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7/30/2019 Bradby_Sampling Sexuality Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music - Copy

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Popular Music (1993) Volume 12/2. Cop yright 1993 Cambridge University Press

Sampling sexuality: gender,technology and the body indance musicBARBARA BRADBY

Suspicious minds: feminism and popular musicBayton (1992) is righ t to be preoccupied by the mu tual blindness betwee n feminismand popular music. For if pop m usic has been the twentieth-century cultural genremost centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect morefeminist critique and engagem ent with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists haveoften been suspicious of po p music as typifying ev erything that ne eds chan ging forgirls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture thatexcludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished tocelebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw anembarrassed veil around its sexual p olitics, and have had good reaso n to be wary offeminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography showsthe considerable work that has been done by feminists on popular music, and theproblem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within bothfeminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that thework of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in 'reclaiming'the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does haveparallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girl-groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of themechanisms throug h w hich men exclude wom en from participation in rock band s,while Bayton's own stud y of women musicians parallels other sociological work onhow women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audienceresearch in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women ' sexperience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators ofmeaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990).

In this article I try to draw connections between some of the themes of thiswriting, and theoretical work in feminism and in popular music. In both of theseareas, the intersection with postmodernist social and cultural theory has domin-ated recent debates. For feminism, postmodernism has meant the need to workthrough what a recognition of differences between women means for political andcritical prac tice; w hile in the area of popular music, the debate has been about thesignificance of what has been summ ed up as the 'death of rock' (Frith 1988). At firstsight, there seems little in common between these two debates, apart from theircommon derivation from theories of the 'death of the subject' and the 'end of

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156 Barbara Bradbyhisto ry'. But I believe it is importan t to try and make the se con nection s, if feminismis to engage with popular music in a meaningful way.One important strand of postmodernist writing on popular music has focusedon a series of technological practices, running from 'scratching', 'dubbing' and'versioning' in Caribbean music (Hebdige 1987), through to digital 'sampling' inhou se m usic and its evolution into 'dance mu sic' in the late 1980s. These technolo-gies have seemed to some to have radical democratic potential, subvertingaccepted ideas of 'the author' and blurring the boundaries between production andconsumption (Hebdige 1987; Jones and Willis 1990; Langlois 1992). Durant (1992)provides a more considered discussion of the implications for musical literacy anddemocracy of the new technologies. Yet nowhere in the literature on house musicand sampling have the implications of these practices for women been consideredin any depth. This is particularly problematic given the utopianism that has sur-rounded dance culture, which has a 'post-feminist' side to it in its claims to havemoved beyond sexism. In focusing on dance music, this paper looks at theevidence for new social practices which can explain these Utopian claims in relationto gende r an d sexuality in dance-floor culture, and relates these to the way gende ris represented in the music itself.

The way in which the computerisation of music worked to exclude womenand girls from pop production in the 1980s has not gone unremarked by feminists(McRobbie 1988). In one sense this was nothing new: technology had for a longtime been incorporated into rock and pop via ideologies that linked technologicalexpertise with masculinity. A mastery of technology, whether as easy familiarity,or as Promethean conflict, is a taken-for-granted aspect of the spectacle of 'live'rock and a part of rock's peculiarly masculine erotic.1 Rock's concepts of autho rship(originality, art) and of authenticity (the real person in the real performance) devel-oped around this use of technology and not in opposition to it. And while the'new' technologies promised to render these concepts of authorship redundant,Goodwin shows how they have been reconstituted around figures such as 'theproducer' and around new ways of demonstrating mastery of technology in 'live'acts (1990).2 But these processes also have a familiar gender dimension to them.The new categories of studio hero - producers, mixers, 'scratchers', etc. - are allnormatively male, unless we indicate to the contrary. And terms such as 'author-ship', 'art', 'creativity' and 'originality', which have been used both by detractorsand proponents of 'sampling',3 are the same terms that have generally workedagainst the inclusion of women performers in the rock hall of fame.

If women have had an acknowledged role in rock and pop it has been asperformers, even though this has been mainly limited to vocal rather thaninstrumental performance, and has been circumscribed by ideologies that do notgenerally allow women's performances to be 'authentic' in the way that men's are.It is therefore important to look at what the new technologies are doing to thenotion of performance in popular m usic, and at how that affects the representationof w om en, both vocally in reco rdings, a nd visually in mu sic videos. As it turns ou t,female performance has been a contested area in dance music, because of theparticular ways in which sampling has been used on women and the implicationsthis has had for women's identity. But the introduction of female vocal perform-ances, deriving from the black musical genres of soul and rap, was also of crucialcommercial importance in the transition from (underground) 'house music' to thema instream success of 'da nc e'. In the proc ess, not only has the n ew role of 'female


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 157vocalist' emerged, with ambiguous implications for women's musical careers, butdisturbingly traditional repre sentation s of wo m en have bee n recycled in both 'live'and sampled performance.

There is an obvious way in which women have once again been equated withsexuality, the body, emotion and nature in dance music, while men have beenassigned to the realm of culture, technology and language. These positionings ofwom en an d m en in relation to natu re and culture have been identified by feministsas a contradiction at the core of Enlightenment universalism and rationalism(Jordanova 1980). Yet, as representations in dance music, it is difficult for feministanalysis to come to grips with their critique, since their 'recontextualisation' withinhi-tech sounds tends to mark them as inauthentic performances - a representationof a performance as the expression of emotion, rather than the performance itself.It is in this sense, I would argue, that male producers have been 'sampling sexu-ality' in dance m usic, regardless of whe ther voices have be en technically 'sam pled 'or not. But this tendency is enh anc ed by a process of technologisation of wo m en 'sbodies at the level of representation, which includes the intervention of digitaltechnologies in the female voice as we hear it, and the fragmentation of audio andvisual body imag es, or of the voice and the bod y. The resu ltant cyborgs (Haraway1990) transgress the boundaries of the Enlightenment equation of women withnature, and pose difficulties for orthodox feminist analysis. These dilemmas aresimilar to those identified at an abstract level by feminists deb ating with theo ries of'postmodernism', but are here concretised in actual people and their social rela-tions in the creation of music. Analysis must therefore shift between the modernand the postmodern, between the critique of Enlightenment gender categories andan awareness that they have become untenable divisions in everyday practice aswell as in theory.

Caught in a trap? Feminism and postmodernismAs a subject-based politics, there is no do ub t that feminism has found the adv en t ofpostmod ernism u nne rving . The 'death of the subject', to which feminism h ad in nosmall part contributed, was turned back on it as the sin of 'essentialism', and thepioneering feminist theory of barely a decade before was castigated for its naivebelief that all women share common characteristics (Bordo 1990). But while it istrue that feminism's exposition of the covert masculinity of the gender-neutrallanguage of Enlightenment individualism did lend credence to the 'death of thesubject', this is only half the story. For a part of the critique was the revealing ofmasculine subjectivity that underlay the 'objective' language of 'man', 'the author','the individual', or 'rights', and of the exclusion of female subjectivity which hadbeen defined as 'other'.

Faced with this paradox, some have welcomed postmodernism as thetheoretical incarnation of the difficulties within the women's movement itselfaround differences between women (of class, race, sexual orientation, and in rela-tion to colonialism, to name only some). The challenging of white, Western,middle-class and heterosexist assumptions has led to the more specific andlocalised framing of demands, which is not necessarily incompatible with princi-pled social criticism (Fraser and Nicho lson 1988), and can lead to a netw ork ing typeof politics, where differences acknowledged become a source of strength (Barrett1987; Moore 1988). Others, like Flax, take the implications of postmodernism much


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158 Barbara Bradbyfurther, and question 'the notion of a feminist standpoint that is truer thanprevious (male) ones' not only on the grounds that any standpoint is partialbecause 'rooted in the social relations of class, race, or homophobia', but alsobecause 'It . . . pre sup po ses ge nde red social relations in which there is a categoryof beings who are fundamentally like each other by virtue of their sex - that is, itassum es the othe rness m en a ssign to wo m en' (Flax 1987, p. 642). Strangely, such aposition seems to grant reality to the social relations of class, etc., but when wecome to thinking of our social experience as women, it is all just a male fantasy!This seems impossibly undermining of the painstaking work that has gone intobuilding wo m en 's language of our ow n experiences over the last twen ty years - thenaming of sexual harrassment or wife abuse, new discourses around the violenceof rape or male-controlled childbirth, new discourses around female sexuality andaround the cultural representation of women. Postmodernist theorising hascertainly sh arpe ned aw arene ss of the n eed to locate claims about 'w om en' in termsof other social vectors, to avoid 'speaking for' other groups of women, and to beaware that one's analysis is only ever partial. Yet as Bordo argues, it is an illusionthat ethnocentrism can be overcome by 'political correctness' (1990, p. 138). Thedogma that 'attacks gender generalisations as in principle essentialist or totalizing'needs questioning and opening up to empirical social research (ibid., pp. 139-^10).In addition, the politics advocated by Flax, of 'decentring the world' so that 'realitywill appear even more unstable, complex and disorderly than it does now' (1987,pp . 642-3), does make me want to revert to gender generalisations and questionwhy for women reality n eed s to be any more unstable and disorderly than it alreadyis . Part of wom en 's 'invisible' oppressio n is surely the way in which w e must 'cope'in our perso ns no t only with the instability of our own fragmented roles, but w ithclearing up the disorder of others on a daily basis. The point is surely to make thisreality more apparent, to dislodge from centre stage the 'reality' of an automaticallyfunctioning social order which it has been men's privilege to believe.

The basic insights of this debate on the 'death of the subject' and its implica-tions for feminism could well be applied to that on the 'death of rock' in popularmusic analysis, which has h ad similarly am biguou s results for wo me n. W hat is notclearly spelt out in the debate on the causes of rock's demise (which is reviewed inmore detail in the next section) is the way in which rock music proclaimed a form ofmasculinity that is by n ow hopelessly ou tdate d (not least because of the conscious-ness-raising work of feminism and the arrival of 'New Man' as some kind ofresponse). The subject of rock 'died' for the same reason as other subjects andauthors died in the 1970s and 1980s: because the unity it purported to representsplit apart u nd er its ow n con tradictions, one of which was the gen der contradictionof a masculinity claiming to represent 'collectivity'. Feminine subjectivity wasexcluded by rock music, and relegated to 'pop'. The women's punk bands alloweda brief outburst of feminist ideas on the debris of the rock scene, while gay andlesbian subcultures deserted rock for disco (Dyer 1990), or the 'women's music'movement in the USA (Lont 1985). The resultant break up of the apparentmonolith of rock masculinity gave way not to the reconstitution of an equallymonolithic female or gay subject centre stage, but to a multiplicity of more partial,ironic, sexual subjectivities, celebrating artifice, not authenticity, as Frith puts it(1988, p. 2).

In the area of empirical cultural analysis, the political potential of post-modernism for women has been treated more sceptically by feminists. Kaplan, for


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 159instance, in her work on MTV, sees 'postmodern feminism' as the predominantstance for women in music videos (1987, pp. 11516). However, she also describesthese videos as typical of 'coopted postmodernism', that is, a postmodernismwhere any radical direction has been absorbed into consumer culture (Kaplan1988). Madonna's 'Material Girl' video exemplifies this coopted feminist post-modernism, in its playful refusal to take a stance, even as it exposes and pro-blematises the construction of woman as the object of the male gaze in Hollywoodcinema (Kaplan 1987, pp. 116-27).

A more historically grou nde d insight into the relationship betw een feminismand p ostmo dernism is given by Griggers' work on fashion p hoto grap hy (1990). Sheargues that 'postmodernism' must mean something very different for a femaleaudience than for a male one, since the experience of twentieth-century modernityhas been so different for women. Jameson's view of modernism as an artisticmovement of progressive resistance to industrial society (1983), speaks little towomen's experience of the repressive maternal discourse that addressed them aswives and mothers during the same period. Postmodernism, by contrast, inrepresentations of women for a female audience, demonstrates the anxiety of thebreak with motherhood experienced by the new generation of middle-class womenin the post-war period. Whether combining motherhood with paid work, orwhether choosing not to become a mother, the body became a locus of newcontradictions for women. For women it is not Jameson's loss of a sense of historythat is the problem, but the lived history of a loss of sense (Griggers 1990, p. 92). Inwomen's everyday experience this century, motherhood has ceased to be 'thecultural referent anchoring a normalised feminine subject' (ibid.), that which givesmeaning to wo me n's lives and to the female bod y. Postmo dern w ome n live with thisabsent text, hence the extraordinary ambivalence, towards both power andfemininity, displayed by the Vogue photog raphs of people like Helmut N ewton orDeborah Turbeville.

In her recent book, Motherhood and Representation, Kaplan similarly locates 'adramatic shift in the mother-paradigm' and notes anxiety as common to the hetero-geneous discourses that emerge in film, advertisements, etc. around women, sex,the foetus and motherhood/fatherhood in the period since the 1970s.In searching for a paradigm shift more specific than the global postmodern one - a shift thatwould encompass all the different forms of anxiety - I became aware that the shift has to dowith childbirth and childcare no longer being seen as an automatic, natural part of women'slife-cycle. (Kaplan 1992, p. 181)Now that 'woman' no longer naturally equates with 'mother' in the language,women's identity becomes fragmented.4 But Kaplan shows how film represen-tations of women continually fail to capture the fragmenting identities of thispostmodern paradigm shift, but instead fall prey to conscious and unconsciousanxieties around the disappearance of 'mother'. 'What representations still cannotproduce, are images of sexual women, who are also mothers, and who in additionhave fulfilling careers. "Sex, Work an d M oth erho od " is obviously too threaten ing acombination on a series of levels' (Kaplan 1992, p. 183). Of course the loss that isbeing felt is that of the mother of a particular class ideology - the white, middle-class mother of Western patriarchal no rms . In the era of mass com mun ications thisclass and racial ideology ha s occluded an d o ppre ssed other co nceptions of moth er-hood, other relationships to and between domesticity, paid work, and sex.5 This


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160 Barbara Bradbymeans that there are no simple or unitary solutions: cultural resistance may takethe form of a defence of the traditional family against the ravages of class and racialoppression, or it may take the form of alternative childbirth movements. But it doesseem that when the anchoring role of motherhood is removed from patriarchalideologies, class and racial statuses are thereby also threatened, perhaps account-ing for the seepage of anxiety onto a more general, social level.In broad social terms, Kaplan sees these changes as signalling the possibleend of the 'modern unconscious', produced out of the 'culturally coded relations tothe mother in the modern nuclear family'. And she questions: 'If that unconsciouschanges, then does the mother's hitherto negatively central place in the oldunco nscious begin to shift? Does her d isplacement to the margins ch ange?' (Kaplan1992, p . 218). The paradoxical result of Kap lan's analysis is that the displacement ofmotherhood as definitive of women's identity means that 'the mother' mustbecome less ghettoised as representation, and that aspects of woman-as-mothermu st be allowed to enter into the representation of woman as other than mother.In popular music, representations of women have clearly been much morepartial than in film, and mainly confined to 'sex' rather than work or motherhood.But there are parallels betwe en the 'angel/witch' dichotom y that Kaplan analyses inthe portrayal of the mother in film melodrama, and the 'angel/devil' represen-tations of sexual women in rock. More broadly, one must consider the way inwh ich rock m usic was itself part of the cultural rejection of moth erhood as wo me n'sdestiny (even if this 'freeing' of women was done firmly within the confines of apatriarchal sexuality). This development is highly contradictory, since if rock musicis built partly on the fantasy of women's sexuality as completely divorced frommotherhood, it involves the invocation of negative stereotypes of the mother asrepressive of sexuality. Part of the social conservatism of rock is undoubtedly theway it has been incapable of portraying sexuality after marriage or parenthood (thedifficult area tackled in the 'cheatin' tradition of country music, or in areas of theblues and soul traditions in black music). Generally in rock and pop, women havehad to be 'young' or 'teen', and any representation of older women has beenrigidly eschewed. This is particularly so in the white traditions. In black popularmusic, which has been less tied to the 'teen' genres, it seems that there has been aplace for the mature, more maternal body and voice of a woman, and this willbecome relevant in looking at the introduction of 'soul' singing into dance music.But all this suggests that there is a need to think more specifically about how themuch talked about extension of the social category of 'youth' relates to women'schanging social position, and at how this is affecting the representation of womenin popular music.

Clearly there are ways in which eighties music broke with the dominant rockversion of sexuality an d exp lored new one s. From the point of view of wome n an dmotherhood, Madonna's positive portrayal of the pregnant teenager in 'Papa Don'tPreach' (1986) is indeed a revolutionary image. And in the last couple of years, ithas at least become possible for singers like Sinead O'Connor, Annie Lennox orSiobhan Fahey to 'come out' publicly as mothers and continue their careers, evenfor their motherhood to be represented within the music, as in Sinead's love songto her small daughter/son, 'My Special Child'. Of course, as social reality, thisaccep tance of wo rking m oth ers is at least fifty yea rs out of date; but at the represen-tational level - the level of cultural fantasy about women - it is a big break, andperhaps represents the beginning of the end of that cultural dichotomy between


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 161sex and motherhood that rock music helped to cement. One way in which it doesthis is by making more explicit the link betwee n the lan guag e of maternal love an dthat of sexual desire. In rock'n'roll, this appropriation of maternal discourse washidden beneath the 'baby' metaphor (Bradby and Torode 1984): it is made veryexplicit in a song like Sinead's (and accompanying video of her with small boy);Madonna's song keeps the ambiguity of the 'baby' language, but makes it refer toboth pregnancy and boyfriend. To me this makes motherhood less different, less'other'. Likewise some other of Madonna's work, particularly on the Like a Virginand Like a Prayer albums, seems to give voice to the female body as both maternaland sexual, and, in contrast to O'Connor, makes the transition to thinking aboutthe woman herself, rather than centring on the child (Bradby 1992).

There is a sense in which the 'feminist postmodernist' debate is all abouttrying to substitute social and cultural descriptions of women for 'natural' defini-tions of 'wom an' based on m otherhood . Donna Haraway attacks the nature/culturedichotomy and the way it has emprisoned women, from a different direction. Thepostmodern age is for her the transformation of our social relations by telecom-munications, in a rather grand theory whereby the nuclear family of industrialcapitalism becomes the female-headed household of global electronic homework.Hi-tech culture, she argues, breaks down the human/machine distinction, andrather than lamenting this as innocent victims, feminists should welcome it,exploring the cyborg myth as a way of deconstructing and reconstructingboundaries, of gender, the self and the body. A cyborg body:is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generateantagonistic dualisms . . .; it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only onepossibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but [is] an aspect ofembodiment. . . . The machine is us, our processes, . . . We are responsible for boundaries;we are they. Up till now, female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary [and]. . . to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. . . . Cyborgs might considermore seriously the partial,fluid,sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. (Haraway1990, p. 222)And the political task becomes to recode identities across the complex fragmen-tation that international information systems have imposed: 'cyborg gender is alocal possibility taking a global ven gea nce' (ibid., p . 223).Haraway's cyborg semiotics can illuminate the complex mix of human-machine identities that popular music has constructed, and seems potentially use-ful for looking at the technological fragmentation of the female body in dancemusic, which I go into below. However, I agree with Bordo that her ideas workbetter as a collective political myth than as an epistemology of personal identity(1990, pp. 154-5). The 'View from Nowhere' of Enlightenment theory becomes thedeconstructionist fantasy 'Dream of Everywhere', and the replacement of themetaphor of the objective 'standpoint' by that of 'the dance' results in just asdisembodied a theory (ibid.). If one looks at actual, gendered dance in the 1990s,there seems to be little change in the construction of gender and technology thatrock music set up, whereby the association of men and technology was part of theerotic spectacle of live performance, and women's relationship to technologytended to be passive, male-controlled and hidden in studios. 6 Occasionally, housemusic has foregrounded this relationship in a way that can be seen as postm od ern,and there has been an opening for some discussion on women as victims oftechnology in popular music. I return to this below, in considering the Black Box


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162 Barbara Bradbycontroversy, and argue that Haraway's cyborg metaphor can show the way to afeminist analysis that avoids falling back into the w om an-as-nature equation.Everybody dance now: popular music and postmodernismThe writing on popular music and postmodernism has been dominated by twointerrelated preocc upations: the threat to previously stable categories of au thorshipand performance posed by the new digital and computer technologies; and thesense of an 'end of history' as manifested in the collapse of rock music's meta-project of youth and rebellion and subsequent dispersion into a proliferation ofgenres and styles. It is undeniable that the writing in this area has been over-whelmingly male, not just in authorship but in orientation to musical examples. Iwant here to begin to explore the implications of these debates for women, inparticular in relation to the end of a history from which they have largely beenexcluded.The first question is what is at stake for women in the debate on the causesand meaning of the 'death of rock'. Frith, who rejects a 'postmodernist' explana-tion, argue s that rock died w he n it stopped taking its roma ntic, Bohemian image ofitself seriously - when punk exploded all this and showed just how commercialrock had really been all along (Frith 1988, p. 1). The recycling of old songs asadvertisements for cars, or the reissue of old artists on expensive new formats likeCD, is therefore no contradiction in terms, as rock was always part of a profit-ledindustry, and is nowadays simply responding to the shift in purchasing power tothe adult m arket. Frith hints at the idea tha t wha t could not be taken seriously anymore was not just rock's claim to be above commerce, but also its version ofsexuality: 'there is som ething essentially tedious these days about that 4:4 beat andthe hoarse (mostly male) cries for freedom' (ibid.); or later on, 'what is at issue isrock's supposed sexual force' (ibid., p. 2). But I suspect that to pursue thesearguments too far in this context would have upset the argument that the death ofrock is an industry led rather than a consumer led phe nom enon .

Another debate has focused on the recycling process itself, and its implica-tions for aesthetic and social theory. W hile the po stmo dern ists argu e that pastichein mod ern music repre sents the collapse of a sense of history into the present, thisis severely challenged by the evidence that sampling of older music is educationalfor a younger generation; and nostalgia for the music of previous decades is notsimply the recycling of their youth by a generation that has lost its way, but is alsothe recuperation of the history of postwar popular music by today's youth (Good-win 1990, p. 271). But again the question is 'for whom?'. Although the concept of'youth' has been used extensively in these debates, there is little awareness of thefeminist deconstruction of this concept (e.g. Hudson 1984). However, Straw haspointed out in relation to the culture of 'alternative rock' in the USA and Canadathat the creation of history through 'connoisseur-ism' has been one of the specificmechanisms through which women have been excluded from rock culture over thelast decad e:the cultivation of connoisseurship in rock culture - tracking down old albums, learninggenealogical links between bands, and so on - has traditionally been one rite of passagethrough which the masculinism of rock-music culture has been perpetuated. . . . With thesedevelopments, the profile of women performers within post-punk culture has diminished,and, just as the culture of alternative rock within the United States and Canada has becomealmost exclusively white, it has become overwhelmingly male as well. (Straw 1991, p. 378)


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 163The situation would seem to be similar with relation to the CD reissue market,where policies have been conservative, in following a fairly orthodox idea of thehistory of popular music, which centres on male rock and its perceived close maleprogenitors.But if one looks at samp ling in relation to 'ho us e mu sic' it is clear that it is notonly, or centrally, rock music th at is being recycled.7 The discovery of a history ofsoul music, or of seventies disco, are largely alternative to the orthodoxy of 'rockhistory', although of course they overlap with rock at some po ints. (Roddy D oyle'snovel, and film, The Commitments (1988) plays crucially on the difference between'rock' and 'soul', and on the finding of different histories. And compare Thornton'sproject of writing a history of discos in Britain (1990).) Even the mainstreamadvertisements for cars and jeans have used a lot of black music from the soul andR&B genres. An d the possibilities for wo me n are de mo nstrated by a com parison ofGreig's 'history of girl-groups from the fifties on' (1989) with Betrock's book on girl-groups (1982). The former traces a continuity of women's team-work and vocalstyle across wh at in orthodo x histories are defined as different genres (i.e. from thefifties vocal groups through sixties girl-groups to seventies disco groups and rap-ping duos of the 1980s); the latter treats girl-groups as a sub-genre (if the best one,for afficionados) of sixties rock'n'roll.8

Another aspect of the death of rock is what is seen as the loss of any sense ofpolitical oppositionality in rock's successor musics (Grossberg 1988, 1991). This islinked to debates about the 'decentring' of rock from some sort of central placewithin pop ular music (Frith 1988; G rossberg 1988; Co nno r 1989; Straw 1991). WhileHebd ige is able to find a sense of the po litidsation of an ethn ic identity in looking atthe 'marginal' music of black Caribbean cultures (1987), it is no longer clear wherethe 'centre' of rock is (Frith 1988; Grossberg 1988). Connor criticises Hebdige andother postmodernist academics for ignoring the social contradiction involved intheir claim to centrality for marginal musics, and accuses them of being implicatedin the practices they claim to describe - the n ew A&R peo ple for the music in du stry(Connor 1989, pp. 189-90). Again, it is not clear what is at stake for women in thisdebate about marginal musics, since the sense of marginal oppositionality is usu-ally fairly exclusive of wo men . From this po int of view , it does no t seem surp risingto me that the most sustained exploration of feminist ideas in popular musicerupted right in the centre of mainstream pop in the 1980s (Madonna) rather thanworking in from the margins as in the (typically male) model of the avant-garde.In line with the arguments of postmodernist feminism, this would suggestthat what has 'died' is the ability of the discourse of 'rock' to impose a unity in theform of the white, male subject/author upon the heterogeneity of 'other' racial,sexual and gendered identities and musics on which rock music itself fed. Thismust m ake one suspicious about the anxiety a roun d the absence of a centre and ofopposition in these debates, and the way they avoid discussion of the sexuality ofrock (even though embarrassment, particularly about 'serious' or 'progressive'rock, does seep through these texts, wh eth er the strategy is to brazen it out on pasttastes (Frith), act too young to know (Goodwin) or remain unrepentant (Gross-berg) ). This anxiety reaches a p itch in Grossberg's pessimistic piece abo ut MTVand (post)modern culture (1988), and I take a small example from this text toillustrate the deadly seriousness of what is, I believe, at stake for women (and men)in the death of rock. Grossberg outlines a scenario where the conjunction of theelitism and cultism of rock culture with the 'sentimental democracy' of television


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164 Barbara Bradbymeans that all that is left to the rock fan is 'feeling', but no longer 'about' anything,or even 'feeling good'. The only meanings left to rock music are those of a range of'inauthenticities'. In describing the nihilistic view of the contemporary world asseen through 'hyper-real inauthenticity', which rejects any form of feeling, Gross-berg, while clearly distancing himself from the ideologies involved, uses the slogan'desire kills (AIDS)':Portraying the dismal reality . . . is the only statement left available, and it matters littlewhether that reality is contemporary or futuristic: all images have become post-holocaustbecause the true holocaust is the very destruction of any possibility of caring, of making adifference. In fact, affect has become impossible because the last site of potential investment- desire and pleasure - has become the enemy. Caring too much is dangerous and oftendestructive (The Name of the Rose), and desire kills (AIDS). (Grossberg 1988, p. 330)Although the use of the slogan here clearly (and perhaps critically) invokes theearly advertising campaigns a rou nd HIV/AIDS, it does still suggest a nostalgia for atime when 'desire' did not kill. Again, what seems important to me here is thatinasm uch as rock has 'd ied' or been de-centred, this is surely in part due to the de-centring of the traditional masculine model of desire, built on the domination andsilencing of women, and performing the everyday conflation of 'sex' and pen-etration. The (overlapping) work of feminists, gays and lesbians in mapping alter-native forms of sexuality, pleasure and desire has certainly acquired new politicalurgenc y w ith the AIDS crisis, and the ne ed to de-couple the patriarchal equation ofdeath and desire in the new context (Bright 1990; Patton 1990; Watney and Carter1989). But these we re always importan t issues in their ow n right, and were p erha psoccluded not so muc h by rock music as by rock history an d the discourses throughwhich rock has been understood.

In turning to the literature on dance music, it is striking that its textualideologies have bee n written a bout far mo re in the po pular music area than ha ve itssexual ones. Goodwin (1990), for instance, argues that while the 'sampler' is'potentially the most postmodern musical instrument yet invented', it does notfollow that its compositions are 'heard' as pastiche: the ideologies through whichits music is understood are still essentially those of 'realism, modernism andromanticism' (ibid., p. 261). The new textual practices of bricolage, intertextualityand 'stealing' tend to be subsumed back into the old notion of authorship throughthe ideology of the creativity of 'the producer' (ibid., p. 272). But while it seemstrue that the old ideologies of authorship and creativity die hard, one could arguethat they are kept alive especially by the 'expert' writing of the male rock press andamong male groups and producers. And while it may be an approximation toreality tha t all Go odw in's exam ples of grou ps an d p roduc ers are male, the implica-tions for women both of the old ideologies, and of the new stresses to which theyare being subjected, remain unex plored. This suggests the need to look at the newsexual ideologies emerging in and aro und dance m usic.

In parenthesis, I would venture that the most important argument against thenotion of dance music as aesthetic pastiche is the fact that this music, howevercomposed (and regardless of whether samples are meant to be heard, discoveredor hid den ), really do es sound different. As sou nd , it can be compared with any of thegreat 'revolutions' in popular music: like them, it followed the cycle of innovationfrom the avant-garde into the mainstream, and like these other trends, it can berelated both to structural social change, and to new social-sexual movements,identities an d practices.


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166 Barbara Bradbyday. You might smoke, drink, whatever, get out of your head, but at least for one day youcan see that there's a better world to be had. It really is positive. (NME, 23 September 1989,p. 56)Ben, his white partner, adds to this statement of egalitarian collectivism the ideasthat house music really does have no more heroes, and that it is oppositional:This is the first time that a massive musical movement has come along where the people intothe sounds and dancing aren't idolising pop stars because there are no pop stars to beidolised in this scene. . . . It's totally underground and that's why the authorities and themedia can't deal with it - it's outside their comprehension, (ibid.)The interviewer introdu ces ideas of gender and sexuality in explaining that Steppzis a rapper with a difference:Rapping which is worlds away from the macho, sexist, chest-beating stereotype, all set tomusic that storms. The result of instinctive education, not alienation.Alienation! Yes, that's exactly what the current rave scene is an antidote to, with itsenfolding, warm sense of community, that keeps out the chill realities of British despair,(ibid.)This suggests a gender dimension to 'alienation' which is seen as demonstrated ina kind of rapp ing tha t is mac ho and sexist. The antidote, 'warm c om mu nity', is notexactly located in the 'edu cate d', mo re subtle rapp ing of Steppz, bu t is attributed tothe dance community itself, which becom es by implication m ore female.These claims about gender equality and the elimination of sexism and racism,as well as the ideas around community/alienation, are typical of the discourses ofdance m usic at this time . O ne can also find explicit challenges to the com bination ofracism and sexism, as in this interview with Damon Rochefort, the producer of aBritish group called Nomad, here talking about his 'vocalist':Sharon and I are so close, we're dependent emotionally and spiritually. I love her, she's likean incestuous family unit type thing where no one can come between us. I also like thatshe's a Black female and I'm a White male, yet we're best friends. It defies those obscenerecord company formulas where they see acts in terms of sex and colour co-ordination. Myscene is a huge mixture of Black and White, gay and straight, which I think is perfectlynatural, and a good role model for young people. If you stick exclusively with your own kindyou lose out. (Interview with Ronnie Randall in D/, July 1991)

If taken as descriptions of dance-floor culture in Britain, these kinds ofUtopian disco urse can be closely paralleled in sociological research:10 'The hallmarkof raves is that people of different ages, occupational groups, sexualities, sub-cultures and races dance together (particularly remarkable in an institutionallyracist city like Liverpool)' (Newcombe 1992, p. 14). But I am highly sceptical ofthese discourses as descriptions of gender relations within the dance music indus-try and within the texts of songs. In researching for this paper, I was particularlyinterested in the surfacing of wh at had been an 'un de rgro un d' (i.e. largely connois-seur-ist) musical subculture, into more mainstream popular culture, when recordsstarted to become more financially accessible as albums (particularly as compila-tions), an d w he n v ideos of dance tracks started to appe ar in far greater num bers onMTV Europe.11 During this period of 1990-91, the use of female 'vocalists', usuallyblack, had become a standard counterpart to the use of male 'rappers' in theevolution of dance music. This development can be described in terms of anevolution of No rth Am erican an d E uropean genres or styles of house m usic, where'garage' house represented the addition of 'classic, soulful and identifiable voices'


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 167to the earlier electronic sounds of Chicago house (Straw 1991, p. 382). An other wayof putting this is from the listener's point of view, where the net effect of theaddition of rappers and soul singers wa s a more or less ma rked division of genderedvoices in house music and its evolution into 'dance music' over this period.At its simplest, this division of voices is between male rapping and femalesoul-singing, between male speech and female song, male rhythm and femalemelody. A more complex description would see the gendered division as betweena form of speech whose main musical feature is rhythm, and a form of singingwhere melody is foregrounded over verbal messages. Of course any of thesedescriptions of the contrast is an over-simplification, highlighting binary opposi-tions, whereas in fact rapping is also melodic, and soul-singing also fits words intomusical rhythms. The effect of the division, however, is to establish an alignmentbetween the male voice, language, and technology, and the female voice and theexpression of emotion.

The division can be heard at its most exaggerated on tracks which weremainstream chart hits in Britain in 1990-1, like Snap's 'The Power' (two weeks atno. 1), and subseq uent hits with 'Oo ps U p' and 'Mary had a Little Boy'; C&C MusicFactory's 'Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)' (no. 3 in the charts);Black Box's 'Strike It Up' (reached no. 16); Nomad's '(I wanna give you) Devotion'(reached no. 2), and their follow-up 'Just a Groove'; or Incognito's 'Always There',featuring Jocelyn Brown. What I have called 'exaggeration' is achieved by the useof a female soul singer 'shouting', usually in the upper octave. There are otherexamples where a female vocalist performs in this style without a male rapperbeing present on the track, the most famous of which would be Black Box's 'Rideon Time' (six weeks at no . 1 in Britain in 1989), bu t o ne co uld also includ e Rozalla's'Everybody's Free', and Sabrina John ston's 'Peace ', both in the top ten in 1991. Avariety of other very successful tracks feature a female voice singing in a mo re 'lowkey' style against a male rap, a style adopted by many rap groups during thisperiod12 (for instance, De La Soul's 'A Rolling-Skating Jam Called "Saturdays" ',Deee-Lite's 'Groove is in the Heart', Technotronic's 'Pump up the Jam', DJ JazzyJeff and the Prince's 'It's Summertime', Massive Attack's 'Safe from Harm'). From adifferent direction, some chart-oriented female singers started to insert a male rapinto what were otherwise fairly straightforward songs, like Kim Appleby's big hit'G.L.A .D.' in 1991, or Kylie M inogue 's 'Shock ed'.Obviously the gendering of voices is used to different effects across even thisspectrum of music. The urgent, aggressive female sexuality of Black Box or C&CMusic Factory is a long way from the vacuous repetition of 'groove is in the heart'by Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite while the male rappe r ex po und s on the pos tmo derncondition. Massive Attack in 'Safe from Harm' organise the voices as a male voiceof menacing urban violence and a female voice of materna l protection, keeping 'herbaby' safe tonight. In the more laid back style of the rap groups, the addition of thefemale voice singing me lody can signify a softer side to urba n a lienation . But in allthese cases, there is a sense in which the female voice is being u sed to connote theexpression of human emotions (anger, desire, love, pity), which have been

emptied o ut of the m on oton ous, mechanical style of male rapp ing one h ears in thismusic. Of course as well there is something ranging from an alienation effect to atremendous excitement and tension, arising out of the recontextualising ofwo me n's singing voices within such a technological setting. T here is also a varyingdegree of self-consciousness about this gendering of voices: one could instance


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168 Barbara BradbyBlack Box's 'Strike it Up', where the male voice plays on the theme of reversingmusical gender roles, in a rap that starts 'If I had the line, and you had the bass'.One version of this rap makes clear the equation between rhythm, bass andmasculinity, and asserts their superiority; another talks about the need to 'com-bine' the tw o roles. But overall in da nce music this gend ering of voices appears as apowerful restatement of traditional gender divisions - the association of men withculture, language and technology, and of women with emotion, the body, sexu-ality - even if the associations are made in an, at times, exaggerated over-state-ment, with the 'performance' element foregrounded and some ironic distancingfrom any notion of authentic expression.13

If this brief analysis of the vocal division of labour in the music of dance hasthrow n into question the claims of a post-feminist gend er U topia in dance culture,the claims about the irrelevance of race also need questioning, and the need to doso becomes more pressing when one looks at the video representations of dancerecordings. For given that most of the vocal performers (though not all of theproducers) with the groups mentioned so far are black, the projection of sexualityonto the female body also has a familiar racial dimension. Running through thevideos for these dance tracks is a super-sexy image of the black female performer,wh ich is used in some of the most successful tracks (Black Box's 'Ride on Time ', orC&C Music Factory's Things that Make You Go Hmmm') to 'front' the perform-ance in the conventional mode of the 'lead singer'.

Even in these videos though, and in many others from the genre, there is amarked contrast between the gendered sexualising of the lead singers, or 'vocal-ists', and the very 'unisex' representation of the dance troupe, which can bethought of as dance music's own representation of the dance-floor 'community'.Many of the videos, not least C& C's, backg round these dan cers in such a way thattheir gend er is indistinguishab le, ev en tho ugh their bodies seem highly sexualised.The dancers are usually identically dressed, and often the major part of theirmo vem ents are also identical (or with just a short 'break' b eing allowed for men toshow their symbolic dominance). The 'nowhere' setting and lack of perspective inthese videos is playfully futuristic, all of these features helping to create a visualreprese ntation of the Utopia of the d ance floor co mm unity, a dance outside of andbeyond mundane social relations. The representation of the 'vocalists' (or their'front' performers) as gen dered and coloured beings within very conventional axesof heterosexual desire (black female as object of white and male gazes), seems torend er m ore conv entional and less ironic, the 'hearin g' of the gen dered division ofvoices already identified.

Finally, it is necessary to look at the category of 'female vocalist' itself, as ithas emerged in relation to 'producer music', and which seems to have been ahighly ambiguous development for women. Straw has noted a tension within thedance-music industry between the promotion of female vocalists into durable per-formers, and the rapid turnover of male producers (1991, pp. 382-3). This is aninteresting observation, in that it reverses the usual links between gender anddurability in the pop scene. If the majority of producer outfits are small, and comeand go quickly, it is obviously not worth a singer entering into long-term contractswith them, and she is more likely to become a freelance 'vocalist', instead of being'lead singer' to a group of male instrumen talists as in the old rock model. But then,of course, it was never open to a black woman to be 'lead singer' to a maleinstrumental band in the rock era, and most black female singers' careers were as


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 169vocalists in groups. The interesting difference nowadays is that, whereas before,the singer's identity was submerged in that of the group, which could then beposited as the creation of the male producer, now the singer attempts to preserveher identity as an individual outside of the g roup s she m ay sing for.It is possible that this 'vocalist' model gives a wom an mo re auto nom y to builda career strategically, moving betw een styles and g rou ps. But tho ug h a few wo m enhave achieved some sort of durability like this (Adeva, Jocelyn Brown, CaronWheeler, Kim Mazelle) many more have disappeared without trace. And what ismore worrying is that many female singers have gone completely uncredited bothon records and on TV play. Female vocalists tend on the whole to be moreanonymous than male producers, and get little coverage in the specialist dancemusic press, which is disproportionately concerned with producers and tech-nology. The successful dance groups of 1989-91 are mostly thought of and writtenabou t as p roducer g roups even where, arguably, it was female vocals that sold theirrecords.14

To exemplify the way in which the discourse of the male producer works atthe everyday level to marginalise and render anonymous women's singing role,here is the introduction to Nom ad's second single, 'Just a Groo ve', as prese nted onMTV Europe in June 1991:And before we see Nomad just a few words of background information about their leadsinger, he's called Damon, which is Nomad backwards, Rrrocheforrrt, French pronunci-ation's important here, it's just like Rroqueforrt, so Damon Rochefort, he's twenny-fouryears old and he started out in the music business, just like some other musicians likeChrissie Hynde from the Pretenders or like Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys as musicjournalist, but then clever enough he decided that it's just much more fun doing it yoursel/than only writing about it, that's quite right I s'pose, and here is Nomad with their latestrelease, 'Just a Groove'.The presenter is Kristiane Backer, one of MTV Europe's hip-looking, mildlyflirtatious female 'VJs', who speak perfect English with a slight 'European' accent.Note that the whole introduction to this song is abou t the m ale produce r: he is thename and the personality bound up with the group. He is even described as the'lead singer' of Nomad! In actual fact, the lead singer of this song, and of Nomad'sprevious hit, is the female vocalist, whom Damon identified in the interviewquoted above, as Sharon, or Shazz. Damon does apparently sing harmonies und erher lead in the opening phrase of the song. The male rapper is likewise leftuncredited on MTV, and one is left to guess if this is MC Mikee Freedom who wascredited on 'Devotion'.15Similarly, it is Damon Rochefort who is interviewed at length in the specialistmagazine, D], and only through him that we learn about 'Sharon'. This kind ofidentification by the 'expert' media discourses encourages us as naive readers tolearn that Nom ad 'is' (really) the prod ucer, Dam on Rochefort. As a gro up/pro duc erwho had had one hit single, were just producing a follow-up with a video topromote it, and had an album coming out later in the year, they/he no doubtlooked 'up and coming'. I have no idea where they are at the end of 1992. But thediscourses have ensured that the producer can capitalise on his hits with thegroup, whereas we barely know the singer's first name.


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170 Barbara BradbyDeath of the female subject: Deconstructing Black BoxOne famous legal case over the sampling of a woman's voice shows how complexthe issues raised for women can become in this 'postmodern' area of culturalpractice. In the summer of 1989, an Italian producer group called Black Box had amassive hit in Britain with the song 'Ride on Time', which spent six weeks at No. 1in the charts. Black Box were pioneers of a genre that became known as Ttalo-house', which tended to be identified by its looped piano riffs, and a sound heardas 'tacky' by comparison with American house. The video that accompanied thesong on television showed a tall, sexy model from Guadaloupe, whose name isKatherine Quinol, 'performing' the passionate vocal line. But the rumour quicklyspread that the vocals had been 'sampled' from a song called 'Love Sensation' bythe American soul singer, Loleatta Holloway. During the time that the record wasin the charts, the record companies involved (DeConstruction Records in Britain,distributed by BMG/RCA, and the Italian Disco Magic) were sued for royalties byHolloway's record company, Salsoul (also distributed by BMG/RCA). The processof sampling involves digital recording which then makes possible very elaboratechang es to the original sound , so that the que stion of whe n a recording stops beingthe same sound as the original can be ambiguous. In this case, the producers hadbroken up the vocal line, 'looping' various phrases around, and resulting in some-thing that could not have been sung by the unaided voice. They tried to brazen itout for a while, and then said that they had issued a second batch of records onwhich Katherine did sing the vocals (Billboard, 28 October 1989). Another versionsays that on this batch 'a new sho uter imp erson ated ' Holloway, and points out thatthe first batch were neither withdrawn nor identified separately from the second(Gambaccini et al. 1991, p . 7).

There is no doubt that Loleatta Holloway attracted considerable popular sup-port during this dispute, helped by a strategic appearance on British televisionwhere she burst into tears. People I spoke to at the time saw her as having beentotally 'ripped off by Black Box; and indignation centred around the cynicism ofBlack Box in 'fronting' her voice with the tall, slim, sexy model, Katherine, in thevideo, as if ashamed to show the 'real' singer's body (fatter, older looking, more'mater na l'). In effect, Loleatta Holloway had been doubly 'ripp ed off, since notonly had her voice been stolen by others to make money, but her person had beenusurped by Katherine Quinol's image. So the popular discourse not only upheldwomen's rights as authors/performers of their own voices, but also allowed someopposition to the 'tyranny of slenderness' and of 'acceptable' body images forwomen.

The music press, while pleased to be able to reveal the source of the sample,was full of admiration for the Italian producers and of photos of KatherineQuinol.16 When Loleatta Holloway toured Britain, NME carried an interview withher by Paolo Hewitt (1989) which was sceptical about her claims ('The problem isit's a moral point, and the music business and morality have hardly seen eye toeye'), and quoted Pete Hadfield of DeConstruction Records: 'Unfortunately,Loleatta, like a lot of old soul singers, has yet to come to terms with the newtechnology'. The interviewer twice referred to her as a 'mother', an image whichshe herself seems to have pro m oted by bringing her family w ith her.

On the Black Box LP I bought in 1990, Dreamland, which contains 'Ride onTime', there is still no credit to Loleatta Holloway. Even more extraordinary,


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 171though, there is no credit to Martha Wash, who, rumour has it, sings on manyother of Black Box's tracks, inclu ding their other h it, 'Strike It U p'. So, on the sleeveof Dreamland, Black Box is still listed as the two men plus Katrin Quinol (Englishphonetic transcript of the French 'Katherine'). There then follow a score of creditsto instrumentalists who appear on various tracks, all of them men as far as I canmake out.However, while I was researching dance music for this paper, I did happenupon the following credit for a video clip of 'Strike It Up', shown on MTV'sSaturday night 'Club MTV' programme:Black Box (Lead vocalPerformance of Martha Wash Visual Performance ofKatr in Quinol)'S t r ike I t Up 'DreamlandDeconst ruct ion and RCA RecordsThis seemed to raise new issues for women. The voice, although playing this'anchoring' role in relation to the female body, was being credited separately fromthe visual image of 'that' (i.e. the female) body. Now clearly, there are reasonswhy, as feminists, and rather like the reaction to the Loleatta Holloway scandal, wemight decry such a form of crediting. Once again, Katrin Quinol appears as theacceptable (because attractive to the male gaze) image of women that can sell thevoice of another woman that has been electronically manipulated by the maleproducers. The necessity for two women to do what one man could do seemsreminiscent of Islamic law, and d em onstrative of wom en 's continuin g wea kne ss inthe social, public sphere.

On the other hand, I think there are ways in which we can read this creditdifferently as feminists. For a start, I think we should welcome such a form ofcrediting in preference to no crediting at all. The credit above actually gives prom i-nence to two women's names (whereas the male producer-songwriters are notthere at all). And it also beg ins to dem on strate the collective, collaborative natu re ofthe video-song as a piece of work, or work of art. In exposing the d eception playedby juxtaposing body and voice of two women, it contradicts that deception with anew form of hone sty. This m ano euv re actually challenges the primacy of the visualin our everyday imaging of the body (which has been central to the feministanalysis of the representation of women), and the implication that the voice issomehow 'disembodied'. It both deconstructs our assumption of the singing voiceas emanating from an individual rooted in a body we can see, and re-roots thatexpectation into plural bodies, or the female body seen/heard in different ways.Each body, that of the voice, and that of the visual image, seems immediate, andwe are so used to putting them together (even as experienced view ers and conn ois-seurs of 'miming' to pop songs), that to see them separated, or 'mediated' bydiscourse, so starkly, and so 'honestly' in this way, is quite shocking.

Perhaps feminism is stuck again here with the postmodern contradiction,between the need to piece together the female subject that appears as fragmentedby male discourse, and the need to acknowledge that subject's, or those subjects',fluidity and internal differences. The fragmentation is here achieved by tech-nology: the image of the 'singer' on Black Box's videos is truly a 'cyborg' - anamalgam of different persons and machinery - and listening to the vocal line of


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172 Barbara Bradby'Ride on Tim e' one can hear that the voice could not have sung w hat we hear on therecording. Although this is routinely true of the recording of voices in popularmusic (one has only to think of the 'double-tracking' of voices), what makes thisinstance aesthetically 'p ostm od ern ' is that, o rdinarily these processes are hidd en or'naturalised'; but here we hear these as 'impossible vocals' (Hayward 1992, p. 142).Black Box's name cleverly conveys an interest not just in black music but in tech-nology, and technology in the form of coded knowledge to be deciphered - apromise of the revelation of sexual-technical secrets. Deconstructing Black Boxinvolves more than just deciphering the mysteries of authorship in the age ofsampling. It also involves looking at the way that the public and legal debate over'Ride on Time' forced a more open acknowledgement of what technology wasdoing to performance and particularly to women as performers.

It is noticeable that in what is generally cited as the most important ground-breaking litigation over sampling in Britain - the Stock, Aitken and Watermanversus M/A/R/R/S case - what was at stake was rights in intellectual property, orauthorship. The all-male nature of this case, then, reflects where men had posi-tioned them selves in relation to ow nersh ip and auth orship in popu lar music. In thecase of Loleatta Holloway versus Black Box, the underlying issues were morecomplex, and involved the position of women in relation to performance and thecriteria we use to identify a body as that of 'the performer' (even if the legal casewas eventually resolved in much the same terms as the M/A/R/R/S one). WithM/A/R/R/S the issue was the sampling of men's ideas; with Black Box, it was thesampling of women's bodies.17

The broader issue is the w ay in which, in these clearly 'inau then tic' perform-ances, the female b od y, as manifested in the 'gra in' of the voice, is still serving as atouchsto ne of authenticity. T he voices of black wom en soul singers that emerged indance music over this period evoke strength, maturity, deep emotions - typically'maternal' qualities. Arguably, they do not perform the same divorce of mother-hood and sexuality that has been implicit in most white rock and pop through theconcept of 'teen'. And if this divorce seems to be made again in the fragmenting ofthe visual image of the woman from this sound, there is also clearly a sense inwhich the technological superimposition of the strength of the older woman'svoice on the sexiness of the yo ung er w om an 's body succeeded in establishing itselfin the audience's imagination. This has various consequences: one is that young,black 'vocalists' are now presented with the daunting combination of having tolook like Naomi Campbell and sound like Loleatta Holloway. But another way ofputting this is that popular music has appropriated the vocal/sexual strength ofolder, black women, for younger women who would not formerly have beenallowed to use their voices in this way. There is also evidence of some sort ofliberalisation towards visual representations of older and larger (black) women inBritish dance videos in 1991. Prominent would be 'Sharon' in Nomad's videos, orJocelyn Brown in Incognito's 'Always There'. Both in this latter song, and inNomad's '(I wanna give you) Devotion' the reassuring and anchoring role of themother is implied in the lyrics ('I'll be there to hold you, always there', etc.). InN om ad 's 'Just a Groo ve' the hom eliness of the dancing em brace betw een fat, black,confident 'Shazz' and youthful, white, male Damon (her rhythm encompassing hishaircut) is used to offset and contain a sexy 'fantasy' sequence wh ere a black maledancer makes love to a white female dancer, reversing the usual allowable screenstereotypes.


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 173What seems important about these developments is that they take thestrength of maternal discourse into contexts other than motherhood, the only onewhere women have traditionally had some 'say'. They also give voice to a female

sexuality that is not confined within notions of 'romance'. While such voices mayhave been intrinsic to black American traditions of popular music, they are alien towhite pop and rock, and to the kind of mainstream terrain that dance music nowoccupies. Such changes in the way we imagine women are vital corollaries of theshift away from the equation of women with motherhood that is so important incontemporary culture and theory. The strength that women have derived frommaternal discourse needs to be linked in the cultural 'imaginary' with other 'non-mo ther' positions of wom en, if wo me n are to develop a voice in those othe r w orlds(sex, work) which have be en so dom inated by male discourses. In its own peculiar,technological way , it seem s to me that the bo dy of dance music I have be en writingabout here does begin to do this. Through sampling and recontextualising femalesounds, images, stereotypes, it has created different links between women, thevoice and sexuality. Perhaps in this way it contributes to the shifting of the'negatively central place' of the mother in the old unconscious, of which Kaplanwrites, and to the end of her 'displacement to the margins' of representation.Endnotes

1 In a suggestive essay, Hacker (1990) has poin-ted out and elaborated on the eroticism of tech-nology, though not in relation to music.2 See, for instance, the practice of live samplingand editing, as advocated by M ixmaster Morris(Sinker 1990).3 See the interviews with Dave Dorrell ofM/A/R/R/S and with Matt Black of Coldcut inNew Musical Express, 14 November 1987, pp.12-14.4 These choices and anxieties are of course com-pounded by the new reproductive technolo-gies, whose own rhetorical claims of givingchoice to wom en are belied in practice both bytheir preponderant statistical failure rates, andby the disembodied way in which women aretreated by medical science in their implemen-tation (Arditti et al. 1984).5 The way these ideologies of domesticity andmotherhood have been promoted (in the teethof other realities) in the Third World bydevelopment agencies has been exposed byRogers (1980).6 Ronnie Spector's autob iography contains abrilliant description of how Phil's control overher was exerted in and through the recordingstudio (1991).7 However, in 1992, a trend know n as 'pro-gressive' house in Britain and Germany did,subsequent to its naming by Mixmag, developan interest in the 'acid' side of 'progressiverock' (see the June and December issues ofMixmag).

8 As does Marcus (1976). My own piece lies

somewhere between these two approaches(Bradby 1990).9 These trends are given an ambiguously nega-tive, Freudian interpretation by Rietveld:The use of 'E' . . . breaks down mentaldefence mechanisms and 'opens the heart';it means that relaxed attitudes are 'in' andtherefore restrictive clothing is definitely'out'. The result was that the wearer lookedlike an overgrown toddler, which seems toindicate a complete refusal to grow u p, to fitinto the official 'rational' restrictive world.. . . 'E' also makes the skin sensitive to tex-tures, which is why women sometimesindulged in wearing silk, purely for thepleasure it gave to themselves. In Freudianterms, 'E' made the user return to a pre-Oedipal stage, where libidinous pleasure isnot centred in the genitals, but where sexu-ality is polymorphous and where sensualityengages the entire body. (Considering thatthe Rave scene developed during theadvance of AIDS, which makes penetrativesex a fatal possibility, this was not, socially,a bad thing). (Rietveld 1992, p. 18)

The negative assessment of 'overgrown tod-dlers' with 'a complete refusal to grow up'seems at odds with the bracketed last sentenceadmitting, in understatement, that these prac-tices are socially 'not a bad thing'.10 While it would be wron g to den y that anexperience of transcending social divisions ispart of the attraction of dance culture, particu-


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Gender, technology and the body in dance music 175Vanilli the 'real' performers, the studio musi-cians, were presumably themselves involvedin the deception, since it was apparently theirdemands for more money that forced the con-fession, making the affair more conspiratorialthan the Black Box case of 'stealing'. Neverthe-less the separation of visual from audio imagein the creation of 'Milli Vanilli' is similar. It is

therefore interesting that there was no attempt(to my knowledge) on the part of musicjournalists to defend this as the creative use oftechnology, as there was to some extent in theBlack Box case (centring of course on 'the pro-ducers'). It seems that for men to publiclyparade their inability to perform in this waywas taking 'inauthe nticity' a bit too far.

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1992. 'Out on the m argins: feminism and the study of pop ular m usic', in Women: a Cultural Review, 3:1,pp . 51-9Betrock, A. 1982. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound (New York)Bordo, S. 1990. 'Feminism, postmodernism and gender-scepticism', in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. L.Nicholson (London), p p. 135-56Bradby, B. 1990. 'Do-talk and don't-talk: the division of the subject in girl-group music', in On Record:Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. S. Frith and A. Goodwin (New York and London), pp. 341-681992. 'Like a virgin-mother?: materialism and maternalism in the songs of M adon na', Cultural Studies,6:1, pp . 73-96Bradby, B. and Torode, B. 1984. 'Pity Peggy Sue', Popular Music, 4, pp. 183-205Bright, S. 1990. Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World (Pittsburgh)Cohen, S. 1992. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making (Oxford)

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