Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality 9781315743639

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures, Tables, and Examples......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
1 Setting the Stage: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality......Page 14
2 Love: A Very Queer Construct......Page 47
3 ‘In and Out’: Games of Truth and the Confessional......Page 75
4 Applause, Applause: Art into Pop......Page 107
5 ‘Talking Blah Blah’: Camp into Queer......Page 146
6 To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics......Page 177
7 Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion......Page 209
Bibliography......Page 236
Names Index......Page 246
Index of Recordings......Page 254

Citation preview

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Queerness in Pop Music

This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, ­Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others. Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of ­opacity and temporality, which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates a model of analysis that involves both ­temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Music analysis is woven into this, illuminating aspects of parody, nostalgia, camp, naïveté, masquerade, irony, and mimesis in pop music. One of the principal aims is to uncover the subversive strategies of pop artists through a wide range of audiovisual texts that situate the debates on gender and sexuality within an aesthetic context that is highly stylized and ritualized. Queerness in Pop Music also addresses the playfulness of much pop music, offering insights into how discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure. Given that pop artists, songwriters, producers, directors, choreographers, and engineers all contribute to the final composite of the pop recording, it is argued that the staging of any pop act is a collective project. The implications of this are addressed through structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Ultimately, Hawkins contends that queerness is a performative force that connotes futurity and utopian promise. Stan Hawkins is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo and Adjunct Professor at the University of Agder. His research fields involve music analysis, popular musicology, gender studies, and audiovisual theory. From 2010 to 2014 he led a Norwegian state-funded project, Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context. He is also author of Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics (2002), The British Pop Dandy: M ­ asculinity, ­Popular Music and Culture (2009) and co-author of Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (with Sarah Niblock, 2011). His edited volumes include Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and ­Cultural Identity (2004), Essays on Sound and Vision (with John ­Richardson, 2007), Pop Music and Easy Listening (2011), and C ­ ritical M ­ usicological ­ Reflections:Essays in ­Honour of Derek B. Scott (2012).

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Routledge Studies in Popular Music

1 Popular Music Fandom Identities, Roles and Practices Edited by Mark Duffett 2 Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity The Making of Modern Britain Irene Morra 3 Lady Gaga and Popular Music Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture Edited by Martin Iddon and Melanie L. Marshall

6 David Bowie Critical Perspectives Edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power 7 Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea Sounding Out K-Pop Michael Fuhr 8 Popular Music Industries and the State Policy Notes Shane Homan, Martin Cloonan, and Jen Cattermole

4 Sites of Popular Music Heritage Memories, Histories, Places Edited by Sara Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard, and Les Roberts

9 Goth Music From Sound to Subculture Isabella van Elferen and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

5 Queerness in Heavy Metal Music Metal Bent Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

10 Queerness in Pop Music Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality Stan Hawkins

Queerness in Pop Music

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Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality

Stan Hawkins

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hawkins, Stan. Queerness in pop music: aesthetics, gender norms, and temporality / by Stan Hawkins. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in popular music; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Popular music—Social aspects. 2. Homosexuality and popular music. 3. ­Gender identity in music. 4. Popular music—Performances. I. Title. ML3470.H39 2015 781.64086’64—dc23 2015029588 ISBN: 978-1-138-82087-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74363-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

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Contents

List of Figures, Tables, and Examples Acknowledgments 1 Setting the Stage: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality

vii ix 1

2 Love: A Very Queer Construct

34

3 ‘In and Out’: Games of Truth and the Confessional

62

4 Applause, Applause: Art into Pop

94

5 ‘Talking Blah Blah’: Camp into Queer

133

6 To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics

164

7 Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion

196

Bibliography Names Index Index of Recordings

223 233 241

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List of Figures, Tables, and Examples

Figures 1.1 Model of analysis 1 2.1 Boy George in the video ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’46 3.1 Mick Ronson and David Bowie in the video ‘Jean Genie’ 69 3.2 Madonna in the video ‘Hung Up’ 77 3.3 Annie Lennox in the video ‘I Need a Man’ 83 3.4 Shirley Manson in the video ‘Androgyny’ 87 4.1 Lady Gaga in the video ‘Applause’ 98 4.2 Ysan Roche getting ready for the kill in the video ‘Bass Gun’ 105 4.3 Nicki Minaj in the video ‘Anaconda’ 116 4.4 Drake and Minaj in the video ‘Anaconda’ 119 5.1 Le1f in the video ‘Wut’ 134 5.2 Rufus Wainwright in three personae in the video ‘Out of the Game’ 138 5.3 From washroom to disco in the video ‘Outside’ 141 5.4 Jay Kay in the video ‘Space Cowboy’ 148 5.5 Justin Timberlake cloned in the video ‘Rock Your Body’ 153 5.6 Azealia Banks in the video ‘Atlantis’ 155 5.7 Audio Waveform and Spectrogram in ‘Atlantis’ 156 6.1 Antony Hegarty in the video ‘Epilepsy Is Dancing’ 174 6.2 Janelle Monáe jamming in the video ‘Tightrope’ 180 6.3 Kurt Cobain in the video ‘In Bloom’ 190 7.1 Conchita Wurst in the video ‘Rise Like A Phoenix’ 197 7.2 The Supreme Fabulettes in the video ‘A Drag Queen is a Cowboy’s Best Friend’ 203 7.3 Mykki Blanco and boyfriend in the video ‘She Gutta’ 208 7.4 Zebra Katz in the video ‘Tear The House Up’ 211 7.5 Le1f in the video ‘Soda’ 217

Tables 4.1 4.2 6.1 7.1

Production devices in ‘Skin Tight’ Music, visuals and narrative in ‘High School’ Song structure and harmonic layout in ‘Tightrope’ Le1f’s vocal costuming in ‘Soda’

107 114 178 216

viii  List of Figures, Tables, and Examples

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Examples 2.1 Main guitar riff in ‘Free’ 2.2 Vocal hook – Do you really want to make me cry 2.3 Vocal hook – I want the whole world to celebrate 2.4 Groove pattern in ‘Celebrate’ 2.5 Vocal phrase – I wanna come home 2.6 Bass riff in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ 3.1 The ‘Jean Genie’ riff 3.2 Melodic riff in ‘I’m Coming Out’ 4.1 Vocal embellishing in C Section – ‘Yoü and I’ 4.2 Melodic menace in chorus of ‘Bass Gun’ 4.3 Bass line in ‘Anaconda’ 4.4 Three-note backing vocal motif in ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ 5.1 Rapped line with counter-melody in ‘Atlantis’ 6.1 Verse – ‘In Bloom’ 6.2 Chorus – ‘In Bloom’ 7.1 Bass line in ‘Tear the House Up’ 7.2 Bass line and rap vocals in ‘Soda’

35 44 50 50 52 54 68 80 101 104 117 125 158 188 188 212 215

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a most pleasurable experience and great fun to write. Crucial to the writing process has been the generous support and encouragement from the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, without which the project would not have been possible. This has been an amazing place to carry out my work. Also, I have benefited greatly from a generous research grant I received from the Norwegian Research Council from 2010 to 2014 to lead a research project entitled Popular Music and ­Gender in a Transcultural Context. In particular, my appreciation goes to members of my team who continuously sparked intellectual excitement: Mats Johansson, Birgitte Sandve, Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik, as well as the project’s two research assistants, Craig Jennex and Mari Paus. During the past years I  have been fortunate enough to supervise a very special group of doctoral students engaged in many of the ideas presented in this study, who deserve specific mention: Kyrre Tromm Lindvig, Marita Buanes Djupvik, Eirik ­Askerøi, Cláudia Azevedo, Per Elias Drabløs, Erlend Hegdal, Agnete Eilertsen, Tormod Anundsen, Lars K. Norberg, and Kai Arne Hansen. Their enthusiasm and critical scholarship has been an invaluable resource for the pursuit of many of my ideas. My gratitude also extends to all my undergraduate and postgraduate students, who, over the years, have significantly enriched my work. Parts of this material were presented in various versions at events, including keynote addresses at the Nordic conference for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music at Roskilde University, Denmark in 2012 and the ‘Queer Sounds and Spaces’ Symposium at the University of Turku, Finland in 2013. In addition I am grateful for various invitations to hold lectures at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, Goldsmiths C ­ ollege in London, and Humboldt University in Berlin, which had a direct impact on the formulation of many of my concepts. An invitation by Allan F. Moore to attend a special session on popular music analysis at the E ­ uroMac conference, University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2014, provided me with a ­necessary platform to air my approaches to music analysis in the company of distinguished scholars. During the writing of this book my contribution to two groundbreaking volumes of interdisciplinary music research had a strong bearing on my work: The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual

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x Acknowledgments Aesthetics (eds. Richardson, Gorbman, and Vernallis) and Lady Gaga and Popular Music (eds. Iddon and Marshall). I owe much to all my colleagues and students at the University of Oslo, with a special thanks to Anne Danielsen, Kyle Devine, Alexander Jensenius, Tami Gadir, Peter Edwards, Ståle Wikshåland, Rolf Inge Godøy, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen, Steven Feld, Hans Weisethaunet, Erling Guldbrandsen, Yngvar Kjus, Nanette Nielsen, and Hans Thorvald Zeiner-Henriksen, all of whom offered me useful feedback and encouragement at various stages along the way. The administration and library staff at my department, U ­ niversity of Oslo, is greatly valued; thanks to Målfrid Hoaas, Gisela Attinger, and Arve Thorsen. Good support has also come from the ­University of Agder in Kristiansand, where I am adjunct professor and part of the team that runs the PhD program in popular music. Thanks to Tor Dybo and Michael Rauhut and all former and current PhD students for their consistent encouragement. To Derek Scott, my friend and fellow co-commissioning editor for the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, I am indebted for his reading of drafts of my chapters with insightful critique and infectious humor. Thanks also go to friends and allied scholars in my field: Susan Fast, John Richardson, Susan McClary, Anahid Kassabian, Barbara Bradby, Will Straw, Peter Wicke, Rob Walser, Freya Jarman, Erik Steinskog, Eoin Devereux, G ­ eorgina Born, Fabian Holt, Susanna Välimäki and Katherine Williams, for their feedback, inspiration, and encouragement at various stages in the writing of this book. To David Harrison, whose work I discovered during the final stages of this project, I am grateful for his input into the analysis of a Scissor Sisters track in Chapter 5. For assistance with the transcriptions and invaluable insights into the intricacies of performance approaches and techniques, I am grateful to Per Elias Drabløs. Equally so to Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik, who not only assisted with the preliminary formatting of this material, but often helped sharpen important perspectives on my work. A wide group of friends and family deserve thanking on many important levels: Helge Klungland, Charles ­Cilliers, Martin Lund-Iversen, Jackie Roxborough, Barbara Hooper, Monique and François Widemann, Lynne Leader, Paul Jackson, Hylton Harrington, Cameron Robinson, Merete Falck, Moyra Metcalfe, Chris Met­ ranziska Franz, Siren Leirvåg, Eystein Sandvik, and Lil calfe, Adrian Baker, F Nilsen. Any monograph of this kind is always in the hands of an editor and team of workers, and I thank the editorial board and staff of Routledge, and especially to the commissioning series editor, Elizabeth Levine, as well as Sofia Buono and Katherine Gilbert, for all their effort and support in guiding this book through to final publication. In addition I want to express my gratitude to the three anonymous readers who gave this project their blessing right from the outset, whose numerous insightful criticisms and remarks are greatly appreciated.

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Acknowledgments  xi I have the pleasure in dedicating this book to all my British colleagues, whose erudite scholarship has played a significant role in furnishing me with an understanding of identity politics through the love of popular music. These include, but are not limited to, Sheila Whiteley (who sadly passed away during my writing this book), Derek Scott, Allan Moore, Dai ­Griffiths, Keith Negus, Paula Wolfe, Sarah Niblock, Laudan Nooshin, Simon Z ­ agorski-Thomas, Annette Davison, Lucy Green, C ­ harlie Ford, Katherine Williams, Martin Iddon, Jonty Stockdale, Philip Tagg, Sara Cohen, R ­ ichard ­Middleton, Ian Biddle, Steve Sweeney-Turner, Tim Warner, Simon Frith, Freya ­Jarman-Ivens, Nicholas Cook, Nicola Dibben, and the late Vanessa Knights.

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1 Setting the Stage

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Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality

Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own.1 —Judith Butler

What makes pop music queer? Why are queer modes of address so compelling? And, how does queerness spawn modes of reflection? If one never does gender alone, as Judith Butler has insisted, then “the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author.”2 For this reason alone, identifying gender traits in music is a tricky issue. Since the millennium shift, queer images abound in all forms of cultural expression, including pop music. In its bid to entertain, pop negotiates the strains of human endeavor, and this is aided by satire, camp, irony, sarcasm, mimicry, and travesty. Uncannily, pop music delights at the same time it reconstructs, reaffirms, and challenges fixed notions of gender. The main tenet of this book is that queer elements in pop music can boast a radical element for articulating human subjectivities. On the matter of queering, Fabio Cleto states that it “does not invest just gender, but semiotic structures at large.” In this way, queering operates through the crisis “inscribed in all ‘naturality of signs.’”3 If we go along with this, the gendered body can be envisaged as a conduit for artistic expression. The model I employ is based upon processes of listening and viewing, with two broad disciplinary areas set into operation, namely, popular ­musicology and queer studies.4 All my examples are drawn from pop song performances that frequently indicate opposing strategies. In the main, my model embraces two general categories for analyzing the pop text: ­temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing.

Figure 1.1  Model of analysis

2  Setting the Stage Temporal-specific listening: •

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• •

Assessing the effects of ‘being queer,’ dependent on a sensitivity to age, gender, ethnicity, class, and so on, works across a cultural-historical lineage. Understanding the reception of artists along a timeline tests assumptions based on popularity and success. Ascribing to a spatio-linear concept of time that alerts us to various forms of musical representation, their developments, and their experiences, with an emphasis placed upon notions of past, present, and future. Implementing structural listening as a critical response to music-related phenomena of a temporal ordering. Biographic-oriented viewing:

• • •

Critiquing the pop artists’ intentions and their purpose for performing in a specific manner that makes explicit the aesthetic and political positionings of their performance. Negotiating subjectivities that are manifested in the wake of creative forces through the portals of time. Interpreting biography that is always open to contestation, and that entails a degree of self-reflexivity.

Throughout this book, I invite the reader to partake in my own experiences, delights, and impressions of pop performances in a variety of ways. Right from the outset, I want to emphasize that the hermeneutic approach I employ is embedded in my own identity, my profession as a musicologist, my generation, and the environmental Anglo-American context I am part of. Predominantly, listening is an important part of visualizing the pop music experience, where mannerisms, gestures and peculiarities of the body denote pleasure, sometimes pain, with a wish to entertain. Accordingly, the gendered body on display provides the spectatorial pull through the intricate processes of recording and production. For my purposes, a hermeneutic approach is selected to inspect musical details via an understanding and reading of pleasure principles. At the forefront of most pop recordings, vocal delivery constitutes a prime signifier of identity, and the practice of singing is evaluated alongside the creative handling of parameters, such as melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and studio production techniques. Vocality is negotiated by gender in contexts that mirror reflexivity, and the voice is a product of identity because of its cultural construction. In order to address this, I activate the term ­genderplay to situate vocality in relation to attitude as much as intention.5 In much pop music genderplay refers to the specifics of a singer’s persona and musical idiolect, often through a good-humored engagement with lyrics and subject matter in recorded form.6 Hence, the staging of the voice is all about corporeal presence and active participation.7 Understood in this way,

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Setting the Stage  3 pop performances involve gestures and emotions that are assembled within the production of a highly personal event. Musical production also contributes to queerness in pop. Contingent on the reproduction of an original – a knowing copy, a derivative of an ­original  – pop productions comprise a web of style-specific referents that lure us into the music. By making things audibly tangible, the recording mediates biographical information,8 and it is here that the practice of intertextuality comes into full operation, with connections between one text and the other implicated in an axiom of temporality. Intertextuality is the state by which a text transforms into another text and assumes meaning,9 and because a song is defined through a network of relations, it forms part of a larger structure.10 There are numerous analytic ways to approach this, whereby the role of the gendered body takes center stage.11 Forming the basis of my investigation are the numerous i­nterdisciplinary considerations of queer performativity developed by scholars such as Judith Butler, Nicholas de Villiers, Donna Haraway, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz, J. Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Riki Wilchins, and David ­Halperin, to name a few. Over time their work has started to filter into musicological studies with the emergence of an approach to interpreting agency in performance contexts.12 In her article, “Soprano Masculinities,” Susan McClary provides a useful historical perspective when pinpointing the 1950s as a watershed for establishing a queer pop sensibility. Little Richard (Richard Wayne Penniman) shook up a range of norms through the antics of genderplay. As McClary stresses, it was with a sense of indignation that this occurred, paving the way forward for “the leading Divas of Disco” of the 1970s. Sylvester James, who can be ranked alongside Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer, headed up a culture that “asserted its right to disrupt the ways the dominant realm dictated how masculinity was to be performed.”13 Sylvester’s hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” from 1978, became one of the central anthems to endorse the gay liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, and was danced to on virtually every disco floor. This track was magnetic in its appeal, uniting minority groups in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and the gay liberation movement. While looking back in time, Sylvester’s recordings empowered the lives of future generations of queer, gay, and drag artists in the form of disco. Notwithstanding the prevalence of queerness in commercial pop music over many decades now, it is a sobering fact that audiences, even in recent times, link “suspicions of sexual deviance” to male voices that do not ­conform to conventions and norms. McClary’s reference to the King of Pop brings this point home: The late Michael Jackson was idealized for his gorgeous sonority, already offered with flawless perfection in his hits with the ­Jackson Five, yet also subjected to gossip concerning not only his sexual ­orientation but even his physiology.14

4  Setting the Stage

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Not white and, for that matter, convincingly hetero enough, Jackson would be driven into a marginalized existence, where the pressures of gender ­normativity became too much.15 In a Butlerian sense, Jackson’s body was his although not his, and at the core of his phenomenon was a queered body on display, which, as Susan Fast claims, led him away from this conventional performance of black masculinity and towards one that could be considered ‘queer’ in that it challenged the stereotypes and made Jackson seem ‘safe’ for young white consumers and their parents.16 Fast’s application of the term ‘queer’ to Jackson’s performance practices, traditions, and genealogy is helpful for addressing matters of queering in pop spectacles, particularly when performances appropriate, tease, contest, and perpetuate gender norms. Into the twenty-first century, queer music videos seem more ubiquitous than ever before and are largely responsible for marketing artists and groups. Advances and changes in digital technology and social media have made them readily downloadable and accessible on appliances such as smart phones, MP3 players, and iPads. The video hosting online service, Vevo, founded in 2009, syndicates pop videos across the web, sharing with Google the advertising revenue. YouTube has ensured that pop videos operate in spaces that are digitalized, where music-in-action unfolds, aided by the constantly changing technicalities of mediation and production. S­ ignificantly, pop videos document our ever-changing social and cultural landscapes, allowing us to experience pleasures we might normally be denied. Since its inception in the 1950s, pop music has survived and stood the test of time, and credit must go to the original pop performers and bands to emerge from Anglo-American markets. Albin Zak has argued that “postwar pop musicians of all stripes participated in laying the foundation for a new way of making and experiencing music that remains fundamental to music culture worldwide.”17 Through the decades starting with the 1950s, pop recording has captured the personae of its performers in all sorts of intriguing ways. As a recorded artifact, we might say that the pop song is foreclosed by temporality; its sense of being in the here and now can indeed propel us into the then and there. Yet, it can also take us back in time. How often do we return to our favorite songs for any number of reasons? Songs track our lives, and contrary to Adorno’s critical views on fast-­ consumerism, mass production, and instant gratification – here today, gone tomorrow – there is actually no sell-by date in popular music today. This is because technology has provided us with the means to store and access the music of our past in virtually any place, space, and time zone imaginable.18 ­Moreover, technologies have shaped compositional processes and evolved due to experimentation and collaboration. This is why recorded songs tell us much about the people who have engineered, programmed, and performed them, with strong cultural and social implications.

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Setting the Stage  5 Given that music tracks our past, it also hints at where we might be ­heading.19 Nostalgia is inevitably part of this process in whatever time, space, or place we find ourselves. Certainly, the proliferation of music in our daily lives emphasizes the fluidity and reflexivity of subjectivities as they become mapped against categories of ethnicity, class, gender, and so on. Music, after all, is about lifestyle, attitude, politics, and even survival – it holds up a  ­mirror to our very existence and spurs us on. With this in mind, I  turn to a consideration of subjectivities within a digital environment, where ­musicians interact with and adapt to an ever-increasing virtual musical community. In recent years, musicologists have concentrated on the intersections of music production, gendered identity, and performance,20 and my approach has been to situate the pop recording (what I commonly refer to as the pop text) within a vibrant, interdisciplinary context, where aspects of composition and performance receive prime attention.21 Methods for interpretation are by now well established, with music’s efficacy continuously debated. Carolyn Abbate, for instance, suggests that hermeneutics “fundamentally relies on music as mysterium.” Mystery is the “very thing that makes the cultural facts and processes that music is said to inscribe or release (therein becoming a nonmystery) seem so savory and interesting.”22 Problematizing music’s ineffability, Abbate adds that it “is relied upon so thoroughly and yet denied any value and denied existence. This is the mysticism that will demonize mystery at every turn.”23 Fathoming out music’s ‘mysterium’ is part of my quest to identify queering processes. From one perspective, music shapes a trajectory of cultural and historical consciousness in the queered body, which scholars addressed in the 1990s and 2000s.24 A recurring topic in earlier research on queering is musical stylization and the task of locating the aesthetic effects within the composite recording. Pop recordings are created by processes of mixing, production, and recording, and, as David Harrison insists, “compositional styles are subject to, and are manipulated by, emergent paradigms within computer music communities.”25 In particular, vocal delivery, techniques of arranging, instrumentation, and programming are of stylistic relevance, and a central objective of the music analyst is to decipher how these aspects shape artistic expression. To this end, a major part of my study is directed towards the role of producers and the development of trends and technical fluency in the use of music software and recording engineering. By emphasizing the link between musicology and queer theory,26 I draw on the work of Nicholas de Villiers, which deals specifically with transgressive role-playing and the phenomenon of the ‘closet.’ Ideas of opacity I apply to the working out of gendered display within pop performances, and, hence activate the second part of my proposed model involving ‘biographic-oriented viewing’ (see page 1). Also building on de Villiers’ ­problematization of the closet, I attempt to unravel some of the complexities of musical practices, strategies, and idiosyncrasies that denote ­Otherness.27 Opacity, as de Villiers argues, “is visible only outside of the purity of the opposition opaque/transparent itself. Likewise, the closet is unable to contain the above oppositions

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6  Setting the Stage but attempts metaphorically to maintain them.”28 With regard to biography, especially when describing gay lives, de Villiers insists that this is often executed in a way that “privileges the objectivity and authority of the biographer (simultaneously discrediting the biographical subject while crediting the biographer).”29 Which brings us back to the question of music’s ineffability and its role in the queering of biography. One might posit that the ambiguities, peculiarities, and opacities inherent in music are what arouse us, and when distorted, gender norms entertain in quite extraordinary ways. To date much has been written on ‘masculinity in crisis,’ a major topic of research since the 1980s. In the wake of gay liberation and, not least, the many social and political changes instigated by feminism, the status of white, heterosexist masculinity in the West has been challenged.30 A deconstruction of masculinity forms an important theoretical trajectory for mapping music onto gender studies and comprehending queerness.31 What is more, music validates the expansion of identity politics into Otherness for the duration of a performance. My approach, then, is to venture forth into less-known territories where queerness is rendered pliable. Conceptually, I set out to identify transgressive qualities in musical performances that stretch across cultural arenas. Thus, the questions posed relate to those queer spaces, where the mediatory role of the performing body takes center stage. If the queered body functions in a multitude of ways, it reveals the twists, turns, and detours of human agency. Discourses on queerness inevitably deal with debates around ‘social memory’ and the cultural perceptions of ­performance. Discourse analysis offers a useful path into considering music as a condition of human behavior (even at times shirking the hard ­reality of inheritance and responsibility),32 its markers predicated upon social memory and ideology. A discourse is a conglomeration of ideas and p ­ ractices that define specific properties relating to a way society perceives itself. ­Discoursing on a musical style entails some reflection on the organization and representation of gendered features. Take, for example, ‘queercore,’ an offshoot of punk that has its inception in the mid-1980s (in the form of zines, art, film, video, writing, and music). Musically, its roots are in styles such as punk, indie rock, power pop, no wave, hardcore punk, experimental and industrial pop, synthpunk, and noise. Queercore style is about protest and social disdain, something I take up in detail during Chapter 7. At this point I am compelled to emphasize that my definition of pop music in this book is deliberately broad-based, including numerous sub­ genres and styles that feed into a broader understanding of the ‘popular.’ As well as queercore, I have incorporated into my work queer hip hop (often referred to as homo or queer hop33) by LGBT bands and solo artists. In Chapters 5 and 7, for example, I turn to the openly gay, New York rapper Le1f whose camp disposition transforms many of the regular features of mainstream pop as he opens up a space for new performance practices. Le1f ’s art-based, emancipatory performances are progressively situated within a genre that is usually associated with homophobia and misogyny. Yet, wary

Setting the Stage  7 of his own categorization and marginalization, especially when it comes to New York rap, he has insisted:

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I’m not trying to be competing with my friends based on their race and sexuality. The whole ‘room for one’ mentality is homophobic … if the world is ready for a gay rapper, then they’re ready for multiple gay rappers. If we were straight, no one would be comparing us.34 Performatively, Le1f’s pop videos are proof enough that queer hop is about an emerging community of rappers and artists who have risen to the challenge of producing and breaking down music within genres that have been historically antagonistic towards queerness and gay sexuality. Survival, hope, and new possibilities, dominant themes in Le1f’s texts, reach out from the then and there into the future, and on the way there are obvious hints of Prince in his queer demeanor. At this stage, I feel compelled to emphasize that no study into queerness in pop would be complete without mentioning Prince’s profound influence, and readers familiar with my own work will know that I have prioritized him in much of my research into composition, production, and pop aesthetics.35 Although I have decided to dwell on other artists in this book, I want to afford some time to Prince’s ploys of ‘veiling’ and ‘unveiling,’ which have been a continual source of fascination for fans and scholars. Spanning four decades (at the point of writing this book), Prince’s songs are offset against ‘games of truth,’ confessing, and religious fervor, while, at the same time, chronicling the changes in modes of sexuality and gender from the 1980s onwards. Outlandish for their time, his early songs and performances inspired many artists to come out and deal with their sexual orientation. Most of all, Prince’s queerness still demonstrates opacity at work through his enthralling tactics of disidentification. Foucault’s critique of the burden of the closet is useful when considering Prince’s impersonations and queer sexual inferences. Turning to humor, Prince’s stories of ‘doing gender and sex’ are expertly amalgamated with an inimitable musical signature. His act of queering can be understood ­poststructurally, as Rob Walser has shown in his discussions of Prince’s social, political, and ideological grounding.36 The salient point I  want to drive home is that breaking with gender norms on stage is not necessarily part of Prince’s world off stage. As such, this artist duly remains one of the most enigmatic celebrities in pop history. José Muñoz has theorized thoroughly queer temporality and utopia, his lifetime work a beacon in queer studies. His approach is enlightening when it comes to interpreting queer texts in the form of photos, poems, plays, art, films, and music. Muñoz’s notions of a queer utopia (linked to critical readings of Ernst Bloch) concern the ‘not-yet,’ the ‘no longer conscious,’ and the ‘lack in the present.’ It is in disappointment and failure that queer ­utopia emerges as an affective structuring device for implementing or, for

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8  Setting the Stage that matter, imaging transformation. In this respect, queer utopianism is a nonreproductive futurism; it challenges ‘straight time,’ the parameters of which are ‘an autonaturalizing temporality.’37 Alternatively, ‘straight time’ denotes the present and future as equally static. Muñoz’s concept is further developed by a bold affirmation of a possibility that stretches far beyond idealism into a domain marked by the dismantling and radicalization of heteronormativity.38 Worth noting are the commonalities between Muñoz’s and de Villiers’ positions on queer subjectivities, futurity, and utopianism. For instance, de Villiers’ concept of opacity (in the work and times of three intellectual queer icons from the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Andy Warhol) intersects with Muñoz’s theory of ­disidentification. Both authors advance the concept that a queer utopian state of being overrides the confessional and the obligatory entrapments of Otherness. As a result, their scholarship establishes a new direction in queer functionality that can readily be applied to musicology. Another scholar who problematizes opacity through an epistemology of the closet is Sara Ahmed. In her book Queer Phenomenology, she makes the following argument: If the closeted queer appears straight, then we might have to get into the closet, or go under the table to reach the points of deviation. In other words, while the closet may seem a betrayal of queer (by ­containing what is queer at home) it is just as possible to be at home, or even to queer the closet. After all, closets still ‘make room’ or clear spaces, in which there are things left for bodies to do.39 Extending Foucault’s thoughts on the unrelenting tropes of the confession, Ahmed conceptualizes the closet and queer spaces, a topic I deal with in Chapter 3.40 Feelings and attitudes of difference are predicated upon intentions, and contingent on specific cultural, historical, and political circumstances. This endorses Butler’s idea of the individual’s identity (the queer ‘I’), which opens a space for new authorization: When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacity for narration; indeed, when the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist. The reason for this is that the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms. […] The ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence.41 From this it should be apparent that the ‘I’ poses a set of challenges in ­relation to context and norms. It is well known that queerness is relegated

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Setting the Stage  9 to a sub-category of homosexual subjectivity, and in his analyses of Proust and Cocteau, Foucault renders the term ‘homosexuality’ inadequate. ­Interestingly, his discussions of ‘concealing while revealing,’ with reference to Proust, tend to position the author as a creative entity in his own right. By tackling queerness, Foucault uncovers the manifold procedures by which the ‘truth’ of a person is forced to speak out. What is meant by ‘truth,’ though, is troublesome, and the way a queer person is ‘put on trial’ is, in actual fact, a repudiation of the privileges granted by ‘coming out’ and modern homosexual identity. Assessing the strategy of ‘coming out’ requires focusing on the transformative aspects of the artist. Throughout pop history, artists have entered and exited arenas of infinite possibilities that ease the past into the present and even the future. This involves a ‘blurring of time’ that alludes to utopian and dystopian desires. Musical performances can represent a re-envisaging of the world that goes well beyond the norms of value and propriety, offering up an impression of ‘different’ spaces and temporalities. Ideas of queer futurity therefore need to be positioned alongside the dystopic proponents of temporality. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee ­Edelman outlines a set of ethics around the all-pervasive figure of the child, the nexus of reproductive futurism. For Edelman the child symbolizes the possibility of a future against which the queer is polemically positioned. Contrary to Muñoz’s ideas on queer optimism, Edelman urges queers to accede to the propulsion of negativity in links with the death drive. P ­ aradoxically, his argument for no future (in terms of queer antisociality) has had a profound impact on spelling out the future for queer theory. Whereas there is much I do not side with in Edelman’s vision, I do comprehend how social organization and the dream of queer futurity “keeps the place of life empty – merely a hollow, inanimate form.”42 Pop texts thrive under the conditions of ‘being in the world,’ where the utopic evanescence of a musical performance not only stages, but also projects the nonnormalized and disadvantaged gendered body in time and space. In this regard, I want to flag up two types of temporality for consideration: queer temporality and musical temporality.43 In his seminal article, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’ Paul de Man highlights human temporality as a process of permanent negation, whereby the subject seeks refuge. In his writings on interpretation (of literature), de Man exhibits a deep-rooted skepticism towards ‘ultimate readings,’ a perspective that has greatly impacted on music criticism. The implication of social memory poses a challenge in any form of discursive analysis, and de Man’s single-minded views on this are indexical. A musician himself, de Man would explain how irony dissects temporal experience into “a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic.”44 Theorizing linear time and futurity seems particularly pertinent to the study of pop audiovisuality. Because the visual signifiers of ‘presence’ are conventionally constructed, they highlight the fragility of the temporal conditions of sound. De Man’s theory of ‘memory’ gains its currency during the pursuit of musical

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10  Setting the Stage meaning, best borne out in his essay, ‘Literary History and ­Literary Modernity.’ By reasoning that the power of memory does not necessarily link the past to the present, de Man points to the illusion that memory’s function is to “resurrect a situation or a feeling that actually existed.”45 Memory, a mere act of the mind, binds its own notion of the present, hence ushering us into the future. Memory retrieval is not just a matter of the past – it is as much about a desire for the impending future, where, in the long run, there “can be no perfect repetition.”46 Reading queerness raises the issue of authenticity, and in earlier s­ tudies I have been engaged in this intractable dimension of experience, taste, and preference, maintaining that the recorded score is often more authentic than the live event.47 What first sparked off my interest were the temporalities, queer aesthetics, and imaginative ventures of the Pet Shop Boys. In this book I return to their music once again in Chapter 2, dwelling on their queer agency in the tracks, ‘Vocal,’ ‘Thursday,’ and ‘Love is a Bourgeois ­Construct.’ When Tennant croons, I’ll be taking my time for a long time!, there is something in this melodic phrase that idealizes an imaginary time and space, edging the listener towards a moment of self-realization. Forcibly unleashed, a melodic phrase, in an instance of profound jouissance, gains its figural meaning in the forward motion of teleological time. Any consideration of musical temporality is inextricably linked to duration in composition and performance.48 How one delineates time in a groove, for instance, relates to the progression of specific units and their variations in time. In all their detail, recorded songs are hardwired into a space of duration under time control – musical temporality is about the period of time in which events continue. As I perceive it, even in static forms of music, the static never quite relinquishes progressive advance. It is precisely this idea that de Man pursues when he emphasizes the linkage of musical meaning to temporality. Arguably, subjective notions of temporality are delusory in music notwithstanding its function to fill the vacancy of the passage of time. Music transforms time into an entity that pathologizes our very existence. Musical temporality raises the question of ‘queer time.’ Halberstam has maintained that queer time charts cultural and political changes in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Queer time is about “those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/ safety, and inheritance.”49 When applied to music, queer time is measurable in performance, composition, and lyrics. A general premise here is that the codes of queerness in performance disrupt the normative narratives of time that condition the individual. For instance, Halberstam has described how queer punk emerged as “a potent critique of hetero- and homonormativity,” and in dyke bands such as Tribe 8 (which I turn to in Chapter 7), there is a revision of subcultures in relation to “queer cultural production and in opposition to notions of gay community.”50 Halberstam argues for a different epistemology of queer youth and seniority that scrambles “our

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Setting the Stage  11 understandings of place, time, development, action, and transformation.”51 In this sense, temporality plunges us into those spaces and gaps in a performance that serve to alter cultural norms. Moreover, it reconfigures the spaces of our own whereabouts during time and place. Thus, whereas queer subcultures might thrive in urban contexts, they also oppose “the essential characterizations of queer life as urban.”52 In other words, queerness is not simply a phenomenon of urbanity; it emanates from all those places where the mores and mannerisms of human conduct reflect resistance. A related topic is dealt with, albeit from another perspective, in Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, where Lady Gaga’s performances are cause enough for reflection. Halberstam’s manifesto for the new millennium delineates social practices and gender norms – what is ‘gaga’ today will be something entirely different tomorrow, and gaga feminism will constantly reinvent itself to remain at the frontiers of hope and queer futurity.53 Using the example of a ‘queer parenting’ duo (butch dad, femme mum), Halberstam insists that authority without patriarchy is about the flexibility of gender and gender norms. A discourse on gaga feminism can therefore offer up ways for thinking about ‘alternative masculinities,’ which is vital for considering different types of emerging sexualities in time and space (See Chapters 2, 5, and 6). So far, the approach I am advocating connects queer time to perceptions of gender. To hear and detect queerness is of specific musicological interest, which means that the confluence of music and gendered representation lends itself to a discourse that provides an opportunity for considering and critiquing postfeminist ‘space-times.’ Furthermore, temporality enables a reassessment of the teleological histories that bring subjectivity into relation with the gender norms of sexual being. Any application of temporality to musical interpretation needs to include perspectives on intention, agency, and politics, a task that entails not only the deconstruction of identity, but also its disidentification. After all, temporality is linked to perceptions of gendered performance in the context of the music industry and its ‘platforming’ of celebrity culture in space and time.54 Which brings me to Summer Kim Lee’s theory of the multiplicity of space-times. Lee has argued that tracks and albums compose space-times “with various images, figures, and textures that, although they might not be coherent, are nevertheless distinct elements together, with, and among each other.”55 If songs move us in mysterious ways, this is because of the sharing and distribution of the sonic image in temporal settings. Emphasizing the multiplicity of space-times, Lee identifies the relationships to “sound’s resonance in space” and how this “opens up and passes through time.”56 In a comparative analysis of Janet Jackson’s song, ‘He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive,’ and Blood Orange’s cover of the song, ‘He Doesn’t Seem to Know That I’m Alive,’ Lee discovers that [h]er (Janet Jackson’s) song is a playful rehearsal of the moment before the self emerges alongside of, and in an encounter with, the [O]ther.

12  Setting the Stage

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There is the promise of this distance or spacing ‘between’ to be closed off – for the same/the self and the [O]ther to transfix each other as singularly alone subjects.57 The thrill of hearing the body in different space-times constitutes a major part of the pop experience, and consequently this draws our attention to aspects of theatricality where, in a Butlerian sense, gender is something one performs rather than what one is. Ambivalences surrounding the pop spectacle and its propensity for confusing sexual binaries certainly require new approaches for interpreting not only the gaze, but also the self. As I was writing this book, a new generation of mainstream female pop artists had emerged – Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks, and Lady Gaga – amidst protests that they pander to ‘porno chic.’ Brian McNair has defined the ‘pornosphere’ as the result of a “more pluralistic sexual culture,”58 and in the age of the Internet, there is little doubt that gendered representations of both male and female artists are reconfigured to meet the demands of the new technologies and digital download cultures. One might argue that music technology impinges directly on the iconographic trends in the pornosphere, and Harrison makes a valid point that the “interconnectivity of cyberspace” has determined how artists “restructure their musical productions.”59 That the social domain of a virtual context is under constant evolution implies that “more participants become attracted to the prospect of an identity that would otherwise be difficult to realize without technological intervention.”60 Pop is about erotics and is technologically produced, depicting the social and cultural trends of gender on display and ‘in play.’ There are high stakes involved when queering in a predominantly heterosexist context, and I duly share Rachel Devitt’s reservations: Mainstream popular music presents queer audiences with a kind of paradox. On one hand, the history of Western popular music is in many ways a history of sexuality and rebellion, the bold-type moments of which have often involved taboo-transgressing displays of desire and a good deal of genderfucking, from Elvis the Pelvis to eyeline­r-friendly emo boys. On the other hand, those queer moments in pop music also end up recuperated into and even recuperating normative conventions that do not allow space for queer acts or queer people [emphasis in original]. Meanwhile, very few out queer artists have enjoyed widespread s­uccess in pop music even as the mainstream music industry has, at various times, attempted to cater to the powerful ‘pink’ dollar.61 Devitt’s position dovetails with Ahmed’s phenomenology of queerness and the idea that the “edges of that world disappear as you zoom in.”62 In questioning what it means to be disorientated, Ahmed notes that the body has emerged from a history of ‘doing’ in the course of inheriting the past. ­However, that this also entails a history of ‘not doing’ and of ‘paths not taken’ suggests a

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Setting the Stage  13 loss. If we accept that “the body is directed as a condition of its arrival, as a direction that gives the body its line,” this leads to the question, “what happens if the orientation of the body is not restored?”63 Moreover, how do bodies shape space-times? Linking the body to the social space through orders of temporality cannot circumvent the questions of sexual orientation. Queering always connotes a sense of difference by rejecting the contours of normativity. Ahmed’s position is similar to Lisa Duggan’s concerning the politics of homonormativity, which sustain the ‘straightening up’ of queer points of expression. Both Duggan and Ahmed alert us to the crooked lines of sexual orientation that occur in the repetition of specific gestures that take on surprising turns. Ahmed has insisted that the queer “is not available as a line that we can follow,” and “if we took such a line we would perform a certain injustice to those queers whose lives are lived for different points.”64 The validity of such an argument rests on the possibility of diversity, while looking back by assuming different perspectives.65 For Ahmed queering is an affect of disorientation, where bodies are as oblique as the spaces they occupy. By seeking out the spaces that support queer bodies, we continually return to the question of difference and the diffuse symbolic structures of individuality.66 Tavia Nyong’o and Francesca Royster assert that queerness in music “resounds through the exercise of self-differing it invites us into, not through the identities it consolidates.”67 This means that when a performance is queered, specific motives are at stake. Take self-differing, which is invariably mediated via humorous intent. Strangely enough, humor has not received sufficient attention in popular music studies – after all, pop thrives on humor, its performances implicated by antics that substitute for laughter. We might say that humor strips bare identities, poking fun at stereotypes by exaggerating mannerisms. In discoursing on ‘guilty pleasures,’ Pamela Robertson broaches questions of complexity and contradiction in humor, promoting the idea that “camp is a reading/viewing practice that, by definition, is not available to all readers.” Regarding the matter of reception, Robertson argues, “for there to be a genuinely camp spectator, there must be another hypothetical spectator who views the object ‘normally.’”68 To this I would add that camp discloses the intricacies of humor and affect by addressing the spectator in specific ways. Functioning as a socio-cultural activity, camp negotiates orientations and behavior patterns in the performing subject, challenging the fictive structuring of gender norms. In turning to various musical examples of this in Chapter 5, I extrapolate camp aesthetics as a crucial part of the humor and intentions of self-differentiation – which raises the question of modes of behavior. In Bodies that Matter, Butler considers identity as an illusion ­retroactively created by performances. Beliefs in ‘natural behavior’ are actually the ­product of subtle social coercions and constructions, and Butler emphasizes that gender is a fiction, a historical category, affected by social conventions. As such its rules (familial, social, and legal) enforce gender norms. Imposed on us, norms foster the rhetoric of sameness and conformity, and as Butler insists in Undoing Gender the norm is “a measurement and a means of

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14  Setting the Stage producing a common standard.” This point is further clarified when she emphasizes that, “to become an instance of the norm is not fully to exhaust the norm, but, rather, to become subjected to an abstraction of commonality.”69 The implication here is that “only by virtue of its repeated power to confer reality is the norm constituted as a norm.”70 Via strategies of exclusion, queering norms becomes an incentive for expressing alternative possibilities. In his groundbreaking studies of masculinity, David Halperin has surveyed the changing representations in male behavior. He has referred to how the “hypermasculine look of gay clones” is so deceptive that it becomes queer. Paradoxically, the coding of gay male virility evolves into the very strategies for “valorizing various practices of devirilization under the sign of masculinity.”71 Cases of this abound in popular music, where the self-fashioning of masculinity is palpable when it comes to the depiction of the eroticized male. Remarkably, music conflates the images of contemporary masculinity against a backdrop of an idealized sexual history. By this I am suggesting that music influences the discursive conditions of gender norms and platforms the signifiers of humor in the forms of parody, camp, kitsch, satire, and irony. To return to an earlier point, there is no doubt that music technology has radically altered the ways in which we perceive musicians and their performances, as well as having redefined the premises of artistic creativity. I am particularly drawn to the idea that queer pop expression is inscribed by a crisis in the ‘naturality of signs’ induced by developments in technology. To be sure, the appeal of pop lies in playfulness and diversity, and how this is manufactured technologically is a major determinant of musical aesthetics. Further, because of humorous intent (and any resulting sensibilities of difference), pop music helps throw a special light on human agency. Usually, the subject in pop music is defined by an eroticized performance, and, as I argue throughout this study, this frequently connotes queerness.72 Which returns us to the questions of what it means to be queer, and how to define the complexities of queer aesthetics. Calvin Thomas alerts us to the generalized employment of the term and the risk of it becoming a “dematerialized signifier.”73 Swiftly it can become a mechanism for straights to “sidestep interrogations of their own sexual practices” in much the same way as “whites have not had to think of themselves as raced.”74 In a similar vein, Jarman-Ivens suggests that it is “the invention or construction of the very notion of sexuality and its relationship to identity that is being drawn attention to by the word ‘queer.’”75 Thus, to identify ‘queer’ as a practice, a process, or an act, becomes an imperative when breaking out of the homo/ hetero straitjacket. Yet, as Thomas insists, there remains a concern in the labeling of someone as queer: The terror of being mistaken for a queer dominates the straight mind because this terror constitutes the straight mind: [I]t is precisely that culturally produced and reinforced horror of/fascination with abjected homosexuality that produces and maintains ‘the straight mind’ as such.76

Setting the Stage  15

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Importantly, though, queering is not just a matter of concealment. Rather it is a mechanism for plurality, with actions and performances involved that require critical attention. Expressing feelings of difference can expose an individual’s sexuality and political beliefs. The fact of the matter is that fl ­ uidity and mobility are integral to notions of shifting in queerness, and the term ‘queer’ can be activated as a verb, as much as an adjective. Jarman-­Ivens tracks its etymology: As a verb, ‘to queer’ suggests a process, and one of upsetting, making strange, unsettling, perhaps an act of trickery or deceit; and it suggests this in multiple languages through its connection with the act of questioning and of enquiry. Hence we see the connection to an adjectival form that predates the colloquial form in common current usage; it has become tied to sexuality, but is has long since been a word that denotes the unusual, the strange, the odd, the bizarre.77 It is the different, the original, or the quirky that frames impressions of queerness within the structures of utopian escape. And, through music multiple personae and alter egos can exhibit queerness. This is traceable in hip hop, which, as Russell A. Potter importantly points out, took “disco as one of its first sites of incursion” and actively produced “trends in dance music such as ‘electro funk’” that “moved between solidarity and kind of tense cohabitation with gay audiences and DJs.”78 This is exemplified in Mark Anthony Neal’s reference to rapper and hip-hop producer, Jay-Z, where ‘queer flow’ works due to adaptability. Insisting that this is “more so the matter of managing discontinuity, or in this particular case, the management of Jay-Z’s queerness,”79 Neal activates ‘biomythography’ to identify the thin veil between fact and fiction. As he points out, Jay-Z’s use of his birth name, Shawn Carter, and S. Carter, operates as monikers for carefully calculated purposes: It is “Shawn Carter” that embodies the rapper’s hustling instincts […] – the instincts that have helped translate his street wit into a rap career of some distinction. In the guise of the hustler, Shawn ­Carter embodies the improvisational aspects of both his persona and his vocation.80 Cunningly, the layering of identity results in an expansion of the ­possibilities for social formation – blurring ‘real’ identities teases and taunts when it comes to staging the ‘real self.’ Critical of commercial cosmopolitanism, Neal points to the moniker of S. Carter, originally representing Jay-Z’s publishing enterprise. Not only did this appear for songwriting credits, but also for the artists Jay-Z ‘ghost’-wrote. Neal explains: Given the history of black musicians, early blues musicians, and hiphop artists, in particular, who sold off their potential publishing royalties for paltry advances, ‘S. Carter’ is evidence of Jay-Z’s savvy in the recording industry.81

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16  Setting the Stage Thus, Jay-Z’s adaptability and his management of ‘discontinuity’ illustrate well how branding operates. In a sense, hip hop is based on the art of exploiting strategies of change, and of course much the same can be said for other genres of commercial music, which I address in all the chapters. Perhaps the salient point is that the flexibility of identity and its promotion of music transpire in tantalizing ways – a time-tested phenomenon in itself. This returns us to the matter of space-times, where pop heightens our imagination of not only the person in question, but also our own temporalities. Every time we listen to music we sense our own bodies via a range of senses and experiences. Theorizing this, Gayle Salamon has identified the intricate relationship between our ‘felt and physical senses.’ Engaging a phenomenological concept of ‘proprioception,’ Salamon asserts that the entities of the physical body do not necessarily align to the felt sense of the body. Conversely, they connote a sense of displacement when it comes to, say, ­gender identification. The relevant point here is that “proprioception offers us a way of reading and understanding the body beyond the visible surface of its exterior.” Salamon contends that the body’s sexuality “is a matter not of seeing but of sensing, which takes place below and beyond the threshold of the visible.”82 Bearing this in mind, my focus shifts to the creative realm of performance, where the artist’s persona discloses a fascinating range of intended strategies. Philip Auslander insists that the persona is of key importance because it is the signified to which the audience has the most direct and sustained access, not only through audio recordings, videos, and live performances, but also through the various other circumstances an [sic] media in which popular musicians present themselves publicly.83 Audiovisual narratives in pop are made potent by pop personae, and in many of the examples I have studied, structures of hyperembodiment disclose a crucial component of contemporary, digitalized aesthetics.84 ­Generally speaking, the gender-on-display in pop videos tends to exaggerate and magnify the subject with the aid of technology. Foucault’s ideas on the ‘technologies of the self’ are useful here, especially in terms of the written text (and in our case, the ‘recorded’ text), which function as part of culture’s take on itself.85 Arguably, the pop video inscribes experiences of the self, and, as Andrew Dell’Antonio stipulates, the entity of the musical text within audiovisuality provides a critique of the processes of appraisal. The argument here is that videos establish ‘collective negotiation,’ implying that appraisal strategies are “in no way dependent on notions of structural listening.”86 So, although it might seem that collective listening in an audiovisual context pays little attention to the ‘music itself,’ the process nevertheless “provides useful insights on contemporary appraisal strategies, both actual and ideal.”87 Audiovisuality thus enables us “to revisit transhistorical notions of ‘music itself’ in ways that scholars of non-Western culture have already done with transcultural generalizations.”88

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Setting the Stage  17 Accepting that audiovisual perceptions require an assimilation of the gendered body, we need to ask, what role does digitalization play in the gendering of what we see and hear? A direct outcome of the organization of the microdetails of technological manipulation, prediction, and control, involves fetishist manipulations. In this respect, the function of editing is a critical component in digital aesthetics. Editing controls animation, and, hence, defines specific body gestures and movements. Furthermore, the performing body is the outcome of technological control. In dance the body is fetishized, its visual features invoking specific modes of identification. ­Digitalization thus shapes audiovisual aesthetics and how choreography functions in pop videos.89 Interpretations of the musicalized body, its gestures and mannerisms, form a prerequisite for advocating a musicological discourse on queerness, and the body’s role in performance mode, I want to insist, is a lot more than just entertainment. Watching, hearing, and imagining a performance are based on the artist’s intentions as much as our engagement as listeners. As the ­subject/protagonist in a song’s narrative, the artist is perceived in a complex set of relations, and in pop songs there is a strong correlation between the public persona of singers and their protagonist persona. This is because the act of singing is a physical activity with immediate correlations to the prior information we have on ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality and age. Alone, this prompts an array of questions dealing with the trajectories of identity in the singing of songs and moreover with the logic of authenticity.90 How then do we go about distinguishing features of queerness in songs? Answers to this are wide-ranging and linked to notions of subjectivity and our comprehension of any given performance. During the recorded performances there are specific strategies for situating the body in sonic spaces, and as I have emphasized already it is especially the voice that assumes a central role. With the voice the personality is articulated in fascinating ways as the act of singing draws in points of identification that are always gendered. Again, the strategies of queering loom large, and in performance the voice can come across as abject. Partly this is due to modes of delivery that are habitually ambiguous.91 To explain: performances entice us into an aesthetic landscape that is often enigmatic if not escapist. Because the voice is positioned performatively, it is indicative of the uniqueness of the body and its behavioral contradictions. Thus, when queered, the body makes the familiar weird.92 Singing becomes a channel for mediating this by connecting the persona to the body, where hearing this asserts notions of the artist’s being; the phenomenon of vocality is therefore a product of constructed subjectivity. On this matter, Jarman-Ivens insists, “the voice has a performative function more than it is a direct marker of a stable, fixed, or inherent nature.”93 Undeniably, singing is one of the most powerful hallmarks of gendered identification in popular song, and in earlier studies I have considered the gestures and movements that link the voice to the self. The performances of Annie Lennox and her style of singing, her attitude, and her acts of impersonation, are subversive in that they chip away at gender norms ­

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18  Setting the Stage on many levels. Tropes of theatricality in Lennox’s style of performance, as I  argue in Chapter 3, are located within her timbral control, textural nuancing, and articulation. Mainly, it is in the dramaturgy of her performance style, her strategies of masquerade and role-playing that she contests heterosexism, homophobia, and sexism.94 Commensurately, her songs not only entertain, but also communicate narratives of femininity that are predicated upon the monstrous, the seductive, and the disruptive. In this sense, a double-mimesis weeds out the discrepancies between essence and attitude as Lennox situates the constructed ‘feminine’ within a context of abjection, a context in which white male hegemony comes under harsh scrutiny. In Chapter 3, my reading of her performance of the song “I Need A Man” indicates traits of contestation that are equally discernible in queer male performers, who bend gender by means of drag. In his music analysis of Jamie Stewart from the experimental post-punk group, Xiu Xiu, Victor Szabo addresses the precariousness of white masculinity: (C)onsiderations of music as counterpublic address might more ­carefully describe the relationship between felt emotion and musical affect to better understand how music registers and complicates normalized distinctions between privately experienced and publicly accessible feeling.95 Extracting the components of Stewart’s performances, Szabo probes at the issue of sexualized abjection. Openly bisexual, Stewart has been keen to stress his queerness, which Szabo describes as a “fetishization or aestheticization of the social wound,” and therefore suggestive of “failed compassion.”96 Effectively, Stewart articulates the paradoxes of queer performativity that are fixed and symbolized in the recording. On a related note, Albin Zak states that it is in the culture of recording that “musicians’ styles take on a symbolic quality, signifying a particular set of associations.”97 Symbolic features and attributes “can function in different ways, sometimes simultaneously.”98 That the persona of Jamie Stewart is reliant on the team he works with in the studio implies his identity is as much a collective as an individual one. The gestures harnessed by his performativity in the recording are therefore contingent on a creative context that is socially interactive. This would intimate that the recorded voice is not only distinguishable by styles and techniques that make it feel real, but also by the social backdrop of “technological manipulation and analytical parsing.”99 Meanings produced in a song therefore involve the material effects of the recording studio environment and its team of workers. Inquiring into queer aesthetics involves the challenge of sifting out representations of Otherness. If a recorded performance is a snapshot of that which lingers in the memory – something already in the past that bridges us to the future on every hearing – then the uncanny, the peculiar, and the queer mark an absence as much as a presence. The diegesis of the recorded

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Setting the Stage  19 voice speaks to us in the moment of listening. Details of vocality are always located within a range of ‘effects’ that are referential, and it is diegetically that the recorded voice communicates time; it is an indicator of who we are, why we are in a place, and where we are heading. In this sense, recorded voices are temporal signifiers within a larger typology of musical codes, where formal properties denote cultural meaning with specific connotations. With this, I want to draw together a few thoughts on the gendered construction of queerness, especially in relation to sonic markers of production.100 Historically, the recorded voice has activated powerful associations of gender that are identificatory and symbolic. In this way, the recording becomes an ideal carrier of gender, defining the relationship of the vocalist to the outside world. Sean Cubitt verifies this when stating: The recorded performance is a revenant, a representation of something which is already past […] The presence of the recording overlays the absence of the artist, an effect which lies at the core of that glamour which pop music and its stars share with film and its stars.101 We might say that glamor is relayed via a set of aesthetics that surpasses everyday life and disturbs the ‘natural order’ of things. In all its intimate detail, the voice, when glamorized through the recording, is an orientation mechanism. It provides points of intersection while keeping open the possibilities for diversion. It enables us to look back while still feeling part of the present. It harnesses attendant pleasures while predicting the future. Also, it urges us to reassess what has gone before us by shaping the conditions of moving forward while rooting us in the past. Not only is the recorded voice a historical relic, but also a consolidation of a sonic object in both the present and the future. As Ahmed puts it, “history cannot simply be turned into something that is given in its sensuous certainty, as if it could be a property of an object.”102 Undoubtedly, pop music is produced in extraordinary ways, its musical content fixed in social memory. Today we have instant access to the self-accounts of artists themselves. By this I am referring to music videos, songs’ narratives, interviews, reviews, blog sites, and documentaries that also provide the analyst with biographical accounts. In this sense, it is personal narratives that construct the artist and shed light on role behavior. For instance, Kurt Cobain’s own self-reflexivity about feeling ‘gay on the inside’ is explicitly documented in compelling accounts of his masculinity. Throughout a short career, Cobain purposefully drew attention to his tactics of queering of gender roles. In Chapter 6 I draw on Jan Muto’s enlightening study to shed light on Cobain’s way of challenging stereotypical male norms. Muto concludes that, “Cobain brought the dialectic of social definitions of ‘male’ and ‘female’ into confluence.”103 And by doing this, he regularly commented on his own dilemmas with gender and sexuality in relation to grunge. My close examination of what it meant to him to be a boy makes

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20  Setting the Stage references to his cross-dressing and physical appearance, and how this was framed by a rebellion against the expectations and pressures males come under when expressing themselves. As Muto discerns, Cobain’s stance was not just a defiance of authority, but “a rebellion against social expectation […] Passivity, a decidedly feminine characteristic, worked for Cobain.”104 In glaring contrast to one another, Cobain’s on- and off-stage performances were marked by a struggle where he finally fell victim and lost out. That ­Nirvana’s music attracted a primarily white, male, teenager audience, who felt their own gender identity under attack, paradoxically nudged Cobain into a dark space where “he lost that sense of being part of the social collectivity, of social expectations.”105 One of the prime tasks of this study is to chart the function of musical style in producing layers of identity. Often enhanced and even transformed by music videos, songs create imaginative versions of an original, their goal being to entice us into personal narratives.106 As with cinema, a video performance provides escape from the habitual tendencies of everyday-ness, and signifies far more than just the marketing of the artist and the song – they work as narratives and forms of interaction between humans and technology. This involves directors, producers, and engineers, all of whom contribute to the crafting of expression that attracts our attention. As pop production is a matter of collaboration, it involves the creative interfacing of many people working on a single recording project at the same time. So far I have intimated that a main trademark in queer pop music is genderbending,107 made distinguishable through the nuances, paradoxes, and irregularities of gender norms. A critical aspect dealt with in this book concerns the transgression of gender norms in queering antics, and drag acts are an obvious phenomenon worth studying. Take as an example the inventive drag queen, RuPaul, and his popular TV series, RuPaul’s Drag Race, premiered in the US in 2009. The modalities of utopianism in such a show, whose title plays on drag queen and drag racing, are contingent on a specific type of queerness. The male’s take on femininity in drag functions to queer fantasies, and vice versa. A study of ‘queening’ by men and ‘bio queening’ by females is one of several aspects of drag that I dwell on throughout this book. With RuPaul and his protégés or contestants it is evident that they thrive on repetition and mimesis, paying tribute to an original artist by detailing mannerism, visual appearance, and gender. Their tactics of parody in queening involve the appropriation of gender norms, whereby exaggerated displays of femininity can easily verge on misogyny and homophobia. However, that RuPaul’s shows include only transgender and gay men in contexts where their put-on roles as women are a send-up alongside tactless opinions and caricatures of ethnicity, race, and physical size raises political concerns. Popular in terms of entertainment value, their acts are potentially subversive. And, because genderplay is predicated upon a high dose of titillation, RuPaul’s character is not without its problems. Minority groups have taken offense at his use of the term ‘transgender’ or ‘tranny’ to describe

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Setting the Stage  21 himself, as well as resenting the highly sexualized, feminized and derogatory representations of ‘feminine’ gay men. Nonetheless RuPaul spectacularly queers gender norms in his performances, acts, and shows, extending well beyond the confines of conservative mainstream television. Notably, his sixth studio album, Born Naked, released in 2014, coincided with the sixth season of his hugely successful RuPaul’s Drag Race. ‘Sissy That Walk,’ the second track on the album, rapidly became RuPaul’s trademark on an international scale he never imagined. Especially provocative, the song’s narrative instructs the drag queen, who might be too masculine, to walk in a more feminine way. Usually ‘sissy’ is a downright derogative term aimed at any male who does not conform to the masculine norms society expects. It could be argued that RuPaul’s employment of the term is quite the inverse to this, with the word ‘sissy’ (with its associations with vogueing and ball culture) reclaimed.108 Boldy, he cries out in one of the phrases, pick myself up, turn the world on its head. In the video release of this track, the final four contestants in the sixth season of his Drag Race were featured alongside RuPaul – Courtney Act, Adore Delano, Bianca Del Rio, and Darienne Lake. Ostensibly, the video scoffs at homophobia, with the idea for ‘sissying that walk’ coming from RuPaul’s best friend, Rich Juzwiak, who had witnessed parents shouting at their children in a beauty pageant to ‘sissy their walk.’109 Drawing on the practices of vogueing, RuPaul’s video opens up for considering an array of narratives on temporality, race, and music. In his article, “Put Some Bass in Your Walk,” Scott Poulson-Bryant provides a reading of the character, Mystique, an African American from Texas, who appeared in the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Poulson-Bryant suggests that Mystique, by attempting to “circulate a new narrative of queer activism,” in fact lacked the glamour that was expected for her to succeed.110 Mystique, a rapper, was “defiant in difference from the pop landscape that rejected her.” As a result, she derailed the demands of drag queen spectacles by leaving a mark and “recasting the trope of the glamorous trans with a unique dignity.”111 Mystique’s role, Poulson-Bryant argues, showed that rap has “a DNA born in queerness.”112 Alas, Mystique did not possess quite enough ‘mystique’ in the end because “in her reach for the crown of the Next Drag Superstar she showed all the seams.”113 Thus, in going for the ‘real’ she broke protocol by not being like the other girls. Not dissimilar to RuPaul, Lady Gaga has welcomed the ‘trans’ possibilities of queering. Her bio queening and drag performativity is about salvaging difference for audiovisual pleasure as she re-inscribes norms and narratives of gender into her artistic expression – this occurs in the guise of alter egos, such as the monster, the femme fatale, the angel, the bitch, and all sorts of ‘fabulous’ creatures. Undoubtedly, her various appropriations of gender norms involve a straightening up of the oblique for the entertainment industry. Fancy gender representations position Lady Gaga in a ­melancholic and ‘creepy space’ that reaches out to Otherness always on

22  Setting the Stage

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her terms. Intentionally, her world is portrayed as one large carnival with her ‘Mother Monster’ alter ego protecting her little monsters. Positioned in a more critical light, Gaga’s strategies of genderplay capitalize on the dominant structures of ethnicity, heterosexuality, and Catholicism, a stark reminder that queerness is often an expression of whiteness. This is an issue that Ahmed has problematized: When we describe an institution as ‘being’ white, we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather and cohere to the edges of such spaces.114 Accepting that Lady Gaga’s pop acts privilege her own ethnicity, the ebb and flow of her queer characterizations can be incendiary. Her repertoire, as a direct response to straight culture, often situates her as a straight woman in a very queer world. Teasingly, she turns to an aesthetic that is flamboyant enough to be lost in the gaze. Most of all, Lady Gaga demonstrates that queerness in pop is about destabilizing the normative while laying bare the rhetoric of put-on earnestness. She engages with pop art to instate her utopic vision of originality. All this is in the name of fun, the prime qualifier for being a pop celebrity. But, as Susan Sontag has claimed, turning the serious into the trivial is a “grave matter,”115 not least because of the anti-social issues at stake. A more concise insight into this is provided by David Halperin: “By ‘anti-social,’ I do not mean hostile to communal belonging, then, but contrary to social norms.”116 Scrutinizing the function of camp, Halperin asserts that the unserious is not just a disqualification, but also “a potential source of collective strength – hence, a strategic opportunity. Grabbing that opportunity, camp endows its anti-social aesthetics with a potent political dimension.”117 The aspirations of camp are a reversal of the conventional valences of style and appearance, where social identities are rejected as authentic or naturalized. Camp expression in pop therefore gains its leverage along these lines, in humorous forms of representation, such as parody. Parody, a central ingredient of the pop experience, is also discernible in compositional techniques. In her book, Queer Tracks, Doris Leibetseder inspects parody as a marker of queering. Because of its duplicity, parody is spurious, as Leibetseder explains: “Its ambivalence originates both through conservative and revolutionary powers that are inherent to its nature and the authorized transgression. In this sense, parody could be described as transgressive.”118 Annexed to genderplay it has the potential to be anti-social, and, hence, subversive. Leibetseder’s concept of parody emphasizes ‘hybridity,’ which “undermines the dominant conservative forces,” thereby making a critical difference to our perception of gender norms and contesting the stabilizing effects of hegemony. Pop music’s appeal resides in its propensity to challenge values, and I would suggest that in revealing the performative potentiality of music, parody often negotiates the terrain between textual

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Setting the Stage  23 address and listening process. Experiencing music in listening, dancing, concert going, or viewing, establishes a basis for understanding our societies. Thus, a way forward for the musicologist is to examine the meaning of musical codes and gestures within transgressive contexts. It would therefore stand to reason that a flexible method is required to draw on the irreducible elements of performance practice. Identifying points of difference and expressions of diversity also has a direct bearing on our understanding pop. Relevant here is the positioning of Otherness and its bridging of new connections between individuals and groups. Pop artists know how to gauge performativity and queer it through their own communicative faculty. With little exception, pop performances provide indicators of the gendered body as we, the fans, work out who exactly the artists are. Something narcissistic occurs in the two-way process of emitting and receiving, which I attempt to uncover when identifying a wide variety of features pertaining to gender politics and their operation. Examining the conditions of a variety of performances that make for queer readings, I reflect on the multifaceted characteristics of the pop text. Through rules, conventions, and systems, music is bound up in issues relating to creativity, often in the form of contradictions, as Jodie Taylor insists: Music provides a context for the (re)signification of non-normative gender and sexual identities because musical expression is noted in both historical and contemporary contexts as being particularly accommodating to those who contradict the rules of social propriety.119 The suggestion here is that resistance defines queerness, with Taylor making the claim that music is “empowering, providing both performers and scene members with a model of self-efficacy.”120 It would be untenable, if not futile, to devise a comprehensive taxonomy of queer pop artists. Every track, video, and artist I have included is therefore a personal choice that informs my methodologies and theories. But my incursions into specific examples are more than just observing and labeling artists as queer. As I argue, queering cannot be reduced to simple explanations of why some artists and groups are queer and others not. In the throes of entertainment, genderplay is notoriously diffuse and reliant on infinite instances of self-efficacy. Therefore, any critique of queerness needs to ground the cultural sphere of signifying practices. Within the existing literature of popular musicology, the issue of language in analysis is not sufficiently addressed. Inherent within the analytic investigation of popular song, language transports the burdens of our disciplinary past. Foucault once claimed that “language forms the locus of tradition, of the unspoken habits of thought, of what lies hidden in a people’s mind; it accumulates an ineluctable memory that does not even know itself as memory.”121 Foucault also claimed that utopias are easily misconstrued, especially as memory effects or a slip of language. As such, he upheld the belief that the urgency

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24  Setting the Stage to grasp the historical basis of ideas is dependent on concepts of time – if not an impediment to rationality, time is a mechanism of transformation.122 From this perspective, visions of utopia propel us forward by reconfiguring and appropriating norms. Yet, dystopias easily stop us in our tracks. I therefore advocate an approach that attempts to strike a fine balance between the ideologies, tastes, and preferences that instate pleasure within the new relational formations of social spaces. The spatialization of time is attuned to the multiple forms of belonging, and, as I want to ascertain, this often queers the linearity of straight time. Pop texts offer a way forward to envisage queer futurity, and any book of this kind could hardly bypass the profound influence of Paris Is Burning.123 Directed by Jennie Livingstone in 1990, this documentary film is rated as one of the most sensationalist records of LGBT subculture at the end of New York’s era of drag balls. In many ways it stands as a prime piece of work for aiding minoritarian groups, as well as numerous queer scholars –  Judith Butler, for instance, references it in Bodies That Matter. Paris Is Burning steers me towards the intersections between music and the categories of class, gender, race, and sexuality. Queer black hip-hop artists, such as Azealia Banks, Le1f, Mykki Blanco, Cakes da Killa, House of LaDosha, and Zebra Katz, reveal an extraordinary approach to queering. Emerging in the 2010s, these artists have extended the aesthetics and ideologies of ‘ball culture’ and the ‘house system.’ They have reconfigured the queer strategies of the 1990s according to kinship and choice. Ball culture is one of many instances of shifting trends in popular music, where grappling with the past becomes a part of our future. Queer rap crossover, as I have discovered, forges a bridge between human agency and pop aesthetics by contesting binary thinking. In closing this study in Chapter 7, I opted for an analysis of one of the queerest tracks I encountered on the way, ‘Tear The House Up’ by Zebra Katz. This artist came into the international spotlight with his single, ‘Ima Read,’ an allusion to Paris Is Burning that vividly profiles vogue culture and queens in Harlem during the 1980s. Delivered through Katz’s rich, booming baritone voice, and supplemented by female rapper, Njena Reddd Foxxx, this track’s hook was put into a loop and used by fashion designer Rick Owens’ autumn/­winter collection at the Paris Fashion Week in 2012. Since then it has been sampled and remixed countless times by artists, such as Azealia Banks, Tricky, Busta Rhymes, Grimes, and Gangsta Boo. Katz takes up the theme of gender as part of his re-invention of hip hop, and this entails an individualistic approach to queering. In terms of queer hop language, his approach deserves critical attention, as exemplified in ‘Ima Read,’ where a resignification of the word ‘bitch’ (used by him and Njena Reddd Foxxx about 87 times) re-inscribes the bitch in all of us. I hardly need to state the obvious that it would be too simplistic to deem this as misogynist, as Katz ‘reads’ in order to describe a person, positively, regardless of gender, race, sex, and sexuality. In queer hip hop, ‘reading,’ ‘shading,’ and ‘vogueing’ were created on the streets of Harlem in the 1980s within the subcultures

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Setting the Stage  25 of young gay males. ‘Reading’ was, and still is, used to literally ‘read’ a person by highlighting, often with exaggeration, their flaws; ‘letting them have it’ publicly is a prime motive. One activates a ‘reading’ in ball culture by picking up on the details and mannerisms of appearance – makeup, clothes, walk, talk, and swag. All of this forms part of a battle that is based upon wit, where the winner is the one that gets the crowd to laugh the loudest. Although reading is partially about insult, it is resignified and transferred to the street, becoming part of the training ground for young people’s knowledge of racism and heterosexism. Katz’s video, ‘Ima Read,’ with two dark, white-masked, long-braided, gender-less schoolchildren, epitomizes the risky politics of ‘reading’ gender nonconformity. Tongue-in-cheek ‘readings’ are parodied in snippets, such as chop that bitch, dice that bitch, ice that bitch, proofread that bitch, send that bitch to college, and give that bitch some knowledge. Flippantly, Katz and Njena Reddd Foxxx appropriate the term ‘bitch’ by assigning it to the roles of schoolmaster and schoolgirl, respectively. ­Gradually, they merge into the spirits of the two gender-less dancers, as Katz waxes, with a wicked glint in his eyes, Ima that bitch. Not dissimilar to the opening minutes of ‘Tear The House Up,’ when he growls, Ima that bitch that does it like that, the strategies employed transfer the historical weight of the word ‘bitch’ on to the queer black male performer. There is a peculiar resonance of this in a recording by the US band, Of Montreal, with the lines screamed out by lead singer, Georgie Fruit (band leader Kevin Barnes’s alter ego), Let’s tear the fucking house apart (in the psychedelic track, ‘The Past Is a Grotesque Animal’). The signification of this type of queer performativity is explored in Chapter 4, when I consider the implications of the cross-dressing African American alter ego of a white performer who gets completely wasted each time he goes on stage. There is a sense that the music transfixes him by an overindulgent splattering of stylistic referents as Barnes queers his world through Georgie in a way that disidentifies him. His over-the-top theatrics on stage do more than tear the house apart; the ritual of his performance transports both him and his audience to another space in time. This is a good example of how alter egos effect change in such performativity, and the performances I study all possess such particularities that relate to the personal as much as the public. Indeed, it seems that the plight of all the artists is to articulate poignant social commentaries as they simultaneously escape from the realities of their everyday existences. Amongst the artists I have examined are: Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Madonna, David Bowie, Nicki Minaj, Ysan Roche, Scissor Sisters, Kurt Cobain, Boy George, Rufus ­Wainwright, the Pet Shop Boys, Bruce Springsteen, George Michael, RuPaul, Jimmy Somerville, Mika, Marc Almond, Antony Hegarty, Conchita Wurst, Kevin Barnes, Le1f, Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco, Azealia Banks, as well as queercore groups, such as The Apostles, Anal Traffic, Pansy Division, and Tribe 8. Such an assembly of rich and diverse individuals and bands are examined alongside various themes addressed in the chapters that follow. Whereas some chapters deal

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26  Setting the Stage with the superstars of mainstream pop, others consider the less commercially successful within a range of subcultural genres as I deliberate on the broad spectrum of aesthetics in recording and production. How queering exposes the artist’s intentions is a vital component of music’s function. Insofar as Queerness in Pop Music is situated within popular musicology, it has one major objective, namely, to usher in an auditory approach that is complementary to other disciplinary influences. The music-analytic approach on offer includes a range of concepts that engage with visual imagery and iconography. In an attempt to propose new ways of thinking about queerness in sound, I draw attention to the intricacies of aural perception, and, particularly, the diacritical differences of signification that circumvent essentialist thought. A musicological understanding of queerness evolves from locating the vibrant junctions of sound and performance, and my implementation of textual analyses attempts to shed a critical light on the legitimizing norms of the binary gender systems that prevail in pop culture. For all their supposed eloquence and musical flair, the pop artists I dwell on possess unique characteristics that involve remarkable skills in the manipulation of identity. It is the juxtaposition of this with musical performance that ultimately wins over fans. Innumerable identity indicators aestheticize pop music, and it is hardly my intention to paint a picture of queerness that is prescriptive. I want to instead suggest that pop has led to historical moments where performances are disclosed by the captivating positioning of the gendered body that transcends everyday experience. During an era when the entertainment industry is coming to terms with major change and development, diversity is more visible than ever through queering. But the journey is hardly blissful or utopic; it contains a litany of warnings on the way. Throughout this study I take heed of the possibility of a renewed queer studies as advocated by Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz in their seminal article, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” The contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity – as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and embattled legal ­category  – demands a renewed queer studies every vigilant to the fact that ­sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent.124 In sum, the book applies a model of analysis that comprises two categories for analyzing the pop text: temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Interpreting the musicalized body, I maintain, is a prerequisite for developing a discourse on queerness, where gendered performativity is an audiovisual matter for examination. Watching, hearing, and imagining the performer is inextricably linked to issues of aesthetics and temporality. We experience the persona in pop texts through, and as part of, a complex set

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Setting the Stage  27 of relations. The examples I engage with throughout are from the broader field of commercial popular music, and with little exception every track and video is easily accessible to the reader. Various themes run through the book, and in Chapter 2, ‘Love – a Very Queer Construct,’ the idea of love in pop songs is addressed as I unpack the markers of queerness in diverse contexts. Dance, as I argue, is synonymous with pop, and part of my attention is directed to the disco-influenced, dance-pop trends that resulted in mainstream pop of the 1980s. The Pet Shop Boys’ songs frequently address the construction of love, and I turn to tracks from their Electric album to discuss their postmodern aesthetic and how this is mediated by an innovative approach to music technology. In Chapter 3, ‘“In and Out”: Games of Truth and the Confessional,’ I seek to identify the tactics of the confession in pop music by a critical examination of the struggles of pop artists in an industry that links celebrity status to affirmations of sexual orientation. Introduced into this critique are the mechanisms underlying disidentification and opacity that make the closet tangible. Through an examination of various artists, commencing with David Bowie, I show how secrets and ‘games of truth’ are integral to strategies of queering, and in this respect, opacity as a striking feature of queering is brought to the fore. In Chapter 4, ‘Applause, Applause: Art into Pop,’ I address the issue of performativity as a way forward for debating ideas of ‘vocal costuming’ and its championing of queer politics in social-media contexts. The intersections between ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are also investigated in what I describe as pop art performances, which purport to ideas of difference in camp, irony, and parody. Artistic invention and creative flair are assessed from various perspectives in the performances of Lady Gaga, Ysan Roche, Nicki Minaj, Kevin Barnes, and Scissor Sisters. The studies presented in Chapter 5, ‘Talking Blah Blah: Camp into Queer,’ aim to provide an account of the role of camp in queer popular music, and, as my findings indicate, pop audiovisual aesthetics are predicated upon drag in numerous guises. Camp expression tends toward resistance, elucidating the gestures associated with a set of politics involving gender. Hyperbolic performances by Le1f, Rufus Wainwright, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Jay Kay, Justin Timberlake, and Azealia Banks are shaped by attitudes that intersect with musical styles and sensibilities in extravagant ways. For instance, kitsch finds its way into the enclaves of pop in the form of glamor, albeit transporting with it the politics of camp. ­ hapter 6, ‘To Be a Boy,’ I establish a general critique of masculinity by In C dwelling on aspects of self-fashioning and intended reception. This prompts a further consideration of empathy and the mechanisms at work in performances that evoke feelings for artists. Identifying with artists is a powerful process in audiovisual entertainment. To function at all, a song has to grab our attention. Interwoven into those special feelings we have are anxieties, delights, and pleasures of gender identification, and masculinity is scrutinized alongside race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Finally, Chapter 7, ‘Queer Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion,’

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28  Setting the Stage signals a return to the broader issues of  queerness and futurity and how aesthetics are bound up in temporality. As well as queercore, my attention is directed towards queer hop, with specific reference to the artists, Le1f, Mykki Blanco, and Zebra Katz. I choose to end the book with an analysis of their music, as they represent a young, new generation of queer performers who interface with subcultures to challenge the paradigms of heteronormativity in hip hop and rap. They are fitting examples of a trend that disidentifies in order to state difference with pride and instill in our senses the bliss of unfettered sexuality. So, to the task: What signifies queerness in pop music and how is it staged over time?

Notes

1. Butler, Undoing Gender, 21. 2. Ibid., 1. 3. Cleto, ‘Introduction,’ 19. 4. For a comprehensive guide to Queer Studies, see Beemyn and Eliason, Queer Studies. 5. I have chosen to employ the term ‘genderplay’ throughout to denote the switching of roles and toying with norms that are intentionally designed to entertain. This term is much in use and can be written as two words as well. 6. See Moore, Song Means, for a similar musicological perspective. 7. Lacasse, “The phonographic voice,” 228–30. 8. See Zagorski-Thomas, The Musicology of Record Production, for a relevant approach to perception and a well-rounded discourse on the influence of music production on the interpretation of meaning. 9. I am also interested in the distinction between hypertextuality and i­ ntertexuality in pop texts, discernible through recording techniques and engineering approaches. Serge Lacasse draws on the work of Gérard Genette (Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré), whose comprehensive paradigm of intertextuality highlights the actual presence of a text within another. See Lacasse’s definition in Michael Talbot, ed., The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (­Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) 37. 10. Also see this point discussed in Richardson and Hawkins, Essays on Sound and Vision, 17. 11. For a thorough explication and in-depth theorization of the emerging field of popular musicology, see Scott, “Introduction.” 12. This is evident in the work of musicologists such as Philip Brett, Susan McClary, Judith Peraino, Elizabeth Wood, Nadine Hubbs, Mitchell Morris, Fred Everett Maus, Simon Zagorski-Thomas, Ruth Solie, John Richardson, Robert Walser, Susan Fast, Jacqueline Warwick, and Ian Biddle. For specific work on queer musicology, also see Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat; ­Morris, “Reading as an Opera Queen;” Brett, Wood and Thomas, Queering the Pitch; Hubbs, Gay Modernists; Hubbs, Rednecks; Peraino, Listening to the Sirens; Whiteley and Rycenga, Queering the Popular Pitch; Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices. 13. McClary, “Soprano Masculinities,” 37. Also see Halberstam, “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy,” for another angle on Sylvester and his queering

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Setting the Stage  29 of masculinity through a falsetto that links him in various ways to women. ­Sylvester, Halberstam argues, does not wear his drag, but rather sings it. 14. McClary, “Soprano Masculinities,” 39. 15. See Fast and Hawkins, Popular Music and Society, as well as Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet, for a historical exploration of black sexuality rooted in African American culture, which includes a detailed critique of the death of Michael Jackson and issues relating to his sexual orientation and race. 16. Fast, Dangerous, 48. 17. Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 241. 18. Notably, Richard Middleton positions Adorno’s critique in a nuanced light in his seminal text Studying Popular Music. 19. See Reynolds, Retromania, for a fascinating account of temporality within pop culture. 20. Derek B. Scott, Freya Jarman-Ivens, Nicholas Cook, Philip Tagg, Robert Walser, Peter Wicke, Richard Middleton, Dai Griffiths, Simon Zagorski-Thomas, and Anne Danielsen, to name a few. 21. For my theorization of the pop text, see Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score. 22. Abbate, “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?,” 521. 23. Ibid. 24. See, for instance, the volumes Queering the Pitch and Queering the Popular Pitch. 25. Harrison, Music by Numbers, 61. 26. See de Lauretis, “Queer theory,” who first used this term to problematize and deconstruct the critical differences in the naturalization of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as categories. 27. ‘Otherness’ refers to the ‘constitutive other,’ a concept dealing with divergence from the norm and the self. I employ this term and ’Other’ capitalized throughout to refer to the minority, especially in the disadvantageous asymmetry of sex and gender modal systems. My concept of Otherness is derived from Simone de Beauvoir’s alteration of Hegel’s idea of the Other, which described heterosexist, male-dominated culture. 28. De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet, 22. 29. Ibid., 11. 30. In contrast, see Djupvik, “Welcome to the Candy Shop!,” and King of the Rhythm. Djupvik’s in-depth study of black masculinity (as depicted in 50 Cent’s track ‘Candy Shop’), through a musicological discourse, positions an analysis of hip hop videos alongside representations of hypermasculinity. 31. For one of the definitive musicological studies of gender, where masculinity is deconstructed, see Walser, Running with the Devil. Also his analysis of queerness in Prince’s identity (1994) paved the way for other musicologists, such as myself, working on the analysis of masculinity in popular music. 32. See Gordon, Ghostly Matters. 33. For a relevant discussion of this term, see http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Hip-to-homo-hop-Oakland-s-D-DC-fuses-gay-and-2839793.php. 34. Carrie Battan,“We Invented Swag: NYC’s Queer Rap.” Pitchfork, March 21, 2012, http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8793-we-invented-swag/. 35. For example, see Hawkins and Niblock, Prince. 36. Walser, “Prince as Queer Poststructuralist,” 79–89. 37. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 22.

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30  Setting the Stage 38. See Penney, After Queer Theory, for a provocative perspective on heteronormativity, where he insists that they have become ‘structural givens’ in queer theory. Penney demonstrates that critical insights into sexuality (advocated by queer theory) were already provided by Freud, although, paradoxically, he is erected as a figure of paternalistic heteronormativity. Penney is critical of Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, and the fetish of unconventionality he claims that characterizes her work. Also see Edelman, No Future, who coins the term ‘reproductive futurism’ to address and reject the logic of a narrative that is at the core of the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. Contrary to Edelman, Muñoz perceives the present as not an alternative to reproductive futurism. Rather the present is profoundly predicated upon straight time and utopian futures are indeterminate precisely because the present is indeterminate. Also see Eng, ­Halberstam, and Muñoz, “What’s queer about queer studies now?,” for a reflective consideration of how queer studies needs to address citizenship and immigration. They propose an approach that includes the broader social issues of race, nation, religion, class, ethnicity, class, and sexuality alongside queerness. 39. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 175–76. 40. In his first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault deconstructs sexuality to argue its role of psychic and social ordering. See Foucault, History of ­Sexuality, Vol. 1. 41. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 7–8. 42. Edelman, No Future, 48. 43. For a theorization of musical temporality in relation to corporeality, see my earlier study into dance music. Hawkins, “Temporal Turntables.” 44. De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 203. 45. De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 92. 46. Ibid., 76. 47. See for example my Chapter 1 in Settling the Pop Score and “Introduction” in Pop Music and Easy Listening. 48. See Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure, Chapter 8 for an exploration of an important aspect of this, namely ‘linear temporality,’ with specific reference to funk grooves in the music of James Brown. 49. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 6. 50. Ibid., 153. 51. Ibid., 187. Also see Pullen, Queer Youth, for a relevant study on queer youth and media culture. 52. Ibid., 15. 53. Halberstam, Gaga Feminism, 149. 54. Here, my employment of the term ‘platform’ is intended to suggest the mechanism for staging production and, moreover, for archiving performance (in the form of collective social memory). 55. Lee, “Alive With You,” 469–70. 56. Ibid., 471. 57. Ibid., 473. 58. McNair, Striptease Culture, 11. 59. Harrison, Music by Numbers, 55. 60. Ibid. 61. Devitt, “Keep the best of you,” 429–30.

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Setting the Stage  31 62. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 157. 63. Ibid., 159. 64. Ibid. 179. 65. Most of the scholarship in ‘queer musicology’ has been undertaken by historical and popular musicologists rather than ethnomusicologists. Rachel Lewis in addressing the implications of this insists that the “challenge for feminist and queer musicology in the twenty-first century is to move beyond the kinds of divisive politics that characterized the cold war period – politics that continue to play out within contemporary musicology. If a comparative transnational feminist and queer critique has anything to teach us in musicology, it is that speaking positions cannot be so easily divided between East and West, local and global. Ethnomusicologists and historical musicologists might do well to think more deeply about what it means to encounter the other and to recognize the interconnectedness of the spaces we have long since viewed as separate.” Extracted from Lewis, “What’s Queer,” 52. 66. Much of this has to do with the ‘gaze’ and spectatorship. In their introduction to the volume, A Queer Romance, Paul Burston and Colin Richardson make the claim that psychoanalytical theory has had the single most profound influence on a critical approach to popular culture. More specifically, psychoanalysis, in pathologizing homosexuality, has opened up a wide range of interpretations, not least through the work of Freud, Lacan and more recently Laura Mulvey. 67. Nyong’o and Royster, “‘Different Love?,’” 414. 68. Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, 17. 69. Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 50. 70. Ibid., p. 52. 71. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 89–90. Also see Amico, “‘I Want Muscles.’” 72. See Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic, for a visionary approach to the erotic valences inherent in a broad-range of genres. 73. Thomas, Straight with a twist, p. 17. 74. Ibid. 75. Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 14, author’s emphases. 76. Thomas, Straight with a twist, 27, author’s emphases. 77. Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 15–16. 78. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars, 101. 79. Neal, ‘Trafficking in Monikers,’ 160, my emphases. 80. Ibid., 159. 81. Ibid. 82. Salamon, Assuming a Body, 57. 83. Auslander, “Musical Persona,” 314. 84. This part of my study builds on a theory of hyperembodiment, first vented in a music analysis of the pop artist Rihanna. See Hawkins, “Aesthetics and Hyperembodiment.” 85. See Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, for a useful explication of Foucault’s technologies of production and ‘of the self.’ 86. Dell’Antonio, “Collective Listening,” 229. Notably, Dell’Antonio employs the term ‘appraisal’ to describe the process of experiencing multimedia representations, arguing that terms such as ‘viewing’ and ‘listening’ are inadequate. Although agreeing with this, I tend towards the term ‘evaluation,’ which I use as a synonym for ‘appraisal’ throughout this book.

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32  Setting the Stage 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. See Richardson, Gorbman and Vernallis, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. 90. For a reflective and fascinating study into what audiences perceive as authentic in pop song performances, see Bicknell, ”Just a Song?.” 91. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, for a persuasive psychoanalytic discourse of abjection as a condition of subjectivity. 92. Jarman-Ivens addresses the ‘uncanny’ aspects of queering throughout Queer Voices. Also see Royle, The Uncanny, for Nicholas Royle’s discourse of the ‘uncanny’ in queer representations. 93. Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 19. 94. Such aspects are discussed in greater detail during Chapter 4 of my book ­Settling the Pop Score. 95. Szabo, “Between Silence and Stigma,” 454, my emphases. 96. Ibid., 451. 97. Zak, The Poetics of Rock, 52. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 60. 100. See Askerøi, Reading Pop Production, for a detailed theorization of the concept of sonic markers in production and their implications for identity politics. A major strength in this study is the deconstruction of representations of straight masculinity amongst mainstream superstars. 101. Cubitt, “Maybellene: Meaning and the Listening Subject,” 147, author’s emphasis. 102. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 41. 103. Muto, “He Was the Woman of His Dreams,” 70. 104. Ibid., 75. 105. Ibid., 81. 106. See Hawkins and Richardson, “Remodeling Britney Spears,” for a theorization of personal narratives and agency in pop music. 107. I define genderbending by the blurring of the distinctions in fixed gender roles. This can be as coincidental as it might be deliberate, referring specifically to an individual who ‘bends’ or transgresses gender norms. Androgyny and drag display are examples of gender activism that would fit the description of genderbending. 108. Referred to as ball/house community, contemporary ballroom culture comprises a community of Black and Latina/o women, men, and transgender ­people who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual or straight. Two structures, house and balls define ballroom culture. For further details, see Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness.” 109. “RuPaul, ‘Sissy That Walk:’ Exclusive Video Premiere,” Billboard, May 12, 2014, http://www.billboard.com/articles/6084802/rupaul-sissy-thatwalk-video-premiere-drag-race-exclusive. 110. Poulson-Bryant, “‘Put Some Bass in Your Walk,’” 221. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., 224. 113. Ibid. 114. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 132.

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Setting the Stage  33 15. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 276. 1 116. Halperin, How To Be Gay, 189. 117. Ibid, 191. 118. Leibetseder, Queer Tracks, 41. 119. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 217. 120. Ibid. 121. Foucault, The Order of Things, 297. 122. This idea has been explored extensively in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, JeanClaude Passerson, Walter Benjamin, Richard Terdiman, and others. 123. Also see Muñoz, Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia. 124. Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” 1.

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2 Love: A Very Queer Construct

Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

—Oscar Wilde1

In his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde critiques the late Victorian period. Executed with his usual dose of acerbic wit, numerous perspectives are vented in the form of a ‘discourse on life’ and the ­gradual progression toward individual freedom. Casting a critical light on the ideological contradictions of speculation, Wilde ponders over the future at the fin de siècle. Preoccupied with temporality, he assesses the merits of s­ ocialism while reviewing the utopian notions of the revolutionary, the evolutionist, the materialist, the idealist, the escapist, and the practitioner. Satirically, Wilde situates the present within the future by dint of a libertarian snapshot of the world, a parody of imperialism in itself. For Wilde, artists epitomize individuality; they provide insights into the ‘soul;’ they are our guiding light; they are our future. Experiencing the pop artist evokes just this. On the spur of the moment their music gets us to respond emotionally and physically. Music is about moving the mind and body. It is about guiding us into new spaces. It is about freeing up our bodies. It is about dance. Synonymous with the realization of utopias, it is the dance floor that stages music and, as Muñoz claims, it serves as a “space where relations between memory and content, self and other, become inextricably intertwined.”2 Importantly, it is the “persistent variables of difference and inequity” that lead people to the dance floor. Muñoz’s idea of the “queer communal logic” overrides individual identity and becomes a mainstay of social and musical relevance.3 The trends with which I want to address this evolved in the 1970s onwards, shaped by styles and technological developments. As a style, disco emerged from the early 1970s and incorporated mainly ‘real instruments’ – a combination of orchestral (strings, brass, woodwinds) and popular (kit, bass, guitar). Disco was played in recorded form by disc jockeys at club venues, and by the end of the decade Studio 54 in New York had established itself as the top venue in the world, a formative force in the shaping of disco and club music.4 Amongst the many artists that dominated the dance floor were Donna Summer, The Bee Gees, ABBA, Gloria Gaynor, Diana Ross, Chic, and KC and the Sunshine Band. And, then there was Kraftwerk. Their music introduced into disco the electronic sound,

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  35 which, in turn, influenced producers in their choice of sounds and techniques.5 During the 1980s and 1990s, as disco transformed, it impacted countless performers, including post-punk bands (New Order, A Certain Ratio, Orange Juice, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts) and early hip hop (The Sugarhill Gang and Afrika Bambaataa). New offshoot styles included post-disco, club, and dance-pop, all of which became more experimental due to the introduction of synthesizers, sequencers, and music software. Singers were now hired by record producers to record the vocals as mainstream dance-pop of the 1980s was shaped by the advent of new electronic trends, such as Hi-NRG, best exemplified by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, the producers behind Kylie Minogue, Bananarama, and Dead or Alive. The megastars of 1980s dancepop, including Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, the Pet Shop Boys, Paula Abdul, and Whitney Houston, helped transport pop culture into the 1990s as it underwent substantial changes. Incorporating into its style synthpop, house, techno, contemporary R&B, and trance, dance-pop dominated the mainstream charts in the 2000s with acts such as Madonna, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kesha, Usher, Taylor Swift, and Britney Spears. Its disco origins remain discernible in the following musical features: strident persuasive grooves, programmed beats, catchy hooks, medium to fast tempi, straightforward lyrics, simple verse-­ chorus form, and glossy production and engineering. In one of the biggest hits of the 1990s, ‘Free,’ by Ultra Naté, something beguiling emanates from a laid-back double-guitar riff that opens up this track. It consists of a four-bar loop, played once in its entirety and then spliced and looped. The two guitar lines are partly doubled up on the melody creating suspended chords (see Example 2.1). Following many repetitions, the riff transforms as the groove starts up. At precisely this point the music alters character. Now elated and celebratory, it becomes danceable. ° bb b 4 ‰ œ œj ˙ & b 4 ~œ œ œJ œ œJ ~~~ mp j bb b 4 ‰ œ œ ˙ ¢& b 4~~ ˙™ œ ~~ dreamy q=125

gtr.1

gtr.2

> j œœ ™ œ œ œj œ œ ~~~~ ‰ œ œœ œœ ˙œ œ œ J Œ J J > j ‰ œj œ œ ˙ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œJ~~~ Œ œ

˙ œJ œ ˙ œ

˙ œJ œJ œ ˙

˙

œJ œ

Example 2.1  Main guitar riff in ‘Free.’

Later on during the chorus when Naté sings, Don’t hold back! You’ve got to live your life, the guitar riff breaks into a strident backing figure. Instantly, the stylistic codes gel into an irresistible groove. Propelled by a bouncy bass, the beat is tightly regulated, contributing to the general organizational principles of the groove.6 Are we all strangers, Deep down we’re all the same are the lyrics that kick-start the second verse of ‘Free,’ as the song builds up in momentum. Released in March 1997, this song symbolized liberation as more an imperative than a choice. There can be little doubt that the chart-topping success of ‘Free’ during the final years of the twentieth century owed much to Naté’s soulful and uplifting voice: Don’t be scared

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36  Love: A Very Queer Construct your dream’s right there. Epitomizing the disco diva is her vocality, which energizes the track. The musical intercourse between the melodic acoustic guitar riff, Naté’s vocals, and the programmed layers of kit and bass samples express the track’s ecstatic mood. A strong sense of abandonment arises from features of repetitiveness in the instrumental, rhythmic, and vocal parts and their treatment in the mix. Naté grew up listening to Martin Gaye and Boy George, and these influences in ‘Free’ are obvious.7 In 1997, when the song was released on her label Strictly Rhythm, she would have grasped that being immersed in the beat implies a transcendence from the then to the now, with a clear sense of projection into the yonder. As such, a distinct aesthetic fuels the track, ‘Free,’ with love as its central theme. Two decades after ‘Free’ was released, it is ­difficult to ignore the utopian quality of this track. Feelings of blissful liberation from life’s drollness are rendered emblematic in the musical production. After all, dance is about escape, and Naté luxuriates in the command to live our lives in order to be free. Levels of exuberance, while exceptionally rousing, also seem heartrending in a track that decontextualizes the past while reveling in the present. Rooted in the history of disco and house, ‘Free’ succeeds in encapsulating the feel-good factor of dance music in the 1990s with a special kind of timelessness. When dance animates our bodies, it makes real the material conditions of gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, and sexuality, and to feel free is to be lost in time. And when it comes to queerness on the dance floor, as Muñoz puts it, this is to be “lost in space or lost in relation to the space of heteronormativity.”8 Certainly, Naté’s track is an incentive for ‘queer becoming’ in dance spaces; it is about accepting loss (authority, order, and ideology) and relinquishing control. Based on communal experiences, music scenes would steadily mushroom into sites where emotions and politics were negotiated aesthetically. From the 1970s onward, multi-gendered queer scenes flourished where dance ­signaled a way of perceiving the world in time and space. In this sense, dance-pop toys with utopian spaces where temporality is defined by the intricate musical properties of organization. In ‘Free,’ it is fairly conventional chord shifts, tricky contrapuntal lines, the compelling double guitar riff, and a gentle bass that egg the diva on. Representing a stirring enactment of queer time, ‘Free’ is an invitation to partake in the not-yet-there. Throughout this chapter, my focus also falls on aspects of corporeality that are queer. Performances when queered, I maintain, project the complexities, nuances, and subtleties of our bodies. Importantly, participatory reactions affect our judgments of a performer in different ways from just listening. It is the ways people move to music that informs our impressions of identity. For instance, we make sense of pop spectacles (as with opera) not only sonically, but also by experiencing the visual effects of movement. While the ear makes aural sense of the world around us as we identify things in terms of the proportions of sound waves and their frequencies, the eye makes different assessments, charting the micro-details in frequencies of

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  37 light refraction.9 Let us assume that the body is constructed from auditory and visual vibrations, and that the feel-good sensation arises when straight time is interrupted. Muñoz has referred to this as ‘ecstatic time,’ occurring during those special moments when “one feels ecstasy, announced perhaps in a scream or grunt of pleasure, and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present, or future.”10 Thus, if dance calibrates music from the present into the future through ecstatic time,11 how do notions of escapism shape musical expression? In quite extraordinary ways the groups and artists I consider in this chapter express themselves by a range of s­ tructuring devices. They prompt us to envisage new temporalities and spaces by way of a set of performative traditions. Moreover, they allow us to experience the gendered body as a form of ‘public display.’ Finally, it is the variants of genderplay and bodily flexibility in musical performances that spell out the appeal of the queered performer.12

Love: A Bourgeois Construct In previous studies of the Pet Shop Boys’ music, I have addressed their tendency toward the utopian, which is also predicated upon irony. In one sense, their music comes across as banal and naïve,13 two terms I activate to describe a rather cunning process of creativity. Neither intended as derogatory nor reductive, the ‘banal’ and the ‘naïve’ is based on an aesthetic that is a cleverly engineered ploy. Regularly, their music gets us to imagine places outside the stifling confines of the present, where the future is shaped by a queer temporality. In this way, a transgressive quality emerges from their narratives, which is discernible in their flirtatious rhythms, sonorous melodies, and sexy productions. Characteristically, the Pet Shop Boys’ pop songs are delivered with aplomb due to a virtuosic employment of technology. Further, their propensity to self-parody draws on the polarities of the ‘serious’ and the ‘ludic,’ activating their own sense of self. As powerful forms of enactment, pop songs mediate countless different messages at the same time, and in the Pet Shop Boys’ productions a camp sensibility functions to theatricalize their act in a rather special kind of British way. They know full well that being ‘frightfully camp’ is a means to undercutting societal and political disdain in the realities of everyday life. I would also add that ‘being camp’ tackles a wide range of gendered topics as they play to an in-crowd, with a musical style that brims with innuendo. All in all, the surplus value of their signature is found in a collision of meanings that contravene norms as they depoliticize identity categories with great panache. In 2013 their song ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ was released to ­critical acclaim, its witty lyrics satirizing the political and social practices of the British middle class. From the album Electric, their twelfth studio album in 27 years, this song is one of their queerest to date, teasing out the transformative relationships of time, space, and culture. A musical quote of Michael

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38  Love: A Very Queer Construct Nyman’s ‘Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds’ (which incidentally has its origins in the ground bass from the prelude to Act III, Scene 2 of Henry Purcell’s opera, King Arthur) turns this track into a very English affair. Nyman’s piece, made famous in the soundtrack to Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film, The Draughtman’s Contract, is instantly recognizable, its quirky theme structured by large, staccato intervallic leaps up and down. Tainted by social memory of another period in time, ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ satirizes the contemporary bourgeoisie. As one might anticipate, the lyrics ooze with irony in the form of cleverly formulated musical quips. All about gender norms and love’s eventual dissolution, Tennant cries out: When you walked out you did me a favour, You made me see reality. Confronting hetero-­ hegemony, the song is inspired by David Lodge and his 1988 novel, Nice Work, where a wife leaves her husband on the grounds that he has gone too far down the “very respectable bourgeois road” of life. It should not go amiss that the woman in question is a feminist university lecturer, her husband the manager of an engineering firm. “I love you,” he says … “I’ve been in love with you for weeks.” “There’s no such thing,” she says. “It’s a rhetorical device. It’s a bourgeois fallacy.” “Haven’t you ever been in love, then?” “When I was younger,” she says, “I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.”14 Karl Marx had much to say about love in a thesis claiming that the bourgeois male perceives his wife as an instrument of production. Hardly content with having their own wives and daughters, these gentlemen also tended to seduce each other’s wives.15 It is not by chance that Marx is referred to in the lyrics of ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’: digging through my student ­paperbacks, flicking through Karl Marx again (4:45–4:51). ­Theatrically, ­Tennant laments in the final phrase, I’ve given up the bourgeoisie! This precedes a coda where the word bourgeoisie is released and looped, phased, flanged and technologically ‘screwed up.’ There is a rider at the end of the song: so I’m giving up the bourgeoisie until you come back to me. Wit becomes the repository for their views on cultural politics, aided by an excessive musical production. Well into their fourth decade of songwriting, their original use of technology documents a fascinating legacy. Glamorously, technological wizardry shapes the aesthetics of ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct,’ positioning broad, geopolitical issues of bourgeois love alongside musical frivolity. Encapsulating precisely what Wilde claimed 100 years earlier in his satirical libertarian snapshot of the world (described at the start of this chapter), the song is a biting critique of British society. The other songs from the Electric album also flag up tropes of queerness in an age of cynical entrepreneurialism. This is achieved by employing the musical codes of dance-pop and sewing them into a style that offsets queer

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  39 masculinity against the more conventional male representations found in the music industry. In the main, the Pet Shop Boys’ queer performativity raises issues of authenticity and socialization. As Fred Maus has observed: “Lacking the direct, sincere self-expression normally associated with authenticity, they offer, instead, a veiled, inhibited expressiveness that can, nonetheless, be taken as an emblem of a community.”16 Much of this boils down to the ambivalence of a male subjectivity that is politically encoded. Maus states that, “ambiguity or ambivalence involves setting out an opposition, along with an unclear or undecidable relation between the terms of the opposition, and such patterns are ubiquitous in the Pet Shop Boys’ music.”17 If we follow Maus, a clue to working out and interpreting their sound recordings lies in locating the ambiguous details of their production and not least the motives of the producer. Understandably the producer has a major impact on any recording, and Stuart Price’s influence on the Electric album is unmistakable, with his obvious links to other queer albums: Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, Scissor Sisters’ Night Work, Kylie Minogue’s Aphrodite, The Killers’ Day and Age, and Take That’s Progress, to name a few. ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ is rendered queer in the details of the production, which extract a range of quips and camp social observations. Not only offering up a critique on sexual politics, the song is a romp through a British camp landscape. It is also the longest in duration of all the tracks on Electric, lasting just over six and a half minutes. The euphoric fanfare introduction of almost one and a half minutes prepares the scene, and when the groove kicks in (1:01) a sense of urgency is mediated that is not necessarily consigned to one thing. I would suggest that the desire to be in the groove, at least in terms of auditory verisimilitude, is about departing from the present. In other words, the passage prior to the groove start seems short-lived as the strictures of the here and now hurtle us into blissful oblivion. The attitude on display, albeit playful and facetious, is articulated with a put-on bitterness: Love is a bourgeois construct, just like they said at the university. Eloquently, this suggests the mechanisms of a camp sensibility at work. By this I am referring to the song’s state-of-the-art production and its fancy edits and glittering arrangement, which illuminate the showbiz community of queer culture. In particular, the pseudo-utopian theme of love seems consistent with the Pet Shop Boys’ idiolect. Numerous instances of this are discernible in the regulation and production of the rhythmic layers and riffs. As in all their recordings, the technological manipulation of the four-on-the-floor beats and the production behind the programmed beat patterns are what make the song euphoric. Throughout ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct,’ vocal editing is crafty, includ­ erpetually ing flanging and countless other effects, with Tennant’s voice p manipulated in ways that add extra weight to syllables, words, and vowel sounds. Inextricably linked to the execution of the melody, his singing works as a critical structuring device. By this I am referring to the furnishing of

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40  Love: A Very Queer Construct vocal virtuosity, a chief ingredient of the Pet Shop Boys’ aesthetic that is deceptively simple and arguably banal. The voice’s positioning alongside all the compositional features contributes to a technologically sophisticated mix, providing an annex between gender and technology. Stephen Amico has considered many forms of masculine signification and their links to the “appurtenances of technology,”18 and with the Pet Shop Boys’ pop texts it is especially their productions that highlight “a postmodern aesthetic based upon a style mediated and engendered by technology.”19 Addressing the complexities of gender, technology, and musical ­expression poses a prime challenge for locating the markers of queer orientation. These are entirely reliant on the temporal conditions of any object of study. Of interest is the innovative spirit of ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ and ­creative implementation of technology. The song’s Nyman quote belies a rhetoric that is more than just playful, delivered in a production that brims with technological quips. In effect, the song gets its message across poignantly. This is because the Pet Shop Boys’ approach is always contingent on the development of a musical idiolect that is made plausible due to songwriting expertise. Indeed, their idiolect comprises a range of musical criteria that encompass attitude, generation, ethnicity, and class. It is the accumulation of such ingredients that defines the Pet Shop Boys’ act. Again, it is well worth highlighting their tendencies toward quotation. ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ is a send-up of love, harking back to earlier songs with similar themes – ‘Pandemonium’ (2010), ‘I’m with S­ tupid’ (2006), ‘Rent’ (1987), ‘So Hard’ (1990), and ‘Love is a Catastrophe’ (2010). So why love, and what about the Pet Shop Boys’ take on queer love? Jacques Lacan has argued that love orients itself to the wholeness of the person,20 supporting the subject’s pursuit of the part of himself that is lost forever. As a result of fantasy, love regains a lost immortality in its ­guarantee of future restoration and hope. In his The Four Fundamental Concepts of ­Psychoanalysis, Lacan reinforces this claim, distinguishing the function of drive (within a narcissistic field of love), and the matter of the reciprocity of being loved and loving. For Lacan, there is also the underlying issue of desire’s relation to lacking (le manque),21 and one might say that the sentiments that underpin ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ speak less to society’s anticipation of what love might promise to be than to the nature of the subject’s lack of having what he desires. Mistaking love’s relation to desire becomes a main issue here. Persistently conservative in its mission, love is intent on fixing, or better remedying, the image by which the ego regards itself. In this sense, it evinces whatever its imaginary identification serves. Fuelled by love and enabled by fantasy, desire fills a vacuum that replaces absence for presence. Thus, one might posit that the rhetorical terrain of love falls well outside all logic, and a general resistance to patriarchy (the underlying critique of marriage) is endemic in the mannerisms and clichés of the Pet Shop Boys’ songs. Their flouting of social conventions suggests a mobile trajectory of frankness and satire. As such, their self-reflexivity is a

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  41 statement on them not taking themselves too seriously, even when critiquing the social politics of love. One of their most renowned lyricist tricks is to make U-turns on the points they are keen to stress. Take the lines, so I’m giving up the bourgeoisie, until you come back to me, which has its witty resonance in the Burt Bacharach and Hal David 1968 hit, ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’: So for at least until tomorrow, I’ll never fall in love again. As a feigned parody of love, ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ infers a strong hint of sexual yearning. The music production adds weight to such sentiments and, again, Price’s role cannot be underestimated. In his production meticulous attention is paid to devices, such as the details of side chain compression, where the four-on-the-floor kick drum controls a compressor bus, and any sonic signal being sent into this is dampened when the ‘kick’ comes in. Intended to avoid the collision of kick drums with bass-lines and drums, this functions as one of many powerful stylistic determinants in the genre of electronic dance music. Price turns to a distinct 1980s feel in the mix of this track, providing a retro feel at the same time as a sense of being at the cutting edge of technology. Discernible in the majority of pop tracks is a rich archaeology of tainted love narratives. Originally recorded by Gloria Jones in 1964, the song ‘Tainted Love’ took seventeen years to become an international hit when released by the English synthpop duo, Soft Cell (consisting of Marc Almond and David Ball). Although it was a cover song, it rapidly became theirs. This had to do with Soft Cell’s very queer subject positioning. As with Tennant, Almond’s queer sensibility is of relevance. At the time of its release in 1981, with the AIDS epidemic on the rise, there was a sense that the song dealt with insider knowledge, a ‘forbidden love.’ Concerning a romantic relationship, where one of the partners offers up more love than the other, both parties have had enough and are quitting a love that has died and turned bitter. Don’t touch me, please turns into a plea of touch me, baby during the final fadeout as Almond bemoans that the love we share seems to go nowhere. Such sentiments arise in the Pet Shop Boys’ song, ‘Thursday.’ Intoxicating in terms of stylistic flashbacks of disco, the style of performance conjures up gender-queer escapades. Surfing on the ‘feel good’ factor of disco and all its erotic jouissance, the utopian undercurrent of this song hints at queer futurity. Clichés of gender normalcy expose the flawed protocols of a process that is charged with dystopia. Tracking the past in musical styles becomes an endeavor to idealize the present. There is a strong hint of this in ‘Thursday,’ where the track’s convergent politics debunk the troublesome notion of bliss. A broad array of musical ideas backs up this assertion. One instance involves the disco bells and their placement in the mix over a propulsive groove, which gives way to plucked strings within the climactic zone of the song. At this point disco gives way to rap as the British rapper, Example, waxes: I’ma take that trip down memory lane but you’re never gonna feel the same. The ephemerality of this moment is a result of the intricacies of a slickly produced arrangement.

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42  Love: A Very Queer Construct Moreover, the fusion of disco with rap works well in a measured and casual performance. Since the early 1970s, disco has had a convoluted history with associations of setting oneself free. The disco track also entailed extending the ‘natural order’ of the three-minute pop song, as Tim Lawrence explains: “If the record was long, the dancer had a greater opportunity to lose her- or himself in the music, and therefore to enter into an alternative dimension that did not so much evacuate the site of the body as realign it within a new sonic reality.”22 By ‘new sonic reality,’ Lawrence refers to the social contexts where dance sessions became a marathon and the emphasis fell on the physical (more than the rational). Effectively, this opened up the “experience of the body as an entity that was not bounded and distinctive, but rather permeable and connected.”23 Intimacy on the restricted space of the dance floor would be made all the more vibrant with the technologies of sound systems, enhanced by the visual aesthetics associated with lighting. Added to this experience was the consumption of drugs (mainly LSD in the early days), which not only freed up the dancer, but also made things euphoric. The kind of practices adopted within disco culture involved a queer utopianism, and the Pet Shop Boys’ style has turned to this pleasure principle with gender modifications. Tennant’s flamboyant singing style and Lowe’s low-key presence as keyboardist on stage vividly depicted a unique class of male-ness. The experiences of young white men in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s are framed by discourses on ‘masculinity in crisis,’ something the Pet Shop Boys’ narratives address. By promoting aspects of queerness, they contributed to new trends in male expression. In pop music there have always been subversive strategies that aestheticize masculinity, and this is exhibited in the meta-theatrical devices of time, context, and language. All this slots into a wider historical framework of cultural expression, including legendary figures like Beau Brummell, Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Quentin Crisp, and others. One might say that the Pet Shop Boys’ songs depict a Dionysian sonic universe that indexes a desire that undercuts normative and naturalized stereotypes. In essence, their queer aesthetic is spatially organized in studio productions that reference a cultural context that exudes incandescence. Instinctively, they know that the higher the temperature, the brighter the glow. Analogous with liquid substances, music effects color changes, such as from red to white and finally to blue, and in my employment of the term ‘incandescence’ I refer to the experience of burning red in moments of heightened emotion. Graphically, the Pet Shop Boys capture the pent-up emotions of excess in a musical materiality and convert them into dance. All their songs have enthralling dramatic build-ups that result in a kaleidoscope of dazzling colors. Acutely aware of the historical relevance of dance music, the Pet Shop Boys have tended toward alternative spaces and temporal disjunctures. Evidence of this is apparent in another track, ‘Vocal,’ which stormed the Billboard Hot Dance charts in August 2013. Possibly one of their most uplifting dance tracks ever, ‘Vocal’ illustrates their impassioned approach

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  43 to songwriting. Chris Lowe has claimed: “I just can’t get enough of this track […] I mean you don’t get many lyrics like, ‘aspirations for a better life are ordained,’ on a lot of dance records.”24 Disco is taken to another level in ‘Vocal,’ conjuring up mental images of flashing strobes, glitter balls, and glass-tiled dance floors. All in all, the production translates cheesy riffs into glamorous carnal realities, albeit for a short moment in time. Tennant’s languid singing style is enhanced by catchy rhythm riffs, expertly produced and polished. It is the very musical ingredients of such an affective force that inspire the body to move. Inviting participation, the groove hints at how a better world might feel. Highly energized, the track is a metaphor for the temporality of existence. Replete with puns, literary allusions, and camp gestures, the performance is shaped by a charm offensive. Most of all, it is the camp flair of the performance that chips away at bourgeois sentimentality. Crammed with layers of different meanings, ‘Vocal’ is crafted in a way that accentuates a sensibility that is decidedly British. One might say that the excess exhibited in such productions maps out the transformative potential of their sound world. This suggests a longing that emerges as a powerful impetus for a queer politics, eschewing the standardized rhetoric of gender norms. Music, as the Pet Shop Boys show us, provides a gateway from the here-and-now into the utopian domain of that-which-might-be.

Do You Really Want to Make Me Cry? What exactly binds people to their favorite music is a complicated issue, and the thematics of love are worth further rehearsing here. Generally, pop songs target young people, a vulnerable group, who fall in and out of love more than any other group of people. Melancholia, elation, nostalgia, bitterness, sadness, remorse, and pain are just some of the sentiments experienced when we encounter love narratives in pop songs. Throughout history, being in love and feeling hurt have contributed to expression in all forms and guises. Pop songs are about an outpouring of emotions, such as ‘hurt,’ ‘pain,’ and ‘love,’ and there is the ongoing debate of the pop artist’s biographical presence in a song.25 Tensions abound, not least when it comes to interpreting whose queerness and why all the genderplay. Worth considering is the self-positioning of the artist in the here-and-now, given that the present is never causal. Journeys toward discovering what love is about get us to respond in extraordinary ways. In 1982 the British group, Culture Club, released its single ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.’ From their platinum-selling debut album, Kissing to Be Clever, this song rose rapidly in the UK and international pop charts as the lead singer, Boy George, started making headlines. His androgynous look and cross-dressing style turned him into one of the biggest queer icons of all time. Indeed, the displays of genderbending in British pop around the 1980s seemed to absorb everything from the previous English Romantic era, Bonnie Prince Charlie, 1930s cabaret, the French Incroyables to ­Russian

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44  Love: A Very Queer Construct Constructivism.26 Boy George developed a new wave, queer style that mixed 1920s zoot suits, geisha outfits, and exaggerated suits, all with garish colors, braids, and ribbons. Furthermore, he turned to makeup on a scale never witnessed before, his painted face outlined by bold eyeliner, lashings of mascara, and high-tone eye shadow. His prime mission was toward an outlandish invention of masculinity that confronted gender norms. When first appearing on Top of the Pops, the majority of British households would query whether he was a boy or girl, and it took little time before Culture Club had occupied a queer segment of the 1980s pop market, complementing the New Romantic bands and artists of the day, such as Spandau B ­ allet, Visage, Ultravox, Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, Bryan Ferry, and David Sylvian. In retrospect, there can be little doubt that Boy George was one of the most extravagant front men of any band in the early 1980s, his queering antics transforming the face of pop for all time. Hugely popular between 1982 and 1984, Culture Club fused cultures and musical styles into an identity that became an original signature in itself – Caribbean rhythms and bass lines, rock, pop, new wave, soul, and country would contribute to their musical signature. Driven by a soft reggae beat, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ has a catchy Caribbean feel to it, mainly due to the bass part played by Mikey Craig. From the outset, Boy George, who wrote the lyrics, admitted this was a very personal song. Kept from the public for a long time was his love affair with Culture Club’s drummer, Jon Moss, which had left him deeply hurt. Initially, Boy George had not wanted to release this track, and in an interview with Q Magazine in September 2008, he explained how he had threatened to leave the band if this song ever came out. ­Subsequently, it was released and became successful. A serene, gospel-flavored introduction ­ushers in Boy George’s vocal phrases, from which point on his blueeyed soul singing style brims with deep-felt feelings. The details of vocal articulation are particularly noteworthy. For instance, on the second chorus, there is a weepy blues-note slide on the word ‘cry’ (see Example 2.2). This involves a slippage down a fifth (E–A) to include the flattened third (Bb), all in the home key G major (1:32–1:35). Up to this point in the song there is an Aeolian modal flavor, created by the motion between the chords G major, E minor, and B minor. As part of the buildup in musical intensity, the insertion of a blues note (Bb) heightens the song’s pathos by ornamenting the word ‘cry,’ repeated in the phrase, Do you really want to make me cry. mournful q=100 G

vocal

4 &4 Œ ‹ mf

œ

œ

Do

you

j œ

B‹7/F©

œ œ œ real

-

ly

œ want

œ

to

>œ

E‹7

make

œ me

3

œ

bœ

cry

Example 2.2  Vocal hook – Do you really want to make me cry.

œ- ˙

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  45 The mournful vocal expression literally aches with pain. Notably, on the second phrase more of an inflection is created by emphatic chord shifts in the backing, which are detached and crisply executed. All the details of pitch control, timbre, ‘grain,’ texture, inflection, and diction help extract Boy George’s pathos. The sensation of being deeply hurt, as he duly was when writing the song, becomes part of his strategy to implicate him as protagonist and person. Melodic treatment of the word, ‘cry,’ functions to extract pain, which is further intensified by an increase in vocal velocity. As Boy George rounds the word ‘cry,’ he clutches on to this word longer than any of the other words, emphasizing it by means of precise diction. A fine balance is maintained between expressivity and technical control as the word ‘cry’ is virtually milked dry. In such moments, queerness is projected through a voice that is raw and vulnerable. Technically this due to a vocal timbre, which is shaped by his heavy use of vibrato on certain held notes and an ever-so-slightly flawed sense of pitching (deliberate or not). This occurs on the high pitches in the pensive first verse, culminating with the rhetorical question, how can I be real? (0:00–0:45). Critiquing Boy George’s queer sensibility in relation to his musical performance is an intriguing subject. To start with, that he revealed himself as an eccentric, supposedly gay man in 1981 is a phenomenon in itself and well worth pursuing. What was it in his act that attracted so much media attention? Why did his opposition to gender norms succeed? And, how did his strategies of genderbending attract so much attention? Probing at such questions directs our attention toward the persona of the performer. Possessing a conventional male, full-tone tenor voice that is rich and sonorous, with occasional light vibrato trills to certain pitches, I would argue that his voice on its own is not overtly queer. Marked by a degree of ‘effortlessness,’ his vocality conveys an air of nonchalance, which is assisted by the use of laryngeal vibrato.27 This tends to follow upward intervallic leaps. The effect of this is to intensify vocal expression and inflect certain syllables and vowels, as in ‘make’ and ‘cry’ in ‘make me cry,’ and ‘hurt’ in ‘want to hurt me.’ Interestingly, Boy George masters a type of recitative-like approach to singing, adopting the meter of ordinary speech to enhance his expressive shading. As with many of the artists I have studied, this constitutes a major vocal technique in conveying emotions. In addition to vibrato, he places dynamic swells on the key words, ‘make,’ ‘cry,’ ‘hurt,’ and ‘tears’ to heighten the lyrical meaning. As the song progresses, a wealth of subtle melodic alterations are engaged to give a sense of spontaneity and development. This involves extending the duration of syllables, shaping phrases with different rhythmic inflections, and creating variations in vocal timbre. Worth noting is his repetition of melodic phrases, which is always variable. Routinely, Boy George places weight on the word ‘hurt’ with one note, resolving to the word ‘cry’ (three-note slippage). This extracts a degree of vulnerability, which, arguably, contributes to an impression of the singer’s persona. On the whole, Boy George’s performance conveys a melancholic attitude that problematizes love and desire.

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46  Love: A Very Queer Construct I now want to turn to the video for ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,’ where elements of queerness surface as a dominant point of observation. In a relatively low-cost video production of around $22,000, Boy George’s performance occupies a space rife with connotations. At this point it is worth bearing in mind that the majority of Culture Club fans in the USA had only heard this single on the radio – they had no idea of what the band or Boy George looked like. In the beginning, MTV was uneasy about showing the video for a number of reasons. Produced by David Forest and directed by Julien Temple, the video’s storyline deals with Boy George on trial in a courtroom, with a jury that is in blackface. A scene follows in Soho’s fictional Gargoyle Club, in 1936, where he is seen performing with Culture Club in front of an audience who all look like spies. Following a bout of dancing around the club, he is ushered out by two bouncers. Suddenly, without any warning, he puts on his magic round glasses, transforms and escapes. The next scene is set in the Dolphin Square Health Club in Soho in 1957. Symbolically, Boy George emerges slowly up the steps of an indoor pool, god-like and still clothed. With this appearance, the homoerotic ambience of a health club is instantly deflated. Despite the well-worked-out crowd and two muscle-bound young men who look on with revulsion, there is little implied when it comes to same-gender relations. Much of this is down to Boy George’s apparent disinterest. As these men attempt to capture him and push him into the pool, Boy George vanishes. Magically, he appears back in court where the judge issues his verdict and sends him to jail. A scene follows of him in a cell, with a shadow of his hat projected on a brick wall: He looks sad and dismayed, as if in disbelief. Soon, though, he is visited by his band members, who open up the cell and set him free. Final shots depict Boy George with his band, all wearing colorful clothes (designed by Sue Clowes), filmed on a stairwell. From this one might surmise that it is not entirely coincidental that he is positioned one step above his lover, Moss, to whom he directs the last refrain of the song, do you really want to hurt me.

Figure 2.1  Boy George in the video ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  47 Clothes and fashion speak volumes about one’s identity, and during the course of the video, Boy George is filmed wearing a long skirt with a Hebraic inscription of the band’s name (wrongly translated). He has admitted that most people took him for a female, and there is little doubt that his blatant display of transvestism emerged as a major marker of genderplay in the context of early 1980s’ music videos. Notwithstanding his androgynous image, Boy George was usually considered non-threatening to a heterosexual public. Much of this was due to his wit and self-irony. In the US he would field all kinds of questions relating to his sexuality. Playing on his Englishness, he often declared that he preferred having a cup of tea to having and thinking about sex.28 One might say his body, a marker of non-normative masculinity, pertained to a particular white, British identity that was in itself queer from a US perspective. As such, his New Wave, punk-rock image succeeded in opening up a temporal space for a trans-masculinity that circumvented normative categories of gender. Through the years fans have continued to love Boy George as he has maintained a successful career as DJ and musician. His queerness has ­survived as he has dealt with Otherness on his own terms as an outspoken gay man. Notably, his appearance helped establish him as a leading figure of the ­British New Romantic movement in the 1980s. Culture Club was a groundbreaking band for its time, and it is worth remembering that they were the first group after the Beatles to notch up three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 from the first album. Thirty years after him recording ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,’ Boy George released his album, This Is What I Do, in 2013. This, his first new solo album since 1995, had a strong autobiographical pull to it. In the ­retrospective song, ‘Live Your Life,’ the lyrics, everybody said the boy was strange, are delivered in a mid-tempo, reggae-pop style tinged with nostalgia. Projected by way of a solipsistic moody voice that digs deep into his own past, Boy George makes a statement that little has changed in society and that homophobia still takes its toll on people every day. Huskily delivered in a richer and more mature voice than in ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,’ the song exudes warmth, confidence and an injurious air. Indeed, feelings of hurt in ‘Live Your Life’ have their corollary in ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,’ making the ‘disjuncture’ between the past and the present powerful. Deeply embedded in personal memories, his music is haunting, and this is due to different temporalities. With pop music, there is often the sense of it belonging to another time, where temporal disjuncture emphasizes what might be described as a memory crisis, where the logic of discontinuity literally puts time out of joint. This idea is explored by Richard Terdiman in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, where the author links nostalgia to “a totalizing or unproblematic circulation between present and past.”29 Myths of progress, when attached to nostalgia, can make the “loss of memory less troubling.”30 Boy George’s ‘Live Your Life’ can be understood in these terms as an attempt to handle the stress of the past in the present. By virtue of his own nostalgia, he seeks a comparative diagnosis of

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48  Love: A Very Queer Construct what it meant to be a strange boy in the early 1980s to one today. Dressing up in a non-masculine manner, being mistaken for another gender, not coming out, and taking genderbending to its extreme, constructs a personal narrative that shirks from conforming. Visions of the past are thus a complicated matter, the result of which in Boy George’s case could be seen as an abstraction and aberration of the past. In this light, his songs are invitations to rethink our lives and times differently, and more. They are also reminders that the phenomenon of being queer requires figuring out subjectivity and recognizing how one can travel from one space in time to the next.

‘I Want the Whole World to Celebrate …’ Influenced by the Pet Shop Boys as much as Boy George is the Lebanese-­ British singer and songwriter, Mika (born Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr. in 1983).31 His third album, The Origin of Love, continues many of the issues hitherto addressed in this chapter. As with Boy George and many of the artists covered in this book, Mika has had to confront issues of ‘difference’ when it comes to his identity, spending a good part of his early career dispelling assertions of gayness. In an interview with the gay magazine Out he insisted once that there are ways of understanding and discussing sexuality without necessarily using labels.32 The following year, in an interview appearing in the London Evening Standard, he again would declare that he wanted to be ‘label-less,’ simply because he could fall in love with anybody.33 Finally, it was in September 2012, amidst much media excitement, that he came out. Conveniently, this coincided with the release of The Origin of Love, in many ways a flashy demonstration of Mika’s musical virtuosity, with a queer aesthetic discernible in all his songs. The seductively cheesy track, ‘Popular Song,’ is a nod in the direction of Robbie Williams’ camp sensibility, while ‘Love You When I’m Drunk’ extends the queer overtones of the Pet Shop Boys’ hit, ‘You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk.’ Then there is the track, ‘Elle me dit’ (She tells me), the album’s first single in France, which peaked at Number 1 on the French Singles Charts. Perhaps it is the album’s title track, ‘The Origin of Love,’ with its Queen-esque flavor, that most epitomizes the ‘love song.’ On his previous two albums, Mika had already turned to dance and electronica idioms as part of his signature, but in The Origin of Love this would be taken to another level. Much of this was due to the producers he collaborated with: Pharrell Williams, Klas Åhlund, Benny Benassi, Nick Littlemore, and Greg Wells. Inevitably their input aided the diversity in Mika’s style of delivery. As the title suggests, all the songs affirm experiences and impressions of love – there is a suggestion of ‘pure’ dance-pop candy in ‘Celebrate,’ a spoof of love in ‘The Origin of Love,’ over-indulgence and silliness in ‘Love You When I’m Drunk,’ prostitution and sex in ‘Lola,’ a hilarious slippage between porn and robotic love in ‘Make You Happy,’ and a glorious send-up of disco and liberation in ‘Tah Dah.’

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  49 For the purpose of this chapter, my attention is directed to the track ‘­Celebrate,’ recorded in Miami and London. This became one of the great summer hits of 2012. Written by Mika, Pharrell Williams, and Ben Garrett and produced by Peter Hayes and Nick Littlemore, the song has a retro, synthpop, disco-house feel. The message of the song – to celebrate life and love – is conveyed by the Daft Punk dance-pop style of Littlemore, coupled with the slick, erotic beats and ingratiating groove of Williams’ production, all of which extract Mika’s persona in the mix. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Mika claimed: ‘Celebrate’ is the kind of song that is only possible when everyone throws themselves into a session without any ego. And that open attitude is at the heart of the album. You might recognise my fingerprints but it’s an evolution. You can’t stay in the same place.34 When it came to the making of ‘Celebrate,’ Mika has claimed that the breakdown section (1:48–2:02) ended up being a ‘silly moment.’ Quite intentionally, the bland lyrics, I’m not mad at you at all, But I want the whole world to celebrate, were sung in a pretentious manner. A sense of silliness can be detected in the details of vocal articulation. Although this passage might well be open to many interpretations other than those Mika gives us, it does denote a moment of respite as the protagonist plays on a sense of vulnerability. All this has to do with a performing attitude, and its inextricable links to the gendered body. In the light of such an assertion, I want to contemplate what elements of queerness are perceptible in the recorded performance. To start with, a clue lies in the technical expertise of producing and arranging the song where the overall sound image is the result of a meticulous control of music technology. Various features bear this out: (a) the programming of the kit and percussion parts that shape the groove and make it danceable, (b) the controlled entry and exit of parts, aided by a subtle treatment of compression, echo, and reverb, (c) the rhythmic syntax of all the combined tracks, (d) the precise vocal recording techniques that provide color and contrast throughout, (e) the technical highlighting of dynamics, inflections, syllabic emphases, and register, and (f) the mannerisms attached to vocal overdubbing, including Pharrell Williams’ rather restrained vocal interjections on the choruses – one can hardly ignore his self send-up yells of, and have fun, toward the end. There is little mistaking that the craftsmanship behind the production discloses recording techniques that are meant to sustain a high level of exuberance from start to finish. Of course, the technicalities behind recording, engineering, and producing ‘Celebrate’ are inseparable from the compositional organization of melodic hooks, chord sequences, catchy rhythmic gestures, and textural instrumentation, such as synth motives that frequently fill in the gaps and increase the musical interest. What then are the junctions between the production ploys and the queer aesthetic?

50  Love: A Very Queer Construct elated q=122

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Example 2.3  Vocal hook – I want the whole world to celebrate.

Musical pleasure is negotiated by the employment of sounds, riffs, and hooks we instantly recognize. There is a confectionary frosting of queerness in ‘­Celebrate’ that comes in the form of a triplet-oriented house organ riff. This gels with a four-on-the-floor disco groove to create a dance groove with a distinct Bee Gees flavor. I would also suggest that the appeal of ‘Celebrate’ is embedded in a strategy of politicization that I read as reversible. Because the frivolity of such a cheesy song might anesthetize, depoliticize, and promote romantic love as a solution to the world’s problems, it nevertheless works on other levels. It is significant that at the beginning of the 1980s disco was renamed ‘dance,’ not only by the mainstream, but also by the gay press. During the 1970s, there was no style of popular music more associated with racial and sexual minorities than disco. This was a period when rock tended toward treating sex as fantasy and conquest, while disco approached it as fun, pure and subversive.35 As Lucas Hilderbrand puts it: “The form of disco was understood to be polymorphously erotic, and its lyrics seemed to suggest a sexual utopia.”36 In 1981, it was already “post-disco as dance-pop took off and the primary continuity between disco and new wave was located in new directions.”37 Advances in music technology also meant that the relatively cheap retailing of samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, and effect units ushered in new transgressive stylistic codes. Old school house organ riffs are at the core of ‘Celebrate,’ ensuring that the track is uplifting, while four looped chords comprise this house riff (C–D–G–Bm/A), with a dotted feel, riding the crest of the steady drum patterns. bouncy q=122 pad

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Example 2.4  Groove pattern in ‘Celebrate.’

Superimposed over this jaunty riff is Mika’s voice, highly processed with subtle touches of auto-tune, evident in the intervallic leaps. This adds a dimension of put-on artificiality, with a definite nod in the direction of Daft

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  51 Punk and the queer audiotopias of tracks, such as ‘Digital Love’ and ‘Lose Yourself to Dance.’ Similarly, there is a sense that Mika wears his heart on his sleeve in the performance and production of this song, and this is primarily due to its danceability, its pull away from everyday life, and its marking of ecstatic time. A queer aesthetic is sculpted by his penchant for alluring melodies that drive home the message. The result of this is a sense of utopia, heralded by musical moments that denote elation. The aesthetics of the mix contribute significantly to the ‘feel-good’ factor as much as Mika’s performance in a tightly controlled production. Dimensions of distance in location and sound-source positioning have a direct bearing on the song’s narrative. Vocal image location constantly shifts, and as I have already discussed, many aspects contribute to this (including microphone choice, effects, etc.). The imaging of the voice is vital in extracting the meaning of the song, and the ways by which this is touched up with reverb in the solo lines and chorus overdubs determines the entire feel of the track. Indeed, it is the subtle contrasts in distancing, dynamics, width, and depth, that provide the track with its appeal. Overall, the aesthetics of mixing allow us as listeners to experience Mika’s presence as if we were close to him, small differences and variations determining intimacy. Pop arrangements of this kind are all about achieving a sense of buildup, and there is a teasing quality to the multi-layered chorus (notably in the synth pad and the electric guitar, which is arpeggiated and chopped up). Moreover, a ‘lightness of touch’ (which Mika aims for) evades the ‘slamming in yer face’ of many dance tracks, and this is down to the regulation of a production that grooves. Any perceptions of queerness in ‘Celebrate’ will pick up on the performativity of an over-processed voice, which, as I read it, suggests a degree of farce. Much of this has to do with the branding and marketing of a queer identity in commercial dance music. Certainly, the ‘commercial’ aspect of the third album (on which ‘Celebrate’ appears) is more pronounced than his earlier two albums, Life in Cartoon Motion and The Boy Who Knew Too Much. Now out, having confessed and been on a long journey, Mika has the chance to be free. Having consistently emphasized his resistance to categorization, his strategy is to break loose within an imagined space, where there is a glimpse of an utopian possibility. One might describe his utopianism as a postmodern one, characterized by the proliferation of cultural fragments that are never fixed. Fluid and reflexive, his project is one of captivating and putting into play queer musical markers. In the video of ‘Celebrate’ Mika chooses not to highlight same-sex relations (as one might expect in the case of him having just come out). Rather the focus falls on a frustrating boy/girl romantic relationship. Upon making the video, directed by Maxim Bohichik, the intention was to problematize the very notion of celebration. Mika has explained that “although the song’s called ‘Celebrate,’ at its heart, it’s quite sad.” The director wanted “to have something that had an evolution from sadness to joy, but in quite a clever way.” As the song builds up to its climax, Mika literally swims in a

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52  Love: A Very Queer Construct sea of torn-up paper, which, as he puts it, “symbolizes all my sorrow, all my frustration.”38 In the video’s storyline Mika, sick of this world, goes out into the streets and encounters all sorts of different people, living their lives and indulging in different forms of celebration. The video was his first to be shot outside the UK, in New York. Mika has stressed that although he has never lived there, it has always been part of his life: “I’ve always wanted to do something here.”39 Toward the end of the video he makes his way to a party, bursting through all the millions of pieces of paper that rain down on him like confetti. What started off as sorrow becomes part of life’s celebration. The final shot is of Mika smiling coyly, and lying on his back on the floor with shreds of paper covering him: I wanna come home, to the only place I know! longing q=122

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Example 2.5  Vocal phrase – I wanna come home.

Meaning in any pop song is derived from a wide range of signifiers that add up to provide information about the performer and protagonist. Identifying with Mika, for instance, draws the listener into the song’s narrative, with any number of relationship possibilities at stake. So, what about generation, class, race, and ethnicity, and to what extent do sexuality and gender unite and divide? The marketability of stardom is often contingent on ­videos, which set out to promote the artist’s look and identity. In ‘­Celebrate,’ a queer temporality emerges from Mika’s decision to take a journey into various narratives. While there is a straight narrative in the video, it would be hard to bypass the queer dimensions of the musical performance. On close inspection, the song comprises an imaginary landscape of collective belonging, a glimpse into the future that promises desires based on the becoming of a future generation. It is worth stressing that Mika has comprehended that musical styles in pop complicate queer history and that his own staging of queerness connotes affective states. His appropriation and articulation of dance idioms becomes a way of approaching the past. Prizing open the ‘queer past’ is made possible by tactics that trace formations from other times, spaces, and places where an underlying purpose of such a venture is to liberate oneself from the present’s stifling grip and hold. The spatialization of time is implicit in pop songs, and the ‘here and now’ sense of experiencing music is part of the ‘then and there.’ Thus, it is how the ‘then’ can release us from the ‘now’ and propel us into the ‘future’ that suggests queer futurity. If queer pop music is utopian, then this comes about by it subscribing to a future that overrides the hardships of the present. Mika’s exploration of self, sexuality, ethnicity, and generation in his songs is, on the one hand, a genuine struggle for liberation, while, on the other

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  53 hand, a testimony to a neoliberal-lifestyle diversity. As I interpret it, ‘Celebrate’ is an example of queer memory, where the yearning for certain structures makes space for equality in sexual citizenship. The workings of queer utopian memory are a form of documenting public opinion by providing a critique of the present. The pathos in Mika’s performance lies not only in the fact that he imagines a specific utopia, but also in the portrait of a pained and desperate subject. A longing for collectivity and acceptance is the central theme of ‘Celebrate,’ a theme that runs across many queer pop songs. Pop music stylizes the politics of desire, allowing us to imagine the future. Toward an understanding of how this works, we need to continually revisit the origins of love.

‘And then He Was She’: Walk on the Wild Side Love of a very different kind was in the air when transvestites came in droves to New York in the 1970s. Lou Reed would choose this as his theme for his song, ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ from his second album, Transformer. Reed, who never tired of walking on the wild side himself, had a vision that was predicated upon a personal set of queer politics. Not only did many of his songs empathize with a group of alternative people, but they also gave him recourse to disidentificatory desire. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ was released in 1972, the year of B ­ owie’s infamous coming out, which I discuss in Chapter 3. By paying h ­ omage to a group of colorful characters from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, who ­Warhol named Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy, and Jackie, the song is ­double-edged: the protagonist comes over as an observer looking in on a weird group of characters, at the same time as identifying with them. In essence, the song is about individuals who are stigmatized for not complying with normative conventions. Set within a social context where transgression was morally condemned, Reed’s challenge was to suggest a way of existing, a lifestyle that promised hope alongside fear and rejection. Historically, the song has achieved the status of grounding a controversial subject through Reed’s rich horizons of experience. What is more, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is a staging of utopia. Suggestive of an ideality that is worth striving for (albeit from a dystopic perspective), the song documents the queer politics of the day by caricaturing transvestites in the 1970s with humility. So what is it about the song that has sustained its popularity over the span of four decades? The story is about a New York landscape rife with drugs, poverty, racial discrimination, and sexual politics. For its time, it functioned as an invitation to step out of straight time, offering a heuristic way into understanding the intersections between music and the queer subject. I now want to consider the elements in the music that capture the aesthetics of the wild side of the street. Let us begin with one of the song’s most memorable markers, the dry, sliding bass riff. Driving the song, this highly unusual bass figure has gone down as one of the most unforgettable hooks in history. Close

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54  Love: A Very Queer Construct listening, however, reveals that the stealthy bass line is not as simple as it might appear. Bass player Herbie Flowers doubles on two tracks – the first with an upright acoustic bass and the second with an electric bass. As such the bass part consists of two melodic lines repeated within a two-bar cell, with the bass guitar moving in contrary motion to the double bass (see Example 2.6). This grounds the tonic to subdominant root notes (C–F). Played in its high register, the bass guitar spans a minor sixth interval, E up to C, via the perfect fourth, A. One of the features that stands out most is the contrary glissando movement from the 4th beat to the first beat of each bar. The effect is eerie and smoothed out by the subtle drumming that is performed with brushes rather than sticks. Most of all, this bass figure holds a clue to the rhythmic syntax of the entire song. I would suggest that something in its gesture is queered by the gentle up and down glissandi and the accompanying strings in the high register that supplement the chords. ˙™

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Example 2.6  Bass riff in ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’

It seems little wonder that the song became an instant Top 20 hit, despite the fact that the radio edit had to delete a reference to backroom blow jobs. For its time, it was shocking for some, for others not, with an ambivalent narrative dealing with male prostitution, drugs, oral sex, and transsexuality.40 Released during a period in the early 1970s when audiences were increasingly aware of cross-dressing, transvestism, and queerness, it exposed the genderbending options in identity politics. Glam Rock was currently in its heyday, made attractive by artists such as Elton John, David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music, and Gary Glitter. Although glam rock went into decline during the later part of the decade, it had a profound influence on 1970s and 1980s groups, such as Kiss, Mötley Crüe, and the British New Romantics (Culture Club, Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Spandau Ballet). Dealing explicitly with social deviance and the sentiments of minority groups, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is a potent critique of queer temporalities and non-normative relations. A great sense of self-awareness emanates from Reed’s laconic style as he waxes lyrical. Defined by a smoky, casual voice, his vocal timbre sharpens the focus on the lyrics. It is a baritone saxophone solo that ends the track (3:38–4:14), extending Reed’s final phrase, with backing female voices on the line, And the colored girls say, Doo-doo-doo-doo. The overall mood is highly clichéd, with the saxophone solo creating an impression of a smoldering New York subway station in the early hours of the morning. Above all, the song’s aesthetics are shaped by a monotonous oscillation between the tonic, C major chord, and F major. Other than this, the only harmonic addition is a short entry of a D major chord (V of V) in the pre-chorus.

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  55 In pop, the details of the production and the recording disclose the compositional features. For the sake of this analysis, I am particularly interested in how creative processes in the studio shape the aesthetics of the track. Production techniques, after all, are intended to regulate the full spectrum of sonic elements in a mix, and more often than not a track is engineered to fit the style and character of the artist himself. In ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ the production pulls together in the mix melodic phrases, harmonic progressions, rhythmic patterns, groove structures, tempo regulations, and the overall instrumental arrangement. All these elements are assembled by the meticulous organization at preproduction stage. It is at the point of a song’s conception that technology becomes part of the sonic marker of the singer’s identity. What I mean is that it is not just Reed’s performance, but also his vocal production, that draws us in as listeners. From this, one might deduce that the sculpting of the track’s sound-design accounts for the aesthetics of any pop track, which commences right at the beginning of the process with live performance in the studio. Peter Wicke explains this as, “[l]ike mixing colours before actually beginning to paint, or selecting suitable material for a sculpture […].” 41 In effect, this involves drawing up a design that eventually undergoes the complex process of involving engineers, producers, and musicians. Emphasizing the historical aspect of these specific roles, Wicke points to the audio-technical creativity of musicianship. In the field of popular music, the audio-technical and the musical became so dependent on each other through the mass production of records that it is no longer possible to have an understanding of musical development without keeping both sides simultaneously in view. The history of music in the twentieth century was, indeed, written in equal measure by musicians and audio technicians.42 This is not to say that recorded songs only gain their character because of the studio recording, but rather that the initial conception is already predicated upon the potential possibilities of sound technology and engineering. Ken Scott, the engineer for ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ has suggested that this played an important role in the original sound-design of the song. Worth bearing in mind is that this song was recorded between two other queer albums, namely Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Aladdin Sane. Multi-tracking was in its early days then and, as Scott has explained, the bass line was recorded after the band had thoroughly rehearsed and learnt the song.43 While Flowers was rehearsing, Scott placed a Neumann KM 56 microphone (wrapped in a sponge) in the double bass bridge, a technique he had tried and tested when recording Stanley Clarke. As I have pointed out earlier, the signature bass part involved the over-layering of an acoustic with an electric bass guitar, precisely coordinating glissandi in both parts. Reed’s vocals were recorded with a U67, requiring only slight touching up through compressors and a bit of EQ. Ritchie Dharma played kit on the track, with Scott placing different microphones

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56  Love: A Very Queer Construct on the kick, the snares, and overhead. Scott has explained that he had just started to record in stereo, meaning that the kick had its own track while the snare and overhead microphones were mixed in stereo to the 16-track deck. The acoustic guitar, played by Mick Ronson, was recorded with two AKG C-12As, while a second guitar was recorded with a U67 on the amplifier. Overall, it is the accumulation of details such as these that makes a track work. Two points of observation arise from the overall effect of the production in ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ First, the vocal mannerisms of Reed’s performance are quite extraordinary in terms of how he detaches himself. The affect of his nonchalant sung lines is to gently urge us to partake in the very personal experience he recounts. Subdued and lighthearted, the low-key, beautifully recorded voice lures us into a dark narrative. It is the singing-talking manner of his delivery that makes the story plausible. This owes much to his phrasing and subtle shadings with slightly ornate embellishments, a powerful indicator of ordinariness. Second, Reed manages to translate a complex topic into something that comes across as quite normal, with virtually no melodrama. Inadvertent or not, his phrasing on the words, wild side, ­discloses a tinge of campness as he descends, intervallically, on the word side. Close examination also reveals subtle variations in pitch inflection, where weight is afforded to specific words. All this raises the general matter of ‘verbal space,’ a term coined by Dai Griffiths to describe the “pop song’s basic compromise: the words agree to work within the spaces of tonal music’s phrases.”44 By the time we arrive at the chorus, there is a release in tension as the incessant repetition on doo-doo-doo-doo-doot signals increased emotional intensity, rising to a climactic point as the female backing singers take over with a great crescendo and shift to the front of the audio image. Exactly how attitude is mediated by musical phrases in the mix becomes a prime signifier of meaning in any song. Griffiths describes how verbal and musical phrasing come together “in aspects of rhythm,”45 therefore contributing to aspects of density in the arrangement. Reed’s melodic rhythm (with all the other features of expression – dynamics, textural and timbral inflections, and register) in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ captures an intimacy, and his penchant for telling a queer story is rich with poetic satire. Vocally, then, he infers a quality that is attached to a narrative dealing with queer utopianism beyond the here and now. In the end, this song grants us access to an imaginary, utopic place where the social transformation of gender relations is cherished. Griffiths makes the relevant claim that this legendary track demonstrates aptly how words and music trade off one another due to rhythmic impetus: Lou Reed begins ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ typically and prosaically enough – ‘Holly came from Miami, FLA.’ During the song, though, he sees the ‘coloured girls,’ and occupies the verbal space differently, dancing rhythm through a babble word: ‘doot.’46

Love: A Very Queer Construct  57

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Indeed, the aesthetics of this song are wrapped up in Reed’s own handling of a verbal space, which accentuates the complexities of his own gender politics and views on love. His way of dealing with difference through musicalizing the verbal space implies a queer performativity in progress. Knowingly, he unsettles traditional sex-roles by treading a fine line between the ordinary and the glamorous: his agenda is as provocative as it is contrived.

Concluding Thoughts All the routes into the discussions on love have been via the recording, the score, and the lyrics, which I argue are prime focal points for any musicological inquiry.47 I have suggested that the sonic design of a pop song is the result of production technology, one of the most determining features of musical style. Each of the artists I have discussed possesses their own set of appealing musical features that are identified by many aspects of audiovisual production. With the Pet Shop Boys, their aesthetic is made recognizable by vocal techniques as much as sound production. Stuart Price’s role in ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ is all-determining, especially when it comes to milking their queerness through the art of production, and there is much in Price’s own biography that comes to the surface in the songs I have analyzed (not least in the form of intertexts with other artists, such as Madonna and her club-friendly Confessions on a Dance Floor album, which I turn to in Chapter 3). There is always a sense with the Pet Shop Boys’ tracks that the fun actually starts in the studio during the putting down of tracks, where techniques and devices are employed to extract quips and emphasize ironic retort. It is as if Price has understood their idiolect and brought it to the fore in his work with the duo. Taking snapshots in time, the pop recording is a biographical documentation of an artist or band. This is evident in Ultra Naté’s track, ‘Free,’ capturing the spirit of late 1990s mainstream dance culture in a recording that not only showcases the state-of-the-art technology, but also the huge popularity of dance anthems during this decade. What made this hit a crowd-puller in forty countries is largely down to the vocal recording and its slick production. Issues of race are as relevant as gender in disco, and Naté needs to be positioned alongside black divas such as Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, Diana Ross, and The Weather Girls. The queer aesthetic in ‘Free’ assumes its highest endorsement when incorporated into the soundtrack of the fifth and final season of the UK TV series, Queer as Folk, within the dazzling Jason Nevins mix. Disco and dance music, we know, have emerged as primary genres in most queer communities, slotting into a vibrant social narrative that literally unfolds on the dance floor – indisputably, the track ‘Free’ articulates this and offers a site for utopic imagination and escapism. In his late career, Boy George would become immersed in club culture, achieving international acclaim as a leading DJ. As I have pointed out, his iconic look and sound determined the course of Culture Club, especially

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58  Love: A Very Queer Construct through recordings, such as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” As this song became a hit in the US, in fact the band’s first single release, it entered the Adult Contemporary charts, with North Americans generally ignorant of what Boy George looked like. Theorizing his queerness helps position him within a special juncture of masculinity and sexual orientation in the 1980s. His markers of masculinity adhered to an English sensibility that was ­working-class and not middle-class, art-school-oriented. As I have explained, his voice, when heard by North Americans on the radio, came across as ‘normalized’ male. Yet his success, as we know, was entirely due to a queer ­aesthetic and biography, the importance of which should not be underestimated. His inimitable flair for cross-dressing as a male-sounding artist unhinged and realigned structures of masculinity alongside gender, race, sexuality, nation, class, and generation. Perhaps most crucial here is actually what he set out to communicate through the sonic qualities of his vocal style. Consistently, Boy George has conveyed a high level of self-­reflexivity when stating who he is and what he is about. And in a sense, genderplay becomes something authentic to him. In the beginning of his career he projected a queer bravado that was unashamed and playful, resisting all the pressure to come out and declare his homosexuality; the 1980s were hostile and discriminatory. Looking back, his display of gender-transgression was fearless, embodying a ‘male-femininity’ that became necessary for reimagining the possibilities of selfhood in a pop world undergoing major changes. His impact on pop artists has been colossal, as we have seen in the music and career of Mika, representing the generation following Boy George. Belonging to an earlier generation, Lou Reed also paved the way forward for representations of diversity in popular culture. His excessive experimentation with drugs during a life loaded with paradoxes and contradictions formed the backdrop for many extraordinary recordings and performances. Often with frustration he would vent his feelings, as he reached out for new ways of self-expression. As a result, his songs became the narratives of an existence predicated upon a remarkable persona, as they advocated resistance, justice, and multiplicity. For example, “Perfect Day,” one of his most renowned songs, released in 1972, exemplifies Reed’s personal convolutions: On the outside it comes across as a sweet and naïve piece, arguably utopic. Yet, there is a darker internalized element, belligerent and ­embittered, expressed in the final phrase, You’re going to reap just what you sow. As with “Walk on the Wild Side,” Reed’s knack was to provide a biting commentary from the sidelines. This involved delivering songs in a detached way, where the style of the music, and its mood, remained constantly ambiguous. The world Reed sang about was tough, decadent, and brutal. As poet and rock star, he gave credence to the subverted and marginalized in society, and this was always in tension with institutes of power and control. In the queer readings I have offered in this chapter are major issues of personalized musical endeavor. This intends to throw into relief biography and musical rhetoric in songwriting. Considered from various perspectives,

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  59 music emanates from the persuasive force that induces empathy in the listener, and this is based upon matters that the artist is fervently occupied with. Within popular song, inventive initiatives furnish notions of individuality, and this is generally accommodated within the three-minute format of song form that is destined for entertainment. Ideology is crucial to stylistic expression and part and parcel of the details of sound we experience. This helps explain why music functions to provide people with the impetus to transgress and protest. Down the ages, music has been conflated with movements of moral opposition to which pop icons are still subjected today. There is much to unpack from the fashioning of gender in pop songs, which allows us to imagine a queer world, where music’s mysterium allows for multiple meanings of the idiosyncrasies that frame spectacular performances.

Notes 1. Wilde, “The Soul of Man,” 291. 2. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 66. 3. Ibid. 4. Studio 54 in New York was in operation between 1977 and 1980, established by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. In 1981 the building was sold to Mark ­Fleischman, but the lease was kept. The club re-opened in September 1981, with a guest list comprising Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, Cary Grant, Lauren ­Hutton, Gina Lollobrigida and Calvin Klein. Parties included guest appearances by Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Wham!, Culture Club, Run-DMC, and Spandau Ballet. From 1988 up to 1993 the club changed its name to The Ritz and became a concert venue for Eurodisco, New Wave, and Punk acts. 5. See Lindvig, Wir fahren auf der Autobahn. 6. I have analyzed elsewhere (Hawkins, “Feel the Beat Come Down,” 101–02) that it is the aesthetics of the beat and groove that link dance styles to their specific cultural context. 7. “For the Love of House: Ultra Nate-Free,” Defected, June 25, 2013, http:// defected.com/news/love-house-ultra-nate-free/. 8. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 72. 9. See Chion, Audio-Vision. 10. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 32. 11. See Richardson, An Eye for Music, for an in-depth critical study into the concepts, theories, and methods of audiovisuality in popular culture, where an emphasis is placed upon the ‘performative turn.’ 12. My use of the term ‘genderplay’ relates to the act of role-playing and fantasy when it comes to disturbing gender norms. In particular, transgression is a result of genderplay, where heterosocial relations and representations are challenged and undermined. 13. Hawkins, “The Pet Shop Boys,” Settling the Pop Score, The British Pop Dandy. Also see Ålvik, Scratching the Surface, for an application of banality in his reading of the Norwegian artist, Marit Larsen. He makes a compelling argument that “banality plays an important part in the construction of illusions, such as in pop songs about love” (156). 14. Lodge, David. Nice Work. London: Vintage Books, 2012, 210.

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60  Love: A Very Queer Construct 5. Marx and Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1 16. Maus, “Glamour and Evasion,” 390. 17. Ibid., 386. 18. Amico, “‘I Want Muscles,’” 365. 19. Ibid. 20. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts. 21. Thanks to my colleague, Ståle Wikshåland for drawing my attention to the fact that Lacan’s concept of le manque is not synonymous with failure. 22. Lawrence, “Disco and the Queering,” 239. 23. Ibid. 24. http://www.examiner.com/article/pet-shop-boys-vocal-is-storming-up-the-billboard-dance-club-chart-video (accessed September 27, 2013). 25. For example, see Auslander, “Musical Persona.” 26. Also see Geczy and Karaminas, Queer Style. 27. Although the terms vibrato and tremolo are often used synonymously, this is not accurate. A periodic variation in the pitch (frequency) of a sung note is what defines vibrato, whereas the periodic variation in volume of a sung note defines tremolo. To produce a good tone when singing, vibrato will often be a result of breath flow that is steady. A tremolo effect can alternate with this, whereby the volume level changes while the pitch remains constant. Larynx or laryngeal vibrato induces a trill vibrato that entails the larynx moving up and down. 28. See Bromley, “Side One (1980-1984), Track Six: Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” 29. Terdiman, Present Past, 22. 30. Ibid., 24. 31. Notably, his name is stylized as MIKA. Born in Beirut to a Syrian mother and an American father, Mika was only 1 year old when his family was forced to leave Lebanon. They moved to Paris, and then later, when Mika was 9 years old, they settled in London. He describes a horrific amount of bullying at his first school in the UK, Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, in Kensington. As a result he was taken out of the school and taught at home by his mother. Later, at the age of 12, he was enrolled at St. Phillip’s School in Kensington, where his musical activities flourished, and where he became head of the school’s choir, the Schola Cantorum. 32. Shana Naomi Krochmal, “Mika’s Second Verse (Same as the First?),” Out, January 27, 2008, http://www.out.com/entertainment/2008/01/27/mikas-secondverse-same-first?page=0,0. 33. He has accounted how he got death threats over his sexuality as a 23-yearold. See “Mika: I’m Getting Gay Death Threats,” London Evening Standard Online, March 23, 2007, http://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/mika-im-gettinggay-death-threats-7186405.html. 34. Adrian Thrills, “Mika Is Still Scarred by Sister’s Suffering,” Mail Online, September 28, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2209752/ ­ Mika-Singer-songwriter-scarred-sister-fell-50ft.html. 35. Also see Tucker, “Outsider Art.” 36. Hilderbrand, “‘Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice,’” 421. 37. Ibid. 38. “MIKA – Celebrate (Behind the Scenes) ft. Pharrell Williams,” YouTube, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj3fYqKdavw (accessed November 2, 2014).

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Love: A Very Queer Construct  61 39. Ibid. 40. Reed has stated in an interview with Disc and Music Echo that the lyrics were carefully formed so that straights could miss the point and not necessarily be offended. “Lou Reed: The Black Sheep of New York,” Disc and Music Echo, 21 October 1972. 41. Wicke, “The Art of Phonography: Sound, Technology and Music,” 149. 42. Ibid., 150. 43. Dan Daley, “Classic Tracks: Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’” Mix, December 1, 2008, http://www.mixonline.com/news/profiles/classic-tracks-loureeds-walk-wild-side/366039. 44. Griffiths, “From lyric to anti-lyric,” 43. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 48. 47. Also see Middleton, “Popular Music Analysis;” Tagg and Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes; Timothy Warner, Pop Music; and Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, “Introduction,” and Song Means, for similar concepts on the pop recording and its interpretation.

3 ‘In and Out’

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Games of Truth and the Confessional

You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.1 —The Beatles

Perhaps the most legendary interview to blow the door off the closet appeared in Melody Maker in 1972. It was David Bowie’s moment of ‘coming out,’ a cunning act of disclosure, and an unbridled moment in pop ­history. It would have a remarkable impact, jolting young people into seriously rethinking their own gender and sexual orientation. Yet, in retrospect, the interview also illustrated how pop music yields insuperable paradoxes. Of special ­relevance, then, are the tactical conditions for performance. By pursuing the debate on queerness from several new directions in this chapter, I scrutinize the implications of ‘coming out’2 or remaining silent, and how these statesof-being function in the form of a variety of strategies. Generally speaking, the public buys into the idea that the act of confessing reveals some truth about the artist in spite of hints of trickery and the tactic of put-on artifice. Time and time again, the spectacle of confessing occurs in a bewildering range of guises as pop celebrities are brought to their knees in the full glare of the media spotlight. Granted, the format for this has changed radically since 1972 when Bowie came out. Today all pop artists have their own blogs, Facebook and MySpace sites, and personalized web pages, with the social media providing the optimal channels for confessing all. If you’ve done something wrong or irregular, you can at least explain yourself away on your terms, let us say, in your confessional space with its own specifications. With a window out to the world, the Internet has facilitated a virtual music community where fans absorb and produce content based on their relationships with pop stars. Such symbiosis is the result of new marketing strategies in an industry where artists, in the main, establish themselves in a digital environment before going out live. When Bowie came out in his interview with Melody Maker, public acts of ‘kissing and telling’ were very different. Bowie knew that failing to confess becomes, in itself, a “sin of omission.”3 The ploy of verbalizing one’s sins, of course, has a historical lineage, which Foucault traces back to the eighteenth century. And, the paradigms of truth

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‘In and Out’  63 and revelation are based upon a shared consciousness, where ‘outing’ is part of the ‘unrelenting machine’ of the confession. Hence, pop songs become a stark marker of stating things differently (from words) and exposing the idiosyncrasies of human agency. All this occurs along a temporal axis where genderplay contributes to entertainment through the obligation to speak. One of the dominant signifiers of the confessional is the ‘closet,’ a crucible of meaning, policed by language and institutionalized power structures. A key premise of Foucault’s discourse of the body was its function as a site of regulating social orders. As he regularly stressed, the complexity of the body, when in a state of confession,4 requires a great amount of reflection in terms of the politics of ‘coming out.’ In this light, biographical description surfaces as a problem when authorizing nonstraight subjectivity. Here I want to propose that the act of queering also works as a strategy for resisting confessional discourse. This is particularly discernible in the struggles and pursuits of pop celebrities in a highly competitive music industry.5 Feeding directly into the confessional are the details of biography that inform us on who the artist is. In pop music well-rehearsed techniques of submission are envisioned in pleasure as much as pain, where the motive is to not only ‘open up,’ but also conceal. Foucault’s diagnoses of the confessional showed up the ‘blind spots,’ indicating that what we frequently encounter is merely a social game. The precariousness of social and political orders (as implemented by institutions) prompted Foucault to critique the ontological and political presuppositions upon which codes of normality are built. Consequently, this paved the way forward for queer studies and a discourse that demonstrated that opacity operates as an antidote to the closet, a discursive mechanism in itself that is not necessarily conjoined to disclosure.6 Andy Warhol once declared that “pop comes from the outside”7 – its ‘secrets’ have no depth and that which is repeated is merely a depiction of the emptiness of r­ epetition – the more you look at something the more meaning dissolves away.8 Indeed, Warhol’s own opacity, his artistic creativity, and his forthright disavowal of intellectualism, aptly verified this. De Villiers writes that through his art Warhol challenged “the sexist and homophobic logic that dismisses the superficiality and depthlessness (coded as feminine and queer).”9 During the course of this study, I focus on the function of opacity as an effective mechanism for disidentification. If opacity in pop performances is about disengaging and distancing oneself,10 then stating who you are, in the way you choose, needs to appease an eagerly awaiting congregation. We know that the confession, mobilized by chat shows, documentaries, pop videos and broadcast interviews, yields a high entertainment factor. Moreover, the chat show bridges personal narratives to sexuality and sex. By the start of the 1980s Foucault had claimed that sex had become the privileged topic of the confession, persuading individuals to confess any and every sexual peculiarity. Perhaps the salient point here is that “sexual interdictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself.”11 In spite of everything, confessing is all about appearing to make things public knowledge.

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64  ‘In and Out’ There is plenty evidence that ‘coming out’ has emerged as one of the West’s most prized channels for truth telling. If not spontaneous, it is forced out in ways that are threatening, callous, and even violent. Down the ages, humor, a critical component of queerness, has emerged as a potent mechanism for combatting the pressures to come out. Oscar Wilde once stated: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”12 Importantly, the confessional is not only relegated to mainstream pop and its artists, but also to virtually every musical genre. For example, two sensational cases of ‘coming out’ in heavy metal and black metal circles involved the Norwegian lead singer, Kristian Eivind Espedal (known as Gaahl) from the band Gorgoroth, and Rob Halford, lead singer of Judas Priest. Gaahl came out in 2008, ten years after Halford’s confession during a tearful interview with the editor of The Advocate, Judy Wieder. In both cases these artists, the first openly gay members of ‘metal’ bands, only declared their homosexuality late in their careers with far less of the homophobic backlash they would have experienced earlier in their careers. Once in the public eye pop celebrities usually declare their inclinations in some form or other. Part of the social game is to produce ‘truth effects’ that are located both in the biographical and sociocultural sphere. The compulsion to affirm one’s sexual orientation, then, feeds into a ritual that underpins virtually every instance of pop stardom. Often, the showcasing of shame gives way to unrelenting pleas for forgiveness. Indeed, conveying one’s shame publicly screens the satisfaction of self-exposure, making the act of sinning and guilt all the more plausible. There can be little doubt that a thrilling feature of pop entertainment involves the risk-taking motions of hide-and-seek. Consequently, truths are divulged in order to make the closet tangible – they entail elements of confessing that sustain the mechanics of revelation in process. In a Foucauldian sense, then, disclosing one’s secrets is an enticing ingredient of human agency, where the artist falls under constant surveillance, as we will now see.13

The Unrelenting Jean Genie Bizarrely enough, David Robert Jones, born in Brixton, London, on January 8 1947, shares the same birthday as Elvis Presley, albeit twelve years later. It was on September 16 1965 that he changed his name to David Bowie. Few pop stars have meant so much to teenagers growing up in the 1970s as Bowie. In the UK he was by far the most lurid and talked about artist during the period 1972 to 1983, with his androgynous appearance and performance style displaying a personal style in constant flux. As with his music, his image was always undergoing changes. Remarkably, this suburban pop icon challenged, transformed and liberated an entire generation,14 and by the early 1970s he had become the leading pop provocateur. His wearing of dresses and anti-conventional attire fused a Warholian pop-art aesthetic with a decidedly British camp sensibility, and, as David Buckley

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points out, by 1972 Bowie had “replaced Dylan, in the UK at least, as the s­erious-minded rock critics’ ideal of cool, and would retain the mantle of ‘most important rock artist’ until deposed by Prince in the mid-1980s.”15 Brazenly, Bowie declared in his interview with Michael ‘Mick’ Watts, “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.”16 This shameless yet amusing coming out moment is described by Watts: But there’s a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth. He knows that in these times it’s permissible to act like a male tart, and that to shock and outrage, which pop has always striven to do throughout its history, is a ballsbreaking [sic] ­process. And if he’s not an outrage, he is, at the least, an amusement. The expression of his sexual ambivalence establishes a fascinating game.17 To be sure, coming out just five years after homosexuality had been legalized in the UK, and three years following the Stonewall riots, was bound to have a strong impact. Although Bowie was not that well known internationally, his confessing to not being straight disclosed a growing openness in the UK toward sexual orientation. It should also be stressed that his instinct for incongruities and style of entertainment had its British roots in music hall and the theatre. Furthermore, as actor and art student (with direct links to Warhol and the Velvet Underground) it was only to be expected that Bowie would empathize with gay culture. One might say that his queer strategies in the 1970s were a direct result of an experimental process that allowed for lapses and excesses in meaning. In retrospect, Bowie’s politics of coming out were a demonstration of what de Villiers alludes to when defining ‘queer opacity.’ Building on Sedgwick’s work, de Villiers’ argument is that queer opacity is one way of locating the weak points in the system known as the “epistemology of the closet,” and, moreover, of “finding an opening for the creation of a queer public persona that manages to resist the confessional discourse.”18 In the same interview article referred to above, Watts elucidates on ­Bowie’s strategy of genderplay: He began wearing dresses, of whatever gender, two years ago, but he says he had done outrageous things before that were just not accepted by society. Its just so happened, he remarks, that in the past two years people have loosened up to the fact that there are bisexuals in the world.19 There can be little doubt of Bowie’s queer public persona; his continuous re-invention of himself through bizarre alter egos taught a generation of pop celebrities and their fans that one could transform oneself in terms of clothes, hair, mannerisms, and even sexuality. In 1980 Jon Savage published an article in The Face, proclaiming that Bowie had stood the test of

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time: “To the public he’s beyond Pop Star – he’s Star Artist. On a plateau: untouchable and mysterious.”20 Interestingly, Savage also documented the significance of Bowie’s ‘coming out’ moment: This really was news. Homosexuality, if not bisexuality, had always been part of pop, both in the process (managers picking up potential singers) and the appeal. Film stars like Montgomery Clift had killed themselves in a previous age trying to deny it, but this was the first time, five years after legalization, that any star came right out and said it.21 Later on Savage makes the point that as Bowie’s “pessimistic futurism” became harder, so his homosexuality was perceived as “part of some greater decadence”: What he did, then, was to open Pandora’s box: by making homosex attractive (rather than a snigger), he liberated and brought into the mainstream a whole range of fantasies which had hitherto been repressed. Naturally they came out with great force.22 Somewhat unexpectedly, shortly after this article was published, Bowie came down to earth with a bang. The panic of the AIDS epidemic had started to take its course. Just eight years after the Melody Maker interview, Bowie had yet again changed his image, personae, and music, with albums and artwork that shocked and thrilled. In 1983 he appeared on the front cover of Rolling Stone alongside the caption, ‘David Bowie Straight.’ Now confessing that his biggest mistake had been stating his gayness and bisexuality, he claimed that he had all along really been a ‘closet heterosexual.’ Justifiably, a certain amount of public irritation and bewilderment ensued. It would be years later that Bowie would concede that the hostility he had encountered in the US compelled him to distance himself from the gay community and not hold any banners.23 Delving into the matter of Bowie’s queerness, the focus of my attention is directed specifically to the years 1972 and 1973, the summit of Bowie’s glam-style period. It was in the same month as the Melody Maker revelation, November 1972, that the song, ‘The Jean Genie,’ was released. The song’s title, allegedly a pun on the name of the rebellious queer French author, Jean Genet, was the main single from the album, Aladdin Sane (1973). With its play on the words, ‘a-lad-insane,’ this album sealed his success as a mainstream pop star. Rising quickly to the top of the UK charts, it remained in the Number 1 position for five weeks. David Buckley has claimed that this became the biggest commercial mainstream success of 1973 because it “was at the very core of English pop sensibility. It was a reincarnation for the pop world of the British love of theatricality and makeup.”24 Those of us who bought the album when it came out will likely recall the conservative reactions to the album sleeve of Aladdin Sane. With a garishly painted

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thunderbolt dividing his face, covering one eye, and a clear liquid pool dripping from his clavicle, Bowie is photographed with eyes shut. Dyed orangered, his long, straight hair contrasts vividly with his translucent skin color, pale against a stark white background. This is undoubtedly one of the most disquieting iconic portraits of all time, taken by the late Brian Duffy and directed by Celia Philo, who recalls its making: That evening in the studio there was just Duffy, myself and Pierre La Roche, a French makeup artist who Duffy chose for the shoot. David arrived all by himself; there was no fanfare, no entourage, not even his then-wife, Angie Bowie. […] You have to realise that, in 1973, men weren’t walking down the King’s Road with brightly coloured hair and wearing makeup.25 Bowie was, of course, doing precisely this. The cover of Aladdin Sane was printed in seven colors, with the entire process implemented in Switzerland (for it was not possible to produce this in the UK as the technology was not available). Buckley interprets the image as follows: “The shot turned his physiognomy into a sort of tribal death mask, a shaman for the 1970s.”26 Indeed, with this heavily treated image, Bowie subjected himself to a high degree of constructed-ness that questioned his very authorship. Ian Chapman goes as far as to even suggest that “David Bowie, the human being behind Aladdin Sane, is absent.”27 This assertion is based upon Chapman’s interpretation of the cover alone, where there is “no evidence of the ‘real’ David Bowie, [which is a] result of the utilization of techniques that in combination remove his authentic presence.”28 To some extent, I part company with Chapman’s insistence that the “character has taken over the performer, leaving nothing behind.”29 Rather I tend more toward interpreting any strategy of masking or depersonalizing as an example of queering that verifies the subject’s positioning of himself outside the confines of heteronormativity. Indeed, Bowie’s queer sensibility is as integral to his cover shot as his on-and-off stage personae. Thus, on the album’s release many of us sensed immediately the person behind the cover shot as not only the object of desire, but also the one doing the desiring.30 It was at the beginning of 1973 that Bowie’s queering reached new heights as his alter ego, Ziggy, turned into Aladdin Sane. A watershed had been reached in the construction of his alter egos, as Buckley explains: The Bowie/Ziggy/Aladdin Sane personalities had soon destroyed any vestiges of the ‘real’ David Jones. Despite this, however, these were not years of psychic terror for Bowie. His coke addiction had not yet started, nor was Bowie as terrifyingly thin as he would be in the States in 1974/5. The constant pressure of tour/album/tour/album was certainly crushing, but Bowie had not yet entered his own ‘mindwarp pavilion.’31

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68  ‘In and Out’ Of course, the Aladdin Sane queer aesthetic owed everything to Bowie’s persona. Recorded the year before the album was released, ‘The Jean Genie’ stood as homage to very special people and all the musical influences in his life. As his biggest seller at that point in his career, the song peaked at Number 2 just after Christmas 1972, and a unique live performance of the song was recorded for BBC’s Top of the Pops, transmitted on January 4 1973.32 There is little doubt that the song will always be remembered for its stylistic hybridity and the sexual persona of its protagonist. Allan Moore provides his impressions of the song: ‘The Jean Genie,’ a song of transgression, is couched as a talking blues (again, ‘real life’), complete with blues harp, boogie guitar and stomping beat (cf. ‘glitter rock’). Note the final phrase, ‘loves to belong’ – Bowie’s willfully obscure sexuality added to his notoriety.33 As one might expect, much of Bowie’s ‘notoriety’ was inspired by his friend, Iggy Pop, who is described in the song as so simple-minded, he can’t drive his module. Another influence was the American actress, Cyrinda Foxe, a former lover of Bowie and actress who had a role in the 1977 comedy film, Andy Warhol’s Bad. She would also appear in the video of ‘The Jean Genie.’ Brimming with innuendoes, the song is a comical send-up of the fictional character, Jean Genie, who we gather is far from straight. By all accounts he is a beautician, a guy who sells you nutrition (likely chemical foodstuffs, such as Methdrine, Benzedrine, Dexedrine and Drinamyl). Also, he lives on his back and loves chimney stacks. Barbiturates make him so simple-minded that he cannot even drive: he bites on the neon and sleeps in a capsule. It is the nocturnal life he lives, and in daylight sleeping pills offer him respite. Laid-back with a drugged-out feeling, the music consists of a strident R&B riff in the vein of the Yardbirds’ cover of Bo Diddley’s song, ‘I’m A Man.’ It is arranged in hypnotic rhythms that are galvanizing and steeped in attitude (see Example 3.1). This is made ‘bluesy’ by the jarring of intervals, such as the minor second occurring between the electric guitar 2 and the bass line (G/G#) and the augmented fourth intervals (D/G#). raunchy q=130

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‰

Example 3.1  The ‘Jean Genie’ riff.

Clearly, there is a direct stylistic line into the Rolling Stones’ style (especially their 1960s period), as well as references to Jimi Hendrix (in terms of the guitar licks). A blurring of styles results in something that is not quite

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‘In and Out’  69 blues or rock ‘n’ roll. Rather, it is a blend of various musical influences that intermesh into a vibrant sensibility, all of which is captured by Bowie’s vocal expression. In the four-minute video of ‘The Jean Genie,’ directed by Mick Rock, Bowie appears in full glam regalia, a reminder that he is at the peak of his androgynous period. Studio footage scenes show him performing with his backing band, the Spiders from Mars, as well as Cyrinda Foxe, at the Mars Hotel in San Francisco. Reportedly costing only $350 to produce, the video was filmed in one day. It was the first of its kind to use a crosscutting technique that seamed shots of live performances, studio takes, and street scenes outside the Mars Hotel. As the song progresses, so the music intensifies with the imagery growing more explicit. Just over halfway through, Bowie is filmed with naked torso alongside Mick Ronson (2:48), as both men deliver the chorus hook, The Jean Genie lives on his back. (Figure 3.1) ­Homoerotic and stylishly queer, the shot comprises the two men shouting out their lines passionately alongside the stomp of the rhythmic pulse. ­Occasionally they glance adoringly at one another. Such small touches reveal an attitude that encapsulates the theatrics of glam-rock, and, moreover, homosocial behavior.34

Figure 3.1  Mick Ronson and David Bowie in the video ‘Jean Genie’

On the whole, the video boasts a colorful array of mini-portraits or micro-shots that fit into a large jigsaw. Long shots of all four musicians, jamming together in the studio, are interspersed with close-up shots of Bowie in different costumes. The shots of him with Ronson lead into the somewhat bizarre street scenes with Foxe. Most enthralling of all is the flagrant display of masculinity. As with Bowie, all the other males are coiffured, made up, and flamboyantly dressed, quintessentializing the look of

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70  ‘In and Out’ glam rock. Such iconography, laced with attitude, also extracts the energy and passion of a gripping musical performance. What drives the song most is Bowie’s magnetic voice, distinctly signaling a departure from the earlier sci-fi singing style found on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. In visual terms, it is possible to detect the emergence of a more Iggy Pop-type character in ‘The Jean Genie.’ One might posit that the all-defining feature of the Aladdin Sane period is Bowie’s focus on sexuality, which is more pronounced than on the previous Ziggy Stardust album. As Ziggy Stardust morphed into his Aladdin Sane persona, so the musical traits changed according to the erotics on display. As I have already intimated, a wealth of stylistic features contribute to the recording. Bowie’s diction is crystal clear, every word is weighted, and his appropriation of blues is decidedly British (this has to do with pronounciation, melodic gestures, and vocal timbre). The pitch slide downwards on each repetition of ‘Genie’ releases tension, and following the phrase, let yourself go, there is a sense of abandonment heightened by the embellishment on the word ‘go.’ I would suggest that this personalized gesture forms part of Bowie’s phraseology, a prime generating emotive device. E ­ mbellishments of this kind, at the end of iterative phrases, are however always different, and thus tend to have an individualizing effect. Indeed, the lyrics end with a repetition of the word ‘go’ three times (3:22–3:29). This occurs in short spurts before the instrumental coda, which subsequently builds up into a frenzy with a rapid guitar strumming figure crescendo on the tonic having the final say. In 1988 Simon Frith declared that Bowie “defined for a British pop generation what it means to be an artist,” and as he had “invented himself […] his ‘honesty’ was not an issue.”35 There can be little doubt that his impact on generations of pop artists was crucial for spreading the message that one could have as much control over one’s artistic production as one’s own gender. Shifting from gay to bi to straight via the dramaturgy of the confession, Bowie became the first British pop artist to demonstrate that one could queer things through re-invention on and off stage. In the end, his androgynous disposition shook up the norms of masculinity, and there would be no turning back. Generations of pop artists and fans are indebted to Bowie’s inimitable flair for being queer.

All Hung Up: Madonna in Retrospection Accepting the Hall of Fame Award on behalf of Bowie at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1996, Madonna would enthuse: Before I saw David Bowie live, I was just your normal, dysfunctional, rebellious teenager from the Midwest, and he has truly changed my life. I’ve always had a sentimental attachment to David Bowie, not just because I grew up with his music, but it’s because it was the first rock concert that I ever saw and it was a major event in my life. […] It was

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the most amazing show that I’d ever seen, not just because the music was great, but because it was great theater. And here’s this beautiful, androgynous man, just being so perverse … as David Byrne so beautifully put it … so unconventional, defying logic and basically blowing my mind. Anyway, I came home a changed woman […].36 Madonna’s influences have stemmed directly from the art world, the theater, and the dance floor – all her extravagant videos, live concerts, and album concepts testify to this. Videos, such as ‘Deeper and Deeper,’ ‘Justify My Love,’ and ‘Erotica’ have a strong Warholian influence about them, and one might say that ever since the start of her career in the late 1970s she has been ‘on trial’ for her gender politics. Sexual politics have been part and parcel of her establishing herself as a leading figure in pop music. And, I would add to this, queer tactics have had much to do with shaping her appeal, as one album after the next displays games of ‘truth telling’ through stories of intrigue. Over time her tactics have altered, although she has never tired of confessing and transforming impressions of herself, her sexuality, and her relationships. Genderplay is at the heart of Madonna’s aesthetics.37 During a long career, her queering of norms has revealed an openness toward sexuality and sex in the public sphere. This has circulated in the form of, let’s say, ‘open secrets.’ Her tenth studio album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, is a cut and paste archive of the artist’s own musical history, spanning four decades. Released in 2005 by Warner Bros. Records, this album is a DJ set, where all the songs are joined together and played continuously without any breaks. Its queer sensibility and dance-oriented direction (a striking departure from her previous American Life (2003) album), pays homage to the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, ABBA, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and Prince. Promoted in her 2006 Confessions Tour, the album occasioned the highest grossing on-the-road tour for any female artist during this period. Intended to be retrospective, the tracks on this album glance back on her career, at the same time seizing the opportunity to side with queer celebrities. The four singles from the album would be huge international chart-topping hits – ‘Hung Up,’ ‘Sorry,’ ‘Get Together,’ and ‘Jump.’ ‘Hung Up’ topped the charts in 41 countries, becoming Madonna’s most successful single worldwide. Early on in her career, Madonna acknowledged the confession as a crucial mechanism for shaping her subjectivity and attracting attention. Whereas ‘coming out’ and disclosing one’s ‘true self’ might be a major selling point in pop, the inverse is also the case, something she has known with a wink of the eye. She surely took a big gamble in October 1992 when talking in graphic detail about her sexuality. Published by Warner, her glossy coffee table book, Sex, included photos of her taken by Steven Meisel Studio with film frames by Fabien Baron. Highly stylized and edited by Glenn O’Brien, Sex included unabashed depictions of sadomasochism, analingus, homosexuality, and masturbation. Inspired by the popular German film actress Dita

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72  ‘In and Out’ Parlo, Madonna authored the book under the pseudonym ‘Mistress Dita.’ Despite its initial media furor and scandalized effect, Sex became an instant success, topping the New York Times bestseller list. In retrospect, it seems obvious enough why Sex received both critical condemnation and adulation. At 34, Madonna, with her strong Italian Catholic roots, was not only taunting conservative values (in the form of erotic photography, pornography, poems, stories, and short essays), but also deconstructing Western sexuality. During an era when lesbians and gays were struggling for their rights in the US, Madonna’s tendency toward female emancipation through sexual explicitness and the breaking of taboos was considered highly effective, albeit contentious. One of her political aims was to focus on the US and the problems with sexual norms and discrimination.38 The release of Sex was timely, coming the day before her fifth studio album, Erotica, recorded with Shep Pettibone and André Betts. This would be the first album launched by Maverick, her own multimedia company, comprising a record company (Maverick Records) and a film production company (Maverick Films). Dealing candidly with sexuality and sex, this concept album also incorporated her alter ego. On the opening title track and first single, she tells us, My name is Dita, while instructing her lover to be obedient and to do exactly what she says. Throughout all the songs on this album there is a sense of the control freak gone amok, not only in terms of the production, but also in the manner with which her style of confessing unfolds. Numerous self-referential quotes are offset against ­Pettibone’s beats – flamenco guitar in ‘Deeper and Deeper,’ hip hop in ‘Thief of Hearts,’ rap in ‘Did You Do It?’ and ‘Waiting,’ and house-style beats in ‘Fever.’ Furthermore, it is the prevalence of disco, new jack swing, and techno that defines the pop-dance genre of Erotica, forming a sensual canvass for all her put-on confessions. No doubt Foucault and Warhol would have had much to say about Madonna’s tactics of self-eroticization and confessing. In an ‘autocritique’ of his own position, Foucault wrote that the confession is not so much about the covering of desires, but more about a transformation of knowledge and consciousness in ways of living and conducting one’s life. Void of repression, the confession operates through the assistance of another’s speech and presence. This implies that language corresponds directly to such events, enabling exchange and social intercourse. The premises for this seem relevant when contemplating what lyrics infer during the rituals of musical performances. Given that the closet is always in sight in pop music, the strategy of queering as a tactic for enticement accounts for pop music’s strong appeal. This is an aspect of Madonna’s work that can also be understood as the inverse to opacity – a strategy of transparency. In earlier studies I have pondered over this when dissecting her album Bedtime Stories and its numerous tracks and related videos. My findings revealed the intricate relationships that exist between musical expression, storytelling, and subjectivity.39 Above all,

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‘In and Out’  73 Madonna’s degree of self-­reflexivity – not least her ­tendencies toward playful deception – represent special transfer points for negotiating power. My overriding point has been that her performances assume many layers for interpretation insofar as it becomes virtually impossible to separate Madonna’s ‘real’ persona from her stage personae. Much of this is due to her ironic disposition. Generally speaking, her performativity is about a melancholy that is expressed by way of the imaginative constructions of femininity. As such, Madonna evokes a “variety of subject positions” that ultimately clash “with conventional concepts by the trading in of the notion of a single, true identity.”40 In terms of her performativity, the politics of teasing out the ‘truth’ are grounded in the history of Western culture and the overrated syndrome of confessing. Her songs arbitrate a t­ension through the connection of political resistance and pop entertainment and its consumption. Over the span of four decades, Madonna’s longevity in the pop world raises many critiques dealing with the modalities of representational strategies and tactics of self-examination. The tropes of confession found in Bedtime Stories are primarily those of playfulness, which become a justification for ‘shameful behavior’ and confession. Madonna knew when releasing the songs on Bedtime Stories in 1994 that the shame associated with ‘kissing and telling’ had placed the minority subject within the u ­ nrelenting trap of the confession. As with the majority of her earlier songs, she set out to problematize truth-telling, suggesting a strategy that offers up alternatives to the essentialist categorization of the subject. As self-narratives, then, her songs have routinely mediated an erotic drive, sexuality, and an acute awareness of race and ethnicity.41 In pop music, stylized performances idealize the persona, with music shaping the dramaturgy of self-narratives in quite extraordinary ways. From the outset, Madonna has recognized this and seized the opportunity to problematize heterosexual relationships. Accordingly, she has employed innovative technologies of musical production to access a range of signs, symbols, and meanings that queer her act. Primarily, it is her ever-evolving soundscape (by this I’m referring to the production, arrangement, voice, mix, engineering) that forms her stage personae.42 To exemplify this, in relation to a consideration of queer aesthetics, I again want to turn to C ­ onfessions on a Dance Floor. Self-referentiality is borne out by her duet with Prince from 1989, ‘Love Song’ (from the Like a Prayer album), which is cited in the lyrics of ‘Hung Up.’ Then there is the track ‘How High,’ which harks back to two songs from her Music album, ‘I Deserve It’ and ‘Nobody’s Perfect.’ Whereas ‘I Love New York’ is an ode to the city that turned her into the person she is. Dealing with the challenges of striving forward against all odds, the track ‘Jump’ is a sequel to her song, ‘Keep it Together,’ from 1990. Other points of lyrical intertextuality include the recurrence of specific words, such as ‘sorry,’ which is executed in ten languages during the track ‘Sorry.’ Regularly, Madonna appropriates carefully selected words to wring out notions of nostalgia, with a high dose of sarcasm.

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74  ‘In and Out’ If confessing is a chief quality in her songs’ narratives, how then does musical style communicate this to her fans? To address this question, it is important to emphasize stylistic inferences from the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout Confessions on a Dance Floor, disco is fused with contemporary club idioms to make every song highly danceable. This happens in a dazzling production, the outcome of her collaboration with producers, Stuart Price, ­Mirwais Ahmadzai, and Bloodshy & Avant, who glue together the tracks with string sections in the bridgework. As well as references to her earlier work (in the form of all the inferences discussed above), ­Madonna’s musical style is bound up in sampling, remixing, and recycling, with a clear nod in the direction of numerous pop artists and their producers. I­mportantly, the referents of her style are located historically in gay culture, and consciously her strategies of stylistic appropriation symbolize political resistance. To put this differently, the political charge of disco-oriented musical signifiers becomes a celebration of the liberation and empowerment of the marginalized body.43 Of the four singles from the album (mentioned above), ‘Hung Up’ was released first, becoming her most successful hit to reach top position in four countries. It would also be included on her 2009 Greatest Hits album, Celebration. The main sample is from ABBA’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!,’ released in 1979. Set to a moderate tempo (120 bpm) and disco beat, this is part of the main thematic thread that weaves in and out of the song’s material. Stuart Price and Madonna decided to produce a track that would take the listener down memory lane in a corny and fun manner. Other musical quotes are extracted from her own songs, ‘Holiday’ and ‘Like a Prayer,’ as well as bands such as Tom Tom Club and S.O.S. By and large, the theme of ‘love and confession’ takes center stage in an autobiographical narrative of a girl who once had nothing and started from scratch. Foregrounded in the arrangement, right from the start, is the ticking of a clock, a sample that Stuart Price extracted from Gwen Stefani’s ‘What You Waiting For’ from 2004. The other more obvious intertext is Pink Floyd’s iconic track ‘Time’ from their eighth studio album, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). The narrative of ‘Hung Up’ is all about temporality: time goes by so slowly for those who wait. This, the opening hook, gels with the rhythmic figure, with its frequencies filtered to expose and intensify the high range. David Harrison, in his analysis of the production in ‘Hung Up,’ accounts for the main rhythmic theme that follows the ticking of the clock: The upper frequencies are filtered initially, allowing only the lower frequencies to pass through. As the filter opens, allowing the high ­frequencies to be heard, the impression of rising tension eventually introduces the chorus. The eminent impact of the full spectrum of sonic range emits a notion of release whereby the initial tonally s­ubdued sediment is replaced by renewed vigour. Once again Madonna’s voice becomes the focal point of the song through process and placement in the mix and has a yearning quality to it that further enforces the notion of time and desire.44

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‘In and Out’  75 The material and production devices described by Harrison function to transform and change the musical color – the result is euphoric, serving as a powerful fanfare to Madonna’s vocal entry. She enters by riding the wave of this glittering introduction, crying out I’m tired of waiting on you. Mixed to the fore, with a broad stereo presence, her voice dominates the audio space and comes across as intimate (in the sense that she personally addresses the listener). Numerous editing devices and technical enhancements doll up the expansive palette of musical details, sustaining a high level of vocal interest throughout the track. ‘Hung Up’ is one of many tracks that epitomizes Madonna’s penchant for dance culture and its technological advances. As I have argued earlier, her expertise as a performer and producer is identifiable through an acute awareness of the developments and trends in recording and production, verified by an ability to infuse her musical ideas with new ideas. Compositionally, ‘Hung Up’ is as much about technical proficiency as issues of musical temporality. In particular, the track’s compilation, its intertextuality, and its compositional proficiency, denotes an artistic instinct that is brazen and exhibitionist. Harmonically, the track is lush in content. There is a general progression from a D minor feel in the verses (Dm–Dm–F–C) and choruses (Dm–F–Am– Dm) to a major feel in the bridge (with the submediant, mediant, dominant and major chords (Bb–F–A–Dm)), thus adding a brighter flavor to the song (while never actually departing from the tonality inherent within the verse and chorus). Also the vocals, sounding the seventh degree (G) of A major, induce a sense of instability (by employment of the dominant (V7)), which functions as an anticipation for the return to the root chord, D minor.45 Devices such as this contribute to the song’s uplifting character. Tonal movement involves a common modulation between related keys (in this case to the dominant major), having a strong bearing on the overall harmonic fabric. Shifts from the minor to major chords within the key of D minor emerge as a decisive mechanism for suggesting change and progression, and the appropriation of the kitsch ABBA sample pokes fun at the 1970s albeit nostalgically. Appropriated in a way that creates surplus value in a very different context, this sample is camp, frivolous, and hyperbolic. Because of its slick production, it assumes an aesthetic based upon resignification. The ABBA sample also merges with the ‘groove,’ another main signifier of the production, gorgeously assembled in a twenty-first-century disco vein, and enhanced by bass, synths and samples.46 All in all, the theatricality of the production – the flanging effects, the phasing, the clock ticking and countless other devices – is a resilient marker of camp, which is also discernible in her singing, her behavior, her adaptability, and her sharp retorts. Certainly, her popularity owes much to her combination of fun and political earnestness. What is serious, she knows, can be treated jovially. In queer pop tracks, such as ‘Hung Up,’ Madonna conveys a unique perception of the world in which one needs to survive! As indicated above, musical dramaturgy is instated in social memory, and pop songs embody this. Baring the ‘truth of one’s soul’ entails both control

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and intention, which becomes reinforced by musical expression. Insofar as the confession goes, there is a level of risk-taking in finding a diagnosis that pinpoints intention through the rhetoric of speech. Judith Butler has addressed the complexity of this: By focusing on the rhetorical aspects of speech, the analyst finds meanings that exceed and sometimes confound intention, and I gather that the response to such speech runs the risk of doing something it does not mean to do, of exercising effects that exceed and sometimes ­confound the intentions of the analyst.47 The rhetorical aspects of speech, when musicalized, can often imply acts of transference. In this sense, I am suggesting that lyrical effect needs to be carefully considered alongside features of speech and diverse modes of delivery. In music, speech operates differently from spoken language; it emanates from the body in different ways.48 How speech becomes a musicalized entity of the body and its condition is a critical question in music analysis. Given that singing is a mode of ‘speeching the body,’ we inevitably need to turn to lyrics to discover what the body signifies through words and then what experiences it mediates. Implicated in the act of singing is the embodying of a specific deed. Words put to music are part of the action of the body; they indeed construct the body in performance. Furthermore, the transference of subject matter in the act of singing is a constant matter of exchange, and lyrical delivery contributes to the rhetoric of mannerisms that are beguiling, seductive, flirtatious, mesmerizing, or all of these at once. As I perceive it, transference in music therefore takes place during the mergence of musical codes (stylistic and technical) and lyrical signifiers. Physically, the mouth, the tongue, the teeth, and the larynx form a specific synecdoche through singing that helps theatricalize the body. It is such properties that define human agency. That said, the performing body is always subject to some degree of critical distance from itself, and if we go along with Foucault, speech always involves a degree of dispossession but never a sacrifice of total attachment. In sum, then, musical performance is a form of exhibiting oneself; it is a form of elaboration, a way of communicating, and a process of exposure. Watching a performance unfold is a convincing illustration of how transference operates. Directed by Swedish director, Johan Renck, the video for ‘Hung Up’ is nostalgically grounded. Madonna has claimed that the video was intended as a tribute to John Travolta’s dancing routines in the films Saturday Night Fever and Grease. She wanted to make a video that confronted all sorts of dance subcultures in the world. With regard to the meticulous choreography, the dance movements are slick and agile, with much of the video filmed in a dance studio rehearsal space, where Madonna is seen practicing her moves in preparation for going out and meeting a whole group of younger dancers. Opening up with a shot of her bringing her boom box into the studio, Madonna wears

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‘In and Out’  77 a lightweight blue tracksuit, popular in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the first sequence of the video she discards this, revealing a tightly fitting pink leotard with a sash around her waist (see Figure 3.2). Her attire is representative of 1980s pop culture, while her mode of performance is voyeuristic and tantalizing. In the first minute of the video, medium close-up shots capture her sensuality, as she opens her mouth and languidly thrusts her hips back and forth. These gestures are further eroticized by close-up shots of her well-worked-out bottom, arguably luring and yet scornful of the male gaze.

Figure 3.2  Madonna in the video ‘Hung Up’

Madonna wastes no time in unlocking the groove with the ticking of the clock, propelling her troupe of male dancers into dance through lines such as those who run seem to have all the fun. To highlight the variations of time, an impression of slowness is introduced to accent the line time goes by slowly. Slow-motion filming is also used in various shots to further accent this. Of particular music-analytic interest is the relationship between the visuals (where the time is actually shown fleeting in minutes and seconds), the lyrics, and the tempo, where the beat, speed, and meter regulate our sense of temporality. Fancy editing devices and camera angles create different effects along a temporal axis, and whereas Madonna’s vocal performance provides the stimulant for much of the audiovisual synergy in this

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video, it is her style of dancing that allows her body to melt into the groove as she occupies the space of the dance floor. Intentional or not, she shows how conceptions of queering are historically grounded in dance styles. After all, her roots are in New York’s dance culture of the 1970s, where the conventions of heterosexual couple dancing gave way to dancers occupying the floor without partners in a collective solidarity. Tim Lawrence has identified this trend of dancing in terms of sexuality: The transformation underpinned the historical experience of gay male sexuality: the longstanding practice of cruising encouraged gay men to be open to the idea of moving onto the dance floor autonomously, while ongoing legal restrictions around male-male dancing encouraged gay male dancers to continue to take to floor and dance as singles […].49 With the social dynamics of dance from the 1970s onwards, a queer aesthetic emerged out of disco. Richard Dyer has explained how disco in its early days permitted an eroticism that opened for new possibilities for experiencing pleasure. In contrast to rock, there was a “willingness to play with rhythm” in disco, and this involved the participation of both sexes.50 Alas, a backlash against disco in 1979 would culminate in the ‘disco sucks’ campaign in the form of a record-burning rally at the residence of the Chicago White Sox in July of the same year. This marked a historical turn. According to Lawrence, the idea that disco had failed was more about the “failure of a form of disco that vaporized the patriarchal, the heterosexual, and the bourgeois and not the queer disco.”51 Perhaps one of the key factors to back up Lawrence’s point was the commercial success of the film Saturday Night Fever, where disco framed, for the first time, heterosexual courtship and straight male identity. John Travolta, in the role of Tony Manero, enacted a romance narrative of going after someone of the opposite sex, while the Bee Gees’ music “threatened to leave viewers with the impression that disco amounted to a new incarnation of shrill white pop.”52 In Lawrence’s analysis the overwhelming popularity of Saturday Night Fever “established an easily reproducible template for disco that was thoroughly de-queered in its outlook.”53 In this sense, the space opened up for queering in disco was under threat, and one might argue that ABBA’s music during the 1970s did less to aid this than it did two and a half decades later in a Madonna song. In effect, disco returned with a vengeance in new forms, constellations, and subjectivities. Historically, Madonna’s songs tell this story as they forge the relationship between the utopic disco culture of the 1970s and dance music’s turbulent developments thereafter. By expressing narratives of erotic desire, emancipation, and sexual tolerance, the physical quality of her voice (its tone, its timbre, and its affectation) denotes a queer sensibility that involves the layering of one meaning over the next. Through her convictions of political agency, Madonna has highlighted subjectivities of difference, with fun and humility, that pander to the gay gaze. But, as Peraino has maintained,

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‘In and Out’  79 Madonna’s “conscious antinormative performances of gender and sexuality reveal the extent to which the ideal of fluidity can double back to an original ­narcissism – one that, based on self-idealization and self-reference, may ultimately result in insignificance.”54 From the start of her career in the early 1980s, she has often expressed “the wish to be both man and woman, to simultaneously be the subject and object of desire,”55 learning to perform out her identity by r­ eferencing diversity and parodying the illusion of any authentic gendered self. Above all, her grandiose resistance to stereotypes is shaped by a strategy of self-parody that becomes compelling for investigating a pop sensibility that continually solicits enormous media response.

‘I’m Coming Out’ – Diana Ross Three years prior to the release of Madonna’s 1983 hit, ‘Holiday,’ Diana Ross’s music was pounding the dance floors, with her gay following on the increase. To come out in the pop industry is no mean feat, something the founders of the band Chic, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, were well aware of when releasing one of their all time classics, ‘I’m Coming Out.’ Rodgers had the idea to write this for Diana Ross having observed three drag queens dressed like the singer at the New York gay disco, GG Barnum Room. It was in 1980, while Ross was severing her ties with Motown and her producer, Berry Gordy Jr., that ‘I’m Coming Out’ made it into the charts. Rife with emotional discharge, it became such a huge hit that Ross would start her shows with it for decades to come. The opening of this song is a big teaser; it is uplifting and gets folk right away onto the dance floor. The hook, I’m coming out, is dramatic, delivered in a staccato fashion with one accented word a measure in the introduction. Subsequently, this phrase is compressed from three measures into one measure on the three first beats (see Example 3.2). Definitely, there is joy in its repetition as it is reinforced by brass fills and crescendo swells, a funk bass, guitar backing riffs, and drum motifs, all of which give the impression of release. The stage takes some time to set, with a lengthy build up to the groove, which takes almost a minute to kick in (0:54). Numerous intricate details shape the material preceding the groove’s commencement. Markedly, the drum and bass parts punctuate the material with sporadic, short, loud spurts, increasing anticipation. When the groove rolls into motion, with the backing vocals entering and reinforcing Ross’s voice, there is a feeling of unleashed energy that is sustained right up to the song’s other distinguishing feature, its protracted ending (3:14–3:35). This entails a trombone solo as the vocals exit the mix. The unlikely timbral change, from Ross’s high-pitched vocal strains to the deep, baritone sonorities of the trombone, is bizarre if not sexy. Seldom featured in pop tracks (contrary to the saxophone), the choice of this instrument proved to be successful. Rodgers claimed he went for it when he got producer Meco Monardo to arrange the horns and play the solo on the recording. Years later, however, in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Rodgers admitted

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that a DJ had warned Ross that this song could likely destroy her career; its associations were too obviously ‘gay,’ and might insinuate that she was not straight. Rodgers recalls that he had to placate Ross: It was the only time I’ve ever lied to an artist. I said: ‘What are you talking about? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’ We had written it because of her gay following, but I said we should use it as her ‘coming out’ song – to start her gigs – and she has ever since.56 Implying associations of Otherness, the lyrics invoke a strong sense of solidarity. Ross is centered as the song’s protagonist with the personal pronoun, ‘I’m’ (on the pitch C), which is delivered on the highest pitch of the chorus hook, with a strong accent on every repeat. The next two words, equally emphatic, occur on the same pitch (‘com-ing’) with the ‘out’ dropping down a perfect fifth (F) (see Example 3.2). The manner in which these three words are activated speak volumes. Intentional or not, Ross’s forceful rendering of the words, I’m coming out, entailed a symbolic transition from the inner to the outer sphere – it became an act of solidarity that instantly accessed LGBT groups. In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Butler has insisted that public declarations of ‘coming out’ hardly solve all problems. In effect, the inside/outside rhetoric in sexual identity is never without its problems. In a stream of pop songs, utopic visions of change and transformation are a contrived matter. Arguably, it is the song’s protagonist in ‘I’m Coming Out’ that declares her coming out, and, ostensibly, not Ross. Yet, Ross takes a risk by articulating the genuine desire of the protagonist through her own subject-positioning, something which is expressed with flair and conviction. Singing that you are ‘coming out’ without really coming out is not easily defensible. Thus, the word ‘out’ denotes ambiguity regardless of whether this was intended or not.57 festively q=109 vocal

4 & b 41 œJ ‰ œ œ œj ‰ Œ I'm

bass gtr.

com-ing out

‰ j œ œ œj œ. ‰ œ œ œ œ I want the world

to

know

? b 44 œ ™ œ œ ≈ ¿ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ ≈ œ œ bœ œ ≈ œ œ ≈ œ f

j‰ œ

œ œ œ ‰ œ ‰ œj

Got to let

it

show

œ ≈ œ nœ bœ œ ≈ œ ‰ œ

j‰ Œ œ

Ó

œ œ ≈ œ nœ œ œ ≈ œ œ ≈ œ

Example 3.2  Melodic riff in ‘I’m Coming Out.’

From one perspective, however, the incessant hook, I’m coming out, could be little more than a naïve double entendre; it is hardly an intentional mechanism for destabilizing gender norms. Yet, there is bound to be some shadow of doubt when Ross’s heartfelt outpourings passionately ‘wring out’ the confession, with her blasting the highest note, ‘I,’ with no trace of vibrato. How does this work empathically, and what are the intentions to put all the emphasis on the first personal pronoun? Effectively, how the ‘I’ is treated vocally, its production, and its positioning within the arrangement,

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‘In and Out’  81 possesses a rhetorical strength and pulling power; it promises survival, hope, and the possibility to find one’s way forward against tides of oppression. Moreover, it functions as a code for identification. We know that the elation that greeted this song in 1980 was tumultuous. Alas, it would be brutally dampened one year later as HIV and AIDS were discovered in the US, the first country to detect a peculiar, strange illness amongst young men. ­Coming out, previously a bold statement of pride and confidence, would now turn into something else. Back to Ross’s voice: its expressivity is defined by her tessitura, framed within an arrangement that is enlivening in terms of its textural thickening and rhythmic intricacy. As the song develops, so the vocal energy levels increase. I have already mentioned that the ‘stop and start’ techniques of the opening material serve to increase anticipation for the onslaught of the coming together of the musicians as the groove finally starts up. It is with great zest that Ross songs (this has much to do with the high register she uses and the sung word, I’m, on the first beat, being the melodic high point), as she vocally rides the crest of the wave through a maze of timbres and textures. All along her diction is perfectly clear as she keeps precisely in time with the beat.58 To a large extent, the lightness of melodic rhythm in her vocal lines contributes to the overall aesthetic of the song’s groove. There is something euphoric about her vocal production that not only denotes the pleasures of the song’s narrative, but also her own subjectivity. By this I am referring to the exhilaration of black liberation as much as gay solidarity, which had its resonance in countless disco tracks of the 1970s, such as ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.’59 Vocal nuances, inflections, and variations, when charged as emotive markers, are a good illustration of Dionysian energy as a self-validating process in disco. With these ideas in mind, I now approach a very different artist, Annie Lennox, in my ongoing quest to ascertain music’s role in shaping queerness.

‘I Need a Man!’ – Lennox in Drag So far I have been arguing that gender norms are often challenged in pop performances, and that this is due to a range of subject-positions adopted by the artist. I now want to turn my attention to the distinguishing features that constitute a performer’s idiolect, and inquire into how this is musically communicated. Allan Moore defines idiolect as “the individual stylistic fingerprints (perhaps the tone of the voice, perhaps the way the kit and bass interlock, perhaps the particular guitar tone) of a performer or group of performers.”60 Building on this, I would suggest that an idiolect also pertains to the normative features and associated nuances of identity that instantly make an artist recognizable. The Scottish singer, Annie Lennox, who achieved international fame as part of the British synthpop duo, Eurythmics (with Dave Stewart), queers her act by transgressing norms in terms of performative function. As with Bowie, her androgynous aesthetic resulted in millions questioning her

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sexuality and sexual orientation. Historically, she stands out for her demonstrative stage personae and powerful voice, and is well known for her vehement support of LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS campaigning. In 2014 she issued the following statement on the marginalization of groups of people: One day we’ll get rid of this word ‘gay,’ because it’s irrelevant (…) Of course it’s terribly relevant when you are trying to create a campaign. During a human rights movement, it’s terribly important to have labels and to have platforms that are very identifiable, but ultimately we should just be fine with everybody no matter what our sexual orientation is.61 Thirty years prior to this, in 1984, she made headlines at the Grammy Awards by appearing in drag and impersonating Elvis Presley. Significantly, she was the first female artist to imitate a male pop star in such a public arena. Ever since the start of her career in the 1970s, her style has been instantly identifiable by a set of signifiers that convey the communicative details of her queer address. During the 1980s her image was gutsy and sexually ambiguous. Often she would wear men’s clothes on stage in a bid to veer away from push-up tops and miniskirts. As a feminist, her aim was to repudiate stereotypical representations of femininity in pop and rock, and in recent years she has been vociferous about the pornographic tendencies of the music industry, especially with reference to specific female icons and their videos. It stands to reason that the hypersexual representation of young pop divas in pop videos is a heated subject amongst feminist and queer scholars in popular music studies, and Lucy O’Brien has closely examined the implications of and motives for exaggerated femininity in videos, suggesting that they might reflect a “sense of deep alienation.”62 O’Brien refers to the unsettled postfeminist space where a new generation of female celebrities have resignified the Madonna phenomenon. With reference to Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Beyoncé, she accounts for the complexities around the hypersexuality found in their videos that are not necessarily geared toward a male audience: “Although they may not be explicitly feminist, these artists are finding a way to express their autobiography: what the industry has done to them, or made them do.”63 O’Brien also notes how many artists at the peak of their career have deliberately demonstrated alienation by veering away from beauty aesthetics – Madonna did this with her Erotica album, ­Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears messed with their Mickey Mouse popstrel appearances, and Lady Gaga has gone to lengths to distort her image, not least through her alter ego, Jo Calderone. In line with queer artists from the 1980s, such as Morrissey, Madonna, Michael Stipe, Andy Bell, Boy George, to name a few, Lennox is part of the generation O’Brien refers to who excelled in role-playing, with her consciously detaching herself from the normative strictures of gender and sexuality. At the time of writing this book, Lennox has been involved in over sixty videos of astonishing variety. Her solo album, Diva (1992), with all its drag references, occupies a special place in pop history, prompting pop

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‘In and Out’  83 videos that were saturated with a queer sensibility. As I have pointed out in earlier studies, she has succeeded in destabilizing fixed structures of gender and sexuality in a strategy that challenged the male gaze.64 Dismantling gender norms comes across as a distinctive strategy in her performance of ‘I Need a Man,’ recorded by Eurythmics in 1987 and released in 1988, from their album, Savage. The accompanying video of the song is a good illustration of Lennox’s approach to gender-bending. ‘I Need a Man’ was the second in a trilogy directed by Sophie Muller. It was flanked by the tracks, ‘Beethoven’ and ‘You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart.’ This entailed a transitory narrative of Lennox appearing as frustrated housewife, nightclub vamp, and love-stricken survivor. Of special interest here is the dramatic impetus of her visual performance tactics alongside her musical idiolect. Turning to drag in ‘I Need a Man,’ Lennox highlights the constructedness of gender. Her over-the-top sense of flaunting and pouting signifies something explicitly transgressive; her exaggeration of gender stereotypes is a stark indicator of transgenderism. By foregrounding an image that might easily be taken for a male in drag, she knowingly fools around with the double role of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider.’ Stating she wants a real man – one who does not wear makeup, coiffure his hair, shave his legs, or paint his fingernails – she turns to parody. Not unlike Marilyn Monroe in appearance, she delivers a performance with great panache. Simple lighting, a single camera and a few props frame Lennox as a glamorous diva. Dolled up to the nines, she pays tribute to a subculture predicated upon nonnormative identities. Reconceptualizing her own heterosexuality, she undermines the social order of patriarchy by parodying the character-type of the ‘blonde bombshell’ (see Figure 3.3). At stake is the conflation of a straight woman, arguably the femme fatale, pandering to an inflated construction of femininity. As such, the song is about gender revolt and most likely not needing a man.

Figure 3.3  Annie Lennox in the video ‘I Need a Man’

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On its release, the song and video of ‘I Need a Man’ received mixed responses, more so in the US than the UK. For its time, Lennox’s androgynous look was a source of much media attention, with ongoing questions relating to her sexuality. It seemed that the media were poised for her ‘­coming out.’ In an interview with The Observer in 2010, she would explain her choice for projecting a tough image by wearing men’s suits and defying gender norms: I didn’t want to be perceived as a girly-girl on stage. It was a kind of slightly subversive statement, and what’s even more subversive about it is that I’m so not gay. I’m completely heterosexual.65 Such a statement offers rich material for interpretive pickings. In the video of ‘I Need a Man’ Lennox’s crazed performance is characterized by hyperbole and excess. The main stylistic influence is rock, evidenced by the song’s formal structure, its harmony, melody, and musical arrangement, all of which on the surface are relatively straightforward. Hence, it is void of harmonic or melodic complexity, irregular rhythmic patterns, or modulations. Throughout the song there is a fluctuation between a Dorian minor and diatonic major harmony. Continuously, the tonic chord, C minor, flirts with a C major chord, thus functioning, in my reading, as a device of ambiguity. While grounded in C Dorian (the relative diatonic key is Bb major), there are occasional slips into C major every time the guitar takes over from the vocals. For the sake of this analysis, it is worth pointing out that the oscillation between a minor mode and a major key evokes in itself a degree of transgression – Lennox is represented by the minor-flavored chord, ­Stewart by the major. A common harmonic device in rock and pop songs is to create diversity and heighten interest. In ‘I Need a Man,’ the verses are grounded in the tonic chord, C minor, with punctuations at the end of each phrase involving the subdominant (F/C–Cm). The F major chord and the bass line, which works the major sixth and minor seventh intervals in the turnarounds, establishes the song’s C Dorian modality. During the choruses the subdominant chord is dropped, with an emphasis placed on the tonic and mediant (Cm–Eb), essentially a Cm7 harmonic flavor. In the first guitar bridge (2:11–2:25) the vocals exit as the mood changes with the C Dorian giving way to the lighter C major. But this is only short-lived, as the C minor chords return at the start of the final verse (2:25). Throughout, the rhythmic gestures consist of a combination of a solid four rock-beat, with slight syncopation on the third and fourth beats. After the final verse, the song culminates with an extended, raucous guitar solo. Significantly, this signals the final arrival point with a shift to C major. Interestingly, the alternating between C major and F minor is in contrast to C minor and F major in Lennox’s sung lines during the verses and chorus. The effect of this is to profile a duel between the two performers with respect to the narrative. A sense of friction ensues between the minor-flavor of Lennox’s hook, I need a man (on

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‘In and Out’  85 the pitches G, F, Eb, and G), and Stewart’s wailing solo over a C major chord (notably destabilized by an E natural in the bass line). Nuances, such as the subtle clash between the E natural and E flat pitches, create an intentional playfulness around the minor third blues note. Lennox’s idiolect in ‘I Need A Man’ is variable according to where one is positioned as listener. It is important to continually stress that subject-­ positioning and listening are major concepts pertaining to music analysis, especially when it comes to picking up on aspects of attitude and demeanor.66 For my part, her idiolect stems directly from the Rolling Stones, albeit in her version. Her voice is forcibly foregrounded in the mix and arrangement, which comprises a steady kit part with even beats (snares, bass drum) and strident guitar backing. Without doubt her Jagger-like style of singing seems commensurate with the guitar backing and impassioned solo passage. In effect, the Stones-oriented feel of performance is imported into a new context, where gendered authorship shifts from the cocky masculine to the bio queen. Lennox’s adaptation of a musical style, with its obvious correlations to the Stones, suggests pastiche at work. The way she pulls this off discloses the details of her idiolect. Mention should also be made of the textural layers of the arrangement, which are finely regulated to display Eurythmics’ hallmark. In addition to the chord progressions and harmonic fabric, the sparse bassline assumes an important role. As well as functioning as melodic and harmonic filler, it determines the rhythmic impulse of the track, punctuating the musical texture with melodic fills and thereby creating contrapuntal interest. In any Eurythmics song, the guitar part personifies Dave Stewart – his inimitable style is as much about gender as musicianship, and inevitably, the two artists provide us with information about who they are and what their relationship to one another is about. Complementing Lennox’s voice, Stewart’s guitar part in ‘I Need a Man’ becomes a potent signifier of attitude and body language. Throughout the song there is a gradual buildup in the guitar fills and thickening of textures that result in an unleashing of emotions in the solo passage, where the improvisatory ideas delivered scream out the message. The intention behind this frenzied guitar solo is to meet the desires of the protagonist who insists that she needs a man. ­Suffice to add, there is a good dose of humor injected into the guitar gestures, which greatly enrich Lennox’s lines. One possible reading of the guitar part is that of the male yelling back at Lennox, well if you need a man, here I am. Effectively, the stereotype-laden, virtuosic guitar passage is a send-up of the rock musician, who lets rip his frustrations right at the end. In the video this gesture is greeted with a smirk and confident air of resignation by Lennox. The symbiosis between the overdriven rock guitar gestures and the singer’s strident tone can be understood in terms of diegetic function – ‘cries out’ for recognition, adding rhetorical weight by virtue of its mocking style. Lennox’s style of performance is infused with details that are rich with intention. She employs a wide range of inflections, timbres, and registers to spell out her message musically. A hard edge to her timbre helps slice

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86  ‘In and Out’ through every word she articulates as her singing turns to dramatic contrasts in dynamics, deafening screams, sung-spoken phrases, and, most certainly, an angry tone. In terms of production, her voice is heavily reverbed, providing her performance with an eerie feeling; there is something detached about her performance that has direct associations with the drag and bio queen roles she assumes. Notably, levels of reverb employed fluctuate significantly from one verse to the next, reaching saturation point in the final verse on the hook, I need a man, where her vocal timbre becomes hollow and oversaturated due to its booming resonance. Perhaps what stands out most in the track are her two piercing screams – the first occurs in the introduction (0:15–0:19) and the second in the final coda section of the song (4:06 onwards). Forming this shattering climactic point, Lennox’s scream is elongated into Stewart’s guitar wailing. The result is a lavish queering of pent-up emotions that melodramatize the impersonation of the incorrigible pop diva in all her glory. ‘I Need a Man’ is full confirmation that Eurythmics were stylistically part of the new wave movement in pop; and as much as a rock-influenced duo they were, as Martha Bayles claims, “a soul powerhouse.”67 Bayles attributes this to not only their genderbending aspect, but also their chemistry: Lennox is no Aretha Franklin, but her partner, Dave Stewart, made her sound very good, backing her up with gospel singers and topnotch musicians, including himself. Unlike Blondie or Roxy Music, the Eurythmics never deadened the music with deadpan performance; rather they hypnotized audiences with their suave but celebratory stage presence.68 The Eurythmics’ songs abound with topics of confessing, teasing, and blurring gender norms, and aptly demonstrate how much mainstream pop thrives on androgynous subject material.69

Beautiful Garbage The final song I turn to in this chapter is ‘Androgyny’ from 2001, released by Garbage, a US alternative rock group. It appears on their third studio album, Beautiful Garbage. Initially received with mixed reactions on both sides of the Atlantic, it deals head-on with androgyny and transsexuality: girls in the men’s room, you free your mind in your androgyny. Born into one body, but having the sexual identity of another is a major part of the song’s narrative. Garbage, known for their parodying of conventions of gender order, have the mantra, free your mind, and do not get bogged down by restrictions. Accept and embrace your sexuality – free your mind of your androgyny. Featuring lead singer Shirley Manson, this idea is put across in a no-nonsense style during the video performance. Directed by Don Cameron, a lot of attention is paid to style and attitude, with an ­abundance of subtle effects employed to enhance the interpretation of androgyny. Skillfully, Manson is

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portrayed as ‘beautifully’ androgynous and positioned demurely in various shots with the band (see Figure 3.4). The highlight of the video involves her ‘coming out’ in the form of an androgynous phantom in a sequence that is engineered by clever post-productions effects. Four main effect-moments are worth pointing out, which were used to design the video and create the sense of blurring and crossing over: Moment 1 (0:00–0:39) – Multi-layered, garish coloring provides Manson with a ghostlike complexion, reminiscent of the kitsch Vladimir Tretchikoff paintings of Balinese girls. Moment 2 (1:01–1:37) – CGI is employed to morph Manson’s image, involving a blurring between her being dressed as a male and a woman. In tandem with her rotating movements, her clothing changes. Moment 3 (1:58–2:18) – A motion-controlled landscape frames a limousine scene, with Manson driving a young couple down a freeway. Moment 4 (2:57–3:06) – Manson is filmed against a city backdrop that is designed through countless layers of elements. The musical production of ‘Androgyny’ is as crammed full of effects as the video, with Manson’s voice modified according to the moments described above.

Figure 3.4  Shirley Manson in the video ‘Androgyny’

Most prevalent in the production is the processing of her voice, which is relatively untreated against the backing vocals that are individually EQ’d. While the verse consists of her voice stripped down, the chorus is

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88  ‘In and Out’ overprocessed – high reverb, octave doublings, and heavy compression all contribute to the complexity of her identity as she sings, Boys in the girls’ room. During the choruses the arrangement swells, with everyone joining in and endorsing the sentiments of the song’s protagonist. In production terms, there is a clear reference to Madonna’s ‘Don’t Tell Me’ from the album Music (2000), especially concerning one editing device. This has to do with the occurrence of an unexpected technical glitch (reminiscent of a faulty CD player) that attempts to disrupt the musical flow with a high dose of playfulness. Judith Peraino has described the effect of this as “a brilliant sonic construction, a postmodern collision of acoustic warmth with cold digital dissection represented by interspersed silence.”70 A not dissimilar device is used in the editing of Garbage’s ‘Androgyny’ that plays a central role in shaping the song’s aesthetic. Anne Danielsen and Arnt Maasø, in analyzing the significance of digital mediation in the drop-out that occurs in ‘Don’t Tell Me,’ point to the effect of “frozen movements in the foreground” that, rather than mistakes, become identifiable as an “intended aesthetic effect.”71 Particularly relevant is the correlation between M ­ adonna’s visual responses and these frozen rhythmic gestures: “Her movements freeze simultaneously with the silent dropouts. However, the camera movement continues seamlessly, revealing that Madonna is performing in front of a blue screen.”72 It seems to me that in both these tracks these dropouts are not only intentional, but also a deliberate teasing strategy. In the track, ‘Androgyny,’ the dropout is subtler, occurring only in the instrumental parts, with a trickle of echo on the dropout point, and a sensation of reversing the audio signal taking place in the editing.73 That said, the guitar part is not unlike that found in ‘Don’t Tell Me,’ its momentary cessation evoking immediate attention. Because it occurs at the onset of the first verse, it instantly directs attention to the lyrics. Juxtaposed with this instrumental glitch, Manson’s voice is crystal clear in its pronunciation of the lyrics. By comparison, the choruses contain an expansion of textures, which are more inflamed and impassioned. The dropout riff recurs throughout, albeit in a less overt manner, while other musical elements grow and develop consistently. Garbage turns to artful effects in their production as a hallmark of their idiolect. Interestingly enough, their sophisticated digital productions also allude to a sense of being ordinary and down-to-earth. The eclectic, sliced-up backing dropout riff is positioned alongside other musical gestures within a digital environment that is made sexy and fun-like. All of this conveys an artistic strategy that is bent on mediating the use of music technology in a creative way and, arguably, an obviously artificial way. In the end, ‘Androgyny,’ in both its sound and video recording, can be interpreted as a metaphor for breaking the temporal flow of gender norms, where ‘coming out’ is associated with a difference and quirkiness that is cool and laid-back. Endearingly, Manson has referred to her fans as ‘darklings,’ a term ­designating the project of ‘being noir.’ Upfront about her anti-­discriminatory

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‘In and Out’  89 politics, she has combatted the normalization of the female look, sexuality, and lifestyle. Not surprisingly, she has emerged as an alternative gay icon to superstars, such as Kylie, Madonna, Cher, or Elton John. Frequently described as gay-friendly, Garbage is a band that picks up on topics dealing with queerness, LGBT rights, fetish orientations, straight-acting, and so on. This is illustrated in conspicuous ways in a number of their songs. For instance, their song ‘Queer’ addresses homophobia by way of the protagonist, a female prostitute, who is hired by a father to teach his boy all about hetero sex. Alas, there are suggestions that the father could also be gay in lines such as like father, like son. It would appear that Garbage is decisively ambiguous in their tactics. For example, in their track ‘Milk,’ they veer away from a queer sensibility by embracing a more generalized theme of ‘unrequited love’ and the loss of a loved one. Quite poignantly, the narrative hints at the costs entailed in stigmas, as the topic of loneliness assumes the main focus. Similarly, their song, ‘#1 Crush,’ is about desire and unrequited love and the emotions of agony experienced by individuals who are alienated due to sexual orientation. Taken by some as evil and satanic, homosexuality is satirized in the song ‘Temptation Waits,’ where strategies of masking are made overt. The underlying message is that oppressive societies on every continent adhere to patriarchal values, where the majority of gay women and men around the world are forced to ‘act straight’ in order to conform. All this is mediated in the opening lines, I’ll tell you something, I am a wolf but I like to wear sheep’s clothing. Then, in the song, ‘So Like a Rose,’ the subject of suicide is taken up in the story of a boy who took his life due to intense feelings of isolation and loneliness. The depression arising from isolation is connected to the protagonist’s sexuality, which is rejected by his family, mirrored in lines, The stars are out tonight, only they can hear you breathing. Finally, the song, ‘Cherry Lips,’ is a heart-wrenching ode to a transgender person who most probably does not make it. Again, the message imparted is one of hope and encouragement, both to pursue one’s desires and accept others’ differences: Because you looked just like a girl, your baby blues would flash. These sentiments illustrate the intricacies of human relationships, and at issue here is the functionality of special types of difference in performative contexts. Queer identity is inextricably connected to androgyny, which is borne out by the self-reflexivity of Garbage’s songs. Their appeal lies in a display of virtuosity in sexuality that is unique and gently provocative. There is also a high degree of parody invested in the narratives of gender in all their songs, and this is contingent on cultural imagination and the will to entertain via music performance.

Concluding Thoughts As I have sought to demonstrate, displays of queerness permeate the songs of Bowie, Madonna, Ross, Lennox, and the group Garbage. Their musical rhetoric is solicited by a creative agency that prides itself on an allure and

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90  ‘In and Out’ quest for freedom of expression. In all the cases I have presented, there are diverse strategies of ‘coming out’ and confessing, where the fetishization of genderbending defines everything to which these artists purport. By this I am referring to a politics of provocation that frames the pop artist and operates as a template for enjoyment and desire. Bowie’s sublime drive to come out of the closet is far less about ‘coming out’ than ‘getting over.’ Games of truth, he shows us, are about renouncing oneself by dodging the charge of iterating the same. In retrospect, Bowie’s subversive act of declaring his Otherness reveals not only confusion, but also exploitation in the name of self-interest. Immersed in this complex pursuit is the enactment of an illusion of the future that accords Bowie a very special queer place in pop history, even if he shies away from the burden of queerness. Much the same can be said of Madonna, Ross, and Lennox, all of whom work strictly on their terms, albeit to varying degrees, in a bid to consolidate the pressing displays of Otherness around them. It is how their productions unfold in the extravagant spaces of pop identity politics that demands continuous reconceptualization. Hardly pure and simple, the music of Bowie and Garbage binds the androgynous subject to their texts, making apparent the pull of the scintillating performance. All the same, their musical performances show that confessing in whatever way you desire is not just a marker of truth, but also one of enjoyment in terms of controlling one’s own narrative.74 Moreover, it is an important component of narrativity that makes pop songs more an ideal than a reality. Hence, the matter of opacity is worth pursuing further, which I do during the following chapters. In the main, this chapter promotes the idea of ‘coming out’ as one variant of queering, where the strategy behind confessing requires careful scrutiny. Any musicological analysis of queerness therefore needs to address the elaborations of performance as they are offset against capricious constructs of biography and temporality. This is because so often the artist’s authorization of their subjectivity defines the process of glamorization in very queer ways.

Notes 1. The Beatles’ song, ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ (1965) was allegedly a reference to their ‘closeted’ manager, Brian Epstein. Rumors also followed John Lennon’s holiday with Epstein in Barcelona in April 1963, that the pair had shared a sexual experience. 2. Throughout this chapter, given its subject matter, I have decided to place the term ‘coming out’ in single quotes to stress the very act of confessing and its problematization. However, in all the other chapters I have chosen not to emphasize this in the light of the position already established here. 3. See Foucault, Essential Works, 249. 4. For instance, Foucault’s social constructionist discourse on the history of sexuality and the rendering of the body as a passive object (through which social meanings are inscribed) has led to well-established critiques. See Dean,

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‘In and Out’  91 Governmentality; Mills, Michel Foucault; Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity; and de Villiers, Opacity and the Closet. 5. See Landry, “Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity,” for an in-depth ­discussion of Foucault’s treatise on the confession. 6. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, my approach is aligned to the work of de Villiers, whose theoretical grounding of opacity and queerness informs many of my interpretations. 7. This appears in the 1980 memoir, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and co-authored by Pat Hackett, Warhol’s ­secretary. The confessional nature of this memoir is highlighted by anecdotes and accounts of celebrities Warhol met, as well as characters associated with the Factory. 8. See Wayne Koestenbaum’s reading of Warhol’s interview tactics through strategies of ‘deferral’ or ‘proxy.’ Koestenbaum insisted that Warhol’s job was ‘not to convey truth but to perform.’ Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 80. 9. De Villiers, 149. 10. See, for example, my studies of the British pop icon, Steven Morrissey (Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score, ‘You Have Killed Me’). 11. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 16. 12. The quote is from “The Nightingale and the Rose,” an allegorical tale of love, sacrifice, and selfishness, which appears in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). 1 3. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 61. 14. Also see Devereux, Dillane, and Power, eds. David Bowie: Critical Perspectives. 1 5. Buckley, Strange Fascination, 138. 16. Michael Watts, ‘Oh, You Pretty Thing,’ Melody Maker, January 22, 1972. See Buckley, Strange Fascination, who pays particular attention to how low-key and unsensationalist the whole admission was, for its time. Also, see Gill, Queer Noises, who critiques Bowie’s ‘coming out’ as cynical, as a foil for him, in reality, being a closet homophobe. 7. Ibid. 1 1 8. De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet, 163. 19. Watts, “Oh, You Pretty Thing.” 20. Jon Savage, “David Bowie: The Gender Bender,” The Face, November 1980. 2 1. Ibid. 2 2. Ibid. 23. Mikal Gilmore, ‘David Bowie: How Ziggy Stardust Fell to Earth,’ Rolling stone. com, February 2, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/how-ziggystardust-fell-to-earth-20120202. 2 4. Buckley, Strange Fascination, 163. 25. Jackie Hunter, ‘The Day That Lightning Struck,’ Stylist, http://www.stylist. co.uk/people/the-day-that-lightning-struck (accessed 20 February 2015). 2 6. Buckley, Strange Fascination, 163. 27. Chapman, “Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis,” 204. 2 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 2 30. My thanks to Simon Frith for drawing my attention to this by comparing Marc Bolan to Bowie, and pointing out their different conditions of queerness. Whereas Bolan slotted into a tradition of the boy as an androgynous object of

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92  ‘In and Out’ desire, Bowie was instead performing the desiring by the successive changes in his stage personae. 3 1. Buckley, Strange Fascination, 140. 32. This recording was lost with hundreds of shows, because the BBC had to wipe out videotapes in order to be reusable due to its high costs. Up to 2011 it was believed that every recording of Bowie singing ‘The Jean Genie’ live had been destroyed. John Henshall, a TV cameraman, suddenly discovered a copy he had held onto of Bowie performing an extended version of the track with his band, The Spiders from Mars. “David Bowie ‘Lost’ Footage to be ­Broadcast,” BBC News, December 21, 2011, http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-16280335. Many groups have been inspired by ‘The Jean Genie,’ paying tribute to it some way or other. For example, thirty years following its release, the English eclectic duo, Goldfrapp, released their track ‘Train’ a direct tribute to ‘The Jean Genie’ – an electronic rendition, chilled and beautifully expressed in a dazzling glam rock arrangement. 3 3. Moore, Song Means, 146. 34. For another reading of this track, see “David Bowie: ‘The Jean Genie,’” The Daily Guru, July 27, 2010, http://thedailyguru.blogspot.fr/2010/07/july-27-­ david-bowie-jean-genie.html. 35. Frith, “Popular Music 1950–1980,” 42. 36. “Madonna Accepts for David Bowie Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions 1996,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kcm90o9Plk (accessed November 16, 2014). 37. In an interview in 2010 on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, for instance, she spoke out on bullying and teenage suicides (directly linked to sexuality and not fitting in), declaring that without the gay community she would never have had a career. “Web Exclusive: The Unedited Madonna Interview,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s251LO_L2G8 (accessed November 27, 2014). 38. See Deborah Wilker’s review, “Madonna: She’s Got Sex for Our Eyes and Erotica for Our Ears,” SunSentinel, October 18, 1992, http://articles.sun-sentinel. com/1992-10-18/features/9202240139_1_madonna-big-book-orders. 39. Hawkins, “I’ll Never Be an Angel,” Settling the Pop Score. 4 0. Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score, 60. 41. Similarly, Eminem acknowledges this in ‘White America,’ where he confesses that skin color has benefited his career: Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby – just like yourself … Let’s do the math – if I was black I woulda sold half. Hamilton Carroll has pointed out that all through his career, Eminem has nurtured a form of possessive individualism that has steered his transformation of white trash abjection into that of bourgeois superstar status. 42. Also see Danielsen and Maasø, “Mediating Music.” 43. By marginalized groups, it is important to include female fans, whose identification with disco has been as liberating as those of minority male groups. See Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure, 144–47, for a detailed discussion of disco’s significant influence on female sexuality. 4 4. Harrison, Music by Numbers, 92–93. 45. My thanks to Lars Norberg for pointing out various subtleties in the harmonic material of ‘Hung Up.’ 46. Also see Middleton, “Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Bridging the Gap,” for an analysis of gestural modeling in Madonna’s dance-based song, ‘Where’s the Party.’

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‘In and Out’  93 47. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 171. 48. Also see Ålvik, Scratching the Surface, for an in-depth critique of the use of ­language and its relationship to identity politics within popular songs. 49. Lawrence, “Disco and the Queering,” 233. 50. Dyer, “In Defence,” 527. Also see Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure, for a detailed discussion of crossover funk (that had strong roots in disco) and its function in queering the “heterosexual masculinism of the dominant ideology of rock.” Danielsen, Presence, 146. 51. Lawrence, “Disco and the Queering,” 242. 52. Ibid., 241. 53. Ibid., my emphasis. 54. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 150. 55. Ibid. 56. Chris Hall, “Desert Island Pictures: Nile Rodgers on the Magic of Michael Jackson and Honouring Miss Piggy,” Mail Online, May 25, 2013, http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2329058/Nile-Rodgers-From-magic-­ Michael-Jackson-honouring-Miss-Piggy.html. 57. Also see Fuss, Inside/Out, for a similar, related critique. 58. Singers vary considerably in terms of keeping time, and it is not uncommon to sing slightly ahead of the beat, as well as behind it. Also see Moore, Song Means, 101–18, for a detailed discussion of the voice and delivery in popular song. 59. Thanks to Simon Frith for this reference. 60. Moore, Song Means, 166. 61. Curtis M. Wong, “Annie Lennox Sounds Off on Being a ‘Gender Bender,’ Her Gay Fan Base and More,” The Huffington Post, September 25, 2014, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/25/annie-lennox-gay-icon-_n_5883626. html. 62. O’Brien, “Not a Piece of Meat,” 37. 63. Ibid. 64. Hawkins 1996; 2002. 65. Andrew Anthony, “I Would Have Been Perfect as a Man,” The Observer, ­Sunday, October 10, 2010. 66. See, for example, Clarke, Ways of Listening, and Moore, Song Means, who have developed theoretical approaches to listening in their respective analyses of ­popular music. 67. Bayles, Hole in Our Soul, 372. 68. Ibid. 69. Examples of androgyny are found in Blur’s ‘Girls & Boys,’ The Kinks’ ‘Lola,’ Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel,’ and Antony and the Johnsons’ ‘You Are My Sister.’ 70. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 149. 71. Danielsen and Maasø, “Mediating Music,” 138. 72. Ibid. 73. My thanks to Anne Danielsen for pointing this out. 74. This is a salient point provided by Simon Frith in his feedback on this chapter, which reinforces the significance of humor in music (parody, self and audience mocking, hyperbolic emotional display).

4 Applause, Applause

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Art into Pop

I believe in show business. The ‘Applause’ is what breeds that thing I love. When I know I’ve made you happy. When I know it was good.1 —Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga dispatched the above Twitter message on September 18, 2013. Prior to this, in January 2013, she had spread the chorus lyrics to her social network. Then, six months later, a clip of a painting with the word ‘applause’ and ‘8-19-13,’ repeated twice, was again sent out – this was the single’s intended release date. Almost instantly, ‘Applause’ peaked within the top five in numerous countries amidst much adulation. Assimilating the cause for fandom in pop reveals a range of fascinating phenomena, and one might say that pop celebrities live for the sound of their fans cheering. Lady Gaga has become accustomed to high doses of applause, as she admitted in the above Tweet.2 So, what exactly makes pop music appealing? And, why the applause? My aim in this chapter is to dwell on these questions while contemplating the implications of dressing up musically. Pop art erupted in New York during the post-war consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s through the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, and Roy Lichtenstein. Reviled by many art critics in its day, pop art defied the modernist good/bad axis of quality. In 1954, the British art critic Lawrence Alloway coined the term ‘POP’ to refer to art that was inspired by popular culture. From the outset, there was much gender trouble ­surrounding pop art, which in music was personified by Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Little Richard. Considered by skeptics as a homosexual conspiracy, pop art combatted the restraints of straight culture with an expression that was markedly camp and communally dissident. It posed a threat to the structures that maintained dominant social institutions by openly supporting gay culture, which, as Michael Bronski insists, “engenders ambivalent emotions in heterosexuals about pleasure, sexuality, and personal autonomy.”3 G ­ radually, a queer sensibility and tolerance of minority groups’ rights emerged from pop art that remains in pop music today. This explains why pop artists often render the mundane as spectacular, exaggerating conventions and norms that take gender objectification to its extreme.

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Applause, Applause  95 Keen to map the structures of musical hyperbole, I consider the ­ eculiarities of pop art and its alliances with minoritarian communities. p Again, the matter of temporality enters the debate as I delve into issues of musical appropriation that are integral to stylistic originality and the art of production. Implied by activating the term ‘production’ is a mesh of variants that are contingent on a calculated undertaking of gender representations in specific contexts of time and place. On the way, as we will see, paradoxes surround the construction of gender norms. In her seminal book, Gender and Power, Raewyn Connell asserts that all the doctrines of ‘natural difference’ are fundamentally flawed. Basically, society’s way of culturally ‘dressing up’ people is about regulating the distinctions between sexes. Despite the modest differences in physique between women and men; traditional clothing exaggerates specific physical attributes. Connell explains that the sight of women’s breasts or men’s penises through garments has always been politically determined with the intention to amplify the distinctions of biological sex.4 In addressing structures of queerness in the book, I turn to aspects of fashion that are inextricably linked to pop culture. Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP album, released in 2013, and the accompanying videos, are excellent examples of this. Her performances are characterized by style hybrids, kitsch gestures, and a fashion project that is quite exceptional. I want to suggest that her aesthetics are graspable through a special kind of performativity, where vocal costuming teases out gender norms alongside categories of class, race, ethnicity, and generation. Since its emergence in the 1950s, pop culture has been a prime channel for genderplay within spectacles that filter into a commercial market hungry for celebrities. In a bid to entertain, pop glamorizes the individual not only through the body, but also in social and cultural contexts. Integral to this is attitude, a chief component for defining and marketing the artist’s persona. In pop performances, articulations of difference have almost become prerequisites. Within a postmodern landscape, many pop artists confront gender in a wide variety of stereotypical roles.5 As strategies of queering, pop performances invariably situate gender alongside the ideological values that prop up specific orders. Championing queer politics, gender research has prompted new ways for understanding sexuality, class, age, and ethnicity. Indeed, pop texts are rife with gender experimentation in the form of playfulness and are predicated upon the creative urge to try out new things. I concur with Muñoz who states that queerness is a performative “because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future.”6 Consider the social-media contexts that have mushroomed in recent years, where performance practices denote vibrant expressions of human agency. Not just reiterating norms, performers often lay bare constructions of difference in a bid to entertain. As Jodie Taylor states, “the potential for a performance to subvert or expose the rigidity and unnaturalness of gender and sexuality will be a fundamental measurement of its success at queering normativity.”7 Granted, how one

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96  Applause, Applause measures success will always be debatable, because “the political and subversive potential of performance is always contextual.”8 By acknowledging this, we might say that the resignifying of gender norms highlights the fluidity of identity within ever-changing landscapes. Picking up this point later, I implement Josh Kun’s concept of ‘audiotopias’ to inspect the sonic spaces of utopian aspiration often found in pop. By critiquing gender in an artist, one cannot overlook ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and in my discussion of rapper Nicki Minaj the nub of my inquiry involves a queer disposition that is framed by the homophobic and misogynist history of a predominantly male-dominated genre. My analysis of Minaj’s performances is a precursor for considering other queer ­African American artists: Le1f (see Chapter 5, this volume), Azealia Banks (­Chapter 5), and Mykki Blanco and Zebra Katz (Chapter 7). This part of my study draws on Marquita Smith’s erudite work on hip hop, a genre that has “developed in a complicated and often problematic relation to female participants.”9 Undeniably, Minaj’s standing as one of the most successful, controversial, female rappers in the early twenty-first century is due to clear-cut strategies along the way. Her quirky, cartoon-like, hypersexualized appearance does more than just entertain; it disrupts traditional codes of femininity. By scrambling norms, she has altered the course of hip hop, as Brent Staples of the New York Times verifies: The success of Nicki Minaj will no doubt drive record companies to seek out female artists who might connect with the same audiences. But the business plan for the protean diva with neon hair seems pretty clear. She is already moving beyond the reach of the hip-hop powers that be.10 The other artists dealt with in this chapter include Lady Gaga, Ysan Roche, Scissor Sisters, and Kevin Barnes. What they share in common with Minaj is an urge to dislocate a range of norms through the accoutrements of camp, irony, and parody. As I argue, their distinctive performances pertain to structures of difference as they turn to artistic invention and creative flair. As with Minaj, Lady Gaga has achieved a celebrity status that positions her in the top league of the music industry. And, the ‘radical makeover’ one encounters from one performance to the next suggests a remarkable degree of creativity. Albeit within a less-commercial pop context, artistic creativity flourishes in the performances of Ingrid Lorrenzio (with her alter ego, Ysan Roche) and Kevin Barnes (with his alter ego, Georgie Fruit). With her roots in alternative pop and a strong European identity, Roche is a New York– based Visual Artist and Musician (MFF Art) who blends electronic music, goth, grunge, rock, and Eurovision schmalz. In particular, her videos are arty, intellectual, trash, and debauched, and have by all accounts influenced Lady Gaga. She is a strong proponent of ‘Black Yellow Pop’ – the cycle of life –  a brand of pop that is dark, enticing, and glamorously shocking. Having

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Applause, Applause  97 spread across the Internet like wildfire (demonstrated by her burgeoning global fan base), Roche’s acts are eclectic and queer. Much the same can be said of Barnes, lead singer of the US band, Of Montreal, whose stylistic direction is highly experimental within an indie pop-rock idiom. In many ways, the song that I examine, ‘The Past is a ­Grotesque Animal,’ epitomizes the quagmires of temporality and queer subjectivity. In my reading of this track I attempt to fathom out the singer’s subject-positioning amidst a wave of gaudy gestures underpinned by cynical lyrics. The erotics he puts on display involve kinky musicalized mannerisms that throw a new light on vocal costuming. In all the performances studied in the following pages I detect a strong urge on the part of the artists to fend off any clichés of the nice guy or girl behind the façade; the scenebased gloss of their endeavors indeed aspires to a queer jouissance. Often unruly in their approach to performance, they recycle pop into a new set of aesthetics. This becomes a mainline for a vital dialogue that incites arousal, indignation, and intrigue.

Hybridized and Queer: Lady Gaga At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lady Gaga’s music lights up a fantasy world. Blurring the ‘real’ with the virtual, she dislodges norms from their stranglehold. Promoted via a hybridized self that is ignited by musical performances, Lady Gaga’s visual soundscapes are compelling narratives of self-discovery and transgression. Never is her body conflated into one ­persona or one history as she reaches out to a diverse fan following. M ­ artin Iddon and Melanie Marshall account for her popularity amongst queer fans: “Lady Gaga’s appeal to queer fandom originates in her celebration of her (quite deliberate) difference, her refusal to be ‘closeted,’ alongside her support of gay pride events and her gratitude to her gay fan base.”11 Underpinning her queer performativity is a ravenous appetite for drag. Addressing the plight of drag queens, drag kings, and other groups of marginalized people in her texts,12 Lady Gaga not only subverts, but also glamorizes the binarisms of sexuality and gender. Furthermore, she adjusts the ‘queening’ part of drag by often sharing the same terrain as transsexuals.13 Traits of ‘bio queening’ are ubiquitous in her videos. Rachel Devitt has insisted that the bio queen seeks to ‘out’ gender as performative, without necessarily being dependent on the ‘displacement’ of the original gender norm. Devitt also maintains that drag, in its implied crossover to the opposite of one’s gender,14 leaves little space for women to play out variations of femininity. Hence, the subjectivity of the ‘bio queen,’ whose gender norms not only subvert biological imperatives but also the conventions of drag. This is evident in the ‘Applause’ video from Lady Gaga’s third album, ARTPOP. Directed by Dutch fashion photographer duo, Vinoodh ­Matadin and Inez van Lansweerde, including illustrator Jo Ratcliffe, this ­elaborate video turns to the bio queen in various guises. Lady Gaga references numerous

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98  Applause, Applause personae: dead Marilyn in a birdcage, Little Eddie, Madonna (as in Vogue), the court jester, the black swan, the character Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Heath Ledger’s character Joker, Liza M ­ innelli (Cabaret), a sad clown with a smeared face (created by makeup artist Yadim), and Botticelli’s Venus with plastic fan shells glued to her mermaid outfit. In this, one of her most provocative videos, she writhes around in the nude with a skimpy, black-gloved-hands brassiere covering her breasts (1:26 onwards). The striking intertext here is Janet Jackson’s controversial classic Rolling Stone cover spread in September 1993.

Figure 4.1  Lady Gaga in the video ‘Applause’

For its time, the photo of Janet Jackson, shirtless with her breasts covered by her then-boyfriend René Elizondo’s hands, evoked shocked reactions. However, some twenty years on this is inverted with the male absent – the hands over Lady Gaga’s breasts are instead a brassière bodice. Bio queening for Lady Gaga is all about positioning herself narratively in ways that do not necessarily tally. Not only does she transform and cavort with gender norms, but also she boasts a rich musical genealogy. Effectively, her hyperembodiment renders the subject unfixed in relation to almost every category imaginable, accenting the reflexivity of agency in both sound and image. It is as if her elements of personal parade (through, say, airbrushing and

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Applause, Applause  99 technological manipulation) are an ongoing experiment in ‘Othering.’ All in all, she inhabits an outlandish space that is liquid in terms of its transformative quality. This is what delineates pop art. Implicit in the track, ‘Applause’ is a spectacular navigating of gender and sexuality. In Chapter 3, I argued that Madonna’s politics of drag function as a device for cultural expression on multiple levels. As part of the next generation, Lady Gaga extends this into a bio queen, postfeminist space15 where gender performativity is culturally and technologically shaped by a new wave of production that denotes processes of resignification. I would suggest that her commercial cosmopolitanism demands a nuanced and critical understanding of a set of politics.16 The sophisticated videos she releases register a plethora of styles that signal a disjuncture between girl power and commercial gain. Besides they underline a strategy of alienation, as exemplified in ‘Applause,’ where the crass defines the chic, and Lady Gaga’s queering antics emphasize the androgynous misfit. Otherwise, this is aestheticized by a robotic voice that can suddenly become warm and human. If nothing else her vocal costuming is deviant, freaky, and ironic. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (Lady Gaga’s birth name) was born to an Italian American father and a mother with Italian, French Canadian, German and English ancestry. Since her rise to fame in the pop world, she has consistently staged herself through citation and mimicry. Skillfully, her performances flaunt the conventions of the past in narratives of the present. Utopian referents position her in the fleeting present, with all her influences brazenly stamped out. A prime example of this is found in another song, ‘Yoü and I’ (2011), from her second studio album, Born This Way – a tribute to Queen, with the sampling of their 1977 hit ‘We Will Rock You.’17 The single’s cover consists of a black-and-white photograph of Jo ­Calderone (Lady Gaga’s alter ego), head tilted upwards and exhaling smoke from a cigarette. Directed by long-time collaborator, Laurianne Gibson, and shot in Springfield, Nebraska, the video of ‘Yoü and I’ profiles Lady Gaga with her male alter ego. The narrative starts with her walking from New York to Nebraska, with the intention to woo her boyfriend back – allegedly, she wrote the song after having reunited again with Lüc Carl (note the use of the umlaut in the song’s title!). Flashbacks to a former period, involving wedding scenes, abuse by a man in a barn, and shots of her immersed in a water tank, form part of an intricate narrative. Following the first 48 seconds with scenes dealing with a turbulent love relationship, the music starts up with a slow, grinding, rock feel (60 bpm). The mood is ominous. Dressed in black, with large sunglasses, big veiled hat, and platform shoes, we see that Lady Gaga has bruised and bleeding feet – she crouches in pain. ­Following on from the first verse, the imagery rapidly alternates between her and Calderone – she is filmed playing an upright piano in a cornfield with Calderone demurely perched on top of it, smoking. By the second chorus, she has turned into the mermaid, Yüyi, and is lying in a tub of filthy water. Clichés of redemption, confession, and remorse are played out in ‘Yoü and

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100  Applause, Applause I,’ and as the narrative reaches its climax in the final scene, Lady Gaga is once again united with Calderone. This peters off into a sequence of her running across a field just before being tortured. Just as the screen turns black, a dream wedding flashes past as Yüyi and the scientist are filmed together in the bathtub. An intertext to Tarantino’s Kill Bill films seems aesthetically obvious.18 Another dominant feature in the video is dance. Choreography always constitutes a major part of the stylizing of all Lady Gaga’s performances, be they live or recorded. In ‘Yoü and I’ it is at the moment of May’s guitar solo that she is filmed dancing with her troupe all dressed in white dresses. At this point the visual narrative becomes intentionally disconnected, with the Nebraska desert providing the canvas for painting a story that is complex and full of twists and turns. Lady Gaga has shed light on the choice of mermaid and Calderone. Whereas the mermaid is a free spirit without water, literally able to do her own thing, he is constrained and hung-up on conventions. Asked by a fan on her blog if this mermaid could actually engage in sex, Lady Gaga answered sweetly: Sometimes in love, you can’t make it work. No matter what you do, there’s this giant boundary between you and someone else. So that’s what it’s about, perceiving in your imagination that there’s something magical inside of you that you can make it work.19 Toying with gender norms and sexuality is integral to Gaga’s strategy, and I would argue that her tactic is to outplay stereotypes through drag and bio queening.20 At the MTV Awards in 2011 a notorious appearance of Calderone left many in the audience gasping. It seemed a perfect moment to rearticulate gender norms in the footsteps of Annie Lennox’s unforgettable Elvis Presley impersonation at the 26th Grammy Awards in 1984. Theresa Geller has described the Calderone alter ego as ‘disruptive work,’ with the spectacle of Gaga as a male taking on specific meanings.21 There can be little doubt that Calderone radically deterritorialized the cultural norm of masculinity during the MTV event, and whereas this might have been entertaining, it heightened an awareness of male vulnerability. Shrewdly, Lady Gaga distanced herself by turning to drag. Such a subversive strategy continues to be part of her allure, providing a key to understanding the seductive play invested in the aesthetics of drag and transgender display. Geller suggests that, “Jo Calderone’s performance of gender, sedimented with the paratext of Gaga’s hyperreal fashioning of the female modern pop performer as artifice, indeed, as fashion, elicits the transgender sublime.”22 Lady Gaga’s vocal delivery plays a major part in this process, and there are three instances in ‘Yoü and I’ worth considering.23 1 First verse (0:04–0:18) – a most poignant melody opens up the song, It’s been a long time since I came around. Lady Gaga’s voice is raw,

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Applause, Applause  101 exposed, and quivering within a raunchy, classic-rock arrangement. The stripped-down arrangement (guitar, piano, heavy accents on beats three and four) is made massive by a high dose of reverb. Crystal clear, and recorded in a comfortable low register, the voice has a pronounced drawl on the words ‘around’ and ‘town.’ A strong country and western inflection is discernible here. This verse ushers in the Queen sample, ‘We Will Rock You,’ in the first bar (0:19). 2 First chorus (0:49–0:58) – this entails chorus backings on something, something about this place – filled out with rich Queen-oriented chorusing on the word ‘something.’ The hyperbolic delivery in the chorus is in stark contrast to the verse, as Gaga’s melodic lines work contrapuntally with the backing vocals, all of which heighten the textural richness of the material. Stylistically, a strident move from a country to rock feel underlines the urgency of the lyrics, and at the same time it increases the sense of emotional involvement. 3 C section (2:35–3:05) – You and I, you, you, and I is the climactic point of the song, where a great deal of effort is invested (Example 4.1). It is at this point that the subject’s impassioned delivery reaches a fevered pitch, literally on the highest notes of the song. Enhanced by May’s guitar solo, which accompanies Gaga’s short melodic spurts, there is a release of pent-up energy to great dramatic effect. Many subtle musical references occur in this section, including the citation in the guitar part played by Brian May in ‘We Will Rock You’ at the end of the solo (3:03–3:04).24 Intensifying the lead vocal, the guitar part pushes up the level of tension and anticipation. In a way, this becomes a duel, with Gaga competing with May (arguably symbolizing Calderone) as they both pelt out their sentiments of love in the repetitive cell, you and I. It is from this point onwards through the final verse to the song’s conclusion that Gaga mostly exploits the tessitura of her voice by embellishing the chorus hook with great virtuosity. emphatically q=128 vocal

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Example 4.1  Vocal embellishing in C Section – ‘Yoü and I.’

From this analysis so far, how might one consider the aesthetic effect of Lady Gaga’s performance? That her vocal part is highly processed raises the question of extended vocal techniques. Frequently, Lady Gaga exhibits techniques of huge vocal contrast in her singing style that may be likened to the costuming that goes into her various photo shots. In terms of vocal costuming, her low tessitura, nestling in a strong contralto range, is rendered potent by a strong, ‘natural-sounding’ timbre. This is in contrast to her singing

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102  Applause, Applause in the high register, which veers toward an artificial-sounding timbre that, while contrived, is assured. The musical interest here is due to the precise regulating of her melodic lines through variants of timbre, breath control, and vocal grain. It would seem that her vocal morphology is continuously in flux and contingent on textural and timbral fluctuations of her voice within the mix. Contributing to this are the regular techniques of overdubbing, effects, and chorusing. Aspects of glamor arise from a glossy style of delivery that employs a wide range of devices and production techniques. The best example of this is illustrated by the climax of ‘Yoü and I’ in section C (see Example 4.1), where close inspection indicates that every repetition of you and I is executed differently, thus establishing nuanced emotive moments. During these processes of ‘vocal costuming’ in the recorded voice, meticulous attention is afforded to ornamentation. The effect is theatrical, demonstrating Lady Gaga’s salient artistic spirit. Technological engineering and sound production in pop grounds the artist’s identity, contributing directly to the vocal costuming. Choice of microphones, rates of compression, levels of reverb, regulations of EQ’ing, and so on, enhance vocal imagery and negotiate the narrativity. The recording and editing process convey a high degree of glamor, shaping Lady Gaga’s hyperreality. Her manipulated voice emerges as a dominant signifier in conveying messages about difference, and, moreover, about how to have fun. Occupying a site where relationships are forged with fans, she promotes solidarity and collective consciousness.25 Epitomizing adaptability through the continuous transformation of her persona, she parades queerness in all its guises. Camp and kitsch are central to her artistic expression; they give credence to an entire aesthetic of bad taste kitsch that is arguably part of a strategy of showcasing good taste. In their studies of pop culture, Holliday and Potts explain that: “One must have good taste in order to know what bad taste is. So, camp, that once exclusive way of seeing, has hit the mainstream media.”26 Lady Gaga’s capital is based upon being camp; she is a diva par excellence who cleverly accesses the aesthetics of pop in the form of authorial intent. Her musical articulateness guarantees her authorship, exhibiting tenacity and candor as part of her ludic performative quality.

Carnivorous Concubinage – Ysan Roche Down the ages human performances have involved drag. Gender’s subversion in the form of drag is crucially strategic and closely bound up in entertainment. Taylor points out that “the musicality of drag performance is often ignored, and the songs that are performed and the methods of vocalization appear largely inconsequential to many scholarly observers.”27 Already I have referred to the role of the ‘bio queen’ who performs out hyperfemininity as a function of gender-crossing and protest. Part of the politics of the bio queen is to resist the clichés of males doing drag. Superbly illustrating this are the performances of Ysan Roche. Having established a career as

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Applause, Applause  103 music-fashion-film artist, Roche believes in the freedom of expression and of identity transformation through beauty and darkness. Inspired by the music of Marilyn Manson, David Bowie, Madonna, Björk, and The Velvet Underground, her name is derived from her Indian aunt, who predicted her karmic world success.28 Known as ‘Black Yellow Pop,’ the musical trend she has contributed to is rebellious and anarchic, and thus a countermovement to mainstream pop. As well as goth musical features, low-register voices, and soft harmonies, it draws on heavy rock and electronic dance music mainly from European club scenes. Roche has claimed that black and yellow colors highlight the extremes of dark and light and of night and day.29 Significantly, video games and cinema have a strong bearing on her texts. A good example of this is found in her hit, ‘Bass Gun,’ released as a single in June 2012, from her debut album, Brain Artificial Limb. One might describe its narrative as bizarre and threatening. Centered on the carnivorous Concubine, a girl whose heart is ruled by her gun, the track carried with it a feminist message:30 When Bass Gun came out [in] 2012, the metamorphosis had already taken place and it was her first more commercial song produced with Yoad Nevo in London (Pet Shop Boys, Girls Aloud) appealing mainly to women to fight for themselves and equality. At the same time it was an appeal to fight for your creative right and speak up especially for artist’s copyright[s] that aren’t protected or appreciated enough in today’s society, mainly because men rule the game and don’t accept women as equal. Some powerful men at big labels take ideas from talented and strong minded (sic) women and give them to puppets because they can control those ones and make money with them.31 The lyrics are aggressive in ‘Bass Gun,’ as well as teasing and threatening. Aesthetically inspired by horror movies, Roche is depicted as the victim on a rampage. A central modality of her femininity is drag, as she resorts to the raunchy theatrics of a femme fatale. In the video of ‘Bass Gun’ the female character is made crude by a display of uncontrollable jealousy. The violent narrative is directed at the male perpetrator, who ostensibly has it a lot worse than one would imagine. The female protagonist is likened to a shadow chasing itself as she seeks out love and ends up in a lot of trouble. Roche explains: “We can’t see our wrongdoings while we are in a victim position.”32 Charged by a bass line that worms its way through the mix, the musical arrangement is highly dense. Something sinister in the melodic lines is reinforced by the occurrence of a tricky augmented fourth interval, D to G# (Example 4.2). The bass energizes the song’s narrative as its low register is mashed into the bass drum and other kit parts; sonicwise the bass line emerges as an obvious metaphor for the ‘bass gun’ itself.

104  Applause, Applause threateningly q=120 vocal

4 & b 4 - œ #œ œ

synth

4 & b4 Œ

{

ff

so taste my

bass

‰

‰

œ œ

#œ œ œ œ œ

&b œ œ œ

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j3 œ

gun

≈

œ

j œ œ -

j - #œ œ

taste my

≈

taste my

j3 œ

œ œ

bass

gun

‰

j - œ œ

taste my

nœ ™ bass

œ œ J

œ œ œ gun

≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ œ ≈ œ œ œ #œ ≈ œ ≈ œ œ ≈ ≈ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ bbb œ œ œ bass

Ó

∑

gun

b { & bœ œ ≈ œ ≈ œ œ #œ ≈ œ ≈ œ b b œ œ ≈ œ ≈ œ œ nœ ≈ œ ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ ≈ œ œ nœ ≈ œ ≈ œ

Example 4.2  Melodic menace in chorus of ‘Bass Gun.’

Another striking production feature in the chorus hook, so taste my bass gun, involves flanging on the repeated words bass gun. Sliding up through an augmented fourth pitch (D to G#) and then up a chromatic to the perfect fifth (A), with a flanged tinge in the production, is an arresting melodic device. The effect of this is to make the singer’s voice spooky. By spooky I  am referring to an interval that is often used to evoke a menacing and scary mood. Further, I would add that the overmanipulation of the voice by flanging, the Auto-Tune audio processor, and a high use of reverb expresses deviation. This ties into a musical style that has an indie flavor, arguably a marker of countercultural opposition. My suggestion here is that the generally low-budget production of ‘Bass Gun’ becomes a response of disempowerment in itself to the male-dominated music industry. All in all, Roche’s penchant for ratifying pop deterritorializes a space that is foreboding. Firmly embedded in her experimental approach is a subversive style that gets us to think alternatively. Fashioning her body through garish makeup, excessive clothing and jewelry, she opens up the possibilities for radical transformation and utopian quest. Celebrating difference is integral to her branding as a ‘beautiful monster,’ and the absence of any ‘real’ self suggests a process of resignification as the artist borrows from other sources to shape her identity. Pastiche, kitsch, and camp expressive qualities lie at the heart of a politics that is daring and flexible. For all intents and purposes, Roche forges the modern with the postmodern by turning to an aesthetic that disrupts linearity and antagonizes conventions. So, who is the person behind the mask? And, in what ways is her performativity made erotic? The aesthetics of ‘Bass Gun’ comprise a broad range of idioms that pick up on the contemporary scenes of urban spaces. ‘Black Yellow Pop’ is an eclectic mix of styles, a postmodern musical extravaganza that designates a move away from mainstream pop. Having found her niche, Roche has developed a transgressive style in a way that pioneers new representations of queer subjectivity. Traversing the local while engulfing the transnational, she participates in what Josh Kun has termed the ‘audiotopias’ that exist across transnational geographies. What characterizes Roche’s audiotopia is her unifying different forms of community in new genres, scenes,

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Applause, Applause  105

Figure 4.2   Ysan Roche getting ready for the kill in the video ‘Bass Gun’

and cultural interventions. Engendering a sense of imagined space that is accessed through utopic visions of a queer world, she calls forth an expressive quality that permits great flexibility. Drawing on Foucault’s ideas of ‘heterotopias,’33 Kun has conceptualized audiotopias as sonic spaces of effective utopian longings where several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought together not only in the space of a particular piece of music itself but in the production of social space and mapping of geographical space that music makes possible.34 These imaginary spaces conjure up experiences of utopian longing, where the act of listening has a dual function: First, to focus on the space of music itself, including the different spaces music juxtaposes within itself; second, to focus on the social spaces, geographies, and landscapes that music can enable, reflect, and prophesy.35 Kun’s objective is to track music’s migration across borders, indeed via the diasporas that distort conventional mappings of the Americas. Presenting us with ‘ideal’ rather than ‘real’ sites for excavating diasporic cultural formations, audiotopias anticipate the cultural interventions of performance style. Thus, the possibilities of social agency in musical performance are a pathway into the formation of audiotopias, not least in the form of identities that are perceived as ‘different.’ Roche’s audiotopia, it seems, aspires to border-crossing and cultural expression within a fantasy domain. There is little doubt that her creativity is predicated upon the transgressive play and multiple transformations of a ‘Black Yellow’ pop art iconography.

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106  Applause, Applause By suggesting queerness as central to her act, there are numerous issues to consider. Above all, the iconography she employs spectacularizes her unique form of genderplay, establishing her as a ‘vagabondiva.’36 Since the advent of MTV, strategies of queering have enunciated a bewildering wealth of desires. Central to this is the fetishization of the female body in countless contexts. Building on a pop tradition, Roche unsettles conventions and stereotypes. As with Lady Gaga, she shows that gender performativity can be something inconsistent. That this takes place through musical codes of expression, as much as via the features of kitsch display, helps allegorize libidinal positions of desire. By this I am referring to the unleashing of an agency that is compelling and formidable. With this in mind, I will divert my attention to a different form of queer agency that leads us back to the dance floor.

Skin Tight and Excessive: Scissor Sisters The band, Scissor Sisters, encapsulated the spirit of queer New York at the turn of the millennium. Formed in 2001, they combined glam rock, disco, pop rock, and electroclash. Their debut album, Scissor Sisters, from 2004, was a success and named by the magazine, Attitude, the top gay album of all time. It is their third album, Night Work, released in 2010 that I will now turn to. Produced by Stuart Price, it is full of musical references from the 1970s and 1980s, and is a tribute to a group of queer megastars, Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys, Elton John, George Michael, and Freddie Mercury. The album cover art, from 1983, is a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of the dancer, Peter Reed, clutching his backside. All the tracks from Night Work are glamorous, camp, and erotically charged. Mapped on to the dazzling instrumental arrangements are the vocals by Ana Matronic and Jake Shears. Sex(iness) features as a central theme in many of the album’s tracks – ‘Skin Tight,’ ‘Skin This Cat,’ ‘Harder You Get,’ and ‘Sex and Violence.’ Stylized by high camp, their aesthetic is a result of flashy production, engineering, mixing, and programming, all of which are expertly controlled.37 A prime aspect of the Scissor Sisters’ appeal is located in the codes of a gendered discourse that play on difference. As I intend to argue, this is prescribed through features of vocality, production, keyboard riffs, grooves, instrumentation, and melodies. For the purpose of my analysis I have selected the ninth track, ‘Skin Tight.’ Worth stressing is the glitzy production to which the track owes its vitality. Bawdy and ecstatic, the song is a send-up of intimacy and sexual desire: You’re skin tight, Fit me like a glove, Skin tight, Wrap me in your love. The song’s formal layout is simple, as is the harmonic material, comprising a prime sequence, Db–Eb–Bbm–Gb (I–III–vi–IV), in the key of Db major. Conversely, the production is complex in terms of minute details, with Stuart Price’s creative signature firmly stamped on the mix. This is discernible in the disco stylistic references, with a four-on-the-floor stomp sizzling with the kind of euphoria that pulls crowds on to the floor. A main aesthetic of the track results from

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Applause, Applause  107 the tight control; all the details of a slick production (Table 4.1) induce high levels of affectation and excess, driving home the sexy narrative of feeling ‘skin tight.’38 Amongst the numerous production techniques that provide this track with its exuberance are: (1) minute processes of textural shaping (with a clever usage of high and low pass filters on the instrumentation in the introduction, verses, and outro), (2) wide vocal imaging in the choruses (to create an expansive feel), (3) touches of flanging on part of the vocal dubs (in the verses), and (4) meticulous application of EQ to the kick drum and bass lines, which adds weight to their presence whenever they (re-)enter the mix. Price’s production virtuosity and use of special techniques, as described above (also see Table 4.1) constitute an important dimension of the overall performance. In this regard, corporeality is something delineated by the producer’s own sensitivity to programming, which is particularly evident in the editorial control of the voice and its mobility within the mix. That is to say, the tailoring of vocal and instrumental costuming by production skills has a direct bearing on furnishing the compositional ideas and performance. Table 4.1  Production devices in ‘Skin Tight’ Sections

Production Processes

Intro [0:00–0:17]

Multi-dimensional landscape – programmed plucked synth (fast attack, short decay envelope) – tempo sync’d LFO speed increase on plucked synth sound with reverb and delay – textural shaping by high and low pass filters – cut out at ca. 250hz extending to 3k – notched EQ range designates ‘tightness.’

Verse I [0:18–0:53]

Low pass filtering on instrumentation (ca. 370hz), creating rumble effect – lead vocals to the fore and doubled by an octave with different treatment at the top – lower part’s EQ notch is ca.800hz (reduced with overdrive plug-in) – higher vocal flanged with reverb and delay – high pass filters ensure separation from lower frequencies. Development in verse includes opening up of texture to anticipate the groove entry – kick drum is tightly regulated (thickness in width and depth) with light occasional snares – meticulous employment of EQ, frequency positioning, and compression – vocal reduced to single line with slight modulation – build-up with upper frequencies clear and transparent.

Spectrograph

(notched EQ range)

(frequency reduction in pre-verse, introduction of verse)

(thickness of kick drum to left -0:44)

(Continued)

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108  Applause, Applause Sections

Production Processes

Chorus I [0:54–1:12]

Increase in bass zone as kick drum is released from frequency range – snare drum weight increased – instrumentation more upfront with guitars to the left, synths in the center right with wide vocal imaging defining the chorus texture – general intensity serves to profile the lyrics – width and modulation increased to add emphasis to the vocal part.

Verse II [1:13–1:50]

The beat is trimmed down, with textural EQ processing – vocal sustained in 800hz slot – low pass filter sweeps down reducing the high end on second half of verse – another high pass filter negates this by elevating all the sounds – the bass is removed in preparation for the chorus.

Chorus II [1:51–2:20]

Added drum processes – harmonies a 3rd above main line – use of wide imaging continues – chorus is more strident than the previous one.

Bridge [2:21–2:34]

On commencement this section is stripped down to vocals and synth pads – the beat reappears with softer kick timbre – vocal effects with slight increase in width and depth.

Spectrograph

(graded increase in frequency depth and range)

(high pass filtering)

(Bridge pt.1)

(Bridge pt.2) Chorus III [2:35–3:03]

Use of wide imaging again – the vocals are more ornate (in terms of embellishment) in comparison to the previous two choruses – the effect of this is create elation in the song’s climactic moment.

Outro [3:04–3:25]

Re-entry of intro material with a glittering ambience – synth chords are less processed this time, and a new chord progression with an acoustic piano sound (3:13–3:25) acts as a bridge to the next song on the album.

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Applause, Applause  109 The sonic landscape of Scissor Sisters is about openness and plurality. Every one of their songs is a statement on queer identity. I want to suggest that camp tropes help position them within a European and North ­American context, where the grammar of classification is often diffuse. Their tracks are tactical in the sense that they promote a sense of Otherness while also reaching out to a mainstream fan base. Given that most of the members of the band are non-hetero, there is arguably an implied queerness to their unique audiotopia.39 Most of all, Scissor Sisters stage their songs in a way that circumscribes gender norms through the political objectives of difference and opposition, and accordingly their musical style becomes a critical determinant of new sexual politics. Dance-oriented and bursting with energy, a track such as ‘Skin Tight’ can be read as a phantasmatic urge to be ‘free.’ That they are received with adulation by their fans as a gay band raises other questions concerning the premises of tolerance and reception politics in pop music. In studying the strategies of ‘tactical identity endorsement’ in British and American societies, Mark Norris Lance and Alessandra Tanesini have taken issue with the slogan ‘straight but not narrow’: We think this is a mistake. There is, of course, a political point in making the claim that one opposes heterosexist bias. One hopes that many non-gay people would perform such political acts of solidarity against homophobia. But it is hard to see why such acts should take the form of identity claims.40 Underpinning structures of authority, privileges are “undeservedly bestowed upon people whom society deem straight, and who do nothing to disassociate themselves from such an attribution.”41 The differentiation between ‘tactical identity endorsement’ and ‘short-term political effectiveness’ is therefore in need of critique when it comes to measuring the positive effects of reception. Lance and Tanesini assert that in spite of groups of straight people acquiring their identities through queer politics, minoritarian ­solidarity still perpetuates rather than undermines the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy. They beg the question: What does a non-queer p ­ erson say to the question whether they are straight or gay “if they accept our position?”42 One response is to “recommend that those of us who are not gay, when asked whether we are straight should insist that ‘straight’ is not one of our words.”43 Interestingly, Annie Lennox has adopted this position following a long career where the problematics of endorsement, as much as the privileged status of her own straightness, have become part of a larger political campaign. Lance and Tanesini contend that the inscription of one’s identity might be construed as an endorsement of “­psychological attitudes” and social roles that entail a set of politics.44 The task of un-diagnosing gender therefore seems a viable option, something Butler advocates in Undoing Gender, when assessing the analysis of gender identity disorder (GID).

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110  Applause, Applause One of Butler’s most ethical issues deals with ‘queer crossings.’ Given that sexual orientation tends to follow the trail of gender identity, the heterosexual matrix is flawed when working out the complexities of attraction. This comes about because of the “disjunction between gender identity and sexual orientation […] that constitutes for some people what is most erotic and exciting.”45 Probing at the complexity of transsexuality, Butler points out that GID presupposes the assumption that homosexuality “is the damage that will follow from” sex change. This is further exacerbated by the idea that “a gender can only be diagnosed if it meets the test of time.”46 ­Diagnosing gender as a permanent feature is hardly feasible, and Butler identifies two different conceptions of autonomy at work in this debate. The view that opposes the diagnosis altogether tends to be individualist, if not libertarian, and the views that argue in favor of keeping the diagnosis tend to acknowledge that there are material conditions for the exercise of liberty.47 Confronting head-on the regulatory discourses of diagnosis, Butler ­illuminates the paradoxes of freedom and how they are conceived and articulated. The cost of diagnosis often entails purchasing one type of freedom at the expense of another. In adhering to the psychological discourse that instates gender norms, it is language that ultimately describes a person’s psychic life. With cross-gender identification, “the desire to be the Other” or even “the insistence that one is” implies that what is the ‘Other’ is not necessarily tenable. Conventional diagnoses, therefore, indicate that we can experience biological sex, “without considering what the cultural advantages of being a given sex are”:48 Indeed, when we think about cultural advantages, whether we are doing something – anything – for the cultural advantage it affords, we have to ask whether what we do is advantageous for me, that is, whether it furthers or satisfies my desires and my aspirations.49 At the heart of Butler’s critique is the diagnosis of transgendered youth in direct relation to peer pressure and social violence. Distress is often recast as an internal problem, and the diagnosis people are subjected to “intensifies the very suffering that requires alleviation.”50 As such, any deviation from gender norms (even post-diagnosis) is still suspect, hence the paradox of autonomy. Butler insists that economic and legal institutions need to acknowledge “how essential becoming a gender is to one’s very sense of personhood, one’s sense of well-being, one’s possibility to flourish as a bodily being.”51 Butler recommends that the diagnosis of GID be abandoned completely, with transsexuality not diagnosed as a disorder. So, what pathologizes a mental disorder might be better understood as one of the possibilities humans have when determining their own gender for themselves.

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Applause, Applause  111 I have taken this detour to emphasize that perceptions of the queered body in pop performances can be confusing. In videos the inconceivable becomes the conceivable even when aberration and glamorized freakishness challenge norms and predispositions.52 Because the spectacle of gendered performances prompt new ways of experiencing the body through sound, questions need to address gender through styles and trends. The normalizing principle that showcases many mainstream artists also demands attention, bearing in mind that norms are not easy to pin down. Often they are muddled through the very effects they seek to creatively exploit. In pop art (including literature, poetry, music, architecture, and cinema) there has been a tendency to platform and spectacularize the permutations of gender that do not conform to the binary ‘feminine and masculine’ matrix. If gender is the mechanism by which the production of human representation is regulated, then it is a mechanism of social power that is institutionalized. A gender norm only survives through social practice, instituted through the policing of the body in everyday life. This is an underlying premise in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (Volume 1), an influential text that traces the legal and social aspects of regulation. Foucault’s central tenet is that the norm not only produces individuals, but also actively exploits them. By taking this one step further, Butler argues that the norm cannot be “fully extricated from its instantiations,” and that “only by virtue of its repeated power to confer reality is the norm constituted as a norm.”53 Thus, to depart from the gender norm is a prime goal in the queering process. How then does this function in styles that are less queer than others? Take rap and hip hop, where references to women as ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ highlight the process of normalizing and discrimination at work. Empowered females in hip hop are scarce. Historically, hip hop has worked against female rappers, as well as queer-identified performers,54 although, as I argue later in this book, the times are a-changing. That said, sexual domination and humiliation still loom large in rap music, especially through the visual portals that ‘pimp’ women in order to sell male artists’ music.55 Enigmatic in one sense, though, is the fact that the glamorized sexual prowess, violence, and materialism that stereotype and demasculinize black male performers feed into a music industry that still secures white privilege.56 Frequently, violence eroticizes women, promoting misogyny as something standardized amongst black males. Patricia Hill Collins has observed the routinized tendencies of emotional and physical abuse of black women. In her book, Black Feminist Thought, she suggests that female sexual emancipation is encouraged along the lines of male domination and fantasy.57 That this still festers in countless contexts is a recurring concern, with women exhibited primarily on sexual terms. There can be little doubt that sexual stereotypes reinforce modes of oppression, especially when the “sex/gender hierarchy functions smoothly” and when “sexual nonconformity is kept invisible.”58 This assertion gains weight as I turn my attention to Nicki Minaj, whose original animated rapping style, attitude, and look have secured her unprecedented success in the music industry.

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Nicki Minaj Born Onika Tanya Maraj in 1982, Nicki Minaj has often been hailed as the black Lady Gaga in hip-hop circles. In many ways her image complements the hypermasculinity of male rap performers – The Game, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, 50 Cent, and others. Of mixed Indian and African-­Trinidadian descent, and brought up in Jamaica and Queens, New York, Minaj has emerged as a leading fashion icon of her time, with deals with Pepsi, ­Adidas, and MAC Cosmetics. She is the only female to ever be featured on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings list.59 Reading Minaj’s queerness is more complex than it might seem at face value, and her influences are broad-ranged.60 Minaj’s story is one of hardship, success, and survival in one of the most fiercely protected male domains of popular music. An interchangeable repertoire of images and identities discloses a queer subjectivity that is beguiling and provocative.61 Despite her alleged claims to possible bisexuality, Minaj has been ambivalent about revealing the details of her private life, ostensibly not wishing to gamble with her career. After all, as Marquita Smith states, the “baiting of queer desire comes with risks and further implications.”62 Smith points out that issues of sexuality relating to Minaj’s performativity are constantly directed to her musical style: In the language of hip-hop culture, Minaj has outlined what her ever-evolving musical identity looks like. When it comes to matters of sexuality, her music and performance veer away from the typically expected heteronormativity and playfully delve into queerness that exists outside heterosexual male fantasy.63 Smith asserts that attempting to discover a performer’s “personal truth” is a futile exercise; for it is the inscription of meanings by fans that counts. Hence, there is a sense that how Minaj is received is then a ‘real effect’ of the artist, the ramifications of which seem relevant. Smith reminds us that, “gimmicks and publicity stunts abound” in the music industry.64 Yet, marketing ploys are not consistent across genres, and identities are always negotiated, even if “Nicki Minaj, Queen Pen, or Queen Latifah never openly commit to a sexual identity.”65 Notwithstanding their underlying motives, they prompt critical reflection on female representations and sources of entertainment. Minaj articulates a queer identity that panders to sexual promiscuity and flexibility. Her animated constructions operate as a send-up of femininity in the form of an impudent resistance to homophobia, racism, and heteronormativity. Molding her cartoon-like imagery entails an exaggerated stereotyping of the ‘bimbo character.’ One of her mechanisms is to play on the anxieties of straight masculinity by engaging in the rhetoric of same-sex play and ‘different’ sexual encounters. In her raunchy track, ‘Go Hard,’ she raps: I only stop for pedestrians or a real, real bad lesbian. With relish she delivers this message through rapid rhymes in a tantalizing hybrid accent, comprising hints of Caribbean, New York, and British pronunciation. Reinforcing

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Applause, Applause  113 her spectacle, her musical expression frames her subjectivity. Hence, performativity and creative enterprise are central focal points in my analyses of two videos, ‘High School’ and ‘Anaconda.’ Featuring American hip-hop recording artist Lil Wayne (Dwayne Michael Carter Jr.), ‘High School’ is from Minaj’s reissued second studio album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded – The Re-Up. Released as a single in April 2013, it was written and produced by Boi-1da and T-Minus. ‘High School’ is a blend of R&B and hip hop, and deals with controversial topics. These become all the more evocative in the steamy video for ‘High School,’ directed by Benny Boom. The narrative deals with an affair between Minaj and Lil Wayne, with footage of the symbolic ‘Pink Pill’ (a version of the ‘Beats Pro’ speaker conceived by Beats Electronics). The musical elements that stand out in this song include (1) tight rhythmic structuring of the vocals and backing parts, (2) expressive dynamics and textures of Minaj’s voice, and (3) scintillating production devices. Throughout the video, Minaj turns to overt ‘teasing’ and ‘flirting’ that could easily be misconstrued in terms of their graphic suggestions. In an MTV interview with Christina Garibaldi, she describes not only Lil Wayne’s and her close friendship, but also the playfulness involved in the making of the video: Not only is he my boss, but he’s also like my brother. It’s very weird because I’m just used to Wayne making fun of me, and all of Young Money boys making fun of me, so every time they yelled ‘Cut!’ I was just being picked on. It was completely them being bullies to me. But it’s still like Wayne is still so sexy and so I texted Wayne and I was like, you’re going to have all the chicks back on you, know what I’m saying? Because when this video comes out, he looks like art; he looks like a piece of art all tatted up, all sexy, black, and beautiful.66 Numerous image shifts spice up her spectacle in a way that might well border on the offensive. Different skimpy colored monokinis, lingerie, masks, and black hoodies constitute her dress codes while various wigs and excessive makeup accessorize her ‘wackadoo’ fashion.67 As much as her musical performance, her look is intended to be fun to watch. At the same time she is highly political – her comments on the ‘High School’ video bear this out. Ostensibly, Minaj plays the part of seductress in her relationship with Lil Wayne, and in many ways the track is a love song. As to be expected in any Minaj song, there are subtexts galore. Although she is exposed to the heteromasculine gaze, on the one hand, there is a sense that she exerts immense control over her act, on the other. Emphatically, she has explained what went on behind the scenes: “He refused to touch me, he’s so respectful, he refused to touch me, and then I was like, ‘Wayne,’ I was like, ‘You could do this.’ But he was acting scared, like, ‘Yo, Nick, this is my dream. I’m gonna be a man

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after this video.’ He was just being crazy,” Minaj said. “But if I didn’t tell him ‘Yes, you can do this’ or ‘touch this,’ he refused to do it, like he’s a southern gentlemen [sic], which people don’t realize.”68 A large dose of expletives is on display in ‘High School.’ Both Minaj and Lil Wayne are heavily engaged in the terminology that flaunts sexist and racist hip-hop speak – ‘bitches,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘pussy,’ ‘lick,’ ‘slide in,’ and, of course, ‘nigga.’ In a sense, Minaj reclaims the speak that defines her blackness, and with panache turns this love song into a romp with romance, with nothing less than a huge, knowing wink (in the video at 2:26 and 2:42). Her toying with stereotypes and the manipulation of her image could be read as a ‘baiting’ strategy as she makes ambivalent her queer desires. A description of the narrative as juxtaposed with the music and video sequences is provided below.

Table 4.2  Music, visuals and narrative in ‘High School’ Form

Details on music and style

Visuals

Intro 0:00–0:37

Helicopter sound builds up into a crescendo. Main chord progressions and melody presented.

Minaj is filmed walking at the poolside. The characters are introduced, which include the rapper, Birdman (or Baby), and actor, Emilio Rivera, who plays the ‘don.’

Verse 1 0:37–1:20

Rap vocals enter (Minaj), very exposed in the mix. Rumbling bass lines. Sparse, staccato string stabs.

Lil Wayne and Birdman are seen carrying a Louis Vuitton bag into the mansion. Minaj flirts with Lil Wayne.

More lush sound, with backing vocals entering, and harmonic material filling out. Minaj’s singing is sensual.

The bag is handed over to the don, and a deal is secured.

Chorus/ Hook 1:20–1:43

Video and timecode

He said he came from Jamaica, he owns a couple of acres

They holler at me but it’s you

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Applause, Applause  115 Form

Details on music and style

Visuals

Video and timecode

Verse 2 1:43–2:28

Rap vocals enter (Lil Wayne) – same material as verse 1 – voice exposed in the mix – sense of increase in passion due to percussion.

Lil Wayne is seen at the poolside in bathing trunks with two other women. A steamy lovescene between him and Minaj is shot in a bedroom.

Chorus/ Hook 2:28–2:49

Return of lush chorus material. Minaj sings.

Minaj again occupies most of the chorus, looking directly into the camera. They holler at me but it’s There is you winking and grimacing, and a strong hint of parody in her performance.

Interlude 2:49–3:11

Non-verbal breathy sounds employed as punctuation expressions.

More shots of a love scene between Minaj and Lil Wayne.

Uh, she gotta a nigga at home and one on the side, best friend is a dyke

(non-verbal vocal sounds) Outro 3:11–3:57

Minaj sings tenderly and sensually, her voice subdued within the mix.

Minaj is disguised in a black hoodie and glittering mask as she robs the ‘don.’ The video culminates with Lil Wayne waving down a helicopter, before he and Minaj escape.

I know you want it, boy, I see you tryin’

My attention now turns to Minaj’s single, ‘Anaconda,’ released in August 2014. This is from her third studio album, The Pinkprint, and is rife with queerness. Directed by Colin Tilley, this video broke all streaming

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116  Applause, Applause records on Vevo with 19.6 million hits on its first day of release. Eleven days later, Vevo verified the video had been seen 100 million times, and by October 2014 over 1 billion digital downloads had been recorded in the US. From the outset, mixed reviews of ‘Anaconda’ related to Minaj’s near pornographic display. Was her pandering to the male gaze within a pornosphere the main reason for the video’s unprecedented popularity? Intrigue preceded the song’s release, with the cover to the single ‘accidentally’ leaked over the Internet (Figure 4.3). Portraying Minaj’s naked backside, with only the tiniest hint of a monokini strap between her buttocks, the video flaunts stereotypes of African American female bodies. That the up-and-coming hip-hop director of this video, Colin Tilley, had a great deal of control over her image and act has not been without criticism, and on no account should such issues of exploitation be bypassed.

Figure 4.3  Nicki Minaj in the video ‘Anaconda’

What is the anaconda reference about, how is Minaj self-positioned, and what about the stuff of total fantasy? To start with, the title refers to a reptile indigenous to the tropical South Americas. Generally referred to as the green Eunectes murinus, the anaconda is one of the largest snakes in the world. These aquatic snakes are found east of the Andes in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, The Guianas, and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1997, the film Anaconda was released. It was about a National

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Applause, Applause  117 Geographic film crew who were taken hostage by a crazy hunter and involved the ­capture of the world’s largest and most dangerous snake. In Minaj’s song, the anaconda is more a euphemism for an anatomical part, with the main hook, my Anaconda don’t, emphatically repeated throughout. ­Musically, the song signals a move to a more hardcore rap style. Throughout there is an obvious sample from ‘Baby Got Back’ by the MC and producer Sir Mix-a-Lot (Anthony Ray), with the instantly identifiable bass line holding the main clue to the narrative (Example 4.3). jerky q=130 bass

? 44 #œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. #œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. #œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. #œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. . . . . . . . . . . . . mf

Example 4.3  Bass line in ‘Anaconda.’

After Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You,’ ‘Baby Got Back’ was the second-most selling song in 1992. What many will recall in the song are the sexually explicit lyrics, although Sir Mix-a-Lot, who wrote and recorded the track, has been adamant in his defense of this song’s subject matter (that deals with females’ buttocks), stating that most black women responded favorably (because they recognized his own personal condemnation of the fashion industry that pressurizes women to be skinny). Problematically, the video of ‘Baby Got Back’ opens with a dialogue between two white valley girls as they observe a black female dancer: Oh, my God, Becky, look at her butt! It is so big … She’s just so … black! This snide observation is lifted, sampled, and inserted into ‘Anaconda’ as a mocking retort by Minaj, I got a big fat ass (ass, ass, ass). The narrative of ‘Anaconda’ concerns a Detroit boy, let’s say a ‘bad boy,’ who has bought his girlfriend extravagant clothes made by Alexander McQueen from drug sales, without being caught by the police. We learn, however, that she earns enough money herself, and just wants to have fun with the boy to the point of not even caring ‘if he bites her with his grills’ (gold plated teeth). In the song, Minaj also refers to Michael, who we learn is a well-endowed dude (dick bigger than a tower), who calls her NyQuil (a medication to aid sleep at night) after they have ‘played together.’ Another anaconda reference appears in the phrase, Little in the middle but she’s got much back, which graphically describes her slim waist and large bottom. That her guy prefers the fat ones to the skinny bitches is made crystal clear. Weighed down with such quips and clichés in the lyrics, the video aesthetics are designed to supplement the narrative in vivid ways. It begins with the scene of a jungle, exotic and ‘primitive,’ where we catch sight of a group of black women poised like anacondas in anticipation of the grind of the beat. The kitsch quality of this opening scene functions dialectically in terms of its excessive antagonism. The location of the jungle hints at all the subversive features of Minaj’s performance we can anticipate. Snakelike, the bass sample from ‘Baby Got Back’ slithers around the melodic lines and instrumental

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118  Applause, Applause textures with foreboding sexiness and scorn. Self-effacing in mannerisms, Minaj and her troupe writhe like pole dancers while looking defiantly into the camera; the strategy is one of belligerence, to lure in the male gaze before ensnaring it. Replete with corny referents, the sequence of shots is hyperbolic all the way through. For instance, in one scene (3:03–3:23), whipped cream is slowly smeared over her breasts from a spray can while fellatio is performed with a banana. This scene ends with a brutal amputation of the banana into slices as Minaj, sneering into the camera, discards the remains over her right shoulder. It is the lap dance with Drake that announces the climactic moment (3:24–4:40), where everything is acted out strictly on her terms. This is evident in the tone of her commanding voice, her aggressive cackle, and the lyrical content in phrases, such as fuck the skinny bitches in the club. On no account is Drake allowed to touch her as she expertly gyrates over his crotch. The final insult to injury is her slapping his hands away as she minces off stage, leaving him unfulfilled, frustrated, and, most of all, emasculated. Tightly structured around verse and chorus divisions and a lengthy middle section, the song is a rap rant. And, at the end of the song there is a transition into new material that comes across more improvised yet affirmative in every way. I want to return to the symbolic bass sample from ‘Baby Got Back’ (see Example 4.3), which not only functions intertextually, but also through its prominence in the mix. As well as eroticizing the entire track, it offers up a raunchy counterpart to Minaj’s voice – it feels over-sexed, lascivious, and foreboding. It is a musical metaphor for the anaconda ‘snake’ and male genital, contrasting with the gendering of Minaj’s voice. Here, I am suggesting an anticipatory function, where the bass zooms in on the politics of female ­representation. Negotiated through ‘wackadoo musical ideas’ (that say much about sexuality and desire), her ploy is to camp things up. Situated within a postfeminist context, she turns to a highly mediatized setting to exercise astonishing control over her own self-fashioning. Within an African ­American context her femininity is verified as much by her musical style as her ethnic ­origins, and the kitsch structures of hyperembodiment on show are highly political. In this sense, she provocatively reclaims the territory that has ­traditionally been part of the male rapper’s vanguard, but at the same time shakes her finger at white females who denigrate women of color for their different physical features. Ever so queerly,  ‘Anaconda’ becomes the platform for subverting a range of norms in the guise of a tough female rapper. As I have suggested, the levels of intertextuality found in ‘Anaconda’ are rich and varied. The referencing of the ‘Baby Got Back’ video, as well as the samples, not only destabilizes the male gaze, but also reclaims the norms of beauty associated with weight, size, shape, and skin color. That Minaj flaunts a sexuality that is antithetical to the white girls in ‘Baby Got Back’ circumvents many of the structures of patriarchy to which females are subjected. Basically, during the performance she slams racism, misogyny, and sexual prejudice. The explicit lap dance sequence drives this point home, as with a huge wink at the camera she gains full control of the male subject.

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Applause, Applause  119 Her rejection of submission is manifested in her detachment to and contempt of Drake. By looking at us through the camera lens, there is a strong hint of her desires rather than his. Drake is reduced to a mere prop, a horny male waiting to be serviced, and then discarded. Minaj lap dancing in this sequence is not dissimilar to Le1f’s routine in ‘Wut,’ as he perches on the lap of a straight white male (see Chapter 5). Not only does this render the scene preposterous, but it also emasculates patriarchy. Such a strategy reifies a special type of desirability, clearing the space for an expressivity of difference within a conventionally aggressive male domain. Emphasizing stereotypes while defying them at the same time is a staging device that entails untold risks. There is a strong sense that Minaj knows what she is doing.

Figure 4.4  Drake and Minaj in the video ‘Anaconda’

Of course, all sorts of difficulties arise in any evaluation of eroticization in pop texts.69 Pushing at the boundaries, Minaj’s performances are never static, and in this sense she highlights what bell hooks has described as “the emotional immaturity that underlies much hip-hop sentiment.”70 Meeting males who embrace patriarchy on their own terms, Minaj knows how to trump them, and this she achieves through exaggerating her femininity. She objectifies herself on her terms within a compulsory heterosexist hip hop context. Subsequently, she follows in the footsteps of Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, and Missy Elliott by troubling female norms of representation, and, more importantly, introducing elements of kitsch, camp, and queerness into her act. Embracing multiple images of herself, and creating a garish, pornographic spectacle, she places the body of the black female under the glare of feminism. One might say that the postmodernist pornosphere she

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120  Applause, Applause appropriates is one of robust sexual utopianism, made viable by tormenting hypersexualized representations that animate a cartoonish snapshot of pop femininity as predatory. It is also worth adding that the spectacular up-front plight of the female protagonist involves a high degree of ironic distancing. Through the choice of the title alone, Minaj turns to exoticized jungle features to valorize her own femininity. Indisputably, Minaj has entered the hip hop scene in an outlandish way. Rather than looking like or imitating the boys she has chosen the direction of the bio queen. One might say that she has quintessentialized femininity through a hyperstyling of costumes and accessories, heavy makeup, impossibly high heels, and creative coiffures. Crucially, she is one of the first black females to import drag into the unlikely domain of hip hop, as Brent Staples insists: It was only a matter of time before a hip-hop star would blow through the lines separating pop from rap and appeal to two lucrative audiences at once. And it was as inevitable that hip-hop purists would swiftly cry foul. It is particularly upsetting to the hip-hop boys club that the most successful transgressor, a freshly minted megastar named Nicki Minaj, is a woman.71 Staples’ enthusiastic account, however, neglects aspects of Minaj’s ethnicity that impinge directly on the aestheticization of her gender. During the 2010s there has been a sense that racial minorities are shifting on a global scale never witnessed before. Hispanics are now the most populous minority in the US, at the same time Arab-Americans and Asian-­Americans are seeking greater recognition. Riki Wilchins has accounted for a great number of North Americans, including whites, who are rejecting traditional categories. All this has to do with the task of classifying oneself. Tiger Woods, when questioned on his ethnicity, replied that he was “­Cablanasian – Caucasian, black, and Thai, plus (on his father’s side) Native American.”72 Albeit somewhat utopic, the increasing focus on multi-racial politics suggests a tendency towards “decreased visibility (and political power) for all racial groups.”73 Yet, stereotypes still fence in race, sexuality, and gender, and are inextricably linked to institutions of power. For the purposes of my study, it is necessary to stress that the ideals of race are never gender neutral. Wilchins turns to stereotypes of black gangsta males – hypermasculinized, emotionally tough, and predatory – to make the point that “the racial stereotype of the black thug is still impossible to think as anything less than 100 percent heterosexual.”74 Historically, definitions of homosexuality in the US have depended on the context of racial divisions. In her book, Queering the Color Line, Siobhan Somerville accounts for homosexuality’s invention as a category of identity in the US during the nineteenth century. Cultural anxieties about mixed blood and bodies established a form of logic for medical experts and sexologists to articulate thoughts on homosexuality at the turn of the nineteenth century. As absurd as it might seem, racial models were used to characterize

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Applause, Applause  121 emerging models of homosexuality and, moreover, employed to simplify the socially constructed boundaries of race and sexual orientation. In sum, the body became embedded within these anxieties.75 At issue here are the mechanisms of gender and race in everyday life, where conformity is measured through structures of visibility and a strong sense of consciousness. Scholars have drawn attention to ways in which skin color is magnified out of all proportion. In a study undertaken in the 1940s, black teenagers had over 150 words for describing skin color, including yellow, half-white, medium brown, blue-black, chocolate, each with coded meaning.76 Through the history of jazz and popular music we know that skin color and sexuality have been decisive in canonizing artists and their music. Consider the legendary jazz singer Josephine Baker. While light-skinned, she was not deemed light enough when auditioning for Noble ­Sissle and Eubie Blake’s black musical Shuffle Along (1921). As a result she was employed as a dresser, watching the show from the sides while rehearsing all the steps. One night a chorus girl fell ill and Baker urged the director to let her go on stage. This was her break and she became an instant hit with the audience. Shuffle Along became one of the biggest successes to run in New York as Josephine Baker emerged as a true global superstar. Russell-Cole, Wilson, and Hall have pointed out that the black characters in musicals were usually medium-brown, and when not dark enough were smeared with blackface. Skin color was completely restrictive. Only light-skinned black actresses were cast in “tragic, sympathetic, or sexually charged roles,”77 while dark-skinned women were relegated to the role of mammies. Forward winding to the 1990s, there was a significant increase in films made by African Americans at the same time they were more visible in most genres of popular music. Significantly, though, in the following decades light-skinned African American women have been favored in virtually all entertainment domains. Russell-Cole et al. have suggested that the 1980s signified a historical shift in the music industry, “when television went cable and sound went video.”78 This affected black artists lightening up – Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, and countless others exemplify this. Also, Russell-Cole et al. offer a critical perspective on rap and R&B videos: Rarely if ever are dark-skinned African American women with more blacklike features and natural hairstyles portrayed in these videos, not even in the genre of urban gritty rap. Instead, over and over again, long-haired, African American women with Caucasian-like features strike provocative poses behind macho black male performers.79 In the pageant of mainstream pop culture, light-skinned black females are more the norm than dark-skinned females. This has not been without its controversies. In 2008, an advertisement in Elle, promoting L’Oréal hair-­ coloring products portrayed Beyoncé as exceptionally light-skinned:

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The cosmetic giant denied that it had lightened Beyoncé’s skin, but it was obvious that somebody had. Of further annoyance was the fact that Beyoncé’s long hair was “photoshopped” to look perfectly straight and dark blond – in other words, to make her look overall more racially ambiguous and mainstream.80 Importantly, in their critique of the world of fashion, Russell-Cole et al. point to recent trends where darker-skinned females are not lightened or touched up, and where designers set out to emphasize difference and the ‘exotic.’ They make reference to Sudanese-born, Alek Wek, from the Dinka ethnic group, who was discovered in London at the age of 18. In 1997 she appeared on the cover of Elle, despite concerns that a dark-skinned woman would damage the magazine’s sales. However, this proved to be such a success that the editors for Elle were credited (quite literally!) for redefining norms of beauty. An invitation by Oprah Winfrey followed with Wek appearing on her chat show. Winfrey would make the claim that, if Wek “had been on the cover of a magazine when I was growing up, I would have had a different concept of who I was.”81 Dark-hued supermodels have since been featured with more regularity in high-fashion magazines, such as Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Elle, and on international catwalks. Russell-Cole et al., however, stress that the problem today is “less about the complete exclusion of models of African descent […] than it is about how African American models are portrayed.”82 Demeaning examples still abound in both the fashion and pop industry, with females represented and dehumanized as ‘exotic.’ Particularly, in the world of rap, the African American community is exposed to color prejudice with popular male performers from Big Daddy Kane to Kanye West and Lil Wayne openly preferring lighter-skinned ladies. ­Generally, a disdain for dark-skinned African American women is manifested in the countless music videos produced and directed by males. Of course, exceptions exist, and male rappers such as Snoop Dogg have contested the aesthetic that lighter is righter, and accordingly often feature dark-skinned females alongside lightskinned ones in their videos.83 As I have attempted to illustrate, there is a correlation between ethnicity, gender, and sexuality when discussing queerness. Certainly, racial representations continue to be a major point of concern, and as Russell-Cole et al. insist, “color prejudice has gone viral,”84 affecting a greater number of people around the world than ever before: The pattern is always the same, with most of the discrimination being directed toward those considered too dark to be acceptable, and to a lesser extent, but still occurring, toward those deemed not dark enough to join “the group.” But perhaps most insidious of all is the color intolerance that is directed inward toward the self.85 In pop culture, the ‘bleaching syndrome’ – the desire to be lighter – continues at the cost of exclusion and distress. In a media-saturated culture, then, how

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Applause, Applause  123 does the signifying role of race still mirror color prejudices? What are the consequences of primary media resources that favor lighter skin and that are subsequently organized into color classism? And, in a post–Michael Jackson era, how far has the pop industry come in terms of elucidating the numerous nuanced discriminatory practices that concern skin-color differences? All this returns us to the queered body and its classification along lines of color. Race is not just a matter of biology and genetics – it is something grounded in shared notions of social belonging and cultural memory. This is not to suggest that race is culturally constructed, but rather, like gender and sexuality, it is politicized. Liberal narratives of color-blind meritocracy have been a prime concern for Critical Race Theorists (CRT), who make the case for a reconfiguration of racial identity through intersections with gender. By ‘racing the law,’ CRT proponents use various strategies to reimagine minority lives in dialogue with norms and stereotypical narratives. On this matter, Patricia Hill Collins alerts us to the shift in control of the image that occurs through such deconstruction and the coercive task of going ‘upstream’ and denying the evils of racism. If we take this perspective, race is what culture makes out of the body, and as we know from pop culture, hybridized representations can traverse sexuality, race, and gender, not least when queered.86

Georgie Fruit Versus Kevin Barnes Seldom do white artists queer or, for that matter, bother about addressing their ethnicity in pop music. Writing in 2004, Riki Wilchins would provide the following explanation: Even today, Caucasian Americans see only white and nonwhite. But many African Americans see an entire spectrum, because in a racist system such distinctions are crucial in the access to privilege. […] Although race and skin color are out there somewhere, whites and African Americans are not seeing the same thing. Color may be there, but everything they mean in terms of whiteness and blackness is clearly not.87 A notable exception to this is Kevin Barnes, who has opted for an alter ego, Georgie Fruit, a black, transsexual, 40-something, glam rock, soul singer. Barnes has described Georgie as a ‘wizard’: “He helped me cope when I was suffering. I like the idea of a person that goes back and forth between male and female experiences. He offers an escape from any perceived perceptions of self.”88 Intriguingly, the story Barnes has created around his alter ego is about a black man who has been through multiple sex changes. He’s been a man and a woman, and then back to a man. He’s been to prison a couple of times. In the 70s he was in a band called Arousal, a funk rock band sort of like the Ohio Players. Then he went through a few different phases. It’s funny, because, in my mind, when I think about

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this character, he’s so far removed from my personal experiences. But I can somehow identify with this character really well. I think that because I’m so into Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, and Isaac Hayes and all of those people.89 Born in 1974, Barnes, lead singer and songwriter for the indie rock band, Of Montreal, has his roots in the music of British artists, such as David Bowie, Ray Davies, John Lennon, and Genesis. Performatively, what stands out most is his on-stage sensibility. Decisively queer, he dresses up and theatricalizes his act while jostling with members of the band.90 It is all about the new and not looking back, Barnes has claimed. In 2007, Of Montreal released their eighth album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, with all the material written, recorded, and performed by Barnes. Thematically, this deals with the transformation of Barnes into Georgie Fruit, who takes over at the second half of the album during the lengthy seventh track, ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal.’ Referencing Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil [Story of the Eye] and Edward Albee’s theater production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the song draws together psychedelic pop, R&B, experimental punk, and electro funk. The escapist element of this brazen track is attributable to a number of musical features that draw on UK and US punk, the early Kinks, David Bowie, New Wave (The Jam), Nirvana and grunge, and Iggy Pop. Harmonically, ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ comprises a cyclic chord riff (Gm–Bb–Dm[7]–F), suggestive of G Dorian mode. Not once is there any let-up in this pattern. Painfully long, at almost 12 minutes duration, the song draws on many compositional devices. What first strikes one is the incessant repetition of the chord progression, spread over a four-measure pattern throughout the song. Inevitably, there are slight modifications to these chord types due to the instrumental and vocal melodic parts. Close inspection reveals that the G minor chord is missing its third (Bb) right up until the backing vocal riff enters (4:20). In its overall effect, the harmonic fabric is powerful and resolute, supplemented by a standard 4/4 meter with predominantly eighth- and sixteenth-note repetition figures in the bass and guitar parts, remaining consistent throughout. One of the dominant gestures is a high-pitched, descending three-pitch backing vocal riff (see Example 4.4), entering the mix directly after the phrase, she gets hysterical (4:20). From this point onwards this recurs, without any significant alteration, in every measure for just over 6 minutes. Indeed, it survives long after the final lyrical phrase, none of our secrets are physical now (9:01), merging with the drawn-out, final instrumental solo passage. As it drops out of the mix (10:30), there is a great sense of release (and, arguably, relief) as a wailing synth solo takes over, embellishing the three notes in a wildly ecstatic manner. A climactic moment full of tension ends abruptly through a petering out into a messed-up coda (11:44–11:53). The aesthetics here create the sense of a ‘poorly’ processed (read: uncompressed, over-EQ’d, and wrongly

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re-verbed), sloppy gesture. Put differently, the collapse induced by such textural thinning-out can be read as anarchic as it depletes the quality of the performance drastically. This suggests a ‘breakdown’ (something we seldom experience in commercial pop recordings), which dramatically heightens the idea of the past as ‘grotesque.’ Such connotations warrant further commentary. hysterically q=153 vocals

b4 &b 4 ‰

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œœ™™ Oo

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œœ ™™

oo

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∑

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Git 1 j Git 1 j Git 1 j Git 1 j j ° b4 œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œj œ guitars & b 4 œ œ œ œ nœJ œ œ œ nœJ œ œ œ nœJ œ œ œ nœJ œ œ œ J J J J J Git 2 Git 2 Git 2 Git 2 4 ? œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ b ‰ bass ¢ b4

f

Example 4.4  Three-note backing vocal motif in ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal.’

As already mentioned, ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ signals an important turning point in the album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, at the point where Barnes turns into Georgie Fruit. Inferences of temporality and queerness abound in this track. As well as the title, the poetic lyrics deal with angst and paranoia – the underlying message is to not look back at one’s grotesque past, but rather to define one’s present. The protagonists, as I interpret it, are both Barnes and Georgie Fruit, and a level of ambiguity arises through an ongoing dialogue. Of analytic interest are the expressive structures and tactics of delivery that communicate the narrative’s humorous congruity. Barnes has stated that his personal life was in turbulence when making the album and that this song formed the centerpiece of the album. Above all, writing from the perspective of different personae gave him the opportunity to explore his complex personality.91 Straightforward in one sense, complicated in another, the music possesses elements of consistency and surprise. Monotonously, the bass line, the chord progressions, and a backing vocal riff with bass guitar flanged and played with a pick (see Example 4.4) are repeated incessantly, providing a canvas for the voice to splash upon. The song is in verse form, with no choruses. As the song progresses the vocal part heightens in terms of frenetic passion. The instrumental passages are lengthy, including an introduction (0:00–1:42) and ending (9:01–11.53). Whereas the voice is not placed in the foreground of the mix – it is as an equal partner with the other lines – it is always made discernible through its timbral flavor and, of course, the words. Throughout the diction is clear to the point that every word is driven home. Moreover, the lyrics are intellectually profound and rife with ambiguity: how can I explain I need you here and not here too, or but it’s like we were not made for this world. Although the lyrics do not have a rhyme scheme, word reiterations, especially at the end of phrases, create rhymes in themselves. Barnes exploits his full vocal register, and when in the high range the exertion of

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126  Applause, Applause his straining establishes terse moments of poignancy. Yelling and shouting also assists his pitching, at the same time it defies precision. This is in true punk style and connotes a sense of ordinariness, a quality I have explored in some detail with Morrissey and The Smiths.92 One of the best examples of this occurs on the phrase: The mousy girl screams,”Violence! Violence!” She gets hysterical (4:14–4:19). Straining up to the first syllable of viol-ence, the voice cracks into a screech on the word hysterical as the pitch latches on to the second syllable. Such precarious instances of pitching display a level of ingenuity, with the performance projecting the narrative poignantly. Something alarming characterizes the vocal mannerisms of Barnes as he gets to the crux of a story that is obsessed with the curse of time. In reminiscing, the protagonist is haunted by his/her past and forced to confront the here and now, if not the futility of any ideas of a future. At the same time, a romantic relationship is idealized: We’re always touching by underground wires. All the way through the story touches on positive and negative emotions – we learn that what is important is that the secrets we hold are in the physical now (the last two words end the vocals on the track). A journey of a lifetime starts in a dark place full of recriminations: how completely wrong you can be. But through the passage of time, a sense of optimism blossoms at the end, despite the smudged punctuation mark (referred to above). One of the final analytic angles I want to explore has to do with the recording itself. The aesthetics of ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ are furnished by the arrangement of Barnes’s voice within the mix, which conjures up a sense of physicality that is raw, lived-in, and ‘untrained.’ It is from the position of a relatively unpolished live recording that the narrative of the song gains its plausibility. In contrast to artists I have dealt with in this chapter, such as Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Scissor Sisters, Barnes shares more in common with Ysan Roche in terms of vocal production and a sense of down-to-earth delivery. This is where the central quality of the production’s aesthetics lies, namely in the pleasure of experience of hearing the protagonists struggle, a potent point of identification. The recording techniques work in tandem with the post-punk style, complementing the singer’s own subject-positioning in his grueling monolog. Whereas many of the other tracks from the album exhibit features of mainstream pop (glossy, clean production), this track and its recorded vocal performance veers off in quite another direction in terms of technical virtuosity and recording techniques. It is not without some reservation that I employ the term ‘virtuosity’ to distinguish embellishments through extraordinary contrasts and inflections in the control of the voice that defies the more conventional techniques of singing found in mainstream pop. Key aspects to Barnes’s virtuosic vocality include full-throttle intervallic straining in the high register, strong and unexpected ­ anic-like tone syllabic accents, vivid timbral fluctuations, and a forceful, m that is half sung and half spoken. In the main, the formal verse structure of the song lends itself to a delivery that is conversational, and, again, this is recorded in way that creates a sense of the ordinary. On close inspection,

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Applause, Applause  127 the lyrics have a poetic beauty in terms of self-reflection, at least I author my own disaster (3:28) or performance breakdown and I don’t want to hear it (3:47). It is how the phrases and words are uttered within the recording production that determines the aesthetic effect. By this I am referring to how the presence of every aspect of vocality is made profound through rhythmic, melodic, timbral, textural, and dynamic regulation. Thus, the recording positions the performer sonically, and in so doing encodes his gendered features, which are of course not all determining in any absolute sense. Barnes’s positioning in the mix refers to amplifying the presence of the subject within a unique context, and this functions more as an effect than a cause. The recorded voice within such a busy arrangement connotes a specific state of being, and whether we understand the gist of the narrative through the words or not, there is an acute awareness of individuality through the expressive entities of musical performance. Singing is a powerful process of signification, and the subject’s position in the narrative is marked by the personal pronoun ‘I’ and the forms ‘I’m’ and ‘my,’ as much as by his object of desire, ‘you.’ All about struggle, desire, and remorse, the song profiles the ego in a vulnerable setting. As the vocal lines finally draw to an end, and the long instrumental coda takes over, various important features are affirmed. First, the vocal utterances do not provide any resolution in terms of closing the story. The instrumental coda is the duration of a new song in itself, with the preceding words still resonating in a musical landscape that basks in the aftermath of a tortuous personal journey. Second, the voice and its connotations of subjectivity are a principal source for us empathizing with the protagonist’s queer identity. And, third, by energizing his desire in such a raw vocal fashion, the subject becomes a trajectory of temporality itself, a paradox that culminates in one sensing there is no future. The emotive auditory experience of the recording itself accesses the persona, but, paradoxically, we know this is illusory in the sense that such an existence is marked by absence; it is ultimately music’s efficacy that shapes our consciousness.

Concluding Thoughts If what happens in the recording studio and production process makes music meaningful, it is at the moment that the producer greets the artist that things start happening. Subjectivity can be detected through the dialectics of desire communicated in sound engineering. In previous chapters I have argued that queer traits become apparent through reception, and the unfolding of meaning in a performance is due to the multiplicity of expressive elements. My incursions into pop art during this chapter are an attempt to argue for the aesthetics and poetics of musical performance.93 This suggests a need to acknowledge pop music’s historical roots in the art movement in the late 1950s in the US and the mid-1950s in the UK, where material from popular culture (especially advertising) was drawn on as a way of opposing elitist

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128  Applause, Applause art. Underlining kitsch, camp, and banal features, pop is invariably bound up in irony and is eclectic, borrowing from styles, genres, and idioms, and rapidly absorbing influences. Perhaps most characteristic of pop music is its aspiration to technological innovation (in the form of recording, song production, video production, and instrumental development). Issues taken up in this chapter are addressed from different perspectives in the next chapters as I continue to explore what constitutes queer subjectivity in pop. The task of evaluating pop music assumes that identity categories count. This is because they are the result of cultural constructions that are predicated upon musical style. As we have seen so far, the loss of coherence of a category can lead to new formations and exciting ways of being that are not always easy to accept. New constructions like the bio queen, transsexual, cross-dresser, andro-boy or girl sever the normative ideals we are used to, and thereby offer us different versions of woman or man at work. In the texts I have presented so far, pop performativity suggests different ways of reenacting gender and, thereby, assimilating conventional gender norms as fragile and transformative. Maybe musical performances are subversive in their character when they get us to address the centralizing principles that regulate bodies. If queering through music subverts gender norms, then we might trade on the assurance that there is hope for a politics of ‘post-identity’ and the promise for new rights in the offing.

Notes 1. Sam Lansky, “Lady Gaga Explains the True Meaning of ‘Applause,’ Sort Of,” Idolator, September 18, 2013, http://www.idolator.com/7484887/lady-gagaapplause-song-meaning. 2. Ibid. 3. Bronski, The Pleasure Principle, 247. 4. See Connell, Gender and Power, Part 1, Chapter 4, ‘The Body and Social ­Practice’ for a most important account of ’natural difference.’ In particular, studies of transvestism and transsexualism in contemporary Western societies have shed light on the social construction of gender. Connell makes the valid point that social practices do not reflect natural differences in gender, but rather create symbolic structures of order and interpretation. In fact, the result is one of distortion and exaggeration. 5. In the pop songs and videos I look at, the cowboy, the cop, the librarian, the nurse, the professor, the dancer, the judge, the jury, and so on, are rendered ambiguous in various ways. 6. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 7. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 34. 8. Ibid. 9. Smith, “Or a Real, Real Bad Lesbian,” 361. 10. Brent Staples, “Nicki Minaj Crashes Hip-Hop’s Boys Club,” The New York Times Sunday Review, July 7, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/nicki-minaj-crashes-hip-hops-boys-club.html?_r=0. 11. Iddon and Marshall, “Introduction,” 1–2.

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Applause, Applause  129 2. See Ashburn, “Drag Shows,” 87–89. 1 13. Jodie Taylor enters into a useful discussion of this in her chapter on ‘doing drag.’ Taylor, Playing It Queer, 83–116. 14. Devitt, “Girl on Girl,” 34–37. 15. See O’Brien, “Not a Piece of Meat,” for a detailed account of the main distinguishing elements between Madonna and the next generation of hypersexualized female divas. 16. Also see Hansen, Hardly That Kind of Girl?, on the politics of Lady Gaga’s subjectivity in a range of tracks and videos. 17. Queen’s lead guitarist, Brian May, is featured on the recording, and it is no secret that Lady Gaga greatly admires this group, with her name most likely derived from the group’s hit, ‘Radio Ga Ga.’ 18. I am referring specifically to Kill Bill Volume 1, directed by Quentin Tarantino and released in 2003. Starring Uma Thurman, the narrative concerns one woman’s quest for justice through vengeance. 19. Jacob Moore, “Lady Gaga Compares Meaning of ‘Yoü And I’ Video to Mermaid Sex,” Complex, August 20, 2011, http://www.complex.com/music/2011/08/ lady-gaga-explains-meaning-behind-you-and-i-video. 20. In an earlier study, I have taken this up through a musical analysis of drag in the video of the song ‘Judas,’ which also disturbs the heterosexual matrix. See Hawkins, “I’ll Bring You Down, Down, Down.” 21. Geller, “Trans/Affect,” 217. 22. Ibid., 226. 23. The source used in this analysis is the single and radio edit of the song with total duration of 4:07. 24. Thanks to Per Elias Drabløs for pointing this out. Remarkably, this is the same citation by Queen’s guitarist from ‘We Will Rock You’ (1.39–1:44) in a track some 38 years later. 25. Click, Lee, and Holladay conclude in their study of Lady Gaga and her relationship with fans, her Little Monsters, that: “Her messages about appearance, gender, and sexuality have struck a chord with fans, who identify with her history of being bullied in school for being different.” Click, Lee, and Holladay, “Making Monsters,” 361. In their survey of 45 fans, they identify a relationship whereby direct and regular feedback is forthcoming from Lady Gaga. 26. Holliday and Potts, Kitsch, 141. 27. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 85. 28. “Ysan Roche – Interview,” Beatsta, http://www.beatsta.com/portfolio/ysan-rocheinterview/ (accessed November 19, 2014). 29. See http://ysanroche.com/explore/ (accessed September 10, 2013). 30. “Ysan Roche – Bass Gun (Music Video Version),” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guiCHPEP0WY. 31. Jacqueline Cassell, “Rising Artist: Ysan Roche,” Entertwine, October 3, 2014, http://entertwine.net/rising-artist-ysan-roche/. [access date?]. 32. Ibid. 33. Foucault describes the spaces and places that operate under nonhegemonic conditions as heterotopias. These are designated spaces of ‘Otherness.’ By comparison to utopias (where everything is perfect and not real), heterotopias are where things are ‘different’ and where very few or no connections between its members are intelligible. Foucault’s heterotopias are time-bound with no bias

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130  Applause, Applause to the ‘eternal.’ They have two opposite poles when it comes to function: on the one hand, they create an illusion of space, and, on the other hand, they form a perfect space that is well arranged. But, rather than illusory, heterotopias are compensatory. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” 34. Kun, “Against Easy Listening,” 289. 3 5. Ibid., 289–90. 36. This is the term used to describe her on the website, https://about.me/rocheysan, accessed May 20, 2015. 37. In an earlier study of Scissor Sisters, I identified the ways in which they chronicle many of the developments, trends, and changes in queer pop history. See Hawkins, “On Male Queering.” 38. My thanks to David Harrison for his invaluable insight into the production techniques invested in ‘Skin Tight.’ and also for providing me with the spectrographs as illustrated in Table 4.1. See Harrison, Music by Numbers, for an innovative approach to analyzing production and style in mainstream pop. 39. Allegedly, of the five members in the group only the drummer, Boom, is straight. 40. Lance and Tanesini, “Identity Judgements,”183. 4 1. Ibid., 184. 4 2. Ibid., 186. 4 3. Ibid. 4 4. Ibid., 180–81. 4 5. Butler, Undoing Gender, 79. 4 6. Ibid., 80–1. 4 7. Ibid., 84. 4 8. Ibid., 93. 4 9. Ibid., 94. 5 0. Ibid., 100. 5 1. Ibid. 52. For example, see McClary, Feminine Endings, “Soprano Masculinities;” Brett, Wood, and Thomas, Queering the Pitch; Walser, “Prince as Queer Poststructuralist;” Whiteley, Sexing the Groove; Whiteley and Rycenga, Queering the Popular Pitch; Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices. 3. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1, 52. 5 54. See Smith, “Or a Real, Real Bad Lesbian.” 55. Prominent scholars, addressing gender constructions through important theoretical excavations into violence, homophobia, heteronormativity, and violence, include bell hooks, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Tricia Rose, Imani Perry, Molly Haskell, and Patricia Hill Collins. 5 6. See Sandve, Staging the Real, for a specific inquiry into identity politics in rap music from a Northern European perspective, and Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet, for an ambitious illumination of African American emancipatory political strategies alongside race and sexuality. 5 7. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 187. 5 8. Ibid., 194. 59. In 2013 Minaj earned $29 million, achieving fourth position on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings List and in March 2015 became one of the sixteen artist co-owners of Tidal, a subscription-based music streaming service.

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Applause, Applause  131 60. When it comes to musical style, she has acknowledged a close alliance to rapper, Foxy Brown. Born in 1978 (as Inga DeCarlo Fung Marchand), Foxy Brown is a rapper, model, and actress. Minaj has described her as a major inspiration. Her musical style is also in debt to artists such as Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, Remy Ma, Jadakiss, Lauryn Hill, Lil Wayne, Smokey Robinson, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. 61. It is worth stating that Minaj is not the forerunner of queerness in rap. Her most obvious predecessor is the American rapper, Queen Pen, whose controversial song ‘Girlfriend’ contained direct lesbian references. 62. Smith, “Or a Real, Real Bad Lesbian,” 366. 63. Ibid., 368. 64. Ibid., 369. 65. Ibid. 66. Christina Garibaldi, “Nicki Minaj: Lil Wayne ‘Refused to Touch Me’ During ‘High School’ Shoot,” MTV News, April 2, 2013, http://www.mtv.com/news/ 1704811/nicki-minaj-lil-wayne-high-school-kiss/. 67. For Minaj’s beauty secrets, see April Long, “Nicki Minaj’s Beauty Secrets,” Elle, January 19, 2012, http://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/tips/a11865/nicki-minajsbeauty-secrets-613667/. 68. Ibid. 69. See my in-depth study of hyperembodiment and pornographic inferences in pop videos. Hawkins, “Aesthetics and Hyperembodiment.” 70. hooks, We Real Cool, 152. 71. Staples, “Nicki Minaj Crashes Hip-Hop’s Boys Club.” 72. Wilchins, Queer Theory, 110. 73. Ibid., author’s emphasis. 74. Ibid., 115. 75. See Somerville, Queering the Color Line, “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,” Chapter 1, 15–38. 76. See Russell-Cole, Wilson, and Hall, The Color Complex. 77. Ibid., 213. 78. Ibid., 240. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 229. 81. Farai Gundan, “Supermodel Alek Wek on the Business of Fashion, Being the Face of Refugees, and Life after the Runway,” Forbes, December 31, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/faraigundan/2013/12/31/supermodel-alek-wek-onthe-business-of-fashion-being-the-face-of-refugees-and-life-after-the-runway/. 82. Russell-Cole et al., The Color Complex, 232. 83. Ibid., 243. 84. Ibid., 245. 85. Ibid. 86. Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 2005. 87. Wilchins, Queer Theory, 84, author’s emphases. 88. Lizzy Goodman, “Divide and Conquer,” nymag.com, August 23, 2010, http:// nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2010/pop/67637/index1.html. 89. Mike Carriere, “Of Montreal,” Pitchfork, November 19, 2007, http://pitchfork. com/features/interviews/7454-of-montreal/.

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132  Applause, Applause 90. Footage of his performances with the band, interviews with family and friends, and the challenges of recording and songwriting are investigated in the documentary film, The Past Is a Grotesque Animal (2014), directed by Jason Miller and produced by Andrew Napier. 91. See Jonah Flicker, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal,” Rolling Stone, May 7, 2012. 92. Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score, “You Have Killed Me.” 93. Jeff Koons was recruited by Gaga to design her album cover, which featured a nude sculpture of her with a large, blue, shiny ball between her legs. It is also worth noting that Relative Wave (Björk’s architects for her Biophilia app) were commissioned to design an Artpop app, which fused together fashion, music, art, and technology in an attempt to access a worldwide interactive community. Through the purchase of the album, the app would be made free.

5 ‘Talking Blah Blah’

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Camp into Queer

I don’t mind the press around openly queer musicians right now (…) The style of my music is not defined by who I am, just by what I make.1 —Le1f

New York producer and rapper, Le1f, went positively viral on the release of his video, ‘Wut,’ in 2012. Impudently, he speed-raps while perched on the lap of a shirtless, oiled-up muscular white bloke wearing a Pikachu mask (Figure 5.1). Loaded with such transgressive signifiers, Le1f’s demeanor in this video could hardly be more camp: This yuppie’s talkin’ blah blah, he wants to Bink my Jar-Jar. Born Khalif Diouf (a Senegalese surname), Le1f, a Wesleyan University arts graduate, is one of the first black rappers to be openly gay. His way of vogueing, mildly put, is provocative, with a ‘swag’ (an internet term referring to a style that exudes confidence and even a­ rrogance) that involves exaggerated movements. Le1f’s force as a queer icon resides in a biting political agenda that converts common gay-­bashing terms into expressions of ‘bragging and boasting,’ in a rap style called b ­ raggadocio. Referring to himself as a ‘banjee-boy’ – a derogatory term for a closeted or straight playing Latino or gay black – Le1f is self-deprecating in many ways during his ‘Wut’ video performance, directed by his friend and fellow ­Wesleyan graduate, Sam Jones. Yet, as I read it, this is far from just clowning around. Adroitly, highly ornamented breakneck rhymes are delivered in a low, rusty vocal register and the vocal timbre is made gritty through a jeering quality. In production terms, his voice is muddied by an abundance of processing devices and innovative tricks. Technically speaking, the vocals are side-chain compressed via a TR808 bass drum sound, and at each point they kick in the voice is instantly lowered in pitch. As a result, vocal clarity is drowned at the expense of the bass drum sound,2 with the lyrics warped and difficult to follow. Witty, sped up, slowed down, never losing their bounce, words, rhymes, and phrases are transported by a simple tune that is fragmented with intricate beat patterns and a rude fart-sounding MIDI-horn motif that worms its way into the mix. One thing is certain: Le1f sure knows how to make his lines sexy, uncompromising and sassy.

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134  ‘Talking Blah Blah’

Figure 5.1  Le1f in the video ‘Wut’

Quite spectacularly, the audiovisual aesthetics in ‘Wut’ play on Le1f’s sultriness, in an audacious display of camp that chips away at gender norms through divahood. Self-effacing, his stylish drag capers subvert the wellworn signifiers of macho-oriented hip hop by taking ostentation to an extreme. The swag in his dance routine suggests vogue fem, which stems from ‘ball culture’ and involves erratic hand and wrist gestures and scooting maneuvers on the balls of the feet. All this is topped by ‘soft dips,’ neatly rounded spins, and lavish gestures. Latching onto the beat, Le1f’s acting style and vampy choreography recycles the drag conventions of yesteryear. (A more in-depth examination of his queer iconography as part of a strategy of ‘bad taste’ is presented in Chapter 7 in an analysis of his video, ‘Soda.’) Meanwhile, such hyperbolic display feeds into a critique of various forms of hyper-stylized drag performances and undercuts dominant gender roles with a good dose of campness. As early as 1964, Susan Sontag argued that camp is not a concept nor an identity, but rather a sensibility that is always elusive.3 She identified and theorized camp’s aesthetic pull, especially with regard to stylization and degrees of artifice. Le1f’s camp style is traceable back to this period, and equally so prompted by politicized action. Jodie Taylor explains: “Factions of the Gay Liberation Front began using drag performances in their street theatre groups as a public act of empowerment and confrontation.”4 In both the UK and US, during the 1960s and 1970s, pop music often turned to ‘high’ and ‘low’ aesthetics, as the radical destabilizing aim of drag became

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  135 a source for mere impersonation and mimicry.5 “Sex role exploration and entertaining social confrontation,” Taylor maintains, emerged out of the 1970s and into the 1980s as a main strategy for queer activism.6 Still today, camp, in its close associations with drag, is a potent transgressive tool in articulating political agendas; for it heaps scorn on conventions, while critiquing authorship through a specific set of aesthetics. Camp aesthetics stem from a will to go against the grain and, at times, incite gender anxieties. When identifying with pop artists, fans and audiences will generally pick up on over-the-top melodramatic moments. ­Notably, the exaggerated ‘feminine characteristics’ often associated with camp continue to evoke reactions of homophobia and misogyny today,7 and it is well documented that, historically, the angst around masculinity has harbored prejudices.8 Western music traditions (not just classical and contemporary art music) have validated the power afforded to white, straight males, where their roles continue to sustain heteronormative valences of ­subjectivity. However, camp has formed a major part of a resistance to this as my previous analyses of British dandyism show.9 Examining the music of numerous male pop artists, I have observed how camp shapes lyrical phraseology, expressive vocality, and stylistic peculiarity. Above all, my findings show that camp is primarily steered by tactics of self-fashioning, and rife with struggle; ­gestures associated with mannered expression are threatening to some, while entertaining to others. With this in mind, let us return to the issue of musical performance and how to distinguish between the unintentional and deliberately naïve in camp expression. If performances are a mechanism of resistance (and even a survivalist practice), they need to be plausible in order to succeed. ­Taylor insists that camp is a “proliferation of what was originally homosexual wit and aestheticism, [which] has now become part of a critically queer discourse.”10 Taylor’s studies suggest that camp as political tool forms an important component of queerness, and therefore performativity. I am particularly keen to pursue this idea by examining a range of musical features invested in a camp sensibility. Given that camp opposes essentialist ontologies, I examine its impact on representations of gender by analyzing the music of the following artists: Rufus Wainwright, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Jay Kay, Justin Timberlake, and Azealia Banks. The huge appeal of these artists emanates from an attenuated sensibility that shamelessly plays on the ostentatious and hyperbolic. Part of my inquiry into camp involves investigating the role of music technology, especially with regard to digital editing and production techniques.11 Uniquely, camp is distinguishable from the conventions of everyday life; it theatricalizes identity in role-playing. Perhaps its greatest appeal lies in the way it derides gender ‘normalcy’ by the use of kitsch.12 Music ­furnishes camp by stylizing and complementing performances in sight as much as sound. In this respect, I am interested in identifying the surface markers of an artist’s look (clothes, accessories, hairstyle, make-up) and

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136  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ how they operate, not least in relation to the musical properties of sound. Kitsch is a critical component of pop art and, following Muñoz, is “a nostalgic postmodern aesthetic that is basically a longing for a lost emotional journey.”13 I would add that kitsch provides a nostalgic commentary on consumer culture often in the form of parody. Commonly, video performances turn the pop world into kitsch postcards, cartoons, and souvenirs, and when conjoined with the camp performance suggests the end of good taste. Inherent in the facsimiles of style and attitude is the persona, framed by context and temporality. Superbly, this is illustrated by Queen in their video, ‘I Want to Break Free,’ with references to Britain’s longest-running soap opera, Coronation Street. Usually, pop performances captivate our attention with a complicated set of intentions that enact subjectivity, and when camp enters the equation it is often the serious that is converted into the frivolous. After all, the power of rhetoric in any successful musical performance stems from the idiosyncrasies of the artists themselves – in the form of the ordinary, bizarre, enigmatic, and the familiar. Perhaps what most characterizes all the artists I have studied in this chapter is their satirical approach to performance, where individual ways of being camp are not just alluring, but also assailing. Camp and kitsch expressive devices tend to taunt in bizarre ways, reminding us there is always a double edge to queer performativity. As Jarman-Ivens asserts, it is worth considering “the relationship between camp and kitsch as two very closely related, but subtly distinct, ideas, and this is where things start to get particularly messy.”14

Out of the Game: Rufus Wainwright Self-put-downs and quips are frequently construed as autobiographical and can certainly seem messy. Rufus Wainwright’s fey performativity is an enthralling case in point. Foppishly, his personality is communicated by pronounced inflections, accents, and unmistakable timbral traits. A precise bridging of words through melodic articulation and control of register conveys information on his personality. Stylistically, he mines the traditions of musicals, operas, and cabaret. The title track, ‘Out of the Game,’ from his seventh album, released in 2012, is a good place to start for considering this. Elaborately, musical details, such as melodic maneuvers (involving pitch contours, rhythm, and intonation) camp-up his performance. Sirenlike, his voice comes across effortlessly controlled, with a style of delivery that renders every recording he does graceful. At the same time his songs are imbued with intrigue. Nonetheless, Wainwright has not compromised his sexual identity and the candor with which he deals with being gay is inextricably linked to his camp sensibility. Describing himself as a self-proclaimed ‘opera queen,’ his songs are pseudo-operatic in a pop way.15 A high degree of impersonation, mimicry, and putting-on-a-show dramatizes his performances – his voice is by no means conventionally operatic, although there are the traces of this genre in his mode of performativity. His overall style is

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  137 also tinged with chanson, vaudeville, and jazz, with obvious influences from Edith Piaf, Elton John, Queen, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Judy Garland, Tom Waits, Nina Simone, and others. It is important to stress that Wainwright’s vocal techniques are enticing not only because of their originality, but also their manipulation within studio production and recording. Amplification and microphone use is a good place to start. Wainwright’s front-of-house engineer, Suneil Pusari, has described his vocal range as relatively large, which warrants careful choice of microphone, such as the Shure KSM9. Pusari explains that the effect of this is to (…) replicate [Wainwright’s voice] quite accurately without being too clinical. His voice can also be quite sibilant, so I like to compress his vocal in two stages: I sidechain an EQ to a Focusrite ISA 430 to act as a de-esser, ducking the whole signal level very fast – as compared with just the top end – then overall compression is through an EL-8 Distressor.16 Regulating a singing style is all about extracting the artist’s personality and emphasizing their vocal qualities, and I want to argue that the technologies of amplification and vocal sculpting contribute to a camp sensibility. To explain: in ‘Out of the Game,’ Wainwright’s voice-type conjures up a sense of warmth, sincerity, and sentimentality that is rife with innuendo. Singing in the mid-register he is most at ease, with registral fluctuations discernible between the verses and choruses. Although the verses are contemplative and arguably down-played (utilizing a register that is almost spoken), the choruses involve a gradual move towards his higher range with intervallic upward leaps suggesting a sense of straining. On the first phrase of the chorus, Look at you, look at you, look at you, look at you, suckers!, there is a gradual escalation in pitch to the word ‘suckers,’ where the highest pitch in the song is sustained. Here Wainwright’s voice quivers, unleashing a high dose of emotion. Effectively, the rise in pitch and dynamic, with the reiteration of the words, look at you, four times, creates a build-up in tension. Devices, such as the tremulous quivering and melodramatic accent on the word, suckers, result in an emotional discharge, demonstrating the extent to which camp is performed out. English speakers know full well that the word ‘sucker’ is not that flattering, referring to a dupe, or a person who is gullible. Wainwright has claimed that much in this song and on the album is tonguein-cheek.17 Certainly, the song’s feel owes much to the arrangement, production, and instrumental parts, not least the poignant guitar solo, played by Homer Steinweiss from the Dap-Kings. Explaining its George Harrison style, Wainwright has described how the Dap-Kings are usually “relegated to a more ‘60s R&B sound, but for this record they had to open up and were given a chance to explore their chops. I think they loved every minute of it, being on this vacation from what they’re known for.”18

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138  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ Such nuances in the sound regulate the meaning of a song. The laid-back nuances of ‘Out of the Game’ hark back to a wealth of 1970s pop-rock songs, and much of this is down to the producer, Mark Ronson (whose retro-styled work with Amy Winehouse and numerous other artists is now legendary). It is worth pointing out that the somewhat whimsical video for ‘Out of the Game’ features Wainwright’s good friend, actress Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the part of a librarian driven to distraction by the split personalities Wainwright presents her with. He is depicted in three roles: as a woman, as a dashing young man wearing a fedora, and as a hippy, doped-up man (Figure 5.2). During the video Carter mimes Wainwright’s sung lines to the point that viewers not familiar with him might well believe this was her voice. His cross-gender displays are another instance where camp is part and parcel of Wainwright’s performativity, reminding us that the aestheticization of masculinity is effectively political when it denaturalizes gender. As I read it, this display of utopianism is about reminiscing in the past to deal with the future. In the end, Wainwright knows that music is a prime carrier of attitude as it relays to his fans that gender roles are always open for negotiation. Most of all, he gets the point across that it is the blend of lyrics, music, and video performances that makes camp possible.

Figure 5.2  Rufus Wainwright in three personae in the video ‘Out of the Game’

Being Outside: George Michael Imbued with incalculable possibilities for resistance, pop entertainment sustains its subversive potential in many different ways. In 1998 an incident involving a ‘lewd act’ in the public restrooms of the Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills would make pop history.19 This was George Michael’s coming out moment, forthright and public. Turning his outing into a victory he not only ridiculed the undercover LA police officer (who had attempted to solicit him), but also the social and political mechanisms that prejudice

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  139 minority sexualities. In retrospect, Michael’s song, ‘Outside,’ was one of the most effective queer responses on record to oppose gay-­bashing at the end of the twentieth century. Aided by its promotional video, the song soared to number 2 in the UK pop singles charts and number 3 in the US dance charts in 1998.20 Michael’s ‘slutty behavior’ in a real-life incident (in the form of penis-flashing in a public lavatory) is rendered mirthful in the overtly sexual innuendoes of the video, which signal a powerful camp sensibility. Both in the song and the video Michael’s campness is discernible in a variety of ways. As I aim to point out the overall stylistic features of the production fuse camp aesthetics with real-life experiences, and a range of structuring devices are employed to this end. Highly energized, the up-beat disco arrangement of ‘Outside’ comprises soaring strings, pounding kit lines, pumped-up bass lines, and lush synthesizers. In no uncertain terms, the track’s disco aesthetic helps poke fun at society’s discomfort with open sexuality by means of a style that has had its own fair share of trouble in the past (see Chapter 3). Comprising a standard alternating verse-chorus form (AABAB), the song opens with a lengthy instrumental introductory passage (40 seconds). There are two parts to this: the first, a busy passage consisting of police sirens, wah-wah licks and vocal chorus snippets in the high register, repeating the strain, let’s go outside; and the second, a cascading string motif that weaves in and out of the song. One of the distinctive compositional techniques involves the frequent use of sweeping crescendos in the verses. These function to increase tension at the beginning of the first chorus, with Michael’s voice soaring into a high register. At this point the dynamics are loud, with glittering strings entering and contributing to a general thickening in the instrumental texture. ­Facetiously, Michael starts his confession: And yes I’ve been bad (1:42) with all the double ­entendre one might expect from him, as he tells us he has already ‘serviced’ the community. In this chorus material the disco gestures are rendered jubilant, unyoking the singer’s persona from the strictures of heteronormativity. Jaap Kooijman provides the following interpretation of his performance: Michael responds to the discipline of the disco beat and the (literally) uniformed image, which paradoxically enables him to embrace the rhetoric of personal and sexual freedom. In doing so, Michael does not let the controversial arrest deconstruct his star image of seriousness and sexual ambiguity, but instead actively reconstructs his star image to include his openly gay identity.21 Musically, the second chorus (3:18) is even more elaborate than the first. This is due to an increase in musical activity, a normal compositional device in the development of any song: the arrangement is filled out, vocal inflections are more pronounced, and the production effects in the mix are all the more detailed. In terms of vocal articulation, Michael hits his top notes with extraordinary clarity and just the right amount of vibrato to get the message

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140  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ across. As with the chorus, his pitching in the high register signals the climactic point in the song, with its final arrival preceded by an instrumental teaser (3:02–3:17). Again, this culminates in an arpeggiated, staccato string motif as he pelts out, all the more emphatically, and yes I’ve been bad. It is in such moments that the bliss of disco supports his self-reflexivity. In elegant counterpoint with the backing vocals, his vocal tone scorns the system that incriminated him on the grounds of sexuality. The arrangement enables a sense of release and, as I read it, emancipation. Complementing the lyrics, the musical details abound with fun, jibes, and insinuations, and it is the total impact of the musical gestures that discharge meaning; the grammar of musical details and their effects is central to defining the narrative of outing. Insults, accusations, indignations, and sexual discriminations convert into pleasure and fun during the musical performance, and the deed of coming out and its injurious results cannot be underestimated. Following the release of ‘Outside,’ the police officer, Marcelo Rodriguez, who arrested Michael, brought a 10 million dollar suit against the singer for ‘emotional stress.’ His ridicule by the singer in the video and Michael’s support from a global community of fans would be too much. Alas, Rodriguez’s slander suit was denied. Political intent habitually underscores camp. Because songs entertain by getting us to reflect on our social environments, they also position us as listeners/fans in a state of flux. As such, the reception of camp is always affirmed by the non-musical elements as well as the music itself. Unequivocally, Michael’s role in ‘Outside’ is autobiographical as he pushes his recent experiences and flaws to the fore of the song’s narrative. As such, he permits us to revel in his victory, while sympathizing with him in his traumas in a real life event. Graphically, the video of ‘Outside’ captures this personal narrative. Directed by Vaughan Arnell and filmed in June 1998, the video satirizes the Los Angeles police force and its surveillance of US citizens. Commencing with a parody of 1970s Swedish pornography, on-screen subtitles with deliberate misspellings (they could be construed as Swedish or German) are introduced with shots of porn actors and the sentence, ‘Då plötsligt kom jag ihåg, det var ingen dröm: jag var … i Hollywood!’ [Then suddenly I recalled, it was no dream: I was in … Hollywood!] A couple of bars of the US national anthem are heard before sirens and helicopter sounds flood into the mix and the disco beat starts churning. In a low bass gruff register, Michael’s first line, I think I’m done with the sofa, is delivered as the artist looks demurely into the camera. All intentions to be serious, however, are dispelled in the chorus, with him and his troupe dancing in a men’s lavatory that magically turns into a disco space (see Figure 5.3). Dressed as a police officer and clutching his baton, Michael satirizes ­California law by turning their police force into the Village People. Even more provocatively, two gay-playing-straight male police officers are occupied with arresting couples in the throes of lewd conduct in public spaces. However, by the end of the video, the two officers start making

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  141 out, unaware that the surveillance cameras are picking this up. Again, disco is employed to political ends, satirizing promiscuity, same-gender relationships, and hedonism. I would also point out Michael’s obvious clone-look in the video. Historically, this image of masculinity, as Michael Bronski explains, “set the stage for the emergence of a wide-spread S/M subculture in the gay male community.”22 By the 1980s the ‘clone,’ with his inception in San Francisco’s Castro Street in the mid-to-late 1970s, had spread around the world, and varied according to where one lived. The most obvious features of the clone-look in the UK during the 1990s were stubble beards, tight fitting jeans, leather jackets, slim musculature, and a self-assured attitude.

Figure 5.3  From washroom to disco in the video ‘Outside’

Appropriating disco, the video gets its message of parody across in a way that not only adds weight to Michael’s coming out, but also his mode of confession. Applying Sontag’s notion of camp to Michael’s performance brings to the surface a set of strategies. By turning to disco, a style that has often implied solidarity, his performance expresses moral outrage against law enforcement tactics that discriminate against minority groups. Feelings of marginalization can be expressed through the fantasies and practices of pop music, and the resistive power demonstrated in ‘Outside’ works because of tropes of excess and male objectification. By this I am referring to Michael’s strategy of denaturalizing heterosexuality within the utopian space of the public lavatory turned disco (see Figure 5.3). On the basis of his queerness, he acknowledges the politics of ‘failure’ often felt in countercultures, situating himself in a context that, while celebratory, is angst-ridden – there

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142  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ is a dialectical tension between hope and disappointment that spells out queer utopia. Viewed historically, the song’s queer politics depict the struggles of another time and place: Britain of the 1980s. Michael’s stylized look – the Wham ‘Club Tropicana’ look – would have a huge impact on young men. Simpson describes their look as, “fake tan, sharp sideburns, blow-dried hair, sprayed-on white jeans, hoop earrings,” all of which amounted to copies without an original, not unlike masculinity itself. Michael’s arrest and his coming out shortly after had a tumultuous effect. British young males quickly changed tack, and overnight, “the drains of Essex were chocked with the hastily shaved hair of ten thousand goatees.”23 No longer cool, the look had gained clone connotations. Simpson draws important parallels between Oscar Wilde and Michael: “Wilde’s prosecution for indecency turned him overnight into a transatlantic symbol of what one of those newfangled homosexuals – the word was invented not long before his arrest – looked and sounded like.”24 But, whereas Wilde was locked up and persecuted for his homosexuality, Michael was charged for improper conduct. Also worth considering was his queering of many categories at the same time, as Simpson points out: By moving between American-ness and British-ness, Greek-ness and English-ness, straight-ness and gay-ness, Beverly Hills-ness and toilet-ness, George Michael was able to escape the kind of fixed identity that most of us can’t live without (and hence resent enormously). It may or may not have made him happy – but it certainly made him. Dull people on both sides of the Atlantic could project their barely sublimated fantasies, frustrated dreams, and unresolved attachments onto him. This is what pop stars are for.25 Thus, Michael’s politics of outing himself spectacularly were the result of many factors – everyday situations, incidents, attributes, processes, relationships, and so on. Again, the mechanisms of celebrity culture are well worth pursuing. Richard Dyer has written at length on the star phenomenon in Western societies. In Heavenly Bodies he makes the point that film stars cannot help being themselves in public life. Much the same applies to pop stars, with the private/public dichotomy “embodied by stars in various ways.”26 Perhaps more problematic is the hype surrounding going public, which illustrates the whole star phenomenon as “profoundly unstable.”27 Therefore, interpreting stars as camp is about “enjoying them not for any supposed inner essence revealed but for the way they jump through the hoops of social convention.”28 As proof of this, Michael has provided his fans with a form of entertainment that subverts and resists conventions. Aesthetically sophisticated yet playful, he has turned to camp to promote his own history and the peculiarities of his own subjectivity. And, not unlike Freddie Mercury,

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  143 he has sung about being free and breaking the chains that hold him and us down. It would be fair to say that camp thrives in countless pop songs; it e­ ntertains by jolting norms and confronting culturally encoded signs. What is more, the fan’s response to music is predicated upon the individual perception of an artist or band, and in ‘Outside’ it is of importance that the narrative is autobiographical; it is a personal reconstruction of the confessional, truth-telling, and gender differences that distinguish the UK from the US. Much of the pleasure in the song gains its momentum from to the star’s own traumas and desires in the real world. Ingeniously, Michael’s ‘­Outside’ showcases a musical performance that is hyper-stylized; it reiterates Naté’s message, Don’t hold back! You’ve got to live your life. And, most importantly, the queer inferences are not exclusively lesbian or gay; they cover all modes of sex, relationships and love situations. As such Michael’s camped-up performance in the video is a blueprint for an antihomophobic declaration as he navigates a course to liberation that was originally sparked off by a confession. For sure, he grasped the specter of homosexuality and knew what it signified for a mainstream popular imagination. In Bronski’s words, in spite of its associations with sin, crime and disease in the late twentieth century, homosexuality carried with it “the possibility of escape from the constraints of heterosexuality.”29 The very notion of turning a sordid urinal into a lusty disco setting in ‘Outside’ became a symbolic transition into something that felt like heaven.

‘I Want to Break Free’: Freddie Mercury Seven years prior to the release of ‘Outside,’ in November 1991, Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the band, Queen, made a heart-rending public announcement: Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have Aids. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has come now for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against the terrible disease. My privacy has always been very special to me and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue.30 On the next day, November 24 1991, Mercury died at the age of 45. As the first rock superstar to die of AIDS, his death signified a major landmark not only in the disease’s history, but also in pop music. George Michael, a close friend of Freddie Mercury, was at his bedside the day he died. In the line-up of the tribute concert, ‘Freddie Mercury AIDS Benefit,’ on April 20 1992,

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144  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ featuring some of the biggest acts in the music industry, it was not coincidental that Michael performed Queen’s hits, ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ and ‘Somebody to Love.’ The next year, his EP, Five Live, was released as a five-song tribute to Mercury, with all proceeds going to the Phoenix Trust. Strong similarities exist between Freddie Mercury and George Michael, such as their singing style and vocal expression. For instance their voices are situated within a tenor mid-range, with a propensity to hit a powerful high falsetto range. What sets Mercury apart from the pop stars of his generation is an extraordinary brand of queerness. Eccentric and highly artistic, he had a dramatic disposition that contributed to an operatic style of rock performance. This is evident in his performance in the video, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975), hailed by many as the first pop video to ignite the MTV era. Mercury’s gay identity was starkly offset against the other straight members of Queen in a way that made the group all the more appealing on stage. But off stage, in the media spotlight, there were continuous rumors about Mercury and his relationships to men and women. Robert Urban sheds light on his sexual mystique: Mercury did not ally himself to political “outness,” or to public LGBT causes. While the general gay audience could always somehow easily identify with the likes of Elton John, George Michael, David Bowie, Boy George (even when those stars themselves would not acknowledge being gay), many queers were not that familiar with Mercury, since he was more part of the era’s hetero-dominated heavy rock scene.31 Mercury has gone down in history as one of the queerest rock performers of all time, with an extraordinary capacity for singing within a four-­ octave range, elasticizing his voice to its maximum especially on his highest notes.32 As Queen’s own ‘queen’ his knack was to add innuendo to words and phrases with great panache, in addition to a speeding up or slowing down the tempo of phrasing in order to get his point across. His use of fermatas also stands out as an effective technique for exaggerated significance. Most of all, Mercury’s persona was constructed around an aestheticization that was decidedly camp with an air of theatrics. As a result of his palpable vitality, his singing was infectious, his performances magic, and fans had little difficulty in identifying with him. Mercury, after all, wanted to break free. Filmed at Limehouse Studios in 1984 and directed by David Mallet, the video for Queen’s hit, ‘I Want to Break Free,’ was about the band having fun and taking themselves less seriously. While peaking at only number 45 in the US charts, the song became a hit all around the world. This was likely due to the video being banned by MTV and numerous US stations. Mercury’s display of bisexuality, and, not least, his cross-dressing in the video was certainly appreciated in the UK, whereas US audiences largely bypassed the soap opera narrative and blatant scenes of queering.33 Coronation Street, the longest running TV soap opera in the world, would be spoofed in ‘I Want

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  145 to Break Free,’ with Mercury, as housewife, depicting one of the main characters, Bet Lynch. Other band members were dressed up as Suzie Birchall (Roger Taylor), Ena Sharples (John Deacon), and Hilda Ogden (Brian May). Rather than going blonde (as the barmaid, Bet Lynch), Mercury opted for a black wig, which he allegedly felt was less ridiculous! Referencing the opening scenes of Coronation Street, the video starts with shots of rooftops and red brick houses, typical of Northern England, accompanied by majestic long sustained synth chords that build up in intensity (0:00–0:22). It is only thereafter that the song kicks in rhythmically as the scene changes to Hilda Ogden’s dowdy bedroom. May, playing her character, is depicted lying in bed sleeping, suddenly woken up by the Teasmade (a machine, popular in the UK, that automatically made tea first thing in the morning before people got up).34 With curlers in his hair, and dressed in pink, May gets out of bed and dresses. The next shot is of Mercury vacuuming the living room carpet (0:26–0:48). With his shoulder-length black wig juxtaposed with a thick moustache, and dressed in a black leather miniskirt with a pink blouse sporting an oversize false bust, Mercury enters the living room. Wiggling his hips while steering the vacuum cleaner with limp-wrist hand movements, this scene encapsulates the queering of drag in the 1970s. It is further enhanced by the other members – Deacon, dressed in a black cloak, gloves, hat and a grey wig is sitting on the couch, and blonde-wigged Taylor is at the sink washing up, dressed as a schoolgirl, with grey miniskirt, white blouse, tie and a straw hat. In this part of the performance, Taylor lip-syncs the chorus vocals as Mercury sings. At the start of the second verse, the scene in the living room gives way to a coal-mine setting. Structurally, most pop songs consist of verses and choruses. In ‘I Want to Break Free,’ however, there are no choruses. In the song there are four verses (including a solo/verse 3), flanked by an introduction and coda (outro) with bridge in the middle. The melody is strident and sculpted so as to sustain much repetition. As such, it also compensates for not having chorus sections. Compositional properties, such as rhythmic development, harmonic diversity, a synth solo, and phrase variations keep things buoyant and interesting. In the video an extra instrumental verse is included, following the solo, which opens a sizeable temporal space for the ballet sequence (2:09–3:10). Outrageously tacky, this moment in the video is one of the best examples of the ‘kitsch-man’ parodying high culture with the aid of pop expression. Holliday and Potts describe the ‘kitsch-man’ as a “peculiar fellow – he is often a woman; sometimes she or he is working class, and is also variously infantilised, racialised and sexualized.”35 Choreographed by former principal dancer of the Royal Ballet, Wayne Eagling, Mercury is portrayed as a faun in a mock scene based on Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (symphonic poem by Claude Debussy; later choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes). Mercury comes into contact with a group of nymphs in a choreographed sequence that starts with him breaking free

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146  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ out of a large white box that explodes. Poised on the top of a stone, he is filmed playing a copper pipe instrument (albeit to the sound of the electric guitar solo). Surrounded by a group of men and women in spotted skintight one-piece costumes, Mercury is lifted and carried over the heads of the dancers. The scene is Dionysian in its orgiastic narrative, with Mercury burying his face in a large mountain of green and black grapes. This is followed by him crowd-surfing, first leaping into the raised arms, and then jumping from a crouched, feline position rolling over the dancers’ turning bodies. Gorgeously, his body is positioned as a prop in this choreography, as he is moved around from one scene to the next by the dancers. There are so many ways to interpret the aesthetics of this mock-ballet sequence, but I would tend to go in the direction of reading this as send-up kitsch, with a twisting of taste that has to do with appropriation. As the final verse commences, things return to everyday life on Coronation Street as Mercury laments, but life still goes on. The other members of the band are sitting in the living room, Taylor doing his/her homework, while May and Deacon are reading. Mercury mounts the staircase as the frame crosses over to him in ‘real life,’ naked torso, with the other band members in the coal-mine set depicted earlier on. The video ends with the mining helmet torches flashing like stars in the sky. Camp aesthetics define ‘I Want to Break Free,’ and as I have pointed out the entire band complements Mercury’s performance by eschewing all serious intent. The junctions between the genres of ballet, pop performance, and soap opera are worth considering.36 Contrary to what one might assume, camp does not necessarily dismiss content as trivial. Rather it calls into question a performance’s ambivalent response to dominant cultural referents. During the video of ‘I Want to Break Free,’ traditional ballet structures are muddled in a pop spectacle where the lead singer does not conform to a given standard. Mercury does not even pretend to dance well as he plays the fool. This, in itself, suggests an oppositional strategy to a dominant and high Western art form, a depoliticization that endorses the performative aspects of being camp. Queen takes elements out of context, re-styles them, and then turns them into new theatrical performances. In fact, in the video, ‘I Want to Break Free,’ kitsch is a carrier of camp traits. I have referred to multiple points that make this obvious. Perhaps the Coronation Street sequences best explain the role of kitsch as ironically nostalgic. The recycling of the soap opera characters within the context of their working-class homes illuminates how kitsch aesthetics can function as a potent sociopolitical critique. In common with Holliday and Potts, I consider kitsch as less a sensibility than an action which is forced into a specific service: “Doingkitsch is constituted further by a struggle (as bad, as goodbad etc.) and, consequently, by a politics, which is in turn constitutive of a community.”37 In any case, kitsch operates in a way that frames camp expression – and, crucially, underscores the seriousness of frivolity by making us want to enjoy the experiences of living.

‘Talking Blah Blah’  147

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Jamiroquai – Space Cowboy/Little L Not taking oneself too seriously is an endearing feature in much pop, often relayed to the fan in the clink and wink of ‘knowingness.’ Consider the frivolous character who regularly smokes marijuana, a pothead, a stoner – or even a ‘space cowboy.’ On The Steve Miller Band’s album, Brave New World, released in 1969, the first use of this term in pop music appears on the seventh track entitled ‘Space Cowboy.’38 The catchy refrain starts, I’m a space cowboy, bet you weren’t ready for that, and ends with the smug line, I’m sure you know where it’s at … yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a fitting bridge to quite another spaceboy, the lead singer of the British band ­Jamiroquai, Jason ‘Jay Kay’ Cheetham. During the 1990s he was rated alongside George Michael as one of the UK’s most talented artists. Jamiroquai’s name was a cunning fusion of the Iroquois Indians and the ‘jamming’ directions the band took. It is important to emphasize that two official versions exist of Jamiroquai’s ‘Space Cowboy.’ The first is often called the ‘Stoned Again Mix’ and is in the form of a single. The second is a slower version with a very different bass-line, appearing on the album, The Return of the Space ­Cowboy, released in the UK in 1994. For the purposes of this discussion I will turn to the first version, which is also used in the video that promoted the song and features motion control photography to facilitate the sense of long, continuous shots as the camera pans.39 Directed by Vaughan Arnell and Anthea Benton, it was controversial for its time due to its references to ­marijuana-leaf patterns in several backdrops and the word ‘cheeba’ (slang for marijuana).40 There is a sense of being spaced-out in the visuals, with multiple replications of Jay Kay as he dances around a blue room and the other band members fade in and out. While fusing many styles, ‘Space Cowboy’ revives funk queerly in the deconstruction of the cowboy. Particularly compelling is Kay’s retro-camp fashioning, which is linked to his personal fascination with Native ­American tribes. This is illustrated by his own invention of the Buffalo Man, ­manifested in the buffalo man in silhouette iconography used by J­amiroquai. The band’s musical signature consists of a unique mix of soul, funk, disco and acid jazz and, not least, the strong influences of Stevie Wonder, together with 1970s and 1980s artists and groups – Earth, Wind and Fire, Prince, Curtis ­Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Sly and the Family Stone. Jay Kay’s close alliance with African American music is easily detectable in every aspect of his performance style. What stands out is his approach to the challenging technique of scatting41 and how this fits into the way in which he uses humor in his performance. His expressivity evokes a strutting attitude, an impassioned driving force in his mannerisms, and this is harnessed by a persona that constitutes an upfront position on issues of glamor, politics, and gender.42 This is borne out by countless articles, reviews and media slots over the years, and, biographically, informs any interpretation of his strategies as a performer. Perhaps what distinguishes Jay Kay from

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148  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ all the other British artists I have studied in this book and elsewhere is his approach to dancing, which puts the white, straight male body on display. Over the years this dimension of his performance has stood the test of time: it is unique in terms of being cheeky, cool, and quirky. The video of ‘Space Cowboy’ is an ideal starting point for scrutinizing his tactics of response to music by nimble dancing gestures, something I attempt to illustrate as strikingly camp. By positioning himself in one space in the video, his movements are made in relation to replication shots of himself and the other band members. In his dance routines his body becomes decentered. As such the body emerges as a polymorphous construction, edited and engineered to induce pleasure. A camp quality is detectable in the animated facial expressions, nimble leg and arm movements, and the somewhat feline crouching up of the torso. During the song, Jay Kay returns to the main hook with gusto, in the form of an improvised vamp that finds its resonance in the spontaneous style of disco (albeit in stark contrast to Travolta’s more rehearsed choreography in Saturday Night Fever). In the video, the confined blue room cube set and the low camera levels heighten the focus on the artist’s bodily movements, all of which are enhanced by lighting and camera angles. Underpinning the visual spectacle are details of the groove, in particular the squelching bass line, and the ever so slick production. Aesthetically, sonic elements charge the visual performance, luring the viewer in. Notably, there is much direct eye contact between Jay Kay and the camera, a main device in establishing the ‘gaze.’

Figure 5.4  Jay Kay in the video ‘Space Cowboy’

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  149 When it comes to considering Jay Kay’s camp sensibility, and for that matter his approach to queering, it is worth examining his dress codes alongside the music. The tribal aesthetic of his American Indian patterned, cord-hanging hat, his baggy Adidas clothes and dance movements define a sartorial disposition. Sonically complemented by high-pitch squeals, yells and falsetto phrases that are framed within cleverly crafted tunes and chorus riffs, the audiovisual performance suggests a paled-down version of Jay Kay’s funk ancestors (George Clinton, James Brown, Prince, and Isaac Hayes). More critically put, there is a dose of ‘authentic’ sonic markers turned ‘lite.’ In effect it is this that makes his act camp – the spectacle of a skinny, white English boy appropriating a genre far removed from his own, and pulling it off in a self-effacing manner. It is this that is the mainstay of Jay Kay’s camp sensibility and his symbiosis with fellow musicians in Jamiroquai. To elaborate, one might say that the band’s distinct funk/acid jazz style situated within a British context has always had something cool, yet naff about it.43 In 2010, seventeen years following their first album release, Emergency on Planet Earth (1993), they produced their seventh studio album, Rock Dust Light Star. This booty-oriented, glitterball collection of twelve songs is testament to the band’s eclectic style and camp traits. Intentionally over-stylized, it illustrated Jamiroquai’s skewed appropriation of disco and 1970s funk in much the same ways we first encountered in 1993. Artifice coupled with elegance opens for a degree of transgression, albeit never venturing too far. The brand of camp I am suggesting here does not necessarily dislodge or reverse binary value systems. Instead it emerges from the artist’s own sense of self-aestheticization and him envisaging himself in the conscious debunking of any trace of seriousness. Making a fool of himself, and showing the fun involved in doing this, reveals one of the traits of being a pop star. It is in this way that his farcical, slick style is cleverly situated within a system of camp praxis. Camp pop for Jay Kay is about the recycling of musical theatrics by willfully selecting a mode of self-enactment that parodies straight masculinity. The corollary of effeminacy with gayness has been a distinguishing feature since the late nineteenth century when the homosexual was identified as a ‘species.’ It was Oscar Wilde who would bridge the gap between queerness and homosexual behavior, not least by deliberate displays of ambiguity and play.44 In many ways there is a direct lineage from Wilde to pop music’s first outwardly queer proponent, David Bowie, whose art-orientated influences from Mod culture played a major role in his self-fashioning. In effect, Bowie made a travesty of aggressive and NOT aggressive cock rock45 in the 1960s and 1970s by transforming himself from one queer character to the next (for instance, Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane). His sensibility found its place in the history books as something queer, bisexual, and hetero-dandy-like, and such qualities spawned a new generation of pop artists, such as Jay Kay. His concept is derived from a large taxonomy of queer types, including the ­Village ­People, whose attire included the cop, the leather man, the G.I., the blue-­collar worker, and, significantly, the American Indian and cowboy, of

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150  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ which the latter re-surface in Jay Kay’s own iconography. Not unwittingly, his persona perpetuates this aspect of the disco-driven Village People, and says a good deal about the prevalence of ‘cowboy’ style in popular culture. While the Village People arguably rendered gay identity more masculine, the new male culture of the 1980s changed this by going in other directions. The ambit of gay iconography in the 1970s, the theatrical performativity of queer style and sensibility, would contribute to key changes in the straight male of the 1980s, and by the 1990s the impact of gay pornography on men was widespread. Metrosexuality would describe all kinds of men at the forefront of urbanity, as they subscribed to many of the features that earlier would have denoted gay effeminacy. Gender, when intersecting with musical performance, shapes attitudes, and this is enhanced by the choice of dress and look. In the case of Jay Kay, it is how his musical style and flamboyant artfulness expose a camp sensibility that most interests me. In queer terms, his masculinity is not subversive, as I read it, and this owes much to his frankness about being straight. Media coverage of this star in the 1990s was centered upon fast cars, beautiful girls, and mansions with swimming pools. In his associations with frivolity and superficiality, his personality is defined by a postmodern playfulness that employs parody as a political strategy to market himself. Something quintessentially English is at the core of Jay Kay’s queerness and there is a sense of him making fun of himself on and off stage. Narratives of self-­ indulgence and foolery furnish his theatricality, in terms of appearance and musical style. And, as I have argued in earlier work, this dandified disposition is reflected in the media constructing him as a playboy in the pursuit of leisure and pleasure.

Rockin’ the Timberlake Body Camp is ubiquitous in pop videos and brings pleasure to countless performances. Originally stemming from minority cultures, it is today appropriated by dominant groups. The ‘camp=queer’ equation includes aspects of sexuality and ethnicity as much as gender. In pop, as I have pointed out so far, there are heterosexual subjectivities that fall outside ‘straight time’ or heteronormativity, as with gay subjectivities that are neither queer nor camp. Following on from Jay Kay, another white artist I introduce at this point in my discussion is US singer, songwriter and actor, Justin Timberlake, born in 1981 in Memphis. By re-visiting some of my ideas on his queering antic presented in an earlier study,46 I now set out to consider the degree to which his performances are camped up. My point of departure is in the video, ‘Rock Your Body.’ Written together with Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo (known as The Neptunes; they also produced the track), and featuring singer Vanessa ­Marquez, ‘Rock Your Body’ was released in 2003, as the third single off the album, Justified (2002). Without question, its dominant referent is

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  151 Michael Jackson, and the song harks back to the track, ‘Rock With You,’ from 1979.47 Both songs represent the respective artists’ coming of age – they were both 21 years old when the songs were released. Made to look cute and sparkly in their videos, Timberlake and Jackson turn to the beat to dance away to their songs. Both songs possess the ideal ingredients to pack dance floors, and while ‘Rock With You’ is steered by a medium-tempo groove (114 bpm), ‘Rock Your Body’ is slightly slower (104 bpm). There is a sense that both performers fetishize their mannerisms, promoting their personae as fun loving, innocent, and irresistible. The style of ‘Rock Your Body’ involves a blend of R&B, soul, and disco molded into an arrangement that typifies the late 1990s productions by The Neptunes. Punchy kick drums, programmed beats, abrasive bass-lines, and a range of synthesizers merge with the alluring backing vocals. Andrew Coleman, the prime engineer on this track, has explained the approach he adopted when recording Timberlake on ‘Rock Your Body.’ In the recording he used a modified large-diaphragm condenser microphone, the C12, owned by producer Brian McKnight: “It had just a little more high end, a little crisper-sounding in the upper mids, to the point where I rolled some of that off for monitoring […] it recorded his voice beautifully.” Timberlake was very specific about how he preferred his headphone mix: “He would want the doubles and triples split on the other side from the vocal he was doing then, the new one on one side and the others on the other.”48 With his vocal register spanning B3 to top D6, Timberlake’s choice of microphone and the editing processes that followed were vital in captivating all the nuances of his vocal expression. Again we are reminded here that recording technology not only mediates the artist’s persona, but also extracts a sense of craftsmanship on the part of the entire production team and band. This occurs in a number of ways and the producer’s creative involvement in the track is of paramount importance. Close attention to recording also impacts on attitude, and in essence, the art of recording and production demands flexibility and creative input. In ‘Rock Your Body’ the intricate details of editing the groove, especially in relation to the kit and bass parts, underpin the gestures of the singer both vocally and when dancing. As with Jay Kay, Timberlake’s vocality is a matter of sung melodies and scatting, albeit in a very different way. His scatting includes squeaks, shrieks, yells, howls, and even ‘scratching,’ which is steered by the skills of ‘beatboxing,’ again fully reminiscent of Michael Jackson. The apotheosis of the song occurs in the breakdown section at the end of the song (3:30), notably in the form of a lengthy middle section in the video (2:42–3:10). It is precisely here that I want to unearth the possibilities of camp traits as part of the performance strategies. Timberlake’s employment of beatboxing involves a vocal technique that produces drum kit and percussion sounds with the articulation of the tongue, lips, mouth, and voice. Derived in name from the first generation of drum machines, beatboxes, the practice of beatboxing continues in much pop music today.

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152  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ With its origins in 1980s hip-hop, it has flowed over into many other styles, and as well as their voices, artists commonly use their hands and other body parts for rhythmic and sonic effect. For instance, scratching effects can also be imitated. Timberlake’s beatboxing technique in ‘Rock Your Body’ discloses a degree of campness in the mannerisms with which he turns to the classic kick drum (lips closed, pressure built up, and punch on the letter ‘b’), the hi-hat ‘ts’ sound, with the tongue forward behind the front teeth for a thin sound, and the classic snare drum (on the letter ‘p’ a snare-like effect is induced by the addition of a second fricative [continuous] pf-ps-psh-bk sound, as his lips are swung out before returning to their original shape). In addition, his inward inhalation involves producing a sound and breathing at the same time. All this illustrates that vocal beatbox sounds that can be made outward can also be made inward. To deliver this convincingly involves rigorous training. Also worth mentioning is microphone technique, a crucial ingredient in beatbox performance. Breathing into the microphone is generally avoided, while the technique of grasping it with the first two fingers on top of the head and thumb on its base produces a crisp, clipped and cleaner sound. In my reading, Timberlake’s beatbox performance in the middle section of the video (2:42–3:10) is rife with humorous intent. Particularly, the sight of him beatboxing and dancing – deftly showing off – in the video seems more than an attempt at displaying virtuosity. Moreover, his performance serves as an outlet for pent-up tensions, contingent on race, gender, age, nationality and sexuality. Identification is a powerful signifier and can be understood across identities that are different from one’s own. ­Significantly, Timberlake is one of the few white male superstars to access a black audience since George Michael, and much of this can be credited to The N ­ eptunes, especially his friend, Pharrell Williams, and their direct influence on his career development. When it comes to questions of queerness in ­Timberlake, cross-­identification with white gay male culture is prevalent (as in much mainstream pop). With Timberlake though one detects a desire for a context that is other from his own, where melancholia is intrinsic to communal identifications. Building on this idea, I want to turn to several visual elements that relate to Timberlake’s subjectivity in the video, ‘Rock Your Body,’ directed by Francis Lawrence. A black cube, lit up by multi-colored, flashing lighting forms the main backdrop. While filmed dancing with a girl (Staci Flood) for much of the video, when it comes to the break section Timberlake dances solo in a way that is combative. Dressed in white (a reference to John ­Travolta and Saturday Night Fever), Timberlake sports a closely shaved hairstyle, angledcut at the crown, which is framed by a short goatee. In terms of accessories, a studded black belt and a wallet chain combo adorn his all-white outfit. In contrast to Travolta’s movements in the 1970s, Timberlake’s are less rigid: he crouches and slouches, shoulders rounded, and makes his body malleable. His brand of camp is rendered plausible by a blend of signifiers that have to do with image, movement, and facial expressions (in conjunction with

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  153 sound). Obvious references to disco help define the musical style, as with the visuals which import the past into the present. As already described, Timberlake’s dance movements and beatboxing have their genealogy in Michael Jackson. But there are, of course, distinctions. Timberlake’s specific modality of rocking his body, I would suggest, is an attempt to escape from the entrapment of the white male heterosexual body. The style of his beatboxing, especially while dancing, is animated in a performance that titters, wobbles, and skates on the borderline of failure. Ethnicity, sexuality, and gender are brought to the fore in a hetero-sphere of girl/boy dialogue: Just wanna rock you girl (Timberlake) and Talk to me boy, bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song (Flood). Aurally, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the gender differences between the vocalists, hence the emphases on the lyrics and their stylistic treatment in the mix. As the video builds up to its final climax in a final beatboxing section (3:58–4:57) Timberlake’s image is duplicated (or, better, cloned) into several of his own characters dancing with one another on the dance floor. This long scene is the epitome of narcissistic display in the ludic form of cloned backing dancers and singers, a veritable act of self-initiated homosociality.

Figure 5.5  Justin Timberlake cloned in the video ‘Rock Your Body’

Richly harnessed by camp display are the broader problematics of masculinity and, arguably, a fake naïve global utopianism that is consistent with Jackson’s rhetoric to ‘save the world.’ The spectacle of a straight white male dancing involves another set of issues. Timberlake’s agility in the video, underscored by the athletic-oriented choreography, belies an intricate process of social identification, where a series of inversions are shrewdly challenged. Especially the aesthetics of the well-conditioned male body that Timberlake exudes are ambiguous, as his masculinity comes across more symbolic than real. His rehearsed dance routines are

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154  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ in effect quite standardized, and much of the glamour is dependent on CGI manipulation – a sprucing up by the visual effects and rapid camera angle shifts – as well as the expertise of the other dancers. Action on the dance floor, when hyped, magnifies aesthetically embodied practices, and in my reading, Timberlake never quite captures the spirit of Jackson’s performances. Rather his movements index a different set of aesthetics that aim at the virtuosity of the post-Travoltan white male performer. All said and done, it is Timberlake’s own self-reflexivity that is camply conveyed via the material signifiers of his body in motion and singing style. Indeed, the affected high falsetto singing and squeals serve to queer his body. ­Furthermore, the shift from singing to beatboxing unmasks the artifice of the white boy who does not quite get it on, but who realizes this and has fun at the same time. As a result, the scene is rendered camp due to a parody of the white male body. Assessing Timberlake’s subjectivity is therefore relevant to any interpretation of queerness, and, behind this pop production a range of signifiers come into force. Let us consider, for instance, his appropriation of African American stylistic codes. Elias Krell has studied Timberlake’s performance of ‘Cry Me a River,’ drawing attention to the details of his representation within a “classed and raced medium,” where “his white skin and multimillion dollar bankroll grant him ‘cultural cache’ for a performance of Blackness that does not work in reverse.”49 In his critique Krell makes the claim: “(…) Black musicians who perform in traditionally white genres are at best anomalous, at worst considered to be out of place, by a dominantly white cultural imaginary.”50 Because markers of whiteness generally denote privilege, they reinforce male heterosexuality by negotiating on their terms the widely acceptable embodiments of identity. Thus, in spite of Timberlake’s campness, in a style that can be quickly branded as queer, the space he occupies in mainstream pop is never without its concerns.

Out of this World: Seapunk and Azealia Banks I draw this chapter to a close with a consideration of a movement that started in 2011 known as ‘seapunk’ and its impact on pop stars, such as Azealia Banks, Rihanna, and Katy Perry. Described as a ‘web joke’ cultural movement in the social media, it spread, much to the annoyance of its founders, into the mainstream arena. Sartorial and camp in its graphics, ‘seapunk’51 is first and foremost highly visual, suggestive of Windows 98 screensavers involving psychedelic colors, aquatic scenes, and rave-oriented imagery. Banks’ appropriation of ‘seapunk’ aesthetics in her video, ‘Atlantis,’ is a glamorized affair (see Figure 5.6), with her Jupiter-queen/Venus iconography offset against animated graphics. ‘Atlantis’ is the third track from the Fantasea mixtape, released in 2012 consisting of nineteen tracks, including three remixes.

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  155

Figure 5.6  Azealia Banks in the video ‘Atlantis’

Directed by French artist, Fafi, the video ‘Atlantis’ contains clip-art-­ inspired visuals: an underwater theme, with scenes of Banks perched on a throne, romping with a swordfish, surfing with water-skis, emerging from a shark’s jaws, cloned and dancing on round coral rocks, and stroking a seahorse. The music is as swirling and trippy as the ultra-colored animations themselves. One might describe the overall aesthetics as tacky, with the intention to be camp – corny synth sounds, gurgling vocal bubbles, sped-up rap rhymes, and jerky sub-bass snippets. Banks’ attire has a reggae flavor, with her holographic sunglasses, silk-like harem pants, and suggestive choker necklaces. The Afro-futuristic aesthetic in the video locks into an eclectic Sun Ra incarnation that reaffirms black pride. Surrealistically, this ensues in the underwater world. As purple-lipped avatar, Banks poses a challenge to Lady Gaga by the sheer hypersexuality of her image coupled with warped speed-rapping phrases in the verse, like, When I hop pop slang bang-bang for the summer I’m the twist. Banks’ camp theatrics are shaped through a voice that is velvety, ‘naturally’ out of tune (read: no pitch correction), and sensual. Banks’ singing style is sassy; she noodles with melodies, words, and rhymes. Compositionally, the track is constructed around four main sections, designed to contrast quite dramatically with one another. The breaks between these sections are well defined in the audio waveform (­Figure 5.7), while instrumentation, arrangement and production techniques provide vivid contrasts, thus maintaining a high level of music interest.52 In addition, an audio spectrogram (Figure 5.7) of the track picks up the dominance of the bouncy bass line in the second and fourth sections, which

matches in terms of velocity Banks’ rapped lines. This is in stark contrast to the other two sections where the EDM fun-loving bass line falls out and features of vocality, synthesizer lines, and samples are more pronounced. From this one can view the aural stream of events as represented in ABAB form with pauses (in the form of acute drop-outs) separating each section. The B sections are unambiguously more syncopated than the A sections. Notably the two A sections are in stark contrast, the first one illustrating more activity between the voice, mid-range synth parts, snares and handclaps. Otherwise, the sequencing of beat patterns and sampled sounds within the period structures of each section indicate the musical flow, all of which underpins the animated rap lines.

Frequency (Hz)

Audio spectrogram 1500 1000 500

Audio waveform

0.4 0.2

Amplitude

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156  ‘Talking Blah Blah’

0 -0.2 -0.4

0

20

40

60

Time (s)

80

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Figure 5.7  Audio Waveform and Spectrogram in ‘Atlantis’

A prime aspect of the ‘Atlantis’ video performance is its camp quality, which I would suggest is based upon an aesthetic of cool kitsch. Conveyed by a cheekiness that makes an assault on stereotypes, her subjectivity is rooted in an artistic heritage that encompasses the set of minoritarian black rights addressed in texts, such as Paris is Burning. Mention should also be made of her alter ego, ‘Yung Rapunxel,’ which discloses part of her provocative demeanor. In an interview with Colleen Nika in Rolling Stone, she explains: Yung Rapunxel is that girl who pisses people off but doesn’t really mean to. She’s actually a sweetheart! But people are so taken aback that she’s so herself; she’s not even trying to be unique or different. She literally just lives in her head; she does what she wants to do. So, the lipstick is here for someone who is happy to be themselves.53 She has also emphasized her reclaiming of the ‘cunt’ word: “To be cunty is to be feminine and to be, like, aware of yourself. Nobody’s fucking with that inner strength and delicateness. The cunts, the gay men, adore that.”54 Marlon Bailey has pointed out that in contemporary ballroom culture terms

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  157 such as ‘cunt’ or ‘pussy’ are “criteria for gender performance,” employed in diametrical opposition to “insults or demeaning expletives hurled at women and femme queens.”55 For instance, at the House of Ebony Ball In Atlanta in 2004, Bailey observes that when the commentator, Jack Givenchy, asked a woman if she was ‘real cunt’ she did not appear to be offended: “Instead, she responded with affirmation, ‘Yes, it is all real,’ suggesting that the terms signify and serve as criteria for authentic femininity.”56 Additionally, when the commentator insists, “give me pussy,” or “you look cunt,” this is a request to put femininity into the performance.57 The political objective, according to Bailey, is to achieve rather than to demean femininity. Bailey stresses that although these terms connote problematic meanings outside the context of ballroom culture, it is nevertheless “important to take seriously the context in which terms are used and the varied meanings that they carry for people situated within that context.”58 Concerning her feelings of solidarity, friendships, alliances with gay men, and her sexuality, Banks has stated: “­Definitely. I mean, I’m bisexual, so it makes sense. But I don’t want to be that girl who says all gays necessarily hang out together, of course!”59 Perhaps most revealing here is Banks’ own self-reflexivity when it comes to sexuality, and the manner by which this undergirds her queerness. S­ urrealistically, she is situated within a queer minoritarian sphere in ‘Atlantis,’ and this is of aesthetic significance. John Richardson’s studies of the surreal as an emerging tendency in digital audiovisual culture involve charting the line of historical developments that trail into the catchment area of ‘neo-surrealism.’ In particular, it is worth considering the significant cultural and technological transformations that bridged the last decade of the twentieth century to the start of the twenty-first century. In terms of innovation this includes: […] rapid advances in CGI technologies in film production, the proliferation of digital recording technologies in audio production, and more sweeping technological changes from broadband Internet and smartphones to increasingly realistic or hyperrealistic gaming experiences.60 The neosurreal arises through a revival of pop art in the 1970s and the 1990s, where the accentuating of the bizarre in dreams and the sub-­ conscious mind is apparent. Richardson’s definition of neosurreal aesthetics implies that the object is removed from its everyday functionality to destabilize normative cultural formations. From a similar perspective, I have argued in my work on pop dandyism that the phenomenon of audiovisual masking provides the performer with access to performative modifications. How self-fashioning translates into the musical performance and forms gendered queering is arguably hyperrealistic. The issue of ambivalence in its relation to the ‘neosurrealist sensibility,’ Richardson insists, is “inseparable from the mutable and plural subject positions that have proliferated in postcolonial, gender-marginalized and other complex and cosmopolitan

158  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ cultural formations.”61 This brings me to the main hypothesis in my analysis of Banks’ seapunk theatrics in the video for ‘Atlantis,’ namely her neosurrealist aesthetic, denoted by a virtuosic mode of address that involves highly animated rap vocalization (Example 5.1). passionately q=136

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Example 5.1  Rapped line with counter-melody in ‘Atlantis.’

A powerful kinship exists between the kinaesthetics of her speed-rap lines and the visual motion of the video’s narrative. I would suggest that the multidimensional rhythmic actions of the visual performance are embodied in the rap configurations of Banks in a remarkably camp delivery. For instance, the auditory flow of the lyrics interacts with the visual material in a dynamic relationship that has considerable implications for how we interpret the artist herself. Understood in this way, the match between the music and the additive images of Banks in numerous settings signifies what she stands for. And, with this I am back to the discussion of camp and how we might understand its effect in ‘Atlantis.’ Intrinsic to Banks’ camp disposition is a subversive ingredient that arouses curiosity as much as indignation. An effect of this is located in the elements of banality that beset the viewer in ‘Atlantis.’ It is the artist’s neosurrealist construction that is at stake. Arguably, the visuals of seapunk can be understood as a causative agent in the shaping of a new audiovisual aesthetic, where theatrical performativity of this kind occupies a camp position. Notions of the gaudy, the spectacular, the tacky, and the phantasmatic are elevated in a hip hop track that showcases contemporary technology. The camp sensibility of this video lies in a mix of machine-generated, liquid sounds and vividly colored structures that expose the hallucinatory world of dub reggae. Undeniably escapist, the coding of all the visual and sonic f­eatures represents a psychedelic bricolage of material that is highly intertextual. The brash melding of countless audiovisual referents and the eloquence of Banks’ rap lines seems celebratory of a cosmopolitanism that strives towards a new temporality. This comes about because of the multisensory dimension of her euphoric performance. Lest we forget this is induced by a large dose of animation graphics, the result of digital technology realigns conventions and norms. All the imagery and musical gestures become a vibrant example of the neosurreal, with the animated performer

‘Talking Blah Blah’  159

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sublimely situated in an incongruous underwater world that is camp from start to finish. Banks’ performance demonstrates, on the one hand, how seapunk functions as a strategy of resistance to conformity and stereotypes ‘on land,’ while, on the other hand, why the fetishized animation of the Black body signifies the imperative to reconfigure and re-invent the discursive ideas of femininity in pop.

Concluding Thoughts Beginning with a discussion of Le1f’s camp display in ‘Wut’ I concluded with Azealia Banks’ neosurreal aesthetics in seapunk in an attempt to explain how camp aesthetics work as a device for distancing an artist from stereotypes. In the case of Rufus Wainwright’s performance strategies, he plumbs camp in a unique celebration of artifice that is socially critical at the same time it is fun. His mode of subjectivity functions ornamentally with over-emotional singing mannerisms animated by a sensibility that is arguably reminiscent of the stylistic fashioning of Noël Coward. The prevalence of ‘utopian enclaves’ produced by camp expression is detectable in countless ways, a direct consequence of artists reaching out for another time and space. Muñoz has claimed that the “history of actually realized utopian enclaves is, from a dominant perspective, a history of failures.”62 Both hope and disappointment “operate within a dialectical tension in this notion of queer utopia.”63 Despite an element of corniness, George Michael’s video, ‘Outside,’ constitutes a performative force that is replete with eye-winking, nudges, and for its time raised many eyebrows. The utopian aesthetics of the disco arrangement in ‘Outside’ is paralleled in the visualization of Michael’s iconic clonelook and dance routines. The success of this performance is due to the act of reclaiming the past in the form of a musical style. Perhaps the essential point here is that his performance denotes a temporality that is queer and upfront; one might say it is an acknowledgment of success by disgrace and failure. Molding his biography into a song and video of this caliber is his way of dealing with the stifling temporality of the present. There can be little doubt of Freddie Mercury’s impact on Michael. While there are commonalities in their ethnicity, class, and sexuality, they represented two different generations, and, in one sense, Michael took over from where Freddie left off. The camp aesthetics in ‘I Want to Break Free’ are distinct from those found in Michael’s ‘Outside.’ Mercury stepped out of straight time with a full-blown display of excess and flamboyance, his songs reaching the masses by way of unprecedented camp performance gestures. Mercury’s voice was ephemeral, and it turned the experiences of everyday life into theater. Campness often defines the queer esprit of straight artists, as my studies of Jay Kay and Justin Timberlake suggest. In the case of the former, a white boy performing funk well is an appropriation of an African American style that transcends more than just play. Jay Kay’s quirkiness is a distilled form

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160  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ of camp, a major transformative dimension of his act, and this is due to his musical hybridity and exceptional dance moves. As I have noted in an earlier study, “his slick choreography taps into a legacy of African American artists such as George Clinton, Michael Jackson, Prince, Little Richard and James Brown.”64 Timberlake’s aesthetic is not that dissimilar as he imports a Michael Jackson idiom into his content. His idiolect is shaped by humor and theatricality in the form of an attractiveness that stems from a failed seriousness – that is, he exposes the performative features of his ethnicity and gender through a farcical copying of the Other. In addition, the mainstream queering of both Jay Kay’s and Timberlake’s performances indicates a knowing sense of genderplay as illustrated by the flashy markers of groove-based arrangements. Teasing narratives out in a different way, Azealia Banks showcases seapunk in her ‘Atlantis’ performance, accomplishing an important critique of Internet culture while reconfiguring aspects of hip hop. In this performance the tacky dimension of kitsch is exaggerated by a neosurreal caricaturization of Banks positioned alongside sea creatures in the underwater world. As I have pointed out, it is how the musical style complements the psychedelic graphics and rave-oriented animations that becomes a send-up of pop itself. By layering representations of herself visually and sonically, Banks by no means limits herself to one persona. Her staged movements feel over-the-top in an aquatic setting that proliferates the neosurreal. Rooted in hip hop and dance trends of the 1990s, Banks articulates a style that displays a musical virtuosity, which she converts into nifty gestures, movements, dance steps, and facial expressions. The pleasure derived from her brand of campness lies in a performance that is exhibitionist and cheeky. As revealed in all the artists I have considered in this chapter, camp is integral to queer performativity, where a sensibility emerges that is dependent on fluctuating levels of distancing. Being taken for camp is based upon performance practices that charm our senses by means of a range of clichés that in the end guarantee pleasure. The creative spirit of impersonation and stylized mannerisms in pop performances highlights the fallacy of authenticity itself.

Notes 1. Alex Chapman, “Discovery: Le1f,” Interview, http://www.interviewmagazine. com/music/discovery-le1f/#_ (accessed January 5, 2014). 2. Thanks to Eirik Askerøi for pointing out the technicalities of this part of the production. 3. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 275–92. Also see Ross, No Respect, and Flinn, “The Mutating Musical and The Sound of Music,” for important considerations of camp expressions within popular music. 4. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 93. 5. By ‘high’ aesthetics, I am referring to the attributes commonly associated with high art and the institutional evaluation of qualities of beauty, form, and value.

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  161 ‘Low’ aesthetics is in contrast to thisin that it stresses aspects of resistance and subservience. In the case of much pop music strategies are employed to reject modernist notions of artistic value. For one of the most exemplary discussions of this, see Shusterman, Performing Live. 6. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 94. 7. See Sedgwick, Between Men. 8. See McClary, Feminine Endings; Solie, Musicology and Difference; Brett et al., Queering the Pitch; Purvis, Masculinity in Opera. 9. Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy. Also see Ross, “Uses of Camp,” and his critique of queering after “gender-bending had run its spectacular, public course,” 326. 1 0. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 68. 11. See earlier work dealing with this approach in Hawkins, “Dragging out camp,” The British Pop Dandy, “Aesthetics and Hyperembodiment in Pop Videos,” “‘I’ll Bring You Down, Down, Down.’” 12. For an insightful and rich historical account of kitsch and how it informs identity and sensibility, see Holliday and Potts, Kitsch. 1 3. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 121. 14. Jarman-Ivens, “Notes on Musical Camp,” 194. 15. Somewhat pretentiously, he has insisted that, “every child should have to go to the opera, and gay people should almost be tricked into loving it.” Anthony Tommasini, “Born Into Popular Music, Weaned on Opera,” The New York Times, September 7, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/arts/music/07rufu.html? pagewanted=2&_r=2. 16. Barbara Schultz, “Rufus Wainwright: Warm, Complex Sound Showcases New Songs,” MixOnline, July 1, 2012, https://www.mixonline.com/news/tours/ rufus-wainwright/368282. 17. Joe Bosso, “Interview: Rufus Wainwright on his new album, Out Of The Game,” MusicRadar.com, April 24, 2012, http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/ interview-rufus-wainwright-on-his-new-album-out-of-the-game-540907. 8. Ibid. 1 19. For an account of this incident, see http://articles.latimes.com/2002/dec/04/ local/me-slander4. 20. The song appears on the solo hits collection, with the lavatory designation, Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael. 21. Kooijman, “Outside in America,” 32. 2. Bronski, The Pleasure Principle, 103. 2 2 3. Simpson, It’s a Queer World, xii. 2 4. Ibid. 25. Ibid., xiii, author’s emphasis. 2 6. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 13. 2 7. Ibid., 14. 2 8. Ibid. 2 9. Bronski, The Pleasure Principle, 16. 30. “Queen star dies after Aids statement,” The Guardian, November 25, 1991, http://www.theguardian.com/century/1990-1999/Story/0,,112639,00.html (accessed July 28, 2014). 31. http://www.raggedblade.com/reviews/000329.html (accessed July 28, 2014). 3 2. See Bret, Living On the Edge, for a description of Mercury’s vocal technique.

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162  ‘Talking Blah Blah’ 33. John Richardson, in my conversations with him, has verified that the tradition of cross-dressing and drag is a distinct element of masculinity in British popular culture (cf. Monty Python), rather than necessarily homosexual alone. 34. A slightly less sophisticated version of the Teasmade was used in some Victorian homes prior to the 1930s. After the arrival of electricity in the 1930s, George Absolom patented his automatic tea maker and marketed it as the ‘Teasmade.’ 35. Holliday and Potts, Kitsch, 36. 36. Fast, “Popular music performance and cultural memory.” In her discussion of Queen’s 1985 performance at Live Aid, Fast focuses on a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ She demonstrates how signifiers from one genre (opera, for instance) de-contextualize artifice in another setting. 37. Holliday and Potts, Kitsch, 31. 38. The theme of the space cowboy also appeared in a more popular song in 1973, ‘The Joker,’ from The Steve Miller Band’s eighth album, with the same title. 39. This technique involves filming several elements using the same camera motion, followed by composing them into a single image. 40. Without Jay Kay’s permission, these were replaced with daisies in the American version of the video. 41. Scatting is a key aspect of improvisation, originating in jazz, where the voice is used instrumentally to articulate sounds rather than words, such as ba-lam-baba-lam-ba in ’Space Cowboy.’ While there are indeed earlier examples, scatting is often traced back to Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘Heebie Jeebies’ in 1926. See Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat.” 42. A style icon with a rock-star life style, with a mansion in Buckinghamshire and a garage bursting with expensive sports cars, Jay Kay has also been vociferous about environmental matters and Native American rights. 43. The term ‘naff’ is British slang for something silly, hopeless, and in poor taste. 44. Geczy and Karaminas, Queer Style. 45. Cock rock is a term that came into prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, describing a musical genre of rock music that exaggerates male sexuality. Proponents of this included Led Zeppelin, the Stones, The Who, and The Doors. Sociologists, Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, introduced the term in 1978 to illustrate the distinction between feminized teenybop oriented pop and male-dominated cock rock. See Frith and McRobbie, “Rock and Sexuality.” 46. Hawkins, “On Male Queering in Mainstream Pop.” 47. In his critical review of the Justified album, Alex Needham has claimed that ‘Rock Your Body’ could well be placed on the Off The Wall album. Needham also points out that some of the tracks from Justified were originally rejected by Jackson. See Needham’s review, ‘Justin Timberlake: Justified – he brings nothing to the table other than his own celebrity status,’ NME, November 1, 2002. The Neptunes have openly acknowledged that Jackson’s Off the Wall and Thriller were inspirational when producing Timberlake’s Justified album. 48. “Recording The Neptunes: Andrew Coleman ± Hovercraft Studios,” Sound On Sound, July 2005, http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul05/articles/andrewcoleman.htm (accessed April 11, 2014). 49. Krell, “Contours through Covers,” 482. 50. Ibid. 51. Based around a nostalgia for the 1990s, seapunk is an internet-based subculture of design, music, and fashion. Stylistically, seapunk music draws its influences from 1990s house music, R&B, and rap.

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‘Talking Blah Blah’  163 52. Gratitude goes to my colleague, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, for supplying the spectrogram and waveform measurement and pointing out numerous features that define the rich audiovisual characteristic of Banks’ performance. 53. “Q&A: Azealia Banks on Why the C-Word Is ‘Feminine,’” Rolling Stone, ­September 10, 2012. 54. Ibid. 55. Bailey, “Gender/racial Realness,” 382. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 383, author’s emphases. 58. Ibid. 59. “Q&A: Azealia Banks on Why the C-Word Is ‘Feminine,’” ibid. 60. Richardson, An Eye for Music, 33, author’s emphases. 61. Ibid., 57. 62. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 155. 63. Ibid. 64. Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy, 68.

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6 To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics

To make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things.1 —Sara Ahmed The text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective ­political becoming.2 —José Esteban Muñoz

‘If I Were a Boy,’ released in 2008, has to be one of Beyoncé Knowles’s more puzzling and introspective hits. Lamenting over how things would be if she did the same things that he does, a brooding sense of melancholia prevails. Her wish is that someday he might realize the reality of the situation and become a better boy. Basically, the song plots the complexity of human relationships via a commentary on the fixity of gender roles. With its slow, grinding, R&B–tainted love theme, the clichéd girl/boy love relationship is set in a critical light. The track as much as the video targets a fandom not entirely secure in their identity. But, in pop, all is open to interpretation. There are also live performances, public interviews, and world tours to take into consideration. Good evidence of this is Beyoncé’s legendary appearance at the 52nd Grammy Awards in 2010, which provided a very different platform for expressing herself. A feisty performance of ‘If I Were a Boy’ involved her grabbing her crotch at climactic points in the song, stoking up quite mixed reactions. There is a great deal to unpack from this gesture. Erik Steinskog has identified ­Beyoncé’s ‘crotch grip,’ with its obvious genealogy in Michael ­Jackson’s legendary thrust and grab movement, as her “trying to imagine – and, thus, partly ­perform – an imagined sex change.”3 I would add to this also Madonna’s parodic crotch-grabbing moves in her legendary ‘Express ­Yourself’ video from 1989.4 Perceptively, Steinskog insists that the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson and Beyoncé “only underline[s] the perceived differences.”5 When Beyoncé “swears she’d be a better man, and touches herself on the word ‘man’ there is a lyrical gender change. Her song is in the ‘as-if mode,’ and points to the imaginary.”6 This resignification of masculinity entails Beyoncé transgressing the very constructed-ness of her own gender roles. And, symbolic rather than phallic, the crotch grip needs to be understood within the context of dance choreography.

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  165 Apart from entertaining and marketing the track, this controversial thrust gesture constituted another prime objective – the dissolution of norms through the inventiveness of genderplay. One might say that Beyoncé’s own self-positioning, especially in the song’s hook, if I were a boy, provides a clue to her own gender politics. In terms of a song’s narrative, it is never certain to what extent the ‘I’ is nonfictional. Obviously, a female artist’s own desires are bound to come under scrutiny when she imagines what it is like to be a boy. At any rate, Beyoncé’s performance at the Grammy Awards teased out fantasies of gender mimicry, with a reflexive staging of herself powerfully complementing that of Michael Jackson’s. Otherwise, she showed how music reinforces the vicarious aspects of attitude. From this it becomes clear that subscribing to an artist’s act is part and parcel of ‘buying into’ a pop artist’s identity, which raises the question of empathy and feeling. In his thesis from 1873, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics, Robert Vischer devised a German term, Einfühlung, to describe the ‘in-feeling’ or ‘feeling into’ state of mind. Later, this would be translated into ‘empathy’ (in English), and has been a topic for much discussion in the humanities ever since.7 In the realm of popular music scholarship numerous scholars have problematized how we feel and empathize with artists. Simon Frith’s seminal work, Performing Rites, for example, is an incursion into the intricacies of musical tastes and preferences. In his sociological critique of musical meaning, Frith is interested in “people’s continued attempts to make it [music] meaningful: to name their feelings, supply the adjectives.”8 For empathy to work, aesthetic response is a prerequisite and when linked to musical experience it involves “the coming together of the sensual, the emotional, and the social as performance.”9 Feeling for an artist implies the assimilation of a physical reality, with a range of identity indicators firmly in place. We know that a performer’s strategies in any performance are dependent on stipulating structures of ­identification. So, what then happens when those structures are not felt familiar? Does empathy cease when encountering differences and unrecognizable signifiers? Throughout this study I have been engrossed in these ideas when examining the signifiers of gender nonconformity that define so many pop acts, where the issue of ‘gender difference’ continues to be a central concern. Research studies have indicated that there are higher rates of gender nonconformity amongst LGBT people in childhood but not necessarily in adulthood. Of course, other categories of identity impact on gender. Elias Krell’s study of gender nonconformity in the Canadian transgender man, Lucas Silveira, addresses the convergence of ethnicity and race.10 Probing at a variety of questions dealing with gender politics alongside ethnicity, Krell ascertains that despite his transgendered features Silveira’s whiteness “protects him from racist legacies of assigning emotionality to masculine bodies of color.”11 Butler, who problematized ethnicity and queerness already in the early 1990s, stressed that the presence of queer nonwhite communities had not been sufficiently acknowledged. The term ‘queer,’ she argued, needed to be “revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent

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166  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized.”12 Notwithstanding the term’s gradual transformation since the 1990s (and Teresa de Lauretis’ attempt to reclaim it), it is still widely employed as derogatory. The naming of someone as queer follows a long history of homophobic assault. Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century ‘hate speech’ in social media regularly involves ‘queer-­ bashing,’ and the injurious effect of this is indeed well on a par with other abusive terms.13 In spite of the term’s separation from pejoration and, at times, neutral usage, it is still loaded with problems. Historically, measures have been undertaken to combat this. For instance, four men from the ACT UP group (formed during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s) started the organization ‘Queer Nation’ in 1990. This direct-­ action LGBT group adopted confrontational strategies not only to contest homophobia, but also to instill the practice of ‘outing.’ Indeed, their success was to detach the term ‘queer’ from those who use it negatively and to reclaim it. Soon ‘Queer Nation’ offices sprung up across the US and within days of its creation the organization had caused a flurry of activism. Their own use of ‘queer’ was for its time shocking, their message candid: ‘we’re here and queer, so fucking get used to it.’ Controversy soon brewed over their militant approach, especially regarding their ‘outing’ strategies. However, long after Queer Nation’s impact in the early 1990s, the idea of reclaiming the word ‘queer’ would persist. Admittedly, to some extent this terms has infiltrated mainstream popular culture as an entity of acceptance and approval, popularized and for that matter trivialized in the drama television series Queer as Folk, the reality show Queer Eye, and comedy chat shows such as The Graham Norton Show, Alan Carr: Chatty Man, and The New Paul O’Grady Show. During this chapter I continue to problematize structures of ‘normative masculinity’ in musical performance. As I stress, masculinity designates plurality and we cannot ignore the ways in which the norms of what it means to be male are so often scrambled. Antony Hegarty’s music comes under the spotlight in a consideration of his transgender congruences. If Hegarty comes across comfortable as a transgender person, this is because of an assured and polished performance style. Given his close ties with Boy George – an analysis is provided of ‘You Are My Sister’ from 2005 – I consider the possibilities of sisterly love between two males. Then, from quite another perspective, I turn to the Scottish pop artist, Jimmy Somerville, whose songs and performances are a testament to the painful struggles of being openly gay in Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s. Not only did ­Somerville offer hope to minority groups, but he also paved the way forward as a role model for the next generation of queer pop artists. June 2014 marked the thirty-year anniversary for the hit, ‘Smalltown Boy,’ which I focus on by analyzing Somerville’s vocality. Meanwhile, I have also decided to include in this chapter the African ­American artist Janelle Monáe, whose performance style in my readings has a strong queer sensibility. Monáe’s strategies in performance have been crucial in fashioning an aesthetic that evokes impressions of the

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  167 drag king, the messianic android, and the electric lady. Adamant about contesting stereotypes of gender and race, she identifies fiercely with the queer community and her African American past. Two of her major role models include female legends Josephine Baker and Grace Jones. At the same time, there is much in her style that harks back to ­dandyism in the eighteenth century. An analysis of her track ‘Tightrope’ positions her in the light of the ‘new Other’ as I c­ onsider female masculinity in performance. To a large extent, my working premise is that queer performances are mobilized through intersections with other utterances, texts, and identities. The decision to include Bruce Springsteen and Kurt Cobain might seem somewhat incongruous. However, my aim is to show how trajectories of white masculinity are often wielded to surprising, eccentric, and strange ends in popular music. Mostly, the ambiguity that surrounds both these artists returns me to the central question, namely, what does it mean to be a boy? As one of the legendary proponents of rock, Springsteen has always been distinguished from the pop artist. His markers of manhood are harnessed in a ‘rock authenticity’ that, paradoxically, embraces diffuse narratives of intimacy and restrictions when it comes to the blue-collar hero. Often his characters deal with brotherly love, fraternal intimacy, and goodtime girlfriends and wives. In an essay published in the late 1990s, Gareth Palmer identified the blue-collar world into which Springsteen slotted: a world where limitations on masculinity prevented men from changing. “Springsteen understands this,” Palmer argued, “and his work will continue to have a melancholy relevance.”14 Palmer concluded with a visionary statement: “What will be interesting to see is whether he can provide new icons of masculinity or simply continue to chart the frustrations of the old.”15 In one of Springsteen’s more perplexing songs, ‘My Lover Man,’ the potential to undermine masculine authenticity is glaringly obvious. The song’s protagonist crosses over from good friend to lover by virtue of a range of musical tactics that depict a posturing of desire that is supplanted by seemingly romantic same-gender relationships. I draw on the work of Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel to reflect on Springsteen’s gender as fluid and situational through the details of his recorded performance. My argument is that queer opacity is one way of critiquing the epistemology of the closet and working out Springsteen’s expressed ambivalence in this enchanting song. My discussions in this chapter culminate with Kurt Cobain and his and my generation (Gen-X). Assuming a self-deprecating stance on male norms, he chipped away at stereotypes and norms while still trapped by the strictures of gender constraint. His suicide at the age of 27, in Jan Muto’s words, was “a statement on masculinity” as his “private pain became social expression.”16 Born a boy, and loathing the expectations and demands placed on gender, Cobain developed a rebellious style and attitude that projected a deeply personal crisis. Epitomizing the anti-hero, he was also the celebrity megastar. Today he has his place in the gallery of fame, alongside the likes of others who died prematurely, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Marc Bolan.

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‘Today I am a Boy’ – Hegarty and Gender Someone who grew up feeling the ambiguities of ‘being a boy’ was Antony Hegarty. Born in 1971 in Sussex, England, of Anglo-Irish parentage, he moved to Amsterdam and later to California as a 10-year-old. In the 1990s, he studied art in New York. During this period he declared himself as transgender. Hegarty has claimed that he was determined to be ‘true to himself’ from an early age, and by his twenties he had already become famous as a singer. Lou Reed would enthuse: “When I heard Antony, I knew that I was in the presence of an angel.”17 Somewhat modestly, Hegarty would respond, “I really think anyone can sing. It’s a matter of rain or shine, not giving up, applying yourself. That’s what I did: I copied my favorite singers and learned – singing for hours and hours, years and years. Eventually I got my voice.”18 As with Boy George, his style owes much to the late, flamboyant Australian performance artist and fashion designer, Leigh Bowery, whereas his musical influences stem from Marc Almond, the Cocteau Twins, Yazoo, Nina Simone, Joey Arias, and Kate Bush. In 1998 Hegarty started his band, Antony and the Johnsons, and they released their eponymous debut album in 2000. It would take some five years before their second album, I Am a Bird Now, came out in September 2005, featuring the tracks I will consider: ‘For Today I Am A Boy’ and ‘You Are My Sister.’ From an album that deals explicitly with gender, sexuality, and love, ‘For Today I Am A Boy’ is about the trials and tribulations of masculinity and not being quite the boy one would expect. A wistful yearning to become another gender is apparent in the lines, One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful woman. Cushioned by a personal narrative, the song expresses the anguish of feeling trapped; the protagonist craves to belong, to be accepted, yet still knows he is different. Stylistically, Hegarty owes much to gospel, which is evident in his mannerisms of melodic embellishment and ‘call and response’ techniques. At the same time, there is a strong baroque pop style inherent in all the songs by Antony and the Johnsons that stems back to the late 1960s.19 Whereas in the verses the vocal overdubs and backing are rhythmically precise, in the choruses (0:26–0:48 and 1:12–1.35) a smudging occurs in the top and lower parts of the vocal lines. Such vocal staging disturbs the clarity of the audio picture, with Hegarty challenging and modifying the norms of an established style. There is something bluesy in the warbling of his melodic lines that builds up to a momentum in the hallelujah closing section (1:36–2:36). This entails an extension of the chorus, colorful vocal embellishments, an increase in dynamics, and fancy fills in the piano accompaniment (spiced with percussion). Hegarty’s spectacular vocal ornamentation is enhanced by a vibrato technique that borders on the tearful as he literally cries out, for today I am a child, for today I am a boy. Specific vowels are elasticized to the point of pain and discomfort on the words, today, child and boy, and final closure is achieved by the dying out of a long, sustained C pitch (2:23–2:36). Quite melodramatically, the song culminates with everything evaporating

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  169 into a single pitch. Musically, this functions as a punctuation mark: a period, a question mark, a colon, or even an exclamation point. On the haunting fifth track of I Am A Bird Now, entitled ‘You Are My Sister,’ Boy George makes an appearance as guest vocalist.20 In his adolescence Antony was drawn to Boy George, and has claimed that he saved his life.21 In no uncertain terms, the duet ‘You Are My Sister’ is more than a tribute; it is an act of solidarity, a heartfelt communion, a passionate declaration of love, and a release from the constraints of normative masculinity. The song starts with Hegarty on the verses. Boy George then responds in the first chorus (1:04–1:50): You are my sister, and I love you. By the next chorus round (2:19), Antony joins in with George as the song progresses into a coda section (3:14–4:00): I want this for you, they’re gonna come true. It is how the musical intensity is created by a gradual buildup in the vocal dynamics that shapes the pent-up sentiments of the song. Undulating, the accompaniment cushions the impact of the lyrics. Consisting of acoustic piano, guitar, strings, and drum kit, the arrangement and studio production are carefully controlled in order to accommodate the vocal tracks. As the two voices merge in the final chorus, a stripped-down string arrangement joins the piano and drums. The effect of this is to not only color the texture, but also to suggest a degree of vulnerability as the voices finally merge together. Performatively, ‘You Are My Sister’ emphasizes the fragility of gender. ­Tenderly, the singers refer to each other as ‘sisters.’ Notwithstanding their roles as protagonists in the song, there is a sense that their everyday personae are stamped onto the track in their bid to traverse gender stereotypes. Hegarty’s politics of resistance are rooted in a performance style that retains the very codes of its suppression. As well as his look and mannerisms, his vocal costuming is a statement on who he is and why he is not like the everyday boys around him.22 A heartfelt vulnerability emerges from his singing style that adds credence to his lyrics, with him proclaiming his rightful place in a social context. Hence, his voice is symbolic of the transgender person’s place in the world – it denotes subjectivity and draws attention to the body. He knows that a queer sensibility can stimulate new pursuits by disturbing the ‘natural order’ of predispositions to gender. Positioned within a transgendered space, performativity of this kind is instructive in communicating the peculiarities of gender behavior. Ultimately, Hegarty’s sensibility is derived from a sartorial vocal disposition that gains momentum because of an agility that evokes powerful empathic response. To explain: With a range between mid-range baritone and high-range tenor, his voice flutters, trembles, wails, and raptures with an immediacy that is touching. Something soft and delicate makes his expression sublime; his voice is exposed and raw and its warbling, birdlike timbre is chilly. ­Produced by a jellylike vibrato, his timbre connotes fragility and sensuality. Steinskog has described Hegarty’s vocal ‘difference’ in terms of its erotic sensuality,23 and the gender ambivalence of his ‘vocal costuming’ connotes queerness. Steinskog insists: “Invoking the term queer, however, at the same time means that one will have to define, somewhat clearer, what queer (could) mean.”24

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170  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics Uniquely, Hegarty’s performance harnesses the constituents of ‘queerness’ in “the interplay of voice, melody, and lyrics.”25 In addition, his vocal stylization owes much to the processes of recording technology. Vocal subjectivity, after all, is shaped by the technicalities of amplification, spatiality, and added effects, all of which contribute significantly to a sense of intimacy and “an erotic relation between singer and listener.”26 Self-fashioning is contingent on the manipulation of sound and technological design, and the erotics conveyed by this are part of the pleasure experienced in effects of the recording process. I accept Wicke’s assertion that the pop artist’s voice is disembodied because of the microphone. As he states: “Without the microphone and amplifier [the pop stars’ ‘natural’ voices] do not exist; they are disembodied through technical production, set loose from their origins in the larynx, and lodged, in the special sound quality, somewhere between the human and the machine.”27 Thus, the act of empathizing with a singer is entirely due to the sonic representation that captures a pre-existing performance moment in the studio.28 Let us consider the specific microphones selected during a recording session, and, above all, their aesthetic effect. We might assume that in the recording we do not necessarily hear the ‘real’ Hegarty, but rather a version of his ‘natural voice.’ I have described this in earlier studies as ‘masking,’ which refers to the subject positions of artist, engineer, and producer in pop recordings.29 Upon experiencing a vocal performance, we always detect a variety of features that help idealize the voice as the singer navigates an array of production techniques. Vocal timbre, the result of technological manipulation, therefore determines identification. The materiality of the voice, as it is imbricated in the recording production via amplification, caters to the attendant desires of listening. This is how it induces empathy. Thus, any ‘naturalness’ we might sense in the relationship between us and the performer is part of the signifying practices of recorded performance. In what ways, then, does Hegarty’s performativity connote queerness? A closer look at the technicalities of singing reveals a range of physical features, such as the inner vibrations of the vocal cords, the regulation of breath control, and the sculpting of sound color in expressive articulation. ­Timbre comes from the blending of amplitudes, frequencies, and harmonics to form vocal dynamics. This also entails microdetails of vibrato, tremolo, and attack-delay envelopes. Every voice possesses its own ‘tone,’ and this is quite distinct from pitch frequency, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues in his book, ­Listening. Timbre is the materiality of sound, a blend of frequency and amplitude. When identifying timbre, aural perception of sound is all-determining, involving the listener’s own subjective responses. Nancy describes the link between the ‘self’ and the ‘world’ as a simultaneous listening process.30 This is a phenomenon articulated by the complex layering of identity. Steinskog considers the implications of this in Hegarty’s ‘vocal drag,’ describing it as a kind of mainstreaming of what used to be known as ‘deviance.’ At the same time we find, in the case of Antony, more of this than the

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dimensions of gay-aesthetics more commonly taking place within popular music. Not that this is totally new, but there are some differences. Antony, as transgendered, reaches a ‘mass audience,’ and to a certain extent this is new.31 So, if queerness is a site of contestation in the pop song, how does vocal drag mediate this? The microgestures of an individual’s musical makeup in a pop recording convey the vicissitudes of vocality, inherent in inflections, tones, and nuances, all of which establish a sonic image; it is this that actually individualizes the body. By sonic image, I am referring to the control of a specific voice-type – the fine grain of a vocal sphere that instantly helps identify an artist. The individualizing effect of any voice (in terms of timbre, texture, and grain) bridges the gap between listener and performer, giving way to a special moment of contact. During the process of listening, we automatically place emphasis on specific details. William Moylan claims that the primary elements of a recording include instrumentation, groove, and vocality, whereas secondary elements can relate to timbre, dynamics, texture, and stereo location.32 Thus, any perceptions of an artist are about identifying with the details of musical material. There is sufficient evidence that humans develop their ability to recognize the intricacies of sonic details to a high degree. Moylan verifies this by singling out the spatial properties of recorded sound that depict the performance environment and its characteristics. We know in pop recordings that the “acoustical characteristic of any space may be simulated by modern technology,”33 and, accordingly, that the immersion of the voice within any given environment can be used to great dramatic effect. Notions of distance, regulated and captured during the recording process, meticulously define timbral detail. Regulating distance adds weight to vocal expressivity.34 Because listeners are able to identify and recall countless timbres (just consider how quickly we remember personalities because of voices), the personal characteristics relating to an artist become a p ­ rofound part of the musical experience. This partly explains why vocal timbre, and its enhancement thanks to the recording techniques, induces empathy. The dramaturgy arising from singing in a pop song’s delivery is a result of the manipulation of vocal timbre during the technological engineering of music production. Technologies therefore stage the voice, enhancing the artist’s subjectivity. Undoubtedly, vocal production constitutes one of the most interesting objectives for music analysis. In the studies conducted by Serge Lacasse, three main aspects of sound in the vocal staging of effects are identified: space, timbre, and time. Connotations of vocal sound (humorous intent and nuance), as much as their cultural signification, are prioritized: [I]rony is sometimes working on the basis of a contrast between what is said and the way it is said[;] it sounds reasonable to imagine a listener

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(unconsciously) associating a given vocal sound with a given connotation – such as ‘inner turmoil’ in the case of flanging – even though this connotation is not made explicit in, or supported by, the lyrics.35 A tension exists between the explicit and the implied in vocal staging, a direct result of everything from the accentuation of a syllable to double tracking and filtering. Again, the function of the microphone in shaping pop aesthetics is worth dwelling on, because its technological effect not only enhances, but also alters the recorded voice. Intimacy, playfulness, and pretentiousness are just some of the qualities that produce empathy in the listener. Microphones access an abundance of vocal effects that literally boost a performance; for example, they pick up on the adjusting airflow through the nose as the throat opens to afford a more glottal attack and resonance. Microphones also detect the smallest details of enunciation in, for instance, a soft palate edge and diaphragmatic pulsation. Instinctively, singers know that amplification can be abrasive, especially when it comes to the articulation of consonants. The sound of Bs and Ps tends to be easily overexaggerated, creating a popping sound, whereas the sibilance of Cs, Ss, and Zs produces a hissing. Good microphone control enables an avoidance of unnecessary exaggerations of these syllables, and the actual choice of microphones is a prime technicality in the execution of any pop song performance. During a recording session, the vocalist will concentrate on getting a performance right while the producer focuses on the aspects of engineering. This symbiosis (in terms of studio roles) is what defines the final result. Emery Robyns, who recorded Hegarty on I Am a Bird Now, has claimed that he remained quite unconcerned about the equipment used in recording his vocals. When it came to information regarding to structure, style, and expression, virtually nothing was communicated: We never had a warning about anything. In order to react to any surprises in signal levels, I kept one hand on the vocal fader at all times. We were really alert and on our toes during those sessions. We never knew when he’d take the vocal dynamics up or down.36 Also, the producer, Stewart Lerman, who worked with Hegarty on the 2008 EP Another World, has described how detailed he was when working with instrumentalists: During the Another World sessions, Antony worked very carefully with all of his string players, handing out charts and going over every note with a fine-tooth comb. We would discuss the particulars of the instrumentation, rearrange the room for a particular arrangement, and hit the Record button. We basically did a song every three hours.37

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Lerman proceeds to explain the processes involved in the choice of ­microphones at recording sessions: [At New York City’s Dubway Studios] Hegarty’s vocals were recorded through a Neumann U47 and Mercenary Audio preamps into Pro Tools. The U47 saw action again during the Another World sessions at Allaire Studios in the Catskill Mountains, but the mic was routed through a Neve 31106 preamp and an Urei 1176 limiter before hitting Pro Tools.38 A wealth of production details surfaces in the duet between Hegarty and Boy George, ‘You Are My Sister.’ The song is an extraordinary commentary on queerness. Hegarty delivers his lines in the verse in a half-sung and half-­ spoken manner. In the final reprise, there is a moment of ecstatic rapture as both boys execute their lines with silky baritone voices. Something in the production captures a sonic brilliance that discloses superb recording engineering. Belting out their final phrases, they employ timbres and textures that are not falsettist or counter-tenor, but rather low and conventionally masculine in register. This testifies to an affected state of male-ness that is arguably assailing in all its connotations. Queer politics in ‘You Are My Sister’ also alert us to the temporalization of gender. Sisterly love between two males is not a mere subversion of a norm or an attempt at radical fabrication; rather, it is the manifestation of a bond that reconfigures ideas of sisterhood in a new space and time. With rich, quivering voices, it is as if they jeer at the insults and injuries of homophobia around them. The song builds up into a climax of emotional outpouring. The delicacy, tenderness, and conviction with which this is articulated make this song unique as we, the listeners, are exposed to an extraordinary act of genderbending. Much of this is due to Boy George’s presence in the song. Hegarty has openly declared his admiration for his ‘sister’: When Bowie adopted effeminacies, it was plumage, almost the prowess of a mating ritual. Whereas with George it was a revelation of his femininity, which was so much more dangerous because of the extremity of his tenderness and the incredible power of his music.39 Contesting gender norms unleashes a wealth of emotions, such as rage, shame, and anger for a loss one cannot grieve.40 Hegarty’s articulating of gender difference has been clear from the start of his career: It was always clear to everyone that I was transgender, or whatever they would have interpreted that as being. There was no coming out for a kid like me – I was never in. […] I have access to masculine and feminine aspects, although obviously there’s a limitation to both of those things. I have an experience that’s unique to being me, which isn’t just being stranded between two things. It’s another frontier, with its own expansive possibilities.41

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174  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics Perhaps what stands out most are the markers of hope. Reinforced by notions of utopianism, hope is grounded in a resistance to heteronormativity. Musically, this is discernible in an eclectic style that dislodges norms of masculinity. A central goal is to illuminate the potency of queerness. Hegarty’s sound, as with his image, helps to transcend the limitations of roles and rigid behavior patterns (see Figure 6.1). To be a boy he breaks free and, in so doing, offers a formidable utopian plan: a future that accommodates boys who can also feel like sisters.

Figure 6.1  Antony Hegarty in the video ‘Epilepsy Is Dancing’

From ‘Smalltown’ to City Boy Another boy who broke free from the constraints of social pressure and discrimination was Jimmy Somerville. In 1979 he moved to London, where he joined the London Gay Teenage Group. Active in launching gay artists’ careers, one of the group’s video projects was Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts (1982), which featured a segment of Somerville singing ‘Screaming.’ Historically, this video stands as a potent sign of its time, ­politicizing gender in an unprecedented way. Success came to the band, Bronski Beat, in 1983, which consisted of Somerville, Larry Steinbachek, and Steve Bronski, who all shared a flat at Lancaster House in Brixton. This synth-pop trio had no qualms about airing their preferences and politics. They were the first all-out gay band in British history, with a front man who became instantly identifiable due to a piercing, falsetto wail.42 By 1984 Bronski Beat had signed a recording contract with London Records. Their debut single, ‘Smalltown Boy,’ quickly reached Number 3 in

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the UK charts, becoming a bold gay anthem for millions. Asked many years later in an interview why ‘Smalltown Boy’ had endured the test of time, Somerville replied: It’s not a throwaway moment, it’s a very important moment in pop and gay political history. It’s real, emotional, heartfelt, and original. There had been gay singers before but not this kind of evocative, emotional plea. We didn’t drown the song in ambiguity, we didn’t disguise it, or who Bronski Beat were. It wasn’t just gay men that liked it either, it tapped into a universal feeling of needing to change, to explore, to be free. Later on, the song meant a lot to Eastern Europeans, for example.43 A stark reminder that the song’s longevity is entirely due to Somerville’s inimitable singing was iTunes’ release of a new version of the hit, ‘­Smalltown Boy Reprise,’ in 2014. Again the vocal lines captured all the powerful sentiments originally vented by Bronski Beat, albeit within a very different arrangement. Just as poignant as the original, this performance captures the story about a boy who feels different. Rejected by his parents and friends, he is forced to leave his small hometown for the big city. For the purpose of this analysis, my attention is directed to the original recording. Set in the key of C minor (natural), there is only one chord progression, Cm–Bb– Fm–Eb (i–VII–iv–III), throughout. Immediately discernible is the haunting quality of the arrangement. This is due to a number of features, such as the floating sense of harmonic movement, the synth-pop instrumental flavors, the jagged rhythmic synth riff, the chorus vocals, and, of course, Somerville’s tuneful wailing. Mostly, though, it is his falsetto register and timbral details that extract an intensity seldom encountered. Disquieting in its urgency and despair, the voice register seems excessively high. A sense of slippage between elation in one instance and despair in the other is a prime signifier. Bronski Beat’s signature flickers all the way through, with the choruses illuminated like beacons on a dark, rainy night: run away, turn away, run away, turn away. Looped incessantly in the chorus, these words spell out feelings of loneliness, rejection, and excitement. Moreover, they increase anticipation. A high dose of reverberation is used in the production to prolong the vocal sounds, resulting in an eerie ambience due to the physical properties of sheer saturation. The final chorus (4:18–5:02) signals dramatic closure, with Sommerville drawing out long, tied notes over the vocal chorusing on the words run away, turn away. I would add that this is an example of queering the pitch, where intervallic slipperiness arises from moving in and out of pitch. Without any doubt, this is a blues-influenced stylistic gesture. Somerville also employs a subtle portamento effect to reach up to the high C, made all the more affected by a gradual crescendo. Upon hitting the pitch, he sustains it in-tune, albeit with vibrato and timbral fluctuation. In many popular genres the falsetto voice emphasizes powerful emotions, and in Somerville’s recording of ‘Smalltown Boy’ his sung phrases brim with

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176  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics anxiety and vulnerability. A full control of falsetto is apparent in his elaborate technique of pitching, the effect of which is to establish a high degree of determination and conviction. Turning to the blues to capture a desolate mood in the song, his style also latches on to the fashionable synth-pop sound of the 1980s. Indeed, the New Wave idiom of Bronski Beat, in conjuring up the struggles of minoritarian identities of difference, was iconic for its time. Today the song is a cultural assimilation of a past full of suppression that laments the despair brought about by discrimination. During the 1980s in Britain, countless fans would identify personally with Somerville, for he depicted the turbulences in their own lives – in other words, he was in the same fix they were. His high-pitched tessitura blaring out of radios became synonymous with political struggle, an antidote to prevalent homophobic attitudes towards sexuality. Queer songs speak to an audience in terms of sincerity and again notions of authenticity. The intricacies of this are addressed by Nicola Dibben, who points out the overlap between notions of persona and performer in the process of mediating emotional authenticity.44 Responding to ‘Smalltown Boy’ empathically implies that we are also accepting the performer, the musicians, the engineers, the producers, and all involved.45 The creative input invested into a pop track is a team effort, with the singer only forming one part of the entire process. Marketing pop music, though, entails mainly emphasizing the performer and band, and privileging star celebrity status. Obviously, this is not without its problems as we continue with the journey of discovering what queerness in pop music signifies, and how audiotopias produce meanings that aspire to a queerworld.

Walking the Tightrope So far I have been suggesting that the particularities of genderplay in pop are derived from tactics of transgressive mediation. Queering functions along a sliding scale, predicated upon ethnicity, age, class, and sexuality. Often it involves the put-on display of gender during exhilarating performances. Discursive practices in performativity open up for new expressions of temperament. Consciously performing out female masculinity, though, can feel like walking a tightrope.46 Enter Janelle Monáe Robinson, born in 1985 in ­Kansas City, Missouri. Like Hegarty and many of the artists I have selected for study in this book, Janelle Monáe moved to New York as a student, enrolling at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. During this period she also attended the oldest African American theater in Philadelphia, the Freedom Theater. After achieving some recognition with the hip-hop duo OutKast (appearing on their album, Idlewild), she signed with the record label Bad Boy in 2006. It was one year later that her EP record ­Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase) was released, forming the first part of a seven-part conceptual series, Metropolis. Her debut studio album, The ArchAndroid, then followed in 2010 on Bad Boy Records and Wondaland Arts Society, comprising multiple collaborations with other artists. The seventh track, ‘Tightrope,’

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  177 featured Big Boi (Antwan André Patton), a member of OutKast. This, the first official single from the album, achieved instant success. As is often the case, the ‘Tightrope’ video’s total duration (5:12) is slightly longer than the song’s (4:23), and this has to do with an added instrumental introduction (0.00–0:16), as well as a prolonged ending. The form of the song comprises verse and chorus sections, as well as a bridge and jam section (3:19–4:18), including a freestyle, turntable-oriented passage (Table 6.1). The chords have a jazz feel to them, and much of this is due to the employment of major and minor sevenths and ninths. Overall, the arrangement is tightly controlled, with a live feel to it (mainly due to the horns). Directed by Wendy Morgan, the video for ‘Tightrope’ is filmed at the Palace of Dogs – an asylum for the insane – where celebrities such as Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker were once admitted. Playing an in-patient, who has the power to move through walls, Monáe rounds up the in-patients and staff during a crazed-dance routine. Mid-way in the video, she is haunted by a couple of Grim Reapers, a blatant reference to Maya Deren’s experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), where men with ‘mirror faces’ appear (also depicted in Yeasayer’s quite extraordinary ‘Ambling Alp’ video). A similar reference, which Monáe is likely to have known, is the film, Space is the Place, from 1974, featuring Sun Ra.47 Reminiscent of a younger Michael Jackson, Monáe’s performance in ‘Tightrope is ‘boy-like,’ albeit with a difference. An attitude of je-ne-sais-quoi captivates an ironic sensibility. Stylistically, the song is upbeat, funky, and irresistibly flirty: I’m callin’ you to dinner and you know exactly what I mean! Monáe’s look, in particular her wearing of a narrow-cut tuxedo with broad shoulders, certainly contests mainstream female representations. Its corollary is found in the iconography from the Off the Wall album, where tuxedo-clad Michael Jackson dances a generation into virtual oblivion. Leaving out the white socks, Monáe draws on dandyism, going against the grain in terms of lifestyle and dominant paradigms. Her uniform is a camped-up version of the dress codes traditionally enforced on the staff and patients in a mental asylum, while her dancing parodies accepted conduct and decorum in an institutionalized setting. In addition to her singing, it is her display of androgyny that defines a female masculinity, which literally comes to life in the dance routines in ‘Tightrope.’ The asylum is a metaphor of imprisonment on all kinds of levels. Opening with a title card, The Palace of the Dogs Asylum: Dancing has long been forbidden for its subversive effects on the residents and its tendency to lead to illegal magical practices, the parodic narrative is framed. Up against a white-tiled wall two men are seen dressed in tuxedos – one plays with a small ball, the other one reads. The scene cuts to a shot of a ­sinister-looking institution as the words flash up: Monáe & Leftfoot Tightrope. Next, a severe nurse enters wheeling a trolley of medications as the camera pans from her white shoes up to her bespectacled face. As she glides down the corridor, Monáe is seen peering around a corner. Donning a tuxedo without a jacket, she sports an elaborate pompadour hairstyle. Ducking and diving, she ends up leaning against a door, looking into the camera, and singing.

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Table 6.1  Song structure and harmonic layout in ‘Tightrope’ Intro

Verse 1

Chorus Verse 2 1

Chorus 2

Rap

Verse Chorus 3 3

Bridge

Horn break

Turntable – scratch

Coda

End

0:00

0:28

0:50

1:13

1:36

1:59

2:21

2:44

3:08

3:19

3:53

4:18

5:12

Fm – Bb/F (F Dorian)

Gm7 –C9 –Fm7 –Dm7

Fm7 – Bb/F

Gm –Bb–Fm–Dm

N.C.

Fm

Gm7 – Gm N.C. – Ab/G –F/G – Gm7 –Gm – Fm7

N.C.

Bbmaj7 – Fm7 – F – Dm7

Fm7 – F – Dm7 Gm9 – Dbmaj7 – F

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  179 Dancing in front of a mirror, two mirror-faced figures appear, draped in dark cloaks. Hurriedly, Monáe puts her jacket on and leaves the room. The first chorus starts with her filmed in the corridor, dancing in a bird-like fashion (arms moving up and down in a flying motion) at the same time she ‘softshoes’ in homage to Michael Jackson. Moving into the next verse, she is now joined by four other dancers in a dance routine that extends through the next chorus up to the rap section. The festivity starts as they enter the asylum’s cafeteria, where Big Boi is leading a band in his rap. Monáe jumps onto a table as the third verse commences, vogueing and getting everyone to join in. This extended sequence forms a transition to the next chorus, then the bridge and horn section. The nurse from the opening scene reappears, peering sternly around the corner, while the two sinister figures with mirror faces glide towards the cafeteria where everyone is still dancing. At this point several shots show Monáe’s head being blown off (read: blown away), as she is accompanied by these figures, with shots of the party continuing. The video ends with her entering a room, resting her head on her arms, and meeting the camera’s gaze. It is in this moment that the music and image fade out simultaneously. The video for ‘Tightrope’ is spectacular in the ways it queers on many levels. To explain: There is an underlying subtext that deals with oppression. This is made visually symbolic within the context of the asylum with all the codes of imprisonment firmly in place. Moreover, one can hardly go amiss in noting the all-black cast. The music is an eclectic mix of African American styles, with Monáe positioned in a not-so-dissimilar role to George Clinton, principal architect and all-time master of P-Funk. Her Post-Soul eccentricity can be interpreted as an earnest declaration of being black and facing the everyday realities of political struggle.48 This becomes particularly conspicuous in the final two minutes and a passage of the song (3:08–5:12) during the jam session when everything builds up to the horn interlude, scratch section, and coda. There is a sense of release during the act of improvisation; the material here is an elongation of the scatting implemented by Monáe and Big Boi. Musical interjections such as these, as I read them, are not only a dialogic response, but also a nod to the band and other musicians who are ‘paying their respects.’ The tradition of jamming is inherited from jazz and blues, with a powerful social commentary attached to it.49 It occurs according to the circumstances of context and ‘memory;’ its spontaneous riffs, licks, and scats that typify this mode of performance heighten interest and excitement. Monáe’s scatting in this final buildup section of ‘Tightrope’ is a blend of sung, spoken, and shouted sounds, and all her dance movements complement the musical gestures (­Figure 6.2). Indeed, a wide spectrum of vocal gestures is embraced – vowel contrasts, pitch fluctuations, registral colorations, syllable contrasts, sung lines, shouted exclamations, and so on. Not only does this jam passage include the two lead vocalists, but also backing vocals, all of whom evoke a sense of coming together in the gestures of partying and celebrating. The resulting rhythmic counterpoint assigns an extra layer to the already richly regulated groove texture that is driven by drums, percussion and busy bass lines.

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180  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics

Figure 6.2  Janelle Monáe jamming in the video ‘Tightrope’

Monáe’s queerness works both musically and visually as she resignifies the traits of soul, funk, disco, and hip hop. A high degree of self-referentiality comes across in her performance, which provides an opportunity to critique current conceptions of gender and race. Expertly, she shapes a black utopia within an idealized zone that promises release and liberation. ‘Tightrope’ is a refashioning of desires in the guise of song and dance with an aim to heal an old wound. And, it is purposeful disidentification that helps Monáe re-define the Black body in mainstream pop. For her, queerness is as much a survival strategy as a mechanism for dislodging normality through resistance. As with her dance moves, her music is always shifting. It is in this way that Monáe signals hope for transformation and connection.

‘Lover Man’ – ‘The Boss’ and his Forays into Homosociality It will hopefully be evident at this stage that queer aesthetics are shaped by an inexhaustible array of references that are usually politicized. Elsewhere in this book I have intimated that homoerotics are commonly associated with displays of hypermasculinity as male artists conform to physical stereotypes and imagined social norms. I want to probe this a little more in a consideration of what constitutes a homosocial narrative. Given that the passage of time alters our impressions of gender constructions, this is cause enough to examine recent upheavals in male representation in the relatively short span of pop music history. In the course of a long career that started in the late 1960s with the power trio band Earth, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen and his output has been a tour de force in popular music. Along the way, his brand of straight masculinity has pretty much been taken for granted.

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  181 Well, that is until quite recently. A growing curiosity has been discernible when it comes to his personal life, which might well be seen in relation to his solidarity with LGBT communities.50 Yet, on close inspection, aspects of ‘difference’ and, arguably, a queer sensibility have always been around as evident in tracks such as ‘Backstreets,’ ‘Brothers Under the Bridges,’ ‘No Surrender,’ ‘Bobby Jean,’ ‘This Hard Land,’ ‘Incident on 57th Street,’ ‘Lost in the Flood,’ ‘Mary Queen of Arkansas,’ ‘Devil’s Arcade,’ ‘Fire,’ ‘Devils and Dust,’ ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story,’ ‘Spirit in the Night,’ ‘Gypsy Biker,’ and ‘Streets of Philadelphia.’ Also, there is ‘My Lover Man,’ released in 1998 on disc 4 of the Tracks box set.51 As mentioned at the start of this chapter, my interest in this song is due to Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel’s study and her general call for a musical consideration of Springsteen’s songs. Ostensibly the protagonist in ‘My Lover Man’ is in dialogue with an ex-lover. Charged with remorse, the narrative has a range of homoerotic markers. Notably, Springsteen does sing in the first person. Describing the song as a “deliciously explicit gay relationship song,”52 Fanshel sets about contesting various assertions made in the accompanying booklet to the box set Tracks by the two editors of Springsteen’s fan magazine, Backstreets, Christopher Philips and Erik Flannigan. Their outright dismissal of any same-gender or gay subtext prompts a degree of critical inquiry. They proceed to insist that Springsteen wrote the song from a woman’s point of view, something Fanshel declares as a “hegemonic silencing of queer voices.”53 In her understanding of the song, queering veritably abounds, which she backs up by a close look at the lyrical content: [N]othing in the narrator’s self-description indicates a female gender, except – from a heteronormative point of view – the narrator’s relationship to the lover man. A ‘she’ does appear in the song as lover man’s ex, with whom life ‘turned to black.’ One could argue that this indicates the sexual orientation of the beloved to be straight. However, his bisexuality is equally if not more compellingly indicated.54 That Springsteen has had little to say about this would seem to be in line with a general tendency on his part to counteract the “heterosexualising of both his music and image from the beginning.”55 Fanshel also draws our attention to Springsteen’s queer iconography in the Tracks booklet, where a photograph is positioned next to the printed lyrics of ‘My Lover Man’: Springsteen squats against a wall with his face turned and covered (nodding to the closet?) by his right hand, which bears a thick band on the fourth finger. Historically, a ring on the right fourth finger signified homosexuality to others in the know; the fingers of Springsteen’s left hand are tucked against his thigh, conspicuously obscuring the status of his left ring finger. His hairy chest emerges from a shirt unbuttoned to the waist, a cross dangling from his neck points down to the openlegged, full-frontal view of his crotch.56

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182  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics Relevant here is the construction of homoerotic desire. It is as if Springsteen himself calls into question the conventions and practices of male bonding. Remorse, a common emotion expressed in rock lyrics, has many implications. Normative codes of masculinity are made more acceptable as part of a communicative strategy that is carefully defined. Musical simplicity is also decisive when questioning Springsteen’s queerness and subtle refusal of normative signifiers. To start with, there are only three chords throughout, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant (G–C–D), and the harmonic rhythm is subtle in terms of variation and nuance, with one chord to two measures for most of the song. However, to the words my lover man, lyrical weight is added, and, as Moore and Middleton have maintained, harmonic sequences of this kind function as ‘open-ended repetitive gestures’57 in the sense that the repetition will continue ad lib. Equally spaced chords in ‘My Lover Man’ give a feeling of stasis and security, assisted by steady eight-beat percussion-pattern per measure, the gentle guitar backing, and the undulating synth melody. Such devices cushion Springsteen’s sung sentiments. The choice of instrumentation, their arrangement, and production also play a major role in supporting the pensive lyrics. The tempo of the track is on the quick side, and there is a steady buildup in material that leads to a prolonged instrumental fade-out (3:44–3:56). Here, the lingering on of the instruments (without vocals) draws the song gently to a close – a fitting pause for reflecting over what has been expressed. In this way, there is respite for thought following the final hook, my lover man, repeated four times within four measure cycles. As I have already pointed out, simple harmonic structures are a recurring trait in Springsteen’s songs, and in ‘My Lover Man’ this, in addition to a range of other features, typifies the Anglophone popular ballad.58 By comparison to the other songs interpreted in this chapter, ‘My Lover Man’ involves less technological processing (in terms of programming, sequencing, sampling, and so on). Compositionally, there is transparency in the control of all musical parameters: melody, texture, instrumentation, harmony, and production processing. Not dissimilar to Bob Dylan’s, Springsteen’s songs frame their lyrical content in what seems like a down-to-earth construction. Much of this has to do with the mode of delivery and idiolect that defines the songwriting practice in rock and pop ballads. I am eager to insist that arguing for simplicity in musical expression and song-form should not be without some critical reflection, as things are seldom what they seem. Markers of authenticity, I have found, are all the more beguiling in supposedly straightforward contexts; subtleties can easily go amiss. For instance, textural nuance in a vocal track of a recording is an intricate engineering matter where the positioning of the voice in the mix entails a good deal of decision making. In a profound way the regulation of vocal texture in the studio impacts greatly on a song’s meaning. When reminiscing about a past love relationship where his life with a woman turned to black, Springsteen’s voice is delicately pitted against the quiet accompaniment. Ever so gently

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  183 the line, and now you want our love back, is eased into the arrangement. A sense of tenderness results from the fusing of the counter-melody in the synth part with the voice and regular beats in the kit. An obvious intertext to this counter-melody is AC/DC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long,’ a song drenched in sexual innuendoes.59 This melody is even in the same key. The protagonist’s confessional outpouring might well be part of a shrewd ‘game of truth.’ Indeed, vocal sonority and clear lyrical delivery lays emphasis on the narrative. Vocal phrasing not only vents frustration, but also regret, as is implied by a story line oozing with nostalgia. The artist’s own biography always impinges on our interpretations of a song, and whereas Springsteen has said very little about the relationship he refers to, he leaves things openended.60 I would argue that he achieves this by constructing a performativity of concerted indifference. How his intent is mediated to the listener ambiguously is a necessary factor to take into consideration.61 If as Fenshel suggests the narrative in ‘My Lover Man’ centers on Springsteen’s intimacy with another man (in whatever form that may be), there is sufficient cause to believe this is a special relationship. Within a carefully controlled song, where every component of the composition and vocal expression is sensitively mediated, Springsteen sings about a lover man who could well be his lover man. Love is wrenched from him, we learn. ­Admitting that he wants to come close again, to find our beautiful selves, has a bitter twist to it in the almost sighing manner it is delivered. According to Fanshel, “this line speaks of the falsity of trying to live a heterosexual life.”62 The protagonist is in pursuit of a life where he can find his ‘true self,’ and the reflexivity in the details of articulating the lyrics is in stark contrast to the hypermasculinity expressed in other songs. In this respect, the song transcends homosociality by confronting the topic of unrequited love. A well-calculated maneuver is found in ‘My Lover Man.’ Knowingly ambivalent, Springsteen’s sentiments are opaque. Tactically, he injects life into a song that eroticizes and, arguably, normalizes same-gender relations in a storyline that can be experienced in different ways. One senses that a prime motive is to address gender politics. This song becomes a personal narrative of homosocial behavior and, arguably, queer sensibility. The queer aspect to his identity is actually less surprising than it might initially seem. Demonstratively homoerotic are his on-stage relationships with band members, Clarence Clemons and Steven Van Zandt. Numerous videos and live performances bear this out. It is well documented that the bonding between these men and Springsteen has been of a highly affectionate character. The frequent exhibitions of staged erotics seem queerly transgressive for their time, and with Clemons’ passing, Springsteen has not dampened his bond with Van Zandt, as Fanshel accounts: To this day, during any given performance, Springsteen and Van Zandt repeatedly share the microphone throughout the night, staring

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intensely into each other’s eyes, their lips nearly touching as they harmonise. They either face each other or spoon their bodies, their guitar fret boards conspicuously erect as they pulse together.63 Homosociality, a term developed in sociology, refers to nonromantic relationships between members of the same sex, and was problematized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her groundbreaking discourse on homosocial desire between men.64 One of Sedgwick’s pertinent observations is the continuum between homosociality and homosexuality, where male bonding also includes women, often in the form of ‘a love triangle.’ In recent times ‘bromance’ has been activated as a popularized designation of homosociality, and, while coined by Dave Carnie in the 1990s, it gained widespread usage in 2005. Springsteen’s bromance with the late Clarence Clemons (even more so than with Van Zandt) was undoubtedly pioneering in that it encapsulated a profound display of emotional intimacy and affection. The openness of their relationship helped to reshape perceptions of male friendships, with an intentional slippage between the platonic and homoerotic molded into their musical expressivity. Indeed, their close relationship on and off stage has likely been Springsteen’s longest lasting affair, and well exceeds the limitations of traditional homosocial practices. So, in summing up, let me return to the question of how one situates Springsteen in ‘My Lover Man.’ First, we need to recognize the opacity of the lyrics and their function as loaded signifiers. As Fanshel insists, the indication of a nonheterosexual orientation in this song is latent enough to prompt a homosexual reading. The only ‘she’ that appears in the text is a reference to an ex-girlfriend. Fanshel presents a persuasive argument for identifying Springsteen’s unequivocal bisexuality through a strategy of queering. Second, something in the intensity of the recorded performance gets the message across with conviction. Suffused with unprecedented tenderness, Springsteen’s melodic phrases convey the possibility of queer identification. The intimacy expressed during an almost tearful delivery suggests a very special moment that is revealing, and, in musical production terms, this is conveyed in a relatively uncomplicated sound recording where the voice is offset against simple instrumentation and within a mix that extracts every word with deliberate clarity. I read the aesthetic effect of this as integral to the self-fashioning of Springsteen as it brings forth a gendered position that is, on one level, the voice of the Other. There is a temptation to suggest that Springsteen is in the closet in many of his songs and that he gives us only glimpses of his queer desire. However, this would be an error of judgment, I feel, as imposing the closet on him would be to ignore an important element, namely the general estrangement of the masculine norm in musical expression. This is a main ingredient of queer-becoming, and moreover, a personal declaration of a special desire in a lost space. By mourning a loss of this kind Springsteen boldly steers away from heterosexuality’s constriction.

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Anti-Heroism and Grunge: Kurt Cobain Often referred to as the ‘Seattle sound,’ grunge, a subgenre of alternative rock, sprang out of hardcore punk, hard rock, and heavy metal. Aesthetically, it comprised a raw sound, defined by distorted electric guitars, dissonant harmony, extreme contrasts in dynamics, and angst-ridden lyrics. Following in the footsteps of the band, Soundgarden, Nirvana was next to sign to a major label, Geffen Records. Subsequently, their entry into the mainstream pop and rock market was successfully sealed with the release of Nevermind in 1991. Their single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ made them famous, with its fourpower-chord guitar riff (F–Bb–Ab–Db), and it became the teen revolution anthem for Generation X. Cobain’s fingering on the fretboard (he strikes the bottom three strings, but the fourth string resonates as well) actually made the F and Ab chords suspended 4th chords, anticipating the follow-up chord and imbuing the song with a sense of urgency.65 Cobain’s complex gendered identity and social standing need to be understood within the context of the music of Nirvana and the grunge movement in Seattle during the mid-1980s. The basis of Cobain’s own personal style is found in the music of David Bowie, the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, R.E.M., and even Motown. He idolized Michael Stipe, perhaps his most important role model. Stipe had been planning a joint project for some months to try to ‘save’ Cobain prior to his suicide. R.E.M.’s album Monster from 1994 was dedicated to River Phoenix, with the track, ‘Let Me In’ about Cobain – both close friends of Stipe, who died under tragic circumstances.66 Mark Mazullo has suggested that it was likely that the very entity of his performativity led to his demise: Cobain was somehow unable to transfer the results of that quest into music that transcended, in his mind, the standardized emptiness of a popular-music culture that he claimed to have deplored. In the end, the idea of cultural authenticity stifled and devoured Kurt Cobain. It remains among the most important issues in American popular music.67 Cobain’s struggle concerned realizing and living up to his own authenticity within a really tiny niche he fitted into, even though, as Mazullo reminds us, “his image and his music satisfied his fans tremendously.”68 Attempting to identify with queer artists such as David Bowie and Michael Stipe, who he saw as guiding if not blinding lights, “Cobain found himself unable to escape, least of all from the powerful cultural claims of authenticity that dominate rock discourse.”69 This created untold bother and vexation. His performative utterances (on and off stage) suggested he wanted to break free from the constraints of the norms attached to rock. Alas, depression, drug addiction, and the pressures of stardom cost him his life. When it comes to self-expression, artists turn to many mechanisms. Jan Muto has noted Cobain’s oppositional stance to all the social expectations

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of being a ‘real boy.’ In a study that seeks out the pressure points in Cobain’s identity, Muto catalogues a list of his ‘selfs’: 1 The physical self – offset by a grunge look (flannel shirt, sneakers and ragged jeans) and a physical appearance that was “slight and painfully thin.”70 To compensate for his frailty he would wear layers of clothes to bulk up and look larger than he was. 2 The rebellious youth self – a result of the “conflict with his social environment” and the strain of “socially accepted definitions.”71 At school he was bullied and castigated, and his response to this was “typically passive, more feminine than masculine.”72 3 The emotional self – a distancing of himself from others at the same time as always wanting to please. The anger and rawness of grunge was in contrast to a quiet, sweet, and broody boy when off stage. His emotional self was “less definitively masculine or feminine.”73 4 The father self – a difficulty with parental responsibility and issues concerning his own masculinity. Conflicting viewpoints on his paternal relationship to his daughter have suggested a high level of ambivalence toward fatherhood. 5 The husband self – in his marriage to Courtney Love (leader of the punk band Hole). This volatile relationship, which received continuous media attention, exacerbated Cobain’s drug dependency, increasing the intensity of his needs. Muto suggests that Cobain relied on “traditional role constructions as his savior,” which relieved him from “the constant tension he faced between masculinity and femininity.”74 6 The Voice of a Generation self – collective values within the framework of Gen-X. He was acutely aware that grunge “appropriates a feminine quality for a male audience.”75 That said, he gradually became tired of pleasuring others and shifted “toward a position of privilege, of masculine power.”76 It was at this point he lost that feeling of being part of a social collectivity with fierce demands on him. Particularly relevant is the role of music in shaping Cobain’s sensitivity (the Musical Self, I would add) and in particular the type of male audience he targeted. At the height of his fame, Cobain would mock his own gender-­ constructed-ness in a self-deprecating manner. This was a direct response to his boyhood and his feelings of being an outcast. Unlike most of the pop artists I have referred to in this book, Cobain’s musical identity is nonironic; seldom do his lyrics convey anything opposite to their literal meaning. Refusing to play out identities, he stages his own character in his songs in the form of elegant tropes of ‘naturalization.’ Over time, he was aware that his body had become the vehicle for not only himself and Nirvana, but also an entire global fan base. The fourth and final single from Nirvana’s Nevermind album was released in 1992. I want to argue that this song positions Cobain in a queer

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  187 light far removed from that of Springsteen. Entitled ‘In Bloom,’ it is all about his strong aversion to macho, redneck, chauvinistic men. G ­ rowing up in Aberdeen, Washington, he would often encounter intolerance and bigotry. Not unlike Somerville he loathed his hometown. In solidarity with minority groups of people, he would problematize his own identity from a young age, considering especially the fragility of his own sexuality. From all his accounts, we know that he did not exclude the possibility of being gay; he felt more bisexual, and this is revealed in many interviews. ‘In Bloom’ is a jibe at homophobic people who bypassed the gist of Nirvana’s messages. Written for his buddy and former roommate, Dylan Carlson, the narrative pokes fun at those boys who sing along ‘without getting it’: he’s the one who likes all the pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, […] but he knows not what it means. As with Springsteen’s ‘My Lover Man,’ the structure and content of ‘In Bloom’ is straightforward, consisting of an intro and verse-chorus formal structure. Yet there are also many differences as well, such as the chords and their stylistic contribution. In particular, the liberal deployment of chromatics muddies any clarity of a modal or tonal key, with the chords assuming a decisive role in constructing and sustaining these chromatic lines, and, as such, maintaining a level of ambiguity. A case in point is the opening riff, where a chromatic upward motif on Bb, B, and C seems to take precedence. This is confirmed by the chords Bb5–G–F5–Ab. Instead of G minor or G5, a G major chord is used, which creates an ambiguity with regard to key. Notably, it is the major third interval of this chord (a B natural tone) that determines the chromatic slide upward. Chromatic tones also appear in the eight-note turnaround that tracks Bb through Ab and A natural with a similar effect. The verse section that grows out of this consists of the root movement Bb to Gb to Eb, with a fourth measure turnaround on Cb and A natural, which, due to their chromaticism, beg a repeat. Such root movement is steered by the bass line as the vocals enter, and from this point onward there is a sense of Bb minor tonality in the verse, but of Bb major in the chorus, mainly a result of the vocals (see Examples 6.1 and 6.2). Consistently, the chords suggest a level of ambiguity. On the commencement of the verse there is a sudden drop in dynamics, with Cobain’s voice mixed to the front (0:26). Soft in its dynamic shading, his voice is however tinged with a snarl in a low bass register on the phrase sell the kids for food. This is made all the more vulnerable by the sudden absence of guitars, with the voice accompanied only by the bass line and kit. The second part of the verse introduces the chords back into the audio image, Bb5–Gbsus4–Eb–Cb5–A5, as the dynamics start rising in anticipation of the full-blown loud, large chorus (0:51). It is worth noting that the chords in the chorus are relatively simpler than in the verse, oscillating between Bb5 and G major for eight bars followed by the progression C–Eb–C–Eb and a further repeat of these twelve bars. A close examination of these chords within a tonal structure of minor verse and major chorus illuminates a number of

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188  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics peculiarities. Because of the addition of the fourth degree to the Gb chord, a chromatic oscillation from Bb to Cb ensues, continuing then into the two next bars (Bb being the fifth of Eb). When addressing the tonal ‘wrongness’ of this chord, it is prudent to consider how it assumes its own logic through such a chromatic function. Certainly, the more predictable and consonant Gb major chord would not have resulted in the same degree of harmonic restlessness. It is also here that the Eb major chord, rather than the anticipated Eb minor chord, emerges out of the chromatic movement. Chromatically the vocals target the major sixth (G) to the tonic (Bb), which is then reinforced by the guitar. The anticipated Eb minor then becomes a Eb major chord. While this slight bending of the framework hardly undermines the tonality, it does however emanate from the sustenance of a chromatic line in the vocals. Finally, the turnaround in the fourth bar implies chromatic motion rather than abiding by a set of tonal rules. Similarly, in the chorus, the pattern discernible in the vocals suggests a Bb major key, while at the same time conflicting with a G major chord. Once again the oscillation between Bb and G for eight measures results in a chromatic motif involving Bb to B natural, with B securing the ‘wrong’ or unexpected chord G major (as opposed to G minor). Importantly, the total effect of bending these rules renders the aesthetics not only spectacular but tense in this riff, with the major 3rd of the G chord (B) constantly colliding with the vocals that repeatedly target the tonic Bb through C. Inadvertent or not, such anachronisms (in the form of chromatic motif, Bb to B natural) are extended by the vocals to include the pitches C and Db. It is exactly at this point that Cobain cries out, knows not what it means. The music analysis of chromatic workings during ‘In Bloom’ suggests a definite disturbance to the otherwise predictable and logical possibilities of tonality. There is little doubt that fans hear and pick up such anomalies as alternatives, as Nirvana’s chromatic twists and turns heighten their grunge aesthetic, thus shaping their idiolect.77 indifferently q=156

voice

bass

drums

b 4 & b bbb 4 ‹

œ œ Sell

˙

j ‰ œ ¿ œ

¿ œ ˙

the kids

‰ Ó

Ϫ

for food

∑

œ œ œ œ >œ ‰ ‰ œ bœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ

? bb b 44 b b œ œ œ œ >œ ‰ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ ‰ œ > 4 ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿œ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿œ ¿ ¿ ¿ 4œ œ Œ / Œ Œ œ œ Œ > > mp

¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ œ Œ œ œ Œ >

¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ œ Œ œ œ Œ >

Example 6.1  Verse – ‘In Bloom.’ jeering q=156 voice

b4 & b 4 ˙™ he's B¨5

bass

drums

? bb 44 ™ œ

4¿ / 4œ ff

œ œ

the one

j œ œ o o ¿ ¿ œ ‰ œJ œ

œ o ¿ ‰ œJ

j ‰ œ œ œ

˙ G

œ o ¿ œ

who likes

j œ œ œ œ n œj o o o ¿ ¿ ¿ œ ‰ œJ œ ‰ œJ

Example 6.2  Chorus – ‘In Bloom.’

j œ

œ

all B¨5

œ ¿ œ

œ

our

j œ œ

pret - ty

œ œ œ o o ¿ ¿ œ ‰ œJ œ

j œ ˙

songs

œ o ¿ ‰ œJ

j ‰ œ œ œ

and he

G

œ o ¿ œ

œ œ œ œ o o ¿ ¿ œ ‰ œJ œ

œ œ o ¿ ‰ œJ

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  189 Toward the end of the entire track, a guitar solo takes over in one of the verse sections, delivered in an understated, quirky fashion that is still charged with an abundance of energy. Notably, the tritone (Db to G) is used as a device to exit the solo chromatically, as much as symbolizing the snide slant of the cynical narrative.78 This is just one of many features in Nirvana’s style, illustrating their flair for handling original harmonic directionality. Other musical elements include alternating material in terms of form, structure and pattern, as well as variation in instrument sound (‘clean’ vs. distorted guitars),79 vocal register (soft and low in the verse vs. loud and high in the chorus), bass rhythm (mobile eighth-note figure vs. long, sustained notes), kit riffs (low vs. high activity between verse and choruses – fills are only used in the choruses), and production (the audio space is filled up in the choruses while left bare in the verses). The producer of ‘In Bloom,’ Butch Vig, has explained how he wanted to get a good vocal track from Cobain. This he did by running the tape for the entire session. By the end of the recording session, he edited and overdubbed the best takes and stitched them together. In their study, Nevermind: Nirvana, Jim Berkenstadt and Charles Gross document the challenges involved in the recording of ‘In Bloom.’ Cobain’s urge to do things in one take and then move on meant that Vig had difficulties in working with many aspects of the production, including the vocal tracks. The task of balance was tricky as Cobain’s vocals became increasingly harder during the session (due to his irascible nature). Because of this, the input levels had to be carefully adjusted. Dave Grohl added upper backing harmonies in the chorus, which demanded meticulous recording skills, as his voice kept breaking up due to the high register. Vig has explained that he used Track 17 to record the guitar part with the Mesa Boogie amp during the choruses, and then Track 18 on the choruses with the Fender Bassman, which boosted, due to double-tracking, the full-blown effect of each chorus. The Bassman was well suited to grunge due to its thick sound and distortion, effectively saturating the low register. Queering is a striking feature in the video for ‘In Bloom.’ Its antihomophobic message is plainly spelled out in a performance that is nostalgic and disrespectful. An early music video for ‘In Bloom’ was produced in 1990 for the Sub Pop Video Network Program VHS compilation. However, it was the next video, with three different edits, that became well known, winning the award for Best Alternative Video at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1993. Good-humoredly, the band members are first filmed dressed in conservative Beach Boys–like outfits. A spoof on TV shows in the 1960s such as the Ed Sullivan Show, the video is directed by Kevin Kerslake, who had already made the band’s videos ‘Come As You Are’ and ‘Lithium.’ By contrast to the audio track of ‘In Bloom,’ the video, filmed in monochrome, includes nonstop screaming by teenagers throughout, which adds a sense of thrill to a live performance situation. Rather hilariously, the band is introduced by a variety show host (played by Doug Llewelyn) who refers to them as ‘thoroughly all right and decent fellows.’ Cobain has his hair slickly groomed back with large, thick black glasses (see Figure 6.3), while Novoselic has a

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190  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics short haircut. The entire video is shot with old Kinescope cameras, capturing the ambience of a bygone and naïve social context. The band’s squeakyclean image is soon shattered as they cross-dress and go amok, demolishing, with merriment, the set and instruments. Perhaps the most provocative scene is the genderbending guitar solo section (3:16–3:38). Dressed in a nightie, Cobain simulates sex with Novoselic. Lying on his back, bass guitar pointed upward, Novoselic gleefully welcomes Cobain going down on him as their guitars hint at touching one another. Such a crude simulation of frottage is anarchic given the context, executed with passion, compulsion, and defiance. Similar queer moments have dominated Nirvana’s live performance, such as Cobain often French kissing Novoselic on stage and rubbing up on him. One might ask what were his intentions and how might we read such bromance affection? Certainly, pushing homosociality to its limits and crossing over into the taboo of same-gender relations says much about Cobain’s rebellion against societal norms. Cobain would have known that, for decades prior to Nirvana, male artists have flirted with one another on stage: Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, David Bowie, David Lee Roth, Iggy Pop, just to name a few. Also, he would have witnessed how in popular music male performers regularly negotiate the rigid conditioning of masculinity by dismantling norms on stage.

Figure 6.3  Kurt Cobain in the video ‘In Bloom’

During the video ‘In Bloom,’ Cobain teases out the gendered and sexual traits of male norms by switching from his phony role as the ‘decent,’ smiling, straight blond boy to the somewhat crazed and disheveled bloke in a dress, who then makes out with his mate on the stage floor. Accepting that

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  191 gender is a prime concern of Cobain, such a demonstration of intimacy between him and Novoselic in this scene might not be as unexpected as it seems. More relevant though is the degree of anger unleashed in his performance as he attempts to smash up the set; indeed, a central emotive marker in grunge. As I see it, the cross-dressing and sexual advances are more than self-mockery; they mark divergence from a stable norm. Dress codes, when broken, provide a site for renegotiating, as Cobain becomes enmeshed in the gender conflicts of his ego and interaction with others. Further, his use of pop idioms in this song and others from Nevermind is a concerted effort to deconstruct the authenticity of grunge. Given that pop is commonly perceived as superficial, Cobain knew that the politics of appropriation might be rendered suspect. That is to say, his earnest characterization of himself in the track, ‘In Bloom,’ was an attempt to disclose the very constructed-ness of his own gender norms. This he did by placing himself under suspicion within a queer space. It was as if his claim to authenticity could only be accessed through a self-reflexive admission of his queerness. To move forward was to confront homophobia by severing the pact of fraternity stylistically; by taunting grunge with splashes of pop he was sending up the fans who missed the point. Ingeniously, Cobain championed a powerful sense of empathy in his implementation of a queer sensibility that dispelled the link between authenticity and masculinity. He demonstrated so vividly that performativity succeeds as a result of the political efficacy of messing up styles and dissing his own identity. In this way he managed to undergird patriarchy and activate new versions of what it means ‘to be a boy.’ However, during the process it is uncertain whether he grasped the normativity of his own whiteness (paradoxically, a cornerstone of queer culture in itself). Again, it is worth stressing that the transgressing of identificatory sites of sexuality, gender, and race in pop performativity are only temporary utopias. Thus, the skinny boy who aspires to be a girl in a pop video was only the start of a strategy for addressing disempowered politics. In Cobain’s world the desire to abandon the confines of heteronormativity meant reconfiguring ideas of which gender he was. This extraordinary performer showed that the melancholic subject negotiates ideology only through resistance; his incandescent queerness was a perturbation of class and gender norms. These norms he showed us were not fixed but forces of resistance and intervention. This grunge hero left no room for normalcy to win over difference. His suicide was the end of hope for change as he snuffed out any utopian longing. Only in death could he terminate the stranglehold of the present, while his music continued into the future as a form of insistence for something else.

Concluding Thoughts Queer performances show up the dilemmas of being a boy in vastly different contexts; they establish a basis for critiquing gendered representations in music. Nuances of humorous intent are played out on many levels, and particularly relevant here is the question of reception. As we have seen with

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192  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics ­ irvana, although a targeted fandom might not grasp the intended message, N it will experience it in an oblivious manner. This is because pop texts are loaded with unfixed signifiers: it is in this way that music sets up a special relationship between the persona and sonic signifier. What interests me most is the diversity surrounding masculinity, bromance, and opacity. The adoption of a masculine look, attitude, or gesture in all the cases I have presented conveys an affirmation or rejection of an assigned gender. ­Musical style, as I have argued, contributes to proclaiming a performer’s gender and sexual identity, and often this can be communicated within a context that demonstrates a desire to be someone different from who one is. My suggestion is that the sound, as much as the look, operates as an expression of one’s impression of the world. As we have seen, the stylizing of gendered performance can be a strategy of resistance; it can come in the form of a retaliation, refusal, and revolt. It is the construction of a musical style that presents us with the mannerisms that both expose and conceal gender. Pop performances are about lifestyle, instated and fashioned by music. Any divergence from norms can lead to unlimited possibilities for queering. I have selected Beyoncé, Anthony Hegarty, Boy George, Janelle Monáe, Bruce Springsteen, and Kurt Cobain to illustrate that gender is tinged with melancholy and more. It is the performativity of male-ness that becomes a discursive element in itself, as we get a glimpse of various states of rupture and anxiety. What has preoccupied me mainly here are the set of components that are not reducible to norms. Again, how is this captured in a recording? And what about the communities that artists inhabit? In the next and final chapter I will consider fashion and musical style alongside examples of subcultural and mainstream acts to explore transgressive intent. My main goal is to inspect the queering of human agency within music composition and production.

Notes 1. Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” 161. 2. Muñoz, “Cruising Utopia,” 189. 3. Steinskog, “‘If I Were a Boy,’” 3. 4. See Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 143–51, for an astute interpretation of Madonna’s queerness. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Ibid., 12. 7. Notably, the phrase sich einfühlen was first employed by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), whose philosophy of language spawned an important ­theory of interpretation. 8. Frith, Performing Rites, 262. 9. Ibid., 272. 10. Krell, “Contours through Covers.” It is important to emphasize Silveira’s ­Canadian-Portuguese background, as well as the fact that he began hormone replacement therapy in 2010. 11. Ibid., 484.

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  193 2. Butler, “Critically Queer,” 20. 1 13. See Muscio, Cunt, for ideas on the transferability of ownership and the detachment of the term cunt from its misogynist context. Her argument, simply put, is that if a word has been kidnapped, it can always be taken back. 14. Palmer, “Bruce Springsteen and Masculinity,” 116. 15. Ibid. 16. Muto, “He Was the Woman of His Dreams,” 82–83. 17. Barbara Ellen, “The Trials of St. Antony,” Observer, Sunday, July 3, 2011. 18. Ibid. 19. Originating in the UK and US during the 1960s, baroque pop is a music subgenre that fused classical music, orchestral pop, rock, and baroque music. It includes instruments not common to pop and rock music, such as harpsichords, string sections, oboes and French horns. Compositional traits found in baroque music contrapuntal melodies and functional harmony patterns are prominent. Importantly, a main stylistic marker is identifiable in dramatic and melancholic gestures. Baroque pop has had a revival since the 1990s by groups such as Divine Comedy, Belle and Sebastian, and Antony and the Johnsons. 20. You Are My Sister is also a four-track CD EP, released by Antony and the Johnsons in 2005 on Secretly Canadian Records and Rough Trade Records in the UK and Europe. 21. Caroline Sullivan, review of Boy George/Antony Hegarty, The ­Guardian, August 9, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/09/boy-georgeantony-hegarty-review. 22. By ‘vocal costuming’ I am referring to the explicit details of his voice and how this is ‘dressed up’ in terms of an amalgamation of all discernible features, such as vocal timbre and tone, melodic embellishment, and technological manipulation through recording and production processes. I have theorized this in some depth within an earlier study. See Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy, 123–41. 23. Steinskog, “Voice of Hope.” 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Wicke, “The Art of Phonography,” 164. 28. See Théberge, “The ‘Sound’ of Music,” for a detailed theorization of this phenomenon. 29. Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy, 153–82. 30. Nancy, Listening, 43. 31. Steinskog, “Voice of Hope.” 32. Moylan, The Art of Recording, 58. 33. Ibid., 210. 34. Ibid., 219. 35. Lacasse, “The Phonographic Voice,” 235. 36. Interview with Emery Dobyns and Stewart Lerman, Electronic Musician 20, no. 1, January 2009, http://www.emusician.com/gear/1332/vocal-cords-antony-­hegartyunsmarts-technology/40617 (accessed July 20, 2014). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Diane Solway, “Mourning Glory,” W Magazine, July 2011, http://www.wmagazine.com/people/celebrities/2011/07/antony-hegarty (accessed July 22, 2014).

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194  To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics 40. See Butler, Bodies That Matter. 41. Solway, ibid. 42. By 1985 Somerville had left Bronski Beat to form another band, The Communards (with Richard Coles, a classically trained pianist). Their hits included ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way,’ the biggest selling UK hit of 1986. In 1988 Somerville would pursue a solo career, releasing his first solo album, Read My Lips in 1989. It is worth noting that this included a cover of another major queer song, namely, Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel,’ which became a big hit. 43. “Small Town Boy,” interview by Martin Aston, Attitude, July 2014. 44. Dibben, “Vocal Performance and the Projection of Emotional Authenticity.” 45. Also see Straw, “Authorship,” for a persuasive critique of ‘Authorship,’ where the details of a song’s assemblage are seldom transparent. 46. My position on ‘female masculinity’ is informed by the work of Halberstam in Female Masculinity. 47. My gratitude to Erik Steinskog for having drawn my attention to this point. 48. See Royster, Sounding Like a No-No, for her discourse on Post-Soul and a range of important perspectives on eccentricity, queerness, and racial reinvention. As well as Monáe, she draws into her study artists such as Eartha Kitt, Stevie Wonder, Grace Jones, Michael Jackson, and Prince. 49. Clarke, Dibben, and Pitts draw attention to social function: “It is also vital to remember that jazz, like most improvising traditions, is a social phenomenon, and that its basic material is distributed within the collective consciousness, or ‘cultural memory,’ of a community, rather than being either the property or the product of an individual.” Clarke et al., Music and Mind in Everyday Life, 53. 50. In 2012, at the age of 63, Bruce Springsteen was a major supporter for the passing of a same-sex marriage ballot in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington. Equal treatment for our gay brothers and sisters, let their voices be heard, and yes to equal marriage was ‘The Boss’s’ mantra. 51. This song was recorded between December 1990 and January 1991 and written in the summer–fall of 1990. 52. Fanshel, “Beyond Blood Brothers,” 370. 53. Ibid., 371. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 377. 56. Ibid., 371. 57. See Moore, Song Means, Chapter 3, and Middleton, “Popular Music Analysis and Musicology.” 58. What is relegated to the verse is very much a matter of interpretation. While the song consists of mainly four verses, I would argue that the short refrain on the words my lover man, which ends each verse, also suggests a very short chorus. In my conversations with Lars Norberg, he has suggested that the verses might be considered as prolonged in AABB structure, with a fake ending that culminates on the words, ‘lover man,’ followed by the synth theme. Hence, the chorus could just be the words of the title and nothing more, or conversely the whole extra B part of the verse and the theme part. 59. My gratitude to Lars Norberg for pointing this out to me. 60. See Fanshel, “Beyond Blood Brothers.” 61. There is always a discrepancy between a listener’s experience of a song and that which the artist might or might not have intended. See Moore, Song Means,

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To Be a Boy? Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics  195 208–11, for a similar argument, where he insists that intention and reception are never coextensive. This forms part of his general critique on the issues surrounding the persona in popular song. 62. Fanshel, “Beyond Blood Brothers,” 371. 6 3. Ibid., 374. 6 4. See Sedgwick, Between Men, for one of the most influential texts in Queer Studies. In particular, the introductory chapter to this book charts the course of feminism, especially ‘radical feminism,’ and its interventions with Gay and Lesbian Studies. 65. Thanks to Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik for this important detail, as much as to Lars Norberg who adds that the fourth string is not an open string but barred as well. This means that when sounded, the resulting effect is the fourth on top of the power chord. 66. Craig McLean, “REM reborn,” The Telegraph, March 8, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/3671711/REM-reborn.html. 67. Mazullo, “The Man Whom the World Sold,” 741–42. 6 8. Ibid., 741. 6 9. Ibid. 70. Muto, “He Was the Woman of His Dreams,” 74. 7 1. Ibid. 7 2. Ibid., 75. 7 3. Ibid. 7 4. Ibid., 80. 7 5. Ibid. 7 6. Ibid. 77. Lars Norberg contributed significantly to my working out of the chromaticism in ‘In Bloom,’ and I am grateful for his meticulous attention to detail, especially in terms of harmony, techniques of articulation and consultations on the matter of the opening riff. 78. Thanks to Derek Scott for pressing me a bit on this point. Historically, the tritone has played a powerful aesthetic role in denoting dissonance, especially within modern classical and Romantic music, where evil connotations were exploited through this interval. In his composition, Dante Sonata, Franz Liszt uses the tritone to denote hell, while Wagner tunes his timpani to C and F sharp in the opening of the second act to Siegfried to evoke a sinister mood. 79. ‘Clean’ refers to the electric guitar without effects, such as distortion and reverb.

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7 Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion

Be the best version of yourself rather than a copy of someone else.1 —Conchita Wurst

The year 2014 was a year of very queer happenings. American actress and reality star Laverne Cox became the first openly transgender person to grace the cover of Time magazine in June 2014, while Panti Bliss, Ireland’s most celebrated drag queen and gay rights activist, ignited a major national debate on homophobia.2 Hailed as one of the best speeches ever, Panti’s ‘Noble Call’ prompted responses of support from queer celebrities, such as Madonna, RuPaul, Stephen Fry, Graham Norton and the Pet Shop Boys. Then there was the fashion icon, Lea T (Lea Cerezo), a Brazilian-born transgender model and fierce advocate for the LGBT community, who became the face for the US hair care product, Redken. With her punk-rock look, she was the first openly transgender model to promote a global cosmetic. The year 2014 was also the year when Andreja Pejić (born Andrej Pejić), famous for fashioning both men’s and women’s clothing, underwent sex reassignment surgery in the full glare of the media spotlight.3 Only a year before, she had been featured with Bowie in his video, ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight),’ together with Saskia de Brauw, Tilda Swinton, and Iselin Steiro. There can be little doubt that the pop sensation of 2014 was the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), Austria’s Thomas Neuwirth.4 ­Entering the contest under the aegis of his drag stage persona, Conchita Wurst, he stirred up a lot of trouble. With dark, smoldering looks, wavy black hair, heavily made-up eyes, and trimmed beard, Neuwirth insisted that the female pronoun only be applied to his Conchita character. Neuwirth had invented an imaginative story around Conchita, who was born in the Colombian mountains and married to the French burlesque dancer, Jacques Patriaque (in real life, a good friend). Neuwirth claimed that Conchita was ‘an everyday girl,’ regardless of her very ‘manly’ beard. Gleefully receiving her trophy at the ESC in Copenhagen, Conchita yelled out: “We are unity and we are unstoppable.” Relayed instantly around the world, this message targeted politicians who oppose LGBT rights, not least the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his administration. During the final rehearsals of the song contest, tempers started raging over Conchita’s

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  197

Figure 7.1  Conchita Wurst in the video ‘Rise Like A Phoenix’

inclusion. Protesters in Russia accused the ‘drag artist with the beard’ of turning the event into a hotbed of sodomy, while the Armenian favorite contestant, Aram MP3, sided with anti-trans supporters, claiming that this was ‘not natural.’ Neuwirth felt compelled to explain in a polite tone that the beard is “a statement to say that you can achieve anything, no matter who you are or how you look. If you have problems understanding that, then I would be happy to sit down with you and explain it to you in more detail.”5 Winning the ESC turned Conchita into a global superstar. The Daily Mail raved that this was a victory for all the people who believe in a future without discrimination based on respect and tolerance. Adding insult to injury for those who opposed her, Conchita accepted an invitation to perform in front of thousands of delegates at an anti-discrimination event held at the European Parliament in Brussels in October 2014.6 Conchita’s heart-wrenching performance of her winning song, ‘Rise Like a Phoenix,’ gave more than a flicker of hope for the LBGT community in Europe. Her talent as a beautiful singer articulated a queerness with powerful political sentiments as, quite magically, her voice soared to places that traverse social and political norms. Queerly, Conchita demonstrated that drag has the potential for political mobility. On this matter, and in reference to the band, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Halberstam states: In queer subcultures, I am willing to propose, many performers ­reimagine gender, race, sexuality, age, and politics, and in the process

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they produce new models of temporality, history, and identity. Temporality has recently become a hot topic in queer theory, and in my own work on what I call “queer temporality,” I claim that queers inhabit time and time-bound narratives in necessarily different ways from straight people.7 One such example is found in queercore, a subcultural movement that is predominantly white, originating in North America in the mid-1980s. ­Distinguished by themes of sexuality, revolt, and gender identity, queercore’s music is anarchic, celebratory, and liberating. Jodie Taylor has defined it as an ideological response that somewhat ambiguously “rejects the notion of cultural unity or cohesion among sexual minorities, and irreverently attacks the established figureheads, symbols, and codification of mainstream gay culture.”8 As part of my study in this chapter, I am interested in how queercore unites a segment of the queer community while functioning as a form of assimilation. Moreover, an objective of this chapter is to highlight the vivid aesthetic distinctions between an anarchic white-based genre and the sexual politics of black masculinity in hip hop. On the way, this involves a diversion into drag, which includes a reading of the The Supreme Fabulettes’ performance, ‘A Drag Queen is a Cowboy’s Best Friend.’ Heuristically, my aim is to tag the creative originality of their queerness to new strategies of vogueing in hip hop. To this end, I return to Le1f, with a critique of his video ‘Soda,’ which serves as leverage for him registering an impassioned act of queering. Le1f is part of a growing community that animates the historically homophobic domain of hip hop. As with his contemporaries, Zebra Katz and Mykki Blanco, Le1f’s self-conscious queering interrupts patriarchal masculinity as well as calling into question homonormative aesthetics and desires. From one perspective, these artists’ videos are replete with naïve and mischievous codes, which parody identity as something conspicuously colorful, dashing, and excessive. An idealist trajectory permeates all their work, highlighting a general struggle for diversification. I argue that the transformative force of their queering in hip hop emboldens Otherness – they are proud, out, and flaming. Engrossed in relinquishing any suggestion of a normalized character, they critique their everyday world and affirm the resurgence of vogueing practices in New York City’s subcultural enclaves. Seeking the antinormative junctures of gender expression, their performances are fabulous romps; they mark a special queer becoming. Thus, in reconfiguring the stories from their past, they anticipate a queer future with minoritarian solidarity, staking out a space that gets us to rethink sexual orientation.

Queercore: Aesthetics and Transgression Sidestepping the format of the commercial pop song, queercore groups have identified with the marginalization of LGBT communities by turning to what might be described as a DIY style.9 Originating in the zine

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  199 J.D.s (juvenile delinquents) of Bruce LaBruce and G. B. Jones, queercore’s initial appellation was ‘homocore.’ With an objective to diversify the scene, the first advocates of queercore set out to avoid the militant orthodoxies of dominant gay and lesbian communities. The first compilation of queercore songs, J.D.s Top Ten Homocore Hot Parade Tape, was released on a cassette tape in 1990, and included The Apostles’ song, ‘Forbidden Love,’ a personal narrative based on the experiences of musicians Andy Martin and Dave Fanning, who later joined the band. Consequently, the band’s popularity declined because of their blatant gay identities and strong anti-anarchist, pacifist, punk-oriented sentiments. With their origins in punk rock and anarcho-punk, The Apostles’ style is eclectic, drawing on numerous sources that ascribe to a soundscape that is experimental and oppositional. Their lyrics are politically charged and defiant, as exemplified in the refrain of ‘Forbidden Love’ in which Andy M ­ artin shouts out: is this the love, the forbidden love, take your love away. The snarling of the phrase, come back another day, showcases all the markers of punk rock and, not least, an uncontrollable libido. Techniques involving exaggerated pauses between melodic phrases (where moments of deafening silence feel excruciatingly long), together with the articulation of a pretentious, saccharine, high-pitched dolce vocal tone, disclose The ­Apostles’ fantastical approach to songwriting. I want to argue that a high degree of risk taking is predicated upon the pragmatics of ‘being queer,’ which, in The Apostles’ case, is musically grounded by the subtle destabilization of stylistic features. Above all, their aggressive handling of themes is a way of confronting prejudice, gender inequality, and the violation of individual rights, all of which are also blatantly evident in the songs of the Australian queer punk band Anal Traffic from Brisbane. In her fascinating study of this band, Taylor identifies a camp and carnivalesque sensibility that dislodges stereotypical depictions of gay male sexuality. This comes about “via the physicality of the band’s performance and through the juxtaposition of the performers’ bodies and gender identities against the sexual themes explored in their music.”10 Anal Traffic’s physical image is commensurate with their exposition of sexual narratives that “deal with themes of overtly aggressive homosexual masculinity.”11 The group’s queerness is “playfully undermined by the collective physicality of the band.”12 Destabilizing gratuitous gay stereotypes by means of hypermasculine markers (leather men and butch bears and cubs) works to fracture the signifiers of “masculinity, boyishness, androgyny, and femininity.”13 Anal Traffic thus turns to ‘straight’ queering tactics to dislodge all notions of gay male homogeneity. In this sense, homonormativity is contested by a unique, sociopolitical approach to musical performance. Another queercore band worth considering is the San Francisco band, Pansy Division, formed in 1991. Comprising mainly gay musicians, the band would appeal to a more mixed audience than The Apostles, with the

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aim to align their punk style to indicators of sexual orientation, as vocalist and guitarist, Jon Ginoli, explains: I usually use the phrase “gay rock band” as opposed to “gay punk band” even though we are, in part, a punk band. The problem is that when you call yourself a punk band you open yourself up to comparison to a lot of things that we’re not really very comparable to. I mean, I think there’s a lot of punk rock that’s really boring, really tedious, and just repeats other things that have gone before, or is more hardcore-oriented and not melodic, just kinda noisy. So, we come from a place where punk was really important to us, but what punk is now is not so important to us. I say we’re a gay rock band, because it encompasses what we do, but if you call us a gay punk band, too, yeah, it’ll work. But I think people’s idea of punk is usually more harder rocking than us.14 Songs from their fifth album, Absurd Pop Song Romance, recorded by Steve Albini, facilitate powerful elements of vulgarity and social protest. Released in 1998, the album signaled a general departure from their earlier, more sex-oriented tracks. Oscillating between the pessimistic and jubilatory, Ginoli’s performance style exhibited all the stylistic traits of queercore. Particularly their album, That’s So Gay, from 2009, indicated a major change in the band’s all-gay lineup. At this stage, straight vocalist and guitarist Joel Reader, who had just joined the band, assumed a position of solidarity with his fellow band mates. No better was this illustrated than in the song, ‘Some of My Best Friends,’ which deals with a guy sticking up for his gay friends. So militant, hostile, and offensive were the lyrics that iTunes would carry an ‘explicit material’ warning. At one point in the song, Reader yells out, I might not be gay, but I know this much is true, I’d rather fuck an ­asshole, than be one just like you. Priding itself in its fiercely anti-­homophobic, queer-straight vocalist, Pansy Division employs a range of melodic t­echniques. ­Frequently melodies are assigned to harmony, with musicians and songwriters often deciding on the chords before the tune. In ‘Some of My Best Friends’ there is a sense that the period structuring of the melody is steered by the harmonic rhythm to get the impression of Reader’s persona across.15 Working out the melodic and harmonic framework provides a primary source for understanding how subjectivity is constructed, and the verse in ‘Some of My Best Friends’ is a good place to consider this. Following an eight-bar instrumental introduction (dominated by distorted guitar power chords), the lyrics enter with a chord progression in D  mixolydian, arching over I–V (D–Gmaj7–C–G–A) [0:15–0:30]. The ­melody rises and falls intervallically, as harmonic stability is attained in the next part of the verse by an identical I–V movement. More pronounced variation then ensues, involving a chromatic descent in the bass with the flattened mediant chord, Bb major: D–D/C#–C–C/B–Bb–A [0: 30–0:45].

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  201 Slightly nasal in quality, Reader’s vocal timbre is located in a high register, albeit non-falsetto. Straining up to high pitches adds weight to the l­yrics with full-throttle vocality; the effect is forceful, detached, and delivered with a matter-of-fact insolence. Given the politics of this song, the singer’s own vocal costuming comes across all-decisive. Melodic intensity reaches a new height in the final coda, with the persistent repetition of the lyrical loop, Some of my best friends, some of my best best friends [2:40–3:12]. By over-accenting each word, especially on ‘best,’ an air of scornful retort is discharged. At this point the melody is taken up and amplified by a forceful, distorted guitar line over eight notes (I–V). The guitar has the ‘last word’ in the song, punctuated by a long sustained full stop on the tonic (D) [3:12– 3:40]. Effectively, the guitar’s melodic response and cadential function is an extension of the persona; by taking over from the human voice it reinforces all that has already been said. In contrast to many of the songs I have considered elsewhere in this book, ‘Some of My Best Friends’ is unambiguous in its message. It reveals a general tendency in queercore to mediate lyrical meaning at face value. Meaning is encoded in straightforward melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, which directly confronts the listener. The voice seldom wanders, inhabiting an audio space that is rhythmically precise. Stylistically, this functions to foreground the trustworthiness of the performer himself and his attitude of being upfront – all in all, this operates as a potent stimulant for reflection. Thus, Reader’s performance is a fitting example of what Moore terms ‘first person authenticity,’ where the performer articulates on his behalf “what it’s like to be me.”16 Crucial to subject formation in queercore are specific markers. The all-­ female lesbian band, Tribe 8, also originating in San Francisco, demonstrates this well. Their choice of name comes from the practice of tribadism – the ‘tribe 8’ referring to tribade, a term denoting a female homosexual. The two main band members are lead singer Lynn Breedlove and guitarist ­Leslie Mah. Breedlove’s highly controversial performances are legendary. Tribe 8’s provocative songs deal with taboo themes, such as transgender, fellatio, S/M, and pornography, and Breedlove would often appear topless, donning a strap-on dildo, egging on her fans to engage with her. In an interview with Todd Wiese, Breedlove explains the choice of Tribe 8’s song titles and content: One of our big hits is “Power Boy” which is about hating cops and how fucked up they are. Every punk rock band has to have a cop song. “Frat Pig” is about fraternity boys, one of their favorite rituals being gang rape. Our recommended solution which is “Gang ­Castrate.” That’s like a pretty big all- time favorite. Usually during that song I’ll do some kind of theatrics like chop off the testicles of big rubber dick or chop off a rubber dick and wave it around and toss it to the crowd. The crowd usually eats it up, likes it a lot, and knows all the words.17

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202  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion Describing their music, Breedlove has said: “Well, I’ll tell ya … We’re punk rock, thrash. We have lots of different influences, but pretty much we’re punk rock, hard core, rock and roll.”18 Such an anti-assimilationist attitude to musical style is epitomized in the track, ‘Frat Pig,’ from the album Fist City (1995). In the lead into the chorus, Breedlove screams, We got something for you baby, come on baby, castrate frat pigs, castrate frat pigs. Amidst a wave of heavy, distorted guitar chords and thrash drumming, her aggressive sentiments strike home. Tribe 8’s queercore style is not only typified by their anarchic approach to musical styling, but also by the form of a storyline that is rife with political agitation. In ‘Frat Pig’ a narrative of subservience stems from the punk rock style, consisting of repeated quaver beats in a fast tempo in 4/4, virtuosic melodic guitar phrases, a dense mix, and aggressively shouted vocals. Most of all, the band’s queerness is a result of exaggeration in terms of the lyrical content and vocality. For example, the emphasis on the word ‘castrate’ is full of malice, dealing with rape at the same time as being playful. The pained sentiments expressed in the performance of ‘Frat Pig’ confront the worst aspects of heterosexism that unfold in the rituals of frat boys raping girls. Critiquing the dark side of masculinity, Tribe 8 attack the practices of bromance in lines such as, so you make her the catalyst, vicarious object of your homoerotic fantasy [1:56–2:08]. A subtle blurring in the musical markers discloses the radicality of punk, while at the same time stressing the queercore aesthetics that signal a departure from more mainstream punk groups, such as The Sex Pistols. Tribe 8’s idiom is anarchic, shocking, and female-centric. This has its roots in the flagrant disruption of gender norms, with Breedlove’s display of female masculinity hyperactively dysphoric. Her performances accentuate the continuum of female masculinity, which, as Salamon has suggested, “runs from soft butch to transsexual, and is thus intertwined with a continuum of bodily dysphoria.” Ultimately this achieves two missions: “It unmoors identity from bodily morphology and it proposes a model in which a firm boundary between male and female is impossible to fix.”19 As with gender, music follows its own set of traditions and norms, which are continuously contested over time. The derisive contempt found within queercore performances hinges on imaginary and musicalized identifications. I would suggest that the impetus behind a song such as ‘Frat Pig’ could be likened to the ‘death drive,’ which in Edelman’s definition, “names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.”20 Illustrative of Edelman’s proclamation are the tracks by the Brooklyn-based electro-pop band, JD Samson & MEN. Consisting of Jocelyn Rachel ‘JD Samson’ and Johanna Fateman, this band has dealt specifically with issues of trans awareness, sexual compromise, and global issues. Their debut album, Talk About Body, released in 2011, took up political and social issues in a queercore version of the Pet Shop Boys. ­Producing music that possesses a banality that makes it ‘easy listening’ on one level, their messages are fiercely crude, genderbending, and hostile.

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  203 As I have attempted to point out so far, all kinds of gendered representations occur in queercore. Consider the representations of cowboys, who feature in numerous queercore albums, including Pansy Divison’s Pile Up, released on Lookout in 1995. This included various cover songs, such as Latin country singer Ned Sublette’s ‘Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,’ a satire on gay men and cowboys. In addition, one should not bypass the presence of cowboys in mainstream pop references, such as George Michael’s album, Listen Without Prejudice and the track, ‘Cowboys and Angels,’ all about a three-way bisexual relationship Michael was in when writing the song.21 And, lest we forget there is the camp ‘space cowboy,’ who got an airing in Chapter 5 in my analysis of Jay Kay. Mention could hardly go amiss of Boy George’s single, ‘A Drag Queen is a Cowboy’s Best Friend,’ in a genre quite distinct from queercore. Accompanied by a spoof video that he directed (with Dean Stockings) in 2013 for The Supreme Fabulettes, the narrative unfolds during an unlikely encounter between three drag queens and a group of three hetero-acting, hunky cowboy men, one of whom is a Johnny Hazzard, amongst the highest-grossing gay porn stars in the US at the time the video was made. Their queerness is signified musically in a twangy country-western/queercore/cabaret-stylistic mixture that showcases a highly polished performance as slick and airbrushed as the Fabulettes themselves. Just as was the case with the drag cowgirls, focus in the video is on the straight-acting gay cowboys and their ironic take on hegemonic masculinity when flirting with drag queens.

Figure 7.2  The Supreme Fabulettes in the video ‘A Drag Queen is a Cowboy’s Best Friend’

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204  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion Corey Johnson has conducted a study of the contradictory messages exhibited by queer men when resisting the stigma of homosexuality. In spite of their identities, homonormative males regularly sever their links to effeminacy by amplifying the features of hegemonic masculinity. This complex yet common tendency, Johnson contends, is detectable in males who occupy places that they not only understand, but also re-negotiate on an equal footing with straight men. In his research into gay male representations in a country western bar, Johnson found that straight-acting queer men consciously reinforce a privileged form of masculinity.22 Johnson postulates that the idealized links to conventional norms of masculine strength and its symbolic power become the driving force behind moving away from the stereotypical effeminate practices of mainstream gay culture or, for that matter, the hypermasculine iconography found in subcultures. This tactic of subject positioning warrants critical response, and addressing the appropriation and faking of cowboy-ness, Johnson concludes that [i]n these environments, gay men find themselves surrounded by those who share in their non-dominant sexual orientation, aiding in the creation and affirmation of non-heterosexual identities and permitting them to experiment with and/or perform multiple masculinities.23 Thus, the gay male’s appropriation of and experimentation with hegemonic masculinity in the form of the cowboy is in itself a transgressive act. Intentional or not, it constitutes features of homonormativity that undermine the visible representations of Others (say, effeminate men) who are all too often denigrated and marginalized. By inhabiting the straight through the ‘unseen’ is strategic and, in many cases, survivalist, not least because the naturalization of gender presupposes a specific alignment to sexual orientation. This is endorsed by Ahmed, who notes that the “discontinuity of queer desires can be explained in terms of objects that are not points on the straight line: the subject has to go ‘off line’ to reach such objects.”24 Hence, the straight-playing queer cowboy feels compelled to go ‘off line’ in order to turn away from the other sex and toward his own sex. Given this, as Ahmed points out, “turning towards one’s sex is read as the act of threatening to put one’s sex into question.”25 Mark Simpson explains the motives for this in his book, It’s a Queer World: Homosexuality is still seen by many, if not most, as the worst possible failure in the process of masculinisation, widely equated with the ruin of the family and Western civilization. Why? Precisely because of its attractiveness. Official heterosexuality must be a deeply unfulfilling and unrewarding lifestyle if boys must be forbidden from even considering the alternative.26 The question remains: How do we identify queer desire along different lines and in ‘unlikely’ popular genres? Moreover, what does it mean to salvage

Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  205 queer desire as a failure of heterosexuality? With these questions in mind, I want to further consider how queer bodies are raced in pop culture in a group of black, queer-hop males living in New York.

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Ball Shows and Whiplash Rhymes A new era of LGBT hip hop has dawned in the 2010s, with black, college-­ educated performers eager to position themselves in a genre that has been rife with homophobia. In 2012, the Guardian picked up on the new wave of queer rappers and the hype surrounding their trailblazing performances: Ball culture has even found its way into mainstream hip hop. Nicki Minaj is more drag than a drag queen, A$AP Rocky calls himself a “pretty muthafucker,” and Willow Smith’s Whip My Hair video ­features vogueing legend Leyomi Mizrahi.27 New York’s legendary ballroom communities, grounded in a rebellious attitude, have nurtured a new generation of queer artists, including Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco, Cakes Da Killa, House of Ladosha (Antonio Blair and Adam Radakovich), and Venus X. Already I have referred to Le1f in Chapter 5, whose performance style chips away at norms and empowers young people to think differently. His demeanor and camp sensibility can be traced back to the ball-culture scene and LGBT subcultures, in the form of groups of people that belonged to ‘families’ (also called ‘houses’), where the aim was to ‘walk’ one’s dance and partake in competitions involving vogueing. Marlon M. Bailey has noted that ballroom members commonly upheld the belief that sex categories are ‘malleable’ and that their bodies are amendable by surgical reconstruction, hormonal therapy, or just padding. Bailey has advocated the following six-part gender system for understanding the multiple asymmetries of gender in ball culture: 1 Butch queens (biological) – biologically born males who identify as gay or bisexual, who can be hypermasculine, feminine, or masculine. 2 Femme queens (MTF) – transgender women or people at various stages of gender reassignment through surgical and/or hormonal processes. 3 Butch queens (drag) – gay men who perform drag but do not take hormones or live as women. 4 Butches (FTM) – transgender men or people at various stages of gender reassignment. Also masculine lesbians or women appearing as men regardless of sexual orientation. Butches may take hormones and undergo surgical modifying procedures. 5 Women – biologically born females who identify as lesbian, straight, or queer. 6 Men/Trade – biologically born males who are identified as straight men.28

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206  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion Originally, the ballroom space established a participatory site and safe haven for gender performance in the form of vogueing. A special set of progressive social relations defined its context and aesthetic fabulousness. As verified by Bailey’s gender system, labels such as lesbian, gay, male, female, straight prove inadequate for describing features of identification in ballroom culture. From the outset, its practitioners, as Bailey argues, have rejected “the rigid boundaries of gender and sexuality that buttress heteronormativity and its attendant heterogendered relations.”29 Thus, the gender system today continues to permit a range of identities and sexual practices that coagulate into the rich diversity of performances at ball shows. Worth registering are Bailey’s concerns around the dearth of black transgender scholarship in the US. He insists that more focus has been directed to the representation of white, middle-class queer communities, who are ­represented as universal – “their experiences and identity claims are posited as the interpretive lens through which the lives of (often) working-class people of color are examined.”30 To date, studies that concentrate on queer groups and color are few and far between, failing to “account for the ways in which convergent forms of race, class, gender, and sexual marginalization structure the experiences of transgender people of color.”31 Similar omissions exist in the interdisciplinary field of popular music studies, where queer hip hop artists and performers seldom receive sufficient attention. The subgenre of ‘queer hip hop’ (or LGBT or homo hop) started out as an underground movement in California in the 1990s, with the coining of the term ‘homo hop’ by Tim’m T. West of Deep Dickollective when he designated the building of a community comprising LGBT artists. Founded in 2001, the Peace OUT World Homo Hop Festival was held as an annual event up until 2008, with artists and their music paving the way forward for the emergence of a new brigade of openly LGBT musicians in the 2010s. Within a changing landscape of greater social acceptance, especially in networking communications, the coming out of mainstream Black hip hop artists, such as Frank Ocean and Azealia Banks, has inspired a new generation of performers. Directly influenced by ball culture, this new wave of performers have acquired the label of ‘queer hop’ as a replacement of the older ‘homo hop.’ For the purpose of this part of my study, the focus falls on two New York artists, Mykki Blanco and Zebra Katz, who have reconfigured not only the look and sound of hip hop, but also its gender and sexual categories. They join a group of performers including Le1f, House of LaDosha, and Cakes Da Killa.32 Following a visit to Manhattan’s Highline Ballroom in March 2012, Carrie Battan would exclaim: Mykki Blancho and House of LaDosha’s performances at the Highline accentuate the juxtaposition of ultra-feminine and flamboyantly gay aesthetics with the in-your-face braggadocio of rap – palpable proof that the two are not as mutually exclusive as any traditional, hypermasculine hip-hop narrative might suggest. […] If there’s ever been

Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  207

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a time for an artist to rip hip-hop identity conventions to shreds, it’s now. The genre is the furthest left-of-center it’s been in a long time – or at the very least, the line between mainstream stardom and underground oddballism is blurring beyond recognition.33 Notwithstanding the successful breakthrough for queer hip-hop artists, ­Battan also cautions us to the reality of the world outside New York’s underground scene, where the battles against homophobia are by no means over – prejudice persists. Michael Quattlebaum Jr., originally from San Mateo County, ­California, and brought up in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded the ‘Pain In ­Consciousness Experimental Theater’ in Raleigh at the age of 15, prior to escaping to New York City and subsequently winning a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition he spent a short time at Parson’s The New School for Design in New York City. Quattlebaum is best known for his teenage girl alter ego, Mykki Blanco, who was conceived during a YouTube music and art video performance in 2010. Following her 2012 debut album, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss, she released the EP, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, and a punk-oriented album, Gay Dog Food. Blanco’s identity is inspired by mainstream artists such as Rihanna, Lauryn Hill, and Lil’ Kim, as well as the entire queercore and riot grrrl movement. There are also overt references to the drag queen, Vaginal Davis, and the controversial Canadian director and writer, Bruce LaBruce. ­Notably, Blanco has opted for a multi-persona transgender-oriented identity. ‘She Gutta,’ from 2014, is a track produced by Jeremiah Meece of ‘­The-Drum,’ its theme centered on Los Angeles gang culture. The song’s video, directed by Jude MC, challenges the conventions of gender representation in a manner that sets out to dismantle heteropatriarchy. A subversion of norms is staged by imagery of gay sex within the context of gang warfare and police discrimination in South Central LA. Violence is depicted through brag and swag, a chief ingredient in queer-hop performativity. Crossing divides helps articulate an anarchic narrative, with Blanco switching between male and female impressions. Basically, ‘Gutta’ has nothing to do with the word, ‘gutter’ – rather, it is urban slang for a female who has control, someone who does not hold her words back, getting what she wants. The lengthy introduction to the video is in the form of a news bulletin. Its foreboding introductory mood is not unlike Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’ video from 1997, lasting just under two minutes before the song starts up.34 Made to feel ‘real’ by a crackling, distorted, noisy sonic tapestry, the introduction picks up on the politics of street violence, discrimination, queer pride, and police abuse. The menacing dimension of this contextualization sets the scene for the entry of Blanco at the point the song starts (1:48). Transgenderism in gangland emerges as a dominant theme, with Blanco positioned at times as an ‘everyday black male youth,’ and then as a girl (with long blond wig). Underpinning the narrative is a volatile wrenching of norms that destabilizes

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208  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion the logic of sex/gender/sexuality paradigms. Blanco pays the price for her sins as the video ends with her lying on the street, motionless. All the way through, the music, a mixture of rap and hip hop, provides a vital commentary on what we see; the dystopic narrative is driven home by intricate beat edits and production details. These complement Blanco’s rap rhymes, charging the track with an abundance of energy and passion. Effectively, the musical mood creates a smoglike cover over this track, depicting the pain and hardship of social unrest and retaliation. Blanco’s strategy of self-fashioning is to destabilize norms and empower her fans, and through her transgendered identity, she produces new subjectivities. The particularities of this extend her performance well beyond the entertainment threshold into an urban zone of deprivation where drag is playful and yet rife with menace. Blanco’s patent show of nonconformity is about ‘gender trouble,’ as she shapes a transformative space where experimentation reflects the perplexity and reality of everyday lives. I would also add that the performance in this video has a celebratory feel to it, albeit in a context that is brutally anarchic and crude. Loaded with signifiers of resistance, the visual style is disorderly and tattered. Most of all, Blanco’s representation naturalizes cross-dressing with great panache, conveyed in a production that functions as a soundtrack; there is a cinematic quality within the aesthetics of the mix that vividly captures the feel of a tough, urban inner city. Imported into this world are Blanco’s sneering brags: I’m in the cut, you want a cut, forget it boy, I’m leaving. There is an earnest call to be oneself without boundaries in a musical style that is a mishmash of experimental popular styles, such as riot grrrl, punk, thrash, and hip hop.

Figure 7.3  Mykki Blanco and boyfriend in the video ‘She Gutta’

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  209 All in all, Blanco’s performance is a fierce retort on the assumptions of Black promiscuity, which does not only challenge racism, but also takes a dig at homophobia. The closet is a nonissue in ‘She Gutta,’ as gay sex is graphically foregrounded with Blanco, as his gay self (Michael Quattlebaum), making out with another boy (see Figure 7.3). Such eroticism confronts the general perceptions of LGBT black people, an issue Patricia Hill Collins addresses in her comprehensive analysis of black sexual politics. Hill outlines the set of contradictions that construct black people as authentically hyper-heterosexual and white people as “the source of homosexuality”: The historical invisibility of LGBT African Americans reflects this double containment, both within the prison of racism that segregates [B]lack people in part due to their alleged sexual deviancy of promiscuity and within the closet of heterosexism due to the alleged sexual deviancy of homosexuality. The closets created by heterosexism were just as prominent within [B]lack communities as outside them.35 Queer rap speaks to this concern, providing political scripts that reject what is assumed in the form of resistance. Artists such as Blanco turn to a progressive sexual politics in the guise of transgendered representations in order to advance an awareness of the reality of violence and sexual discrimination in the US today. The video performance of ‘She Gutta’ is a fearless attempt to forge a path for imagining civil rights and social justice in the future. At the same time, the outrageous shifting between a dark blond female and a sexually active young black gay male, wrapped up into one person, demystifies queer sexualities. Thus, Blanco insists on his/her equal right by stating explicitly in a narrative of explosive force. Authorizing this is a tactic of deferral that is, in actual fact, a disavowal of shame.

Tear the House Up: Zebra Katz As we have seen so far, contemporary sexual politics are often turned into spectacles with the aid of music. In 1995 hip hop was described by Russell A. Potter, in his book, Spectacular Vernaculars, as a ‘vernacular discourse,’ which “draws ever in towards the center, from the city to the hood to the home to the homeboys and homegirls, reaching its terminus in artists such as Flavor Flav, whose idiolect at times seems herme(neu)tically sealed.”36 The work of a very special performer, some twenty years on, invokes a celebration of black gay sexuality in hip hop.37 Ojay Martin’s artist name, Zebra Katz, is developed from a performance art piece, ‘Moor,’ during his studies at New York’s Eugene Lang College. Morgan based his character on the “dark lord of the fashion world,” the villain, the rapper, and a male who does not want to fit into one gender or one sexuality group.38 In the wake

210  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion of the release of his mixtape, ‘DRKLNG,’ in 2013, he provided this account of his character:

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I think a lot of people are frightened or creeped out by Zebra Katz from what I’ve been reading, which is fun. I actually don’t think the music is quite as doom-laden as a lot of people say. It’s dark, but I find a lot of light in it. I think it’s lighthearted in a lot of ways.39 His music is beat driven, and Katz has stressed how he listens to his beats over and over again. In addition, he is highly experimental from one p ­ roject to the next, and this is underpinned by an urge to explore and break boundaries: I don’t want to fit. I just want to explore. And I’m still exploring and experimenting. I’m wandering and I don’t want to fit in one genre or one sexuality group that isn’t even really a thing. I want to be larger than that. I want to break boundaries sonically that haven’t been broken before. That’s what I’m trying to do.40 The single, ‘Tear The House Up,’ from 2014, is a collaboration between Katz and the British DJ producer, Joshua Harvey (know as Hervé). While the music is minimalist, electro-house in its style, the video, directed by Ghost+Cow Films (John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke), produced by Dan Lubell, and styled by Solange Franklin, is fiery in its splashes of color. The rapped lines eschew the dance movements with vivid graphics of Katz in provocative poises. An element of queerness is shaped by the camp production, with a carefully constructed off the grid, kooky style. By this I am referring to the means by which the musical performance is enhanced by the opulence of his eccentric costumes from one scene to the next. The design of the video is kaleidoscopic, with intricate patterns and angles shifting and changing in a type of mirror effect. Katz’s attire has a Vivienne Westwood vibe to it. Offset by garish makeup, much emphasis is placed upon facial expressions: eye movement and eyebrow shaping enliven his relatively laid-back rap lines. During the instrumental introduction Katz is filmed sitting on a white throne in red-and-yellow-colored clothes and shoes that match the background. While tapping his left foot he moves his head sideways in time to the beat. His painted-on gold eyebrows give him a bizarre appearance, complemented by clothes styled from the ‘Crossed Crocodiles Growl’ Winter 2014/2015 collection by Walter Van Beirendonck (WVB). Just a few seconds into the music the mood changes dramatically to a dimly lit scene. Katz is dressed in a long, dark Xander Zhou coat. As with all the scenes, the print of the cloth is picked up in the background of the set. Katz strips the coat off, exposing an elaborate, sequined floral jacket by Jaime Lee. His look is mean as he swirls and looks into the camera, this time with a gold stripe extending from his

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  211 forehead down the slope of his nose. From this point onwards the imagery is triggered by rapid changes as the groove starts churning. Throughout this video, Katz’s visual appearance is enhanced by a sizeable wardrobe of clothes and accessories, including a lilac faux-fur scarf by ­Adrienne Landau, offset with a sleeveless white t-shirt, silver pendant by Bande des Quatres, and arm warmers. His make-up consists of gold eyeliner (over the lids into the corners). Another scene shift showcases Katz in Sir New York clothing, with an Adrienne Landan scarf, David Andersen leggings, WVB shoes, Elisabeth Weinstock boxing gloves, and Bande des Quatres jewelry. This time his gold eyeliner extends to the corners of his eyes. One of his most striking poses has him wearing a WVB jacket and shorts, Stephen Jones + WVB hat, David Andersen leggings, Dr. Martens boots, Bande des Quatres necklace on hat and Brute nose bridge jewelry. In addition to this, he also exhibits a sequined camouflage jacket from Asish with Dr. Martens boots.41

Figure 7.4  Zebra Katz in the video ‘Tear The House Up’

Katz’s live shows have become legendary, not only because of the sheer spectacle but also for the music. Musical features in ‘Tear The House Up’ consist of beat patterns, bass lines, the occasional chord, and Katz’s rapped lines. Structurally, the track comprises: intro – chorus – verse 1 – chorus – verse 2 – chorus – verse III – outro. What stands out is the aesthetics of the production and mix, which provide the track with energy levels, sustained

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212  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion by techniques of layering, buildup, contrast, fluctuation, and, most of all, high rhythmic activity. It is the juxtaposition of Katz’s lines with the bass and beat patterns that propels the track. In the choruses, his rapping is more sung than in the verses, where he threatens to tear the house up and get down on this beat. With the accent falling heavily on the word ‘down’ on each repeat, his vocal expression is menacing. This is enhanced by timbral gruffness in the low register and an exaggerated rounding of the vowel ‘ow’ on ‘down.’ Also the oscillation of a minor third interval in Katz’s melodic lines in the choruses dissipates in the verse sections. Generally, the choruses are more melodious than the verses, whose rhythmic complexity is defined by rapid rapping and busier beat patterns. As the song progresses, nonvocal sounds are introduced to great effect, such as the sustained synth chords in the choruses (I–iii) and the ‘fun’ sounds (squelches, pops, woops, gun-shots) associated with computer games. Blending into the mix, these sounds are cemented by the dance-rallying rhymes and beat patterns. One of the prominent features is the bass line, which enters last following the first chorus section (1:18). Only relegated to the verses, it functions in counterpoint to the rapped vocals. Its synth bass, moog-like timbral flavor (see Example 7.1) spells out the ‘house attitude’ of the verse. I would suggest that the bass assumes a lead role in helping to communicate humorous intent, and by dropping out in the choruses, its presence is all the more felt in the verses. It is a gentle, monotonous, bouncy figure that leaps up, ornamentally, a minor seventh interval (Bb–Ab) on the first quarter note of each bar, before descending diatonically in some repeats and chromatically in other repeats. Its descending motion, pitch-wise, is blurry, with microtonal slippage making it all the more opaque. This is especially pronounced in the fourth bar (see Example 7.1), where the two Abs (marked with arrows) are slightly de-tuned downwards. As I read it, this bass line in itself is a gesture of fun, its subtleties in terms of variation reinforcing Katz’s queer performativity. Similarly, the kit patterns are distinguished by microdetails, varying from one measure to the next. The two main chords (from 2:35 onwards), played on a retro, Moog-like synth, are Gm7 and Bbm7. Their function is to punctuate the groove at specific points in a way that highlights lyrical segments.

bass

drums

‹ 4 bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œbœ ? œ 4 œbœ ¿j e ¿ ‰ ¿j e ¿ ¿ 4 / 4 ‰œ œ œ œ > > > f >

full of beans q=124 j œ

nœbœ

‰ œ >

bœ œ œ œ œbœ œnœbœ

j bœ œ œ œnœbœ œ bœ œ j nœbœ œ œ nœbœ nœbœ œ nœbœ œ nœbœ œ ¿j e ¿ ‰ ¿j e ¿ ‰ ¿j e ¿ ‰ ¿j e ¿ ¿ ‰ ¿j e ¿ œ ≈ œ ¿ e ¿ ¿ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ > > > > > > > > > > >

Example 7.1  Bass line in ‘Tear the House Up.’

The video for this track impresses on many levels. As with the music, the clothes and accessories I have described above highlight Katz’s role as a glamorous and over-the-top MC. His spectacle frames the music in a

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  213 fun-loving manner, achieved as much by the energized rap address as the outlandish outfits. Bragging is a major part of his approach to self-fashioning as he looks directly into the camera. For most of the video he confronts the (straight) male gaze, unsmiling, and the attitude he exudes stems directly from practices of vogueing. This aspect is crucial to piecing together explosive colors within the set and its visual compatibility with haute couture. Continuously, the viewer is exposed to a combination of subject-positions that construct a queer idiolect. As I have pointed out, the prevalence of diversely processed beat patterns augments the vogueing. By this I am referring especially to all the eloquent postures of hands, head, neck, shoulders, and legs that boost the effect of stylizing oneself. Vogueing codifies what we hear in ‘Tear The House Up,’ drawing on state-of-the-art production techniques (exemplified by the use of effects, programming, sound textures, and microprocessing). The queer visual impact of the twirls and vogueing in this video are a result of a tight composure. And his swag is evident in the flick of a hand, wrist, or finger, eyeball rolling and eyebrow raising, the sashaying of his walk, or the dramatic instant of a ‘dip.’ Undoubtedly, what epitomizes Katz’s vogue-style are the ‘floor performances,’ where, together with his dances (and the duplicating of his imagery), he employs primarily his legs, knees, back, and neck to execute the lowering and crouching of the body in a graceful and swift flow. This divulges the tendencies of ‘Vogue Fem’ (1995 onwards)42 in a synthesis of the elements that constitute exaggerated forms of gender battling: hand performance, duck-walk, dips and drops, and catwalk. In sum, the mesmerizing geometric imagery of the set and fashions are realized by the aural manifestation of a compulsive act that is grounded in the catchiest of grooves.

And, Finally, to the Soda Pump … Another artist well-versed in the art of vogueing is Le1f, whose ‘Wut’ video I discussed in Chapter 5. It is now to his sensational ‘Soda’ video I turn. Produced with Boody, in conjunction with their Liquid EP, this is in stark contrast to Katz’s ‘Tear the House Up.’ ‘Soda’ comprises pastel colors within a narrative that addresses the Diet Coke soda phenomenon and the classic chewy Mentos sweets. The only slight adjustment is that Le1f and Boody have their names as product brands (sodas [of all colors] are named Le1f, Mentos tubes are named Boody). As I suggested in Chapter 5, Le1f negates the concept of rap being straight and macho, challenging gender structures by destabilizing norms and conventions. Concerned with creating new forms of expression for black males within this genre, he denigrates the character and iconography of the tough, worked-out masculine rapper. In this way, his brand of queer hop represents a significant initiative to contest the homophobic tendencies in hip hop.43 Styled by Hayley Pisaturo and @LILGOVERNMENT, the video is retrospective; it glances back to the early 2000s with metallic-infused clothing

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214  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion and industrial mechanical sounds. The images are dazzling and queered splendidly by the details of choreography. Opening with him in a long-sleeve gold metallic jumper, his long hair is braided into a purple ponytail that is tossed from side to side and up and down due to his jerky movements. In the next shot his hair is pulled out of the ponytail into multi-braids, with him wearing a denim top. A dancer to his left is pictured with a transparent plastic jacket, and coiffured purple hair. Perhaps one of the most spectacular outfits is a bright orange faux-fur coat, matching knitted jumper and platinum metallic booty shorts. In a later scene, he appears again with the gold jumper, but this time with satin football pants and white sneakers. The two other outfits he dons include a transparent silklike, polka-dot blouse, which is draped around him generously. His second and final piece of attire is a white, leopard-print bomber jacket, a button-up cream-colored tee shirt, offset by a backward visor and glittering rhinestone choker. Integral to his spectacle is the music, with Le1f’s tumbling and rumbling vocal lines intersecting with spacious popping synth sounds, bass drum beat patterns, and countless effects. As with all his tracks his vocal mannerisms assume a meandering quality, made freaky in pitch shifting, tempo shifts, and unexpected bouts of frequency modulation. There is a progressive approach to his way of composing that utilizes electronica in a crazed way. More specifically, his process is one that starts with producing beats that shimmer and ends with spinning off in all directions. He has claimed that it was in 2004, while still in high school, that he experimented with hundreds of beats and attempted to write raps in private, but “always felt defeated” when recording things.44 This he puts down to lacking self-esteem: “At the time, I was super-unsatisfied with the sound of my young voice and gay intonations, but truly I probably just didn’t know how to produce myself well enough to make music.”45 When it comes to his voice, it is significant that Le1f, as with Katz and Hegarty, turns to a low register with gruff timbre. The objective is to parody the stereotypes of sounding hypermasculine, and because genderbending is so overt in his visual representation, his changes in vocal costuming become integral to the queer aesthetics of this track (see Table 7.1). Discernible in the vocal production is a transgressive strategy afoot. By this I am referring to the decadent procedure of over-processing the voice in cranked-up production techniques, which evokes a sense of erotic rapture. In contrast to Sylvester in the 1970s, who, in McClary’s words, “belted out the disco anthems such as ‘Power of Love’ in his exquisite soprano-range voice,”46 Le1f flirts with a different kind of timbre and register in an over-the-top, chipmunk squeal that is queerly hypermasculine. Genderbending, in such instances, is the result of countless effects of variation and vocal costume changes that bring into profile the fragmentary subject whose identity traverses race, sexuality, and gender norms. There is a ‘liquid flow’ and ‘bubbling’ quality to the EDM musical backing, and Le1f’s response to the branding of pop soda is exceptionally satirical. His audiotopia is evocative of candy popping and crackling, of large

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  215 globules dropping, and of soda fizzing. This is charged by flurries of beat patterns and rolling bass lines that are ‘seapunk’ in feel. Reminiscent of Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, and The Prodigy, there is a robotic aesthetic to the musical arrangement that is enhanced by an abundance of echo to create the impression of a large factory warehouse. Wading through this material, Le1f’s highly processed voice changes pitch at the same time it is rhythmically contorted. As with timbre and register, rhythmic invention is significant in ‘Soda.’ Le1f’s rapped vocals assume a life of their own and are relatively consistent in metrical makeup (consisting mainly of even eighth note repetitions). As with most rap, words are only made discernible at certain moments; not only to accent the meaning of a specific word but also to maximize on the sonic characters of the words in question. An instance of this is found in the phrase, slave to the rhythm. Get emancipated, put the serum in your system (1:53), where the rhythmic counterpoint between the kit parts, the bass and Le1f’s voice creates a sense of high activity that energizes the lyrics. Notably the rap vocals contain a simple, mainly eighth note meter, while the bass-line is more syncopated and not least bouncy due to its octave leaps on F#.

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Example 7.2  Bass line and rap vocals in ‘Soda.’

I want to argue that it is something about his experimental edge that discloses the queer aesthetics of ‘Soda.’ Again, it is worth emphasizing the creative dimension of the production and original implementation of compositional ideas and not least a stylistic approach that involves Le1f fusing markers of rap to electronic dance music. The mix conjures up images of a conveyor belt moving rapidly, with a series of ‘candied’ sounds bouncing off and hitting us. One might conceive the track as comprising five main sonic costume changes (Table 7.1), determined by contrasts and fluctuations in singing style.

216  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion

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In a sense, Le1f’s vocal costuming can be likened to musical iconography. Brought to the fore in the verse, his voice is deeply resonant and pensive, the words delivered with more clarity than in the introduction hook (0:26–1:05). The effect of this is to destabilize and quiet down the flurry of all the timbres and textures surrounding him, as he impudently insists, It’s my soda pop, bitch. Table 7.1  Le1f’s vocal costuming in ‘Soda’ Introduction (0:00–0:25)

Introduction (0:26–1:05)

Verse (1:06–2:00)

Break (2:01–2:26)

Coda Hook (2:27–2:56)

Non-vocal sounds. Industrial, robotic, splashy percussion. Rhythmically dense.

Vocal hook. Voice is contorted and flanged.

Main vocal rap lines. Popping percussive descending pattern.

Non-vocal. Atmospheric and factorylike. Techno inflections. Blustery polyphony.

Vocal hook. Gradual reduction of sounds. Voice left bare. Rhythmically sparse.

Undoubtedly, his references to soda and candy are more than contrived. They also eroticize the candy shop with more than a touch of parody. In my reading, this is a direct reference to the subject matter of countless heterosexist rap tracks, where candy shops, lollies, and young girls become the prime subject for licking one’s lips.47 Positioning himself as the queer-boy protagonist, he reinforces the facets of an identity that goes against the grain. Effectively, the mocking quality of his performance is flirtatious, albeit in a reflexive way, where the technique of decorative punctuation (as in ‘quotes,’ ‘exclamation points’ and ‘question marks’) discloses his campness. It is here that the failure of normative roles, by contestation and defiance, is most overt. Hyperbolically, the performance strips down the rigid structures of masculinity with the aid of exclusive haute couture as much as innovative ‘vocal costumes.’ All this spells out a bold aesthetic of self-­fashioning, a phantasmatic showcasing of queerness that opens up for a wealth of performative possibilities. Underlying the audiovisual experience of ‘Soda’ is a personal struggle between a gay man and his social environment. It seems that Le1f knows full well that to be black and queer stands for the formidable Other and that musical styles can be exploited to represent primitiveness and mysteriousness. Again, it is worth emphasizing the vocal details, which imply so much when set against the beats and rhymes. Framed by tantalizing textures and timbres, his voice is more spoken than sung, brimming with innuendo. Inflecting specific words more than others, Le1f raps in a way that accents his own personal narrative. He has grasped that wordplay and the affected poetics of rap can mediate temperament in extraordinary ways. His queer sensibility is harnessed in an idiolect that verifies gender, racial, and sexual values, and in ‘Soda’ this is mediated by the pretentiousness of his

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  217

Figure 7.5  Le1f in the video ‘Soda’

self-branding fizzy drinks and Mentos tubes. Warholian in its inferences, this is high camp, a piss-take on commerciality and branding; the video becomes a potent device for platforming his ostentatious manière. Self-fashioning is a main constituent of staging pop spectacles, and Le1f takes a celebratory stance on this. By directing our gaze from the past to the future in gestures of feisty hair whips and trippy beats, he paves the way forward for new constellations of agency to enter the arena. The writer, Timothy Gabriele, has put it like this: “If hip hop is one of the last vestiges of open homophobia, then it’s also the place where difference and negation of the status quo can be celebrated.”48 Gabriele reminds us that queerness in hip hop helps us realize experiences that get us to move beyond the stultifying present. Rather than idealistic gestures of sheer utopian escapism, the videos and performances I have considered are rejections of normative thinking. Finally, Le1f’s staging of ‘Soda’ occurs in a temporal and spatial place that merges artistic production with a critical project, namely to alter the course of straight time.

Concluding Thoughts and the Finale For sure, Le1f’s performance described above is an enticing queer snapshot. The video positions a performance of the male body in a context for queer imagination. But, far from being just fun, the performance is an invitation to participate differently. ‘Doing queer’ in Le1f’s world is a provocative subversion of a range of norms; his radical gendered performance is a strategy of resistance. As with all the artists I have considered, Le1f turns to a politics

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218  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion of hope, which Muñoz has emphasized as the “emotional modality that permits us to access futurity, par excellence.”49 Staged in the form of words, musical details, images, gestures, and mannerisms, Le1f’s queerness assigns meaning to biography and genealogy. Throughout this book I have attempted to avoid being too prescriptive when it comes to queerness, my aim being to produce a critical optic that illuminates the affective moments imbued in music. As I have discovered on the way, the critical practices of solidarity displayed in queer performances get us to think beyond straight time. I have spent time discussing the particularities of belonging and identifying in association with the rejection of norms. Despair, failure, and cynicism, recurring topics in many pop texts, also spell out hope, and it takes the queer spectacle to offer an escape from the grind of normative time. This is because pop music gets us to feel that all is complete, that nothing is missing, where escaping from the everyday is about departing from the here and now. Yet, in moving from straight into queer time, there are hints of dystopia as much as utopia. Music gets us to transcend a given moment in time. If artists provide insights into the soul, as Wilde claimed, then it is through the eloquence of performance that this succeeds. As my study endeavors to demonstrate, ideals are articulated in ways that are only made possible due to the creative implementation of technologies in the pop recording. Reliant on microphones, production effects, and a range of other technological procedures, pop artists shape their personae in ways that make them instantly recognizable. Therefore, the act of staging performances is integral to understanding the idiosyncrasies of human agency. As I have shown, the manière of the voice harnesses attitude and temperament; it is intended to win over our aural senses and generate empathy. With Ultra Naté’s performance of the disco-pop hit, ‘Free,’ the minute features of her approach to singing capitalize on a spectrum of details that immediately stage her as dance diva. Vocal stylization, rooted in the feel-good features of 1990s dance music, becomes the very material condition for breaking through straight into ecstatic time, where corporeality is felt as queer. Dance captivates the past by envisaging new temporalities, and along the way ambiguities arise when it comes to fathoming out subjectivities. The markers of queerness that infiltrate recorded music are reliant on temporal factors to get the message across. As we have seen, an artist’s idiolect encapsulates the practices adopted by the producer. Pop productions allude to a sense of fun involving skillful applications of music technology. Hence, production is the mainline for articulating traits of gender and sexuality in pop tracks and videos. The outcome of a production can entail resistance, facilitating disidentification with a specific system. Gender subversion in drag is a prime strategy of resistance, where an artist turns to a musical style to transform a political or cultural given from within. Ysan Roche’s rejection of sexism through the role of the bio queen becomes a major constituent in her rebellion against inscriptions of female identity.

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  219 Her aggressive performance in the video of ‘Bass Gun,’ which entails love, murder, and annihilation, symbolizes a revisionary approach to heterosexual desire; it suggests a vampiric interiorization of the Other. Made queer by disidentification she transfigures a turbulent site into something utopian. This tactic is also obvious in George Michael’s video, ‘Outside,’ where he defies the law in an instance of subversion. Camply, he exhibits a desire for a queer world, one in which the politics of a dominant culture are disempowered and even obliterated. In quite a different manner, Zebra Katz slices through the façade of normality by tearing the house down in order to disavow the protocols that deny subjects access to multiple identities. His offensive, as a young gay black cosmopolitan, is to chisel away at dominant culture by rapping and revitalizing hip hop. Comparable tendencies are inherent in the performances of Azealia Banks, Nicki Minaj, Mykki Blanco, and Le1f, all of whom elucidate the numerous antagonisms of race, class, sexuality, and gender by celebrating a queer aesthetic. Features of musical hybridity in their productions bring into force inflections of a genre that still remains contestatory within the confines of a community that suffers discrimination on a daily basis. Music is therefore a formidable expressive device for dealing with the politics of disempowerment and discrimination and comes to the forefront of many struggles. Queering gender norms in pop raises important questions relating to subjectivities in space and time. Empathy, as I have argued, results from a special contract between artist and fan, and the assimilation of a physical reality that assumes a range of indicators. The strategies found in any performance are conditional on mapping out the persona of the performer successfully, and the main objective of this book has been to discover what happens when these are queered. Throughout, I have upheld the belief that queer utopianism is a resource for imagining the intersections of utterances, texts, and identities. The tremendous investment that goes into pop productions can be likened to the cultural landscape of films, comic books, video games, and online computer fantasy game adventures. Survival is a main zeal of the performer and the producer, and the pop happening occurs in different subject-formations and narratives that charge characters with myths of identification. Key signifying practices that emerge from popular culture highlight the material conditions and possibilities of performativity in sublime ways. Queerness in Pop Music attempts to shed light on this by providing a glimpse of music’s role in the past and the present, and all the performances I have contemplated are poignant, hilarious, and opaque, shaped by queer icons in musicalized acts. In much mainstream pop, the queer subject is positioned within a predominantly straight cultural context, where deviance is projected as one of many modes of orientation. Or, differently put, queerness as orientation loosens the heterosexual restraint on identity. Sara Ahmed envisages ‘orientations’ as allowing “us to expose how life gets directed in some ways rather than others, through the very requirement that we follow what is already given to us.”50 Let us keep in sight,

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220  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion then, the queer pop artist who transforms the natural order of things and provides a way for thinking about bodily and spatial orientation by opening up new horizons and temporalities. Queer pop performances point to the future by getting us to look back and reflect on how we went astray. Queerness is made oblique by proliferating sexualities, ethnicities, and genders, and with the aid of music we can learn to step into ecstatic time and take count of how we inhabit collective spaces. By generating kinship as a social ideal, music establishes spaces for queer bodies to reorientate themselves. This is because music unsettles things in the present by queering the stories already told. Ultimately, though, the contingency of queering provides an opening to celebrate new arrivals and gets us to rethink our own being in the world.

Notes 1. Jess Denham, “Eurovision 2014 Contestants: Meet All the Acts from Molly Smitten-Downes to Conchita Wurst.” Independent, April 21, 2014, http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/eurovision-2014-contestants-meet-all-the-acts-from-molly-smittendownes-to-conchita-wurst-9273423. html. 2. This resulted in a video speech filmed at the Abbey Theater. Notably, the Pet Shop Boys released the speech in March 2014 on their single, ‘Oppressive (The Best Gay Possible),’ which inspired their slow mix of the same track with various clips of homophobic material. 3. Andreja Pejić is a transgender model of Bosnian-Croat and Bosnian-Serb ethnicity. 4. Neuwirth first came to the attention of the Austrian public when he appeared on the national broadcasting service’s channel, ORF, with the show Die große Chance in 2011. 5. Jess Denham, ‘Eurovision 2014: Conchita Wurst Faces Transphobic Backlash for “Unnatural” Lifestyle,’ Independent, April 28, 2014, http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/eurovision-2014-conchita-wurst-faces-transphobic-backlash-for-unnatural-lifestyle-9296690. html?origin=internalSearch. 6. Notably, while the majority of European parliament groups backed this appearance, the right-wing political group, Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, together with conservative and reformist groups, did not. 7. Halberstam, “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy,” 52–53. 8. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 123. 9. DIY refers to Do It Yourself, and, in punk and queercore, suggests an approach dedicated to a rejection of ‘polished performance,’ although the music is often technically complex, and especially rhythmically challenging. A DIY approach is also loaded with ethics, especially in terms of ‘authenticity’ and being everyday and at the same time anti-establishment in sound and attitude. 10. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 146. 11. Ibid., 147. 12. Ibid.

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Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion  221 13. Ibid., 148. 14. n0madic, “Some of My Best Friends: A Conversation with Pansy Division’s Jon Ginoli,” Progressive Fox, May 5, 2009, http://www.progressivefox.com/?p=320. 15. Allan F. Moore has emphasized that the persona in a song becomes apparent to a listener not only through lyrics, but, more significantly, via melodic articulation and especially “period structure melodies.” Moore, Song Means, 91. 16. Ibid., 269. 17. Todd Wiese, “Tribe 8 Interview,” Rock Out Censorship, http://www.theroc.org/ roc-mag/textarch/roc-18/roc18-08.htm (accessed July 23, 2014). 18. Ibid. 19. Salamon, Assuming a Body, 172. 20. Edelman, No Future, 9. 21. In 2014 during Michael’s Symphonica tour, he revealed this detail about the song. Thanks to Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik for reminding me of this song. 22. Johnson, “‘Don’t Call Him a Cowboy.’” 23. Ibid., 401. 24. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 71. 25. Ibid. 26. Simpson, It’s a Queer World, 216, author’s emphases. 27. Clare Considine, “Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco and the rise of queer rap,” ­Guardian, June 9, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/09/zebrakatz-rise-of-gay-rappers. 28. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness,” 370–71. 29. Ibid., 372–73. 30. Ibid., 375. 31. Ibid. 32. In 2012 the Guardian hailed Blanco and Katz as the future leaders of queer hiphop artists. Clare Considine, “Zebra Katz.” 33. Carrie Battan, “We Invented Swag: NYC’s Queer Rap,” Pitchfork, March 21, 2012, http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8793-we-invented-swag/. 34. See Hawkins, “Aphex Twin,” for a video analysis of ‘Windowlicker’ that focuses on masculinity, IDM, and madness. 35. Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 107. 36. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars, 154. 37. Hermione Hoby, “Zebra Katz: ‘Creating a strong, black, queer male is something that needed to happen,’” Guardian, May 25, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/may/25/zebra-katz-interview-ima-read. 38. Reggie Ugwa, “Zebra Katz Talks Busta Rhymes, Covering Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ & ‘DRKLNG’ Mixtape,” Billboard.com, May 24, 2013, http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/1563858/zebra-katztalks-busta-rhymes-covering-tiffany-drklng-mixtape. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. See http://maddecent.com/watch-herve-zebra-katz-tear-the-house-up-officialmusic-video/. 42. Vogue Fem is one of the main distinct styles of vogueing, and entails feminine movements that are exaggerated. The two variants of Vogue Fem are Dramatics and Soft & Cunt.

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222  Futurity and Passion’s Compulsion 43. Mention should also be made of a line of artists who paved the way: Last Offence, Meshell Ndegeocello, Tori Fixx, Yo Majesty, Big Dipper, JbDubs, and Deep Dickollective. 44. Alex Chapman, “Discovery: Le1f,” Interview, http://www.interviewmagazine. com/music/discovery-le1f/#_ (accessed March 22, 2015). 45. Ibid. 46. McClary, “Soprano Masculinities,” 37. 47. See Djupvik, “Welcome to the candy shop!,” King of the Rhythm, for a detailed account of this in her study of black masculinity and inscriptions of misogyny. 48. Timothy Gabriele, “Boody & Le1f: Liquid,” PopMatters, March 26, 2013, http://www.popmatters.com/review/168879-boody-le1f-liquid/. 49. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 98. 50. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 21.

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232 Bibliography Taylor, Jodie. Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Taylor, Jodie. “Claiming Queer Territory in the Study of Subcultures and Popular Music.” Sociology Compass 7, no. 3 (2013): 194–207. Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Théberge, Paul. “The “Sound” of Music: Technological Rationalization and the ­Production of Popular Music.” New Formations 8 (1989): 99–111. Thomas, Calvin, ed. Straight with a twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of H ­ eterosexuality. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Tin, Louis-Georges. The Invention of Heterosexual Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. Tucker, Ken. “Outsider Art: Disco and Funk.” Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone ­History of Rock & Roll, ed. Ward, Stokes, and Tucker. New York: Summit Books, 1986. Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital ­Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wall, Tim. “Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dance on the Northern Soul Scene.” ­Popular Music 25, no. 3 (2006): 431–45. Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Walser, Robert. “Prince as Queer Poststructuralist.” Popular Music and Society 18, no. 2 (1994): 79–89. Walser, Robert. “Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances.” ­Analyzing Popuar Music, ed. Moore, 16–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Warner, Michael, ed. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. ­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Warner, Timothy. Pop Music – Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the D ­ igital Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Whiteley, Sheila, ed. Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. London: ­ outledge, 1997. R Whiteley, Sheila, and Jennifer Rycenga, eds. Queering the Popular Pitch. New York: Routledge, 2006. Wicke, Peter. “The Art of Phonography: Sound, Technology and Music.” Derek B.  Scott, trans. The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Scott, 147–168. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. New York: ­Magnus Books, 2004. Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” Fortnightly Review, 291 (1891): 292–319. Williams, Katherine. Rufus Wainwright. Sheffield: Equinox, forthcoming. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2014. Zak, Albin. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 2001. Zak, Albin. I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Ålvik, Jon Mikkel Broch. Scratching the Surface. Marit Larsen and Marion Ravn: Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context. Unpublished doctoral ­dissertation, University of Oslo, 2014.

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Names Index

ABBA 74, 75 Abbate, Carolyn 5 activism, queer 135 aesthetics 26; audiovisual 27; camp 13; of Lady Gaga 95; of mixing 51; shaped by digital technology 14, 16–17, 39–40; sound engineering 55 African American 25, 96, 116–23, 179–80 Ahmadzai, Mirwais 74 Ahmed, Sara 8, 12, 13, 19, 22, 204, 219 Albini, Steve 200 Alloway, Lawrence 94 alter egos 25 alternative masculinities 11 Amico, Stephen 40 Anal Traffic 199 anarchic style of music 198–220 androgynous aesthetics 177; of Annie Lennox 81–84; of Boy George 43–47; of David Bowie 64, 69–70; of Shirley Manson 86–89 Antony and the Johnsons 168 Aram MP3 197 Arnell, Vaughan 140, 147 audiotopias 96, 195–6 audiovisual aesthetics 27 Auslander, Philip 16 autobiographical narrative 138–43 Bailey, Marlon M. 156–7, 205–6 Baker, Josephine 121, 167 ball culture 24, 205–6 ballet 145–6 ballroom communities 205–6 banal 37 Banks, Azealia 154–60, 206, 219 Barnes, Kevin 96, 97, 123–7 baroque pop 168 Barthes, Roland 8 Battan, Carrie 206–7

Bayles, Martha 86 beatboxing 151–3 Benton, Anthea 147 Berkenstadt, Jim 189 Beyoncé 121–2, 164–5 Big Boi 177, 179 biographic-oriented viewing 1–2, 5, 26 biomythography 15 bio queen 20, 21–22, 97–99, 102, 120 bitch, use of term 25 Black hip hop 206–17 black masculinity 198, 209–13 black women, abuse of 111 ‘Black Yellow Pop’ 96, 103–5 Blanco, Mykki 198, 206–9, 219 bleaching syndrome 122 Bliss, Panti 196 Bloodshy & Avant 74 body: disorientated 12–13; felt and physical senses 16 Bohichik, Maxim 51 Boom, Benny 113 bourgeoisie, satire of 38 Bowery, Leigh 168 Bowie, David 27, 53, 62, 90, 149; queering of 64–70 boy: ambiguities of being 167–74; opposition to by Kurt Cobain 186–7 Boy George 43–48, 57–58, 169, 173, 203 braggadocio 133 Breedlove, Lynn 201–2 British society, critique of 38 bromance 184, 202 Bronski, Michael 94, 141, 143 Bronski, Steve 174 Bronski Beat 174–5 Buckley, David 64, 66, 67 butch 205 butch queen 205 Butler, Judith 1, 13, 24, 76, 80, 109–10, 111, 165

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234  Names Index Calderone, Jo 82, 99, 100 Cameron, Don 86 camp 27, 37, 43, 75, 102, 133–60, 199; aesthetics 13, 22; of Azealia Banks 154–9; as being queer 150; of Freddie Mercury 143–6; of George Michael 138–43; of Jay Kay 147–50; of Justin Timberlake 150–4; of Le1f 133–5; and music technology 135; of Rufus Wainwright 136–8 Carl, Lüc 99 Carlson, Dylan 187 Carlucci, John 210 Carnie, Dave 184 Carter, Helena Bonham 138 Carter, Shawn 15 Cerezo, Lea 196 Chapman, Ian 67 Cheetham, Jason ‘Jay Kay’ 147–50 Clemons, Clarence 183, 184 Cleto, Fabio 1 Clinton, George 179 clone-look 141 closet: epistemology of 65; phenomenon of 5, 7, 8; and queer spaces 8; as a sign of the confessional 63 Cobain, Kurt 19–20, 167, 185–91 Coleman, Andrew 151 Collins, Patricia Hill 111, 123, 209 coming out 48, 138, 140–2, 206; implications of 62–90; strategy 9 confession 27, 62–63; by David Bowie 62–70; by Madonna 70–79 Connell, Raewyn 95 Coronation Street (television) 144 Coward, Noël 159 cowboy as transgressive act 203–4 Cox, Laverne 196 Craig, Mikey 44 Critical Race Theorists (CRT) 123 crotch grip 164–5 cry theme 43–48 Cubitt, Sean 19 Culture Club 43–48, 57–58 cunt 156–7 cyberspace impacting musical production 12 dance 34–35, 76, 78, 100, 148, 218 dance-pop 35–36 dandyism 135, 157, 167, 177 Danielsen, Anne 88 Dap-Kings 137 dark-skinned African American women 121–2

Davis, Vaginal 207 death drive 202 Deep Dickollective 206 Dell’Antonio, Andrew 15 de Man, Paul 9 Deren, Maya 177 de Villiers, Nicholas 5–6, 8, 63 Devitt, Rachel 12, 97 Dharma, Ritchie 55 Dibben, Nicola 176 Diouf, Khalif 133 disco 34–35, 41–43, 50, 78, 140–1 disidentification 7, 8, 11, 27, 63, 219 drag 20–21, 97, 99, 102–3, 120, 134–5 Draughtman’s Contract, The (film) 38 Duffy, Brian 67 Duggan, Lisa 13 Dyer, Richard 78, 142 Eagling, Wayne 145 ecstatic time 37 Edelman, Lee 9, 202 Edwards, Bernard 79 Einfühlung 165 electro funk 15 Elizondo, René 98 empathy 27, 165, 170, 219 epistemology of the closet 65 Espedal, Kristian Eivind 64 ethnicity and queerness 165 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) 196–7 Eurythmics 81, 83, 85, 86 Example 41 Fafi 155 Fanning, Dave 199 Fanshel, Rosalie Zdzienicka 167, 181, 183, 184 Fast, Susan 4 Fateman, Johanna 202 feel-good sensation 36–37 female identity 218–9 female masculinity 177, 202 femininity, exaggerated 82–83 femme queen 205 Flannigan, Erik 181 Flavor Flav 209 Flowers, Herbie 54 Forest, David 46 Foucault, Michel 7, 8, 9, 23, 63, 72, 105, 111 Foxe, Cyrinda 68, 69 Foxxx, Njena Reddd 24–25 Franklin, Solange 210 Frith, Simon 70, 165

Names Index  235

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Fruit, Georgie 25, 96, 123–7 funk 149 futurity 9, 28 Gabriele, Timothy 217 gaga feminism 11 gang culture in queer pop 207–8 Garbage 86–89 Garibaldi, Christina 113 Garrett, Ben 49 gay effeminacy 149–50 gay male virility 14 Geller, Theresa 100 gender: associated with vocality 19; in ball culture 205–6; displays in pop performances 5–6; fragility of 169; identity 109–10; mimicry 165; nonconformity 165–6, 173; perceptions of and queer time 11; as something one performs 12 genderbending 20–22, 54, 83–84, 173; by Boy George 43–45 gender identity disorder 109–10 gender norms 3–4, 13–14, 95, 97–100, 111, 219; breaking on stage 4–7; and masculinity 44; transgressing 20–22 gender-on-display 16 genderplay 2, 3, 23, 58, 65, 95, 165 gender politics 71 gender roles 164 Genet, Jean 66 Germanotta, Stefani Joanne Angelina 99 Gibson, Laurianne 99 Ginoli, Jon 200 Givenchy, Jack 157 glam rock 54, 69–70 Greenaway, Peter 38 Griffiths, Dai 56 Grohl, Dave 189 Gross, Charles 189 grunge 185–8 Halberstam, J. Jack 3, 11 Halberstam, Judith 10, 197 Halford, Rob 64 Halperin, David 14, 22 Harrison, David 5, 12, 74–75 Harvey, Joshua 210 Hayes, Peter 49 Hazzard, Johnny 203 Hegarty, Antony 166, 168–74 Hendrix, Jimi 68 heterosexuality, denaturalizing 140–2 heterotopias 105

Hilderbrand, Lucas 50 hip hop 15–16, 96, 111, 198, 205 Holliday, Ruth 145 homocore 199 homoerotics 180–4 homo hop 6, 206 homonormativity 13, 199, 204 homophobia 196 homosexuality 14, 65–66, 89, 143, 184, 204, 209; and race 120–1 homosociality 180–4 House of LaDosha 206 house system 24 Hugo, Chad 150 humor 13–14 hypermasculinity 180, 204 hypersexuality 82–83 Iddon, Martin 97 identity 8, 26; flexibility of 15–16; producing layers of 20; queer 109–10 idiolect 81, 85, 88 intertextuality 3 Jackson, Janet 11–12, 98 Jackson, Michael 151, 153, 177, 179; and queer performance practices 3–4 James, Sylvester 3 Jamiroquai 147–50 Jarman-Ivens, Freya 14–15, 17, 136 Jay Kay 147–50, 159–60, 203 Jay-Z 15–16 JD Samson & MEN 202 Johnson, Corey 204 Jones, David Robert. See Bowie, David Jones, G. B. 199 Jones, Gloria 41 Jones, Grace 167 Jones, Sam 133 jouissance 10, 41, 97 Jude MC 207 Juzwiak, Rich 21 Katz, Zebra 24–25, 198, 206, 209–13, 219 Kay, Jay. See Jay Kay Kerslake, Kevin 189 kitsch 27, 135–6, 145–6, 156 Knowles, Beyoncé. See Beyoncé Kooijman, Jaap 139 Krell, Elias 154, 165 Kun, Josh 96, 104, 105 LaBruce, Bruce 199, 207 Lacan, Jacques 40

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236  Names Index Lacasse, Serge 171 Lady Gaga 11, 94, 96; bio queening 21–22; dance 100; hybridized and queer 97–102; vocal costuming 101–2 LaGanke, Brandon 210 Lance, Mark Norris 109 language, analysis of 23 Lawrence, Francis 152 Lawrence, Tim 42, 78 Lea T 196 Lee, Summer Kim 11 Le1f 6–7, 133–6, 159, 198, 205, 213–18 Leibetseder, Doris 22 Lennox, Annie 17–18, 81–86, 100, 109 Lerman, Stewart 172–3 liberation 6, 35–36, 52, 74, 134, 143; endorsement by pop music 3 Lil Wayne 113–14 linear time 9 listening 16, 23, 85, 171; temporalspecific 1–2, 26 Littlemore, Nick 49 Little Richard 3 Livingstone, Jennie 24 Llewelyn, Doug 189 Lodge, David 38 Lorrenzio, Ingrid 96 love 27, 36; and desire 40; tainted narratives in pop songs 41; theme in songs 37–43 Love, Courtney 186 Lowe, Chris 42, 43 Lubell, Dan 210 Maasø, Arnt 88 Madonna 70–79, 164 Mah, Leslie 201 male domination 96, 111 male voices being unconventional 3 Manson, Shirley 86–89 Maraj, Onika Tanya 112 Marquez, Vanessa 150 Marshall, Melanie 97 Martin, Andy 199 Martin, Ojay 209 Marx, Karl 38 masculinity 14, 18, 19, 27, 138; alternative 11; being challenged 6; black 198; of Boy George 44; changing how it is performed 3; in crisis 6, 42; female 177, 202; hegemonic 204; normative 166; of

Pet Shop Boys 38–39; and queer aesthetics 164–92; white 167 Matadin, Vinoodh 97 Matronic, Ana 106 Maus, Fred 39 May, Brian 101 Mazullo, Mark 185 McClary, Susan 3 McKnight, Brian 151 McNair, Brian 12 Meece, Jeremiah 207 memory 9–10 Mercury, Freddie 143–6, 159 Meshes of the Afternoon (film) 177 metrosexuality 150 Michael, George 138–44, 159, 219 microphones impacting vocal quality 55–56, 102, 137, 151–2, 171–3 Mika 48–53 Minaj, Nicki 96, 112–23, 205, 219; femininity of 117, 119 Monáe, Janelle 166–7, 176–80 Moore, Allan 68, 81 Morgan, Wendy 177 Moss, Jon 44 motion control photography 147 Moyland, William 171 Muller, Sophie 83 Muñoz, José 7–8, 34, 36, 37, 95, 136, 218 music: as mysterium 5; role in queering of biography 6 musical meaning linked to temporality 10 musical temporality 9, 10 musicians, self-reflexivity 19 musicology and queer theory 5 music technology 3, 107–8, 151; altering perception of musicians 14; and camp 135 Muto, Jan 19–20, 167, 185 mystery of music 5 Mystique 21 naïve 37 Nancy, Jean-Luc 170 Naté, Ultra 35–36, 57, 218 Neal, Mark Anthony 15 neosurrealism 157–8 Neptunes, The 150–1 Neuwirth, Thomas 196–7 Nika, Colleen 156 Nirvana 185–92 normative masculinity 166 nostalgia 47, 136

Names Index  237

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Nyman, Michael 37–38 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds’ (2013) 38 Nyong’o, Tavia 13 O’Brien, Lucy 82 Ocean, Frank 206 Of Montreal 25, 97, 124 opacity 5–6, 7, 8, 27, 65; as mechanism for disidentification 63 oppression 179 Otherness 5, 6, 18–19, 23, 90, 198 outing practice 166 OutKast 176–7 Palmer, Gareth 167 Pansy Division 199–201 Paris is Burning (Livingstone) 24 Parlo, Dita 72 parody as a marker of queering 22–23 Patriaque, Jacques 196 Pejic, Andreja 196 Penniman, Michael Holbrook, Jr. See Mika Penniman, Richard Wayne. See Little Richard Peraino, Judith 88 performances: cultural perceptions of 6; and gender norms 95–96 performativity 27 Pet Shop Boys 10, 27, 37–43, 57 Philips, Christopher 181 Philo, Celia 67 Pisaturo, Hayley 213 Pop, Iggy 68 pop art 94–128; and tolerance of minorities 94 pop culture 95 pop text: analysis of 1–2; and subjectivities 5 pornosphere 12 Potter, Russell A. 15, 209 Potts, Tracy 145 Poulson-Bryant, Scott 21 present, idealizing 41 Price, Stuart 39, 41, 57, 74, 106 Prince 7 proprioception 16 Pusari, Suneil 137 Putin, Valadimir 196 Quattlebaum, Michael, Jr. 207 Queen 143 queening by men 20–21

queer: corporeality of 36–37; defining 14–15; as a positive connotation 165–6 queer activism 135 queer aesthetics 10, 18–19; defining 14; in disco 78; and masculinity 165–92 queer communal logic 34 queercore 6, 28, 198–205 queer crossings 110 queer futurity 8, 9, 27, 41 queer hip hop 6, 206 queer hop 6–7, 24, 28, 206–17 queer identity 109–10 queering: as an affect of disorientation 13; as a strategy for resisting confessing 63 Queer Nation 166 queerness: in ‘Celebrate’ 49–53; and ethnicity 165; and ethnicity, gender and sexuality 120–2; as expression of whiteness 22; musical production contributing to 3; as a performance 95–96; and urbanity 11 queer parenting 11 queer performativity 3, 7 queer pop sensibility 3 queer punk 10 queer temporality 9, 54, 197–8 queer theory and musciology 5 queer time 10–11; and perceptions of gender 11 race 121–3; and hip hop 206–17; stereotype 120–1 rap 111 Ratcliffe, Jo 97 Reader, Joel 200–1 ‘reading’ a person 24–25 recording technology. See music technology Reed, Lou 53–57, 58, 168 Reed, Peter 106 Renck, Johan 76 Richardson, John 157 Robertson, Pamela 13 Robinson, Janelle Monáe 176 Robyns, Emery 172 Roche, Ysan 96–97, 102–6, 218–19 Rock, Mick 69 Rodgers, Nile 79–80 Rodriguez, Marcelo 140 Ronson, Mark 138 Ronson, Mick 53, 56, 69 Ross, Diana 79–81 Royster, Francesca 13

238  Names Index

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RuPaul 20–21 RuPaul’s Drag Race (television) 20–21 Russell-Cole, Kathy 121–2 Salmon, Gayle 16, 202 Samson, J. D. 202 Saturday Night Fever (film) 78 Savage, Jon 65–66 scatting 147 Scissor Sisters 106–11 Scott, Ken 55–56 seapunk 154–5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 184 self-differing 13 Sex (Madonna) 71–72 sexual politics 39, 53, 71, 109, 198, 209 sexual yearning 40–41 Shears, Jake 106 Silveira, Lucas 165 Simpson, Mark 142, 204 Sir Mix-a-Lot 117 sissy their walk 21 skin color 121–2 Smith, Marquita 96, 112 smudging 168 social memory 6, 9 Soft Cell 41 Somerville, Jimmy 166, 174–6 Somerville, Siobhan 120 sonic image 171 Sontag, Susan 22, 134, 141 Soundgarden 185 space cowboy 147 Space is the Place (film) 177 space-times 16; multiplicity of 11–12 Spiders from Mars 69 Springsteen, Bruce 167, 180–4 staging of the voice 2–3 Staples, Brent 96, 120 Stefani, Gwen 74 Steinbachek, Larry 174 Steinskog, Erik 164, 169–70 Steinweiss, Homer 137 Steve Miller Band 147 Stewart, Dave 81, 84–86 Stewart, Jamie 18 Stipe, Michael 185 straight time 8 Sun Ra 177 Supreme Fabulettes 198 Szabo, Victor 18 tactical identity endorsement 109 Tanesini, Alessandra 109

Taylor, Jodie 23, 95, 102, 134–5, 198, 199 technologies of the self 16 Temple, Julien 46 temporality 16, 26, 28, 74–75, 95; musical 4–5, 9–11; queer 9, 197–8 temporal-specific listening 1–2, 26 Tennant, Neil 10, 38, 39, 42, 43 Terdiman, Richard 47 Thomas, Calvin 14 Tilley, Colin 115, 116 Timberlake, Justin 150–4, 159–60 timbre 170–1 time: as an entity in music 10; discontinuity of 47; linearity of 23–24; multiplicity of space-times 11–12; spatialization of 52 transference in music 76 transgender 83, 100, 169, 173, 196, 207–8 transvestites 53–57 Travolta, John 78 tribadism 201 Tribe 8, 10, 201–2 truth telling 62–90 Urban, Robert 144 urbanity and queerness 11 utopia 7–8, 23–24, 36, 37, 51, 53, 56, 138, 142; by Pet shop Boys 42 vagabondiva 106 van Lansweerde, Inez 97 Van Zandt, Steven 183 veiling and unveiling tactics 7 verbal space 56–57 viewing, biographic-oriented 1–2, 5, 26 Village People 149–50 Vischer, Robert 165 vocal costuming 27, 169, 216 vocal drag 170–1 vocal production 171–2 vogue fem 134 vogueing 21, 24, 133, 179, 198, 205–6, 213 voice: and gender 2, 19; processing of 87–88; as a product of constructed objectivity 17–18; staging of 2–3; unconventional male 3 Wainwright, Rufus 136–8, 159 Walser, Rob 7 Warhol, Andy 8, 63 Watts, Michael ‘Mick’ 65

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Names Index  239 Wek, Alek 122 West, Tim’m 206 white masculinity 167 whiteness being expressed as queerness 22 Wicke, Peter 55, 170 Wiese, Todd 201 Wilchins, Riki 120, 123 Wilde, Oscar 34, 64, 142, 149 Williams, Pharrell 49, 150, 152 Williams, Robbie 48

Winfrey, Oprah 122 women being dominated and abused 111 Woods, Tiger 120 Wurst, Conchita 196–8 Xiu Xiu 18 Yung Rapunxel 156 Zak, Albin 4, 18 Ziggy (alter ego of David Bowie) 67

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Index of Recordings

ABBA, ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’ (1986) 74 Antony and the Johnsons, Another World (2008) 172 Antony and the Johnsons, ‘For Today I Am A Boy’ (1998) 168–9 Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now (2005) 168–9, 172 Antony and the Johnsons, ‘You Are My Sister’ (1998) 168–70, 173 Aphex Twin, ‘Windowlicker’ (1997) 207 Apostles, ‘Forbidden Love’ (1990) 199

Fruit, Georgie, ‘The Past Is a Grotesque Animal’ (2007) 25, 97, 124–7

Banks, Azealia, ‘Atlantis’ (2012) 154–60 Banks, Azealia, Fantasea (2012) 154 Blanco, Mykki, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss (2012) 207 Blood Orange, ‘He Doesn’t Seem to Know That I’m Alive’ (2011) 11 Bowie, David, Aladdin Sane (1973) 55, 66–68 Bowie, David, ‘The Jean Genie’ (1972) 66–69 Bowie, David, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) 55, 70 Boy George, ‘A Drag Queen is a Cowboy’s Best Friend’ (2013) 203 Boy George, ‘Live Your Life’ (1995) 47 Boy George, This Is What I Do (2013) 47 Bronski Beat, ‘Smalltown Boy’ (1984) 174–6 Bronski Beat, ‘Smalltown Boy Reprise’ (2014) 175

Jackson, Janet, ‘He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive’ (2007) 11 Jackson, Michael, ‘Rock With You’ (1979) 151 James, Sylvester, ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ (1978) 3 Jamiroquai, Emergency on Planet Earth (1993) 140 Jamiroquai, Rock Dust Light Star (2010) 140 Jamiroquai, ‘Space Cowboy’ (1994) 147–50 Jamiroquai, ‘Stoned Again Mix’ (1994) 147 Jamiroquai, The Return of the Space Cowboy (1994) 147 JD Samson & MEN, Talk About Body (2011) 202 Jones, Gloria, ‘Tainted Love’ (1964) 41

Culture Club, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ (1982) 43–48, 58 Culture Club, Kissing to Be Clever (1982) 43

Garbage, ‘#1 Crush’ (1994) 89 Garbage, ‘Androgyny’ (2001) 86–89 Garbage, ‘Cherry Lips’ (2001) 89 Garbage, ‘Milk’ (1996) 89 Garbage, ‘Queer’ (1995) 89 Garbage, ‘So Like a Rose’ (2001) 89 Garbage, ‘Temptation Waits’ (1998) 89 Hegarty, Antony, ‘You Are My Sister’ (2005) 166

Katz, Zebra, ‘Ima Read’ (2012) 24–25 Katz, Zebra, ‘Tear The House Up’ (2014) 24, 210–13 Lady Gaga, ‘Applause’ (2013) 94, 97 Lady Gaga, ARTPOP (2013) 95, 97 Lady Gaga, Born This Way (2011) 99

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242  Index of Recordings Lady Gaga, ‘Yoü and I’ (2011) 99–102 Le1f, ‘Soda’ (2012) 198, 213–17 Le1f, ‘Wut’ (2012) 133–4 Lennox, Annie, Diva (1992) 82 Lennox, Annie, ‘I Need a Man’ (1988) 83–86 London Gay Teenage Group, Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts (1982) 174 Madonna, American Life (2003) 71 Madonna, Bedtime Stories (1994) 72–73 Madonna, Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) 71, 73 Madonna, ‘Don’t Tell Me’ (2000) 88 Madonna, Erotica (1992) 72 Madonna, ‘Express Yourself’ (1989) 164 Madonna, ‘Get Together’ (2003) 71 Madonna, ‘Holiday’ (1983) 79 Madonna, ‘How High’ (2005) 73 Madonna, ‘Hung Up’ (2003) 71, 74–77 Madonna, ‘I Deserve It’ (2000) 73 Madonna, ‘I Love New York’ (2005) 73 Madonna, ‘Jump’ (2006) 71, 73 Madonna, ‘Keep it Together’ (1989) 73 Madonna, ‘Love Song’ (1989) 73 Madonna, ‘Nobody’s Perfect’ (2000) 73 Madonna, ‘Sorry’ (2003) 71, 73 Meece, Jeremiah, ‘She Gutta’ (2014) 207, 209 Mercury, Freddie, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975) 144 Michael, George, ‘Cowboys and Angels’ (1990) 203 Michael, George, Five Live (1993) 144 Michael, George, Listen Without Prejudice (1990) 203 Michael, George, ‘Outside’ (1998) 139–43, 159, 219 Mika, ‘Celebrate’ (2012) 48–53 Mika, ‘Elle me dit’ (2012) 48 Mika, Life in Cartoon Motion (2007) 51 Mika, ‘Lola’ (2012) 48 Mika, ‘Love You When I’m Drunk’ (2012) 48 Mika, ‘Make You Happy’ (2012) 48 Mika, ‘Popular Song’ (2012) 48 Mika, ‘Tah Dah’ (2012) 48 Mika, The Boy Who Knew Too Much (2009) 51 Mika, The Origin of Love (2012) 48

Minaj, Nicki, ‘Anacona’ (2014) 115–19 Minaj, Nicki, ‘Go Hard’ (2009) 112 Minaj, Nicki, ‘High School’ (2013) 113–15 Minaj, Nicki, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded - The Re-Up (2010) 113 Minaj, Nicki, The Pinkprint (2014) 115 Monáe, Janelle, Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase) (2007) 176 Monáe, Janelle, The ArchAndroid (2010) 176 Monáe, Janelle, ‘Tightrope’ (2010) 167, 176–80 Naté, Ultra, ‘Free’ (1997) 35–36, 57, 218 Nirvana, ‘In Bloom” (1991) 187 Nirvana, Nevermind (1991) 185 Nirvana, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (1991) 185 Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007) 124–5 Of Montreal, ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ (2007) 25, 97, 124–7 Pansy Division, Absurd Pop Song Romance (1998) 200 Pansy Division, Pile Up (1995) 203 Pansy Division, ‘Some of My Best Friends’ (2009) 200–1 Pansy Division, That’s So Gay (2009) 200 Pet Shop Boys, Electric (2013) 37 Pet Shop Boys, ‘I’m with Stupid’ (2006) 40 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ (2013) 10, 37–43, 57 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Love is a Catastrophe’ (2010) 40 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Pandemonium’ (2010) 40 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Rent’ (1987) 40 Pet Shop Boys, ‘So Hard’ (1990) 40 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Thursday’ (2013) 10, 41 Pet Shop Boys, ‘Vocal’ (2013) 10, 42–43 Pet Shop Boys, ‘You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk’ (2000) 48 Pink Floyd, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (1973) 74

Index of Recordings  243

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Queen, ‘I Want to Break Free’ (1984) 136, 144–6, 159 Queen, ‘We Will Rock You’ (1977) 99, 101 Reed, Lou, ‘Perfect Day’ (1972) 58 Reed, Lou, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ (1972) 53–58 Reed, Transformer (1972) 53 Roche, Ysan, ‘Bass Gun’ (2012) 103–6, 219 Roche, Ysan, Brain Artificial Limb (2008) 103 Ross, Diana, ‘I’m Coming Out’ (1980) 79–81 RuPaul, ‘Born Naked’ (2014) 21 RuPaul, ‘Sissy That Walk’ (2014) 21 Scissor Sisters, Night Work (2010) 106 Scissor Sisters, Scissor Sisters (2004) 106 Scissor Sisters, ‘Skin Tight’ (2010) 106–9 Sir Mix-a-Lot, ‘Baby Got Back’ (1992) 117 Somerville, Jimmy, ‘Smalltown Boy’ (1984) 166

Springsteen, Bruce, ‘My Lover Man’ (1998) 167, 181–4 Stefani, Gwen, ‘What You Waiting For’ (2004) 74 Steve Miller Band, Brave New World (1969) 147 Sublette, Ned, ‘Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other’ (1981) 203 Supreme Fabulettes, ‘A Drag Queen is a Cowboy’s Best Friend’ (2013) 198 Timberlake, Justin, ‘Cry Me a River’ (2002) 154 Timberlake, Justin, Justified (2002) 150 Timberlake, Justin, ‘Rock Your Body’ (2003) 150–4 Tribe 8, Fist City (1995) 202 Tribe 8, ‘Frat Pig’ (1995) 201–2 Tribe 8, ‘Gang Castrate’ (1995) 201 Tribe 8, ‘Power Boy’ (1995) 201 Wainwright, Rufus, ‘Out of the Game’ (2012) 136–8 Wurst, Conchita, ‘Rise Like a Phoenix’ (2015) 197