Conference Agenda

This talk explores the contingencies of sounded emotionality through a consideration of the genre of “emo rap,” its creative origins and racial politics. Emo rap is a subgenre of hip hop whose coinage in the early 2010s coincided with young, white rappers using Auto-Tune to sing their raps. Though the groundwork for this sound had been laid by non-white artists in the years preceding the coinage, in particular Kanye West"s 808s and Heartbreak, Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon, and Drake’s Take Care, I show how white rappers’ work was, initially, more readily and celebratorily heard as emotional. I show how white performers (Yung Lean, Mac Miller, Lil Peep), when they took up emo-rap’s vocality, sound, and thematic content, were treated in the press with a kind of sensitivity and reverence often denied Black performers, especially Black performers from lower class backgrounds, and/or with lower-class indices in their lyrics and videos. Emo rap cohered around the practices of mostly Black hip hop performers and engineers, but was labeled as “emo” once white performers in the mainstream started producing similar work with similar sonic themes, which I hear as indicative of the ways popular conceptions of “emotion”-- especially when standing in for depression and anxiety – imaginatively belong to whiteness, and remain under-recognized as part of Black life. The “empire of emotion” evoked in Yung Lean’s 2013 song “Kyoto” is not figurative, it is literal: it is a system of governance for emotional worlds and mental health that operates unequally across realms of sonic culture as much as it does in medical care. By examining the way Auto-Tune hip hop vocality articulates through racialized and gendered hearings that more readily recognize whiteness as aligned with full emotional range, I aim to challenge modes of listening that overdetermine the relations of race, sound, and emotion.

Institutionalized musical archives, such as those hosted at museums and university/public libraries, are valuable resources, holding significant discursive power over the production of musical historiographies, cultural identities, and scholarship. Yet, who gets to be archived and institutionalized and, more importantly, where and how these bodies are placed and framed in an archive and consequential matters warrant further discussions. For this, I will discuss my experience of finding Asian American women punks in institutionalized archives about two intersected yet distinctive subcultural musical movements: queercore and riot grrrl. This presentation will touch on the significance of having these bodies archived, the problems of misplacing them, and the politics and ethical challenges behind archiving practices, especially when it comes to working with multiply marginalized communities/narratives. Simultaneously considering the politics of appearance and disappearance, I propose a method that I call “turning to the fringes of fringes” to centralize what is outside of and between musical counter-discourses. By identifying forgotten and misplaced Asian and Asian American sounds and bodies, I offer a critique of the narrative construct of riot grrrl by looking at NYU’s Riot Grrrl Collection, Cornell University’s Riot Grrrl Zine and Music Collection, and DC Public Library's DC Punk Archive. Doing so, I call attention to the issue of reproducing and constructing fringes of fringes through public memories, popular discourses, and institutionalized archives. While it is a common demand to reconstruct punk narratives by recognizing erased bodies, this presentation calls attention to the dangers of accepting this interpellation at the expense of further erasing those who never fully belonged to an established framework of musical narratives. Additionally, with the increasing presence of contemporary Asian American punk and indie rock musicians, this presentation also discusses the significance and limits of co-cultural strategies developed by The Linda Lindas, an Asian & Latinx teen band recently much celebrated as a leading force driving the riot grrrl movement into a new era, posing unique challenges and opportunities to (re)conceptualize punk narratives.

This talk explores how disability (read through disease, distress, disorder) is articulated through what I term “hyperactive temporalities” (tempo, rhythm, meter, choreography) in a myriad of punk productions. I unpack the historical, social, medical-diagnostic, and musico-analytic treatments of “hyperactivity” in the 1980s via punk temporalities in conversation with Reagan-era disciplinary policies and slashing of mental health services. More specifically, I consider punk & neuroatypical processing of time, especially around the historical moment in the United States that saw the development of the hardcore genre, which roughly aligns with a steep rise in ADD (attention deficit disorder) and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) diagnoses, as well as medication-based treatments (often with stimulants). Still, who was listened to and thus labeled “disabled” vs. “a problem child” depended on 1) the political terms of a society fixated on visual markers of identity with devalued attention to mental health (e.g., neurodivergence, intellectual and developmental disabilities, substance abuse and addiction) and 2) authenticity garnered from the medical-industrial complex’s diagnostic evaluation, making it easy for many to fall through the cracks. Moreover, who was diagnosed with behavioral issues and whether treatments were available were very much skewed along racial, gender, and class lines. Exploring the formative role of medical infrastructures and the pharmaceutical industry in Reagan-era biopolitics that helped amplify some “resistant” voices—or what I refer to as the aural-temporalization of the era’s neuropolitics, I draw examples from the film The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) and songs from bands (e.g. Black Flag, the Germs, the Dead Kennedys) to argue that punk has been a space defined by “disability as diversity” (Andrews 2020) where diversity is something heard and felt—and processed—over time. By rewriting disability, as diversity, into the seminal California punk narrative of the late 1970s and early 1980s, I hope to complicate the myth of homogeneity that shapes punk and hardcore representations while also recognizing the limitations of this argument given punk’s foundational multiply marginalized participants as yet another facet of the intersecting political, medical, and societal complexes through which emotional and affective states are claimed, sonorized, and processed musically.