So my recourse, in spells of emotional turmoil, is to media occupying two opposed registers: on the one hand, macho or machinic music that denies the possibility of emotion/affect (excepting aggression, obvs); on the other, stately, hyperbolically tragical stuff – chansons, melodrama, Veronika Voss. Basically I’ve been listening to a lot of D Double E and a lot of Cale-era Nico lately. As a consequence I’ve been thinking a lot about how voices affect me.
Michel Chion differentiates three modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. Causal listening is the level at which we class sounds as (coming from) machines, larynxes, birds, middle-aged Latina females, grime MCs etc. (our hypotheses can be wrong, of course). Taking D Double, the level on which I ‘get’ “think you’re a big boy cos you’ve got a beard/ bullets’ll make your face look weird” is semantic, but the line works musically because of his bizarre torsion of the vowels – perceptible at the level of reduced listening. D Double E gets away with his signature line being ‘it’s me’ because no one else says me like him; he seems to have total control over the production of the sorts of sounds you’d usually associate with vexed inarticulacy. Of course, the three aren’t really separable; what I’ve deduced or supposed about a voice will inflect my interpretation of what it says. I can find this girl’s ‘R’ sounds* fascinating as the residue of a Notts accent’s all-but-totally successful erasure (with that erasure’s attendant class connotations) but also gorgeous all on their dull, frictive own. Nico’s arcane, obstructively mispronounced lyrics kind of don’t matter because they’re the occasion for her to make sounds, though their gamey magniloquence also adds something to the experience.**
Barthes’ term for the irrefutable je ne sais quoi certain singers/vocal artefacts possess is ‘grain’ (which, given my general preference for trebly and sobbing voices over husky and raspy ones, I’ve never much liked as a descriptor). Naomi Schor suggests that we can find the co-ordinates for a Barthesian aesthetics in those aspects of each medium which seem, for Barthes, to represent its irreducible – and irrecuperable – essence: the ‘punctum’ in photography, the obtuse in film, the haiku-esque mode of textual statement that ‘instead of insisting ‘we are the real’... merely announces ‘so’’ (Schor 89). ‘Grain’ – which Schor doesn’t, incidentally, mention - would seem to be the sonic equivalent.
But are these qualities always contingent and/or irrecuperable? Barthes says yes: escaping/exceeding intention and meaning, they can’t be synthesised or produced (Joss Stone signifies without possessing the granular quality proper to proper soul?). Nevertheless, once they’ve happened they command our attention – which is a very valuable commodity. In an essay I recently read (which has transformed my experience of looking at go-see polaroids – something that, as a consequence of my guilty fascination with the fashion industry, is something I actually do a fair bit of), Elizabeth Wissinger talks about fashion models’ role as amplifiers or transducers of affect.
Challenging the traditional supposition that fashion photography is about embodying culturally valorized archetypes, she suggests that the best models/images may be precisely those that mobilise confusion and irresolution, creating expressions/conjunctions that are ‘unexpected... unassimilable... beyond the borders of conventional interpretation.’ A pre-expressive attitude – a face that could be about to resolve into an expression of joy, or ire or sulkiness but is, right now, suggestively illegible – is what the fashion shoot aims to produce/record/transmit.
As such, looking totally punk, or all-American – or, for that matter, looking ‘womanly’/‘sexy’ - isn’t necessarily as lucrative, as durably recuperable, as being able to negotiate the space between definable attitudes and aesthetics (I’ve written elsewhere about how, when Chantal Joffe gets it right, her paintings suggest the proximity of sexily compelling poses/expressions to poses/expressions symptomatic of boredom, panic or foetal alcohol syndrome). The same’s arguably true of voices; while studies suggest that different accents and dialects connote different qualities, signifying for the majority of us as posh, kind, stupid, trustworthy or whatever, voices that are mongrel, or grating, unpredictable or texturally compelling have a capacity to levy attention more to do with reduced listening than with our cultural biases.
Chion uses another term – ‘MSIs’ or ‘materializing sound indices’, ‘qualities of sound that direct our attention to the physical nature of its source’ – that suggests something both about the character of sounds that move us, and the reason they do (weirdly I’m thinking here of the tiny breathless hitch with which the beardy-sounding voice of hhWickes inaugurates his pronunciation of that brand name, also of how abnormally high in the mix Elly Jackson’s vocals tend to be, and how well this serves her raw novitiate schtick); you kind of hear these sounds with your musculature and pallette as much as your brain, they act on you physically, on account of their reference back to their production. Maybe, at points where I’m not really keen on where cognition and memory tend to be taking me, its the capacity of these voices to override the semantic that’s so appealing. Certainly I’m going to give Undeniable – feat. an uncharacteristically sweet-natured D Double vocal – another spin.
*(‘uvular rhotics’, I think they’re called – interestingly Keita Takahashi just called his new company uvula because he was struck by the contrast between the (to him, meaningless) English word’s sound, and its ‘disgusting’ Japanese significance)
**Here we’re up already against the gendered sound/meaning opposition whereby women are identified with formless babble, men with syntactic sense – an opposition psychoanalytic feminism has read as a male attempt to disavow the phase when the bouncing baby boy was dependent on the instructive maternal voice. Music has repeatedly been seen as ‘dangerous’ because it subordinates the signifying function of the voice to emotive/aesthetic imperatives. Dudes finding foreign chicks’ botches cute and the quasi-toddlerish extended sibilants currently voguish among hipster girls suggest this same libidinally invested preference for female speech to be infantile/ornamental/purely sonorous – a charge the paragraph this note’s appended to could be convicted of pretty easily too.
***It also suggests the phenomenon’s similarity to the operation of MSG, which (I’m told) activates so many disparate tastebuds simultaneously that the body asks for another helping in the hope of getting a better handle on what’s going on.
