Chapter 2.5: Sonic Bodies, Vocal-Objects and the Aural Gaze

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

Over the last three chapters, I’ve discussed Donna Summer’s 1977 hit ‘I Feel Love’ in relation to a particular politico-aesthetic programme that found its most perfect manifestation in the rave culture of the late ’80s/early ’90s. As a disco song that anticipates house and techno, both in sound and in spirit, ‘I Feel Love’ and its vocal protagonist haunt the fault lines between shifting genres, identities, listening cultures and ideologies. Yet even the newest and most violent aesthetic eruptions cool and harden into something familiar. Deterritorialisations remain relative (see Chapter 2.3): each has its complementary reterritorialisation (see Chapter 2.4). The utopian spark of dance culture reterritorialises on specific spaces and institutions (clubs, labels, music festivals, style tribes), and on rave nostalgia, with its lost futures and historical fictions. Sounds reterritorialise on genre, style, voice, language, song, vocal-subject, meaning…

So what then are we left with? Desire passes from ‘intransitive intensity’ to something more straightforwardly sexual. Donna Summer materialises within the songworld as a vocal-subject, along with her own object of desire: ‘Oo I’ll get you’. And the listener/dancer is present as well, in a relationship with her and her desire. One of the obvious dangers that the listener faces when polyvalent desire gives way to unidirectional pleasure is one of an exploitative objectification. Is the vocal-subject then always first and foremost an object of the listener’s pleasure? And would this not turn Drew Hemment’s ‘house without a home’ — the ‘nomadic block of space-time’ that constitutes the heterotopian dancefloor (Hemment 1997: 5) — into a kind of mobile cage for the vocal-subject: the shrieking diva locked inside her diva house attic?

Chapter 1.1: The Vocal-Subject

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

In the Introduction, I outlined three theses concerning the way in which pop music is experienced as meaningful by its audience. The first part of this series focuses on the first of these theses:

On recorded pop tracks, the vocals constitute a distinct 'vocal-subject' in relation to a non-vocal, musical 'situation'.

For each thesis, I will try to demonstrate a) how they are implicated in notions of power and control, b) how they can be used in analysis and criticism of pop music, and c) how this can inform hearings of political music, as well as political hearings of music. Part One is by far the most theoretical, philosophical section of the series, in that I try to explain what I actually mean by these terms, and how they might compare to existing theories of musical phenomenology: not only in the academic realms of musicology, philosophy and cultural studies, but also in everyday fan discourse and journalistic pop criticism.