It's Different For Girls (Auto-Tune)

Following on from the "my kind of rap" post with its coda about Auto-Tune and ad libs.

Here's something that's been puzzling me for a while...

Q: Why have female rappers not embraced Auto-Tune to anything like the same degree as their male counterparts? They tend to have naturalistic sounding voices. 

(possible) A #1 - Because the pop associations of pitch-correction - melodizing the rapping, turning it into something between rapping and singing - are something to avoid for "real MC" cred reasons?

(possible) A #2 -  Or is that the androgynizing effect A-Tune has on gruff male voices is not equivalently transgressive when applied to a woman’s voice? 

Below some further thoughts on this - originally an unfinished blogpost from 2018

Migos, "MotorSport"

The ethereal effete wafting of the backing track has an almost systems music quality to it: that chiming tuned-percussion pulse, the flutters of  strings.

There's the contrast between the floaty, angelic, half not-there-ness of especially Quavo and Offset, and the super-potent, marauding, phallic-woman cameos by Cardi and Nicki. Which are so overpowering, so in your face, they topple the mood of the song. Such that listening, sometimes I will actually skip the two female tour de forces, cut straight from Offset to Takeoff, to preserve the dreamy ambience.

Playboi Carti - No Time 

Vocal-texturally (as well as backing track texturally) this reminds me of Orphan Fairytale's hypnagogic instrumentals or the fluttering, twittering vocal counter-melodies that Liz Fraser does in back of her main vocal on Bluebell Knoll / Heaven Or Las Vegas era Cocteaus. 

I hallucinate the line as "I draw my penis out"

And then the baby voice and foetus voice  stuff - completely regressive, emasculated, dreampop-chillwave melting-of-self. 

Jump to 1.18

The virtuous dominated the end o' year lists (but then they always have played well with that constituency - remember Arrested Development)

The decadent, though, had - if not the best tunes - the best swoons. A monopoly on jouissance.

For me all other metrics fell away  - importance, innovation, resonance, significance etc - and I fell back on, fell into, bliss - as the inarguable - a category I started out with in many ways as a writer 

Although it is innovative and original, and possibly not devoid of significance or resonance, the Migos sound above all distinguishes itself through the flooding insistence of jouissance.

And it is about jouissance - this is its subject, its subjectivity in fact - how many times do things flood or drip in these lyrics? These are selves that are melting and brimming and bubbling and overflowing.

Culture the first has higher heights - "T-Shirt" and "Slippery" but Culture II is the one I've listened to many times more. It goes further into jouissance, deeper into a deliquescing subjectivity.

I started out liking the bangers most - "Narcos" and "Auto Pilot". 

Great beat and the production takes the terraced voicescape thing even further - main rap, ad libs, wordless backing ripple of Gregorian gurgles and droning moans and then that mysterious incantation intoning deep in the cavernous background - a sample? I could almost believe it's from Popol Vuh. 

But then the initially overly subdued-sounding  second side bloomed for me and I realised that the second half of the second side  - traditionally where a double album starts to run thin and run out of steam -  was the most creative, unusual and different stretch of the album.

From "MotorSport" through "Top Down On Da Nawf", via "Moving Too Fast", "Work Hard", "Notice Me", "Made Men"  (skipping the misconceived "Too Much Playa", and the inessential album coda / finale / reprise)

"MotorSport" is an example of how far Migos have come from their own earlier mixtape incarnations. Before, the hyped-up jabber - sinewy and shouty -  emphasized how hard they work for their success. Now, from "Slippery" onwards,  their feel is imperturbable nonchalance, gliding serenity,  basking in glory.

That spring-heeled buoyancy was captured perfectly by writer Jordan Rothlein when he described hearing his own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones: “I immediately felt superhuman. The best comparison is walking through an airport and stepping onto one of those conveyor-belt walkways, where suddenly you’re walking twice as fast as everyone else with the same amount of effort.” Which is why on “MotorSport”, Quavo raps “I feel like I can fly”, while Offset goes further, declaring, “No human being, I’m immortal”.

Migos, "Moving Too Fast"

Serenity creased with melancholy - "My heart is so numb /I cannot cry /I don't got feelings"

Migos "Work Hard"

Except they don't sound like they're working at all - and that to me is so much more interesting, unusual - this almost effete rapture - what Stubbs and I would once have called "the ghostly unbody"(in reference to the likes of A.R. Kane) 

Migos, "Notice Me"

Migos, "Made Men"

Very musical track, that

Migos, "Top Down on Da NAWF"

"I'm home... I can never get lost"

Again, cruising-in-the-car serenity creased here and there with pain and sorrow

In the intro, that sample -is it the little girl from Poltergeist trapped in the TV saying "please help me"?

And then the cracks in the armored fortress-self - "for some reason I can't cry-cry"

But the words are saying the opposite of the music - or rather the music (and the vocalisation style - fey melancholia) is undercutting and contradicting the lyrics

The lyrics are like a residual element, a hollowed-out signifier of rap-as-was

But the truth of the music is the woozy gaseous vocal texture - the listless wistfulness

These vocals have more to do with PM Dawn or A.R. Kane

The discontinuity between the two elements - lyrics and vocal grain / affect / mode - can get pretty jarring

This serene elegaic mood of instant nostalgia is set up and then it ends with the mood-dissonant line "she got my kids on her face"

Yet as hard-hearted and cold-souled as the lyrics seem,  the fluidity of the vocal interplay and its ecstatic texturizing speaks to something else: a vulnerability to bliss.  Quavo and Offset and Takeoff seemed entranced by themselves, lost in an auto-erotic swirl, draped in a jouissance that seems to seep out of their bodies as mist of Auto-Tuned droplets, a self-swaddling canopy of shivers and moans, fluttery-shivery wafts....

Quavo, so phonetically proximate to “quiver”, is the perfect name for the Migos MC who is the most ecstatically merged with Auto-Tune technology, to the point where he’s a virtually a cyborg, inseparable from  his vocal prosthesis. 

The lyrics are the usual alpha male, warrior male, gangsta, hardest working me in the rap biz stuff - but the vocals are saying "I surrender"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Not a blissy one but hark at that fractured, halting structure, the way the ad libs are almost as prominent as the main rap. The effect is almost like a trap equivalent to roundelay or canon singing.

^^^^^^^^^^

Twelve months of Migos over-saturation were bookended by this (the purring glow-moan back-lighting "this is how it's sposed to be" is like a fluorescent marker pen)

And then that was it... nothing else really of note from the Migos camp, solo or the main group (Culture III, idiotically deemed a return to form by some after the supposed squib of Culture II, is utterly barren, from the pointless sampling of "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" on the opener onwards)

Still, in hindsight, their sound remains one of the most original, unexpected sounds of the past decade. 

Without every going into the zone of tediously testing the listener, striving to be frenziedly challenging or difficult - staying within the ear-erogenous zone.

The sheer pleasure-principled orientation of the music hides how out-there it can be - there are moments in "Auto Pilot", "Top Down on Da NAWF", "Bosses Don't Speak" - shivers and shudders and dilated moans - that seem to be cut from the same cloth as Tim Buckley's "Starsailor". A song I once described as being like the 'space' of orgasm expanded into an environment, a maze you can walk through.

That's what the Migos backing gurgles - or Playboi Carti at his heights - or the entirety of Young Thug's vocal in almost anything  - or Lil Yachty on "The Ride" -  or Future at his most groggy and reptilian - that's what it sounds like: coming, endlessly stretched out.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Going back to how this started - virtue versus decadence  - the electric lure of the dissolute, of dissipation and the reprobate...

Migos could be contrasted with another Atlanta-based artist whose latest mistresspiece is far more feted

The latter is - like all her previous ones - an essay about Afro-Futurism (with a tick list of progressive stances). It's woven almost entirely from what was once genuinely futurist in its day but is now a stifling tradition.  Rendered in insipid melodies and a rather small voice.

Migos, Carti, Thug, Future - these simply are Afro-Futurist without having to declare themselves as such  (although Future kinda nods at this with his "Future Hendrix" talk). This is  a new thing that is out there in the world, on the radio, on YouTube, streamers. 

The sentiments are the opposite of progressive - in fact, they are psychologically and socially regressive - but they are also hallucinatory, psychotic, hyperreal - the leaking id of the Simulacrum - and symptomatically revealing of the contemporary moment.

The lyrics are like some terminal hyper-decadent state of gangsta-thug-playa-izm - beyond even rap in its hair metal phase of the 2000s - just fleeting fragments of triumph, flaunting, disdain, glory, etc - barely any continuity from line to line. 

Compelling on that level - but what's really fascinating is the disjuncture between the lyrics and the "message" of the music itself. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body….

"Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”

Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text

Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Harmony Engine etc complicate the idea of "the grain of the voice", Barthes's "carnal stereophony"  and "language lined with flesh"- but I feel this passage still captures what's going on with this music and its reversal of priorities. 

Further reading on related topics. 

The kid on "Astral Squeaks" and Playboi Carti.

Anon in Comms reminds me I forgot to include this blissy bubble - "when I take drugs I go to the Moon"

Bingen tune mate!

 

"The female vocal  sampled in "The Sun Rising" is from a song titled "O Euchari" which appears on the album "A Feather On The Breath Of God" composed by Abbess Hildegard Of Bingen and sung by Emily Van Evera who was a member of the vocal ensemble Gothic Voices in 1981 when the album "A Feather On The Breath Of God" was originally recorded." - Wiki

from Tank magazine conversation between Huw Lemmey and Hans Ulrich Obrist, titled "Unknown Language:

"Lemmey's latest novel is unusual in that it was written in collaboration with a co-author who lived over 800 years ago. In Unknown Language, Lemmey channels the voice of medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, recasting key passages from her visionary writings into a work of polyphonic authorship. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist spoke with Lemmey about his collaboration with Hildegard and the affinities between her eschatological visions and our own extreme present.

HUO .... I’ve always been very inspired by Hildegard. For me, she’s the mystic of mystics, a mystic like no other. How did this historic collaboration between you and Hildegard come about?

HL Ben Vickers and Sarah Shin of Ignota Books approached me with the opportunity, asking me if I wanted to read her works and reimagine them within a novel form – in both senses of the word – to make them more accessible for people today. Her work is extremely rich but very dense. There’s a lot of repetition of the same ideas to reiterate and strengthen them, which makes it quite hard going to read. They knew that a lot of my previous work dealt with a sort of eschatological vision of desire and worlds that are moving towards a catastrophe or crisis, and within Hildegard’s own theology there’s a strong eschatological or millenarian idea of an end of the world. Based on her distinct visions, I had to narrativise her cosmology and her teachings. This came quite easily because it feels like we’re living in a world which is on a similar sort of eschatological brainwave, in terms of climate catastrophe and imminent political breakdown.... 

HUO ... The structure of the book mirrors the choir singing Hildegard’s great work. It’s polyphonic. Hildegard said, “Those voices you hear are like the voice of a multitude, which lifts its sound on high; for jubilant praises, offered in simple harmony and charity, lead the faithful to that consonance in which is no discord.” Could you tell me a little bit about the polyphony of the book?

HL ... The nature of the book, as a dialogue that emerges between myself and Hildegard, is very much about allowing myself to become a medium for her ideas. My contribution is a technical novelistic framework which provides a tempo and a pace for the ideas and for the narrative. So the narrative is produced, but then the real flesh of the book, the cosmology, the ideas around grace and spirituality, are all Hildegard’s. It was a matter of trying to find within my own work the space and the silence in which her work could speak.

"....  it was a very easy book to write. Because Hildegard had already written the meat of the cosmology, once I found myself in a creative state I felt like I understood what she was trying to say and I understood what I wanted to do....  I felt like a bit of a jobbing author, like I was ghostwriting the story that she’d already told in her visions.

... Her ideas are mystically revealed, and therefore potentially at odds with the mainstream theology of the Church. She’s a rebel when she emerges, but by sheer luck or serendipity, she becomes somebody whose visions are accepted, which gives her enormous earthly power. Within her work there’s this constant tension between the established Church and what she regards as the revealed truth. My interest, politically, is in her relationship with God the Father as a patriarchal figure, and then God the Spirit, the entity who delivers grace..... 

.... The only way you can really understand her life is through its tensions. The tension between her visions and the strict form of the Catholic Church, and the extremely physiological tension between her sickness and her visions and her sickness and her work. She was a very unwilling subject for the visions that manifested in her and felt a deep sickness whenever they arrived. She experienced them as something painful and unpleasant that had to be made manifest in order to almost exorcise them from her, and yet she recognised them as communication from God.... 

HUO...  Ben Vickers suggested we discuss the erotics of spirituality. Is there a relationship between queerness and its speculative dimension, between Hildegard and queerness?

HL I was very influenced by Elvia Wilk, who writes amazingly about female mystics in the Middle Ages and the relationship they had towards the body. One of the only ways in which female mystics could contextualise or survive their experiences was through their relationship with the body...  Elvia talks a lot about the embodied knowledge of female mystics and their relationship towards Christ being one of sublimated sexuality, which is unsurprising given the material conditions in which nuns were living at the time. Hildegard spent her entire adolescence locked in a single room with an anchoress, one other woman. Hildegard was very unusual as one of the few women in the medieval Catholic Church who could preach, and that was partly because of the force of her revelations and her mysticism being based on the body. People very much understand that relationship when they talk about her illness, but less so when they talk about her sexuality. Calling that queerness is maybe pushing it. It’s impossible to retroactively fit contemporary notions of sexual identity back onto people for whom sexuality was not necessarily a discrete part of identity but rather just a series of acts. Certainly though, her vision of the body and of sexuality is not one that fits comfortably into a lot of binaries around gender and sexual orientation that we have today and is much richer for it. There is a strange, sensual, erotic aspect to a lot of her writing and it’s quite literally very fluid. There’s a lot of discussion of bodily fluids and the vitality of things that flow.... It’s about her relationship with the natural world as well as her embodied relationship with God’s grace. She believed in this idea of viriditas, of greenness, which is a sort of early ecology stating that there’s an ecosystem of living things that are all interrelated in order to sustain the worship of God...

HUO Do you think Hildegard had drugs?

HL No. There’s a lot of discussion around the nature of her visions. There’s a very interesting essay by Oliver Sacks which suggests that what she experienced might be something similar to what contemporary migraine sufferers would understand in those terms....

shoegazetronica

Says Chal Ravens, "really enjoying The Primitive Painter reissue coming on Apollo – glittering cybertech waters, distant polygonal islands, '90s digiutopics, that sort of thing"

Now I was wondering if the artist name (an alter ego for Alter Ego, apparently - i'm stealing a Youtuber's quip here) was a reference to Felt

... and thought "nah, more likely it's directly referring  to Lascaux"

But lookee here, a nod to The Waterboys

and "Cathedral" - as in the proverbial "sonic cathedral" for 4AD-ish religiose reverb aesthetic?

Felt had this proximately titled song

and this even more proximately titled song




ah - and, stop press - as Cesar in comments points out, there is also this Felt song 

so clearly formatively rooted in mid-80s Anglo-indie this The Primitive Painter chap - or chaps, rather, since Alter Ego = duo 

now I'm wondering if that song is named after the House of Love offshoot captained by Terry Bickers of vitreous-guitar showering you with crystalline splinters renown?

The shoegaze into post-rock evolution is well documented and logical

But the shoegaze into the electronic listening music / chill out / IDM side of techno is less delineated

Chapterhouse got that album remixed by somebody or other IDM-ish (Global Communications? Future Sound of London? )

Morr Music

a German friend of mine Heiko Hoffmann - long time editor of electronic music magazine Groove, until recently - did a shoegaze compilation back in 2003

the texturitis and blissy feeling of dreampop / shoegaze was a gateway drug for E-lectronic dance and non-dance, for some, maybe

for me as a writer, maybe that applies too - texture-attentiveness (texture > text) vis-a-vis MBV et al, sets me up well for texturrythm-attentiveness about rave .... ditto "the politics of ecstasy" becomes "the politics of Ecstasy" (although in both cases I would say now that it's more like an "anti-politics" - for better or worse, and increasingly, i think worse) 

but as a listener I was into club music and synth-abetted funk right from the start of the 80s

and in fact would write about things like Mantronix  in that engineer-as-poet / new sonic architecture mode well before I became a raver - at the exact same time as I was hymning A.R. Kane in similar sort of terms (not man-machinic but certainly the human figure disappearing into the miasma of sound)

same kind of becoming-abstract, depersonalized, sensation-not-significance approach

"against interpretation" (before I'd even read Sontag's essay)

Deleuzian, before I'd ever cracked open A Thousand Plateaux 

one instinctively know what is right

and this was the right response to what the music was doing 




the missus reviewed this gig (where they were supported by The House of Love) 

later we saw Felt's final gig together