Towards an Ethics of Creative SoundJ A M ES A N D E A N.docx

Towards an Ethics of Creative Sound
J A M ES A N D E A N
Centre for Music & Technology, Sibelius Academy, University
of the Arts Helsinki, PL 30, 00097 Taideyliopisto, Helsinki,
Finland
E-mail: [email protected]
This article examines some of the ethical issues involved
in working creatively with sound. Issues considered include:
sound ownership; sound vs. vision as determinations of
identity, and their relative iconicity; recorded sound; sound as
physical phenomenon vs. sound as symbol; issues of copyright
and trademark; community ownership; awareness, sensitivity
and responsibility; composer responsibility vs. listener
responsibility; the relative importance of contextualisation;
and intercultural dialogue. We will conclude with a critique
of the cultural and ethical shortcomings of the article itself,
and a call for social, cultural and ethical engagement in
creative sound work.
1. INTRODUCTION
This article intends to examine some of the issues
involved with and surrounding the ethics of working
creatively with sound. The term ‘creative sound’ is
used here primarily in an attempt to think broadly
about creative sound work, without narrowing it to
an examination of a particular style, genre or prac-
tice; however, due to some of the issues raised, some
of the discussion will be particularly relevant for
categories that include working with recorded sound

in some form.
It should be stressed from the beginning that we are
not here attempting to define or prescribe a particular
ethical framework for creative sound work. This is not
an attempt to judge, nor to preach; it is instead an
attempt to observe and outline some of the existing –
and sometimes contradictory – mores, pressures, stric-
tures, demands, requirements, prejudices and other
social and ethical factors that come into play when
working creatively with sound. It is an attempt to
engage with and bring into play some of the many criss-
crossing ethical strands that impact our work. It should
also be noted that we cannot claim here to be complete,
nor definitive, by any means, but merely to offer a few
small points, and an attempt at an overview of some
aspects of a broad and complex subject.
2. ‘WHOSE SOUND IS IT ANYWAY?’: SOUND
OWNERSHIP
Some of the key questions regarding the ethical use
of sound concern sound rights: which sounds can
be used, and which sounds can’t; by whom; in what
manner, and so on. However, we will open with an
issue that speaks in much less equivocal terms: sound
ownership.
Is it possible – or meaningful – to ‘own’ a sound?
For a sound to be the property of an individual, or of
a community? One finds a range of decisive responses
to this question, often quite polarised. Many of these
are closely tied to questions of identity, as well as
to varying cultural understandings of the nature of
sound.

3. SOUND AND VISION
In both of these respects, it is perhaps informative to
begin with similarities and differences between cultural
attitudes towards ownership of sound and image.
Generally speaking, ethical positions are often much
clearer, and stronger, regarding image – photography,
for instance – than sound. One encounters different
reactions if one attempts to photograph a stranger in
public, without their knowledge or consent, from if one
captures a recording of their voice, in which case the
imperative for consent tends to be significantly reduced.
Photographing children on a playground is considered
inappropriate; recording the voices of children at a
playground, dramatically less so. If you photograph a
stranger on a train, you are considered to be ‘stealing’
something from them; there is a question of owner-
ship – the camera is used to commit a theft.1 With a
microphone, however, one is not accused of ‘stealing’
their voice, though one does risk being accused
of spying on them – the technological extension of
eavesdropping. No longer, then, a question of theft,
but of invasion of privacy. There is the anthro-
pological cliché of the belief that the camera will
‘steal the soul’ of the person photographed (Marr
1989); the equivalent belief regarding the recording
of a person’s voice, on the other hand, is either far
less common, or less often reported. ‘To photograph
is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means
putting oneself into a certain relation to the world
that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power’
1There are, of course, situations in which public photography is
more generally acceptable, or at least more common; for
example,

in heavily touristed areas. Such situations are not, however,
with-
out their own ethical entanglements. For a detailed
consideration
of the ethics of recorded sound in such contexts, see Naylor
2014
and Blackburn 2011.
Organised Sound 19(2): 173–181 & Cambridge University
Press, 2014. doi:10.1017/S1355771814000119
(Sontag 1977: 4). ‘The microphone takes away a
man’s words, but the camera takes away his soul’
(Young 1975: 112).
In some ways, this seems a curious contrast. An
image is the capturing of a single frozen moment;
sound, on the other hand, through its temporal
engagement and its collection of an evolving scene,
seems somehow to hold more of the essence, the
flavour, of the subject – more of one’s ‘soul’y Per-
haps the issue is sound’s ephemerality: a picture
can be held in the hand, put on the shelf; a sound
cannot – it retreats into its medium, awaiting fresh
mediation to be conjured up anew. Perhaps this, too,
is part of the distinction: the image is a moment
captured and held, where the sound is simply ready to
be born again.
4. ICONICITY
More critical, however, is the relative iconicity
assigned to image and to sound. A person’s image is
considered to be imbued with explicit and immediate

iconicity, without the requirement for any further
symbolic content; the mere sound of a person’s voice,
however, is not in and of itself iconic – this is instead
located in the words and their semantic content. The
image, on the other hand, requires nothing further;
the subject is not required to sign or signal a message
in any way – the simple fact of their image is, in and
of itself, enough, where the simple appearance of the
sound of their voice is not.
5. ETHICS CONCRÈTE
This brings us to an issue of central importance in
sound ethics: variations in conception of what we
mean when we talk about ‘sound’, and which aspects
concern us when dealing with ethical considerations.
Sound is an ephemeral phenomenon. How can we
claim to ‘own’ such a phenomenon? What is it exactly
that we are claiming to own? To claim as property
something that cannot be held, stored or kept seems
improbable and impractical. Except, of course, sound
can indeed be stored, held and kept: the central
glorious epiphany of recording and of musique con-
crète in the 1940sy Does the advent of recorded
sound equal a similar revolution in sound ethics –
does it lead us to a kind of ‘ethics concrète’?
Unlikely. While it is perhaps conceptually easier to
accept the notion of ownership of ‘stored sound’ – it
is now a physical object, no longer merely a fleeting
phantom, brushing past in the air – in practice, the
fact of storage is largely irrelevant (culturally, if not
legally, a distinction that will be addressed shortly). It
is not the ownership of the strip of tape, disc or hard
drive that happens to be the vessel for a particular

sound at a particular moment that is at issue. Over
what, then, is a claim of ownership being made?
The key to this lies with the central question
alluded to above: what, exactly, are we referring to
when we talk about ‘sound’? While this may seem a
facetious question at first, it is in fact both legitimate
and crucial, and shifting definitions of ‘sound’ lie at
the heart of some of the key differences in ethical
perspective.
6. SOUND OR SYMBOL?
For our purposes, it is useful to draw up a contrast
between two concepts: ‘sound’, and ‘a sound’. The first
of these is a mass noun, referring broadly to a physical
and psychological phenomenon, as motion causes a
pressure front to travel through a medium to reach
a listener, who then experiences that phenomenon
through a complex biological and neurological process.
‘A sound’, however, is a completely different phenom-
enon. ‘A sound’ is a mental and cultural construction; it
is a signified that wraps together a number of factors
into the sign that is triggered by the reception and
recognition of a particular sound pattern. ‘A sound’
combines the sonic unit – the recognition of a particular
sonic gestalt, assigned to a particular source and a
particular action – and, more significantly, the mental
image that this triggers. This last element is a very
complex unit indeed, tying together a number of
‘objective’ physical characteristics with a sophisticated
and multi-faceted complex of culturally loaded ideas
about the object in question and what it signifies
(Atkinson 2007).

To summarise this much more simply: ‘sound’ is a
primarily acoustic phenomenon, while ‘a sound’ is a
cultural construct: a symbol. The vast majority
of ethical considerations relating to sound concern
primarily, or only, this second concept: sound as
symbol. It is the symbol that is at issue, not the
acoustic phenomenon of pressure waves in a medium,
of cochlear reactions, nor even of sound stored on a
medium. A sound wave is innocent; a sound wave
that happens to form the sound of a person scream-
ing in pain is not. Individual pitches are innocent, but
pitches that build up to form a political anthem are
not (McClary 1987).
One sometimes encounters an attempt to bypass
ethical issues by casually side-stepping from one
definition to the other: a philosophical sleight of hand
in which the cultural symbol is surreptitiously
replaced by the acoustic phenomenon, suddenly
rendering all ethical considerations irrelevant and
absurd. To avoid this, we must be clear which of
these we are talking about.
Thus, when ownership is being claimed over sound,
it is most often ownership of the sonic symbol that is
at issue, rather than ownership of a precise wave
174 James Andean
pattern, or of a particular instance of that pattern’s
storage. It is this emphasis on ownership of symbol
that is reflected in the discussion of visual vs. sonic
iconicity, above: a person’s image is considered a
more direct symbol than the sound of their voice, and

is therefore more tightly guarded.
7. SOUND AS PHYSICAL PHENOMENON
While there remain ethical issues that relate specifically
to the physical phenomenon of ‘sound’, rather than its
role as symbol, these generally relate specifically to
sound’s physical properties: for example, its amplitude
or its frequency. Potential consequences of unethical
use of sound here range from mild annoyance, to
permanent physical damage, with infractions ranging
from small acts of thoughtlessness to serious crimes
and human rights abuse.
It is interesting to note, however, that the severity
of the consequences do not necessarily correspond
with the degree of public censure. Loud music from
neighbours is met with anger, rage and often a call to
the police; loud music at a club or concert is not only
considered acceptable, with some genres and sub-
cultures it is often demanded by much of the public,
who will be outraged if the necessary decibel levels
are not delivered. The first of these two situations is
no more than a nuisance, but regularly receives a
reaction on an entirely different scale from the second
situation, which results in very real, well-documented
and sometimes tragic consequences, from slight to
extremely serious hearing loss, tinnitus and other
forms of hearing damage (Daniel 2007). The general
public treats the nuisance as a serious ethical con-
travention, and the physical assault as an acceptable
inconvenience, or even as a desirable quality.
Certain other instances that engage with the ethics
of sound as physical phenomenon are more deliber-
ate, and can therefore seem rather more sinister. One

area of current controversy is the use of sound as
torture – submitting a prisoner to music played at
painful volume levels for significant durations, or to
short bursts of loud music only a few minutes apart,
24 hours a day, thereby preventing the subject from
achieving deep sleep (Cusick 2008). These are indeed
issues that are ethically disturbing, and many voices
have been raised in objection. However, the primary
ethical failing here must surely be the act of torture:
the judgement that ‘torture is wrong’ is equally true
of sonic torture as of any other form of torture. There
is a strange counter-current, however, that refuses to
believe that music is capable of serving as torture,
especially not such absurd examples as some of those
in actual use for this purpose, such as the theme song
for children’s television programme Barney the Dinosaur
(Worthington 2008). This again points to the dichotomy
described above, sound-as-physical-phenomenon vs.
sound-as-symbol: it is in its capacity as physical
phenomenon that it is being used as torture, but
sound’s capacity as symbol – in this case, for a
harmless children’s television programme and char-
acter – appears to contradict this capacity, despite its
obvious irrelevance to the situation.
A less hostile, but still ethically dubious, sound
practice, employing extremes of frequency rather than
of amplitude, is the social control device known as
‘The Mosquito’ (Goodman 2010; Volcler 2013). This is
a device in use in public spaces in the UK, France and
elsewhere that emits a pitch at a frequency high
enough to be no longer audible to the majority of
those over a certain age. Its purpose is to discourage
the gathering of youths in key public spaces, especially
at certain times of evening and night. As an ethical act,

this is clearly extremely questionable, open to accu-
sations of both ageism and of impinging on people’s
rights and freedoms, not to mention its impact on
individuals – young children for instance – outside of
the intended target group. It is another clear example
of an ethical question based on sound as physical
phenomenon; there is no ethical complaint based on
the symbolic content of the frequency produced.
8. COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK
The majority of ethical loci in creative sound, however,
deal not with these physical characteristics, but rather
with sound as symbol. We began discussing this above,
with the question of personal ownership of one’s
own visual or sonic image. This leads in short order to
aspects of sound ownership that are tightly wound
up with copyright issues and questions of creative
property, critical to debates around a number of
creative forms: sampling culture, for instance. This is
an intense, sophisticated and ongoing debate, so we
will refrain from exploring it here in much detail, as it
would require more scope than we can offer here.2
Speaking more broadly, we will avoid specifically legal
questions generally, in part because these tend to be
firmly recorded and documented elsewhere, but also
because here we are concerned first and foremost with
ethics, and law is not governed by ethics alone, much as
we would often like to believe otherwise; weight is also
given for example to political questions, business and
economic questions, and so on (Pound 1954). As a
result, a given law may run counter to general ethical
consensus. A relevant case in point is the trademarking
of the NBC ‘chimes’ in 1950 (Harris 1996), a sound
logo that amounts to a second-inversion broken chord,

without any other signature sonic characteristics – no
rhythmic elements, no morphological development and
so on. The claim of ownership over such a basic unit of
2See, for example, Newton 1988 and Schumacher 1995 for more
information.
Towards an Ethics of Creative Sound 175
tonal music is clearly not in keeping with the culture’s
general understanding of sonic rights; however, one
could argue that it is not this trademark’s intention
to control every use of this triad, nor does it appear
to have resulted in much in the way of enforcement.
This leads to the question of whether the ethical focus
lies primarily in a law’s intention, its wording or its
enforcement (Pound 1954).
It also leads us back to the question of sound vs.
symbol: it is not so much the sound – the triad itself –
over which NBC is claiming ownership; it is its role
as symbol – its service as a sonic signifier for the
network. As such, it is not the musical use of the triad
to which NBC might be expected to object; it is the
hypothetical attempt by another company or brand
to employ this same triad form for their own logo.
9. COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP
However, we are here more interested in the broader
social attitudes towards sound ownership than in
purely legal questions. Having discussed individual
ownership, what of community ownership? Here we
find some of the most vigorous ethical discussion and

debate over cultural ethics, including issues of cul-
tural appropriation, cultural sensitivity, orientalism3
and so on.
These are rarely simple questions. As described
above, questions of sound ownership are often difficult
to define; even more so when it comes to questions
of group, community or cultural ownership. What
constitutes a ‘community’ or ‘culture’? Where does
one community begin and another one end? What
constitutes membership in a given community, and
who is excluded? Who within the community can claim
authority in questions of ethical use? Most importantly
of all, when two communities or cultures disagree over
appropriate use, who is able to adjudicate?
On a large enough scale, the answer, most often, is:
no one. There is no one sufficiently free of cultural
perspective, background, bias and baggage to impar-
tially determine differences of opinion between larger
cultural groups. This leaves the groups in question to
attempt to navigate points of friction and conflict
without recourse to umpire or arbitration – often a
long, complex and delicate process, in which cultural
values in conflict go head to head.
Once again, image provides clearer examples than
sound: consider, for example, international conflict
over the use of the image of the prophet Muhammad
(Klausen 2009). For practising Muslims, this is
blasphemous and prohibited; yet Western cartoonists
have, on a number of occasions, claimed the right to
present this image based on freedom of expression.
Both of the two principles in play here – ‘religious

respect’ vs. ‘freedom of expression’ – are culturally
relative terms: they take their meaning from the cultures
in which they are expressed. As a result, there is no
possible point of comparison, even if some imaginary,
impartial, extracultural judge could be found to con-
sider the issue. Any comparison requires the translation
of either term into the cultural framework of the other,
rendering it unreliable at best, meaningless at worst,
and invalidating any conclusions one might attempt
to draw.
This seems to leave us with a choice: we can either
ignore ethical considerations entirely, using sound
and symbol in whatever way we wish, or we can
choose to engage with the incredibly complex ethical
cultural web. However, this is only the illusion of
choice: although the first of these may claim to be a
position somehow ‘beyond’ ethics, it in fact simply
takes an extreme and consistent position on any
ethical questions that might arise. We are therefore
hopelessly bound to the ethical web, whether we like
it or not.
10. AWARENESS, SENSITIVITY,
RESPONSIBILITY
In attempting to elaborate the ethical concerns sur-
rounding culturally sensitive use of sound, we can
perhaps distinguish three key areas:
> being informed;
> being sensitive; and
> taking responsibility.
Are we primarily concerned about the inappro-
priate use of sound, or more about the ignorance this

may imply? What was the artist’s intention in
employing this sound – were they unaware of the
potential offence, or did they use it despite, or even
deliberately because of, such offence? Is either of
these ethically better or worse than the other – is it
worse for an artist to be ignorant of the cultural
implications of their work, or to have gone ahead
despite and in full knowledge of these implications?
Let us consider an example. In a number of forms
of sound-based composition, sounds are often chosen
primarily for their purely sonic properties. Let us
imagine a composer at work upon a composition
employing recordings of human speech, deployed
according only to these sonic priorities. Let us further
propose that this composer cannot speak a word
of English, but is using recordings of a number of
spoken languages, English included. Let us now
imagine that, enraptured with its sonic properties but
unaware of its meaning, our composer employs an
extremely offensive four-letter word, and the com-
position that results is extremely offensive to a great
many listeners, the majority of whom know enough3See Said
1978.
176 James Andean
of the language to be fully familiar with the word in
question. To what extent is the composer at fault, or
responsible for this situation? Would they be more, or
less, at fault if they had employed this word in full
awareness of its negative impact?
Let us complicate matters further: what if the word

used is not English, but a language from a particu-
larly small and geographically isolated linguistic
group, one which is unlikely to come into contact
with the resulting sound work? Is this ethically more
acceptable? Perhaps – the number of offended parties
is significantly reduced; perhaps not – the word’s use
remains equally disrespectful of a cultural group.
Another example: Steve Feld (1988) has described
a situation in which he was reprimanded for a casual
reference to the call of a particular bird, unaware that
the local culture believes this call to be the voices of
ancestors, and was therefore to be treated with
deference. If one were to record this bird in ignorance
of this fact and employ it in a piece, what are
the ethical implications? None of the principles of the
composer’s own culture have been upset – is this the
point at which the composer’s responsibility ends?
If responsibility extends to the principles of the
offended culture, is ethical judgement of the compo-
ser’s transgression tempered at all if that culture
never hears the piece, and therefore remains ignorant
of the offending act? Once informed, to what extent
does the composer retain the right to judge for
themselves the relative weight of the infraction, and
to what extent must they balance this with the con-
cerns of the offended party?
None of these are questions to which we can here
provide an objective answer; however, all of these are
questions that artists and creative professionals are
likely to have to wrestle with from time to time. Only
one thing is certain: the better informed we are of the
cultural implications of a given sound, the more
aware we are of the range of responses to the work we
might expect. This is significant on both an artistic

and a social level: we can choose not to use a con-
troversial or culturally sensitive sound, or, if we
decide to use the sound in spite of this, then we can be
prepared for the public reactions that might result.
Being informed is also an absolute prerequisite for
cultural sensitivity: one cannot engineer the sensitive
use of sound, if one is unaware of the context and
cultural implications of that sound. And ultimately,
we must be able and willing to take responsibility for
our artistic decisions in using culturally sensitive
material. The more culturally charged a symbol may
be, the greater the responsibility the artist must be
willing to take in using it; the greater the imperative
that the use of this symbol be artistically or culturally
validated. Casually employing Nazi imagery in a work
for no reason at all will be likely to cause outrage; the
use of Nazi imagery to construct a responsible critique
of fascism might not. And if one does opt for the
trivial deployment of such imagery, one must be aware
of and prepared for some of the probable cultural
responses and consequences this may entail.
However, how much responsibility can we realisti-
cally take for a symbol? If we are concerned with
cultural interpretations of our work, where is the line?
In defining a cultural group, we can refine the group
under consideration in ever greater detail, giving us
ever smaller sub-cultures to consider, with a theoretical
limit case of a membership of one. Yet it is taken for
granted that no artist can be responsible for every
individual’s interpretation of their work; nor, indeed,
can the artist be fully responsible for any single indi-
vidual’s interpretation. A number of famous examples
present themselves: Charles Manson taking inspiration
from The Beatles (Bugliosi and Gentry 1974); Mark

David Chapman taking inspiration from J. D. Salinger
(Jones 1992). The extent to which the broader com-
munity holds either of these artists responsible for the
crimes committed by Manson and Chapman is limited.
More importantly, symbols are culturally relative:
they are heavily dependent on the cultural web that
surrounds them; move to another cultural web, and
your symbol has changed, sometimes dramatically
(Andean 2012). Does the composer need to be respon-
sible for that symbol in every conceivable cultural
interpretation? Furthermore, each of these cultural
determinations of interpretation is extremely likely
to change over time, theoretically leaving us with an
infinite number of possibilities, so the answer to our
question must surely be ‘no’. But where is the line?
Where does the artist’s responsibility for a symbol end?
11. COMPOSER VERSUS LISTENER
For this latter question to be sensible, something must
lie beyond this point – beyond the border of the artist’s
responsibility for a symbol, and it is here that we find
the listener. The artist is clearly responsible for the
presentation of a symbol, and this will have a signi-
ficant, possibly defining, impact on its interpretation;
however, it is in fact the listener who performs the
interpretive act, and who must therefore share
responsibility for this interpretation.4 ‘Just as the pain
of the bite does not belong to the mosquito, nether
does the buzzing sound belong to the bug. It, like the
pain, belongs to the bitten’ (O’Callaghan 2007: 7). The
same can be said of the composer–listener relationship:
a sound does not belong to the composer, but to the
listener, and at least some of the responsibility for what
results must surely lie with them.

This may at first appear to contradict the artist’s
power and control over their own work. But it is not
4‘to involve the listener in an essential part of the composition,
namely to complete its network of meanings’ (Truax 1996: 55).
the role of the creator that is being questioned by the
relationship described above: it is the notion of
the work of art as an independent object. Western
culture has tended to imbibe such works with a sense
of being, with an objective, autonomous existence
(Adorno 1997). This appears to grant the work a
degree of authority and self-determination that would
make it difficult to interrogate its ethical implications.
However, it can be argued that this autonomy is in
fact an illusion, that the work of art is entirely
transactional – a cultural negotiation, with artist and
audience as the primary agents. As an independent
unit, the art work is beyond the reach of ethics; as
a locus of cultural communication, exchange and
interaction, ethics are fully implicated in the very
heart of the art work.
12. THE ETHICS OF CONTEXT
Many of the ethical questions and considerations
described above rest on questions of context. It is often
in the changing of context that a symbol becomes
controversial; the appropriation of a symbol from an
originating context and its creative application in a
new context is a common cause of ethical protest. This

suggests that one can ensure ethical use by maintaining
or otherwise deferring to context: if the sound is
appropriately contextualised, possibly by maintaining
its originating context, offence and transgression are
avoided.
However, the degree to which this is consistently or
verifiably accurate is debatable; perhaps more import-
antly, this notion of ‘context’ can be extremely volatile.
In much of the literature on soundscape composition,
for example, the genre defines itself by its emphasis on
the maintenance of context (Truax 1994, 1996, 2008;
Proy 2002), in contrast to other forms of electroacoustic
composition, with the implication of thereby offering
a more ethically grounded compositional form. The
degree of context this implies or assumes, however,
seems to vary enormously from work to work and from
composer to composer; what’s more, this also varies
significantly across many of the genres from which
soundscape composition is attempting to differentiate
itself. More importantly, it ignores the primordial
decontextualising act: the severing of sound from
source. Carefully laying this sound in a bed of
surrounding sounds that have been similarly torn
from their roots in the world to take up residence in a
tape piece, composition or other work of sonic art
seems fairly cosmetic by comparison with the initi-
ating separation imposed by the act of recording.
The practice of soundmapping5 comes up against a
similar interrogation: once again, one finds a practice
that places great emphasis on context – the careful
linking of sound with place – in apparent denial of
the extreme decontextualising act that is the severing
of sound from the moment in which it was born.
Further, this sound that now lays claim to repre-

senting place is but a frozen moment, pinned and
examined under glass like a butterfly in a collector’s
case, a somewhat forlorn substitute for a living,
breathing reality.
13. THE ETHICS OF DIALOGUE
Despite the many intercultural challenges described
above, many composers are drawn to work in pre-
cisely the area ‘in between’ cultures, of cultures in
dialogue and collaboration, despite – or perhaps
because of – the heat of cultural friction. In doing so,
many have taken a very close look at some of the
issues we have raised to date;6 many have gone to
great lengths to ensure an exemplary degree of
awareness, sensitivity and responsibility. Some have
developed close collaborations that serve as models
of dialogue and co-creation, with respect, creative
flow and credit flowing freely in both directions, and
all parties coming away satisfied and enriched by the
experience and the results.7 Despite the best of these
efforts, however, there remain ethical concerns that
cannot entirely be avoided or dodged. This is perhaps
inevitable, and has less to do with a particular work,
project or composer, and more to do with cultural
challenges that we can none of us entirely escape. We
remain inevitable representatives of the cultures from
which we spring; regardless of the symbols with
which we choose to infuse our work, we ourselves will
continue to serve as symbols of the culture and con-
text with which we are identified, and the reception
and interpretation of our works will be infused with
this knowledge. Similar use of a particular culturally
loaded symbol by two composers of contrasting
backgrounds will almost inevitably be interpreted
differently – sometimes radically so – by the aware

listener, as this symbol is transformed through
engagement with the cultural signifiers of the com-
posers’ differing identities. We therefore risk being
confronted or accused, not based solely on our
actions or works, over which we have control and in
which we can therefore exert and express the full
strength of our best intentions, but based on our
cultural identities and the full historical and cultural
5Soundmapping is the practice of linking field recordings with
recording locations, creating a network of sound bites to
represent
place and geographies. For more on soundmapping, including a
(F’note continued)
more detailed consideration of ethical implications, see
Waldcock
2011.
6See for example Cipriani and Latini 2008; Ciardi 2008; Gluck
2008. See also Drever 2002, who ties these issues to the con-
sideration of context and soundscape just discussed.
7Blackburn 2013 deserves particular mention here.
178 James Andean
weight of what these signify in a broader context over
which we have little to no impact.
To begin with, much of the discourse surrounding
intercultural creative work focuses on ‘dialogue’ –
with unquestionable sincerity, but also in an engaged
effort to deflect the sharpest accusations of cultural
imperialism: it is not an act of cultural appropriation
if it is a joint and collaborative exchange between two

committed parties. But, are we really seeing the kind
of dialogue artists seek and crave? Possibly not.8
There are a number of potential reasons for this.
To begin with, in many of these projects, it is very
often ‘our’ side that initiates the exchange and
proposes the terms: what each side will offer, what
each side will gain. While there is generally no sense
whatsoever of any disingenuousness here, it remains
significant that the initiating proposal is often from a
single perspective. As such, the exchange is often
based on what one side seeks to gain from the other,
and simultaneously on what this same side believes
they themselves have to offer, as distinct from what
the other side might seek to gain.
This is far from insignificant, as it is constrained by
the full limitations and blindness of cultural bias,
leaving the project open to the weight of a number of
postcolonial criticisms (Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1988).
Every culture’s artistic activity is born from and
reflects many of the most significant aspects, current
and historical, of that culture: political structures,
social structures and so on (McClary 1987; Small
1998). Western culture has regularly attempted to
ignore, avoid or deny this with regards to its own
artistic output, for example by emphasising the
autonomy of ‘pure’ art, or by downplaying social
aspects of art-making while glorifying the artist
as individual. However, there is nothing we can do;
our art is as closely tied to the social, political and
historical underpinnings of the society from which we
spring as that of any of the cultures we observe with
a pretence of anthropological neutrality (Shepherd
et al. 1977). This is particularly painful in instances
where artists might personally object to the political

or social characteristics that surreptitiously inform or
define the context for their work. We may object to
aspects of our own society, but we nevertheless
embody and internalise many of these aspects in ways
that cannot be escaped, and – very significantly – we
remain a symbol of that society to others. Many of
these aspects seriously limit the relevance of any
translation or importing of Western sonic art culture to
other cultural communities: for example, the concept
of ‘the artist’ as a distinct social role and position; the
privilege associated with this position; the concept of
the art work as a detached, autonomous aesthetic
object; or, as a very specific sound-based example, the
compositional use of decontextualised sound, which is
often a source of bewilderment in the society from
which it springs, let alone after cultural export. It is not
so much, however, that our art forms have nothing
to offer another culture; it is rather that these many
elements of our own cultural perspective on our own
art-making prevent us from being able to envision or
understand another culture’s potential perspective on
our own cultural products, and thereby what they
might find to be of use or value therein.
In fact, there is a very real risk that we would fail
to recognise a genuine dialogue between our own
creative sound culture and another culture, should
one take place. When we select elements from
another musical culture to employ in our own work,
is this recognised by the other party as somehow
having a relevant relationship to the practice from
which we have borrowed? Often the answer here is
‘no’. We have selected elements of interest to us, but
there is no reason that these elements should happen
to align with those qualities that are singled out as

defining characteristics by the originating culture;
instead, the various qualities – formal or structural,
for example – that are considered definitional by the
originating culture are now absent when the practice
is reinterpreted by the other group, resulting in the
rejection of suggestions that a meaningful dialogue
has taken place. It seems probable that the reverse
would likely also occur: that, should another culture
attempt to engage with our sonic art practice, we
would fail to recognise any connection with said
practice, due to the loss of key elements in which we
locate the nature and identity of the genre. Instead of
looking hopefully for how another culture might
engage with and interpret our practice, we instead
are looking for a mirror that will reflect our own
concerns back at us.
In fact, we might suggest that we have already seen
examples of this phenomenon within our own culture,
for example where so-called ‘popular’ musical forms
have freely adopted and incorporated elements of
electroacoustic music, while downplaying key formal
or structural concerns considered essential and defining
by the electroacoustic community (see for example
Ramsay 2013).
In this, and elsewhere, the discourse is at times guilty
of a number of postcolonialism’s well-founded accu-
sations,9 because we either fail to recognise our own
cultural and aesthetic biases, or fail to recognise our
practice as culturally produced, culturally bounded and
culture-specific. This leads us to propose a dialogue
between an ‘other’ that is recognisably community
based and culturally defined, and our own practice,
8There are, of course, a number of powerful exceptions: see for

example Blackburn 2010 and 2011; Emmerson 2000. 9See Said
1978; Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1988.
which by exemption somehow claims an omnipotent
position above and outside such mundane cultural
roots. A key component of this illusion is geo-
graphical, with the claim that ours are fully ‘inter-
national’ practices that have escaped or evolved
beyond any historical roots as strictly Western
traditions, or even that these practices hold the key
to universal, geographically egalitarian dialogue and
art practice.10
14. CONFESSION
As stated above, however, some of this is perhaps the
inevitable consequence of our inescapable identities
as products of culture, and as culturally rooted,
culturally engaged agents, with no possibility of fully
extricating ourselves from the stickier corners of the
cultural web. In writing this text, I am as guilty of this
as anyone else; I am just as bound by my cultural
background, education, and so on, as any of the
artists or practitioners mentioned above, and the
manner in which the problem has been discussed –
indeed, the very fact of discussing it at all – is fully
determined by this background. A different cultural
background would probably lead to a very different
framing of the issue, in very different terms, from
a very different perspective; one might no longer
see any value in a written treatise discussing what
purports to be engaged social and aesthetic actions,

nor any validity in the very notion of a disembodied,
dislocated ethical framework. This seeps all the way
down to the details of the discourse to date, based as
it has been on a number of relatively abstract and
entirely culture-specific notions – for example, ‘sound
as symbol’ – which would be considered by a great
many other intellectual traditions to be a meaningless
proposition.
But here, again, we walk directly into the central
traps surrounding such cultural issues, once again
implicating me as much as anyone else in this same
imbroglio. Because I have been trying to speak gen-
erally about our subject – as it is clearly impossible to
enumerate and address each and every instance of
creative sound work in which ethical and cultural issues
arise – I have inevitably been led to repeatedly make or
imply gross categorisations of ‘us’ – ‘creative sound
professionals’ – and ‘them’: those ‘other’ cultures with
whose sounds we are engaging in some way. Stated
thusly, this is clearly problematic: to begin with, who is
this ‘other’ to whom I vaguely and implicitly refer? On
what grounds do I make the assumption that the
‘creative sound professionals’ for whom these might be
relevant issues are necessarily Western, or rather that
they share my own cultural background, while these
‘others’ are not, and do not? This enormous reduction
to a contrast between vaguely ‘Western’ tradition,
practice and perspective, and a sweepingly generalised
‘other’, is, in fact, perhaps the most commonly decried
failing of current cultural discourse, making me guilty
of trespassing against one of the clearest of current
ethical imperatives.
15. REDEMPTION

However, here, as in any act of creation, the goal has
not been to entirely avoid any and all hint of ethical
debate, but rather to engage as fully, actively and with
as much awareness as possible. This will never be a
straightforward proposition. On a social and cultural
scale, we, and everything we do, are a vast web of
points, all of them in motion, and all with ethical
implications. And, as if this were not enough, every one
of these points is in motion, which means that this vast
web is in a constant process of reconfiguration. It is
impossible to come accurately to terms with the entirety
of the web; but, even were it possible, this newfound
understanding would immediately become redundant,
as the web would already have moved on, into new,
constantly evolving configurations. Here we have, in
essence, the cultural incarnation of Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle: to properly understand the web
of ethical and cultural relations, we must freeze it, in
order to analyse it; but this is an entirely unnatural state
for the web, whose meaning and identity is inextricably
connected with its state of flux. Once removed from this
flux for analysis, any observations or determinations
become highly suspect, and open to misunderstanding,
misinterpretation and distortion.
Nevertheless, it is our duty to understand as much of
this web as we can – our duty, not as artists, but as
human beings. To understand, but not necessarily to
agree, or to accept: we may play here at objectivity, but
in truth, we have our own active roles to play, as our
own points in the web, and this requires us to take up
ethical positions – never simply passive observers of the
web. The creative act, in particular, is an act of social
engagement, and therefore of ethical engagement. It is
impossible to address all concerns, all perspectives, on

all issues. Worrying too much about potential ethical
conflicts would unnecessarily and unproductively
shackle and burden creativity. Instead, the goal is, and
must be, to engage: artistically, aesthetically, creatively,
socially, personally and, yes, ethically. And, through-
out, we must remember to proceed with optimism,
good will and noble intentions – but most importantly,
with eyes (and ears) wide open.
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Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 1, Pages
19–39
Michael Jackson’s Kingdom: Music, Race, and the
Sound of the Mainstream
Tamara Roberts
University of California, Berkeley
Using the grandiose title “King of Pop” to describe Michael
Jackson’s
impact on the past forty years of popular culture is quite
possibly an
understatement. The litany of statistics never seems to grow less
staggering:
Thriller as the largest selling album in the history of the
recording industry,
Guinness World Records recognition as the “Most Successful
Entertainer of
All Time” (“Bio”), and levels of unquantifiable stardom critics
claim was
previously the sole territory of Elvis (Werner 272). And there is
hardly a
contemporary megastar who does not count him among their
influences.
But what exactly is the musical monarchy over which Jackson
reigns?
What is this “pop” that artists such as Justin Timberlake,
Britney Spears,
and Beyoncé claim to emulate? As numerous radio and
television stations
replayed Jackson’s vast tome in the wake of his death, I realized

that
Jackson’s work sounds both unique and wholly familiar.
Resonating with
styles such as disco, R&B, and even New Wave, his music
incorporates and
exceeds these genre demarcations. And Jackson is somehow
King of all and
none.1
What exactly is pop? The general musicological conception of
popular music is as a secular, accessible, “light” body of music
enjoyed
by a large portion of a given population (Grout and Palisca;
Kerman;
Manuel; Peñı́n; Sadie). The music is often enhanced by a star
system, in
which an artist’s popularity and success is determined by not
only sound
but elements such as their personality, private life, or fashion
(Manuel 3).
Scholars typically distinguish popular music from more elite
genres such as
the Western classical tradition, as well as from supposedly less
commercial
folk traditions. For example, in “Música popular de masas, de
medios, urbana
o mesomúsica venezolana,” José Peñı́n divides music into the
categories of
“cultured,” folk, and popular but claims, “En realidad, el
término popular
es ambiguo, quiere decir tanto, que a la postre nos dice poco”
[In reality,
the term popular is ambiguous, wanting to say so much, that by
the end it
tells us little] (62). If we take the term popular at face value, as
literally

C⃝ 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
20 Tamara Roberts
what appears on the Top 40 charts, today’s young stars would
clearly only
be idolizing a business model rather than a sound.
But we know that there is something about Jackson’s masterful
sound
that has permeated the world’s ears for decades. Reducing this
sonic domain
to simply what sells provides little indication of what popular
artists are
actually creating. Like other key figures such as Madonna and—
also royally
named—Prince and (Sir) Elton John, Jackson was key in
establishing a
musical category that was simply pop: a late 1970s originated
amalgam of
rock, funk, disco, and R&B. Jackson pulled from these genres
but did not
perform one in particular; he borrowed from them all and mixed
them into
his own unique musical base. In this article, I use Jackson’s
music as a means
to explore the sonic and racial implications of defining pop as
its own genre.
After detailing the central importance of race in marking the
consumption
of sound in the popular music industry, I contrast Jackson’s
hybrid musical
life with his strategic use of monoracial acoustic markers.

Ultimately, as I
show, pop and “the mainstream” Jackson helped establish are
based not on
a specific sonic or racial category but on the tension between
realizing and
transcending race through sound.
Defining Pop and the Mainstream
Despite the long history of cross-racial and interracial musical
practice in the United States, the popular music industry has
from
its beginning been divided into racialized genres and executives
have
capitalized on perceptions of racial difference in marketing
artists (Miller).
From the early twentieth-century distinction of black “race
records” from
white “hillbilly records” to the current divisions between,
supposedly,
white rock, black hip-hop, and, more-or-less, brown world
music, race
has been the central organizing category for how popular music
is
cultivated, sold, and consumed. It would be simplistic to
suggest that
greedy music executives solely fabricated this racially
segregated economy.
More accurately, industry officials capitalized on extant racial
divisions
and tensions as a means to brand artistic production. And black
artists,
for example, also seized these musical demarcations as a way to
positively
differentiate and promote African American practices as distinct
from the

white-dominated mainstream (Radano). Thus, once these
divisions were
given new economic, social, and political meaning, parties from
every
racial background performatively constructed and reconstructed
the racial
divisions as they remain today.2
Michael Jackson’s Kingdom 21
As the industry solidified, so did sonic distinctions of race. As
Lisa
Gitelman argues, the early days of recording provided a
temporary moment
of disruption between sound and racialized bodies (120, 134–
37). The first
recordings of black musicians in the United States, for example,
actually
“sounded more ‘Irish’ than ‘black’” (Radano 5). This
“colorblind” moment
was soon gone, however, as music executives employed visual
markers and
advertising campaigns to make the races of performers known to
listeners
(Moon 42). In some instances, the same sonic material was at
times marketed
to different audiences under alternate race-based descriptions.
For example,
Narciso Martı́nez’s record label not only sold his mid-twentieth
century
conjunto recordings to Chicano listeners under his given name,
but also to
Polish audiences as performed by the “Polski Kwartet” and to
Cajun music

aficionados as performed by “Louisiana Pete” (Appell and
Hemphill 197).
In all, the music industry has been in a prolonged struggle to
define sound
aptly through racial labels to increase sales. And these efforts
have resulted
in particular styles of vocalization, formal properties, and
instruments
being linked to specific racialized categories, despite their
interracial
beginnings.3
The exact definition of these genres, however, has not always
been
clear. As Reebee Garofalo explains, in the first moment of
widespread
nonblack consumption of race records in the 1940s, “the
conventional
marketing strategies of the music industry were based on three
product
categories: pop for the mainstream audience, country and
western for the
regional audience, and rhythm and blues for the black audience”
(277). Yet
while the pop category persisted, African American music was
variously
called “sepia,” “ebony,” “rhythm and blues,” “soul,” and even,
briefly,
“black” in an ongoing quest to label its content and targeted
audience (276–
78). These labels shifted between defining the race of the
musician and the
nature of the sound, indicating a confusion as to exactly how to
pin down
the music. But what remained important was the racialized
distinction of

genres.
At the same time, the industry has also been largely fueled by
the
transgression of these musico-racial boundaries. As the minstrel
tradition,
Elvis’s reign, and more contemporary popular fascination with
white rappers
and black rockers evidence, the juxtaposition of racialized
bodies with
unexpected sounds generates excitement and intrigue—elements
industry
executives have used to sell their product. Of course, the
crossing of racial
lines has not been an equally simple task for all pop artists. As
Garofalo
details,
22 Tamara Roberts
On those rare occasions when a recording became popular in
more
than one market, it was said to “crossover.” While the term can
be used to indicate simply the simultaneous appearance on more
than one chart, its most common usage in popular music history
connotes movement from margin to mainstream. For a rhythm
and
blues release to become a pop hit, it had to “crossover” from the
rhythm and blues charts to the pop charts, which is to say, it
had
to first sell well in the black community. This is the essence of
the
concept of crossover; by and large African American artists
must

first demonstrate success in the black market before gaining
access
to the mainstream. It is a process which holds black artists to a
higher
standard of performance than white and it is only recently that it
has
been successfully circumvented in any systematic way. (277)
Whether in the case of crossover artists or not, the fixed racial
taxonomy
of the industry grew to exist—in large part but not
exclusively—in order to
be traversed by performers or consumers. Even now, the
industry thrives in
particular on the commodified cross-racial encounter, exploiting
dominant
listeners’ interest in how the subaltern plays and sings.
All of this categorization, as well as the crossover concept,
present
“the mainstream” as a de facto white genre. The extant body of
scholarship
on black popular music is a prime example of this tendency.
While a number
of contemporary studies have done much to construct a more
complex,
nuanced vision of black music, they fall short in doing the same
for
the mainstream against which black music is defined (Boyd;
Garofalo;
Neal, What the Music Said and Soul Babies). The mainstream is
generally
understood as what black or other racially/ethnically marked
genres are
not. The unspoken assumption here is that the mainstream is
white, but this

clearly presents a very limited picture. In the early twentieth
century, racially
defining African American and other non-European styles was a
means to
distinguish them from the European art music that was popular
with white
audiences of the time. Soon, however, African American
ragtime, blues,
and jazz exploded in national and international popularity,
eclipsing other
racially defined genres in sales to all races. Despite the
increasing presence
of African American material in wide national consumption,
though, the
notion remained of “the mainstream” as a category separate
from music of
color.
But as the field of whiteness studies has illuminated, the power
of
whiteness is its ability to go unmarked, thus eclipsing and even
consuming
everything else, where it is “not seen as whiteness, but as
normal” (Dyer 10).
Probing into the exact composition of the, supposedly, white
mainstream
reveals a more intricate structure of power and racial
negotiation. In reality,
the mainstream features industry producers that are largely
white but artists
that are, generally, black and white, and listeners that are

entirely mixed.
Since ragtime and then jazz began to circulate the globe,
African American
music has been central to the music industry, so much so that
Steven Feld
claims that “American popular music” is more or less “a
euphemism for
Afro-American popular musics” (31). At the same time, the
journey to
mainstream success for black artists has often meant
concessions either
in the form of sonic and visual “whitening” or the need to
adhere more
closely to stereotyped black images. These two narratives of
moving into
the mainstream are sonic equivalents of racial assimilation and
segregation.
Yet we know that African American music itself has long been a
product
of African and European cultural material, black and white
musico-racial
features, and elements from other racial/cultural groups.
Instead of labeling the mainstream as black or white, Deborah
Wong
moves to describe it as “a phantasmatic late capitalist
framework that
effectively defines and maintains an Elsewhere much as race
records did
during the first half of this century. It is the marked category
against which—
through which—[in her case] Asian American indies and
performers define
themselves” (253). Building on this formulation, I suggest we
shift from
defining the mainstream as simply “not Elsewhere” but rather as

a marked
“Here,” a space in which images and material from various
Elsewheres come
into dialogue. I propose the contemporary mainstream as an
arena of racial
confrontation and negotiation rather than the terrain of a
singular musico-
racial category. In reality, it is less a “stream” than a zone, a
discursive no
man’s land between categories that relies on those very
categories for its
makeup.
This conception demarcates the mainstream as based on
aesthetic
criteria—as they express race and culture—rather than
economic practices
or impact. Of course, much as Wong indicates, these elements
are linked.
But highlighting the popular realm as a sonic environment
emphasizes the
ways in which most listeners approach mainstream artists—not
as shrewd
businesspeople but acoustic artists who trade in concept and
style. Even
more, the notion of dueling Elsewheres troubles the existence of
a monolithic
sonic Other. I believe this not only paints the mainstream as
built from
variegated cultural material but also opens a space to consider
the distinct
mechanisms of racial difference it harbors: the transracial and
hyperracial.

24 Tamara Roberts
Jackson’s music is a perfect indication of how these two
varieties of racial
performance operate, often in tandem.
Michael Jackson as Hyper/Transracial Artist
The two-sided coin of hyperraciality and transraciality provides
a
useful model for discussing contemporary identity formations,
particularly
for people of color. Hyperracial indicates an overt and possibly
stereotyped
marking of race, whereas transracial is the traversing or
dissolving of racial
categories. The popular music industry holds both of these
elements in
its operations: the guiding hand of racial categorization and the
potential
that, with the right combination of money, talent, or desire,
these bounds
might be crossed. A term like hybridity allows us to counter
notions
of racial authenticity by attuning us to a wider circle of
practices or
affiliations someone of a given racial group may have. But what
often goes
undertheorized or completely untheorized is the interplay of
authenticity
and inauthenticity—stereotype and reality—in a world in which
racial
constructions engender material effects.
Jackson’s life in the public eye is a prime example of the
hyper/transracial dynamic. Within popular media, there has

been a sharply
attuned awareness of his racial status and at least the possibility
of its
transformation. Internet sites chart the lightening of his skin
and reshaping
of his facial features through plastic surgery. Debates have
raged over the
verity of his claims of suffering from vitiligo, a skin disease
that causes
the loss of pigment. And more recently, rumors abound alleging
Jackson
was not the father of his supposedly white children. These cases
reveal a
fixation on race as biologically based and an integral component
of how
Jackson’s public persona is to be engaged. At the same time,
this discourse
suggests that there is the potential for racial change via
changing the body.
Thus, the conversations surrounding Jackson’s racial identity
present static
understandings of race alongside questions of where exactly his
body falls
into or can move around within a phenotype-based taxonomy.
Of course, racial change does not mean the destruction of the
larger
racial system. And, despite the discursive potential for racial
transformation,
Jackson’s shift from black child star to white media icon could
never be
fully complete. Discussing what he calls “colonial mimicry,”
Homi Bhabha
details how the colonial subject can deftly imitate the colonizer
and yet,
because of racial disparity, never fully inhabit the same social

position
(86). Jackson’s perceived push toward whiteness was similarly
impossible;
the fascination was always for a black man who wanted to be
white. The
popular culture industry—and in this I include consumers—
must continually
manufacture difference and transgression through a repetitive
process of
hyperracial awareness, the positing of transraciality, and the
disavowal of
this prospect. During Jackson’s forty-five-year career, this
process cycled,
recycled, and continues to cycle through public discourse.
Bhabha also
claims that mimicry on the part of the colonized provides a
space for
sociopolitical resistance, calling out the careful construction of
colonial
discourse on false notions of dominant racial purity (86).
Jackson’s case
similarly suggests the limitations of gestures that preserve
racial categories
rather than deconstructing them, and his popularly presumed
discomfort in
his own body—and thus desire to become white—mitigates what
might be
seen as a more radical desire for racial dissolution.
His music, however, suggests the potential for racial
transcendence

in the realm of popular culture as it crisscrosses through various
racialized
genres. Jackson’s musical biography displays the hidden
interracial roots
of pop, as well as the vast knowledge many contemporary
performers have
of a variety of popular and folk musical traditions. For example,
his career
supposedly began not when joining his brothers in the Jackson
5, but when
singing the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic “Climb Ev’ry
Mountain”
from The Sound of Music at an elementary school talent show.
This event is
mythologized as the impetus for his father adding him to the
family band,
which soon became one of the most popular acts on black-
owned Motown
Records. Although Motown was important as a musical and
economic setting
created by blacks for blacks, its consumer base was largely
white (Neal, “Sold
Out” 117). What is unclear about this “crossover,” however, is
how to account
for the broader nonblack audience of color that also would have
encountered
the Jackson 5 once they entered into the phantasmatic—and not
white—
mainstream. Jackson left Motown in the mid-1970s and, as he
transitioned
into a solo career, continued to court a multiracial and
international roster
of fans. In fact, as Garofalo explains, it was his success
internationally that
precipitated his epic rise to fame in the United States and paved
the way for

other black artists such as Lionel Richie, Prince, Diana Ross,
Tina Turner,
and Whitney Houston (286).
It was with these and other artists that Jackson crafted a new
mainstream pop sound. Prior to the late 1970s, singular styles
would move
into the mainstream—such as swing and rock—often sustaining
alterations
in their sonic, racial, or cultural makeup as they did so. But
with the
emergence of artists like Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince,
and Jackson’s
26 Tamara Roberts
sister Janet, the public began to catch a glimpse of the
culmination of decades
of cross-racial popular music consumption. These artists all
pulled from a
variety of musical practices that were, according to the
industry’s racial
taxonomy, both black and white.4 For his part, Jackson’s songs
frequently
blended African American traditions such as gospel (“Will You
Be There”),
funk (evident in the repetitive bass grooves of “Billie Jean” and
“Thriller”),
R&B (ballads such as “You Are Not Alone”), hip-hop (“Jam”),
and his vocal
exclamations came straight out of a tradition of soul singers.
His music also
contained stylistic resonances with several genres dominantly
racialized as

white, most notably rock (“Beat It” and “Dirty Diana”), New
Wave, and
techno in his use of synthesizers, especially string and horn
samples, and
sequencing as a compositional tool.5
In reality, when he supposedly integrated MTV in 1982, Jackson
did
not racially cross over but redefined what the mainstream was: a
space in
which an interracial and intercultural musical past gets filtered
through a
hyperracial frame. After all, the 1980s and early 1990s industry
remained
a segregated amalgamation of rock, newly emerging grunge
rock, R&B,
and hip-hop. While black and white artists both held space in
popular
discourse, their output remained segregated on different radio
stations, music
television programs, and sales charts. In fact, to defend why
they were not
playing more black artists in their early rotations, MTV
executives used
the semantic distinction between rock and R&B as justification,
indicating
the still strongly held racialization of these genres (Garofalo
280). By the
time Jackson ascended to the height of stardom in this era, he
had—
along with producers such as Quincy Jones and Bill Botrell—
shrewdly
perfected a sound that consisted of the transracial base that was
his musical
heritage punctuated by carefully wielded hyperracial sounds
such as hard

rock guitar and rap vocals. Ultimately, however, while Jackson
pointed the
way to moving past rigid musico-racial categories, the manner
in which he
incorporated these sounds inadvertently made it difficult for
this space to
be genuinely realized.
A Dirty Duet
A music lover and cultural innovator, it is no surprise that
Jackson
was acquainted with the musical fads of his time. But he also
knew
well how to capitalize on them in order to make his music
appeal to
increasingly greater segments of the population. As Craig
Werner suggests,
“The unprecedented popularity of his videos complemented a
musical
strategy crafted to increase the white rock audience that heard
Off the Wall
as near-disco” (273). To bridge this gap—and likely personal
affinity, as
well—Jackson released several singles making prominent use of
electric
guitar, most notably in “Beat It,” “Dirty Diana,” and “Black or
White.”
And he enlisted the help of some of the biggest hard rock
guitarists of the
time to play on them, including Eddie Van Halen and Slash

from Guns
N’ Roses, capitalizing on their already established image and
audiences.
I will return to “Black or White” in a bit, but here wish to
discuss the
particular representational strategies Jackson employs in the
former two
songs.
Jackson won two Grammy Awards for “Beat It,” and the song
was
instrumental in making his 1982 Thriller a success. The song
opens with
what sounds like several gong strikes and the start of an urgent
but subtle
drumbeat. Van Halen’s now classic guitar riff—with just the
right balance
of syncopation and straight hits—provides the first melodic
content, clearly
establishing a claim over the sonic space of the track. Another
guitar enters
(not Van Halen) and plays a simpler counterpoint to the main
riff. As
Jackson enters singing the first verse, the guitars form an
accompaniment
woven of interlocking patterns, including a persistent rhythm
guitar part
supported by several synthesizers. Jackson moves to the chorus
and Van
Halen’s riff returns, a rhythmic counterpart to Jackson’s
alternation between
percussive vocals and sustained notes. In place of a sung bridge,
Van
Halen launches into a guitar solo that is a classic example of
heavy metal
“shredding,” employing distortion, high squealed notes,

intensive scale runs
and tremolos, and strategically placed glissandi. In all, the
incursion of the
electric guitar gave a harder edge to Jackson’s funky pop sound.
And it was
successful in getting the track played on white rock stations,
although some
listeners called to complain about the broadcast of “black”
music (Day and
Martens).
“Dirty Diana” (1988) presents a simpler incorporation of
electric
guitar in its tale of an obsessive fan’s sexual desires. The song
opens with
a gong sound reminiscent of “Beat It,” followed by the sound of
digitally
processed wind. A crowd screams, and we get the sense that we
are at
a live performance with Diana lurking nearby. The main
accompaniment
begins: a slow bassline and spare drum track with a subtly
nagging ride
pattern. On top, Jackson sings a few vocable ad-libs, the guitar
matching
his mood and sparseness. As he moves into the opening verse,
Jackson
grows more passionate and begins to sing louder and with more
abandon.
The guitar plays angular rhythmic patterns that build in time
with Jackson.
28 Tamara Roberts

The chorus erupts with Jackson and guitar singing/playing the
melody an
octave apart, although the distortion on the guitar makes it seem
slightly
off from the vocals. In all, the guitar is not all that adventurous,
merely
mirroring Jackson’s voice; the instrument is present more for its
timbre than
any melodic or harmonic additions.
In both songs, the guitar is a singular voice against a more
generalized
backing texture. The instrument is exploited for its unique sonic
properties
and pushed to the extreme in an almost overdramatic illustration
of the
genre it represents. This gesture establishes a unique audio
profile for
the songs as distinct from Jackson’s standard transracial pop
sound. And, in
the case of “Dirty Diana,” the guitar provides a rock “sheen” to
a song that—
because of the minimal integration of the instrument—could be
rendered
cohesively without it. The visual components associated with
the song tell
a similar tale. Van Halen does not appear in the music video for
“Beat It,”
further emphasizing the extreme focus on the timbre of the
electric guitar
and, perhaps, rock listeners’ extant elision of his instrument,
technique,
and persona. “Dirty Diana,” however, does feature two guitar
players on
stage with Jackson. These musicians—one male and the other
female—are

dressed in the tight leather pants and massive hairdos associated
with rock
and metal bands. Jackson apes their style, wearing tight pants
adorned with
excessive metal hardware and a curly mullet only slightly
smaller than the
guitarists’. All three figures do a fair amount of head banging to
accentuate
their musical exhortations.
But despite the ability of Jackson and guests to dialogue, the
racial
transgression is temporary. Boundaries are supposedly blurred
as Jackson
performs whiteness and the rock artists groove with black soul.
The excessive
marking of this genre as an addition to the songs, however,
draws attention
away from the rock already inherent in Jackson’s sound,
suggesting that it is
in need of outside supplementation. It is interesting to contrast
these early
uses of electric guitar to the way Jackson planned to incorporate
it into his
This Is It tour (2009). In the documentary detailing this
concert’s production
process, the tour’s guitarist—young Australian appears quite
frequently. She
plays on many of the songs, sometimes as a lead voice, other
times in the
supporting ensemble. But, most importantly, she is just part of
the band:
visually present like the rest of the group and stepping into the
spotlight
when needed. Jackson highlights her playing in a key moment
during “Black

or White,” in which she is to play a dramatic unaccompanied
solo. In one
moment, he coaches her on this solo, vocally illustrating
examples of the
types of contours he would like her to play. Orianthi attempts to
match
his example but is a bit too timid and unable to fully let loose.
Jackson’s
knowledge of rock conventions becomes clear as he tries to
coax a convincing
solo from her, relying on the rock image she embodies but also
actively
crafting it.
Yet two decades before, in an era in which the mainstream was
more
racially segregated, Jackson donned the physical and acoustic
clothes of
white rock artists in “Beat It” and “Dirty Diana.” He could not
legitimately
be rock to a consumer base and thus had to find other (white)
artists
who could, preserving the black/white musical dichotomy.6
While Van
Halen forged new territory in “Beat It”—but remained a sound
without
a face—the “Dirty Diana” guitar simply sat there, functioning
primarily
as a timbral indication of White Rock. This fact is all the more
ironic
given the reality of rock as a fundamentally African American

tradition,
despite its racial coding as white. Jackson’s transracial pop
sound—and his
later This Is It presentation of rock expertise—reflects this
history, but it
is overshadowed by the hyperracial whiteness of rock in all its
in/authentic
theatricality.
Jamming with Blackness
With slightly different dynamics, Jackson also called on the
representational power of hip-hop in several songs, including
“This
Time Around” and “Unbreakable” with the Notorious B.I.G.
(the later one
posthumously), “Serious Effect” with LL Cool J, “2 Bad” with
Shaquille
O’Neal, “Jam” with Heavy D, and a remix of “You Rock My
World” featuring
Jay-Z. While there may be a desire to read these collaborations
as a “natural”
exchange between black artists, his choice of guests again
showcased a keen
sense for enlisting the genre’s hottest voices. Jackson also
chose artists
strategically for each project, selecting, for example, Biggie to
rap about
“gun-totin” and “indo smoke” in the paranoid antiestablishment
“This Time
Around” and having LL Cool J rap about the dangerously
seductive object
of affection in “Serious Effect.”
Already a mainstream success, interracially palatable Heavy D
performs on the feel-good “Jam” (1992). The song opens with

the sound
of breaking glass followed by a beat rife with heavy kick drum,
turntable
scratches, and synthesized string hits—clear indicators of an
attempt at
evoking a hip-hop aesthetic. Several overlapping effect-laden
voices repeat
“jam” and “you wanna get up,” which Jackson begins to
punctuate with
percussive exhalations. He starts to sing a verse that calls for
nations to
30 Tamara Roberts
come together to face common problems, ultimately saying “we
must live
each day like it’s the last / go with it / go with it / jam / it ain’t
too much
stuff.” Heavy D comes in for a rap interlude in the bridge
section and, much
like traditional MC cameos, hypes Jackson as “The Man” and
says little
else that relates to the rest of the song’s lyrics. After this
moment, Jackson
returns to the chorus and D enters one last time repeating nine
times “it ain’t
too hard for me to jam.”
The music video pairs these lyrics with scenes of urban decay.
After
an animated opening in which the letters J, A, and M are “spray
painted”
in the frame, à la graffiti, the camera pans through empty lots
full of trash

and burning tires, catches a boy using an old easy chair as a
makeshift
trampoline, and finds Jackson dancing (to a ghetto blaster) in an
abandoned
warehouse/dance studio. Amidst this environment, the video
focuses on a
variety of images of black boys and men; groups of young men
with no shirts
play basketball and break-dance, for example. But the
hyperperformance of
black masculinity comes from the appearance of Michael
Jordan, who ends
up shooting hoops and trading dance moves with Jackson. To
round out the
cast, D appears during his interlude, as do preteen hip-hop duo
Kriss Kross,
who silently dance around D and later with Jackson. There is a
lone shot of
girls playing Double Dutch, as well as several inactive semi-
close-up shots
of a young woman. But the majority of the video clearly indexes
black urban
masculinity.
What is striking in the song and video are the ways in which
Jackson
is set apart from the other black men. On the verses, his vocal
style differs
from his standard lilting falsetto peppered with staccato
interjections. He
instead speak-sings in a harsh but hushed tone, sounding more
like a stream
of prose than poetic lyrics. This style moves Jackson’s vocals
closer to rap
but not quite; he still organizes his voice around melodic
pitches, although

he sings long strings of words on a single note and within a
minimal
range. But his vocalizations register even more as an
approximation of
MCing when heard in contrast to Heavy D’s buoyant interlude,
in which
he emphasizes the rhythm of words rather than vocal pitch.
Jackson’s
incomplete approach toward the particular brand of black
masculinity
that surrounds him also occurs when he silently apes the
somewhat
stereotypical wide-stance, rounded arm posture, and “pimp
walk” of a hip-
hop artist. These gestures greatly differ from his usual
movement vocabulary,
showing in an almost minstrel fashion the putting on of
hyperracial
gestures.
Jackson’s blackness and masculinity are ultimately presented as
insufficient and/or inauthentic in the ways in which he is paired
with Jordan
in the music video. In the 1990s, Jordan himself exploded as a
superstar,
transracial in his global appeal. Yet he also presented the
hyperracial big,
black athlete stereotype, thus fitting into rather than contesting
the limited
roles for black men in mainstream popular culture. Like the
inclusion of
hip-hop musicians, Jordan’s appearance provides the video with

“street
cred,” particularly due to the resonances of basketball as a
black, urban
sport. Jackson is depicted as lacking in the elements Jordan
provides in
abundance. In a number of scenes, he struggles to keep up while
playing
ball with Jordan, unable, for example, to intercept the ball
Jordan dribbles
and tries to keep from him. Rather than putting himself out too
much,
Jackson playfully jumps on Jordan’s back and crawls between
his legs. Only
with the aid of a ladder is he finally able to make a basket.
Jackson fares
slightly better when, in very brief shots, he is able to hold his
own in a group
of young black men playing ball. But in two shots in which we
clearly see
him make baskets—once by kicking it backwards with his
foot—they are
the result of camera tricks, suggesting he requires “magic” in
order to rival
the marvel that is Jordan. Black and in blackface—through his
mimicry
of the hip-hop artists and ballplayers—Jackson must employ
others to make
up for his racial deficiency.
Despite the racial dynamics of this video, and his shifting
phenotype,
Jackson never disavowed his blackness. He continued to present
himself
rhetorically as a black man in his music and other projects, most
notably in
“Black or White,” which I discuss below. In a number of videos,

he played
opposite black women as love interests, for example, and he
starred in the
movie version of the musical The Wiz (1978), an Afro
adaptation of The
Wizard of Oz. In all, he neither assimilated into the mainstream
by letting go
of his blackness nor segregated his practice to a monoracial
niche market.
Yet the popular conception of Jackson was that he was
perpetually acting out
a desire to be something other than black or, never quite
successfully, white.
Considering this discourse, “Jam” posed his blackness as weak
or aberrant,
outside of the “natural” progression from jazz to funk to the
hyperracial male
blackness of hip-hop. Heavy D’s skin tone is arguably close to
Jackson’s light
hue; but in sound and demeanor, they could not be further apart.
As in his duets with rock in “Beat It” and “Dirty Diana,”
Jackson
and Black Hip-hop were in dialogue: he taught Jordan some of
his signature
choreography, for example. But Jordan struggled with this
nonathletic
form of movement, looking large and awkward as Jackson broke
down
32 Tamara Roberts
the steps and even pushed his tennis shoe (Air Jordan?) clad
feet into the

correct positions. The two figures and their respective varieties
of blackness
temporarily visited each other’s worlds, but there was no grand
coming
together under an umbrella of heterogeneity. The possibility of
representing
Jackson’s musico-racial hybridity was thus negated, for “black”
music simply
could not hold his Otherness. Ultimately, what was clearly an
attempt by
Jackson to connect with the contemporary musical blackness of
hip-hop
resulted in a separation.
Beyond Humanity
If Jackson’s musical base was devoid of both hyperracial sonic
whiteness and blackness, electric guitar and rap combined
should make
it whole again. In “Black or White” (1991), he did just this,
hyperracially
connoting a tale of transracial humanity. In the opening two
verses of the
song, Jackson unfolds a first-person narrative in which he
denounces racism
and promotes interracial relationships:7 “I took my baby on a
Saturday bang /
But is that girl with you? Yes we’re one and the same / Now I
believe in
miracles and a miracle has happened tonight.” Taking his
girlfriend out on
a date, Jackson is questioned as to whether she is “with” him by
a passerby.
The framing of this question—if she is rightfully in his
possession—recalls
the historical trope of the white female as victim of black male

sexuality,
a narrative used to justify lynching and other racist acts. In
response,
Jackson proclaims they are “one and the same,” a universalist
“miracle”
that effectually denounces both the racism and misogyny in the
stranger’s
statement. He then turns the spotlight on his own identity,
singing, “They
print my message in the Saturday Sun / I had to tell them I ain’t
second to
none / And I told about equality / And it’s true, either you’re
wrong or you’re
right.” In a moment of racial pride, Jackson tells the papers he
is equal to the
rest of humanity and that the verity of this fact is indisputable.
Both verses
are punctuated by the exhortation of the title, ultimately ending
with him
claiming, “If you’re thinking of being my brother / It don’t
matter if you’re
black or white.”
Musically, the song opens with an exuberant solo guitar fanfare
followed by its signature electric guitar riff, punctuated by
Jackson’s vocal
exclamations of “ow!” and a sample of what appears to be a
sexy lion
growl. The guitar line repeats numerous times and provides the
primary
melodic and harmonic content of the song, supported by a
bouncy bassline
and percussion tracks. The riff remains an almost constant
presence, except

in the bridge section that features a different guitar solo and the
hip-hop
interlude that follows. In this segment, a voice that is not
Jackson’s raps
about how race provides a rallying point for “gangs, clubs, and
nations” but
also strains human interactions. Ultimately, the MC claims
racism has made
“the bright get duller / I’m not gonna spend my life being a
color.” Here,
the accompaniment drops down to percussion supported by a
subtler and
primarily rhythm guitar part, a sparser texture akin to a late
1980s or early
1990s hip-hop sound.
The music video for “Black or White” even more explicitly
trumpets
a celebratory multiculturalism. Jackson spends the first two
verses of the
song dropping into various groups of ethnic dancers and joining
in an Epcot
Center-esque dance jam. Wearing a nondescript black-and-white
costume,
Jackson becomes an Everyman for the late twentieth century—a
global
citizen equally at home cavorting on a soundstage with ornately
attired
Thai women, in an anachronistic Native-American celebration,
at a busy
metropolitan traffic intersection with a lone classical Indian
performer, and
in the bush with generic African tribesmen. After wrapping up a

snow-
covered romp with a Russian male folk troupe, the video cuts to
a shot of
two babies, one black and one white, sitting on a model of the
earth and
playing with a snow globe that supposedly contains Jackson and
the Russian
dancers.
This idyllic scene of interracial/cultural celebration is soon
inter-
rupted, however, with an abrupt shift to flames, images of war,
and burning
crosses. Highlighting the violent intrusions that rallying behind
racial and
other difference can promote in our lives, the narrative turns
into a discussion
of frustration. In a dramatic bridge section, Jackson sings,
I am tired of this devil
I am tired of this stuff
I am tired of this business
So when the going gets rough
I ain’t scared of your brother
I ain’t scared of no sheets
I ain’t scared of nobody
Girl when the going gets mean

34 Tamara Roberts
Jackson denounces the legacy of intolerance and racial violence
in an
exasperated tone. This long-standing vexation, though, gives
him the
strength to say that he is no longer afraid of tactics of racial
intimidation such
those used by as the Ku Klux Klan. Later, he even criticizes
closet racists,
saying, “Don’t tell me you agree with me / When I saw you
kicking dirt in
my eye,” a poetic cut at knee-jerk antiracism. It is important to
note that
Jackson rhetorically places himself in contrast to these tactics
of violence
and intimidation. While popular discourse may have questioned
his racial
authenticity, he speaks from a position of the disenfranchised
rather than an
elite, easy-to-promote-diversity perspective.
Jackson and producers use the two defining sounds of white and
black music in the 1990s—rock guitar and rap—to sonically
support the
song’s message of racial coexistence.8 Even more, for the first
time, we see
and hear the transracial instead of merely temporary racial
transgression.
Before the song proper, a different guitar riff appears in a
spoken scene in
which a boy’s father yells at him to turn his music (the guitar)
down. This
guitar part is performed by Slash, the mixed black-and-white
Guns N’ Roses

guitarist. The song’s main riff is sometimes credited to Slash,
others times
to Bill Botrell, the white coproducer of the song. The rap was
written by
Botrell and performed, in various accounts, by either Botrell or
black rapper
L.T.B. In the video, the rap is lip-synced by white actor
Macaulay Culkin,
further muddying racial lines. Slash’s presence indicates the
possibility of
Black Rock, particularly in that his first playing is indicted in
the standard
narrative of the “unruly” music to which “the kids these days”
listen. And
the circulating credit confusions suggest that, for many critics
and casual
Wikipedia writers, a black rocker or white rapper are both
viable.
The challenge for this song, however, is that again Jackson is
constructed as outside of the happy hyperracial union. His
kinesthetic
world tour relies on the theatrical display of racial, cultural,
geographic,
and even temporal difference for visual interest and narrative
cohesion.
And the emphasis on the dancers’ brightly colored costumes and
distinctive
movement styles makes this difference tangible in a heightened
fashion.
At the same time, these distinctive traditions are placed back-
to-back to
emphasize their universality: while we do so in different ways,
we all like
to get down. This same interchangeability is captured in the
final musical

moments of the video, in which a cast of multiracial actors’
heads morph into
one another’s while they lip-sync to the song’s outro. This
phenotypic fluidity
confirms the universalist message. Yet the ability to transcend
racial/cultural
boundaries also requires the visible—and often heightened—
appearance of
race in order to showcase this transcendence.
Jackson, though, is able to move freely between these groups,
phenotypically ambiguous and able to perform all of their
dances, channeling
them through his personal vocabulary. His ability to flow
between categories
showcases the artifice of racial categories. And while the
guitar/rap blend
simplistically symbolizes interracial harmony, Jackson’s
underlying pop
context stands in contrast as a true sonic vision of racial
transcendence. The
racial structures Jackson passes through remain, however,
limiting the impact
of his transracial abilities. Thus, in the video, the song ends and
the camera
pans to a black panther that exits the soundstage in a dark alley.
The cat
morphs into Jackson, and he performs a dance routine in which
he smashes
windows, simulates masturbation, and repeatedly yells/growls.
Rather than

end on a happy note, Jackson chose to punctuate the song with a
vision of un-
resolved angst and the sense that interracial and multicultural
happiness is a
façade.
The response to this routine was quite poor, with critics
questioning
the purpose of the additional scene and viewers complaining
about elements
they found to be inappropriate (Pareles 9; Burnett and Deivert
19). To
justify Jackson’s destruction, graffiti of swastikas and various
racial slurs
was edited onto the windows in later versions of the full video.
It thus
became a more palatable antiracism that fueled Jackson’s rage,
rather than a
vaguely defined anger. Jackson claimed he was just performing
movements
he considered panther like and apologized to his fans for acting
in a way
they found unseemly. While this statement could clearly have
been motivated
by a practical need to save face, what is striking is the way he
jumped to
proclaiming a nonhuman identity as the solution to the problem
with his
violent outburst. By editing in the racist epithets, Jackson’s
anger was
confined and antiracism became the safer and more polite
expression.
The complex racial negotiation one hears in his music was
obscured by
a reactionary multiculturalism that denounced racism but not
necessarily

the broader racial—and racist—structure. The notion of
transracial unity
became hyperracial in itself, wielded as a static image rather
than a living,
hybrid practice.
After Jackson’s death, numerous voices in the popular press
touted
his work as having shattered racial barriers, appealing to a
range of
consumers, and paving the way for other black artists into
mainstream
media outlets such as MTV. I believe, however, he was not
transgressive
by simply being a black musician who became widely popular
but
36 Tamara Roberts
in the more deep-rooted ways in which he unseated racial
musical
assumptions. Jackson challenged racial boundaries as a “pop”
artist who
continually negotiated the territory between performing and
transcending
race.
Long Live the King
In 2001, Destiny’s Child released their smash single
“Bootylicious,”
a song celebrating the hyperracial “thickness” of the singers’
black female
bodies. The trio’s video for the song features costuming and

choreography
modeled on several of Jackson’s videos, including his signature
“fanning
the crotch” flourish and fedora thrown to the side. What is most
striking in
light of this article, however, are the sonic resonances with
Jackson’s work.
On their respective verses, Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland,
and Michelle
Williams sing in clipped, heavily glottal phrases. The track is
supported by a
funk-laden beat constructed out of highly processed drum
samples. And the
song features a prominent guitar sample from Stevie Nicks’s
“Edge of Sev-
enteen” (1982), bringing the classic rock riff into a twenty-first
century R&B
context (Nicks also appears briefly in the opening moments of
the song’s
video). In all, “Bootylicious” is a perfect example of the
multiracial/cultural
legacy of Jackson’s pop kingdom, in which contemporary artists
not only
imagine a vast world of racialized sounds in their library but
also weave
them together with self-conscious acknowledgment of their
juxtaposition.
It is no wonder that, reportedly, Jackson appreciated the song,
even singing
the lyrics when he encountered Destiny’s Child at an event
(“Destiny’s
Child”).
Jackson’s sonic mash-up of the previous 30 years of popular
music
history resonates loud and clear in the contemporary pop artists

of our time.
His music transcends the racialized categories that drive the
music industry,
blending styles historically labeled black and white into an
interracial
formation. At the same time, his music features heightened and
static
images of race that serve as currency within the industry and
foils to his
hybrid base. The Jackson-influenced mainstream, then, is both
progressive
and regressive—and the conversation between these two
political poles.
Popular music is the culture this tension produces, pointing the
path toward
new ways of hearing race in the twenty-first century while
providing the
very tools to resist this transcendence. Michael Jackson held
sway over
this realm and experienced the results of these two extremes.
How we
now choose to remember his legacy will determine whether his
music
is given the power to confirm what we think we know, or open
our
minds.
Notes
1. This piece began as a short paper for the symposium Michael
Jackson:

Critical Reflection on a Life and a Phenomenon, hosted by the
Center for Race
and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley, in October
2009. I extend my
gratitude to Alisa Bierria for inviting me to participate, as well
as Rashida Braggs,
Brandi Catanese, Claudia Roberts, Elisha Roberts, Dez Roberts,
and Tanya Saracho
for their assistance in developing this article.
2. I make the terminological distinction here between “black” as
a racial
category and “African American” as cultural praxis. “Black
music,” then, is a
racially constructed industry category that can overlap but does
not equate with
“African American music: Afro Asian Musical Politics,”
Northwestern University,
2009.
3. I discuss these ideas in significantly greater detail in my
dissertation,
“Musicking at the Crossroads of Diaspora.”
4. These artists also called on other nonwhite traditions, but
these, for
the most part, were less holistically integrated and served more
as explicit
markers of racial/cultural difference. See Madonna’s “La Isla
Bonita” (1987), for
example.
5. Let me be clear that I am talking about sound and the
racialization
of sound, not the integration of the larger structures of the
music industry.

Towards an Ethics of Creative SoundJ A M ES A N D E A N.docx

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