Brought to Life by the Voice

Front matter

E

| [ ed pos x o Ee aan

HE MI

Part I. Prehistories

1. Trading Voices: The Gendered Beginnings of Playback

PART II. PLAYBACK'S DISPENSATION 2. "A Leader for All Song": Making a Dravidian Voice 3. Ambiguities of Animation: On Being "Just the Voice"

4. The Sacred and the Profane: Economies of the (Il)licit

Part III. Afterlives

5. The Raw and the Husky: On Timbral Qualia and Ethnolinguistic Belonging

6. Anxieties of Embodiment: Liveness and Deadness in the New Dispensation xi xv

53 78 viii CONTENTS

Notes 205 References 225 Index 243

= m e O

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

Cartoon, Kuntüci magazine, July 1948 38 Actress Savitri with playback singer P. Leela, August 1957 40

Sartorial differentiation between classical and playback singers, ca. 1972 45 K. B. Sunderambal singing in song sequence from Avvaiyyar (1953) 49

T. M. Soundararajan dressed for his role in Pattinathar (1962) 69 T. M. Soundararajan and M. G. Ramachandran in the early 1980s 76

“Pattum nàné pavamum nané” song sequence from Tiruvilayadal (1965) 77

P. Susheela and T. M. Soundararajan in the studio, ca. 1965 80 Musicians in a posed photograph in the studio, ca. 1962 86 Actress J. Jayalalitha recording a song, ca. 1968 89

Ni(1965) 112 "Pattattu rani” song sequence from Sivanda Mann (1969) 116

. Video still and clip of "Enakku vanta inta mayakkam" song sequence from

J. Jayalalitha acting in the song sequence "Ammano Samiyo" from Naan

(1967) 123

Singers with light music troupe, Chennai, January 2018 159

A. R. Rahman pictured on a ticket stub, January 2018 167

Studio musicians dressed for the studio scene in Server Sundaram

(1964) 179

TABLE

Characteristics and Indexical Associations of Husky and Raw Voice

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is my pleasure to acknowledge the people and institutions who have helped bring this work to life.

My heartfelt thanks go to all those who took time from their busy lives to graciously allow an anthropologist into their midst. This book would not exist without the cumulative insight I gained from interviews and conversations and from observing the work of playback singers, voice teachers, music directors, sound engineers, lyricists, fans, and radio announcers. In Chennai: Anuradha Sriram, Anupamaa Krishnaswami, Chinmayi Sripada, K. S. Chitra, L. R. Eswari, Malathy Lakshman, P. Susheela, S. Janaki, S. P. Balasubrahmanyam, B. Vasantha, Vani Jairam, A. V. and Uma Ramanan, Sujatha Mohan, Suchitra, Sunitha Sarathy, Shweta Mohan, Divakar Subramaniam, “Malgudi” Subha, Ramya NSK, Rahul Nambiar, K. G. Ranjith, Madhu M. M., Ananth Vaidyanathan, Vasu, Vedanth Bharadwaj, G. Sivakumar, Satish Chakravarthy, Thayanban, Sindhu, Balaji, “Mix” Mujeeb, K. Sampath, R. Chandrasekar, Ram Subu, Abu Gabriel, K, Shyam Benjamin, Na. Muthukumar, B. H. Abdul Hameed, Anooradha Unni, Elumalai, Chitty Prakash Dhairiyam, Manikanth Kadri, and Anirudh Ravichander. In Madurai: M. P. Balan and C. V. Subramaniam of the TMS Rasikar Manram; and in Colombo: Lucas Tiruchelvam and Jayakrishna of the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporations Tamil service.

Several key people facilitated my entry into the world of the Tamil film music industry in Chennai. V. S. Narasimhan and V. R. Sekar shared their extensive experience and contacts in the film music industry. N. Vamanan generously shared with me on many occasions his exhaustive knowledge of Tamil cinema, its songs and its singers; his insights are key to the early chapters of this book. K. Sundar and xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M. Surveswaran welcomed me into the fellowship of “Vintage Heritage" enthusiasts and provided me with clips of early song sequences.

Iam grateful, as well, for the strategically timed and illuminating conversations I had with several individuals during my periods of research in Chennai: Mubeen Sadhika, Thalam Govindarajan, T. M. Krishna, M. D. Muthukumaraswamy, V. Ramji, A. R. Venkatachalapathy, V. A. K. Ranga Rao, Film News Anandan, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Stephen Hughes, and Anand Pandian. I thank the faculty at New College in Chennai; the Madras Institute of Development Studies; and the Center for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore for their interest in and support of my research.

Several enduring friendships have supported me during the long period I was at work on this book. I am deeply indebted to V. S. Narasimhan and Umayalpuram Mali, consummate musicians both, for their generosity in sharing their musical gifts with me; to S. Shanmugham and S. Bharathi for their warmth and keen intellectual interest in all of my work; and to N. S. Saminathan for his iconoclastic enthusiasm.

This work has come to life through conversations with many colleagues. Much of it came into being in dialogue with Constantine Nakassis, who has read every word of the manuscript, some chapters more than once. His ethnographic insights and theoretical acumen have shaped this book in numerous ways. The friendship and intellectual comradeship of David Novak and Laura Kunreuther have sustained me in this and all my work. I am grateful to have experienced the mentorship of Bernard (Barney) Bate, whose ethnographic work and enthusiasm were a source of insight and inspiration. Barney, who tragically passed away in 2016, is an imagined interlocutor for much of the argument this book makes about the relationship between expressive forms and sociopolitical formations.

Numerous other colleagues in anthropology, ethnomusicology, South Asian studies, musicology, and sound and media studies have engaged with and facilitated the work that became this book over the years: Ilana Gershon, Susan Seizer, Susan Lepselter, Gary Tomlinson, Ron Radano, John Durham Peters and the graduate students in his 2018 Studies in Sound and Voice seminar at Yale, Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Mitchell, Rama Mantena, Davesh Soneji, Archana Venkatesan, Hari Krishnan, Indira Peterson, Lakshmi Subramanian, Francis Cody, Miyako Inoue, Charles Briggs, Webb Keane, Michael Silverstein, Sara Dickey, E. Annamalai, Ravi Sriramachandran, Rupa Viswanath, V. Rajesh, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Indira Arumugam, Perundevi Srinivasan, S. V. Srinivas, William Mazzarella, David Shulman, Damodaran Karthikeyan, Bhavani Raman, Kajri Jain, Anna Seastrand, Sascha Ebeling, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Alicia Walker, Guangtian Ha, Christopher Fraga, Pallabi Chakraborty, Kristina Wirtz, Perry Sherouse, Danny Fisher, Nina Eidsheim, Louise Meintjes, Ryan Skinner, Pavitra Sundar, Jayson Beaster-Jones, Natalie Sarrazin, Nick Harkness, Shikha Jhinghan, Jillian Cavanaugh, Kristen Rudisill, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Gwendolyn Kirk, Andrew Weintraub, Bart Barendregt,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

Aaron Fox, Anna Stirr, Maria Sonevytsky, Farzaneh Hemmasi, Amanda Minks, Matt Sakakeeny, Marti Newland, Garrett Field, Matthew Engelke, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Yasmin Moll, Michael Lempert, Andrea Mariko Grant, Paja Faudree, Kaley Mason, Zoe Sherinian, Kathleen L Armand, and Kati Szego. I thank the Bryn Mawr Anthropology Department for providing a congenial work environment, especially my colleagues Melissa Pashigian and Susanna Fioratta for their support and engagement with this work in various ways over the years, and the many students in my classes whose questions and comparisons have led me to see familiar things anew. Outside of academia, Pia Ercole, voice teacher extraordinaire, helped me discover the secrets of playback singers voices—and my own.

For help with translation, I am grateful to Alli Natesh, Rajeswari Mohan, and Vasu Renganathan. In Chennai, R. Pratheeba provided research assistance with library materials, and the Roja Muthiah Research Library provided access to film magazines from the 1940s to the 1980s. For help with images, I thank S. V. Jayababu, who spent numerous hours selecting and sending digital copies of photographs and magazine articles from his extensive collection; T. Vijayaraj, who shared with me his documentary footage on singer T. M. Soundararajans life; and E. Gnanaprakasam.

I thank my editor at the University of California Press, Reed Malcolm, for his interest in this project, and all the editorial staff who have facilitated its journey into the world. I also thank several readers whose valuable comments on the manuscript influenced the final shape of this book: Neepa Majumdar, Patrick Eisenlohr, and Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda.

Research and writing for this project were supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a Fulbright-Nehru Research fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies International and Area Studies fellowship, a Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship from the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, a Penn Humanities Forum Regional Faculty fellowship, the Bryn Mawr College Social Science Center, and the Bryn Mawr College Department of Anthropology. I also gratefully acknowledge subvention support for the open access publication of this book from the Bryn Mawr College Faculty Research and Grants fund, Provost's Office, and Social Science Center and from the South Asia across the Disciplines series.

Though books may seem to come from well-defined periods of research, they are, in fact, made possible by relationships that extend beyond their pages. Violinist Adrian L'Armand has been my teacher, friend, and interlocutor for nearly thirty years. Our meeting in the early 1990s was the serendipitous gift that brought me to India in the first place. The genius of Adrian’s teaching, our regular playing sessions, and our conversations about music and India have shaped me and this work in innumerable ways.

I am grateful for the love and support of my parents, Bette and Burt Weidman, through many years of hearing about playback singers. My mother read and xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS commented on all the chapters of this book at an early stage. I have been lucky to be able to share the joys and frustrations of writing and the academic life with my sister, Nadine Weidman, and to have a wonderful extended family, including Joe Ferrari, Leora Ferrari, Andrew Ferrari, Yeong-Ping Whang, Yun Chow Whang, and the Whang-Cholvibul-Durands, who have all supported me in different ways during the years I have been at work on this book.

Ken Whang has shared life and trips to India with me from the inception of this project. His unconditional love and confidence in me, and the refreshing intellectual perspective he has provided at crucial junctures, even amid the pressures of everyday life, have been invaluable. Our daughters have grown from baby- and toddlerhood to talented and perceptive teenagers in the time that I have been working on this project. Ken, Sylvia, and Valerie have shared with me many of the joys and frustrations of research. Though they may not (yet) have read every word of this book, they have definitely already lived every word, from the minutiae of editing and formatting to the flash of major insights.

Some material in this book has appeared in previously published articles and book chapters and appears here by permission. Parts of chapter 4 were published as “The Remarkable Career of L. R. Eswari; in Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities, edited by Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendregt (2017). Some material in chapters 3, 5, 6, and 7 appears in the following essays and articles: "Voices of Meenakumari: Sound, Meaning, and Self-Fashioning in Performances of an Item Number, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture 10 (3) (2012); “Neoliberal Logics of Voice: Playback Singing and Public Femaleness in South India,” Culture Theory and Critique 55 (2) (2014); "Iconic Voices in Post-Millennium Tamil Cinema,’ in Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity, edited by Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin (2016); and "Vision, Voice, and Cinematic Presence" (co-authored with Constantine Nakassis), differences 29 (3) (2018).

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND SPELLING

My transliteration of Tamil words and phrases follows the Madras University Lexicon scheme. Tamil words, song titles, and song lyrics are transliterated. However, for the sake of recognizability, I have used the most commonly occurring spelling for film titles and names of individuals.

XV

Introduction

Theorizing Playback

In playback, the body confesses to being the puppet brought to life by the voice.

— MICHEL CHION, THE VOICE IN CINEMA

In 1975, a reviewer for the Toronto Sun reported on a live performance by Lata Mangeshkar, then the reigning playback voice of Hindi cinema, during her first North American tour. “Lata Mangeshkar is what is known as a ‘playback singer,” he wrote. "That is the vocalist who replaces the voice of the leading lady [in a film] whenever she breaks into song. . . . And if the actress is anyone important, her singing voice is supplied by Lata Mangeshkar" (Deora and Shah 2017, 45). Though North American audiences had become acquainted with the sounds of Indian classical music in the 1960s through the Beatles and the concert tours of sitarists Ravi Shankar and Amjad Ali Khan, this was their first exposure to Indian popular film songs. The term playback refers to a system that relies on the technical capacity to separately record and subsequently synchronize aural and visual tracks in the production of the song sequences that are a central part of Indian popular films. Playback singers are so called because their voices are first recorded in the studio and then “played back" on the set as the visuals of the song sequence are being filmed.

Indian playback singers embody a combination of characteristics and roles that would have been unfamiliar to North American audiences in the 1970s. Singers who, in the North American context, would have been relegated to a behind-the-scenes, anonymous role, were in India clearly well-known celebrities. Yet, as the reviewer noted, while their voices commanded tremendous affective power, these singers’ live performances did not include visual signs of self-expression or involvement with the performance. “An obstacle for the potential fan of the mediasaturated Western world is the show’s rigorous lack of visual distraction. There is no dance, no interpretive acting—just the music” (Deora and Shah 2017, 45).

The reviewer's conclusion—that both the music and its mode of performance were "an acquired taste"— reflects the fact, as true now as it was then, that playback singers embody a culturally specific form of celebrity for which there is no real equivalent in the North American context.

Taking its cue from the reviewers puzzlement, this book seeks to understand playback in India as a culturally specific institution that has generated novel forms of celebrity, publicity and performance, and affective attachment to voices. Though playback relies on particular technical capacities and media assemblages, it is more than a simple technological process of substituting one voice for another. Technological capacities alone did not determine the institution that playback would become in India; for instance, they did not dictate that the aural track would be recorded before the visual, that singer and actor had to be two different people, or that the singer would be a known celebrity rather than a behind-the-scenes ghost singer. Moving beyond a narrow technoindustrial explanation of playback, this book explores its significance as a realm of vocality and performance that has become intricately encoded with meaning over the roughly seventy years it has been in use in India.

Playback is a complex set of practices involving the production, recording, amplification, manipulation, and circulation of voices. It acknowledges not just the audiences awareness that onscreen body and offscreen voice are produced by two different people but, indeed, the expectation that this division of labor between singing and acting, voice and body, will be maintained. In contrast to Hollywood cinema and the American media entertainment industry, which have been preoccupied with maintaining voice-body unity, Indian popular cinema responded differently to the affordances of separating sound- and image-tracks, embracing sound cinemas fragmentation of body and voice as a necessary and positive feature. In the latter half of the twentieth century, playback became a key aspect of Indian popular cinema's famously *heterogeneous mode of manufacture": the separate production of the various parts of the film and their final assembly into one unit (Prasad 1998, 42-43). Indian film industries moved from a period of using singing actors in the 1930s and 1940s, through a short phase in which unacknowledged "ghost" or "traded" voices provided singing voices for onscreen actors, and then, in the early 1950s, to the system of playback, in which the use of dedicated singers was acknowledged.' Knowledge about playback singers began to circulate in the 1950s through news and film magazines and, by the 1960s, through live stage performances by the singers themselves. Playback singers became well-known in their own right, often overshadowing onscreen actors and actresses in their popularity and the longevity of their careers. The legacy of these developments is a distinctive form of celebrity and a lasting fascination with the difference, and disjuncture, between the onscreen body and the singing voice that emanates from it, a play of matching and mismatching that is elaborated and aestheticized both onscreen in the films themselves and in offscreen sites of performance and audition.

This book is based on historical and ethnographic research in the South Indian Tamil-language film and culture industry. It situates playback within the cultural and political context of Tamil South India from the post-independence period to the post-liberalization present, tracking the emergence of playback in the 1940s and 1950s, its consolidation in the 1960s through the 1980s, and its partial dismantling since the 1990s, when new technological capacities for sound manipulation and structural changes in the film and entertainment industries have transformed earlier modes of production and ideals associated with playback. This relatively long time frame makes it possible to see how playback as an institution has both shaped and been shaped by a wider sociopolitical context.

While independence and liberalization provide anchor points linking the narrative to a broader Indian national-cultural history, a more specific story also emerges here. Although playback as a system came into standard use in the various film industries of India around the same time, its practices and aesthetics have not been harnessed to the same sociopolitical projects everywhere. Focusing on the Tamil-language film industry, this book offers a perspective distinct from that provided by the more-studied Bombay-based Hindi-language film industry, now known as Bollywood. Sound films in Tamil have been produced since the 1930s. The Tamil film industry is based in Chennai (formerly Madras), which, along with Bombay and Calcutta, was historically one of the three major hubs of Indian film production. It takes its present-day name, Kollywood, from the first letter of Kodambakkam, the neighborhood of Chennai where the major studios were originally located and where much production activity continues to take place? The Tamil film industry is one of India’s most prolific, producing between 150 and 200 films per year, only slightly fewer than the number of Hindi-language films produced each year in Bollywood.

Tamil cinema has historically been shaped by the priorities of regional political and ethnolinguistic identity more than by questions of national identity, presenting aesthetic, social, and political content distinct from that of Bollywood cinema (Velayutham 2008, 7). While a national-secular “modern” public sphere was evoked in many Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s by the trope of romantic love across ties of caste or community, and while Hindi cinema worked to present a pan-Indian subject supposedly devoid of specific ethnolinguistic identity, in South India these were the years in which ethnolinguistic nationalism emerged as a political force. In the context of the linguistic reorganization of states following independence, as a challenge to the then nationally dominant Congress Party, a new regional political party, the DMK, began to use cinema to assert a new "Dravidian" political identity? It eventually consolidated its political power in its electoral victory of 1967, creating a powerful and long-lasting link between cinema and politics and establishing cinema as a prime site for the construction and elaboration of Tamil ethnolinguistic identity.

The liberalization of Indias economy beginning in the 1980s is widely recognized as a major turning point in India's history and ethos as nation.* The increase in available consumer goods that resulted from liberalizing economic policies was accompanied by an explosion of privatized media in the 1990s that brought in images and sounds from abroad and provided alternatives to state-controlled radio and television, while giving increased scope and prominence to the advertising industry (Fernandes 2006; Mazzarella 2013). Though the power of Dravidian ideology has become attenuated in the post-liberalization context, its legacy continues to interact with the dynamics of the post-liberalization period—the emergence of the “new middle class; the increasing salience of consumptionbased class distinctions, and the new forms of masculinity and femininity’—with distinct implications for the sonic and affective resonances of playback voices.

DISTRIBUTING THE SENSIBLE

Playback singers’ voices have been a ubiquitous element of the aural public culture of South India since the 1950s. In the absence of a separate popular music industry, film songs, here as elsewhere in India, have long constituted the main source of popular music. In addition, the institutionalization of playback itself as standard practice in film production was contemporaneous with major political shifts in mid-twentieth-century Tamil South India; both depended on the affordances of voice amplification technologies. In the 1940s and 1950s, the very same years that the microphone was transforming singing styles and aesthetics for playback singers, it was also playing a key role in the oratorical transformation associated with the rise of Dravidian politics: the development of a “refined” style of public political speaking that depended on microphone amplification (Bate 2009).° But although the nexus of politics, performance, and expressive forms such as oratory and cinema is a topic of particular relevance in the context of Tamil South India (see Bate 2009; Prasad 2014; and Nakassis n.d.), a critical consideration of playback has not been part of this scholarship. This is perhaps because playback singers have never assumed political roles. Unlike acting and other authorial roles such as directing, scriptwriting, or composing lyrics, being a playback singer and being a music director have been consistently and often deliberately constructed as nonpolitical roles in the context of Tamil cinema.’

The framing of singing as a nonpolitical act should not, however, obscure the sociopolitical significance of playback voices. Indeed, recent scholarship has explored voice as a site where macrolevel constructs such as race, gender, or national identity get scaled down to the bodily level, constituting a naturalized domain of aesthetics and sensibilities that are produced and reproduced through embodied practice, performance, and mediated consumption (Ochoa Gautier 2014; Harkness 2013; Eidsheim 2019). While discursively articulated ideologies sometimes determine which voices become audible in the public sphere, different possibilities may also be enabled, or silenced, by the affective and disciplinary entailments of listening practices (Hirschkind 2006; Kunreuther 2014; Eisenlohr 2017). On analogy with the concept of "scopic regimes" (Metz 1977; Jay 2011), we can identify "regimes" of aurality and the voice: the forms of regimentation effected by modes of discipline in vocal production, recurring practices and contexts of audition, shared ideologies about the sonic qualities of voices, ideas about the relationship between body and voice, and the technological media through which voices come to be heard. These, in combination, work on bodies and sensibilities, even—and perhaps especially—when the voices in question are not considered to be explicitly political (Kunreuther 2014).

While at points in this book, I do occasionally connect playback to politics proper—that is, to the world of political parties and democratic forms of representation—I work throughout with a more expansive notion of the political that inheres in what Jacques Ranciére has called the *distribution of the sensible? Ranciére resisted drawing direct connections between art and political formations or regimes, but he did note the world-making capacity of expressive forms, their capacity to organize the way things are perceived: as he put it, their “parceling out of the visible and the invisible" (2004, 19).* I take up Ranciéres provocation here by exploring the ways in which playback constitutes a particular distribution of the sensible. First, at the most basic level, playback produces and manages both visibility and audibility, determining what is seen and what isn't, whose voice is heard and whose isn't, who sings and who speaks. This is done through the institutionalization ofa division of labor among different personnel (actors and singers) and at different sites (onscreen and offscreen). Second, playback differentiates voice qualities by gender and social type, narrowing the range of possibilities for what female or male voices should sound like and the indexical associations that are allowed to go with them. This process of regimentation is also accomplished through the flooding of the market with a few particular voices. And finally, playback, through its divisions of labor, frames the act of singing in a particular way, creating an inside and an outside that can be crossed for performative effect. All of these processes— division of labor; differentiation, narrowing, and flooding; and framing— are "distributions of the sensible" with particular effects and implications.

The emergence of playback’s distribution of the sensible is part of a larger twentieth-century shift in ways that the female form was becoming available to be heard and seen in the public sphere through different expressive and medial forms, including music, dance, and cinema. Throughout this book I note the ways in which playback as a system and its shifting aesthetics have at times seemed to close off possibilities or to open new ones, sometimes doing both simultaneously but always in asymmetrically gendered ways. Playback maneuvers within a cultural context where respectable femininity is defined by the careful management, and often avoidance, of public appearance. Cinema, by this logic, constitutes a distinctive and potentially problematic site of appearance because of its open-ended mass audience and because its contexts of reception can never be controlled. Within this medium, the combination of a single individual's body, voice, name, and authorial will or intention can create a potent sense of presence that can work to the benefit of male actors or singers but has long been largely undesirable for actresses and female singers (Nakassis and Weidman 2018). Playback emerged as a way of manipulating these elements, putting body, voice, name, and authorial will and intention together in different ways and mitigating the effects of combining them.

Distributions of the sensible shape, in ways both concrete and more general, who and what gets heard, and in what ways, in the public sphere (Fraser 1990). They undergird the structures that regulate cultural production in mass-mediated contexts, the “performative dispensations" that function at once as “patron and police,’ both enabling and circumscribing the possibilities for performances (Mazzarella 2013). A dispensation both “opens and maintains a protected space in which a form of life can be performed . . . and decides on the exception, on what falls outside the symbolic order of the law,” or what is considered vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate (Mazzarella 2013, 41). In so doing, a performative dispensation not only regulates the kinds of things that can be performed, but also attempts to regulate their performative force: the meanings or effects that particular performances may have. In the context of this book, I explore the post-independence decades and the post-liberalization decades as two different performative dispensations, each of which mobilizes a complex combination of permissions and prohibitions in order to tie the sensuous, performative force of voices back to an acceptable meaning (Mazzarella 2013, 40).

IDEOLOGIES OF THE EMBODIED AND DISEMBODIED VOICE

The persistence of voice-body unity as an ideal in Hollywood cinema has rendered the existence of a separate voice "behind" the screen attached to a body onscreen a problem—one that must be either hidden or masked or resolved by bringing the owner of the behind-the-scenes voice out into the open to be acknowledged as the true source. As film theorist Mary Ann Doane has argued, in order to counteract the disarticulation of body and voice by technical means, much is invested in representing them as springing from the same source (Doane 1980). The most literal dramatization of this is the iconic and much-discussed climactic scene of the Hollywood musical film Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which manages to present a happy onscreen resolution by revealing the owner of the "true" voice behind the curtain, while simultaneously masking the fact that her voice was, in fact, provided by an unacknowledged singer.?

Meanwhile, a powerful current within the American media entertainment industry works to naturalize singing as a modality that expresses the self in a privileged transparent and direct way. The existence of a "behind the scenes" singing voice remains the stuff of scandal or at best comedy. The embodied voice in the act of singing is continually staged as an act of expressing sincere emotion and self-identity. In the American context, this ideology of the singing voice was bolstered by the strong distinction drawn, beginning in the 1960s, between "folk" music— defined as unmediated, spontaneous, uncommercialized expression—and “pop” music, deemed to be overly commercialized, technologically mediated, and disconnected from the subjectivities of its performers. Rock borrowed heavily from the ideology of the folk but transformed the idea of singing from expressing the truth of a community or collective to expressing the truth of the self (Frith 1981, 163-64; Meizel 2011, 52-53). The idealized figure of the singer-songwriter that emerged was that ofa self-contained, self-possessed individual whose voice was an expression of his or her own interiority and experience. The continuing influence of this figure is apparent in the values that underlie American music TV reality shows. On American Idol, for instance, contestants are enjoined, even when singing a song they didn't write, to “make the song their own" (Meizel 2011, 56-63); there is a strong expectation that the singer will be interpellated by the song in the act of singing, that they will realize a song that was written by someone else and has been performed countless times by hundreds of others to be an expression of their own individuality or experience. Complementing this insistence on the sincerity of performance is a fixation on the voice as that which lies behind the mask of appearances. The disembodied voice becomes the site of truth, linked both to meritocracy and to recognition.”

These examples constitute different popular-culture versions of the metaphysical conceits of interiority and self-presence underlying conceptions of the self in Euro-Western modernity, in which the voice, conceived in a particular way, plays a central role. Within the European philosophical tradition, a particular model of the speaking subject gave rise to notions of voice as guarantor of truth and self-presence; voice became both a metaphor for the subject's interiority and the vehicle through which a subject comes to express inner thoughts to others (Weidman 2006, 2014a; Taylor 1989, 390; Dolar 2006). Voice, body, and self came to be tightly linked in this conception, giving rise to a distinct distrust of the sonic, material voice because of its potential to break free from the self and to evoke the body rather than the inner thoughts of the idealized subject (Cavarero 2005; Tolbert 2001). Consequently, much Euro-Western theorizing about voice—including the work that would critique this concept of voice—starts from the assumed ideal unity of voice, body, and self, treating the voice separated from self or body as disorienting, whether disablingly or productively so. This has led to a dense interdisciplinary web of theorization about the voice as acousmétre—the voice delinked from a visual representation of its source—as a site of power and mastery, as well as of excess and danger (Chion 1999; Dolar 2006; Kane 2014).