Readings, Listenings, Viewings
This week, we’ll listen to a lot of songs. A few to start us off: Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit (important for the Eidsheim article); Sam Amidon, Wild Bill Jones; Danny Kaye, Inchworm; Judy Garland, Somewhere over the Rainbow; The Smiths, Well I Wonder; Prince, When Doves Cry; Joni Mitchell, A Case of You; Ella Fitzgerald, Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive; Neil Young, The Needle and the Damage Done; Bjork, There’s More to Life than This; Radiohead, The National Anthem. As you can see, this is impossible!
Reflections
Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Bifurcated Listening,” in The Race of Sound (pp. 151-76).
Simon Frith, “Voice” and “Performance,” from Performing Rites (pp. 183-202, 203-25).
Questions
This week’s readings take us deeper into issues of sound and source. If all voice is acousmatic voice, as Dolar would have it—i.e. all voices ultimately drift free of their sources—we must put to ourselves the provocative question: to what extent is voice autobiographical? Our terrain this week is popular music and a dangerous assumption that guarantees the success of much pop music, that in this music we can hear the pop singer “singing herself” (Frith). In other words, that we hear her voice and can immediately “summarize [her] life story” (Eidsheim). Resisting this slippery collapse of voice and identity, Frith and Eidsheim urge us instead to listen in a “bifurcated,” de-essentializing way. That is, we must learn to listen acousmatically, on multiple levels, both to the “singer in the song” and “the singer on the stage” (Frith) and to know the difference between them. There is in the background of this week the ever-lurking notion that voice should both seem to promise that it can be known, and to resist that knowing, thus guaranteeing the continued circulation of Lacanian jouissance (pleasure) for you, dear listener!
Exercise
No exercise, given midterms. (You’re welcome!) Just send us a link to a song with a voice that compels you—we’ll rummage around the recommendations as we go.