WILLIAM CHENG Dartmouth College Email:
[email protected] So You’ve Been Musically Shamed ABSTRACT In July 2014, an anonymous source leaked the raw audio of Britney Spears’s confessional ballad “Alien.” Haters pounced on this star’s denuded voice, gleefully seizing on the viral artifact as a smoking gun for Spears’s deficits and for the pop industry’s artistic fakeries more broadly. My paper situates this flashpoint of Spears-shaming within late-capitalist archives of public humiliation, cyberleaks, and the paternalistic scrutiny of women’s bodies and voices. KEYWORDS: critical theory, media studies, popular music A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. – monica lewinsky1 “Poor Britney Spears” is not the beginning of a sentence you hear often uttered in my household. – tony hoagland, “poor britney spears,” beginning of the poem2 In the summer of 2014, the internet sprang a musical leak. Suddenly circulating on YouTube was a video featuring the allegedly raw, non-Auto-Tuned sounds of Brit- 3 ney Spears singing her new album track “Alien.” Spears’s voice in this recording was noticeably off-key and off-kilter, like some abject artifact meant to be overwritten, for- gotten, abandoned on the cutting room floor. In the video’s comment threads, view- ers’ strident pronouncements of aching ears and melting brains swirled in a chorus of mockery. Haters pounced on the star’s denuded voice and offered it as airtight 1. Monica Lewinsky, “The Price of Shame,” TED Talks (2015), transcript available at http://www.ted.com/ talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame/transcript?language=en.