Conference Agenda

At the conclusion of her NPR TinyDesk performance, and with lipstick on her teeth, Chappell Roan declared “be bimbos, ladies, be bimbos!” She then launched into her final song, “Red Wine Supernova,” utilizing her expansive range and an array of timbral tools to convey queer desire.

In pop songs, the voice is dominant and therefore responsible for conveying the artists persona (Moore 2012; Frith 1996). The performance persona, or the sonic and visual projection of that identity, is framed socially and musically in order to inform listener perception (Auslander 2021). The Chappell Roan drag persona— a hyper-sexual, fabulous lesbian— is presented as an exaggerated and fantastical manifestation of a teenage girl’s latent queerness. In this paper, I argue that Roan’s vocal sound sonically expresses the overt hyperfemininity that her visual persona is putting on. Specifically, I focus on three main timbral qualities (Nobile 2022; Malawey 2020; Heidemann 2016) exhibited throughout her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (2023).

The visual performance of femme-drag can create separation between the performer and the character by its exaggeration of feminine aesthetics through glamorous costumes, bodysuits, large wigs, and over-the-top makeup (Coull 2019). The Chappell Roan persona, an AFAB drag queen, is complete with a voluminous red wig, subversive clown makeup, and supremely fabulous costumes. The extravagance “put on” through this persona reads as illusory, acting as a safeguard for which Roan can signal that the person singing about these queer escapist fantasies is not the ‘real’ her.

Midwest Princess explores themes of queerness and femininity that are expressed in the lyrics, tracks, and vocal timbre. For example, “Picture You” depicts a masturbatory fantasy, utilizing the yodel break in the climactic bridge, similarly evoking orgasmic climax. Breathiness signals arousal and the brightness/twang in the pre-chorus emphasizes the text, expressing an increase in momentum both sexually and formally. The application of these timbral markers in “Picture You” differ significantly from her lesbian-liberation anthems, like “Pink Pony Club,” highlighting the expressive capabilities of Roan’s vocals and the narrative potential of the Chappell Roan persona.

Reneé Rapp’s career took off following her performance at the Jimmy Awards in 2018, where she received the award for Best Performance by an Actress and was promptly cast as Regina George on Broadway. Soon after, she landed a TV spot on The Sex Lives of College Girls as another rich, mean, blonde girl named Leighton Murray. Rapp has since come out as a lesbian and often takes liberties with her mean girl roles, allowing her queerness to shine through. Given Rapp’s work in these roles as well as her words on her life as a queer woman, I interpret Rapp’s deeply personal 2023 album Snow Angel through a queer lens.

To Suzanne Cusick (1994), “‘being’ a ‘lesbian’... is a way of organizing the force field of power, pleasure, and intimacy that refuses the simple binary opposition male and female.” Cusick discusses a relationship with music where the boundaries of doing and being done to are porous, rather than the heteronormatively framed music-as-object and analyst-as-actor dynamic. For Rapp’s album, I take a lesbian relationship with music to mean non-conformity to stylistic norms and a joyful, gay discarding of musical shoulds and should-nots.

In this paper, I first discuss how Rapp subverts norms through the addition of non-sensical/unnecessary sections, which either ignore or actively thwart musical climax. Rapp also capitalizes upon metric norms and re-orients listeners to a queer conception of time by adding time to build-ups or rushing into the next section of the song. Finally, Rapp challenges, or heightens, timbral norms by emphasizing a variety of (typically non-primary) parameters as structurally important and expressive. Timbral heat maps measure intensity in given parameters that describe perceived vocal effort. Her non-normativity through aversion to typical formal norms, the creation of tension and play with time, and the use of timbre as a dramatic story-telling device result in catchy songs that can be mainstream yet also queerly manipulate space, time, and identity – both her own and the listeners.

This paper investigates Janelle Monáe’s (she/they) transforming music persona to convey how this portrayal delivers overt implications of racialized and gendered injustices. In her first three albums (2007–2010), Monáe portrays a messianic android challenging conformity. In Dirty Computer (2018), Monáe frees herself from the android narrative to prioritize self-expression. What does the android contribute to her musical expression, and what, then, do we gain in its place once the android is gone?

The term ‘robot’ originates from Karl Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots], and this word translates to “slave” (Jordan 2016). Monáe’s android—a robot with human appearances—confronts how society pushes underrepresented people towards conformity, and she invites us to consider how this representation reflects both historical and current perceptions of Black, queer individuals (Yates-Richard 2021). I present analyses of two of Monae’s music videos: “Tightrope (Feat. Big Boi)” (2010) and “Make Me Feel” (2018). Using Lafrance and Burns’ (2017) methodology, I propose a cross-domain analysis of the lyrics, music, and images. In the lyrical domain, I apply BaileyShea’s (2014) work on shifting modes of address to convey how Monáe’s lyrics become increasingly intimate. Musically, I demonstrate how Monáe draws from James Brown and Prince’s performance styles (Maultsby 2015) to amplify her own critiques of societal norms. Visually, I dissect the staging, framework, and gestures. My work demonstrates how Monáe’s android grapples with cultural perceptions of Black, queer people, and how shedding this persona allows her to express a more intimate portrayal of her lived experience.