibility of the music video while presenting the viewer with a complex commentary on the ‘politics of looking’ that emerge as a result of it.1 The repeated hook from the song, “If you want me you can have me on your video phone”, makes clear reference to the accessibility and commodification of the female body through the established genre of music video and handheld media devices. Set in a posthuman and ‘hyperreal’ landscape where women are sexualised cyborgs and men are life-size cameras, ‘Video Phone’ can be read as a provocative account of how the power relations between those who are looked at and those who look are changing as new media technologies become an increasingly important part of everyday life.2 Emphasising the instantaneous transmission and pervasive commodification of popular music through recent technological developments, ‘Video Phone’ presents new media gadgetry as a constitutive part of how musicians are received and understood. ‘Video Phone’ deliberately and explicitly contends with the themes of accessibility and commodification through its strategic interplay of subjectivities. Working within the constructs of the music video genre and the confines of new media technology, Beyoncé’s video can be seen to say two key things about gender, sexuality and the politics of looking: on the one hand, it says that the video phone operates according to the logic of ‘the male gaze’ (Mulvey 1975) and is, therefore, bound up in the objectification of women and their bodies; on the other hand, however, it says that the video phone makes men into what might be called ‘slaves of the gaze’ or, put differently, into either inhuman beings who can do nothing but look or captives who cannot look at all (see Figure 8.1). In other words, two contrasting arguments can be made about Beyoncé’s hit music video. First, ‘Video Phone’ can be seen to reflect a patriarchal politics of looking and reinforce hetero-normative relations of visibility. And second, ‘Video Phone’ can be seen to disrupt the patriarchal politics of looking and complicate hetero-normative relations of visibility. We explore both arguments as they relate to Beyoncé’s video while reflecting on what they say about gender, sexuality and popular music culture in an age of new media spectacle.3 102

Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’

Figure 8.1

‘Video Phone’: The male gaze or slaves of the gaze?

Table 8.1 Analytic Model

Thematic Gestural

Spatial

Relational

Lyrics

Music

Images

-popular themes -social issues -attitudes -actions -gestures toward others -mediation of space -looking/being looked at

-musical style -genre references -timing, delivery, articulation -musical patterns -stereo mix -acoustic field -effects to create sonic space -vocal and instrumental interaction

-style, costumes, props

-subject/object relations -stance and address

-movements, choreography, behaviour -camera movement, editing -setting -dimensions of the subjects -framing of the images -staging of subjects in relation to others and to viewer -direct/indirect address

In order to explore the cultural relevance of ‘Video Phone’ and its discursive transmission, this chapter presents an analytic methodology that focuses on the constitutive elements of the music video. In particular, we examine how the expressive content in the domains of lyrics, music and images raises complex questions about gender, sexuality, subjectivity and embodiment in an age of handheld media technologies. In order to analyse the music video, we consider its three domains – lyrics, music and images – and identify and interpret the content that characterises each of these domains according to four cross-cutting parameters: thematic, gestural, spatial and relational. Applying these parameters to create a close reading of the video materials, we raise a number of interpretive questions about the use of technology, the representation of gender and sexuality and the nature of genre-driven musical subjectivities. The analytic model presented in Table 8.1 exposes the three domains and distinguishes content within each of these domains according to the four parameters.4 The thematic 103

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parameter considers popular cultural themes and social issues in the lyrics, the musical references to style and genre and the stylistic features of the costuming and staging of the video. The thematic parameter opens up the analysis to intertextual explorations as well as to social and cultural issues. The gestural parameter considers the attitudes and gestures of the subject in the lyrics, the timing and articulation of musical events, and the physical movement and choreography of the subjects in the visual images, as well as the mobility of the camera and the editing of shots. The spatial parameter considers the subject’s mediation of space in the landscape of the lyrics, the placement of the musical sounds within the acoustic field, and the dimensions of the subjects within a spatial setting in the visual field, as well as the framing of the shot in the film production. The relational parameter considers the ways in which the subjects interact and relate to one another: this parameter tracks the subject/object relations evident in the lyrics, the vocal and instrumental relations in the musical texture, the staging of the subjects in the visual field and the way they relate to the camera. The relational parameter is particularly suitable for the analysis of the gaze for, as Sturken and Cartwright claim, “To gaze is to enter into a relational activity of looking” (2009, 94). These four cross-cutting parameters serve to channel the interpretation of the expressive content and uncover the dynamic relationships at play within the video.

The thematic parameter The video release of ‘Video Phone’ is a remix of the song originally produced on Beyoncé’s album I Am . . . Sasha Fierce (2008), a two-sided album featuring expressive ballads on the I Am side and upbeat dance tracks on the Sasha Fierce side, which was named for her alter ego performance persona. In keeping with the representations of that daring persona, ‘Video Phone’ explores the concept of ‘sexting’, that is, capturing and sharing sexual content on a mobile device.5 The invitation to watch is given a song treatment that is grounded in the genre of snap, a southern hip-hop genre that is lyrically characterised by boasting about money, drinking in the club, sexual seduction and patronising references to women named ‘Shawty’. The genre of snap (related to crunk) was widely popularised during 2005–2007 by artists such as D4L (‘Laffy Taffy’), Yung Joc (‘It’s Goin Down’), Soulja Boy (‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’) and T-Pain (‘Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)’). Snap is musically characterised by a slow, sparse-textured groove featuring the Roland 808’s bass drum, snare and hi-hat, with backbeat finger-snaps, groaning vocals and high-pitched synth patterns. Solidifying her genre references through explicit intertextual borrowings, Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’ not only opens with the lyrical line, “Shawty, what your name is”, but also picks up the bass drum effects and finger-snaps of the T-Pain track and the high-pitched synth gesture and fast snare attack of the Soulja Boy track.6 ‘Video Phone’ stands out on the album I Am . . . Sasha Fierce as the only track that operates within the genre of snap, in contrast to the electropop and dancepop tracks on the Sasha Fierce side. The track that connects most closely to ‘Video Phone’ is ‘Diva’, with its references to the genre of trap, an earlier, southern hip-hop style that served as a precursor to both crunk and snap. As a female artist recognised for her R&B and pop styling, Beyoncé’s choice in 2008 to adopt these southern hip-hop genres is noteworthy, especially given their strongly sexualised and misogynist content. In this regard, she is in company with fellow female artist Shawnna, who is featured as a dancer in T-Pain’s ‘Buy U a Drank’ and whose track ‘Gettin’ Some’ (2006) responds directly to the traditions of snap, while subjecting those traditions to feminist revision.7

104

Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’

Figure 8.2 Visual Borrowings from T-Pain’s ‘Buy U a Drank’, featuring Shawnna, and Soulja Boy’s ‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’.

Table 8.2 Thematic Parameter of ‘Video Phone’ ‘Video Phone’

Lyrics

Music

Images

Thematic

-social issues: ‘sexting’, club culture, technology and sexuality

-genre connections: the slow, sexualised gestures of snap fused with high production values of pop and contemporary R&B

-dark, sultry and busy club scene of snap is brought into a posthuman and hyperreal setting (Hype Williams)

While the musical impetus of the track owes a huge debt to snap, the visual world of ‘Video Phone’ does not conform to a hip-hop aesthetic. Some of the visual codes in ‘Video Phone’ confirm the snap genre references and intertextual borrowings. For instance, she adopts the finger-snapping gesture of Shawnna, who is featured in the T-Pain video, and she wears a copy of Soulja Boy’s oversized T-shirt (see Figure 8.2). Notwithstanding such genre cues, the visual world of ‘Video Phone’ suggests hyperreal and posthuman representations, and thus can be seen to resist ‘authentic’ immersion within hip-hop culture. The thematic parameter facilitates this reflection on the overall generic and stylistic features that emerge across the domains of lyrics, music and images (Table 8.2). The topic of ‘sexting’ is set musically to the gestures and sonic palette of snap (although enhanced by high production values) and the typically sultry images of snap’s club scene are highly stylised (by Hype Williams) to enhance the represented figures and situate them in a posthuman landscape. While the thematic parameter facilitates stylistic analysis, the remaining parameters (gestural, spatial and relational) allow for the close reading of the specific song and video materials. To illustrate these parameters, we will focus on individual sections of the song as they are developed in the video narrative.

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Gestural, spatial and relational parameters of the pre-hook The pre-hook’s gestural, spatial and relational parameters are summarised in Table 8.3. In the domain of lyrics, the opening gesture of the pre-hook is the subject’s act of walking and the hustlers’ act of watching and commenting. Her action is described in terms of the hustlers’ interest in it: “Them hustlers keep on talkin’/They like the way I’m walkin’”. Her response to being watched is to invite a form of watching that is mediated by the camera technology (“I’ll let you film me”). The implied space in which the subject is being watched is public, as the hustlers observe her on the street. However, the space has the potential to be mediated by the recording device, yielding a reproduction of her walking in video form. The resulting video reproduction can be fetishised in a private setting, providing access to her image that is no longer ephemeral. We see here the boundaries between public and private becoming blurred through the use of mobile technology. Within the pre-hook lyrics, we also see a multi-layered invocation of the gaze and its power relations: the subject asserts her control to invite the gaze, that is, to become the object of the look; the hustlers are attributed the function of the diegetic gaze, but their power is apparently granted by the subject; entering the story through the subject’s perspective, the listener–spectator is destabilised by the question of who is in control of the look. Although, as Sturken and Cartwright indicate, “The act of looking is commonly regarded as awarding more power to the person who is looking than to the person who is the object of the look” (2009: 111), the subject’s control of the invitation to look shifts the balance of power towards her as subject rather than mere object. Mulvey (1975) would understand this arrangement to disrupt the active male/passive female binary, thus to disrupt scopophilic pleasure. In the musical domain, a one-bar repeated loop features a synthesised kick drum, snare and finger snap in syncopated patterns. Beyoncé’s vocal style offers simple melodic gestures with a clear rhythmic profile, and rich back-up vocals enhance the texture in a variety of production techniques. A lingering ‘uh-uh’ vocal gesture is juxtaposed with the more aggressive, street-accented primary vocal. In the recording space, her voice is centred and focused, compressed and forward, while the back-up vocals are panned left and right with a very wet reverb effect, enhancing the sexual quality of the gesture. The kit and main vocal relate in a lively and integrated rhythmic texture. An active call and response patterning evolves between the rhythmic kit and the primary vocal line. Table 8.3 Gestural, spatial and relational parameters in the pre-hook Pre-hook

Lyrics

Gestural

-walking is being watched -invitation to film

Music

Images

-rhythmic loop: kick drum, snare, snap -vocal: direct rhythmic gestures -back-up vocals: guttural ‘uh, uh’ Spatial -public space, -B’s voice centred, compressed, although potentially forward mediated by filming -back-up vocals panned L and R, reverb Relational -subject watched by -dynamic integrated rhythmic texture many, also by a specific one -call and response between kit and vocals 106

-camera moves in zooming gesture -male figure with camera head adjusts his suit -B moves to music, finger snap -gray background -figures centred -camera image occupies full frame -juxtaposition of images -B’s face in camera lens

Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’

Figure 8.3

Images in the Pre-hook.

As the images of the pre-hook unfold, the gestural economy is developed to expose a dynamic relationship between the female subject and not only the watching male, but also the technology itself, which appears in an embodied form both as a camera and as a male figure with a camera for a head. As the camera itself takes on the role of a character, the inanimate becomes animated, while at the same time the human figure (the animate) is de-animated through the replacement of his head with a technological apparatus. This posthuman conception is supported aesthetically by means of the video setting and the actions of the characters, as well as the editing of the shots. The pre-hook establishes the spatial setting of this video: the background is grey with no clear edges or boundaries; there is more light in the centre of the shot, and a slight framing effect is created by the darkening of the grey background as it moves to the edges. The figures exist in contrast to the cold artificial background, and their gestures take place against the austere backdrop. As the images are edited to move quickly from a shot of Beyoncé to a shot of the camera, the implication is that the camera is capturing images of Beyoncé, and this is confirmed when Beyoncé’s gaze is directed back to us through the reflection of the camera lens and viewfinder (Figure 8.3). With respect to the gaze, ‘Video Phone’ once again challenges dominant cinematic norms. As Susan Hayward (2006) summarises, the relations ought to be as follows: In so far as the exchange of looks is concerned, in dominant cinema, it comes from three directions – all of which are ‘naturally’ assumed as male. First, there is the pro-filmic event – the look of the camera, with behind it the cameraman [sic]. Then there is the diegetic gaze, the man gazing at the woman, a gaze she may return but is not able to act upon. . . . Finally there is the spectator’s gaze which imitates the other two looks. The spectator is positioned as the camera’s eye and also, because as spectator he [sic] is subject of the gaze, as the eye of the beholding male on screen.8 (177–178) Transferring this conception of the gaze in cinema to the medium of music video, the profilmic setting of ‘Video Phone’ establishes the gaze of the camera, which remains fixed upon the centred objects of the look, with frequent edits of the image from the male camera head, to Beyoncé in a variety of body positions and image fragmentations, to the camera and viewfinder within which her image appears. With respect to the normative diegetic gaze, the man who is gazing at the woman is dehumanised and de-animated, creating a hyperbolic diegetic gaze. The spectator’s gaze is disrupted by this process, as the spectator (an animate human) cannot easily identify with the camera-headed male who functions as the ‘beholding male on the screen’. When Beyoncé gazes directly at the spectator through the lens of the viewfinder, 107

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the spectator must grapple with these diegetic contexts as they interfere with scopophilic pleasure. Mulvey explains the importance of the ‘natural’ perception of the gaze: Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology and camera movements combined with invisible editing all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action. (Mulvey 1975, 13) In the visual world of ‘Video Phone’, the perception is not ‘natural’ and the limits of screen space are not blurred; the spectator is made to be self-conscious as a viewer who is dependent upon many layers of technological intervention. The three domains (lyrics, music and images) intersect to create a seductive but destabilised relationship between the viewer, or the one who looks, and the subject who is being looked at. This relationship unfolds in a public setting, but is explicitly mediated by technology to become intimate and potentially the object of fetishised scrutiny. At the same time, the beholder of the look is shown to be usurped by the very technology that enables his looking.

Gestural, spatial and relational parameters in the hook The hook’s gestural, spatial and relational parameters are summarised in Table 8.4. This section of the song offers a repetitive lyric pattern with each line featuring the title hook, “on your video phone”. Complementing the repetitive nature of the lyrics is a greater emphasis on the vocal texture, which features the primary voice recorded with lowered intensity, panned left and right, with the back-up vocals chorused in the same panned position to create a multi-layered vocal texture that is full, rich and sonically expansive. Beyoncé’s voice fills the musical texture, reinforcing the message of her accessibility. A steady and fast-paced attack on the hi-hat creates a shimmering timbre at the very surface of the mix, a low rumbling sound darkens the acoustic field, a dry bass drum pattern underscores and

Table 8.4 Gestural, Spatial and Relational Parameters in the Hook Hook

Lyrics

Music

Images

Gestural

-invitations to “take me”, “watch me”, “want me”

Spatial

-subject projects herself into phone

-B’s image duplicated, layered -background B sings lyrics -foreground B snaps, dances -B’s duplicated image fills screen -artificial space

Relational

-direct address -Other has power, except for resistant “I can handle you”

-steady vocal presentation with accents on “video” -kit serves timbral function, with kick drum accent at end of bar -soft vocals panned and delayed, fill space -hi-hat centred -low rumble opens space -vocals dominate texture -bass drum complements voice, hi-hats active at surface

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-B in direct address -central B framed by mirrored image

Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’

Figure 8.4

Duplicated images in the Hook.

complements the vocal presentation and the kick drum creates an upbeat accent in the last part of the measure that leads to the vocal downbeat on “video”. The all-encompassing vocal and instrumental texture of the hook invites the listener to be sensuously immersed in the sound of Beyoncé’s voice. The images of the hook reinforce the effects of the vocal expansion and the lyrical message of the subject’s accessibility by multiplying the image of Beyoncé in a rich and dynamic visual texture: a medium shot is centred, dancing to the music; on either side of the centred medium shot is a mirrored image of another medium shot of the artist, holding a mask to her eyes and moving in a different dance pattern; behind these medium shots is a faded close-up of Beyoncé’s face that is duplicated in a mirror form (Figure 8.4). This faded, close-up Beyoncé delivers the lyrics. As the chorus unfolds, the medium shots of Beyoncé in the foreground are duplicated in a digital repetition to show the different time-points simultaneously. The visual effect is that of multiple Beyoncés, with multiple roles and gestural capacity. We experience her from many angles and moments in the timeline to create a fantastical and endlessly proliferating representation of her body in time and space. The viewer is invited to experience a sensational display of Beyoncé’s voice and body, potentially (as the lyrics tell us) on a handheld device that permits an intimate and private mode of spectatorship. One might even say that Beyoncé ‘becomes’ time and space in the context of this video; she is everywhere all of the time. Her spatial omnipresence is established through the image-based strategies and her temporal omnipresence is established by and through the fact that it is the movements of her body that appear to dictate the camera’s ‘behaviour’; that is, the technology of the camera is mobilised to respond to her every gesture. While she is represented as being everywhere, she is also, paradoxically, confined to the video phone where she occupies only a small screen of space and is subject to the viewer’s desire to turn her on and off. This dynamic proliferation of Beyoncé’s image, in combination with the repetition of the lyrical hook and the heavily layered musical effects, might be understood to suspend the spectator’s perception of advancing time and narrative action. Mulvey’s comments about the presence of the female object in narrative film structure resonate with such an interpretation: The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. (Mulvey 1975, 11) Beyoncé’s spectacular representation here certainly thwarts a sense of real-time action and instead encourages the viewer to contemplate multiple perspectives of her body, notably now without the literal presence of the camera technology. The effects of technology are manifest in the layered manipulations of her image; however, the image is delivered without the 109

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auspicious evidence of the camera-headed figure. Whereas the pre-hook images constantly remind the viewer of the media interventions, the hook foregoes self-reflexivity and celebrates the desire of the gaze.

Gestural, spatial and relational parameters in the verse structure The first statement of the hook is followed by a sequence of four verses, delivered by Beyoncé. While verse 1 returns to the images of the pre-hook, the second verse is marked visually by a strobe effect, in which individual frames from two shots are interleaved in a dynamic sequence. Each of the shots used to create the strobe effect features Beyoncé delivering the lines of the verse, such that we witness two simultaneous presentations of the lyric, with Beyoncé in a head shot alternating with Beyoncé in a head and shoulders shot (Figure 8.5). Once again the video subject is multiple and made available to the viewer from more than one perspective. Throughout verse 2, the strobe shot sequence is juxtaposed with a new image of Beyoncé, this time centred between two male figures, each with a bare torso and a blue bag over his head; Beyoncé points two toy pistols at the man she is facing (1:35 in Figure 8.1). As the verse sequence continues (verses 3 and 4), Beyoncé is featured alternately in uniform with two camera-headed figures and in hip-hop attire with a hooded man who is bound to a chair (1:45 and 1:48 in Figure 8.1). It is important to reflect on the effects of the representation of male figures as inhuman camera heads and as hooded victims.9 While the earlier images of Beyoncé represent the female body as accessible and reproducible for the male gaze, the male figures are also accessible and reproducible insofar as they are either immobilised or reduced to the status of a mass-produced commodity – the camera. We will return to this issue, but first, let us consider the role of Lady Gaga in ‘Video Phone’. When Gaga enters for her presentation of verses 5–6, we witness a significant interaction between the two artists. The familiar grey background returns, and she and Beyoncé sport the same costume of a white dance suit and long white gloves, carrying colourful plastic weapons (2:37 in Figure 8.1). Despite the familiar setting and apparently equivalent clothing style, Gaga’s movements are in contrast to what we have seen of Beyoncé so far. As Gaga delivers her verse lyrics, she is in direct address to the camera, while Beyoncé’s back is turned. Gaga frequently looks away from the camera and avoids direct address. When she does address the camera, she adopts positions that raise questions about her stance toward the spectator. For instance, she holds her glove to her mouth and delivers the line “hubba, hubba”, she adopts a defiant stance and shoots her pistol off to the side, and she tosses her hair and shakes her shoulders in an aggressive and free form of expression. Relying again upon the analytic model, the gestural, spatial and relational parameters reveal a number of key features that position Gaga as a more aggressive subject (Table 8.5). At the gestural level, the female subject now lyrically identifies the male other as her “phone

Figure 8.5

Strobe images in Verse 2. 110

Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’ Table 8.5 Gestural, spatial and relational parameters in verses 5–6 (Gaga) Hook

Lyrics

Music

Images

Gestural

-female subject now captures Other with technology

-disruptive gestures (hand over face, firing of pistol, looking at camera with one eye)

Spatial

-social (public) space -reference to Oscars and to other famous actors (Gene Tierney, Marlon Brando) -female subject has greater control (“put you in my movie”)

-G’s voice more aggressive, forceful -free lyric gestures presented with vocal liberty (“oh”; “hubba hubba”) -G’s voice is more forward and has a harsher quality -reverb and delays on primary vocal add depth and breadth to space -dynamic relationship between vocal and kit

Relational

Figure 8.6

-angled image of G from above -black background, golden spotlights suggest another space -G’s images in strobe sequence are not centred (disorderly image) -G’s actions in front of B are disruptive

Strobe images in Verse 6.

star”, thus claiming the power to capture him via technology: he is on her phone, on her receiver and then in her movie. Once again, in the context of the technologically mediated universe of ‘Video Phone’, the power dynamics between men and women are constantly shifting. Musically, Lady Gaga’s voice is more forceful, with a harsher (less sultry) sound as compared with Beyoncé. In the video images, her gestures are disruptive as she covers her face, fires the pistol and meets the camera’s gaze with only one eye. At the spatial level, Gaga opens the lyrical contexts to the broader world of the celebrity by referring to the Oscars and to specific actors (“I’ll be your Gene, you’ll be my Brando”). Her voice is more forward in the mix, with a higher level of reverb and delay to create a sense of greater depth and breadth. Gaga’s image operates within the spatial setting in a strikingly different way: the camera does not film her in a direct frontal position, but rather adopts a slightly angled position from above; her background lighting reveals a black background with golden spotlights creating circles of light on the floor (Figure 8.6). The relational parameter also facilitates the analysis of Gaga’s contributions to ‘Video Phone’. As a subject, she is ascribed greater control in the relationship with the Other, and a stronger sense of resistance. When her image is treated to the strobe technique, the sequence has a disruptive effect: her face is captured on angle from the side and above in a cropped form so that we do not see her complete right eye (Figure 8.6). As these two images blend together in the strobe, we see the fuller image of her head and shoulders in the centre, with 111

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the cropped image of her face and left eye on the right of the screen. It is a disorderly image, compared with the more centred image of Beyoncé in the strobe presentation (Figure 8.5). These differences in performance values for Lady Gaga point to the fact that the women of ‘Video Phone’ are endowed with individual subjectivity and the power to occupy different subject positions, unlike the men, who appear to be generic and faceless.

The politics of looking in ‘Video Phone’ With this close reading of some key passages as a foundation, we would like to reflect further on the politics of looking as they are developed in ‘Video Phone’. The discussion that follows will cast a broader perspective on the video and put forward an interpretation of the cultural messages that emerge. Our goal here is to explore the paradoxical nature of the video’s representations of gender, sexuality and the body: namely that ‘Video Phone’ can be seen to reflect a patriarchal politics of looking and reinforce hetero-normative relations of visibility while also being seen to disrupt a patriarchal politics of looking and complicate hetero-normative relations of visibility. Once again, we will structure the interpretive commentary according to the cross-cutting parameters of the analytic model, although we will focus now primarily on the domain of images. The workings of a male gaze are very much in evidence when thinking critically about the thematic features of ‘Video Phone’. Drawing on Sut Jhally’s notion of a ‘pornographic imagination’, we find an abundance of visual cues associated with the codes and conventions of the sex industry; these cues consist, for instance, of the long, synthetic nails often worn by porn stars, the revealing costuming characteristic of pin-up girls, the high heels worn by pole dancers and the silver chairs – made, of course, to be straddled – reminiscent of the strip club (Figure 8.7) (Jhally 2007, 3). Above and beyond these visual cues, the stylistic features of ‘Video Phone’ are consistent with the norms associated with what R. W. Connell (1987, 1995) calls “emphasised femininity”. Emphasised femininity is associated with availability, dependence, passivity, receptiveness and vanity. By contrast, “hegemonic masculinity” is associated with activity, strength, independence, power and virility (Connell 1987, 183–190). Indeed, the abundance of revealed flesh, of suggestive clothing and of elaborate makeup all contributes to making the women in the video appear exaggeratedly available and on display. That being said, ‘Video Phone’ also disrupts the patriarchal politics of looking and complicates hetero-normative relations. Men are shown as highly muscular and dressed in fashionable designer clothing – but with no heads. The camera-headed figures are all dressed the same way, reinforcing their generic, mass-produced and de-individualised status. Men are also shown hooded, with their chests exposed in an objectified representation (1:35 in Figure 8.1). This treatment of the male body can be seen as a defamiliarisation of the familiar

Figure 8.7

The ‘pornographic imagination’ in ‘Video Phone’. 112

Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’

Figure 8.8

Male rappers in the genre of snap: T-Pain and Soulja Boy.

insofar as the males appear to be men but are, instead, machines.10 Especially in the context of the musical genre of snap, this particular effort to defamiliarise the male body resists the conventional representations of Southern male rappers as shown, for example, in Figure 8.8. Considering the relational parameter, the women of ‘Video Phone’ address us directly, maintaining eye contact for the vast majority of the video. The direct eye contact can be interpreted in two very contrasting ways. First, the ongoing eye contact resonates with the argument in favour of the male gaze insofar as this very direct mode of ocular address tends to represent women as vulnerable and consumable through their direct eye contact with the camera. Above all, the direct address and ongoing eye contact maintained by the women in the video can be seen to make them both accessible and available to men at all times. This appears to confirm the argument that the male gaze represents women in exhibitionistic terms and men in scopophilic terms. On the other side of the argument, however, men – with cameras for heads or with hoods covering their heads – are not given the opportunity and do not have the ability to look at the viewer; women look at the viewer all the time and are thus given access to the viewer in a way the men are not. One could argue that the video presents a powerful woman with an entourage of male minions who are manifestly disempowered through a range of strategies. The strength of female eye contact throughout the video resonates with bell hooks’s understanding of the oppositional gaze, as expressed here: By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality”. Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. (hooks 1992, 107) hooks reflects here on the power of the gaze (indeed, the ‘stare’) to reinforce the agency of the looking subject. As Beyoncé and Gaga are the only subjects in the video with the power to gaze without the assistance of technology, they are shown to stare in the face of the structures of domination that would otherwise work to disempower them. With respect to the spatial parameter, women dominate the centre of the screen. For instance, Beyoncé’s face is framed by and through a viewfinder (00:53 in Figure 8.3). This suggests that she is available ‘to-be-looked-at’, which, in turn, points to a kind of female dependence on the gaze of the male other. What is more, because the women in the video are so often shown alone and positioned in the centre of the screen, we are almost unavoidably invited to focus on them. Here the costuming, makeup, lighting and set-design reiterate and 113

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reinforce this invitation. At the same time, however, even when the women are not alone on screen, they are always, with few exceptions, positioned between – that is, in the centre of – two or more men. So even when there are men on the screen, it is the women who are given ocular priority. This is also the case when either Beyoncé or Gaga is shown amidst multiple versions of themselves: even in situations such as these, there is almost always a ‘real’ Beyoncé or Gaga positioned in the very centre of the visual frame. In addition, these multiple versions of Beyoncé and Gaga encourage the viewer to feast on the women visually; they can, if we follow the male gaze argument through to its logical conclusion, be seen as a kind of ocular jouissance.11 The flipside of always being in the centre of the screen is that it also gives the one being gazed at a lot of influence over the internal and external lookers – in other words, it can be and often is a position of power. Men are often positioned on the sidelines; they are rarely in the centre except when they are camera-headed figures. When they occupy the margins, they are shown to be slaves to the gaze (1:35 and 1:45 of Figure 8.1). When they occupy central space, they are weakened, either by their loss of natural vision (00:51 of Figure 8.3) or by the violence to which they are subjected by the female figures (1:48 and 3:25 of Figure 8.1) – like injured trophies of female dominance and domination. At the gestural level, most of the shots of Beyoncé represent both her behaviour in general and her movement in particular in relation to gender and race stereotypes. When she is represented as the exotic Other (2:37 in Figure 8.1; Figure 8.4), there is a strong emphasis on hip gyrations and pelvic thrusts synchronised with the beat of the music. When she is represented as the dominatrix, she places her extreme high heels onto the leg of her prisoner (1:48 in Figure 8.1). When she is wearing the uniform costume, with her booty framed by the hands of the camera-headed men, she is shown to be inviting and enjoying this kind of ocular attention (1:45 in Figure 8.1). In sum, the visual economy of ‘Video Phone’ is one that can be seen to conform to the mainstream heterosexual male imaginary – one in which women are represented as consumable fantasies and men are represented as consumers of those fantasies. In the counterargument, however, while women are shown to be active, dynamic, sadistic and violent, men are shown to be passive, robotic, masochistic and powerless. Ultimately, the aesthetic landscape of ‘Video Phone’ exceeds reality, and overwhelms and unsettles the viewer in and through its treatment of posthuman figures and hyperreality within the context of a musical genre where such conventions do not apply.

Conclusions The analytic model explored here facilitates reflection on the multiple dimensions of representation that emerge in and through the thematic, relational, spatial and gestural parameters of the lyrics, music and images. Applying this approach to the multifaceted materials of Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’ allows the viewer to develop a polysemic interpretation of the song which, in turn, allows us to make sense of how it represents gender, sexuality, subjectivity, power and embodiment in a range of different domains and through a variety of cross-cutting parameters. By paying close attention to these different domains and the parameters associated with them, the viewer is able to move beyond a reductive representational analysis that argues either for or against the workings of what has come to be known as the male gaze. Instead, the multi-dimensional approach presented here allows for a nuanced analysis that supports the argument that while the workings of a male gaze appear to be very much in evidence in ‘Video Phone’, so too are the workings of female power, as characterised by 114

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control, surveillance and violence. To return to the theoretical conception of gender presented earlier, we would offer that the video presents not only a context of emphasised femininity and hegemonic masculinity, but also one of emphasised masculinity and hegemonic femininity. Ultimately, this approach enables the interpreter to map the machinations of the gaze at work in the song in a way that yields a systematic and, above all, complex interpretation of the politics of gender, sexuality and technology in Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’.

Notes  1 This chapter has been developed out of several conference presentations based on ‘Video Phone’ (see Burns, Dubuc and Lafrance 2011; Burns and Lafrance 2011; and Lafrance and Burns 2011). The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.  2 For a thorough reflection on feminism and posthumanism, the reader is encouraged to consult James (2008) and Toffoletti (2007), who extend Baudrillard’s work on simulation and hyperreality (1993) to contemporary representations in popular culture.  3 For additional scholarly writings on how female artists reclaim and restructure the gaze in music video, please refer to Fouz-Hernández and Jarman-Ivens (2004), Hawkins and Richardson (2007), Kaplan (1987) and Lewis (1990).  4 The model presented here is based on similar principles applied in the development of models for other works we have analysed. For examples of other multi-dimensional models, the reader is encouraged to consult Burns, Lafrance and Hawley (2008), and Burns and Watson (2013).  5 The issue of sexual content as transmitted through mobile devices was emerging as a social concern at the time that the song was created. For instance, in 2008 (the year the song was recorded), The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy published a survey, entitled ‘Sex and Tech: Results from a Survey of Teens and Young Adults’. Washington, DC. http://thenationalcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resource-primary-download/sex_and_tech_summary.pdf.  6 The reader is encouraged to compare the bass and finger-snap patterning in the hook of ‘Video Phone’ (1:04) to similar patterning in the hook of T-Pain’s ‘Buy U a Drank’ (0:25), and also to compare the high-pitched and syncopated marimba-like synth patterns in Beyoncé’s chorus (1:04) to similar patterning in Soulja Boy’s ‘Crank That’ (0:22). The time codes listed here refer to the official music videos for these tracks.  7 With her video ‘Gettin’ Some’, Shawnna’s feminist sensibilities emerge in a number of ways. For instance, she sets the scene in a hair salon in which female figures predominate, and her lyrics boast of cunnilingus as well as sexual dominance over men.  8 Hayward’s formulation here is credited to Raymond Bellour (1975).  9 The image of the tied and bound male figure in ‘Video Phone’ can be considered in light of a larger trend towards representing violence against men in music videos by female artists. Burns and Lafrance (2014) explore similar representations in Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’, featuring Beyoncé, which can be connected to ‘Video Phone’ on a number of interpretive issues, and Lafrance and Burns (in press) take up the topic in a robust analysis of Christina Aguilera’s ‘Your Body’. 10 The strategy of defamiliarisation is understood to achieve an unsettling effect as viewers of art are asked to look at representations in a critical way and question meanings (see Birch 2009). 11 We transfer here Barthes’s (1973) concept of jouissance – pleasure in the text – to the visual dimension, and it is important to note, in this regard, that jouissance connotes not only a reassuring pleasure, but also a destabilising and unsettling pleasure (see Baldick 2015).

Bibliography Baldick, Chris. 2015. “Jouissance.” In The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. http://www. oxfordreference.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/ acref-9780198715443-e-624. Barthes, Roland. 1973. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. Bellour, Raymond. 1975. “The Unattainable Text.” Screen 16 (3): 19–27. 115

Lori Burns and Marc Lafrance Birch, Dinah. 2009. “Defamiliarization.” In The Oxford Companion to English Literature. http:// www.oxfordreference.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/ acref-9780192806871-e-2076. Burns, Lori, Tamar Dubuc, and Marc Lafrance. 2011. “Dynamic Subjectivities and New Media Technologies in Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’ (Featuring Lady Gaga): Material Elements of Sound, Text and Image.” Paper presented at the conference Material Cultures, the 2011 Canadian Literature Symposium, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 6–8 May 2011. Burns, Lori, and Marc Lafrance. 2011. “Gender, Sexuality and Technology in Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’.” Paper presented at the international conference Feminist Theory and Music 11, Phoenix, Arizona, September 2011. ———. 2014. “Celebrity, Spectacle and Surveillance: Understanding Lady Gaga’s ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Telephone’ Through Music, Image and Movement.” In Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture, ed. Martin Iddon, 117–147. New York: Routledge. Burns, Lori, Marc Lafrance, and Laura Hawley. 2008. “Embodied Subjectivities in the Lyrical and Musical Expression of PJ Harvey and Björk.” Music Theory Online 14 (4). http://www.mtosmt.org/ issues/mto.08.14.4/mto.08.14.4.burns_lafrance_hawley.html. Burns, Lori, and Jada Watson. 2013. “Spectacle and Intimacy in Live Concert Video: Lyrics, Music, Staging and Film Mediation in P!nk’s Funhouse Tour (2009).” The Journal of Music, Sound and Moving Image 7 (2): 103–140. Connell, R.W. 1987. Gender and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fouz-Hernández, Santiago, and Freya Jarman-Ivens, eds. 2004. Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations, 1983–2003. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan, and John Richardson. 2007. “Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of Intoxication and Mediation.” Popular Music and Society 30 (5): 605–629. Hayward, Susan. 2006. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. Third edition. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. James, Robin. 2008. “‘Robo-Diva R&B’: Aesthetics, Politics, and Black Female Robots in Contemporary Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 20 (4): 402–423. Jhally, Sut. 2007. Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex and Power in Music Video. Northampton: Media Education Foundation. Transcript available at https://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/229/ transcript_229.pdf. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1987. Rocking Around the Clock. London and New York: Methuen. Lafrance, Marc, and Lori Burns. 2011. “Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Looking in Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’.” Paper presented at the conference, The Ghost in the Machine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2–3 February 2011. ———. 2017. “The Dark Side of Camp: Making sense of Violence Against Men in Christina Aguilera’s ‘Your Body.’” In Music and Camp, ed. Philip Purvis and Christopher Moore. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017. Lewis, Lisa. 1990. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. 2009. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Second edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Toffoletti, Kim. 2007. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.

Videography Beyoncé. 2009. “Video Phone (Featuring Lady Gaga).” Directed by Hype Williams. Columbia Records. http://www.vevo.com/watch/beyoncé/Video-Phone/USSM20902123. Shawnna. 2006. “‘Gettin’ Some.” Directed by Shaka Zulu. The Island Def Jam Music Group. http:// www.vevo.com/watch/shawnna/gettin-some/USUV70600115. Soulja Boy. 2007. “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” Directed by Dale Resteghini. Collipark Music/HHH/ Interscope Records. http://www.vevo.com/watch/soulja-boy-tell’em/Crank-That-(Soulja-Boy)/ USUV70704373. T-Pain. 2007. “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin).” Directed by Benny Boom. Nappy Boy/Konvict, Jive. http://www.vevo.com/watch/t-pain/Buy-U-A-Drank-(Shawty-Snappin)/USZM20700117. 116

9 ‘WORKING IT’ Female masculinity and Missy Elliott Marita B. Djupvik

Although successful female artists often dominate the pop charts, traditional gender roles still have a stronghold on the music industry. Female performers succeed primarily as singers to a far less degree than instrumentalists, and there are still very few female producers (Cohen 1997; Mayhew 2004). Record producer and artist Melissa Arnette Elliott, better known by her stage name Missy Elliott, is an exception. In this chapter, I will provide a reading of her video, ‘Work It’ (2002), with an aim to explore what happens when a female artist adopts and adapts various signifiers of masculinity, including those that are deemed as superficial, in terms of attire, and those that are considered substantive, in terms of performance style, production and musical markers. The persistence of stereotypical gender roles in the music industry seems to mirror cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity. Certain representations of masculinity have traditionally been perceived as authentic in contrast to that of femininity, which is often presented as constructed and artificial. However, several recent studies of masculinity in popular music (Biddle and Gibson 2009; Biddle and Knights 2007; Bradley 2015; Forman and Neal 2012; Hawkins 2009; Hawkins and Niblock 2011) have argued that masculinity is just as constructed as femininity. In fact, concepts of blurring, say, through female masculinity or male femininity form new points of departure in research today, and with this in mind I will examine the ways in which voice production, choice of instrument and expression of attitude contribute to Missy Elliott’s video ‘Work It’. In her book Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam argues that masculinity is in fact the total cultural, social and political expression of maleness, and that it should not be reduced to “the male body and its effects” (Halberstam 1998, 1). Women who express masculinity do more than imitate maleness: “Female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity” (Halberstam 1998, 2). Halberstam suggests that female masculinity does not seek to reproduce masculine power or male masculinities, but rather engages in its own forms of masculinity. Throughout history, women looking and behaving masculine have challenged the coherence of male masculinities and also contributed to the whole concept of masculinity. Still, “female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing” (Halberstam 1998, 1). In acting out conventions, gestures and attitudes otherwise thought of as ‘manly’, certain women lay bare masculinity for the construct it actually is. This chapter attempts to 117

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fuse together various theoretical perspectives through a critical examination of the strategies behind female masculinity. Even though the music producer is predominantly male, there has been change going on during the last thirty years. New production technology, in the form of compact digital ‘home studios’, has democratised this work somewhat and allowed female as well as male musicians to produce their own music (Hesmondhalgh 1998). Stan Hawkins points out that, overall, there has been a “blurring of roles between musician and producer” as well (Hawkins 2002, 52), and women have contributed significantly to this (Dickinson 2004; Hawkins 2004; Mayhew 2004; Warwick 2004). Madonna was producing her own work already in the late 1980s and took control of her image early on. Other female artists from very different musical genres have also produced their own music, alone or with a co-producer, including Tori Amos, Björk, Kate Bush, Beyoncé, PJ Harvey and Alanis Morissette. However, these successful artists are the exceptions, not the norm. This is borne out by the prestigious Grammy Award category, Producer Of The Year, which over a span of four decades has only had six female nominations, with no awards (Grein 2014, online). As Chris Tabron writes in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop: Despite the increasing affordability of technology, there are nonetheless lines drawn between who has access to certain technology, and who has access to the training/ education necessary to learn how to operate it. The audio engineering world was traditionally a closely guarded fraternity, predominantly populated by white men, who usually came from middle-class backgrounds. (Tabron 2015, 138) Thus, as a black, working class woman trying to succeed as a producer, Elliott has fought against all odds (Kessler 2001). As Jacqueline Warwick notes: “The majority of women who flourish in the music industry have to deal with the assumption that the men in their lives – lovers, brothers, fathers – were the true architects of their success” (Warwick 2007, 91). Elliott’s success has involved Timothy Zachery Mosley (a.k.a. Timbaland), with whom she began her production career. Timbaland plays a minor role in ‘Work It’ and his appearance directly evokes Elliott’s personal narrative1 – the two grew up as neighbours and started to collaborate as a producer duo while they were young. As she worked hard to land a record deal, she realised that her image did not meet the music industry’s standards. African American female artists in hip-hop videos are usually portrayed as scantily clad, sexually available, gorgeous women who cater to the male stars’ every desire. Elliott’s body size was larger than the industry ideal, her attitude was tough and she often dressed in clothes more common for male hip-hop stars. Furthermore, through what might be described as a ‘masculinised image’, Elliott would experience difficulties when trying to launch her singing career. Record companies rejected her appearance: “They said I could sing, I could write, but that I looked wrong”, she recalled (Elliott in Kessler 2001). Their prejudice would backfire; when she finally won a contract, the album it generated, Supa Dupa Fly (1997), went platinum, as critics and fans alike welcomed this multitalented performer. This was partly due to her many years of experience as a producer. Notably, Timbaland has co-produced all of her records, leading to rumours about their relationship while simultaneously devaluing her role as producer. Yet, she has persevered to great effect: Electra Records offered her her own label, Gold Mind Inc., that ensured Missy would have 100 percent creative control over her image and music, as well as the 118

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opportunity to sign artists. In doing so, they made Missy Elliott America’s first black female entertainment mogul. It’s a deal that worked out well for both parties. (Kessler 2001) Indeed, this enabled Elliott to support new female talent, including Destiny’s Child, Eve and Macy Gray, all of whom have credited her with clearing a path for African American women within a white, male-dominated music industry. Stylistically, the video of ‘Work It’ is in collage form. There is no story as such, but instead a sequence of shifting images of Elliott dancing and interacting with a crew of dancers and actors. As a synopsis of the themes and events, I have devised a table of contents for the video (see Table 9.1) and will refer to the time code (in minutes and seconds) for the different images that I will analyse (Table 9.1). Elliott plays several roles in this video, with the suggestion of female masculinity evident in four particular characters: the MC, the music producer and instrumentalist, the butch and the queen bee.

Table 9.1 Lyrics, musical cues and visual action in ‘Work It’ Image

Time Cues in Lyrics Code

Key Musical Cues

Synopsis of Visual Action

0.03

“DJ please”

Timbaland in a phone both. His arm is switched back and forth in sync with the scratching

0.11

Instrumental

Scratching and vocal sample from The Dynamic Three’s single Request Line Scratching

0.28

“This is a Missy Elliott one-time exclusive”

Blondie sample, Elliott as ‘the queen a whistling riff bee’ and scratching

0.36

Vocal track played Blondie sample The MC character backwards and a keyboard riff

1.18

“sex me so good I Blondie sample Missy Elliott in a dance say blah, blah, and keyboard studio blah” riff

Elliott’s feminine hand touching the vinyl record in order to scratch

(Continued) 119

Table 9.1 Continued Image

Time Cues in Lyrics Code

Key Musical Cues

Synopsis of Visual Action

1.31

“I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it”

Blondie sample Missy Elliott dancing and whistling and rapping in a riff hairdresser salon

1.37

“If you got a big”

The sound of an Missy Elliott grabbing elephant her crotch in the saloon, trumpet surrounded by hairdressers dancing with their blow dryers

1.44

Instrumental

Dial tone sound Hairdresser dancing and effect and styling hair scratching

1.45

Instrumental

Dial tone sound Hairdresser salon effect – the image changes background colour

2.03

“You won’t find a Blondie sample At a restaurant with a chick that’s even and keyboard date better” riff

2.09

“Listen up close”

Vocal track played backwards

The MC character

2.20

“keep your eyes on my bo bom pa bom bom”

Break in instrumental effects

The MC character surrounded by scantily dressed dancers

3.11

“Kunta Kinte a slave again, no sir”

Blondie sample Master and slave and keyboard riff

Female masculinity and Missy Elliott 3.15

“Picture black sayin’, ‘Oh, yes a master’ NO”

Break in instrumental effects

Master turns black

3.31

“ba-rom-poppom-pom”

Scratching and whistling riff

Soldier playing the drum

4.01

Instrumental

Scratching

A back flip is scratched back and forth

4.21

Instrumental

Run-D.M.C. sample and scratching

Missy Elliott playing her ‘air turntable’

In the first section of this chapter, I will explore the MC character and how vocal production is central to Elliott’s performance of female masculinity. Then, in the second section, I will examine how Elliott is presented to the spectator/listener as the producer and mixing board player. I will also take into consideration how her choice of instrument, samples and virtuoso production connote masculinity. In the third section, I will critique Elliott’s female masculinity by mapping this against the butch character defined by Halberstam. Central to my argument is the idea that Elliott operates as a queer trickster, who carves out a space that falls outside the two most common stereotypes in hip-hop: the hypersexual male MC and the sexually aggressive ‘hoe’.2 Finally, I will turn to the iconic image of Elliott as the queen bee that turns upside down the power structures so often presented in mainstream hip-hop videos.

The MC: Clothes, attitude and voice production One of the early characters we encounter in ‘Work It’ is the MC, who reappears in short sequences throughout the video (0:36). The masculinity performed out by this character is especially evident in her choice of clothes, attitude and the production of her voice. The MC wears a rough pair of jeans, a fur-collared denim jacket, a headband, big golden earrings and a gold chain with an African medallion hanging around her neck. The legendary group Public Enemy introduced traditional, large African medallions as a part of their style in the early 1980s. According to Tricia Rose, wearing an African medallion was to project one’s pride and emphasise black unity (Rose 1994, 53). When rapping, Elliott faces the camera head on. Compared to the female characters in other hip-hop videos, Elliott’s MC wears a lot of clothes, which contributes to an overall shapelessness that appears to signal masculinity over femininity. The MC then appears in a different outfit: tracksuit, t-shirt, jeans, cap and the same African medallion (1:31). Once again the baggy clothes hide Elliott’s body shape 121

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and make her look almost like a male MC, a quality that is underlined further when this character appears in dance routines with slim, scantily dressed women (2:20). Elliott’s chest vocal timbre generally fills the middle range and evokes singers like Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin, as well as the genre of gospel music in general. As MC, she mingles four vocal styles in ‘Work It’: a talking voice, a lead vocal rap, a backing vocal rap and a shouting voice. The talking voice, loaded with reverb, appears first, after the sample in the introduction: “This is a Missy Elliott one-time exclusive”. A shout promptly interrupts – “Come on!” – and the lead vocal and backing vocal kick in. For the most part, the backing vocal doubles the conclusion of each line of rap throughout the song, and both rapping voices are punctuated by the shouts, which comprise not only words, but also moans, grunts and cries. This is the part typically taken on by the crew behind a male hip-hop star. Elliott actually supplies her own ‘crew’ through studio effects. According to Freya Jarman-Ivens, in mainstream hip-hop videos [a]ll – male spaces are constructed visually by the way of the ‘crew’. Groups of disenfranchised young men work to enact an almost excessive display of masculinity. (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 199) Elliott performs female masculinity by signifying masculinity; this is powerful and reinforced by her crew. Importantly, she draws attention to how the crew is constructed and how she can control them with her own voice.

Percussion-effusive vocal style According to hip-hop scholar Alyssa Woods, important aspects of rap vocal practice include vocal quality (resonance, timbre, colour), technique of lyric delivery (flow, tempo, articulation, declamation, pronunciation) and physical qualities such as register, range, pitch and intonation. Such elements all work to underpin rap’s masculine performative conventions, which include braggadocio, sexual assertiveness, aggression, toughness, confidence and seductiveness (Woods 2011, 265). Added to the voice, of course, are the lyrics, which both communicate actual content and transmit insinuations of gender: it is considered masculine to be able to talk and write well, and feminine to be an irrational, emotional chatterbox. Elliott manages to prove her skills as a rapper while simultaneously parodying the chatterbox/‘girl talk’ pop music stereotype described by Warwick: I consider that the use of vocables specifically associated with girls’ songs (as in the case of ‘shoop’) can be identified as a form of girlspeak, a code that signifies while refusing conventional language. The idea that girl talk is a specific language, knowable only to initiates, is borne out in countless representations of teenage girls squealing and chattering incomprehensibly in film and television programs and commercials. (Warwick 2007, 41) Elliott’s use of nonsensical words has a profound rhythmic aspect to it that is perfectly suited to the genre. At the same time, she makes fun of the stereotype of the female chatterbox (at one point, the lyrics read, “Ra ta ta ta ta ta ra ta ta ta, sex me so good I say blah blah blah” [01:18]). She also demonstrates a rhythmic agility throughout these sections of the song – while the meaning of the words is nonsensical, the rhythmic delivery is controlled and 122

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technically advanced. These parts of the rap evoke the percussion-effusive style described by Adam Krims. According to Krims, a percussion-effusive delivery evokes the rhythms or beats one might play on a drum set (Krims 2000, 64). This is well emphasised by Elliott when she mimics the sound of a drum in the song’s bridge: “Hear the drummer boy go bar a pa pam pam, give me some some of this in a bun” (3:31).3 Deftly, Elliott ridicules the stereotype of the female chatterbox while also showing off her rhythmic expertise by mimicking an instrument associated with masculinity. In the video, a soldier in uniform stands in front of an American flag while playing the drums. We do not hear the sound of the drum, only Elliott’s “bar a pa pam pam” (in sync with the soldier). Not surprisingly, the soldier is male, underlining the drum’s connotations with masculinity. Elliott also opts for a tradition that stretches back to the black rock ’n’ roll of Little Richard and others. Roger Horrocks has described how Little Richard “made a wild poetic frenzy out of these nonsense lyrics, and this anti-linguistic drift has been found periodically in rock music, and indicates the sensuousness of rock and pop” (Horrocks 1995, 135) – and, I would add to this, hip-hop. Elliott acknowledges both female and male influences – Queen Latifah, MC Lyte and Saltn-Pepa, but also LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane and Run-D.M.C. Susan Fast argues that Tina Turner similarly constructed her vocal style around male performers, such as Little Richard and James Brown, as a strategy of “claiming maleness” in order for her to gain agency in a male-dominated space (Fast 2010, 214). Likewise, Elliott also ‘claims maleness’ in order to gain access to the male-dominated space of hip-hop. Within a male environment, with almost exclusively male role models, Missy Elliott has also cultivated an attitude that appears to be at once sturdy and flexible enough to succeed. She even appropriates the necessary degree of raunchy braggadocio, so common in mainstream hip-hop lyrics. Indeed, ‘Work It’ celebrates all of Missy Elliott’s talents, as rapper, producer and sexual partner. The sound of an elephant is discernible when Elliott raps: “Is it big? Let me search it, to find out how hard I got to work it” (1:37). During the first chorus Elliott asks with a quizzical look: is it big? The elephant trumpet sound effect works as a humorous answer (it’s big indeed). The second time we hear this sound effect, Elliott stands in the hair saloon facing the camera. When the sound effect occurs, Elliott grabs her crotch.4 In this scene, she is surrounded by hairdressers dancing with their blow dryers in the form of gun/phallus signifiers. Elliott’s performance ridicules men’s obsession with the size of their penises at the same time she reclaims all the privileges that come with male power. I would argue that she is also ‘up-ending’ the cliché of the sexually passive female; she is the active part, trying to figure out how to ‘work it’. In effect, this suggests an extraordinary invasion of the male turf. The implications of the elephant trumpet sound effect lead me to the next part of this chapter, where I discuss Elliott’s role as producer.

Female producer and instrumentalists The first character that Elliott herself embodies in the video happens to be the ‘producer/ instrumentalist’. It is her hand that scratches the vinyl record (0:11. Next, we see her sitting behind a turntable in front of a studio microphone (0:28). Elliott’s producer role is audible in two ways: first through the choice of instrument,5 and second in the virtuoso use of samples and studio effects, each of which also connotes masculinity. Historically, males have dominated the Western music world, and this has influenced gender norms when it comes to playing instruments as well.6 Initially, the rise in legitimacy, both cultural and critical, of popular music did little to change this. As Sheila Whiteley has noted in reference to pop musicians, women have traditionally been viewed as singers, 123

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positioned in front of a band, the focus of audience attention not simply for what they sing, but for how they look (Whiteley 2000, 52). All through popular music history, there have been numerous examples of female artists working hard to take charge of their own career and image.7 The production of a song is a complicated process, and usually a team of people, rather than one person alone, is responsible for the final product. Regardless of the apparatus that actually makes the decisions (the record company, management, stylists, music video producers, musical producers and the artist him/herself), the impression we often have from album reviews, interviews and music journalists is that the male worked the magic. According to Mavis Bayton in her study of women and the electric guitar, the only real opportunity for women to succeed as full-fledged instrumentalists derives from their ability to directly mimic men in the same roles (Bayton 1997, 40). This applies to the role of popular music producer as well, and we also see it in the rap lyrics of female hip-hop artists. In his article “A ‘Man’s Woman?’”, Matthew Oware argues that black female rappers in the 1990s turned to lyrics that undermined their liberating and empowering message because they used much of the same demeaning and degrading language about other women that male rappers did: “The Black feminist approach is lost, and in its place arises a ‘man’s woman’ – a woman who imitates and reinscribes a White supremacist, misogynist structure” (Oware 2009, 798). Oware may be right to conclude this way for the content of the rap lyrics he has examined, but as Halberstam has argued, female masculinity is more than just imitating male behaviour. Halberstam’s point is helpful for understanding Elliott’s video as she does more than just mimic male roles. When Elliott works a turntable by presenting several images of herself scratching (in sync with the sound of scratching in the song), she is also parodying the role of the producer. As viewers, we are made to realise how constructed this role is, while, at the same time, Elliott employs her skills to challenge gender norms and invade the male-dominated space. The turntable is a good example of how an instrument carries gendered connotations and how the construction of masculinity and femininity also influences how we think about specific instruments as gendered. While the electric guitar is often interpreted as a male instrument, and even a phallic symbol, Susan Fast argues for alternative interpretations in her examination of gendered codes in Led Zeppelin’s on-stage performance: The position and shape of Page’s guitar – low-slung around his hips – may turn the instrument into a phallic symbol, but there are certainly other possibilities for interpretation available. One is that the guitar acts, in fact, as the male musician’s mistress, whom he treats now tenderly, now tyrannically, devouring her with kisses, lacerating her with lustful bites, embracing her, caressing her. B. B. King, after all, named his guitar Lucille, suggesting perhaps that the instrument possessed the same power to seduce him as a lover but, in any case, assigning to the instrument a feminine identity. (Fast 2001, 186) I would extend the gendering of the electric guitar to the mixing board and the turntable. Numerous magazines for audio equipment contain annual surveys of the top ten most beautiful and exotic turntables. Advertisements for studio equipment and insider descriptions of mixing boards are often sensualised and eroticised.8 A gendering of the mixing board as a female draws on the ‘traditional’ (that is, white male) view of the heterosexual relationship, where he is an active manipulator and she is the passive object of desire. The male producer/ DJ touches buttons and manipulates faders and knobs in order to produce good sound. This 124

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is where Elliott flips the construction, with her firm hand controlling the studio equipment. Through her virtuoso command of this equipment, she defuses male power and legitimacy. In one scene of the video, Elliott is on a date with a handsome man; as they sit in a fancy restaurant, waiting for their food, Elliott starts to rap and, in the process, inverts the power dynamic. Suggesting that they should get drunk, as this might bring them closer, she tells him how lucky he is to be going out with someone like her while bragging about her sexual expertise. In this way, Elliott presents herself musically as the boastful and dominant partner in the relationship, further claiming this position through her sexually explicit lyrics. Finally, her male date falls off his chair.

Virtuoso studio effects and audiovisual opacity Throughout music history, virtuosity has been a mechanism of empowerment and a signifier of masculinity (Biddle and Gibson 2009; Walser 1993). Elliott’s samples in ‘Work It’ are profoundly virtuosic, which warrants further commentary. Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen has coined a set of terms to describe this phenomenon, namely, opaque versus transparent mediation. In certain musical genres, the ideal is often to camouflage all use of studio effects. The mediated sound is supposed to be transparent and not draw any attention to itself; but in hip-hop, studio effects are used effectively as musical elements (Brøvig-Hanssen 2010, 159). Notably, ‘Work It’ features among its many samples a drum-and-cowbell sequence from Run-D.M.C.’s hit, ‘Peter Piper’. Both criticised and praised for their eclectic music style, Run-D.M.C. was the first hip-hop group to fuse rap with rock and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. In addition to being a founding group of hip-hop, Run-D.M.C. was also one of the first groups to succeed commercially (Erlewine 2002). By sampling one of their songs, Elliott pays due respect and, arguably, gains credibility. In addition, the introduction to ‘Work It’ includes a sample from Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three’s B-side single ‘Request Line’. Unlike Run-D.M.C., this group enjoyed only moderate success in the 1980s, yet they are still respected among hardcore hip-hop fans and other artists who have often used parts of this single as samples. Both the Run-D.M.C. and Rock Master Scott samples stand out as striking intertextual references to old-school hiphop heroes. Somewhat surprisingly, Elliott also samples Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ (0:12) in ‘Work It’, a 1970s new wave track that might seem far removed from Elliott’s own genre. While lead singer Deborah Harry differs from Elliott image-wise, there is a link between them in that Blondie was one of the first rock bands to incorporate rap into their songs (their 1981 song ‘Rapture’ included long passages of rap and reached number one on the US Billboard charts). Along with the Blondie sample’s musical contribution to ‘Work It’, the sample may possibly be a nod to early rap. Notwithstanding, its presence certainly functions as an additional testimony to Elliott’s wide musical influences. While Brøvig-Hanssen only examines ‘opaque mediation’ in recorded songs, I find this entity all the more relevant in videos. For instance, Elliott’s use of studio effects is all the more opaque in her video than her audio recording. Upon listening to the song ‘Work It’, the samples and studio effects are foregrounded; when viewing the video, they are seen as well as heard. In Experiencing Music Video, Carol Vernallis argues that “the image can be shaped so that it mimics the experiential qualities of sound” (Vernallis 2004, 175). This is what happens in ‘Work It’. Highlighted studio effects start once we see the visual representation of scratching in the phone booth scene (0:03). The image moves back and forth in sync with the scratching effect, as if someone were ‘scratching’ the film as well. In the 125

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hairdresser scene, a sound effect simulates a dial tone, which is accompanied by the background colour change from dark to light (1:44–1:45). Vocal tracks are also played backward while the film continues forward in real time. In the chorus, Elliott even lip-syncs to the backward track. A scene towards the end of the video depicts a boy dancer jumping up to do a back flip. The image is manipulated in sync with the sound of scratching: it freezes when the boy is in the air as he is ‘scratched’ back and forth (4:01). During this scene, the image mimics the production, turning the screen into a virtual turntable. The images of the boy jumping imitate the hand movements of a DJ, scratching the vinyl record back and forth. Finally, at the end of the video, Elliott is shown playing an ‘air turntable’ (4:21). Gerry Moorey has examined the act of miming the action of an instrumentalist and the pleasures it evokes in listeners. Drawing on Simon Frith’s work, Moorey considers the pleasure in vicariously sensing the experience of producing the sound (Moorey 2007, 2). For Elliott, the pleasure is twofold. First, it is pleasure in the sheer activity of mimicking a sound. Second, Elliott knows that we (as spectators) know that she is the actual producer of this sound as well. This serves to increase the pleasure, fitting well into the ‘boasting’ rhetoric of hip-hop. At the same time, miming that one plays an instrument also has to do with virtuosity. There has to be a convincing dynamic, movement, speed and drama to the act one mimes. On this point, Moorey observes that conducting a symphony orchestra also invites mimicking (Moorey 2007, 3), which reinforces my earlier point that imitated movements trigger pleasure. Much of this has to do with male empowerment. Robert Walser points out in his work on heavy metal that the word virtuosity derives from the Latin root vir, meaning ‘man’: to be a virtuoso instrumentalist has always been connected to “demonstrating and enacting a particular kind of power and freedom that might be called ‘potency’” (Walser 1993, 76). Both words, potency and virtuosity, are heavily gendered, and as Walser concludes: “Heavy metal shares with most other Western music a patriarchal context wherein power itself is constructed as essentially male” (Walser 1993, 76). Thus, through demonstrations of virtuosity, the guitarist or the conductor produces sound in a specific way; they control it and execute power over it. In miming, the fan vicariously feels the pleasure of power and control (Moorey 2007). In Elliott’s video, I read her air turntable performance as a demonstration, if not a parody, of power, as she proves that she can ‘work it’, and thus appropriate gender roles through her virtuoso production skills. Ultimately, her ability to claim power that traditionally has been reserved for men qualifies her in my opinion to Halberstam’s definition of ‘the butch’.

Butch not bitch but Queen Bee In rap lyrics, African American women are often referred to as ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’, with some female rappers opting for these roles as their access into the genre. Lil’ Kim, for example, has adopted the stereotype of the sexually aggressive black woman as part of her stage image, while Elliott, as I have pointed out, opts for male stereotypes in the guise of the MC and the producer, performing those roles as a counterpoint to the female stereotypes. This reveals with surprising clarity how constructed gender roles really are. By destabilising traditional norms through her appearance, her vocal style and her virtuoso studio effects, Missy Elliott draws attention to the cultural constructedness of the macho black masculinity to which we have grown accustomed in hip-hop videos. She performs male characters and invades male-dominated territory. Judith Butler describes the significance of imitating gender roles in drag: As much as drag creates a unified picture of ‘women’ (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gender experience that are falsely 126

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naturalised as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency. (Butler 1990, 76) Although female MCs have been active participants in rap since its inception, they have been outnumbered by men. One might say that the gender imbalance that characterises many popular styles, such as jazz, blues and rock, is further exacerbated in rap music. This has resulted in gendered norms that promote male dominance, control, confidence, aggressiveness and even misogyny and homophobia (Woods 2011, 3). Because hip-hop emerged among African American youth in New York in the 1970s, ethnicity has played an important role for the norms in this genre, along with gender. The prototypical mainstream male hip-hop star is a black man, surrounded by sexy female dancers, fancy cars and several other markers of material wealth. Several scholars (Bradley 2015; Forman and Neal 2012; hooks 2004; Perry 2004; Woods 2011) have employed the term ‘hypermasculinity’ to describe this. Donald L. Mosher and Mark Sirkin identify the exaggeration of stereotypical male behaviour with a particular emphasis on sexuality, physical strength and aggression (Mosher and Sirkin 1984, 150). This underlines hypermasculinity and often spills over into parody. Hip-hop scholar Imani Perry considers the black embrace of hypermasculinity as a defence strategy to counter the traditional white picture of the black man as simple or childish (Perry 2004). Perry and hooks both argue that black men have long been objectified as a result of white patriarchy, and furthermore feminised; hooks perceives hypermasculinity as part of a strategy that black men have used to fight back (hooks 2004, 67). Significantly, Elliott is at pains to not appear dismissive of the politics underpinning male stereotypes, especially in relation to African American history. One scene in ‘Work It’ makes this clear, where a master/slave binarism is set up: the slave wears a scarf on his head and has filthy clothes, while the master dons a Rococo-inspired wig and an expensive suit (3:11). In this scene, the slave slaps the master across the face and the master’s skin turns black (3:15) as Missy Elliott raps about the famous Roots character Kunta Kinte. Paul Gilroy considers the consciousness surrounding the history of the slaves, as often expressed by African American artists: A politics of freedom (and indeed of being free) needs to be addressed today with a special sensitivity because the meanings of freedom and the idioms through which it is apprehended have become extremely significant for interpretations of contemporary popular culture. [. . .] The memory of slavery is seen as an encumbrance or an old skin that has to be shed before an authentic life of radicalised self-love can be attained. (Gilroy 1997, 97) In this light, I would suggest that Elliott is not just parodying her male collages as a tactic of revenge. Rather she acknowledges their fight for freedom as well as her own. That said, she also objects to the denigration of black women. Rather than pandering to the male gaze through the stereotypes of the bitch or the hoe, Elliott tends towards the butch character, which Halberstam describes as follows: The masculine woman prowls the film set as an emblem of social upheaval and as a marker of sexual disorder. She wears the wrong clothes, expresses aberrant desires, and is very often associated with clear markers of a distinctly phallic power. She 127

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may carry a gun, smoke a cigar, wear leather, ride a motorbike; she may swagger, strut, boast, flirt with younger and more obviously feminine women. She often goes by a male moniker: Frankie, George, and so on. (Halberstam 1998, 186) It is evident that Elliott’s performances in ‘Work It’ evoke a number of stereotypes and characters without ever really settling upon any of them. In the end, what we know is that she has a turntable (as opposed to a cigar or a gun) that she has flipped from a passive ‘female’ object of desire to a phallic symbol: there is also plenty of proof that she knows how to handle this equipment. Her vocal style also contributes to this butch image through the boasting phrases of her rapping. This butch image is further strengthened by her vocal delivery that is at once laid back and cocky, mimicking the typical flow of male rappers, such as 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg. In this, she differs from the female background figures in mainstream hip-hop videos that either embody the sexually aggressive ‘hoe’ or the emotionally disturbed ‘bitch’. Elliott contests both the ‘hoe’ and the ‘bitch’ in her performance of the butch. Yet, as Hawkins reminds us, drag is all about performing out identity, and “the distancing between the artist and role-playing implicates a degree of superficiality through the switching on and off of these roles at will” (Hawkins 2004, 4). In this sense, Elliott turns to hip-hop fashion for yet another character of intrigue: the trickster. Henry Louis Gates introduced the trickster figure from African folklore in The Signifying Monkey (1988). In brief, a monkey in the jungle tells his archenemy, the lion, that the elephant has spread nasty rumours about him behind his back. The monkey persuades the lion to find the elephant and assault him, but the physically superior elephant trumps the lion, who understands a little too late that his big mistake was to listen to the monkey. Through clever wordplay, or ‘signifying’, the monkey outshines the lion without using physical strength and reverses the hierarchy of power in the jungle. Rather than animals, Elliott tricks the two most common stereotypes in hip-hop by performing the butch. In effect, her masculine appearance, her vocal style and her virtuoso studio production turns Elliott into a queer trickster as she creates a space for herself outside the confines of the hypermasculine MC and the sexually aggressive ‘hoe’. With this in mind, I conclude this chapter with a consideration of the queen bee, who, uncannily, reverses the hierarchy of power in both a mainstream hip-hop video and the recording studio. There are three castes of the honey-bee: queens who produce eggs, drones or males who mate with the queen (and have no stinger), and workers who are all non-reproducing females. In other words, the queen bee is the sole producer of life in the hive, a metaphor that is visualised in the scene in ‘Work It’ that occurs at 0:28. In this scene, Missy Elliott is positioned in the centre of a room, with a backdrop depicting the walls of a beehive. Elliott sits at a turntable as bees fly around and crawl over her. In this image Elliott inverts the traditional power relations represented in hip-hop videos. For several male hip-hop artists, the harem is a compelling metaphor for success as it represents the male star as powerful and dominating while the women are reduced to obedient servants (Djupvik 2014). This forms the narrative in 50 Cent’s ‘Candy Shop’ (2005) and Snoop Dogg’s ‘Bitch Please’ (1999). Elliott’s beehive turns the hierarchy of the harem on its head; the female is the boss, with the male drones as the mates. The structuring of power is one of the most important components in the definition of masculinity. According to Michael Kimmel, who investigates masculinity in his book Guyland, “masculinity is measured more by wealth, power and status than by any particular body part” (Kimmel 2008, 44). According to both Perry and hooks, some black men have embraced hypermasculinity as a way to resist the objectification and feminisation

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of the white male gaze (hooks 2004; Perry 2004). Yet, such a quest for patriarchal power as a way to fight oppression often results in a reinforcement of these (originally white) stereotypes of black men. This damages the fight for gender equality, with black women falling victims. hooks sees this way of thinking, which gained force in the 1960s, as a setback in the progress of the human rights movement: When black males began in the name of ‘black power’ to completely embrace patriarchal masculinity, the historical movement for racial uplift rooted in nonviolence and gender equality was ruthlessly undermined. (hooks 2004, 14) In many ways, Elliott’s beehive metaphor inverts everything. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, the male record producer still dominates in the music industry, with access to females restricted. The beehive metaphor inverts the studio’s power balance, as Elliott places herself behind the turntable. Her position is more than just an image, however. As I have indicated, her virtuosic use of studio effects in tandem with her personal narrative verifies her production skills. Through the image of the beehive, inspired by nature, Elliott in turn questions the naturalness of the traditional power structures in the studio. As Elliott ‘works’ her now phallic turntable, she succeeds as trickster, defeating her competitors through artistic skills and verbal dexterity rather than by ‘force’. In the final prognosis, Elliott helps herself to masculine roles where and when they are useful. In the end, though, she is mindful that she is the queen bee, fortifying her place in the hive for female artists to follow suit.

Notes 1 According to Hawkins and Richardson, personal narrative “is about the narrative reconstitution of the self through an open-ended process of reflection and revision” (Hawkins and Richardson 2007, 607). Certain events in an artist’s life are emphasised while others are bypassed. The personal narrative is constituted not only by the performer’s self-presentation, but also by the discourse surrounding him or her via music reviews, gossip magazines, fans’ blogs and so on. 2 Historically the ‘hoe’ character, so often depicted in hip-hop videos, draws on old stereotypes of the Jezebel: the wild, sexually irrepressible black woman. Likewise, the MC character draws on stereotypes relating to African American men after the abolition of slavery, who were deemed as dangerous and hypersexualised. 3 This is also a reference to the famous Christmas song ‘Little Drummer Boy’, written by Katherine Kennicott Davis. 4 I also read Elliott’s crotch grabbing as paying homage to Michael Jackson, an artist she constantly refers to as an important source of inspiration. 5 For more on how the turntable actually works as an instrument, its strengths and weaknesses, see Mark Katz: Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen: “DJs and turntablism”, in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin A. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 42–55. 6 Only in recent years have female composers been studied as equals to their male counterparts. For more on this, see Biddle and Gibson (2009) and McClary (1991). 7 Susan Fast has examined Tina Turner’s amazing story and fight for recognition as an artist in her essay, “Bold Soul Trickster: The 60s Tina Signifies” (Fast 2010), while Jaqueline Warwick has written about female artists’ struggle with the music industry in Girl Groups, Girl Culture (Warwick 2007). 8 See for instance DJ Shiftee’s love letter to his Pioneer DJM-T1 Mixer at: http://blog.dubspot.com/ dj-shiftees-love-letter-to-the-pioneer-djm-t1-new-mixer-for-traktor-pro-2

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Bibliography Bayton, Mavis. 1997. “Women and the Electric Guitar.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 37–49. London: Routledge. Biddle, Ian and Kristen Gibson, eds. 2009. Masculinity and Western Musical Practice. Farnham: Ashgate. Biddle, Ian and Vanessa Knights, eds. 2007. Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bradley, Regina N. 2015. “Barbz and Kings: Explorations of Gender and Sexuality in Hip-Hop.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin A. Williams, 181–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild. 2010. “Opaque Mediation: The Cut-and-Paste Groove in DJ Food’s ‘Break’.” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Anne Danielsen, 159–175. Farnham: Ashgate. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cohen, Sara. 1997. “Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender”. In Sexing the Groove; Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 17–36. London: Routledge. Dickinson, Kay. 2004. “‘Believe’: Vocoders, Digital Female Identity and Camp.” In Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, 163–179. Aldershot: Ashgate. Djupvik, Marita B. 2014. “Welcome to the Candy Shop! Conflicting Representations of Black Masculinity.” Popular Music 33 (2): 209–224. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261143014000312 Erlewine, Stephen T. 2002. “Artist Biography.” Allmusic (accessed 30 September 2015). http://www. allmusic.com/artist/run-dmc-mn0000358408/biography Fast, Susan. 2001. Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Fast, Susan. 2010. “Bold Soul Trickster: The 60s Tina Signifies.” In She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music, ed. Laurie Stras, 203–234. Farnham: Ashgate. Forman, Murray and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. 2012. That’s the Joint. Second edition. London: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul. 1997. “‘After the Love Has Gone’: Bio-Politics and Etho-Poetics in the Black Public Sphere.” Public Culture 7: 49–76. Grein, Paul. 2014. “The Producer of the Year Category Turns 40.” Grammy (accessed 15 January 2014). https://www.grammy.com/news/the-producer-of-the-year-category-turns-40 Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hansen, Kjetil Falkenberg. 2015. “DJs and Turntablism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin A. Williams, 42–55, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, Stan. 2002. Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2004. “Dragging Out Camp: Narrative Agendas in Madonna’s Musical Production.” In Madonna’s Drowned Worlds, ed. Freya Jarman-Ivens and Santiago Fouz-Hernández, 3–21. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy : Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan and Sarah Niblock. 2011. Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon. Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan and John Richardson. 2007. “Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of Intoxication and Mediation.” Popular Music & Society 30 (5): 605–629. Hesmondhalgh, David. 1998. “The British Dance Music Industry: A Case Study of Independent Cultural Produciton.” The British Journal of Sociology 49 (2): 234–251. hooks, bell. 2004. We Real Cool. London: Routledge. Horrocks, Roger. 1995. Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture. New York: St.Martin’s Press. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2006. “Queer(ing) Masculinities in Heterosexist Rap Music.” In Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, 199–219. London: Routledge. Katz, Mark. 2012. Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kessler, Ted. 2001. “Missy in Action.” 5 August The Guardian (accessed 29 September 2015).

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Female masculinity and Missy Elliott Kimmel, Michael. 2008. Guyland. New York: Harper. Krims, Adam. 2000. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mayhew, Emma. 2004. “Positioning the Producer: Gender Divisions in Creative Labour and Value.” In Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, 149–162. Aldershot: Ashgate. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moorey, Gerry. 2007. “Music, Identity and Oblivion.” Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 1 (2): 1–16. Mosher, Donald L. and Mark Sirkin. 1984. “Measuring a Macho Personality Constellation.” Journal of Research in Personality 18 (2): 150–163. Oware, Matthew. 2009. “A ‘Man’s Woman’? Contradictory Messages in the Songs of Female Rappers, 1992–2000.” Journal of Black Studies 39 (5): 786–802. Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Tabron, Chris. 2015. “The Glass: Hip-Hop Production”. In The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin A. Williams, 135–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vernallis, Carol. 2004. Experiencing Music Video: Aestetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2004. “‘He’s Got the Power: The Politics of Production in Girl Group Music.” In Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, 191–200. Aldershot: Ashgate. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2007. Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s. London: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Woods, Alyssa. 2011. “Vocal Practices and Constructions of Identity in Rap: A Case Study of Young Jeezy’s ‘Soul Survivor’.” In Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube, ed. Nicole Biamonte, 265–280. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press.

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PART 3

Vernacular soundworlds, narratives, and stardom

Overview The issue of vernacular soundworlds permeates the research offered in this part of the book, where narratives of stardom take central stage. Focusing on a variety of contexts, the authors confront the ideas and practices that organise gender in musical performance situations. All the chapters revolve around gender politics as part of a larger theoretical project that is intended to critique the systems of power inherent in stardom. The curtain lifts with Freya Jarman’s chapter on Broadway musicals, one of the first studies of its kind to address the historical connection between the tenor hero of opera and the female musical performer, commonly referred to as the ‘belter’. New angles of criticism are suggested that relate to the emergence of the 1960s Broadway and its transformation during the years up the present time. At the crux of Jarman’s argument is a retrospective consideration of both these figures’ different ‘soundworlds’. Jarman’s conceptualisation of ‘soundworld’ is useful for exposing a sonic trope that is predicated upon compositional decisions and manifested in performance choices. In a historical light, the evolving soundworld of Broadway women is inextricably linked to notions of ‘legitimacy’ that translate into vocal production and virtuosity. Based upon a number of methods and theories from her seminal text, Queer Voices (2011), Jarman identifies the genealogies of vocal timbres found in the Broadway woman’s soundworld, tracking parallel changes in gender politics in the tenor soundworld. Unavoidably, this raises the question of a camp sensibility. The Broadway hallmarks of camp, Jarman concludes, are not that far removed from the soundworld of the operatic tenor, and yet leave numerous questions unanswered. Given that humour is a precursor of camp, then the expressive textures that constitute the soundworld of both the tenor and Broadway belter are fundamentally driven by the staging and resolution of tensions. Her in-depth music analysis of the ‘belting finale’ reveals a cunning musical device that Jarman pins down to timbre and affect within a musico-cultural context that is politicised via excess. Zooming out from Jarman’s discourse on stardom, Keith Negus pays attention to the materiality of stardom as work and labour, introducing into his argument the production of the pop persona. In his chapter, a close inspection of the narratives of pop music success and failure are considered in the vernacular spaces where a ‘nobody’ works their self into a ‘somebody’ by assuming a persona. This opens up vital and provocative questions related

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to gender politics and how narratives invariably include references to the ‘true self’ and the ‘real’ person. Negus’s insights offer up new ways for critiquing the narratives of fame, failure, and fulfilment when identities collide. Furthermore, he calls for a critical approach that is informed by insights promoted by cultural and social theorists, such as Ricoeur and Clifford. Advocating a methodology that revisits the writings of these two scholars, Negus advocates a route for tracking the circumstances that result in ‘making it’ (a critique of stardom) as he examines the collective and individual labour of musicians, aspects of musical proficiency, and occupational opportunity. Moreover, Negus makes a plea for more research that not only documents and details the neglected repertoires and domains of ‘hidden’ musicians, but also critiques the clichés and stories of music business stardom and how a ‘nobody’ can work themselves into a ‘somebody’. Musicians who join the circus, who run away from it, or even drop out have experiences that can be recounted through the category of gender, but as Negus cautions us, this must not be at the expense of a consideration of class, race, sexuality, disability, age, and geography. Popular music scholars might take heed of these new perspectives alongside the concepts found in Negus’s earlier work, in books such as Producing Pop (1992), Popular Music in Theory (1996), and Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999). Negus’s discourse on narratives of success can be applied to all genres, including hiphop. In her chapter, Birgitte Sandve tackles issues of authenticity, gender, and race within a transcultural context. The object of analysis is the black Norwegian rapper, Jesse Jones, and his staging of a ‘gangsta persona’. Setting out to theorise Jones’s hypermasculinity, Sandve offers a range of perspectives that focus on audiovisual representation. The main method involves musical interpretation, which is grounded in the personal narrative, where multiple performative strategies are engaged to stage notions of realness. Jeffrey Ogbar’s theory of hypermasculinity helps Sandve to address male authenticity, which leads to critical thoughts on Jones’s own personal narrative within a Norwegian transcultural context. By means of a close reading of the song and video ‘Gategutt’, Sandve problematises gender display and the potential slippage between homosociality and homosexuality. Another video analysis of ‘Kommer aldri inn’ opens up a discussion of the all-male space created by gangsta rap and the exscription of women (underlined by a heterosexist attitude). While Jones might appropriate a black American identity, his personal narrative is grounded within a Norwegian context, where acts of transgression are conflated by marginalisation across time and space. Sandve’s study extends the discourse on transnationalism and cultural belonging by critiquing the staging of a street boy, who is framed by Otherness, albeit through the rearticulation of rap and hip-hop. It is already established that gender and voicing strategies in a vernacular soundworld warrant theorisation. Moving from hip-hop in the previous chapter to British folk rock in the next, Tor Dybo turns to the legendary band Fairport Convention to examine the roles assigned to female and male singers from the band’s inception in 1967 to 1976. In his chapter, the role of Sandy Denny, not only as vocalist but songwriter and bandleader, is a central feature in Fairport Convention’s soundworld. We learn that upon replacing Judy Dyble in 1968, Denny altered Fairport Convention’s sound signature considerably, introducing new, traditional English and Scottish folk material into the band’s repertoire. Based upon an ethnographic and historical investigation, Dybo investigates how and why Denny broke with gender stereotypes in order to assume a strong presence in a predominantly male band. This study takes a critical look at the transition from Fairport Convention when it consisted of female singers to it becoming an all-male band, and how alternative voicing strategies emerged in a bid to compensate for the female vocal presence. Dybo’s study also includes

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music analytical methods as part of a survey of the gender politics, aesthetics, and sonic signatures in Fairport Convention’s songs from the late 1960s to early 1970s. Gender stereotyping is another prevailing theme in this part of the volume, and Tami Gadir’s chapter on women and contemporary dance music identifies an array of terms and concepts that problematically describe feminine sounds. At the core of this study is an analysis of the DJ-producer Nina Kraviz in various contexts, which helps highlight the structuring of gender norms on dance floors and in DJ booths. Gadir turns to Jodie Taylor’s and Nikki Sullivan’s respective queer theories to inspect how music practices subvert through active participation. Gadir refers specifically to the adjective ‘fluffy’ to exemplify sounds that are deemed to be feminine. This term is one of numerous examples of large-scale gender stereotyping, connoting material qualities of softness and floating around. Gender stereotypes, we learn, are widespread in dance music communities. Based upon her interviews with female DJs, Gadir argues that there is variability across different genres as to what is implied by ‘fluffiness’, and a detailed music analysis of electronic sound and its production makes this point clear. Perceptions of Kraviz’s femininity form part of Gadir’s main discourse on refuting the assumptions of women’s roles in male-dominated spheres. As her study makes clear, DJ-ing and music production by females requires a better understanding in the field of dance music research.

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10 HIGH NOTES, HIGH DRAMA Musical climaxes and gender politics in tenor heroes and Broadway women Freya Jarman

The Mirror (Leyfield 2015), The Telegraph (Burn-Callander 2015), the Sunday Express (Edge 2013) and the Daily Mail (Cliff 2015) all agree: the advertising campaign for insurance-comparison website Go Compare, featuring a rotund tenor with a heavy Italian accent and a gravity-defying moustache, is one of the most annoying of all time. Readers of The Guardian will also have noted that it received one of the highest number of complaints (Sweney 2013). But in the figure of Gio Compario (the rotund tenor’s name) are contained a number of stereotypes of the tenor singer (because, of course, stereotypes help humour work, and to work quickly enough for a 40-second television advert): the tenor is ideally Italian, and ideally as large in size as he is in voice. The significance of the tenor in popular culture has a long history, with Enrico Caruso being one of the first to enjoy the mass distribution of music through sound recording, and Mario Lanza (who played Caruso in The Great Caruso [dir. Thorpe 1951]) being a mid-century example of the combined capacity of the Hollywood film and recording industries to propel a classical artist into mainstream popular success. Towards the end of the century, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras would come to the fore as another major junction in this historical lineage, performing as The Three Tenors in Rome in July 1990, just ahead of the FIFA World Cup Final. But it was Pavarotti who provided the major tune in the soundtrack to the Cup; his 1972 recording of ‘Nessun dorma’ was adopted as the official theme song of the competition. In Pavarotti, and in that recording particularly, are found the knots of truth that define various stereotypes of the tenor. Known as ‘Big Lucy’, his weight was something of a trademark, and, at a full six seconds, the penultimate syllable of his performance of this aria is one of the longest on commercially available record.1 On another stage, at another time, another singer of Italian ancestry – Liza Minnelli – gave another full six seconds to a climactic high note. Recorded live at the Winter Garden in 1974, in a performance of the title song from Cabaret, her performance of the line “when I go, I’m going like Elsie” is little short of astonishing in the campness framing the climactic “go”; the crude punching out of key syllables, the enormity of the ritardando and the outright pauses (either in silence or on held sung notes) all contribute to the extravagant build-up of anticipation for an eventual upwards modulation.2 Indeed, only the first two seconds are accompanied by the band – the remaining four are completely exposed, belted out to the audible delight of the audience. 137

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The historical proximity of these performances may be a coincidence; it may not. However, the musical proximity is clear, extending across the relevant repertoires. Listening to a certain moment in the history of Broadway women, one is struck by the musical similarity to the formula of the 19th-century tenor aria. But it was not ever thus in either case. Both the tenor hero and the Broadway belter emerged in their respective musical contexts as representatives of new shifts towards different vocal timbres than had previously been privileged; as such, they constitute new relationships between gender and voice in their musical worlds. The question with which this chapter is concerned is the extent to which one can trace any lines of connection between these two figures, these two historically and musically different worlds. I argue that by understanding the tenor hero and the gendered politics of his soundworld, we can better understand the emergence of the 1960s Broadway woman and the politics she mobilises, insofar as her soundworld inverts some of the principles of his by utilising a similar musical device. I conclude by suggesting that the belting finale of musical theatre, in all its glorious camp, holds open a tension between excess and containment, inviting its reiteration for the promise of closure.

The soundworld of the tenor hero The tenor was not always the obvious choice for the operatic hero; until the early part of the 19th century, the more common decision was to compose for a castrato, or, failing the availability of such a man, a mezzo-soprano woman en travesti. The radical change from a treble voice to a tenor, and towards a different biological standard for the operatic hero, came as a result of a number of contributing factors and has been well documented (André 2006; Ashbrook 1998; Jarman 2013; Potter 2009; Rosselli 1992, 32–55 and 176–195). The association of castrati with the excesses of the ancien régime is one clearly relevant context. Musically, reforms in operatic writing led to an increased emphasis on words and drama over the showy virtuosity for which the castrati had been so renowned. From the perspective of changing gender politics, the rise of a new model of understanding human sexual difference paralleled a calcification of gender roles (see André 2006; Jarman 2013; after Laqueur 1990), and this coincided with an increased demand in literary forms for realism, such that music came to require a biologically conservative model in romantic operatic plots. The contexts, in terms of gender politics specifically and of broader cultural and economic politics more generally, seem well-trodden ground. For the purposes of this chapter, the most pertinent element is that there was a shift in the structure of the relationships between vocal type, vocal writing and characterisation. Specifically, the connection represented by the castrato – of melismatic virtuoso with heroic character – is radically disrupted in the early decades of the 19th century, with the two elements split. The eventual result, clearly audible by the time of Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) is that coloratura writing generally becomes a musical code for madness, feverishness or lovesickness in the soprano heroine, while the sound of the hero is a tenor voice, singing arias whose climactic point is often an exposed, extended note, high in his range (A–C above middle C is the typical pitch) and, increasingly importantly, from the chest voice rather than the falsetto (Potter 2009, 44–56). Over the course of the century, this soundworld became a convention in writing for operatic tenors, and by its premiere in 1926, ‘Nessun dorma’ epitomised the tenor’s showpiece, as it still does today. By ‘soundworld’, I refer to a sonic trope that is made available by compositional decisions and that is manifested in performance decisions. From the perspective of the tenor aria, this phrase therefore accounts for a changing trend in writing for the tenor (writing the hero as a tenor in the first place; writing arias that climax in high notes from the chest), as 138

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well as a changing trend in performance practice (singing from the chest rather than shifting into falsetto; and to some extent, a developing sense that longer-is-better). The term ‘soundworld’, then, allows for a focus on the sonic event as such, whilst neither fully disregarding nor getting entangled in the question of performer or composer agency.

The changing soundworld of Broadway women From Show Boat in 1927 through the Golden Age of Broadway shows, led by Oscar Hammerstein II (who had collaborated with Jerome Kern on Show Boat) and Richard Rodgers, the big songs for female leads and supporting roles are generally characterised in their sound by an operatic vocal style termed ‘legit’ (as a contraction of ‘legitimate’). Roger Pines describes it as “generally not quite operatic in scale”, but rather a sound that “offered full but smooth-textured tone, wide range, easy access to head tone, and clear, unfussy shaping of text – in effect, ‘Broadway bel canto’” (Pines 2012). This is the vocal timbre found from Helen Morgan’s Julie LaVerne in Show Boat, through the 1940s in Christine Johnson’s Nettie Fowler (‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, Carousel, 1945), into the 1950s in Gertrude Lawrence’s Anna Leonowens (‘Getting To Know You’, The King and I, 1951), and comfortably into the 1960s with Inga Swenson’s Lizzie Curry (‘Simple Little Things’, 110 in the Shade, 1963) and Irene Adler (‘I’d Do It Again’, Baker Street, 1965). Pines’s turn of phrase – ‘Broadway bel canto’ – is apposite; not only does this voice represent something originary about the genre of musical theatre, being so closely associated with its earliest decades, but it also signifies musical theatre’s roots in the light opera of Gilbert and Sullivan or Harrigan and Hart. Yet amidst all this ‘legitimacy’ operates another vocal timbre, one from the top end of the range possible in ‘chest voice’ before shifting the vocal production mechanisms into the ‘head voice’. Admittedly, this distinction between ‘chest’ and ‘head’ voice is not entirely helpful. For one thing, it is not a standard enough terminology to translate easily to operatic vocal production; for another, the male voice has a more common, audibly distinct falsetto timbre than the female.3 And for yet another, in trying to use such a distinction, it would become increasingly difficult to shelve the value-laden implications of ‘head’ and ‘chest’.4 Rather, then, I would like to use a distinction that allows some translation across these quite disparate genres of singing, since the vocal system as an instrument is, after all, mechanically the same in either case. One distinguishing system is based precisely on the mechanisms of vocal production. Labelling vocal timbres as M0, M1, M2 and M3, this system is one of the commonest in the technical literature on voice, because it has a precise method in distinguishing between mechanisms (hence the M) of laryngeal vibration.5 These mechanisms roughly correspond to pitch – M0 at the lowest and M3 at the highest – although there is overlap between the mechanisms in terms of pitch range. And broadly speaking, they correspond to the crude system of ‘chest voice’ (M1) and ‘head voice’ (M2), with vocal fry6 (M0) at the lower end and whistle tone (M3) at the top. In this system, ‘belting’ would be a sound produced at the top end of the M1 range. However, the vibration of the vocal folds is not quite the same as the musculature being deployed, although there appears to be some relationship between the two.7 Moreover, it is also the case that M1 production can result in ‘head voice’ sounds, and, conversely, that M2 production can result in ‘chest voice’ timbres. Without an electroglottograph, the distinction loses precision, as it is based primarily on subjective perception. A more recent vocal pedagogy, Cathrine Sadolin’s Complete Vocal Technique ([CVT] Complete Vocal Institute n.d.), proposes that there are four ‘modes’, four basic ways in which the human voice can produce its sound: Neutral, Curbing, Overdrive and Edge. These modes are described as 139

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having different levels of ‘metal’ in the voice, from the non-metallic Neutral to two varieties of fully metallic (Overdrive and Edge), where distinct levels of ‘metal’ are described as having a “harder, more raw, or direct sound”.8 Although they are also verifiable by endoscopic vision, it is, importantly, implicit that the modes are distinguishable by sound. Moreover, the term ‘Edge’ is recognised on the CVT website as replacing the earlier term ‘belting’. Although it is not clear from the site when or why the term was changed, one might hazard a guess that its heavy association with specific (non-classical) genres of music played some role; it would be ideologically challenging, for instance, to replace ‘edge’ with ‘belting’ in this description: “Edge is used in classical music when men sing very loudly ( ff ) often in the high part of the voice such as the high C of a tenor”.9 And yet, since the two had been closely enough defined at some point, hence the substitution, it appears that some technical similarity likely exists between the tenor’s do di petto and the Broadway belt. To proceed without problematic vocabulary is virtually impossible; vocal pedagogy is far too contentious an area to find a set of terms that would not be objected to by someone. But to focus on the fundamental purpose of this chapter – the comparison of soundworld between operatic tenors and Broadway belting women – I choose to employ the term ‘belting’ to denote an effect, rather than a mechanism of production. This effect, I propose, is that of a note being pitched at the high end of the lower range of a singer’s voice, accepting that a singer has multiple ranges based on different physiological formations. There may be a lower range still (vocal fry), and a much higher one again (falsetto, whistle tone), but in character, the sound of belting – which is my focal point – is strained, pushing against the possibility for the singer to shift his or her technique to achieve a different sound quality. It may be that the belt occurs in M1, or it may be simulated in M2, but either way it sounds like it could break, like the vocal mechanisms need to give way to a less strained mode of production. This emphasis on sonic effect, rather than production mechanism, allows an easier translation across the two genres; it is likely that Luciano Pavarotti and Liza Minnelli use different vocal techniques to achieve their musical climaxes, but the effect of the timbre, placed as it is in localised and generic contexts, is distinctly similar in each case.10 Voices as early as those of Ethel Merman in the 1930s and 1940s are described in popular discourse as ‘belting’, and Chita Rivera, creating the role of Anita in West Side Story (1957), definitely makes use of a strong upper chest range, briefly discernible in ‘A Boy Like That’ and behind Carol Lawrence’s Maria In ‘I Have A Love’. Yet there is a prevailing sense in chesty voices before the 1960s that the vocal sound is deployed primarily for reasons of characterisation or generic styling more than musical display; this is partly to do with the belting timbre’s vernacular association in contrast to the ‘high art’ origins of the ‘legit’ voice (see Taylor 2009, 35–38). So, for instance, in West Side Story, and later as Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie (1960), Rivera’s vocal timbre is used to frame the comparative innocence or purity of another character; the comparison between Anita and Maria in ‘A Boy Like That/I Have A Love’ is not dissimilar, then, with regard to the casting of voice type, to that of Carmen and Micaëla in Bizet’s opera. Similarly, Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady (1956) makes strategic use of a strong chesty range; but when she does, it is in service of characterising Eliza Higgins’s working class status – Andrews invariably peaks in a legit voice in the role. Although a first shadow emerges in ‘I Got Rhythm’ (Girl Crazy, 1930), it is with Gypsy in 1959 that Merman provides one of the earliest clear examples of a new soundworld emerging for the Broadway woman, in ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’. In the last 40 seconds of the song, Merman’s Rose describes various things that “everything” is “coming up”, from “roses and daffodils” through “sunshine and Santa Claus” to “bright lights and lollipops”. Each line

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oscillates melodically from the submediant (A) to the dominant (G), generating a sense of anticipation for melodic resolution, a sense that is exaggerated by virtue of the gradual ritardando over these last four lines. In the end, Merman finally resolves upwards to the tonic (C) and holds it until the band supplies a brassy fanfare to close; the effect is of a glorious, belted climax led by the voice and supported by the band. What is important here is not simply that there is a woman belting. More specifically, what I am interested in is what I call the ‘belting finale’, a musical device that relies not only on vocal timbre but on the framing of that timbre as crucial to the climactic point of the song. The following year, Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) premiered in the West End, with Georgia Brown creating Nancy, and, coming so soon after ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’, it is in Oliver! that we see the belting finale firmly established as an emergent trend in musical theatre writing; in ‘As Long As He Needs Me’, a musical frame enables an extravagant display of the belting timbre (see Figure 10.1). At the “so” of “when someone needs you, you’ll love them so”, Brown holds the supertonic (G) on the way to a modulation from F up to A-flat, sustaining it beyond the orchestra so that her held G is entirely exposed. The band rejoins at her A-flat on the “I” of “I won’t betray his trust”, a line which is subtly held back in terms of tempo. Following a couple of phrases of a more regular pulse, she lingers over the final lines: “I’ve got to stay true just/as long as he needs me”. At “just”, Brown’s voice is again exposed, as this time she holds an A-flat beyond the band, who do not rejoin until her “he”. The band/voice timing is then reversed at “me”, as the band cuts out after “needs” and Brown enters on “me” before the band’s closing flourish. The belting voice on an extended note in the final seconds of the song constitutes a device that becomes conventional over the remainder of the decade. Hints at the soundworld are palpable in ‘I Was A Shoo-in’ (Carol Lawrence in Subways Are For Sleeping, 1961), ‘You’re As English As’ (Sally Ann Howes in Kwamina, 1961) and ‘Steady, Steady’ (Michele Lee in Bravo Giovanni, 1962), but none of these are as big a finale as ‘As Long As He Needs Me’, where the final vocal note combines with the ritardando and the strategic use of orchestral silence or pause to make the vocal note seem all the bigger. That specific combination of factors is not altogether common, but it does feature in some of the most well-known numbers of the period, such as ‘Don’t Rain On

Figure 10.1 Relationship between voice and orchestra in ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ (Oliver!, 1960). Georgia Brown, original Broadway cast recording (1964).

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My Parade’ (Barbara Streisand in the stage production of Funny Girl, 1964) and ‘Cabaret’ (Jill Haworth in Cabaret, 1966). And by the time the film of Cabaret was released in 1972, the belting finale had become fully established as a conventional device in the genre. It is distinguished by a female belting voice sustaining a long, high note at the end of the song, often camply framed by extravagant ritardandi, possibly also momentary orchestral silences, and quite often occurring in the wake of a narrow upwards modulation,11 which itself might feature a belted transitionary note, ritardando and orchestral pauses. All of this is not to say, of course, that the legit voice was completely eclipsed. On the contrary, Shirley Jones in the title role of Maggie Flynn (1968) demonstrates a distinctly legit timbre, although the musical trajectory could also support a classic belting finale. Later still, Sarah Rice as Jayne Wisener (Sweeney Todd, 1979) and Elizabeth de Grazia as Blanche Ingram (Jane Eyre, the Musical, 2000) firmly represent the clear continuation of a legit vocality, even in the context of a strong trend for belting finales. Yet the 1960s undoubtedly saw a shift in favour of the voices of Barbara Streisand, Liza Minnelli and Eydie Gormé, such that those voices came to dominate the soundworld of Broadway women over that favoured by the stars of the 1940s. From the English production of Les Misérables (1985), another new trend starts to emerge in Éponine’s ‘On My Own’, in which the belting climax is followed by a quiet, reflective coda. This device is used through the 1990s (see ‘Someone Like You’ from Jekyll and Hyde, 1997), and is fully conventional by the early 2000s; Dracula, the Musical (2004), Legally Blonde (2007), Bonnie and Clyde (2011), Ghost, the Musical (2012) and The Book of Mormon (2012) all make clear use of the reflective coda. But just as the belting finale did not completely supplant legit vocality, this new trend in turn has not directly replaced the classic belting finale either. Indeed, Jekyll and Hyde also makes use of the more classic structure (‘Good ’n’ Evil’ and ‘A New Life’), and Wicked (2003), which has broken and re-broken gross-takings records as one of the most popular musicals of the century so far, made full use of the belting power of Idina Menzel as Elphaba by constructing most of the green witch’s solo numbers around a classic finale structure (‘The Wizard and I’, ‘No Good Deed’ and ‘Defying Gravity’). Rather, there is clearly significant historical overlap (as Figure 10.2 demonstrates), resulting from the continuation of older styles in contemporary practice on the one hand and the precursors of contemporary practice being traceable in older styles on the other. Yet the general trend over the last 70 years is also quite clear; the ‘Broadway bel canto’ style has been gradually supplanted from the 1960s onwards by a tendency towards the belting voice, which typically results in a big finale of an extended high note over a large ritardando, a climactic moment which, in turn, has in more recent years been contrasted with a reflective coda. It is almost certain that the development in the 1970s and the widespread use by the 1980s of wireless radio microphones in theatre productions helped facilitate the ‘reflective coda’ model; Millie Taylor (2009, 43) and Stacy Wolff (2011, 141) both point to the importance for musical theatre of this technological development. From the perspective of the belting finale, it surely enabled the radically contrasting sound in the form of the reflective coda, which has the important effect of making the ‘big notes’ seem even bigger by contrast and in turn increasing the dramatic effect overall. I consider the reflective coda model to be a modern development, facilitated by technological advances, but nonetheless firmly in the same line of tradition as the classic belting finale – fundamentally, I hear it as a variation on the same affective theme in the Broadway woman’s soundworld. To trace a parallel change in gender politics over these decades, as I have done with the tenor soundworld, it is simple enough to say that a 1945 woman is subject to very different social and cultural expectations than is a 142

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Figure 10.2

Historical development of vocal timbres.

1965 woman, who in turn is different from a 1985 woman and a 2005 woman after her. And, since cultural artefacts from literature to visual art to multimedia forms always bear traces of their contexts of creation, so Nettie Fowler of Carousel is composed (in all senses of that word) very differently than Fanny Brice, who is composed differently from Éponine, who is different again from Elphaba. Looking at the standard markers of women’s social role – participation in marriage, age at first marriage, motherhood rates, age at first birth, age at last birth, reproductive lifecycle, participation in (paid) labour – it is easy to trace a general trend over the 20th century in which women now work more, mother less and mother older. This trend obviously has important nuances and caveats (see El-Khorazaty and Horne 1992; Stanfors 2014). Yet the shifts in each area are consistently interpreted as relating to ideological shifts in the perception and expectations of women; the relationship is almost certainly circular – changing behaviour puts pressure on ideological expectations just as it is also a result of such expectations – but it is nonetheless recognised (see Schoen and Canudas-Romo 2005, 135). Janet Kohen argues that “Delayed age at marriage, decreased fertility, higher employment rates, and increased family headship indicate a major change in women’s attitudes and relationships to family roles” (1981, 576), describing the attitude in 1981 as one that demands women sustain their “self-identities” and a “sense of autonomy” even as they continue to participate in marriage and motherhood (1981, 579). Sarah Hayford observes that there is a “social or ideational incompatibility between motherhood and other pursuits, such as work 143

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or education” (2013, 1642); it is this tension between these two areas that characterises the debate by the mid-1980s, when the popular debate would take on a significant turn towards the conundrum of the woman expected to be equally successful as both a homemaker and an earner (see New York Times 1986). And the notion that women’s lives are a ‘balancing act’ between home and work prevails even in modern popular discourse (see Barth 2012). The crudest interpretation, then, of the parallel developments in women’s social roles and pressures and Broadway women’s soundworlds would be to note that the amplification of feminist discourse through the 1960s coincides with the rise in popularity of the belting finale (and not accidentally so), and to suggest that the mid-1980s woman who has to ‘balance’ success at home and as a professional finds her sonic counterpart in the combination of belting climax and reflective coda. Needless to say, though, it would be far too reductive to suggest a direct causal relationship. But in the same way that the tenor climax emerged at a time of some radical shifts in the meaning of and tests for masculinity, so the belting finale represents the sonic counterpart for the battles over ‘appropriate’ femininity in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, the underlying causes of the shift in soundworld arguably include not only social reasons but also musical, creative, commercial and technological ones. So, rather than seeking to attribute an explanation to any specific combination of causes, I am keen to articulate what the new soundworld represents in terms of the portrayal of women on the Broadway stage.

Excess/frame and vulnerability/domination In order to fully situate the belting finale in its musico-cultural context, I want to view it through two lenses, two pairs of binaries. The first is that of excess and frame, theorised by Susan McClary in particular relation to madwomen in opera (2002, 80–111); the second is that of vulnerability and domination, which emerges as a trope in the discourse around the place of women’s voices in opera. Using examples as historically diverse as Monteverdi, Donizetti, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, McClary argues that vocal music at once constructs the madwoman in terms of musical excess – expressed by intense ornamentation, chromaticism, formal discontinuity and melisma – and contains the threat she represents by erecting a frame of conventional form and harmony. This frame is represented narratively by forces that represent the social policing of women, and particularly their sexual desire. For the tenor hero’s part, he may not be especially prominent in those musical moments that erect the frame, but he may nonetheless represent the same forces: Alfredo loves Violetta away from her sexual excesses; Calaf persuades Turandot away from frigidity; José literally silences Carmen with a knife.12 Sonically, then, his belted finales represent the stable, sustained counterpart to her flighty, erratic coloratura, or her chromatic excesses. Equally, however, he is vulnerable in his own way – both narratively and musically – and I will return to this fact. But to consider the Broadway belter in terms of excess nonetheless sheds some interesting light on the phenomenon. It is true that the Broadway belting number is not typically known for its chromaticism, melismatic ornamentation or radical formal discontinuity; on the contrary, my argument is precisely that her sound is much closer to that of the tenor’s, who once represented so clearly the stable frame around the excess. Yet, in the new context of mid-20th-century musical theatre, this soundworld becomes the new excess. By sustaining these notes with such muscular power, the belting voice is itself excessive, in ways only exaggerated by the relationship to the orchestra (which must momentarily be silenced), and to the passage of time, which appears to slow down in the often-overblown ritardandi that sustain the harmonic tension 144

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and sense of anticipation. In this way, the belting finale in its classic form takes the tenor’s soundworld and redefines it, twisting the frame into a new camp excess. Moreover, the frequency with which the musical number itself is an expression of either torchy sentiment (‘I will love this man despite how he treats me’) or of resistance against inappropriate male power (‘You are behaving badly; I won’t put up with this’) means that, in many cases, this twisting and redefining of the soundworld is used precisely as a tool of political reclamation, structurally similar to the reappropriation in African American communities of the word ‘nigger’, or among LGBTs of the word ‘queer’ (if not in terms of political gravity). Whether it is Nancy at the hands of Bill Sikes, Fanny despite the financial misdemeanours of Nick Arnstein or Mabel heartbroken for Mack, Broadway women sing words of their love and belt out their determination to survive (although they do not always manage it). The tension between vulnerability and domination is therefore palpable in both voice and narrative and in both the tenor and the Broadway belter. It is, as opera scholars have acknowledged both individually and between them, the basic paradox of the operatic soprano, certainly. Catherine Clément was quick to note how many “dead women” litter the stages of (19th-century) operas (1997), but McClary and Carolyn Abbate (1993) both acknowledge the importance of the enormous vocal power of the soprano despite the narratives of subjugation. “Visually, the character singing is the passive object of our gaze. But, aurally, she is resonant. Her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive object, battered by that voice”, writes Abbate (1993, 254); McClary, for her part, calls the soprano’s “moments of excess” opera’s “very raison d’être” (2002, 81). It is my contention that we might be equally battered by the relentless climaxing by opera’s heroes at the same time as they are narratively less-than-perfect characters; Rodolfo (La bohème’s impoverished and jealous poet), Calaf (a refugee caring for his dying father, and without a name for most of Turandot), Cavaradossi (whose torture drives much of the second act of Tosca) and Don Alvaro (the mixed-race foreigner in La forza del destino) – each one has a weak spot, a chink in his armour. And these weaknesses of masculine subjectivity find their correlate in the climaxes of the characters’ arias, these notes which are themselves both dominating, battering and exposed, vulnerable. Indeed, given the tendency with which these climactic high notes are extended longer and less supported orchestrally than their soprano counterparts’ climaxes, there is a sense in which the exposure is even greater for the tenor. And so, the vulnerability/domination dyad is not a straightforward relationship of mutually exclusive states. Rather, what we see in the tenors’ climaxes is precisely domination through vulnerability; and it is not even a straightforward vulnerability as such, but a “vulnerability-on-display” (Hawkins 2009, 39), the staging of vulnerability for the very purposes of domination. Furthermore, such a staging is at the same time an open secret, reliant on a ‘fake naivety’. The audience simultaneously know that the vulnerability is ‘on-display’ and agree to pretend that they do not know that, since the portrayal of naivety by the performer is so clearly ‘on purpose’, but fantasy and willingness to be seduced are the very pleasures of performance from the audience perspective. Such an effect is not unlike the one Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood argue to be the same one enjoyed by female impersonators: “Veiled beneath multiple layers of the feminine, female impersonators are frequently able to exercise considerable masculine power in the contexts in which they reside”, they write (2008, 8). “Images of the feminine are merely the real estate upon which many drag queens do status and power”, and so “actually being a drag queen in practice and contextual relation to others would often seem to be more about doing and experiencing masculinity than being effeminate” (2008, 9). Stan Hawkins pursues this ‘vulnerability-on-display’ in relation specifically to the British pop dandy’s vocality, and there are important lines of 145

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enquiry opened up by considering the modern, vernacular masculinity of his case studies (Morrissey, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry etc.) in relation to both the modern vernacular diva femininities and the historical, high art masculinities of my own. Yet the vocal strategies I am concerned with here are rather different, and that fact brings a different set of questions to the fore. In Hawkins’s cases, those voices he identifies as most ‘dandified’ are generally described in terms such as ‘delicate’, ‘mellow’, ‘smooth’, ‘crooning’13 and ‘velvet-like’, and it is these qualities that result in the ‘fragility’ and ‘vulnerability’ Hawkins rightly perceives. By comparison, the counterexample – Justin Hawkins of The Darkness – is described as “strident, determined, and full” in voice (2009, 141), words that would be highly appropriate for any tenor aria from the repertoire I am focusing on. Certainly, there are cases like Jarvis Cocker and Robbie Williams whose ‘rich, rounded’ or ‘deep, booming’ vocal qualities are important in their vocal dandy-ness, but these qualities seem to dandify primarily by virtue of their contrast with, and superseding of, the softer, subtler qualities already described. In the belting finale – whether operatic or musical-theatrical – the musical trajectory leans precisely in favour of the “strident, determined, and full”. Of course, such determination is only as palpable as it is because of its contrast within the aria or number with the other qualities, and in the post-Les Mis reflective coda, we hear a different strategy of contrast again, which might be more closely related aesthetically to Hawkins’s model. But in the classic belting finale, the stridency wins out. In all cases, however, it is the case that vocal timbre mobilises questions to do with aural space (and the domination thereof), with the threat of excess (which is always lurking in the voice, which must always exceed the body which produces it), with containment, and with (the performance of) vulnerability. These questions find different formulations and different answers in the tenor hero and Broadway belter at the most general level, and in the particular cases of particular songs and performances at the most specific. But what these high notes stage, in both opera and musical theatre, is not simply the high drama of the narrative moment, but that of a set of (irresolvable) dyadic tensions among excess, frame, vulnerability and domination.14

Conclusion: Camp as drama? What has been bubbling under much of the analysis thus far is the question of camp, and this underlines my ultimate reading of the belting finale as a tension that begs for reiteration for the promise of closure. Although the extant scholarship on camp in general is now copious,15 the body of work on music and camp has only comparatively recently been growing, and it is even more recent still that such work has been concerned with the musical technicalities of camp.16 That there is sonic camp in the Broadway belting finale is an easy enough case to make; joyful excess and playful extravagance are easy to identify in the crescendo, the ritardando and the upwards modulations, all of which contribute to the camp effect through the teasing extension of anticipation. In two of the canonic cases, ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’ and ‘Cabaret’, subsequent film versions amplify the finales again. For Streisand in Funny Girl (dir. Wyler 1968), the song was already familiar, but the film performance is noticeably bigger in voice than the cast recording; although the film recording is sung a semitone lower in B where the cast recording is in C, the impact of the final notes on the 1968 film soundtrack is still a greater belt than that in the 1966 cast recording. The comparative length of time taken over the last line (“Nobody, no nobody is gonna rain on my parade”) is easily perceived in the fact that the two recordings last the same length (2:45) but the final line starts three seconds earlier in the film recording (at 2:17) because of the extra space taken by the ritardando. From the start of the line, the pitch is more secure on the film soundtrack; the first “no” 146

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contains a rapid semitonal upper mordent in the cast recording, as opposed to the attacking grunt on the film soundtrack. And in the final word, the cast recording displays an almost yodelling squeak in the middle, whereas the later one holds the first syllable longer and carefully bends the note upwards on the second syllable. For her part, Minnelli had already demonstrated her capacity to achieve a belting finale on stage in the title role of Flora the Red Menace (‘Sing Happy’, 1965), but her performance as Sally Bowles in the film of Cabaret shows off a bigger sound than either her performance as Flora or Jill Haworth’s originary Sally Bowles. This is partly facilitated by the inclusion of several replacement songs: ‘Mein Herr’, replacing ‘Don’t Tell Mama’, is one place early in the film where Minnelli’s voice comes to the fore; ‘Maybe This Time’ is another.17 In her rendition of the title tune, she holds the extended notes (for example “when I go”) for longer than Haworth, is allowed time to expand against the orchestral pauses and pushes the penultimate syllable up to the mediant (E) in C while Haworth only achieves the tonic in B-flat. So, by the time this song comes in the film, in the wake of ‘Mein Herr’ and ‘Maybe This Time’, the soundworld is very firmly established by Minnelli, and it is no surprise to hear such belting extravagance. More to the point, what these two film versions demonstrate is that the belting finale not only becomes ever more conventional, but also ever camper. Indeed, its increased campness is also the more lasting effect, since films circulate wider and arguably therefore have greater potential to influence future practice. Perhaps, on the whole, the musical hallmarks of camp are not deployed to such an extravagant extent in the tenor arias of Verdi or Puccini; then again, at times, perhaps they really are. In any case, the fact of a sonic and structural similarity between the belting finale and the tenor climax has been established already, and as such the musical campness of the latter must at least be considered. The hesitation to make a clear declaration that this material is equally camp might emerge not only from musical differences, but also differences in the conditions of reception surrounding each. That is to say, perhaps it would transgress aesthetic propriety to say so clearly that tenor arias are in the same trashy realm as Broadway musical theatre. And yet, I suspect that it is not too far a stretch either. The frequency with which the operatic tenor is depicted in contemporary popular culture as a figure of humour – affected, melodramatic, hypochondriatic, over-ebullient – might itself suggest an easy slippage from seriousness to camp. (I am not suggesting that all humour is camp, but I do propose that humour is a precursor of camp, and part of its expressive textures.)18 As such, the ease with which popular culture can poke fun at the tenor and his emotional and physical excesses might give some clue to the presence of a camp shadow lurking over his figure. It is important to note the musical camp for its own sake, but I want to propose something further: that the staging of the various tensions – in the two dyads of excess/frame and vulnerability/domination, and also between those dyads, like an irregular quadrangle always seeking squareness – is itself camp in the case of musical theatre, precisely because of the sonic qualities. To an extent, narrative forms such as musical theatre, as well as the novel or the symphony, are fundamentally driven by the desire to resolve some tension or crisis that exists; lovers unite, cadential progressions triumph, good overcomes evil – or not as the case may be. But tension is there to be resolved. For musical theatre, however, where the belting finale has become the sonic hallmark, another layer of tension is left unsettled. Questions remain: does excess yield to frame? Or does excess warp and twist frame? Does vulnerability dominate? Or is it dominated? Let me be clear that I am not proposing that everything must always be neatly packaged up into binaries. But since these dyads underpin much of the (musical) drama of musical theatre, their lack of (musical) resolution is significant. Specifically, the musical camp that leaves these questions unanswered means that the soundtrack of 147

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the questions’ unansweredness is also camp, lending the unansweredness itself a gloriously camp quality: ‘Ta-daah’, cries musical theatre in the belting finale, waving its jazz hands and panting for breath. ‘Just look at these unresolved and highly gendered tensions! Aren’t they fabulous?!’ And don’t you just want to go back and listen again, in the hope of a resolution next time?

Notes  1 One I have found that is as long as Pavarotti’s is recorded by Jussi Björling and compiled on the album Jussi Björling – The Swedish Caruso Vol. 5 (2013). Both are exceeded, at approximately 7.5 seconds, by Andrea Bocelli, live at his A Night in Tuscany concert in 1997 (see http://www. classicfm.com/composers/puccini/guides/best-nessun-dorma/#TKzj8bf0ezv7lubb.97). But roughly speaking, the note tends to come in somewhere between three and five seconds, and Pavarotti’s clearly stands out as unusually long by average standards.  2 See Jarman-Ivens (2009) for a full explanation of how camp can be seen to work in technical musical terms. I will return later to the question of camp in relation to the examples under examination in this chapter.  3 This is not to say that the female voice does not have a falsetto tone, but it is worth noting that the idea of ‘falsetto’ is predominantly masculinised in discourse.  4 See Koestenbaum (1993, 164–167) for commentary on some of the ideological, and specifically gendered, burden carried by ‘chest’ and ‘head’ as terms in talking about vocality.  5 See Castellengo (2002) for details illustrated by sound samples.  6 Vocal fry is a ‘sub-modal’ (i.e., below normal speech or singing range) register, in which the vocal cords vibrate so slowly that the voice takes on a creaking sound. In (western) speech, it is considered by some to be a disorder, but by others to lend gravitas to the speaker. The ‘epidemic’ of vocal fry amongst young American women in particular is the subject of some popular commentary: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqVgtLQ7qM for both critical observation and examples. In singing, the technique might be used strategically to hit notes below the normal register, but also for the same socio-linguistic reasons that underpin its popularity in ‘Valley Girl’ speech. See Britney Spears’s ‘Baby One More Time’: in the introduction (the end of the second and fourth word “baby”; the two “oh”s); in the first verse (“that something”; the second “oh baby”; “I should”; “and now”); the bridge (‘how’; ‘tell me’); and littered throughout. See also Jude (2014) for an insightful cultural analysis of vocal fry in American speech.  7 M1 tends to be figured as dominated heavily by the thyroarytenoid muscle, while M2 is characterised by greater use of the cricothyroid muscle.  8 Navigate to http://completevocalinstitute.com/research/vocal-modes/general/  9 Navigate to http://completevocalinstitute.com/introduction-uk/ 10 I will use ‘legit’ only in relation to the Broadway context, since it has no logical comparison in the operatic world. I use ‘chest’ and ‘head’ as rough, imperfect but accessible terms to denote a loose distinction between two basic vocal sounds, whilst also acknowledging that the distinction works best in vernacular rather than classical contexts. 11 Dai Griffiths (2015) writes at length about the ‘elevating modulation’, and this is a highly relevant touchstone here. The elevating modulations that often herald the start of a belting finale certainly function as formal devices as much as technical ones. 12 Of course, the framing force reveals as much about the creator’s social context as it does anything else. That anyone ‘needs’ framing is an ideologically loaded starting point, just as the choice of masculine forces to undertake the policing of women is a manifestation of that starting point which bears the markers of its specific cultural-historical moment of creation. I see these characters very much as proxies for the expression of the (identity-)politics of the composer, bearing in mind his (and I mean ‘his’) social context. 13 See McCracken (1999) for a specific investigation of crooning vocality in relation to masculinity. 14 These are the notes to which Poizat (1992) would point as moments when “the singer and the listener are both removed to the extent that the voice appears to be pure voice, pure sound, and both singer and listener disappear, becoming pure ecstatic voice” (Taylor 2012, 52). Millie Taylor takes issue with the premise upon which Poizat’s reading is based, namely that the voice becomes “disembodied as a voice-object in these extreme moments” (52, n83), and deploys Abbate (1991) 148

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15 16 17 18

and Symonds (2007) to remind the reader of the importance of the performer’s materiality. This tension between the disembodiment of the voice and the body of the performer is crucial to the very nature of the voice as such (see Jarman-Ivens 2011, 4–13), and, were there space to do so here, I would explore further the extent to which the tension between the (disembodied) voice and the (embodied) performer underpins the potential for identification with the voice and the loss of self in the listener (see also Jarman-Ivens 2011). See the contents pages of Cleto (1999) for a sense of the extent of the literature, which is generally regarded to start with Susan Sontag in 1964. See, for instance, Cohan (2005), Dickinson (2001), Flinn (2004), Geyrhalter (1996), Hawkins (2004), Hawkins (2009), Jarman-Ivens (2009), Robertson (1996), Rodger (2004), Taylor (2012) and the edited collection by Moore and Purvis (Forthcoming). ‘Maybe This Time’ was apparently not written for the film, but some years earlier in 1964 (Encyclopedia of Popular Music). See Newton (1993, 46): “Incongruity is the subject matter of camp, theatricality its style, and humor its strategy”. See also Jarman (forthcoming) for a fuller theorisation of the links between camp and humour.

Bibliography Abbate, Carolyn. 1991. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1993. “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women.” In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie, 225–258. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. André, Naomi. 2006. Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-NineteenthCentury Opera. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ashbrook, William. 1998. “The Evolution of the Donizettian Tenor-Persona.” Opera Quarterly 14 (3): 25–32. Clément, Catherine. 1997. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Trans. Betsy Wing. London: I. B. Tauris. Cleto, Fabio, ed. 1999. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Cohan, Steven. 2005. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dickinson, Kay. 2001. “‘Believe’? Vocoders, Digitalised Female Identity and Camp.” Popular Music 20 (3): 333–347. El-Khorazaty, M. Nabil and Amelia Dale Horne. 1992. “Dynamics of Childbearing Statistics in Twentieth Century Developing and Developed Countries.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 23 (1): 13–37. Encyclopedia of Popular Music. “Cabaret (film musical).” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flinn, Caryl. 2004. The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Geyrhalter, Thomas. 1996. “Effeminacy, Camp and Sexual Subversion in Rock: The Cure and Suede.” Popular Music 15 (2): 217–224. Griffiths, Dai. 2015. “Elevating Form and Elevating Modulation.” Popular Music 34 (1): 22–44. Hawkins, Stan. 2004. “Dragging Out Camp: Narrative Agendas in Madonna’s Musical Production.” In Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations, 1983–2003, ed. Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens, 3–21. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Hayford, Sarah R. 2013. “Marriage (Still) Matters: The Contribution of Demographic Change to Trends in Childlessness in the United States.” Demography 50 (5): 1641–1661. Jarman, Freya. 2013. “Pitch Fever: The Castrato, the Tenor, and the Question of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Opera.” In Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology, ed. Philip Purvis, 51–66. London and New York: Routledge. ———. Forthcoming. “Watch My Lips: The Limits of Camp in Lip-Syncing Scenes.” In Music and Camp, ed. Philip Purvis and Christopher Moore. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2009. “Notes on Musical Camp.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 189–203. Farnham: Ashgate. 149

Freya Jarman ———. 2011. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jude, Gretchen. 2014. “Return of the Valley Girl or Unsung Cyborg? (Beyond) Media Representations of Glottal Fry, A Contentious U.S. Speaking Practice.” The Journal of Engaged Pedagogy 13 (1): 11–19. Koestenbaum, Wayne. 1993. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Poseidon Press. Kohen, Janet A. 1981. “Housewives, Breadwinners, Mothers, and Family Heads: The Changing Family Roles of Women.” Advances in Consumer Research 8 (1): 576–579. Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McClary, Susan. 2002 [1991]. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality. Second edition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McCracken, Allison. 1999. “‘God’s Gift to Us Girls’: Crooning, Gender, and the Re-Creation of American Popular Song, 1928–1933.” American Music 17 (4): 365–395. Moore, Christopher and Philip Purvis (eds). Forthcoming. Music and Camp. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Newton, Esther. 1993. “Role Models.” In Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman, 39–53. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Poizat, Michel. 1992. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Potter, John. 2009. Tenor: History of a Voice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Robertson, Pamela. 1996. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Rodger, Gillian. 2004. “Drag, Camp and Gender Subversion in the Music and Videos of Annie Lennox.” Popular Music 23 (1): 17–29. Rosselli, John. 1992. Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schacht, Steven P. and Lisa Underwood. 2008. “The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators.” Journal of Homosexuality 46 (3–4): 1–17. Schoen, Robert and Vladimir Canudas-Romo. 2005. “Timing Effects on First Marriage: TwentiethCentury Experience in England and Wales and the USA.” Population Studies 59 (2): 135–146. Stanfors, Maria. 2014. “Women in a Changing Economy: The Misleading Tale of Participation Rates in a Historical Perspective.” The History of the Family 19 (4): 513–536. Symonds, Dominic. 2007. “The Corporeality of Musical Expression: The Grain of the Voice and the Actor-Musician.” Studies in Musical Theatre 1 (2): 167–181. Taylor, Jodie. 2012. Playing It Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-Making. Bern: Peter Lang. Taylor, Millie. 2009. Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wolff, Stacy. 2011. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Online sources Barth, F. Diane. 2012. “The Modern Balancing Act: Can Working Mothers Ever Feel a Balance?” Psychology Today, 10 March. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201203/ the-modern-balancing-act-can-working-mothers-ever-feel-in-balance. Burn-Callander, Rebecca. 2015. “The Most Annoying Adverts From the Past 15 Years.” The Telegraph, 22 January. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11359924/Themost-annoying-adverts-from-the-past-15-years.html. Castellengo, Martha. 2002. “The Human Voice and its Registers: The Value of Interdisciplinary Collaboration.” Presentation at the First International Conference on Physiology and Acoustics of Singing, Groningen, Netherlands, 3–5 October. http://www.med.rug.nl/pas/Conf_contrib/Castellengo/ Castellengo_bio_touch.htm. Cliff, Martha. 2015. “It’s Jingle Hell! From Halifax’s Toe-Curling ISA ISA Baby to the Booming Tones of the Gocompare Man, the Most Annoying Advert Tunes Ever Revealed.” Daily Mail, 5 October.

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High notes, high drama http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3259497/From-Halifax-s-toe-curling-ISA-ISA-Babybooming-tones-GoCompare-man-annoying-advert-tunes-time-revealed.html. Complete Vocal Institute. Complete Vocal Institute. Accessed 29 November 2015. http://completevocalinstitute.com/. Edge, Simon. 2013. “Annoying? Yes, but the Go Compare Advert Changed My Life.” Sunday Express, 24 September. http://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/431666/Annoying-Yesbut-the-Go-Compare-advert-changed-my-life. Leyfield, James. 2015. “Most Annoying TV Adverts Ever: From Daz’s Doorstep Challenge to Webuyanycardotcom to Go Compare.” Mirror, 25 June. http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/ most-annoying-tv-adverts-ever-5948530. New York Times. 1986. “Women’s Roles vs. Social Norms.” 30 December. http://www.nytimes. com/1986/12/30/style/women-s-roles-vs-social-norms.html. Pines, Roger. 2012. “That Broadway Sound.” Opera, January. http://opera.archive.netcopy.co.uk/ article/january-2012/6/that-broadway-sound. Sweney, Mark. 2013. “Go Compare Tops List of Most Complained about Ads of 2012.” The Guardian, 30 April. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/30/go-compare-most-complained-ads.

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11 THE GENDERED NARRATIVES OF NOBODIES AND SOMEBODIES IN THE POPULAR MUSIC ECONOMY Keith Negus

A wide variety of research illuminates the significance of gender and popular music production. This encompasses conventional academic scholarship with its valuable generalisations and analytical reductions. It includes published autobiographical memoirs or privately kept diaries delving into unique personal experiences, or local history archives expansively evoking the drama of details. It embraces practice research, bringing insights from composition, songwriting and a wide array of creative performance activities. Such diversity is rarely acknowledged let alone incorporated in most popular music research. Popular music studies have largely ignored James Clifford’s call, made back in the 1980s, for researchers to adopt an inclusive ethnographic approach to the materials that contribute to knowledge and understanding of human cultures. Clifford argued that “ethnography appears in several forms” and refers to “diverse ways of thinking and writing about culture from the standpoint of participant observation” (Clifford 1988, 9), encompassing the perspectives of poets, novelists, artists and sculptors, creators of artefacts and so-called native informants. Clifford advocated a stance towards research and writing that involves the juxtaposition of different voices as a means of expressing the dynamism of culture as “an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions” (Clifford 1988, 46). It was also during the 1980s that Paul Ricoeur published his influential studies of time and narrative (1984, 1985, 1988, 1991b, 1991c), arguing that our experiential uncertainty of existence is “refashioned by its passage through the grid of narrative” (1991a, 338). Identities and experiences are comprehended as we narrate events and interactions that will always incorporate the views and behaviour of others. Although Ricoeur’s insights influenced cultural and social theorists, rarely have they featured in the study of popular music. This seems a particularly conspicuous absence because Ricoeur stressed the “complementarity between fictional and empirical narratives . . . our fundamental historicity is brought to language by the convergence of the different modes of narrative discourse” (1983, 4). Our grasp of the temporal world is acquired as much through the ‘fictional’ as it is through the ‘factual’. Ricoeur supported his argument through an analysis of literary fiction, yet his arguments

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imply that all narrative forms – songs being a notable example – are important for mediating and organising our knowledge of life. As I write this, nearly thirty years later, in light of the institutional growth of popular music studies, the writings of Clifford and Ricoeur seem to be more pertinent than ever. Augmenting these ideas with Derek Scott’s suggestion that musicology should strive to be “an intertextual field of inquiry rather than a discipline” (2010, x), we might embrace an orientation to research informed by an ever richer, wider and more inclusive range of materials. In this chapter, I am advocating an approach informed by these methodological precepts and suggesting one amongst many possible routes for research that traces the material and moral narratives of fame and failure; the voluntary and involuntary shifts from amateur nobody to acclaimed somebody as these are shaped by commercial music production. Exploring the circumstances within which music is made, from the earliest days of gaining skills and becoming an amateur musician to the struggles to ‘make it’ and subsequent responses to stardom, entails asking questions about the acquisition of musical proficiency, occupational opportunities and the individual and collective labour of musicians. Rather than stake out a theoretical ‘position’ on gender and apply this, I want to approach the issue in a more open and oblique manner by asking when gender becomes articulated and experienced as an issue in the narratives of fulfilment and success. We can examine the relevance or irrelevance of gender in popular music culture, the pressures on women and men and the expectations for the adoption of masculine and feminine identities by being attuned to the tales told by amateur, semi-professional and successful musicians. We may potentially weave together many strands of popular music research, juxtaposing diverse voices by focusing on the material dynamics, ideological beliefs and biographical narratives of fame and failure; grounding an understanding of how individual creative activities and identities are realised within systems of production characterised by stark contrasts between the wealthy pop star (secluded, protected, powerful, enjoying freedom from necessity) and the pop pauper (investing in music making without return, living in relative poverty, struggling for recognition and reward and with no bargaining power). Persistently mediating the practices of musicians is the ideological dream of ‘making it in the music industry’ along with the accompanying anxiety of being a ‘nobody’, beliefs that are reinforced or resisted through the material sacrifice and unrewarded labour of countless amateur musicians. Given the scope of these issues, the size of this chapter and the aims of this book (to provoke further thinking and research), I shall inevitably leave a number of these questions open to further research and debate.

The narratives and negotiations of nobodies One starting point is Ruth Finnegan’s acclaimed and unique detailed study of ‘hidden musicians’ based on observation and interviews during the 1980s in the English new town of Milton Keynes. Finnegan focused on amateurs (those not professionally making a full time living out of music) and recognised that there was no simple way to define such musicians other than at the “amateur end of the complex amateur-professional continuum” (2007, xii) which allowed for “many different possible variations” (2007, 14). Researching across generations and musical styles (taking in choirs and brass bands as well as pop and rock groups), Finnegan provided numerous insights into the way school, family life, neighbourhood and community are integral to the acquisition of musical skills, the personal satisfaction gained and the social recognition accorded. Drawing insights from ethnomusicology – notably, the

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perennially important research of John Blacking (1973) – Finnegan argued that amateur music making “may play a far larger part in the experience and fulfilment of human beings and the patterning of society than is usually allowed by social scientists, musicologists or the conventional wisdom on the topic” (2007, 341). Similar themes weave throughout Sara Cohen’s ethnography of rock musicians in Liverpool during the 1980s and in her subsequent research on music making in Liverpool (Cohen 2007). Like Finnegan, Cohen described the importance of peers, family members and friends and the significant role of experienced older musicians. Family life is central to becoming an amateur musician. Musical skill and understanding is achieved within kinship networks, distinct local face-to-face communities and encounters across generations. Cohen’s research reveals two important issues that shape how popular music is made and which permeate the transition from unknown amateur to recognised musician – that of gender, and the dreams and dilemmas of seeking to ‘make it’ in the music industry. When Finnegan was researching pop and rock bands in the early 1980s, 8 out of 125 musicians she studied in Milton Keynes were female (Finnegan 2007, 119). She found that girls tended to be more involved with western classical repertoire within school, whilst boys were more active in making popular music outside of school. Cohen’s study, at a similar moment during the 1980s, found a comparable division, with one Musician’s and Band’s Association containing 66 performers – only 1 being female. Cohen’s study included an important chapter entitled “The Threat of Women”. In this she referred to varied narratives from the history of jazz and rock music, evidencing how women have been absent, marginalised or viewed as intruders in many music scenes. Cohen provided detailed case studies of how this was maintained by young rock musicians at the very start of any possible career. Male members of the bands she studied judged women in bands largely in terms of their appearance rather than their musical skills and considered having a woman in a band as something of a novelty. Cohen found that the women she interviewed – whether present as performers, friends or partners – spoke of feeling intimidated within the rehearsal or gig environments and recounted incidents of disputes between band members and partners about the amount of time being devoted to music. Cohen’s research has been extended by Mavis Bayton’s study of women rock musicians (Bayton 1998), Marion Leonard’s research into ‘female-centred’ alternative rock bands (Leonard 2007), Helen Reddington’s account of female musicians during the punk era (Reddington 2012) and a range of memoirs, including those of Viv Albertine (2015) and Kim Gordon (2015) offering occasionally bleaker insider’s accounts. All demonstrate how children and young adults, along with their teachers, parents and carers, have been grappling with enduring historical legacies whereby certain instruments and performance styles are deemed more appropriate for boys and girls – the by now almost clichéd gendering of electric guitars, drum kits, flutes, harps and so on (Green 1997). When young musicians have formed bands they have often unwittingly mobilised all manner of inherited ideas and assumptions about the musical activities that are more appropriate for women and men (Green 2002). This has even been apparent in ‘alternative’ musical circles and illustrated in Mary Ann Clawson’s influential study of women bass players in indie rock bands (Clawson 1999). Clawson provides an astute insight into the paradoxes and tensions as the bass guitar provides an opportunity for girls and women to find a route in to rock performance, but simultaneously reinforces taken-forgranted assumptions about the restricted space for women in male-dominated bands, a theme that weaves through academic and insider accounts of women in music during this period. 154

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Academic narratives can sometimes seem irrevocably at odds with the moments of ambiguity and paradox experienced by musicians, often alluded to in interviews and memoirs. For example, in Tracey Thorn’s compelling recollections of how she “tried to be a pop star” she remembers buying her first electric guitar in 1979: “I’m amazed at myself – where have I found the audacity to buy this, well, very masculine icon? And it does feel masculine – that’s one of the things I like about it” (Thorn 2013, 29). She was getting an electric guitar at the very moment when it was indeed an icon of the inherently masculine style of ‘cock rock’ (Frith and McRobbie 1978). In the same year that Thorn bought her guitar, Richard Dyer was polemically arguing that “even when performed by women, rock remains indelibly phallo-centric music” (Dyer 1990, 415). Some twenty years later, such sentiments were echoed in an account of the voice in dance music: “The rock voice is almost definitively masculine. Even on those rare occasions when women sing music which can be unproblematically defined as ‘rock’, the vocal style tends to take on the ‘masculine’ characteristics of traditional rock singing” (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 83). Such assertions, whilst a valuable polemic against male dominance in rock music during this era, tend towards absolutist theorising and avoid lived experiences such as Thorn’s that do not fit the pattern. In their study of ‘disruptive divas’, Lori Burns and Melisse Lafrance acknowledged that woman had been “traditionally denied access to that form of anger or aggression” (Burns and Lafrance 2001, 131) associated with rock, but set about narrating an alternative story that allows for “moments of female appropriation”. If we take the musicians discussed by Burns and Lafrance (such as Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me’Shell Ndegéocello and PJ Harvey) along with Thorn’s memoirs, we catch glimpses of an alternative narrative, a more varied counter-history. The masculine cultures of bands and gendered assumptions about instruments infiltrate the experience of trying and buying instruments and technologies. Again, historically, the ‘organisational culture of musical instrument stores’ has proved to be an intimidating environment for girls and women (and also for many boys and men). This is illustrated in Carey Sargent’s participant observation study of interactions between workers and customers in retail outlets on the East Coast of the USA from 1999 to 2005. Predictably she found that more males were employed in and frequented the shops and that men were usually more confident in talking to workers in the stores. Women reported finding the stores intimidating and staff assumed that men would be more likely to understand technical jargon. Sargent identified two exclusionary masculine habits which she characterised as “competitive fraternization” and “geeky paternalism”: Competitive fraternization offers a high degree of (male) social bonding and limited amount of information about music technologies in a setting that ascribes women positions as noninsiders and nonmusicians. . . . Geeky paternalism offers limited opportunities for social bonding but copious information in a setting with fixed hierarchies where most, but not all, of the authority figures are men. (2009, 684) Again, a slightly different story might be told about women and technology. This is a narrative of accessible instruments and cheap recording technologies (from tape machines and cassettes through to digital hardware and studio production software) allowing girls and women to find ‘a space of one’s own’ – an idea that Paula Wolfe develops by drawing on the writings of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. Wolfe emphasises how female musicians have been able to work on music on their own, at home or in their bedrooms, on 155

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laptops and using software such as GarageBand. This has allowed autonomy, independence, flexibility and self-production, along with growing confidence, self-belief and creative fulfilment. It has enabled girls and women to develop music without needing to negotiate the male camaraderie of bands. Working in solitude has been particularly beneficial to women musicians: “the steady rise in self-production practices amongst women not only points to artistic and career potential for the individual but may also serve to address an inherited gender imbalance in the field” (Wolfe 2012, n.p.). There is, inevitably, more that can be written and researched about the experiences of unknown and amateur rock musicians and the myriad ways that gender shapes opportunity, creative practice and the dynamics within ensembles. My point in this section is to highlight the tensions and dilemmas; the opportunities, achievements and enduring constraints that confront boys and girls, and women and men, wishing to make music from the earliest days prior to any formal commercial negotiations and deals.

Aspiration, ambivalence and industry The activities of amateur musicians are not outside or independent of the networked webs of the music industry. Musicians acquire their skills from industrially manufactured instruments and technology, and engage with repertoire from commercially available recordings and software. Antoine Hennion has noted that the growth of media and recorded music from early in the twentieth century led to an “intensification of amateur practices” (Hennion 1999, 1), inspiring people to take up instruments and to learn from recordings rather than resulting in a shift towards passive consumerism. A history of ‘do it yourself’ culture (Spencer 2008) has been inspired by recordings of blues, skiffle, rock ’n’ roll, punk and hip-hop, whilst digital technologies have “increased amateur creativity” (Spencer 2008, 85), allowing “nonprofessionals to create, remix and publish content online” (Wikström 2009, 7) as evidenced in remixes, mash-ups, user-generated tracks and videos. Amateurs are not outside of nor simply recipients of the music industry, but they are implicated in commodified music production through their use of technologies, adoption of repertoires and embracement of imagery and ideas. The music industries seek to contractually engage recording artists from a large pool of ‘unknown’ musicians seeking to ‘make it’ and acquire a contract. This motivation characterised the music business during the emergence of rock ’n’ roll and soul during the 1950s and has continued to inform the aspirations of musicians, as Cohen found in her 1980s study in Liverpool, researching during the peak moment of recorded music production when it was possible to claim, with some justification, that recording was the core music business from which all significant profits derived. She made a distinction between two types of bands. First were bands that opposed or sought to ‘resist’ commercial pressures and which sometimes responded “to commercialism by expressing its alienating effects in their music” (Cohen 1991, 196). In contrast, Cohen identified bands that adopted a “capitalistic attitude”; the band members “took on commercial values and ambitions and constructed their music accordingly” (Cohen 1991, 196). During interviews with musicians and music industry personnel between 1988 and 1991, I became acutely aware of the dilemmas encountered by musicians whose repertoire did not conform to the criteria required by the industry (Negus 1992). The instrumental line-ups of amateur bands have often been more varied than the conventional ensemble of drums, bass and guitars. It was not uncommon to find young people, at school, college and university, making music in groups that included instruments that were not conventionally part of a pop 156

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or rock ensemble – clarinet, violin, flute and trumpet, for example. Original compositions often displayed eccentricities of song structure and arrangements that were seldom found in professionally produced, commercially successful music (this was more than just amateurism in the pejorative sense of the term). Since the 1950s, many amateur musicians have made music that has only ever been heard and appreciated in private spaces (parties, family occasions, for friends) or at marginal public places (school hops, proms, youth clubs and community centres). During the 1980s in the UK, an entire subculture developed whereby recordings were circulated on cassettes. This is alluded to in Thorn’s memoirs: I first heard the Marine Girls on the band’s home-produced cassette, played to me by a friend in a bedsit; a friend with whom I had also made recordings on cassette and which were circulated in the mail to other non-publicly performing musicians across the country (in an age before the Internet and mobile media). Additional research could detail and document the neglected repertoire of amateur musicians and might broaden our understanding of the sounds that are assumed to be representative of rock and mainstream pop music from the 1960s (celebrated in histories and biographies of bands) to the 1980s (when Cohen was writing), and perhaps during more recent times (and might connect with a critique of the assumptions about the male sound of rock referred to above). There are many tales to be told about other ‘hidden musicians’. By extending Cohen’s distinction, I would suggest that it is possible to identify dependent amateurs adopting an acquiescent relationship to the music industry, uncritically accepting a ‘making it in the music business’ ethos and endorsing commercial values. These may be contrasted with autonomous (I do not mean ‘indie’) amateurs adopting a more critical or ambivalent stance. Again, in practice, such a blunt heuristic dichotomy may be blurred and result in tensions and paradoxes through which the music industry lives off and exploits this activity, quite regardless of the fulfilment and satisfaction gained by hobbyists and amateurs. It is also at this moment when discourses of expectations of appropriate female and male behaviour are mobilised by those deciding whether or not to offer deals to unsigned musicians and when musicians shape their sounds, images and identities to be suited to commercial criteria prevalent at any one time, an issue I shall loop back to later when I discuss the imperatives of the economy of stardom. For the moment it is worth noting that, some twenty-five years after Cohen’s account of unknown bands, the orientations of musicians have changed as revenues from consumer sales of sound recordings has become increasingly irrelevant and as recorded songs are used as a “customer engagement tool” used to sell mobile phones (Seabrook 2014). The romantic belief that signing a deal to produce recordings equates with ‘making it’ is being superseded by recognition that being a musician entails what has often been characterised in recent years, euphemistically, as a ‘portfolio career’. A new term, perhaps, for what was always the case for musicians – a ‘portfolio’ that might entail working in bars, busking, paying to record songs in studios and to play gigs, whilst working in an Apple store, as a freelance proofreader or in a small web design company.

Making it in the big city At this point our narratives leave behind ambivalent amateurs and hobbyists and crossfade into another episode in the chronicle of musicians seeking attention, recognition and reward. Yet another familiar story is told. Musicians acquire their skills and struggle with adversity, battle against indifference and support themselves through working as waiters/waitresses or by eking out an existence on ever-dwindling state benefits, until there is a breakthrough moment, after which recognition and reward follow. 157

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Early struggles are energised by a pivotal geographical move; a physical relocation from small town, village or suburb to city. Whilst the characteristics of place, and movement across space, have been extensively interrogated as themes in the geographies of musical identity (Stokes 1994; Connell and Gibson 2002; Whiteley, Bennett and Hawkins 2004), discussions of place have rarely addressed the geographical movement that is central to the desire to get a deal and a prominent theme in the narratives of success: rewards reaped in the city allow successful musicians exclusive access to a secluded country estate, security fenced mansion or island hideaway. In this story, the city is the site of opportunity and exposure, contacts and networks, deals and patronage, critical recognition and financial reward. This is a persistent narrative, celebrated in numerous songs. It continues to inform the aspirations of countless unknown musicians, even in the age of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and networked communication. Although it is apparently so easy to create and distribute music across space and link with entrepreneurs, investors and audiences, a real sense of place endures. Evidence can continually be found in media profiles of new performers. For example, the band The Wild Beasts formed during 2002–2004 in Kendal, a small town (population about 30,000) in the Lake District, Northern England. In 2005, they then moved to Leeds (population about 750,000) where three of the four members attended University. After this they moved about 190 miles south to Stoke Newington in northeast London, a neighbourhood that was a small village outside the city at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, it was considered a Pooterish suburb, until it formally became part of the inner London borough of Hackney in 1965. Five miles from central London, with no underground line, it can take longer to reach the centre on public transport than many of the commuter trains that come into London from twenty miles outside the city. But, you can tell people you are living in London. You have a London postcode (N16). And, at this moment, it had become something of the place to be for conventional male rock bands like the Wild Beasts, who decided to move to Stoke Newington because – to quote their bass player Tom Fleming – they were “close . . . to being just another pub band from Leeds” and in London “[you] have to have something to say otherwise you are just guys pretending” (Brey 2011). The band clearly felt that they had something to say, and this move to northeast London was one way of articulating it. Comparable tales about moving to make it in the big city have been narrated throughout Europe and North America, with similar location hopping from small town or village to the nearest big town with a scene. In the UK, this might be a move to Liverpool, or Manchester, or Cardiff, or Glasgow, or Sheffield or Belfast, and then a subsequent move to London. Tracey Thorn, who grew up in Brookman’s Park, Hatfield, some twenty miles from London, remembers that as soon as she got her degree from Hull University she “straight away moved to London”. Recalling how she abandoned any alternative plans to pursue a PhD, Thorn said “there was a music career here which seemed mine for the taking . . . Morrissey and Marr were living in London now too” (2013, 150), the two songwriters of The Smiths having moved down from Manchester. The move from suburbs to city was celebrated in accounts of 1970s rock culture in the UK with the south London suburbs providing a backdrop to the aspirations of, amongst others, David Bowie, Siouxsie Sioux, The Cure and Kate Bush, with a biography of the latter suitably entitled The Princess of Suburbia. Louise Wener of the band Sleeper grew up in the northeast London suburb of Gants Hill and in her memoirs of Brit-pop recalled her plan as “something like this: come to London, find a room in a shared house, sign on, write some

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chart toppers, get a huge record deal, sign off, move to Hawaii” (Wener 2011, 127). She vividly conveys the feelings of increasing anxiety and desperation, familiar to many bands but not often articulated so candidly: How long is this supposed to take? How long are you meant to give it? Two years? Three years? Four? . . . The days turn to months, the months turn to years, each of them blurring into one another: waitress for six months, office temp for six months, gig a few times, record new demo tape, write new songs, form new band, dump old songs, sign on, sign off, waitress, temp, gig again, save up to record the definitive demo tape. . . . . [O]ur pop clock is ticking. (130, 134, 135) Some fifteen years prior to Sleeper, The Members, from Camberley (some thirty-five miles southwest of London), ironically satirised their anxieties and observations of the move to London in two songs released in 1979, ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ (listing boring details of small town life) – a title that has been used in at least two academic articles on popular music and suburbia; and ‘Solitary Confinement’, in which they sneered at an unnamed naïve suburbanite who makes the move “up to London Town” where they “think everything’s happening” and ends up “living in a bedsit” in “solitary confinement”. The image of solitary confinement in a bedsit (a single room in a house of many occupants with a shared bathroom) evokes the city from a prisoner’s cell of isolation and loneliness, the antithesis of participating in a place where everything is happening. This is a capital that, in the words of The Clash’s ‘London’s Burning’ (1977), is “burning with boredom” and where “everyone’s sitting round watching television” and where “I run through the empty stone because I’m all alone”. The sense of urban alienation – of being in close proximity to strangers (as neighbours, on transport, on the street) yet experiencing a loss of connection – is a poetic sensibility that Raymond Williams has traced back to the writings of William Blake and William Wordsworth. Williams writes of how Thomas Hardy evoked a “sense of paradox: that in the great city itself, the very place and agency – or so it would seem – of collective consciousness, it is an absence of common feeling, an excessive subjectivity, that seems to be characteristic” (Williams 1973, 215). In discussing a long history of literary representations and commentary, Williams highlights how the city as site of opportunity became mapped onto a dichotomy of country and city. The rock musician’s belief that the city is the site of possibility and cosmopolitanism (the limitations of the country, village and small town to be escaped) is part of a much longer history of ideas and imagery. Williams quotes from Arthur Young, writing in 1768: “Young men and women in the country fix their eye on London as the last stage of their hope. . . . The number of young women that fly there is incredible” (Williams 1973, 146). Despite the fact that women have been moving to cities for centuries, the distinction between country and city has sometimes been mapped on to the binaries of culture/nature, public/private and male/female. Elizabeth Wilson challenged these dichotomies in her research, whilst arguing that the masculine has tended to dominate in the architecture, imagery and behaviours of urban public space (Wilson 1991). Male dominance was also apparent in the strand of writing about youth subcultures, perhaps at its peak in the late 1970s, in which the visible public masculine street subcultures were celebrated, whereas the more private female bedroom cultures were ignored, although later recuperated and revalued following feminist critique, notably in the writings of McRobbie (1980).

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Stardom and the commodification of the self As women and men negotiate the contradictory demands and paradoxes of city life, the attraction is not only the bright lights and the stages in clubs and venues, but commerce and ‘the deal’. The main offices of the large and many of the significant small music companies have been based in London since the days of music publishing and then recording. If ‘making it’ in the big city is ultimately about anything (other than illusions), it is about fame, fortune and freedom from necessity. The music business, as part of a wider entertainment industry, is structured around the dynamics of stardom. It is towards some form of stardom that musicians who move to the city aspire – as evidenced in Wener’s wry quote about moving to Hawaii. The attractions of stardom for individual musicians hardly need stating in terms of the financial rewards and their consequences. Fame not only benefits the musician, stardom is crucial for a music company’s profitability. Stars impact upon a company’s share value and the willingness of investors to put money into a company; stars are indicators of a company’s ability to attract, retain and manage talent. Stars also act as a magnet to attract other musicians (see Negus 1999; Marshall 2013). In media and cultural studies, most discussions of stardom (whether directly or indirectly addressing questions of gender) have tended to focus on representations – the image of the star, or the identifications expressed by audiences. Far less attention has been paid to the materiality of stardom as work and labour, despite Dyer’s argument about the production of stardom in the film industry back in the 1980s: “Stars are involved in making themselves into commodities; they are both labour and the thing that labour produces. They do not produce themselves alone” (Dyer 1986, 5). The star persona or identity is the result of individual effort and labour, and this inevitably begins with dedication and enthusiasm as amateur musicians acquire skills. It then gains intensity with recognition by the music and entertainment industries, and may lead to a type of egotistical labour focused on self-regulation and presentation. Once musicians are within the networks of the music industries, they work as much (if not more) on their personas as their music. As bands become brands (Forde 2012) rather than simply recording artists, ever-more time is devoted to training in media presentation and stagecraft, exercise, workouts and diets, often with recourse to ‘cosmetic’ surgery and the use of prosthetics. Stardom epitomises “the view of the self as an experimental identity or object that does not say I am what I am, but I am what I can become” (King 2007, 339). The pressures to labour on bodily transformation in producing the pop persona are compounded by the pressures and possibilities allowed by the circulation of copyrighted images and sounds. As Rosemary Coombe has observed, A celebrity could, theoretically at least, license her signature for use on fashion scarves, grant exclusive rights to reproduce her face to a perfume manufacturer, voice to a charitable organisation, legs to a pantyhose company, particular publicity stills for distribution as posters and postcards, and continue to market her services as a singer, actress, and composer. The human persona is capable of almost infinite commodification, because exclusive, nonexclusive, and temporally, spatially, and functionally limited licenses may be granted for use of any valuable aspect of the celebrity’s public presence. (1998, 91) Stars are a “commodity amongst commodities . . . the cybernetic monitor which returns all efforts to the same apparent core of meaning” (King 1987, 149). Kembrew McLeod quotes 160

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Elizabeth Taylor, when promoting her brand of perfume, declaring without any apparent irony: “I am my own commodity” (McLeod 2005, 197), a clear indication of how stars begin to experience their identity and those of their competitors as comprised of fragmented fungible parts. An insight into intensive commodification of identities can be found in Yeran Kim’s (2011) account of how an aesthetic of ‘Lolita nationalism’ has been central to the construction of South Korean ‘girl industries’. Drawing on extensive research and analysis of the experience of girl and boy K-pop musicians, Kim makes three pertinent points. First, she argues that a highly selective version of young girl bodies and identities has been systematically constructed and strategically commodified in the creation of ‘girl industries’, exaggerating the existing star system whereby musicians are encouraged to commodify themselves and to break down their bodily personas into copyrightable components, framed according to notions of beauty, style and sex appeal. Second, on this point, she suggests that an ‘ambiguous’ and ‘innocent’ form of sexuality has been disseminated and normalised in visual representations and practice as the required mode for performers, and their fans, to adopt and to deploy when presenting themselves. Third, this ‘girl identity’ has been exploited both within Korea and globally as a form of ‘Lolita nationalism’ and as an integral part of the ‘idol republic’. Kim calls for a feminist critique of the normalisation of this exploitative commercial process and its representations; an assessment of its consequences for how girls and young women act, perceive and present themselves; and a critique of its impact on international perceptions of South Korean female identity. Meanwhile, a short hop across the planet, the paradoxes and contradictions of the US pop star system are articulated in the seemingly post-ironic ‘commodity feminism’ (Goldman, Heath and Smith 1991) of Rihanna or Beyoncé.

Has beens and never weres Employing a metaphor that has become almost a cliché in tales of music business stardom, Wener narrates the decline of the band Sleeper and her disillusionment with the music industry and showbiz – “the circus motors on to its inevitable end” (Wener 2011, 303). An end that has been looming, it has caused her to reflect in these terms: “All pop careers, like political ones, end in failure and I knew I would reach this point sooner or later, but the pace with which it happens is shocking. One moment you’re elated and immune on a platinum tour, the next you’re clinging to the rock face, trying to stop yourself falling” (Wener 2011, 298). Many more stories of successful bands and musicians get published than tales of decline and fall. Yet, the latter can be insightful, moving and occasionally bathetic. In Nicky Forbes’s memoir of his time in The Rezillos/Revillos he narrates the increasingly desperate state of a group in decline as he accepts a New Year’s Eve gig with a local band whose leader apologetically says, “I don’t like to ask you, ‘cos I know you’ve ‘made it’ now, but our drummer’s ill. But the gig only pays you 20 quid” (Forbes 2008, 117). As Forbes remembers: The year had started with me happily on Virgin Records: a pop star on Top Of The Pops, hobnobbing with the rich and famous on myriad TV shows and interviews, chart singles, promo videos, radio sessions; an album release plus packed, wild, crazy gigs. The group had been splashed across the covers of the music papers, national and European press, with photo sessions galore. We had toured Britain, Holland, Belgium, France and Ireland. And now, 1980 had stumbled to a close with 161

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a pub band gig at the King’s Head in the village of Tiptree, Essex, on the stageless, swirly-carpeted floor of the lounge bar. Worst of all, I’d never been so grateful for £20. (Forbes 2008, 118) In this woeful tale of a band on the way down, he recalls a gig in the wooden hut of a Territorial Army Centre in York (a city where they had once played to a packed University) and where no one had thought to book a PA. On they go, playing to fewer people, their final UK tour being a “sad, pathetic affair” (Forbes 2008, 235). Forbes concludes his memoirs by reflecting on why he persevered for so long and asks what, if anything, he got out of the experience. He refers to long-term physical damage to his ears and stomach, and mentions that other members of the band suffered addictions and had problems with their physical and mental health. Towards the end, he recounts a conversation during which someone says to him, “You’re just a forgotten old has-been” (Forbes 2008, 246). It is a familiar phrase and one used to caustic and ironic effect in William Shatner’s song of that title, ‘Has Been’, in which he angrily intones a response to such a comment over spoof spaghetti western rhythms, twanging guitars and distant trumpets – “you calling me ‘has been’? What did you say your name is?” Shatner addresses “the never was”, talking about “still trying”, and those who “laugh at others’ failures” yet have done and achieved nothing. Forbes conclusion is similar – better a ‘has been’ than a ‘never was’. The ultimate stigmatisation of those investing their efforts in the pop music circus is signalled by these two terms casually used to describe musicians; phrases seldom, if ever, subject to critical reflection. The term ‘has been’ defines a musician who was once ‘somebody’, an acclaimed and successful person now deemed to be past their best, in decline, their creative currency and public recognition devalued. The ‘never weres’ are those musicians (or bands) that never achieved the requisite level of acclaim, the ones who never ‘made it’. Out of the ‘public eye’ they remain invisible and inaudible, deemed to have failed. These categories indicate how an entertainment industry shapes public discourse through systems of values about life trajectories, endurance and repeated achievement, restricted notions of fame, fashion and commodity aesthetics. Such critically neglected judgements (‘has been’, ‘never were’) influence (often unobtrusively) the activities and values of musicians, critics, academics and fans. It is a long way from the pleasure and perseverance of amateurs making music for the intrinsic pleasure. Yet, musicians are not the hapless victims of a dynamic beyond their control, as evidenced in more voluntary steps from the spotlight. In Tracey Thorn’s account of her self-confessed attempt to be ‘somebody’, an aim admitted to in the first part of the book, she recalls a moment when Everything But The Girl were offered the opportunity to support U2 on a major US tour. Not only does Thorn wonder about the wisdom of stepping on to a stadium stage in front of an impatient rock audience, she begins reflecting on life and a conversation she has had with Liam Gallagher who told her that he was “desperate to have kids” (Thorn 2013, 316). Her response to the offer to tour with U2 was “I think I want to stop now” (Thorn 2013, 320). As Thorn becomes a mother of twins and then attempts to tour with two toddlers, her reflections succinctly raise many of the issues about becoming a musician and the meaning of success that I have been alluding to in this chapter. She recalls preparing for a gig: At that point I’d have to try and turn myself into someone else. Someone less like a mum with sick down her T-shirt and more like a pop star. . . . No, it wasn’t just the 162

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exhaustion. It was more the split-personality thing of having two different people at different times of the day. ‘Mummy’ in daylight hours, except when I was also called upon to do my job of soundchecking for the night’s gig. Then, later that night, when the audience had arrived and the lights were down, I’d go onstage and have to become someone else, a character I’d never been that comfortable with anyway – a singing show-off – only now I felt even more of a phoney and a fraud than ever before. It was all my onstage nightmares rolled into one. (Thorn 2013, 330) Narratives of pop music success and failure are replete with the anxieties and experiences of how a nobody works their self into someone else in order to become a somebody, and must then assume a character and adopt a persona (see Negus 2011). Such stories also include reference to the true self, the real person (quite regardless of academic suspicion of notions of authenticity). If our roles in social life – mother, father, musician, accountant, nurse, soldier – entail a performance (Goffman 1959) and if gender identities are performed, whether on stage or in our everyday lives (Butler 1990), a study of the narratives of fulfilment, fame and failure could provide rich insights into how these identities collide, provoking further questions: in what ways is it different for girls? In what ways is it different for boys? In what way might a focus on gender lead us to ignore other relevant narratives and experiences of class, race, sexuality, disability, age and geography (all could be inserted in this chapter at various points)? The category of gender provides one way of illuminating aspects of popular music culture. Circumstances, events, situations and experiences may be narrated in contrasting ways, from other perspectives. Such experiences may be recounted in the written, sung and studied narratives of musicians who join the circus, those dropped by the circus, those who run away from the circus and those who have no inclination to become part of the circus in the first place.

Bibliography Albertine, Viv. 2015. Clothes, Music, Boys. London: Faber and Faber. Bayton, Mavis. 1998. Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical Is Man? London: Faber and Faber. Brey, Elisa. 2011. “The Art Rockers with a Touch of Magic.” Independent Arts & Books, 18 November 2011, 14–15. Burns, Lori, and Melisse Lafrance. 2001. Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity & Popular Music. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Clawson, Mary Ann. 1999. “Masculinity and Skill Acquisition in the Adolescent Rock Band.” Popular Music 18 (1): 99–114. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Princeton: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohen, Sara. 2007. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Aldershot: Ashgate. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2002. Sound Tracks: Popular Music Identity and Place. London: Routledge. Coombe, Rosemary. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dyer, Richard. 1986. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: British Film Institute. Dyer, Richard. 1990. “In Defence of Disco.” In On Record, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 351–358. London: Routledge. 163

Keith Negus Finnegan, Ruth. 2007 [1989]. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Second edition. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Forbes, Nicky. 2008. The Rhythm Method. Suffolk and Watt (no location). Forde, Eamonn. 2012. “Product Placement: I’m With The Brand.” Word Magazine 113 (July): 58–61. Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. 1978. “Rock and Sexuality.” Screen Education 29 (1978–79): 3–19. Gilbert, Jeremy, and Ewan Pearson. 1999. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. London and New York: Routledge. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Goldman, Robert, Deborah Heath, and Sharon L. Smith. 1991. “Commodity Feminism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (3): 333–351. Gordon, Kim. 2015. Girl in a Band. London: Faber and Faber. Green, Lucy. 1997. Music, Gender, Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Lucy. 2002. How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hennion, Antoine. 1999. “Music Industry and Music Lovers, Beyond Benjamin: The Return of the Amateur.” Soundscapes.info, 2, July 1999. http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/ MIE/Part2_chapter06.shtml (accessed 29 March 2011). Kim, Yeran. 2011. “Idol Republic: The Global Emergence of Girl Industries and the Commercialisation of Girl Bodies.” Journal of Gender Studies 20 (4): 333–345. King, Barry. 1987. “The Star and the Commodity: Notes towards a Performance Theory of Stardom.” Cultural Studies 1 (2): 145–161. King, Barry. 2007. “Modularity and the Aesthetics of Self-Commodification.” In As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, ed. Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie, and John Roberts, 319–345. Oxford: Peter Lang. Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Farnham: Ashgate. Marshall, Lee. 2013. “The Structural Functions of Stardom in the Recording Industry.” Popular Music and Society 36 (5): 578–596. McLeod, Kembrew. 2005. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. New York: Doubleday. McRobbie, Angela. 1980. “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique.” Screen Education 34 (1980): 111–123. Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Arnold. Out of print book. Pdf available – http://research.gold.ac.uk/5453/. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge. Negus, Keith. 2011. “Authorship and the Popular Song.” Music and Letters 92 (4): 607–629. Reddington, Helen. 2012. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. Second edition. Sheffield: Equinox. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. “Can Fictional Narratives be True?” Analecta Husserliana 14 (1983): 3–19. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative Volume 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1985. Time and Narrative Volume 2. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative Volume 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991a. “Narrated Time.” In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés, 338–354. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991b. “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.” In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés, 99–116. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991c. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés, 425–437. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Sargent, Carey. 2009. “Playing, Shopping, and Working as Rock Musicians: Masculinities in ‘De-Skilled’ and ‘Re-Skilled’ Organisations.” Gender and Society 23 (5): 665–678. Scott, Derek. 2010. Musical Style and Social Meaning: Selected Essays. Farnham: Ashgate. Seabrook, John. 2014. “Revenue Streams.” The New Yorker, 24 November 2014, http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2014/11/24/revenue-streams. Spencer, Amy. 2008. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. London: Marion Boyars. 164

Nobodies and somebodies in pop music Stokes, Martin, ed. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Thorn, Tracey. 2013. Disco Bedsit Queen, How I Grew Up and Tried To Be a Pop Star. London: Virago. Wener, Louise. 2011. Just For One Day: Adventures in Britpop. London: Ebury Press. Whiteley, Sheila, Andy Bennett, and Stan Hawkins, eds. 2004. Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wikström, Patrik. 2009. The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge: Polity Press. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1991. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wolfe, Paula. 2012. “A Studio of One’s Own: Music Production, Technology and Gender.” Journal on the Art of Record Production 7 (2012). http://arpjournal.com/a-studio-of-one’s-own-musicproduction-technology-and-gender/.

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12 STAGING THE ‘STREET BOY’ Transculturalism, realness and hypermasculinity in the Norwegian rapper Jesse Jones Birgitte Sandve

Introduction Addressing constructions of authenticity, gender and race forms the focus of this study, which is directed towards the musical performance of Black Norwegian rapper Jesse Jones. Through my discussions of ‘the making of’ Jesse Jones documentary and readings of the music video ‘Gategutt’,1 I show how the staging of a ‘street boy’ persona is grounded in appropriations of gangsta rap aesthetics, and how subjectivity is negotiated through sample aesthetics, bodily display, vocal performance and the audiovisual construction of urban space. Jones’s gangsta persona relies on ‘staging the real’, connecting genre-specific conventions of ‘keeping it real’ with issues concerning the politics of relocation. On the one hand, I maintain that the display of the stereotypical Black male gangsta enables transgression through a conflation of marginalised urban males across notions of time, space, ethnicity, race and cultural belonging. On the other hand, I attempt to demonstrate that the audiovisual construction of Jesse Jones’ hypermasculinity draws on heteronormativity, where fixed notions of masculinity prevail. Hence, the audiovisual display of Jesse Jones opens up for critical perspectives on how the ‘marginal’ is constructed and negotiated through cultural appropriation and recontextualization in a vibrant transcultural space.2

Jesse Jones – constructions of a ‘real’ street boy Born in 1981, Jonas Tekeste aka Jesse Jones is a Norwegian rapper from the drabantby3 (suburb) Haugenstua in eastside Oslo.4 The Norwegian hip-hop writer, Øyvind Holen, has described how Haugenstua was left to decline into a “no man’s land cut off from the subway and with no local offers left for the community”.5 Holen draws upon various accounts of Haugenstua through public media, which paint a negative picture of the place as dominated by “armed robbery, vandalism and car thefts” (Holen 2005, 199). In the opening of the documentary Gategutt (2010), it seems as if the TV producer aims at capturing Haugenstua as ‘a modern ruin’6 by cutting between the freight train going past behind barbed wire fences and the grey, high-rise buildings that are located on the other side. Jonas Tekeste is introduced as he appears through the main entrance of one of these buildings. Wearing a large black quilted jacket, dark Ray-Ban sunglasses, baggy jeans and big black sneakers, he fulfills the conventions of hip-hop style. 166

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The documentary concerns the recording process of the album 12 blokker og 1 vei inn (12 blocks and one way in), offering important insights into how artist identity is molded and shaped through the conflation of biographical elements, promotional strategies and the stylization of the artist through the media. Notably, the TV production highlights the ways in which biography merges with musical style by paying attention to the ‘gangsta’ image of Jones, the artist. The use of different locations contributes to this from various perspectives. Filmed in his childhood drabantby Haugenstua, Jones recalls adolescent years filled with gang activity, drugs and violent behavior. During a visit to Oslo prison, he recalls that the time he spent there as an inmate brought forth his inner ‘wild beast’ (villdyret). A short trip to one of the rougher urban areas on the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden, creates a sense of street credibility (quite removed from his own neighborhood). Additionally, the documentary narrates Jonas/Jesse’s troubled path to becoming a professional artist, and how the obligations and demands from the music business, on several occasions, came into conflict with Jones’s own conception of being in control of the situation. A section that shows the shooting of a promotional music video for the reality series Robinsonekspedisjonen7 clearly illustrates what was at stake for Jones during this process. The series’s host,8 Christer Falck, had the idea to cast Jesse Jones as a caddy in the service of the well-established Norwegian rapper Vinni and Jesse’s producer and DJ, Tommy Tee. Jones, however, was strongly opposed to acting as servant for these two guys, arguing that: Considering my background and the way I am . . . I need to think about more than just music journalists and . . . champagne and . . . wine glasses and . . . cameras and . . . do you understand? I need to think about the street, about those . . . where I come from. First and foremost, that’s what I represent.9 So, while both Christer Falck and Jesse Jones’s manager Gunnar Greve argued that the casting was made in order to situate Vinni and Tommy Tee in the role of ‘Godfathers’, Jesse saw through the complex ploy of this promotional gimmick. Indeed, playing the role of underdog threatened to undermine the credibility of the local community that he claimed to represent, and, staging a Black male at the beck and call of two White men invoked connotations of a master/slave dialectic. The uncanny aspect to this becomes particularly evident through Falck’s remark that “black people have the perfect lips for a tee shot [golf sport terminology] and this is what I hope Jesse is up to”.10 Although Falck is renowned for his sarcastic and ironic disposition, considering Jesse’s unease with the whole situation, this comment is problematic. Hence, Jesse Jones’s reluctant stance both mirrors notions of street credibility and the racial underpinnings of rap music. Watching the finished music video,11 however, Jesse’s role as caddy would be rearticulated through the subversive acts of giving the finger to the camera and urinating in the Champagne bottle before serving it to his ‘masters’. In this way, Jesse Jones became empowered through an act of disobedience and deliberate ‘failure’ to fulfill the requirements of his subservient role. Another example that involves a reversal of status quo is the capitalist logic of Jesse Jones’s statement “Haugenstua tjener penger” (“Haugenstua is making money”), which appeared both in rap lyrics and printed on t-shirts sold at the time of the album release of 12 Blokker . . .. By implying that the release of this album (and, as a result, the success of the artist) would lead to commercial profit in this urban area, Jesse Jones is situated as a powerful local figure. In line with Tricia Rose, I want to suggest that he is claiming access to and power over a public space (Rose 1994, 124) through (anticipated) economic and artistic success. Hence, by substituting his individual identity for the social geography of Haugenstua, Jesse Jones 167

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achieves what Murray Forman terms a “place-based identity” (Forman 2004, 203). Identifying the connection between artists and urban space to the significance placed on ‘shout outs’ in hardcore rap, Forman argues that ‘representing’ the hood or the street is vital to ‘keeping it real’: Successful acts are expected to maintain connections to the ‘hood and to ‘keep it real’ thematically, rapping about situations, scenes and sites that comprise the lived experience of the ‘hood. (Forman 2004, 207) In his discussion of the song ‘Raised in Compton’ performed by MC Eight, a member of Compton’s Most Wanted, Forman argues that subjective history and the experience of space “together offer relevant insights on the social construction of a gangster attitude or a gang member’s raison d’etre” (Forman 2004, 215). Similarly, Haugenstua becomes Jesse Jones’s raison d’être, a highly significant place for the social and aesthetic construction of gangster imagery within a Norwegian context. In her analysis of the Norwegian rap group Tungtvann, Anne Danielsen notes that there are few urban areas in Norway suitable for comparison with Black American ‘rap-neighborhoods’ (Danielsen 2008, 213), which clearly reveals the challenges involved in claiming a Norwegian gangsta identity. Yet, as argued by Forman, notions of urban space are highly contingent on the processes of ‘staging reality’, whether through public imagination or in aesthetic constructions of the ‘real’. Thus, by taking into account how notions of the ‘hood “are simultaneously real, imaginary, symbolic and mythical” (Forman 2004, 217), Forman demonstrates that to ‘keep it real’ depends on several artistic strategies. Ultimately, Jesse Jones’s rearticulation of the ‘hood into the drabant’ articulates the relocation of African American tropes and his crucial role in situating notions of the ‘real’ in a Norwegian context.

Jesse Jones: Performing the ‘real’ street boy (coughing) It’s not like coming from this place necessarily makes you a criminal and stuff. And, I’m not trying to glorify it or make it sound cool in any way at all. It has brought a lot of shit into my life, you see? But, at the same time, I am who I am. And I’m still here, right. So it’s not like . . . I’m not crying, poor me and blah blah blah . . . but (laughing) . . . you see what I’m saying? . . . I’m just telling you, right, but it’s not that I think it’s tough or . . . cool or . . . it is what it is like.12

In their theorization of personal narratives in pop performances, Stan Hawkins and John Richardson (2011) have noted how the star persona13 can operate on multiple levels, involving mechanisms of telling and not telling through compelling performances: Personal narratives, then, are performative: they pertain not only to what we tell but how we tell and act. Moreover, they are subject to the same forces and constraints that inform all interpretive acts. (Hawkins and Richardson 2011, 59) Hawkins and Richardson argue that the construction of the personal narrative in pop performance is grounded in the theatricality of gendered performance, from which individual agency is shaped and reaffirmed. The ‘telling’ of Jones’s story certainly depends on 168

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multiple performative strategies that shape notions of realness in the street boy. Repeatedly, Jones’s rhetorical questions punctuate his own accounts of the past, which could be understood in terms of a certain necessity – given the implied criminal nature some details cannot be shared – and as a way of shaping the listener’s imagination of Jesse Jones, the street-wise hustler. This illustrates how, in order to come across as real, the story is also highly dependent on what is not being told. Further, Jones’s act of telling and not telling is underlined by the use of conventional, casual street wear and mannerisms. Importantly, then, the construction of Jones’s hustler identity depends on the stylization of vocal mannerisms and visual appearance and the ways in which selected parts of Tekeste’s biography are highlighted and repeated in various statements offered through different media. A common version focuses on how he, from the age of 17, spent several years in and out of prison, serving sentences for drug-related crimes and an incident of serious violence in which a police officer was stabbed. According to the documentary, while serving time, he had the opportunity to join the prison’s studio music program, which spurred his interest for rapping. Some years later, he caught the attention of prominent Norwegian hip-hop producer and DJ, Tommy Tee, who saw the potential for ‘something new’ in his expression. So, what was this ‘new’ element that Tee picked up on? To start with, Jonas Tekeste’s life story laid the foundation for a gangsta presence that had been ‘missing’14 in Norwegian rap up until this moment. In Miles White’s definition, the gangsta rapper embodies a hardness and brutality, which comes to represent a subversive site through performance: “In hip-hop, the body is privileged through motion and gesture that subvert the regulation of the bourgeois body and its normative vertical axis, wherein the lower body stratum is regulated or denied” (White 2011, 41). In Jesse Jones’s posing both in live performances and music videos,15 he would illustrate how the ‘lower body stratum’ becomes part of the visual iconography of this artist, whereby the pelvic area is accentuated through repeated hand gestures that emphasize the male sex organs. Hence, Jones’s bodily display draws on the iconographic gesture of ‘crotch grabbing’ not only as an integral part of hardcore rap, but also a “threat of sexual aggression that black males have been so historically assailed [sic]” (White 2011, 41). The artist’s intense and direct stare into the camera represents another iconic trait. This locks into the stylized expression of mean mugging, a defiant gaze that “has become virtually a cachet with hard styles of rap performance” (White 2011, 43). Following a long, historical line in African American culture, these stylized expressive gestures have been employed by socially disempowered Black (male) youth as that which “signifies upon and critiques relations of race, power, and social position” (White 2011, 43). Hence, Jesse’s appropriation of cultural codes through iconography raises the issue of recontextualization and how a Black American gangsta image might be transported into a Norwegian urban setting. As such, this informs the ways in which negotiations of ‘realness’ are contingent upon multifaceted mediations of personal narrative. The transition from the ‘real person’ Jonas Tekeste to the ‘artist persona’ Jesse Jones shows the mechanisms involved in the shaping of artist identity. In the documentary Gategutt, manager Gunnar Greve reflects on his role in relation to the artistic career of Jonas Tekeste: “With Jonas/Jesse Jones it’s sort of . . . there’s a . . . raw material that needs to be moulded . . . the product has to be recorded and written and you sort of have to do everything really, from A to Z”.16 Greve’s reference to ‘Jonas’ as ‘raw material’ implies that ‘Jesse Jones’ is a commodified entity. The transformation process suggested by this intersects with Philip Auslander’s theorization of the ‘real person’ and ‘performance persona’ (Auslander 2009). Auslander argues that performance “personae are based in the social perceptions 169

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of the musician” (Auslander 2009, 306) – a musical performer constitutes an individual appearance from a set of social constraints, where genre conventions play a significant role. Although he is both born and raised in Norway, Jonas Tekeste’s Eritrean family background is underlined in social media profiles,17 through interviews and in lines such as “denne er til gutta” and “alle eritreere, boysa mine” (“this goes out to the homies” and “all Eritreans, my homies”).18 In other lyrics, however, general notions of ‘the black American gangsta’ are recontextualized in Jesse Jones’s staging of a ‘criminal minded nigga’19 (‘en kriminell svarting’).20 One might argue then that the transition from the ‘real person’, Jonas Tekeste, to the ‘artist persona’, Jesse Jones, reveals an ethno-cultural renegotiation of (gangsta) rap as a ‘Black (American) thing’, to rephrase Bakiri Kitwana (2005). In this sense, the rapper’s Eritrean (and African) descent is played down in the appropriation of an Anglo-American sounding name. Arguably, Jesse Jones’s display of ‘Blackness’ is identifiable as African American rather than African-European. Granted, my assertion raises questions about how the cultural implications of racial identity get entangled with notions of masculinity, which in gangsta rap are connected through notions of the hypermasculine black male. According to Jeffrey Ogbar (2007), the trope of hypermasculinity in rap marks out a “point of reference to male authenticity” in three significant ways: (1) willful ability to inflict violent harm on adversaries, (2) willful ability to have sex with many women, (3) access to material resources that are largely inaccessible to others. (Ogbar 2007, 75) Ogbar’s definition has parity in the ways that hypermasculinity is conceived in psychological terms, with a focus on the exaggerated masculine style, where personal traits such as courage, stoicism and heroism are valued (Mosher and Sirkin 1984). However, for Ogbar, the ‘exaggerated masculine style’ of rap is also directly related to notions of the badman,21 a longstanding trope within the Black vernacular that challenges authorities in society through reckless behavior and by not confirming to social norms. According to Ogbar, the trope of hypermasculinity simultaneously draws upon the social realities of young Black men and the hyperbolic stylization of Black masculinity. Notably, Imani Perry observes that the badman figure intersects with the bad nigga, as both descriptions encapsulate outlawed positions in society. In gangsta rap, the bad nigga/badman figure constitutes “the metaphor of the drug dealer [which] both reflects an actual category of human existence and provides a symbolic means of articulating a kind of power within the hood, an overwhelmingly powerless context, and an exploitation of the power created by fear of the hood experienced by outsiders” (Perry 2004, 104). On the one hand, hypermasculinity becomes a strategy for staking out social and cultural difference, where Black masculinity becomes a site for negotiating resistance to racial and social oppression. On the other hand, the appropriation of the ‘Other’ by White dominant culture turns the Black body into a commodity where cultural stereotyping – exemplified by the hypersexual Black male – represents a projection of White supremacist suppression of bodily desire (Gray 2005; hooks 2012; Segal 2007; White 2011). Hence, Black masculinity is constructed through complex processes of identity formation, “polarized between desire and demonization” (White 2011, 61). Returning to Jesse Jones, then, several critical questions need to be posed: does his appropriation of gangsta rap provide a symbolic site for articulating street power? Does his hypermasculine performance reaffirm the racial and gendered bias mediated through mainstream 170

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culture? And, how does the personal narrative of Jesse Jones impinge on the commodification of Otherness within a transcultural Norwegian context?

‘Gategutt’ – the musical layering of a street boy In 2011, the collaboration with Tommy Tee resulted in the release of the album 12 blokker og 1 vei inn. Providing Jesse Jones with his commercial breakthrough with the single ‘Gategutt’. A main component of this track is a sample from the protest song ‘Gategutt’, performed by Norwegian singer-songwriter Lillebjørn Nilsen. Nilsen’s song from 1973 is in turn based on Rudolf Nilsen’s poem ‘Gategutt’ (1926),22 depicting the harsh realities facing a street boy growing up in the poor working class areas of Oslo in the 1920s. In the sound production of Jesse Jones’s ‘Gategutt’, the sample from Lillebjørn Nilsen’s song sets the tone for Jesse’s lines and the refrains sung by Vinni, a recontextualizing of Rudolf Nilsen’s poem in a contemporary take on an Oslo ‘street boy’. Besides being one of the most characteristic stylistic features of rap music, the sampling techniques used in ‘Gategutt’ also connote a Bakhtinian notion of dialogism, inscribing a set of poignant utterances into this text. Prior to Jones’s release, Rudolf Nilsen’s ‘street boy’ had been rearticulated through the performance of Lillebjørn Nilsen, whose music formed part of the social protest movement of the 1970s. This type of inscription raises issues concerning politics of location, by positioning Jones’s performance alongside an intergenerational leftist stance on social destitution in the interwar period and the radical 1970s. Here, one might assume that Oslo functions as a kind of spatial ‘glue’, bridging together representations of marginalized males across time and space. Thus, the social protest and rebellion implied in Jesse Jones’s identification with gangsta rap is recontextualized by employing a distinctly urban and Norwegian musical sample. Furthermore, the lyrics performed by Jesse and Vinni hark back to their predecessors (Nilsen and Nilsen) in multiple ways. It seems that the literary realism of Nilsen’s working class poetry, the protest song of the 1970s and early 21st-century gangsta rap all draw upon poetics of the ‘real’, although departing radically through “historical situation and in [its] situation with social totality” (Krims 2000, 70). In accordance with Adam Krims’s theorizations of the poetics and politics of rap (Krims 2000, 70), the sampling technique in ‘Gategutt’ illuminates the ways in which the ‘hardness’ of a rapper’s depicted life experience is invoked by musical fragments that generate a destabilizing effect through sound layering. In Jesse Jones’s ‘Gategutt’, only the first two verse lines of the song are used: “Jeg kom til verden i en mursteinsgård og ble en gategutt” (“I was born in a brick building and became a street boy”). Curiously, the emotional excess of Rudolf Nilsen’s poetic language – describing the tragic life story of a street boy from cradle to grave – is rendered absent through the sample as the poem becomes fragmented and reassembled as a level-headed depiction of the protagonist’s urban location through musical transition. There is a dismantling and reduction of emotional excess, which is in line with the gangsta aesthetics mediated through ‘Gategutt’. As pointed out above, the visual iconography of Jesse Jones draws on images of the street thug, connoting stereotypes of urban Black masculinity. The hardness and coolness implied through the visual display of the performer is also evident through the use of sonic markers23 in the vocal performance of Jesse Jones. A closer look at the musical layering in ‘Gategutt’ reveals how sonic markers inform the aesthetics of this song and position the artist. Such markers, to use Eirik Askerøi’s term, “are contingent upon cultural codification within a specific context” (Askerøi 2013, 19). In ‘Gategutt’, cultural codification becomes apparent on several levels: the first relates to how the lyrics combine a “bitter street-hardened sense of irony” (George 1998, 48) with a ‘being’ narrative in which gangsta rap is used to position “a 171

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first-person story of a gangster” (Perry 2004, 92). Following Perry’s argument, when Jesse Jones delivers the lines “Fra start til slutt er jeg en Gategutt/Eneste de fikk av meg var et jævla kutt” (“From beginning to end I’m a street boy/Only thing they got from me was a fucking cut”), this represents “the archetypes present in ‘being’ tales – or knowing the actual lives in (black) urban communities” (Perry 2004, 92). Listeners familiar with Tekeste’s background are likely to pick up on the allusion to the police stabbing incident. As such, the lines also signify an anti-authoritarian attitude of the outlaw, where [T]he lack of clarity . . . represents the struggle against the repressiveness of traditional literariness in terms of content censorship, and, more importantly, in terms of the limitations tradition imposes on structural innovation. (Perry 2004, 50) Perry’s observation of the structural innovation of rap lyrics certainly pertains to Jones’s lines cited earlier. The words ‘gategutt’/‘kutt’ (cut) elaborate on Rudolf Nilsen’s rhyming words ‘gategutt’/’krutt’ (gunpowder)/’skutt’ (shot) in the poem. Further, poetic intertextuality of this type helps strengthen the historical connection between the portrayed male devastation in Nilsen’s poem and Jones’s depiction of criminally minded young males including the ‘real person’ Jonas Tekeste. Aspects of vocality lead to questions of cultural codification and musicological address. Here, references to street violence, drug abuse and the protagonist’s criminal records are presented in a genre with conventional provocative language, mediated through a simplistic, unpolished rhythmic flow. In ‘Gategutt’, Jones deploys regular quavers, occasionally punctured by crochets and musical pausing, in the delivery of the lyrics. Both verses are divided into five four-bar units, where the last four bars create a transition into the hook. Each four-bar unit is joined to the next by end couplets, occurring often at the end of two or more measures per unit. Another stylistic trait of Jesse’s flow is found in the way upbeats are placed behind the beat with the lyrics delivered in a somewhat laidback, yet regular rhythmic flow. This type of vocal phrasing is aligned to what Adam Krims has defined as sung style, characterized by “rhythmic repetition, on-beat accents, regular, on-beat pauses, and strict couplet groupings” (Krims 2000, 50). In linking this type of flow to ‘old-school’ New York based rap, Krims argues that this rap style is also found in West Coast gangsta rappers, such as Too $hort.24 The vocal stylistics of Jesse Jones thus implies a somewhat ‘old fashioned’ way of rapping, which at the same time underlines his relaxed and ‘cool-pose’ gangsta attitude as a performer. Conversely, ‘the cool-pose attitude’ has marked out poor, young Black males through reductionist notions of anti-educational and self-destructive behaviors, commonly associated with mainstream gangsta rap (Rose 2008, 79). Yet, it also represents a survival strategy, where hardness and coolness are necessitated in order to face the tough realities of inner-city “hoods and the policing of urban black communities in the American society” (Rose 2008, 79). Thus, socially undesirable behavior is actively used in rap music in order to subvert middle-class White and Black cultural conventions by deploying ‘ghetto slang’ and the “performance of ubermasculine hardness that can be transmitted through the gaze, body posture, or bodily adornment” (White 2011, 61). In ‘Gategutt’ specific references to Oslo are invoked by the sampling of Lillebjørn Nilsen (and through him Rudolf Nilsen), revealing how these ‘mannerisms of the street’ also operate in a musical sense through the layering and juxtaposition of sonic elements. Importantly, the sample imports the city’s past into the present, verifying Rose’s point that sampling ‘allows’25 the rapper to take on

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another’s ‘voice’ in order to get his own message across, while at the same time signifying through sampled material. In ‘Gategutt’, the use of the term ‘street boy’ in the title and the lyrics repeats and revises the intertexts of the track. Further, the overarching thematics of the lyrics dwell on the harsh living conditions of a street boy, creating a sense of historical continuum that connects notions of time through urban space. However, this aspect of lyrical continuum becomes ruptured through the rhythmic structuring of the track, the sample emerging as a source of musical friction in several ways. This involves a distinct shift in tempo clearly audible in the transition between the sample and the beat introduced in bar five of ‘Gategutt’, where the tempo is increased from 118 bpm to 180 bpm. Stacking up in a way that leads to musical rupture, small segments of the original sample are dispersed throughout the song. Tommy Tee creates friction by juxtaposing the considerably slower pace of Nilsen’s vocals with the rap delivery of Jesse Jones and the sung hook line performed by Vinni. Finally, musical friction is also established by a change in groove. In Lillebjørn Nilsen’s ‘Gategutt’, the downbeat is marked out by the acoustic bass and followed by a steady four-beat rhythm in the guitar. On the third beat of bar four, the guitar chord is sustained, while the treble is tweaked out through the insertion of a fermata. The fermata is abruptly cut by a snare drum hit that sets off Tee’s beat. The booming bass drum supports a heavy downbeat, which is juxtaposed against a loop of Nilsen’s guitar playing and the snare drum. It is the chord progression Em–Bm–Dm that stakes out the harmonic structure that continues from the sample, where the straight four-beat played on the guitar is chopped up, its tempo increased and the rhythm reassembled as offbeat accents. With the snare drum hit on each third, there is a reggae feel to the beat, a clear contrast to the singer–songwriter style of Lillebjørn Nilsen’s ‘Gategutt’. The disparate vocal styles of Lillebjørn Nilsen, Jesse Jones and Vinni prompt another sense of rupture through the details of layering. The hardness of Jones’s flow is stressed through the monotonous, raspy timbre and the bass register tone in his voice, which helps to increase the sense of a macho cool-pose through vocality. In contrast, Lillebjørn Nilsen’s voice has a richer baritone timbre to it, with the melodic lines performed with legato phrasing and a much softer tone of voice. Vinni’s input in the hooks introduces a third voice into the sonic space, bridging the rupture constructed between Nilsen’s melodic singing style and Jones’s rap delivery. Vinni’s singing voice has a raspy timbre to it and is higher pitched than the other two vocalists. His melodic line ranges from middle E to low B, which through overdubbing in the vocal production is doubled and harmonized an octave below in the pressed, lower part of his pitch range. Despite the fact that Vinni’s melodic line is based on an E Aeolian – circling around many of the same notes and with the same downward movement as Nilsen’s – his unpolished, raw sounding voice introduces an aesthetic that is much closer to the vocality of Jesse Jones. This demonstrates how the sampled material from Lillebjørn Nilsen’s ‘Gategutt’ functions as a sonic marker adding both layering and rupture to Tommy Tee’s sound production. It is as if the sample gathers together sonic markers by linking a contemporary imagery of a ‘criminal minded nigga’ to the protest movement of the 1970s, also extending further back to the communist ideology framing Rudolf Nilsen’s poem. In this way, Tommy Tee’s musical revision might be read as an aesthetic strategy, which underscores the notion of the ‘ethic of outlawry’ through sound production. Musically, Jesse Jones’s street boy identity is constructed by juxtaposing the present with the past through “stylistic and technical coding” (see Hawkins 2002), where the sampling technique is both used as a way of structuring the recorded space and as a distinct marker of genre conventions. Thus, in a double-voiced sense this situates

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Figure 12.1

Screen shot from ‘Gategutt’.

him both in relation to a timelessly conceived conception of an Oslo outlaw and within the broader, transcultural space of a 21st-century gangsta rapper.

The performativity of ‘all-male spaces’ The music video ‘Gategutt’ opens with a close-up shot of a Black adolescent male, staring directly into the camera as the credits roll. Lasting for eight seconds, the shot suggests a conflation of the mean mugging of this young man and the sample from Lillebjørn Nilsen’s ‘Gategutt’. In sync with the musical transition from the sample to the beat, Jesse Jones is introduced visually. The straight-on angle, extended from the intro into this second camera sequence, situates Jones within approximately the same camera frame, establishing a visual connection between the characters in each shot. As the video progresses, it becomes clear that the retrospective elements in the lyrics performed by Jesse Jones are (loosely) dramatized through the visual display of the younger male character, the protagonist in the video. The narrative is structured around Jones’s lyrical depiction of his upbringing ‘on the street’, where petty crime, aggressive attitudes and acts of physical violence are played out through protensive activity (Vernallis 2004, 16). Carol Vernallis has utilized this term to show how music video narratives depart from the ‘narrative plank’ found in classical Hollywood film, pointing out that implied story lines often consist of dispersed activities structured by both image and music (Vernallis 2004, 17). Protensive activity in Gategutt is based upon the young Black male and his three ‘homies’, four pickpockets moving around downtown eastside Oslo in search of suitable victims while shoplifting and harassing people their own age. The protagonist assumes a leading role by carrying out the petty crimes, all made possible by his street gang’s ability to distract the surroundings. Such protensive activities draw on associations with the street gang and/or the crew, thereby framing the collective aspects of the visual narrative. Halfway into the music video the four ‘street boys’ hook up with three long-haired, blonde girls, as the protagonist is filmed handing over a mobile phone to one of them. The exchange of presumably stolen goods is followed by close-ups of intimate caressing and hugging between the boys and the demure girls. Ostensibly, the possible romantic relationship implied in this scene is the guys’ ‘reward’ for carrying out their criminal activity. 174

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Yet, a close examination of gender display in ‘Gategutt’ opens up the possibilities of the ‘internal’ workings of the male crew in rap music. In her article ‘Queer(ing) Masculinities in Heterosexist Rap Music’, Freya Jarman-Ivens shows how the excessive display of masculinity through ‘all-male spaces’ in rap music establishes a site for disclosing the slippage between homosociality and homosexuality, a perspective grounded in Sedgwick’s theorizations on the homosocial continuum.26 The homosocial continuum is discernible both visually and audibly in rap music, where the exclusion or objectification of women contributes to the construction and negotiation of heterosexist masculinity: When women are granted entry to this all-male space they are often objectified and fetishized in a way that constructs the space as male dominated and heterosexual. (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 199) In my reading of ‘Gategutt’, I want to argue that the objectification of females operates in various ways. Male bonding is positioned alongside the display of romantic, heterosexual relations, conforming to a heteronormativity that allows homosociality to be played out without risking sexual transgression. This tendency is aligned to what Robert Walser identifies as romance in heavy metal, a strategy of both gender and power that affirms patriarchy through heterosexual relations (Walser 1993, 110). In debating the ‘forging of masculinity’ in heavy metal, Walser inspects the mechanisms of exscription, which refer to the “total denial of gender anxieties through the articulation of fantastic worlds without women – supported by male, sometimes homoerotic, bonding” (Walser 1993, 110). Such a concept of exscription problematizes how male bonding eliminates the ‘threat of women’ in patriarchal ideology through the total exclusion of women. However, as Walser is keen to show, women are included at certain points in texts of exscription, where their presence “as sex objects stabilize[s] the potentially troubling homoeroticism suggested by the male display” (Walser 1993, 116). To some extent, the male bonding in ‘Gategutt’ has a resonance in Walser’s point. On one level, the romantic scene in the video pinpoints the objectification of these adolescent girls by presenting a relationship as a reward or an exchange for material goods. On another level, however, there is no hint of heterosexual romance in the lyrics as the visual representation of the performers, Jesse Jones and Vinni, reveals the slippage of homosociality through the homoeroticism in the rap text. Drawing on the arguments raised both by Walser and Jarman-Ivens, one might consider how the girls on show are intended to stabilize notions of heteronormativity in a space dominated by males, where male bonding is negotiated through the iconography of ‘street boys’. Hence, while representing a potential threat to the male power implied through homosocial relations, the girls simultaneously confirm a stable, male heterosexuality. Yet, if we go along with Jarman-Ivens’s musicological critique of rap, certain musical aspects might also represent a possible ‘threat’ to this sexual stability. For instance, in her analysis of US rapper Eminem, Jarman-Ivens offers a critique on how the homosocial continuum might move beyond the bodily display of a “uniform and unquestionable masculinity” (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 200), arguing for ways in which musical elements might also destabilize the uniform imagery of ‘hypermasculine’ male rappers. Turning to McClary’s (1991) theorizations of the feminine/masculine coding of Western art music traditions, Jarman-Ivens detects several musical elements in rap music, which can be interpreted along the lines of what is traditionally considered the feminine axis. These include the extended use of cyclic motifs (loop technology in sampling techniques), the disruption of rhythmic stability (through flow and contradicting rhythm patterns) and the “avoidance of the traditionally ‘strong’ perfect cadence . . . to generate a sequence that is repeatable ad 175

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infinitum” (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 209). Jarman-Ivens interprets the repetitious elements in rap music in relation to a feminine/masculine divide where cyclic and tensioned musical elements are aligned with femininity. Further, her analysis shows how the rhythmical elaboration of language in rap results in “underassimilated”27 vocal actions (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 205), thereby “undermining the patriarchal structure of communicative language by evading meaning” (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 207). Thus, according to Jarman-Ivens, the musical-linguistic output of rap has a potentially destabilizing effect on notions of the male-centric, gendered performativity: To consider rap in these terms opens up something of an irony: that in the demonstration of their linguistic skills . . . rap artists invoke a mode of utterance that works precisely against the hypermasculine, male-centric world in which they profess to operate. (Jarman-Ivens 2006, 207) I concur partly with Jarman-Ivens’s argument that the prevailing displays of hypermasculinity and/or misogyny and homophobia in gangsta rap certainly reveal a slippage in the homosocial continuum. However, taking into account how gangsta rap aesthetics also work through musical structuring, my reading of ‘Gategutt’ takes a slightly different turn. Let me illuminate this. In the lyrics, fragments of Rudolf Nilsen’s poem are relocated through Jesse Jones’s lyrical portrayal of 21st-century Oslo, thereby generating intertextual layering through repetition. Furthermore, alterations of groove (from a straight four-beat to a reggaeinfused stress on the third as well as the off-beats) and tempo (118 bpm to 180 bpm) in the juxtaposition of the sample with Tommy Tee’s beat fuel notions of rupture through rhythmic instability. Following Jarman-Ivens, both repetitive gestures and rhythmic instability work against notions of the “rational (masculine) structure” of music: “it is the conglomeration of all these factors that renders unstable the construction of masculinity in the genre” (JarmanIvens 2006, 211). In my reading of ‘Gategutt’, I want to suggest that we move beyond the feminine/masculine binary to consider how these musical elements relate to the significance of flow, layering and rupture in rap music. My claim is that the gendered implications of repetition in Western art music do not necessarily befit the multiple dimensions of repetition in Black American and rap music in particular. Henry Louis Gates’s general notion of how to “rename is to revise, and to revise is to signify” (Gates 1989, 50) in Black culture is applicable to the musicological approach I have advocated. Hence, the repetition involved in the use

Figure 12.2

Screen shot from ‘Kommer aldri inn’. 176

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of sample in ‘Gategutt’ represents a signifying practice, where notions of the ‘street boy’ are revised and recontextualized, and where repetition offers another beginning, to paraphrase Tricia Rose (Rose 1994, 70). Importantly, ‘Gategutt’ signifies the marginalized urban male through the genre conventional employment of musical repetition. The audiovisual representation of Jesse Jones through notions of a stereotyped Black male represents yet another repetitious element by reiterating the trope of hypermasculinity. Although rather toned down in the over-simplistic and seemingly innocent heterosexual relationships portrayed through ‘Gategutt’, it is worth considering how aspects of his performance – beyond this particular video – perpetuate sexism and misogyny, which lock into overt displays of masculinity in rap music. My first example of this comes from an interview published by the Norwegian online hip-hop magazine Kingsize in 2009, where the headline ‘Jesse Jones – Criminal Minded’28 is accompanied by a picture showing him with a gun in hand while standing behind a scantily dressed woman who is slicing bread. Set within a kitchen, the conflation of the female/male in this picture resonates with conventional gender roles: the domesticated woman prepares the food for her partner/husband as the male protects his ‘territorial space’. Such exaggerated visual codes, however, open up for consideration the connotative field of gendered iconography. Highly stylized, the woman, while preparing the food, is heavily made up, with a sleeveless blue top and golden slips. Jesse faces her back, with one hand on the gun and clutching the window blinds with the other. Assuming a protective role, he keeps an eye on his ‘babe’/wife at the same time he watches out for possible intruders. She, then, becomes fetishized in a manner that reduces her to the man’s material asset and thereby accentuates the rapper’s hypermasculinity. A second example involves the audiovisual framing of Jesse Jones in the music video ‘Kommer aldri inn’ (2010). Throughout this video, the protagonist is situated in different locations that serve to stereotype gangster life. The first shot depicts him walking out through the prison gates of Oslo fengsel (Oslo Prison), the very place where Tekeste served his sentences. Outside the prison walls, his mate, rapper Tshawe, awaits him before driving off in a flashy BMW. As the video narrative unfolds, the underlying theme of gang warfare becomes evident. In ‘Kommer aldri inn’ the protagonist’s enemy, a man, is filmed running a local car wash. Working out in the office of his car wash, a close-up of this male’s flexed biceps (2:28) and subsequent MMA29 moves suggest the possibility of a physical threat to Jesse and his crew. There is a sense of retaliation by the crew as they drive past the car wash, with hand gestures simulating gunshots aimed at their enemy. The stylized display of drive-by shootings and street fights is underscored by the use of slow motion camera shots. The heightened attention to maleness is emphasized by close-up shots that depict hardness through aggressive, threatening or stone cold facial expressions. Yet, even when seduced by the female sexiness, Jesse appears nonchalant. Thus, the ways in which the visuals frame the protagonist are intended to flaunt masculine excess by the display of overt macho attitudes and signifiers of potency, which border on homoeroticism. On closer inspection, though, the visual editing of the women is also empowering. In one of the scenes, Jones, in a medium-close up shot, sits in front of a bathtub with his head only just covering the woman’s full nudity; she performs a highly sexualized dance behind him. The camera shot draws attention to Jones’ face and the female’s swaying pelvic moves, which creates a visual backdrop. Notably, the woman’s head is not included in the shot. In tandem with this ‘decapitated’ representation, the other females filmed in the penthouse apartment location are objectified and positioned as visual props: the camera frame cuts off at the women’s shoulder level, whereas the full shots blur their faces. Overall, then, the 177

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video taps into the imagery of the ‘criminal minded nigga’ Jesse Jones by displays of wealth, sexually available women and the constant threat of impending danger. However, the lyrics for ‘Kommer aldri inn’ make no reference at all to the women. Thus, Jones’s rap delivery and Tshawe’s sung hook line together establish an all-male sonic space. As I have attempted to demonstrate, both videos, ‘Gategutt’ and ‘Kommer aldri inn’, illuminate the ways in which hypermasculinity is highly contingent upon the audiovisual display of Jesse Jones. The audible exscription of women in both these tracks confirms the ways in which homosociality operates within the ‘all-male space’ of gangsta rap. Moreover, the trope of hypermasculinity is negotiated audibly through the conflation of male voices and lyrical depictions of urban manhood, all of which connect to notions of violence, crime, drugs and the absence of women. Finally, hypermasculinity is framed visually by macho male bodies on display, where the objectification of the female underlines the heterosexist attitude inherent in Jones’ performance.

Conclusion: Hypermasculinity in a transcultural space Jesse Jones’s persona shapes a personal narrative that is identifiable through the mediation of African American (style), Eritrean (ethnicity) and Norwegian (location) cultural markers. Arguably, it is within such a transcultural space that ‘staging the real’ gangsta takes place. As suggested above, Jesse Jones’s artist name marks a shift in the cultural connotations of ‘Blackness’ drawn from hip-hop culture. In line with Bakiri Kitwana’s (2005) notion of ‘hiphop truth’ as representing Black American subculture and Russell Potter’s (1995) idea of hiphop as an ‘African American homespun’, Jesse Jones clearly negotiates a sense of ‘Blackness’ through cultural appropriation. This also tallies with Perry’s critique (2004, 109) insofar as his gendered performativity shows how appropriation works by simultaneously internalizing Black masculine stereotypes and bringing them into focus by constructing a space to decode the bias on black male identity. Whether or not this decoding is successfully achieved is dependent upon multiple performatives that involve the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘where’. Appropriating a distinctly Black American male identity enables Jesse Jones to construct his personal narrative of hypermasculinity, which is grounded in a Norwegian urban context. In taking this critical approach, I conclude that the promotion and overtly macho stance of media exposure and performance reveals the problematic aspects of pandering to stereotypes within a mainstream popular context. Not only does this support the idea that rap music projects a two-dimensional image of masculine identity, but also that it might backfire on Jesse Jones’s claim to represent his local community (in the sense that it fuels the social stigma already attached to the drabantby Haugenstua). Within a broader sense, this fuels the stigma that is placed on Black Norwegian men with immigrant backgrounds. Here it might be argued that his ethnicity connotes the continuous commodification of the Black male body. That said, Jesse Jones’s display of the stereotypical Black male gangsta is a powerful act of transgression that occurs by the conflation of marginalized urban males across impressions of time, space, ethnicity, race and cultural belonging. My argument is that this opens up for a rearticulation of the socio-cultural connotations of rap music as a ‘Black thing’. Thus, Jesse Jones, in his effort to represent his own street community by appropriating a marginal Black American masculine identity, is framed both by his ethnicity and local identity. Ultimately, the transcultural space disclosed through the performance of Jesse Jones is precisely what stages a ‘real’ Norwegian street boy in a constantly changing local context. 178

Jesse Jones: Staging the ‘street boy’

Notes  1 Translated from Norwegian into English, this means ‘street boy’.  2 The study presented here first occurred in the PhD thesis Staging the real: Identity politics and urban space in mainstream Norwegian rap music (Sandve 2014), which was part of the research project “Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context”.  3 Drabantby refers to suburbs in close connection to the city center that were established in the post-WW2 period as part of the rebuilding projects in Norway, and in order to meet the rapid population growth in Oslo due to rural Norwegians moving into the urban areas. Today, the majority of the immigrant population of Norway have settled down in these suburbs, which has transformed these areas into multiethnic communities. For further discussion on demographic changes in Oslo, see Andersen (2012).  4 See http://www.dagsavisen.no/kultur/nye-takter/en-kriminell-svarting-krysser-sitt-spor/ (accessed 26 April 2013).  5 My translation. “Et ingenmannsland avskåret fra T-banenettet og tilbud i nærmiljøet” (Holen 2005, 199).  6 My translation. “En moderne ruin”. Holen takes this expression from the Norwegian architect firm DARK arkitekter (ibid., 198).  7 The reality series is the Norwegian version of Survivor created by the British TV producer Charlie Parson. Robinsonekspedisjonen first aired on Norwegian TV channel TV3 in 1999. Christer Falck won the first year and has since then been hosting the program, see http://snl.no/Robinsonek spedisjonen (accessed 1 July 2014).  8 From the year 2000 to the present.  9 My translation. “Min bakgrunn da og sånn som jeg er. . . så har jeg flere ting å tenke på enn bare disse musikkanmelderne og . . . champagne og . . . vinglass og . . . kamera og . . . forstår du hva jeg mener? Jeg må tenke på gata, jeg må tenke på de . . . det jeg kommer fra. Det er det jeg representerer, først og fremst”. 10 My translation. “Og svarte har jo sånn veldig fine lepper for sånn ‘tee’ i golf . . . å slå” 11 Entitled “Robinsonekspedisjonen – Nord mot sør!”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deGTo VKlnfY (accessed 21 July 2014). 12 My translation. (hosting) “Det er ikke sånn at hvis du er herifra så er du nødvendigvis kriminell og alt mulig. Og jeg prøver ikke å glorifisere det eller gjøre det kult på noen som helst måte. Det har bringi mye dritt til livet mitt, skjønner du? Men samtidig så er jeg den jeg er også. Og jeg står her fortsatt, lissom. Så, det e’kke noe . . . jeg griner ikke, stakkars meg og bla bla bla . . . men (latter) . . . du skjønner hva jeg mener? . . . Jeg bare forteller deg, lissom, men det e’kke sånn at jeg syns det er tøft eller . . . kult eller . . . det er det det er, liksom . . .”. All biographical information and quotations in this section are taken from the TV documentary Gategutt. 13 The concept of ‘star persona’ draws heavily upon the extended research into the Hollywood star system within the broad field of film studies (Dyer 1998; Gledhill 1991) and has, over the last decades, informed research into the pop star, conducted by scholars coming in from popular music studies as well as popular musicology (Auslander 2009; Frith 1996; Goodwin 1992; Hawkins 2002). 14 Holen (2004) mentions a few examples of early 1990s Norwegian gangsta rap, but the genre never got a strong hold on the domestic rap music scene. Explanations of the absence of gangsta rappers in Norway have been linked to the significant influence both American East Coast hardcore rap and ‘britcore’ in the UK had on the formative years of the Norwegian rap music scene (Holen 2004), whereas the domestic hip-hop community remained more skeptical of West Coast–based gangsta rap. 15 The live performance of “Drabantby” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyc5EiF_xb0, accessed 18 May 2013), the video Gategutt (analysed later) and his featured appearance in the music video Opptur (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2KWSY7bg00&feature=endscreen, accessed 18 May 2013) provide examples to this point. 16 My translation. “I Jonas/Jesse Jones sitt tilfelle, så e liksom . . . der e’ det et u. . . et helt uhøvlet emne som skal på en måte formes. Produktet skal spilles inn og skrives og du skal liksom gjøre alt egentlig fra A til Å . . . Det e’ litt ‘make it or break it’.” 17 Norwegian online hip-hop community kingsize.no lists Eritrea as his ‘country of origin’, see http://www. kingsize.no/Profile.aspx?User=be1e146c-9c76–4e3f-ae60–6ce3cbefad60 (accessed 1 June 2013).

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Birgitte Sandve 18 From “Denne er for gutta” (12 blokker . . .). All lyrics excerpts presented in this chapter are transcribed from the recordings of the tracks, and all the translations into English are done by me. 19 I’ve chosen the expression ‘criminal minded’ (as opposed to criminally minded), seeing as this has direct associations with the album Criminal Minded, released in 1987 by the legendary East coast record label Boogie Down Productions, which is one of the early releases of US gangsta rap. Further, an interview with Jesse, which I’ll return to, is titled ‘Criminal Minded’. ‘Nigga’ refers to ‘svarting’, but could also be seen as connoting the Black masculine trope ‘bad nigga’. 20 ‘Kriminell svarting’ is used about Jesse Jones in interviews and also occurs on tracks such as ‘Drabant’ (12 blokker . . .). 21 Different spelling forms are being used in reference to this term. White (2011) consequently employs ‘bad man’, whereas Ogbar (2007) refers to Robin D. G. Kelly’s notion of the ‘baaadman’. I have chosen to follow Ogbar (2007) and Perry (2004) who both employ ‘badman’. 22 The poem ‘Gategutt’ was published in the anthology På gjensyn in 1926. 23 In his research on pop production, Eirik Askerøi has coined the term ‘sonic markers’, which he uses in order to disclose the contextual implications and appropriation of musical sound, and how aspects of music production come to serve a “range of narrative purposes in recorded music” (Askerøi 2013, 17). 24 50 Cent’s flow would serve as another example here, which Krims briefly analyses in his book Music and Urban Geography (Krims 2007, 3–4). According to Krims, 50 Cent’s flow lies in between ‘speech-effusive’ and ‘sung style’. 25 About six months after the release of the album 12 blokker og 1 vei inn, Lillebjørn Nilsen’s record label Grappa made a copyright claim for the use of the sampled material on ‘Gategutt’. The label and Nilsen demanded NOK 70.000, which was not accepted by Tommy Tee and the team around Jesse Jones. As a result, ‘Gategutt’ was withdrawn from the market in the same year. http://www. kingsize.no/News.aspx?ArtNo=21230 (accessed 21 July 2014). 26 Jarman-Ivens’s discussion draws upon Eve Sedgwick’s work on the homosocial continuum in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, see Jarman-Ivens (2006, 201) 27 Author’s emphasis. 28 See, http://www.kingsize.no/Interviews.aspx?ArtNo=7850 (accessed 21 July 2014). 29 Mixed Martial Arts. The male character in the video is first seen boxing, which is subsequently followed up by a fighting element that within MMA terminology is called ‘the knee’, see http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=S2BPBWwziUI&list=TLWb-gfIO5ws0 (accessed 3 September 2013).

Bibliography Andersen, Bengt. 2012. “Oslo gettoiseres.” In Motgift: Akademisk respons på den nye høyreekstremismen, ed. Sigve Indregard, 172–186. Oslo: Flamme Forlag / Forlaget Manifest. Askerøi, Eirik. 2013. Reading Pop Production. Sonic Markers and Musical Identity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Agder, Kristiansand. Auslander, Philip. 2009. “Musical Persona: The Physical Performance of Popular Music.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 303–315. Farnham: Ashgate. Danielsen, Anne. 2008. “Iscenesatt marginalitet?” In Hiphop i Skandinavien, ed. Mads Krogh and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen, 201–217. Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Dyer, Richard. 1998. Stars. Second edition. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Forman, Murray. 2004. “‘Represent’: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music.” In That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 201–222. New York: Routledge. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1989. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. George, Nelson. 1998. Hip Hop America (2005 ed.). New York: Penguin Books. Gledhill, Christine, ed. 1991. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London and New York: Routledge. Goodwin, Andrew. 1992. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gray, Herman S. 2005. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 180

Jesse Jones: Staging the ‘street boy’ Hawkins, Stan. 2002. Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan, and John Richardson. 2011 [2007]. “Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of Intoxication and Mediation.” In Pop Music and Easy Listening, ed. Stan Hawkins, 57–81. Farnham: Ashgate. Holen, Øyvind. 2004. Hiphop-Hoder: Fra Beat Street Til Bygde-Rap. Oslo: Spartacus Forlag. Holen, Øyvind. 2005. Groruddalen. En reiseskildring. Oslo: J.W. Cappelens Forlag. hooks, bell. 2012. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks. Second edition, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 308–318. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2006. “Queer(ing) Masculinities in Heterosexist Rap Music.” In Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, 199–219. New York: Routledge. Kitwana, Bakari. 2005. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Krims, Adam. 2000. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krims, Adam. 2007. Music and Urban Geography. New York: Routledge. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mosher, Donald L., and Mark Sirkin. 1984. “Measuring a Macho Personality Constellation.” Journal of Research in Personality, 18 (2): 150–163. Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. 2007. Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Rose, Tricia. 2008. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop. New York: Basic Books. Sandve, Birgitte. 2014. Staging the Real: Identity Politics and Urban Space in Mainstream Norwegian Rap Music. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Segal, Lynne. 2007 [1990]. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vernallis, Carol. 2004. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. White, Miles. 2011. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity in American Popular Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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13 FAIRPORT CONVENTION Gender and voicing strategies in a sound signature Tor Dybo

The study presented in this chapter focuses on the question of gender and voicing strategies in a folk rock band’s sound signature, using Fairport Convention as a case study. Fairport Convention – best known for leading the charge of British folk rock in the late 1960s, and still active today – presents an opportunity to critique the roles assigned to its female and male singers, and their impact on the band. Polyphonic vocal arrangements have always been an important aspect of the Fairport sound, and from the band’s inception in 1967 until 1976 there were both female and male vocalists in the line-up. Since that time, male voices have taken over completely in the band’s performances and arrangements, even of their pre-1976 material, due to the replacement of former singer Sandy Denny’s alto voice with founding member Simon Nicol’s baritone. Aspects of the production of gender in a band’s singing voices become apparent in the strategies that Fairport Convention have turned to when developing their own character and sound signature. In this chapter, I will discuss these strategies, and especially the role of lead singer and songwriter Denny in the band’s cultivation of a folk rock profile in the popular music market – one based on a uniquely British musical heritage.

Background For a decade, Denny was a mentor for others in the band, serving not only as a vocalist but also as a songwriter and bandleader. She was also the source of motivation for other band members to write songs and to explore the possibilities of their British folk music heritage. As early as 1968, in fact, Denny displayed the same artistic strategies in the international market that propelled the stardom of Madonna from the 1980s onwards, Björk from the 1990s onwards and Britney Spears in the 2000s, to mention but a few female stars. When such artists and singers compose and arrange their own material, produce their own albums and otherwise take control of their careers, one must ask (and many have) to what extent this represents a new feminism within the popular music marketplace and, further, what effect it might have on the course of popular music history. In this chapter, I address both voicing strategies and Denny’s role in Fairport Convention in terms of popular music and gender. Gender-based studies of female and male vocality are ubiquitous in popular music research, including Susan Fast’s study of the British 182

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group Led Zeppelin with a particular emphasis on Robert Plant’s role as a male vocalist (Fast 2001); Jacqueline Warwick’s article “Singing Style and White Masculinity” (Warwick 2009), in which she explores male vocal styles in popular music with focus on grunge and the role of guitarist and singer-songwriter Chad Kroeger from the Canadian band Nickelback; and Stan Hawkins’s work on the role of the British pop dandy and masculinities in popular music performances (addressing, for example, Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger and their roles as songwriters, male singers and frontmen in, respectively, Roxy Music and the Rolling Stones) (Hawkins 2009). It is worth noting that Charlotte Greig’s article “Female Identity and the Woman Songwriter” (Greig 1997) addresses Denny’s rise as a female folk singer and songwriter in the late 1960s: “The counter-culture of the late 1960s and 1970s produced a number of woman songwriters and performers, who had come up through the folk tradition, both in Britain and in the US” (Greig 1997, 174). In “Sinead O’Connor – Musical Mother”, Keith Negus discusses O’Connor’s role as a singer and artist with a political bent in the popular music market (Negus 1997). Certain terms require elucidation at this stage, with regard to the discussion that follows. ‘Sound signature’ is often associated with high-fidelity sound qualities in stereo equipment (e.g., amplifier and speakers) in home listening situations. The word ‘sound’ alone serves as an all-encompassing label for what we hear out of speakers or experience in a concert situation. Following Lars Lilliestam (1988, 16) and Allan F. Moore (2001, 2012), this includes aspects of instrumentation, ways of performing both as individual musicians and collectively in bands, voice timbre and singing style, rhythmic markers, harmonic movement, overall acoustics, balance among instruments and, in addition, the aesthetic choices involved in songwriting, arranging and performance. In keeping with this framing of the term ‘sound’, ‘sound signature’ is employed in the context of (1) the musicians and vocalists who have developed a distinctive character (e.g., guitarists Eric Clapton or Richard Thompson), (2) bands that have developed a unique and recognisable sound profile (e.g., the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull or Fairport Convention) and (3) record companies and recording studios that have developed distinctive sound ideals that might involve, for example, different ways of using reverb, space, echo or panning in the sound mix (e.g., the Stax sound, the Motown sound or the ECM sound).1 ‘Folk rock’ (as well as ‘folk’ and ‘electric folk’) is another loaded term amongst scholars, journalists and musicians.2 For instance, Britta Sweers engages in a thorough discussion of these terms in her book Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), in which she aligns ‘electric folk’ with groups including Fairport Convention, as well as Steeleye Span, Albion Band, Jack the Lad and Pentangle. She uses the term to single out a distinctively English tradition in relation to the American folk rock tendencies of the 1960s that prevailed among artists and groups such as Bob Dylan or the Byrds: “By the expression ‘electric folk’, I thus mean English groups and musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as their successors, who combined traditional music with contemporary music styles” (Sweers 2005, 24). She continues: The core materials [of those groups] included, first of all, the Child ballads3 and songs in the English language that were handed down orally until the nineteenth century. These, in most cases, were mixed with Irish and Scottish material. Many electric folk groups also used material that was predominantly found in England, such as seasonal songs or particular dance forms like the Morris dance. Moreover, by incorporating particular instruments (such as the fiddle, accordion, and sometimes brass instruments) or local singing and playing styles, combined with 183

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individual arrangement techniques, the English approach became clearly distinguishable from American folk rock, as well as the Celtic (Irish, Scottish, Breton) styles. (Sweers 2005, 24) ‘Electric folk’ as a specific English hybridisation of English folk musical heritage and contemporary rock music thus also differs from what Sweers refers to as ‘folk rock’ in a British and Irish context, including groups such as the Pogues and the Levellers, who integrated folk musical elements into rock music but without any particularly clear link to the English folk musical tradition. While I subscribe to Sweers’s attempts to establish electric folk as an analytical term within the broader field of ethnomusicology, I will keep my own options open in what follows, particularly as space limits any further consideration of this complex issue. Based on my own participation in this area of research since the beginning of the 1970s (including not only my scholastic work, but also regular record buying, English music journal reading and, since the 2000s, Internet discussion group participation), I have found that musicians and journalists generally prefer ‘folk rock’, which is both more ‘natural’ and more contemporary than ‘electric folk’, a term I tend to favour in the following discussion.

Gender and voicing strategies in Fairport Convention The history of Fairport Convention can be traced back to the spring of 1967. The band started up in the House of Fairport (the family home of founding member Nicol) in London’s Muswell Hill4 and since then has been through many changes, with roughly twenty-five musicians moving in and out of its line-up.5 As already mentioned, Fairport Convention comprises mainly men. Yet, early on, the female voice was an important part of the band’s sound signature and plans for distinguishing itself from the many other London-based bands of that era.6 After all, female vocalists were rare in British rock bands at this time, and Fairport Convention wanted to break the mould from the start.7 Fairport Convention’s first female singer, Judy Dyble, remained in the band until 1968. During spring 1967, Ian McDonald (later known by the name Iain Matthews) joined Fairport Convention as a male singer, in addition to Dyble, as the band began to look like the British answer to the American West Coast band Jefferson Airplane. Founding member, singer and guitarist Nicol writes on Fairport Convention’s website: Our setlist was, I think, more eclectic than many of our contemporaries. We stood out because we’d mix songs and instrumentals, mix American covers which the audience could recognise with bizarre and little-known stuff. We also had a girl singer, Judy Dyble – that also marked us out as different. That and the polysyllabic name led to the ‘English Jefferson Airplane’ tag. We used to do a few Airplane covers and I think people assumed we were from the West Coast.8 In a recent interview,9 Nicol listed Fairport’s early American influences, which, other than Jefferson Airplane, included Bob Dylan, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Phil Ochs and the Byrds. With regard to Dylan’s role in bringing American folk songs to the popular music market, Nicol described the Byrds at that time as a band whose repertoire mainly consisted of Dylan songs shortened to three minutes (for example, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’). As was the case with his own band, Nicol acknowledges the Byrds’s relatively avant-garde attempts to 184

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rearrange Dylan’s folksong-inspired ballads into the required three minutes of music that could be accommodated on a 45 rpm vinyl record single, and in doing so, breaking into a whole new music market. This provides a striking example of how an interest in folk music and the American folk revival wave was already prevalent in Fairport Convention during its initial phase, prior to Denny joining the band. Nicol recalls that there were many folk clubs in London in the 1960s, which were important cultural venues for him and his musician friends.10 Not coincidentally, many upcoming female artists (such as Denny and Sonja Kristina) started their music careers in these venues. American record producer Joe Boyd produced albums for many English bands and artists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, including Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band. Boyd gives the following account of his first meeting with Fairport Convention in 1968: I heard a lot of stringed bands, but I wanted a group having electric instruments and a drummer. And I heard this group Fairport Convention. Everything – all my prejudices were such of upon in: “Oh, no . . . please . . . this is basically American folk rock”. . . . And then Richard took a solo . . . and I just . . . “What? This kid is seventeen years old, and he just took a solo like that? Jesus! This kid is amazing.” So I did the cliché . . . walked into the dressing room: “Here is the contract; do you want to sign?”11 As a result of this meeting, Fairport released its eponymous first album in June 1968 on Polydor as a band whose hallmark was its American West Coast sound signature. Perhaps the most important consequence of the contract with record producer and manager Boyd was that he then connected Fairport members with Denny, who he saw as an ideal complement to Richard Thompson’s unique guitar playing and original sound.

Year 1968: Sandy Denny joins Fairport Convention Upon Denny replacing Judy Dyble in 1968, the vocal presence and sound signature of the band changed markedly. While Dyble was an accompished singer (who undoubtedly contributed to Fairport Convention’s uniqueness early on), Denny brought something more into the equation. Before joining Fairport Convention, Denny had been an active artist on London’s folk scene as a singer, pianist and guitarist on her own, as well as performing with the London-based folk and progressive rock band Strawbs. Denny’s alto voice was melancholic, tender with the potential to be powerful. Fairport band members recall a charismatic, direct and determined woman who moved the band forward significantly in its efforts to rearrange British folk tunes for the rock market and also write new songs inspired by that same heritage. Nicol spoke with Mike Harding about the early years of the band and Denny’s role during this period: No, we weren’t [a folk rock band in the beginning] . . . we just played a lot of music, I suppose, first of all influenced from the West Coast of America. That was the core material, a lot of singer-songwriter stuff.12 And then Sandy Denny joined us, and we started playing around behind her traditional songs, and her much more folky approach. And at the same time she started singing our material. Out of that the composite formed, which in 1969 resulted in a release of a project album called Liege & Lief.13 185

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Boyd also recalled Fairport’s situation after Denny joined this group of four rather retiring men.14 In an interview in the TV documentary film Folk Britannia on BBC 4, Boyd referred to Denny’s relationship to the band members:15 I was worried that Sandy was too powerful a personality. The Fairport guys were all quite shy and quiet . . . Sandy was effing and blinding and knocking over drinks . . . and you know . . . spilling cigarette ash everywhere . . . shouting . . . and I just thought she eats them for breakfast.16 Yet, Denny proved to be calm and focused. She threw her support behind Thompson’s talents as an electric guitar player and a songwriter. Boyd continues: “But, once she played with them, she was so in awe of Richard’s musicianship. And then she said: ‘OK, tell me what to do’”.17 In this way, Denny helped the band move forward: “She not only livened them up a bit from her personality, and made them musically and vocally much more powerful as a band, but she got Richard writing songs. She was writing songs; why couldn’t Richard?”18 Denny also introduced new traditional English and Scottish folk material into the band’s repertoire, alongside her own compositions. In the same documentary, Thompson describes how he and the other band members interacted with her: “We were really trying to build around her. We were just listening to her singing . . . just kind of find places, you know . . . percussion, drums, bass, guitars . . . figuring around . . . I think that was a good approach”.19 There is evidence that Denny broke with gender stereotypes in the 1960s, transcending the somewhat familiar female role of vocalist to become an active participant and even a driving force behind the songwriting, arranging, production of recordings, promotion and tour planning.20 Her contributions to Fairport Convention up to 1976 would produce a ripple effect. Soon she became a source of inspiration for female artists, such as Linda Thompson (then-wife of Fairport guitarist Thompson) and Sonja Kristina (of Curved Air). In more recent decades, audiences attending the band’s annual music festival Fairport’s Cropredy Convention in the village of Cropredy have benefited from the fact that a number of young female solo performers and band members now have roles like Denny’s, including Edwina Hayes, the Shee, Thea Gilmore, Pauline Black of the Selecter and Kellie While, among many others. Another new member to move the band forward in the same folk direction was fiddler and singer Dave Swarbrick, who first sat in with Fairport Convention on a couple of Dylan songs on their second album, Unhalfbricking, in 1969. He joined the band permanently later that year, just as Fairport’s bass player at the time, Ashley Hutchings, was collecting traditional songs for the band’s next album from the archive at Cecil Sharp House in London. Besides Hutchings, both Swarbrick and Denny played an important role in cultivating a distinct British voice for Fairport Convention’s next album, Liege & Lief (released December 1969), which consisted entirely of folk songs from collectors, such as Francis James Child and Bertrand Harris Bronson.21 In many respects, this album pioneered the British folk rock movement. Evoking Thompson’s recollection of Fairport’s rehearsal practice with Denny, Hutchings stated that the arrangement of the songs on Liege & Lief was developed collectively then and there22 – the management of Fairport Convention had rented a big, picturesque house in Fairley Chamberlayne near Winchester in the summer of 1969 so that the band could rehearse for the album. According to Hutchings,23 he presented the folk melodies he had collected at Cecil Sharp House to the other band members during this rehearsal 186

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period, and the further arranging of the folk melodies into Fairport Convention’s line-up at that time happened collectively and spontaneously during rehearsal sessions as part of an aural rather than written exchange. I will now turn to the recordings of ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Matty Groves’ from Liege & Lief in terms of the re-releases of these songs in 2012 by the current Fairport line-up.

Fairport Convention today In its current iteration, Fairport Convention relies upon exclusively male voices in both solo and polyphonic arrangements as the underpinning of its sound.24 The present line-up dates back to 1996, when former guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Maartin Allcock left the band and singer, fiddler and mandolin player Chris Leslie joined. Leslie’s arrival moved Fairport’s sound away from a primarily electrified world of electric guitars, keyboards, sequencers and so forth to a more acoustic string sound that featured instruments such as mandolin, bouzouki and acoustic guitar. In 1998, drummer Dave Mattacks left the band for good and drummer and percussionist Gerry Conway joined up. From that point forward, the Fairport line-up has consisted of guitarist and singer Nicol, electric bassist, mandolin player and singer Dave Pegg, fiddle player Ric Sanders, Chris Leslie and Gerry Conway. It is the longest-running line-up in the history of the band. Only Nicol has been with Fairport Convention since its inception (except for a break from 1972 to 1976). Pegg joined the group in 1970, and Sanders in 1985. Nicol remarks: Chris was already in (the band) in 1996 when Maartin Allcock left, and Dave Mattacks left in 1998. And all about that time there’s been established a four-piece acoustic version of the group, which ran parallel with the electric. So for a while there is a Fairport acoustic and a Fairport full five-piece. So Mattacks [left] – becoming Conway – was not a cleaner break, as previous breaks have been when Allcock left, and Chris came in and replaced him. That was a clean break. And it was more complicated with having two line-ups, and both were a little bit different, and even the repertoire was a little different.25 Today there exists both an acoustic and an electric version of Fairport Convention,26 though both the electric and acoustic line-ups presently consist of Nicol, Pegg, Sanders, Leslie and Conway, despite Nicol’s implication in the previous quotation. With a line-up consisting of only men, the band has had to devise alternative voicing strategies when rehearsing new repertoire or revisiting songs from Denny’s two periods in Fairport Convention.

Voicing challenges and strategies in the current line-up of Fairport Convention After Fairport Convention released the album Liege & Lief, Denny left the band for the first time in December 1969, though she would return again between 1974 and early 1976. Bereft of Denny’s hallmark charisma and talent, the band was faced with the formidable task of deciding on a new singer and in which direction they would go. Pegg recalls: When Sandy left the band, you don’t replace Sandy Denny with another girl singer, you know. And you can’t really replace Richard Thompson. There is nobody to 187

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replace Richard, so the band had always gone in different directions when you had people leave the band, whoever comes into the band, you utilize what they are good at, you know.27 Here Pegg responds to a prevailing tendency among musicians or singers within aural (as opposed to written/composed) music traditions to develop ostensibly uniquely personal and original musical identities that cannot be readily replaced. Fairport Convention clearly abandons what went before when members leave and moves on to whatever the next iteration of the band might bring about. In this case, the band did not even attempt to replace Denny with another female voice. Instead, the other male band members took over the singing roles. Nicol, Swarbrick and Thompson initially took turns at lead, and after Thompson left the band in 1971, the lead singer role switched between Swarbrick and Nicol. This pairing of the responsibility proved durable and persists today with Nicol’s deep baritone and Leslie’s high tenor. Interestingly, after the reunion of the band in 1985 (following its split in 1979), Nicol was the only lead singer until 1996, when Leslie joined. The band therefore changed during that time as well. Nicol’s profile as a vocalist derives from the troubadour tradition of a male singer with a guitar, who performs lengthy texts and stories, particularly when he sings ballads. Storytelling is thus the main emphasis when he performs.28 As an example of how Nicol has developed his role, particularly since Denny’s departure, let us turn to the band’s cover version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ for the album Jewel in the Crown (Woodworm Records 1995). Here, Nicol reinterpreted Cohen’s deep, rough-edged, apparently untrained or ‘authentic’ style using his more polished, trained voice and broader register. Just as Denny’s distinctive voice had been such an important part of Fairport’s sound signature, Nicol took over from her later on with a new vocal sound. As a result, the current line-up emphasises different voicing strategies in the band’s repertoire and arrangements. One of the voicing sound signatures of the band today is, as mentioned, the complementary relationship of Nicol and Leslie’s lead voices, backed by Pegg’s voice as well. Nicol points out: That’s worked out really very well to have Chris in. Not only is he a very accurate, beautifully toned and expressive singer, but it means because of that we have two voices – every time a song came along, you have two ways into it.29 According to Pegg, Leslie has been the main songwriter in Fairport Convention since he joined the band in 1996, assuming many of the songwriting responsibilities that were once the purview of Denny, Thompson and Swarbrick. Due to Leslie’s creative input, Fairport Convention has cultivated a particularly well-developed polyphonic vocal style that works with contrasts between low and high male voices. Founding member Nicol’s role as vocalist is closely connected to his position as guitarist – he never sings without playing guitar at the same time. While Nicol is primarily an acoustic guitarist, who tends towards steady finger-picking, he is highly competent as an electric guitarist, clearly influenced by The Shadows’s guitarist Hank Marvin (born Brian Rankin). Nicol plays a convincing ‘groove’ and produces a rich, warm sound on both electric and acoustic guitar. Early on, Nicol was somewhat marginalised by electric guitarist Thompson, who possessed a more virtuosic style; but, since the 1970s he has developed a unique signature as rhythm guitarist with a special timbre and texture. 188

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Revisiting Sandy Denny’s songs Half of the repertoire usually performed by Fairport Convention’s current line-up on stage includes songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s that were written by Denny, Thompson and Swarbrick, as well as traditional folk material from that same time period; the other half comprises songs from CDs issued by the current line-up itself.30 For those older songs, in which Denny was the original singer, Nicol’s deep baritone voice now replaces her alto. I will now consider various instances of vocal strategies in terms of substitution and modification.

Fotheringay Denny’s ballad ‘Fotheringay’ was first issued on Fairport Convention’s second album, What We Did on Our Holidays, in January 1969. It is named after the castle (and village) in Northamptonshire where Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded on 8 February 1587, and it includes her thoughts on the evening before this event. In the 1969 version, Denny sings the song in her tender, evocative alto register. In the version performed by Fairport Convention’s current line-up, included on the 2012 album By Popular Request, the band presents a new arrangement that features an a cappella polyphonic vocal introduction with Nicol’s deep baritone substituting for Denny’s alto voice. The recording opens with the three male voices of Nicol, Pegg and Leslie in counterpoint, followed by Nicol’s acoustic guitar, played in a manner that recalls the original version of 1969. Aside from the polyphonic a cappella opening, another new element in this 2012 version is Nicol’s lead voice, in strong contrast to Denny’s. Nicol’s male voice is prominent in the mix, defining the band’s sound, supported by two fiddles, electric bass and percussion. The entire album, By Popular Request, consists of new versions of songs that were selected in a unique manner. The band placed a poll on its website in late 2011 and early 2012 where ‘Fairporters’ (i.e., fans) could vote on the next album’s tracks using the whole back catalogue since 1968. The fifteen most popular songs that were selected were rearranged by the current line-up and recorded for the album. Band members were somewhat surprised to discover that ‘Fotheringay’ was voted for. It is also noteworthy that six of the fifteen tracks, originally sung by Denny, are now recorded by males, who in a sense re-signify Nicol’s singing voice.

Meet on the Ledge Another example of Nicol’s substitution of Denny’s voice is found in Thompson’s ballad, ‘Meet on the Ledge’ from 1968 – one of his first songs written for the band that is still used as the final salute on concert nights. Denny and Iain Matthews performed the vocals in the original version from 1968,31 with Nicol taking over from when she left: It’s amazing really how that song has grown since 1968, you know. It is one of Richard’s first attempts at making a complete song. It hasn’t changed, that song, but it’s grown somehow. And it’s intensively moving to sing that at Cropredy, you know, at the end of the whole weekend. It’s more than about the music. Because everybody is there with it, and they all have their own attachment to Fairport. They all have their particular reason for being there in that field: they discovered Fairport at some point, and somehow our music touched them. But it means a different thing 189

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to every single person in that field. They all have their own way into Fairport. Their own picture of what they like. You know, I am immensely proud of it, and I am, at same time, a bit puzzled, because I don’t know how it happened. It certainly wasn’t planned, but it is wonderful to watch it occur.32 Examples of the more ‘classic’ Nicol performances of this song include studio recordings from 1987 and 2012,33 where his baritone voice is mixed by the sound engineer with space around it, so that each sound source is clear and distinct. Significantly, his vocal impact on the new Fairport sound is vivid. A male dominance in the Fairport Convention performances is discernible in the current line-up, which appears in a variety of songs, including ‘Red and Gold’ from 1988, which was written by Ralph McTell and released on the album of the same name (fronted by Nicol as singer),34 and ‘Tam Lin’, a traditional song from Liege & Lief (1969) that was originally sung by Denny. Nicol sang both on By Popular Request. The vocal contributions of Leslie and Pegg help to reinforce a powerful sense of masculinity in Fairport Convention performances today. Of course, there are many connotations of the term ‘masculinity’ in this case, including projections of masculine performance in the 1960s London folk scene, and masculinity’s abiding link to authenticity in popular music (e.g., Bannister 2006). With regard to the former, both Nicol and Conway grew up in London as part of the generation of participants who were responsible for London’s folk scene in the 1960s. Sanders and Pegg grew up in Birmingham in the same period and shared the same cultural background. Besides being a metropolis for rock and pop culture in the 1960s, Birmingham boasted an active folk music milieu that included the Ian Campbell Folk Group, which, at different times, employed both former Fairport fiddler Swarbrick and Pegg. Unlike the male-dominated bands that characterised London and Birmingham’s rock and pop scenes in the 1960s, both male and female musicians filled the folk scenes. In folk clubs, performers often simply stood up and offered a song, hence the expression, ‘sing from the floor’. There was little separation between audience and artists in such a setting, and we see this tradition perpetuated in the practice of Fairport Convention. Nicol recalls of this period: We have all been into folk clubs as children, you know, before we became professionals. And that’s the way in folk clubs. There isn’t separation between the audience and performer. You know the idea of a floor singer; somebody gets out of the audience and starts to sing off. Then the main act will get up from the audience and stand on a little stage, so I think it is an extension of that. But certainly there are not many, if we can call ourselves a rock band, there are not many traditional rock bands that enjoy that closeness.35 When it comes to why Fairport Convention changed from a folk rock band with a female singer to an all-male band, we must acknowledge the happenstance turnover in band rosters before we look at the deliberateness with which they realised their new sound. I do not think the male polyphonic vocal arrangements of the band drew any particular inspiration from the 1960s folk clubs. The vocal arrangements for Fairport Convention songs are too thoroughly prepared and rehearsed to compare with the more spontaneous stand-up performances in

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those clubs. But with regard to the individual musicians and singers, it is easier to draw lines back to the clubs. I already discussed Nicol’s identity as a male folk singer with a guitar in the troubadour and ballad tradition, which ran parallel to his experience as a rock musician in the 1960s. Leslie had a folk music background in Oxfordshire and started out as folk fiddler in his early teens. Pegg was a rock musician but also active as a folk musician in Birmingham in the late 1960s. It would appear that the men in Fairport Convention derived the directness of their performance and their contact with the audience from this folk music background. I see similarities here to Matthew Bannister’s (2006) discussion of the indie guitar rock scene from the 1980s (e.g., R.E.M. and Nirvana) “as the culturally and historically specific production of white men” (Bannister 2006, backside text) who also linked masculinity and authenticity.

Matty Groves One of Fairport’s concert rituals, perpetuated at the Cropredy festival, as well as at various other concerts, involves the band announcing ‘The Ballad of Matty Groves’ as the final number of the night. Upon finishing, the group leaves the stage amid applause, returning to perform ‘Meet on the Ledge’ as an encore. The tragicomic lyrics of ‘The Ballad of Matty Groves’ describe an adulterous tryst between the young Matty and Lord Darnell’s wife, which comes to an abrupt end when Lord Darnell discovers the affair and kills them both.36 This Scottish folk song was adapted for Fairport Convention in the late 1960s by former bass player Hutchings as part of his lengthy examination of the folk song collections at the Cecil Sharp House in London for Liege & Lief. While at Cecil Sharp House, Hutchings examined the collections of Francis James Child and Bertrand Harris Bronson. ‘Matty Groves’ is catalogued as Child No. 81 in this archive, sharing its source with Little Mushgrave and Lady Barnard, which goes back to 1611.37 In fact, ‘Matty Groves’ is one among many variants of Little Mushgrave and Lady Barnard that are catalogued as Child No. 81 – others include ‘Lord Orland’s Wife’, ‘Little Mattie’, ‘Lord Donald’, ‘Lord Daniel’s Wife’, ‘Little Musgrove’, ‘Lord Arnold’ and ‘Little Matha Grove’.38 Furthermore, this folk tune has moved across entire continents during its four-hundred-year history – variants or parallel versions are found in the USA, the Netherlands, Germany and Norway, as well as other places.39 Upon reviewing the recordings of the many variations of Little Mushgrave and Lady Barnard at the Cecil Sharp House, I noted that the Alan Lomax Collection best anticipated the version performed by Fairport Convention.40 The Lomax recording, with the name variant ‘Little Musgrave’ on this collection, was performed by Scottish folk singer Jeannie Robertson (1908–1975) in London in 1953,41 and its a cappella styling and clear alto voice characterised by a lot of vibrato reflects a local British folk music sound signature of the 1950s. Sixteen years later, Denny recorded it with Fairport Convention, which was clearly a folk rock group with a rock band backline.42 Yet she managed to respect its heritage. At the same time, this recording stood out in many respects as being ‘quaint’ in a technological sense. That is, if Robertson represented an oral – and perhaps ‘authentic’ – rural folk musical tradition and performance practice, Fairport Convention represented the post-war advance in music technology and sound. The band brought to its version of the song electric guitars, electric bass and electric violin, and their amplifiers, as well as voices amplified through a PA system at concerts. In addition, their version thoroughly globalised the song, thanks to its distribution worldwide in the popular music market in the late 1960s. Since

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then, ‘Matty Groves’ has been on Fairport Convention’s setlist at almost every concert, with the band employing several different renditions, as Nicol relates: Yeah, it is a song I never got tired of, and occasionally we try to come up with a new approach to it. But that was probably once every five years. But it always feels different, because you can do that song really fast, you can do it really slowly, you can do it really gently . . . and then put in big dynamic somewhere. Or you can be at one level, and it still works, because it is a story . . . I think about songs like that as being like movies. I see them as cinematic when singing them. It is always like watching a film.43 Like the recording of ‘Tam Lin’ mentioned earlier, the 2012 version of ‘Matty Groves’ on By Popular Request replaces Denny’s voice with Nicol’s deep baritone, as do all of the live performances of ‘Matty Groves’ after Denny left the band.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at gender and voicing strategies with regard to folk rock band Fairport Convention’s sound signature and highlighted the following aspects: •

•

•

•

Denny broke down stereotypes of popular music and gender in the 1960s via the same artistic strategies in the international market that propelled the stardom of Madonna from the 1980s onwards, Björk from the 1990s onwards and Britney Spears in the 2000s, among others. When such artists and singers compose and arrange their own material, produce their own albums and otherwise take control of their careers, one must ask (and many have) to what extent this represents a new feminism within the popular music marketplace and, further, what effect it might have on the course of popular music history. In this regard, I addressed Denny’s role as a mentor for Fairport Convention. From a feminist perspective, she was remarkably impactful in this group as an active songwriter and bandleader. I then looked at the ways in which the remaining male band members chose to deal with singer roles and polyphonic arrangements after Denny left the band. An important aspect of Denny’s role in Fairport Convention, and generally in the popular music market, is that she was a driving force behind opening a space for female vocalists to be active participants in pop bands. Denny’s contributions to Fairport Convention up to 1976 would produce a ripple effect. Soon she became a source of inspiration for female artists such as Linda Thompson and Sonja Kristina. In more recent decades, audiences attending the band’s annual music festival Fairport’s Cropredy Convention in the village of Cropredy have benefited from the fact that a number of young folk artists and bands now feature female members with roles like Denny’s. Fairport Convention’s male-dominated line-up has forced the band to devise alternative voicing strategies when rehearsing new repertoire or revisiting songs from Denny’s two periods in the band. Fairport Convention clearly abandons what went before when members leave. In this case, the band did not even attempt to replace Denny with another female voice. Instead, the other male band members took over the singing roles. For the older songs in which Denny was the original singer, Nicol’s deep baritone voice now replaces hers. On By Popular Request (2012), six of the fifteen tracks were 192

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originally sung by Denny. Half of the repertoire usually performed by Fairport Convention’s current line-up on stage includes songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s that were written by Denny, Thompson and Swarbrick, as well as traditional folk material from that same time period; the other half is composed of songs from albums issued by the current line-up. For those older songs, in which Sandy Denny was the original singer, Nicol’s deep baritone voice now replaces hers, thus re-signifying not only the aesthetics, but also gender as a critically important entity of Fairport Convention’s sound.

Notes  1 Research on this kind of sound signature in relation to music technology and studio production has expanded to include an annual conference, called The Art of Record Production (ARP). Publishing in this area is extensive and includes important contributions by Frith and Zagorski-Thomas (2012), Moore (2001, 2012), Théberge (1997) and Zagorski-Thomas (2014).  2 Examples of the academic publications and discourses on the topic of British folk rock and folk revival include Brocken (2003), Burns (2012), Dybo (2005, 2011, 2012) and Sweers (2005).  3 Named after American scholar and folk song collector Francis James Child (1825–1896); for more, see my analysis of ‘The Ballad of Matty Groves’ later in this chapter.  4 “Features: History of Fairport.” Fairport Convention, http://fairportconvention.com/history_of_ fairport.php (accessed 4 April 2010).  5 For a further and more complete presentation and discussion of the history of Fairport Convention, I refer to Fairport Convention and Schofield (2012), Humphries (1997), Redwood and Woodward (1995) and Schofield and Wayne (2002). There are, of course, numerous written, oral and online media presentations of Fairport Convention – see, for example, the presentation on their website titled “Features: History of Fairport”, Fairport Convention, http://fairportconvention.com/history_ of_fairport.php (accessed 4 April 2010).  6 “History: Simon Nicol Writes about Fairport.” Fairport Convention, http://www.fairportconvention. com/simon_nicol_on_fairport.php (accessed 20 May 2013).  7 This was noted in the presentations at the public event “Sandy Remembered: A Cropredy Event” on 17 August 2015 at the Village Hall in Cropredy, outside Banbury, UK, part of the festival Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. The event consisted of a conversation between British writer Mick Houghton (a Sandy Denny biographer) and musician Hutchings (bassist in Fairport Convention from 1967 to 1969). Hutchings, an active musician on London’s music scene during the second half of the 1960s, recalled that it was highly unusual to have female singers in a rock band in London at that time.  8 “History: Simon Nicol writes about Fairport.”  9 “Simon Nicol about Fairport Convention’s early influences on ‘BBC Fairport Convention, Who Knows Where The Time Goes 2012’.” YouTube video, posted by Hans Goor, 13 August 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkZQUdj5M7Y. 10 Simon Nicol, interview with the author, 21 April 2009. 11 “Joe Boyd about Fairport Convention on ‘Folk Britannia’.” YouTube video, posted by Cleapatr, 11 December 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=737-QaVueP0. 12 When Nicol says “singer-songwriter stuff” it refers in this context to Fairport Convention’s performance of cover tunes written by artists who are performing their own songs. 13 Simon Nicol, interview with Mike Harding on the radio show Fairport on Mike Harding Show, BBC Radio 2, 30 March 2011 (transcribed by the author). 14 “Joe Boyd about Fairport Convention on ‘Folk Britannia’.” 15 Ibid. 16 Boyd’s expression “and I did she thought eats them for breakfast” was stated in an interview characterised by a humorous setting in which he tells about Denny’s accession to Fairport Convention, and illustrate how on-going and dominant she could be experienced by people who did not know her. 17 “Joe Boyd about Fairport Convention on ‘Folk Britannia’.” 18 Ibid. 193

Tor Dybo 19 “Richard Thompson about Sandy Denny as a member of Fairport Convention on ‘Folk Britannia’.” YouTube video, posted by Cleapatr, 11 December 2008. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=737-QaVueP0. 20 Feminist perspectives on the popular music industry are also presented in Hawkins (2004), Leonard (2007) and Lieb (2013). 21 See Child (1886) and Bronson (1962, 267–315). 22 Information given by Hutchings at the public event Sandy Remembered: A Cropredy Event on 17 August 2015 at the Village Hall, Cropredy. 23 Ibid. 24 This discussion about male voices and male roles in the history of popular music has long been highly topical. Among many important research contributions, Cohen (1997), Hawkins (2009), Leonard (2007) and Warwick (2009) can be mentioned. 25 Simon Nicol, interview with the author, 21 April 2009. 26 See www.fairportconvention.com. 27 Dave Pegg, interview with the author, 4 May 2010. 28 Simon Nicol, interview with the author, 21 April 2009. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 This version can be heard on Fairport Convention, What We Did on Our Holidays, ILPS 9092, LP, 1969. 32 Simon Nicol, interview with the author, 21 April 2009. 33 These versions can be heard, respectively, on Fairport Convention, In Real Time, Island 208 689, 1987, and Fairport Convention, By Popular Request, Matty Grooves MGCD051, 2012. 34 Fairport Convention, Red and Gold, Woodworm Records Rue 002, LP/CD, 1988. 35 Simon Nicol, interview with the author, 21 April 2009. 36 ‘Matty Groves’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matty_Groves (accessed April 5, 2010). 37 Based on a quotation from Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle in Bronson (1962, 267–315). 38 See Bronson (1962, 267–315). 39 In an earlier article (Dybo 2011), I have conducted a more thorough analysis of ‘Matty Groves’ in its global context. 40 The Alan Lomax Collection, Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, Rounder 11661–1775– 2, CD, track 18. 41 ‘Jeannie Robertson’, Answers.com, http://www.answers.com/topic/jeannie-robertson (accessed June 15, 2010). 42 The term ‘backline’ refers to the electric amplification of bass, guitars, keyboards and so forth, and to the drums that remain behind the band on stage. See ‘Backline’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Backline_(stage) (accessed 31 May 2010). 43 Simon Nicol, interview with the author, 21 April 2009.

Bibliography Bannister, Matthew. 2006. White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brocken, Mike. 2003. The British Folk Revival. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bronson, Bertrand Harris. 1962. The Traditional Tunes of Child Ballads. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burns, Rob. 2012. Transforming Folk: Innovation and Tradition in English Folk-Rock Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Child, Francis James, ed. 1886. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vol. 2. New York: Dover Publications. Cohen, Sara. 1997. “Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 17–36. London: Routledge. Dybo, Tor. 2005. “Folkrock – folkemusikalsk revival eller populærmusikalsk fenomen?” Studia Musicologica Norvegica 31, 124–149. Dybo, Tor. 2011. “‘The Ballad of Matty Groves’: Fairport Convention and the British Folk Tradition.” In Mangfold og vidsyn: En musikkvitenskapelig antologi til Ola Kai Ledang ved fylte 70 år, ed. Leif Jonsson, 103–134. Trondheim: Tapir akademisk forlag. 194

Gender and voicing strategies Dybo, Tor. 2012. “Britisk etnisitet og Fairport Convention.” In Musikk, politikk og globalisering, ed. Tor Dybo and Kjell Oversand, 33–55. Trondheim: Akademika Forlag. Fairport Convention and Nigel Schofield, contributor. 2012. Fairport by Fairport. London: Rocket 88. Fast, Susan. 2001. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frith, Simon, and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, eds. 2012. The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field. Farnham: Ashgate. Greig, Charlotte. 1997. “Female Identity and the Woman Songwriter.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 168–177. London: Routledge. Hawkins, Stan. 2004. “On Performativity and Production in Madonna’s ‘Music’.” In Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, 180–190. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Humphries, Patrick. 1997. Meet on the Ledge: ‘Fairport Convention’ – The Classic Years. Second revised edition. London: Virgin Books. Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lieb, Kristin J. 2013. Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry. New York: Routledge. Lilliestam, Lars. 1988. Musikalisk ackulturation. Från blues till rock. En studie kring låten Hound Dog. PhD thesis, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1988. Moore, Allan F. 2001. Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock. Second edition. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moore, Allan F. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate. Negus, Keith. 1997. “Sinead O’Connor – Musical Mother.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 178–190. London: Routledge. Redwood, Fred, and Martin Woodward. 1995. Woodworm Era: The Story of Today’s Fairport Convention. Thatcham: Jeneva Publishing. Schofield, Nigel, and Neil Wayne. 2002. Fairport Convention: The Official 35th Birthday History. Belper: Free Reed Music. Sweers, Britta. 2005. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2009. “Singing Style and White Masculinity.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 349–364. Farnham: Ashgate. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2014. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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14 “I DON’T PLAY GIRLY HOUSE MUSIC” Women, sonic stereotyping, and the dancing DJ Tami Gadir

In this chapter, I explore the assignment of particular gender stereotypes to sound and performance in contemporary electronically produced dance music, focusing on the sonic quality of ‘fluffiness’ (cf. Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 68). I underscore this exploration with a critique of idealistic theorisations of electronic music, in which machines have the potential to liberate us from the limits of traditional gender frameworks.1 In order to illustrate the iteration and perpetuation of these stereotypes,2 I draw upon interview material with DJs, extracts from sources of online journalism, and online (YouTube) dance music fans’ commentaries. These stereotypes, which participants learn and circulate, are complicated by the specificity of links between gender fluidity and queerness and the development of the types of DJ-based dance music practices that are recognisable as dance music culture today. I argue that the flexibility of gender is overlooked or denied by participants through their conflations of terms such as ‘fluffy’ with what they believe to be ‘feminine’ musical sounds. One of my approaches to examining the idea of fluffiness is through a discussion of tracks from three different dance music genres: ‘Friend of the Night’ by Prosper (psytrance), ‘For An Angel’ by Paul van Dyk (trance), and ‘Eivissa’ by Robert M (progressive house).3 Last, I consider gender-related prejudices as they pertain to the moving body, including dancing, ‘incidental’ movements unrelated to dance, and communication (verbal and nonverbal) with participants and video cameras. My analysis is centred upon the interactions of dance music fans, commentators, and practitioners with the performances, on- and off-stage, of DJ-producer Nina Kraviz. Using the case of Kraviz, I show how movement can provoke reactions to DJs’ performances, based on the binary conceptions of gender that dictate sexist attitudes in many clubbing communities, regardless of the extent to which the DJ fits these norms. To this end, I discuss two YouTube videos of Kraviz performing in Boiler Room DJ sets – one in Berlin (Kraviz 2013b) and another in Edinburgh (Kraviz 2015) – and a YouTube video documentary about Kraviz made by the online dance music magazine Resident Advisor (2013). The extensive commentaries on Kraviz by journalists, other DJs, producers, and fans, some of which I present alongside the videos, demonstrate the specificity of Kraviz’s position in the wider global (and in particular Western European) techno milieu, and constitute some evidence of the continuing dominance of the idea that DJs are men by default (cf. Farrugia 2012; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013).4 Intentionally, I adopt the language of 196

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music- and performance-related gender binaries as used by dance music participants, including addressing women DJs as a gender category. In doing so, I do not mean to claim that a homogeneous ‘women’s experience’ exists, or that these gender categorisations are helpful (cf. Sullivan 2003, 190). On the contrary, by employing the language of participants, my goal is to highlight aspects of gender normativity that I argue are implicit in how participants of all genders interact with many women on dance floors and at DJ booths.

Dance music and gender My exploration of the problems of gender stereotyping in dance music settings is built upon an understanding that heteronormativity is an irrelevant and unproductive framework for human interaction, achieving little more than to reinscribe prejudices. J. Jack Halberstam (2012) challenges heteronormativity – meaning the normalisation of, and assumed heterosexuality in, everyday life – through a series of questions that commence with the phrase “what if . . .”, and proceed to invert widespread and deeply held gender assumptions. For Halberstam, heteronormativity constitutes a range of troubling gender essentialisms that constitute part of a ‘script’ or ‘formula’, put into practice via ‘training’ that is begun in childhood (2012, 8–13). Moreover, the ostensibly stable classifications of male and female that are under redefinition have “no essential . . . traits, desires, or inclinations”, and are therefore increasingly “inadequate placeholders for identity” (2012, 67, 70–71). Indeed, the gender essentialisms that I discuss in this chapter have their roots, as Judy Lochhead (2008, 64–70) points out, in Western Enlightenment philosophy. In this conception, ‘properties’ beyond the biological are ascribed to males on the one hand and females on the other. Beauty is understood as a feminine phenomenon and ‘an inferior aesthetic category’ to the ‘sublime’, a masculine mode of experiencing which contains “a power that registers in prerational experience” (2008, 64). Similarly, I have noted in my fieldwork a pervasive discourse by male DJs, producers, and promoters of two types of women DJs – those whose marketing is based primarily upon visual presentation (namely, physical attractiveness), and those for whom it is based upon the possession of ‘serious’ musical and technical skill (cf. Bayton 1998, 3–4, 107–122; Farrugia 2012, 48–55; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 64–68). Weaving through the gendered discourses of these male participants, beauty is still understood in diminutive terms and is thus perceived as irreconcilable with skill. One of the reasons that I have chosen to discuss Kraviz in this chapter is that, as a figure who is perceived by her fans to possess both of these attributes, she is in a unique position to throw this stereotype into doubt. Another problematic dichotomy upon which gendered-oriented aesthetics manifest in dance music is that of the delineations – or, as Donna Haraway refers to them, “leaky distinctions” (1990, 193) – between masculine and feminine (cf. Leonard 2007, 96–98). This notion holds that human-made technologies are situated in opposition to organic, biological, ‘natural’ phenomena such as the body (cf. Chasin 1995, 74–76; Haraway 1990, 192–194; McClary 1991, 135–140). This is relevant in large part because of the central role that electronic hardware plays at dance music events. In particular, men are given the exclusive right to exert control over technologies (Farrugia 2012, 8–9, 19–23; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 54–57; Haraway 1990, 193; McClary 1991, 138; cf. Bayton 1997, 41–43; Bayton 1998, 41, 124–125; Doubleday 2008; Green 1997, 53). This attitude is clearly demonstrable through the different ways that participants interact with DJs of different genders.

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Utopian interpretations of electronic music frame it as being freed from the burden of these traditional gender categorisations as they are understood in relation to music (cf. Doubleday 2008; Rodgers 2010, 4). Famously, Haraway’s (1990) vision of the cyborg involves the normalisation and incorporation of machine technologies into our activities and bodily experience, thus freeing us from the past separations between our ‘natural’ selves and the machines that we once attempted to control (191–196, 205, 207). Extending this notion, producing and reproducing music with machines could also emancipate us from biologicaldeterminist understandings of how bodies ought to interact with instruments (cf. Doubleday 2008; Rodgers 2010, 4; cf. Bayton 1997, 40–43; Bayton 1998, 40–41; Bradby 1993, 157, 161–162; Green 1997, 53–80, 116–140; Rodgers 2010, 5; Waksman 2004, 697). By this thinking, electronically produced sounds take us out of dualistic modes of listening, affording us the opportunity to explore more possibilities.5 Yet, this potential is hardly achieved in dance music, as in other genres. In rock, for example, technological interactions (both with instruments and sound production) continue to be gendered, with men having access to and authority over technologies (cf. Bayton 1997, 40–43; Bayton 1998, 40–41,124–125; Bradby 1993, 162; Leonard 2007, 44–52), and indeed, as Helen Reddington notes, over the women involved in the process (2012, 59–65). For Tara Rodgers, the tactile and social interactions with machines, and the electronic sounds themselves, are imbued with violent masculine symbolism (cf. Farrugia 2012, 8–10; Goodman 2010; Rodgers 2010, 6–8). In science and technology as well as the arts, electronic sound has, since its inception as an agent of ‘progress’, been utilised in the practices of militancy and domination, as the handiwork of male expertise (Rodgers 2010, 6–10). Thus, DJs and producers have inevitably had this gendered history deeply inscribed into their own practices (Rodgers 2010, 7; cf. Farrugia 2012, 21–23). This seems at odds with the development of today’s recognisable DJ-based dance music practices, which were initially developed in queer communities. I use the term ‘queer’ here in the same sense as Jodie Taylor (2012, 144): to connote practices that subvert normativity and heteronormativity through activities that include, among many other things, musical participation. To use the term ‘practices’ is to helpfully conceptualise queerness, or indeed any form of gender or sexuality, as acts rather than identities (Sullivan 2003, 50, 57–80, 192).6 In adopting this position, I acknowledge the fluidity (and reject the fixity) of gender and sexuality paradigms that lead to unfair treatment of those who occupy the peripheries and in-betweens of dominant categorisations. As Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton (1999) and Tim Lawrence (2003, 2011) argue, queer disco parties in New York in the 1970s were rare environments in which this fluidity could occur, and where the heteronormative modes of sexuality, temporality and dance could be defied and redefined by African American and Latino, as well as white, participants (Brewster and Broughton 1999, 136–137; Fikentscher 2000; Lawrence 2003, 24; Lawrence 2011; Reynolds 2008, 14–24, 28–32; cf. Halberstam 2012, 2). Indeed, parties held at the Loft and the Sanctuary in New York in the early 1970s (Lawrence 2011, 232–233) were uniquely positioned – geographically, historically, and politically – in order for such resistance to occur. While contemporary dance music practices are spatiotemporally and sonically derivative of these past events, and while they have appropriated certain aspects of DJing and dancing practice, event organisers now order and promote many of these dance music activities around music-stylistic rather than political or social concerns (cf. Taylor 2012, 149). Undoubtedly, in some cities, many queer and politically focused club events take place regularly. Participants of such events make use of all the elements that comprise parties – such as music, dance, costume, and drugs – as tools for protest and subversion of the status quo for a range of political issues. However, 198

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these remain the exceptions; much of the queerness – heterogeneity, openness, and fluidity – characteristic of DJ-driven events in 1970s New York has been replaced, in both mainstream and many alternative dance music settings, by a patriarchal and heteronormative turn, where traditional attitudes about gender are endemic.7 I have become particularly interested in the evidence for such sexism when it manifests in participants’ biases against particular musical features. These features are considered by participants to be intrinsically feminine in quality. Of the six DJs to most explicitly speak in such terms, four were male and two were female. Cilla, a DJ from Malmö, Sweden, used the phrase ‘girly house music’ with reference to music that she avoided playing in her DJ sets in order to prove that her tastes, and by extension her skills as a DJ, matched those of her male DJ peers: Cilla: I don’t play girly house music. Tami: What’s girly house music? Cilla: [Hesitates.] Girly house music in people’s ears would be lots of lyrics, maybe? Very easy to listen to. Energy. Childish, popping, ‘yay!’ house music. That would kind of be girly. This rougher and deeper [sound] would not be considered girly, I think. (Cilla 2015)8 Cilla reinforces a high/low division ascribed to male/female music. As Bradby observes in her discussion of female vocal samples, traditional “sexuality, the body, emotion and nature” versus “culture, technology and language” divisions persist even in the aesthetics of machine-driven music (1993, 157). Building on this, I argue that DJs and producers of many dance music genres attach similar binary understandings of gender norms (femininity) to a range of non-vocal musical features (cf. McClary 1991, 55). These understandings of music and sound technologies are also visible in the language used by journalists and music critics such as Simon Reynolds: [Larry Levan] . . . developed a science of total sound in order to create spiritual experiences for his followers . . . he custom-built the Garage’s sound-system, developing his own speakers and a special low-end intensive sub-woofer known as Larry’s Horn . . . during his all night DJing stints he would progressively upgrade the cartridges on his three turntables, so that the sensory experience would peak around 5 a.m. And during the week, he would spend hours adjusting the positioning of speakers and making sure the sensurround sound was physically overwhelming yet crystal clear. Garage veterans testify that the sheer sonic impact of the system seemed to wreak sub-molecular changes in your body. (Reynolds 2008, 28–29)9 The ways that this language is used feeds into the implication that sounds or qualities of sounds attributed with so-called femininity sit at the opposite pole, perceived as lacking depth and impact, and as being of inferior quality (Rodgers 2010, 12–14).

‘Fluffy’ music The associations of sounds, musical gestures, and the materials that produce and play back these sounds with binary gender categories can be brought into focus even further by examining the common use of a single adjective – ‘fluffy’. Fluffiness, far from being a 199

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measurable, physical quality of sound, is a pervasive, ingrained belief, formed through communication and practice, and reiterated through a casual transference from one DJ or dance music participant to the next. Such a phenomenon is exemplified when male DJs state that they play ‘fluffy’ sounds because “that’s a way to get the girls dancing, very often” (Warren 2011). This phenomenon is both discussed between (usually male) DJs and put into practice at performances, in the hope that, as a technique, it will fill dance floors. Fluffiness is one example of the larger-scale gender stereotyping carried out by people both within these genre-centred communities and outside of them.10 It derives from our everyday characterisations of certain physical objects: cotton wool, feathers, dandelion seeds, fur, other fabrics harvested from plants or shorn off animals, cotton candy. The material qualities of these objects such as their texture and their feel against the skin (soft, smooth, gentle), how their forms look to the eye (round, undefined edges), and their weight (extremely light) can and often do translate into interpretations of these metaphors within sound. The softness of these objects is such that they float aimlessly when airborne and have little physical impact upon other objects. With blurred edges, they can be hard to see and hard to catch; their material substance can elude us. With this more explicitly negative metaphor – an object without substance – we arrive at something that lacks significance. The fluffy object is soft, light, and pleasant, but ultimately empty; its pleasures are confined to the surface only. This word – a single example among many – is used widely in dance music communities. Fluffiness is in an already-established state, grounded in dominant gendered notions in which the metaphors of the soft, the smooth, and, by implication, the weak and the superficial are tantamount to femininity. As a concept pertaining to sound objects, it is challenging to grasp in part because of the relatively elusive and invisible quality of sound waves, compared with the tangible, visible objects described above. The difficulty of explaining fluffiness also relates to the requirement that participants possess knowledge of the rules and rhetoric of different dance music genres. Cilla, the DJ I referred to above, uses the word to describe perceptions of women and DJing technologies: Cilla: I think that guys . . . or people think . . . the structure . . . the society thinks that just guys are born with this talent with [technology] and girls are just so pink and fluffy and don’t know things about cables and buttons. . . . Always when something happens, when a mixing cable gets pulled out, this troupe of guys just come up there and [say] “I’m going to help you”. They haven’t done that to a male DJ. I feel like it’s just because I’m a girl. For Cilla, fluffiness does not allow room for the types of technological mastery traditionally afforded only to men. Regardless of how she enacts her gender and sexual identity, men who watch Cilla setting up her DJ equipment perceive a lack of technological skill in her as a ‘girl’. By virtue of her gender, she feels perceived as too soft to manage ‘hard’ materials such as ‘cables and buttons’. Another interviewee to use this term was Warren, a psytrance DJ. Along with many of his peers, he used it to denote musical attributes intended to inspire women to continue dancing.11 Regardless of my cursory familiarity with the specific dance music genre of psytrance, I shared an understanding of Warren’s use of ‘fluffy’ without his expanding upon it. Warren correctly presumed that I possessed specialised knowledge of the music (distinguishing between dance music genres) and participation (DJing and dancing) in his scene. Specifically, my experience as an insider dance music participant, and the inevitable biases 200

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resulting from this participation, would have informed my own understanding of fluffiness. In a genre such as dubstep, I would therefore hear fluffiness as entailing ‘smooth’ legato sounds in a high-register such as synth strings. These higher pitches would have the effect of auditory lightness as a counterweight to abrasive, distorted, electric guitar-like sounds in middle registers, and warbling sub bass lines that are common in the genre. By contrast, in trance, synth strings and higher registers are among the fundamental sounds making up the recognisable texture of the genre; these same sounds might not therefore be considered fluffy by trance fans. A so-called fluffy sound in trance would need to possess other properties – fewer harmonic overtones, for example, sounds that are closer to ‘pure’ sine waves – to contrast the harmonically rich sonic textures and high registers of trance, a genre which attracts stadium-sized crowds of all genders, across the world. All in all, fluffiness in sound seems to pertain to certain types of frequencies, including the perceptual properties of pitch and timbre. However, as I will show through the analysis that follows, these same frequencies can have effects and possess significations that range from girliness or fluffiness to drug-induced, high-energy euphoria. Moreover, unlike ‘fluffiness’, frequencies which carry with them this ‘druggy’ association appear to be acceptable for male clubbers to associate with. DJ-producer and sound engineer Gabriel Kemp-Zislis provides a helpful sonic description of this genre of trance music, whose central focus, he argues, is on frequencies with rich harmonics that “draw out a whole range of emotion simultaneously – an overload of the senses” (Kemp-Zislis 2015, personal communication). What is often described as ‘euphoric’ music in the genre is targeted at consumption in conjunction specifically with the drug ecstasy. A commercially successful example of trance is Paul van Dyk’s ‘For An Angel’ (1998), wellknown enough to be considered an ‘anthem’ – a memorable, catchy track recognised by most trance fans. In addition to typical spacious reverb and delay effects, it is characterised by extended mid- to high-register synth strings, synth leads, and pads at underlying tempos of approximately 130 beats per minute. When overlayered, the pitched sounds that foreground ‘For An Angel’ are examples of the types of sounds that participants refer to as fluffy.12 The synth strings, leads, and pads often provide timbral interest, add to the texture, and function as melodic, countermelodic, or harmonic. The first elements of clearly defined pitches to enter the mix after the kick drum, bass line, and later snare and hi-hat introduction are an extended, atmospheric pad together with a recurring bouncing octave-doubled synth lead with a strong tonality built into it. The pad helps to establish the soft timbres that underline much of the track. The whisper ‘For An Angel’ in a brief breakdown, followed by a punctuated psytrance-like bass line warble, reminiscent of a Roland TB-303 (Kemp-Zislis 2015, personal communication), signposts the entry into the first main section of the track. This section is richly layered with multiple melodic parts. Throughout the track, all the melody lines, including even those with relatively sharper attacks and delays such as during the breakdown beginning at 1:37, form an overall tone of warmth, roundedness, and sonic space between the registers. The highly reverberant sounds in the mix also affect this experience of sonic space. The exception occurs when a more abrasive and ‘noisy’ layer is introduced from 4:10 – a rapidly descending, tenor-register melodic part that gradually distorts. The result is an outward growth in noise, behind which mid-register rapid arpeggiated or sequenced stabs occur. In addition, noisy, percussive sound effects are introduced such as recurring ‘crash cymbals’ on every beat of the bar. An upward glissando sound known by many producers as a ‘riser’ (Kemp-Zislis 2015, personal communication) winds up this section with an abruptly spacious breakdown, in which the central melodic theme returns in a sequenced synth-stab mid-register form. At 5:20, a characteristically melodic higher register layer with a gentle attack is added as simultaneous emphasis (doubling the dominant melodic shape of the 201

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theme) and rhythmic syncopation. At 5:34, the second half of the breakdown is punctuated by a further emphasis (doubling) of this melodic line by another layer softening in its effect because of its extended duration and legato quality. The overall sonic experience is softened also by a tail of sound behind the more metronomic, staccato melodic riff at the foreground. This is likely produced with the commonly used reverb effect to “simulate a ‘cathedralesque’ space” (Kemp-Zislis 2015, personal communication). The variability of the meaning of fluffiness, across different genres, destabilises any absolutist notions of gender in sound. Thus, the commercial strand of trance music exemplified in ‘For An Angel’ is characterised by the types of softer sounds described in the above analysis without any allusions by participants to femininity. The commercial trance genre has, on the contrary, largely presented as an ecstasy-focused, male-dominated scene in the dance music communities I have studied in Europe and Australia.13 Contrastingly, participants associate similar timbres with the aforementioned understandings of femininity in many other dance music genres, including techno, house, dubstep, drum ’n’ bass, electro, breakbeat, and on occasion, psytrance. In the latter genre, sounds which incorporate melodic, light, and catchy elements are positioned differently in the sonic space. At 3:41 of the track ‘Friend of the Night’ by Prosper (2006), the producer introduces a melodic riff with a softer timbre and higher register than the other layers.14 At 3:55, a crescendoing synth pad of extended duration, with a ‘long-tail’ reverb effect added to it, lends texture and atmosphere to this higher register. The track is stripped back to a soft, highly reverberant female vocal sample with a delay effect at approximately 5:35, followed by a reverberating pitch at an interval of a minor seventh below the original. At 5:44, the word ‘dream’ sounds on the tonic note of the track after these reverberations are sounded and allowed to decay. The auditory effect of distortion occurs with the accumulation of frequencies as a result of these ‘time-domain’ effects (Kemp-Zislis 2015, personal communication). After the bass line and kick drum elements return, chorale-like, extended synthesised strings dominate the mix from 6:02, either in the form of a single-pitch melodic line or as two pitches in rhythmic unison and pitch harmony. These are set apart from the rest of the mix by a much higher register and a distinctly softer, purer timbre. Unlike in commercial trance, where such higher register, softer sounds dominate the sonic experience and are integrated into the expectations of the genre, the highlighting of the presence of fluffy sounds in genres such as psytrance and techno sets these sounds up as counter to the ‘fundamentals’ – kick drums, bass lines, snares, and hi-hats. In this case, fluffiness constitutes an example of a feminine ‘other’, problematically attributed to anything that sonically contrasts or offsets these fundamentals. In laying out and challenging the binary understandings of these elements, it is worth further taking into consideration their bodily effects. This is relevant in part because many DJs consider how music affects gendered dancing bodies during their performances, often targeting women dancers. What Vinoo Alluri and Petri Toiviainen (2010) refer to as the polyphonic timbre – the sum total of the multiple layers of electronic sound, rhythmically synchronised, and meticulously pieced together by the producer – has a significant bearing upon the experience of the dancer. For example, the addition or removal of a sound, or alternatively, the gradual and subtle altering of its parameters, can dramatically shift the bodily experience of music, such as the progressive house track, ‘Eivissa’ by Robert M (2007). In this track, the increase in a reverberation effect upon a looped, melodic sequence or arpeggiated riff – beginning at the breakdown at 2:46 and ending with the bass drop at 3:47 – can increase a participant’s sense of “Body” and “Place” (cf. Kim 2010). This is also achieved through the removal of the bass-driven parts of the ‘rhythm section’ (kick drum and bass line) in stages. Attention is momentarily drawn to the hi hat and snare, which maintain the track’s forward 202

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momentum.15 The foregrounded high-register melodic riff on its own fits the notion of fluffiness when superimposed over the ‘fundamentals’ of the rhythm section. In sum, a number of perceptual features would lead participants to associate sounds with the idea of fluffiness. These include the richness of texture, the sense of sonic space, the frequency of single sounds, and the atmosphere created by combinations of sounds in a whole mix.

DJing, the moving body, and the media As I have shown, the physical-perceptual effects of the aforementioned musical features include associations with such human qualities as gender. The gendering of sounds is reflected in and born from the bodily movements of DJs performing the music in the flesh, and dancers responding to it. These scenarios are not confined exclusively to the physical spaces of night clubs, nor do they occur only once; they are often mediated by processes of formal (professionally hired) and informal (clubbers with smartphones) filming, as well as audio recorded by DJs through laptops, sound cards, and mixers, in order that they might be enjoyed by participants at home or at work, either through a feed during the gig, or afterward. As Philip Auslander notes, such media-orientations are an established and familiar practice in a range of musical and other performance event forms (Auslander 2008, 7, 24–27). It can seem strangely contradictory to target a DJ-driven dance music event, such as the Boiler Room, for the home viewer to watch on her personal computer in solitude.16 The contradiction stems from the notion that for participants, dance music events are supposed to work through an in-the-flesh, shared response to music performed by a DJ (only once) and to the dancing of other participants, and the Boiler Room event is undoubtedly aimed first and foremost at the home viewer. The camera and lighting are carefully managed so that the DJ is a great deal more visible on screen than she otherwise would be. She faces the camera with her back to the dancers, so that they might also face the camera.17 All the while, it must remain recognisable as a ‘traditional’ dance music event in order to be attended by ‘live’ clubbers. These clubbers are themselves a part of the cast; indeed, for Auslander, one of the appeals of watching a performed event on video is to witness the feedback from the participants and performers who are co-present (Auslander 2008, 69). The reconfiguration of the physical club space exemplifies the extent to which such events have been mediatised; events are designed around a co-dependency between the documented and the document (Auslander 2008, 25). Given that the Boiler Room event is screen-centred, regardless of the genders of the DJs, fans’ criticisms of Nina Kraviz for deliberately performing sexual desirability for the camera (2013, 2015) are based on normative understandings of what it means to perform gender. It is worth calling to mind the playing of gender roles as conceptualised by Judith Butler, where ‘mundane’ modes of ‘performativity’ are incorporated into behaviour, dress, bodily appearance, and language (Butler 1988, 524, 530). Through this lens, Kraviz’s fans would see her as having internalised the limited notions of femininity described in this chapter. As in other genres of solo pop performance, DJing constitutes a platform for gendered identities to be scrutinised (cf. Hawkins 2009), and in a male-DJ-dominated global techno scene, Nina Kraviz is a frequent subject of such scrutiny. Kraviz has gained the attention of vast numbers of participants, fans, journalists, artists, and followers of these techno scenes since her emergence as a prominent international DJ-producer. The ‘controversies’ surrounding her (Barnes 2013; Cangelosi 2013; Fact 2013; Johnstone 2013; Reamer 2013; Wilson 2013) pertain to the framing of her femininity, sexuality, and/or desirability both in her DJ sets and in a video documentary made for Resident Advisor (2013) about her life as a touring DJ.18 Kraviz’s participation in this documentary 203

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included an interview conducted in her swimsuit at the beach (at thirty seconds into the video) and most notoriously from a bubble bath in a hotel (at 5:42). These scenes spurred strong reactions from viewers, including a DJ-producer peer from techno and house scenes, Maceo Plex (Barnes 2013; Cangelosi 2013; Fact 2013; Johnstone 2013). The scene shot in the bath was deemed in bad taste and constituted a lack of integrity, insulting “the ladies playing amazing music and pushing the scene forward with nothing else but sick records and studio time” (Maceo Plex quoted in Cangelosi 2013; Johnstone 2013).19 Two years after the Resident Advisor ‘scandal’, the Boiler Room DJ set based in Edinburgh (2015) provoked discussions about her physical appearance, criticisms of her mixing skills, and references to her (alleged) relationship with Berlin DJ Ben Klock.20 From YouTube user microglitch: This is the second appearance of Nina I’ve seen after the first Boiler Room and I must say that it is a shame she didn’t make any progress in mixing skills. She’s got a lot of gigs and I believe a lot of time for an improvement as well, but it doesn’t make any difference. No doubt she is very cute behind the mix however it is questionable whether it is enough. (microglitch 2015) User Chris Bradley simply comments, “Serious Bird” (2015), while DAYV GANG asserts, “Nina I wanna have sex with you”. Edward Clowes argues the following: Her sets are getting better in terms of mixing and track selection, but I just cringe so hard when I watch her perform, because I feel she’s as concerned with the set as she is with eye fucking the camera and doing really self-conscious sexy dance moves. (Clowes 2015) Amidst a thread of responses to the above comment by others, user Fig Les writes: I agree, I look at pictures from her sets all over the world and she’s always in the middle of a set, but managing to strike a pose and pout for the camera. Saw her a few months ago and she delayed the set about 5 minutes so she could pout at everyone in the crowd and so they could all take snapchats of her. Have a Love/ Hate relationship with Nina. (Fig Les 2015)21 These examples are a demonstration of the ways in which dance music media coverage of Kraviz inflames and reinforces prejudices by many dance music fans. In particular, there is an underlying assumption within these comments that behaviour deemed to draw attention to sexual desirability is rarely paired with serious DJing and production skills. The comments could even be interpreted to mean that participants believe that the performance of ‘sexiness’ has no business intersecting with the performance of ‘serious’ music.22 The biases inherent in the discourses on Kraviz incorporate the larger-scale gender binaries that lead to the fluffiness-as-feminine notion that I have described earlier. DJs, producers, clubbers, promoters, and bar staff all contribute to shaping ideas such as that women DJs tend to deliberately attract attention to their desirability while playing through ‘sexy’ dance moves, a greater use of their ‘stage’ or ‘booth’ space with their whole bodies, and explicit communication with dancing participants through body language. This theory holds that women are more interested in audience interaction than with their tools of performance 204

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such as mixers, laptops, or effects units, and that men are stereotypically more likely to direct their attentions toward these technologies while DJing, and in doing so, assume a nongendered, ‘neutral’ posture: a self-assured attitude which manifests through relative lack of engagement with the audience and a greater attention toward the technical media being used to produce the sounds. The stereotype extends to images of minimalistic bodily movements and introverted postures, in which a smaller range of movement through space is used, and in which energetic, whole-body dancing is less common. This is a stark demonstration of the themes that have been (usually uncritically) reiterated by these participants over the course of my participant observation and interviewing since 2010. In presenting a guide to the prevalent binary, heteronormative discourses in such a confronting manner, I have been able to analyse, using the Berlin (2013) and Edinburgh (2015) Boiler Room videos, the extent to which Nina Kraviz is playing up her feminine sex appeal, as she is accused of doing by the aforementioned fans.23 My analysis of Kraviz’s gender embodiment does not support the claims that she draws attention to her sexual attractiveness. There are moments during which she becomes more explicitly communicative, such as through smiles and ‘air kisses’ directed toward particular participants at 0:28 (Kraviz 2013b), presumably (although we cannot know) to those she knows personally or professionally. It would seem that these brief moments of what Wilson (2013) refers to as Kraviz’s ‘charisma’ are given undue attention by those who critique her for sexualised performance.24 In the video of her Berlin set (2013), Kraviz’s movements are few and small. Yet that these gestures are being enacted by a woman are enough to threaten or shake up familiar ontologies of DJing as a job for men. Her occasional interactions with people (perhaps promoters and staff at the event, or perhaps clubbers) are the only hints of the ‘feminine’ in her performance, and yet the pervasive commentary is focused upon these moments, either to question her skills, to refer to her physical beauty, or both at once. I therefore contend that comments made about Kraviz ‘overplaying’ her femininity are based in large part upon the notions of gendered performance outlined in this chapter and a lack of acceptance that the skills of a woman (notably, one perceived to be attractive) can be equal to or greater than those of a man.

Conclusion I have endeavoured in this chapter to unpack some of the vagaries of dance music participation that identify so-called femininity as a sonic or bodily phenomenon. In particular, I have argued that many dance music participants associate the sonic qualities of music with binary gender categorisations. Electronic sounds can impress a range of sensations and evocations upon participants, and some of these are tied up with and influenced by a model of gender that assumes fixity and heteronormativity and rejects ambiguity or queerness. Indeed, neither the genderless, human-machine ideals promoted by Haraway, nor the queer dance music spaces where gender, sexuality, or other regressive boundaries dissolve, eclipse the vast number of scenarios in which traditional gender categories dictate people’s discourses and practices. Narratives of electronic sounds, as I have shown, stem in part from the narratives of gender asymmetry in the production of, access to, and consumption of technologies that produced these sounds (Rodgers 2010, 6–16). These narratives have led, among other ideas, to the notion of the ‘fluffy’ sound, which is traced in my analysis to a range of musical features such as high-register melodic lines, and sound parameters such as frequency and attack. Moreover, through observation and interviewing of participants from a range of dance music communities, along with analysis of tracks by Paul van Dyk, Robert M, 205

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and Prosper, I have illustrated that clubbers and DJs’ familiarity with the specifics of genre and style significantly affects their understandings of gendered aesthetics. This genre-based variability suggests that if we ‘hear gender’ in sound, it indeed relates a great deal more to the expression and reiteration of prejudices than to any intrinsic, pre-social or ‘natural’ phenomena. In the final section of this chapter, I have discussed how Nina Kraviz has constituted a pertinent case study for the ways in which DJs who do not present as male are not only attributed problematic gender notions with reference to their sounds, but also to their bodily movements during performance. I have observed that Kraviz rarely moves in ways that typify simplistic understandings of ‘female DJing’. Thus, instead of being able to trace perceptions of Kraviz’s so-called femininity in the ways that she engages her body during performance, I suggest that media and participant fixations upon her gender, sexual desirability, and appearance indicate that these attitudes relate a great deal more to whether or not a woman behind the DJ booth is sexually – and therefore, by default, heteronormatively – desirable. It is relatively rare for women-identifying DJs and producers in global dance music scenes to achieve widespread recognition (Farrugia 2012, 7; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 51–52). These criticisms therefore stem from little more than retrospective assumptions about women’s roles in male-dominated fields. Inspired by Halberstam’s (2012) bold embrace of ambiguity, confusion, and redefinition, my overall discussion highlights a need to reject outright any notion of a feminine aesthetics – whether of the sonic or of the body. The prevalence and seeming immovability of these gender stereotypes does not preclude the necessity for their interrogation, no matter how complex the task.

Acknowledgments Thanks are due to Edinburgh-based DJ-producer G Kemp (Gabriel Kemp-Zislis) for his assistance, and to DJ Shiva aka .noncompliant for permission to cite her personal post.

Notes  1 In addressing women in dance music specifically rather than women across various genres of music, I am able to attend to specificities of performing in this genre which is wrapped up, in the words of Marion Leonard, in its own “distinct histories, performances, practices and discourses that affect how gender is constructed and experienced” (Leonard 2007, 3).  2 These stereotypes are also arguably racialised in that they could be seen as imposing white standards on this music and its performance.  3 A substantial proportion of my knowledge of insider notions and practices in the dance music communities discussed throughout this chapter has been acquired from immersion in dance music – in the form of interviews and participant observation as a clubber, DJ, and event organiser – spread across ten cities, since 2010. These locations include Bangkok, Berlin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Melbourne, Oslo, Tel Aviv, Sydney, and Zurich.  4 Marion Leonard provides an illuminating analysis of how women navigate male-dominant musical practices in rock scenes. Her account evidently parallels many of the issues that women in dance music scenes encounter, such as how participation overall tends to occur in “male-defined terms” (Leonard 2007, 25). Examples of this include the treatment of women musicians as novel by journalists and popular music critics (2007, 34); the lack of agency afforded to them by male journalists and music critics when interviewing them (2007, 105–109); and the excluding practices built into studio production and audio engineering (2007, 51–55).  5 The dualistic listening to which I refer here is effectively depicted in Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida’s empirical examination of male versus female “Visual-Verbal Associations” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 666–678). The outcome of the authors’ research, which highlights the challenge of understanding people’s immediate associations of elements of music with extramusical phenomena, 206

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 6  7  8  9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

22

highlights how embedded these binaries are within their participants’ everyday thinking (2003, 666–679). In this sense, the Tagg and Clarida study should be taken as introductory; it provides evidence for the fact that people essentialise gender (and other categories) while they are listening to music, while not focusing on the reasons that this occurs. As Nikki Sullivan (2003, vi) highlights, queer practices are not exclusively about sex or gender, being also necessarily entangled with other acts and other identities. This is an example of how the process of translation from African American, Latino, and queer popular music practices into white heterosexuality becomes highly profitable for the appropriators (cf. Halberstam and Livingston 1995, 4–5). The names of interviewees cited in this chapter are referred to either by pseudonyms, DJ names, or real names, according to their requests. This discourse endures; many clubbers and DJs similarly ascribe high value to what they see as a ‘perfect balance’ between sound impact and sound clarity (cf. Devine 2013, 166; Keightley 1996, 161; Rodgers 2010, 13). Researchers are also transmitters of this type of ‘knowledge’; indeed, as Jonathan Sterne astutely argues, it is vital that we are reflexive in our recognition of the many visible and invisible ways in which we are wrapped up in the process of ‘pre-constructing’ our research objects (2003, 368). The outdoor psytrance parties attended by Warren tended to last so long that participants would often need to take periodic rests from dancing. In Tagg and Clarida’s survey, listeners consistently associated what the authors refer to as “Legato e cantabile melodies and legato accompaniments, especially of arpeggio or tied-over string pad type” with the female category, whereas “staccato phrasing and quick repeated notes” were experienced as male. This was just one of many examples of highly essentialised understandings which, as the authors bluntly argue, “seem quite sexist, to say the least” (2003, 670). All participants in my ethnographic research who are interested in trance are men, although this is not a statistically significant sample and therefore is not necessarily indicative of broader trends. According to Kemp-Zislis (2015, personal communication), this is most likely a “sinusoidal (sine) or triangle wave, with very little upper harmonic content”. For Kemp-Zislis (2015, personal communication), such an effect is created by the addition of a “filtered white noise riser”. Whether the viewer is sitting is speculative – it could be valuable to perform a survey on regular viewers of Boiler Room sets to find out if any of them dance. Such data pertains also to Emília Simão’s research on virtual psytrance parties (Simão and Tenreiro de Magalhães 2015) in which people would attend psytrance parties in virtual gaming form and take them seriously as events although they were sitting at their computers and their participation did not involve dancing. According to Diana Taylor’s conceptualisation of the ‘archive’ as a documented verbal artefact and of ‘repertoire’ as constituting performed, nonverbal acts, it is important in analysing videos that we understand them as ways to document performances and not as performances in and of themselves (2003, 20). Taylor cautions against taking such a separation for granted (2003); it is significantly complicated by the cases of performances that exist expressly for the purpose of being archived, such as in the case of the Boiler Room sets (2013, 2015) with Nina Kraviz performing to a camera first and foremost, and a dance floor second (cf. Auslander 2008, 7). The Boiler Room parties in 2013 and 2015 were only two gigs among her extensive schedule of touring (GigaTools 2015). Other reactions can be found amongst the hundreds of comments below the video on Resident Advisor (2013), although caution must be exercised when attending to such comments given that it is difficult to ascertain whether users are commenting seriously or merely ‘trolling’. For example, from YouTube user The Anomaly (2015), “Ben Klock needs to take notes from his girl”. Snapchat is software designed for sharing videos and photos on smartphones. It is marketed on the automatic deletion of files after they are viewed for only a number of seconds, and is hence perceived as more conducive to preserving the long-term privacy of users. According to the website’s promotion as an advertising medium, it is used by a relatively young demographic (Snapchat 2015). Some feminist activists have vehemently rallied online in defence of Kraviz against such comments (cf. DJ Shiva aka .noncompliant, 2015). 207

Tami Gadir 23 The presentation of such an interpretation can be compared with the findings of Tagg and Clarida, in which listeners were asked about the masculine versus feminine associations of particular music (2003). 24 It is worth acknowledging here that Kraviz vehemently disputes accusations that she uses her sexuality for marketing (Kraviz 2013a).

Bibliography Alluri, Vinoo, and Petri Toiviainen. 2010. “Exploring Perceptual and Acoustical Correlates of Polyphonic Timbre.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27 (3): 223–242. Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bayton, Mavis. 1997. “Women and the Electric Guitar.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 37–49. London and New York: Routledge. Bayton, Mavis. 1998. Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradby, Barbara. 1993. “Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music.” Popular Music 12 (2): 155–176. Brewster, B., and F. Broughton. 1999. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. New York: Grove Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. Chasin, Alexandra. 1995. “Class and Its Close Relations: Identities among Women, Servants, and Machines.” In Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 73–96. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Devine, Kyle. 2013. “Imperfect Sound Forever: Loudness Wars, Listening Formations and the History of Sound Reproduction.” Popular Music 32 (2): 159–176. Doubleday, Veronica. 2008. “‘Sounds of Power’: Musical Instruments and Gender.” Ethnomusicology Forum 17 (1): 3–39. Farrugia, Rebekah. 2012. Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology, and Electronic Dance Music. Bristol: Intellect Books. Fikentscher, K. 2000. You Better Work! A Study of Underground Dance Music in New York City. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Gavanas, Anna, and Rosa Reitsamer. 2013. “DJ Technologies, Social Networks and Gendered Trajectories in European DJ Cultures.” In DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, ed. Bernard Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas, and Hillegonda C. Rietveld, 51–77. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Green, Lucy. 1997. Music, Gender, Education. Cambridge, New York, and London: Cambridge University Press. Halberstam, J. Jack. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon Press. Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston. 1995. “Introduction: Posthuman Bodies.” In Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 1–22. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1990. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, 190–233. New York and London: Routledge. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Keightley, Keir. 1996. “‘Turn It Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15 (2): 149–177. Kim, Suk-Jun. 2010. “Imaginal Listening: A Quaternary Framework for Listening to Electroacoustic Music and Phenomena of Sound-Images.” Organised Sound 15 (1): 45–53. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 208

Women, stereotyping, and the DJ Lawrence, Tim. 2011. “Disco and the Queering of the Dance Floor.” Cultural Studies 25 (2): 230–243. Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lochhead, Judy. 2008. “Theorizing Gender, Culture, and Music: The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 12: 63–124. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press. Reddington, Helen. 2012. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. Aldershot: Ashgate. Reynolds, Simon. 2008. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador. Rodgers, Tara. 2010. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. Durham: Duke University Press. Simão, Emília, and Sérgio Tenreiro de Magalhães. 2015. “Psychedelic Trance on the Web: Exploring Digital Parties at Second Life.” In Exploring Psychedelic Trance and Electronic Dance Music in Modern Culture, ed. Emília Simão, Armando Malheiro da Silva, and Sérgio Tenreiro de Magalhães, 109–131. Hershey: IGI Global. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. “Bourdieu, Technique and Technology.” Cultural Studies 17 (3–4): 367–389. Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press. Tagg, Philip, and Bob Clarida. 2003. Ten Little Title Tunes. New York and Montreal: The Mass Media Musicologists’ Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Jodie. 2012. “Scenes and Sexualities: Queerly Reframing the Music Scenes Perspective.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26 (1): 143–156. Waksman, Steve. 2004. “California Noise: Tinkering With Hardcore and Heavy Metal in Southern California.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 675–702.

Online sources The Anomaly. 2015. “YouTube Comment.” Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. Barnes, Marcus. 2013. “Maceo Plex on Nina Kraviz, the Return of Maetrik and Juggling Fame with Family Life.” The Independent, April 25. http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/04/18/ maceo-plex-on-nina-kraviz-the-return-of-maetrik-and-juggling-fame-with-family-life/. Bradley, Chris. 2015. “YouTube Comment.” Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. Cangelosi, Ilenia. 2013. “The DJ Sex Battle: Maceo Plex Speaks Out on Nina Kraviz’ RA Video.” Less Than 3, April 9. http://blog.lessthan3.com/2013/04/the-dj-sex-battle-maceo-plex-speaksout-on-nina-kraviz-ra-video/. Clowes, Edward. 2015. “YouTube comment.” Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. DAYV GANG. 2015. “YouTube comment.” Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. DJ Shiva aka .noncompliant. 2015. “Facebook Post.” Facebook, June 5. https://www.facebook.com/ djshiva.ls?fref=ts. Fact. 2013. “Russian DJ Nina Kraviz Addresses That Bath Scene after Greg Wilson and Maceo Plex Have Their Say.” Fact: Music News, New Music, April 9. http://www.factmag.com/2013/04/09/russiandj-nina-kraviz-addresses-that-bath-scene-after-greg-wilson-and-maceo-plex-have-their-say/. Fig Les. 2015. “YouTube Comment.” Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. GigaTools. 2015. “Nina Kraviz’s Past Gigs.” GigaTools. http://gigs.gigatools.com/user/ninakraviz/archive. Johnstone, Henry. 2013. “Maceo Plex Calls Out Nina Kraviz Over ‘That’ RA Video.” Pulse, April 9. http://pulseradio.net/articles/2013/04/maceo-plex-calls-out-nina-kraviz-over-that-ra-video-feature. Kraviz, Nina. 2013a. “Facebook Post.” Facebook, April 9. https://www.facebook.com/permalink. php?story_fbid=556948164349995&id=192110944137172. 209

Tami Gadir Kraviz, Nina. 2013b. Nina Kraviz Boiler Room Berlin DJ Set. YouTube video, posted by “Boiler Room”, February 22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xogJgUteDAs. Kraviz, Nina. 2015. Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. YouTube video, posted by “Boiler Room”, June 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. microglitch. 2015. “YouTube Comment.” Nina Kraviz Boiler Room & Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland DJ Set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIcbIIHcx44. Paul van Dyk. 1998. For an Angel (Original Mix) [HD]. YouTube video, posted by “F sayuri”, March 17, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM5q1o7ofnc. Originally released in: Paul van Dyk. 1998. For An Angel. Deviant Records. DVNT24X, 1998. Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 rpm. Prosper. 2006. Prosper – Friend of the Night (Exposure Recordings, 2006). YouTube video, posted by “nikolaprosper”, September 20, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXgjq4KxNyM. Originally released in: Prosper. 2006. When The City Sleeps. Exposure Productions. EXPOCD 004. Compact disc. Reamer, Jacob. 2013. “Nina Kraviz Video Scandal Explained.” TickPick: Where Smart Fans Buy Tickets, April 12. http://blog.tickpick.com/nina-kraviz-video-scandal-explained/. Resident Advisor. 2013. “Between the Beats: Nina Kraviz.” Resident Advisor, March 19. http://www. residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1765. Robert M. 2007. Eivissa (Original Mix). YouTube video, posted by “szwarcu001” , August 8, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WrukCCDVEs. Originally released in: Robert M. Eivissa. Catwalk Records. CATWALKDIGI001, 2007. Digital. Snapchat. 2015. “3V Advertising.” Snapchat. https://www.snapchat.com/ads. Wilson, Greg. 2013. “Nina Kraviz – The Mistress of Her Own Myth.” Greg Wilson: Being A DJ, April 8. http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2013/04/nina-kraviz-the-mistress-of-her-own-myth/.

Interviewees Cilla (DJ, promoter). Malmö (via Skype). 2015. Gabriel Kemp-Zislis aka G Kemp (DJ, producer, sound engineer, promoter). Edinburgh (via e-mail). 2015. Warren (DJ, producer). Edinburgh (in person). 2011.

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PART 4

Gender, race, and the female celebrity

Overview In this part, the focus falls primarily on the female celebrity, with a view to addressing issues of gender and race. Steve Waksman starts off with a chapter that considers the subject of live music as a historical phenomenon, with the celebrity Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind as a case study. Drawing on examples of Lind’s performances from the mid-nineteenth century, Waksman also moves forward into the last decades of that century and into the early years of the twentieth century with his focus falling on variety theatre and vaudeville. Perhaps most pertinent in the research offered is a detailed account of women’s changing roles in musical entertainment from the 1870s onwards, when the constrictions of ‘feminine virtues’ would be fiercely challenged. In short, the historiographical and sociological account Waksman provides takes up the unstable terms of gender representation on the popular stage alongside reflections on liveness. Jenny Lind’s concert debut in 1850 is considered in the context of a bourgeoning commercial culture in an era before sound recording when there was a far greater longing to be in the very company of a celebrity star in concert. With meticulous detail, Waksman scrutinises the effect of Lind’s musical performances and its eventual impact on the positioning of women in the performance culture of the USA. Significantly, the female audience had a major role to play (arguably, even more than the female performers themselves!) and, as Waksman discovers, popular theatres were redefined as less masculine and more respectable places. Waksman also examines male impersonators, undertaking a comparison across a century (from the 1870s into the 1970s) to Suzi Quatro, who deliberately embodied masculine styles to claim them as her own. Revealing is the fact that female performers engaging in male behaviour and characteristics, and in their unqiue ways reduced masculinity to a series of signs that demonstrated the very performative quality of gender. Waksman also considers the celebrity status of Bessie Bonehill, and her arrival in the USA in 1889, whose unusual dose of fluidity enabled her to slide between manhood and boyhood, politeness and impoliteness while still maintaining a hint of the feminine character beneath the façade. Waksman examines how female predecessors to the megastars we have in the pop and rock industry today successfully disrupted the conventions of the day through strategies of impersonation. Not dissimilar to the historical approach

Gender, race, and the female celebrity

found in his book, Instruments of Desire (2001), Waksman chronicles with precision aspects of gender, style, and aesthetics through impersonation, which becomes a prime strategy for female artists in the past two centuries. This chapter reveals how ideas of the female celebrity from a bygone era articulate gendered identities with a broad social and cultural impact. The genealogy of female celebrities during the past few decades is a compelling one, and Marquita R. Smith’s chapter returns us to the twenty-first century with a study of hip-hop feminism and black femininity. In contrast to the Burns and Lafrance study of a 2009 track by Beyoncé, her focus falls on the artist’s fifth album, released in 2013, entitled BEYONCÉ. This signalled a watershed in the artist’s representation and subject positioning. Theoretically, Smith turns to an intersectional approach to popular music studies to activate a reading that highlights the meaning of feminism for many black women. Beyoncé’s embodiment of black femininity on the album under analysis forms a narrative that intersects race, class, and gender, and, as Smith notes, she is distinct from her contemporaries in the way she embraces feminism. In this much-needed critique of hip-hop feminism, we learn that black women’s relationship to feminism is a negotiated one, where intersectionality is a vital tool for bringing to the fore the complexity of experiences, needs, and agendas. Smith makes the astute observation that while mainstream feminism takes its cues from white women, black feminism concentrates on black women’s problems in order to confront racist, heteropatriarchal, and classist assumptions. By analysing a number of songs and videos and placing what some scholars have termed ‘Bey feminism’ under the spotlight, Smith concludes that the BEYONCÉ album represents a new turn in Beyoncé’s career, where the artist embraces feminism. In unequivocal terms, this can be read as a defiant and self-reflexive answer to post-feminist, and for that matter anti-feminist, thought. Erik Steinskog’s chapter, which follows, encapsulates many of Smith’s debates around race and gender in a theoretical take on Afrofuturism and post-soul via the artist, Erykah Badu. Steinskog chooses to concentrate on Badu’s relation to post-soul and Afrofuturism in performances that present a degree of progressivity in terms of aesthetics and temporality, albeit less so when it comes to gender roles. A main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that unfixed positionings are integral to the negotiation of race and gender in certain contemporary contexts. The discourse on soul (and neo-soul) advocated by Steinskog highlights digitalisation, posthumanism, and the role of music in the Civil Rights Movement. Key questions of presence and absence in Afrofuturism are posed that subsequently lead to a consideration of Badu’s performances and the artist’s renegotiation of soul. A central method employed involves a deconstruction of African temporality, where ‘circular motion’ is inscribed to challenge linearity. Steinskog’s thoughts on digitalisation and Afrofuturism are moulded into his theory of gender and race, and illustrated by a detailed account and interpretation of Badu’s New Amerykah project, where he considers the Gilroyian concept of anti-anti-essentialism to reflect on Bandu’s own notions of blackness and gender. Another pertinent aspect of this research singles out the analogue/digital divide – an ongoing topic in popular music studies – where Steinskog makes the argument that aesthetic choices are inextricably tied to discourses of authenticity as well as creative innovation. Again, this points to the possibilities in technological production to create something original and look to new horizons as the future provides us with opportunities to contest traditional roles of femininity and ‘being a woman’. In sum, this chapter tackles the issue of temporality head on by acknowledging the tricky domain of interpretation. Steinskog shows how Badu’s music, lyrics, and visual performances create a space where the past, present, and future intersect. It is at the point of

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these intersections that notions of gender and race become aggravated and therefore warrant critique. The next chapter by Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik continues the debates of many of the previous two chapters in Part 4 by turning to the celebrity status of a white contemporary female pop artist, Marit Larsen. Ålvik’s theoretical reflections on gender stereotypes and authenticity are invoked by the Butlerian discourse of performativity as he conducts an in-depth analysis of Larsen’s persona. A prickly point of excavation is that of fake naivety, which allows for a close inspection of visual and musical representations alongside strategies. Ålvik takes care to stress that fake naivety is a trait of Larsen’s persona rather than a genuine characteristic of the artist herself. This is a vital point when it comes to theorising authenticity, ideas of realness, and temperament. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Frith, Dibben, Auslander, Randall, Goffman, Hawkins, Shumway, and others, Ålvik distinguishes between the public persona inherent in celebrity status and other categories of the persona that are presented to fans off stage. One of the methods in this study is audiovisual analysis, where Larsen’s video, ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’ is deconstructed to demonstrate naivety as a prime structuring device of temperament and the persona. Interesting parallels are drawn between Steven Morrissey and Larsen, especially in terms of ironic intent. Accordingly, Ålvik’s reading extends numerous theories of the gaze, which leads to a relevant discussion of control: by who and for whom is the gaze mediated? If in pop music a key ingredient is indeed faking it, then the elusive and contradictory qualities this strategy transports with it are rife with implications for understanding the negotiation of gender norms on the part of male and female celebrities. Behind the gendered persona is agency at work; yet, in many cases, this is obscured by the mask of naivety, a mask that shrewdly glosses over signifiers of empowerment. Knowingly, Larsen maintains and steers the paradoxes and anomalies of her celebrity status in a most persuasive manner. Concepts of gender authenticity get a very different airing in the next chapter by Bridget Coulter, whose methodology shifts from the close reading to a more qualitative one (she employs semi-structured interviews with twenty-two participants and focus groups) that is intended to measure how audiences experience musical authenticity in everyday life. More specifically, this study considers how authenticity is felt by young adolescent girls. Coulter evaluates her findings in relation to the wider issues of musical value and gender. The backdrop is popular musicology, sociology, cultural studies, and feminism, which frames Coulter’s critical approach to finding out how and why people feel about authenticity and what this does for audiences gender-wise. During the course of her fieldwork, Coulter found that girls lay emphasis on the act of singing, with the voice serving as a prime vehicle for emotional experience; ‘singing from the heart’ provides a vital clue to the singers’ innermost emotions. Perhaps one of the major insights of this chapter is the idea of the blurring of boundaries between sonic meaning and context. Notions of technology Coulter discovers are gendered as verified by her participants who, for instance, demonstrated negative beliefs about the use of auto-tune with regard to its corruption of the ‘natural’. Perceived as a masculine symbol, auto-tune interferes with the authentic feminine naturalness of the female singer. Coulter also dwells on the responses by her participants to imagery of the body in the case of numerous female pop celebrities, concluding that in many ways young female pop audiences have a literal grasp of authenticity, which forms their impressions of pop music and cognition of musical value. Usefully, this study not only revisits, but also further develops the concept of authenticity in relation to contemporary issues of gender from the perspective of adolescent girls.

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15 ‘A WOMAN’S PLACE’ Staging femininity in live music from Jenny Lind to the Jazz Age Steve Waksman

This chapter is drawn from a larger, ongoing research project concerning the history of American live music; and so I will begin with some observations concerning the challenge of studying the subject of ‘live music’ in historical perspective and understanding ‘liveness’ as a historical phenomenon. There are compelling reasons to make gender central to the history of live music, which I will address using a series of examples starting with the mid-nineteenth century Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind. Looking beyond Lind, I will examine some of the ways in which the image and style of female musical and theatrical performers shifted in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth in connection with a series of new performance venues, the variety theater and vaudeville in particular. Throughout, my principal concern lies with two interrelated lines of inquiry: first, how was gender implicated in the position that musical performance came to occupy in the public life of the USA from the middle of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth; and second, how did female performers adapt their personae to changing standards surrounding the public performance of femininity during these same years? Jenny Lind established a model of feminine musical performance in which virtue was paramount. The assumption of feminine virtue was ideologically crucial to contain what might otherwise have appeared to be an irreconcilable contradiction: ‘respectable’ women of the mid-nineteenth century were not expected to assume such public visibility (or audibility). This association between womanhood and virtue or respectability carried into the postbellum period in US culture, during which time theatrical managers in the emerging fields of variety and later vaudeville entertainment sought to build their appeal to middle-class audiences by creating entertainment designed to draw more women into their theaters. Onstage, however, women’s roles began to change throughout the time period from the 1870s until the first decades of the twentieth century. The established trappings of feminine virtue began to be challenged, and female performers adopted new roles that redefined how they might appear. Two strains of development are particularly revealing in this light: the spread of male impersonators in late nineteenth-century variety and vaudeville performance; and the rise of the ‘coon shouter’ as a distinct sort of female pursuit during the 1890s and into the early twentieth century. In the former, female artists such as Vesta Tilley and Bessie Bonehill

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unsettled the terms of gender representation on the popular stage through the assumption of male clothing and male characters they personified in song. In the latter, racial rather than gender impersonation became the medium through which performers like May Irwin and Sophie Tucker defined a physically flamboyant style of presentation that broke more decisively with the expectations embodied in the figure of Lind.

Reflections on liveness It has become a commonplace in the scholarly literature on popular music that ‘live music’ only came to assume any discrete importance after the advent of recorded popular music. Before recording, all music was effectively ‘live’, and so there was no need to attribute to live performance distinct cultural value. Performance studies scholar Philip Auslander has put forward one of the most influential formulations of this issue, asserting in his study, Liveness: “historically, the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representations as ‘live’”1 (Auslander 1999, 51). Sarah Thornton offers a more precise effort to periodize the moment when ‘liveness’ became a common fixture in musical discourse in her study of dance music culture, Club Cultures. Discussing the shifting modes of authenticity that have arisen in conjunction with live music performance, on the one hand, and recorded music, on the other, Thornton claims that “The term ‘live’ entered the lexicon of music appreciation only in the [nineteen-] fifties”. She further argues that the condition for its emergence in this vein was the rising primacy of recorded music, which had rendered performance into “music’s marginalized other . . . which had to speak its difference with a qualifying adjective” (Thornton 1996, 41). In effect, by Thornton’s account, ‘live’ music is only identified as such once sound recordings assumed hegemonic status, a shift signaled by the advent of the disco club, in which recordings take the place of live performance with no apparent loss of audience enthusiasm or financial return. Auslander and Thornton importantly seek to historicize the category of live music and offer a compelling rationale for its growing distinction in an emergent system of aesthetic value wherein the ‘live’ and the ‘recorded’ exist in a productive tension. Nonetheless, each argument has its shortcomings. Auslander draws too strict of a theoretical and historical line in the sand by suggesting that only after recording technologies become prevalent can one meaningfully speak of ‘live’ performance as a discrete phenomenon. This claim disavows the fact that other forms of ‘mediatization’ were in place long before sound recording, film, and other modes of mechanical reproduction had become routine. Sheet music, journalistic accounts of live performance, and even music venues served to frame the act of performance in ways that warrant their consideration as musical media. Where Thornton is concerned, the 1950s is far too late to date the emergence of ‘live music’ as a category. References to live music begin to appear with increasing frequency in the early decades of the twentieth century in music and entertainment trade papers, in advertisements for musical instruments, and in concert reviews. Moreover, whatever significance we attached to the specific phrase ‘live music’, the notion that attending a musical performance provided a singular set of sensory impressions and stimulating pleasures was far from novel in the 1950s or even at the dawn of the twentieth century. Going back to the mid-nineteenth century, particular musical events had the power to evoke the sense of a unique happening that established the cultural terms according to which live music would assume value as a discrete kind of aesthetic and social experience. 216

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Enter Jenny Lind Perhaps the most prominent such event of the nineteenth century, in the USA, was the 1850 concert debut by the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. By the time she appeared on the stage at New York’s Castle Garden on the evening of Wednesday, 11 September of that year, Lind had been subject of the largest publicity campaign waged on behalf of a single performer up to that time. P. T. Barnum, the manager of her concert tour, infamously promoted Lind’s artistic brilliance and, even more so, her elevated moral character, presenting her as the living embodiment of one of the most potent icons of the era: the sentimental heroine.2 As Daniel Cavicchi evocatively explained, “A Jenny Lind concert, as managed by Barnum, did not simply offer a performance of music; through its multiple events and diverse appeal, it offered a more complex and layered performance of America’s commercial music culture” (2011, 35). Yet Barnum did not accomplish this singlehandedly. Newspaper editors across the USA were complicit in circulating news of Lind’s endeavors nationwide. Moreover, as documented by W. Porter Ware and Thaddeus Lockard in their detailed account of Lind’s American concert tour, from the moment of her arrival in the USA, Lind’s name was used to sell “gloves, bonnets, riding hats, shawls, mantillas, robes, chairs, sofas, pianos” and a host of other items, not least being reams of sheet music that bore Lind’s image and contained the lyrics and melodies of her most well-known performances (1980, 9). The result of this widespread circulation of Lind’s image, music, and accounts of her character was a powerful sense of anticipation regarding her first in-the-flesh concert appearance, which pervaded newspaper reviews of the event. Representative of this tendency was critic John S. Dwight – more commonly known for his proto-highbrow advocacy of artistic refinement – who could barely contain his excitement in recounting Lind’s appearance before the Castle Garden crowd: Now came a moment of breathless expectation. A moment more, and Jenny Lind, clad in a white dress which well became the frank sincerity of her face, came forward through the orchestra. It is impossible to describe the spontaneous burst of welcome which greeted her. The vast assembly [reports placed the attendance between six and eight thousand] rose as one man, and for some minutes nothing could be seen but the waving of hands and handkerchiefs, nothing heard but a storm of tumultuous cheers.3 And all this before she had sung a single note in public! Such a momentous response to the sheer appearance of Lind was the product of a burgeoning commercial culture in which live musical events did not exist in isolation but were already part of a larger media system. Lind herself was the prototypical star who became intimately familiar even as she remained distant from the swelling crowds that gathered to hear her fabled voice or simply to satisfy their curiosity concerning what all the fuss was about. While sound recording might have amplified the power of such stars, in many ways it only enhanced a long-established phenomenon. Indeed, the era before sound recording may well have been marked by an even stronger longing to be in the presence of such a musical star, for the simple reason that only in concert could one actually hear Lind sing.

Jenny Lind, the crowd, and genteel performance Jenny Lind’s debut concert struck observers for the power that the sheer presence of this female artist exerted over the assembled crowd. Her appearance in the USA came at a time 217

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when the meaning of the crowd, and the meaning of public social life more generally, were in a phase of transition. Media historian Richard Butsch’s recent work The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals (2008) offers a valuable framework for considering the transformation then taking place. The key terms in Butsch’s subtitle – ‘crowds’ and ‘publics’ – have a complicated interrelationship, in his account. Surveying the broad period from the early nineteenth century to the present, Butsch demonstrates that crowds have often acted as important instantiations of collective public agency, but that they have also been routinely portrayed as forces of disorder that threaten to undermine the proper workings of respectable public sociality. In Butsch’s chronology, the Astor Place Riot of 1849 was a significant milestone in the perception of the crowd as a source of social unrest.4 Previously, notes Butsch, newspapers and other organs of public discourse had generally recognized the rights of audiences to interrupt theatrical performances and otherwise assert their interests on a collective scale. Following Astor Place, the tenor of published commentary regarding public gatherings assumed a more consistently disparaging character and became more forcefully defined along lines of class. A gathering of working-class people was perceived as a threat to public order, and calls for public decorum became more insistent on behalf of the interests of respectable middle-class citizens. In effect, crowds were more and more defined as something in opposition to legitimate public bodies, and crowd control became conceived more as a requisite aspect of organizing social life. Lind came to the USA, under Barnum’s auspices, just slightly more than a year after the conflict at the Astor Place Opera House. The timing of her arrival helps to explain why the enormous crowds that met her upon her arrival became a source of such widespread fascination and concern. Between ten and thirty thousand people reportedly came to see Lind’s entry into the USA at New York Harbor; and her first several concerts at New York’s Castle Garden each drew audiences estimated between six and eight thousand. New York newspapers and magazines were littered in the days following her arrival with detailed descriptions of the crowds that greeted Lind and went to her concerts; and embedded within these descriptions were some powerful social judgments about what these crowds meant for the state of music and public life in America. To take but one example, the Message Bird, a biweekly New York music magazine that typically featured a semblance of early highbrow cultural commentary, observed of Lind’s earliest US performances: “In spite of the high bidding for tickets for the first two nights, the assembly was not a display of fashionable aristocracy. You looked round in vain for signs of that. If it were there at all, its usual glaring prominence was softened down . . . into the general level of genial and refined humanity. By the third night large representations from the two extremes, the Bowery boys and the ‘upper ten,’ were palpably present. Who but Jenny Lind could have assembled such an audience?”5 In this and other similar accounts, Lind, and arguably Lind alone (in cooperation with Barnum, of course), was capable of transcending the social divisions that had all too recently driven a wedge into New York’s cultural landscape. Without having sung a note in public yet, her sheer ability to draw a crowd as she did attested to the existence of a cultural middle ground where opposed social groups could join together, and attested further to the potential for cultural democracy that still resided in the USA despite the apparent growth of disparity and conflict. It is at this point that the significance of gender, and of Lind’s standing as a highly visible woman occupying center stage in the public life of the mid-nineteenth-century USA, comes into sharper relief. Lind’s perceived ability to cut across social divisions that had recently been the source of intense social conflict had much to do with her femininity. As was previously noted, P. T. Barnum, who managed and promoted the first several months of Lind’s tour through the USA, worked tirelessly to construct an image surrounding her of 218

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unquestionable virtue and unlimited charity, evident in the images of Lind that circulated through the culture. Such maneuvering was one of the ways in which Barnum could justify exposing a female performer to intense amounts of public adulation and scrutiny at a time when women – and especially ‘respectable’ women of the middle classes or the elite – were more commonly and comfortably associated with the private domestic sphere. Yet Lind’s public standing also demonstrates a point made by recent historians of the mid-nineteenth century: that sentimental values were not only oriented toward the private sphere, and that women often used virtue and charity to gain access to public life in ways that might otherwise have been forbidden. How Lind’s femininity figured into her status as one of the most visible figures of her time can be discerned from a story that circulated at the time of her arrival in the USA. We have already seen evidence of the large crowds that met Lind at the New York harbor on Sunday, 1 September 1850, when she came as a passenger on the Atlantic, a large steamship that had left from Liverpool eleven days prior. When Lind finally appeared, and made her exit from the Atlantic onto the shore and into an awaiting carriage, the crowd’s enthusiasm reached a level where its decorum was very much in danger of being breached. The carriage was surrounded to the point that it could not move, and the collective desire to pay tribute to Lind assumed a shape almost akin to holding her hostage: At this moment, was heard a wild hurrah at the gate, such as proceeds from besiegers when they enter the breach they have made in the wall or gate of a city. The people who had been kept off with hard fighting by the police, at length made one tremendous rush . . . and this heightened the excitement to a pitch of wild tumult. . . . There appeared to be no hope of getting through the crowd. The driver had only to battle for it; he whipped the horses, which he found to be useless, and then he whipped the crowd, when immediately the Nightingale put her head out of the window, and said, with much excitement, “You must stop; I will not allow you to strike the people; they are all my friends, and have come to see me.” This sentiment was received with a deafening cheer, and the crowd made way themselves, influenced by the soft, persuasive accents of the Swedish Philomel.6 The people, in this scenario, are on the border between human and animal. Unmovable and uncontained, they are whipped like the horses that draw Lind’s carriage (and perhaps in a more displaced sense, like the slaves whose bondage was a growing source of national tension). By the writer’s account, only Jenny Lind herself has the power to fully humanize the proceedings and restore order to the restless crowd. That versions of this story appeared in other publications certifies that it carried no small amount of symbolic weight in making sense of Lind’s arrival and the accompanying outburst of interest in her. Jenny Lind was widely cast as a figure that could tame the more wild passions of humanity not through force, but through the feminine virtues of compassion and sympathy. Indeed, it was these qualities that made her a woman who could inhabit the public sphere without fear of losing her virtue. Barnum himself solidified this image of Lind at the end of her debut concert at New York’s Castle Garden. Responding to boisterous calls from the crowd asking, “Where’s Barnum?” the impresario appeared on the stage, assuming an air of humility in the face of Lind’s artistry. He would refrain from singing the praise of her musical talents, he said, which had already been demonstrated for all to hear; but he wanted to draw attention to another of Lind’s great qualities, her charity. Boldly announcing the terms of his contract with Lind, which entitled her to half the net profits of every concert, he claimed that she had insisted 219

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that the whole of her share of the first night’s receipts – which he said was “in the neighborhood of $10,000” – would be donated to various charitable causes. Barnum then enumerated each of the causes and the sums they would receive, twelve in all, ranging from the Fire Department Fund and Musical Fund Society at the top, to ten further associations including a number of asylums housed in the city (Colored and Orphan Asylum, Lying-in Asylum for Destitute Females, Old Ladies’ Asylum, etc.). Barnum’s maneuver reinforced much of the advance publicity he had circulated concerning the singer and was designed to transmit a message also at work in many reviews: that Lind’s voice, however powerful and pleasing in its own right, could not be fully appreciated apart from her character. As Herrman Saroni, editor of Saroni’s Musical Review, wrote in concluding his review: “Not the great artist alone do we worship, but the true woman, fresh with all the graces and beauties of unsullied nature, radiant and powerful as an angel, with God’s best gift, a pure and loving heart. . . . Her mission is not alone to delight and enchant, but to bless and elevate”.7 Through such statements, Lind’s standing as perhaps the most widely visible woman of the era was justified. Her ‘true’ womanhood enacted a form of what historian Karen Halttunen has called “genteel performance”, in which women of the early nineteenth century worked to reconcile the increasingly strict boundary that was drawn between public and private experience (1982, 93). By Halttunen’s account, genteel performance most often occurred at home, in the middle-class parlor where women entertained guests and participated in rituals of social distinction and politeness designed to reconcile the cultural imperative to display sincere emotion, on the one hand, and emotional restraint on the other. Lind similarly alternated between these poles of restraint and sincerity: her refined vocal technique became a sign to many of her auditors that she was in control of all that she expressed, while the wide reports of her virtuous conduct conferred upon her an aura of sincerity that elevated her artistry into a realm where aesthetics and public morality became inseparable. In effect, Lind’s innovation working in concert with Barnum was to bring conventions of domestic gentility to the stage, and to invest musical performance with the tenets of true womanhood as they had been defined throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Courting the female audience In the decades following Lind’s American tour, the place of women in the performance culture of the USA evolved in multiple directions. Increased sexual display grew alongside a countervailing push for greater refinement and respectability. As Robert Allen (1991) has argued, by the last decades of the nineteenth-century, burlesque and vaudeville stood as distinct, defining options for the public performance of femininity. Both existed in the sphere of popular entertainment, but the one embraced the equation of ‘popular’ with ‘low’ and traded any appeal to respectability for a tendency to relish in bodily spectacle and sexual innuendo, while the other sought to import into popular culture some of the new standards of behavior associated with the emergent high cultural sphere. In this move toward respectability, the female audience arguably mattered more than any female performing artists who appeared onstage. For cultural entrepreneurs like Tony Pastor and, later, B. F. Keith and Edward Albee, women – and especially middle-class women – presented an audience and, indeed, a market that had been largely untapped and thus could be exploited to build a new business model for popular theater. At the heart of this emergent promotional strategy was the new emphasis placed on matinee performances as a regular part of the weekly theatrical schedule. Pastor, who would enjoy a career as a leading theatrical entrepreneur in New York City that would last from the 1860s until his death in 1908, 220

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quickly established the significance of his matinee offerings a month after he opened his first namesake theater in 1865. In an advertisement that appeared in the 6 September 1865 edition of the New York Herald, Pastor proclaimed that his troupe would appear on stage every night and, in large capital letters, ‘SATURDAY AFTERNOON’ – this last phrase repeated eleven times in succession. A decade later, the Vaudeville Theater in Louisville, Kentucky – one of the first American theaters to adopt the term ‘vaudeville’ so explicitly – advertised its weekly bill in the 9 October 1875 edition of the New York Clipper by stressing that its show was “devoid of all slang and vulgarism” and promised a “Saturday floral matinee” at which every woman and child in attendance would be given a flower. Matinees were an essential means to draw more women to the theater because the social conventions of the time held that only women of ill repute would be seen in public during the evening. In the daytime, a woman could attend a performance without great threat to her respectability, and could even do so without male accompaniment – something that would have been unthinkable at night. To draw women to the theater, in turn, required not only that performances be held during the afternoon, but that the theater be perceived to possess qualities of character that would not tarnish a woman’s reputation, whatever the time of day. As theater managers tried to build a female constituency for their theaters, then, they also began to redefine the popular theater as a less rough and masculine, and more respectable, space (Butsch 2000, 66–80). In a sense, they were following some of the same logic that led P. T. Barnum to invest so much effort in promoting Jenny Lind, but they did so in a way that was more pervasive and proved to have a more enduring impact on the subsequent shape of American public life.

Male impersonation Female performers found new avenues of expression throughout these years as well. Gillian Rodger (2010), in her groundbreaking work on the variety theater, has highlighted the diversity of female types that populated the theater in the years from the 1870s to the 1890s. Although variety theater managers routinely appealed to the moral sensibilities of their audiences, this did not mean that the women they spotlighted represented a narrow definition of feminine virtue along the lines of Jenny Lind. One can gain some sense of the breadth of feminine performance by observing the roster of female performers who appeared at Tony Pastor’s Opera House during this time frame. They range from the conventional beauty of singer and actress Lillian Russell, to the less comely but still conventional brand of sentimental womanhood (with a pronounced Irish accent) embodied by Maggie Cline. Deviating from these more normative versions of femininity, though, was a surprising number of male impersonators who took center stage at Pastor’s, whose ranks included Vesta Tilley, Ella Wesner, Ella Shields, and Bessie Bonehill. About male impersonation in variety entertainment, Rodger suggests that while male impersonators were often “quite masculine women”, they did not pose a strong threat to the prevailing gender hierarchies of the time. Rather, male impersonators ultimately worked to uphold an idea of masculine strength by directing their performances toward the satire of male types seen to be inadequate. A comparison across a century, from the 1870s and 1880s to the 1970s, may be instructive here. In the 1970s, female rock artist Suzi Quatro assumed a persona that Auslander has characterized as that of a “female cock rocker” (2004, 2). Wielding her electric bass guitar in a manner clearly evocative of her male guitarist counterparts, Quatro sought to embody the most overtly masculine styles of rock performance and claim them as her own. On the nineteenth-century stage, by contrast, women impersonating men were more likely to appear as the ‘swell’, a masculine figure that was too much concerned 221

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with style and appearance, and spending money to maintain these features, and so failed to live up to qualities of dominant masculinity such as hard work, physical strength, and financial independence. Most male impersonators assumed the persona of the swell and sang songs that were designed to make the audience laugh at the pretensions of such a figure. In this guise, then, female performers engaged in male impersonation did not actively appropriate the power invested in men, but instead questioned the position of those men who did not “measure up” (Rodger 2010, 134–135). At the same time, like male drag artists and even the male strippers characterized by queer theorist Mark Simpson as “male impersonators” in their own right, women appearing as men on the nineteenth-century stage presented a version of “the male body made improbable, the masculine made Other” (Simpson 1994, 189). Rendering masculinity as a series of signs that connoted adequacy or inadequacy, they demonstrated the fundamentally performative qualities of gender while suggesting something of a continuum between ‘feminine men’ and ‘masculine women’. Looking more closely at the example of Bessie Bonehill suggests the wide room for maneuver that such artists could exercise. Bonehill was one of a string of talented artists that Tony Pastor imported from the British music hall, one of his strategies to bring an air of continuous novelty to the attractions presented at his theater. Although her arrival in the USA in November 1889 was not marked by anything like the outcry that attended Jenny Lind, Pastor nonetheless worked to build a sense of anticipation surrounding her appearance. The New York Clipper was correspondingly enthusiastic when she debuted on Pastor’s stage, and the paper’s description evokes the contradictory signs that artists like Bonehill conveyed to their audiences: “She has a soft, sympathetic voice, a personality of rare attractiveness, and her magnetism carried the audience with her. . . . Her first two songs were done in full evening male attire, her third in a newsboy’s suit and her fourth as a naval attaché. In all she was artistic to a degree, and her expressive face and lithe form were in full accord with the song language”.8 Bonehill’s perceived ‘softness’ here offsets the masculinity she puts on with her clothing. As Auslander says of Suzi Quatro, Bonehill does not “give up” her femininity when she appears onstage as a man (Auslander 2004, 9). Indeed, it is her very ability to assume signifiers of manhood while preserving her feminine ‘magnetism’ that appears most to capture the appreciation of the reviewer. This might confirm Rodger’s suggestion that male impersonation was not, in the context of variety entertainment, a means to undo existing power relations. However, it also demonstrates the degree to which impersonation challenged the ‘either/or’ logic of dominant gender ideologies. Unlike Jenny Lind, who had to adhere to the codes of gentility to preserve her elevated status, performers like Bessie Bonehill enjoyed an unusual amount of fluidity as they moved between politeness and impoliteness, boyhood and manhood, while retaining some suggestion of feminine character underneath it all.

May Irwin and the rise of the ‘coon shouter’ A different sort of alternative stage femininity could be found in the growing visibility, toward the end of the nineteenth century, of a type of popular female singer dubbed the ‘coon shouter’. Among the earliest and most celebrated such performers was May Irwin. Irwin first gained notice in the 1870s as part of an act with her sister Flo, appearing regularly as part of Tony Pastor’s company. They specialized in comedic material from the start, but in their early years assumed feminine roles of a more conventional stripe. By the mid-1880s, though, Flo had moved into the realm of male impersonation; and May would move her own persona in parallel directions with her assumption of a more coarse stage manner attuned to the singing of popular songs associated with African Americans. 222

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‘Coon songs’ were themselves an invention of the 1880s and especially the 1890s. In effect, the coon song was a modernized version of older style minstrel songs. The emphasis was squarely on elements of racial caricature, which was highlighted in song lyrics as well as in the sheet music covers used to promote the songs to a buying public. At a time when there was a marked backlash against efforts to integrate African Americans into the social and political life of the USA, the stereotypes that coursed through coon songs were if anything even more exaggerated and degrading than those pervading minstrel songs of the pre-Civil War era. Yet the songs also dovetailed, paradoxically, with a moment when African American performers were gaining ground as theatrical entertainers in their own right. So it was that one of the biggest coon song ‘hits’ of the 1890s, the 1896 song ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’, was composed by an African American songwriter – Ernest Hogan – who was also one of the most highly regarded black vaudeville artists of his day.9 When M. Witmark and Sons published Hogan’s song in 1896, it appeared under the guise of two different sheet music covers. The primary edition, and the one best remembered, included one of the most unfettered instances of racial stereotyping that emerged in an era where such material was hardly in short supply, playing upon the most unflattering aspects of the song’s title. However, another version of the song was printed that highlighted its association with the star performer who helped to make it into a hit: May Irwin. ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’ is one of two numbers that are listed as “May Irwin’s New Coon Song Hits” – the other is ‘Mister Johnson Turn Me Loose’ by the white ragtime pianist and songwriter Ben Harney. In place of the racist imagery of the first cover this one features a single black-and-white photograph of Irwin, bearing no mark of racial impersonation. At the bottom of the cover is a note that these two songs are sung by Irwin in the “successful comedy ‘Courted into Court’”. In this instance, Witmark and Sons, and Hogan as well, pursued what had already become a tried and true strategy of Tin Pan Alley. They relied upon the reputation of an already popular artist – a white woman known for her ability to effectively and amusingly convey ‘black’ qualities – to sell a song. May Irwin was no male impersonator, but her stage persona often had an air of masculine swagger about it. Singing ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’, she would have given voice to the male narrator of the song, who sings of being jilted by his female lover in a manner that is meant to satirize the materialism and superficiality of modern women. This quality of gender crossover was present in many of the songs for which Irwin became known, including perhaps her most famous set piece, ‘The Bully Song’, in which she sings the part of an aggressive African American man out looking to fight the new ‘bully’ who has come to town. Irwin’s physical stature enabled her to personify such characters with convincing force. She was a large woman in size and possessed a face that was not ‘pretty’ according to the standards of the day. In the words of vaudeville historian Alison Kibler, Irwin and other ‘coon shouters’ such as Fay Templeton used “racial masquerade to create or augment an unconventional appearance that then became the currency of their comedy” (1999, 129). Although her act was predicated on the adoption of character traits that were marked as ‘black’ and a clear outgrowth of the legacy of blackface performance, Irwin did not typically blacken her face on stage. The racially coded qualities of her approach came through in her movements, her use of dialect speech, and in the content of the songs she sang.

Sophie Tucker’s Jazz Age femininity Following a similar path was the Jewish-American vaudeville star Sophie Tucker. At the beginning of her career, Tucker was promoted as a ‘coon shouter’ in the mold of Irwin. 223

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Moreover, unlike Irwin, she routinely performed in blackface for a brief stretch of her career, lasting roughly from 1907–1909. According to her autobiography, the blackface was forced upon her by a small-time theatrical manager named Chris Brown, who thought that Tucker was too “big and ugly” to be well received by the audience if she appeared onstage as herself (Tucker 1945, 33). From that time forward, Tucker felt like blackface was an imposition. She eventually modified her appearance to assume what she called a more “high-yellow” appearance, still blacked up but with a lighter complexion to connote something more refined than the usual blackface look. When she was finally able to appear onstage without the appurtenance of blackface, it was due to a transportation mishap: her luggage, which contained all her costumes as well as the materials she needed to black up, was lost in transit, requiring her to go onstage in her street clothes. However inadvertent the circumstances may have been, Tucker celebrated her ability to remove blackface as a transformative moment in her career, when she embraced not just her whiteness, but her working-class Jewish identity as well, which infused her persona for the rest of her career. As she recalled of the experience, she told the audience at Boston’s Howard Atheneum Theater: “You-all can see I’m a white girl. Well, I’ll tell you something more: I’m not Southern. I grew up right here in Boston, at 22 Salem Street. I’m a Jewish girl, and I just learned this Southern accent doing a blackface act for two years. And now, Mr. Leader, please play my song” (Tucker 1945, 63). That her song was ‘That Lovin’ Rag’, a ragtime-inflected coon song in style not so far removed from ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’, indicates that her persona remained tied to the successful reproduction of musical blackness as it was defined at the time, however much relinquishing blackface changed Tucker’s sense of self onstage. Still, like many artists whose careers began in the first decade of the twentieth century, she worked to adapt her musical material to changing tastes and styles as ragtime gave way to jazz. In the summer of 1916, Tucker and her agent, William Morris, put together the first incarnation of her Five Kings of Syncopation, a group of five instrumentalists who helped the singer navigate her way toward jazz (Ecker and Ecker 2009, 35). She would not record with the group for another two years, but as a performing ensemble Tucker and her Kings were among the advance guard of white musicians who brought jazz to the forefront of national entertainment in the USA. Tucker was already an established vaudeville star when she formed the Kings, and, from the start, her appearances with the troupe moved back and forth between cabaret and vaudeville settings. An appearance at the Keith and Albee-owned Colonial Theater in New York in March 1917 drew accolades, and Variety magazine (9 March 1917, 15) credited Tucker as “the first to show a sign of progressiveness in her particular field”, a nod to the bold gesture she made by surrounding herself with a full jazz band. Three years later, after concluding a successful, months-long run at Reisenweber’s cabaret in Columbus Circle, Tucker found herself at the Palace, another Keith theater and considered by then the pinnacle of vaudeville establishments. About her band, Variety reviewer Jack Lait (5 March 1920) enthused: “Kings is right. She has the last breath in jazz bands”. Yet Tucker herself was the main attraction, and the way she moved through her act epitomized some of the wider set of connotations that jazz assumed on the vaudeville stage: She syncopated a ditty, then did a mammy ballad (“Chocolate Drop”) in a red baby firelight spot, then her “Wild Women” scream and an old-fashioned Tuckerism by medium of “Alexander’s Band Is Home from France.” The superlative band played and she returned in the dizzy creation that she used in “Hello Alexander”. . . and knocked the living daylights out of “Nobody Knows,” with comedy butt-ins . . . Sophie hit solidly. She is still the foremost syncopator, despite her “refinement,” 224

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and she can get closer to an audience than any other individual on the stage. Miss Tucker is pure vaudeville – melodious, gaudy, lowbrow, naughty, intimate, punchy and fast. (Lait 1920, 28) This final list of superlatives offered by Lait to describe Tucker could just as well be taken as a representative set of descriptive terms for jazz writ large, as it was construed circa 1920. The incorporation of jazz onto the vaudeville stage, as embodied by figures like Tucker, furthered the process through which the boundaries of moral acceptability were stretched in a medium that was founded on providing entertainment that was inoffensive to the greatest number of people. Jazz fit the pace of vaudeville, its speed serving as an aural and rhythmic complement to the quick changes between acts that were the modus operandi of the format. It was, in a sense, Tucker’s mastery of this ability to shift quickly and seamlessly from one number to the next that made her “pure vaudeville”, while the skillful accompaniment of the Five Kings of Syncopation heightened the sense of excitement that attended to her presence and also, crucially, allowed her to strike the right, necessary balance between her familiarity as an established star of the stage (known for her ‘old-fashioned Tuckerisms’) and her ability to still bring something new to her act with every engagement. Tucker’s apparent lack of restraint onstage marked a thorough break with the conventions of feminine gentility that had been established more than half a century earlier. Yet as progressive as her persona was in many ways, it also perpetuated the logic of racial impersonation that had been established through blackface minstrelsy, and that had also endured for the better part of a century. In his groundbreaking study of nineteenth-century blackface performance, Eric Lott argued that a key facet of minstrelsy concerned a “gendered pattern of exchange” through which white male performers “put on” qualities that were associated in the broader cultural imagination with black masculinity (Lott 1993, 49). The qualities so adopted – “cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de coeur” – offered a sense of expressive freedom that performers and audiences alike experienced as an alternative to the confining norms of bourgeois morality (Lott 1993, 52). Yet the exploitation involved in these acts of racial expropriation remained inescapable, and the freedom that white performers experienced through the assumption of blackness stood in stark contrast to the social position held by African Americans at a time when slavery was still a powerful institution. Tucker, Irwin, and other women who participated in the ‘coon shouter’ craze enacted a similarly contradictory mode of performance, employing the repressive racial logic of the coon song to stake out new terrain for themselves as female artists. That they did so as women was no idle matter. Stepping into a tradition of racial impersonation that was itself highly masculinized, such women participated in a sort of double masquerade indicative of the complex cultural work required for women who sought to bring a different kind of femininity to the stage.

Recasting femininity, remaking liveness Sophie Tucker, in effect, epitomized a popular style of ‘liveness’ as it was being defined in the early twentieth century. In this she paralleled Jenny Lind, whose own onstage presence and the aura that surrounded it came to define the height of musical experience for many of her contemporaries. The marked differences between these two female artists, considered alongside transitional figures such as Bessie Bonehill and May Irwin, tell us much about the ways in which the cultural position of musical performance changed from the mid-nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth, and how women were often 225

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agents of change in this larger history. As Lawrence Levine explains in his pivotal book, Highbrow/Lowbrow, the first half of the nineteenth century was marked by a relative lack of clear separation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural spheres. Jenny Lind’s standing as a figure whose appeal bridged the divide between the ‘Bowery boys’ and the ‘upper ten’ personified the degree to which an ideal of cultural unity held sway, even as her promotion as an icon of virtuous womanhood was meant to contain the potential for class conflict that had recently surfaced in the sphere of theatrical performance. After the Civil War, however, the class divide as a structuring feature of music and theatrical culture widened. Variety and later vaudeville created venues for ‘popular’ entertainment that were more demarcated from the corresponding spaces dedicated to the presentation of ‘high’ culture; and female performers, appearing in these less distinguished institutions, had more room to adopt personae that broke with conventions of ideal or virtuous femininity. Still, old restrictions did not fade away in an instant. Women appearing on the stage continued to disrupt the limits that remained in place concerning their participation in public life. The best indication that, even into the twentieth century, female performers provoked a sort of “category crisis”, to borrow a term from gender theorist Marjorie Garber (1992), is the prevalence of various forms of “impersonation” employed by the artists covered in this chapter. Impersonation was a widespread phenomenon in the theatrical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with racial, ethnic, and sexual markers of identity being continually subject to satire and rendered at least momentarily unstable. For female artists in particular, impersonation became a primary strategy through which they were able to portray themselves in unconventional ways. It functioned in this manner for the various male impersonators that occupied the variety theater stage, as well as for May Irwin and Sophie Tucker. Yet impersonation also stood as an index of the fact that, as women who made themselves so visible to the public at large, they remained bodies out of place. These female artists did not wrap themselves in a cloak of virtue, and as a result, by appearing on the stage they risked giving up some of the qualities that marked them as proper women according to the cultural terms of their time. So they appeared as men, or under the guise of racial caricature, thus personifying the very uneasiness that surrounded their status.

Notes 1 Auslander’s work is the key text in establishing ‘liveness’ as a term for critical inquiry. Recent studies of the phenomenon, such as Crisell (2012) and Sanden (2013), have stressed the interplay between qualities of ‘liveness’ and technological mediation and are almost thoroughly contemporary in their focus. Historical study of liveness of the sort proposed in this essay has been comparatively rare, although one important line of inquiry has explored how ‘live music’ was implicated in struggles over musical labor in the early decades of the twentieth century; see Kraft (1996) and Roberts (2014). Meanwhile, the collaborative work of Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster (2013) has resulted in the first of a projected three-volume study of the British live music industry since 1950, opening the topic of live music history – and especially in connection with popular music – to new scholarly attention. 2 Sentimentality has been widely interpreted as one of the dominant cultural tendencies of the USA in the years prior to the American Civil War, and especially in the years from 1830 forward. With an emphasis on emotion as a more valued basis for moral judgment than reason, it was strongly connected to women’s – and especially middle-class women’s – efforts to negotiate the constraints of their social position during a time when the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ became more entrenched, and could be used as a tool for women to exert moral authority within the home and in the public sphere. See Douglas (1977), Halttunen (1982), Kelley (1984), Tompkins (1985), and Hendler (2001). 226

From Jenny Lind to the jazz age 3 John S. Dwight, ‘Jenny Lind’s First Concert,’ New York Daily Tribune, 12 September 1850, 1. 4 The circumstances of the Astor Place Riot have been recounted in several sources, with the most thorough account appearing in the unpublished dissertation of Buckley (1984); other key sources include Levine (1988) and Lott (1993). In short, the Astor Place Riot involved a clash between competing constituencies who were part of the theatrical audience of mid-nineteenth century New York. The riot occurred in response to the appearance of British Shakespearean actor Charles Macready at the Astor Place Opera House. Macready had a standing rivalry with the American Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest; as their rivalry was transmitted to their respective audiences, the conflict that resulted concerned tensions surrounding the class-based character of American theatrical life at the time, with Forrest’s working-class advocates standing opposed to the elite constituency that supported Macready. When Forrest’s supporters gathered in mass outside Astor Place to denounce Macready’s appearance there, the resulting conflict left more than twenty people dead and many more injured. 5 ‘Jenny Lind,’ The Message Bird, 1 October 1850, 471. 6 ‘Arrival of Jenny Lind,’ New York Herald, 2 September 1850, 4. 7 Herrman Saroni, ‘Jenny Lind,’ Saroni’s Musical Times, 14 September 1850, 603. 8 ‘Tony Pastor’s Theater,’ New York Clipper, 9 November 1889, 584. 9 On coon songs and their connection to race relations and popular theater in the 1890s and early twentieth century, see Dormon (1988), Riis (1989), Krasner (1997), Jasen and Jones (2005), Sotiropoulos (2006), Abbott and Seroff (2007), and Gilbert (2015).

Bibliography Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. 2007. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, ‘Coon Songs,’ and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Allen, Robert. 1991. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge. Auslander, Philip. 2004. “I Wanna Be Your Man: Suzi Quatro’s Musical Androgyny.” Popular Music 23 (1): 1–16. Buckley, Peter. 1984. “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860.” Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY. Butsch, Richard. 2000. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butsch, Richard. 2008. The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals. New York: Routledge. Cavicchi, Daniel. 2011. Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Crisell, Andrew. 2012. Liveness and Recording in the Media. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Dormon, James. 1988. “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age.” American Quarterly 40 (4): 450–471. Douglas, Anne. 1977. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ecker, Susan, and Lloyd Ecker. 2009. Liner notes to Sophie Tucker, Origins of the Red Hot Mama, 1910–1922. Champaign, IL: Archeophone Records. Frith, Simon, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster. 2013. The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1: 1950–1967, from Dance Hall to the 100 Club. Farnham: Ashgate. Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Harper Perennial. Gilbert, David. 2015. The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Halttunen, Karen. 1982. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hendler, Glenn. 2001. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Jasen, David, and Gene Jones. 2005. Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880– 1930. New York: Routledge. 227

Steve Waksman Kelley, Mary. 1984. Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Kibler, Alison. 1999. Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Kraft, James. 1996. Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Krasner, David. 1997. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theater, 1895–1910. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Levine, Lawrence. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. Riis, Thomas. 1989. Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Roberts, Michael. 2014. Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodger, Gillian. 2010. Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Sanden, Paul. 2013. Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of Performance. New York: Routledge. Simpson, Mark. 1994. Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. New York: Routledge. Sotiropoulos, Karen. 2006. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turns of the Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Tompkins, Jane. 1985. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Tucker, Sophie. 1945. Some of These Days: The Autobiography of Sophie Tucker. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company. Ware, W. Porter, and Thaddeus Lockard. 1980. P.T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind: The American Tour of the Swedish Nightingale. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

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16 BEYONCÉ Hip hop feminism and the embodiment of black femininity Marquita R. Smith

On 13 December 2013, Beyoncé surprised fans and the music industry with the unexpected release of her fifth studio album, BEYONCÉ. Deemed a ‘visual album’, BEYONCÉ moved beyond popular music convention to include visuals for each audio track. Many of the visual texts offered as part of the album render visions of Beyoncé that counter her polished pop star image in ways that were only previously seen through the guise of her alter ego ‘Sasha Fierce’. Through her performances, Beyoncé calls on specific politics of both race and gender, and provokes questions about the intersection of feminism, performance, and visibility in popular culture. In particular, BEYONCÉ is an album that began a sea change in Beyoncé’s representation. This chapter explores how BEYONCÉ displays a hip hop feminist sensibility that emphasizes the importance of feminism to the lives of black women through a politicized hip hop aesthetic. I ask, how might an intersectional approach to popular music studies – one that attends to the politics of gender, race, and class – enable a reading of BEYONCÉ as a (hip hop) feminist text? Emily Lordi suggests that BEYONCÉ is about “testing, respecting, and dissolving borders between different facets of the self; between sound and vision; fantasy and reality; artist and public; the bodies of lovers; mother and child; sincerity and satire; provocative ratchetness and plain old bad taste” (2013). Indeed, BEYONCÉ dissolves boundaries within the self – gone is the alter ego of Sasha Fierce. Instead, the album presents a more nuanced representation of the intersectionality of black women’s lives. As a theoretical framework, intersectionality is an “account of power” (Cooper 2015) that attends to the particular forms of oppression and subjugation faced by black women in their lived experiences. On this album, Beyoncé’s embodiment of black femininity provides a forceful rebuttal to anti- and post-feminist thought in a form that acknowledges the intersectionality of black women’s subjectivity and highlights the negotiation of political and social meaning through popular music. BEYONCÉ offers a provocative and explorative narrative that unfolds at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Beyoncé has avoided the post-feminist trend of shunning feminism. Instead, she proudly declares herself a feminist and, consequently, calls attention to the ongoing necessity for feminist interventions. By sonically and visually resisting a singular, flattened identity, BEYONCÉ breaks free of the restrictive scripts, or what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as “controlling images”, of black womanhood that negatively portray black women as 229

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“stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas” (Collins 2008, 67) and attempt to limit identity to a handful of stable, and denigrated, categories.

Hip hop feminism Hip hop feminism, which is informed by black feminist thought, frames this chapter. As Whitney Peoples articulates, hip hop feminists “have been influenced by both the feminist movement and by hip-hop culture, and borrow core themes from both for the development of their own identity [. . .] to bridge the divide between hip-hop and feminism” (2007, 26). For many who assume mainstream feminism to be irrelevant or incompatible with their lived experience, hip hop feminism interrogates the complexity and contradiction of contemporary gender politics to offer a perspective that is both critical and accessible outside of academia. Black feminism has traditionally sought to make the experiences of diverse women visible in its analysis of the intersecting conditions of sexism, classism, and racism. In particular, hip hop feminism is a generationally and culturally specific one that, in spite of post-feminist and post-racial rhetoric, takes seriously the concerns of the hip hop generation.1 As one of its core principles, hip hop feminism makes use of intersectionality as an analytical tool for analyzing complex issues of gender and racial inequality, especially within the realm of popular culture. Such a framework enables analyses of black cultural performance and recognizes the hip hop feminist perspective as a critical, selfreflexive, and generative one. One critical tool of this perspective is the hip hop aesthetic, which Brittney Cooper outlines: “First, it uses a kind of social alchemy that transforms lack into substance. . . . Second, hip-hop music and cultural expression privilege a wellhoned facility for defiance” and, lastly, “hip-hop aesthetics privilege street consciousness and cultural literacy” (2013, 56). When Jay-Z tells Beyoncé to “talk your shit” on ‘Upgrade U’, it is not to offer masculine validation of her accomplishments. Instead, he is calling on the aesthetics of hip hop to embolden Beyoncé to take pride and power in her position as a talented and successful black woman artist. Attending to the dynamics of hip hop culture allows for a reading of such utterances as part of the symbolic and significant exchange of endorsements common in a culture where artists rely on the participation of their audience in the construction of their performance and cultural capital. With these aesthetic qualities in mind, I read BEYONCÉ as a hip hop feminist work. Sonic, lyrical, and visual layers each provide a rich narrative that complicates, reiterates, and contradicts presumptions about the production of meaning in Beyoncé’s star image while mapping the album’s hip hop feminist sensibility. Beyoncé’s embodiment of black femininity, at times steeped in the aesthetics of hip hop, carries a specific burden of representation. In recent debates about feminism, her embodiment has become a site of contestation over matters of race and gender. As Nathalie Wiedhase argues, “Beyoncé’s body does not contest her feminist status, but instead her body contests the whiteness of mainstream feminism” (2015, 130). Many white feminists, for example, took issue with her celebration of motherhood and her decision to name her tour the ‘Mrs. Carter World Tour’. Those who criticized this move overlooked an important note: black women’s marriageability has frequently been a topic of discussion in mainstream media that seemingly questions if black women can ‘have it all’. Thus, naming her tour in such a way signals the importance of her identity as a married black woman in addition to her career. The tension between feminism and the patriarchal conventions of marriage offers context but does not preclude a successful black woman celebrating her marriage as a way to counter the denigrating narrative of black women being unsuited for marriage. 230

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The body is a specific site in which feminist tensions become visible. Tamara Harris suggests that the “judgment of how Beyoncé expresses her womanhood is emblematic of the way women in the public eye are routinely picked apart – in particular, it’s a demonstration of the conflicting pressures on black women and the complicated way our bodies and relationships are policed” (2013). Harris argues that the idea that feminist critique and the display of one’s body cannot co-exist is perplexing in a time when feminists routinely declare a woman’s right to her own body. Such critiques raise questions as to why Beyoncé’s performance of femininity and sexuality is read as problematic. Harris suggests that, unlike Madonna, “Beyoncé’s use of her body is criticized as thoughtless and without value beyond male titillation, providing a modern example of the age-old racist juxtaposition of animalistic black sexuality vs. controlled, intentional, and civilized white sexuality” (2013). One egregious example of this is a New York Post writer declaring Jay-Z a “poor excuse for a husband” for “letting” his wife perform a risqué song at the 2014 Grammys; similarly, UK Metro newspaper ran a story critiquing the same performance under a headline with the word ‘whore’ in scare quotes.2 Part of the critiques of her performance hinges on the faulty assumptions that motherhood marks the end of sexuality for women (“aren’t you a mother now!!?”, one person quoted in the UK Metro article declares). Though this assumption of motherhood limiting women’s sexual expression is often applied to women across identities of race and ethnicity, the black mother and/or wife must often work against such stereotypes as they are magnified by additional race- and class-based oppressions. Critiques of Beyoncé’s performance demonstrate the power of what Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images” of black womanhood, which include oppressive stereotypes about black women’s sexuality, power, and morality (2008, 67).3 The Jezebel or whore stereotype deems black women’s sexuality as wanton, immoral, or hypersexual. This stereotype works not only to limit black women’s power of sexual expression by any measure, it also justifies historical and continuing sexual abuse of black women. The Jezebel figure is presumed to be an immoral one who cannot be offended or assaulted because she is read as sexually aggressive and promiscuous. This is one of the scripts of black femininity (i.e. the ‘hot momma’) that Beyoncé frequently confronts in her performances. In her solo career, she has taken various measures to maintain her respectability as a black woman performer. One of these measures includes the use of an alter ego to coincide with the release of her double album I Am . . . Sasha Fierce (2008). Under the alter ego guise, Beyoncé – the middle-class, respectable, normative ‘girl-next-door’ – transforms into the dominant and fearlessly sexual Sasha Fierce. As Regina Bradley perceptively articulates, Beyoncé demonstrates “a dichotomy of grit and grace, two polarized representations of black femininity that only co-exist via performances of alter ego(s)” (2013). Alternatively, Ellis Cashmore argues that “Beyoncé is at the centre of an immaculately ordered industry in which ethnic divisions mean nothing and racism is imperceptible” (2010, 139). However, I understand the Sasha Fierce alter ego to be not just a racialized and gendered response to the reception of black women performers, but also a gender-queer performance that references black and Latino gay ballroom culture. Though Cashmore may insist that Beyoncé “has not presented us with a drama of multiple identities, reinvention, the merciless pursuit of fame and envy that purports to tell us something significant about modernity and ourselves [. . .] nor about the perils of marriage and motherhood” (2010, 138) (which he credits Madonna and Britney Spears with doing), alter ego Sasha Fierce and the release of BEYONCÉ (2013) offer strong counter-narratives to both the ‘controlling images’ of black womanhood and the carefully controlled separation of the public life from the private in Beyoncé’s representation.

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The thematic and visual shift in Beyoncé’s image can be attributed to changes in her professional management that have led to her having more (though still shared) control over her own image and other choices. Her father, Mathew Knowles, was well known as the management figure behind the success of the group Destiny’s Child and the beginning of her solo career. In 2011, Beyoncé and her father severed their management relationship, and she and husband Jay-Z have taken control over her career. Consequently, the self-titled release marks an important moment of self-definition for Beyoncé. On the album, Beyoncé explores multiple aspects of her identity as they mingle, coincide, and, at times, contradict one another. The representation of all of these facets of identity under a single name – ‘Beyoncé’ – eliminates the previous necessity of Sasha Fierce by asserting the right to self-definition. Collins argues that “Black women’s lives are a series of negotiations that aim to reconcile the contradictions separating our own internally defined images of self as African-American women with our objectification as the Other” (2008, 94). I extend Collins’s analysis here to suggest that, for black women performers, identity negotiations include engaging with the contradictions that emerge when public performance comes up against private subjectivity. For Beyoncé, the renegotiation of her image post-Mathew Knowles meant taking greater risks in her representation of a black femininity that is shaped by professional success, marriage, motherhood, and increasing awareness of gender politics as a result of butting up against structures of power that disempower black women in dynamic ways. The renegotiation of her image on the album, marked by the multiple naming devices used to refer to her, begins from the very start. In ‘Pretty Hurts’, she is referred to as Ms. Third Ward, a beauty pageant contestant. The lyrics, ballad-style vocals, and video detail the demanding and often painful requirements of perfection for those whose livelihood depends on stage performance: “Pretty hurts, we shine the light on whatever’s worst/ Perfection is a disease of a nation, pretty hurts, pretty hurts” (‘Pretty Hurts’ 2013). The narrative of disillusionment continues throughout the album. Though the audio track listing does not indicate a distinction, ‘Haunted’ is visually split to render two discrete music videos: ‘Ghost’ precedes ‘Haunted’. On ‘Haunted’ we hear a monotone Beyoncé claim, “I’m climbing up the walls cause all the shit I hear is boring/All the shit I do is boring/ All these record labels boring/I don’t trust these record labels, I’m touring” (‘Haunted’ 2013). Her sonic declaration and demonstration of boredom and a growing mistrust of the music industry are joined with the specters of multiple Beyoncés that reunite into a single vision of her by the song’s end. The visual accompaniment for ‘Ghost’ features a black, white, and grey color scheme, highlighting the contrast of the darkness of Beyoncé’s figure (she appears to be dipped in black paint) against the whiteness of the background against which she performs. Dancers who are encased in body-length sleeves of cloth create a feeling of entrapment as the shapes of their bodily figures remain visible through the veneer of fabric. Through these images, ‘Ghost’ provides context for the shift in Beyoncé’s approach to the music business and the management of her star image.4 These changes become clearer throughout the rest of the album, and viewers get a symbolic close-up of her eyes opening up shortly before the video comes to a close. Sonically and visually, we are (re)introduced to Beyoncé as many things: a black woman, wife, friend, sister, and seductress. The representation of various aspects of identity works to disrupt the repressive desire to split women’s subjectivity along the lines of illogical and oppressive opposing binaries that lack an intersectional perspective. These sonic and visual acts are representative of a hip hop feminist sensibility that accounts for the dynamic and complex character of black femininity. 232

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Hip hop feminism in a post-feminist context The release of BEYONCÉ came at a time when female pop stars had been explicitly refusing the label of ‘feminist’, a characteristic that exemplifies the post-feminist tendency for feminism to be acknowledged “but only to be shown to be no longer necessary” (McRobbie 2004, 259). Angela McRobbie defines post-feminism as “an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined”, with one of its defining features being its ability to undo feminism “while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism” (2004, 255). McRobbie asks, “Why do young women recoil in horror at the very idea of the feminist?” (2004, 258). The ‘horror’ that many young women feel in response to feminism cannot be condensed into arguments of ‘cool’ versus passé. The caricatures of feminism that are regularly deployed as a means of devaluing the ideals of critical feminisms may very well be repellent. In addition, many young women may feel disconnected from feminist assertions of empowerment in a moment when feminism is losing cachet. Post-feminist thought would have us believe that the goals of feminism have been met, or were unnecessary from the start. However, Beyoncé’s embrace of feminism – and rejection of post-feminism – has become unequivocal: as she states in a Shriver report on American women’s financial insecurity, “We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet” (Knowles-Carter 2014). Though some critics question the role of a pop star in spreading a message of feminism, when Beyoncé performs, the world watches and listens. Though Beyoncé makes use of the generalized language of ‘feminism’, her speech act is also framed by her blackness. Black women’s relationship to feminism has been a negotiated one that has inspired a distinct brand of intersectional black feminist thought that is attuned to the concerns and experiences of black women’s lives. Intersectionality as a reading strategy is a critical tool developed by black feminist thinkers to attend to the erasure of the complexities of black women’s experiences. As the Combahee River Collective highlights, intersectional analysis and practice critically addresses the major systems of interlocking “racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” (2000, 264). Intersectionality, as Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, elucidates the complexity of black women’s experiences: “Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas” (1989, 150). Whereas mainstream feminism takes its cues from the experiences of white women, black (and thus hip hop) feminism focuses on black women’s experiences to address the range of problematics that can emerge in meeting with the stereotypes and assumptions of a racist, heteropatriarchal, and classist society.

“I woke up like this” By explicitly aligning her public self with feminism through the aesthetics of hip-hop, Beyoncé repudiates the position of the post-feminist female subject who is “despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl” (McRobbie 2004, 260). The refusal to be silent fits within the aesthetical parameters of hip-hop culture and feminism. At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé performed a medley of songs from her album, including ‘***Flawless’. As her performance segued into the section of the song that features a snippet of Chimamanda Adichie’s speech about why we should all be feminists, the lights were lowered as the word ‘FEMINIST’ in capital letters was brightly displayed on a screen. In silhouette, Beyoncé stood, legs firmly planted, in front 233

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of the visual, sending a clear and unmistakable message that has now become associated with her image as a contemporary pop star who champions feminism. However, this track in particular caused a stir when it appeared nearly a year before the release of the album as the single ‘Bow Down’ because of her use of the term ‘bitch’. In a move that seemingly attempts to address this controversy, Beyoncé gave the following preface to iTunes Radio: I had a chant in my head. It was aggressive. It was angry. It wasn’t the Beyoncé that wakes up every morning. It was the Beyoncé that was angry. It was the Beyoncé that felt the need to defend herself, and if the song never comes out. [. . .] Okay! I said it. [. . .] And I won’t do it every day because that’s not who I am. But I feel strong and anyone that says, ‘Oh that is disrespectful.’ Just imagine the person that hates you. Imagine a person that doesn’t believe in you. And look in the mirror and say ‘Bow down bitch’ and I guarantee you will feel gangsta! So listen to the song in that point of view again if you didn’t like it before. (Beyoncé for iTunes Radio 2013) Beyoncé says this is not ‘who she is’, and her refusal to mouth the word ‘bitch’ in the video hints at a discomfort with it, attesting to this sense of misidentification. When she claims the recorded performance of ‘Bow Down’/‘***Flawless’ is not who she is, she also highlights how identity at times can be an unstable series of acts that requires reiteration to hold fast. Her recording of the song in a moment of aggression is not representative of who she is overall, and neither does it completely undermine her feminist endeavors. I suggest that when she sings, “I woke up like this”, she is not referring to her expertly applied makeup – she is signaling that her black femininity is unchanged as the markers of race and gender are often culturally and socially fixed. Sonically, ‘***Flawless’ calls on an aggressive, hard-hitting, chopped, and screwed Houston rap sound that connects her to the racialized, place-specific expressions of defiance and power in Southern hip hop and thus serves as critical to her message. She wants to express anger and assert herself as a feminist with the help of Adichie’s speech, which touches on the heteropatriarchal presumption that women must not compete with each other for anything except men and acknowledges the benefits of marriage while also encouraging women to have ambition outside of marriage (Beyoncé reminds listeners that she’s not just his ‘little’ wife). Instead, the idea of competition, particularly as important to the development of the artist, is built into the visual for ‘***Flawless’. The three stars that precede the flawlessness refer to the rating system given to the girl group Girl’s Tyme (an early version of Destiny’s Child) by the Star Search talent competition show, clips of which bookend the visual for the song. The reproduction of this Star Search loss to an adult, white male rock band within the space of Beyoncé’s album ironically points out the inaccuracy of the show’s star-rating system as a predictor of musical success. A large part of Beyoncé’s success can be credited to her ability to play across genres and performance styles. Her climbing operatic singing style lends a sense of gravity to the challenge: she is not just competing with other musicians (as the Star Search clips detail) but also with anti-feminist thought. The gritty sound of the song is reified by the punk, skinhead aesthetic seen in the ‘***Flawless’ music video. The video opens with a flashback to Beyoncé’s beginnings as a child performer with the group Girl’s Tyme. As they break into performance, the video morphs into a black and white slow motion shot of Beyoncé, in highcut denim shorts and a plaid button-up shirt, following a punk aesthetic. Soon, other ethnically diverse punk/skinhead young men and women – said to be members of the Parisian 234

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Anti-Racist Skinhead Alliance – are interspersed into the shots.5 Adichie’s speech marks a turning point in the song and the direction of Beyoncé’s attention: no longer is it aimed at her detractors. Instead, the song becomes a celebration of women’s confidence as she is flanked by four dancers who perform tight choreography in step with the star. The image of Beyoncé in this video is much darker, cinematically and symbolically, and provides a Southern hip hop edge to the song. This is a noticeable digression from her typically polished image. As Bradley notes, “The discourses of respectability that Beyoncé frequents and consistently navigates are those of visual culture, often limited to what we see of and about Beyoncé rather than what we hear” (2013). Though the lyrics of the song lend themselves to images of dominant women, and the bass-driven Houston rap sound conjures up hip hop, the visual ‘***Flawless’ delivers an alternative to these otherwise non-mainstream cultural expressions. Notably, the visual rendering of Beyoncé as ‘FEMINIST’ in that VMA performance was accompanied by the sonic reference to the song ‘Superpower’, which, despite its slow musical calmness, is visually aligned with a revolutionary aesthetic. The intertextuality of this performance of ‘***Flawless’ effectively drives home the point that this is planned or designed to be a radical moment – it is not a moment driven by emotionality or irrationality. The visual for ‘No Angel’ moves from centering Beyoncé to pay homage to her hometown of Houston, though not necessarily the segment of Houston in which she was raised. She is alienated from the people seen in the variety of clips, never appearing in a shared shot with any of them. While we see clips of Houston rappers, women sitting on porches, children playing, and strippers at work, Beyoncé – dressed in a white leotard, cowboy hat, and white hood fur coat – stands alone. For much of her career, Beyoncé has been the respectable figure with regard to her personal life, and her dressing in white, like an angel of sorts, calls on this history. However, Beyoncé, the social angel, is also a black Southern woman, and this aspect of her identity serves to situate the lives of ordinary black Southerners as respectable on their own terms. ‘No Angel’ – much like ‘***Flawless’ – takes on a ‘ratchet’ aesthetic that is meant to align Beyoncé with her Southern (hip hop) roots. In her piece ‘Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination’, L. H. Stallings outlines the category of ‘ratchet’: “Ratchet has been defined as foolish, ignorant, ho’ishness, ghetto, and a dance. It is the performance of the failure to be respectable, uplifting, and a credit to the race” (2013, 136). The visual for ‘No Angel’ functions to challenge notions of respectability by highlighting images of Houstonites at work and play of various sorts, thus making visible various ways of being as both possibilities and realities worthy of acknowledgement.

On ‘Drunk in Love’ Beyoncé’s restaging of her Star Search defeat is juxtaposed with her persisting musical success to acknowledge loss and challenge. However, the admission of defeat is not simply about reveling in overcoming it; the juxtaposition demonstrates a critical engagement with the dictates of success and the consequences of such fame, particularly for a black woman celebrity. In ‘Pretty Hurts’, the song and video that open the album, we see and hear the pressures of perfection to be an unliveable impossibility through the imagery of a beauty pageant. Though Ms. Third Ward (Beyoncé’s beauty pageant name) wins, it is not without great sacrifice of physical well-being and overall happiness, both of which are named in the song and video as points of desire. In ‘Drunk in Love’, the won beauty pageant trophy is ominously carried along the beach by Beyoncé; soon, it becomes nothing more than a prop that she leaves behind as she begins to dance alone on the night-darkened beach. Midway through the song, Jay-Z joins her. His rap verse on the song fictively offers a narrative of their 235

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intimate sexual encounters but also troublingly makes reference to Ike and Tina Turner’s abusive relationship with the phrase “eat the cake, Anna Mae” (Jay-Z and Beyoncé 2013). As one critic put it, “On a record that critics lauded as Beyoncé’s most feminist to date, and one she proudly dubs her most honest so far, it’s strange to see two major stars shoehorn a domestic violence reference into a track that otherwise celebrates love and all the glory of marital hook-ups” (Mokoena 2014). The reference to domestic and sexual violence is puzzling; many music and cultural critics have avoided looking at it too closely and instead leave it as a matter of bedroom talk between two seemingly happy married people. Part of the reason the offending lines are so troubling is because they are included in this body of work by Beyoncé that demonstrates feminist sensibility in other ways. What are we to do with the ugliness of violence against women within the context of women’s empowerment? Hip hop feminists insist on the practice of what Joan Morgan calls working with “the grays” (1999, 59), or the complexities of lived experience. ‘Drunk in Love’ may tell us about the strictures of imagination within a culture that often erroneously links women’s sexuality with the pornographic, which Audre Lorde describes as the opposite of the erotic (2007, 54). Lorde states that pornography “emphasizes sensation without feeling”, while the erotic springs from the deepest well of feeling (2007, 54). Popular representations of women’s sexuality treat women as objects, a collection of body parts that can be used for pleasure without consideration of women as whole beings. The cultural desensitization to women’s objectification results in an inability or unwillingness to recognize sexual violence as such and undermines our attempts to find empowerment in women’s self-expression of sexuality because the pleasures of the erotic cannot be disentangled from the mass objectification and abuse of women. Consequently, ‘Drunk in Love’, with its complicated and contradictory perspectives, demonstrates the joys of bodily, heterosexual marital pleasure while also reminding us of the imaginative slippage between the erotic and abuse in popular music and culture. Critics have taken up BEYONCÉ in a number of ways, ranging from the perspective of women’s empowerment to those who see her work as representative of a dangerous, “post-feminist gender regime” (Chatman 2015, 3). For example, Dayna Chatman interrogates how Beyoncé’s “body and personal narrative reinforce normative conceptions of marriage, motherhood, and femininity” within a post-feminist ideology (Chatman 2015). For black women in particular, the body itself has been a site of contestation over matters of feminism and femininity. Black feminist and cultural critic bell hooks also added to critiques of Beyoncé’s image when she referred to a magazine cover image of the star as being a source of terrorism during a panel discussion. She is quoted as saying that Beyoncé is “colluding in the construction of herself as a slave” and that she sees “a part of Beyoncé that is in fact anti-feminist – that is a terrorist, especially in terms of the impact on young girls” (quoted in Stretten 2014). This provocative declaration was taken up by Crunk Feminist Collective member Crunktastic (aka Brittney Cooper) as “irresponsible feminist theorizing” (2014). In her online response, Crunktastic writes: Beyoncé is not a terrorist. She isn’t systematically doing violence to any group of people, rolling up and taking folks’ land, creating a context of fear in which people must live, or usurping folks’ right to self-determination, raping women as a tool of war, or turning children into soldiers. (2014) Crunktastic/Cooper notes that it is important to distinguish between the “potential discursive and psychic violence” of Beyoncé’s image, which scholars should reckon with, and Beyoncé 236

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herself. Such distinctions are critical when examining popular culture representations, especially since they are so often mediated through various forms and structures of power. The mediation of popular images of black women creates specific challenges for cultural and popular music studies. Since intersectionality is not “an account of identity but rather an account of power” (Crunktastic 2014), we must examine the structures of power that frame interpretations of popular music. The positioning of BEYONCÉ as a feminist text is deliberate, and this move signals a need to reframe discussions of Beyoncé as an artist and public figure. Weidhase asserts that the album “serves as a catalytic moment that frames the themes of bodily and monetary control evident in her earlier work as explicitly feminist” (2015, 121). Weidhase’s keen framing of Beyoncé’s performance within hip hop feminism recasts her image in a way that disrupts mainstream approaches to understanding her work. As she argues, “Within its pro-sex framework in the context of the lingering legacy of respectability politics, Beyoncé’s performance can be understood as an exploration of the potential of hiphop feminism: her combination of explicitly feminist content with performances of sexual agency signifies an exploration of black female sexuality beyond respectability politics” (2015, 130). Hip hop feminism’s insistence on engaging the contradictions and tensions of experience and performance make it possible to read BEYONCÉ in a multitude of ways that neither tout the album as wholly and incontrovertibly feminist nor anti-/post-feminist.

Pleasure and power The corrective measures taken to empower black femininity on the song ‘Blow’ reflect back to a previous era of flirtation and play commonly associated with young adulthood. The song is reminiscent of Prince’s ‘Minneapolis Sound’, and its video takes on a feel of young adult fun. Lyrically, Beyoncé encourages her lover to focus on her pleasure. In her analysis of the album, Melissa Harris-Perry argues that the “experiences of black women’s bodies are not exclusively those of destructive assault or morbid fascination” and that being “an embodied black woman is also to know joy, subjectivity, pleasure, and the latent capacity to enjoy being seen: to, in a sense, transcend invisibility and to resist erasure” (2015, ix). The ordering of the tracks and videos on BEYONCÉ highlights this embodied black femininity by acknowledging that Beyoncé’s womanly pleasure, like many women’s lives, is also subject to the kind of misogynistic hip hop masculinity husband Jay-Z emulates when he problematically refers to abusive representations of black male authority. ‘Blow’ instead offers a counter-narrative of (sexual) power. She is out with her girlfriends, having fun and disregarding the advances of potential suitors, but lets her lover know that she can’t wait to get home so he can please her. This demonstrates Harris-Perry’s assertion that Beyoncé thwarts the “narratives that black women who are seen must be broken, that they are unequivocal victims of the gaze, or that they do not possess ownership of their intimate desires and sexual pleasures” (2015, x).6 Harris-Perry’s reconsideration of women’s engagement with the gaze demonstrates one way in which scholars are reinvigorating discussions of visual representations of sexuality. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey characterizes the gaze as a combined one in which both the male protagonists and the spectator view the woman as “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized” and derive scopophilic pleasure from such imagery (2009, 348). But what do we make of the black woman artist who closely manages her image in light of Mulvey’s contention that “cinema builds the way [the woman] is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” (2009, 351)? During her most overtly sexual dance moments in the video, Beyoncé is either surrounded by women or perched atop a sports car (both objects of male 237

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objectification), even while she declares that the song is for “all my grown women out there” (‘Blow’ 2013). In a sense, Beyoncé is in command of the looker’s (and her implied lover’s) gaze and redirects focus from the scopophilic pleasure of the looker to the bodily pleasure of the performer. The power to control the gaze drives the narrative of ‘Partition’. The song sees Beyoncé declare she wants to be the “kind of girl you like” and insists that everything you could want is right there with her (2013). When discussing the inspiration for the video, she recounts taking her husband to see the Crazy Horse burlesque show in Paris and wanting to then emulate it. As Aisha Durham notes with regard to Beyoncé’s video catalogue, her performance maps “ideal beauty and sexual desirability [. . .] onto the curvaceous, ethnically marked female body” (2012, 36–37). The song does offer an imaginary glimpse into the sexual life of Beyoncé; however, sex is not the endpoint here or elsewhere on the album. As such, Lordi is right to be wary of overstating the import of sex: Sexuality is an important and compelling part of all this, but when we fixate on the sex we replicate the very problem this album is designed to expose: that it is still so hard for a black woman artist to be seen as deeply sexual and as a range of other things – intellectual, creative, maternal, virtuosic, self-critical, egotistical, and hilarious. When Beyoncé claims all this brilliant complexity she issues a challenge that is also a gift, whether you want to call it feminist or not. (2013) As Lordi implies, black women’s representations of sexuality present a challenge to the ideals of feminism. Because black women’s bodies are often read as always and already hypersexual, any mention of sexuality can be taken up as evidence of self-exploitation or participation in one’s own oppression. Such conclusions rely on the controlling images outlined by Collins and offer some perspective on the kinds of challenges respectability politics sought to protect black women from within public discourse. But, as Harris-Perry reminds us, ‘Partition’ is also a song about power and control: “It is a reminder that we are allowed to look, but only on her terms and only through a lens of her design” (2015, x). This performance is designed to show grown woman sexual empowerment, as opposed to youthful naiveté. The bonus video ‘Grown Woman’, a dedication to mature black femininity, rounds out and counters the beauty queen narrative that opened the album. Beyoncé has outgrown her days as an unhappy pageant contestant struggling for perfection and claimed her right to do whatever she wants. This counter-narrative to the beauty queen offers an important critique of pageants as oppressive structures that attempt to dictate ideal ‘womanhood’. Pageants restrict participants on the basis of age, marital status, and parental status.7 In order to fulfil her desire for grown womanhood, Beyoncé had to leave behind the culture that creates beauty pageants. Her growth is visually presented through footage of young Beyoncé practicing her performance styles and honing her entertainer skills (at times with Destiny’s Child members) that is manipulated and synced with the vocals of grown-up Beyoncé. The video ends with shots of Beyoncé sitting beneath her mother Tina and, finally, holding two children while another leans into her for a kiss. Visually, images of motherhood end the album. Sonically, parenthood and family also stand as the closing representation as the song ‘Blue’ – dedicated to her toddler daughter – ends with the sounds of Blue Ivy’s voice saying “mommy, mommy, mommy! Can we see daddy?” (2013). As Chatman highlights, the image of the Knowles-Carter family, married and raising their child together, offers a “counter to 238

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prevailing discourses that the ‘typical’ black family is composed of an absentee black father, and an unwed, poor, or welfare-dependent, black mother” (2015, 10). The closing sounds and images of BEYONCÉ solidify the album as an affirming representation of black femininity that includes love, marriage, and motherhood.

Conclusion The encoding of pop culture images and sounds may not align with how meaning is decoded from texts. BEYONCÉ espouses what some scholars have referred to as ‘Bey feminism’ (Whittington and Jordan 2014, 156), which, in many ways, succeeds at reaching the women black feminism seeks to empower. However, I differ slightly from Elizabeth Whittington and Mackenzie Jordan’s positioning of ‘Bey feminism’ as oppositional to ‘Ivory Tower Black feminism’ (2014). As demonstrated through my analysis of various songs and videos from the album here, I see ‘Bey feminism’ as being more closely aligned with hip hop feminism, which is a version of black feminism that is self-reflexive and interrogative of the continuing role and necessity of feminism for the hip hop generation. Black feminist thought emerged from a position that questioned the dominance of ‘Ivory Tower’ modes of thinking. To understand the greater implications of the album on popular culture, the complex politics of performance relevant to black women performers of the hip hop and post–hip hop generation must be considered. By taking a less cynical view of Beyoncé’s embrace of feminism, the significance of this declaration becomes clearer: it is a necessary and timely response to post- and anti-feminist thought that often privileges the individual and choice over the collective good. Beyoncé is undoubtedly a privileged celebrity who can live her life without fear of economic insecurity or vulnerability to the full range of gender inequalities. However, raising one’s voice in the service of the collective has both benefits and risks. The insistence on disregarding the (hip hop) feminist sentiment of the album or dismissing ‘Bey feminism’ as not feminist enough is an unproductive and alienating act. Replete with images of black femininity that celebrate marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, BEYONCÉ represents a break with Beyoncé’s past and an embrace of feminism that is unequivocal in a contemporary moment of post-feminist ambivalence.

Notes 1 The hip hop generation is commonly defined as those born between 1965 and 1984 (Kitwana 2002, xiii). 2 The piece offers a collection of parents’ responses to Beyoncé’s Grammy performance as one that was distasteful and too risqué for children. Available online at: http://metro.co.uk/2014/01/27/ grammys-2014-beyonces-risque-performance-slammed-by-shocked-parents-4278835/. 3 Four stereotypical tropes Collins notes are the Jezebel or whore, the Mammy, the Welfare Mother, and the Matriarch. For further detail, see Collins (2008). 4 In Stars, Richard Dyer outlines the star image as a “complex configuration of visual, verb, and aural signs” (1979, 153). 5 This use of the term ‘skinhead’ reflects the original usage of the term to refer to the working-class youth subculture of 1960s London, England. Though the term is now often associated with white power/white nationalism, the origins of skinhead culture lacked this racism and reflected more diversity. 6 In their article “Race and Genre in the Use of Sexual Objectification in Female Artists’ Music Videos”, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey and Cynthia M. Frisby conclude that Black women artists tend to dress more sexually provocative than artists of other races and thus “might still feed into stereotyped notions of Black female sexuality” (2012, 81). This restrictive view of black women’s performances deeply limits readings of such productions outside of arguments about controlling images and stereotypes. 239

Marquita R. Smith 7 For example, Miss USA rules read: “contestants may not be married or pregnant. They must not have ever been married, not had a marriage annulled nor given birth to, or parented a child. The titleholders are also required to remain unmarried throughout their reign” (Miss Universe 2015). Up until 1999, Miss America contestants had to swear that they were not and had never been married or pregnant.

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17 PERFORMING RACE AND GENDER Erykah Badu between post-soul and Afrofuturism Erik Steinskog

In the song ‘. . . & On’, from the 2000 album Mama’s Gun, Erykah Badu sings about an “analog girl in a digital world”. Even though the world had become digital by 2000, Badu’s music testifies to the continuous presence of the analogue. So, what does this mean? When it comes to musical production, her presence is primarily staged by way of an interaction with computer-based music, where the voice becomes the human or analogue presence in a machine-like or digital context. However, on a more general level, it is also about the negotiation of musical genres and, thus, of developments in the history of popular music from the 1970s onwards. Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant Than The Sun claims that disco is to be seen as the audible moment where the 21st century begins: “Disco remains the moment when Black Music falls from the grace of gospel tradition into the metronomic assembly line” (Eshun 1999, -006).1 Eshun’s interpretation is particularly related to the proposed connection between the human and the soul. If the rhythms become too mechanical or machine-like – “the metronomic assembly line” – then, so it seems, the human is removed from the equation. For Eshun, this marks the entry of the posthuman, a move he seems to celebrate. For too long African Americans were denied their status – as slaves they were reduced to animality or even biological machines – and both the gospel tradition and an understanding of soul seem to have been later consequences of this same set-up by which Christianity and, particularly, the story of Egyptian bondage justifies African American slave-existence. To become truly free from this heritage, then, one would leave Christianity – and the related idea of the soul – behind. As a result of disco, the posthuman, thus, becomes the equivalent of ‘post-soul’, a term often used to describe a particular African American postmodernism (George 1992). In this chapter, I provide a dual focus – first, on the relation of Badu to post-soul versus Afrofuturism and, second, on her performance of gender and race. These performances expose a progressive view of aesthetics and temporality, which meet a more conservative view of gender roles. Rather than claiming that this is inherently a problem, my aim is to show the challenge that this perspective brings forth – one in which the unfixed position is part and parcel of a negotiation of gender and race in contemporary culture. The term post-soul might be employed to describe historical change, which is related to political developments as well as to musical genre (cf. Ashe 2007). Following what has been 242

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called the hip-hop generation (Kitwana 2002) or the New Black Aesthetic (Ellis 1989), postsoul relates to African Americans born after the Civil Rights Movement in what was supposed to be a new America. The soundtrack changed as soul gave way to disco, funk, and hip-hop; and these changes are important for understanding the history of African American music. While Badu is primarily associated with neo-soul, she is also very clearly a representative of the hip-hop generation. Born in 1971, she released her debut album, Baduizm, in 1997. Together with D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, Baduizm was considered as inaugurating neo-soul for a long time, and Badu was called ‘the queen of neosoul’. While she didn’t really like the term herself, it stuck to her and her music; and, for a period around the turn of the millennium, ‘neo-soul’ became an important term in discussions of black music. Nonetheless, as Philip Lamarr Cunningham argues, the term could be understood as problematic by underlining change rather than continuity (Cunningham 2010, 241). But this double dimension of looking backward and forward simultaneously also arguably reflects other issues relating to the artists, such as the music and our understandings of history. One area of interest is the act of repetition as implied by the term neo-soul, where what is old and what is new meet in a different way – in other words, a negotiation of the concept ‘soul’. I would argue that ‘soul’ signifies several different things at the same time. First, and most important, it is a reference to a bygone era of music. The ‘old’ soul, the soundtrack to the Civil Rights Movement, is referenced as an important source of music for contemporary practices. In this, there seems to be a need to return to elements of soul even if this is meant to be of importance for the current moment – that is, a return to a moment just before the millennium. There could be several possible reasons for this – a desire to have music mean something again. It is not that the music in the historical time between soul and neo-soul has meant nothing, but rather that this meaning is contested. In this sense, one could think that neo-soul is also a criticism of hip-hop. Second, however, there is an aspect of musical sound and production at stake, a return to ‘real’ music in the midst of technologically produced music, music without (so to speak) instruments. In this sense, the discussion of the analogue and the digital comes to the fore. Digitalisation in the late 1990s was ubiquitous, with changes in production signifying important alterations. This was also the time when the so-called digital divide was discussed, when access to digital technology and the cultural alterations due to digital technology were important issues for cultural critique. Discussions of soul seem relevant for Badu as well, in whose case neo-soul also seems to be a return to an earlier time saving music from the machines. Describing the sound of neosoul, one can often find terms relating to the organic – as if life has returned to music and a balance between human and non-human elements has been reinstated. Historically, there are interesting dimensions to this way of thinking. Soul musicians were important for the Civil Rights Movement. Eshun’s ‘fall from grace’ with disco is, in effect, only after the Civil Rights Movement is won. The role of music within social life, one could argue, changed. However, there are both utopian and dystopian aspects to this story: either one could go beyond the place previously designated for blacks, thus opening up and embracing the coming posthuman age (which Eshun is arguing for), or one could acknowledge that, even after the Civil Rights Movement, American society continued to be hostile towards blacks. One would then need to establish a parallel universe or leave the planet entirely. This last option seems to be what Sun Ra argues for in the film Space is the Place (1974), where music is used as a means of transport into outer space and the colonisation of a planet for black folk. Such space travel, one might argue, is necessary as it becomes increasingly clear that the heritage of slavery and the understanding of blacks as sub-humans cannot really be changed. 243

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Digitalisation is a way of removing the soul from music, with soul understood as some kind of core value of humanity rather than as a musical genre. Digitalisation could be understood in terms of technology replacing humanity as humanity becomes analogue. Here, another feature of cybertheory appears, developing a posthuman aspect. Discourses on the posthuman are simultaneously utopian and dystopian, and neo-soul arguably participates in the more dystopian aspects in the sense that it struggles to keep humanity as important and crucial within – and against – a process of continuous digitalisation understood as a gradual removal of the human. In Neuromancer (1984), a novel of huge importance for the cyber-discourse of the 1990s, William Gibson wrote: “the body was meat”. This opens up for a form of thinking where, in cyberspace, people could move around as disembodied entities – not only as cyborgs with the mixture inherent in the term cybernetic organism (the mixture of cybernetic circuits and organic materiality) but also, perhaps, by simply leaving the body behind. Theoretical discourses following the definitions of cyberspace have been criticised for being blind to the privileged position from which they were written. In order to keep the body in the equation, however, criticism has been directed to embodiment within techno-utopian theories. N. Katherine Hayles stresses this in How We Became Posthuman when drawing attention to how gendered embodiment continues to be important and, how theories of disembodiment tend to remove any thought of gender, thus ending up with an abstract notion of ‘Man’ – a notion understood more often than not as a white, heterosexual, middle-class man. Here, even the techno-utopia of cybertheory is in danger of re-establishing an old-school, patriarchal, heteronormative world, where the so-called liberal subject becomes the model for humanity. Whereas Hayles emphasises the importance of thinking gender (and sexuality) in relation to developments in cybertheory and theories of the posthuman, Alexander Weheliye and Thomas Foster underline how race and racialised subjects are equally important to include in this discourse (Weheliye 2002; Foster 2005). The blind spots found in cybertheory are understandable but, at the same time, problematic. Discussing matters as if gender, sexuality, and race will become obsolete in the near future has consequences in the here and now. What are the roles for women or people of colour in constructing a future that will be posthuman? Where are the racialised subjects in the future? These same issues are at stake within Afrofuturism, where a key question concerns the presence or absence of racialised subjects within science fiction and other stories of the future.

Afrofuturism Mark Dery introduced the term ‘Afrofuturism’ in his 1993 interview article ’Black to the Future”: Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses AfricanAmerican concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future – might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’. (Dery 1994, 180) Around the same time that Dery conducted the interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose, several authors were working with similar ideas, referred to as ‘black sci-fi’ or hip-hop aesthetics. Dery’s term, however, would become crucial for discourses around 244

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black culture in which technology, science fiction, and related topics are an integrated part of thinking (theory) or art practices. What could be called the empirical field, however, has continually expanded: historically, back into the 19th century as well as to discussions of the Middle Passage, pre-colonial Africa, and ancient Egypt; geographically, throughout the Afro-diasporic world as well as within African countries. The point of origin, however, seems clearly to be in African American culture, where popular music, science fiction, and everyday life in late capitalism colours not only the original impulse of Afrofuturist thinking, but also its aesthetic styles and the questions the theory seems designated to answer. A key question regarding this is found in Alondra Nelson’s introduction to Social Text’s ‘Afrofuturism issue’ (2002), where she discusses how the digital divide influenced African Americans. This also makes sense as Dery’s interview was published in Flame Wars, a book dealing with cyber-culture. Still, there is no reason to think that this discourse is limited to a certain 1990s Zeitgeist. Rather, cyber-culture opened up possibilities for thinking about race and gender anew. This relationship to technology was simultaneously discussed related to the movement from analogue to digital – with the digital divide often functioning as a way to keep the dichotomy of black ‘primitivism’ versus white technological futurism (cf. Nelson 2002). Eshun’s take on the digital divide seems to be more about a dichotomy found within black music, as soul versus post-soul or as a humanist versus a posthumanist discourse. These dichotomies, however, are multi-layered when it comes to black music – particularly, when one moves outside of what has become a kind of canon of Afrofuturism, a canon that seems to be dominated by an avant-garde logic that remains male and heterosexual. It is a challenge to think about the presence of the future in the present, but science fiction comes to help. By this I mean not the future as something being created but, rather, as something being already present, as if the future has been here all along. There are several ways to understand this. One could conceive the future as a utopian space (and time), with us moving towards this utopia. This utopia is not really here, but it is precise enough to give the directions for present actions. In Graham Lock’s term ‘Blutopia’, utopia highlights the relation between the blues and racialisation (Lock 1999). In other words, this future is not post-racial, where questions of race are left behind. Rather, it points toward a construction of a future in which race matters. This can also be seen related to Afrofuturism – where the future is already here or, better, where we are ‘after the end of the world’ (Sun Ra) or where ‘Armageddon had been in effect’ (Public Enemy). In the case of Sun Ra, this idea of being ‘after the end of the world’ is presented in the very opening of the movie Space is the Place (1974). “We are,” he says, “on the other side of time”: time has ended and must, thus, be thought differently. Such an approach can be used to imagine the future as already present, to change how we think about the present given this presence of both the past and the future. Here, ‘the new’ becomes different in the sense that the new is not simply something breaking with the past, a change rather than a continuity. It simultaneously breaks with and prepares for the future.

Badu’s performances When Badu sings that she is “an analog girl in a digital world”, she acknowledges her digital surroundings. In this, her return to soul is never simply a return; it is a renegotiation in which the old is taken up, repeated, and changed in the present. Here, time or temporality is important, as it is for the Afrofuturist framework. This is also where the understanding of history comes to the fore. The most traditional way of understanding history in Western (European) thought is as a linearity from the past to the present and on into the future. In this, 245

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the past is present, in a changed form, in the now, while the movement to the future simultaneously creates that future. By taking into account understandings of African temporality, a certain circular motion is inscribed. Linearity is challenged, and history becomes more of a circle or spiral in which the past is repeated – often with a difference – on another level. As such, it is related to what Amiri Baraka (then, LeRoi Jones) in 1966 called “the changing same” (Jones 2010, 205ff.). Here, ‘the same’ both is and is not the same; the act of repetition keeps the past and changes it at the same time, although a continuity is created. I am referring to a continuity that is more stable than the ever-changing dimensions of linearity. The very notion of ‘the new’ cannot be upheld in the same way if ‘the changing same’ is crucial; rather, the new is always also related to the past in terms of malleability and changeability. The changing same, then, changes the past or the understanding of the past. It keeps the past alive in a different way than linearity does. Badu is not only analogue in contrast to the digital, but she is an analogue girl in the digital world; and, through her music she is self-consciously black. Both gender and race are thus inscribed into this notion of the digital world without making too much fuss about it. Any thought on digitalisation as disembodied, post-racial/post-gender, is removed from her discussion, without necessarily being replaced with something else. While one does not necessarily have to read Badu in relation to cybertheory, her aesthetics, or cosmology, Baduizm, are in many ways close to Afrofuturism. As such, her work demonstrates – if such a demonstration is needed – that Afrofuturism does not have to engage cybertheory, despite the impression offered by Dery’s article. Baduizm is not simply the title of her first album but a kind of personal worldview. There is a strong element of Afrocentrism in it, as well as a spirituality that challenges more traditional religious worldviews. Importantly, it can be seen as a personal version of Afrofuturism; most of the elements are recognisable from other artists, but Badu makes them her own through her particular combination. Notably, both Marlo David and Jason King read Badu’s work as related to autobiography (King 1999, David 2007). Important components are drawn from understandings of African spirituality and ideology, Afrocentrist thinking, and elements from the Nation of Islam and the Nation of Gods and Earths (the Five Percenters) with whom Badu has been affiliated. These are both heterodox versions of Islam, which become all the more pronounced through Badu’s syncretistic additions.2 It is not only the question of genre leading to negotiations between the old and the new, between tradition and more forward-looking issues. Another key issue is that of gender. While Badu is very much in the tradition of independent female artists, giving credit to women in modern music such as Billie Holiday as she goes along, there is a traditional view of gender found within her performance. One likely reason is her relationship to the Nation of Islam and the Nation of Gods and Earths. The latter in particular maintains a strong dualism between the genders, with men being ‘Gods’ and women ‘Earths’. As Felicia M. Miyakawa writes in Five Percenter Rap: Five Percenters value the foundational role of the family, and maintain the patriarchal family model set forth by Elijah Muhammad for the Nation of Islam. Gods (men) should provide for their families financially and emotionally and are responsible for teaching their mates, called Earths, the ‘knowledge of self’. The family unit of man, woman, and children is often spoken of in a celestial metaphor of sun, moon, and stars; just as the moon receives its light from the sun, so, too, the Earth receives the light of knowledge from her God. (Miyakawa 2005, 33) 246

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Thus, traditional family values – patriarchy as well as heteronormativity – are inscribed into the teachings of the Five Percenters, which have a cosmological foundation (related to heavenly metaphors) as well as possible relations to what is close to science fiction. There can be no doubt that this view could be inscribed within a science fiction or Afrofuturist framework. It would, however, challenge any thought of Afrofuturism as being avant-garde in the political sense, as breaking with traditional social organisational forms, including patriarchy. Miyakawa also writes about how “a woman’s body should be at least three-fourths covered with clothing” and that her main goal is reproduction (Miyakawa 2005, 34), thus underlining what within 21st-century popular culture must be seen as strictly traditional. Are these views found in Badu’s music? And, with music I refer to more than the notation, including the lyrics, the videos, visuals (cover art, and so on), and performances. There is an obvious essentialism in Badu’s project when it comes to race, and there is also a kind of essentialism when it comes to gender. From this point, her work challenges much of today’s discourse in popular music and gender studies in which the performance of gender and a critique of heteronormativity have become increasingly important. This, then, leads to the question of how a scholarly discourse can relate to her music and her ‘ideology’ at the same time. Her music seems to continue developments in contemporary black music, taking it farther to become new and musically successful, while there are simultaneously traits in her lyrics and visuals that could be interpreted as highly conservative, not to say reactionary. Here, tradition and modernity, the old and the new, intersect in a different sense within the Afrofuturist discourse in which an avant-garde thinking has dominated. In this context, it becomes important to interpret Badu’s music not only in relation to the category of neosoul but also in relation to discourses on development or avant-garde. Both King and David have criticised Afrofuturism for establishing a canon of primarily avant-garde leanings. Of interest here is not so much what is included in this canon as that which is excluded. King argues that there is an Afrofuturist canon “of techno and hip hop” that is “selectively male and heterosexist”, which excludes music with vocals, particularly, female and transgender voices (King quoted in Zuberi 2007, 290); whereas David claims that with its focus on “radical black music styles – electronic music and experimental jazz”, Afrofuturist discourse “leaves mainstream black music behind” (David 2007, 696). In this, David argues, “popular R&B” is excluded. One reason, she claims, is that this music still clings to an idea of the humanist subject. Badu writes on the album’s cover about the inspiration for the different songs on Baduizm. The song ‘On & On’, an important predecessor to ‘. . . & On’, is inspired by ‘the Gods and the Earths’ – arguably, the clearest reference to the Five Percenters in writing on Badu’s albums. Other references, however, are found throughout her lyrics, and the visual art also includes Afrocentric imagery, as well as what – for lack of a better term – could be called Afrofuturist imagery. The lyrics to ‘On & On’ also include the phrase “the mothership can’t save you”, a reference important for a number of reasons (cf. Womack 2013, 65). First, it obviously refers back to George Clinton and Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), an album now canonical within Afrofuturism. Second, the mothership seems to imply a relationship to ‘the Motherplane’ as found within Nation of Islam theology as well as a possible reference to the ship and the Motherland with a clear reference, given the context, to the Middle Passage, when West African slaves crossed the Atlantic, and the history/relationship to the Motherland still found within African American culture. One could argue for an Afrocentric reading here, but more important is the presence of the African past in Badu’s present as well as in the future of African Americans. 247

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Take, for example, the video for ‘Next Lifetime’ from Baduizm. It shows a story taking place at three different points in time: pre-colonial Africa, referenced in the video as ‘Motherland 1637 A.D.’, the USA in 1968 (called ‘The Movement: 1968’), and a future space-aged Africa, ‘Motherland 3037 a.d.’. Badu is present in all three scenes, as is a man she looks at passionately in the first scene. She is, however, already in a relationship; and, thus, the ‘maybe next lifetime’ theme is stated. Badu’s visual performance is clearly Afrocentric and, in one sense, might be seen as challenging notions of Afrofuturism. The video, however, underlines a science fiction aspect in that the third chapter in the video is set in a future Africa. That it is a future Africa is important because she seems less occupied with leaving the planet behind – as so many other Afrofuturists have imagined. In that sense, Badu is more concrete about the future, less inclined to science fiction, so to speak, illustrating that there are blacks (African Americans, Africans) in the future. The Afrocentricity, however, seems to suggest that this future is in the Motherland rather than in a changed USA. In this, too, she is in a long tradition of African Americans, and her utopia is some kind of a return. There are similarities between the mythical past and the science fiction future, and these similarities bring to mind different versions of Afrofuturism – particularly, perhaps, the music of Earth, Wind & Fire. Within what could be called the Afrofuturist canon, Earth, Wind & Fire is the closest one can get – aesthetically – to Badu. Their album sleeves are one reason for thinking this: an ancient Egypt is mirrored by a future outer space. A similar movement is found in the video for ‘Next Lifetime’ since the past, mythical Africa and the future, imagined (science fiction) Africa seem to mirror each other. It is not that they are ‘the same’; rather, they are almost the same but not quite, or ‘the changing same’. These notions have been important within postcolonial thinking and African American studies, but they do challenge a thinking based in the European – Hegelian/Marxist – conception of progress. Any thinking, one could claim, that relates to the future as something rearticulating the past is, by definition, conservative; whereas the only true futurism follows the maxim of making it new, radically new. Here, however, might be the blind spot of theory – in the Euro-American (and need I say white?) conceptualisation. What if it is precisely the linearity of time that is the problem? As is evident in ‘Next Lifetime’, there is another way to deal with time and temporality, and the video can be inscribed in a continuous negotiation of relations to the past. Here, too, Badu is autobiographical – comparable to the way she has sought out her genetic ancestry,3 but she is also musical in establishing numerous relations to her musical ancestors. These relations to the past, however, are also what challenge the understanding of her work in relation to soul as well as an Afrofuturist reading of her work. In this, King’s article is important, particularly because he challenges Badu’s traditionalism when it comes to issues of gender, sexuality, family, and, thus, the crucial dimension of her politics. The politics here are especially related to the domestic sphere, which is precisely the point. With this he underlines the important question of how the image of Badu as a cutting-edge soul singer, whom Greg Tate calls “Soul Sister Number One” (Tate 1997), can be understood alongside her traditional understanding of gender as patriarchal and heteronormative. This impossible intersection between progressive music and conservative gender politics is one of my own entry-points into writing about Badu. Having listened to Badu for a long time, her quite clearly more conservative – when it comes to gender roles – videos to ‘On & On’ and ‘Next Lifetime’ became a challenge for me after writing about Janelle Monáe’s video ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’, where Badu, as Badoula Oblongata, participates (Steinskog 2014). In no uncertain terms Monáe’s video is queer! It is not necessarily about any relationship between Monáe and Badu although they are both – as Janelle Monáe and Badoula Oblongata, respectively – part of the story of the video. For Monáe, ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ is an acronym for Queer, 248

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Untouchables, Emigrants, Excommunicated, and Negroid, thus highlighting queerness as one form of otherness in today’s cultural climate. Badu is a guest singer on this song, and she does a terrific job. One of my challenges as an interpreter is to get around the Afrofuturism of Monáe with what is, arguably, Afrofuturism on Badu’s part as well. Suddenly – or, rather, obviously – the possibility arises that Afrofuturism might not be simply a story about progress and the future and, thus, inherently progressive, but that there might be conservative (or even reactionary) impulses to it as well. Here, too, however, there are historically important aspects for understanding the present, and negotiating with the past becomes necessary. Gender politics inherited from the time of slavery as well as later African American life obviously contributes to how gender is understood today. And, as E. Patrick Johnson discusses in his article “‘Quare’ studies” (2001), if ‘queer’ is a white, middle-class concept, one should be careful in using the term to describe or analyse African American (working-class) artistic expressions. Perhaps, one needs other terms. On the other hand, with respect to queer people of colour, non-normative blacks, and so on, claiming that heterosexuality is more important within the black community than within the white one – and, thus, that one should not criticise African American heteronormativity – would be totally wrong. King ends his article by comparing Badu with Me’shell Ndegeocello. There are aspects of tradition and modernity in both, particularly if one includes albums released after King’s article is written. Ndegeocello’s re-imagining of Nina Simone – a very literal reenactment of tradition – would stand in contrast to the imagined repetition of Billie Holiday that so many have evoked in the case of Badu (hampton 1997; Griffin 2001). Thus, four female African American artists/singers are mentioned, each of whom has enormous potential for interpreting African American femininity, although the differences are many. Ndegeocello is also one of the cases discussed by Royster in her book Sounding Like a No-No, as one of the ‘eccentric’ performers of the post-soul era, whereas Badu is not. And, in Royster’s use, ‘eccentric’ is a term that points towards difference without using the term ‘queer’. Could one make a case for Badu as ‘eccentric’ as well? I believe one could. It is not that I necessarily want to queer Badu (although, given ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’, I admit the idea is tempting). Rather, I think Badu is, in many ways, less heteronormative than King acknowledges (and the same, arguably, goes for David). What if neo-soul is not simply a repetition of soul but actually a queering of it? How would one discuss a queered ‘neo-soul’? My point is, rather, that, after being designated – by others – as doing ‘neo-soul’ (that is to say, new soul), Badu inscribes herself with the New Amerykah project into a logic of making it new – clearly with her own language and her own ‘American-ness’ invested into the project. Thus, there is a change in perspective and agency from critics claiming she created ‘the new’ to her taking ‘the new’ upon herself. These two latter albums, however, also show continuity – perhaps, nowhere as clear as with the notion of the analogue girl in the digital world and with her insistence on some kind of Afrocentricity or ‘essentialised’ blackness. This, moreover, is my second challenge in working with this material (the first being conservative gender roles): can one today even work with essentialisms when it comes to race? My own reading would suggest that Paul Gilroy’s ‘anti-anti-essentialism’ is the way out of this problem (Gilroy 1993, 99); but, working with Badu, it feels like too easy a way out. Her essentialism is not, I would argue, anti-anti-essentialism; it is a factual essentialism, and it is so for a reason. At the time of writing this chapter, the second of the New Amerykah albums, Return of the Ankh (2010), is Badu’s most recent album. What is of particular interest in the current context is the subtitle, which includes both the notions of return and the symbol of the ankh. It is not as if the ankh has not been there all along for Badu, but here its return – in the ‘new Amerykah’ – testifies to a different kind of reiteration than the one found in the notion of 249

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neo-soul. Still, there is a constant negotiation with tradition in this symbolic reiteration, although it is a tradition closer to Sun Ra’s MythScience than to the neo-soul movement.4 There is, in other words, a new mythology at stake, but it is an Afrocentric mythology, given that the ancient Egyptians – within the discourse of Afrofuturism, at least – are seen as Africans first and foremost, and not, as European thinking has been tempted to do, as predecessors of the Greek philosophers (cf. James 2008). The analogue/digital divide – or opposition – is still part of the New Amerykah project, since the first album was digitally produced, whereas the second is a return – also, here – to a more analogue aesthetic. At the same time, this analogue quality is post-digital, which also makes quite a difference when it comes to interpretation – not to speak of ideology. What does ‘the analogue’ mean after digitalisation? This question, too big for the present context, should still be acknowledged, as it points to important issues within popular music studies, Afrofuturism, gender studies, and so much more. To choose analogue after the possibilities of the digital is indeed a conscious choice, something one could do differently; as such, it hardly has anything in common with the analogue before the digital was possible. Here, theoretical terms as well as practices have a problem in using the same term both ‘pre’ and ‘post’. After digitalisation, the analogue can never be the same again, and it can most definitely never be the same as the analogue before digitalisation was possible. In a particular sense, however, the analogue is a product of the digital. This is primarily the result of how the analogue got its meaning from the digital (similar to the way the original got its meaning from the possibility of making copies; before the possibility of making copies, the very notion of the original had a totally different sense). As such, making an album in an analogue fashion is a choice and a performance, not a necessity; and, as choice, ‘the analogue’ is a result of digitalisation, a choice demonstrating a non-digital endeavour. If Badu is “an analog girl in a digital world”, she is at the same time conservative – in a particular sense – in a world in which other options are available. But where the aesthetic choice of making analogue music – or music sounding as if it is analogue, music with an analogue vibe – is simultaneously an aesthetic choice pointing toward discourses of authenticity and realness, the conditions of production also point toward possibilities for making something inherently new, something pointing to a future. This future might be where traditional gender roles and family values are left behind and where new constellations of living together and being together are encouraged. In this future, the very role of ‘woman’ or ‘femininity’ is contested, particularly since the definition of these terms has been historically within the male domain. Janelle Monáe opposes being labelled – perhaps most clearly on ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ in which she sings, “Categorize me, I defy every label” – but it is not as obvious that Badu is doing the same. And, thus, no matter how up-to-date Badu’s music sounds, the echoes of the past – particularly, in combination with her lyrics and her music videos – point to a bygone age with a kind of nostalgia for the good life rather than white supremacy or slavery. It is this, I believe, that King finds provocative about the earlier albums and videos by Badu, and to a large extent I concur with him. But it is also here that Badu’s independence and her breaking away from what is expected from her point to a more complicated present time.

Conclusion Finally, this returns us to the way Badu employs the past, the present, and the future – and how these three dimensions of time are interrelated in her work. It is worth emphasising that ‘Next Lifetime’ is probably the best example from her earlier work, given that, in this 250

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video, she moves between different layers of time. But, what about her later works? One might posit that she is opening traumatic experiences related to more than the African American experience. In the video to ‘Window Seat’, she is seen running through Dallas, Texas (her hometown) and, towards the end of the video, she is shot down at the same location John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. In this sense, she situates her own vulnerability – a vulnerability underlined by her gradually getting undressed – within the same location as one of the great traumas of American history after the Second World War (and before 9/11). It is, obviously, also related to racial politics, since JFK’s policies were in dialogue with the policies of Martin Luther King (and, to a lesser extent, Malcolm X). Badu being shot as a black female, vulnerable and naked, at the same spot as JFK establishes a historical connection between the Civil Rights Movement and our own time. However, this has nothing to do with the ankh. Mentioning the ankh is much more of an Afrocentric gesture, simultaneously communicating with Afrofuturism by conceiving the African-ness of ancient Egypt as some kind of utopianism in the return of the ankh. Ancient Egypt, prior to being Europeanised (cf. James 2008), was deemed a high African civilisation. The exploitation of this tradition in the European context led directly to the slave trade and the exploitation of Africa. Yet, any return of the ankh could establish a totally different stream of history, some history tuned at such a low frequency that it has never been heard before, where the European tradition of ‘Humanism’ could be bypassed. In many ways, this characterises Eshun’s take on Afrofuturism and what he describes as ‘sonic fiction’, where one could merely dig out other histories and leave ‘the human’ behind. Badu, Alternatively, Badu leaves us with a cipher (not only in the Five Percenters’ sense), a kind of riddle in need of interpretation. Her music, lyrics, and visual performance open up a field in which the past, the present, and the future intersect. At this complex intersection, gender studies, in combination with Afrofuturism, shows that whether the present is settled or not, it continuously merges the past and future. Thus, the conservative components of Badu’s performance are part of her constructions of gender and race, demonstrating the unfixed positions of her surroundings.

Notes 1 Eshun’s book has an unorthodox pagination, where the preface occurs in negative numbers, thus -006. 2 The Five Percenters, or the Nation of Gods and Earths, is a group that broke out of the Nation of Islam in 1964 and is known to have many musicians as sympathisers/believers, particularly within ‘the hip-hop generation’ (cf. Mohaiemen 2008). 3 DNA analysis shows that her maternal side came to the USA from Cameroon, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=YXtUomMjscw. 4 MythScience is one of the terms defining Sun Ra’s ‘system’ or worldview, as well as a term used to describe incarnations of his ‘Arkestra’. The term challenges normative ways of distinguishing between myth, science, and history, and as such points to alternative histories. It is widely used within Afrofuturist discourse, to such a degree that Eshun writes: “MythScience is the field of knowledge invented by Sun Ra, and a term that this book uses as often as it can” (Eshun 1999, -004).

Bibliography Ashe, Bertram D. 2007. “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction.” African American Review 41 (4): 609–623. Cunningham, Philip Lamarr. 2010. “There’s Nothing Really New under the Sun: The Fallacy of the Neo-Soul Genre.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22 (3): 240–258. David, Marlo. 2007. “Afrofuturism and Post-Soul Possibility in Black Popular Music.” African American Review 41 (4): 695–707. 251

Erik Steinskog Dery, Mark. 1994. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery, 179–222. Durham: Duke University Press. Ellis, Trey. 1989. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 38 (Winter): 233–243. Eshun, Kodwo. 1999. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books. Foster, Thomas. 2005. The Souls of Cyberfolks: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. George, Nelson. 1992. Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture. New York: Harper Collins. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 2001. If You Can’t be Free, be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: The Free Press. hampton, dream. 1997. “All Women.” Vibe (April): 72–78. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, George G. M. 2008. Stolen Legacy. Radford: A & D Publishing. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2001. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (1): 1–25. Jones, LeRoi. 2010. Black Music. New York: Akashi Books. King, Jason. 1999. “When Autobiography becomes Soul: Erykah Badu and the Cultural Politics of Black Feminism.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10 (1–2): 211–243. Kitwana, Bakari. 2002. The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. New York: Basic Books. Lock, Graham. 1999. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press. Miyakawa, Felicia M. 2005. Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohaiemen, Naeem. 2008. “Fear of a Muslim Planet: Hip-Hop’s Hidden History.” In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, 313–335. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nelson, Alondra. 2002. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text 20 (2): 1–15. Royster, Francesca T. 2013. Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Steinskog, Erik. 2014. “Janelle Monáes tidsrejser. Mellem cyberteori og afrofuturisme.” Kritik 211 (August): 87–94. Tate, Greg. 1997. “Soul Sister Number One.” Vibe (August): 82–87. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2002. “Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Social Text 20 (2): 21–47. Womack, Ytasha L. 2013. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Zuberi, Nabeel. 2007. “Is This the Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse.” Science Fiction Studies 34 (2): 283–300.

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18 “ARMED WITH THE FAITH OF A CHILD” Marit Larsen and strategies of faking1 Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik

Why do pop stars employ gender stereotypes to come across as credible? And how can we evaluate the paradoxes of these stereotypes in the artist’s persona? To begin with, I want to consider that the notion of honesty and truthfulness is not the responsibility of the artist alone, but part of a broader ideological context of popular music. As Nicola Dibben observes: “Belief in a singer’s authenticity reflects one of the prevalent ideologies of music creation and reception and of the person in contemporary society – the idea that people have an inner, private core” (Dibben 2009, 317). During the course of this chapter, I turn to the connections between this “private core”, stereotypes of gender, and the use of the figure of the child in the audiovisual construction of the pop persona. My aim is to contribute to the ongoing debates on authenticity in popular music studies by examining specific gender norms and their empowerment of the pop artist. My focus falls on the Norwegian singer-songwriter, Marit Larsen, and the 2009 video for her song, ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’. Throughout her teens, Larsen was a member of the internationally popular duo, M2M, until they broke up in 2002. While her former band-mate Marion Ravn went straight on to a solo career, Larsen kept out of the spotlight for some years before emerging in 2005 as an artist in her own right. Since releasing her first solo album, Under the Surface, in 2006, she has received consistent praise from music press and fans alike for her ‘honesty’ and ‘realness’.2 Remarkably, Larsen succeeds in pulling off the illusion that there is no gap between persona and real person, between real and implied author. In this light, I feel compelled to pursue a critical examination of how she shapes her appeal by constructing the gendered stereotype of the girl-child. As a solo artist, Larsen has crafted a narrative as the former pop star who was always eclipsed by her more attention-seeking partner but who has come into her own for her solo career. In keeping with this career narrative, her persona is shaped as straightforward and ostensibly ‘real’ – that is, what you see is what you get. This is borne out by her dress style and statements in interviews as well as the sound of her voice and her performance in music videos. Staging herself as a child in an adult world, a housewife at home, and a girl-nextdoor type (who befriends her studio staff and collaborators), Larsen may be perceived as performing a number of traits of normality and conventional femininity in order to create specific illusions of idealised female types. 253

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Such implied femininities invoke Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. One of Butler’s most powerful tenets is her deconstruction of the idea of a stable ‘core’ in gender identity; as she argues, “acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause” (Butler 1999, 173, author’s emphasis). Consequently, “acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (Butler 1999, 173). In short, gender “ought not to be construed as a stable entity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1999, 179, author’s emphasis). By activating Butler’s theory of gender performativity I dwell on Larsen’s agenda as a producer of pop texts. In her critical reading of Butler’s work with regard to vocality, Annette Schlichter has pointed out that “[at] the heart of the Butlerian discourse of physical materiality is an engagement with materiality as textuality, which results in a reading of ‘the body as a shifting text, or discursive effect, such that the body’s perceived outline is constantly changing’” (Schlichter 2011, 39, author’s emphasis). Schlichter points to the legibility of the body within a framework of gender performativity, and also indirectly to the pop text, opening up the possibility for a critical analysis of a pop artist who purports ‘just to be herself’ and thus exempt from scrutiny.3 Butler’s observation of the “stylized repetition of acts” flies in the face of any assertion that the pop artist’s realness resides in their ‘just being themselves’. Hence, conceptualising gender performativity in this way prompts me to consider closely how Larsen mediates her persona. More specifically, to what extent does she employ terms such as ‘real’ and ‘honest’ in conjunction with furnishing her persona with a sheen of authenticity, an illusion of an inner, private core?

The mannered self: Faking naivety My theoretical basis for a close reading of Larsen’s project is through the concept of ‘faking’. Primarily, I draw on Stan Hawkins’ theory of fake naivety in dandyism to unveil the work invested in shaping the persona. The precision with which Larsen performs at any given time is of significance here. Also, in theorising the construction of naivety, it is necessary to consider the role of the popular media discourse on the artist. Based upon the rich source of interviews and press clippings on Larsen since her emergence as a solo artist, it is striking that Norwegian journalists have consistently taken her persona at face value, portraying her more or less as an ingénue – demure, soft-spoken, trusting – and never questioning her self-reflexive discourse, where she frequently invokes terms such as ‘real’ and ‘honest’. In my opinion, this is a testament not only to Larsen’s successful re-invention of herself as a solo artist, but also the willingness of journalists to go along with it. In this case, naivety functions as much on the part of the artist as the intermediaries, namely the (predominantly male) music journalists who buy into her act. As a skilled professional, Larsen is well aware of the workings of the music business so as to fashion a persona that comes across as ‘real’; she does this by playing on traits that connote accessibility and universality, and being more or less autodidact and emotionally driven.4 My central critique of this builds on Hawkins’s (2009) hypothesis around the British pop dandy and, for that matter, the football (soccer) player. Faking naivety as a strategy 254

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surfaces in Hawkins’s interpretation of David Beckham, the footballer whose public appeal is on a par with pop stars in terms of celebrity status. Hawkins views Beckham as a complex and highly theatricalised figure: “Image-wise, he befits a fashion model, whose ‘natural good looks’ and manner of speaking can be read as a faking of naivety that props up a metrosexual spectacle” (Hawkins 2009, 31). A faking of naivety as part of being an ‘ordinary lad’ is the prime constituent of Beckham’s “faux naïf spectacle”. Drawing on a range of discourses in his investigation into popular music, from celebrity culture to technology, Hawkins enables a discussion of naivety as “a critical aspect of twentieth-century pop performance practice” (Hawkins 2009, 39). As an analytical tool for approaching subjectivity, this theory of naivety allows for critical readings of visual and musical representations, which is particularly useful for illuminating Larsen’s strategies and understanding her wide-ranging appeal, most notably through the stereotype of the girl-child. At this stage, it is important to establish that ‘fake naivety’ does not presuppose any ‘real’ naivety. While I do not assert that Larsen displays a genuinely naive character, I argue that fake naivety is a trait of her persona, first and foremost as a device to equip it with an appeal that is not hampered by displays of agency. As such, ‘faking it’ becomes a strategy for creating an illusion. In this respect, naivety is one of the masks that an artist can put on as part of their act. I also wish to emphasise that faking does not necessarily entail dishonesty. On the surface, ‘faking’ clearly goes against any ethos of authenticity. Thus, it easily comes to mean the opposite of the cornucopia of value terms in music discourse – sincere, real, honest, truthful, genuine – that signify authenticity in popular music. These pertain as much to an artist’s persona as to the musical output. As Joshua Gamson notes, the rhetoric of authenticity in celebrity culture “sets a bottom to the pit of suspicions raised by the awareness of artifice. Its power to do so rests in a final confidence that the markers of authenticity can be trusted, that they cannot be faked” (Gamson 1994, 144). A point worth highlighting is the illusion of ‘authenticity’ as something that cannot be faked, and something that, by virtue of its non-artifice, takes on a normative function as marker of realness and honesty. Yet, this opposition is redundant; for one, because these terms are opaque, and even the supposed genuineness of an artist such as Larsen does not adhere to any universal idea of ‘authenticity’. Equally important, the act of faking, as William Ian Miller has argued, is inevitably performed by everyone all the time, sometimes in the service of sanity – “Why is it that I cannot help feeling foolish at times going through the motions of playing the roles I have to play to pass for a properly socialized and sane person?” (Miller 2003, 3–4) – and order in everyday life: “Part of being a truly polite person means carrying on politely when one feels like a fraud for carrying on politely” (Miller 2003, 40). From Miller’s perspective, ‘faking it’ is integral to civilisation. This also entails a clever deconstruction of the positive value of being authentic: “Is it only the roles I am good at for which I can claim authenticity?” (Miller 2003, 129). Other scholars have invoked the notion of ‘fake naivety’ to interpret the strategies of performing artists. For instance, John Alberti identifies the roots of the faux naïf in pop music through the critical theatre of Bertolt Brecht, who used the imperfection of amateur actors “to question the assumed inevitability and righteousness of the status quo outside the theater by challenging the supposed naturalness of the acting inside the theater” (Alberti 1999, 175). Extending Brecht’s pioneering work in theatre into popular music, Alberti sees naivety as a prop used by several rock bands and artists to various ends, but often to similar effect: from the mannered naivety of early Talking Heads and Jonathan Richman’s near-Brechtian mimicking of performative styles to the anti-intellectual use of cartoon graphics by punk bands 255

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from the Ramones to Green Day, naivety amplifies the uniqueness of the artist and becomes part of “the continuous production of new and improved uniqueness” in the popular music industry (Alberti 1999, 179). As with Hawkins, Alberti predominantly deals with male artists (Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth notwithstanding) in his theorisation of naivety. I take this as a good indication that fake naivety is not contingent on gender, and thus not inherently ‘feminine’ in any way, which reinforces my claim that Larsen’s persona builds on stereotypes of femininity rather than any intrinsically ‘feminine’ traits. Moreover, it is vital to emphasise that ‘feminine’ is not synonymous with ‘female’. Here, I follow Toril Moi, who has suggested that we distinguish between “‘femaleness’ as a matter of biology and ‘femininity’ as a set of culturally defined characteristics” (Moi 1989, 117). My point here is to be aware that Larsen’s employment of female stereotypes may be construed as her persona being authentically ‘female’, with naivety in this context being perceived as a central facet of ‘femininity’. Thus, the efficacy of her persona rests on the fallacy of equating femaleness with femininity. With Larsen’s transformation from the teen pop star of M2M to an ostensibly more mature singer-songwriter, both fans and reviewers have picked up on her use of terms such as ‘real’ and ‘honest’. Notably, they have also patronised her by terms of endearment, such as ‘charming’ and ‘cute’ as well as ‘sweet’ and ‘enchanting’.5 Such descriptions overlap with characterisations of her music, which rely on ideas of the ‘real’ and the ‘honest’ that are often associated with rock music. We may read this reception of her work as indicative of a type of naivety that Matthew Bannister describes in 1980s UK indie music and the pronounced fascination and nostalgia for the 1960s. Bannister sees this as indicative of how, for many 1980s indie musicians, the 1960s took on a double function as “both a time of literal childhood memories” and “the golden age of pop culture” as a respite from “the grim realities of the present” (Bannister 2006, 138). Larsen, who arguably takes inspiration from both early 1960s ‘girl groups’ and early 1970s singer-songwriters, can thus be seen to situate her project in a lineage of rock nostalgia that enhances her credibility with her fans. In addition to the concept of cuteness, another key ingredient of fake naivety to consider is that of temperament. Hawkins makes the point that naivety “suggests something excessively simple – a trusting view of one’s environment – and often the result of youthful expression and inexperience”. This notion of simple trust “can be construed as romantic, charmingly straightforward and refreshingly unaffected” (Hawkins 2009, 40). Indeed, as Bannister also suggests, a childlike view of the world is not necessarily innocent (2006, 44); an artist such as Larsen may just as well use infantilism and naivety in order to “control without appearing to be in control” (2006, 48). Not unlike Beckham or contemporary pop stars, such as Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande, Larsen plays on the faux naive as part of her strategy to establish her persona. Given this, how then does her strategy function as a screen for her own agency? As Hawkins has pointed out, faking also involves a degree of masking.6 Arguing that “how the pop artist shapes a fantasy around his own construction is to do with the way the self is relentlessly produced and ‘mannered’” (2009, 12), he goes on to show that in pop masking takes place on all levels, from recording to on-stage performance, from clothing to interviews. However, Hawkins also reminds us that masking does not necessarily imply cynicism at work; it might just as well entail an enhancing of the pop act (2009, 155). Of particular musicological interest in this respect is the voice. Hawkins compares an artist’s everyday voice to the processed voice in recording: “Masking is self-referential, offering up the voice as the persona” (2009, 156). Given that Larsen’s ‘normal’ (read: speaking) voice in interviews and public appearances closely resembles her singing voice in recordings, I 256

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suggest that masking occurs on at least two levels: first, the treatment of her voice in the studio so as to make it sound ‘untreated’, and, second, her own theatrical alignment of her singing and speaking voices so that her persona comes across as immutable (read: authentic). I would contend that this is a cleverly crafted illusion – a faking of ‘realness’ that indeed suggests the relentless nature of Larsen’s mannering; rather than making the recorded voice ordinary, she structures her speaking voice as extraordinary. In this sense, Larsen utilises a similar strategy to that of Steven Morrissey. Pointing out the resemblance of Morrissey’s singing voice to his spoken voice, Hawkins suggests that this shapes the voice as ‘natural and untrained’: “Certainly, Morrissey’s voice helps stage his credibility (read: authenticity) as he accesses his fans on an intimate level” (Hawkins 2011, 310). This is one of the most central features of authenticity: “Staging the voice is ultimately what we buy into, and indeed the recorded voice functions as an imaginative canvas for aestheticizing the combined effect of a song’s delivery” (Hawkins 2011, 318). Interestingly, though, Larsen’s spoken voice appears modelled on the spectacular singing voice and not the other way around. At this point I want to turn my attention to ‘realness’. On the one hand, ‘realness’ connotes the authentic person behind the persona – the ‘real me’ that one assumes is there. Annie Randall observes in her study on Dusty Springfield that there is a complex interplay between the persona and ‘the real me’; consequently, the discourse on any artist can become a springboard for launching ‘the real me’ (Randall 2009, 128). Larsen can be seen to insist on a similar trope: that there is always already a ‘real me’ behind the persona that vouches for its authenticity. On the other hand, we encounter a potential problem with translation here. In an early interview that coincided with the release of her first solo album, Larsen referred to herself with Norwegian terms ekte and ærlig, instigating the value-laden terminology that journalists and fans have used consistently ever since. While the latter term translates as honest, ekte translates with a number of terms: ‘true’, ‘real’, ‘genuine’, ‘pure’, ‘natural’.7 If we are to take Larsen’s own strategies of staging into account, then, we need to be aware that she herself uses such opaque terms, and furthermore that these terms are opaque precisely because the meaning changes both in translation and according to who is speaking. It is also worth stressing at this point that I do not make any claims about the ‘real’ person behind the pop artist’s persona. Nor do I see the persona as ‘just’ a mask, something that is merely on the surface and that has nothing to do with the actual person. Rather than anything superficial or even insincere, I side with David Shumway’s view that pop stars’ personae are “complex and meaningful texts that require the kind of interpretive exploration we devote to other works of art” (Shumway 2014, xiii), and I see the persona as central to my discussion of how the female pop celebrity is gendered. Why, then, should we distinguish between the ‘real person’ and the ‘persona’? For fans this distinction may seem immaterial, especially in the light of how the artist’s own identity politics align life to work for commercial purposes. As Lori Burns has argued, “[it] is sometimes quite difficult to separate the artist from the musical product, and it is all too easy to interpret the music as a realistic reflection of the artist’s worldview” (Burns 2010, 157). A sense of unity of music and worldview might even be a source of pleasure. Then again, this is also a suitable starting point for an analysis of how the artist effects this, as Burns suggests: “In order not to equate author with persona, one must tease apart the expressive layers of the lyrical message from that of the individual experience (author) and social engagement present in the performance (persona)” (Burns 2010, 158). Contemplating the gap between author and persona is a fruitful starting point. Theorising this division, Simon Frith suggests that pop singers are involved in “a process of double 257

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enactment: they enact both a star personality (their image) and a song personality, the role that each lyric requires, and the pop star’s art is to keep both acts in play at once” (Frith 1996, 212; author’s emphasis). Similarly, Philip Auslander elaborates on this in his trisection of the artist as person, persona, and character, where the persona corresponds to Frith’s star personality and the character to the song personality (Auslander 2009, 305). Auslander makes the valid point that, “[the] real person is the dimension of performance to which the audience has the least direct access, since the audience generally infers what performers are like as real people from their performance personae and the characters they portray”; consequently, “[public] appearances offstage do not give reliable access to the performer as a real person since it is quite likely that interviews and even casual public appearances are manifestations of the performer’s persona rather than the real person” (Auslander 2006, 5–6). This goes against notions of the artist as in any way real, honest, or just being herself, and reminds us that we have no way of knowing what the actual person adds or subtracts in order to create the persona.

Staging ‘the real me’: The celebrity Larsen’s simultaneous insistence on the realness of her identity (as a solo artist in opposition to the glamour and celebrity of M2M) is one of the most striking attributes of her solo persona. Consequently, the concept of the celebrity warrants some clarification here. As a solo artist, Larsen has consistently played out a persona that seems uninterested in appearing on TV shows and other forms of media that may bring her exposure to a broader audience. Her proponents tend to interpret this as a hallmark of authenticity, seeing her relative reclusiveness as part of what makes her an artist and not ‘just’ a celebrity.8 This recalls Jacqueline Warwick’s apt description of rockism as “wary of commercial success” and disdaining “artists who demonstrate too keen an interest in the business of music and entertainment” (2012, 242). Chris Rojek, meanwhile, sees celebrities as “cultural fabrications”, phenomena that are “carefully mediated” with the assistance of “cultural intermediaries” (2001, 10). Continuously mediated through sound as well as image, the celebrity invites a discussion of the persona as something that is not the actual person. Rojek insists that we distinguish between celebrity and renown, “the informal attribution of distinction on an individual within a given social network” (2001, 12). This necessarily entails that some stars seem more real than others. Reflecting on this, Shumway asserts that “all stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are stars” (Shumway 2014, 2). He suggests a number of attributes that distinguish stardom, the first and foremost of which being that the star has achieved success in a skilled field or profession and is thereby “distinguished from other celebrities because of valued achievements” (Shumway 2014, 3). Similarly, artists who do not express interest in sporting a ‘celebrity lifestyle’ with constant press coverage, preferring instead to ‘focus on the music’, up their chances of being perceived by fans as ‘real’ people and not just superficial celebrities. Of vital importance here is their ability to offer an alternative to other, more superficial celebrities who have, in Hawkins’s words, “achieved their prominence through establishing a public persona that can seem more important than their professional one” (2009, 30). One of the most important tactics of any star in popular music is to create the illusion that there is no illusion at all, that instead what the audience gains access to is indeed ‘the real thing’, namely the human being as a creative entity, who does the chores of the music business out of necessity so as to be able to do what they love the best, making music (and thereby bonding with their fans). In this way, authenticity becomes

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the antithesis to celebrity. Gendering the pop celebrity thus entails identifying markers of gender that provide the staging of the pop artist with a sense of ‘realness’. I wish to further emphasise that the idea of staging does not imply that there is any real or authentic self that is somehow veiled or eclipsed by a staging or faking of a persona. Rather, I perceive the self in a theoretical context that harks back to Erving Goffman’s theories of the presentation of the self, where the self “is a product of a scene that comes off, and . . . not a cause of it” (Goffman 1969, 245; author’s emphases); the self is itself created through staging. In her essay about how the self is staged through narratives in teaching, Lauren Smith provides some valid insights. A central purpose of staging the self is to make it intelligible to others. This means that the ostensibly private and personal traits that go into the staging must be meaningful in that particular context. As she reminds us: “The I is necessarily structured by the historical forces that bring it into being in the first place. It has no nature, no existence, outside of these historical forces” (Smith 2000, 71). The idea that the self is always historically and socially situated, and that this is necessary for understanding a self at any given time, recalls Allan F. Moore’s point that authenticity “is a matter of interpretation that is made and fought for from within a particular cultural and, thus, historicized position” (Moore 2012, 266). All in all, this makes for a compelling argument in the theorising of subjectivity, especially in the light of Larsen’s own use of value terms such as ‘real’ and ‘honest’ in interviews. This situating of the ‘I’ also functions as a reminder that the individual pop artist, no matter how authentic they portray themselves, is also understood within particular cultural and social contexts.9

The artist as girl-child: ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’ Let us now turn to Larsen’s video, ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’. Originally included on her second solo album, The Chase, in 2008, the song was released as a single in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland the following year, prompting Larsen’s continental record company, Sony Music Germany, to release a compilation album of the same name. The video, produced by Katapult Filmproduktion GmbH and directed by Hinrich Pflug,10 is a brilliant example of Larsen’s projection of naivety through the figure of the child. Crucially, the complexity of this figure is contingent upon the fact that the artist who employs it is an adult. Larsen’s strategic presentation of her persona in the video invokes the character trait that Warwick identifies as ‘girlness’, which is different from the physical stage of girlhood as part of a woman’s life cycle in that it is “not a liminal phase but a set of behaviors and attributes available to females at any time during their life” (Warwick 2007, 3); consequently, anyone can “adopt a girly manner for strategic purposes, and they can play with the characteristics of girlness for their own enjoyment” (Warwick 2007, 3). Sheila Whiteley makes a similar point in her theory that being a girl is “not a pre-given fixed human characteristic”; rather, like subjectivity, it is “continually in the process of formation and is thus capable of reconstitution” (Whiteley 2005, 69). Whiteley takes this into the context of gender, suggesting that “the construction of innocence (and its relationship to immaturity)” is an important part of “the ensemble of presentations that constitute women’s gendered subjectivity” (Whiteley 2005, 116). Significantly, this positions the girl-child as both girl and child, thus giving us a point of entry into how a pop artist like Larsen negotiates a marketable identity by including the child in her repertoire of stereotypes of femininity. The video’s narrative takes place in one single space, inside a house in a state of disrepair or possibly under renovation. Larsen stages and plays out various facets of her persona,

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Figure 18.1 Angel wings and fake tattoo – Marit Larsen in the video of ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’.

symbolised by the distinct colours of her dress and the different acts she performs. Among these, she is depicted in a blue dress in a boat on a plastic ‘ocean’, in a red dress at the piano or with the acoustic guitar, and in a black dress in the rehearsal space of a rock band, which doubles as a makeshift stage. On first viewing, the video resembles a piece from a children’s TV programme: the rock band stage becomes a playground for the little girl to fool around with the adults’ (electric) instruments. She frolics and rolls on the floor with the unwieldy guitar and bass, and attempts to play the drum kit with such fervour that her hair is flying. This is juxtaposed with images of Larsen’s mastery of acoustic instruments (guitar and piano) and of her persona as inhabiting a pre-adolescent world, with signifiers such as a toy boat on a fake sea of blue plastic, an angel’s costume, and a fake tattoo (see Figure 18.1). Throughout Larsen’s performance she employs specific traits of body language to perform out a presence poised between child and quirky young woman. Clumsy movements, for example, characterise her attempts at playing electric ‘rock band’ instruments, while fits of laughter disrupt the action of the narrative and turn into accidental comic relief. In addition to the acoustic instruments, the singer-songwriter ethos is maintained through images of Larsen with pen and paper, ostensibly trying to write a song. This is afforded further gravity by the images of Larsen holding up cue cards for the camera, in direct reference to Bob Dylan’s promotional film clip for his 1965 single, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. However, this pastiche is given a twist, as the cue cards do not always correspond to the lyrics. With a self-deprecating manoeuvre, Larsen adds a meta-level to the video, holding up cue cards that implore ‘you’ to come back, stating that she is ‘really sorry’, and having one card refer to herself as an idiot, presumably because she has left the ‘you’ of the lyrics and has since come to regret it. The ‘idiot’ sign may be read as what Hawkins describes as ‘an exaggerated guise of self-deprecation’ (2009, 39), where ‘sincerity’ becomes a quality of the pop persona. In this way, Larsen creates an image of herself as ‘just’ a fallible human being – an ostensibly universal realisation – but also appropriates the male pop star’s strategy, thereby veiling her agency by trying out the (adult) man’s trick to her own ends, thus both drawing attention to her persona and retaining control; the emotional universality is not merely to be found in the male artist, but also in the girl-child. Such purported universality is reinforced by the absence of choreography and excessive styling in the video. Larsen’s appearance forms a counterpoint to the slick videos of pop 260

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artists from Michael Jackson and Britney Spears to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. On the one hand, this accentuates a sense of ordinariness in the artist, situating Larsen in a lineage of seemingly “not particularly image-conscious female musicians” (Kruse 1999, 92) and thereby enabling her to avoid being objectified as a female artist. On the other hand, the apparent lack of choreography, and the clumsiness, deliberate or otherwise, function as a form of comic relief, permitting the artist ironic distance from the spectacle of her persona. This distance also fortifies the dissonance between music and lyrics, where a tale of loss and heartbreak is set to music so cheerful it resembles a nursery rhyme. Further depth to the narrative emanates from Larsen’s put-on-naivety. In the video, naivety becomes a central facet of her temperament, underpinning her happy-go-lucky attitude to life and the world. This belies the amount of work invested in the persona and also the precision with which she performs it at any given time. On this note, I would emphasise that naivety constitutes a central part in the construction of her persona, although functioning only insofar as it is put to use by the disciplined artist behind it.

Spectacle and control: The gaze Throughout the video, Larsen panders to the gaze that constructs her as to-be-looked-at, allowing her to execute her performance. This is granted by the same gaze that constructs Larsen as a Lolita-like figure in the first frame in the rock band sub-plot, where her embarrassment at being caught in the act (with a grown-up’s instrument?) is rendered ambiguous through her coyness. In these and other scenes, the protagonist in the video retains a childlike, pre-sexual, and naive attitude to the idea of love; but at the same time, Larsen hints at a certain sagesse about adult life from behind the mask, playfully returning the camera’s gaze and adding microscopic, seemingly insignificant gestures (such as the angel’s conspicuously enticing movement of the hands [3:00], where she appears to simulate exposing herself, or the display of subordination when she lies sprawling on the stage with the electric guitar on top of her [1:33], which could indicate subordination to the masculine-coded rock signifier). Gestures of this kind nevertheless connote a wide-eyed curiosity about the adult world as much as any knowledge about consensual ‘adult’ pastimes. This mix of childish and adult components renders her persona in the video ambiguous and potentially problematic, but also secures the performer’s distance to her audience. On first impression Larsen’s contradictory traits make her an unreliable narrator, notably by her send-up of her own song. She sings of how she would try any identity to get a loved one to come back to her – waltz, rock ‘n’ roll, et cetera. However, in the course of the video, she is seen dragging a stand with a fake electric halo on it into the picture [2:13]; subsequently, we see her displaying the support for the wing costume as well as the fake tattoo, and she pretends to be drowning in the fake plastic sea, waving a ‘Help!’ sign. In this way, she discloses the constructedness of the roles. On the one hand, she sings/tells of how she would be anything for the song’s antagonist (an act of self-effacement, and therefore very problematic); on the other hand, she shows us that these roles are, at the end of the day, a joke. Arguably, this is reinforced by her physical awkwardness in the video. The strategies of send-up instate the impression that Larsen puts on a show for the gaze of the camera as well as the spectator. This prompts me to turn to Laura Mulvey’s model of the gaze, from her seminal 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey’s theory has been thoroughly criticised in recent years, notably by musicologists who point out both the lack of female agency and spectatorship in her theory. I will return to these critiques below; however, Mulvey’s original theory also warrants mention at length here. Taking 261

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Hollywood feature films as her object of study, Mulvey explores how woman is constructed as an object of desire for the man and argues that the controlling gaze in cinema is always already male. She outlines two main ways of spectatorship, or two contradictory aspects of “the pleasurable structures of looking”, in Hollywood cinema: scopophilia (pleasure in looking) and its complementary function, narcissistic pleasure in being looked at (identification with the image seen) (Mulvey 2009, 18). According to Mulvey, the power resides in the male gaze, which determines whether the female object is desirable: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are traditionally looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 2009, 19; author’s emphasis). Hence, the male gaze is tripartite: the audience, the camera, and the male actor, all of which work together to maintain a masculine control. In the first instance, scopophilia is contingent on distance, on an Othering of the object in order to make it desirable for the self; in the case of narcissism, identification requires proximity in order to receive confirmation. Grounding her theory in psychoanalysis, Mulvey goes so far as to refer to the twin ways of looking as “the scopophilic instinct” and the “ego libido”, which “mould this cinema’s formal attributes” (Mulvey 2009, 25). This indicates how, throughout her essay, she is in danger of essentialising both the spectator as male and women as spectacle. Even though she implies that cinematic codes create the gaze, “thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire” (Mulvey 2009, 26), she firmly fixes the gaze as male and the object of desire as female. Four decades after its release, the importance of Mulvey’s article cannot be underestimated; nevertheless, her tenets have been criticised and developed further by several scholars. In their numerous studies, both Fast and Hawkins have pointed out the lack of female agency and spectatorship in Mulvey’s theory (Fast 2001) and “the extent to which men have been objectified in popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s”, as well as the growth in number of studies dealing with this issue (Hawkins 2002, 17). Crucially, these critiques question gendered agency in Mulvey’s model. Fast has emphasised that the spectacle of hard rock and metal as performed by male musicians is a powerful reversal of Mulvey’s theory of the gaze (Fast 2001, 186). Further, she argues that erotic pleasure is only one way in which images can be received, even though “it is unlikely that eroticism can be neatly separated out from various other responses” (Fast 2001, 188). The ambiguity of Larsen’s persona in the video, and how she plays on different and contradictory modes of attraction, offers up a pertinent example of this, where the child is not easily separable from the gendered pop celebrity who connotes to-be-looked-at-ness. From a non-musicological perspective, Susanna Paasonen critiques the historicity of Mulvey’s model, pointing out that the two modes of looking are contingent on an active/ passive split that leaves the female with “the position of exhibitionist and masochistic object of a spectacle” (Paasonen 2011, 175); thus, “[the] historical specificity of Mulvey’s analysis is lost if and when the male gaze is seen as a general visual order and dynamic of looking” (Paasonen 2011, 175). Paasonen’s reading exposes the essentialist flaws in Mulvey’s model and shows how this can be turned around: “Ultimately, the problem lies in identifying looking with control, distance, and mastery through the psychoanalytical notions of voyeurism and scopophilia, as well as in associating relations of control, as depicted in pornography, with the control of the viewer” (Paasonen 2011, 176). This shifting of focus is applicable to music video analysis, and especially useful for my purposes. The idea that control, and therefore power, reside in the spectator, could easily confine the audience to seeing Larsen’s

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persona as ‘just a girl’ performing for the camera’s (male) gaze. This would demand that Larsen relinquish control and agency rather than become a passive exhibitionist who silently enjoys being looked at. But who controls the gaze here? Perhaps the clue to this lies in the opening frame of the video. The visual narrative opens with a close-up of Larsen’s face; she fixes the viewer’s gaze while delivering the opening lyrics with the smallest hint of a smile. This moment places the song’s protagonist, the ‘I’, firmly at the centre of the narrative. From then on, the story revolves around her, with the viewer being invited/commanded to take on the role of ‘you’. This makes the contract abundantly clear from the first frame: Larsen is the one who is in control of both spectacle and spectator, a fact subtly emphasised by the fact that the first word out of her mouth is ‘I’. The first frame, then, suggests the presence of the artist behind the persona. What is more, Larsen’s naivety is rendered ‘fake’ insofar as it is theatricalised and played out within the confines set up by the artist herself. Consequently, in Larsen’s performance in the video, it is the object of the gaze who is in control. Behind the persona, the artist’s agency is at work, but covered by the mask of fake naivety – a mask that cleverly disguises the power of representation. Masking involves another signifier in Larsen’s song ‘Only A Fool’. The lyrics to this song contain one of her more puzzling lines. In the chorus, she states, “I was armed with the faith of a child”.11 This certainly recalls the stereotype of the child-figure as a characteristic of Larsen’s persona – a figure that can be both disarming and empowering. The image of the child’s faith as something with which you arm yourself – as part of a person’s arsenal – can possibly be interpreted as the child’s defence against the adult world of love and loss, and thus against having your heart broken.12 One might well read this as a kind of ‘look, don’t touch’ attitude which, as time goes by and Larsen’s solo career takes flight, would seem to outgrow the adorable child. In my earlier analysis of the video, however, the girl-child comes across as a powerful component of Larsen’s persona, in ways that both reassure and intrigue the spectator. The artist also clearly makes an effort to control the gaze of the audience by framing the narrative as hers alone, without any supporting characters to interfere with her performance. The video thus connotes fantasy, as if the child is putting on a performance for herself in her room, dreaming of a nondescript ‘you’ who, in the end, is less important than her own show and less inclined to causing her emotional trouble. Markers such as (fake) ingenuity and light, bubbly voice connote the child, and the artist may or may not be aware of how this comes across to the listener. It is, however, likely that other child star performers, such as Michael Jackson, may have contributed to the cultural intelligibility of Larsen’s childlike persona. In her analysis of Jackson’s transition from child star to (adult) superstar, Warwick makes the point that “navigating from child star to adult entertainer is no mean feat” (Warwick 2012, 250); with reference to Valerie Walkerdine’s work on child movie stars, she suggests that “the child star must be simultaneously innocent in looks and knowing in manner” (Warwick 2012, 244), a description that applies equally to Larsen’s persona in the video. Warwick’s interpretation of the young Jackson as performing out “a rehearsed naughtiness” that combines “menace, humility, sexual knowingness, and innocence” (Warwick 2012, 247) can similarly be applied to Larsen. However, I see it as applicable only when reversed. Consequently, in the video, Larsen appears less as a child faking adulthood than as an adult staging a childlike version of herself; a cursory reminder that the girl-child is an ideal signifier for Larsen to maintain a distance from herself as much as her audience.

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Concluding thoughts Paradoxically, Larsen purports to be honest, real, sincere – all hallmarks of individual authenticity – while also striving to make her artist persona ‘ordinary’. To this end, the so-called realness of her persona builds on notions of patriarchal femininity. Yet, by faking naivety she retains control of the gaze as well as her persona. This device of control extends to how the protagonist’s counterpart – Larsen’s love interest – is absent from the video. My reading suggests that there is a chance the protagonist does not want to actually have the ‘you’ within the narrative. Rather the subject as ‘I’ is perfectly content to have ‘you’ as a reverie, as an imaginary ‘partner’ only. In this sense, Larsen’s video is the polar opposite of a man’s world. Instead of instating the reality of the lyrics, where the ‘you’ plays a central role, the video portrays Larsen in a solitary room – a room of her own – characterised by the absence of any images of ‘you’. This returns us to the task of reading the subjectivity of artist and fans. Do artists actually believe that they are only ‘being themselves’? Do fans believe that the artists speak the truth about themselves with such phrases? In my understanding, Larsen’s distance to her persona (and, arguably, sexuality) as well as the public eye provides her with a defence against being reduced to an emblem of femininity. There are no overt sexual insinuations and – ostensibly – no parodic displays of femininity. Larsen’s claims to being real and honest have been taken at face value from the outset, a trait that has worked to maintain the impression of universal ‘realness’ and ‘honesty’ – and attendant traits such as ‘cuteness’ – through the specificities of her persona (white, female, Norwegian, and Anglophone). Miller makes a useful point that “faking it is no simple point, but many points”, mirroring everyday life as well as the complexity of pop stars’ personae: “Consider, for instance, that the ‘it’ in faking it is variously a role, a disposition, an emotion, a character trait, a commitment, an experience, or an entire identity” (Miller 2003, 232). In pop music, perhaps a key lies in the very notion of faking it. In his study of celebrities, Joseph Roach has discussed the phenomenon of ‘it’, the elusive quality that characterises celebrities and stars. One of Roach’s most compelling attempts at describing this factor is “the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them” (Roach 2007, 8; author’s emphases). It would seem that this is precisely what Larsen manages, a testament to her dexterity as a professional artist. Intentionally sustaining the paradoxes and contradictions of her persona by playing them out as ‘natural’ leaves the listener-spectator free to construe this embodiment of contradictory qualities. Deftly, Larsen manages to negotiate a framework of gender stereotypes within a context that she knows full well is rife with innuendos.

Notes  1 I wish to thank Lori Burns, Stan Hawkins, and the anonymous reviewers of this chapter.  2 Larsen herself made an explicit connection between songs and songwriter as early as 2006, in interviews for the launch of Under the Surface. Setting an example for both fans and media to follow, she referred to her work as indicative of her own realness and honesty, notably in how she asserted that the songs on the album portrayed her “as I actually am – a real and honest Marit” (Trine Rasmussen, ‘Tilbake i rampelyset’, TV 2 Nettavisen, 2 February 2006). This terminology has since been used extensively by journalists in interviews and reviews, along with qualificatory and highly loaded terms such as ‘cute’. I discuss this terminology in more detail later.  3 The idea that professional pop artists might actually believe that they are ‘just being themselves’ at any given time is compelling, but a further investigation of this is outside the scope of this chapter. 264

Marit Larsen and strategies of faking  4 These traits of Larsen’s self-presentation appear in a number of newspaper and magazine interviews from 2006 onwards. For a notable instance of her oft-told story of sitting beneath her mother’s grand piano as a child, absorbing the music that her mother’s piano students were playing, see Pernille Dysthe, ‘Snill pike?’, Henne, December 2008, 24–31 (29). In this interview, she also hints at an absence of musical tuition by positioning herself as rebelling against her parents’ classical training by turning to popular music (2008).  5 Several newspaper and magazine pieces contain such descriptions of the artist, as journalists either infer from Larsen’s music to her persona in reviews or take her persona at face value in interviews. For an example of the former, see Johnny Andreassen, ‘Til å spise opp’, ABC Nyheter, 11 October 2008, URL: http://www.abcnyheter.no/nyheter/2008/10/11/75597/til-spiseopp (accessed 9 November 2016); for the latter, see Ida Giske, ‘Redd for å bli for lykkelig’, VG Helg, 11 October 2008, 6–12 (8).  6 It is worth noting that the origin of the word ‘persona’ is the Latin word meaning “mask, character played by an actor”. Oxford Dictionaries, URL: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/persona (accessed 10 August 2015).  7 Ordnett: Stor norsk-engelsk ordbok, URL: http://www.ordnett.no/search?search=ekte&lang=en (accessed 30 September 2015).  8 A case in point is the Norwegian TV show, Hver gang vi møtes, which features a selection of seven artists who perform cover versions of each other’s songs over the course of a season. Marion Ravn was one of the featured artists in the show’s highly successful second season in 2013. Journalists disclosed the news that Larsen had also been offered to participate, but had turned the offer down. Mats Borch Bugge, head of music for the channel P3 at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), connected this to what may be perceived as Larsen’s integrity by suggesting that Larsen “surely said no out of artistic considerations”, thus positioning her opposite the supposedly more commercially oriented Ravn as someone who values artistic merit higher than the money it generates (Merete Skogrand and Jonas Pettersen, ‘Marit tjener på Marions tårer’, Dagbladet, 10 December 2012, 34).  9 A crucial part of Larsen’s appeal is her staging of ordinariness, such as claiming in interviews that she does not have an image – “I am just who I am” (Giske, ‘Redd for å bli for lykkelig’, 10). The idea of ordinariness can be enormously convincing when projected through an artist’s music and persona; however, this presupposes a variant of ordinariness that is marketable to an audience that may identify with the artist. Like authenticity, ordinariness is not universal, but differs according to context. In this respect, Larsen creates and performs out a pop star persona that makes sense as different – from pop stars in general and her own previous personae in particular – in a context that accommodates this ‘difference’. 10 This information is taken from the booklet to the compilation CD If A Song Could Get Me You (Larsen, 2009). 11 ‘Only A Fool’ from Under the Surface (Larsen, 2006). 12 This raises the question whether the childlike/childish character of Larsen’s persona is about retrieving an actual childhood, or the staging of an ideal childhood. Even though she has made reference to incidents in her own childhood that have had a bearing on her career, such as her parents’ divorce which allegedly fuelled her decision to take up acting (see for example John Arne Gundersen, ‘På ville veier’, Dagbladet, 24 April 2009, 28), I am of the opinion that her employment of the girl-child stereotype is about the construction of an endearing persona, and the notion of authenticity that comes with this figure.

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Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik Burns, Lori. 2010. “Vocal Authority and Listener Engagement: Musical and Narrative Expressive Strategies in the Songs of Female Pop-Rock Artists 1993–95.” In Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music, ed. Mark Spicer and John Covach, 154–192. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Butler, Judith. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Femnism and the Subversion of Identity. 10th Anniversary Edition. New York and London: Routledge. Dibben, Nicola. 2009. “Vocal Performance and the Projection of Emotional Authenticity.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 317–333. Farnham: Ashgate. Fast, Susan. 2001. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gamson, Joshua. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving. 1969 [1959]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Hawkins, Stan. 2002. Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2011. “‘You Have Killed Me’ – Tropes of Hyperbole and Sentimentality in Morrissey’s Musical Expression.” In Morrissey: Fandom, Representation and Identities, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power, 307–323. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Kruse, Holly. 1999. “Gender.” In Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss, 85–100. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Larsen, Marit. 2006. Under the Surface. EMI Music Norway, album. Larsen, Marit. 2009. If A Song Could Get Me You. Sony Music Entertainment Germany GmbH, album. Miller, William Ian. 2003. Faking It. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Moi, Toril. 1989. “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” In The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, 117–132. London: Macmillan Education Ltd. Moore, Allan F. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate. Mulvey, Laura. 2009 [1975]. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. Second Edition, 14–27. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Randall, Annie. 2009. Dusty! Queen of the Postmods. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Roach, Joseph. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rojek, Chris. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Schlichter, Annette. 2011. “Do Voices Matter? Vocality, Materiality, Gender Performativity.” Body & Society 17 (1): 31–52. Shumway, David. 2014. Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, Lauren. 2000. “Staging the Self: Queer Theory in the Composition Classroom.” In Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, ed. Calvin Thomas, 68–84. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2007. Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s. New York and London: Routledge. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2012. “You Can’t Win, Child, but You Can’t Get Out of the Game: Michael Jackson’s Transition from Child Star to Superstar.” Popular Music and Society 35 (2): 241–259. Whiteley, Sheila. 2005. Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender. London and New York: Routledge.

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19 “SINGING FROM THE HEART” Notions of gendered authenticity in pop music Bridget Coulter

Authenticity is a powerful concept within popular music culture. As Shuker (2002, 20) notes, authenticity carries considerable cultural weight, and Thornton (1995, 26) argues that it is perhaps the most valuable quality that can be ascribed to music. To be considered authentic, music must convey an impression of being ‘real’, ‘raw’, ‘honest’ or ‘original’. In the popular sphere, authenticity is rarely interrogated and, as a result, it maintains an enigmatic quality that increases its symbolic power. Because of its cultural prestige, authenticity helps determine the taste distinctions of popular audiences (Frith 1996, 71; Keightley 2001, 131; Leach 2001, 143). Ultimately, authenticity presents a dichotomy: “if good music is . . . honest and sincere, bad music is false” (Frith 1986, 267). For example, within dominant cultural discourses, rock music is typically considered an authentic style, whereas pop is considered inauthentic (Cook 1998, 11; Hawkins 2011; Keightley 2001, 111; Moore 2002, 210). The widespread denigration of pop music may reflect the genre’s association with women and girls; girls’ music is frequently trivialised (Baker 2001, 362; Railton and Watson 2011, 75), and femininity is culturally associated with artifice (Coates 1997, 52; Mayhew 1999, 67–68; Thornton 1995, 72). Young female pop audiences are typically presented as passive and hysterical, and portrayals of female fans often downplay their interest in music (Driscoll 2002, 186; Warwick 2007, 5). The key question, then, is how is authenticity conceptualised within a genre that is generally assumed to be inauthentic, and by an audience that is typically portrayed as uncritical? This study sheds light on this question, investigating how authenticity is understood by adolescent girls and how this relates to ideas of musical value and issues of gender and identity. This research offers a new approach to the study of authenticity, based on primary qualitative research exploring how audiences experience musical authenticity in everyday life. As musicologists have argued for several decades, scholars need to avoid essentialist approaches to the study of music (Kerman 1985; Leppert and McClary 1987; McClary 1991, 2000). Discussions of music should therefore consider the role of subjectivity in the reception of music. It is vital to acknowledge that perceptions of music are influenced by listeners’ identities and experiences, and to consider how music’s material properties constrain the range of potential interpretations available to listeners and the ability of the music to afford various subjectivities (Clarke 2005; Cook 2001; Dibben 1999, 2006; Kramer 2011). 267

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Given that the concept of musical authenticity is, to an extent, governed by various musical and cultural conventions, it is possible to explore how music conveys authenticity and how audiences experience it. Scholars such as Fornäs (1995, 274–280), Frith (1996), Grossberg (1993), Moore (2002) and Thornton (1995, 26–86) have attempted to investigate this, and their studies identify three broad categories. The first of these categories is based on the idea that the authentic in music conveys an essential truth about the music’s originator (usually the composer or performer). Moore labels this “first person authenticity”, which “arises when an originator . . . succeeds in conveying the impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity” (2002, 214). To do this, music must seem to reflect the identity and experiences of the composer or performer, as if to say “this is what it’s like to be me” (2002, 212). Similar versions of authenticity have been identified by others, such as Thornton’s notion of authenticity of “originality and aura” (1995, 30) and Fornäs’s notion of “subjective authenticity” (1995, 276). The idea of first person authenticity derives from 19th-century Romantic cultural ideology, which positions art as the emotional expression of an individual genius, motivated by creativity rather than economic necessity. Despite changes in the production and dissemination of music, Romantic discourses of authenticity and authorship remain firmly embedded in the popular psyche (Frith 1986, 267; Greckel 1979; Mayhew 1999; Negus 2011). The second category of authenticity is based on the idea that authentic music speaks the truth about a group, community or subculture (Grossberg 1993, 202). This “second person authenticity” (Moore 2002, 220) is similar to “social authenticity” (Fornäs 1995, 276) and “subcultural authenticity” (Thornton 1995, 30). A third category is identified by Moore (2002), which he calls “third person authenticity”. This arises “when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another, embedded within a tradition of performance” (2002, 218), usually by following the conventions of a musical style. The flurry of academic debate about authenticity in the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in scholarly agreement that authenticity is a cultural construct, which audiences “ascribe to a performance” (Rubidge 1996, 219) rather than an inherent musical quality (Keightley 2001; Moore 2002). Consequently, some scholars have largely relegated the concept “to the intellectual dust-heap” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, 30). Indeed, Middleton even argues that within scholarship, the idea of authenticity “has become an embarrassment” (2006, 203). However, this approach is not without its problems, and notions of authenticity remain significant in the popular imagination (2006, 203). The concept is frequently invoked by musicians, listeners and music critics, and one need only open a music magazine, glance through the online comments about a music video or watch a television talent show to see that ideas of authenticity continue to influence how audiences understand music. For this reason, it is important to revisit the concept, exploring how and why people use it. In other words, I am interested in examining what authenticity does for audiences, and the gender implications of this. This study examines adolescent girls’ attitudes to authenticity in pop music. In order to investigate this, I used informal semi-structured interviews and focus groups, qualitative methods that have been employed by other researchers investigating popular music audiences and musicians (Bayton 1997, 1998; Einerson 1998; Koizumi 2002; Lemish 1998; Lowe 2004; Richards 1998; Williams 2001). My participants were girls between the ages of 10 and 13, who were recruited from two schools and two Guide units in the north of England. Participants were drawn from a wide range of backgrounds by selecting schools and Guide units in different locations, including affluent, deprived, urban and suburban areas. This 268

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chapter is part of a wider study, which included 54 participants and explored girls’ engagement with pop music more generally. In this chapter, I use data collected in focus groups and interviews with 22 participants from the wider study. In the following sections, I present an analysis of the girls’ beliefs, exploring their subjective responses to authenticity in pop music and how they employ the concept, with particular reference to female pop stars. This is followed by a discussion that investigates the implications of my findings and possibilities for further research.

“Be who you are”: First person authenticity in pop music It soon became clear during my fieldwork that notions of authenticity were of great importance to the girls. Without being prompted, many of the participants talked about authenticity, and it was the subject of much debate. The girls mainly discussed authenticity with reference to solo female pop stars, such as Adele, Ariana Grande and Beyoncé. The only male star who was frequently discussed in relation to authenticity was Sam Smith. Although the girls often discussed boy bands, such as One Direction and The Vamps, they did not talk about the authenticity of these stars; instead, the participants generally positioned them as heartthrobs, discussing their personalities and perceived attractiveness. In contrast, the girls had a different gendered view of Sam Smith, positioning him primarily as a singer. In general, the girls believed that music was authentic if it reflected the identity and experiences of the performer. Molly,1 for example, preferred music that was autobiographical: I think it’s also from past experiences that I think Sam Smith . . . has had, which might make it more stronger and [bring] more affection to the song. I think [Ariana Grande] . . . she’s like 21 . . . there’s enough time for some breakups and . . . past experiences. Because I think past experiences . . . bring out . . . the most in your voice and better lyrics. When listening to music by a particular performer, the girls drew upon knowledge of that star gleaned from unofficial sources, such as television and the Internet. Stars were perceived as authentic if their music reflected their overall star image (Dyer 2004). The idea that music should represent the music’s originator is the main tenet of first person authenticity, as defined by Moore (2002, 211–214). Interestingly, the girls understood the musical originator to be the performer and did not discuss song-writing. In a sense, this contradicts the widespread belief within popular music that the songwriter is the musical originator (Negus 2011, 610). As explained earlier, first person authenticity positions art as an expression of the originator’s inner self. My participants were deeply preoccupied with this belief, particularly Imogen: [Jessie J and Adele] like, be who they are . . . and have their own personality. I think [Miley Cyrus’s video for ‘Wrecking Ball’ is] trying to tell [girls] just to be whoever they want to be and change, and really you should be yourself and be who you are, not someone who you want to be. Imogen’s language strongly suggests the notion of intrinsic selfhood. She describes being authentic as a choice, emphasising agency – an individual can choose to literally be, or 269

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embody, the self: “you should be . . . who you are”. In these quotes, she presents the self as a fixed entity, which cannot be changed regardless of “who you want to be”. This idea of static selfhood dominated the girls’ discussions of authenticity.

“Singing from the heart”: The importance of unmediated vocal expression The girls placed enormous importance on the act of singing. Clearly, they regarded pop stars primarily as singers, rather than performers or celebrities. If [Sam Smith] hadn’t got a good voice . . . not a lot of people would view his songs. (Yasmin) If they’re good singers, I like them. (Chloe) I like Rihanna because . . . her singing is very nice. (Zara) The girls viewed the voice as a vehicle for emotional expression. Repeatedly, Molly and Fiona used the phrase “singing from the heart” to describe vocal authenticity and to distinguish between authentic singers (Sam Smith, Beyoncé, Jess Glynne and Ariana Grande) and supposedly inauthentic stars (Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus). [‘I’m Not the Only One’ by Sam Smith is] really like from the heart and it’s really like going out to everyone. (Fiona) [Miley Cyrus] doesn’t sing from the heart or doesn’t put a lot of effort into it. (Fiona) The expression “singing from the heart” is open to several interpretations. One interpretation is that “the heart” refers to non-physical attributes, such as the mind or the soul. This is likely to be the intended meaning, given that the heart is culturally associated with emotions. In this sense, “singing from the heart” refers to the voice as a vehicle for the singer’s innermost emotions. The girls valued this mode of performance because they believed it offered insight into the emotional lives of their favourite stars. The phrase’s reference to the heart, a bodily organ, is also suggestive. This allusion grounds the act of singing within the physical realm, emphasising the bodily source of the voice (the lungs, throat and vocal cords). Understood in this sense, the phrase “singing from the heart” emphasises the corporeality of the voice. Unlike instrumental sound, vocal sound is the product of internal bodily processes, and this creates an air of mystique (Green 1997, 28; Jarman-Ivens 2011, 27). Arguably, this notion of vocal corporeality was crucial to the participants’ feelings of authenticity. The perceived closeness of the voice to the body creates an impression of unmediated expression, a quality that Moore identifies as a signifier of first person authenticity (2002, 213). When a person sings, the sound (the voice) seems to emanate directly from the source of production (the singer’s body, which is seen to contain the self). This reflects 270

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the widespread belief that vocal expression is a sincere expression of the self (Jarman-Ivens 2011, 2; Koestenbaum 1991, 205). The idea of the voice as an extension of the body is closely linked with patriarchal ideas of femininity, and it is significant that the girls mainly discussed vocal authenticity with reference to female stars – with the notable exception of Sam Smith. This reflects gendered cultural attitudes that situate women within the realm of the physical and the bodily (Bradby 1993, 157; Grosz 1994, 14; McClary 1991, 138–140), thereby presenting singing as inherently feminine and natural (Green 1997, 21–51; Mayhew 1999, 72–74). In order to better understand what the participants meant by “singing from the heart”, it is worth considering which stars they identified as authentic and which they did not. The stars whom Molly and Fiona believed “sing from the heart” (Sam Smith, Ariana Grande, Jess Glynne and Beyoncé) are all known for their distinctive voices and vocal skill. This links vocal proficiency with the notion of emotional communication, cementing the idea of the voice as an authentic mode of expression. The performance style and image of these stars also broadly conforms to the traditional model of the solo singer, particularly the female pop star or diva. These performers are generally associated with conventional love songs and individualistic songs about inner strength and self-discovery. Arguably, these signs of conventional authenticity convey the impression that these stars intend to “sing from the heart”. Another marker of authenticity was musical styles, specifically those associated with black culture, such as soul. Although young soul fans may not be consciously aware of this connection, it is likely that – to an extent – their perception of soul music will be influenced by it; the association of soul with blackness is widely accepted and culturally ingrained. For example, when I asked Fiona how she knew that Sam Smith was “singing from the heart”, she explicitly invoked the link between soul music and authenticity: ‘Cause he’s a soul singer so like he’ll put a lot into making the song. A lot from his voice . . . you can just tell that it’s all from the heart, and just the way he sings it. Most likely inadvertent, such views reflect essentialist notions of Otherness, which continue to resonate in the popular imagination. Black music is still widely believed to be inherently ‘natural’ (Cook 1998, 6; Thornton 1995, 72; Warwick 2007, 11) and blackness, particularly black femininity, is constructed as bodily and animalistic (Railton and Watson 2011, 87–107). It is also revealing to consider Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus, the two performers that Molly and Fiona identified as stars who do not “sing from the heart” and who were viewed as inauthentic by many other participants. Considering their performance styles, it is likely that Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus do not always intend to “sing from the heart”. Instead they frequently adopt an ironic, deliberately artificial aesthetic in their work. Both stars are wellknown, and indeed notorious, for their visually spectacular performances, which experiment with ideas of gender and sexuality. Arguably, their flamboyant performances and personae can be understood as examples of camp, particularly the referential vocal style and image of Nicki Minaj (McMillan 2015, 205). Despite its origins in gay culture (Dyer 2002, 59; Hawkins 2009, 25–27; Horn 2012, 86; Taylor 2012, 68), camp is now firmly embedded in the mainstream and is commonly used by female pop stars (Dickinson 2001; Hawkins 2004; Horn 2012; Robertson 1996; Shugart and Waggoner 2008). Camp is generally understood to be a performance style that employs an inauthentic aesthetic (Bergman 1993, 4–5; Dickinson 2001, 344). More specifically, camp can be a form of parody, which uses irony, aestheticism, theatricality and humour to expose 271

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the artifice of dominant cultural images (Babuscio 1993; Cleto 2000, 164; Dyer 2002, 60). In many cases, parody exaggerates the performativity of gender roles to enact a form of Butlerian gender critique (Shugart and Waggoner 2008; Taylor 2012, 67). Given the prevalence of Romantic notions of authenticity, it is unsurprising that many listeners react with derision and distrust when confronted with performances that unashamedly celebrate artifice. Arguably, the camp performances of Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus invite a more complex reading than the torch songs of Sam Smith or the girl power anthems of Beyoncé; as Dickinson argues, “camp disregards standard modes of readership and gives its objects subversive qualities without worrying about whether they are ‘authentic’” (2001, 344). Not all audiences are familiar with camp aesthetics and, because camp performances can be read as both normative and resistant, some audiences may not recognise such performances as camp (Dickinson 2001, 345; Horn 2012, 94). My participants, for example, took the work of Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus at face value and seemed unaware of the camp possibilities of these performances. At just 10 to 13 years old, my participants may not have engaged with many semantically complex works and may lack the necessary critical skills to offer anything other than a face value reading based on first person authenticity. First person authenticity offers a simplistic model of cultural analysis, which effectively asks ‘is this person telling the truth?’ This straightforward moral standpoint may appeal to younger listeners.

Auto-tune: Musical Botox? As explained in the previous section, the girls valued the idea of the ‘natural’ singing voice extremely highly. Consequently, they opposed the use of vocal enhancement technologies, particularly auto-tune.2 Notably, my participants did not distinguish between cosmetic uses of auto-tune, which correct pitch imperfections, and aesthetic uses, which enhance the voice for artistic effect. Despite the increasing aesthetic application of auto-tune in popular music, auto-tune is most commonly understood as a corrective tool, and this was my participants’ understanding. Interestingly, they implied that auto-tune was instantly recognisable, suggesting that they were unaware of the prevalence of cosmetic auto-tune – it is used widely in popular music and is usually imperceptible. Because of this misconception, it is likely that they were mistakenly referring to aesthetic, rather than corrective, uses. The girls’ discussions of auto-tune were highly moralistic, describing it as dishonest and deceptive. They’re not actually telling you what they can sing like and then it’s lying to their fans. (Sophie) One participant, Amelia, was particularly outspoken about her stance on auto-tune: I think it’s a bit like someone saying ‘oh, I’m really pretty’ but they’ve actually had Botox. I don’t feel like [Adele] uses auto-tune as much . . . I feel like her voice is quite real. I don’t think people should be earning so much money when they’ve technically got like a robotic voice . . . I just have a thing with it. I just don’t like listening to auto-tune sometimes. 272

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This quote demonstrates the blurring of boundaries between music’s sonic meanings and extra-musical, contextual meanings. In it, Amelia refers to both contextual meanings (“I don’t think people should be earning so much money when they’ve technically got like a robotic voice”) and sonic meanings, which she understands as autonomous and inherent (“I just don’t like listening to auto-tune sometimes”). This suggests that her interpretation of the sound of auto-tune is influenced by her subjective moral beliefs about the technology, which in turn are shaped by wider cultural discourses surrounding music, technology and authenticity. In other words, she dislikes the sound of auto-tune because she has a moral objection to it. This reflects Kramer’s assertion that “musical meaning consists of a specific, mutual interplay between musical experience and its contexts” (2002, 8), as well as the work of other scholars who have emphasised the role of context in the interpretation of musical meaning (Green 1988, 1997; McClary 1991, 2000). The girls’ negative beliefs about auto-tune reflect the widespread view that the supposedly ‘natural’ human voice represents emotional authenticity (Mayhew 1999, 73). The girls believed that auto-tune undermined the idea of the ‘natural’ voice, reflecting the idea that “technology is opposed to nature” (Frith 1986, 264). Their attitudes also demonstrate their belief in the importance of unmediated expression. They believed that auto-tune corrupted the mediation process by coming between the sound source (the body) and the product (the voice). The idea of technology as a ‘corruption of the natural’ is arguably gendered, reflecting patriarchal attitudes which link technology with masculinity, and naturalness with femininity (Bradby 1993, 156). My participants believed that the ‘naturalness’ of female performers was highly significant. Their dislike of auto-tune arguably suggests that they conceived it as a masculine symbol, problematising the authentic feminine naturalness of the female singer. By invoking this gendered dimension, the participants asserted a highly gendered, feminine version of authenticity.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover”: Authenticity and image In this section, I explore the participants’ responses to image. Many were keen to stress that they had little interest in the image or physical appearance of pop stars. Even when prompted, they denied that image was important to them and condemned those who cared about it. People say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, and that’s what they’re kind of doing. (Sophie) I like their music, [it’s] not about what they look like really. (Lily) I don’t personally . . . think it’s that important because you’re not going to be listening to the image, you’re listening to the music. (Amelia) ‘Anaconda’ and Miley Cyrus . . . seems like it’s about how you look, not necessarily a song that’s come from their heart. (Molly) 273

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Imogen believed that she was less interested in image than other female fans. By concentrating on musical sound, she felt that she was going against the grain. Girls like [One Direction] because of their image, not because of their songs. . . . I don’t really mind how they look . . . I just . . . listen to their songs. Imogen’s interpretation of this stance as resistant further reinforces the idea of musical authenticity as a dichotomy, with image in direct opposition to sound. This effort to focus on musical sound suggests an attempt by the girls to gain cultural capital. As Cusick (1999) and Green (1988) note, within dominant cultural ideologies, the idea of “the music itself” (Cusick, 491–492) carries considerable prestige. However, despite their claims to the contrary, the girls talked extensively about physical image. These discussions mirrored their discussions about music: they were mainly concerned with the dichotomy of real versus fake. Mostly, the girls condemned bodily enhancement, linking this with dishonesty. [Nicki Minaj] wears a wig . . . and it’s no need for it . . . she should be proud for who she is. (Zara) [Miley Cyrus is] fake. Like, she puts so much makeup on. (Yasmin) Dolly Parton . . . she got all . . . plastic surgery and things to make her look more prettier but I think she looked pretty when she just first started. . . . Miley Cyrus . . . she tried to get away from the Hannah Montana image. I think they should just all just stay the same and stay natural. (Jo) In contrast, the girls preferred female artists with a more ‘natural’ appearance. Iggy [Azalea] . . . I don’t think she’d put a lot of effort in. Which I quite like. (Imogen) I prefer [Iggy Azalea] more than Nicki Minaj ‘cause . . . she doesn’t wear wigs, it’s just her natural hair. (Selma) [Jessie J] doesn’t go over the top, she’s natural . . . she doesn’t . . . do surgery or she doesn’t put . . . so much fake stuff on. (Selma) These statements present beauty products and body modification as deceptive. Whereas some audiences might perceive Nicki Minaj’s outlandish wigs as an entertaining aspect of her camp performances, the girls saw them only as a façade. Like their beliefs about autotune, the girls’ dislike of body modification may derive from a belief in the importance of unmediated expression. The girls considered body modification as a corruption of the

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natural, an obstacle which came between the source (the body) and the product (the image of the star). Tellingly, most of the girls’ discussions about image focused on female stars. This may well reflect widespread patriarchal attitudes to women which emphasise the importance of women’s physical appearance (Warwick 2007, 73). They also position women as Other, presenting femininity as different from and inferior to masculinity (Grosz 1994). The emphasis on the appearance of female stars may also reflect widespread patriarchal attitudes towards female musicians, particularly singers, who are typically objectified by audiences (Green 1997, 16; McClary 1991, 138). This means that the music of female singers is often judged on extra-musical factors, such as perceived attractiveness, and this can influence perceptions of authenticity. Almost all of the girls expressed disapproval about the sexualised imagery of pop music, particularly in the work of Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus. In the Miley Cyrus videos, they’re quite weird and they’re quite a bad influence. (Chloe) Nicki Minaj is taking advantage of girls, and . . . showing girls off to be something that . . . they don’t want to be. (Fiona) I don’t like [Miley Cyrus’s] videos and I don’t like her . . . it’s a bit sexual. (Jo) Given that the girls associated authenticity with sound rather than image, the overtly sexualised images of these stars may have made them seem more inauthentic. As Green notes, “the more that sexual attractiveness becomes part of the delineations, the less respect is paid to the singer’s ability to manipulate and understand inherent meanings” (1997, 40). The girls’ preoccupation with the image of female performers also suggests that they may identify with these stars. This idea is widely accepted in popular discourse; it is taken for granted that young people are influenced by pop stars, and this view is perpetuated by the media and politicians through debates about the supposed sexualisation of children. Although scholars have criticised the simplistic nature of this idea (Egan 2013), it is understandable that adolescent girls may be curious about femininity and the female body. From a young age, girls are taught to be aware of how they represent their bodies (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997), and many of the girls in my study admitted that they were insecure about their appearance. Stars provide an opportunity for girls to explore and observe different modes of bodily representation. This self-identification is evident in Selma’s statements about Ariana Grande’s image: I think that [Ariana Grande] puts too much makeup on . . . if I was her, I wouldn’t put as much makeup on, I would just look natural. In this quote, Selma puts herself in Ariana Grande’s place, showing a remarkable degree of self-identification. Her language emphasises agency: she portrays both herself and Ariana Grande as individuals, each capable of controlling her own image. By drawing attention to Ariana Grande’s supposedly inauthentic appearance, Selma asserts her own authenticity by

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comparison. She uses this idea to claim a more empowered identity, which allows her to say to the world ‘I am authentic’.

Discussion The version of authenticity that emerges from this study is a highly specific type of first person authenticity, based on the idea that music is a form of emotional communication that expresses the originator’s inner self. This reflects dominant cultural ideas of authenticity, which position art as the product of a great individual. Such ideas rely on the Romantic notion that all individuals possess a true, authentic self. Perhaps the most striking thing about the girls’ responses is their remarkably literal understanding of first person authenticity. Whereas some audiences may understand authenticity more vaguely as a vibe or “aura” (Thornton 1995, 30), my participants understood the concept to be a tangible characteristic with strict parameters. In order for a musical work to be deemed authentic, the girls needed to believe that it reflected the performer’s experiences, and they sought evidence that these experiences were genuine. They used this information to draw parallels between the star’s musical output and private life, thereby constructing authenticity during the act of music consumption and confirming Meyers’s assertion that “the blurring of the private/public distinction that occurs in celebrity media is essential for the maintenance of their star power” (2009, 892). As suggested earlier, this simplistic notion of authenticity may reflect the girls’ cultural inexperience and their moralistic approach to the interpretation of cultural works, which was largely based on ideas of truthfulness. The girls also took the notion of unmediated expression literally. Ideally, they believed that music production should be an uninterrupted process of mediation, from the sounding source, which they located in the performer’s body, to the sung product. Consequently, they viewed auto-tune and other electronic effects as an obstacle, corrupting this process. They regarded image in much the same way, basing judgements of authenticity on the mediation of images, in this case, from the visual source (the body) to the product (the image of the star). Just as electronic effects were understood as a corruption of the star’s ‘natural’ voice, body modification was seen to corrupt the star’s ‘natural’ body. The participants did not recognise or acknowledge the aesthetic or artistic possibilities of vocal or body modification. Instead, all modification and enhancement was discussed only in terms of its ability to mask the ‘natural’. This valuing of the ‘natural’ indicates a fetishisation, a belief that authenticity belongs to the bodily realm. Again, this indicates a peculiarly literal understanding of authenticity, suggesting that the unaltered human body, and therefore voice, epitomises authenticity and ‘realness’. Indeed, the idea of the ‘unaltered’ body in a ‘natural’ state is problematic since the girls’ ideas of ‘naturalness’ themselves reflect a set of specific cultural practices. This idea goes far beyond Moore’s (2002) notion of first person authenticity, instead echoing Fornäs’s notion of “subjective authenticity” (1995, 276): “the striving for individual bodily presence in subjective authenticity can take the form of an anti-intellectual biologism that avoids all reflexivity in a mythologising return to pure nature” (277). Why, then, did the girls uphold such a rigid understanding of authenticity, and what did they gain from this? For the participants, authenticity was a valuable musical currency which they used to make taste distinctions. Using the idea of authenticity to measure musical quality, the girls constructed their own hierarchies of value within mainstream pop music. As Cook (1998), Frith (1996) and Keightley (2001) note, distinctions of value and 276

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authenticity are commonly drawn between popular music genres, such as rock and pop music. This study supports and extends this idea, demonstrating that specific audiences use distinctions of value within specific musical styles. This is particularly notable in the case of young female pop audiences, given that both adolescent girlhood and pop music are widely denigrated and are generally associated with artifice. The girls in my study used distinctions of authenticity to construct micro-hierarchies within a style that is not usually understood as authentic. In many ways, the participants’ literal understanding of authenticity led them to value the concept extraordinarily highly; they had exceptionally rigid standards when judging the authenticity of music and were always on the lookout for signs of artifice and deception. In this way, the girls’ focus on authenticity could be read as an attempt, conscious or subconscious, to challenge the widespread characterisation of young female audiences as passive and uncritical, and to assert the value of the music that they enjoy. This could arguably be interpreted as a resistant act, providing them with an opportunity to cultivate a more discerning listener identity, which emphasises their ability to exert agency and make sophisticated taste distinctions. This identity offers the girls access to a powerful position that is not normally available to adolescent girls.

Final reflections This study attempts to shed light on the workings of a central cultural concept in the musical lives of girls. However, a number of factors must be taken into account when interpreting my findings. The study uses data collected in focus groups and interviews with just 22 participants and is not intended to represent the views of the wider population. Instead, my findings offer insight into the perceptions of a specific musical audience, showing how this group of individuals understands and uses the concept of authenticity. As with any fieldwork involving interviews, it is possible that the participants may have withheld or modified their views, consciously or subconsciously, because of my presence. There is, however, no significant evidence of this. Most of the participants were enthusiastic about taking part; they seemed keen to express their opinions and were remarkably frank. The dynamics of the focus groups, however, were at times problematic. Some participants were not comfortable expressing themselves within the groups, probably because the participants already knew one another – a few of the girls admitted this in the one-to-one interviews. However, despite this, the focus groups yielded interesting data, and I primarily used them to introduce the study and build a relationship with the participants. During the analysis, themes emerged that would be worth investigating in more depth. One such theme is authenticity and male pop stars. It is significant that the girls mainly discussed authenticity with reference to female pop stars. This seems to reinforce my argument that the participants had a highly gendered understanding of authenticity, reflecting patriarchal discourses that position singing as an inherently bodily act that is associated with femininity. Further studies could address this by exploring how young female listeners perceive authenticity in the work of male performers, comparing this with their ideas about authenticity and female pop stars. The findings of my study also highlight the need to understand how the concept of authenticity operates in other cultural contexts. Further research could explore whether other popular music audiences subscribe to the same highly specific version of first person authenticity as did the girls in my study, and whether they also use discourses of authenticity to assert status, power and agency. 277

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This study confirms that authenticity remains prevalent in the popular imagination. By shifting the focus from the object (the music) to the subject (the listener), my research provides new information about how young female pop audiences understand authenticity, and what they gain from using the concept. For the girls in my study, authenticity shaped their perception of pop music and their understanding of musical value. Moreover, because of the subordinate position of young female audiences and the widespread denigration of girl culture, authenticity was used by the girls as a tool of empowerment, emphasising listener agency and elevating pop music above its status as a low form of culture. This analysis opens up a debate about the possibilities of the concept of authenticity, particularly in relation to issues of gender, identity and power.

Notes 1 All of the participants’ names have been changed. 2 Auto-tune is a pitch correction technology that is widely used to amend vocal pitch imperfections. Auto-tune manipulates the frequency of specific notes, correcting the pitch whilst maintaining the original vocal quality.

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Gendered authenticity in pop music Egan, R. Danielle. 2013. Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualization of Girls. Cambridge: Polity. Einerson, Martha J. 1998. “‘Do Ya Wanna Dance?’: Collaborating with and Empowering Preadolescent Girls in Feminist Interpretive Research.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19 (3): 42–57. Fornäs, Johan. 1995. Cultural Theory and Late Modernity. London: SAGE. Fredrickson, Barbara L., and Tomi-Ann Roberts. 1997. “Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 21 (2): 173–206. Frith, Simon. 1986. “Art versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music.” Media, Culture & Society 8 (3): 263–279. ———. 1996. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greckel, Wil. 1979. “Rock and Nineteenth-Century Romanticism: Social and Cultural Parallels.” Journal of Musicological Research 3 (1–2): 177–202. Green, Lucy. 1988. Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, Education. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1997. Music, Gender, Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1993. “The Media Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Post-Modernity and Authenticity.” In Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg, 185–209. London: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hawkins, Stan. 2004. “Dragging Out Camp: Narrative Agendas in Madonna’s Musical Production.” In Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations, 1983–2003, ed. Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens, 3–21. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2011. “Introduction.” In Pop Music and Easy Listening, ed. Stan Hawkins, xi–xxx. Farnham: Ashgate. Horn, Katrin. 2012. “Follow the Glitter Way: Lady Gaga and Camp.” In The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga: Critical Essays, ed. Richard J. Gray II, 85–106. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2011. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Keightley, Keir. 2001. “Reconsidering Rock.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street, 109–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerman, Joseph. 1985. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koestenbaum, Wayne. 1991. “The Queen’s Throat: (Homo)sexuality and the Art of Singing.” In Inside/ Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, 205–234. London: Routledge. Koizumi, Kyoko. 2002. “Popular Music, Gender and High School Pupils in Japan: Personal Music in School and Leisure Sites.” Popular Music 21 (1): 107–125. Kramer, Lawrence. 2002. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. London: University of California Press. ———. 2011. Interpreting Music. London: University of California Press. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2001. “Vicars of ‘Wannabe’: Authenticity and the Spice Girls.” Popular Music 20 (2): 143–167. Lemish, Dafna. 1998. “Spice Girls’ Talk: A Case Study in the Development of Gendered Identity.” In Millennium Girls: Today’s Girls Around the World, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 145–168. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary, eds. 1987. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Melanie. 2004. “‘Tween’ Scene: Resistance Within the Mainstream.” In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, ed. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 80–95. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Mayhew, Emma. 1999. “Women in Popular Music and the Construction of ‘Authenticity’.” Journal of Interdiscplinary Gender Studies: JIGS 4 (1): 63–81. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 279

Bridget Coulter ———. 2000. Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form. London: University of California Press. McMillan, Uri. 2015. Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. New York: New York University Press. Meyers, Erin. 2009. “‘Can You Handle My Truth?’: Authenticity and the Celebrity Star Image.” The Journal of Popular Culture 42 (5): 890–907. Middleton, Richard. 2006. Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music. London: Routledge. Moore, Allan F. 2002. “Authenticity as Authentication.” Popular Music 21 (2): 209–223. Negus, Keith. 2011. “Authorship and the Popular Song.” Music & Letters 92 (4): 607–629. Railton, Diane, and Paul Watson. 2011. Music Video and the Politics of Representation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Richards, Chris. 1998. Teen Spirits: Music and Identity in Media Education. London: UCL Press. Robertson, Pamela. 1996. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Rubidge, Sarah. 1996. “Does Authenticity Matter? The Case for and Against Authenticity in the Performing Arts.” In Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader, ed. Patrick Campbell, 219–233. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shugart, Helene A., and Catherine Egley Waggoner. 2008. Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Shuker, Roy. 2002. Popular Music: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Taylor, Jodie. 2012. Playing It Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-Making. Bern: Peter Lang. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Warwick, Jacqueline. 2007. Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s. London: Routledge. Williams, Christina. 2001. “Does It Really Matter? Young People and Popular Music.” Popular Music 20 (2): 223–242.

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PART 5

Challenging hegemonic practices New masculinities, queerness, and transgenderism

Overview In terms of challenging hegemonic practices, there are many artists in mainstream popular music worthy of consideration. The need for addressing this seems paramount with respect to the multiple and even haphazard settings we encounter in our daily lives. Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns, and Alyssa Woods are acutely aware of this when they concentrate on Kanye West’s complication of black hypermasculine representations by building on recent critical masculinity studies. The aim of the first chapter in this final part of the volume is to bridge popular music research with aspects of gender, race, and class in hip-hop culture. A close reading of West’s hit single, ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ inspects how masculinity in hip-hop functions differently. A helpful theoretical overview of hegemonic masculinity frames a discourse into the contextual, intersectional, experiential, and oppositional elements of West’s 808’s & Heartbreak album, released in 2008. Norms generally associated with hegemonic masculinity are on full display in most hip-hop culture, hence its labelling as a hypermasculine genre. Turning to leading scholars in the field (bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Mark Anthony Neal, Matthew Oware, and Byron Hurt), Lafrance, Burns, and Woods provide a critique on black male subjectivity in their attempt to establish an anti-racist stance on mainstream rap and hip-hop. By contextualising West’s stylistic innovations on the aforementioned album, these three authors rethink hip-hop masculinity through a musicological inquiry into various parameters: the use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, the reliance on Auto-tune, and an emphasis on singing rather than rapping. In addition to their interpretive analyses of stylistic innovation, Lafrance, Burns, and Woods also consider West’s comments on the album’s reception. The objective here is to highlight the artist’s own continual concern with male emotions. Finally, this chapter arrives at the track and video, ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’, where an audiovisual analysis is activated to shed light on innovation and emotional expressivity as displayed in the lyrics, music, and images. Perhaps the major finding emanating from this research is West’s willingness to unsettle the restrictions and conventions of hip-hop by a series of original interventions. Moreover, that West resists stereotypes by profiling a different black masculinity, arguably a kind of utopia, signals a breakthrough in our understanding of mainstream hip-hop.

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In the next chapter, Doris Leibetseder outlines a useful definition of transgender and genderqueer, which she applies to the intersectional ties of pop musicians in the rockumentary Riot Acts; the Austrian superstar Conchita Wurst; the Colombian singer Janer, ‘La Gater’; and the artist Angel Haze. In a historical survey of transgender musicians and the music industry, Leibetseder takes us back to the 1950s when the first media-hyped white trans woman made headlines. Her name was Christine Jorgensen, and she had nothing to do with the music industry. However, Leibetsteder, in her definitions of transgender and genderqueer, addresses the important space and place the music industry offers by introducing the agender pop artist, Angel Haze, who opts for the personal pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’. Haze’s pansexuality is behind a preference to avoid all labels, and Leibetsteder turns to Haze’s version of an Eminem track, ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet to describe the a-gender aspects of performativity. Following several other examples moves on to a discussion of how hip-hop songs are used to express strong sentiments in the songs of the black trans woman Janer, ‘La Gata’. An important part of Leibetsteder’s chapter deals with FTM (female-tomale) people and the consequences of vocal alteration. Drawing on research into FTM vocality, Leibetsteder dwells on the trans male singer Alexandros N. Constansis to consider the physical properties of adjustments and technicalities required in the post-transition trans voice. These observations usher in a variety of thoughts on genderqueer erotic aesthetics in relation to affective modelling of mimesis, illustrated by a transgender band, The Degenerettes, and the non-binary white singer and DJ JD Samson. The chapter concludes with a theorisation of Otherness in the guise of the drag queen through a close examination of Tom Neuwirth’s character, Conchita Wurst, a bearded white woman with great charisma and political magnetism. In taking a critical look at Conchita’s victory of winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014, Leibetsteder considers the paradoxes of Austria being showcased as a tolerant country for minority rights. She concludes by referring to numerous white and black transgender and cisgender musicians and the difficulties, if not perils, involved in their very existence. There is resonance in this chapter with many of the author’s theories outlined in her book, Queer Tracks (2012), as she calls for music research that addresses the intersectionalities of transgender and non-binary identities. The third chapter, by Craig Jennex and Maria Murphy, deals with a very different masculinity and music genre from that of Kayne West by introducing the reader to the Canadian singer and songwriter Lucas Silveira. Accounting for Silveira’s project ignites a discussion around the temporality of trans experiences and queer cultural production. One of the unique focal points in this study is the ‘transition video genre’, a developing video format that enables trans individuals to share and participate in trans narratives and politics. Jennex and Murphy explain Silveira’s pedagogical role in the comment sections of his YouTube performances. Notably, transition videos have come under much critique for reasons outlined in this chapter, and this is incorporated into this study to engage with the temporal inclinations of Silveira’s online musical archival project. Chronicling his personal experiences by often covering other artists, Silveira uses his videos to invite readings of authenticity and intimacy. Jennex and Murphy argue that the use of cover songs also gets us to hear gendered performances in different contexts. By turning to the work of Kate Bornstein, they consider the function of collage style as a tactic for trans persons to respond to dominant structures of heteronormativity and misogyny. A close reading of Silveira’s cover of both Orbison and lang’s performances of the hit ‘Crying’ (in two different renditions) concludes that such cover performances can be indicative of a process that curbs the restrictions imposed by gender binaries. It is a queered temporality, both authors argue, that defines the outcome of a performance, and admittedly the archive presented by Silveira is ‘messy’ in their experience. 282

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And this is rendered so by the possibilities and junctures for non-normative trans temporality, which in the case of Silveira suggests a different way of hearing and engaging in trans politics. This chapter cautions us on the problems of categorising the transgender voice by demonstrating that Silveira’s project not only validates the vocal articulation of becoming, but also offers new relational ways of interacting with gender. In the final chapter of the book, Susanna Välimäki reflects on other aspects of transgenderness by studying the performances of Mina Caputo, a male-to-female person in transition during 2011. Vocalist of the hardcore, experimental, and alternative heavy metal band Life of Agony, Caputo has been brazen about her new identity, not least on stage in front of fans. Grounded in queer musicology and transgender studies, Välimäki regulates the balance between interpretation and analysis by presenting a model for understanding music in a transgender-conscious and transgender-empathetic way. The prime focus on Caputo helps extract a mix of audiovisual recordings, ethnographic material, and social media texts. A central tenet in this chapter is the performative, constructed, and technological aspect of cultural expressions of masculinity to which all gendered bodies belong. Välimäki adopts a similar stance to Halberstam’s position on masculinity, which is perceived as a subject position and not just bound to the male body (be it cis or trans). Caputo’s style of performance in Life of Agony’s concerts can be interpreted as an empowerment of women (cis or trans) as it proves that gender identity is self-determining: a woman can define for herself what kind of woman she is. As with Silveira in the previous chapter, Caputo has informed the public on her gender reassignment process through interviews, social media, and an official webpage, Facebook page, and Twitter account. Välimäki notes that heavy metal culture is more acceptant than certain other genres as it is grounded in a celebration of modes of being that representation mainstream culture rejects or finds abject. Following a reading of several Life of Agony songs, Välimäki considers Caputo’s voice as a signifier of sound and style in the band. In accordance with Jennex and Murphy’s study, she considers gender reassignment alongside the voice and all the expectations it might induce. Because Caputo’s voice, in Välimäki’s words, has always been a queer- and trans voice it has never been easily categorised. An audiovisual analysis of the song ‘Identity’, from Caputo’s first album, demonstrates the identity struggles of a transgender person and moreover the very act of giving voice to gender-variant people. Through the space created by Caputo for gender diversity and queerness in heavy metal, the future of this gender is rendered less heteronormative and macho masculine. Popular music thus plays a major role in establishing a site for people to construct identity. It urges us to ask questions and discover what happens when changes take place. So in each of the chapters in this part, as well as throughout this collection, the critical purpose is made clear – to understand gender and corporeality as something constantly in flux. Susanna Välimäki has the last word: “Popular music is a powerful technology of gender”!

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20 DOING HIP-HOP MASCULINITY DIFFERENTLY Exploring Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak through word, sound, and image Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns, and Alyssa Woods

Kanye West’s challenge to the conventions of contemporary hip-hop is nowhere more apparent than on his fourth album 808s & Heartbreak (2008).1 An intriguing object of enquiry for scholars of popular music, the album sets itself apart from many others in the world of mainstream rap for a number of reasons: the lyrics are emotionally expressive and exposed, the music is sung rather than rapped, and the videos represent the lived experiences of pain and hardship that the album’s title so clearly communicates. That said, West’s challenge to the conventions of contemporary hip-hop is made manifest in other ways as well. Indeed, we argue that 808s & Heartbreak can be seen as a critical reflection on the politics of black masculinity within the context of American celebrity culture. More specifically, we claim that the album is constituted by two key themes: first, sadness and vulnerability in the face of loss; and second, emptiness and isolation as a consequence of stardom. Paying close attention to how these themes are brought into being by the album, we show that West complicates the hypermasculine representations of black males that pervade the world of mainstream popular music. With this in view, we begin by considering contemporary theories of men as they have been developed and debated in the burgeoning field of critical masculinity studies. We then discuss how the work of critical masculinity theorists can be brought into dialogue with the work of popular music scholars in order to better understand the workings of gender, race, and class in hip-hop culture. Having reviewed the literature, we explore West’s output in relation to other hip-hop artists whose work is connected to and, at times, in competition with his own. In doing so, we reflect on West’s understanding of his musical contributions, his workings and reworkings of the hip-hop genre, and how his artistic expression is bound up with his performance of masculinity. And finally, we conduct a close reading of one hit single from the album – ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ – in order to show exactly how West can be seen to do hip-hop masculinity differently.2 Our chapter makes a number of contributions on the levels of theory, method, and analysis. Theoretically, the chapter aims to show how critical masculinity studies and popular music studies have the potential to expand and enrich one other.3 Methodologically, the chapter seeks to show how scholars can account for multiple creative domains – that is, 285

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word, sound, and image – in both a simultaneous and systematic manner. And analytically, the chapter attempts to shed more light on how mainstream hip-hop artists resist – rather than merely reproduce – stereotypes of black masculinity.4

Theories of hegemonic masculinity Over the course of the past thirty years, theories of men and masculinity have proliferated at a rapid rate. In his groundbreaking work The Male Sex Role, for instance, Robert Brannon (1976) argues that men are encouraged to follow four rules when performing their gender: (1) ‘no sissy stuff’, which requires the rejection of any and all traits associated with femininity and the ongoing sexual conquest of women; (2) ‘be a big wheel’, which involves the quest for wealth, fame, and success at all costs; (3) ‘be a sturdy oak’, which demands the display of confidence, reliability, unshakeable strength, and unwavering toughness; and (4) ‘give ’em hell’, which is characterised by a willingness to break rules, flout authority, and use force whenever necessary. Like Brannon, R. W. Connell – in her landmark work Gender and Power (1987) – claims that the most highly valued kind of masculinity in modern Western societies typically consists of aggression, courage, emotionlessness, strength, self-reliance, and sexual potency. For Connell, this kind of masculinity is ‘hegemonic’ insofar as it is characterised by and oriented towards the exercise of power. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Connell argues that hegemony is a form of power that goes beyond contests of brute strength and, in this way, operates primarily through ideas, institutions, and relations. Hegemony is effective insofar as it succeeds in presenting these operations as eternal, ideal, and natural. As both a cluster of practices and a crucible of norms and values, there can be no doubt that hegemonic masculinity has been eternalised, idealised, and naturalised in the modern West (Levy 2007). And while few men manage to embody hegemonic masculinity in its entirety, many, according to Connell, are complicit in maintaining and sustaining it. For Connell (1987, 1995), ‘complicit masculinity’ is a kind of masculinity that is – as its name suggests – complicit with the conventions of its hegemonic masculinity even if it is not itself characterised by them. For Connell, many men are complicit with hegemonic masculinity because they tend, by and large, to benefit from it. Following Connell, Tony Coles writes: Even though hegemonic masculinity may not be the most common form of masculinity practiced, it is supported by the majority of men as they benefit from the overall subordination of women. . . . Structurally, men as an interest group are inclined to support hegemonic masculinity as a means to defend patriarchy and their dominant position over women. (Coles 2009, 31) Yet if proving that one can dominate women is a key part of hegemonic masculinity, then so too is proving that one is in no way like them. As Michael Kimmel (1994) makes clear, hegemonic masculinity is defined by its repudiation of all things female and feminine. This repudiation requires a steadfast refusal of all of the traits that have come to be associated with femininity, particularly as they relate to dependence, emotional expression, passivity, and vulnerability. Not only do these requirements often result in sexism and homophobia, but they also demand that men deny many of the things that make them human. Though undeniably useful, the earlier scholarship on masculinity is not without its limitations. In fact, it is precisely because of these limitations that the more recent research 286

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tends to be informed by at least four interrelated ideas. First, models of masculinity must be able to account for how it varies across time and space. As Connell herself puts it, accounting for masculinity in these ways is “necessary to keep the analysis dynamic” while preventing “multiple masculinities [from] collapsing into a character typology” (Connell 1995, 76). Second, critical approaches to masculinity need to be able to make sense of how it shapes and is shaped by intersecting forces such as those of race and class. As Kimmel and Messner put it: “masculinities [are] complicated by cross-cutting elements; without understanding this, we risk collapsing masculinities into one hegemonic version” (Kimmel and Messner 2009, xvi). Third, current scholarship on masculinity must move beyond a narrow focus on relations of domination and subordination in order to better account for how masculinity is experienced by living, breathing human beings. “There is”, as Coles explains, “a distinct need to take masculinity away from the structural and consider masculinities as collective human projects that are individually lived” (Coles 2009, 33). And fourth, theories of hegemonic masculinity must make clear that it is neither total nor totalising. Not only does Connell (1995) point to the many and diverse contradictions associated with this kind of masculinity, but she also points to the fact that it is often challenged by other masculinities. In keeping with current debates in the field, our chapter explores the contextual, intersectional, experiential, and oppositional elements of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak. More specifically, we situate him and his work in contemporary hip-hop contexts; we examine how his performance of gender is informed by the intersecting forces of class and race; we reflect on how his lived experience is represented on the album of interest to us; and finally, we consider how the album can be seen to contest the conventions of hegemonic masculinity. In the end, we argue that through its vivid portrayals of what it means to be a black man, a celebrity, and a hip-hop icon, West’s 808s & Heartbreak creates a popular musical space in which the masculinity often associated with mainstream hip-hop culture can be rethought, reworked, and ultimately, redone.

Hegemonic masculinity and mainstream hip-hop culture The critical scholarship outlined in the previous section – particularly as it relates to the concept of hegemonic masculinity – not only resonates with but also sheds light on the work of scholars interested in the gendered dynamics of mainstream hip-hop. Indeed, the norms associated with hegemonic masculinity are clearly on display in contemporary hip-hop culture, so much so that cultural critics ranging from bell hooks (2004) to Imani Perry (2004) have referred to it as a ‘hypermasculine’ genre. Despite a smattering of female MCs, mainstream rap is for the most part a male-dominated medium characterised by a history of hypermasculine posturing in its musical practices, lyrical themes, and visual images. Hegemonic masculinity is expressed in and through a number of features that have now become commonplace in hip-hop culture. For instance, Byron Hurt (2006) argues that in order to be successful in hip-hop culture, artists have to fit into a ‘metaphorical box’ that demands of them a particular performance of gender. He explains: “In order to be in that box you have to be strong, tough, have a lot of girls, you have to have money, be a playa or a pimp, be in control, dominate other men, other people”. This performance of gender has become the normative standard in mainstream rap, and those who deviate from it are seen to lack credibility or ‘street cred’. As Hurt puts it: “people call you soft or weak, pussy, chump, faggot. Nobody wants to be any of these things, so everybody stays inside of the box”. 287

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Matthew Oware (2011) argues that most of the academic work on hip-hop culture in general, and gangsta rap in particular, emphasises the fact that these genres represent black masculinity in stereotypical terms. Perry (2004), for example, discusses the ‘badman trope’ as one of the most pervasive in hip-hop. Encompassing the attributes of hypermasculinity, misogyny, and homophobia, this trope is often seen as what Oware calls the “cornerstone of gangsta rap music” (2011, 22). Due to gangsta rap’s widespread distribution and commercial success, it tends to be seen as representative of the whole of mainstream hip-hop. This, as Oware observes, is problematic since gangsta rap is “predicated on an essentialized and limited construction of black masculinity” (2011, 22). Like many other scholars, Patricia Hill Collins and Mark Anthony Neal point out that “many rappers construct a black male subjectivity that incorporates the notion that masculinity means exhibiting extreme toughness, invulnerability, violence and domination” (Oware 2011, 22). Collins (2006) calls this construction the ‘real man’ role while Neal (2005) refers to it as the ‘strong black man’ position. Either way, most scholars agree that black men have forged these ways of being in order to compensate for a lack of real economic resources and social capital. As Oware puts it: “A particular presentation of self emerges due to the limited opportunities that many black males face in their daily lives” (2011, 23). For Oware, hegemonic masculinity in mainstream hip-hop contexts – what he calls ‘real nigga’ masculinity – tends to be characterised by a number of key traits and tendencies. Not unlike those outlined above, these traits and tendencies can be described as follows: (1) hyperbolic displays of strength and virility; (2) ongoing assertions of fearlessness and invulnerability; (3) persistent demands for deference and respect; (4) relentless competition, confrontation, and sparring; (5) frequent recourse to firearms; and (6) brazen celebrations of what Ogbar (2007) calls “ghettoised pathology”, which is to say drug trafficking, gang banging, and sexual violence. Nevertheless, Oware argues that ‘real nigga’ masculinity is often more complex than it is made out to be. To make his argument hold good, he discusses lyrical references to male homosocial relationships – or “brotherly love” – and points to the recurring themes of “friends are family, success by association, and lament of lost friends” (2011, 38). Through his analysis of the brotherly love that exists in even the most stereotypical rap, Oware seeks to show that “black masculinity, while drawing on various negative components of hegemonic masculinity (i.e., hypermasculinity, sexism, and homophobia), especially in rap music, may be more dynamic and complex than at first glance” (2011, 26). Like Oware, we are interested in understanding how hegemonic masculinity is resisted by hip-hop artists, especially those who are commercially successful. Doing so allows us not only to better appreciate rap itself, but also to complicate dominant discourses of black male rappers in the world of mainstream entertainment. Complicating these discourses is crucial if the study of popular music is to contribute to contemporary anti-racist scholarship. Indeed, as James Snead (1994) points out, racism often gives rise to monolithic representations of black people in the mainstream media. Whether one studies Hollywood movies, as Snead does, or popular music, as we do, these representations can be seen as the result of an insidious white racism that seeks to contain and, ultimately, control prevailing conceptions of black subjectivity. With this in view, our work on black male subjectivity as it is brought into being by Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak is an attempt to contribute to anti-racist scholarship on mainstream rap and hip-hop. It is, in other words, an attempt to broaden the terms of the debate on black men in popular music and, in doing so, to work against homogenising and universalising representations of them. 288

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Situating Kanye West in mainstream hip-hop culture Kanye West sets himself apart from most other mainstream rappers insofar as he both adheres to and rejects contemporary hip-hop culture.5 Generally speaking, his lyrics conform to our expectations of an MC, especially in terms of their confidence and assertiveness, but West’s public persona has long been exceptional in the world of mainstream rap. After gaining some success as a producer, particularly on Jay-Z’s legendary 2001 album The Blueprint, West made the move to rap artist in 2002. When he first approached Roc-A-Fella Records about recording his own album, he was met with scepticism. Damon Dash, CEO of Roc-A-Fella at that time, found it hard to imagine marketing West as a rapper: “Kanye wore a pink shirt with the collar sticking up and Gucci loafers” (Tyrangiel 2005). Indeed, insofar as mainstream rap has tended to construct itself in opposition to bourgeois norms and values, it has for the most part eschewed ‘preppy’ suburban images such as those of Kanye West while celebrating more ‘street-based’ images such as those of Jay-Z. West’s debut album, The College Dropout (2004), met with immediate critical acclaim (e.g., Carmanica 2008). The lyrical themes on the album bridged the gap between the urban and the suburban, maintaining a close enough connection to conventional rap to be viable while, at the same time, accommodating West’s lack of street cred. Dash remarks: “He combines the superficiality that the urban demographic needs with conscious rhymes for the kids with backpacks. It’s brilliant business” (as cited in Tyrangiel 2005, 54). In other words, West disrupts the conventions of the genre while simultaneously working within them. West stands out in the world of mainstream hip-hop due to his middle-class status and the attention he draws to it. In our view, his upward mobility is part of what allows him to ‘do’ hip-hop masculinity differently. Take, for instance, his emphasis on higher education on albums like The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation. This emphasis is, without a doubt, unusual in mainstream hip-hop culture. And while it is true that West often refers to higher education as something he neither excelled at nor particularly liked, the fact remains that it is his class privilege that helped him to get to college in the first place. This privilege, and the image to which it gives rise, works for West because it is authentic; that is, it is a genuine representation of who he is and where he is from. Any other image would be inauthentic in West’s case, and inauthenticity is not tolerated in the hip-hop world. As he rethinks hip-hop masculinity, West resists many of the genre’s stylistic conventions as evidenced by everything from his clothing to his chosen themes. In what follows, we discuss the innovative features of West’s album while contextualising his departure from the stylistic conventions of mainstream rap in both musical and lyrical terms.

Contextualising Kanye West’s stylistic innovations on 808s & Heartbreak Musically, the 808s album is characterised by three features that set it apart from many contemporaneous hip-hop albums: first, the self-conscious use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine; second, the persistent reliance on the Auto-tune device; and third, the exceptional emphasis on singing. With respect to the first feature, the album makes use of one of the first programmable analogue drum machines made in the 1980s: the TR-808. The TR-808 has an iconic status in the music industry given its extensive use on many hit records of the day. The machine is especially associated with the genre of electro-funk, exemplified by Afrika Bambaataa’s track ‘Planet Rock’ (1982). It is also associated with early hip-hop artists like Run-D.M.C. (e.g., ‘Sucker M.C.’s’, Run-D.M.C. [1984]), the Beastie Boys (e.g., ‘The New Style’, Licensed to Ill [1986]), and N.W.A. (e.g., ‘Gangsta Gangsta’, Straight Outta Compton 289

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[1988]). Given its reliance on the TR-808, West’s album has a 1980s sound that resonates with the themes of longing and nostalgia that run through the entire album. Even more importantly, however, the TR-808 allows West to create sparse sonic effects that express the lyrical emphases on emptiness, isolation, sadness, and vulnerability that characterise the album’s overall concept. He explains: “I came up with the title because I was taking an 808 and pitching it. A lot of people have used 808s in the past but because it was so low, nobody bothered messing with the pitch. I actually call the effect ‘heartbreak.’ It sounds distorted and electronic, and just the sound of it represents where I’m at” (Bainbridge 2008).6 The second distinguishing feature of the album is West’s use of the Auto-tune device. Auto-tune is a type of vocoder or audio processor used not only to correct pitch but also to create vocal effects caused by the modulation of the sound wave and the manipulation of pitch frequency. While West’s voice is produced using other processing strategies as well (e.g., delay and reverberation) the most prominent vocal feature on the album – and the one that received considerable criticism – is the use of Auto-tune. Just before the release of West’s 808s . . ., hip-hop artist T-Pain started the trend toward Auto-tune singing with his album Epiphany (2007). But the vocoder far predates both West and T-Pain. Hip-hop artists from the 1980s such as N.W.A. and Afrika Bambaataa used vocoders to distort their voices. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that one of the first popular music groups to use the vocoder was The Alan Parsons Project. This is relevant here insofar as the 808s . . . track ‘Heartless’ samples content from the group’s song ‘Ammonia Avenue’ (1984). The third distinguishing musical feature of 808s . . . is its emphasis on singing rather than rapping – a feature that has a major bearing on whether or not the album is considered a credible hip-hop contribution. While an increasing number of rappers now sing on some of their tracks, West sings on every track of the album while leaving the rapping to featured artists (e.g., Young Jeezy on ‘Amazing’ and Lil Wayne on ‘See You in My Nightmares’). In fact, the closest he comes to rapping is his adoption of a sung-rap style that features a vocal melody focused around a central pitch. In moments such as these, his departure from the rap style is evidenced by his sustained pitches, expanded range, and directional melodic design. During the early years of rap, the melodic content of a rap song tended to be generated by samples in the background musical texture. In these songs, the ‘hook’ was rapped rather than sung (e.g., The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ [1979]). Only rarely did rap songs include singing and even then it was usually sampled or performed by a featured singer (e.g., Run-D.M.C.’s ‘Walk this Way’ featuring Aerosmith [1986]). From the 1990s through to the early post-millennium, male rappers began to feature female singers who delivered catchy melodic content. An early example of this is Puff Daddy’s ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ featuring Faith Evans (1997), while more recent examples include Jay-Z’s ‘03 Bonnie and Clyde’ featuring Beyoncé (2002) and Eminem’s ‘Love the Way You Lie’ featuring Rihanna (2010). MCs who cross the boundary between rap and singing have become increasingly common over the last two decades. In 1991, Biz Markie charted with the song ‘Just a Friend’ in which he sang his own chorus. Despite his rough vocal timbre and out-of-tune melody, his singing was acceptable to mainstream rap precisely because he was a rapper and not a singer. DMX, Busta Rhymes, and Ja Rule all sang on various tracks throughout the 1990s, all with rough vocal timbres and questionable tuning. Eminem started singing the chorus on various tracks in the early 2000s. A notable example of this is ‘Hailie’s Song’ (2000), which opens with the disclaimer: “I can’t sing, but I feel like singing, I wanna fuckin’ sing, ’cause I’m happy”. Eminem clearly links singing with intense emotional expression when he declares that he chooses to sing rather than rap in order to communicate his love for his daughter. 290

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Eminem has continued this trend, particularly on tracks where he expresses a great deal of emotional intensity (e.g., ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ [2002]; ‘Not Afraid’ [2010]). The increase in the number of hip-hop singers in recent years has undoubtedly influenced how rappers have thought about singing. Hip-hop singers (e.g., Pharrell Williams, Akon, and T-Pain) are vocalists who otherwise might have been associated with R&B, but who are often classified as hip-hop artists due to the thematic content of their work and their collaborations with well-known rappers. Their singing is often highly processed. For his 808s . . . album, West continued this trend by using vocal processors on all of his tracks. Although West’s singing can be linked to the work of Akon and T-Pain, the 808s . . . album diverges from the work of these artists in one very important way: while Akon and T-Pain typically work within the norms associated with hegemonic hiphop masculinity, West’s melancholy melodies and introspective lyrics can be seen as a departure from these norms.7 On all twelve tracks of the 808s . . . album, West’s lyrics explore a variety of themes relating to emotional frailty in the context of both private and public life. Invoking images of empty roads and vast distances, many of the songs describe a love that has gone wrong or is out of reach – such as ‘Say You Will’ (1), ‘Heartless’ (3), ‘Bad News’ (9), and ‘Coldest Winter’ (11) – while other songs – such as ‘Love Lockdown’ (5), ‘Robocop’ (7), and ‘See You in My Nightmares’ (10) – point to relationships that have become cruel and controlling. In addition, many of the songs reflect on loneliness and fear – as in ‘Street Lights’ (8) and ‘Paranoid’ (6) – while criticising celebrity culture and its destructive emphasis on material gain – as in ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ (2) and ‘Pinocchio Story’ (BONUS). In all of these instances, West adopts a critical stance in relation to the conventions of mainstream hip-hop culture; that is, instead of privileging the hypermasculine themes associated with what Perry calls the ‘badman trope’, what Collins calls the ‘real man role’, or what Neal calls the ‘strong black man’ position, West privileges themes of alienation and isolation, pain and sadness, vulnerability and weakness. West’s lyrical innovations can already be seen to have had a strong impact on other male hip-hop artists. For instance, The Chicago Tribune’s review of Drake’s album Take Care (2010) attributes its exposed and expressive style to West’s influence and, in particular, to the 808s . . . album: Though hip-hop has had its share of ‘emo’-inspired soul-searchers in past decades, from Atmosphere to Eminem . . . it was Kanye West’s (2008) album, 808s and Heartbreak, that set off the most recent wave of inward-looking sensitivity. It presaged everything from the introspective hip-hop of Kid Cudi’s ‘Man on the Moon: The End of Day’ (2009) to the wispy crooning, plush keyboards and light mechanical beats of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and British dub-step balladeer James Blake. Drake shares plenty with both camps, which is why his take on hip-hop is so skewed. (Kot 2011) Similarly, a Rolling Stone review refers to Kid Cudi as “the first big post-Kanye MC, someone who shares some of his mentor’s . . . tendency toward introspection, and who epitomizes the sea change in hip hop toward more vulnerable characters” (Hoard 2009, 40). Clearly these critics see West’s 808s . . . album as highly influential in the world of hip-hop, associating its emotionally driven themes with a stylistic transformation among younger hip-hop artists.8 In order to explore how West understands his own stylistic innovations and, more 291

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specifically, how they relate to his rethinking of mainstream hip-hop, we will now consider the artist’s comments on the album and its reception.

Rethinking hip-hop culture on Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak In the same way that he wants to rethink the hip-hop genre, West also wants to rethink hiphop culture and its representations of black masculinity. He explains: “Maybe I’ll make half of what someone else will make. But I think I’ll make history at the same time. Or change people’s minds about hip hop culture, about black culture” (Fennessey 2009, 82). To rethink hip-hop culture the way he wants to, West claims to need to break with convention: “I definitely feel like, in the next however many years, if I work out for two months, that I’ll pose naked. I break every rule and mentality of hip hop, of black culture, of American culture” (Fennessey 2009, 84). Here we see the recurring themes of self-conscious exposure and self-reflexive innovation at work in West’s creative strategies. What is more, we see him linking his desire to expose himself and innovate his creative work directly to his desire to change the way people think about the normative imperatives of hip-hop and the politics of race in contemporary popular culture. With 808s . . ., West certainly succeeded in making a cultural impact. The single ‘Heartless’ sold 5.5 million digital copies in 2009 and was covered by The Fray, Kris Allen (American Idol), and Dia Frampton (The Voice). The same song reached number 2 on the Hot 100 chart, and ‘Love Lockdown’ reached number 3. West clearly connects the 808s . . . album to issues of men and masculinity. More specifically, he defends his sung lyrics by claiming that they are every bit as ‘manly’ as rapped lyrics: “It’s not no R&B get on your knees and beg a girl type bullshit”, explains West. “It’s still like guy music, like you know with a swag on it and stuff” (West 2008b). While his statement may appear simplistic, there is indeed something subversive about stating that music characterised by themes of emotional expression is every bit as manly as music characterised by themes of sex, violence, and wealth.9 Interestingly, however, some critics have commented on what appears to be an almost paradoxical juxtaposition of emotional expression with hypermasculine aggression on West’s album. For instance, The Village Voice’s Clover Hope writes: So here’s where I’m conflicted, as a woman, torn between loving Kanye’s (newfound?) sentiment and being disturbed by the resulting carnage . . . Kanye’s position on Heartbreak is awfully harsh, with the defendant absent and thus unable to defend herself as he takes minimal blame and finds myriad ways to call her a bitch without actually calling her a bitch. (Hope 2009, 72) Unlike Hope, however, West sees his music as offering a much-needed male perspective on the lived experience of a broken heart. He explains: There hasn’t been any albums in the last ten years that stress what the guy goes through in a relationship. We got artists like Pink, and Keisha Cole . . . but where’s like a guy, a masculine guy, like a ‘you better watch the way you talkin’ to me yo,’ like a tough guy that actually is hurt and feels the way, and feels like damn, it’s like a real life crisis. (West 2008a) 292

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In an interview with Fader magazine, West goes further when he claims that he is “like the only dude to speak up for the guys from an intelligent, really been in a relationship type perspective” (Macia 2008). And, in an interview with Vibe magazine, West’s emphasis on emotional expression and the role it plays in rethinking hip-hop masculinity is made even clearer: It’s men out there who never had anyone to speak on their behalf about the way they feel in a relationship. We don’t feel like, F**k you, bitch, I’m gonna just f**k a whole buncha girls. No! We feel hurt. We feel pain. Like, Damn, why would you say something like that to me? Damn, I LOVE YOU. Damn, I want to have a family. Damn, I want to find someone to raise my kids. (Fennessey 2009, 83) Like his music, West’s interviews convey an ongoing concern with male emotion. In what follows, we present an analysis of the music, lyrics, and images associated with one of the more commercially successful tracks on the album, ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’, and how it crystallises this concern.

Lyric, music, and image analysis in ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ The second track on the 808s . . . album, ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’, develops the lyrical themes of emptiness and loneliness in the face of fame and fortune. This self-reflexive meditation is communicated by the ominous soundscape of the song. With its rich textures and expansive sonic space, West creates an instrumental arrangement and vocal melody that allows for a musical representation of his emotionally driven reflection. The video for the song portrays an image of West, trapped by the symbols of celebrity status, struggling to unmask himself. Directed by Nabil Elderkin, the video is characterised by a postproduction technique referred to as ‘data moshing’. This technique maintains the outline and shape of a subject within an image, but transforms the subject using a mixture of colour and design elements taken from the image’s background (Brassfield 2009; Kirn 2009). Throughout this process, the lines between the body and the background become blurred and, at times, erased. With their emphasis on masking and merging, the data moshed images ask the viewer to reflect on what is real and what is not. In other words, the images we see in the video correspond with the meditation on personal identity we hear in the lyrics. In the context of this video, data moshing becomes a visual complement to the audio interference created by the Auto-tune device. The video represents both the data moshing and the sound interference as visual metaphors for estrangement and isolation; that is, in both sound and image, the use of these techniques resonates with the theme of not being truly seen or heard that runs through the lyrics of the song. The video is also characterised by its use of a number of effects associated with television, such as colour test patterns, distortion, and pixilation. These televisual effects emphasise the constant mediation characteristic of a celebrity tabloid-driven society, and point to how difficult it is to remain authentic in the context of large-scale public exposure.

Intro The video opens with television distortion on a black screen. As the distortion begins to dissipate, a distant figure in an industrial setting becomes increasingly visible. As the camera zooms in closer to the figure – who is, of course, Kanye West – the video’s images are 293

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accompanied by a cello delivering a slow-moving eight-bar phrase that remains metrically ambiguous until the entry of the kick and Taiko drums in the last bar. The rhythmic accentuation coincides with an explosion of colour and a data-moshed image of West. As the images of West and Kid Cudi unfold, the full instrumental arrangement is established, featuring a pitch-modulated synth bass that takes on the earlier cello melody, a kick drum on beats 1 and 3, a distorted backbeat snare crash, a ‘ticky’ groove created by running rim shots, and an active keyboard that develops motives from the G-Aeolian melody.

Verse 1 The lyrics of the first verse confirm the song’s gloomy mood. “My friend showed me pictures of his kids”, West sings, “and all I could show him were pictures of my cribs. He said his daughter got a brand-new report card/And all I got was a brand-new sports car”. This verse articulates a number of themes that West discusses in the interviews presented above and that recur throughout the song: namely, a nostalgia for a traditional family arrangement, a longing for fatherhood, and a desire to have more than just a big house and sports cars. Given their celebration of emotional connection and their condemnation of macho hedonism, the themes characterising the first part of Verse 1 are at odds with the norms of hegemonic masculinity that we have discussed throughout the chapter. Musically, these themes – and particularly the emotional emptiness associated with them – are reinforced by an almost mechanical vocal delivery punctuated by matching end-rhymes and reverberant echoes created by a processed vocal delay. As the active keyboard drops out of the texture, a hollow space is left between the low bass, the high-register synth wash, and the aggressive backbeat snare crashes. West’s voice enters this musical space while the Auto-tune device masks his natural sung expression and echoes his struggle to remain authentic in the context of contemporary celebrity culture. The reverberant echoes create a stark contrast to the strident backbeat crashes while the video image of West – who is shown walking in a public space – is punctuated by overexposed ‘flash’ images that suggest ongoing paparazzi attention. West’s overt critique of celebrity culture is delivered in a vocal style that maintains a connection to the conventions of rap by centring the vocal delivery on the tonic G while departing from these same conventions by sustaining the pitches in a singing tone. West infuses the limited melodic range with expressive tension, and a sense of melodic directionality is created by moving to the second and third degrees of the G-Aeolian scale (A and B flat) and treating these as tendency tones that descend to the G tonic.

Chorus The chorus, “And my head keeps spinning/Can’t stop having these visions, I gotta get with it”, points to the subject’s ongoing stock-taking of his seemingly unsatisfying life. The chorus vocal, delivered by Kid Cudi, features a gentle sung quality at a higher pitch level (C4 and D4)10 which is then overdubbed, phased, and split to the left and right channels. From the centre of the mix, West’s strained, high-pitched “ooo” emerges, enhanced once again by the Auto-tune device. The video complements the vocal arrangement with a mirrored image of West characterised by 3D colour effects, out of which emerges his data moshed image which then delivers the plaintive “ooo”. West’s pitch register is a full octave higher than his delivery of Verse 1, as he focuses now on G4 and its upper second and minor third. The chorus lyrics, when combined with West’s intensified vocal expression and the data-moshed images, communicate the subject’s desperate need to intervene in his life and make a change. 294

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Verse 2 Verse 2 continues the theme of the subject’s desire for a ‘normal life’ in the face of enormous wealth. This verse opens with the line “Dad cracked a joke, all the kids laughed” and continues, “But I couldn’t hear him all the way in first-class”. A longing for fatherhood is articulated once again here, and this articulation is made all the more powerful by its vivid portrayal of the ostensibly banal pleasures of travelling with people one loves. These pleasures are out of the subject’s reach; he is too far away from them to be able to participate fully in everything they represent. Travelling first-class is not linked to glamour and macho hedonistic delight, as it is in many rap songs, but rather to West’s tragic experience of his own success. Following the lyrical reference to the loneliness of the privileged first-class lifestyle, West declares, “Chased the good-life, all my life long/Look back on my life, all my life gone/Where did I go wrong?” The theme of regret is made manifest here and is expressed through his derisive attitude toward the celebrity-driven choices he has made over the years. The good life that fame and fortune were meant to bring is presented as existentially bankrupt. Here West distances himself from a number of the hegemonically masculine norms characteristic of mainstream hip-hop: success at all costs is shown to be empty and alienating, while emotional distance and reserve are shown to result in estrangement both from oneself and others. Here the empty and distant feel of the vocal delivery and lyrics is mirrored by a musical texture that is dominated by the bass, kick drum, Taiko, and backbeat crash, all of which leave hollow the acoustic space in the middle and high registers. His voice is alone in occupying that space, and he keens into it, rising to the fourth and fifth degree of the G-Aeolian scale. He then returns to the lower tonic G3 and completes the last line with the familiar descending A–G gesture to reflect a mournful and questioning ‘wrong’. Once again, the final word of each line is treated with a delay effect, allowing the words to echo while drawing attention to the hollow sonic space.

Bridge After the second statement of the chorus, the bridge offers a dramatic sonic intensification as West leaps to the higher register (F4) while being accompanied by a high string arrangement. The allusion to ‘seeing things’ in the bridge (“I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it before”) corresponds with the allusion to ‘visions’ in the choruses. In both instances, these allusions suggest that the subject is conflicted about the life that has become his own. The lyrics communicate not only his frustration but also his resignation with respect to the inescapable repetition of his unsatisfying life experiences. The video images for the bridge offer the one and only moment of aggressive action in the entire video: West throws a rock through the television screen and shatters the glass. In a brilliant moment of videography, Elderkin symbolises the broken screen by allowing the image to extend beyond the borders of the previous wide-screen format (2:11–2:18).

Verse 3 The dense texture and explosive images of the bridge are abruptly interrupted by the sparse aesthetic of the third verse. The video features a long-held (2:28–2:44), medium facial profile shot of West set against a black backdrop and characterised by a gradual dispersal of the data-moshing effects. A dreamy low-level synthesiser wash offers an aural complement to the colours that float in a downward left to right motion across the screen. Characterised by 295

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a complete absence of percussion, the sonic texture is stripped down. Similarly, the delay on the final word of each vocal line amplifies the loneliness expressed by the lyrics: “Sister getting married by the lake”, West sings, “But I couldn’t figure out who I’d wanna take/ Bad enough that I showed up late/I had to leave before they even cut the cake/Welcome to heartbreak”. Isolation is communicated in a number of ways here. To begin, the subject’s sister is seen to be forging a presumably lifelong bond with another person while he fails to find someone with whom he wishes to share her wedding day. Similarly, the subject is shown to be arriving late and leaving early, and this is due, we infer, to his work schedule. Here, again, emotional connection is shown to be more important than promiscuous sexual conquests, while a happy family life is shown to be more meaningful than the constant demands of celebrity culture. Ultimately, the contrast between the subject’s affective landscape and that of his sister drives home the alienation that characterises his existence and points, once again, to his inability to fully and completely participate in his own life.

Outro The outro features the repeated words, “I can’t stop/No, no, I can’t stop/No, no, no, no I can’t stop” (3:00). These admittedly ambiguous lyrics could mean one of two things: they could represent the subject’s inability to slow his life in the ‘fast lane’, or they could represent the visions mentioned in the chorus and the fact that he ‘can’t stop’ having them. More important than what the lyrics say here, however, is how they are delivered. Emotionally exposed rather than tough and invulnerable, the vocal strategies over the course of the last part of the song harken back to the strained, high-pitched, cry-like “ooo” that closes the chorus. Desperate and sorrowful, they rely heavily on distortion and Auto-tune processing.

Conclusion In his work on hegemonic masculinity, Cheng (1999) contends that it is characterised by the following: “[D]omination, aggressiveness, competitiveness, stoicism, and control”. He goes on to claim that “[aggressive] behaviour if not outright physical violence is important to the presentation of hegemonic masculinity. . . . Love, affection, pain, and grief are improper displays of emotion” (1999, 298). Over the course of our chapter, we have argued that the concept of hegemonic masculinity as defined and elaborated by critical masculinity theorists is a useful one for thinking about the gendered dynamics of mainstream hip-hop. By reading this concept alongside the critical scholarship on representations of gender, race, and class in hip-hop’s commercial mainstream, we have demonstrated that Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak resists these representations by privileging a different kind of black masculinity; that is, one focussed less on ‘domination, aggressiveness, competitiveness, stoicism and control’ and more on ‘love, affection, pain, and grief’. Through its themes of doubt, loss, loneliness, and the struggle for authenticity in America’s present-day popular musical culture, West’s album emphasises displays of emotion that are, as Cheng puts it, ‘improper’ in the world of mainstream hip-hop. More specifically, we have shown that the distinctiveness of West’s album is the result of both a relatively rare and exceedingly candid set of lyrics and, perhaps above all, a willingness to disrupt the conventions of his genre by widening the scope of his vocal performance and melodic style. Ultimately, we have maintained that West complicates dominant discourses of hip-hop masculinity by expanding the range of emotional expression and artistic genre innovation through novel interventions on the levels of lyrics, music, and images. 296

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Notes  1 The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at conferences (see Burns, Lafrance, and Woods 2012 and Lafrance, Woods, and Burns 2010)  2 A few words about our approach to our object of enquiry are required before we proceed. To start, we are not arguing that Kanye West is the only artist to have resisted stereotypes of black masculinity in the world of mainstream hip-hop around the time of his 2008 album release. There are others, such as those discussed by Monica Miller (2009) and Matthew Oware (2011). That said, we have yet to find a mainstream hip-hop artist whose resistance to stereotypes of black masculinity is as substantive or as thoroughgoing as West’s is on 808s & Heartbreak. As we show throughout the chapter, both the overall album concept and the songs that make up the album are in many ways at odds with the conventions of mainstream hip-hop. What is more, few other artists who have done hip-hop masculinity differently have enjoyed the same amount of mass media exposure or commercial reach as West. And it is precisely because of this that his subversive political gestures are among the most impactful in the world of hip-hop culture in particular and popular musical culture in general. Regardless of how one thinks or feels about the artist, it is hard to deny that he did something innovative in and through his representations of black masculinity on the album in question. And that innovation is, in our view, worthy of scholarly attention by those interested in gender and the mainstream music industry.  3 While many scholars of popular music explore issues of men and masculinity, few engage with the increasingly influential texts associated with critical masculinity studies (see, for example, Jarman-Ivens 2007). Our chapter shows how these texts – and especially the concept of hegemonic masculinity that emerges in and through them – provide a particularly productive backdrop for thinking critically about the codes and conventions of masculinity in mainstream rap and hip-hop.  4 At this point, some might argue that recent LGBTQ scholarship shows that hip-hop has always engaged critically with dominant norms of masculinity. This argument is certainly valid, though it is important to note that the majority of the scholarship in question relates either to mainstream hiphop artists who reinforce misogyny and homophobia or to artists who, quite simply, operate outside of the hip-hop mainstream (see, for example, Halberstam 1997; Lamont Hill 2009; Mark 2007). In both cases, the LGBTQ scholarship falls outside the scope of our project. In the post-808s & Heartbreak period, we have seen some progress in the hip-hop mainstream, with increasing numbers of commercially successful male artists coming out as gay (such as Frank Ocean) or supporting artists who do (such as T-Pain). For more, see Sieczkowski (2014).  5 For a more detailed account of the various stages of West’s career, see Burns, Woods and Lafrance (2016).  6 Of course, many mainstream hip-hop artists use the TR-808. In this respect, West is not unique. What is unique about West’s use of the TR-808, however, is its self-conscious nature; or, put differently, the fact that he calibrates and manipulates it in such a way that it is made to express through sound what the lyrics express through word. And, as we already mentioned, the self-conscious nature of West’s use of the TR-808 is also evidenced by the album’s overall concept which clearly connects this particular drum machine to the album’s key themes. For more on West’s use of the TR-808, see Greene (2015).  7 It is worth noting here that the prevalence of singing has only continued to increase since West’s release of 808s. Singing has now become common amongst male rappers, many of whom – such as Drake, Fetty Wap, and Future – sing their own hooks on selected tracks rather than feature wellknown singers or rely on samples.  8 The hip-hop landscape has changed dramatically since West released 808s. While hegemonic masculinity continues to be performed and perpetuated in many ways, we are nevertheless seeing the emergence of increasingly diverse range of masculinities in the world of mainstream rap. Young Thug perhaps best exemplifies this emergence, with his tough ‘thug’ identity tempered by his continual public appearances in women’s clothing.  9 Many studies have shown the extent to which mainstream hip-hop is characterised by persistent themes of pornographic sex, gratuitous violence, and over-the-top wealth. See, for instance, Aubrey and Frisby (2011), Durant et al. (1997), Hurt (2006), Katz (1999), and Miller-Young (2008). 10 Pitch register will be indicated by octave designations where middle C is C4.

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Bibliography Aubrey, Jennifer, and Cynthia Frisby. 2011. “Sexual Objectification in Music Videos: A Content Analysis Comparing Gender and Genre.” Mass Communication and Society 14 (4): 475–501. Bainbridge, Luke. 2008. “Wild West.” The Guardian, 30 November. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ music/2008/nov/30/kanye-west-new-album-heartbreak. Brannon, Robert. 1976. The Forty-Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Brassfield, Marissa. 2009. “Data Moshing Music Videos.” Trend Hunter, 24 February. http://www. trendhunter.com/trends/data-moshing-kanye-west-welcome-to-heartbreak-chairlift-evident-utensil. Burns, Woods & Lafrance. 2012. “Sound/Image Distortion and Alternative Black Masculinities in Kanye West’s ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ (2008).” Paper presented at the Popular Culture Association of Canada, Niagara Falls. ———. 2016. “Sampling and Storytelling: Kanye West’s Vocal and Sonic Narratives.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, ed. Justin Williams and Katherine Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carmanica, Jon. 2008. “Kanye West, Flaunting Pain Instead of Flash.” New York Times, 24 November. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/arts/music/25kany.html?_r=0. Cheng, Cliff. 1999. “Marginalised Masculinities and Hegemonic Masculinity: An Introduction.” Journal of Men’s Studies 7 (3): 295–315. Coles, Tony. 2009. “Negotiating the Field of Masculinity: The Production and Reproduction of Multiple Dominant Masculinities.” Men and Masculinities 12 (1): 30–44. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2006. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Durant, R. H. Michael Rich, S. Jean Emans, Ellen S. Rome, Elizabeth Allred, and Elizabeth R. Woods. 1997. “Violence and Weapon Carrying in Music Video.” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 151 (5): 443–448. Fennessey, Sean. 2009. “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Vibe Magazine, February: 80–85. Greene, Jayson. 2015. “The Coldest Story Ever Told: The Influence of Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak.” Pitchfork, 22 September. http://pitchfork.com/features/overtones/9725-the-coldeststory-ever-told-the-influence-of-kanye-wests-808s-heartbreak/. Halberstam, Judith. 1997. “Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene.” Social Text 15 (3/4): 104–131. Hoard, Christian. 2009. “Profile: Kid Cudi: Hip-Hop’s Sensitive Soul.” Rolling Stone. 17 September: 40. hooks, bell. 2004. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge. Hope, Clover. 2009. “The 100 Problems of Kanye West.” The Village Voice, 21 January: 72. Hurt, Byron. 2006. Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. Documentary. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. Jarman-Ivens, Freya, ed. 2007. Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music. London: Routledge. Katz, J. 1999. Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis of Masculinity. Documentary. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. Kimmel, Michael. 1994. “Masculinity Is Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” In Theorizing Masculinities, ed. H. Brod and M. Kaufman, 119–141. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kimmel, Michael, and Michael Messner. 2009. Men’s Lives. Boston: Pearson. Kirn, Peter. 2009. “Data Moshing the Online Videos: My God, It’s Full of Glitch.” Create Digital Motion, 18 February. http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/02/data-moshing-the-online-videos-mygod-its-full-of-glitch/. Kot, Greg. 2011. “Album Review: Drake: Take Care.” Chicago Tribune, 13 November. http://articles. chicagotribune.com/2011-11-13/entertainment/chi-drake-album-review-take-care-reviewed20111113_1_aubrey-drake-graham-album-review-hip-hop. Lafrance, Marc, Alyssa Woods, and Lori Burns. 2010. “I Got Homies but in the End I’m Still So Lonely: Men and Masculinity on Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association, St. Louis.

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Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak Lamont Hill, Mark. 2009. “Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 31 (1): 29–54. Levy, Don. 2007. “Hegemonic Masculinity.” In Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology Online, ed. G. Ritzer. http://www.sociologyencyclopedia.com/public/. Macia, Peter. 2008. “Fader 58: Kanye West Cover Story and Interview.” Fader Magazine, 25 November. http://www.thefader.com/2008/11/25/fader-58-kanye-west-cover-story-and-interview/. Miller, Monica. 2009. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller-Young, M. 2008. “Hip-Hop Honeys and Da Hustlaz: Black Sexualities in the New Hip Hop Pornography.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8 (1): 261–292. Neal, Mark Anthony. 2005. New Black Man. New York: Routledge. Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. 2007. Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Oware, Matthew. 2011. “Brotherly Love: Homosociality and Black Masculinity in Gangsta Rap Music.” Journal of African American Studies 15 (1): 22–39. Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sieczkowski, Cavan. 2014. “T-Pain Rants about Frank Ocean, Homophobia in Hip Hop.” The Huffington Post, 2 November. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/11/t-pain-frank-ocean-homophobia_ n_4766909.html. Snead, James A. 1994. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. Ed. Colin MacCabe and Cornel West. New York: Routledge. Tyrangiel, Josh. 2005. “Why You Can’t Ignore Kanye: More GQ Than Gangsta, Kanye West Is Challenging the Way Rap Thinks about Race and Class – and Striking a Chord with Fans of All Stripes.” TIME, 29 August: 54. West, Kayne. 2008a. “New Zealand Press Conference, December 1, 2008.” Part 4. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=bZK1-jeoOjI. West, Kayne. 2008b. “Singapore Press Conference, November 7, 2008.” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VTNe5xcv3Y0&feature=player_embedded. Wilson, D. Mark. 2007. “Post-Pomo Hip-Hop Homos: Hip-Hop Art, Gay Rappers, and Social Change.” Social Justice 34 (1): 117–140.

Discography West, Kanye. The College Dropout, 2004. Roc-A-Fella, Mercury, 20300. West, Kanye. Late Registration, 2005. Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam (Universal), 9049. West, Kanye. Graduation, 2006. Mercury, 9878399. West, Kanye. 808s and Heartbreak, 2008. Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam, Mercury (Universal), 1787279.

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21 EXPRESS YOURSELF! Gender euphoria and intersections Doris Leibetseder

Genderqueer and a-gender have become terms for denoting the future; they are employed by mainstream pop stars to self-define themselves in the light of the binary transgender media hype around Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner and other trans artists who have come out recently. One example is the White punk rock front woman and singer Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, who came out as a woman in 2012 (Eells 2012).1 Notably, in 2014, the band released an album, entitled Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Even Miley Cyrus has stated that she does not want to be a boy, but rather a kind of nothing. While she did not despise being a girl, she did not wish to be placed in a box (Krochmal 2015).2 It is salient that much discussion and research centres around trans women, and less on transgender and intersectionality. Notably, the interaction of various forms of discrimination, including race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ethnic background, age, dis/ability and so on (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990) has had a major impact on transgender people of colour.3 My intention in this chapter is to shape a discourse around issues of gender and popular music by turning to Queer and Trans Studies and Transnational Feminism (which also includes intersectionality). To start with, I want to present an overview of the history of transgender musicians, and then attempt to provide definitions of what is meant by transgender and genderqueer. The main part of this contribution deals with transgressive a-gender and genderqueer expressions and self-definitions within pop music and (binary) transgender pop musicians, their intersectional ties, and how this affects their music and their audience. The examples I use for this analysis are from Angel Haze, ‘La Gata’, the musicians of the rockumentary Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance and the Austrian superstar, Conchita Wurst. Above all, I also want to identify some of the pitfalls facing genderqueer, transgender and cis4 (non-trans) musicians who wish to support transgender issues. Let us turn to the history of transgender musicians and the music industry.5 During the 1950s in the USA, Christine Jorgensen was the first media-hyped White trans woman, later a starlet, actor and singer, who made the headlines, “Ex-GI became Blond Beauty”. This occurred during the McCarthy era in the USA, when the pathologisation of transgender people took its course – cross-dressing and homosexuality meant job-loss and prison (Califia 2003, 17–28). Later on, in the 1970s, transphobic attitudes in certain feminist spaces began to appear, which resulted in trans people being excluded, for instance, from the Michigan 300

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Womyn’s Music Festival. Sandy Stone, a trans woman, had to leave the collective of Olivia Records, a lesbian record label (Leibetseder 2012, 160–164). I have searched for instances of trans men in music, but they are few and far between (possibly more so in the jazz scene. It was discovered that Billy Tipton, who died in 1989, was FAAB [female assigned at birth/‘female-bodied’], something his adoptive sons knew nothing about). People on a trans female/feminine spectrum are often more in the public eye and part of drag shows and theatre; for example, RuPaul (with the song ‘Supermodel of the World’ in 1993), or Beth Elliott, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s participated in the hippie folk music scene and was expelled from the Daughters of Bilitis6 in 1972 because she was not a ‘real woman’. Mention should also be made of Terre Thaemlitz, a multimedia artist and electronic musician who draws on the politics of the trans and queer movement in her work and his project ‘Trans-Sister-Radio’. Thaemlitz self-defines as transgender, employing alternating male and female pronouns rather than gender-neutral pronouns (such as ‘they’ or ‘hir’) (Leibetseder 2012, 165). There is growing evidence of a strong involvement of transgender people in the music industry, which is becoming an important space and place for transgender people. Sally Hines, who researches on transgender everyday lives, points out that the transition is easier for transgender people who work in cultural industries (writers, artists, musicians and designers). This is borne out by musician Gabrielle, whom she interviewed, who “positions her work environment as progressive and recognizes that this affords her greater gender flexibility” (Hines 2010, 602, 604). I will now endeavour to provide definitions of ‘transgender’ and ‘genderqueer’. This is no mean task given that the terms are not necessarily disparate, with their differences often blurred as they depend on the self-definition of the subjects in question. Notwithstanding, I will use both terms even though it is important to point out that many genderqueer people count and self-define themselves as trans or transgender as well. Conversely, there are also genderqueers who do not do this.

1 Transgender Transgender is used as an umbrella term for referring to a range of gender-variant people (Williams 2014, 232). Susan Stryker explains that transgender with its actual signification appeared in Leslie Feinberg’s 1992 Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come (Stryker 2006, 4). However, Virginia Prince described herself as transgenderal or transgenderist as early as the 1960s and 1970s, naming “the specific behavior of living full time in a chosen social gender role different from that typically associated with birthassigned sex, without undergoing genital sex-reassignment surgery (see Ekins and King 2006)” (Williams 2014, 233). Today, this may even include people who have had genital sex reassignment. A physician wrote as early as 1965 that the term transgenderism should replace transsexualism, and during the 1970s transvestites and transsexual people used this inclusive term for themselves (Williams 2014, 233). It is also important to point out that trans people of colour have played a major role in trans activism right from the beginning. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson helped during the 1960s and 1970s to combine the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on racial equality with issues of the trans and queer movement. Both trans women were crucial in the Stonewall Riots and founded the activist group S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and their shelter (the first one) for homeless queer and trans youth sex workers. Diego Sanchez, a Latino trans man, was the first transgender individual to form part of the 301

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Democratic National Committee in the USA in 2008, and testified before the US House of Representatives on discrimination in the workplace (Ziegler and Rasul 2014, 34). The surprising emergence of transgenderism began in 1995. Stryker attributes this to the expansion of the World Wide Web and the build-up in momentum of the queer movement that gave transgender people the opportunity to raise their voices against the oppressive heteronormative regime. Distinct from queer, transgender focuses more on questions of corporeality and identity rather than desire and sexuality (Stryker 2006, 6–7). Today ‘trans’ and ‘trans*’ are also coined as even more expansive terms (Leibetseder 2012, 149–151; Tompkins 2014, 26–27), but for the purposes of this chapter, I will adhere to the more common term, transgender.

2 Genderqueer Genderqueer, the “refusal of all categories of sexual and gender identity” (Love 2014, 173), suggests a similarity between transgender and queer. But as transgender studies has emerged as a separate field of research from queer theory, it is clear why transgender scholars criticise queer as a false universal, in that it has “used gender non-normativity” as an “allegory of queerness”, and “not engaged fully with the material conditions of transgender people” (Love 2014, 174). On the part of trans communities, serious objections are based on the notion that the queer transgender movement measures or diminishes the value of transsexual and transgender people. For example, the queer idea of anti-normativity is felt to work against binary transgender people. Despite the efforts of transgender people to be as inclusive as possible, there is still a degree of criticism. Riki Ann Wilchins writes that “trans activism is often focused on the problems (bathroom access, name change, workplace transition, and hate crimes) faced by those who have been most active in its success: postoperative male-to-female transexuals” (Wilchins 2002, 59). Wilchins emphasises that genderqueer people often feel left out of transgender groups because they do not always want to change their bodies. She calls for people to fight against normative genders and to participate in a movement against the gender stereotypes that affect us all (see Wilchins 2002). A general description of genderqueer is suggested by Carbery: “Genderqueer is rapidly becoming more widely recognised, accepted and commonly used amongst LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex) communities as a term for self-identification” (Carbery 2011, 42). Carbery explains that genderqueer people “may think of themselves as being both male and female . . . as someone whose gender falls completely outside the gender binary or as not having a gender at all” (Carbery 2011, 42) and may also refer to themselves as “bi-gendered, multi-gendered, androgyne, gender outlaw, gender bender, genderfluid and gender-fuck. Sometimes they refuse to attach a label to their gender identities at all, feeling that no one word or phrase can adequately capture the complexities of how they experience gender” (Carbery 2011, 43). Researching into the history of when and how frequently the word ‘genderqueer’ has been used, I discovered that genderqueer started to appear in printed sources in 1989, with its usage flourishing since 1993.7 The question of which pronoun is preferred is solved individually: Some genderqueers do go by the conventional binary pronouns though many prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘ze/hir/hirs’ or singular ‘they/their/theirs’ instead of the traditional gendered ones and some prefer to use only their name and not use pronouns at all. (Carbery 2011, 43) 302

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While some genderqueer people do present themselves in line with binary gender roles, many choose to present themselves in a non-normative, gender-variant way. However, the genderqueer movement has been criticised for consisting mainly of people who are “female-assigned, white, young, queer, urban, hip, non-transsexual, middle-class, politically radical and feminist” (Elliot 2010, 34), although this has already changed in recent times as more genderqueer people of colour are coming out. Our first musician is representative of the recent developments.

3 Angel Haze I want to introduce the self-defined a-gender pop musician, Angel Haze, who prefers the pronoun ‘they’, as stated on ‘their’ Twitter account.8 African American and Native American, Haze is a singer who does not conform to the aforementioned critics’ example of the typical genderqueer person. In 2013, Haze came out as pansexual, describing ‘themselves’ “as someone who sees people for who they are and not gender”, preferring to avoid all labels: “I think that labels aren’t for me. You know, it’s not for a person, it’s to make other people comfortable, so I don’t buy into that” (DeRuy 2013).9 Their 2012 Eminem remix, with their own lyrics to ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet on Classick, describes the sexual abuse they experienced as a child (Macpherson 2013)10 in a very detailed and uncomfortable way (MEN 2011). Haze’s version is, on the one hand, more polite and positive than Eminem’s, with a warning at the beginning: it “might get a little personal, or a lot”. In the last part, they focus on more positive meaning and “to stay strong and just to move on” for a good ending, and finally they thank the listener, who joined them in cleaning out their closet. Such warnings, the detailed descriptions of sexual abuse and a positive attitude at the end are unusual for the hip-hop genre and are in stark contrast to Eminem’s lyrics, which mainly deal with accusing his mother for his bad upbringing – as he used his rough childhood for being a White rapper, suggesting that his intersectional experiences are similar to those of Black rappers. This is his reasoning for identifying with the typical elements of rap: to prove that he is just as good at hip-hop as his Black colleagues. Conversely, Haze does not need to justify their rap and feels free to play around with the genre and also to queer the genre itself. In comparing Eminem’s and Haze’s voices, the latter’s singing is much more emphatic and their voice sounds rushed, as they have to catch their breath often. Arguably, Haze’s version is more powerful, extracting deeper emotions. They achieve this by singing the first lines (in the form of a polite warning) very close to the microphone,11 thus creating the audible impression of closeness and intimacy in a small room. When they start rapping, they are less close to the microphone, appearing more distanced, as if in a bigger room and perhaps with a greater audience. Haze manages to bring the two extremes together; on the one hand, being polite and positive (stereotypically more female characteristics), despite their very detailed description of their abuse and, on the other hand, being more powerful (stereotypically male) while sounding more authentic (closer to their emotions, hence stereotypically female) than the original by Eminem. Haze shows in this song how to combine and neutralise (two gender) oppositions, similar to what happens in their a-gender self-definition. This combination of opposites arises again in the music video of ‘Battle Cry’ (featuring Sia), from their 2013 album, Dirty Gold. The lyrics are about empowerment, dealing with how Haze managed to come from their lowest point in life to find a way to express their emotions. Now they feel no one can hold them back. It is a battle cry for someone who has experienced great struggles and overcame them. Again, this time with Sia, the oppositions 303

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are pronounced: Sia is the white angel-like figure (with blond hair in a very bright white light, almost presented like a ghost), who brings love, despite all the abuse and resulting personal struggles that Angel sings about. Sia’s voice is soft and soothing, whereas Angel’s lines are rapped – sounding like a machine gun firing off words – which explain their very religious upbringing and that they had to first break away from the church in order to escape its abusive environment. Haze has called this a cult (as they were not allowed to have friends who did not form part of this religion), which also prevented them from listening to pop music. They only started to listen to rap music at the age of sixteen, about four years before their musical breakthrough. In ‘Battle Cry’, Haze makes their intersectionality very clear, including the influences it had on their childhood – to be assigned female at birth, categorised as African and Native American, and to belong to a religious cult – how this all contributed in a complex way to their abuse and struggle, and even their dehumanisation.12 In 2014, ‘Battle Cry’ was MTV-VMA nominated for best video with a socially relevant message. In 2013, Haze released another remix, ‘Same Love’ (originally by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, featuring Mary Lambert). The song supports same-sex marriage, again with their autobiographical lyrics, talking about when they came out as not straight to their mother at 13 and were told they would burn in hell or die of AIDS. In this song, Haze states that “we are boxed in and labeled, before we’re ever able to talk”, which can be read as a refusal of having a specific sexual orientation and of gender labels and thus as a call for not fulfilling the rules of the heterosexual matrix (Butler 2006). Again, as with Eminem’s song, their version sounds even more powerful and authentic because of their strong voice and their personal experiences, whereas the original seems to be more focused on its agenda, the support for same-sex marriage. In Angel Haze’s version, their advice is “never neglecting who it is you feel you are”, thus ensuring the right of self-definition. Notably, they quote Andrea Gibson, a queer poet: “No I’m not gay, No I’m not straight, And sure as hell am not bisexual dammit, I am whoever I am when I am it, Loving whoever you are when the stars shine, And whoever you’ll be when the sun rise”.13 During the citing of this poem, Haze’s voice is electronically manipulated. Samples and an echo effect are used, creating the impression that more people are around and singing the song. Perhaps the main point is that no one fixed gender and sexual identity exists, but rather that more possibilities are opened up in the poem. The part of the poem in the song that stands out musically and lyrically from the rest of the song and the original version makes it clear that same-sex love and marriage are not the only issue Haze wants to focus on. Haze’s lyrics, different from the original, are clearly opposed to fixed identities and categorisations, which serve to express their personal feelings and experiences as being genderqueer or a-gender. Even with music genres, Haze does not want to be categorised and be labelled solely as a rapper or hip-hopper. Evidence of this is in their use of a sound that is not only hip-hop or pop and verified by their choice of the alternative rock/pop producer, Markus Dravs, for Dirty Gold.14

4 ‘La Gata’ – transgender of colour in Colombia Transgender people of colour have different perspectives and experiences because of their intersectionality (being transgendered and of colour) and are invisible in queer movements. This is illustrated in the White- and cis-washed film, Stonewall (2015), which completely ignores the fact that many transgender people of colour were at the forefront in the Stonewall Riots. Exemplifying this is the Black trans woman Janer, ‘La Gata’, from Cali, Colombia. She 304

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has explained how she had the idea of using hip-hop songs to express her thoughts about the transphobia and racism that she encountered in school, in church and on the streets. Moreover, she tells of how her songs prevented her from getting even deeper into crime (robbery, fighting with guns and knives). She now prides herself on the fact that she has changed how people think about transvestites (the term she uses in the original Spanish) in her neighbourhood, where she is considered to be the best hip-hopper. Parents would knock on her door and ask her if she would like to teach their sons how to sing. Consequently, teaching younger boys in the area to sing and dance in order to express themselves instead of turning to crime improved the conditions in a poor neighbourhood.15 However, her life was still immersed in violence, including carrying a gun and having to pick up a partner or relative from the ground with gunshot wounds in his/her head. Survival remains an issue for many transgender people of colour even in the USA and Europe. La Gata’s poor living conditions are depicted in the video, where we see her neighbourhood, the narrow streets and small houses. This is captured by her music as well, and she does not use any instruments or technical equipment and seems not to have had vocal training training. Her voice sounds raw, as if coming directly from the streets without any technical intermediaries. The video was published by Carlos Motta, an L.A.-based artist, who was also born in Colombia and forms part of Motta’s project ‘Gender Talents’. For this online archive he conducted interviews with transgender and intersex activists (Sutton 2015).16 Therefore, the money for creating this video, filming her rapping on the streets together with a cis male friend and two cis female background dancers in addition to the interviewer, comes from the Northwestern (US) hemisphere. I point this out because without the connection to the global North, it would have been difficult to find out about ‘La Gata’. In the interview, she explains how the intersection of her being Black, transgender, poor and from the global South has influenced her rap lyrics. Building on this, I now want to focus more closely on different views of how being transgender has an influence on music.

5 Transgender influence on music I first encountered the careers and music of transgender musicians through the ‘trans fabulous’ rockumentary film, Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance (2009). I now turn to various interviews in this film for this part of my discussion.17 My first example is Jessica Xavier, who claims that before she transitioned, she had trouble finding something to say as a songwriter. But during her early transition, she wrote a lot of songs because the experience was so rich. In the 1990s, her first band, Changeling, was one of very few trans bands, along with All the Pretty Horses and The Temptress. For Xavier, it was necessary “to not have to explain things to people, they come to her and they want her to play”. One of the most important features in the music by trans singers was, and is, their voice, and if, how and why it changed seems to be of varying concerns for the musicians. For a few MTF (male-to-female) transgender people, their voices already sound quite female (for instance, the singers of Basic Fix and The Degenerettes); others do not care if their voice does not match their image, or they just try to get used to it (Lipstick Conspiracy); and some of them opt for voice training (Jessica Xavier). For FTM (female-to-male) people who are singers, much depends on their voices breaking due to the higher testosterone level and them having to adjust to their changed instrument. For most of them, starting to take testosterone has involved an adventurous journey. When some of them began, there was no research on how it might change their voices or if they would 305

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be able to sing afterwards, as Joe Steves from Coyote Grace has explained. For Anderson Toone, not knowing how his voice would turn out was the reason he did not take testosterone for a long time (about ten years), and others were very apprehensive before starting the process. Geo Wyeth (from Novice Theory) has also insisted that if you want to build a career as a singer, you will want people to recognise your voice; yet one never knows how it will sound afterwards. Some transgender people have dealt with this through humour – when their voices started cracking on stage, they started yodeling. Joe Steves maintains that in his case it is still possible to sing, although one develops a new voice. At one point, he had a fifth of the range that he had before and had to change the key of most of his songs. The challenging aspect in this process is that the muscle memory of how to produce a specific note is no longer correct. It is as though you have to ‘re-string your guitar’ and then have to find the notes again. A different emotive quality to your voice emerges, and thus influences your songs. Inevitably, certain songs cannot be sung anymore. However, the singer of Coyote Grace has encountered that they are almost back in the same key as before, but an octave lower. The Shondes talk about ambiguous trans voices, which show something other than the typical binary gendered voices, thereby opening a space for non-gender-binary people (Leibetseder 2012, 166). Today, research into FTM vocality has been undertaken that is important for avoiding vocal misuse (inappropriate use of pitch and volume), something Alexandros N. Constansis, a trans male singer, has highlighted. His findings point out that “vocal reactions to artificial testosterone are rarely stable or smooth, especially during the first year” (Constansis 2013, 2),18 and that it is best to avoid the abrupt and high dose of hormonal administration at the beginning, a procedure that is often recommended by doctors to FTMs in Europe. Constansis suggests that it is better to opt instead for a gradual increase of the doses and a soft exercising for the voice (Constansis 2013, 4–5). He pleads for further education for FTM singers, so that they do not lose their singing ability, but get to know the idiosyncrasies of their own individual instruments. Composers and coaches thus need to be involved as well (Constansis 2013, 10–11), because the post-transition trans voice creates more “hybrid vocal personae”, which, as mentioned by The Shondes, achieves freedom from binary standards. In the future, additional terms need to be devised, such as “hybrid baritone, trans or variant tenor”, which would need to be available to the singers themselves (Constansis 2013, 6). Also, the ability to transpose to a lower key (one and a half tones lower than cis male baritones, i.e. a G key instead of B flat) is necessary. In effect, this key is more suitable for a trans vocal range and timbre (Constansis 2013, 6–8). All this points to the fact that developments in the future will not only focus on visual transgender aspects, but also on auditory ones with new roles and innovative composition characterising songs for trans people.

6 Influence on audience When it comes to considering patterns of reception and response, I turn to the non-binary White singer and DJ JD Samson, who was part of the post-riot-grrrl band, Le Tigre, together with Kathleen Hanna. Samson was also lead singer in MEN. JD Samson self-identifies as a gender outlaw, who does not want to become a man (Wright 2012).19 Her moustached appearance often leads to her being mistaken for a young boy. In an interview for ARTE in 2014, she admitted that her everyday interaction with other people is a political statement in itself, as she is frequently perceived as a man. Her wish is that people see all kinds of gender performance, and it is for much the same reason that Conchita Wurst’s Eurovision victory has been important. I will return to Wurst later on in this chapter. Meanwhile, JD Samson has insisted that far too few women with facial hair are seen in public.20 She is a queer icon 306

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not only because of her feminist electro-punk/dance music, but also because she posed as a lesbian pin-up for two calendars in 2003 and 2006 (which earned her the nickname ‘Viz’), creating a space for butch lesbian visibility. It is a genderqueer erotic aesthetic that distinguishes her songs and videos, with her lyrics exposing critical aspects in contemporary society. For example, the song ‘Who Am I To Feel So Free’ deals with negative issues, such as sexual harassment, unemployment and the glass ceiling that many women artists face (all issues why we are not so free at all), which are combined with an upbeat musical mode. In an interview with Noisevox, Samson explains that already in Le Tigre, they tried to avoid negative political messages, such as ‘I hate that you are doing this’, because these depressing ideas are “ruining us”. She prefers to get together and “celebrate our diversity” and “celebrate the ways in which we come together” and “gain equality”. If you draw these messages together with upbeat music, it “kind of creates an anthem”, although she likes the “juxtaposition of them talking about depressing things over happy music, or happy words over sad music”.21 This encapsulates what Julia Kristeva refers to as the dual character of the voice, which consists of the symbolic parts (the content) in the lyrics and the somatic (bodily) parts, comprising the timbre and rhythm of the voice. Kristeva named this concept the semiotic chora, the “song or music behind the text”. With the help of the voice the revolutionary chora is made possible, because lust is reintroduced in the poetic text through the body (Kristeva 1984, 29, 164; Bayerl 2002, 129; Leibetseder 2012, 116–119). Judith Butler has also pointed out the subversive potential of the chora, which leads to a liberation of the bodies and “to an open future” (Butler 2006, 127). JD Samson further explains why she thinks that dance and politics go together. During their concerts, they create a “safe and comfortable space”, a “space of freedom” for the people moving around and being confident in their bodies and feeling like they are not going to be judged.22 She goes on to suggest that some people come to their concerts because they “like the lyrics and do not really care about the music”, while for others it is the other way around. She has said that she enjoys seeing “a bunch of straight dudes singing” their songs, for it makes her “feel like these words are embodied by new people”. Such an insight into her concerts corresponds to the utopian possibility of mimesis, which is the potential of non-identity and an anticipation of Otherness (Bayerl 2002, 67; Leibetseder 2012, 111–112). JD Samson does not care if the straight men “consciously understand the words”; the fact that they are “learning and . . . opening their eyes and their hearts” is what matters. So the space that MEN or Le Tigre create during their concerts is where “people can learn about these different things”. This resonates with what The Degenerettes, a transgender band, have had to say about their performances: “When people have to grab hold of something on their own, just based on what’s being presented in front of them – sometimes it’s a more profound experience than being told something” (Riot Acts 2009). This process is described in theory as the affective modelling of mimesis, which has an effect on reality itself, as Lukács has mentioned, because “reality can be influenced in the desired way through the imitation of processes” (Lukács 1969, 379; Leibetseder 2012, 112–113). With this in mind, I want to turn to Conchita Wurst, an Austrian singer, who recently became internationally renowned as the Eurovision Song Contest winner of 2014.

7 Conchita Wurst – genderqueer drag Conchita defies the gender binary more by appearance and presentation than self-definition. She combines the female ‘conchita’ (vulva in Spanish slang) and the masculine ‘Wurst’ (sausage and slang for penis in German). Hence, gender/biological sex terms are engrained 307

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in her name. It is worth noting that Wurst not only refers to male genitals, but also to a typical Austrian-German phrase, ‘es ist mir Wurst’ – ‘it does not matter’ or ‘I do not care’ – underlining the non-normative gender Conchita is representing. Certainly, the most obvious genderqueer visual signifier in her drag queen performance is her beard, which breaks with the gender binary drag traditions. Conchita is Tom Neuwirth’s character, and he selfidentifies as a drag queen. Conchita’s performance on stage is indisputably a demonstration of Otherness, a bearded White lady, whose transgressive and political magnetism reaches out to a large audience. This was borne out by the tumultuous popularity and high number of votes Conchita accrued in the Eurovision Song Contest, all in spite of the protests against her in Austria and certain other countries prior to the event. In looking closer at the intersectionality of Conchita, being White and brought up in mainly Catholic Austria with its geo-political positioning, we see that the East/West European dynamics played a major role in her victory. After Conchita’s victory, Russia threatened to leave the Eurovision Song Contest and set up its own equivalent. However, when examining the voting system of the Song Contest and the actual votes from Russia and other Eastern European countries we get quite a different picture. Each country’s votes for the Eurovision song contest are divided into the popular vote, decided by their population, and the vote by a selected jury from each nation. An analysis of the Eastern European popular votes show that they were mostly in favour of Conchita; only the Eastern European jury votes were against her, as a study at the University of Reading highlights (Renwick 2014).23 Therefore, the stereotypical distinction between a LGBTIQ-accepting Western and a homo- and transphobic Eastern Europe is not demonstrable on the level of the population, although Russia’s homo- and transphobic laws are still in force. Conchita’s song and performance was a dramatic solo act, with a James Bond–like feel. The song, ‘Rise Like a Phoenix’, a power ballad, was intended to emphasise the glamour and elegance of her look and powerful countertenor voice. The typical Eurovision spectacle (lights and pyrotechnic effects) would make her appearance and the song even more exhilarating. The song, a typical ballad, comes across very camp, for all the reasons that Freya Jarman-Ivens describes in “Notes on Musical Camp” (2009). It starts off with an orchestral opening and continues to escalate in levels of theatricality and extravagance, transported by a voice that steadily becomes more impassioned. It culminates in the rise of a semitone in the last refrain of the song. Conchita’s diva-like performance is kitsch and in line with many of the other legendary Eurovision performances. As gauged by public reactions, the camp character of this song (through Conchita’s beard and the lyrics) was unveiled in tandem with a political message (acceptance of gender non-conforming and same-sex relationships) that led to much debate. The lyrics are well worth contemplating. They start with identifying a difficult past life: “neighbors say we’re trouble, well that time has passed”, and that she is looking into the mirror and seeing a stranger (maybe a reference to Neuwirth’s real persona and his drag-character Conchita), perhaps invoking memories of Neuwirth’s childhood, growing up in a small rural town. The chorus refers to the myth of the phoenix that rises out of the ashes and is transformed and reborn, very much like Conchita herself. “You threw me down” and “you’re my flame” hints at the homo- and transphobic statements, or hate speech, that Conchita and many other LGBTIQ people have encountered. The phoenix is symbolic of recovery and, as Catherine Malabou explains, with the help of Hegel (Phenomenology of the Spirit), there is a comparison here to the legendary bird of the spirit, who is “constantly reconstituting itself from its wounds” and “from its ashes is produced the new, renovated, fresh life”. Implied here is regeneration as resurrection (a theme which 308

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fits into Conchita’s Jesus-like face and her Catholic upbringing), and “to recover” turns out “to be present once again” (Malabou 2011, 74–75). The wound disappears as the new spirit emerges. A similar idea of invincibility is repeated, but in a more community-oriented way. Addressing the LGBTIQ community after her victory, Conchita’s first words were: “This night is dedicated to everyone who believes in a future of peace and freedom. We are unity. We are unstoppable” (BBC 2014).

Pitfalls and downsides I want to suggest that the downside of Conchita’s victory was that it was politically misused for homo-national means, presenting Austria as a ‘tolerant’ country for LGBTIQ people. However, when it comes to rights for same-sex couples, this is certainly not the case. Compared to other Western European countries, Austria lags way behind when it comes to legislation, and if any progress has been made, this is mostly due to European Court decisions. It is revealing that while Austrian politicians published pictures of themselves with Conchita, there was little attempt to amend their politics or the law despite the tumultuous Eurovision event held in Vienna. Although more people were saying that Austria should allow same-sex marriage, nothing was achieved. One might say that the positive outcome of Conchita’s victory for the Austrian LGBTIQ community remained at the symbolic/representational level (read: same-sex couples on pedestrian lights in Vienna), while not ‘trickling down’ (to use a quite unpopular economic metaphor for good reason) into political and juridical decisions. Alas, a few months after the Eurovision Song Contest was held in Vienna, the only reminder of Conchita’s victory in Austria were the same-sex couple traffic lights for pedestrians and a picture of her on the Bank of Austria’s advertisements for Cash Back – in effect a cunning campaign to target the LGBTIQ ‘pink Euros’.

8 Cisgender musicians and transgender anthems There are a growing number of White and Black transgender musicians, such as Amasha Greyson, Angelica Ross, Shawnee Talbot, Black Cracker, Antony and the Johnsons, Rae Spoon24 and Terre Thaemlitz,25 to name a few. Also, there are cisgender (non-trans) musicians who attempt to represent transgender topics amidst certain difficulties. When cisgender people make ‘transgender’ music or create a ‘trans anthem’ they often unintentionally misunderstand transgender issues, as was the case with Kate Pierson, the former singer of the B-52’s, with her song ‘Mister Sister’. Jamie Cooper Holland explains that the title itself caused an outcry by the transgender community because of its misgendering. The lyrics and video perpetuate the many stereotypes of trans women and “make being trans appear to be a collection of superficial aesthetic conflicts instead of an array of deep personal and political issues from a deeply sexist and oppressive culture” (Cooper Holland 2014).26 Another most likely well-intended attempt was the music video ‘We Exist’ by Arcade Fire, with Andrew Garfield (‘Spiderman’) playing a trans woman who gets attacked in a bar and then reappears in dance scenes. At the end of the video, she receives great applause whilst appearing on stage with Arcade Fire at the music festival Coachella. Kat Haché explains why this video was not such a good idea: first, because the lyrics are about a son telling his father that he is gay, which creates a conflict with the visuals and therefore mixes up gender identity and sexual orientation (transgender people are not simply ‘extra gay’). Second, a trans woman would have been a better choice, rather than the cisgender man who played the role. This is because there are many transgender actresses who have to fight in 309

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their everyday life (Haché 2014);27 surely, given that the title is ‘We Exist’ it should actually demonstrate how transgender people exist!

Conclusion During the course of this chapter I have turned to various example to explain how transgender and genderqueer pop musicians and their intersectional ties have influenced their music and audience. In concluding, I wish to emphasise that the most crucial outcomes of this study are that, nowadays, more young musicians self-define in ways that do not conform to the gender binary, and that new trans male voices (composition, roles, etc.) need to be better accommodated in musical practices. The pitfalls of transgender performances should be avoided, such as musicians being misused for homo-national and purely economic (targeting ‘pink’ money) means. And, ‘existing’ trans people should be representing their own agenda in supportive trans songs and anthems by, say, including transgender actors in music videos. Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to show it is important to look at gender selfdefinition and the various intersectional aspects of the artist in music and performance analyses. Up-to-date research into popular music needs to not only focus on gender differences and sexuality, but also on non-gender binary and transgender issues and their complex intersectionalities.

Notes  1 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-secret-life-of-transgender-rocker-tom-gabel-20120531 (accessed 26 October 2015).  2 http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/music/2015/05/05/exclusive-miley-cyruslaunches-anti-homelessness-pro-lgbt-happy- and Out.com, 5 May 2015, http://www.out.com/ music/2015/5/05/exclusive-miley-cyrus-launches-anti-homelessness-pro-lgbt-happy-hippie-foundation (accessed 24 July 2015).  3 The majority of murdered trans women are non-white, are targets of the police and are subjected to poverty. Less research has been undertaken on trans men in popular music and almost none on genderqueer or a-gender musicians.  4 Cis (or cisgendered) designates staying within parameters for normative gendered behaviour (Enke 2012, 61), and functions as a binary opposition to a term such as trans (or transgendered). In doing this, a cisgendered person ostensibly stays in line instead of crossing the line, “as though we agree upon what and where that line may be as well as on what constitutes male and female” (Enke 2012, 73).  5 This contains a short summary of parts of my chapter about trans* in my book, Queer Tracks (Leibetseder 2012).  6 The Daughters of Bilitis was the first lesbian civil and political rights organisation in the USA.  7 Google books NgramViewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=genderqueer&case_ insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=7&share=&direct_ url=t4%3B%2Cgenderqueer%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bgenderqueer%3B%2Cc0%3B% 3BGenderqueer%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BGenderQueer%3B%2Cc0 (accessed 23 July 2015).  8 https://twitter.com/AngelHaze/status/566688238396375041/, 14 February 2015 (accessed 26 July 2015).  9 http://fusion.net/story/4335/pansexuality-and-asexuality-what-you-need-to-know/ (accessed 30 July 2015). 10 http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jan/31/rapper-angel-haze-religion-rape-survival (accessed 30 July 2015) 11 I thank David Buschmann BA for this observation regarding the effects on changing the distance to the microphone. 12 A very good analysis of dehumanisation and ‘bare life’ in M.I.A’s music video ‘Born Free’ is done by Alexander G. Weheliye in Habeas Viscus (2014, 65–71). 13 http://genderqueer.tumblr.com/post/22343870122/andrew-by-andrea-gibson (accessed 2 August 2015). 310

Gender euphoria and intersections 14 Interview on Booska-P., 19 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjCLmrODbNo (accessed 4 August 2015). 15 ‘La Gata – Hip Hop singer and trans activist, Cali’, https://vimeo.com/121104977 (accessed 2 August 2015). 16 http://hyperallergic.com/192388/in-an-artists-video-project-getting-to-know-trans-and-intersexactivists/ (accessed 13 November 2015). 17 Again, this contains parts of my chapter about trans* in my book, Queer Tracks (Leibetseder 2012, 165). 18 http://transposition.revues.org/353 (accessed 21 July 2015). 19 http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/the-lowdown-jd-samson/ (accessed 28 July 2015). 20 “TRACKS on ARTE/Pink Weekend Juli 2014”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9IdKDIQhP4 (accessed 4 May 2015). 21 “Face Time: MEN”, www.noisevox.org/node/25111 (Air Date 02.03.2011) (accessed 12 December 2011). 22 “Noisevox Face Time MEN/JD Samson Interview”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs_Pwp3PK6M& feature=related (accessed 12 December 2011). 23 http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/readingpolitics/2014/05/11/eurovision-a-continent-divided-in-its-sexualattitudes/ (accessed 15 September 2014). 24 More on http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/music/2014/12/11/37-alternative-trans-anthemstrans-musicians. 25 Terre Thaemlitz, “Attempting to Answer Common Points of Confusion,” Comatonse Recordings, 20 October 2011, www.comatonse.com/writings/2011_terre_interviews_terre.html (accessed 12 December 2011). 26 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-cooper-holland/an-open-letter-to-kate-pierson_b_6279128. html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices (accessed 3 August 2015). 27 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bustle/yet-another-cisgender-andrew-garfield_b_5399369.html (accessed 2 August 2015).

Bibliography Bayerl, Sabine. 2002. Von der Sprache der Musik zur Musik der Sprache. Konzepte der Spracherweiterung bei Adorno, Kristeva und Barthes. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Butler, Judith. 2006 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Califia, Pat. 2003. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press. Carbery, Rebecca. 2011. Queer Genders: Problematising Gender through Contemporary Photography. Unpublished Master Thesis, Durham University, Durham, UK. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Constansis, Alexandros N. 2013. “The Female-to-Male (FTM) Singing Voice and Its Interaction with Queer Theory: Roles and Interdependency.” Transposition 3, March 2013. Cooper Holland, Jamie. 2014. “An Open Letter to Kate Pierson, from a Trans Woman and Fan, about Your New ‘Trans Anthem’ Attempt.” HuffPost Gay Voices, 12 May 2014. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140: 139–167. DeRuy, Emily. 2013. “Pansexuality and Asexuality: What You Need To Know.” Fusion, 7 December 2013. Eells, Josh. 2012. “The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel.” Rolling Stone, 31 May 2012. Ekins, Richard, and Dave King. 2006. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Sage. Elliot, Patricia. 2010. Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites. Farnham: Ashgate. Enke, A. Finn. 2012. “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies.” In Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, ed. Anne Enke, 60–77. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Haché, Kat. 2014. “Why It’s Not Okay for Andrew Garfield to Play a Trans Woman.” HuffPost Gay Voices, 6 June 2014. 311

Doris Leibetseder Hines, Sally. 2010. “Queerly Situated? Exploring Negotiations of Trans Queer Subjectivities at Work and Within Community Spaces in the UK.” Gender, Place and Culture 17 (5): 597–613. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2009. “Notes on Musical Camp.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 189–203. Farnham: Ashgate. Lukács, Georg. 1969. Georg Lukács Werke, Ästhetik Teil 1. Vol. 11: Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. Krochmal, Shana Naomi. 2015. “Miley Cyrus Launches Anti-Homelessness, Pro-LGBT ‘Happy Hippie Foundation’.” Advocate.com, 5 May 2015. Leibetseder, Doris. 2012. Queer Tracks: Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music, trans. Rebecca Carbery. Farnham: Ashgate. Love, Heather. 2014. “Queer.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (1–2): 172–176. Macpherson, Alex. 2013. “Rapper Angel Haze on Religion, Rape and Survival.” The Guardian, 31 January 2013. Malabou, Catherine. 2011. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Plato. 1892. Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. 2, 655–656. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renwick, Alan. 2014. “Eurovision: A Continent Divided in Its Sexual Attitudes?” Politics at Reading, 11 May 2014. Stryker, Susan. 2006. “(De)Subjugated Knowledges.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1–18. New York and London: Routledge. Sutton, Benjamin. 2015. “In an Artist’s Video Project, Getting to Know Trans and Intersex Activists.” Hyperallergic, 24 March 2015. Tompkins, Avery. 2014. “Transgender.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (1–2): 26–27. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblage, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wilchins, Riki Ann. 1997. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Milford: Firebrand Books. Williams, Cristan. 2014. “Transgender.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (1–2): 232–234. Wright, Tillet. 2012. “The Lowdown: JD Samson.” T, The New York Times Style Magazine, 11 April 2012. Ziegler, Kortney Ryan and Naim Rasul. 2014. “Race, Ethnicity, and Culture”. In Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, ed. Laura Erickson-Schroth, 24–39. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Discography Haze, Angel. Classicks. Mixtape. 2012. Haze, Angel. Dirty Gold. Island Records and Republic Records. 2013. Katastrophe. Fault, Lines, and Faultlines. Cherchez La Femme Projects. 2007. MEN. Talk About Body. IAMSOUND Records. 2011.

Films Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance. 2009. Dir.: Actor Slash Model. New York: Outcast Films. Stonewall. 2015. Dir.: Roland Emmerich. USA.

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22 COVERING TRANS MEDIA Temporal and narrative potential in messy musical archives Craig Jennex and Maria Murphy

Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’s hit song ‘Freedom’ to YouTube in September 2009, Canadian singer/songwriter Lucas Silveira – lead singer of Toronto-based rock band The Cliks – has regularly posted solo cover performances on the video sharing platform. While cover songs are ubiquitous on YouTube, Silveira’s are extraordinary, chronicling his gender transition and the effects of the hormone testosterone on his voice and body. Silveira began posting covers in response to fan requests; comment sections of his YouTube videos, where a thriving international fan community amassed, quickly became a space in which fans pleaded for Silveira to cover specific songs, artists, or genres.1 So too did this online forum enable an overtly pedagogical project, as fans asked Silveira specific questions about the administration of testosterone and the effect the hormone has on trans masculine vocal performers. That his archive interested trans2 singers is not surprising; Silveira’s broad oeuvre of covers – recorded and posted from September 2009 to April 2016 – allows us to listen closely to otherwise ephemeral sonic markers of gender transitions: voice breaks and subtle changes in pitch and timbre, among others. Silveira’s online cover project presents a voice in process. Silveira draws our attention to the aural and visual construction of gender in our culture, and the way this work is often done through music performance. In chronicling his gender transition through cover performance, he implicates others – often the normatively gendered artists he covers – in his profoundly personal experience. Most significantly, Silveira’s project enables listening practices that reimagine engagement with contemporary musical archives and the temporality of trans experience. His broader oeuvre presents a generative tension between the presentation of a coherent trans narrative and a perceived episodic, fragmented, messy, or jagged collection of self-articulations. We read his project as part of a larger turn in queer thought and queer cultural production to non-normative temporal possibilities.3 Ultimately, his is an archive that enables listeners to intervene in the pervasive progressive logic of the linear trans narrative and thus challenges the cultural ideality of normative gender performance.4

The transition video genre Silveira’s videos exist within a broader DIY phenomenon on YouTube in which trans individuals chronicle and analyse their experiences of transitioning. This has been dubbed the transition video genre – the proliferation of which is a significant development in trans media 313

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production.5 In fact, in their introduction to a recent issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, Julian B. Carter, David J. Getsy, and Trish Salah argue that “the vernacular form of the DIY transition video has exploded to become what is arguably the first form of truly mass cultural production by trans subjects”.6 Film theorist Laura Horak agrees, claiming that “YouTube has almost single handedly transformed the trans mediascape”.7 Defining elements of the transition video style, according to trans media scholars, include the following: appropriating the ‘talking head’ or medium close-up shot to suggest expertise and authority; recording in personal space (often a bedroom, living room, or kitchen) to signal a sense of authenticity; and directly addressing the camera – mimicking a face-to-face conversation that may occur on Skype or FaceTime – to encourage feelings of intimacy with viewers.8 These videos are often labeled and thus searchable by titling terminology that has become common practice: for example, “Three weeks on Testosterone”, “1 Year HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy)”, “Eight months on T”, “MTF transition, six months on hormones”, etc. Transition videos facilitate the development of an online trans commons in which the agency of narrativization is taken away from medical and state institutions – long the arbiters of trans experience. Through this video format, trans individuals themselves create, share, and participate in the development of trans narratives and politics. For example, Silveira assumes a pedagogical role by engaging with his fans in the comment sections of his YouTube videos. Commenting on Silveira’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘I’m Your Man’, YouTube user DarrinTDT writes: “I’m 7months [sic] on T, but only 2months [sic] on the right dosage so my voice has only started breaking in the last month. I know it’ll [take] time to settle and it’s really frustrating I can’t sing anymore but watching these videos gives me hope”. Silveira advises DarrinTDT to “Keep singing. Everyday. Don’t stop”, and warns of the perils of testosterone that are potentially unique to vocalists: “And don’t take too high a dose. It will make your larynx grow too fast and make it harder for you to sing”. Responding to another comment on the same video, Silveira offers guidance and affirms the wide possibilities of transitioning, telling YouTube user Hayden Shannon that “My path took me to starting T and I’m very happy. BUT that doesn’t mean it’s what’s right for you. Don’t let anything anyone tells you about being a ‘man’ get into your head. It’s all bullshit”. This is simply one example of the kind of dialogue Silveira’s work fosters and that is enabled through the broader transition video genre. The transition video genre, however, remains controversial among trans media makers and trans cultural theorists. As Horak shows in her article, these videos are critiqued for a number of reasons: first, for presenting normative gender performance as the desired goal; this, of course, means the burden falls on an individual (and their ability to pass) rather than the larger system regulating gender. The second critique often leveled at these videos is that they suggest that medical, surgical, and/or hormonal intervention is necessary to be recognized as ‘properly’ trans. Most overtly, however, these videos are critiqued for the prescribed progressive timeline they follow: with an individual beginning in the ostensibly ‘wrong’ body and working steadfastly and over a sustained period of time to eventually embody one that is ‘true’ or ‘real’. Legal theorist Dean Spade refers to this stipulated temporality as coming from a “Medical model of transsexuality”.9 He contends that conforming to a specific story limits and governs trans experience. As a child, the trans person had always cross-dressed, or had always wanted to ‘be’ a man or woman in the most narrow sense of those terms. Spade shows how time is used as evidence to prove or make legible one’s transness: one must articulate their non-normative desires over a long period of time, preferably from childhood, with the end goal of normative gender performance always in sight. Canadian trans activist Ivan Coyote 314

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has compellingly articulated the stultifying way that trans people must “play the game”: to communicate their identities in the terms the heteronormative state provides.10 In her recent article published on xojane.com entitled “Not Born this Way: On Transitioning as a Transwoman Who Has Never Felt ‘Trapped in the Wrong Body’”, Kai Cheng Thom echoes Coyote’s claims. She recalls telling her doctor that “Since childhood, I’ve felt like I was born in the wrong body”. Thom writes that this “is the answer that the doctor was expecting, a story that was written before I was born by Western media and the psychiatric profession, a phrase that I knew would unlock the door to the medical care that I needed, as it has for so many transpeople before me”. But, she notes, “That story is not, has never been, mine”.11 For many trans people, playing the game is often the necessary means to occupy their bodies in the way that they want. Hence, transition videos and their temporal structure are critiqued by trans media makers and scholars for following a confined linear timeline, which potentially limits the representation of a plurality of gender expression and trans experience. The etymology of ‘trans’ relates precisely to this desire for movement: ‘trans’, from the Latin ‘trāns’ meaning ‘across, over, beyond’. The transition video genre, critics allege, is inevitably imbued with a temporal logic that privileges certain performances of transness. These critiques certainly do not invalidate the life-saving work that these videos do for some trans people. We incorporate these critiques in this chapter to inform and think through the temporal implications of Silveira’s online musical archival project, which enables an additional way trans cultural production can refuse to “play [this temporal] game” and thus be potentially world-making.

Covering his transition While situated within the transition video genre, Silveira’s project is unique for a number of reasons. That he chronicles his transition through vocal performance is significant: while the administration of testosterone is, of course, no small feat for any transitioning individual, it seems potentially more perilous for a talented and established vocal performer; the administration of testosterone thickens the vocal cords, and lowers and often constricts the range of the voice. Drawing on Alexandros Constansis’s groundbreaking study on FTM singers, Joshua Riverdale writes that “testosterone therapy makes the vocal folds grow thicker but they are restricted in length by the size of the larynx (which is typically smaller in trans men than in cis gender men)”.12 In Elias Krell’s generative article “Contours Through Covers: Voice and Affect in the Music of Lucas Silveira”, Silveira is quoted as saying, “This is the one place that is the most difficult, is that a lot of trans guys don’t realize this, is that when their voice is changing, is that the vocal cords thicken, they don’t lengthen, like in biological males”.13 He explains the dread of “[w]aking up in the morning and not knowing what your voice is going to sound like”.14 By archiving this potentially risky and precarious process, Silveira provides viewers, who may also be interested in the effects of hormones on the singing voice, with knowledge stemming from his lived experience. What is particularly distinctive about Silveira’s online project is that he turns to words and ideas we strongly associate with others to chronicle this personal experience. As we indicate in the previous section, what makes conventional transition videos so captivating is the way they participate in discourses of authenticity around confessional and intimate experience.15 Silveira’s videos similarly invite readings of authenticity and intimacy. Musically, his performances are imbued with well-established signifiers of authenticity (especially in relation to genre) and inauthenticity (his embrace of cover performance, specifically). His articulation 315

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of self through covers mean that others are implicated in his larger project. While performing casually and alone in a domestic space, Silveira re-articulates each piece of music as well as re-animates and re-purposes its seemingly established meaning. He simultaneously initiates a broader performance project that overtly plays with his presentation of self as well as the way we hear the artists he covers. Cover songs, when recognized as covers, are necessarily dialogic; according to Susan Fast, covers “create a dialogue between originating and cover artist” that puts two (or more) performers in conversation.16 By embracing cover songs, then, Silveira implicates other artists in his transition. He demands their co-participation; covering makes his project a collective one. That Silveira is a well-known songwriter intensifies this tension: he is certainly capable (to briefly draw on language of authenticity) of writing about his transition but chooses instead to turn to music we associate with other artists. As we will show in relation to his performances of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’, Silveira works to ensure that previous, wellknown versions are kept in listeners’ ears throughout his covers, encouraging us to recognize the conversations his covers spark. Thus, covers are overtly intertextual. George Plasketes argues that cover songs are implicitly intertextual because a “cover song invites, if not insists upon, a comparison to the original”.17 When we hear covers as covers, we hear them as resonating with something that already exists in our personal experience. This is one reason why covers are compelling for so many listeners: they play with – and validate – songs that are already part of an individual’s personal soundtrack. Accordingly, covers interpolate listeners into a performance in a particular way, balancing a familiarity and a newness that is both comfortable and exciting. Krell argues that the familiarity offered by covers is similarly inviting for trans artists, writing that cover songs provide a relatively safe haven – a familiar, but fraught, ‘home’ space – while individuals “undergo the inter- and intrasubjective changes that gender/sex transition can augur”.18 Listeners may perceive a closeness with Silveira through his play with genre as he incorporates conventions of the singer/songwriter genre into his performances. Wham!’s original version of ‘Freedom’, a forward-driving pop song with a heavy backbeat pounded out by the snare drum and tambourine, for example, moves listeners forward at a steady 135 beats per minute (bpm) in 4/4 time.19 Conversely, Silveira’s version features a fluctuating and overall slower tempo – around 44 bpm in 12/8 time – and reimagines the song in an acoustic folk or singer/songwriter genre, with Silveira performing his own accompaniment on acoustic guitar.20 In many of his covers, Silveira re-performs the original within a logic of 1960s singer/songwriter performance: we hear (and see) a solo performer articulating an understated performance style in which the lyrics are given primacy and there is little perceived distance between the listener and the performer. Music performed in this style – with a solo artist providing his or her own accompaniment and an emphasis on lyrics and vocal delivery – has regularly been heard as an “aural impression of sincerity and intimacy” through which artists “reveal their unmediated personal perspectives”.21 Silveira incorporates these generic markers in his performance – hear, for the most direct examples of this, his renditions of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Last Goodbye’ and Madonna’s ‘Borderline’. His use of cover songs, and the familiarity enabled therein, and his reimagining of this music as singer/songwriter-style performance encourages a sense of intimacy that is recognizable and comfortable. For his project, in which he elucidates a cultural process of gendering (and thus, to briefly draw on Judith Butler’s work, the queer possibilities in gender’s failed or unsuccessful citations), these covers become pedagogical and overtly political. A number of scholars have articulated the queer potential of cover song performance, especially in the way covers enable a form of sonic gender play.22 By covering well-known 316

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artists – many of whom serve as recognizable archetypes of gender (Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Elvis) or queer sexuality (Robyn, Lady Gaga, Jeff Buckley) – and re-articulating their work, Silveira forces us to hear his gendered performance in relation to the broader cultural frames of ‘proper’ gender performance. So too does his drawing on a wide range of artists, genres, and musical styles link his project with a long line of political trans projects predicated on collation. In her formative book Gender Outlaw, which continues to resonate in trans theory, Kate Bornstein argues that there is a uniquely transgender style of performative life writing and autobiographical performance that incorporates “a little bit from here, a little bit from there? Sort of a cut-and-paste thing” that she recognizes in the works of Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker, among others.23 For Bornstein, this collage style is a tactic through which trans citizens negotiate a phobic public sphere and repurpose material in response to the dominant cultural logics of heteronormativity and misogyny. For trans citizens, and other minoritarian subjects,24 cultural identity work is thus often “cultivated from the dominant culture, but meant to expose and critique its conventions”.25 Shana Goldin-Perschbacher has persuasively linked this collaboration style with music performance in her work on Jeff Buckley’s vocal performance, arguing that we can hear a potential transgender vocality in Buckley’s “multigenre affiliation”.26 Goldin-Perschbacher posits that this serves as an articulation of non-normative gender politics because “genre, like gender, is an invented category intended to police borders and advertise identity”.27 Queer theorist Elizabeth Schewe argues that the end of the twentieth century saw a pivotal shift for trans life writing and autobiographical performance. Analyzing the works of RuPaul and Bornstein, Schewe explores how trans citizens now direct their performative life writing toward mainstream audiences and “mix genres with the dual purpose of sharing their experiences of gender exploration and inviting their readers to experiment with gender in similar ways”.28 Trans performance of self does important work not only for the performer, but also on those who participate in the performance; this is brought to the fore in Silveira’s cover song performance project. While, as we have indicated above, Silveira’s reliance on covers clarifies the way gender performance is a learned behavior, so too does the cover performance model call into question the pervasive linear narrative of progress associated with increasingly homonormative LGBTQ politics. Ours is a moment in which certain queer and trans bodies can flourish, particularly when queerness collides with whiteness, wealth, and normative gender and sexual behaviour. It seems particularly telling, then, that Silveira consistently turns to past musical moments to chronicle his experience in the (ostensibly queer) present. His frequent return through cover performance to a prior moment suggests – despite our culture’s frequent claims to the contrary – that there is something lacking for queer and trans possibility in the present. For overt examples of Silveira’s more historical cover work, see his versions of ‘My Way’, which Frank Sinatra popularized in the late 1960s, Leonard Cohen’s 1974 song ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, or Cohen’s 1988 hit ‘I’m Your Man’. There is an interesting tension here as Silveira’s embrace of cover songs risks his performance project being heard as inauthentic – cultural discourses around notions of musical authenticity continue to imply that imitation is incompatible with authentic, personal truth. Or, as Deena Weinstein reminds us: pervasive “[r]omanticism dismisses cover songs as inauthentic ugly ducklings”.29 Another element of Silveira’s project, which gives it its seemingly apolitical or innocuous tenor (these are ‘just’ covers, after all), comes from the way Silveira’s videos function as familiar, casual conversations with fans who share their musical interest by determining the repertoire Silveira performs and similarly participate in this archive while in a domestic space, often alone. His reliance on covers and this intimate setting does not make his project less politically inclined: his re-performances of music that 317

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we associate with others ensures that the ‘original’ artists – often models of normative gender performance – persist as the normative actors that frame his gender articulation. His articulations of a gendered self are made in direct relation to the broader gendered logic of Western popular culture. In his process of becoming, he draws our attention to the implausibility of a static, stable, gendered self. This implausibility is clear if we compare Silveira’s cover of ‘Freedom’ with his most recent cover performance (posted in November 2013) of Rihanna’s 2012 pop ballad ‘Stay’.30 By comparing the first and last songs recorded in this transition video project, we can consume this archive in its simplest form: a normative temporal narrative in which Silveira becomes his ideally transmasculine self. In his cover of ‘Freedom’, Silveira moves evenly throughout his range, mixing his head and chest voice seamlessly with a consistent tone throughout. ‘Stay’, in his rendition, sits lower in his range and features an edgier, more pointed or nasal vocal quality. Instead of the flow between registers that we hear in ‘Freedom’, we hear Silveira use his falsetto as a special coloring effect in ‘Stay’. Other aspects of his performance change as well, and are recognizable in screenshots of the videos (see Figures 22.1 and 22.2): while both feature a medium close-up shot and close range framing, ‘Stay’ is recorded in a much brighter

Figure 22.1

Silveira performs Wham!’s ‘Freedom’ (2009).

Figure 22.2

Silveira performs Rihanna’s ‘Stay’ (2013). 318

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space. Comparatively, the video of ‘Freedom’ looks muted, confined. That we can see Lucas more clearly in this second video means we can see his facial hair, and his tattooed neck, right arm, and chest, and the way Silveira moves his body as he performs Rihanna’s single. It is not merely the lighting: in the video of his performance of ‘Stay’ – posted four years, two months, and four days after his performance of ‘Freedom’ – we witness an ostensibly more confident Silveira. He has a subtle embodied confidence, exemplified as he leans in toward the camera to emphasize certain passages. When he sings the lyrics “a cold sweat” and “show me something”, for example, he looks directly into the camera, suggesting a confidence that is difficult to discern in his cover of ‘Freedom’. Thus, when explored in chronological order, Silveira’s archive offers listeners a progressive trans narrative in which Silveira becomes increasingly (conventionally) masculine: his vocal range lowers and shrinks, his voice becomes more pointed, and he develops a visible confidence (perhaps most obvious in his cover of Justin Timberlake’s ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’) that animates his performances. But hearing the differences is easy; this reading (which once again privileges normative masculine vocal performance and restrictive linear temporality) potentially invalidates some of the affective power that is expressed in Silveira’s earlier covers when he is striving to occupy his body in the way he wants and before he appears more settled in his hormonal regimen. That something is lost through this required progressive temporal structuring is not a new argument; theorists such as Heather Love and Sandy Stone have both written in various ways about how queer progress narratives often require the past to be forgotten or invalidated even when the subject wants to hold on.31 This is particularly true for trans individuals who are routinely required to negate their own personal histories as a tactic to have themselves recognized or validated as their confirmed gender. Of course, we also recognize that forgetting the past and passing as cisgender (not trans) can be necessary for survival in order to move safely through the world. Indeed, there is as much violence in imposing a subversion of such a linear trans narrative as there is to requiring a subscription to it. The risk with privileging subversive trans narratives over those that follow a linear, teleological timeline is the growing expectation that trans individuals must be as transgressive as possible in order to perform the gender politics of progressives in their communities. Silveira’s online archive is a body of work with world-making possibilities that points to a proliferation of narratives made possible through performance. In particular, Silveira’s voice exemplifies what the aforementioned theorists show us: that, when possible, something important can be communicated from these forgotten pasts. Stone contends that in this “erased history, we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender”.32 Silveira’s project encourages a reading that does not negate the past; in fact, his large oeuvre, and his use of the YouTube platform, suggests an alternative temporality altogether. Silveira’s two covers of Roy Orbison’s (1961) hit ‘Crying’,33 in particular, encourage us to also pay attention to what remains the same in Silveira’s voice and performance and thus prompts the question, in direct opposition to conventional reading of transition videos: is there a way to participate in Silveira’s project without only hearing later performances as more real, more accurate, more Silveira?

Turning to the past through covers Orbison’s performance of ‘Crying’ exemplifies the sentimental ballad style for which he became known in the early 1960s.34 Orbison’s ‘Crying’ features a rich instrumental accompaniment – strings, bass guitar, keyboard, marimba, toms, brushes on snare drum, cymbals, 319

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and chorus backing vocals – that gives the song a denser, more orchestral texture which is mobilized for particularly expressive moments. This is audible in the second verse, when percussion, keyboard, and strings mirror each other in terms of rhythm and attack and, again, when the strings break off into a descant featuring an ascending melodic line, which quickens the rhythmic pace over the cadential gesture that leads into the chorus. When the mirrored rhythms return to drive the song to its climactic finish, accompanied by high sustained pitches from the chorus, Orbison passionately delivers the final lyrics at the top of his range – his final wail serves as a manifestation of the very act of crying. Emotional intensity becomes audible in Orbison’s ‘Crying’ in three specific ways – his use of lush string arrangements, his rising tessitura, and the interplay of his lead vocals with backing vocals – all of which substantiate the orchestral-pop mood that complements his exceptional vocal range and operatic timbre.35 Orbison’s ‘Crying’ has continued to resonate with artists in the years following the song’s release. In the 1960s, a number of Orbison’s contemporaries recorded versions of the song (Waylon Jennings, Del Shannon, Dottie West, and Lynn Anderson, among others). k.d. lang’s 1987 version is perhaps the best-known cover of this piece; lang even performed a cover of ‘Crying’ as a duet with Orbison and subsequently re-released the duet version in 2010 on her Recollection album36 – a retrospective of her career and songs that she found particularly formative.37 Silveira retains elements from both of these well-known versions. Orbison’s presence remains through Silveira’s concluding ‘cha-cha-cha’ tag, mimicking the mirrored rhythms we identify above as a sonic citation to end both of his covers. Silveira nods to Orbison’s popular duet with k.d. lang by incorporating that version’s opening strumming and broken chord gestures as his introduction. He also integrates characteristics from these earlier versions, including a robust vocal delivery that we can similarly hear in Orbison’s and lang’s performances. Silveira covers Orbison and lang and, by recording two versions of ‘Crying’, also covers his own performance. In the description of his second version, uploaded on 1 February 2012, Silveira encourages listeners to compare the two versions: “I did this song way back when my voice was different. I thought I’d lost it for a while and would never be able to sing it again. Apparently, I was wrong! With a lot of work and dedication, I’ve brought my vocals back full tilt”. He continues: “Compare, it’s a doozy!” Indeed, we can easily recognize differences between Silveira’s two covers: in his 2012 version, the song is in a lower key, the timbre and register of his voice has changed. Perhaps we could even argue that he appears more comfortable or relaxed in the second version, sitting up straight, with his head up. The differences between these two renditions might demonstrate what is comforting about someone passing within a society that requires and rewards a subscription to normative gender performance. The logic of the progressive trans narrative suggests that we should recognize the changes in Silveira’s voice as compelling evidence of his transition. In the transition video genre, the voice can be portrayed along with body hair, muscle contour, and even acne as one of many political fictions that participate in the production of a ‘proper’ trans body. More generally, vloggers (those who record and post video blogs) who are documenting their transitions arrogate the voice to their transition projects, citing its register and timbre as sonic signifiers of their progress. The progressive logic of the linear transition narrative suggests that Silveira’s latter version of “Crying” will reveal a much more developed voice-in-transition. However, if we consider an analogous reading of these two performances of ‘Crying’, we notice that Silveira makes almost all of the same stylistic choices: he colors vocal passages in a similar manner with falsetto and chest articulations. He emphasizes the same words, breathes in the same spots, adds the same melodic decorations and melismas, and plays the 320

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same accompaniment almost completely. In fact, in both versions there is audible strain as Silveira sings the final phrase of the song. It is noteworthy that when Silveira records the second version in a lower key he does not choose a key that would enable him to sing the final phrases without straining. Instead, he only transposes the song down a third and thus retains an audible vocal strain in the final section of the song, realizing an affective tension that captures some of the strain we equated with his earlier effort to occupy his body in the first rendition. These videos do not only indicate changes in Silveira’s gender performance: by performing these two covers so similarly, we are compelled to recognize what remains the same, to see and hear what Silveira has held on to from his past. In both performances, we hear the strain in Silveira’s voice; it seems as though his voice might very well crack into a sob or wail on the final ‘crying’. These short affective moments carry extra-musical weight concerning the loss of the ability to cry that some trans persons experience. The very act of crying is one of rupture or breakage. Crying is a sonic phenomenon that, like the experience of the voice breaking during puberty or during a transition, causes ruptures or cracks in the voice. Silveira is quoted in Krell’s article as saying: “When I discovered that [I couldn’t cry] it was shocking to me. Like, right now, I’m going through this thing where I still can’t [cry] – and I want it! Some guys are okay without crying. I am not. I need that release”.38 The rupture that is embodied in both the act of crying and Silveira’s performance of ‘Crying’ is indicative of the inimical gap at the crux of the transition experience for many trans people, which reduces the entirety of the transitional process to stultifying binarizations: the break between pre- and post-op or ‘wrong body’ and ‘right body’ constitutes a gap that divides and oversimplifies the relationships that those experiencing transitions have with their pasts. We can also consider the implications of Silveira’s use of the platform YouTube as part of what creates a more temporally flexible approach to and, in turn, experience of his musical archive. Notably, Silveira does not label his videos based on his testosterone regimen as convention dictates. His collection of covers is thus less linearly structured than those consistent with conventions of the transition video genre and so, too, is our encounter with his archive. For example, YouTube users may stumble upon Silveira’s covers by searching for a popular Lady Gaga or Justin Timberlake song; or they may find his covers because they are searching for one of his music videos with his band The Cliks. Participation in this archive is one of chance encounters. While Silveira documents his transition in chronological order, YouTube re-structures and we further re-orient videos through our use of the platform. YouTube frequently updates the ways the platform offers ‘Related and Recommended’ videos to users. In 2012, the company moved away from a system that “serves videos based on the number of clicks they receive” to a model that privileges what they call “video engagement”. The company claims, in a press release marking the shift, that they have “discovered that time watched is one of the best indicators of a viewer’s engagement”.39 In other words: a video that is often watched in its entirety is understood by the platform as more popular than one that is watched for a few seconds before being closed by the viewer. Accordingly, a compelling performance that engages viewers for the entire length of the video is recommended by the platform far more often than, say, a video with a catchy thumbnail and title that viewers select but quickly move away from. All this to say that there are a number of factors that influence which videos we watch on YouTube, making this an experience not exclusively controlled by the user. Emphasis on the platform enables an ‘out’ of sorts; for too long, queer theorists have called on trans lives and bodies to be the most queer among us, furthering a project that may or may not resonate with the political interests of the individual.40 What we can 321

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glean from Silveira’s use of YouTube, embrace of cover performance, and eschewing of naming conventions is a way in which the onus of queerness is not placed on the performer but instead made possible by the archived performances. Silveira’s videos are filmed and posted in chronological order, but this order is re-articulated by the very platform through which they are made available. In other words: a queered temporality is an outcome of the performance and the way it is shared, not a requirement of the performer. Our experience with this archive is messy, and by eschewing the naming convention popular in transition video genre, Silveira offers an archive that users are unlikely to encounter in chronological order. We can experience Silveira’s cover songs in the order that they were recorded by going to The Cliks’s channel and selecting to view the videos by date added, but the nature of YouTube is such that the videos are organized or suggested to us in a side column through many factors: popularity, temporal engagement, number of comments, and our own previous viewing history, among others, which all take precedence over chronology. Accordingly, when many encounter Silveira’s project, it is out of time, out of sync, and out of order. The temporality of his transition, articulated through cover songs, is jagged and episodic, and refutes simplistic assertions of linearity. Silveira’s performances participate in a number of overlapping genres (the cover song genre, the transition video genre), but more importantly, they circulate as part of a network of various ephemeral affective moments, fragments, or episodes in Silveira’s life that are untethered from a specific coherent narrative governed by linear time. Through this temporal play, Silveira’s project and, more specifically, our listening practices to engage with this project subvert the linear, progressive gendering process. It is, of course, not the responsibility of trans people to teach those of us who recognize ourselves as cisgender about the rigid and violent gendering processes in hetero- and homonormative culture, but this is certainly an impact of Silveira’s project. By elucidating but also resisting how these seemingly natural processes are constructed, performed, and made legible, Silveira’s archive does not simply articulate a single self-becoming (though that would certainly be enough), but exposes the fundamental logic through which normative gendering works. Silveira’s project produces and elicits in its viewers a plurality of situated, bodily knowledges that evidence the precarity and potential of gender constitution – even as performed by a single actor. Each of these videos on its own serves as compelling performances. Silveira is an accomplished and commanding musician who re-invents these songs in ways that are exciting and enjoyable for listeners. Further, when we consider the entirety of his project, we hear new types of musical potential in trans performance. Trans, in Silveira’s archive, manifests as movement across increasingly expansive vocal parameters. Our interaction with his archive renders audible a type of vocal virtuosity made possible by a state of flux – by incessant movement backwards and forwards. Too often, the transgender voice – especially as a musical instrument – is widely understood as unstable and always in danger of betraying an individual’s ability to pass. Silveira’s broader performance project suggests otherwise: there is something worthwhile in each (otherwise lost) vocal articulation of becoming. This hormonal process is generative, neither wholly limiting nor precarious. Silveira’s archive offers further possibilities for non-normative trans temporality by embracing others’ past work and eschewing chronological naming conventions. Deployed through the medium of YouTube, his cover song project enables a different mode of hearing and participating in trans politics – a new relational mode to hear and interact with sonic expressions of gender.

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Notes  1 Fan requests for covers on YouTube eventually led to Silveira releasing an album of cover songs in 2011 entitled Mockingbird.  2 Throughout this chapter, following Susan Stryker and Steven Whittle, editors of The Transgender Studies Reader, we understand the term ‘trans’ in its most capacious sense: referring to anyone “who does not feel comfortable in the gender role they were attributed with at birth, or who has a gender identity at odds with the labels ‘man’ or ‘woman’”. See Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, “Forward”, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), xi.  3 Temporality has often been at the heart of queer thought, and queer figures have frequently been linked with notions of timeliness (often as anachronistic figures of the past or harbingers of the future and in processes of gentrification). Recently, there has been an increasing interest in queer timelines (see, for example, Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives; McCallum and Tuhkanen’s Queer Times, Queer Becomings and a special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on queer temporalities); queer pasts (Freeman’s Time Binds, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings); and queer futures (José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia and a number of collectively written manifestos including a special issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online entitled “A New Queer Agenda”). The impulse behind all of this work is that queerness is consistently bound to notions of time and temporality. In the book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, J. Jack Halberstam argues that queerness is, ultimately, a result of strange temporalities. McCallum and Tuhkanen suggest that this is because “living on the margins of social intelligibility alters one’s pace; one’s tempo becomes at best contrapuntal, syncopated, and at worst, erratic, arrested” (McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011, 1).  4 Progressive trans narratives are structured around conventional, heteronormative logic, through which certain trans experiences are deemed legible and respectable; these temporal ideals align neatly with hetero- and homonormative neoliberal politics, limiting possibilities of difference.  5 While YouTube offers a broader level of access, the work done by transition videos resonates with the work done by early autobiographical trans life writing. Film theorist Michael Renov argues, presciently, that when a video camera is taken up by a confessant, “the camera becomes the ‘camera-stylo’ . . . a moving-image equivalent to the pen, which has so assiduously transcribed two millenia [sic] of confessional discourses” (Renov 1996, 83).  6 Carter, Getsy and Salah 2014, 472.  7 Horak 2014, 572.  8 Horak 2014, 574–576.  9 Spade 2003, 22. 10 Ivan Coyote, “The Rest of My Chest”, in Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon, Gender Failure (Toronto: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014), 69. 11 Thom 2015, 1 (accessed 11 April 2015). 12 Riverdale 2009 (accessed 12 June 2015). 13 Krell 2013, 490. 14 Krell 2013, 488. 15 This is certainly not surprising; Foucault famously argues in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 that “Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth”. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 58. More recently, trans theorist Kate Bornstein has articulated the way that confessional writing continues to be the only genre of writing that trans people can write “and get published” (Bornstein 1994, 13). 16 Fast 2011, 220. 17 Plasketes 2010, 36. 18 Krell 2013, 489. 19 George Michael. “Freedom”. Wham! CBS, 13 August 1984, single. 20 Lucas Silveira, “Lucas Silveira covers George Michael song Freedom”, YouTube Video, 4:24, posted by cliksmusic, 22 September 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9z_qXDOjXU. 21 Covach and Flory 2012, 331. In addition, as a number of scholars have shown – for example, David Brackett in his chapter “The Sound of Autobiography” in the widely used Pop, Rock, and

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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Soul Reader – a characteristic element of singer/songwriter performance is that the songs are often offered (and subsequently heard by listeners) as confessional: as a single artist offering his or her innermost truth with little or no mediation. See David Brackett, “The Sound of Autobiography”, in The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader (Second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 279–281. See, for example, J. Jack Halberstam’s “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy” (Halberstam 2007) and Erik Steinskog’s excellent article “Queering Cohen: Cover Songs as Subversions of Identity” (Steinskog 2010). Bornstein 1994, 3. See, for example, Henry Louis Gates’s study on ‘signifyin(g)’, a verbal strategy through which African Americans exploit connotative signifiers of language in a similar manner. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, 25th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Muñoz 1999, 31. Goldin-Perschbacher 2007, 216. Goldin-Perschbacher 2007, 216. Schewe 2009, 670. Weinstein 2010, 243. Lucas Silveira, “Stay- Rihanna Cover”, YouTube Video, 4:15, posted by cliksmusic, 26 November 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE0hyy-bASM. See, for example, Love’s Feeling Backward, in which she turns to the past to recover an archive of feelings that reveal the shortcomings of queer progressive narratives. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Also, in “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”, Sandy Stone argues against the articulation of trans lives as a “series of erasures . . . but [instead] as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body”. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 232. Ibid., 230. Lucas Silveira, “Crying”, YouTube Video, 3:56, posted by cliksmusic, 31 December 2009, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnushdY4R_E and Lucas Silveira, “Crying- Roy Orbison cover”, 3:52, posted by cliksmusic, 1 February 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovDREyTIfQ. Roy Orbison and Joe Melson, “Crying”, Roy Orbison, Monument 447, July 1961, single. In his article “‘Only the Lonely’: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style”, Albin Zak suggests that these musical choices signify an intimacy for which Orbison was known and loved (Zak 2010, 18–41). k.d. lang and Roy Orbison, “KD Lang & Roy Orbison – Crying”. YouTube Video, 4:04. 13 March 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOXMnYfJCtc. Fillion 2010, 1. Krell 2013, 483. The YouTube Team, “Changes to Related and Recommended Videos”, YouTube Creator Blog, 9 March 2012, http://youtubecreator.blogspot.ca/2012/03/changes-to-related-and-recommended. html (accessed 10 July 2015). This is most famously argued by Jay Prosser in his 1998 text Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, in his widely read critique of Judith Butler’s work (Prosser 1998). More recently, Stephan Pennington has linked this critique with musical performance, asking: “What would happen if we stopped linking gender variance to sexual variance? This is not to say we must completely abandon gender variance as a vector of sexuality, but to argue for an expansion” (Pennington 2013, 860).

Bibliography Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge. Brackett, David. 2008. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, Julian B., David J. Getsy, and Trish Salah. 2014. “Introduction.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (4): 469–481. 324

Covering trans media Covach, John, and Andrew Flory. 2012. What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History. Third edition. New York: Norton. Coyote, Ivan E., and Rae Spoon. 2014. Gender Failure. Toronto: Arsenal Pulp Press. Fast, Susan. 2011. “Bold Soul Trickster: The 60s Tina Signifies.” In She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music, ed. Laurie Stras, 203–234. Burlington: Ashgate. Fillion, Kate. 2010. “Maclean’s Interview: k.d. lang.” Maclean’s, February 13. http://www.macleans. ca/general/crooner-k-d-lang-on-being-in-debt-pro-football-walking-away-from-fame-and-whymany-of-her-songs-arent-that-good/ Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana. 2007. “Not with You but of You: ‘Unbearable Intimacy’ and Jeff Buckley’s Transgendered Vocality.” In Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music, ed. Freya JarmanIvens, 213–233. New York: Routledge. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2007. “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender & Culture 11: 51–58. Horak, Laura. 2014. “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (4): 572–585. Krell, Elias. 2013. “Contours through Covers: Voice and Affect in the Music of Lucas Silveira.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 25 (4): 476–503. McCallum, E. L., and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds. 2011. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Albany: State University of New York Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Orbison, Roy. 1961. “Crying.” Crying. Monument 447. Audio single. Pennington, Stephan. 2013. “A Meditation on the Relationship between Gender Variance and Sexual Variance.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (3): 857–861. Plasketes, George. 2010. “Further Re-Flections on ‘the Cover Age’: A Collage and Chronicle.” In Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plasketes, 11–39. Burlington: Ashgate. Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press. Renov, Michael. 1996. “Video Confessions.” In Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, 78–101. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Riverdale, Joshua. 2009. “Testosterone and the Trans Male Singing Voice.” Trans Guys, December 28. http://transguys.com/features/testosterone-ftm-singing (accessed June 12, 2015). Schewe, Elizabeth. 2009. “Serious Play: Drag, Transgender, and the Relationship between Performance and Identity in the Life Writing of RuPaul and Kate Bornstein.” Biography 32 (4): 670–695. Spade, Dean. 2003. “Resisting Medicine, Re/Modeling Gender.” Berkeley Women’s Law Journal 18 (1): 15–37. Steinskog, Erik. 2010. “Queering Cohen: Cover Songs as Subversions of Identity.” In Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plasketes, 139–152. Burlington: Ashgate. Stone, Sandy. 2006. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 221–235. New York: Routledge. Thom, Kai Cheng. 2015. “Not Born This Way: On Transitioning as a Transwoman Who Has Never Felt ‘Trapped in the Wrong Body’.” xojane, July 9. http://www.xojane.com/issues/ im-a-transwoman-who-never-felt-trapped-in-the-wrong-body. Weinstein, Deena. 2010. “Appreciating Cover Songs: Stereophony.” In Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plasketes, 243–264. Burlington: Ashgate. Zak, Albin. 2010. “Only the Lonely: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style.” In Sounding Out Pop: Analytic Essays in Popular Music, ed. Mark Spicer and John Covach, 18–41. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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23 CONFRONTING THE GENDER TROUBLE FOR REAL Mina Caputo, metal truth and transgender power Susanna Välimäki

“You wanna see my tits? What about my dick?” Mina Caputo (born 1973), vocalist of the long-running alternative metal band Life of Agony1 from New York, enters the stage at the Alcatraz Metal Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium, on 8 August 2014. The other members of the band are already in their places, and ominous, deep guitar and bass drones well up from the amplifiers. She walks to the front of the stage, claps her hands above her head a couple of times and pauses, staring straight at the audience, before grasping her breast for a second or two in a pose that communicates pride and audacity. The audience cheers, whistles and shouts. She blows them kisses while guitarist Joey Z roars in his distinctive, broken voice: “Let’s fucking do this shit together tonight”. Caputo has taken the microphone and writhes around it as she has done for 25 years in performing with the band. The first song is ‘River Runs Red’ and is one of the band’s most famous. It begins with furious drumming, overpowering guitar noise and suicidal lyrics, which Caputo rhythmically delivers in a piercing tone: “I got the razor at my wrist, ‘cause I can’t resist” (LOA 2014). This is the band’s first live performance since Caputo, its vocalist and front figure, came out as a male-to-female transgender person in transition in 2011, changing her name from Keith Caputo to Mina Caputo. Until that point she had performed for over 20 years as the male vocalist and frontman of the band known for its edgy blending of hardcore punk, thrash and sludge metal in the line of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal. Caputo neither hides nor understates her new identity; on the contrary, she alludes to it in a concrete, humorous and empowering way at the very beginning of the concert (see Figure 23.1). Simultaneously, the rhythmic unfolding of the opening gestures, the ambient sonic design of the entrance (typical of the band) and the speedy transition to the fiery first number with a moshing audience seem to suggest that the concert is not about gender or queerness, but about being faithful to the ‘heavy metal ethos’: being what one is, obdurately, and disregarding the norms of mainstream society. There is something exceptionally natural, powerful and

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Figure 23.1 Mina Caputo enters Life of Agony’s first concert after announcing her gender reassignment process (Alcatraz Metal Festival, Belgium, 2014). Screen shot from a video on the band’s official website. Source: LOA 2014

appealing in this particular performance of hardcore metal music, for as regards the art of life, being transgendered is hardcore too. In this chapter, I turn to Mina Caputo as a case study to discuss how transgenderness2 is negotiated in contemporary heavy metal music. Taking my point of departure from queer musicology and transgender studies,3 I aim to first develop transgender music research as a field that examines music in a transgender-conscious and transgender-empathetic way (Välimäki 2013a, b); second, to contribute to the queering of heavy metal music (Smith 1997; Sarelin 2009; Gregory 2013; Clifford-Napoleone 2015) and, third, to contribute to heavy metal studies with a transgendered perspective.4 By practicing reparative reading (Sedgwick 2003), my focus is on how Caputo communicates transgenderness, and gender in general, to a larger audience, and how transgender subjectivity, meanings and pleasure finds its space, even under the pressures, strictures and effects of the heteronormative culture. My research materials are mixed, ranging from audio and audiovisual recordings to ethnographic observation materials and public media texts, including websites and online discussion boards related to Caputo, Life of Agony and heavy metal culture. I am particularly interested in heavy metal culture, where (supposedly) straight and queer scenes intermingle. Because of this overlapping of straight and queer scenes in the same space (Clifford-Napoleone 2015), normative conceptions of gender are effectively undermined. Indeed, right after the second number in the concert mentioned at the beginning, Caputo said, “You wanna see my tits?” The audience cheered and shouted, and Caputo

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continued against a powerful drumbeat, “What about my dick?” and, after a short pause, “You wanna fuck me?” At that moment, with the aggressively growling addition “Come on” by guitarist Joey Z, a hefty metal riff launched the next piece, ‘Method of Groove’. The audience, most of whom came to the concert because they are devoted fans of Life of Agony or because they subscribe to heavy metal culture, cannot paper over the transgenderness of a vocalist who makes such remarks and gestures. A transgender act constitutes a different case from a cisgender (that is, non-transgender) artist. Though cisgender artists may play with gender conventions in transgressive ways, the audience knows or thinks they are not transgendered, whence the audience may continue living in a world in which (supposedly) no real trans people exist. The openly transgender musicians, by contrast, force the public to confront the gender trouble for real: to experience real, serious trans presence, the ‘actual threat’ of the collapse of the binary gender system and personal insecurity about the gender of the performer and the gender order in general. Thus, openly transgender musicians make, hopefully, the audience to include trans people in their worldview – making them see that transgender people are ‘real people’. Although it is true that real trans presence on the stage may simultaneously stir the existing transphobia in more ignorant or hostile segments of the audience, the only way to fight against transphobia and for a more gender-diverse culture is to increase the visibility of and serious attention to transgender people everywhere, thereby establishing transgenderness as normal. In this regard, popular music plays a critical role.

Masculinity – available to all genders Life of Agony established its hardcore, experimental and alternative metal image with its acclaimed debut album River Runs Red (1993), presenting an aggressive, dark and moody soundscape, the influences of which range from strands of heavy metal to punk, grunge and industrial music.5 Intricate drumming and guitar noise dominate the thick, layered textures. Complex forms with tempo changes are typical (from very slow to fast), as are affective break-ups that have a strong sense of physicality and kinaesthesia, spurring the audience to mosh. The band’s song lyrics address inner turmoil, angst and emotional pain, social alienation, the search for identity and the meaning of life. They often revolve around narratives of loneliness, loss, non-existent family relations, despair, a sense of being unable to live, death and suicide. The lyrics are poetic, elliptical and repetitive, and Caputo’s vocal delivery emphasizes their rhythmic quality. The melodies are mostly monotonous, chromatic and without tonal resolution. Often they linger on one pitch and then circle that pitch in a stepwise motion, thus contributing to the imagery of pain. Caputo’s voice can be characterized as protean, capable of alternating between different vocal registers and styles within one piece. Most often she uses highly tensed, heavy rock screaming in the tenor/alto register or a more relaxed, soft and deeper crooning. It is precisely her unique, whiny voice, conveying both suffering and power, that reaches out to her many fans. The music of Life of Agony constructs extreme masculinity, as is the case with most heavy metal music, with loud, low timbres, aggressive rhythms, brutal textures, muscular playing and macho ‘gang vocals’ (co-growling band members). The type of masculinity

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evoked by the music is not, however, monolithic; it is a spectrum, as is evident from the emotional lyrics constructing vulnerable subjectivity, Caputo’s androgynous voice (both before and after transition) and music that displays abrupt changes of different, extreme affects.6 It is crucial here to grasp that, in accordance with the constructed, performative and technological nature of any cultural expression of masculinity (or femininity), all metal masculinities are open to individuals of all genders and bodies, to cis- and transgender people, to men, women and those beyond the gender binary. Masculinity is a subject position as well as an expressive style available to all genders (see Halberstam 1998). The fact that masculinity is not bound to the male body (be it cis or trans),7 or any particular kind of body, is highlighted by Caputo’s style of performance in Life of Agony concerts. As Life of Agony’s female vocalist and frontperson, she has not adopted any stereotypical female role in heavy metal culture (such as a video vixen or symphonic metal soprano), nor is she more passive, quieter or less aggressive than the men in the band. Despite her transition and more feminine body, her stage behavior is much the same as before, although her appearance is now, arguably, more relaxed and open. She has not changed her overpowering performance style, which includes moving freely about and appropriating the stage, abundant swearing or visits to the mosh pit and crowd surfing. Nor has the audience ceased moshing. (See Figures 23.2–23.3.) Caputo’s performance style and gender expression in Life of Agony concerts can be understood as empowering to any woman, trans or cis, because it demonstrates that every woman has the right to define for herself what a woman is and what kind of woman she is. Gender identity is therefore a question of self-determination, and ultimately, there are as many genders as there are people. The fact that Caputo has not reshaped her vocal expression in Life of Agony in a more feminine direction (in the traditional sense; her solo output forms a different case) might be viewed as both a prerequisite of the genre and a (trans) feminist stand: Caputo’s voice and performance style construct a liberating message. Women can (and should) be allowed to be masculine, feminine or non-feminine and to mix masculinity and femininity in whatever ways they wish, and they should be allowed to enjoy whatever music in whatever way they wish.8 Being a woman does not necessarily mean having to compromise over the hardcore or alternative metal aesthetics and its celebration of masculinity. There is no one right way to be a woman. This stance is both empowering and transpolitically enlightening, as instead of stereotyping transgender people, it yields more openly alternative genders; masculinities and femininities get queered in Life of Agony’s music. This creates space and inner freedom for both trans and cis people, with regard to their gender expression.9 That the band continues to be active and as popular now that it has a transgender female vocalist (instead of a supposedly straight male singer) verifies how much queer space and acceptance there is in heavy metal culture for gender non-conformity, despite the mainstream media representation that often presents heavy metal as overtly or only straight, macho masculinist and even intolerant of women who behave independently or of queer people. Other stories exist (Hickam & Wallach 2011; Gregory 2013; Hill 2014). For instance, queer anthropologist and heavy metal scholar Amber S. Clifford-Napoleone (2015, 144) points out that the best way for metal scholars to deal with effeminophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, ableism and ageism is to write the diverse story of heavy metal.

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Figure 23.2–23.3 Moshing, stage diving and crowd surfing at a Life of Agony concert, 5 April 2015, Club Aqua, Jacksonville, Florida (Southeast Beast Festival). Screen shot from a film directed by Cameron Nuñez.

Coming out and being truthful to the heavy metal ethos Caputo has informed the public of her gender reassignment process in many ways since 2011, including giving interviews to music and cultural magazines and media platforms, such as The Advocate (Anderson-Minshall 2011) and Graspop Metal Meeting Television (Verhoeven 2015), and via social media, such as her official webpage, official Facebook pages and Twitter account, thereby often contributing directly to transgender activism. Many of her recent solo songs deal directly with transgenderness. She also performs in 330

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LGBT happenings, and as already pointed out, may refer to her transgenderness in Life of Agony gigs.10 After Caputo came out, Life of Agony’s official website started to use her new name and to refer to her using female pronouns. On the website’s opening page, the news line refers to the matter as follows, under the headline ‘Life of Agony’s Triumphant Return to the Stage in 2014! The Original “River Runs Red” Line-Up Emerges with Mina Caputo’: Life of Agony performed on multiple festival dates in Europe over the summer [2014], the first shows since the group’s lead singer Mina Caputo (formerly known as Keith Caputo) came out as transgender in 2011. . . . “We’ve helped so many people around the world cope with their emotional struggles through our music, it was time to get back out there,” said [the bass player Alan] Robert, regarding the group’s decision to reunite. “Our songs connect with people on an emotional level because they were written out of real pain and hardship. It doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, blue, green, gay, straight, trans or whatever. Our fans know it comes from a real place and have stood by us. We’ve always worn our hearts on our sleeves. That is just who we are and that is something that will never change.” (Life of Agony’s official website) This statement, targeted at fans and metal audiences, claimed that the band’s music is and always has been about emotional pain in general, which anyone can identify with. It further states that the musicians draw their musical energy from their own struggle. This idea of being truthful to oneself and coping with hardships by means of music is an essential part of the heavy metal ethos. Equally important is the shared sense of being an outsider or an outcast and against the mainstream normative culture, belonging to a metal community in which one can express one’s true self without any pretense or hypocrisy (Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000 [1991]; Wallach et al. 2011). This builds an ethos of acceptance (Hickam & Wallach 2011, 260; Clifford-Napoleone 2015, 58–59, 144) based on ideas of marginality, solidarity, kinship, truthfulness, resistance and power with which to fight the (normative) world together. This ethos of acceptance is evident in the way heavy metal media, Life of Agony fans and metal audiences have reacted to Caputo’s transgenderness. The news has been circulated and discussed in newspapers, cultural journals, music magazines and online media platforms, and, for example, reviews and advertorials of Life of Agony’s concerts regularly mention it. Metal people have commented on various Internet discussion boards, such as heavy metal-themed online magazines, community and news websites, and YouTube, and by writing comments on Caputo’s webpage, Facebook page and YouTube channel. The discussions largely show support for her, and transphobic comments and negative judgements are in the minority. Here are some typical examples, taken from the YouTube comments on Caputo’s interview posted on the online music news platform Artisan News Service in 2013 (YouTube comments 1):11 I do not care you were my bro and now you are my sis :D (‘Blah Anger’) ‘I would rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not’ Kurt Cobain (‘Jerry Brice’) 331

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I dont fucking care what she does LOA sounds great still and their happy who cares. (‘ronartest77’) The following examples are comments on the YouTube download of one of Life of Agony’s most popular songs ‘This Time’ (YouTube comments 2): keith . . . mina . . . watever i have alot of respect for caputo!!LOA!! (‘Cmm98’) The alternative path was self-destruction. You don’t choose the body you live in, but she chose not to hide. Respect, Mina. And . . . we are happy you’re back with the Life Of Agony too :). (‘Andrea C.’) fan of Life of Agony since they burst onto the scene, I also enjoy Keith and later Mina’s solo stuff, she makes me feel empowered to make the decisions I want to make . . . you may not understand her choices but they are hers to make and she is so brave for following her path, whevever it takes her. (‘djstevie 69’) In heavy metal journalism and online discussions, more often than not it seems to be precisely the heavy metal ethos of acceptance that guides the (positive) conversation rather than the principle of supporting the rights of LGBT people. This is reflected particularly in comments that indicate writers are not well aware of or do not understand transgender issues in relation to correct pronouns, names and terminology, and yet the tone is accepting: Regardless of the sex change . . . LOA rules. I hope Keith found some peace of mind as Mina and lives a happy life. Good on her for finding the courage to really try to find herself. Respect. (‘munnomunno’) (YouTube comments 2) We may not necessarily understand Mina’s new gender (keeping the penis, has a girlfriend, but identifies as a woman), but it takes tremendous courage for her to do this. (Bram Teitelman in Metal Insider; Teitelman 2012) Heavy metal culture may accept transgenderness more easily than some other genres as this culture is based on a celebration of the modes of being that mainstream society fears, rejects and considers abject. For fans, heavy metal is about not conforming (Clifford-Napoleone 2015, 144), and the same can be said of transgenderness. A gender outlaw – such as a woman with a male body – is just one type of ‘metalhead outlaw’. This ethos of acceptance and being true to oneself instead of surrendering to the normative mainstream society can be described as ‘the metal truth’. Here is how one fan crystallizes this truth (YouTube comments 1): The whole point of the punk and hardcore movement was to stand up for each other because we were all different and did not fit in with the norm of society. We either

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were or wanted something else. It gave us a place to go, people to be with, music to identify with. It gave us solace and solidarity. Anyone who says they’re an LOA fan would be supporting Mina in her endeavors because she’s finally doing what she wants and saying fuck the system. (‘Duane Scott’) The ethos of acceptance is an important theme for Caputo in Life of Agony concerts. For example, after the concert at the Graspop Metal Meeting Festival in Dessel, Belgium, in June 2015, Caputo shared two photos on her Facebook page, alluding to the embrace of difference and intersectionality. One shows a disabled man crowd surfing in a wheelchair, and the other shows Caputo hugging him (Figure 23.4). As the entry for the posting she wrote, “This is

Figure 23.4 Mina Caputo’s Facebook entry after the Life of Agony concert in Dessel, Belgium, 19 June 2015, including photographs by Tim Tronckoe (above) and Jef Matthee (below).

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what happens at LOA concerts. Iz Nothing but REAL LOVE. An over-abundance, of fearless LOVE”. This ‘love’ can be understood as referring to the ethos of (queer) acceptance. However, most of the media and Internet discussions about Life of Agony or Mina or Keith Caputo deal with music and not gender. Even if someone mentions Caputo’s transgenderness, the discussion soon turns to Life of Agony albums and concerts or to the importance of Life of Agony’s music in one’s own personal life history (YouTube comments 1): Been a fan of her since i bought the Life of Agony ‘Ugly’ tin can cd. So much emotion. Beautiful. It gave me so much strength in times of sadness and weakness. Love and respect. (‘DolleHengst’) Mina has kept many a teenage kid from killing themselves with her songs showing them they are not alone. I have to say I was one of those kids, and she will always have a place in my heart. (‘chris altobelli’) Cmon Keith . . . Ahh you helped me through some rough times and provided some of the most intense electrifying live shows so no matter what I got your back brother . . . err sister. (‘Tyrone Watson’) These examples are consistent with my observations at recent Life of Agony concerts in which it has seemed clear that the concerts are not really about the band’s recent gender news, but rather about music, just as they have always been. Most of the LOA fans and heavy metal people come to the concerts because of the music and not because of Caputo’s transgenderness – or perhaps despite her transgenderness. When comparing, for example, the concerts or audiovisual recordings of concerts before and after Caputo’s transition, the audience looks similar, and the dominant concert behaviors and audience practices, such as moshing, have remained similar. Since Caputo’s coming out, the band probably also lost some (transphobic) audience, although neither the band, Caputo, nor her agent have viewed the loss as amounting to a significant number, and the band still plays to full houses, thanks to its cult following.12 Although Caputo had queer fans prior to her transition, it was only after her coming out that a (new) greater trans following developed. Yet, this new trans audience forms such a small minority in relationship to the overall audience at LOA gigs that one could not conclude from merely observing the audience that the band’s singer happens to be a trans icon. Certainly, though, for many trans fans of Caputo, the LOA concerts may be as much or more about gender transgression than about heavy metal music.

Show me respect and I’ll show you right back It may be that for many metal people, Caputo’s coming out enhanced the credibility and sense of real pain in the music of Life of Agony. This means that, because of Caputo’s transgenderness, the angst in the band’s old songs may be heard as representing gender dysphoria, though the quality of the angst, pain and non-conforming is naturally open to

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different interpretations.13 Yet many queer fans have listened to Life of Agony with a queer ear right from the beginning and long before Caputo came out. As a fan reports (YouTube comments 1): As someone who use to be a HUGE LOA fan and identifies as QUEER, their music helped me through alot of extremely difficult times. for someone to go to the depths of themselves and beyond to be who they truly are is a great act of courage and an awakening. educate yourselves and eradicate the hate. (‘midnitelipz’) More fans, including non-queer ones, have noticed this interpretative dimension after Caputo came out (YouTube Comments 1): there was always so much torment in all of the LOA lyrics. (‘Hemi Cuda’) Listening to Life of Agony it’s pretty damn obvious that she wasn’t happy as Keith. (‘Troels Hœgh’) Since his-her coming out as transgender, LOAs lyrics make so much more sense. (‘Olukold Meust’) I always complained about Keith Caputo (Mina) and what I thought was just a babyish cry me a river attitude and a o woe is me kind of thing. When I found out about her transformation I thought, wow, NO WONDER WHY. . . . I support MIna 100 percent and even though I haven’t really been into LOA for a while I want to see LOA to support her and let her know there are many people who are not bigoted assholes in the scene. (‘Lisa Metal’) Good examples of Life of Agony songs, suggestive of transgendered listening, are ‘Respect’, ‘Lost at 22’ and ‘Weeds’, all from different albums. ‘Respect’ (from River Runs Red) displays a ritualistically pumping atmosphere and rhythmically excitable texture with chirping riffs. The bitter lyrics tell about a major disappointment in human relations, mixed with loneliness, aggression, empowerment and self-respect. The lyrical ‘I’ of the song has been abandoned by her friends, and now she insists on defiant respect for herself; only after that will she be ready to respect others. Respect is a mutual act. The sense of rancour, vehemence and force is enhanced with a chorus in which hyper-masculine growling by guitarist Joey Z and bassist Alan Robert (“Show me”) alternate with Caputo’s more melodious bellowing: “Respect and I’ll/(Show me)/Show you right back/(Show me)”. From a transgendered point of audition, we hear the loss that many trans people experience with families, friends and others after coming out, as well as the lack of respect many experience with prejudiced people everywhere. At the same time, the song is a big-time power song that transforms the trauma into a source of empowerment. ‘Lost at 22’ (from Ugly) portrays a young person’s inner confusion, being at odds with society and not knowing what the right choices – if any – are. The music consists of repetitive and monotonous riffs in one and the same tempo, as if constructing a musical prison;

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this suits a representation of gender dysphoria very well. ‘Weeds’ (from Soul Searching Sun) is a more straightforward grunge piece with cryptic lyrics about a life one was never able to live and the resulting sense of suffocation – familiar experiences for many trans people. These three pieces were played in succession in a concert at Hamburg’s Markthalle in June 2015. Between ‘Respect’ and ‘Lost at 22’, Caputo, referring to her transgenderness, thanked the audience for the respect and the support she had received from fans: Thank you. So beautiful. I already thank you. Fucking Germany. . . . You know how many years we fucking shared together? Thank you for sticking with us. You know all the hills and valleys. Thank you for being open-minded, loving, accepting [loud cheering from the audience], radical [loud cheering continues]. I thank you for allowing Life of Agony to come to your home. ‘Cause that’s the most special fuckin’ reward. Thank you very much. (LOA 2015) Then, after ‘Lost at 22’ and ‘Weeds’, which were played in succession without a break, she continued: Am I the only transsexual in the house? I am fuckin’ awesome. I mean, it’s not ego. You got to love yourself. Or else there’s no fuckin’ point left. Embrace yourself. No matter what it is [audience cheers]. (LOA 2015) Such comments by Caputo are empowering to trans people in the audience, since it is seldom that a trans person talks aloud about her transgenderness to hundreds or thousands of people and gets applause and cheers. Simultaneously, for non-trans fans Caputo’s casual way of talking communicates that transgenderness is not some strange medical (or psychiatric) condition, but a matter of identity struggle and a social fight to which anyone can relate.

The diva and her voice Caputo’s voice is one of the distinguishing signatures of the sound and style of Life of Agony. Her vocal style has often been described as expressing an exceptionally emotional and vulnerable voice, like a sonic mirror of the struggle of subjectivity. The effect is enhanced by anguished lyrics portraying inner chaos. The heightened sense of fragile subjectivity in Caputo’s voice is a reminder that the voice – whether singing or speaking – is associated with an individual’s uniqueness. According to the philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005), it is precisely the individual tones of a voice – rather than the semantic content of the words – that most directly expose how each human being is unique and distinguishable from all others. It is this singularity that makes us listen to the personal history behind a voice, and this aspect has become emphasized in Caputo’s voice in a new way as this revealed such a new and touching knowledge about the singer’s personal history and torment. This offered listeners new, signifying dimensions behind Caputo’s grieving vocals. Indeed, Caputo could now be heard as a classic diva in whose exceptional voice and affective performance fans hear a diva’s personal agony elevated to a divine art (e.g., Koestenbaum 1993; Morris 1993; Leonardi & Pope 1996).

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After Caputo’s coming out, some fans expressed their concern about what would happen to Caputo’s voice during the gender reassignment process, especially in connection with hormone therapy, possible vocal fold surgery and the new female identity, which might make her voice more ‘girly’ or ‘woman-like’. However, Caputo’s voice and vocal style have not really changed in this sense since transition, as related to her performances in Life of Agony (her solo output is a different case). It is a fact that male-to-female trans women do not experience such a dramatic change in their voices through hormone treatment as female-to-male trans men (Leibetseder 2012, 166). Any change in the voice is rather a question of vocal training and volition. Furthermore, Caputo’s voice and vocal style have actually undergone many changes and transformations during her overall career of more than 25 years. The voice on Life of Agony’s first album (1993) is more tensed, screaming and aggressive than on the next two albums (1995 and 1997), in which she began using a more relaxed, soft, crooning style. Both before and after transition, she has tended to use different styles, registers and tones within one piece, mixing features traditionally considered feminine and masculine. We might say that Caputo’s voice has always been a queer and trans voice because of her high, emotional and vulnerable male voice and low, aggressive and powerful female voice. Voice as a queer substance draws on the fact that it can be very difficult to assign it a gender (Wood 1994; Välimäki 2005, 320; Hawkins 2009, 22; Jarman-Ivens 2011, 18–19). In sum, Caputo’s vocal sound does not possess (just) one kind of categorical gender.

Identifying with monsters It is, of course, true that Caputo may reshape her voice more in the future. This can already be heard in her recent, singer-songwriter type of solo output, which exposes a contralto voice in the lineage of Sade, Tracy Chapman, Nina Simone, Tanita Tikaram, Toni Braxton, Amy Winehouse and others. Caputo’s solo output is not heavy metal, but alternative rock, and whereas the output of Life of Agony is not explicitly about transgenderness, Caputo’s recent solo output is.14 The first album Caputo made after coming out and under the name of Mina Caputo, As Much Truth as One Can Bear (2013), is a concept album about identity and transgenderness – being true to oneself even if it means a tricky road, as the name of the album indicates. Stylistically, the music is romantic rock with an intimate singer-songwriter feel, yet strong, old-school rock ballads dominate. It addresses transgenderness as a question of the art of life, related to existential pain, identity search and self-appreciation. This is why it appeals not only as a transgender album, but equally as music about a search for identity in general. An example is the album’s first track, ‘Identity’, which can be understood as a straightforward representation of gender dysphoria. A hard rock ballad in C major, the piece employs basic rock instrumentation (drums, bass, electric guitar with some distortion, piano and back-up vocals) and alludes to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and others. The lyrics are direct and the melodies compact, while the form and harmony are simple, with an absence of instrumental sections or solos. All this emphasizes the sense of sincere narration, as does the steady contralto tone. Yet tiny details hide unique experiments – a reminder of the uniqueness of each storyteller. The verses employ the basic formula (“I am not a man, I am not a woman”) that is varied, and the (first half of the) refrain asks for healing (“Sew me back together again”). (For further details, see Table 23.1.) When interviewed about the release of the video for the popular music journal and media platform Billboard (Titus 2013), Caputo

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Table 23.1 Structure of Mina Caputo’s ‘Identity’ song and music video Section Intro [about 1 mm.] Refrain II1 [8 mm., two of which are half shorter] Verse1 [8 mm.]

Lyrics

Look at me, all of me Look at me, all of me

Refrain II2 [6 mm., two of which are half shorter]

I am not a man I am not a woman All I could taste Is my burning heart Sure I’m not a man Sure I’m not a woman All I could wear Is a willing smile Sew me back together again Back Sew me back together again Back Together again I am not a man I am not a woman All I could do Is keep on crying Sew me back together again. . . Look at me, all of me Look at me, all of me

Refrain II3 [6 mm., two of which are half shorter] Coda [4 mm.]

Look at me, all of me Look at me, all of me Sew me back together again

Verse2 [8 mm.]

Refrain I1 [10 mm.]

Verse3 [8 mm.]

Refrain I2 [10 mm.]

Source: Caputo 2013

Harmony Pedal point (B → C) C Em / Am Em / Em / C Em / Am Em7 / Em7 / G / G7 / C / Em / Am / Em / F/C/ G / G7 /

Sonic Details

Mina at bed, whip, skull Piano chords, acoustic guitar, tambourine

Blurred face, facial details, knife, looking in mirror, facial hair

Back-up vocals doubling or alternating with the lead

Looking in mirror, stroking hair, singing, combing, dressing up, walking at rubber band, tattoos, looking in mirror in a dress Looking in mirror, stroking hair, singing, embracing a man in bed, singing, in front of a mirror, in underwear, standing with a man, butterfly tattoos Singing in front of the mirror in a dress, halfnaked, tattooed man approaching from behind, man caressing Mina in front of a mirror Man looking into the mirror with Mina, smiling, cuddling, close-up of the man’s face, a kiss

C / Em / Am / Em / F/C/ G / G7 / FC/G/ Fmaj7 C / Em / FC/G/ Fmaj7 C / Em / G7 / G7 / C / Em / Am / Em / F/C/ G / G7 /

Image

Overdriven guitar sound, back-up vocals

Hammond

Handcuffs, cuddling, kissing C Em / Am Em / Em / C Em7 / Am Em / Em / C Em / Am Em / Em / C Em / Am Em7 / Em7 / G / G7 / C / Cmaj7 /

Mina dancing, whipping, licking skull, knife, together in bed, playing with SMBD kit, being intimate

Mina in bed alone as at the beginning

Mina Caputo and transgender power

described her gender dysphoria and severe depression in 2008 with words that resonate with the song lyrics: I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror anymore. I couldn’t play. Living in my testosterone and my masculinity was killing me. It was just a nightmare for me. Words can’t describe the torture someone like me feels or anyone that’s gender fluid. However, the music video, directed by Dan Quigley, is more baffling than the song, as it contains sexual imagery. It is shot in an almost home-video style, with Caputo appearing in rock-style underwear, heavy makeup and some BDSM accessories. Her long hair, big earrings and high heels, as well as the naked skin and erotic imagery, allude to a conventional understanding of femininity. But the black nail varnish, ample tattoos and torn stockings make the picture more ambiguous, as does the leather man with whom she is intimate. The actor here is the New York underground artist Kenyon Phillips, known for his band Unisex Salon and other gender-transgressing acts. Most of the video shows Mina – or Mina and Kenyon – looking in a mirror, as a direct illustration of the lyrics (“look at me”), symbolic of examining one’s identity and the transsexual’s gap between her inner sense of herself (true gender identity) and the outer image (what other people see). The atmosphere in the video is serious, yet playful and hopeful, since Kenyon is presented as supporting Mina’s (trans) female identity and seeing her as she wants to be seen. Caputo had already dealt explicitly with transgenderness in her solo output before coming out.15 In 2010, under the name of Keith Caputo, she released a music video for her song ‘Got Monsters (I No Longer Exist)’, from the album A Fondness for Hometown Scars (2008). This piece too is a hard rock ballad (compare, for example, ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd, ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ by Guns N’ Roses or ‘Dreamer’ by Ozzy Osbourne), with basic rock instrumentation (vocals and backing vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, including piano and Hammond organ). The long ambient intro with electronic noise winds around a descending bass line with a steady, gentle chord progression (Gmaj7, D/F#, Bm7, Em9), slow rock beat, piano arpeggios and a melancholy atmosphere. The song is in chorus-bridge form, with some tiny irregularities (such as the length of some phrases) constructing a sense of authenticity and uniqueness. Caputo sings with a soft and heavily raspy voice, which when combined with the lyrics communicates intimacy and tiredness. Hushed electronic noise and reverberating guitar gestures can be heard as the sonic reflections of being broken – the haunting ‘monsters’ of transgenderness. (For further details, see Table 23.2.) Without the video, the song can be understood as describing any agony in life or a haunting trauma. However, the video (directed by Niko Bikialo; Caputo 2010) makes explicit that this is about transgenderness and self-acceptance. The song lasts five-and-a-half minutes, while the music video lasts over ten minutes. The song is made into a short film with added cinematic passages in the beginning, middle and end. At the beginning of the video, we see a youngish, beautiful and androgynous-looking person (Vané Russo) waking up (it is later affirmed she is a woman and transgendered). She looks in a mirror and seems to see a different person staring back (Keith Caputo).16 (See Figures 23.5–23.6.) During the video, we see the woman at a doctor’s office receiving hormone treatment, then at a tattoo parlor, a hair salon and café, on a train, in the recording studio and on the Coney Island Boardwalk. The mirror theme is repeated throughout the story. The woman (her inner body image and identity) looks in the mirror from which her outer image (the way other people see her) stares back. A climax takes 339

Table 23.2 Structure of Mina Caputo’s ‘Got Monsters’ music video Section

Lyrics

Harmony

Cinematic prologue

Intro [1:07] [about 10 mm.]

Chorus1 [9 mm.]

Bridge1 [6 mm.]

Interlude1 [4 mm.] Chorus2 [8 mm.]

Bridge2 [6 mm.] Interlude2 [4 mm.] Cinematic episode [4:27]

I’ve got monsters How ‘bout you? Was born a monster Do you hide your monsters too? Now everybody else in here What has become of you? I’ve got monsters, how about you?

pedal points B / D / B/ pedal points D / B / Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / G D/F# / Em / G D/F# / Em / G D/F# / Em /

Sonic Details

Image

Tubular bells, traffic, clock, silence, emergence vehicles, traffic and other noise increases, a car starting Ambient

A woman sleeping in bed, waking, close-up, the ‘other’ (Keith) in the mirror, alternating between the woman and Keith Getting up

Drumbeat begins Piano arpeggios

Morning routines Shower, female body exposed

Piano full chords for each beat

Doctor’s office, the ‘other’ (Keith) in the mirror, doctor’s examination, doctor writing a prescription

Backing vocals

Medicine bottles

G D/F# / Em / Em / C/D/ G D/F# / C/E / C/E / D / Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / G D/F# / Em / G D/F# / Em /

We got monsters We suffer like the rest Man, I don’t know, G D/F# / and I don’t care Em / What a lovely home we share G D/F# / Em / What a tangled web we have weaved Now everybody else in here. . . Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 /

Hormone injection Distorted guitar sounds

In a train Walking at Coney Island Boardwalk, playing ‘Play Me’ – piano at the Boardwalk, playing piano at café

Guitar gestures Ambient cinematic sounds, sound of train, sound of train increasing

Picture of Elvis, tattoo studio, pet dog Hair salon, the ‘other’ (Keith) in the mirror Dressing up for a more feminine look, café, a female ‘friend’ judging, the ‘other’ (Keith) in the mirror, leaving, being hurt

Interlude3 [4 mm.] [8 mm.] [06:16] Bridge3 [11 mm.] [06:47]

Coda [8 mm.]

Now everybody else in here What has become of you? I tiptoed up to my daughter’s room And I saw her monsters too I’ve got monsters, how about you? Yes I’ve got monsters too [rit.] Yes I’ve got monsters too

Cinematic epilogue [8:37]

Train, changing clothes back Watching photos (“This is love!”) Recording session in studio, mixing, walking on the Boardwalk, meeting a friend, hugging, talking, kissing

Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / C/D/ G D/F# / C/E / C/D/ G D/F# / C/E / C/E / D / D / Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / Gmaj7 / D/F# Bm7 / Em9 / Em9 / G / D/F# / Em /

Noise

Balcony at night with a view, being alone, candles, wine, bathroom

Ambient, heart beat, tubular bells, traffic sounds

Woman’s finger reaching for Keith’s finger, the ‘other’ (Keith) blurring in the mirror, wristwatch on nightstand, close-up of Keith in bed, being awake at night, woman at the mirror, end credits

Source: Caputo 2010

Figure 23.5–23.6 Music video ‘Got Monsters’: Trans woman (Vané) as she experiences herself and her reflection in the mirror (Keith).

Susanna Välimäki

Figure 23.5–23.6

Music video ‘Got Monsters’ continued.

place at a café where she meets her ex-partner, who condemns her transgenderness and denies her female identity. Vané/Keith represents the conflict between the inner and the outer identity/image, yet this is resolved at the end: Vané reaches out a finger to Keith’s finger in a gesture reminiscent of Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam (1511, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican). The ‘new I’ gets the ‘old I’s’ blessing and a spark of (a happier transgender) life is launched. Also gender-politically progressive is the fact that Vané, as the (trans) woman Keith wants to be, is not a feminine stereotype, but more androgynous in appearance, with small breasts, short hair, tattoos, unisex clothes and no makeup (most of the time). Both music videos depict the identity struggle of a transgender person. Searching for or having one’s own voice is a metaphor for identity struggle and personal strength. In terms of her output as singer-songwriter, Caputo’s trans voice is of great significance socially; it is a symbolic ‘giving voice’ to gender-variant people. The voice serves as a metaphor for political agency and becoming a subject, with everyone having the right to talk about their own experiences in their own voice and thus let themselves be heard (Lanser 1992; Cavarero 2005, 169).

21st-century transgender musicians as activists Mina Caputo can be considered as one of the most prominent, self-identified transgender musicians on the contemporary metal, punk and rock scene, ranked alongside Marissa Martinez, the guitarist and vocalist in the California death metal or grindcore band Cretin, and Laura Jane Grace,17 the lead singer and guitarist in the Florida-based punk or alternative rock band Against Me!, each of whom publicly came out as a trans woman in 2008 and 2012 respectively. If the 1990s saw the coming out of gay and lesbian musicians such as Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü, Otep frontwoman Otep Shamaya or most famously Rob Halford of Judas Priest, the 2000s continued with the coming out of transgender musicians.18 And, more and more transgender musicians are appearing in mainstream (i.e., not exclusively 342

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queer) venues in the 2010s in all musical genres, rocking the binary gender system and its heteronormative basis and undeniably demonstrating the actual diversity of genders, not only in music but also in society at large. Openly transgender stars increase public awareness and acceptance of trans people, and popular music stars, who receive copious attention in the media, are among the most prominent transgender celebrities. It is also true that people really listen to musicians, which is why musicians may change ordinary people’s conceptions about gender variance. For many Life of Agony fans, for instance, Caputo’s coming out was the first time they really thought about transgender people and the courage it sometimes takes to be true to oneself (cf. Rolling Stone 2012). Popular music is a powerful technology of gender,19 and, as such, a major cultural site for people’s identity construction. Not only does this music have an impact on the general public’s conceptions about gender and contribute to society’s progress towards a more liberated and multifarious gender system, but it also provides an important identity platform for gender-variant people, role models and spokespersons for the transgender community, all of whom strive for a more tolerant and safe society. With her identity-based music making agenda, Caputo creates a space for gender diversity and queer subjectivity in heavy metal and hard rock music environments, traditionally considered male-dominated, heteronormative and macho masculine. There is every suggestion that the future of heavy metal, as well as popular music in general, is becoming more queer; not straight or gay, but decisively queer insofar as queer does not refer solely to alternative subcultures, but to an existing impulse that queers the mainstream.

Notes  1 Abbreviated as LOA.  2 By ‘transgender’ I refer to individuals whose expression of gender disrupts conventional assumptions of the gender order and puts them outside the normative sex/gender relations and the binary gender system (Girshick 2008, 2, 14–15; Elliot 2012, 1). Often this means experiencing some kind of disconnection between body and internal body image, gender identity, gender expression or gender role. ‘Transsexual’ refers here to those who usually seek hormones and/or surgery to live as men or women (Elliot 2012, 1).  3 For queer musicology, see, e.g., Peraino (2006), Jarman-Ivens (2011), Leibetseder (2012) and Hawkins (2016); for transgender studies, see Stryker and Whittle (2006) and Stryker and Aizura (2013).  4 For other contributions to the study of heavy metal and gender, see, e.g., Walser (1993), Weinstein (2000 [1991]) and Purcell (2003). On critical gender strategies by female rock musicians, see Leonard (2007), Reddington (2007), Goldin-Perschbacher (2008) and Gregory (2013).  5 The band has made four studio albums in all (River Runs Red, 1993; Ugly, 1995; Soul Searching Sun, 1997; and Broken Valley, 2005), one compilation album (1989–1999, 1999) and several live albums and DVDs (Unplugged at the Lowlands Festival ’97 [live album], 2000; River Runs Red Again: Live 2003 [live album/DVD], 2003; and 20 Years Strong – River Runs Red: Live in Brussels [live album/DVD], 2010).  6 As Clifford-Napoleone (2015) argues, it is the rich tapestry of different masculinities and mixtures of masculinities and femininities that is the nucleus of the gender palette of heavy metal culture, from hyper-masculine BDSM leather men to bleached-blonde glam guys in tights and makeup, from hyper-masculine women to bearded machos, and from leather women and masked monsters to heavy metal butches and bikers of all genders, just to mention some examples.  7 In other words, masculine music does not have a more natural or direct connection to the male body than to the female body or to a body beyond the binary. This means that even if there is a great deal of masculine angst in metal music, it does not have to indicate a misogynist position. Misogyny lies in the oppressive social structures and practices of heavy metal music that favor men over women, not in the masculinity of music as such. Certainly, there is blatant misogyny, as well as homo- and 343

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 8

 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

transphobia, in metal culture, and these attitudes vary from one subgenre to another, but not necessarily more than in the mainstream society. My approach here is queer feminist and trans feminist, which takes into account the existence of more than two genders; it emphasizes the differences, intersectionality and complexity of gender; it considers transgender issues significant for gender theory and feminist thinking in general; and it aims to keep the gender categories fluid, open and inclusive. On debates and tensions between queer, transgender and feminist theories, (see, for example, Elliot (2012)). Caputo’s manner of asking the audience to take care of each other and pick up those who fall into the mosh pit and her talk of love are feminine behaviors from the traditional perspective. Caputo was already doing this when she was performing as Keith, and it is partly related to the fact that an 18-year-old fan died at a Life of Agony concert from moshing injuries in 1994. This is why she often reminds the audience that the band does not want to lose any more fans. It has been typical at recent Life of Agony concerts for Caputo to refer in passing to her transgenderness a few times, but most of the time there is no mention of her gender at all. In quotations of online discussion board comments, the pen name of the commentator is given after the comment, in brackets and inverted commas. Yet it is also true that Caputo, like other transgender artists, confronts substantial discrimination because of her gender. It would however require another article to examine the hardships of being trans in heavy metal culture. The band has not released any new music since Caputo’s transition. Yet, in 2016, the band announced that a new studio album A Place Where There’s No More Pain will be released in Spring 2017. Caputo has released several solo albums since the late 1990s. Coming out is a complex process and naming a place and time is often artificial, since people may come out to different people at different times and over a long period. Meanwhile, there may be others around who are more aware and may draw the conclusion long before the coming out becomes official. Yet for the public at large, celebrities usually announce their transition in a public way, such as giving a media interview. I am using the name ‘Keith’ here in order to highlight the gender dysphoria theme in the video. The video was released when Caputo was still using the name Keith. Laura Jane Grace and Mina Caputo performed together on a mini-tour in 2013, and Laura Jane Grace mentioned Caputo as an inspiration for her own coming out (Shaw 2012). Other famous transgender heavy metal or hard rock musicians are Jade Starr (the lead singer of DreadCircus), Marcie Free (the lead singer of King Kobra, Signal and Unruly Child) and Jackie Enx (the drummer of Rhino Bucket and Warrior), for instance. Cf. de Lauretis (1987).

Bibliography Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published as A piu voci: per una filosofia dell’espressione vocale (Roma: Feltrinelli 2003). Clifford-Napoleone, Amber R. 2015. Queerness in Heavy Metal Music. New York: Routledge. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Elliot, Patricia. 2010. Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites. Aldershot: Ashgate. Girshick, Lori B. 2008. Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men. Hanover: University Press of New England. Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana. 2008. Sexuality, Listening, and Intimacy: Gender Transgression in Popular Music, 1993–2008. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ann Arbor. Gregory, Georgina. 2013. “Transgender Tribute Bands and the Subversion of Male Rites of Passage through the Performance of Heavy Metal Music.” Journal for Cultural Research 17 (3): 21–36. Halberstam, Jack (Judith). 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Hawkins, Stan. 2009. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, Stan. 2016. Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality: Routledge Studies in Popular Music. New York & London: Routledge. 344

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Audio and audiovisual materials Caputo, Mina. 2010. “Got Monsters” [official music video]. Accessed 15 August 2015. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=D9GhaCdLtd4. Caputo, Mina. 2013. “Identity” [official music video]. Accessed 15 August 2015. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=gLy8v9Jz6Wc. 345

Susanna Välimäki LOA. 2014. “Life of Agony at Alcatraz Festival in Brussels, Belgium, August 2014.” Fan-shot video footage available at the band’s official website. Accessed 15 August 2015. http://www.lifeofagony. com. LOA. 2015. Live Concert at the Markthalle, Hamburg, 16 June 2015. Audio recording for ethnographic research purposes (material held by the author). Verhoeven, Steven. 2015. “Interview: Life Of Agony / Mina Caputo at the Graspop Metal Meeting, 19 June.” Accessed 15 August 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNwcTnUIAnw.

Websites Life of Agony’s Official Website: Accessed 15 August 2015. http://www.lifeofagony.com. Mina Caputo’s Official Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/officialminacaputo. Mina Caputo’s Official Homepage: http://www.minacaputo.com. Mina Caputo’s Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/minacaputo. Mina Caputo’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/keithcaputotv. YouTube comments 1. User comments to a YouTube streaming of Mina Caputo’s interview in Artisan News Service 2013. 212 comments. Accessed 15 August 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mQxcRoY1fko. YouTube comments 2. User comments to a YouTube download of ‘This Time’ by Life of Agony. 403 comments. Accessed 15 August 2015. https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=_HnDVKiWDYM.

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INDEX

808s and Heartbreak 281; Exploring Kanye West’s 285–97 1000 Forms of Fear 90, 93, 97, 99 1860s 220 1870s 211, 215, 221–2 1880s 221–3 1890s 221, 223 1920s 171 1930s 140 1940s 139–40, 142 1950s 10, 29–30, 66, 73, 139, 156–7, 191, 216, 282, 300 1960s 2, 14, 30, 37, 45, 65, 129, 133, 135, 138–40, 142, 144, 157, 182–3, 185–6, 189–93, 239, 256, 301, 316–17, 319–20 1970s 2, 4, 8, 125, 127, 135, 142, 144, 158–9, 171, 173, 183–5, 189, 193, 198–9, 211, 221, 233, 242, 256, 300–1 1980s 4, 10, 13, 18, 82, 118, 121, 125, 142, 144, 152–4, 156–7, 160, 182, 191–2, 256, 262, 289–90 1990s 5, 8, 10, 52, 82, 124, 142, 179, 182, 192, 243–5, 262, 268, 290, 305, 342, 344 2000s 142, 182, 184, 192, 268, 290, 342 aboriginal artist 48–51, 54–7 acoustic 97, 103–4, 108, 173, 187; guitar 65, 67–8, 70, 73–4, 187–9, 260, 316, 338–9 Adele 269, 272 Adichie, Chimamanda 233–5 Aerosmith 290 aesthetics 23, 70, 77–8, 85, 135, 146–7, 161–2, 183; Afrofuturism and 245–6; audiovisual 89, 96–9; gangsta rap 166, 168, 171, 173, 176; gender and 5, 11, 13, 193, 197, 199, 206, 212, 216; genderqueer erotic 282, 307; hip hop 105, 229–30, 244, 248, 250; performance and 8, 220,

271–2; pop 64, 90, 92, 94–5; sonic 89, 93, 100; transgender issues and 309, 329; transnational 48; video and 107, 114, 295; voice and 257, 276 affect 1, 5, 52, 94, 97–8, 133, 142, 147, 282, 296, 307, 319, 321–2, 328–9, 336 Afrofuturism 212; Erykah Badu between post-soul and 242–51 Against Me! 300, 342 ageism 19, 329 agency 1, 5, 12, 17, 22, 30, 51, 99, 113, 123, 139, 159, 168, 206, 213, 218, 237, 249. 254–6, 263, 269, 275, 277–8, 314, 342; anti-fame, arduous past, and 90–3; female 13–15, 260–2; ironic 93, 96–7, 100; performance and 6, 8, 11; strategies of 54–7 a-gender 282, 300, 303–4, 310 Akon 291 Alan Parsons Project, The 290 Albee, Edward 220, 224 Albertine, Viv 154 Albion Band 183 Allcock, Maartin 187 ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’ 223–4 Allen, Kris 292 Allen, Robert 220 All the Pretty Horses 305 alter ego 29, 104, 229, 231 alternative: dance 199; metal 283, 326, 328–9; rock 154, 304, 337, 342 alto 182, 185, 189, 191, 328 American Sign Language 97 ‘Ammonia Avenue’ 290 Amos, Tori 2, 118, 155 analogue 212, 242–6, 249–50, 289 androgyny 2, 329, 339, 342 Angel Haze 282, 300, 303–4 ankh 249, 251 372

Index anti-feminist 212, 234, 236–7, 239 Antony and the Johnsons 309 Askerøi, Eirik 14, 63–76, 171, 180 Astor Place Riot 218, 227 audiovisuality 2, 5, 7, 51–2, 84, 86, 90, 92, 134, 166, 177–8, 327, 334; aesthetics 89, 96, 98–9; analysis 213, 281, 283; context 8, 53, 77–9; culture 77, 79, 85, opacity 125–6 Auslander, Philip 6, 53, 169, 203, 213, 216, 221–2, 226, 258 authenticity 3, 48, 53, 77, 166, 212, 250, 293–4, 296, 314–17, 339; emotional 44, 273; first person 14, 73, 268–70, 272, 276–7; gender roles and 6, 213, 256, 282, 303–4; hip-hop and 23, 289; ‘homosocial’ 13–14, 36–7, 39–42, 45; identity and 8, 12, 163, 253–4, 257–9, 264–5; live music and 216; male 134, 170, 190–1; in pop music 267–78; popular music and 5, 100, 190, 253–6, 258 auto-tune 213, 276, 278, 281, 289, 290, 293, 294, 296; Musical Botox 272–4 B-52’s 309 ‘Baby’ 13, Justin Bieber’s duet with Ludacris 15–31, 33 badman 170, 180, 288, 291 bad nigga 170, 180 Badu, Erykah: as Badoula Oblongata 248; between post-soul and Afrofuturism 242–51 Baduizm 243, 246–8 Bakhtin, Mikhail 69, 72, 171 Balawan 48 Bambaataa, Afrika 289–90 Bannister, Matthew 10, 13–14, 35–47, 64, 190–1, 256 baritone 25, 67, 72, 173, 182, 188–90, 192–3, 306 Barnum, P.T. 217–21 Basic Fix 305 ‘Battle Cry’ 303–4 Bayton, Mavis 10, 124, 154, 197–8 BDSM 339, 343 Beastie Boys, the 31, 67, 289 Beatlemania 14, 41 Beatles, the 13–14, 183; homosociality and the early Beatles 35–46 Beauvoir, Simone de 155 Beckham, David 255–6 beliebers 13, 15, 18, 32 Berry, Chuck 37 BET (Black Entertainment Television) 82 ‘Bey feminism’ 212, 239 BEYONCÉ (album) 212, 229–31, 233, 236–7, 239 Beyoncé (artist) 8, 23, 78, 99–100, 118, 161, 212, 269–72, 290, 317; Hip hop feminism and black femininity 229–40; ‘Video Phone’ 102–15 Bieber, Justin 13, 261; ‘Baby’ duet 15–32 Billboard 15–16, 66, 125, 337

binarism 7, 89, 127, 197, 199, 204–5, 282, 302–3, 306–8, 310, 328–9, 343; see also binary gender bisexuality 11, 302, 304 Björk 14, 49, 57, 118, 182, 192 Black Actress 83–5 Black&Sexy TV 82–3 Black Cracker 309 blackface 223–5 Blacking, John 154 black music 29, 242–3, 245, 247, 271; narrative of 23–5 blackness 170, 178, 212, 224–5, 233, 249, 271 Blondie 119–20, 125 ‘Blow’ 237–8 ‘Blue’ 238 Blueprint, The 289 blues music 65, 127, 156, 245 body, the 5–6, 8, 11–12, 49–54, 92, 100, 112, 146, 149, 169, 197, 199, 206, 213, 231, 236, 244, 254, 270–1, 273, 275–6, 293, 307 Boiler Room 196, 203–5, 207 Bonehill, Bessie 211, 215, 221–2, 225 Bono 18, 69; see also U2 ‘boom-chicka-boom’ 63, 65, 68, 74 Boone, Pat 24–5, 30, 32 ‘Borderline’ 316 Bornstein, Kate 282, 317, 323 ‘Bow Down’ 234 Bowie, David 146, 158, 337 Bradby, Barbara 10, 13, 15–34, 41, 44, 198–9, 271, 273 Braxton, Toni 337 Brecht, Bertolt 85, 255 Broadway 133; High notes, high drama 137–48 Brown, James 123 Buckley, Jeff 316–17 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 82 burlesque 220, 238 Burns, Lori 55, 58, 78, 102–16, 155, 212, 257, 281, 285–99 Burton-Hill, Clemency 23 Bush, Kate 118, 158 Busta Rhymes 290 butch 119, 121, 307, 343; not bitch but Queen Bee 126–9 Butler, Judith 1, 5, 7, 11, 57, 126, 203, 213, 254, 272, 307, 316, 324 Butsch, Richard 218 ‘Buy U a Drank’ 104–5, 115 Byrds, the 183–4 Cabaret 137, 142, 146–7 camp 133, 137–8, 142, 145–9, 271–2, 274, 308 Caputo, Mina (also Keith) 283; metal truth and transgender power 326–44; see also Life of Agony 373

Index Carpenters, the 68 Carreras, José 137 Caruso, Enrico 137 Cash, Johnny: Markers of vulnerability and nostalgia in 63–75 castrato 138 Cavarero, Ariana 336 celebrity 111, 160, 264, 270, 276, 287, 343–4; culture 6, 255, 285, 291, 294–6; female 7–8, 91, 211–13, 235, 239, 257–8; pop 89, 213, 257, 259, 262; status 77, 89–100, 211, 213, 255, 293 ‘Chandelier’ 77; vulnerability in Sia’s 89–100 Changeling 305 Chapman, Tracy 337 ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ 317 chord progression 23–4, 69, 93, 173, 339 Christianity 17, 53, 66, 242 chromaticism 144 Cilla 199–200 cisgender 282–3, 300, 304–6, 315, 319, 322, 328–30; musicians and transgender anthems 309–10 Citizen Audience, The 218 Civil Rights Movement 212, 243, 251, 301 Clapton, Eric 183 class 3, 5, 8–9, 31, 78, 134, 163, 212, 229–30, 233, 281, 285, 287, 296, 300; conflict 226–7; middle 82, 172, 215, 218–20, 226, 231, 244, 249, 289, 303; working 14, 43, 66, 68, 74, 118, 140, 171, 218, 224, 227, 239, 249 Clement, Jack 67 Cliks, The 313, 321–2; see also Silveira, Lucas Cline, Maggie 221 ‘Closing Time’ 188 Clowes, Edward 204 clubber 201, 203–7 Club Cultures 216 cock rock 2, 155, 221 Cohen, Al 20 Cohen, Leonard 188, 314, 317 Cohen, Sara 154, 156–7 College Dropout, The 289 Collins, Patricia Hill 229, 231–2, 238–9, 281, 288, 291 Connell, R. W. 286–7 Constansis, Alexandros 282, 306, 315 contralto 337 convention: aesthetics and 48, 91; gender and 2, 16, 26, 78, 92, 112–14, 117, 122, 152, 177, 211, 221–2, 225–6, 230, 253, 286–7, 302, 317, 319, 321–3, 328, 339, 343; linguistic 3; music and 52, 54–6, 97–8, 141–2, 144, 147, 154, 156, 158, 166, 169–70, 172–3, 177, 220, 229, 268, 271, 281, 285, 289, 291–2, 294, 296–7, 315–16 Conway, Gerry 187, 190 Cooke, Sam 23 ‘coon’: shouter 215, 222; songs 223–5, 227

Cooper, Brittney 230, 326; see also Crunktastic corporeality 2, 9, 55, 283, 302; voice and 7, 270 Coulter, Bridget 213, 267–80 countertenor 308 country 64–6, 73–4 cover songs 68, 193, 282, 313, 315–18, 322–3 Cox, Laverne 7, 300 Coyote Grace 306 Coyote, Ivan 314–15 ‘Crank That’ 104–5, 115 ‘Crocodile Rock’ 24, 32 crooning 146, 148, 291, 328, 337 cross-dressing 300, 314 Crunktastic 230, 326; see also Cooper, Brittney ‘Crying’ 282, 316, 319–21 Cudi, Kid 291, 294 culture: African American 169, 245, 247; black 30, 176, 245, 271, 292; celebrity 6, 255, 285, 291, 294, 296; dance music 196, 216; hip-hop 105, 178, 230, 233, 281, 285, 287–9, 291–2, 297; performance 211, 215, 217, 219–20, 226; pop 7, 12, 16, 52, 89, 91, 94, 99, 115, 127, 137, 147, 190, 220, 229–30, 237, 239, 247, 256, 262, 292, 318; popular music 102, 153, 163, 267 Cure, The 158 cybertheory 244, 246 Cyrus, Miley 7, 269–75, 300 D4L 104 dance music 135, 155, 196, 200, 202–6, 216, 307; and gender 197–99 Danzig 67 Dash, Damon 289 data moshing 293–5 Dawson’s Creek 82 Degenerettes, The 282, 305, 307 Denny, Sandy 134, 182–3, 185–90, 192–3 Dery, Mark 244–6 Destiny’s Child 119, 232, 234, 238 ‘Diamonds’ 92 Dibben, Nicola 98, 213, 253, 267 Diddley, Bo 29–30 digital 79–80, 109, 118, 155–6, 212, 242–6, 249–50, 292 digitalisation 212, 243–4, 246, 250 Dion 23–5, 30 Dion, Celine 99 Dirty Gold 303–4 diva 2, 12, 146, 155, 271, 308; and her voice 336–7 Dixie Chicks 67 DJ 38–9, 82, 119, 124, 126, 167, 169, 282, 306; producer 135, 196, 201, 203–4; women, sonic stereotyping, and the dancing 196–207 Djupvik, Marita B. 78, 117–31 DMX 290 374

Index Domingo, Plácido 137 Donegan, Lonnie 37 Donizetti 144 doo-wop 23–5, 28, 30 drag 5, 7, 126–8, 145, 222, 282, 301; Conchita Wurst–genderqueer 307–9 drag queen 7, 145, 282, 308 Drake 31, 291, 297 Drake, Nick 185 ‘Drunk in Love’ 235–7 Durham, Aisha 238 Dwight, John S. 217 Dyble, Judy 134, 184–5 Dybo, Tor 134, 182–95 Dyer, Richard 155, 160, 239 Dylan, Bob 66, 183–6, 260 Earth, Wind & Fire 248 ECM 183 Edwards, Leigh 65–6, 69, 74–5 Elderkin, Nabil 293, 295 Electra Records 118 electric: 97, 185, 187, 189, 191, 194, 260; folk 183–4; guitar 65, 67, 124, 154–5, 186–8, 191, 201, 221, 261, 337, 339 electronic music 48–9, 135, 196–8, 202, 205, 247, 276, 290, 301, 304, 339; electroexperimental 57; electro-funk 289; electropop 104; electro-punk 307 Elliott, Missy (Melissa Arnette) 78; female Masculinity and 117–29 Eminem 16, 31, 99, 175, 282, 290–1, 303–4 empowerment 100, 124, 167, 177, 263; female 2, 233, 236–9, 276, 278; gender and 7, 213, 253, 283, 303; male 125–6; Mina Caputo and 326, 329, 335–6; Sia and 91, 99 Epstein, Brian 39–40, 42 equality 1–2, 129, 233, 301, 307 erotic 49, 94, 98, 109, 124, 236, 262, 282, 307, 339 ethnicity 6, 8, 31, 81, 127, 166, 178, 226, 231, 234, 238, 300; identity and 53 ethno-pop 51, 53, 55 Eurovision Song Contest 7, 282, 306–9 Eve 119 Everything But The Girl 162 experimental music 48, 57, 85, 247, 283, 328 FAAB (female assigned at birth) 301 Facebook 158, 283, 330–1, 333 Fairport Convention 134–5, 182–94 fake naivety 145, 213, 254–6, 263 falsetto 24, 138–40, 148, 318, 320 fans 1, 6, 8, 23, 25–8, 30–2, 40–1, 78, 82, 91–2, 100, 118, 125–6, 129, 161–2, 213, 229, 253, 256–8, 264, 271–2; beliebers 13, 15, 18, 32; dance music 196–7, 201, 203–4; ‘Fairporters’

189; female 13, 15, 267, 274; Life of Agony 283, 327–9, 331–7, 343–4; male 12–13; Silveira 313–14, 317, 323; versus the haters 18–22 Fariña, Richard and Mimi 184 Fast, Susan 2–3, 10, 123–4, 129, 182, 262, 316 Feinberg, Leslie 301 female-to-male (also FTM) 282, 305–6, 315, 337 femininity 11, 14, 36, 40, 42, 44–6, 50–1, 55, 77, 91, 98, 100, 117, 119, 121–2, 128, 135, 144–6, 175, 196–7, 199–200, 202–6, 211–12, 250, 253–4, 256, 259, 267, 329, 339–40, 342–4; Black 212, 249, 271; emphasised 112, 115; hegemonic 78, 115; hip-hop feminism and the embodiment of 229–39; masculinity and 2–4, 7, 37, 56, 78, 89, 117, 124, 153, 176, 197, 208, 329, 337; naturalness and 89, 213, 273, 276; patriarchy and 264, 271; staging 215–27 feminisation 19, 78, 97–8, 127–8 feminism 2, 4–6, 12–13, 57, 81, 99–100, 104, 115, 144, 159, 161, 182, 192, 194, 207, 213, 303, 307, 329, 344; Black 124, 212; hip-hop 229–39; transnational 300 Ferry, Bryan 146, 183 Finnegan, Ruth 153–4 Five Kings of Syncopation 224–5 Five Percenters 246–7, 251 Flappy Bird 79 ‘***Flawless’ 233–5 fluffy music 135, 196, 199–203, 205 folk music 41, 65, 68, 134, 182–7, 189–93, 301, 316 folk rock 134, 182–6, 190–3 ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ 66–7 Fornäs, Johan 268, 276 ‘Fotheringay’ 189 Foucault, Michel 11, 323 Frampton, Dia 292 Fray, The 292 ‘Freedom’ 313, 316, 318–19 Frith, Simon 2, 5, 10, 49, 53–4, 126, 213, 226, 257–8, 268, 276 FTM see female-to-male Furler, Sia see Sia Future 31, 297 Gabrielle 301 Gadir, Tami 135, 196–210 Gaga, Lady 261, 317, 321; Beyoncé’s ‘Video Phone’ 102–15 Gallagher, Liam 162 gangsta rap 166, 169–72, 174, 176, 178–80, 288 GarageBand 156 ‘Gategutt’ 134, 166, 169; the musical layering of a street boy 171–80 gay 3, 6, 11–12, 19–20, 39, 82, 231, 271, 297, 302, 304, 309, 342–3 375

Index gaze 3, 8–9, 104, 106–8, 111, 113, 115, 145, 169, 172, 213, 237–8, 264; Beatles and 14, 36, 38–9, 41, 45; male 78, 92, 102–3, 110, 112–14, 127, 129, 262–3; spectacle and control 261–3 gender: conventions in 1–3, 16, 26, 78, 92, 112–14, 117, 122, 152, 177, 211, 221–2, 225–6, 230, 253, 286–7, 302, 317, 319, 321–3, 328, 339, 343; diversity 283, 328, 343; dysphoria 334, 336–7, 339, 344; equality 129, 233; fluidity 7, 196, 198–9, 211, 302, 339, 344; identity and 5, 44, 55, 64, 68, 89, 92, 98, 128, 134, 148, 153, 161, 163, 197–8, 200, 203, 207, 212, 230, 254, 267, 277–8, 282–3, 302, 304, 309, 315, 323, 329, 336–9, 342–3; inequality 78, 239; musical climaxes and gender politics norms 137–48; 5–6, 8, 55, 91, 123–4, 135, 197, 199, 213, 253; outlaw 302, 306, 317, 332; performativity and 1–2, 6–7, 78, 89, 98, 122, 178, 203, 211, 213, 222, 254, 272, 282–3, 306, 313–14, 317–8, 320–1, 329; politics 8, 78, 133–5, 230, 232, 248–9, 317, 319; race and 3, 8, 66, 114, 134, 166, 211–13, 229–30, 234; research 3–4, 7, 10, 77; roles 2, 4, 6, 25, 78, 117, 126, 138, 177, 203, 212, 242, 248–50, 272, 301, 303; stereotypes 134–5, 186, 196, 206, 213, 253, 264, 302; subjectivity and 2, 4–5, 7, 11, 259, 327 Gender and Power 286 Gender Outlaw 317 genderplay 3, 7, 92, 316 genderqueer 282, 300–4; Conchita Wurst 307–8, 310 gesture 117, 251, 254; gestural parameter 78, 104, 106–12, 114; musical 50–2, 199; performance and 7, 49, 53, 57–8, 70, 73, 295, 320, 326, 328; rap and 169, 176–7; videos and 95–6, 98, 205, 261, 339–40, 342 ‘Gettin’ Some’ 104, 115 ghetto 172, 235, 288 ‘Ghost’ 232 Gibson, Andrea 304 Gibson, William 244 Gilbert and Sullivan 139 Gilroy, Paul 127, 212, 249 ‘Girl from the North Country’ 66 Girl’s Tyme 234 Goffin, Gerry 41 Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana 317 Gordon, Kim 154 gospel music 64–7, 82, 122, 242 ‘Got Monsters’ 339–41 Grace, Laura Jane 300, 342, 344 Grammy Awards 118, 231, 239 Grande, Ariana 256, 269–71, 275 Gray, Macy 119 Greig, Charlotte 183 Greve, Gunnar 167, 169

Greyson, Amasha 309 Griffiths, Dai 18, 148 Grossberg, Lawrence 268 ‘Grown Woman’ 238 Guetta, David 16, 92, 99 Guns N’ Roses 339 ‘Hailie’s Song’ 290 Halberstam, J. Jack 11, 64, 78, 117, 121, 124, 126–8, 197–8, 206–7, 283, 297, 323–4, 329 Halford, Rob 342 Halttunen, Karen 220, 226 Hanna, Kathleen 306 Hansen, Kai Arne 77, 89–101 Haraway, Donna 197–8, 205 Hard Day’s Night, A 41 Harrison, George 38, 41 Harris-Perry, Melissa 237–8 Harry, Deborah 125; see also Blondie Harvey, PJ 2, 118, 155 ‘Has Been’ 162 haters 13, 26, 30–2; fans versus the 18–22 ‘Haunted’ 232 Hawkins, Stan 1–12, 38, 53, 55, 64, 74, 90–3, 98–100, 115, 117–18, 128–9, 145–6, 149, 158, 168, 173, 179, 183, 194, 203, 213, 254–8, 260, 262, 267, 271, 337, 343 Hayles, N. Katherine 244 Hayward, Susan 107, 115 Hearing Film 8, 82, 86 ‘Heartless’ 290–2 ‘Heart of Glass’ 125 heavy metal music 2, 126, 175, 283, 326–7, 328–34, 337, 343–4 hegemony 5–8, 216, 281; femininity and 78, 115; masculinity and 35–6, 112, 115, 281, 286–8, 291, 294–7 ‘Help!’ 44 hermeneutic 2, 5, 58 heroine 138, 217 heteronormative 8, 13, 16, 22, 26, 78, 166, 175, 197–9, 205–6, 244, 247–9, 282–3, 302, 315, 317, 327, 343 heteropatriarchy 212, 233–4 heterosexist 134, 175, 178, 247 heterosexuality 5, 8, 14, 36, 78, 114, 124, 127, 175, 177, 197, 207, 233, 236, 244–5, 249, 254, 304 hip-hop 17, 78, 122–5, 134, 156, 166, 169, 177, 179, 212; culture 105, 178, 230, 233, 281, 285, 287–9, 291–2, 297; doo-wop and 23–5, 28, 30; feminism and the embodiment of black femininity 229–39; generation 243, 251; genre 104–5, 285, 292, 303; record scratch in 83–5; stereotypes in 121, 126–9; videos 110, 118, 129 Hogan, Ernest 223 376

Index Holly, Buddy 29–30, 37 Hollywood 137, 174, 179, 262, 288 homoeroticism 36, 45, 175, 177 homophobia 4, 19, 127, 176, 286, 288, 297, 329 homosexuality 6, 38, 134, 175, 300 homosociality 16, 30, 134, 175–6, 178, 288; authenticity 13–14, 36–7, 39–42, 45; and the early Beatles 35–46 hook 26, 68, 102, 108–11, 115, 172–3, 178, 290, 297 hooks, bell 78, 113, 127–9, 236, 281, 287 Horak, Laura 314 Horrocks, Roger 123 HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) 314 Hubbs, Nadine 4, 11 ‘Hurt’ 14, 63–4, 67–74 Hurt, Byron 281, 287, 297 hypermasculinity 78, 127–8, 134, 166, 170, 175–8, 281, 285, 287–8, 291–2, 335, 343; see also masculinity I Am . . . Sasha Fierce 104, 229, 231–2 identity 152, 167, 224, 226, 228–9, 232, 234–5, 237, 257–9, 261, 293, 297, 329, 331; cultural 2, 317; formation 3, 63, 170; gender and 5, 44, 55, 64, 68, 89, 92, 98, 128, 134, 148, 153, 161, 163, 197–8, 200, 203, 207, 212, 230, 254, 267, 277–8, 282–3, 302, 304, 309, 315, 323, 329, 336–9, 342–3; musical 64–6, 69, 72–4, 157–8, 160, 188, 191, 264, 268–9, 326; politics 10, 13, 89, 98, 148, 257; race and 16–18, 167–70, 173, 178, 230–1 IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) 53 ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’ 213, 253, 259–6, 265 impersonation 5, 145, 211–12, 215–6, 226; male 221–2; racial 223, 225 ‘I’m Your Man’ 314, 317 indie 4, 10, 154, 191, 256 inequality 16, 78, 230, 239 instantiation 1, 218 instrumentalist 117, 119, 123–4, 126, 187, 224 Instruments of Desire 212 interpretation 1, 5, 11, 18, 20–2, 25–6, 28, 32, 45, 68, 90, 92, 94, 100, 104, 109, 112, 114–15, 124, 134, 144, 198, 200, 208, 212, 237, 242, 250–1, 255, 263, 267, 270, 273–4, 276, 283, 335 intersectionality 212, 229–30, 232–3, 237, 248, 251, 281–2, 287, 333, 344; gender euphoria and 300–10 intersex 7, 10, 302, 305 ‘I Put a Spell on You’ 44 irony 93, 100, 161, 171, 176, 271 Irwin, May 216, 224–6; and the rise of the ‘coon shouter’ 222–3 Islam 246–7, 251

i-Tunes Radio 234 ‘I Walk the Line’ 64, 66 Jack the Lad 183 Jagger, Mick 67, 183 see also Rolling Stones Jarman, Freya (also Freya Jarman-Ivens) 10–12, 68, 74, 100, 115, 122, 133, 137–51, 175–6, 180, 270, 271, 297, 308, 337, 343 Ja Rule 290 Jay-Z 23, 230–2, 235, 237, 289–90 jazz music 67, 127, 154, 247, 301; from Jenny Lind to the jazz age 215–26 Jenner, Caitlyn 7, 300 Jennex, Craig 282–3, 313–25 Jethro Tull 183 Jewish 223–4 Jhally, Sut 78, 112 Joey Z 326, 328, 335; see also Life of Agony John, Elton 24, 32 Johnson, E. Patrick 249 Jones, Jesse 134; Staging the street boy 166–80; (see also Tekeste, Jonas) Jorgenson, Christine 282, 300 ‘Julia’ 44 Kane, Big Daddy 123 Kaplan, E. Ann 8, 12 Kassabian, Anahid 8, 77, 79–88 katajjaqi 14, 55, 58; Tagaq and the 52–4; see also throat singing Keith, B.F. 220, 224 Kennedy, John F. (JFK) 251 Kern, Jerome 139 Kibler, Alison 223 King and I, The 139 King, B.B. 18, 124 King, Ben E. 23 King, Carole 41 King, Martin Luther (MLK) 251 K-pop 161 Kraviz, Nina 135, 196–7, 203–8 Krell, Elias 315–16, 321 Krims, Adam 123, 171–2, 180 Kristeva, Julia 307 Lacan, Jacques 22 Lafrance, Marc 10, 55, 78, 102–16, 281, 285–99 La Gata 282, 300, 304–5 lang, k.d. 2, 10, 320, 324 Larsen, Marit 8, 213; and strategies of faking 253–65 ‘Last Goodbye’ 316 Latifah, Queen 123 Led Zeppelin 3, 10, 124, 183, 337 Leibetseder, Doris 12, 282, 300–12, 337, 343 Lennon, John 14, 35–46 377

Index Leonard, Marion 4, 10–11, 154, 194, 197–8, 206, 343 Leslie, Chris 187–91 Le Tigre 306–7 Lewis, Andrea 83 Lewis, Jerry Lee 65 Lewisohn 37, 39 LGBT 7, 145, 331–2 LGBTIQ 308–9 LGBTQ 4–5, 11, 297, 317 LGBTQI 302 Liege & Lief 185–7, 190–1 Life of Agony (LOA) 283, 326–37, 343–4; see also Caputo, Mina (Keith) Lil’ Kim 126 Lilliestam, Lars 183 Lil Wayne 31, 290 Lind, Jenny 8, 211; to the jazz age 215–27 Little Richard 44, 123 LL Cool J 123 Lorde, Audre 236 Lordi, Emily 229, 238 ‘Lost at 22’ 335–6 Love, Courtney 2, 155 Love, Heather 319 ‘Love Lockdown’ 291–2 LSD 42, 44 Lucia di Lammermoor 138 ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ 44 Ludacris 13; Justin Bieber’s duet with 15–32 Lymon, Frankie (and the Teenagers) 24–5 Lyte, MC 123 M2M 253; see also Larsen, Marit McCartney, Paul 38–42, 44, 50, 57 McClary, Susan 10–11, 74, 129, 144–5, 175 McLachlan, Sarah 2, 10 McRobbie, Angela 2, 10, 94, 155, 159, 233 Madonna 118, 182, 192, 231, 316 Malcolm X 251 male-to-female (also MTF) 283, 302, 305, 314, 326, 337 Mama’s Gun 242 Markie, Biz 290 Marr, Johnny 158 Martin, George 39 masculinity: available to all genders 328–31; Beatles and 35–7, 45; black 126, 170–1, 178, 225, 281, 285–6, 288, 292, 296; Doing Hip-Hop Masculinity Differently 285–296; femininity and 2–4, 7, 37, 56, 78, 89, 117, 124, 153, 176, 197, 208, 329, 337; gender and 4, 7–8, 78, 89; hegemonic 35–6, 112, 115, 281, 286–8, 291, 294–7; hyper 78, 127–8, 134, 166, 170, 175–8, 281, 285, 287–8, 291–2, 335, 343; and Missy Elliott 117–129; music and 2–3, 13–16, 144–6, 153,

155, 159, 166, 175–8, 183, 190–1, 197–8, 211, 213, 221–3, 225, 230, 237, 261–2, 275, 282–3, 307; spectres of 63–74; tattoos and 56; technology and 273; as a transcultural journey 29–31; trans- 313, 318–19, 337, 339, 343 ‘Matty Groves’ 187, 191–3 MEN 306–7 Merman, Ethel 140–1 ‘Method of Groove’ 328 mezzo-soprano 138 Middleton, Richard 6, 9–12, 36, 44, 74, 268 mime 97, 126 mimesis 282, 307 Minaj, Nicki 16, 270–2, 274–5 ‘Minneapolis Sound’ 237 Minnelli, Liza 137, 140, 142, 147 minstrel 68, 223, 225 mirror phase 22, 31 misogyny 2, 19, 22, 79, 91, 104, 124, 127, 176–7, 237, 282, 288, 297, 317, 331, 343 ‘Mister Sister’ 309 Monáe, Janelle 248–50 Monteverdi 144 Moore, Allan F. 1, 5, 18, 73, 100, 183, 259, 268–70, 276 Moorey, Gerry 126 Morrissey, Steven 146, 158, 213, 257 ‘Mother’ 44 Motown 183 Motta, Carlos 305 Mould, Bob 342 ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ 184 MTF (see male-to-female) MTV 8, 12, 233, 304 Mulvey, Laura 78, 108–9, 237, 261–2 Murphy, Maria 282–3, 313–25 music: analysis 2, 5, 9, 13–14, 18, 25, 31, 49, 55, 73, 78, 91, 100, 104–5, 111, 114–15, 133–5, 161, 168, 175–6, 193–4, 196, 201–2, 205–7, 212–13, 232, 237, 239, 254, 257, 262–3, 269, 277–8, 281, 283, 285, 288, 293, 300; conventions and 52, 54–6, 97–8, 141–2, 144, 147, 154, 156, 158, 166, 169–70, 172–3, 177, 220, 229, 268, 271, 281, 285, 289, 291–2, 294, 296–7, 315–16; convergence with other media and 2; research 3–5, 13, 135, 152–3, 182, 281–2, 328 musicianship 1, 186 musicology: ethno- 6, 153, 184; popular 3, 5–6, 179, 213; queer 6, 283, 328, 343 MySpace 158 ‘My Way’ 317 MythScience 250–1 Ndegéocello, Me’Shell 2, 155, 249 Neal, Mark Anthony 281, 288, 291 Negus, Keith 2, 133–4, 183 378

Index New Amerykah 212, 249–50 ‘Next Lifetime’ 248, 250 Nickelback 183 Nicol, Simon 184–5, 187–92 Nilsen, Lillebjørn 171–4, 180 Nilsen, Rudolf 171–3, 176 Nine Inch Nails 63, 68–9 ‘No Angel’ 235 N.W.A. 289–90 objectification 54, 78, 92, 102, 112, 127–8, 175, 177–8, 232, 236, 238, 261–2, 275 Ochs, Phil 184 O’Connor, Sinead 183 Ogbar, Jeffrey 134, 170, 180, 288 Oliver! 141 Ono, Yoko 37, 42–6 opera 12, 133, 138–40, 144–8, 234, 320 Orbison, Roy 65, 282, 316, 319–20 Otherness 7, 31, 134, 171, 222, 249, 271, 282, 307–8 outro 24, 29, 296 ‘Over the Rainbow’ 40 Oware, Matthew 124, 281, 288, 297 pansexuality 282, 303 parameters: gestural 78, 104, 106–12, 114; relational 78, 104, 106–13; spatial 78, 104, 106–13; thematic 78, 104–5 Parton, Dolly 66, 274 Pastor, Tony 220–2 patriarchy 2, 4, 35–6, 45, 57, 102, 112, 126–7, 129, 175–6, 199, 230, 244, 246, 247–8, 273, 275, 277, 286; femininity and 264, 271; heteropatriarchy 212, 233–4 Pavarotti, Luciano 137, 140, 148 Pegg, Dave 187–91 Pentangle 183 performance 1–4, 9, 12, 16, 22–3, 29, 40, 69, 112, 117, 145, 152, 191, 200, 203, 207, 211–12, 223, 229–31, 237–9, 253, 260–1, 263, 268, 270, 316, 319, 324, 336–7; agency and 6, 8, 11; Badu’s 245–51; blackface 223–5; camp 272, 274; cover 193, 282, 313, 315, 317–18, 322; culture 211, 215, 217, 219–20, 226; film 146–7; gendered 6, 133, 163, 168, 196–7, 202, 204–6, 215, 221, 233, 242, 282, 287, 306–7, 308, 310, 314, 317–18, 321; genteel 217–20; live 38, 58, 77, 89–90, 92–3, 97–9, 169, 179, 192, 216, 235, 326; masculinity and 30, 121, 123, 128, 170, 172, 177–8, 182–3, 190, 285; persona 3, 6, 104, 169, 258; pop 54, 96, 98, 168, 203, 255; practice 2, 7, 14, 49, 52, 55, 57, 139, 191, 255; stage 48, 55, 124, 232, 256, 308; style 117, 154, 234, 238, 271, 283, 316, 329; theatrical 218, 226; vocal 14, 51, 64, 70,

74, 93, 96–7, 166, 171, 296, 315, 317, 319; YouTube 22, 282, 313 performativity 8, 39, 77, 169, 255; ‘all-male’ spaces and 174–8; gender and 1–2, 6–7, 78, 89, 98, 122, 178, 203, 211, 213, 222, 254, 272, 282–3, 306, 313–14, 317–8, 320–1, 328–9; interpretation and 134, 168; representational 26, 67, 78, 98 Perkins, Carl 65 Perry, Imani 127–8, 170, 172, 180, 287–8, 291 Phillips, Kenyon 339 Pierson, Kate (B-52’s) 309 Pink Floyd 183, 185, 337, 339 Plant, Robert 183; see also Led Zeppelin Plastic Ono Band 36, 44 pop persona 133, 160, 253, 260 pop texts 1, 90, 93, 239, 254, 257 popular music 48, 89–90, 206–7, 236, 242, 265, 337; African American 85, 245; authenticity in 5, 100, 190, 253, 255, 256, 258, 267–9, 272, 277; the Beatles and 37, 39; culture and 102, 153, 163, 267; female fans and 15; economy 152–63; ethno- 51, 53, 55; feminism and 13, 182, 194; gender and 1–2, 78, 94, 102, 123–4, 247, 283, 300, 310, 328, 343; genres in 4, 277; Johnny Cash and 64, 68; live music 216, 226; mainstream pop 14, 17, 30, 157, 276, 281, 285, 300; market 182–4, 191–2; masculinity in 14, 117, 287, 297; resistance in 200; sensing gender in 1–9; studies 2, 4, 6, 8, 12–13, 53, 55, 134, 179, 212, 216, 229, 237, 250, 253, 281, 285, 288; technology and 102, 290; Western 14, 49, 55 pop video 8, 78, 93 post-soul 212; and Afrofuturism 242–51 potency 126, 177 pre-hook 106–7, 110 Presley, Elvis 65–6, 317, 340 ‘Pretty Hurts’ 100, 232, 235 Prince 237 Prince, Virginia 301 psytrance 196, 200–2, 205, 207 Public Enemy 67, 121, 245 Puccini 147 punk 154, 156, 234–5, 255, 300, 307, 326, 328, 332–3, 342 Quatro, Suzi 211, 221–2 ‘Q.U.E.E.N’ 248–50 queer 4–8, 11, 38, 145, 175, 196, 198–9, 205, 207, 231, 248–9, 281–2, 306, 313, 316, 319, 322–3, 326, 329, 334–5, 337, 343–4; queering 5–6, 12, 249, 327; movement 301–4; musicology 283, 327, 343; theory 5, 135, 222, 302, 317, 321; trickster 78, 121, 128 Queering the Pitch 6, 12 Quigley, Dan 339

379

Index race: gender and 3, 8, 66, 114, 134, 166, 211–13, 229–30, 234; identity and 16–18, 167–70, 173, 178, 230–1; performing race and gender 242–51 racism 3, 24, 212, 223, 230–1, 233, 239, 288, 305, 329 ragtime 223–4 R&B music 16–17, 30, 40, 82, 104–5, 247, 291–2 rap 49, 83, 120–8, 134, 234–5, 281, 285, 287–90, 292, 294–5, 297, 303–5; gangsta 166, 169–72, 174, 176, 178–80, 288; gestures and 169, 176–7; growing up to be a rapper 15–31; rapper 7, 78, 100, 113, 124, 126, 128, 134, 288–91, 297, 303–4; staging the street boy 166–80; video 81 ‘Rapture’ 125 Ravn, Marion 253, 265 record scratch 83–5 Red Hot Chili Peppers 67 relational parameter 78, 104, 106–13 research: gender and 3–4, 7, 10, 77; music and 3–5, 13, 135, 152–3, 182, 281–2, 327 Reznor, Trent 63, 68–9; see also Nine Inch Nails Rhimes, Shonda 79, 86 Richardson, John 9, 55, 90–2, 98, 100, 115, 129, 168 Rihanna 23, 92, 99, 161, 290, 318–19 Riot Acts 282, 300, 305, 307 Riverdale, Joshua 315 River Runs Red 326, 328, 331, 335, 343 Roc-A-Fella Records 289 rockabilly music 65–6 Rock Master Scott 125 rock music 2, 4, 36–7, 91, 99, 123, 127, 153–6, 157–9, 184, 191, 256, 267; alternative 154, 304, 337, 342; authenticity 14, 45; hard 262, 337, 339, 343–4; indie guitar 10, 191; pop/ rock 3, 54, 56, 153–4, 211; rap and 31, 125; rock and roll 17, 24, 30, 36–7, 40, 43–5, 123, 156; Hall of Fame 125 Rodgers, Richard and Oscar Hammerstein II 139 Rolling Stones, the 183 Romanek, Mark 69, 72 Rose, Ruby 7 Ross, Angelica 309 Rubin, Rick 65, 67–70, 73 Run-D.M.C. 121, 123, 125, 289–90 Running with the Devil 2, 10 RuPaul 301, 317 Russell, Lillian 221 Sade 337 ‘Same Love’ 304 sample 5, 97, 119–23, 125, 148, 166, 171–4, 176–7, 180, 199, 202, 207, 290, 297, 304 Samson, JD 282, 306–7 Sanchez, Diego 301 Sandve, Birgitte 17, 31, 134, 166–81

Sangaré, Oumou 48 Sargent, Carey 155 Saroni’s Musical Review 220 Schlichter, Annette 254 Schoenberg 144 scopophilic 106, 108, 113, 237–8, 262 Scott, Derek 4, 11, 153 ‘September in the Rain’ 40 sex appeal 50, 56, 161, 205 sexualisation 20, 94, 102, 104–5, 205, 275; hypersexualise 129 sexuality 6–12; bisexuality 11, 302, 304; heterosexuality 5, 8, 14, 36, 78, 114, 124, 127, 175, 177, 197, 207, 233, 236, 244–5, 249, 254, 304; homosexuality 6, 38, 134, 175, 300 sexual orientation 2, 20, 300, 304, 309 Shadows, The 188 Shamaya, Otep 342 Shatner, William 162 Shawnna 104–5, 115 Show Boat 139 Sia 77, 303–4; ‘Chandelier’ 89–100 signature style 49, 54 Silveira, Lucas 282–3, 313–23 Simone, Nina 44, 249, 337 Simpson, Mark 222 Sinatra, Frank 317 Siouxsie Sioux 158 Slayer 67 Sleeper 158–9, 161 Smith, Jaden 7 Smith, Marquita R. 212, 229–41 Smith, Sam 269–72 Smiths, The 158 social media 3, 15, 20, 81, 170, 283, 330 songwriting 37, 39–41, 46, 90, 92, 134, 152, 158, 186, 188, 192, 223, 269, 305; singer-songwriter 64, 91, 100, 171, 173, 182–3, 185, 193, 253, 256, 260, 264, 282, 313, 316, 324, 337, 342 sonic 14, 336, 338–40; feminisation 8, 98; gender 64, 322, 326; marker 63, 67–8, 70, 73, 75, 171, 173, 180, 313; phenomenon 205, 321 soprano 138, 145, 217, 329 Soulja Boy 104–5, 113, 115 soul music 156, 212, 245, 248–9, 271; neo- 212, 243–4, 247, 249–50 sound recording 89–90, 93, 97, 137, 157, 211, 216–17 soundscape 7–8, 73, 293, 328 soundworld(s) 85, 133–4, 138–42, 144–5, 147 Space is the Place 243, 245 spatial parameter 78, 104, 106–13 Spears, Britney 55, 91, 99, 148, 182, 192, 231, 261 ‘Speedy Gonzales’ 24–5, 32 Spoon, Rae 309, 323 Springfield, Dusty 257 staging the voice 7, 257 380

Index stardom 7–8, 64, 133–5, 153, 157, 182, 192, 258, 285; and the commodification of the self 160–1 Starr, Ringo 40–1 Star Search 234–5 S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) 301 Stax 183 ‘Stay’ 318–19 Steeleye Span 183 Steinskog, Erik 69, 72, 74, 212, 242–52, 324 stereotype 49–50, 137, 239, 263; black male 166, 170, 177–8; gendered 51, 54–5, 114, 126–7, 134–5, 186, 192, 196, 205–6, 213, 253, 255–6, 259, 264–5, 302, 342; hip-hop 121–3, 128–9; male 78, 126; race 114, 129, 171, 206, 231, 223, 233, 281, 286, 297; trans 309, 342 Stévance, Sophie 14, 48–62 Stone, Sandy 301, 317, 319, 324 Stonewall riots 301, 304 Strauss, Richard 144 Stryker, Susan 301, 317, 323 Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright 78, 104, 106 subculture 5, 9, 18, 20, 38, 92, 152, 157, 178, 268, 343; female fan 13, 15; subcultural theory 14, 43, 46; youth 43, 159, 239 subjectivity 1, 3, 8, 12, 20, 55, 72, 89–90, 102–3, 112, 114, 145, 159, 255, 264, 267; black female 229, 232, 237; black male 166, 281, 288; gendered 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 11, 259; pop 78, 98; queer 5–6, 343; transgender 327–9, 336 ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ 260 Sun Ra 243, 245, 250–1 Supa Dupa Fly 118 ‘Supermodel of the World’ 301 ‘Superstar’ 68 Sutcliffe, Stuart (Stu) 38–9, 42 Swarbrick, Dave 186, 188, 190 Sweers, Britta 183–4, 193 Tagaq, Tanya 14; and Katajjaq musical signature 48–58 Take Care 291 Talbot, Shawnee 309 Tate, Greg 244, 248 Taylor, Jodie 5, 11, 135, 148–9, 198, 271–2 techno music 196, 202–4, 244, 247 Tee, Tommy 167, 169, 171, 173, 176, 180 Tekeste, Jonas 166, 169–70, 172, 177 (see also Jones, Jesse) Templeton, Fay 223 Temptress, The 305 tenor 133, 188, 201, 218, 306, 317, 328; heroes and Broadway women 137–49 Thaemlitz, Terre 301, 309 ‘That Lovin’ Rag’ 224 thematic parameter 78, 104–5 ThisIsDrama 83

Thompson, Richard 183, 185–9, 193–4 Thorn, Tracey 155, 158, 162 throat singing, to transcultural expression 48–57; see also katajjaq Timbaland (Timothy Zachery Mosley) 118–19 Timberlake, Justin 31, 317, 319, 321 timbre 108, 122, 133, 138–43, 146, 173, 183, 188, 201–2, 290, 306–7, 313, 320, 328 Tin Pan Alley 40, 223 Tipton, Billy 301 ‘Titanium’ 92 ‘Toxic’ 55 T-Pain 104–5, 113, 115, 290–1 trance music 196, 200–2, 207 transcultural 7, 13–14, 134; Justin Bieber’s duet with Ludacris 15–31; from throat singing to 48–57; transculturalism, realness, and hypermasculinity 166–78 transgender 4, 7–8, 11, 80, 247, 281–2, 301, 307, 317, 322; cisgender musicians and 309–10; of colour in Columbia 304–5; influence on music 305–6; Mina Caputo, metal truth and 326–44; narrative 282, 313–4, 319–20, 323; studies 283, 300, 302, 327, 343; voice 247, 282–3, 305–8, 310, 313–15, 318–22, 337, 342 Transgender Dysphoria Blues 300 transgression 4, 9, 54–5, 92, 100, 134, 166, 175, 178, 300, 308, 319, 327–8, 334, 339 transition: video 282, 313–15, 318–23 transnational 14, 48–9, 52, 56–7, 134, 300 transphobic 300, 305, 308, 328, 331, 334, 344 transsexual 11, 301–3, 314, 324, 336, 339, 343 transvestite 301, 305 travesti 138 treble 16, 24–5, 138, 173 Tricky and The-Dream 17, 23 troubadour 188, 191 Tshawe 177–8 Tucker, Sophie 216; jazz age femininity 223–6 Turner, Tina 123, 129, 236 Twitter 15, 30, 32, 158, 283, 303, 330 U2 18, 162 Unisex Salon 339 Unwritten Rules 83–5 utterance 69, 171, 176, 230, 268 Välimäki, Susanna 283, 326–46 vaudeville 211, 215, 220–1, 223–6 Verdi 147 Vernallis, Carol 8, 72, 125, 174 Video Music Awards (VMA) 233, 235, 304 ‘Video Phone’ 78; gender, sexuality and the politics of looking in Beyoncé’s 102–15 Vinni 167, 171, 173, 175 vinyl record 119, 123, 126, 185 381

Index violence 3, 38–9, 79, 114–15, 169, 172, 174, 178, 236, 288, 292, 296–7, 305, 319 virtuosity 54, 125–6, 133, 138, 322 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ 237, 261 vocality 5, 93–5, 142, 145, 148, 172–3, 182, 254, 282, 306, 317 vocoder 290 voice 152–3, 155, 173, 213, 217, 220, 222–3, 228, 270–3, 276, 303, 305; female 29, 37, 44–5, 98, 148, 184, 188, 192, 247, 337; Beyoncé’s 106, 108–9; gendered 3, 6, 64, 98, 306; gesture and 50–2, 57–8, 106; individual 41, 44–5; Johnny Cash’s 63–4, 67–70, 72–4; Justin Bieber’s 15–16, 19, 22, 24–5, 27–9; Kanye West’s 290, 294–5; Lady Gaga’s 111; male 16, 139, 178, 182, 187–9, 194, 337; Marit Larsen’s 253, 256–7, 263; Mina Caputo’s 328, 336–7, 339, 342; opera and Broadway 137–42, 144–9; production 50, 117, 121–2, 133, 139, 173; quality 52, 122, 146, 278, 318; Sia’s 77, 94, 97–8, 100, 304; staging the 7, 257; strategies 97, 134, 146, 182–94, 296; timbre 108, 122, 133, 138–43, 146, 173, 183, 188, 201–2, 290, 306–7, 313, 320, 328; transgender 247, 282–3, 305–8, 310, 313–15, 318–22, 337, 342 vulnerability 14, 63–4, 67–9, 73–4, 144–7, 239, 251, 264, 285–6, 288, 290–1; on display 64, 77, 89–99, 145

‘Weeds’ 335–6 ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ 281, 285, 291; lyric, music, and image analysis in 293–6 Wener, Louise 158–61; see also Sleeper West, Kanye 281–2; 808s & Heartbreak 285–97 Wham! 313, 316, 318 Whiteley, Sheila 2, 10–12, 94, 99, 123–4, 158, 259 whiteness 8, 224, 230, 232, 317 ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’ 24–5 Wikipedia 16, 23, 31–2 Wild Beasts, the 158 Williams, Hype 102, 105 Williams, Kim 83 Williams, Pharrell 291 Williams, Raymond 159 ‘Window Seat’ 251 Winehouse, Amy 337 Wolfe, Paula 155 Woods, Alyssa 122, 127, 281, 285–99 Wooler, Bob 38–9 Woolf, Virginia 155 ‘Work It’ 78, 117–19, 121–3, 125–8 ‘Wrecking Ball’ 269 Wurst, Conchita 7, 282, 300, 306; genderqueer drag 307–9

Waksman, Steve 198, 211–12, 215–28 Walk the Line 67 ‘Walk this Way’ 290 Walser, Robert 2, 10, 125–6, 175, 331, 343 Ward, Brian 30 Warwick, Jacqueline 10, 44, 118, 122, 129, 183, 194, 258–9, 263, 267, 271, 275 Washington, Dinah 40 Web series 77; assertive music, and African American women producers 79–86

Young Jeezy 290 YouTube 51, 79–80, 82–3, 158, 196; Justin Bieber and 15–16, 18–19, 21–2, 30–2; Lucas Silveira and 282, 313–14, 319, 321–3; Mina Caputo and 331–5; Sia and 93–4, 97, 100 Yung Joc 104

Xavier, Jessica 305

Ziegler, Maddie 94–6, 100 Ålvik, Jon Mikkel Broch 9, 213, 253–66

382