UC Riverside Department of Music presents:

Catherine Provenzano

“Demonic Work and the Problem of Listening: Women, Hip-Hop, and The Politics of Auto-Tune”

This paper explores the work of female and non-binary rappers who do not take up the same Auto-Tuned aesthetic that has purportedly “transformed” hip hop and pop over the last quarter century. That transformation, largely recognized through the work of male rappers like Kanye West, Drake, Future, and others, has been accompanied by a shift in interpretation of hip hop’s emotional mode from “hard” to “soft.” What I argue is that many of the women of hip hop—focusing in this paper on Flo Milli, Latto, Young M.A and Doechii—perform the demonic work of frustrating a centering of white bourgeois emotional politics, including performances of “vulnerability” and “tenderness” that have been identified in some Auto-Tune rap. Using Katherine McKitrick’s formulation of the demonic as “a non-deterministic schema” that Black women’s geographies prove (and prove otherwise), I argue that, in their various rejections of Auto-Tune and embrace of their own rap prowess, these artists reject a pull toward the “center”—both sonic and cultural—that insists on their sexual and material dispossession and erasure. Building on how these artists navigate market politics while earning less than their peers and receiving less robust circulation (i.e. fewer listeners), I revisit the problem of listening and the limited potential of recent listening paradigms. I take up María Zuazu’s “technologies of not listening” to invert Eidsheim’s “acousmatic question” which is always in doomed pursuit of individual knowability, and ask what happens if the question is never raised, if the listening does not happen to begin with. I argue that demonic work, which so often lays outside of the center while clandestinely frustrating it, grates at listening’s liberatory potential and exposes its false material/symbolic divide.

Part of the 2024-2025 Florence Bayz Music Series

The Florence Bayz Music Series offers online concerts, lectures, and presentations of academic research by Department of Music faculty, postdoctoral researchers, students, and international guest artists and scholars.

Dr. Amy Skjerseth (she/her), Assistant Professor of Popular Music, Coordinator

Events are free and open to the public.
 

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