Voices That Matter: Authenticity, Identity, and Voice in the Musical Career of Lana Del Rey
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<jats:p> Discursive authentications of singing voices in pop music reception are often rooted in gendered expectations. Moving away from essentialist understandings of the ‘authentic voice,’ this article proffers that voices are formatively entangled in processes of subjectification. Lana Del Rey is a singer whose (vocal) career has been considered inauthentic in the discourse of journalists, particularly when she first rose to stardom in 2011 via YouTube. Del Rey is a prime example of the contemporary values of artistic personae in pop culture, as her career has been so bound to notions of authenticity and sounding authentic. Through an analysis of the vocal aesthetics of Del Rey and the discourse that surrounds her, the notion of ‘vocal ontogenesis’ is developed. This concept moves from subjectification as an ontologically complete instance to subjectification as a never-ending process. The notion of vocal ontogenesis becomes useful for comprehending the complex aggregations of which the voice is a component, and more broadly implies the need for further study of vocal materialism, setting an agenda for decentered examinations of voice, gender, and authenticity. </jats:p>
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Blackburn, Anton (n.d.). Voices That Matter: Authenticity, Identity, and Voice in the Musical Career of Lana Del Rey. Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology, 13(1). pp. 84–114. 10.5206/notabene.v13i1.8579 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25867.
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Anton Blackburn
Education:
M.St. Musicology, Wadham College, Oxford University (2021)
B.A. Music, Jesus College, Oxford University (2020)
Bio:
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies. My doctoral dissertation, "Listening After Death: Trans Music, Nightlife, and Deathliness in Contemporary London," examines trans modes of musical mourning under necropolitical conditions in the United Kingdom. Through a transaural approach to the nexus of listening, music, and death, my ethnography asks what political possibilities are generated and foreclosed by mourning as it is sustained by encounters with recorded popular tracks as haunted objects. By exploring dance, breath, and listening as ways into understanding the everyday life of necropolitical structures, this project reveals the ways in which the ordinary and the spectacular, or the political and the aesthetic, spill into and out of one another.
I serve as an Associate Editor for Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology, the graduate journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. My writing can be found in The Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Contemporary Music Review (forthcoming). I have presented my work at the American Anthropological Association, The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, and the Duke-Leuphana Gender, Queer, and Transgender Studies Workshop. My non-peer-reviewed writing can be found in my blog, Xenophonia.
Before arriving at Duke, I completed my M.St. in Musicology at Oxford University under the supervision of Georgina Born. Prior to my master's, I earned my B.A. in Music (summa cum laude) also at Oxford.
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