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‘Sing it for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Joseph Auner
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Abstract

Drawing on writings concerning the cyborg and the posthuman, this article considers songs by Radiohead, Moby and others that use processed voices, digitally generated speech and sampled vocal loops. In these songs the technological sphere is made the locus of expression, while the human voices are mechanized and drained of subjectivity. These pieces – products of a rock band that relinquishes its voice to a computer, and of a ‘techno’ DJ striving to make mechanized dance music sing – can illustrate some ways musicians have used posthuman voices to chart and destabilize the boundaries of race, gender and the human.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , 2003 , pp. 98 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2003

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References

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Humanities Institute Stony Brook (1999), the American Musicological Society (Toronto, 2000) and the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (Stony Brook, 2000). For much helpful advice I am grateful to Edith Auner, Mike Boyd, David Brackett, Christa Erickson, Ira Livingston, Timothy D. Taylor, Jason Hanley and the anonymous referees.Google Scholar

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12 Yorke identified the voices as coming from the 1974 film Flight of the Condor, sampled off a hotel television. Marc Randall, Exit Music: The Radiohead Story (New York, 2000), 225.Google Scholar

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18 In the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke described the belief that the mind would eventually free itself from matter, with robot bodies as a stepping stone: ‘Sooner or later, as their scientific knowledge progressed, they would get rid of the fragile, disease-and-accident-prone bodies as they wore out – or perhaps even before that – by constructions of metal and plastic and would thus achieve immortality. The brain might linger for a little while as the last remnant of the organic body, directing its mechanical limbs and observing the universe through its electronic senses – senses far finer and subtler than those that blind evolution could ever develop.‘ Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on the screenplay of the MGM film by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (New York, 1968), 173–4.Google Scholar

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20 Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide (New York, 1999), 1218–19.Google Scholar

21 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.Google Scholar

22 Ibid.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., xiv.Google Scholar

24 Plant, Zeros and Ones, 182.Google Scholar

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26 Nichols, ‘The Work of Culture’, 111.Google Scholar

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28 Ibid., 286.Google Scholar

29 Loza, ‘Sampling (Hetero)sexuality’, 352.Google Scholar

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31 Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 163.Google Scholar

32 Dickinson, ‘“Believe”?‘.Google Scholar

33 Loza, ‘Sampling (Hetero)sexuality’, 350–1.Google Scholar

34 Weheliye, Alexander G., ‘“Feenin”: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music’, Social Text, 71 (2002), 21–47. I am grateful to Prof. Weheliye for sharing this text with me prior to its publication. Although he departs from some of its conclusions, Weheliye draws in particular on Kodwo Eshun's study of ‘Afrofuturism’, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London, 1998). See also Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover and London, 1994), 62–98.Google Scholar

35 Weheliye, ‘“Feenin”‘, 23–4.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 24.Google Scholar

37 For additional approaches to complexities around issues of whiteness and masculinity in popular music see Ching, Barbara, ‘The Possum, the Hag, and the Rhinestone Cowboy: Hard Country Music and the Burlesque Abjection of the White Man’, and Jeffrey Melnick, ‘“Story Untold”: The Black Men and White Sounds of Doo-Wop’, Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York and London, 1997), 117–33, 134–50.Google Scholar

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39 Contrasting sharply with HAL's soothing vocal timbre, the computer's speech is closer to the grating voice of the all-powerful ‘Alpha 60’ in Godard's Alphaville (1965), which was produced not electronically but by a man ‘whose vocal cords were shot away in the war and who has been re-educated to speak from the diaphragm. Godard thought it was important to have, not a mechanical voice, but one which has been, so to speak, killed – like the inhabitants of Alphaville.’ Alphaville: A Film by Jean-Luc Godard, ed. and trans. Peter Whitehead (New York, 1966), 12. Thanks to David Metzer for directing me to this reference.Google Scholar

40 Loza sees dance music's highly sexualized mechanized personae, which she dubs ‘fembots’, as a means for reasserting gender dualities: ‘the salacious fembot allows heterosexual males to contemporaneously manage the threats posed by rampant technology and unbridled female sexuality’. Loza, ‘Sampling (Hetero)sexuality’, 351. For more on images of the female cyborg see Balsamo, Anne Marie, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, NC, 1996).Google Scholar

41 Notably, Chion points out that Kubrick originally intended the computer in 2001 to be an ambulatory robot named Athena; in the final version of the film women are almost totally absent from space. Chion, Kubrick's Cinematic Odyssey, 4.Google Scholar

42 Richard Taruskin, ‘A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and “The Music Itself”‘, Modernism/Modernity, 2 (1995), 2–26; see also Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 84–100.Google Scholar

43 Ernst Krenek, Exploring Music, trans. Margaret Shenfield and Geoffrey Skelton (London, 1966), 23–4. See my ‘Soulless Machines and Steppenwolves: Renegotiating Masculinity in Krenek's Jonny spielt auf’, Siren Songs, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, 2000), 222–36.Google Scholar

44 Dickinson, ‘“Believe”?‘, 333.Google Scholar

45 Theo Cateforis, ‘Are We Not New Wave? Nostalgia, Technology, and Exoticism in Popular Music at the Turn of the 80s’ (Ph.D. dissertation, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000), 191. He contrasts the phallic performance of the stereotypical rock guitarist with the adoption of an androgynous image by Numan, Kraftwerk and others in which ‘the balance of human and machine is matched … by the union of masculine and feminine’ (ibid.).Google Scholar

46 Ibid., 160.Google Scholar

47 Kraftwerk's 1991 tour included robotic replicants of themselves in the stage performances. Band member Florian Schneider said of the robots: ‘The image of the robot is very important to us, it's very stimulating to people's imaginations. We always found that many people are robots without knowing it. The interpreters of classical music, Horowitz for example, they are like robots, making a reproduction of the music which is always the same. It's automatic, and they do it as if it were natural, which is not true. So, we have opened the curtains and said: “Look, everyone can be robotic, controlled.” In Paris, the people go in the Metro, they move, they go to their offices, 8 a.m. in the morning – it's like remote control. It's strange … In fact, we have exposed the mechanical and robotic attitude of our civilization.‘ Cited in Pascal Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music (London, 1999), 161.Google Scholar

48 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 286–7.Google Scholar

49 Fredric Jameson contrasts the lack of expression in works by Warhol, for example, with Edvard Munch's The Scream and its ‘great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation and isolation’. With the postmodern breakdown of the centred subject, there is not only a liberation from anxiety but, according to Jameson, ‘a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling’. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991), 15.Google Scholar

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52 Cited and discussed in Will Straw, ‘Authorship’, Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (Malden, MA, and Oxford, 1999), 199–208 (p. 202). See also Dickinson, ‘“Believe”?‘, 335–6.Google Scholar

53 Sebald, W. G., The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York, 1998), 187–8.Google Scholar

54 Simon Reynolds contrasts the use of the Autotuner in contemporary R & B to produce an ‘intermittent glister of posthuman perfect pitch’ with Radiohead's interest in generating defects. He cites Yorke as saying ‘We used Autotuner on Amnesiac twice. On “Packt like Sardines”, I wasn't particularly out of tune, but if you really turn up the Autotuner so it's dead in pitch, it makes it go slightly … [he makes a nasal, depersonalized sound]. There's also this trick you can do … where you give the machine a key and then you just talk into it. It desperately tries to search for the music in your speech and produces notes at random.’ Reynolds, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, 32.Google Scholar

55 See Auner, Joseph, ‘Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Recent Music’, Echo: A Music-Centered Journal (online: <http://www.humnet.ucla.edu.echo>); and Taylor, ‘Technostalgia’, Strange Sounds, 96–114.);+and+Taylor,+‘Technostalgia’,+Strange+Sounds,+96–114.>Google Scholar

56 Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (New York, 1995), 326. Discussed in Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 261–72.Google Scholar

57 Exit Human: Arvada. Direct Hit Records DH035 (2001).Google Scholar

58 The recording is included in Early Modulations: Vintage Volts. Caipiranha Music, 2027.2 (1999). Thanks to Jason Hanley for pointing out this connection to me.Google Scholar

59 Hayles argues that the very design of the test already betrays a posthuman framework, whereby the idea of the human is deemed testable by disembodied information. How We Became Posthuman, xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

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63 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 290.Google Scholar

64 Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington, 1998), 16.Google Scholar

65 Weheliye, ‘“Feenin”‘, 33–4.Google Scholar

66 Cited at <www.greenplastic.com/lyrics/songs/fitter.html>. Elsewhere Yorke has said, ‘The reason we used a computer voice is that it appeared to be emotionally neutral. In fact, it wasn't, because the inflections that it uses made it to me incredibly emotional.‘ Randall, Exit Music, 225; and see Clarke, Martin, Radiohead: Hysterical and Useless (London, 2000), 121..+Elsewhere+Yorke+has+said,+‘The+reason+we+used+a+computer+voice+is+that+it+appeared+to+be+emotionally+neutral.+In+fact,+it+wasn't,+because+the+inflections+that+it+uses+made+it+to+me+incredibly+emotional.‘+Randall,+Exit+Music,+225;+and+see+Clarke,+Martin,+Radiohead:+Hysterical+and+Useless+(London,+2000),+121.>Google Scholar

67 Reynolds, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, 30.Google Scholar

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69 Deleuze's description of Kleist's treatment of the German language strikingly echoes Loza's typology of vocal modifications in recent dance music: ‘What kind of language was he awakening in the depths of German by means of grins, slips of tongue, grinding of teeth, inarticulate sounds, elongated connections, brutal speeding up and slowing down?’ Gilles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York and London, 1994), 25. Thanks to Mauro Calcagno for directing me to this reference.Google Scholar

70 Nick Hornby's review of Kid A in The New Yorker explained the album as evidence ‘that this is a band that has come to hate itself’: ‘What is peculiar about this album is that it denies us the two elements of Radiohead's music that have made the band so distinctive and enthralling. For the most part, Thom Yorke's voice is fuzzed and distorted beyond recognition, or else he is not allowed to sing at all; and Jonny Greenwood's guitar, previously such an inventive treat, has been largely replaced with synths.’ Nick Hornby, ‘Beyond the Pale: Radiohead Gets Further Out’, The New Yorker, 30 October 2000, 106.Google Scholar

71 Plant, Zeros and Ones, 199. And see Toynbee, Jason, ‘Dance Music: Business as Usual or Heaven on Earth?‘, Making Music Popular: Musicians, Creativity, and Institutions (New York, 2000), 130–62, and Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (London and New York, 1999).Google Scholar

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74 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 291. Plant writes similarly of the internet as a means for throwing into question ‘all individuated notions of organized selves and unified lives’, but, like Hayles, she also argues that the body is not left behind: ‘the keystrokes of the user on the Net connect them to a vast distributed plane composed not merely of computers, users, and telephone lines, but all the zeros and ones of machine code, the switches of electronic circuitry, fluctuating waves of neurochemical activity, hormonal energy, thoughts and desires’. Plant, Zeros and Ones, 143.Google Scholar

75 Weheliye argues similarly of the way that R & B ‘reconstructs the black voice in relation to information technologies’. ‘While singers remain central to the creation of black music, they do so only in conjunction with the overall sonic architecture, especially in the turn away from the lead singer as the exclusive artist to more producer-driven and collaborative musical productions.’ ‘“Feenin”’, 30.Google Scholar

76 M. Tye Comer, ‘Unstoppable Force’, Urb, October 1998, 95; and see Straw, ‘Authorship’, 207.Google Scholar

77 See also Taylor, Strange Sounds, 140–4.Google Scholar

78 Plant, Zeros and Ones, 136–7.Google Scholar

79 Comer, ‘Unstoppable Force’, 92. Straw writes of the multiple personae: ‘In other periods, or in other styles of music, this would be commercially foolhardy, but in the field of contemporary dance music it is strategically appropriate. Within the dance music community, little value is attached to the idea of a creator retaining a consistent identity through ongoing changes of style and genre … And so, Norman Cook (itself a pseudonym) will subdivide his identity, producing distinctive versions of himself to work and flourish in specialized musical genres from which his particular identities seem inseparable.’ Straw, ‘Authorship’, 207.Google Scholar

80 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 285.Google Scholar

81 According to Gerald Marzorati, ‘All by Himself’, New York Times Magazine, 17 March 2002, 34, ‘Porcelain’ has been used in a 'Nordstrom TV campaign, the trailer for the movie The Beach and episodes of the television shows Third Watch, Party of Five and Jack and Jill.Google Scholar

82 Moby was featured in the 2000 Calvin Klein ad campaign for Dirty Denim, with the slogan: ‘Comfortable, Worn-in. Dirty Denim looks worn even though it isn't.’ New York Times, 16 January 2000. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the sound, with its abrupt attacks and decays, is actually a synthesized imitation of the distinctive dynamic envelope of the Mellotron, made famous by Led Zeppelin and the Moody Blues, which used a keyboard to trigger tape loops of recorded string sounds; thus Moby's string sound might be heard as a digital imitation of an analogue imitation of the sound of a string ensemble. For a similar example of what he calls a ‘second order simulation’, see Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, 196.Google Scholar

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88 Significantly, the internet discourse accompanying the album was marked by frequent observations of the blurring of the human and the technological; the title of the album has been linked to a software program for imitating children's voices as well as to the first human clone.Google Scholar

89 Reynolds, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, 32.Google Scholar

90 As printed at <www.greenplastic.com/lyrics/songs/fitter.html>. See sound clip 5 at <www.jrma.oupjournals.org>. Radiohead, from ‘Kid A’, Kid A. © 2000 EMI Records Ltd..+See+sound+clip+5+at+.+Radiohead,+from+‘Kid+A’,+Kid+A.+©+2000+EMI+Records+Ltd.>Google Scholar

91 Morse, Virtualities, 19.Google Scholar