[Mus-undergrad-info] Bayz Tomorrow, 5/14: “Demonic Work and the Problem of Listening: Women, Hip-Hop, and The Politics of Auto-Tune” (Catherine Provenzano)

[Amy Skjerseth]

*2024–2025 Florence Bayz Music Series*
*“Demonic Work and the Problem of Listening: Women, Hip-Hop, and The
Politics of Auto-Tune”*
*Catherine Provenzano*
*Assistant Professor of Musicology and Music Industry, UCLA*
May 14th, 12–12:50pm, ARTS 157
*miércoles de música (bring your own lunch/buy lunch at The Barn) to follow
at 1pm*[image: Headshot of Catherine Provenzano, a woman smiling in a green
shirt]
This talk 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.

*Bio:* Catherine Provenzano’s research focuses on voice, instrumentality,
labor, and technology as they intersect US popular culture. Her forthcoming
book, Emotional Signals: Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and the Cultural Politics of
Pitch Correction (University of Michigan Press), is an exploration of the
history of pitch correction technologies and their musical and social
implications. She is also currently researching the political economy of
sound and software in megachurch worship contexts. Her writing appears in
*Guernica*, the *Journal of Popular Music Studies*, *Musicology Now*, and
several edited collections. She is Assistant Professor of Musicology and
Music Industry at UCLA, and is a songwriter and singer.

Spread the word to your students and friends; Bayz series events are free
and open to the public. For more information about this event, follow this
link: https://events.ucr.edu/event/Catherine-Provenzano.

See you tomorrow!
Amy
*Dr. Amy Skjerseth* (*she/her*)
Assistant Professor of Popular Music
University of California, Riverside

*I sometimes send emails outside of traditional working hours, but I do not
expect a response outside of your own.*
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