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Samplingsexuality:gender,technologyandthebodyin dancemusic
BarbaraBradby
PopularMusic/Volume12/Issue02/May1993,pp155176 DOI:10.1017/S0261143000005535,Publishedonline:11November2008

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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 blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything that needs changing for girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture that excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished to celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw an embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had good reason to be wary of feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography shows the considerable work that has been done by feminists on popular music, and the problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within both feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that the work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in 'reclaiming' the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does have parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girlgroups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of the mechanisms through which men exclude women from participation in rock bands, while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels other sociological work on how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audience research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women's experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators of meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990). In this article I try to draw connections between some of the themes of this writing, and theoretical work in feminism and in popular music. In both of these areas, the intersection with postmodernist social and cultural theory has dominated recent debates. For feminism, postmodernism has meant the need to work through what a recognition of differences between women means for political and critical practice; while in the area of popular music, the debate has been about the significance of what has been summed up as the 'death of rock' (Frith 1988). At first sight, there seems little in common between these two debates, apart from their common derivation from theories of the 'death of the subject' and the 'end of 155

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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 technologies have seemed to some to have radical democratic potential, subverting accepted ideas of 'the author' and blurring the boundaries between production and consumption (Hebdige 1987; Jones and Willis 1990; Langlois 1992). Durant (1992) provides a more considered discussion of the implications for musical literacy and democracy of the new technologies. Yet nowhere in the literature on house music and sampling have the implications of these practices for women been considered in any depth. This is particularly problematic given the utopianism that has surrounded 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 women 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 long 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 authorship (originality, art) and of authenticity (the real person in the real performance) developed around this use of technology and not in opposition to it. And while the 'new' technologies promised to render these concepts of authorship redundant, Goodwin shows how they have been reconstituted around figures such as 'the 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 'authorship', 'art', 'creativity' and 'originality', which have been used both by detractors and proponents of 'sampling',3 are the same terms that have generally worked 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 as 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 representation of women, both vocally in recordings, and visually in music videos. As it turns out, female performance has been a contested area in dance music, because of the 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 performances, deriving from the black musical genres of soul and rap, was also of crucial commercial importance in the transition from (underground) 'house music' to the mainstream success of 'dance'. In the process, not only has the new role of 'female

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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 sexuality' 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 relations 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 the theoretical incarnation of the difficulties within the women's movement itself around differences between women (of class, race, sexual orientation, and in relation to colonialism, to name only some). The challenging of white, Western, middle-class and heterosexist assumptions has led to the more specific and localised framing of demands, which is not necessarily incompatible with principled social criticism (Fraser and Nicholson 1988), and can lead to a networking type of politics, where differences acknowledged become a source of strength (Barrett 1987; Moore 1988). Others, like Flax, take the implications of postmodernism much

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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-^10). 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 implications 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 consciousness-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 postmodernism for women has been treated more sceptically by feminists. Kaplan, for

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instance, in her work on MTV, sees 'postmodern feminism' as the predominant stance for women in music videos (1987, pp. 11516). 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 postmodernism, in its playful refusal to take a stance, even as it exposes and problematises 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 locates 'a dramatic shift in the mother-paradigm' and notes anxiety as common to the heterogeneous discourses that emerge in film, advertisements, etc. around women, sex, 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 that would encompass all the different forms of anxiety - I became aware that the shift has to do with childbirth and childcare no longer being seen as an automatic, natural part of women's life-cycle. (Kaplan 1992, p. 181) Now that 'woman' no longer naturally equates with 'mother' in the language, women's identity becomes fragmented.4 But Kaplan shows how film representations of women continually fail to capture the fragmenting identities of this postmodern paradigm shift, but instead fall prey to conscious and unconscious anxieties around the disappearance of 'mother'. 'What representations still cannot produce, are images of sexual women, who are also mothers, and who in addition have fulfilling careers. "Sex, Work and Motherhood" is obviously too threatening a combination on a series of levels' (Kaplan 1992, p. 183). Of course the loss that is being felt is that of the mother of a particular class ideology - the white, middleclass mother of Western patriarchal norms. In the era of mass communications this class and racial ideology has occluded and oppressed other conceptions of motherhood, other relationships to and between domesticity, paid work, and sex.5 This

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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 accounting 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' representations 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 representational 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

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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' definitions 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 telecommunications, 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 fragmentation 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 humanmachine identities that popular music has constructed, and seems potentially useful 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

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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 metaproject 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 overwhelmingly 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 causes and meaning of the 'death of rock'. Frith, who rejects a 'postmodernist' explanation, argues that rock died when it stopped taking its romantic, Bohemian image of itself seriously - when punk exploded all this and showed just how commercial rock had really been all along (Frith 1988, p. 1). The recycling of old songs as advertisements for cars, or the reissue of old artists on expensive new formats like CD, is therefore no contradiction in terms, as rock was always part of a profit-led industry, and is nowadays simply responding to the shift in purchasing power to the adult market. Frith hints at the idea that what could not be taken seriously any more was not just rock's claim to be above commerce, but also its version of sexuality: 'there is something essentially tedious these days about that 4:4 beat and the hoarse (mostly male) cries for freedom' (ibid.); or later on, 'what is at issue is rock's supposed sexual force' (ibid., p. 2). But I suspect that to pursue these arguments too far in this context would have upset the argument that the death of rock is an industry led rather than a consumer led phenomenon. Another debate has focused on the recycling process itself, and its implications for aesthetic and social theory. While the postmodernists argue that pastiche in modern music represents the collapse of a sense of history into the present, this is severely challenged by the evidence that sampling of older music is educational for a younger generation; and nostalgia for the music of previous decades is not simply the recycling of their youth by a generation that has lost its way, but is also the recuperation of the history of postwar popular music by today's youth (Goodwin 1990, p. 271). But again the question is 'for whom?'. Although the concept of 'youth' has been used extensively in these debates, there is little awareness of the feminist deconstruction of this concept (e.g. Hudson 1984). However, Straw has pointed out in relation to the culture of 'alternative rock' in the USA and Canada that the creation of history through 'connoisseur-ism' has been one of the specific mechanisms through which women have been excluded from rock culture over the last decade: the cultivation of connoisseurship in rock culture - tracking down old albums, learning genealogical links between bands, and so on - has traditionally been one rite of passage through which the masculinism of rock-music culture has been perpetuated. . . . With these developments, the profile of women performers within post-punk culture has diminished, and, just as the culture of alternative rock within the United States and Canada has become almost exclusively white, it has become overwhelmingly male as well. (Straw 1991, p. 378)

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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 girlgroups (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 rapping 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 politidsation 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 usually 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 (Grossberg) ). 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

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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, Grossberg, 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 decentring of the traditional masculine model of desire, built on the domination and silencing of women, and performing the everyday conflation of 'sex' and penetration. The (overlapping) work of feminists, gays and lesbians in mapping alternative 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 textual ideologies have been written about far more in the popular music area than have its sexual ones. Goodwin (1990), for instance, argues that while the 'sampler' is 'potentially the most postmodern musical instrument yet invented', it does not follow that its compositions are 'heard' as pastiche: the ideologies through which its music is understood are still essentially those of 'realism, modernism and romanticism' (ibid., p. 261). The new textual practices of bricolage, intertextuality and 'stealing' tend to be subsumed back into the old notion of authorship through the ideology of the creativity of 'the producer' (ibid., p. 272). But while it seems true that the old ideologies of authorship and creativity die hard, one could argue that they are kept alive especially by the 'expert' writing of the male rock press and among male groups and producers. And while it may be an approximation to reality that all Goodwin's examples of groups and producers are male, the implications for women both of the old ideologies, and of the new stresses to which they are being subjected, remain unexplored. This suggests the need to look at the new sexual ideologies emerging in and around dance music. In parenthesis, I would venture that the most important argument against the notion of dance music as aesthetic pastiche is the fact that this music, however composed (and regardless of whether samples are meant to be heard, discovered or hidden), really does sound different. As sound, it can be compared with any of the great 'revolutions' in popular music: like them, it followed the cycle of innovation from the avant-garde into the mainstream, and like these other trends, it can be related both to structural social change, and to new social-sexual movements, identities and practices.

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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 generation 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 likely to promote a desire for cuddling and friendship than for sex. One of the main reasons young ravers are so proud of their club culture is because house clubs are not sexual cattle markets like so many nightclubs where alcohol dominates. In the words of one young woman: 'If I 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 go, and take a fella home every weekend. I mean, I don't do that, I don't go out to cop off.' Chris, aged 17. (McDermott et al. 1992, p. 12)

Although the language of the above quotation is problematic, in its inability to disentangle 'sex' from the traditional male penetrative model, clearly the writers are straining the language in order to try and express something new. A similar message comes through in the following: 'At raves attitude is more important than appearance. Friendliness, sensuality and "body language" are valued more than trendiness, sexual displays or long conversations' (Newcombe 1992, p. 14).9 None of these accounts quite captures for me the importance of the shift from the allowable public sexual displays of twenty years ago - grinding pelvises, 'snogging' and 'heavy petting' - to the sight of a young couple at a rave today delighting publicly in reciprocal body massage. And rather than seeing the technology, either of drugs or of music, as in some way determining these changing social practices, it seems better to look for social causes and correlates, with the technologies functioning as cultural markers of difference. Probably the most profound social change is that ideological de-coupling of women and motherhood talked about in the previous section, one of the effects of which has been a prolongation of 'youth' for both sexes. 'Youth' here needs to be understood as the social space outside of society's marriage rules and particularly outside of childbearing and rearing; it needs also to be linked more broadly to the whole area of non-reproductive sexuality and the growth of public spaces for gay and lesbian subcultures. To say this is not to exaggerate actual changes in social structure: women still do most of society's 'parenting', and people still go home and fuck without condoms. But it does help to account for some of the utopianism to be found in accounts of dance or rave culture, in particular around the mixing on the dance floor of social categories across which marriage is discouraged, especially age and race, and the relaxation of 'compulsory heterosexuality'. In the next section I pursue this Utopian discourse, and compare it with the way women are portrayed within dance culture: discursively, in the writing around dance music; musically, as voices within dance tracks; and visually, as dancers in videos for these tracks.

If I had the line, and you had the bass: gender in the underground Utopia
An example of the utopianism surrounding dance culture can be read in an interview from the appropriately entitled 'Paradise' column in New Musical Express. The 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 for one day - everyone: black, white, Indian, Chinese, male and female, you can all be equal for one

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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 D/, 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, subcultures 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 industry 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 connoisseur-ist) musical subculture, into more mainstream popular culture, when records started to become more financially accessible as albums (particularly as compilations), 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'

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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 oppositions, 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

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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 'combine' 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, sexuality - even if the associations are made in an, at times, exaggerated over-statement, 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 performance 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 'vocalists', 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 performers, 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

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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 technology. 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 pronunciation'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 yoursel/ 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 specialist magazine, D], and only through him that we learn about 'Sharon'. This kind of identification by the 'expert' media discourses encourages us as naive readers to learn that Nomad 'is' (really) the producer, Damon Rochefort. As a group/producer who had had one hit single, were just producing a follow-up with a video to promote it, and had an album coming out later in the year, they/he no doubt looked 'up and coming'. I have no idea where they are at the end of 1992. But the discourses have ensured that the producer can capitalise on his hits with the group, whereas we barely know the singer's first name.

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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 Ttalohouse', 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 something 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 support 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 reveal the source of the sample, was full of admiration for the Italian producers and of photos of Katherine Quinol.16 When Loleatta Holloway toured Britain, NME carried an interview with her by Paolo Hewitt (1989) which was sceptical about her claims ('The problem is it's a moral point, and the music business and morality have hardly seen eye to eye'), and quoted Pete Hadfield of DeConstruction Records: 'Unfortunately, Loleatta, like a lot of old soul singers, has yet to come to terms with the new technology'. The interviewer twice referred to her as a 'mother', an image which she herself seems to have promoted by bringing her family with her. On the Black Box LP I bought in 1990, Dreamland, which contains 'Ride on Time', there is still no credit to Loleatta Holloway. Even more extraordinary,

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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 happen upon the following credit for a video clip of 'Strike It Up', shown on MTV's Saturday night 'Club MTV' programme: Black Box (Lead vocal Performance of Martha Wash Visual Performance of Katrin Quinol) 'Strike I t Up'
Dreamland

Deconstruction and R C A Records This seemed to raise new issues for women. The voice, although playing this 'anchoring' role in relation to the female body, was being credited separately from the visual image of 'that' (i.e. the female) body. Now clearly, there are reasons why, as feminists, and rather like the reaction to the Loleatta Holloway scandal, we might decry such a form of crediting. Once again, Katrin Quinol appears as the acceptable (because attractive to the male gaze) image of women that can sell the voice of another woman that has been electronically manipulated by the male producers. The necessity for two women to do what one man could do seems reminiscent of Islamic law, and demonstrative of women's continuing weakness in the social, public sphere. On the other hand, I think there are ways in which we can read this credit differently as feminists. For a start, I think we should welcome such a form of crediting in preference to no crediting at all. The credit above actually gives prominence to two women's names (whereas the male producer-songwriters are not there at all). And it also begins to demonstrate the collective, collaborative nature of the video-song as a piece of work, or work of art. In exposing the deception played by juxtaposing body and voice of two women, it contradicts that deception with a new form of honesty. This manoeuvre actually challenges the primacy of the visual in our everyday imaging of the body (which has been central to the feminist analysis of the representation of women), and the implication that the voice is somehow 'disembodied'. It both deconstructs our assumption of the singing voice as emanating from an individual rooted in a body we can see, and re-roots that expectation into plural bodies, or the female body seen/heard in different ways. Each body, that of the voice, and that of the visual image, seems immediate, and we are so used to putting them together (even as experienced viewers and connoisseurs of 'miming' to pop songs), that to see them separated, or 'mediated' by discourse, so starkly, and so 'honestly' in this way, is quite shocking. Perhaps feminism is stuck again here with the postmodern contradiction, between the need to piece together the female subject that appears as fragmented by male discourse, and the need to acknowledge that subject's, or those subjects', fluidity and internal differences. The fragmentation is here achieved by technology: the image of the 'singer' on Black Box's videos is truly a 'cyborg' - an amalgam of different persons and machinery - and listening to the vocal line of

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'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 technology, 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 groundbreaking 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 positioned 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' performances, 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 motherhood 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.

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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 'nonmother' 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 poinsomewhere 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 nega2 See, for instance, the practice of live sampling tive, Freudian interpretation by Rietveld: and editing, as advocated by Mixmaster Morris The use of 'E' . . . breaks down mental (Sinker 1990). defence mechanisms and 'opens the heart'; 3 See the interviews with Dave Dorrell of it means that relaxed attitudes are 'in' and M/A/R/R/S and with Matt Black of Coldcut in therefore restrictive clothing is definitely New Musical Express, 14 November 1987, pp. 'out'. The result was that the wearer looked 12-14. like an overgrown toddler, which seems to 4 These choices and anxieties are of course comindicate a complete refusal to grow up, to fit pounded by the new reproductive technolointo the official 'rational' restrictive world. gies, whose own rhetorical claims of giving . . . 'E' also makes the skin sensitive to texchoice to women are belied in practice both by tures, which is why women sometimes their preponderant statistical failure rates, and indulged in wearing silk, purely for the by the disembodied way in which women are pleasure it gave to themselves. In Freudian treated by medical science in their implementerms, 'E' made the user return to a pretation (Arditti et al. 1984). Oedipal stage, where libidinous pleasure is 5 The way these ideologies of domesticity and not centred in the genitals, but where sexumotherhood have been promoted (in the teeth ality is polymorphous and where sensuality of other realities) in the Third World by engages the entire body. (Considering that development agencies has been exposed by the Rave scene developed during the Rogers (1980). advance of AIDS, which makes penetrative 6 Ronnie Spector's autobiography contains a sex a fatal possibility, this was not, socially, brilliant description of how Phil's control over a bad thing). (Rietveld 1992, p. 18) her was exerted in and through the recording studio (1991). The negative assessment of 'overgrown tod7 However, in 1992, a trend known as 'prodlers' 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 pracan 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 part of the attraction of dance culture, particu8 As does Marcus (1976). My own piece lies

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Love versus Adeva's Ring My Bell', Betty Boo's 'Where Are You Baby?'. Salt'n'Pepa reverse this gendering of voices in 'Do You Want Me'. Technotronic used apparently the same female voice to do both the rap and the sung parts on several of their hits. 13 In this connection it is worth noting that the trend known as 'deep house', which did feature male soul vocalists like Donnell Rush from Chicago, did not catch on at a popular level in the way the addition of female soul vocalists to house music did. 14 Some examples would be C&C Music Factory, Technotronic, Incognito, Black Box, Nomad. For instance, from Phil Cheeseman's House Column in D], July 1991: 'Clivilles and Cole are still running strong in their quest to rule New York. Not content with C&C Music Factory's "Things that Make you go Hmmm" (Columbia), a cruising garage sort of thang . . ., they've revamped Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's career with the Paradise Garage mixes of "Let the Beat Hit Em" . . .'; and from the same column: 'But there's competition in the form of Incognito's "Always There (Talkin Loud)", not as good as CharVoni's definitive version but whipped into a pretty palatable shape by yes, That Man Morales again'. In the latest edition
of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, a group like

larly in the 'mass' variants of 'rave' culture, this is of course a superficial account influenced by dance culture's own ideology of itself. More detailed accounts look at the importance of internal differences within dance culture. For instance, Rietveld (1992) concentrates on clothing fashions, and charts the evolution from an originary moment when British ravers were unified around a notion of 'comfort', to the intricate complexity of commercial markers of difference two years later. Similarly, Straw, writing of Canadian club culture, sees this as 'a cultural space . . . characterized . . . by the marking of distinctions and drawing of boundaries'. Such differentiation takes place not only along standard social axes, but also along a myriad of internal lines to do with the kinds of dancing, of sexual behaviour, or of receptiveness to innovation, expected in a club (1991, p. 379). 11 From September 1989 on, when five out of the top ten British singles were dance records (and Adam Sweeting wrote about it in The Guardian), this dominance of the singles charts by dance music became a source of anxiety to the music industry and the broadcasting media. Commentators started to declare the irrelevance of the singles charts, on the grounds that singles sales were declining in proportion to albums and CDs, and because of the always 'imminent' death of vinyl. During this period the face of 'Top of the Pops' did change to reflect a much greater representation of women and black people in the charts than ever before. But the anxiety over the way TOTP was representing the music industry as a whole, culminated in a changing of its ground-rules in 1991 to allow play from the album charts and from the US charts. The immediate effect on TOTP was to bring in far more 'boys with guitars' (as my five-year-old daughter remarked in disgust the week after the changes). In the longer term, it seems to have drifted back to the old format, interrupted by, often incongruent, 'live transmissions' from bands such as U2, Nirvana, INXS, the drift probably reflecting the increasing emergence of dance music into the mainstream of the industry and of DJ taste. 12 The situation is complicated by the fact that many single-sex rap groups with a dance orientation had already adopted this kind of division among themselves (i.e. sung interludes within the rap, or vice versa). Examples would be Heavy D and the Boyz' 'Now That We've Found Love', P. M. Dawn's 'A Watcher's Point of View', the Shamen's 'Progen 91', Monie Love's 'It's a Shame (My Sister)', Monie

Soul II Soul is just 'male producer, Jazzie B keyboards', with a long list in small print of 'featured' female vocalists after the entry (Gambaccini et al. 1991). Similarly Technotronic is just 'Belgium - male producer', with some listed featured vocalists (ibid.); my Technotronic LP is far less explicit. 15 While both male and female 'vocalists' are black, a gender difference arises between them in that rapping is a form that allows selfadvertisement. In this case, Mikee Freedom spells out his name for the audience in the 'break' on 'Devotion'. 16 Record Mirror, 22 July 1989, p. 19 and 19 August 1989, p. 28; New Musical Express, 19 September 1989, pp. 26-7; Melody Maker, 16 September 1989, p. 13. All of these reviews/ interviews carried (different) photos of Quinol. 17 There are similarities between aspects of the Black Box case and that of the male 'duo' Milli Vanilli, although the latter did not involve sampling. 'Milli Vanilli had three number ones in America in 1989. They were stripped of their Best New Artist Grammy award in 1990 when they admitted they had not personally performed on any of them' (Gambaccini et al. 1991, p. 185). One difference is that Milli Vanilli did succeed in conning the public whereas Black Box did not. And with Milli

Gender, technology and the body in dance music

Vanilli the 'real' performers, the studio musicians, were presumably themselves involved in the deception, since it was apparently their demands for more money that forced the confession, making the affair more conspiratorial than the Black Box case of 'stealing'. Nevertheless the separation of visual from audio image in the creation of 'Milli Vanilli' is similar. It is

175

therefore interesting that there was no attempt (to my knowledge) on the part of music journalists to defend this as the creative use of technology, as there was to some extent in the Black Box case (centring of course on 'the producers'). It seems that for men to publicly parade their inability to perform in this way was taking 'inauthenticity' a bit too far.

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