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
Anton Blackburn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies. Their dissertation, Incongruous Sound: Trans Music, Nightlife, and Listening in Contemporary London, develops a philosophical ethnography of trans night/life in East London, asking how trans women sustain political and social life through musical and sonic encounters with alienation and suspension. Their fieldwork traces “aural incongruence“ — attending in particular to the voice in transition — as it coheres within constellations of recorded popular music, dance, and listening in postcolonial Britain. Incongruous sounds of (non-)passing make audible the relationship between trans embodiment and harmonic ideologies of the social and the self, where the latter’s entanglement with what María Lugones calls the modern colonial gender system produces a negational “reality reinforcement“ of the former.
Anton’s writing appears in The Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Contemporary Music Review. They serve as an Associate Editor for Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology and have presented at the American Anthropological Association, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and the Duke-Leuphana Gender, Queer, and Transgender Studies Workshop.
Before Duke, Anton completed an M.St. in Musicology at Oxford University under the supervision of Georgina Born, and holds a B.A. in Music (summa cum laude) also from Oxford.
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