De Carvalho y Segato-Sistemas Abertos e Territórios Fechados, para Uma Nova Comprensao Das Interfaces Entre Música e Identidades Sociais

Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music
Author(s): Barbara Bradby

Source: Popular Music, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 155-176
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Popular Music (1993) Volume 12/2. Copyright ( 1993 Cambridge University Press
Sampling sexuality: gender,

technology and the body in
dance music
BARBARA BRADBY
Suspicious minds: feminism and popular music

Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blind
and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-
most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, o
feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly t
often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything
girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a
excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely,
celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have
embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had go
feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's ow
the considerable work that has been done by feminists on p
problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of
feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition,
work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and
the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera
parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and B
groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (199
mechanisms through which men exclude women from part
while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels oth
how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewe
research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation
experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 19
meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 19
In this article I try to draw connections between some o
writing, and theoretical work in feminism and in popular m
areas, the intersection with postmodernist social and cultur
ated recent debates. For feminism, postmodernism has m
through what a recognition of differences between women
critical practice; while in the area of popular music, the deb
significance of what has been summed up as the 'death of roc
sight, there seems little in common between these two deb
common derivation from theories of the 'death of the s
155
156 Barbara Bradby
history'. But I believe it is important to try and make these connections, if feminism
is to engage with popular music in a meaningful way.
One important strand of postmodernist writing on popular music has focused
on a series of technological practices, running from 'scratching', 'dubbing' and
'versioning' in Caribbean music (Hebdige 1987), through to digital 'sampling' in
house music and its evolution into 'dance music' in the late 1980s. These technolo-
gies have seemed to some to have radical democratic potential, subverting
accepted ideas of 'the author' and blurring the boundaries between production an
consumption (Hebdige 1987; Jones and Willis 1990; Langlois 1992). Durant (199
provides a more considered discussion of the implications for musical literacy an
democracy of the new technologies. Yet nowhere in the literature on house musi
and sampling have the implications of these practices for women been considered
in any depth. This is particularly problematic given the utopianism that has sur-
rounded dance culture, which has a 'post-feminist' side to it in its claims to have
moved beyond sexism. In focusing on dance music, this paper looks at the
evidence for new social practices which can explain these Utopian claims in relation
to gender and sexuality in dance-floor culture, and relates these to the way gender
is represented in the music itself.
The way in which the computerisation of music worked to exclude wome
and girls from pop production in the 1980s has not gone unremarked by feminists
(McRobbie 1988). In one sense this was nothing new: technology had for a lon
time been incorporated into rock and pop via ideologies that linked technological
expertise with masculinity. A mastery of technology, whether as easy familiarity,
or as Promethean conflict, is a taken-for-granted aspect of the spectacle of 'live'
rock and a part of rock's peculiarly masculine erotic.1 Rock's concepts of authorshi
(originality, art) and of authenticity (the real person in the real performance) devel
oped around this use of technology and not in opposition to it. And while th
'new' technologies promised to render these concepts of authorship redundan
Goodwin shows how they have been reconstituted around figures such as 'th
producer' and around new ways of demonstrating mastery of technology in 'live'
acts (1990).2 But these processes also have a familiar gender dimension to them
The new categories of studio hero - producers, mixers, 'scratchers', etc. - are all
normatively male, unless we indicate to the contrary. And terms such as 'author-
ship', 'art', 'creativity' and 'originality', which have been used both by detractors
and proponents of 'sampling',3 are the same terms that have generally worke
against the inclusion of women performers in the rock hall of fame.
If women have had an acknowledged role in rock and pop it has been a
performers, even though this has been mainly limited to vocal rather than
instrumental performance, and has been circumscribed by ideologies that do not
generally allow women's performances to be 'authentic' in the way that men's are
It is therefore important to look at what the new technologies are doing to the
notion of performance in popular music, and at how that affects the representatio
of women, both vocally in recordings, and visually in music videos. As it turns ou
female performance has been a contested area in dance music, because of th
particular ways in which sampling has been used on women and the implications
this has had for women's identity. But the introduction of female vocal perform
ances, deriving from the black musical genres of soul and rap, was also of crucia
commercial importance in the transition from (underground) 'house music' to th
mainstream success of 'dance'. In the process, not only has the new role of 'fema
Gender, technology and the body in dance music 157
vocalist' emerged, with ambiguous implications for women's musical careers, but
disturbingly traditional representations of women have been recycled in both 'live'
and sampled performance.
There is an obvious way in which women have once again been equated with
sexuality, the body, emotion and nature in dance music, while men have been
assigned to the realm of culture, technology and language. These positionings of
women and men in relation to nature and culture have been identified by feminists
as a contradiction at the core of Enlightenment universalism and rationalism
(Jordanova 1980). Yet, as representations in dance music, it is difficult for feminist
analysis to come to grips with their critique, since their 'recontextualisation' within
hi-tech sounds tends to mark them as inauthentic performances - a representation
of a performance as the expression of emotion, rather than the performance itself.
It is in this sense, I would argue, that male producers have been 'sampling sexu-
ality' in dance music, regardless of whether voices have been technically 'sampled'
or not. But this tendency is enhanced by a process of technologisation of women's
bodies at the level of representation, which includes the intervention of digital
technologies in the female voice as we hear it, and the fragmentation of audio and
visual body images, or of the voice and the body. The resultant cyborgs (Haraway
1990) transgress the boundaries of the Enlightenment equation of women with
nature, and pose difficulties for orthodox feminist analysis. These dilemmas are
similar to those identified at an abstract level by feminists debating with theories of
'postmodernism', but are here concretised in actual people and their social rela-
tions in the creation of music. Analysis must therefore shift between the modern
and the postmodern, between the critique of Enlightenment gender categories and
an awareness that they have become untenable divisions in everyday practice as
well as in theory.
Caught in a trap? Feminism and postmodernism

As a subject-based politics, there is no doubt that feminism has found the advent of
postmodernism unnerving. The 'death of the subject', to which feminism had in no
small part contributed, was turned back on it as the sin of 'essentialism', and the
pioneering feminist theory of barely a decade before was castigated for its naive
belief that all women share common characteristics (Bordo 1990). But while it is
true that feminism's exposition of the covert masculinity of the gender-neutral
language of Enlightenment individualism did lend credence to the 'death of the
subject', this is only half the story. For a part of the critique was the revealing of
masculine subjectivity that underlay the 'objective' language of 'man', 'the author',
'the individual', or 'rights', and of the exclusion of female subjectivity which had
been defined as 'other'.
Faced with this paradox, some have welcomed postmodernism as
theoretical incarnation of the difficulties within the women's movement itsel
around differences between women (of class, race, sexual orientation, and in r
tion to colonialism, to name only some). The challenging of white, West
middle-class and heterosexist assumptions has led to the more specific a
localised framing of demands, which is not necessarily incompatible with prin
pled social criticism (Fraser and Nicholson 1988), and can lead to a networking
of politics, where differences acknowledged become a source of strength (Bar
1987; Moore 1988). Others, like Flax, take the implications of postmodernism
158 Barbara Bradby
further, and question 'the notion of a feminist standpoint that is truer than
previous (male) ones' not only on the grounds that any standpoint is partial
because 'rooted in the social relations of class, race, or homophobia', but also
because 'It ... presupposes gendered social relations in which there is a category
of beings who are fundamentally like each other by virtue of their sex - that is, it
assumes the otherness men assign to women' (Flax 1987, p. 642). Strangely, such a
position seems to grant reality to the social relations of class, etc., but when we
come to thinking of our social experience as women, it is all just a male fantasy!
This seems impossibly undermining of the painstaking work that has gone into
building women's language of our own experiences over the last twenty years - the
naming of sexual harrassment or wife abuse, new discourses around the violence
of rape or male-controlled childbirth, new discourses around female sexuality and
around the cultural representation of women. Postmodernist theorising has
certainly sharpened awareness of the need to locate claims about 'women' in terms
of other social vectors, to avoid 'speaking for' other groups of women, and to be
aware that one's analysis is only ever partial. Yet as Bordo argues, it is an illusion
that ethnocentrism can be overcome by 'political correctness' (1990, p. 138). The
dogma that 'attacks gender generalisations as in principle essentialist or totalizing'
needs questioning and opening up to empirical social research (ibid., pp. 139-40).
In addition, the politics advocated by Flax, of 'decentring the world' so that 'reality
will appear even more unstable, complex and disorderly than it does now' (1987,
pp. 642-3), does make me want to revert to gender generalisations and question
why for women reality needs to be any more unstable and disorderly than it already
is. Part of women's 'invisible' oppression is surely the way in which we must 'cope'
in our persons not only with the instability of our own fragmented roles, but with
clearing up the disorder of others on a daily basis. The point is surely to make this
reality more apparent, to dislodge from centre stage the 'reality' of an automatically
functioning social order which it has been men's privilege to believe.
The basic insights of this debate on the 'death of the subject' and its implica-
tions for feminism could well be applied to that on the 'death of rock' in popular
music analysis, which has had similarly ambiguous results for women. What is not
clearly spelt out in the debate on the causes of rock's demise (which is reviewed in
more detail in the next section) is the way in which rock music proclaimed a form of
masculinity that is by now hopelessly outdated (not least because of the conscious-
ness-raising work of feminism and the arrival of 'New Man' as some kind of
response). The subject of rock 'died' for the same reason as other subjects and
authors died in the 1970s and 1980s: because the unity it purported to represent
split apart under its own contradictions, one of which was the gender contradiction
of a masculinity claiming to represent 'collectivity'. Feminine subjectivity was
excluded by rock music, and relegated to 'pop'. The women's punk bands allowed
a brief outburst of feminist ideas on the debris of the rock scene, while gay and
lesbian subcultures deserted rock for disco (Dyer 1990), or the 'women's music'
movement in the USA (Lont 1985). The resultant break up of the apparent
monolith of rock masculinity gave way not to the reconstitution of an equally
monolithic female or gay subject centre stage, but to a multiplicity of more partial,
ironic, sexual subjectivities, celebrating artifice, not authenticity, as Frith puts it
(1988, p. 2).
In the area of empirical cultural analysis, the political potential of post-
modernism for women has been treated more sceptically by feminists. Kaplan, for
instance, in her work on MTV, sees 'postmodern feminism' as the predominant

stance for women in music videos (1987, pp. 115-16). However, she also describes
these videos as typical of 'coopted postmodernism', that is, a postmodernism
where any radical direction has been absorbed into consumer culture (Kaplan
1988). Madonna's 'Material Girl' video exemplifies this coopted feminist post-
modernism, in its playful refusal to take a stance, even as it exposes and pro-
blematises the construction of woman as the object of the male gaze in Hollywood
cinema (Kaplan 1987, pp. 116-27).
A more historically grounded insight into the relationship between feminism
and postmodernism is given by Griggers' work on fashion photography (1990). She
argues that 'postmodernism' must mean something very different for a female
audience than for a male one, since the experience of twentieth-century modernity
has been so different for women. Jameson's view of modernism as an artistic
movement of progressive resistance to industrial society (1983), speaks little to
women's experience of the repressive maternal discourse that addressed them as
wives and mothers during the same period. Postmodernism, by contrast, in
representations of women for a female audience, demonstrates the anxiety of the
break with motherhood experienced by the new generation of middle-class women
in the post-war period. Whether combining motherhood with paid work, or
whether choosing not to become a mother, the body became a locus of new
contradictions for women. For women it is not Jameson's loss of a sense of history
that is the problem, but the lived history of a loss of sense (Griggers 1990, p. 92). In
women's everyday experience this century, motherhood has ceased to be 'the
cultural referent anchoring a normalised feminine subject' (ibid.), that which gives
meaning to women's lives and to the female body. Postmodern women live with this
absent text, hence the extraordinary ambivalence, towards both power and
femininity, displayed by the Vogue photographs of people like Helmut Newton or
Deborah Turbeville.
In her recent book, Motherhood and Representation, Kaplan similarly locate

dramatic shift in the mother-paradigm' and notes anxiety as common to the he
geneous discourses that emerge in film, advertisements, etc. around women, s
the foetus and motherhood/fatherhood in the period since the 1970s.
In searching for a paradigm shift more specific than the global postmodern one - a shift
would encompass all the different forms of anxiety - I became aware that the shift has
with childbirth and childcare no longer being seen as an automatic, natural part of wom
life-cycle. (Kaplan 1992, p. 181)
Now that 'woman' no longer naturally equates with 'mother' in the langua
women's identity becomes fragmented.4 But Kaplan shows how film repre
tations of women continually fail to capture the fragmenting identities of th
postmodern paradigm shift, but instead fall prey to conscious and unconsc
anxieties around the disappearance of 'mother'. 'What representations still cann
produce, are images of sexual women, who are also mothers, and who in additi
have fulfilling careers. "Sex, Work and Motherhood" is obviously too threateni
combination on a series of levels' (Kaplan 1992, p. 183). Of course the loss that
being felt is that of the mother of a particular class ideology - the white, mid
class mother of Western patriarchal norms. In the era of mass communications
class and racial ideology has occluded and oppressed other conceptions of moth
hood, other relationships to and between domesticity, paid work, and sex.5 Th
160 Barbara Bradby
means that there are no simple or unitary solutions: cultural resistance may take
the form of a defence of the traditional family against the ravages of class and racial
oppression, or it may take the form of alternative childbirth movements. But it does
seem that when the anchoring role of motherhood is removed from patriarchal
ideologies, class and racial statuses are thereby also threatened, perhaps account-
ing for the seepage of anxiety onto a more general, social level.
In broad social terms, Kaplan sees these changes as signalling the possible
end of the 'modern unconscious', produced out of the 'culturally coded relations to
the mother in the modern nuclear family'. And she questions: 'If that unconscious
changes, then does the mother's hitherto negatively central place in the old
unconscious begin to shift? Does her displacement to the margins change?' (Kaplan
1992, p. 218). The paradoxical result of Kaplan's analysis is that the displacement of
motherhood as definitive of women's identity means that 'the mother' must
become less ghettoised as representation, and that aspects of woman-as-mother
must be allowed to enter into the representation of woman as other than mother.
In popular music, representations of women have clearly been much more
partial than in film, and mainly confined to 'sex' rather than work or motherhood.
But there are parallels between the 'angel/witch' dichotomy that Kaplan analyses in
the portrayal of the mother in film melodrama, and the 'angel/devil' represen-
tations of sexual women in rock. More broadly, one must consider the way in
which rock music was itself part of the cultural rejection of motherhood as women's
destiny (even if this 'freeing' of women was done firmly within the confines of a
patriarchal sexuality). This development is highly contradictory, since if rock music
is built partly on the fantasy of women's sexuality as completely divorced from
motherhood, it involves the invocation of negative stereotypes of the mother as
repressive of sexuality. Part of the social conservatism of rock is undoubtedly the
way it has been incapable of portraying sexuality after marriage or parenthood (the
difficult area tackled in the 'cheatin' tradition of country music, or in areas of the
blues and soul traditions in black music). Generally in rock and pop, women have
had to be 'young' or 'teen', and any representation of older women has been
rigidly eschewed. This is particularly so in the white traditions. In black popular
music, which has been less tied to the 'teen' genres, it seems that there has been a
place for the mature, more maternal body and voice of a woman, and this will
become relevant in looking at the introduction of 'soul' singing into dance music.
But all this suggests that there is a need to think more specifically about how the
much talked about extension of the social category of 'youth' relates to women's
changing social position, and at how this is affecting the representation of women
in popular music.
Clearly there are ways in which eighties music broke with the dominant rock
version of sexuality and explored new ones. From the point of view of women and
motherhood, Madonna's positive portrayal of the pregnant teenager in 'Papa Don't
Preach' (1986) is indeed a revolutionary image. And in the last couple of years, it
has at least become possible for singers like Sinead O'Connor, Annie Lennox or
Siobhan Fahey to 'come out' publicly as mothers and continue their careers, even
for their motherhood to be represented within the music, as in Sinead's love song
to her small daughter/son, 'My Special Child'. Of course, as social reality, this
acceptance of working mothers is at least fifty years out of date; but at the represen-
tational level - the level of cultural fantasy about women - it is a big break, and
perhaps represents the beginning of the end of that cultural dichotomy between
sex and motherhood that rock music helped to cement. One way in which it does
this is by making more explicit the link between the language of maternal love and
that of sexual desire. In rock'n'roll, this appropriation of maternal discourse was
hidden beneath the 'baby' metaphor (Bradby and Torode 1984): it is made very
explicit in a song like Sinead's (and accompanying video of her with small boy);
Madonna's song keeps the ambiguity of the 'baby' language, but makes it refer to
both pregnancy and boyfriend. To me this makes motherhood less different, less
'other'. Likewise some other of Madonna's work, particularly on the Like a Virgin
and Like a Prayer albums, seems to give voice to the female body as both maternal
and sexual, and, in contrast to O'Connor, makes the transition to thinking about
the woman herself, rather than centring on the child (Bradby 1992).
There is a sense in which the 'feminist postmodernist' debate is all about
trying to substitute social and cultural descriptions of women for 'natural' defini-
tions of 'woman' based on motherhood. Donna Haraway attacks the nature/culture
dichotomy and the way it has emprisoned women, from a different direction. The
postmodern age is for her the transformation of our social relations by telecom-
munications, in a rather grand theory whereby the nuclear family of industrial
capitalism becomes the female-headed household of global electronic homework.
Hi-tech culture, she argues, breaks down the human/machine distinction, and
rather than lamenting this as innocent victims, feminists should welcome it,
exploring the cyborg myth as a way of deconstructing and reconstructing
boundaries, of gender, the self and the body. A cyborg body:
is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate
antagonistic dualisms ...; it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one
possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but [is] an aspect of
embodiment. .... The machine is us, our processes, ... We are responsible for boundaries;
we are they. Up till now, female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary [and]
... to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. .... Cyborgs might consider
more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. (Haraway
1990, p. 222)
And the political task becomes to recode identities across the complex fragmen-
tation that international information systems have imposed: 'cyborg gender is a
local possibility taking a global vengeance' (ibid., p. 223).
Haraway's cyborg semiotics can illuminate the complex mix of human-
machine identities that popular music has constructed, and seems potentially use-
ful for looking at the technological fragmentation of the female body in dance
music, which I go into below. However, I agree with Bordo that her ideas work
better as a collective political myth than as an epistemology of personal identity
(1990, pp. 154-5). The 'View from Nowhere' of Enlightenment theory becomes the
deconstructionist fantasy 'Dream of Everywhere', and the replacement of the
metaphor of the objective 'standpoint' by that of 'the dance' results in just as
disembodied a theory (ibid.). If one looks at actual, gendered dance in the 1990s,
there seems to be little change in the construction of gender and technology that
rock music set up, whereby the association of men and technology was part of the
erotic spectacle of live performance, and women's relationship to technology
tended to be passive, male-controlled and hidden in studios.6 Occasionally, house
music has foregrounded this relationship in a way that can be seen as postmodern,
and there has been an opening for some discussion on women as victims of
technology in popular music. I return to this below, in considering the Black Box
162 Barbara Bradby
controversy, and argue that Haraway's cyborg metaphor can show the way to a
feminist analysis that avoids falling back into the woman-as-nature equation.
Everybody dance now: popular music and postmodernism

The writing on popular music and postmodernism has been dominated by two
interrelated preoccupations: the threat to previously stable categories of authorship
and performance posed by the new digital and computer technologies; and the
sense of an 'end of history' as manifested in the collapse of rock music's meta-
project of youth and rebellion and subsequent dispersion into a proliferation of
genres and styles. It is undeniable that the writing in this area has been over-
whelmingly male, not just in authorship but in orientation to musical examples. I
want here to begin to explore the implications of these debates for women, in
particular in relation to the end of a history from which they have largely been
excluded.
The first question is what is at stake for women in the debate on the cause
and meaning of the 'death of rock'. Frith, who rejects a 'postmodernist' explana
tion, argues that rock died when it stopped taking its romantic, Bohemian image
itself seriously - when punk exploded all this and showed just how commer
rock had really been all along (Frith 1988, p. 1). The recycling of old songs
advertisements for cars, or the reissue of old artists on expensive new formats li
CD, is therefore no contradiction in terms, as rock was always part of a profit-
industry, and is nowadays simply responding to the shift in purchasing power
the adult market. Frith hints at the idea that what could not be taken seriously a
more was not just rock's claim to be above commerce, but also its version
sexuality: 'there is something essentially tedious these days about that 4:4 beat a
the hoarse (mostly male) cries for freedom' (ibid.); or later on, 'what is at issue
rock's supposed sexual force' (ibid., p. 2). But I suspect that to pursue thes
arguments too far in this context would have upset the argument that the death
rock is an industry led rather than a consumer led phenomenon.
Another debate has focused on the recycling process itself, and its implica-
tions for aesthetic and social theory. While the postmodernists argue that pasti
in modern music represents the collapse of a sense of history into the present, t
is severely challenged by the evidence that sampling of older music is education
for a younger generation; and nostalgia for the music of previous decades is no
simply the recycling of their youth by a generation that has lost its way, but is a
the recuperation of the history of postwar popular music by today's youth (Goo
win 1990, p. 271). But again the question is 'for whom?'. Although the concept o
'youth' has been used extensively in these debates, there is little awareness of t
feminist deconstruction of this concept (e.g. Hudson 1984). However, Straw
pointed out in relation to the culture of 'alternative rock' in the USA and Canad
that the creation of history through 'connoisseur-ism' has been one of the spec
mechanisms through which women have been excluded from rock culture over
last decade:
the cultivation of connoisseurship in rock culture - tracking down old albums, learnin
genealogical links between bands, and so on - has traditionally been one rite of pas
through which the masculinism of rock-music culture has been perpetuated. ... With t
developments, the profile of women performers within post-punk culture has diminish
and, just as the culture of alternative rock within the United States and Canada has beco
almost exclusively white, it has become overwhelmingly male as well. (Straw 1991, p. 378
The situation would seem to be similar with relation to the CD reissue market,
where policies have been conservative, in following a fairly orthodox idea of the
history of popular music, which centres on male rock and its perceived close male
progenitors.
But if one looks at sampling in relation to 'house music' it is clear that it is not
only, or centrally, rock music that is being recycled.7 The discovery of a history of
soul music, or of seventies disco, are largely alternative to the orthodoxy of 'rock
history', although of course they overlap with rock at some points. (Roddy Doyle's
novel, and film, The Commitments (1988) plays crucially on the difference between
'rock' and 'soul', and on the finding of different histories. And compare Thornton's
project of writing a history of discos in Britain (1990).) Even the mainstream
advertisements for cars and jeans have used a lot of black music from the soul and
R&B genres. And the possibilities for women are demonstrated by a comparison of
Greig's 'history of girl-groups from the fifties on' (1989) with Betrock's book on girl-
groups (1982). The former traces a continuity of women's team-work and vocal
style across what in orthodox histories are defined as different genres (i.e. from the
fifties vocal groups through sixties girl-groups to seventies disco groups and rap-
ping duos of the 1980s); the latter treats girl-groups as a sub-genre (if the best one,
for afficionados) of sixties rock'n'roll.8
Another aspect of the death of rock is what is seen as the loss of any sense of
political oppositionality in rock's successor musics (Grossberg 1988, 1991). This is
linked to debates about the 'decentring' of rock from some sort of central place
within popular music (Frith 1988; Grossberg 1988; Connor 1989; Straw 1991). While
Hebdige is able to find a sense of the politicisation of an ethnic identity in looking at
the 'marginal' music of black Caribbean cultures (1987), it is no longer clear where
the 'centre' of rock is (Frith 1988; Grossberg 1988). Connor criticises Hebdige and
other postmodernist academics for ignoring the social contradiction involved in
their claim to centrality for marginal musics, and accuses them of being implicated
in the practices they claim to describe - the new A&R people for the music industry
(Connor 1989, pp. 189-90). Again, it is not clear what is at stake for women in this
debate about marginal musics, since the sense of marginal oppositionality is usu-
ally fairly exclusive of women. From this point of view, it does not seem surprising
to me that the most sustained exploration of feminist ideas in popular music
erupted right in the centre of mainstream pop in the 1980s (Madonna) rather than
working in from the margins as in the (typically male) model of the avant-garde.
In line with the arguments of postmodernist feminism, this would suggest
that what has 'died' is the ability of the discourse of 'rock' to impose a unity in the
form of the white, male subject/author upon the heterogeneity of 'other' racial,
sexual and gendered identities and musics on which rock music itself fed. This
must make one suspicious about the anxiety around the absence of a centre and of
opposition in these debates, and the way they avoid discussion of the sexuality of
rock (even though embarrassment, particularly about 'serious' or 'progressive'
rock, does seep through these texts, whether the strategy is to brazen it out on past
tastes (Frith), act too young to know (Goodwin) or remain unrepentant (Gross-
berg)). This anxiety reaches a pitch in Grossberg's pessimistic piece about MTV
and (post)modern culture (1988), and I take a small example from this text to
illustrate the deadly seriousness of what is, I believe, at stake for women (and men)
in the death of rock. Grossberg outlines a scenario where the conjunction of the
elitism and cultism of rock culture with the 'sentimental democracy' of television
164 Barbara Bradby
means that all that is left to the rock fan is 'feeling', but no longer 'about' anything,
or even 'feeling good'. The only meanings left to rock music are those of a range of
'inauthenticities'. In describing the nihilistic view of the contemporary world as
seen through 'hyper-real inauthenticity', which rejects any form of feeling, Gross-
berg, while clearly distancing himself from the ideologies involved, uses the slogan
'desire kills (AIDS)':
Portraying the dismal reality ... is the only statement left available, and it matters little
whether that reality is contemporary or futuristic: all images have become post-holocaust
because the true holocaust is the very destruction of any possibility of caring, of making a
difference. In fact, affect has become impossible because the last site of potential investment
- desire and pleasure - has become the enemy. Caring too much is dangerous and often
destructive (The Name of the Rose), and desire kills (AIDS). (Grossberg 1988, p. 330)
Although the use of the slogan here clearly (and perhaps critically) invokes the
early advertising campaigns around HIV/AIDS, it does still suggest a nostalgia for a
time when 'desire' did not kill. Again, what seems important to me here is that
inasmuch as rock has 'died' or been de-centred, this is surely in part due to the de-
centring of the traditional masculine model of desire, built on the domination and
silencing of women, and performing the everyday conflation of 'sex' and pen-
etration. The (overlapping) work of feminists, gays and lesbians in mapping alter-
native forms of sexuality, pleasure and desire has certainly acquired new political
urgency with the AIDS crisis, and the need to de-couple the patriarchal equation of
death and desire in the new context (Bright 1990; Patton 1990; Watney and Carter
1989). But these were always important issues in their own right, and were perhaps
occluded not so much by rock music as by rock history and the discourses through
which rock has been understood.
In turning to the literature on dance music, it is striking that its text
ideologies have been written about far more in the popular music area than have
sexual ones. Goodwin (1990), for instance, argues that while the 'sampler
'potentially the most postmodern musical instrument yet invented', it does no
follow that its compositions are 'heard' as pastiche: the ideologies through whi
its music is understood are still essentially those of 'realism, modernism
romanticism' (ibid., p. 261). The new textual practices of bricolage, intertextua
and 'stealing' tend to be subsumed back into the old notion of authorship thro
the ideology of the creativity of 'the producer' (ibid., p. 272). But while it seem
true that the old ideologies of authorship and creativity die hard, one could ar
that they are kept alive especially by the 'expert' writing of the male rock press
among male groups and producers. And while it may be an approximation
reality that all Goodwin's examples of groups and producers are male, the imp
tions for women both of the old ideologies, and of the new stresses to which
are being subjected, remain unexplored. This suggests the need to look at the n
sexual ideologies emerging in and around dance music.
In parenthesis, I would venture that the most important argument against
notion of dance music as aesthetic pastiche is the fact that this music, howeve
composed (and regardless of whether samples are meant to be heard, discov
or hidden), really does sound different. As sound, it can be compared with any o
great 'revolutions' in popular music: like them, it followed the cycle of innova
from the avant-garde into the mainstream, and like these other trends, it can
related both to structural social change, and to new social-sexual moveme
identities and practices.
And so we reach the dance floor, since it is within the dance culture of clubs
and raves that the new practices of the post-feminist and now post-AIDS gener-
ation are being publicly worked out. A detour into the sociology of dance culture
shows that, even though the research has been mainly drugs-related, changing
sexual cultures and practices figure prominently among ethnographers' findings.
For instance:
Though MDMA [Ecstasy] has a reputation as the love drug, it is much more likel
promote a desire for cuddling and friendship than for sex. One of the main reasons y
ravers are so proud of their club culture is because house clubs are not sexual cattle mar
like so many nightclubs where alcohol dominates. In the words of one young woman:
didn't go to the type of clubs I do go to, I'd be in the kind of club that some of my friends
and take a fella home every weekend. I mean, I don't do that, I don't go out to cop of
Chris, aged 17. (McDermott et al. 1992, p. 12)
Although the language of the above quotation is problematic, in its inabilit

disentangle 'sex' from the traditional male penetrative model, clearly the writ
are straining the language in order to try and express something new. A simi
message comes through in the following: 'At raves attitude is more important t
appearance. Friendliness, sensuality and "body language" are valued more
trendiness, sexual displays or long conversations' (Newcombe 1992, p. 14).9
None of these accounts quite captures for me the importance of the shift fr
the allowable public sexual displays of twenty years ago - grinding pelvises, 's
ging' and 'heavy petting' - to the sight of a young couple at a rave today deligh
publicly in reciprocal body massage. And rather than seeing the technology, e
of drugs or of music, as in some way determining these changing social practic
seems better to look for social causes and correlates, with the technologies fun
tioning as cultural markers of difference. Probably the most profound social ch
is that ideological de-coupling of women and motherhood talked about in
previous section, one of the effects of which has been a prolongation of 'youth'
both sexes. 'Youth' here needs to be understood as the social space outsid
society's marriage rules and particularly outside of childbearing and rearin
needs also to be linked more broadly to the whole area of non-reproductive se
ality and the growth of public spaces for gay and lesbian subcultures. To say th
not to exaggerate actual changes in social structure: women still do mos
society's 'parenting', and people still go home and fuck without condoms. But
does help to account for some of the utopianism to be found in accounts of dan
rave culture, in particular around the mixing on the dance floor of social catego
across which marriage is discouraged, especially age and race, and the relaxatio
'compulsory heterosexuality'. In the next section I pursue this utopian discour
and compare it with the way women are portrayed within dance culture: discu
sively, in the writing around dance music; musically, as voices within dance tra
and visually, as dancers in videos for these tracks.
If I had the line, and you had the bass: gender in the underground Utop
An example of the utopianism surrounding dance culture can be read in an int
view from the appropriately entitled 'Paradise' column in New Musical Express.
speaker is Steppz, the black rapper from a London duo called Company 2:
I believe big raves are the only places on this earth where you can honestly be friends fo
day - everyone: black, white, Indian, Chinese, male and female, you can all be equal for
166 Barbara Bradby
day. You might smoke, drink, whatever, get out of your head, but at least for one day you
can see that there's a better world to be had. It really is positive. (NME, 23 September 1989,
p. 56)
Ben, his white partner, adds to this statement of egalitarian collectivism the ideas
that house music really does have no more heroes, and that it is oppositional:
This is the first time that a massive musical movement has come along where the people into
the sounds and dancing aren't idolising pop stars because there are no pop stars to be
idolised in this scene. . . . It's totally underground and that's why the authorities and the
media can't deal with it - it's outside their comprehension. (ibid.)
The interviewer introduces ideas of gender and sexuality in explaining that Steppz
is a rapper with a difference:
Rapping which is worlds away from the macho, sexist, chest-beating stereotype, all set to
music that storms. The result of instinctive education, not alienation.
Alienation! Yes, that's exactly what the current rave scene is an antidote to, with its
enfolding, warm sense of community, that keeps out the chill realities of British despair.
(ibid.)
This suggests a gender dimension to 'alienation' which is seen as demonstrated in

a kind of rapping that is macho and sexist. The antidote, 'warm community', is not
exactly located in the 'educated', more subtle rapping of Steppz, but is attributed to
the dance community itself, which becomes by implication more female.
These claims about gender equality and the elimination of sexism and racism,
as well as the ideas around community/alienation, are typical of the discourses of
dance music at this time. One can also find explicit challenges to the combination of
racism and sexism, as in this interview with Damon Rochefort, the producer of a
British group called Nomad, here talking about his 'vocalist':
Sharon and I are so close, we're dependent emotionally and spiritually. I love her, she's like
an incestuous family unit type thing where no one can come between us. I also like that
she's a Black female and I'm a White male, yet we're best friends. It defies those obscene
record company formulas where they see acts in terms of sex and colour co-ordination. My
scene is a huge mixture of Black and White, gay and straight, which I think is perfectly
natural, and a good role model for young people. If you stick exclusively with your own kind
you lose out. (Interview with Ronnie Randall in DJ, July 1991)
If taken as descriptions of dance-floor culture in Britain, these kinds of

utopian discourse can be closely paralleled in sociological research:10 'The hallmark
of raves is that people of different ages, occupational groups, sexualities, sub-
cultures and races dance together (particularly remarkable in an institutionally
racist city like Liverpool)' (Newcombe 1992, p. 14). But I am highly sceptical of
these discourses as descriptions of gender relations within the dance music indus-
try and within the texts of songs. In researching for this paper, I was particularly
interested in the surfacing of what had been an 'underground' (i.e. largely connois-
seur-ist) musical subculture, into more mainstream popular culture, when records
started to become more financially accessible as albums (particularly as compila-
tions), and when videos of dance tracks started to appear in far greater numbers on
MTV Europe.11 During this period of 1990-91, the use of female 'vocalists', usually
black, had become a standard counterpart to the use of male 'rappers' in the
evolution of dance music. This development can be described in terms of an
evolution of North American and European genres or styles of house music, where
'garage' house represented the addition of 'classic, soulful and identifiable voices'
to the earlier electronic sounds of Chicago house (Straw 1991, p. 382). Another way
of putting this is from the listener's point of view, where the net effect of the
addition of rappers and soul singers was a more or less marked division of gendered
voices in house music and its evolution into 'dance music' over this period.
At its simplest, this division of voices is between male rapping and female
soul-singing, between male speech and female song, male rhythm and female
melody. A more complex description would see the gendered division as between
a form of speech whose main musical feature is rhythm, and a form of singing
where melody is foregrounded over verbal messages. Of course any of these
descriptions of the contrast is an over-simplification, highlighting binary opposi-
tions, whereas in fact rapping is also melodic, and soul-singing also fits words into
musical rhythms. The effect of the division, however, is to establish an alignment
between the male voice, language, and technology, and the female voice and the
expression of emotion.
The division can be heard at its most exaggerated on tracks which were
mainstream chart hits in Britain in 1990-1, like Snap's 'The Power' (two weeks at
no. 1), and subsequent hits with 'Oops Up' and 'Mary had a Little Boy'; C&C Music
Factory's 'Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)' (no. 3 in the charts);
Black Box's 'Strike It Up' (reached no. 16); Nomad's '(I wanna give you) Devotion'
(reached no. 2), and their follow-up 'Just a Groove'; or Incognito's 'Always There',
featuring Jocelyn Brown. What I have called 'exaggeration' is achieved by the use
of a female soul singer 'shouting', usually in the upper octave. There are other
examples where a female vocalist performs in this style without a male rapper
being present on the track, the most famous of which would be Black Box's 'Ride
on Time' (six weeks at no. 1 in Britain in 1989), but one could also include Rozalla's
'Everybody's Free', and Sabrina Johnston's 'Peace', both in the top ten in 1991. A
variety of other very successful tracks feature a female voice singing in a more 'low
key' style against a male rap, a style adopted by many rap groups during this
period12 (for instance, De La Soul's 'A Rolling-Skating Jam Called "Saturdays"',
Deee-Lite's 'Groove is in the Heart', Technotronic's 'Pump up the Jam', DJ Jazzy
Jeff and the Prince's 'It's Summertime', Massive Attack's 'Safe from Harm'). From a
different direction, some chart-oriented female singers started to insert a male rap
into what were otherwise fairly straightforward songs, like Kim Appleby's big hit
'G.L.A.D.' in 1991, or Kylie Minogue's 'Shocked'.
Obviously the gendering of voices is used to different effects across even this
spectrum of music. The urgent, aggressive female sexuality of Black Box or C&C
Music Factory is a long way from the vacuous repetition of 'groove is in the heart'
by Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite while the male rapper expounds on the postmodern
condition. Massive Attack in 'Safe from Harm' organise the voices as a male voice
of menacing urban violence and a female voice of maternal protection, keeping 'her
baby' safe tonight. In the more laid back style of the rap groups, the addition of the
female voice singing melody can signify a softer side to urban alienation. But in all
these cases, there is a sense in which the female voice is being used to connote the
expression of human emotions (anger, desire, love, pity), which have been
emptied out of the monotonous, mechanical style of male rapping one hears in this
music. Of course as well there is something ranging from an alienation effect to a
tremendous excitement and tension, arising out of the recontextualising of
women's singing voices within such a technological setting. There is also a varying
degree of self-consciousness about this gendering of voices: one could instance
168 Barbara Bradby
Black Box's 'Strike it Up', where the male voice plays on the theme of reversing
musical gender roles, in a rap that starts 'If I had the line, and you had the bass'.
One version of this rap makes clear the equation between rhythm, bass and
masculinity, and asserts their superiority; another talks about the need to 'com-
bine' the two roles. But overall in dance music this gendering of voices appears as a
powerful restatement of traditional gender divisions - the association of men with
culture, language and technology, and of women with emotion, the body, sexu-
ality - even if the associations are made in an, at times, exaggerated over-state-
ment, with the 'performance' element foregrounded and some ironic distancing
from any notion of authentic expression.13
If this brief analysis of the vocal division of labour in the music of dance has
thrown into question the claims of a post-feminist gender Utopia in dance culture,
the claims about the irrelevance of race also need questioning, and the need to do
so becomes more pressing when one looks at the video representations of dance
recordings. For given that most of the vocal performers (though not all of the
producers) with the groups mentioned so far are black, the projection of sexuality
onto the female body also has a familiar racial dimension. Running through the
videos for these dance tracks is a super-sexy image of the black female performer,
which is used in some of the most successful tracks (Black Box's 'Ride on Time', or
C&C Music Factory's 'Things that Make You Go Hmmm') to 'front' the perform-
ance in the conventional mode of the 'lead singer'.
Even in these videos though, and in many others from the genre, there is a
marked contrast between the gendered sexualising of the lead singers, or 'vocal-
ists', and the very 'unisex' representation of the dance troupe, which can be
thought of as dance music's own representation of the dance-floor 'community'.
Many of the videos, not least C&C's, background these dancers in such a way that
their gender is indistinguishable, even though their bodies seem highly sexualised.
The dancers are usually identically dressed, and often the major part of their
movements are also identical (or with just a short 'break' being allowed for men to
show their symbolic dominance). The 'nowhere' setting and lack of perspective in
these videos is playfully futuristic, all of these features helping to create a visual
representation of the Utopia of the dance floor community, a dance outside of and
beyond mundane social relations. The representation of the 'vocalists' (or their
'front' performers) as gendered and coloured beings within very conventional axes
of heterosexual desire (black female as object of white and male gazes), seems to
render more conventional and less ironic, the 'hearing' of the gendered division of
voices already identified.
Finally, it is necessary to look at the category of 'female vocalist' itself, as it
has emerged in relation to 'producer music', and which seems to have been a
highly ambiguous development for women. Straw has noted a tension within the
dance-music industry between the promotion of female vocalists into durable per-
formers, and the rapid turnover of male producers (1991, pp. 382-3). This is an
interesting observation, in that it reverses the usual links between gender and
durability in the pop scene. If the majority of producer outfits are small, and come
and go quickly, it is obviously not worth a singer entering into long-term contracts
with them, and she is more likely to become a freelance 'vocalist', instead of being
'lead singer' to a group of male instrumentalists as in the old rock model. But then,
of course, it was never open to a black woman to be 'lead singer' to a male
instrumental band in the rock era, and most black female singers' careers were as
vocalists in groups. The interesting difference nowadays is that, whereas before,

the singer's identity was submerged in that of the group, which could then be
posited as the creation of the male producer, now the singer attempts to preserve
her identity as an individual outside of the groups she may sing for.
It is possible that this 'vocalist' model gives a woman more autonomy to build
a career strategically, moving between styles and groups. But though a few women
have achieved some sort of durability like this (Adeva, Jocelyn Brown, Caron
Wheeler, Kim Mazelle) many more have disappeared without trace. And what is
more worrying is that many female singers have gone completely uncredited both
on records and on TV play. Female vocalists tend on the whole to be more
anonymous than male producers, and get little coverage in the specialist dance
music press, which is disproportionately concerned with producers and tech-
nology. The successful dance groups of 1989-91 are mostly thought of and written
about as producer groups even where, arguably, it was female vocals that sold their
records.14
To exemplify the way in which the discourse of the male producer works at
the everyday level to marginalise and render anonymous women's singing role,
here is the introduction to Nomad's second single, 'Just a Groove', as presented on
MTV Europe in June 1991:
And before we see Nomad just a few words of background information about their lead
singer, he's called Damon, which is Nomad backwards, Rrrocheforrrt, French pronunci-
ation's important here, it's just like Rroqueforrt, so Damon Rochefort, he's twenny-four
years old and he started out in the music business, just like some other musicians like
Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders or like Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys as music
journalist, but then clever enough he decided that it's just much more fun doing it yourself
than only writing about it, that's quite right I s'pose, and here is Nomad with their latest
release, 'Just a Groove'.
The presenter is Kristiane Backer, one of MTV Europe's hip-looking, mildly

flirtatious female 'VJs', who speak perfect English with a slight 'European' accent.
Note that the whole introduction to this song is about the male producer: he is the
name and the personality bound up with the group. He is even described as the
'lead singer' of Nomad! In actual fact, the lead singer of this song, and of Nomad's
previous hit, is the female vocalist, whom Damon identified in the interview
quoted above, as Sharon, or Shazz. Damon does apparently sing harmonies under
her lead in the opening phrase of the song. The male rapper is likewise left
uncredited on MTV, and one is left to guess if this is MC Mikee Freedom who was
credited on 'Devotion'.15
Similarly, it is Damon Rochefort who is interviewed at length in the speciali

magazine, DJ, and only through him that we learn about 'Sharon'. This kind
identification by the 'expert' media discourses encourages us as naive readers
learn that Nomad 'is' (really) the producer, Damon Rochefort. As a group/produ
who had had one hit single, were just producing a follow-up with a video
promote it, and had an album coming out later in the year, they/he no do
looked 'up and coming'. I have no idea where they are at the end of 1992. But th
discourses have ensured that the producer can capitalise on his hits with th
group, whereas we barely know the singer's first name.
170 Barbara Bradby
Death of the female subject: DeConstructing Black Box

One famous legal case over the sampling of a woman's voice shows how complex
the issues raised for women can become in this 'postmodern' area of cultural
practice. In the summer of 1989, an Italian producer group called Black Box had a
massive hit in Britain with the song 'Ride on Time', which spent six weeks at No. 1
in the charts. Black Box were pioneers of a genre that became known as 'Italo-
house', which tended to be identified by its looped piano riffs, and a sound heard
as 'tacky' by comparison with American house. The video that accompanied the
song on television showed a tall, sexy model from Guadaloupe, whose name is
Katherine Quinol, 'performing' the passionate vocal line. But the rumour quickly
spread that the vocals had been 'sampled' from a song called 'Love Sensation' by
the American soul singer, Loleatta Holloway. During the time that the record was
in the charts, the record companies involved (DeConstruction Records in Britain,
distributed by BMG/RCA, and the Italian Disco Magic) were sued for royalties by
Holloway's record company, Salsoul (also distributed by BMG/RCA). The process
of sampling involves digital recording which then makes possible very elaborate
changes to the original sound, so that the question of when a recording stops being
the same sound as the original can be ambiguous. In this case, the producers had
broken up the vocal line, 'looping' various phrases around, and resulting in some-
thing that could not have been sung by the unaided voice. They tried to brazen it
out for a while, and then said that they had issued a second batch of records on
which Katherine did sing the vocals (Billboard, 28 October 1989). Another version
says that on this batch 'a new shouter impersonated' Holloway, and points out that
the first batch were neither withdrawn nor identified separately from the second
(Gambaccini et al. 1991, p. 7).
There is no doubt that Loleatta Holloway attracted considerable popular sup-
port during this dispute, helped by a strategic appearance on British television
where she burst into tears. People I spoke to at the time saw her as having been
totally 'ripped off' by Black Box; and indignation centred around the cynicism of
Black Box in 'fronting' her voice with the tall, slim, sexy model, Katherine, in the
video, as if ashamed to show the 'real' singer's body (fatter, older looking, more
'maternal'). In effect, Loleatta Holloway had been doubly 'ripped off', since not
only had her voice been stolen by others to make money, but her person had been
usurped by Katherine Quinol's image. So the popular discourse not only upheld
women's rights as authors/performers of their own voices, but also allowed some
opposition to the 'tyranny of slenderness' and of 'acceptable' body images for
women.
The music press, while pleased to be able to reve

was full of admiration for the Italian producers
Quinol.16 When Loleatta Holloway toured Britain, N
her by Paolo Hewitt (1989) which was sceptical abou
it's a moral point, and the music business and mo
eye'), and quoted Pete Hadfield of DeConstructio
Loleatta, like a lot of old soul singers, has yet to
technology'. The interviewer twice referred to her
she herself seems to have promoted by bringing her
On the Black Box LP I bought in 1990, Dreamla
Time', there is still no credit to Loleatta Hollowa
though, there is no credit to Martha Wash, who, rumour has it, sings on many
other of Black Box's tracks, including their other hit, 'Strike It Up'. So, on the sleeve
of Dreamland, Black Box is still listed as the two men plus Katrin Quinol (English
phonetic transcript of the French 'Katherine'). There then follow a score of credits
to instrumentalists who appear on various tracks, all of them men as far as I can
make out.
However, while I was researching dance music for this paper, I did happe
upon the following credit for a video clip of 'Strike It Up', shown on MTV
Saturday night 'Club MTV' programme:
Black Box (Lead vocal
Performance of Martha Wash -
Visual Performance of
Katrin Quinol)
' Strike It Up'
Dreamland
Deconstruction and RCA Records
This seemed to raise new issues for women. The voice, alth
'anchoring' role in relation to the female body, was being credit
the visual image of 'that' (i.e. the female) body. Now clearly,
why, as feminists, and rather like the reaction to the Loleatta Ho
might decry such a form of crediting. Once again, Katrin Qu
acceptable (because attractive to the male gaze) image of women
voice of another woman that has been electronically manipu
producers. The necessity for two women to do what one ma
reminiscent of Islamic law, and demonstrative of women's conti
the social, public sphere.
On the other hand, I think there are ways in which we can r
differently as feminists. For a start, I think we should welcome
crediting in preference to no crediting at all. The credit above act
nence to two women's names (whereas the male producer-son
there at all). And it also begins to demonstrate the collective, coll
the video-song as a piece of work, or work of art. In exposing the
by juxtaposing body and voice of two women, it contradicts tha
new form of honesty. This manoeuvre actually challenges the pri
in our everyday imaging of the body (which has been centra
analysis of the representation of women), and the implication
somehow 'disembodied'. It both deconstructs our assumption of t
as emanating from an individual rooted in a body we can see,
expectation into plural bodies, or the female body seen/heard in
Each body, that of the voice, and that of the visual image, seem
we are so used to putting them together (even as experienced vie
seurs of 'miming' to pop songs), that to see them separated,
discourse, so starkly, and so 'honestly' in this way, is quite
Perhaps feminism is stuck again here with the postmoder
between the need to piece together the female subject that appea
by male discourse, and the need to acknowledge that subject's, or
fluidity and internal differences. The fragmentation is here
nology: the image of the 'singer' on Black Box's videos is tru
amalgam of different persons and machinery - and listening to
172 Barbara Bradby
'Ride on Time' one can hear that the voice could not have sung what we hear on the
recording. Although this is routinely true of the recording of voices in popular
music (one has only to think of the 'double-tracking' of voices), what makes this
instance aesthetically 'postmodern' is that, ordinarily these processes are hidden or
'naturalised'; but here we hear these as 'impossible vocals' (Hayward 1992, p. 142).
Black Box's name cleverly conveys an interest not just in black music but in tech-
nology, and technology in the form of coded knowledge to be deciphered - a
promise of the revelation of sexual-technical secrets. Deconstructing Black Box
involves more than just deciphering the mysteries of authorship in the age of
sampling. It also involves looking at the way that the public and legal debate over
'Ride on Time' forced a more open acknowledgement of what technology was
doing to performance and particularly to women as performers.
It is noticeable that in what is generally cited as the most important ground-
breaking litigation over sampling in Britain - the Stock, Aitken and Waterman
versus M/A/R/R/S case - what was at stake was rights in intellectual property, or
authorship. The all-male nature of this case, then, reflects where men had posi-
tioned themselves in relation to ownership and authorship in popular music. In the
case of Loleatta Holloway versus Black Box, the underlying issues were more
complex, and involved the position of women in relation to performance and the
criteria we use to identify a body as that of 'the performer' (even if the legal case
was eventually resolved in much the same terms as the M/A/R/R/S one). With
M/A/R/R/S the issue was the sampling of men's ideas; with Black Box, it was the
sampling of women's bodies.17
The broader issue is the way in which, in these clearly 'inauthentic' perform-
ances, the female body, as manifested in the 'grain' of the voice, is still serving as a
touchstone of authenticity. The voices of black women soul singers that emerged in
dance music over this period evoke strength, maturity, deep emotions - typically
'maternal' qualities. Arguably, they do not perform the same divorce of mother-
hood and sexuality that has been implicit in most white rock and pop through the
concept of 'teen'. And if this divorce seems to be made again in the fragmenting of
the visual image of the woman from this sound, there is also clearly a sense in
which the technological superimposition of the strength of the older woman's
voice on the sexiness of the younger woman's body succeeded in establishing itself
in the audience's imagination. This has various consequences: one is that young,
black 'vocalists' are now presented with the daunting combination of having to
look like Naomi Campbell and sound like Loleatta Holloway. But another way of
putting this is that popular music has appropriated the vocal/sexual strength of
older, black women, for younger women who would not formerly have been
allowed to use their voices in this way. There is also evidence of some sort of
liberalisation towards visual representations of older and larger (black) women in
British dance videos in 1991. Prominent would be 'Sharon' in Nomad's videos, or
Jocelyn Brown in Incognito's 'Always There'. Both in this latter song, and in
Nomad's '(I wanna give you) Devotion' the reassuring and anchoring role of the
mother is implied in the lyrics ('I'll be there to hold you, always there', etc.). In
Nomad's 'Just a Groove' the homeliness of the dancing embrace between fat, black,
confident 'Shazz' and youthful, white, male Damon (her rhythm encompassing his
haircut) is used to offset and contain a sexy 'fantasy' sequence where a black male
dancer makes love to a white female dancer, reversing the usual allowable screen
stereotypes.
What seems important about these developments is that they take the
strength of maternal discourse into contexts other than motherhood, the only one
where women have traditionally had some 'say'. They also give voice to a female
sexuality that is not confined within notions of 'romance'. While such voices may
have been intrinsic to black American traditions of popular music, they are alien to
white pop and rock, and to the kind of mainstream terrain that dance music now
occupies. Such changes in the way we imagine women are vital corollaries of the
shift away from the equation of women with motherhood that is so important in
contemporary culture and theory. The strength that women have derived from
maternal discourse needs to be linked in the cultural 'imaginary' with other 'non-
mother' positions of women, if women are to develop a voice in those other worlds
(sex, work) which have been so dominated by male discourses. In its own peculiar,
technological way, it seems to me that the body of dance music I have been writing
about here does begin to do this. Through sampling and recontextualising female
sounds, images, stereotypes, it has created different links between women, the
voice and sexuality. Perhaps in this way it contributes to the shifting of the
'negatively central place' of the mother in the old unconscious, of which Kaplan
writes, and to the end of her 'displacement to the margins' of representation.
Endnotes
1 In a suggestive essay, Hacker (1990) has poin- somewhere between these two approaches
ted out and elaborated on the eroticism of tech-
(Bradby 1990).
nology, though not in relation to music.9 These trends are given an ambiguously nega-
2 See, for instance, the practice of live sampling
tive, Freudian interpretation by Rietveld:
and editing, as advocated by Mixmaster Morris
(Sinker 1990). The use of 'E' ... breaks down mental
3 See the interviews with Dave Dorrell of defence mechanisms and 'opens the heart';
M/A/R/R/S and with Matt Black of Coldcut in it means that relaxed attitudes are 'in' and
New Musical Express, 14 November 1987, pp. therefore restrictive clothing is definitely
12-14. 'out'. The result was that the wearer looked
4 These choices and anxieties are of course com- like an overgrown toddler, which seems to
pounded by the new reproductive technolo- indicate a complete refusal to grow up, to fit
into the official 'rational' restrictive world.
gies, whose own rhetorical claims of giving
... 'E' also makes the skin sensitive to tex-
choice to women are belied in practice both by
their preponderant statistical failure rates, and tures, which is why women sometimes
by the disembodied way in which women are indulged in wearing silk, purely for the
treated by medical science in their implemen- pleasure it gave to themselves. In Freudian
tation (Arditti et al. 1984). terms, 'E' made the user return to a pre-
5 The way these ideologies of domesticity and Oedipal stage, where libidinous pleasure is
motherhood have been promoted (in the teeth not centred in the genitals, but where sexu-
of other realities) in the Third World by ality is polymorphous and where sensuality
development agencies has been exposed by engages the entire body. (Considering that
Rogers (1980). the Rave scene developed during the
6 Ronnie Spector's autobiography contains a advance of AIDS, which makes penetrative
brilliant description of how Phil's control over sex a fatal possibility, this was not, socially,
her was exerted in and through the recording a bad thing). (Rietveld 1992, p. 18)
studio (1991).
The negative assessment of 'overgrown tod-
7 However, in 1992, a trend known as 'pro- dlers' with 'a complete refusal to grow up'
gressive' house in Britain and Germany did, seems at odds with the bracketed last sentence
subsequent to its naming by Mixmag, develop admitting, in understatement, that these prac-
an interest in the 'acid' side of 'progressive tices are socially 'not a bad thing'.
rock' (see the June and December issues of
10 While it would be wrong to deny that an
Mixmag).
experience of transcending social divisions is
8 As does Marcus (1976). My own piece lies part of the attraction of dance culture, particu-
174 Barbara Bradby
larly in the 'mass' variants of 'rave' culture,Love versus Adeva's 'Ring My Bell', Betty
this is of course a superficial account Boo's 'Where Are You Baby?'. Salt'n'Pepa
influenced by dance culture's own ideology of reverse this gendering of voices in 'Do You
itself. More detailed accounts look at the Want Me'. Technotronic used apparently the
importance of internal differences same within
female voice to do both the rap and the
dance culture. For instance, Rietveld (1992)
sung parts on several of their hits.
13 In
concentrates on clothing fashions, and this connection it is worth noting that the
charts
the evolution from an originary moment trend
whenknown as 'deep house', which did
British ravers were unified around a notion of feature male soul vocalists like Donnell Rush
from Chicago, did not catch on at a popular
'comfort', to the intricate complexity of com-
level in the way the addition of female soul
mercial markers of difference two years later.
Similarly, Straw, writing of Canadian club vocalists to house music did.
culture, sees this as 'a cultural space ... 14 Some examples would be C&C Music Factory,
characterized ... by the marking of distinc- Technotronic, Incognito, Black Box, Nomad.
tions and drawing of boundaries'. Such dif- For instance, from Phil Cheeseman's House
ferentiation takes place not only along Column in DJ, July 1991: 'Clivilles and Cole are
standard social axes, but also along a myriad of still running strong in their quest to rule New
internal lines to do with the kinds of dancing, York. Not content with C&C Music Factory's
of sexual behaviour, or of receptiveness to "Things that Make you go Hmmm" (Colum-
innovation, expected in a club (1991, p. 379). bia), a cruising garage sort of thang .
11 From September 1989 on, when five out of the they've revamped Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's
top ten British singles were dance records (and career with the Paradise Garage mixes of "Let
Adam Sweeting wrote about it in The the Beat Hit Em" .. .'; and from the same col-
Guardian), this dominance of the singles charts umn: 'But there's competition in the form of
by dance music became a source of anxiety to Incognito's "Always There (Talkin Loud)", not
the music industry and the broadcasting as good as CharVoni's definitive version but
whipped into a pretty palatable shape by yes,
media. Commentators started to declare the
That Man Morales again'. In the latest edition
irrelevance of the singles charts, on the
of in
grounds that singles sales were declining the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, a group like
Soul
proportion to albums and CDs, and because ofII Soul is just 'male producer, Jazzie B -
keyboards', with a long list in small print of
the always 'imminent' death of vinyl. During
this period the face of 'Top of the Pops''featured'
did female vocalists after the entry
(Gambaccini et al. 1991). Similarly Tech-
change to reflect a much greater representation
notronic is just 'Belgium - male producer',
of women and black people in the charts than
ever before. But the anxiety over the with
waysome listed featured vocalists (ibid.); my
TOTP was representing the music industryTechnotronic
as LP is far less explicit.
15 While
a whole, culminated in a changing of its both male and female 'vocalists' are
ground-rules in 1991 to allow play fromblack,

the a gender difference arises between them
album charts and from the US charts. The in that rapping is a form that allows self
immediate effect on TOTP was to bring in advertisement.
far In this case, Mikee Freedom
spells out his name for the audience in the
more 'boys with guitars' (as my five-year-old
daughter remarked in disgust the week'break' afteron 'Devotion'.
the changes). In the longer term, it seems16 Record
to Mirror, 22 July 1989, p. 19 and 19
August 1989, p. 28; New Musical Express, 19
have drifted back to the old format, interrup-
September 1989, pp. 26-7; Melody Maker, 16
ted by, often incongruent, 'live transmissions'
from bands such as U2, Nirvana, INXS, the September 1989, p. 13. All of these reviews/
drift probably reflecting the increasing interviews carried (different) photos of Quinol.
17 There are similarities between aspects of the
emergence of dance music into the mainstream
of the industry and of DJ taste. Black Box case and that of the male 'duo' Milli
12 The situation is complicated by the fact that Vanilli, although the latter did not involve
many single-sex rap groups with a dance sampling. 'Milli Vanilli had three number ones
orientation had already adopted this kind of in America in 1989. They were stripped of their
division among themselves (i.e. sung inter- Best New Artist Grammy award in 1990 when
ludes within the rap, or vice versa). Examples they admitted they had not personally per-
would be Heavy D and the Boyz' 'Now That formed on any of them' (Gambaccini et al.
We've Found Love', P. M. Dawn's 'A Watch- 1991, p. 185). One difference is that Milli
er's Point of View', the Shamen's 'Progen 91', Vanilli did succeed in conning the public
Monie Love's 'It's a Shame (My Sister)', Monie whereas Black Box did not. And with Milli
Vanilli the 'real' performers, the studio musi- therefore interesting that there was no attempt
cians, were presumably themselves involved (to my knowledge) on the part of music
in the deception, since it was apparently their journalists to defend this as the creative use of
demands for more money that forced the con- technology, as there was to some extent in the
fession, making the affair more conspiratorial Black Box case (centring of course on 'the pro-
than the Black Box case of 'stealing'. Neverthe- ducers'). It seems that for men to publicly
less the separation of visual from audio image parade their inability to perform in this way
in the creation of 'Milli Vanilli' is similar. It is was taking 'inauthenticity' a bit too far.
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Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music

Author(s): Barbara Bradby

Sampling sexuality: gender,

Suspicious minds: feminism and popular music

Caught in a trap? Feminism and postmodernism

instance, in her work on MTV, sees 'postmodern feminism' as the predominant

In her recent book, Motherhood and Representation, Kaplan similarly locate

Everybody dance now: popular music and postmodernism

Although the language of the above quotation is problematic, in its inabilit

This suggests a gender dimension to 'alienation' which is seen as demonstrated in

If taken as descriptions of dance-floor culture in Britain, these kinds of

vocalists in groups. The interesting difference nowadays is that, whereas before,

The presenter is Kristiane Backer, one of MTV Europe's hip-looking, mildly

Similarly, it is Damon Rochefort who is interviewed at length in the speciali

Death of the female subject: DeConstructing Black Box

The music press, while pleased to be able to reve

ground-rules in 1991 to allow play fromblack,

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