Queerness in Pop Music

Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality

Stan Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317589716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

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, naivety, 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.

1 Setting the Stage

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

Temporal-specific listening:

• 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, 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

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. Significantly, 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.

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...