CMNS 321 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10-1: Stephin Merritt, Vocal Folds, Visual Rhetoric
13 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Blackvoice and adele"s racialized musical performance: blackness, whiteness, and. In the now iconic photographs, adele wears a tailored black gown, emphasizing the glow of the singer"s pale face against the dark background of the stage. Remarkably, these images of adele"s exaggerated visual whiteness spread in concert with an oppositional racial discourse, as fans and music writers began to question adele"s black sound. In fact, singer stephin merritt referenced an ongoing debate about racialized sounds when he argued that adele exemplified british people who sound like american. Classifications of musical genre often correspond to the perceived race of the performer, particularly in cases of non-white artists. Realized through grammy awards and billboard chart categories, generic distinctions not only influence the cultural understanding of popular music, they also contribute to the frequency of radio play and the subsequent financial benefits of musical ubiquity. As brackett (1994) argues, these charts historically privilege white performers in the.
