Conceptualising ‘the temporal shudder’: queer time-troubling in pop music’s ageing women’s voices

Baker, Emily (2023) Conceptualising ‘the temporal shudder’: queer time-troubling in pop music’s ageing women’s voices. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

In this thesis I present the temporal shudder. In part, I suggest it as a concept to identify, examine and infer meaning from the impact of age, time and experience in the singing voice. Ageing is gendered (Woodward 1999; Turner 2000; Byrski 2014) and so, women’s ageing singing voices are a particularly troublesome cog in pop music’s inherently youth-focused machine. Across four case studies of ageing women pop stars I will show what happens when the ageing voice causes that machine to jolt. The temporal shudder is a feeling – as well as a concept – where past, present and future are all felt simultaneously. It can feel uncanny, eerie, and confusing in characteristic ways. After setting out the concepts and key theories (uncanny, queer theory, age and its processes, voice, and the pop music industries), I assert that there are a set of rules or axioms for the temporal shudder to emerge. In the first case study, I examine Joni Mitchell’s vocal performance on Travelogue (2002), where time is made to feel ambiguous through the intimate and anachronistic vocal technologies of the crooner. A blend of non-normative repertoire, affecting orchestration and the use of musical tropes all combine to support and provide context for her vocal performance. In the second study, I show how pitch correction software is applied to Aretha Franklin’s septuagenarian voice, to ostensibly ameliorate the vocal signifiers of age. Where Franklin’s voice does not move with quite the same fluid movement as it did during her mid-60s, iconic, Atlantic Records-era youth, so the technologies applied to her voice appear to offer a kind of sonic prosthetic assistance. The resulting automated vocal performance makes her familiar voice feel strange and uncanny. The penultimate case study is centred around the wild, youthful rockabilly rasp of Wanda Jackson. Jackson’s vocality speaks of a very specific time and place in American history and so this chapter is concerned with the effects of those vocal sounds being performed to mark the retirement of an 80-something-year-old woman. Encore (2021) is said to be Jackson’s last album, and she collaborates with Joan Jett on a short suite of swan songs – the interplay between the two engenders queer effects, and not least the question of ageing (vocal) female masculinity. In the final chapter I examine Dolly Parton’s most recent musical releases. Parton is currently devising ways to continue releasing music after her death and I show how four songs function as prototypes to test the marketisation and profitability of certain musical contexts. The temporal shudder provides a language for the strange, sonic ‘blurriness’ engendered by voices that make ‘now’ feel flimsy and ephemeral; in queering heteronormative assumptions about age, gender and musical industry practices, the temporal shudder is offered as a means of expanding the otherwise ageist horizon of queer theory

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Age, Ageing, Aging, Eerie, Gender, Music, Music industry, Pop music, Popular music studies, Queer, Queer theory, Singers, Temporality, Uncanny, Voice
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	31 Jan 2024 10:00
Last Modified:	31 Jan 2024 10:00
DOI:	10.17638/03172036
Supervisors:	Jarman, Freya Cohen, Sara
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3172036