Conference Agenda

Frank Ocean is often cast as “Alternative R&B” (Minvielle 2021) to the mainstream fare of artists like Usher and Chris Brown (Locker 2012). Nowhere is this refrain reprised more than in reviews of his platinum album Blond (2016), which critics have described as “psychedelic indie rock” (Powers 2016) and a “Prince-like infusion of gospel and soul” (Jonze 2016). Stirring as these critical appraisals may be, they lack the detailed musical analyses necessary to reveal the “alternative” songwriting and production practices Ocean undertakes. Through a thorough analysis of one track from Blond, “Self Control,” I reveal innovations that set the song apart musically from the mainstream.

The terminally climactic form in “Self Control” is extremely rare in R&B, but more common in alternative rock (Osborn 2013). Ocean’s non-recapitulatory ending, through its “combination of repetition and escalation,” behaves quite like a gospel “vamp” as identified by Braxton Shelley (2019, 185). This formal strategy serves Ocean’s lyrics better than would a standard recapitulatory ending. While Ocean pines over his ex-lover in the choruses, his repetitive mantra “I know you gotta leave,” escalates in volume throughout the terminal climax, implying acceptance and resignation.

A second alternative element, Ocean’s use of pitch-manipulated vocals, is a recurring timbre throughout Blond. To distinguish his timbre from the mainstream use of auto-tune and vocoder, Ocean employs the Prismizer, a vocal effect that adds inharmonic spectra “akin to the dispersion of light to a prism.”

My presentation reveals further compositional intricacies in “Self Control,” including hypermetric displacement (Biamonte 2014) that lends more of a “ii-centric” (Downham 2022) sound to the chorus by starting the section halfway through the previous chord loop, and several instances in which Ocean cannily exploits the “structural double-tonic complex” (BaileyShea 2007, Harrison 2016) between two equivalent four-note sonorities: the tonic Ab6 chord and the relative Fm7. I conclude that these experimental elements help Ocean achieve a rare, Radiohead-esque balance of commercial success and critical appeal: both of his studio albums went platinum, and both appear on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Trends in recent popular music are often driven by timbral and articulative practices both digital and acoustic, such as glottal stops, auto tune, or vocal flips. Mimetic analysis of timbre and vocal production in register breaking, for example (Heidemann 2016; Cox 2016; Malawey 2020), demonstrates that some examples conform to yodeling in definition and sonic practice (Platenga 2004; Baumann 2001). Yodeling is historically defined in broad and specific ways, but for the purposes of my work I define it as the practice of breaking a melodic line between chest and head/falsetto register over a single word or syllable. Following Wise 2016, I view yodeling as a verb versus a noun, allowing meaning to be strongly tied to practice. In this paper I argue that female-coded voices in popular music have redefined the yodel and its various expressive implications. I analyze sonic moments in popular music sung by female-coded voices from the last three decades to determine how yodelemes, as units of meaning (after Wise, 36), initiate cues about identity and expression. Yodelemes are defined by changes in tessitura, pitch embellishments, motility, and paralinguistic features, and these cues are tied to narrative and form-making.

Indian popular music has been widely studied from ethnomusicological perspectives, but relatively little attention has been given to its musical materials and organization. While it incorporates elements from Western popular music, it also retains deep roots in indigenous traditions. This paper examines how Indian pop blends Western and Indian formal conventions, focusing on a key structural feature: contrasting verses. By examining Indian pop’s formal conventions, this study sheds light on its negotiation of local and global influences. While aspects of Indian pop songs show Western influence, their contrasting verses reflect enduring ties to indigenous traditions.