|
Post-Traumatic
Expression in Pop Music, Two Examples
Fred
Everett Maus
Department
of Music,
University
of Virginia
(Estados
Unidos)
As Philip Brett (1994)
emphasized, many sexual-minority youth, raised in
homophobic settings, learn not to express basic aspects of
their sensibilities. Brett suggested that these
restrictions may lead queer children to musical
performance as an acceptable medium of expression.
Expanding Brett’s account, I note that music, sometimes
a medium of strong feeling, may also be inexpressive,
hiding feeling.
Trauma often results from a
traumatic event or series of events. But Maria Root
(1992), Laura Brown (1995), and others have defined a
notion of “insidious trauma,” resulting from pervasive,
systematic oppression of, among others, blacks, women, and
queers. Brown (2003) identifies, in the lives of
sexual-minority subjects, patterns that she calls “normative
trauma,” an ordinary part of queer identity. Though
Brown does not discuss forbidden expressiveness as a type
of trauma, it fits her account.
Insidious or normative
trauma, like the acute traumatic event that has been
central to psychological theory, may have various
post-traumatic consequences.
This paper draws upon Brown’s
account of “normative trauma” to describe stylistic
traits of two pop music groups, both dating to the 1980s.
In the early music of R.E.M., singer and lyricist Michael
Stipe, semi-closeted at the time, later self-identified as
queer, sings in a way that many have found very
expressive, though it is difficult to hear the words and,
when heard, they are often obscure. I understand this as
the musical expressiveness that Brett described, a welcome
exception to the discretion normally prescribed for queer
subjectivities at the time, coupled with an explicit
performance of privacy in the inaccessible enunciation and
verbal texts.
No musicians are more
central to the imagery of male homosexuality in
Anglo-American popular music than the Pet Shop Boys, a duo
featuring at least one gay man, possibly two. The Pet Shop
Boys, in songs and in videos, depict post-traumatic
numbing and dissociation and, therefore, resonate with the
post-traumatic experiences of many queer listeners. In
musical performance, these qualities appear especially in
singer Neil Tennant’s distanced affect. His remoteness
sometimes coexists with, and may be felt as dissociated
from, hyper-emotional music; in other cases the music, as
well, seems dissociated from emotional recognition and
expression. In visual media, their trauma appears as
exclusion from a world that they haunt and comment upon,
but to which they cannot belong.
About Fred Everett Maus
Fred Everett Maus teaches
music at the University of Virginia. He has written on the
aesthetics of classical instrumental music; gender and
sexuality in the languages of music criticism and analysis;
gender and sexuality in popular music; and other topics.
|
