“Sounding that Precarious Existence:” On R&B Music, Technology, and Blackness

If you take R&B away, you take away the feeling of one human being to another. You take away so many things. You take away the passion, and the love. And once you get out of R&B, actually, even if you're dealing with tempo records, that's still just about your love for music. It has nothing to do with human contact. Like, at all. It’s just, “Oh man, we’re getting off on this thing, and we’re doing our thing, and these instruments, they are crazy.” But what are you talking about? –The-Dream, NPR interview, June 19 2013.

Content Analysis, total content. Musical, Poetic, Dramatic, Literary, is the analysis in total, which must come, too. But, briefly, the R&B content is usually about this world in a very practical, where we literally are, approach. –LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)”

Scale is an often-useful geographical concept, providing a means through which to organise the world hierarchically, identify connections, determine impacts. Through reading Alexander G. Weheliye’s work on posthumanism, technology, and Black cultural production, I became intrigued with the idea that, through R&B, the Black experience became expressed at the scale of the personal. In a 2015 interview, Weheliye explains that “R&B presents different facets of the practice of Black everyday life under other genocidal conditions than hip-hop, emphasizing the ‘domestic’ interpersonal sphere rather than the street.” And so R&B becomes a specific multi-scalar site of (expressive) interactions between Blackness and gender, technology and the body—for example through the mechanics of breath, the use of Auto-tune, the novel applications of production and recording technologies. Weheliye is currently working on an expansion of the claims he makes in his 2002 article “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Music.” –Nehal El-Hadi This conversation took place over the phone between Chicago and Toronto, and has been edited for clarity and flow.

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Nehal El-Hadi: I’ve been really intrigued by your work for a number of years now and it started off not through academia, but through my interest in rap and hip-hop. Not so much R&B, just understanding and writing about music and technology and where both of those meet Blackness. In the past, you’ve described this as a really intimate relationship between Blackness and technology. They’re almost inextricable from each other, but somehow, they are understood in opposition: one can’t contain the other. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Alexander G. Weheliye: I think it is clearly very deep and elaborate and all those things. The easiest way to think about this is that this has its roots in colonialism and in the assumption that white European-ness has to somehow be superior to Blackness, to brown-ness, and one of the major ways that historically has progressed is through technology. Particularly through writing technologies initially—literacy, the Bible, and so on—and that has been carried over into other technological realms in that there’s still, to this day, this basic notion and surprise when there’s an insight in mainstream society that shows just how Black people engage deeply with technology, whether this is Black Twitter or the way that folks on the African continent use different kinds of technologies. Mobile banking, for instance, which frequently comes as a shock because there is still this elementary belief that Black people are perhaps outside of Western civilization. This is built upon not only the presumed white, western intellectual superiority, but its embodiment in technology, if that makes sense. NE: Yes. I had pulled out a passage from a book called Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern by Amanda Weidman, in response to your work. There’s a point in here that she makes:

Music lives a curiously double life. It is associated with the technical—the musicological terminology of notes and intervals, the acoustic terminology of frequencies and amplitudes—and with the sentimental—meaning, emotion, and a sense of the ineffable. In fact, the coexistence of these discourses and their essential incommensurability seem somehow constitutive of ‘music’ as we know it. On one side, to paraphrase Raghava Menon, is the meaningful: message, memory, murmur; on the other side, the mathematical: arithmetic, fractions, and time intervals. The way in which these discourses are pitted against one another reflects a mode of thinking about music that is, I would argue, peculiar to modernity and, indeed, to a particular postcolonial predicament. [...] “Voice” and “oral tradition” have in the twentieth century become more than merely descriptive. Rather, they are loaded terms in a discourse about authenticity that derives its urgency from the perceived onslaught of technologies of recording and electric sound reproduction.

So, this conversation about music, technology, race is really a discussion about postcolonialism.

As if Aretha Franklin had not sung in her father’s church for so many years before she even recorded and had that practice.

AW: I wouldn’t only say postcolonialism since slavery clearly also played into this, but I definitely think that a large part of it is an inheritance from not only colonialism as a historical practice but as a set of ideas and beliefs that were necessary in order for European colonialism to happen. And that part was that Europeans have to feel superior to non-European populations. And another way that this also plays out, which was initially one of the main reasons that I wanted to think about Black music and technology to counteract the assumption that Black music was in one way or another natural. Particularly, and this is also what I’m working through in the project about R&B, the Black singing voice, the BlackFem singing voice.ⁱ That it is not about training, practice, instrument, artistry, labour, et cetera, but that somehow, when a Black person—particularly when a BlackFem person—opens their mouths to sing, these sorts of guttural notes just come gushing out, as if Aretha Franklin had not sung in her father’s church for so many years before she even recorded and had that practice. There’s a lot going on there, not only in terms of technology as hardware but also specifically about the human voice, the BlackFem voice as a technology. There’s a kind of resistance to that because it is perceived to be something that happens naturally. NE: Yes, definitely. Just building on that as well, if we start from how Blackness is intertwined with technology, how does this change our location in understanding both Blackness and technology? AW:I think it depends on (a) what we’re pursuing, and (b) what kinds of technologies we’re talking about. To me, what is really important is, because Black culture is so frequently perceived as anti-technological, that oftentimes there’s not a precise language about describing it. So we might have certain descriptors for R&B singing voices that are soulful, melodramatic, church-y, and so on, but there’s very little in terms of specific lexicons for what different Black singing styles entail. And I’m not talking about this only at the level of breathing and breath exercises, breath control, but really in terms of the larger picture of what these voices are able to do in relationship to other voices but also in relationship to technological apparatuses: microphones, recording studios, samples, software (Pro-Tools or Auto-Tune, for example), other instruments, and so on, even on the live stage. So to me it’s more about trying to understand more precisely what the artistry is within the field of R&B as a set of mutable and embodied cultural practices. And a lot of that is thinking about technology both in the sense of recording studios, live venues, mp3s, but also in relationship to the concrete practices of singing, the labour that’s exerted, and the performative dimensions of that work. The point is never to say, “oh you know, we the Black people are technological, too” [laughs], because to me that neglects how Black cultures do something different with technology for a number of complicated sociohistorical reasons. I think sometimes it’s about limitations and pushing against those, such as turning the turntable into an instrument in the early days of hip-hop, or even before that, in Jamaican sound system culture. It was necessary to use turntables in the South Bronx in the 1970s because music education programs were destroyed and other instruments were not available, but it’s never only that. So much of Black cultural practices oftentimes push against the limit of mainstream definitions and intended uses of technology and continually innovate without automatically looking back. You see this in so many different ways in terms of sampling, in terms of the R&B singing voice: once the kind of the melodramatic singing of an Aretha Franklin, and then later Whitney Houston, becomes popularised and available for other populations, as it does in the 2000s, Black singers go in a different direction. That is also tied up with the fact that the Black church, particularly the Black Pentecostal church, is not the primary training ground for Black musicians anymore, for people who play traditional instruments, but also singers. This is at least partially a response against the existence of Céline Dion, Christina Aguilera, and later Adele, and all the white singers on American Idol, who are able to perform these kind of singing styles that were considered unmistakably Black in earlier moments. So, Black performers start experimenting in all these different ways. NE: So how did you get to this point, and not your intellectual history, because you document that really well, but what has it been that brought you here? AW: R&B music is the music that I’ve listened to the most in my lifetime, that I have the most deep affective relationship with. I remember there were a few years in the late 80s, early 1990s, where I still listened to R&B but it wasn’t my main listening, and then I remember hearing Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” coming out of every car in New York and New Jersey. And thinking, oh wow, I need to go out and buy that album, and that made me really re-engage with R&B. R&B hadn’t completely disappeared from my life but I didn’t seek it out that often. And growing up in 1980s West Germany, R&B was actually something that I needed to seek out, it wasn’t something that was readily available to me, because there was no—I mean, I think it’s similar in Canada—there’s no format radio that exclusively played Black music. NE: I didn’t come to Canada until late 1999, I was in England before then. AW: The same thing in England. Now you have the legalised pirate radio that played dance music and things like that, but back in the day it was BBC. And there were the big artists: Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Janet Jackson, and a few other exceptions. But overall, beyond that, even someone like Anita Baker, it was something that I had to seek out. And in terms of listening to special radio shows on the Armed Forces Network, going to particular kinds of clubs, having friends tape records for me, especially those Black artists that were not mainstream, since their import-only releases were expensive and not readily available in Germany. And then later MTV and other music video channels, waiting for the soul shows to come on and taping videos off that with friends, all these kinds of things that had to be done in order to engage with R&B music.

I listened to hip-hop from an R&B perspective, meaning that the wordplay and all that stuff is nice, but to me it’s much more about the quality of the voice and the way that rappers intonate.

I also didn’t really know all that much about the lives of the performers because there was also no culture around that in 1980s West Germany for Black music. In the United States, for instance, you had Black teen magazines that wrote articles about DeBarge or other prominent R&B artists in the 1980s. Remembering that moment with Mary J. Blige and there were few others as well where I really thought, “oh I should really go back to this” because I think I was sort of pooh-poohing R&B music for a little moment. Hip-hop seemed to be much, much more exciting. But one of the things I also realized retrospectively is that I listened to hip-hop from an R&B perspective, meaning that the wordplay and all that stuff is nice, but to me it’s much more about the quality of the voice and the way that rappers intonate. So the newer generation, sometimes referred to as mumble rapper generation, doesn’t really bother me. I mean, they disturb me in specific instances, because I don’t like their music, but their sheer existence doesn’t irk me, because I think a lot of the stuff that’s happening in hip-hop now is really interesting precisely in terms of the voice. So thinking about someone like Young Thug or even Drake who takes singing lessons and a number of other artists that have been able to combine vocalizing with rapping, I actually really enjoy that. But I also realized looking back, for example, I love A Tribe Called Quest because of the interplay of Q-Tip’s and Phife’s voices. I like the music and all those things, too, but it’s not necessarily about the lyrics themselves but how they presented them and their voice and delivery. NE: When you were saying that I was just thinking back to Myka 9 from Freestyle Fellowship, and he rapped but he also scatted and sang ... AW: Yeah! That was I think a really great moment, right? And Pharcyde as well. That moment in California just after the explosion of gangsta rap, Del the Funky Homosapien, Digital Underground, et cetera. It was all very melodic and I think that it really laid the groundwork for a lot of the things that are happening now. NE: You also had people like Nate Dogg, who were hip-hop. I wouldn’t describe him as R&B at all, he was pure hip-hop, but then he had this beautiful voice. AW: There are a few things. I think even NWA or Above the Law before that. NWA and De La Soul were actually the two groups that really got me into hip-hop [laughs]. Because I liked hip-hop before, but I wasn’t like ... NE: Just so you know, you’ve totally dated yourself right now.  AW: It’s fine, it’s fine. I mean, before that I did love the Grandmaster Flash, Sugar Hill Gang, Kurtis Blow moment, but not the mid-80s Eric B and Rakim sound. I can appreciate it intellectually, but it was just really dry. Those James Brown drums, I’m like, um ... [laughs]. But with both De La Soul and NWA, there was more the P-funk influence but there was also the melodicism that was there, you know? “Express Yourself” by NWA, I remember someone putting that on a cassette tape for me and without knowing who the artist was and I was like, damn. There was one more thing that I forgot to say earlier about how I got here in terms of R&B. When I wrote “Feenin’” all those years ago in 2001 and I felt that there was barely enough writing academic or even journalistic writing on R&B and I had been hoping that someone would write a book about R&B, which has not happened in the interim. There’s still so little critical literature about R&B music since the 1980’s when compared to Jazz, the Blues, or hip-hop. It’s been something I’ve worked on intermittently over the years, but I didn't initially conceive of “Feenin” as a book. Then I thought maybe it’s not a bad thing to make this into a book because I do feel so passionately about it and have thought so much about it. NE: I’ve said this before, I was never big into R&B but what drew me in, was if there was any R&B group that I could allow, it was Jodeci. Because they were also extremely hip-hop. AW: I mean, I love Jodeci, but it was more Mary J. Blige for me because her earliest records were based on samples that I knew from hip-hop, and then following Mary from What’s the 411 to My Life, which was such an amazing album. It’s so steeped in R&B history yet also a deeply hip-hop-infused album in terms of how it used samples from the history of R&B. So much happened in R&B as a genre in the 1990’s. Initially, I started thinking about it as R&B versus hip-hop, but at this point in time it’s really hard to think about hip-hop without thinking about R&B and vice-versa, because they’ve basically become one. NE: Hip-hop is now everywhere, too.

It’s been interesting to see how Canadian R&B artists get folded into the R&B genre, in that usually they don’t mark themselves as being different.

AW: What then becomes interesting is why certain things are classified as R&B and certain things as hip-hop. That’s where I wanna push back a little bit: on the almost complete engulfment of R&B by hip-hop. And I think it’s also because of the shifts in the music industry: R&B music as a genre has been hit the hardest, particularly BlackFem performers. In terms of how the music industry is currently operating, I would find it hard to imagine for there to be an SWV, an Xscape, a Jodeci, a TLC or a Mary J. Blige, and all the other names of that moment in the 1990s where R&B literally becomes the cultural dominant moving towards the late 1990s with Missy and Timbaland also pushing the boundary between hip-hop and R&B. Besides SZA there hasn’t really been a major breakthrough for a BlackFem R&B artist in the last few years. What I wanted to say earlier about Nate Dogg, of course hip-hop became mainstream through R&B. Through using not only Nate Dogg, but particularly other now-unknown female hook singers—Michel’le being one of the more well-known ones, but there were so many others. There were so many different hook singers, Kelly Price and Faith Evans, on the Bad Boy songs, for example, On the West Coast, it was similar, there were two or three women such as Nanci Fletcher who did all of the hooks and the vocal arrangements on the hip-hop records, which then took over the mainstream. NE: Like Jewell on the West Coast? AW: Yes, Jewell was another one. She even pursued a solo career but did not gain prominence in the way that Kelly Price and Faith Evans did. In order for hip-hop to become mainstream, it had to have this symbiosis with R&B. Particularly on the hooks and then when Auto-Tune rolled around in the late 1990s, it became possible and a lot cheaper for the male hip-hop performers to do their own thing. And then I think that the Auto-Tune actually freed folks up to experiment with their voices, particularly the masculine folks. Even though they might not use it necessarily in this day and age, I don’t think we would have the iLoveMakonnen, Drake, Kanye, Chance the Rapper, all these folks experimenting continually with their voices, whether it’s technologically manipulated or not. So I think it is definitely that. And, of course, there are the samples. In the early days, the R&B samples were important to hip-hop. NE: Going back to “Feenin’”, what was also very intriguing to me was what geographies you considered. Some of them were a little more obvious, like the domestic sphere and the sonic zone, but then you also have the Black voice as a site, the phonograph and other sound technologies as a site, sonic topographies as a site. And I was like, this is a really interesting way to think about space and place and I’d love to hear you talk more about it. AW: Let me come at this from a slightly different direction. I think also that while a lot of this is specific to the United States and to a certain extent the North American continent, I do think that it’s been interesting to see how Canadian R&B artists get folded into the R&B genre, in that usually they don’t mark themselves as being different. Tamia, Glenn Lewis, Melanie Fiona, they won’t necessarily mark themselves as Canadian or being from Toronto in the same way that hip-hop artists do, like Drake and others as well. But the thing is, there’s always been other kinds of tradition. If you look at the history of British R&B music, the kind of melodramatic, grainy, and throaty singing embodied by folks such as Jennifer Holliday and Aretha Franklin in the US, has never been dominant there. Because there, the influence from reggae, which generally favours more smooth, non-melismatic voices, has been really, really strong. That’s one way to kind of think about the geographic specificity of all these things, right? We could also think about how the singing voice plays out in non-English speaking music, in a genre like bachata and how that is becoming incorporated into hip-hop and R&B. But the other thing that I got really interested in at some point is that even though folks in US hip-hop and R&B have largely left behind Auto-Tune as something that you can hear—it’s still used in every single studio to correct ‘mistakes’ [laughs], but not as a desired, audible effect. There are few exceptions of course, such as Future, but in general, Auto-Tune is not being used in the same as during the heyday of T-Pain. But on the other hand, it is hugely influential in global pop music. Whether it’s in K-pop or various forms of pop music on the African continent, like Afrobeats, which is performed primarily between London, Ghana, and Nigeria. Auto-Tune is also prominent in Tanzanian pop music and in pop music in the Middle East. And what seems interesting to me there is that Auto-tune was a kind of moment where the singing voice was democratised around the globe, particularly for non-English speaking performers, not from North America. While frequently disparaged, Auto-Tune really opened up the space for folks from the African continent to also be considered soulful.

R&B music gives us the soundtrack to Black everyday life under slow genocidal conditions.

To me, Auto-Tune represents a digital form of melisma, it’s another way of treating the voice and adding all these kinds of denotive layers to it, the singing voice, and not as something that is throwaway, or not artistry. So that’s been interesting. And of course, R&B music in general has not received the same critical attention as other forms of Black music because it is primarily concerned with what we consider to be the domestic sphere and interpersonal relationships that are not considered political. That’s why, in my most recent talks I use Amaal Nuux’s phrase "Scream my name like a protest" because I thought it was a really nice way to think about what it means to have intimacy—very, very broadly defined—whether it’s sexuality, sensuality or something else, in relationship to what’s going on in the streets. That you can’t really have one without the other. But of course R&B music is also the genre where people joke about all these things. Like the sidechick anthems, there’s songs where particularly BlackFem performers sing about their partner being in prison, et cetera and so on. You get a very, very different way in which these larger "social political economic forces" operate and constitute what is considered to be domestic space. That they’re always in relationship to one another. When I started [giving] R&B talks more recently, there were a couple of times when people said, well, what makes this political? And finally, I just sort of condensed it down and said that R&B music gives us the soundtrack to Black everyday life under slow genocidal conditions. It sounds a bit melodramatic, but I think that that is, to me, what makes it still an important genre beyond the mere enjoyment of the music. How do we have interiorities, interpersonal relationships, and so on, in these environments where, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, we’re not supposed to exist. Not meant to survive, but also not exist. And to me sounding that precarious existence is where contemporary R&B really shines. NE: I had read somewhere where you had said that, and that shifted my relationship to R&B because now I see it on a scalar level of the things that I was interested in. That it was a zooming in, and when you pulled out, you were still dealing with the same world that other forms of music were dealing with. And it’s not even on a level of being explicit or not, but it was a zooming in, it was a different scale. And that particular quote of yours shifted how I listened to the music. AW: One of the things that I was also thinking about, one of the main things actually, is trying to be specific about the way R&B singing has changed. Even though it’s never a complete shift, and one of the things that is really important for me to highlight is that there’s always been R&B singers that were not these powerhouses—I’m running out of adjectives—grainy-voiced, melodramatic, “sanging” singers. And that’s the common complaint about singers like Frank Ocean and SZA being vibe singers and not “sanging-ass” singers. There’s no conviction, there’s no drama in the way that you got in Whitney, in earlier periods of Mariah, Kelly Price. And I think to me partially the way that I read that is not necessarily as a retreat but that the way that folks such as Frank Ocean, Solange, Kelela and even to a certain extent Mariah Carey in her later career, the way that they use the layering of their voices, the multi-tracking of their voices, and even Jazmine Sullivan would be another example, is to highlight BlackFem interiority.  

Endnote

ⁱ I take my definition of BlackFem from Chelsea Frazier, who writes:

“Fem” is rooted in a … queer-community based definition of “femme” that describes “1) a person who expresses and/or identifies with femininity 2) a community label for people who identify with femininity specifically through a queer and/or politically radical and/or subversive context and/or 3) a feminine person of any gender/sex.” First, it is meant to refer to a variety of “affectable” black subjectivities forged through the connective tissue of white, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchy. Second, the term is meant to mark the liminal spaces between the distinct—not conflated, categories of black woman, black female, and black (queer) femme … I offer this language to critique the assumed central subject of black feminism—the black (heteronormative and/or heterosexual). Furthermore, I aim to mark and consider the intricacies of a broader range of feminine subjectivities with which black feminism … must be concerned.

—Chelsea M. Frazier, "Thinking Red, Wounds, and Fungi in Wangechi Mutu's EcoArt,” from Christopher Heuer and Rebecca Zorach's Ecologies, Agents, Terrains.   Nehal El-Hadi is a journalist, writer, and researcher whose work explores the intersections between the body, technology, and space. Recently, she interviewed Dr. Fred Moten for MICE Magazine, and her short story "La Puerta" appears in the forthcoming anthology, The Black Prairie Archive (WLU Press, 2019). Nehal is based in Toronto where she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the City Institute at York University. More information can be found at www.nehalelhadi.com.