Seo Taiji 1992-2004: South Korean popular music and masculinity (my master's thesis)
© Janet Hilts 2006 - please note: this is not the final version of my thesis.
I believe, as a listener and fan of popular music, that gender is most noticeable in vocal sound. As implied in the reaction of the ESL students to my co-worker’s speaking voice, vocal sound is generally understood intuitively by most listeners, as well as by theorists, as gendered perhaps because voices are “ . . . not a technological extension of the body, [but] more an emanation from its intensional core” (Middleton, 2003b:456). Although, as mentioned in the introduction, post-structuralist thinkers Barthes and Kristeva emphasize the importance of the embodiment of voices to vocal music and communication’s meaningfulness, they are ambivalent about vocal sounds’ relationship to ideological processes (Shepherd and Wicke, 1997; Shepherd, 2003). These thinkers acknowledge that voices are particularly important because they are part and parcel with bodies, and Kristeva suggests this has special important implications for understanding gender configurations but does not develop this and remains ambivalent over voices’ meaningfulness. Post-structuralists’ ambivalences impede explaining how voices become gendered or how they manipulate gender constructions exactly.[1] This lack of theory with which to address gendered constructions and vocal sound is a lacuna in popular music studies and I believe of discourse analysis more generally.[2] Unfortunately, the discipline of music analysis has not adequately dealt with how certain musical characteristics are connected to certain affects, and as a result popular music studies has had difficulty explaining why a song or a singer’s voice seems to express a feminine sensibility, for instance. Works thus far emphasize how the sounds of voices are not inherently masculine or feminine, but are gendered through a combination of physiological, social/cultural and psychological forces (Dunn and Jones, 1994). Specific musical materials become gendered because of the history of how they have been used and the social and ideological functions of these uses (Dibben, 2002). Gender is often mapped onto a voice simply because of stereotypes held by a culture concerning sexual difference. “ . . . [F]or example, women’s voices are thought to be high and shrill or breathy while men’s are low and quiet or harsh” and the social meanings attached to these stereotypes carry with them differing levels of power or authority (Dunn and Jones 1994:3). Of course, singers may use their voices in ways that disrupt these vocal stereotypes and even disrupt the social meanings attached to them (Dunn and Jones, 1994; Fast, 2001; Middleton, 2003a). Interestingly, at certain points in popular music history and in specific locales, a vocal sound and/or type of singing that in many ways is disruptive of vocal and gender stereotypes may become a very common or the dominant vocal style while remaining disruptive of gender stereotypes. This can be seen in the soft highly vulnerable singing voices and vocal styles of male crooners of the late 1920s to mid 1930s American popular song, as well as in the male balada singers who have been extremely popular over the last 20 years in South America (McCracken 1999; Party 2004). I believe this is also the case of Taiji’s soft voice, as well as the many soft male voices in the South Korean ballad genre since the early 1990s, and feel that the concept of hegemonic masculinity can aid an exploration of relationships between this popular and common vocal sound and powerful forms of masculinity in South Korean society as a whole.
[1] For a more detailed presentation of this theory and issue, see Shepherd and Wicke, 1997:73-94.
[2] See Shepherd and Wicke (1997) and Bradby and Laing (2001) who address the problem of key questions concerning meaning in popular musicand music generally remaining unanswered. Because of this, it is not uncommon for scholars to address gender, meaning and popular music without even mentioning anything about the sound of the music. See for example Fung and Curtin (2002). It is also not uncommon for scholars to address music simply as an emotional foundation upon which a discourse, in lyrics, sits unaffected by the music. See for example Sellnow (1999).
[1] For a more detailed presentation of this theory and issue, see Shepherd and Wicke, 1997:73-94.
[2] See Shepherd and Wicke (1997) and Bradby and Laing (2001) who address the problem of key questions concerning meaning in popular musicand music generally remaining unanswered. Because of this, it is not uncommon for scholars to address gender, meaning and popular music without even mentioning anything about the sound of the music. See for example Fung and Curtin (2002). It is also not uncommon for scholars to address music simply as an emotional foundation upon which a discourse, in lyrics, sits unaffected by the music. See for example Sellnow (1999).