Toby Stanford

Lost, borrowed and stolen voices: how have these three notions of voice been used critically in
recent discourse to understand musical practice, composition and reception?

You may want to focus on postmodern practices, or to focus on musical examples from your own
experience and preference.

To ‘borrow’ or ‘steal’, or even to ‘lose’, immediately calls into question ideas of authenticity. This
term ‘authenticity’ has become central to debates about popular music, and has come to evaluate
entire genres, with, for example, folk music seen as ‘authentic’ whereas pop music seen as
‘synthetic’. The problem goes further than this, delving into identity constructions. Around genres of
music there tend to spring up ‘imagined communities’, each of which mediate with wider social
constructions surrounding race, gender, and class which become evaluative principles as to whether
an artist can be judged to be ‘authentic’ or not; for example, the discourse surrounding Eminem, a
white hip-hop artist, tend to be centred on his race and how this affects his place in the community
(Born 2011). This assemblage of mediations and their implications on authenticity are inextricably
linked to actual musical practice and the presence of the voice within this wider framework and they
must be considered when conducting a comparative analysis of reworked – or remixed – material.

Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit is one of immense cultural significance, and as such has been
reworked many times. A song about the lynching of a black man, first performed at the racially
integrated Greenwich Village Café Society in 1939, it is necessarily loaded with ‘political context and
powerful social content’, and before examining it in relation to any other work we must first
consider the role and position of Holiday’s own voice in the song. The voice can be seen relating to
the lyrical content in four ways; first, as subject in the lyrical narrative, with the voice functioning as
a ‘speaking subject for the lyrics’ by adopting the role of character or narrator, and often switching
from one character to another thus ‘adopting more than one voice’; second, as a vehicle of social
communication, as the subject might ‘communicate a social message, describe a situation, express
and emotion’; third, as participating in musical codes, conventions, or styles, in that the lyrics are
present in context with the musical content, and as such the voice has an active presence in
determining structure, melody, harmony, and timbre; and finally as a member of the instrumental
ensemble as the voice ‘participates in an active musical texture’ and presented in dialogue with the
‘interplay of musical ideas conveying meaning’ (Burns, Woods 2004).

Holiday’s voice in Strange Fruit fits neatly into this analytical framework. Primarily acting as a
narrative voice, her own subjective positioning and historical context as a black female artist in the
first half of the 20th Century lends the telling of the story an authentic touch. Her own ‘patinated’,
grained voice combined with her use of African American Vernacular English (dropping the ‘n’ on
‘swingin’’ and ‘hangin’’) lending it the authenticity of a living black voice (Barthes 1974), a voice
suitably positioned to detail the lived experience of black people in America at this time. Lyrically
narrative as it may be, perhaps most pertinent is the voice as a vehicle of social communication in
Strange Fruit, with Holiday conveying her bitter, incendiary message and lyrical drama through
‘careful enunciation and word emphasis’ (Burns 2004). Here, she takes a teleological approach,
allowing the message to become ever clearer as the song continues. This is achieved through her
emphasis on natural imagery in the first half of the verse; she gives words with natural connotations
longer rhythmic values, whereas expressions carrying the human and social implications are passed
over quickly (‘blood on the…’ in line 2 is elided into semiquaver triplets). As the verse goes on,
however, the human implications are brought to the fore, with ‘southern’ and ‘swingin’’ in line 3
noted with melodic elaboration and swung rhythms, and finally in line 4 ‘hangin’’ is emphasised on
the strong third beat, as the apotheosis of the lyrical content. All of this is framed by the ensemble,
which centres Holiday’s voice not only timbrally, but also by creating a sense of anticipation with a
prolonged instrumental introduction, including a 27-second-long trumpet solo, and 43 seconds
 Toby Stanford

devoted to the piano. Holiday mediates within the ensemble, and with musical convention, as an
innovator in jazz vocalisation. Her melodic inflection is masterful in word emphasis, ‘enhancing the
more active and poignant words’ such as the verb ‘bear’, which is elaborated onto the active
contrapuntal scale degree 4 (Eb), stepping down onto ‘strange’ on scale degree 3 (D) (Burns 2004).
Moreover, her use of non-chord tones in the emotional climax of the final verse evidences her
mastery of using improvisation techniques to drive the structure of the song itself.

Through this we can see how Holiday’s voice conducts and undergoes a series of mediations with the
ensemble, a wider social context, and identity constructions, and we can also make the argument for
her recovering ‘lost’ voices of those suffering at the hands of systemic American racism, as pertinent
today as in 1939. How, then, can such a voice be ‘borrowed’, or even ‘stolen’? To understand this, its
imperative first to understand what there is to be stolen in such a voice. Strange Fruit, with its
evocative, challenging lyricism, evokes ‘cultural memory’ with the memory of lynch mobs and the
treatment of black people in America driving the music, but the music also driving the memory,
functioning as a ‘reservoir where cultural memories reside’ (Ramsey 2003). The ‘implanting’ of a
cultural memory into the mind of the listener can be conceived as a ‘performative act of transfer’,
and act through which ‘individuals and groups constitute their identities by recalling a shared past’
(Hirsch, Smith 2002). This shared cultural memory, and the latent identity constructions therein,
inscribes the song with a value which might go some way to explaining the motivation for
‘borrowing’ these voices. One such borrowing is Tori Amos’ 1994 cover. Amos adapts the track into
her own style, but maintains the loose, languid character of the original, even retaining the minute-
long instrumental introduction, although in her version this is played solely on piano. Perhaps the
greatest difference between Holiday’s and Amos’ versions is the latter’ metric feel; she disrupts the
4/4 pattern, oscillating between 4/4, 5/4, and 6/4 in the first verse, holding us ‘in suspense,
temporally, not knowing when her vocal and pianistic events will happen’ (Burns 2004). Moreover,
she treats the final climax differently, reaching it before Holiday does at the end of line 3, and
lingering on the outcry for longer with more jarring melodic embellishment: an unexpected rise from
scale degree 5 to the #4 above in an unconventional gesture which articulates the pain of this final
verse more overtly than Holiday’s. It can be said that Amos shares in Holiday’s traumatic cultural
memory, invoking her own experiences of racism and gender discrimination she has encountered in
connection to her Native-American Cherokee Indian heritage. As such, both artist’s compose their
‘own “authentic” versions of the song’; Holiday’s as a ‘witness to the social scene’, and Amos’ as an
‘active remembering of a historical story by someone who carries cultural traumas from other
contexts’ (Burns 2004).

Voices, whether borrowed, stolen, or lost, have taken on a new meaning in the technological era,
and as interdependence between human and machine increases, the voice becomes increasingly
automated. The ‘posthuman’ voice has had widespread applications in music, be it through the use
of vocal synthesis with machines like the vocoder, or vocal samples, and in fact ‘in many areas of
recent music, the unaltered human voice has become an endangered species’ (Auner 2003). In some
sense, this could be interpreted as a loss of the human voice into the convoluted techno-
informational flows of the 21st Century, but, particularly in the case of black voices such as Holiday’s
and other non-hegemonic cultures, the posthuman transition can be considered a liberating force in
its breakdown of the ‘dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and
machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, privileged and cultured, making
‘oppositional international movements’ more difficult to substantiate (Auner 2003). Such a liberating
force is predicated on the deconstruction of the liberal subject, the Cartesian philosophy separating,
and privileging, the mind from and over the body; this ‘liberal subject’ is an inherently white
philosophy, as it implies the subject must already be ‘free from the will of others’, and thus excludes
those ‘cultural and political formations in which the history of subjectivity is necessarily yoked to the
will – and/or the whips and chains – of others’ (Weheliye 2002). As such, the technological remixing
 Toby Stanford

of the black voice in genres such as RnB, hip-hop, and funk are pivotal in redefining black humanity
on its own terms, rather than relying on white conceptions of the human; this can be seen with the
Afrofuturist movement, defined by artists including Sun Ra and Janelle Monae who define their
humanity on extra-terrestrial or cyborgian grounds, evidencing the seeking out of ‘forms of the
nonhuman otherworldliness [to] replace the human as the central characteristic of black subjectivity’
(Eshun 1998).

Strange Fruit is no exception to this rule, as its cultural significance and popularity, as well as its
place in defining the black musician and the black voice, has led to it being remixed in a variety of
genres, such as Kanye West’s Blood on the Leaves (2013) and Rapsody’s Nina (2019). One of the
most interesting reworkings of Strange Fruit is Alix Perez’s drum and bass remix Magnolias, released
in 2006. Significantly, Perez only takes Holiday’s vocals to use in the track, which he treats as a
sample to be chopped up, and sets it fairly far back in the mix, with the drums coming through most
prominently. Magnolias sees a complete recontextualization of Holiday’s vocals, set against very
faced paced acoustic breakbeats, a repeating, harmonically static, and optimistic major key piano
sample, as well as a punchy, repeated synth bassline. The way in which the words are chopped up
means the emphasis falls on ‘magnolias’ (hence the name of the track), with ‘strange fruits’ sounding
almost as an afterthought, usually arriving on beat 2. To return to the earlier lyrical analysis, this
shows an emphasis on the natural imagery itself, rather than the social implications therein, in an
altogether more optimistic rendition; with the track being so popular, the recognizable melody
immediately acts as a signifier to the cultural memory shared by drum and bass’s predominately
black community, and as such the implications of this vocal chopping is clear. Moreover, it is
important to understand the origins and functions of the genre this has been remixed into. Whilst
usual remixes of Strange Fruit are in the genres of hip-hop and RnB, both well known for their
participation in social messages; drum and bass, on the other hand, originated from the celebratory
Jamaican musical traditions of reggae and dub, and whilst they don’t shy away from social issues, the
lyrical content therein typically focusses on fostering a sense of community and joy. This ties into the
typical performance context of a track like Magnolias, which would be at a live electronic music
event, most likely specialising in drum and bass, and would be mixed with any number of tracks to
string together a long, continuous set, and perhaps even blended and played simultaneously with
other tracks to produce a unique flavour. With all of this considered, the posthuman remixing, and
subsequent mixing, doesn’t constitute a ‘loss’ of the voice. Instead, it can be said that this remixing
stands as an ‘active remembering’ of a cultural memory, and a newfound celebration of that culture
on its own terms.

Bibliography

Born, G (2011), Music and the Materialisation of Identities

L. Burns & A. Woods (2004), Authenticity, Appropriation, Signification: Tori Amos on Gender, Race, and
Violence in Covers of Billie Holiday and Eminem
Barthes, R (1974), S/Z: An Essay
Ramsey, G (2003), Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
Hirsch, M & Smith, V (2002), Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction
Auner, J (2003) Sing It For Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music
Weheliye, A, (2002), ‘Feenin’: Posthuman voices in contemporary black popular music
Eshun, K (1998), More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction