I argue that karaoke, the non-professional singing of popular songs as a social practice and entertainment, is a way of engaging with emotions in public and suggests the therapeutic potential of singing popular songs. Pop songs often capture a moment, ‘the feeling’ of an era and are a means of circulating ideas and experiences around the world, across cultures and over generations. By participating in karaoke, people identify with these songs and thus build a temporary sense of community and belonging.
By communally singing pop songs, we share history, thoughts, emotions, but for many there are still significant social inhibitions to overcome. Why is it so difficult to sing in public? How did singing become humiliating? Does karaoke’s performance of emotions betray a vulnerability that somehow carries across privilege; forcing a humility that reminds us of a shared precariousness. As Judith Butler (2009) insists, life is always interdependent.
After a recent voicing event I organised with the artist Suva Das in Helsinki, the filmmaker and performer Roxana Sadvo observed that singing is somewhat taboo in many western cultures, proposing that singing had ‘somehow been civilised out of us.’ All this makes me wonder about cultures who do sing — what do they know that we don’t? What are we missing out on? What is the power of song?
Nisha Ramayya (2019), a scholar of tantric poetics, writes that the Sanskrit the word for voice is vaac. Sanskrit was the ancient language of those born into the highest-caste of India’s tiered society. Amongst other things, young Brahmin boys would learn to recite mantras soon after they could speak; chants or songs capable of revealing higher truths and obtaining special powers. Ramayya claims that many people suspected that ‘speaking’ or language was only a small part of what the voice — vaac — could do, and that they were somehow being suppressed by language. Nevertheless India’s multiple spiritual traditions are evidence that ‘lower-caste’ people developed their own magical songs.
Karaoke Theory is an embodied practice that attempts to address this phenomenon. It attempts to a name a thing that is happening and that I argue goes beyond a mutual appreciation of consumable cultural products. Julian Henriques (2011), a theorist of Jamaican sound system culture notes the difference between listening to music on headphones and being in a dancehall ‘bashment’. In the former you put the music in you, in the latter you are in the sound. With Karaoke Theory, I seek to understand what happens when you put the song into you; allow the words to shape your body, the melody pass through you as you sway to its rhythm. When one becomes a vessel for the song, does it possess you?
‘Poethical De-Scriptings’ broadcast live from Pixelache Helsinki Festival #BURN____2021 outside Oodi central library, Helsinki, 7 June, featuring artist and finance activist Ana Fradique and artist-musician Suva Das.
‘Poethical De-scriptings’ is a term I use to describe a practice of live and improvised verbal narrations for radio broadcast.
In her essay, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics’ (2014), Denise Ferriera da Silva proposes ‘poethics’ as a means of emancipating the ‘Category of Blackness’ from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it, with ‘the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing’ (p. 81). Releasing Blackness from objectification, commodification and the forms of domination that produced slavery, a Black Feminist Poethics elicits a range of possibilities that decolonization demands; not for the betterment of this world, but rather toward ‘the end of the world as we know it’.
‘Scriptings’ is a word coined by the artist Achim Lengerer who is concerned with the political questions of speech and language. It is a conflation of the words ‘script’ and ‘writings’, and is also the name of Lengerer’s publishing and production house in Berlin. ‘Scriptings’ also refers to ‘social scripts’, a term borrowed from behavioural psychology to describe knowledge of how to perform adequately in a given situation. One example is how one gets the attention of a waiter in a restaurant. In some circumstances this can be achieved by establishing eye contact, in others it might be acceptable to call, gesticulate and even whistle. While whistling might be inappropriate in the first scenario, attempting to make eye contact might be insufficient in the latter. So knowing the correct social script is crucial to achieving the desired result, as is performing roles correctly to enable social functioning.
My practice of poethical de-scriptings adopts poethics as an approach to being in the world that enables one to delink from the social scripts that one performs by default. It draws from the ‘alt text’ descriptions that often accompany images online to assist those who are visually impaired. Efforts to address issues of accessibility are inherently political. In this example from screen-based media, written and audio descriptions expose the epistemological violence of (hegemonic) visual cultures.
The term ‘access intimacy’ was conceived by writer and disability justice activist Mia Mingus to name the ‘hard to describe feeling’ and ‘eerie comfort’ that arises when someone ‘gets’ her access needs. Access intimacy is not exclusive to disabled people and Mingus (2011) confides:
There have been relationships that carried emotional, physical and political intimacy, but sorely lacked access intimacy. And there have been relationships where access intimacy has helped to create the conditions out of which emotional, familial and political intimacy could grow.
Mingus urges her readers to adopt ‘Access as a framework’ to address a spectrum of needs of those who are (differently) disadvantaged in an ableist world. Furthermore, she distinguishes access intimacy to ‘obligatory access’ that is ‘stoic’ or perfunctory. She writes:
Sometimes access intimacy doesn’t even mean that everything is 100% accessible. Sometimes it looks like both of you trying to create access as hard as you can with no avail in an ableist world. Sometimes it is someone just sitting and holding your hand while you both stare back at an inaccessible world.
My practice of poethical de-scriptings shifts from literal descriptions of my visible surroundings into self-reflection and speculation. While it might sometimes involve close looking and articulation of details, I work in the haze of representation; my poethical de-scriptings may not be visually accurate, but neither are they fiction. Rather, I seek to be personal and precise about what I am see-feeling-thinking.
I approach radio as a medium that is networked and as an event that can be collectively produced and distributed. Rather than the mass media notion of broadcasting to the world, I pursue radio as a social practice that connects peers, friends and enthusiasts. Rather than shouting out to an unknown audience, my technique is more akin to whispering into a lover’s ear.
Attempting audio descriptions made me acutely aware of the power dynamics inherent in language and that are reinforced in everyday speech acts. I discovered that my efforts to communicate clearly and sensitively were determined, and arguably undermined, by social scripts which inform reflexive speech. Foregrounding these codes emphasised that what is ‘normal’ is designed and that these designs condition, noticeably in the built environment and ‘public sphere’. Indeed, it reveals the prejudices of normativity and how one is positioned relative to authority.
As such, poethical de-scriptings attempts to deconstruct and dismantle these power dynamics through an improvised verbal practice. It makes one acutely aware of how ‘words shape worlds’; how ‘worlding’ is material-discursive and how language is privileged as knowledge. Towards the end of the live broadcast embedded above, the artist Suva demonstrates his hand percussion skills on the ‘Konch’ urban furniture in which I was seated. It is an example of how such a skilled musician can ‘talk with their hands’. This might be phonetic, as Suva mimics the sound of language with percussion. Suva also refers to pre-established cultural codes that might announce an event such as the birth of a child, a wedding or war, emphasising that drumming is not necessarily literal, but also emotive, making using of texture, pattern and abstraction.
Extending out towards non-verbal communication such as humming and drumming, poethical de-scriptings seeks to jailbreak language from the authority it is deployed to uphold and to accentuate other ways of relating in the world.
fugitive radio approaches radio as a network medium. Rather than a one-to-many broadcast model, with the privileged broadcaster sending out a signal to listeners who tune in from different locations, fugitive radio pursues radio as an event that is collectively produced and distributed across networks. ‘By many for many’, or more accurately, by a few with other like-minded enthusiasts. For me such radio is poetic, in this atomised era of pandemic when we are locked-down at home dependent on our devices for the vestiges of physically co-present social life.
I used to daydream about releasing a 7″ vinyl record split between a free noise band I infrequently play in, Antipan, and the Aboriginal ‘postcolonial death metal’ band Dispossessed. Antipan is made up of a group of settlers in so-called Australia (white and first and second generation immigrants) that emerged out of Sydney’s improv/experimental music scene around 2004. Dispossessed were labeled as ‘Fanon’s children’ by Daniel Browning, the long-standing host of AWAYE! on Australia’s Radio National. The band have described themselves as as ‘vessels carrying our ancestor’s wrath, sorrow and vengeance’ and as a platform for a wider movement of Aboriginal resistance and struggles for justice. While Antipan arguably take great pleasure in loud, unbridled sound. These bands have little in common in terms of life experience and are positioned differently along the matrix of settler-colonialism, but they both extend a genealogy of punk rock, hardcore and metal. Given the uncompromisingly sensibilities of several influential groups in these genres, I imagine that our release would be a material-sonic testament to anticolonial solidarity.
At the risk of over-emphasising binaries, my fantasy split 7″ raises a number of ideas concerned with sound: signal/noise, meaning/message (medium), didactics/aesthetics, which lead me to think about noise in relation to politics.
Tuesday 2 June 2020 was declared “Black Out Tuesday” by USA workers in the music industry, “a moment of solidarity that unites the music industry against racism, injustice and inequality experienced by the Black community” according to a statement on Soundcloud.
While many on social media replaced their profile pictures with black squares, others on were critical of the initiative, claiming that social media was a crucial source information for those resisting racism and fascism in the USA. There were also concerns that as people uploaded black squares they were using the hashtags associated with the Movement for Black Lives and thus obfuscating the flow of important information.
A surprising intervention came from legions of K-Pop fans, who over the week of protests and uprisings following the public lynching of George Floyd, refrained from Tweeting not insignificant news about their idols, such as the release of BLACKPINK’s collaboration with Lady Gaga, Sour Candy. Instead, they turned their social media savvy to take on those opposed to Black Lives Matter (eg #whitelivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter) and went on to flood US police and FBI channels had called for evidence of the protestors’ violence with K-pop content. Music scholar and critic Josh Kun described these actions as an act of solidarity and acknowledgement of the influence of Black performers on Korean popular music.
To all BLINKs and BP fanbases! Please stop using the tagline so we can all show our respects for George Floyd. Instead let's put our energy into fighting for justice, signing petitions, and spreading awareness. I hope everyone understands, please and thank you. #BlackLivesMatter
— BLACKPINK BLINK USA UNION 🎡 (@BBU_USA) May 28, 2020
On Saturday 6 June 2020 a anti-racist gathering occurred at Alexanderplatz, Berlin, promoted as a ‘silent protest demo’. In the morning I was arranging to meet with friends from the Black Earth climate justice collective, who were critical of the premise of the demonstration given that Black people had been silenced for centuries and they had no intention of suppressing their outrage. Soon after I received this pamphlet from another friend:
Noise demos, casserolado … Noise can be thought of as dissonance, an undesirable or disagreeable sound that must be filtered out from the message (as medium) in order to discern meaning. Noise might also be that which is not “on message”, drawing attention to the affective, material and textural qualities of what is being announced. Improvised noise as dissonance — dissensus — is arguably an opening; an attempt to break into an experience that is not predetermined. Free noise is potentially liberating, uninhibited by the strictures of formalised music or what is recognisably organised sound. Free noise might seem out of control, yet it can also be purposeful.
As I write, I am thinking about a report describing members of a Latinx punk band Vandalize, who mounted a generator, drum kit and guitar and into the back of a pick-up truck to play a “literal soundtrack for the oppressed” during Black Lives Matter protests in downtown LA.
I’m also reminded of Steve Reich’s tape collage Come Out (1966), built from a four second loop taken from hours of recordings of interviews and testimonies about the Little Fruit Stand Riot in Harlem, New York, 1964. The incident occurred when a group of school children started to throw around the spilled contents from an overturned fruit stand. The vendor whistled for them to stop, alerting the police who allegedly descended viciously upon the children. Daniel Hamm, an eighteen-year-old local Black resident intervened upon hearing the children’s screams, as recalled in a 1966 report filed by James Baldwin:
…we heard children scream. We turned around and walked back to see what happened. I saw this policeman with his gun out and with his billy in his hand I like put myself in the way to keep him from shooting the kids. Because first of all he was shaking like a leaf and jumping all over the place. And I thought he might shoot one of them.
Hamm and another Black resident Wallace Baker were taken to a police station for their efforts to stop the violence, where groups of police took shifts to beat them for several hours. It is Hamm’s voice around which Come Out is composed. Severely bruised, the police refused to take him to hospital because he was not bleeding. Hamm speaks to tape: “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”
Hamm and Wallace were eventually released, pending charges over the fruit stand riot, despite the vendor testifying they had nothing to do with it. Then ten days later, Hamm alongside five other Harlem youth were charged with the murder of Margit Sugar, a local used-clothing merchant. The group became known as the Harlem Six and Hamm served nine years despite a “paucity of evidence,” according to Andy Beta in his essay marking the 50th anniversary of Come Out.
Beta notes that despite the Civil Rights movement in US being one of the biggest issues of the time, Reich by his own admission “wasn’t doing anything about it really.” By chance he was contacted by a civil rights activist, Truman Neslon, who had recorded interviews with the Harlem Six and their mothers for a book, The Torture of Mothers (1965), to raise awareness about their case. Nelson asked Reich to edit a story out of the recordings to played at a benefit, which Reich agreed to do pro bono on the proviso that he would be able to use the recordings for his own compositions.
I keep re-reading this paragraph from Beta’s text, in which he asks Reich:
Was Come Out made as a piece of agitprop? “I think a lot of ‘political pieces’ are, to put it kindly, a waste of time,” Reich says. “If it’s a really good piece of music, then the political purpose to which it’s put is betrayed by the sense in which music will just vaporize, and the theme will vaporize along with it.”
I’ve long been a fan of Reich’s piece and much of his oeuvre, yet there is something about his sentiments expressed in Beta’s essay, also published in 2016 in the midst of struggles to counter anti-Blackness, that makes me feel uncomfortable; that Black pain is the source for white/non-Black production and consumption and as the material upon which we leverage our careers. I’m disturbed by Reich’s claim that good music “vaporizes” any political purpose to which it may be put, although as Beta emphasises immediately after, the history and context in which Come Out was made is often acknowledged by those who cite, sample or refer to it in their own practices.
Reich describes to Beta how Come Out was received as “pass-the-hat music” when premiered at a benefit for the Harlem Six at Manhattan Town Hall:
I don’t think people paid a great deal of attention to the music. They just thought it was some kind of funny sound effect that was atmospheric to get them to contribute. It wasn’t a concert situation at all!
Arguably Come Out is the piece that broke Reich as an artist and has become a canonical work of process music and minimal art, yet Reich’s recollections make me wonder more about how music, sound, noise, performance, reception and discourse produce publics who perceive events in different ways. To me Come Out is not so much proof of good music “vaporizing” political intent, but rather raises issues about historicisation (and specific bias or privileged perspectives that I could label “white noise”).
Beta concludes his essay by paraphrasing Reich discussing Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937), which depicts the bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War: “Good art preserves the stuff it’s about.”
Again this idea of preserving, embalming, fossilising history strikes me as quite odd, when police violence continues to shapes the lives of racialised people today. For me, Come Out serves as a portal into the Little Fruit Stand Riot and the case of the Harlem Six that it draws from, and the contesting understandings of this history. It rides on the political momentum of the Civil Rights movement, the “long hot summer of 1967” and vividly bursts into the present as I read Baldwin’s words:
The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.
Come Out viscerally catapults Hamm’s voice into whatever situation it is being played in. I also note that Beta managed to contact the now elderly Hamm who declined to comment for his commemorative essay. Beta observes that the Harlem Six, once a significant flashpoint for the civil rights movement has disappeared from “popular culture,” yet Come Out still resounds; according to the music scholar Sumanth Gopinath as its “most prominent historical memorial.” Might the history of Daniel Hamm and the Harlem Six outlive Reich’s hagiography or will they remain irrevocably entwined?
