A Natural Ear For Music

A Natural Ear for Music?
Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities

Author(s): Cassandra Loesert and Vicki Crowley
Source: Popular Music, Vol. 28, No. 3, Popular Music and Disability (Oct., 2009), pp. 411-423
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Popular Music (2009) Volume 28/3. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009, pp. 411-424
doi:10.1017/S0261143009990146
A natural ear for music? Hearing

(dis)abled masculinities
CASSANDRA LOESERt and VICKI CROWLEYJ

t Academic Development Research Education, Learning and Teaching Unit, University of South
Australia, St Bernards Road, Magill, SA, Australia, 5072
E-mail: cassandra.loeser@unisa.edu.au
fCommunications and Gender Studies, School of Communication, International Studies and

Languages, University of South Australia, St Bernards Road, Magill, SA, Australia, 5072
E-mail: vicki.crowley@unisa.edu.au
Abstract
Musical performances on the bass guitar, able to be felt bodily beyond the ear, connect into the
many layers of affect that music excites; but they are particularly potent as a means of
communicating embodied masculinity for one young man with a hearing disability. Mascu-
linity as a social code enacted within practices of the everyday involves both the affect and the
effect of difference. The bass guitar, the instrument which drives a band's sound and rhythm,
is part of the performativity of masculinity within popular music - visually, and at the level
of sound, as auricular materiality - an embodied sensation where the 'feel' of sound through
the body constitutes a language in which 'desirable' and 'undesirable' modes of masculinity
become appropriated and defined.
Displays of musical prowess on the bass guitar open a space for becoming 'unfixed' from
the identity and abject status of the hearing-disabled Other. This 'Othering occurs primarily
in everyday spoken encounters where difficulties with hearing and speech limit opportunities for
occupying a viable masculine positioning. By contrast, the capacity to 'fit' the sensory and
sensual prompts that trigger recognition of masculinity within popular music enables the
re-assembling of an embodied masculine identity for a hearing-disabled young man. Mascu-
linity and disability are rendered reversible and exchangeable - performative productions that
are excessive and transgressive, contingent on the sensory perceptions of self and others.
This emphasis on embodied communicative practice through the play of bass guitar
provides an important counterweight to representational forms of embodied gendered subjec-
tivity that continue to predominate in some modes of disability and gender theorising. It
constitutes a forceful assertion of how everyday embodied interactions are irrevocably coupled
with mobile and transient masculine and disabled aesthetic identifications.
Introduction
But the question may be asked: Are not the kinds of phenomena that I have been discussing
of interest precisely because they produce us as human beings with a certain kind of
subjectivity? (Rose 2000, p. 320)
Fve always had a problem with the average macho man - they've always been a threat to me.
(Kurt Cobain 1998)
Much has been written over the past two decades about gender as a performative -
a comportment and ideation that is citational and reiterative - a practice of
411
412 Cassandra Loeser and Vicki Crowley
subjectification that is agentic. As extensive as the work has been, it has almost
exclusively been presupposed by an aural world of able bodies. While trans and
intersex bodies are non-normative and have effectively destabilised identitarian
politics (see, for instance, Halberstam 2005) in what we may term 'this wholly
heterosexual world',1 their historically and contemporaneously conferred dis-ease is
popularly and medically configured within psychiatric and psycho-social disorders
outside the popular imaginary of 'disability'.2 While the writings and politics of
performativity have done much to deconstruct and décentre the white, male and
middle-class corporeal ideal, there still remains, as James Clifford has argued, the
need for close readings and persistent interrogation of the ways in which 'human
beings become agents' (Clifford 2000, p. 103). To this repeated analysis we would
especially argue in favour of attention being levelled at what 'precedes and conditions'
identity conferral and subversion (Butler 1993, p. 226). More specifically, we would
argue in favour of attention to the ways that masculinity is performatively produced
through the play of music. This is because musical performance on the bass guitar
affects and effects different conceptualisations and knowings of masculinity, hearing
and hearing disability. It is the agency - the active participation and labour of young
men and music - that we explore.
The article draws us into the world of 'Shane', a twenty-two year old man who
was born and raised in the working-class suburbs of metropolitan South Australia.
Shane is white and identifies as heterosexual and working class. He has a moderate
hearing disability in his right ear and a severe hearing disability in his left ear. He
also has a mild speech impairment. Shane wears a hearing aid in each ear and uses
spoken English as a primary mode of communication. Problems with hearing and
speech limit his opportunities to valorise a masculine positioning in everyday
spoken encounters. By contrast, the play of music on bass guitar incites and
facilitates a diversity of communications and masculine meanings.
This article is about Shane's experiences of playing music on the bass, and his
amazing capacity to, in his terms, 'speak with sound'. Shane says that music is a
sensation that is not necessarily comprehended with the ears but created and inter-
preted with and through the body. To have what he calls a 'natural ear for music' and
'to pick up music by ear and improvise songs on the bass guitar' requires a height-
ened embodied sensibility that he says many hearing people do not possess. Shane is
the leader of an intra-generic heavy metal punk rock band where he says all the male
members listen to his advice. Shane plays the bass in a band that covers tracks from
bands including Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Sound Garden, Jane's
Addiction, Green Day and Foo Fighters. As will be shown, Shane's play of music
performs a subversion of disabled identity containment, and a distancing from his
experience of being Othered as a 'hearing-disabled' man in spoken exchanges.
The article builds on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to analyse Shane's
interview. Performativity refers to 'the reiterative power of discourse to produce the
phenomena that it regulates . . . [and] the simultaneous production of a domain of
abject beings . . . who form the constitutive outside of the domain of the subject'
(1993, 2). Butler's notion of performativity will be used to give insight into the ways
that disability is fundamental to the cultivation of masculinity through modes of
performance. These performances, however, are not always already visual - the
significance of Shane's story lies in its capacity to show the power of affect in the
stylisation of different modes of embodied masculinity through the play of popular
music on bass guitar. Masculine consolidation through interactions with others is
A natural ear for music? 413
dependent on the reiterated compliance of the body to visible, audible and tactile
norms of conduct. In this way, Shane's interview will demonstrate the affect and
sensory capacity that is routinely, laboriously and intently deployed in the cultiva-
tion of identity. It will show how culturally exalted performances of masculinity in
interactive space may be rendered an 'abject' or Othered performance in another
space or context. The ruptures and breakages inherent in the experience of mascu-
line identification across interactive sites prevent disabled and masculine identity
from being assured as ontologically given property of any subject.
Methods
The data discussed within this article emerge from doctoral research that explored
the question of how young men with moderate to profound hearing disabilities,
who communicate primarily in spoken English, construct their masculine embodied
subjectivities in different spaces and locales of their everyday worlds (see Loeser
2005). The research was partially motivated by a close reading of the burgeoning
social and disability studies literatures that explore the intersections and /or political
dynamics of hearing disability, deafness and cultural Deafness, young men's
experiences of growing up in Deaf families, and the monographs written by young
Deaf men and women. It was identified that there was a paucity of social and
cultural analyses that explored how young men with moderate to profound hearing
disabilities, who communicate primarily in spoken English, constructed their
masculine embodied subjectivities in the everyday social.
The empirical data were collected by means of exploratory in-depth semi-
structured face-to-face interviews and online interviews conducted through e-mail.
All interviews were conducted in the year 2000. Interviews sought the participants'
reflections on six themes, these being social interaction, friendships and personal
relationships, sport, education, employment and manhood. The same interview
schedule was used for both interviewing methods. In total, nineteen men responded
via e-mail and phone messages to the call for volunteers to participate in the
research. With the exception of six participants, the young men had responded to a
poster advertisement and letter of invitation sent out to the mailing list clientele of
a South Australian service provider for people with hearing disabilities. A poster
advertisement placed in a national newspaper yielded three participants. One
participant responded to a poster advertisement placed in a local newspaper
circulated in the Riverland region of South Australia. A colleague provided the name
of a male friend with a hearing disability. One participant was a personal associate.
Of the nineteen formal interviews conducted, sixteen of these were tape-
recorded face-to-face interviews which lasted ninety minutes to three hours in
duration. Fourteen of the participants requested that they would like a copy of the
final interview transcript. The two online interviews were conducted by sending one
section of the interview schedule at a time until all six sections were completed. The
online interviews lasted one month and four months in duration. One participant
chose to be interviewed by written mail but withdrew from the research after
completing the first section of the interview due to time and work commitments.
Follow-up interviews were conducted with five participants by telephone and two
by e-mail. The follow-up interviews were conducted four to ten weeks after the
original interview and lasted ten minutes to thirty minutes in duration. Two of the
participants requested a copy of the follow-up interview transcript.
Informants for the research were men aged eighteen to thirty-three years who
had a moderate to profound bilateral or unilateral hearing disability and lived in
metropolitan or rural locations of Australia. Men with moderate to profound or
unilateral hearing disability were specified as potential subjects for the research
study because of the degree of difficulty associated with oral interaction described
within these classifications of hearing disability. Eleven had speech impairments.
Most of the men identified as heterosexual, one participant identified as bisexual,
and two did not speak about their sexual identities in the interviews. With the
exception of two men who identified as Italian-Australian and Vietnamese-
Australian, the interviewees were primarily white Westerners. All participants used
spoken English as their main form of everyday communication. Young men who use
sign language as a major component of their everyday interactive encounters were
not interviewed. This is despite three of the men being fluent in sign language and
their participation in some activities in their local Deaf communities. The world in
which the participants live, with the exception of the three men who identified as
members of their local Deaf communities, is largely devoid of a sense of community
that involves ongoing interactions with other young people with a hearing disability.
Of the nineteen young men who participated in the study, nine spoke of the
importance of music in their lives. The young men's discussions about music ranged
from their experiences listening to music on the radio and on CDs, going to see live
bands at pubs, clubs and music festivals such as the Big Day Out, dancing at raves,
and playing a musical instrument. One young man spoke about work as a DJ, a job
that ended much to his disappointment when he lost all of his hearing in his early
twenties. Another young man spoke of his experiences organising a rave event in
metropolitan South Australia. Fragments of the story of 'Shane' are selected for this
article because they are indicative of the complexities, contradictions and ambigui-
ties involved in the construction of hearing-disabled masculinities through inter-
active settings including band culture and different music cultures and sub-cultures
that are reflected in all of the participants' stories. Shane chose the option of a
face-to-face interview and also participated in a follow-up interview. His story is
representative of a common research finding, that is, music can affect and effect
different conceptualisations and knowings of masculinity, hearing and hearing
disability for young men with hearing disabilities.
Shane's Story
Shane was raised by his mother and father in a working-class suburb in metropoli-
tan South Australia. To understand the significance of music as a vehicle for
conversation and masculine representation, it is important to begin by emphasising
how Shane's relationship with his father shaped the techniques by which he has
learnt to interact and converse with other males.
The sport of go-karting is the initial vehicle by which Shane, at nine years of
age, establishes a relationship with his father that overcomes his difficulties com-
municating with 'words'. The age of nine has particular significance for Shane. He
says, 'that's when I realised my hearing was bad'. He then remarks:
Shane: When you're really young speech is simple and you don't have any problems
communicating with other kids but later in primary school the speech gets more complex and
that's where the problems for hearing and speaking start.
A natural ear for music! 415
Shane's account of the way he has learnt to relate to his father is an instance of an
incitement to adopt a certain mode of relating established through a sporting
practice. Go-karting functions to publicly affirm specific masculine practices and
values, and up to the age of fourteen Shane shared that enthusiasm with his father,
'because that's what he wanted me to do'. Gender scholar Ian Harris writes that
fathers 'pass on to their offspring codes of conduct' (Harris 1995, p. 24) and 'provide
standards of masculinity by which boys can judge the world' as well as themselves
(ibid., p. 27). Shane's participation becomes the condition in which his gendered
corporeality is socially and discursively produced. Of importance to this discursive
production is how Shane sees the forcible imposition of this activity by his father as
a technique to ensure relational conformity to his gendered expectations and desires.
Shane's insistence and privileging of different masculine behaviours and values
disrupts the continuity of this gendered style of relating. His decision to withdraw
from the competitive sport of go-karting results in a gap in conversation with his
father.
The significance of the gendered dimension of 'being tough' is highlighted
further when Shane's father calls him a 'sissie'. In this relational context, the criteria
for conversing with his father is imbricated in Shane's performance of a public form
of heteronormative masculinity that is divorced from the 'passive', 'fearful' and
'weak' feminine. Resistance to this gendered style of relating results in Shane's
experience of social exclusion. Butler (1990, p. 133) suggests that the repudiation of
bodies for their sex or gender is an 'expulsion' that occurs through acts of exclusion
or domination that consolidate culturally hegemonic identities and their outside
'Other'. Shane later seeks to rectify the social exclusion and rejection he experiences:
Shane: Because Dad and me always did stuff together which was more activity based I felt I
had to find something else I was good at so we had something to talk about again. He was
better than Mum with understanding my problems with hearing people talk and I'm pretty
sure, I reckon he deliberately helped me out of my shell when I found, I find it hard to hear
talking by finding activities we could share together. Ones that didn't need a lot of words.
Shane says that he 'had' to find another way to relate to his father through a
practical-based activity he is 'good at'. A shared activity that Shane 'is good at' is
crucial to ongoing social exchange and gendered acceptability. Shane goes on to
describe how he came to use music as forum to (re)establish conversational
exchange and interconnection. The play of music on bass guitar generates an
imaginary coherence with the 'acceptable' masculine behaviours of his father who
also played guitar in a band as an adolescent:
Shane: My dad played the guitar when he was young so I've sort of always wanted to have a
go so I bought one of his guitars . . . Bass is easier because its got bigger, thicker strings and
you don't have to do high frequency notes . . . I've got a natural ear for music and I'm able to
pick up music by ear and put it on the guitar without needing to learn music written on paper
and so it makes it quicker for me to learn stuff. Dad had his old guitar from when he used to
be in a band so we started spending time every night playing old rock and roll songs together
and he would help me with different chords. We didn't need to talk when we played together
because I reckon the music was how we listened, sort of connected to each other. Cause I was
good at it like dad said I could improvise and we found another way to relate by being
musically in sync.
For Butler, studies of gender must consider the apparatus of production through
which masculinities and femininities are established. Shane's masculine identity
is the effect of a certain repetition of the enactment of 'competent' musical
performance. Shane's desire to reacquaint himself with his father can be conceptu-
alised as an act of retelling and aligning himself with his father's adolescent
masculine way of being.
A capacity to hear the sound of the bass acts as a powerful validation of
Shane's communicative and gendered credibility as it enables him to 'learn' to play
'in sync' with his father. The embodied vibrations of the bass affect his experiential
reality to 'have' a 'natural ear for music' and 'to be able to pick up music by ear'.
Shane's ability to distinguish different music sounds by way of how they vibrate
through his body enables his intimate knowledge of the guitar strings and chords as
well as his ability to produce an infinite variety of sounds. It is by way of the
translation of physical sensation to the manipulation of the guitar that Shane's
aesthetic judgement of his performance is grounded.
Later in the interview, Shane draws attention to the difficulties he experiences
interacting in verbal encounters with other people. He indicates that these difficul-
ties have a gendered dimension. This is evident when he speaks of the specific
communicative techniques he employs to hear other men:
Shane: Really if I'm out at a party and I don't know a group of people I won't say anything.
I just keep my mouth shut, then there's more chance of me not saying anything stupid or
saying something that doesn't mix in with what they're talking about that's not normal. Well,
[others need to] be able to talk clearly to me and have face contact and often in a big group
of people I haven't got time to whip my head around and see who said what and lip read in
time to know what they said ... its pretty embarrassing, unless you walk right up to them and
ask them what they said, like then they might think your going to take them out or something.
You have to watch the guys they are like that.
Shane's everyday experience of the verbal exchange, illustrated with specific refer-
ence to communicative encounters with strangers, is confounded by silence and a
withdrawal from space. His fear of 'saying something stupid' attests to the risk of
social devaluation through a somatic non-compliance to the expected dynamics of
conversational flow. A necessity to get 'close up to lip read' people violates the
bodily distancing required for 'normal' conversational interaction. Close facial
proximity is symbolised as desire to fight or 'take them [the guys] out'. To this
extent, violence works as a mechanism for regulating the normative parameters of
gendered interaction. The threat of violence instantiates in Shane a knowledge that
his style of relating is divergent, undesirable and abject.
The forced situational passivity Shane experiences in verbal encounters initi-
ates his desire to construct new forms of sociability and masculinity elsewhere. From
his experience of learning to play the bass guitar with his father, Shane goes on to
form what he terms an all-male 'heavy metal punk rock band' that performs at local
concerts, parties and at friends' homes. In the following excerpt, he elaborates on the
reasons for pursing the genre of alternative rock music as performed by bands
including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chilli Peppers:
Shane: That style of band were right up in the charts then ... I never really listened to the radio
because I couldn't really hear it so I found out about them [the bands] through friends who
told me about them and lent me their albums. I really liked the style and dad brought me up
with rock and roll music and, urn, so I always liked that style and the power and melody of
it. Cobain and [Eddie] Vedder were good at writing melodies even though they were really
basic they were all the same kind of style which made it easier to play, like Red Hot Chili
Peppers too. And there were a lot of low sounds and bar chords which were easy to hear. We
[Shane and the band members] were all smoking a lot of hooch back then too which made the
songs feel even more powerful, heavy when we played them, heard them. So we played
music that we loved which was popular amongst most young people anyway so that's why
so many people came to hear us play.
Shane goes on to contrast the significance of the bass as communicative strategy
with the ongoing difficulties of spoken engagement that he encounters in the
everyday verbal exchange. He talks about how the material reverberations of sound
perform an interpellation of language and meaning into a gendered style of com-
munication that itself institutes the production of asymmetrical oppositions between
'masculine' and 'feminine'. In Shane's band, a performative capacity to 'feel sound'
and thus 'hear' it, is the criterion by which the band member's hearing capacity, and
masculinity, are judged. Building a masculine identity, or acquiring the ability to
secure positions in masculine discourse, is given impetus through a process of
shaming:
Shane: [I]n the band I got started by advertising in the paper there weren't much communi-
cation problems then. When we weren't playing music the other players would get frustrated
at me cause I couldn't hear what they were saying. But when I played the guitar it was the
other way round and all the guys I have ever played with admired me and listened to my
advice. If they couldn't cut it because they don't feel it ... and play like a fairy boy I had to
let them go so we never seem to have many band members for long. Those people, they don't
have the art. The feel makes the performance perfect. You've still got to hear it obviously but
its more the feelingfulness, yeah, when you and the guitar become one. That's why it got
pretty annoying . . . when you've got a song and they can't pick it up cause they can't hear it,
can't feel it, so they don't know how to sound good.
In the context of the band's social relations, the repeated enactment of standards of
viable communicative clarity is enshrined in an embodied sensibility that is 'able' to
'hear' sound. This vocabulary offers Shane a culturally exalted masculine status
within the band's gender hierarchy. Shane is explicit that in establishing his height-
ened capacity to make the guitar 'speak with sound' through years of practice and
training, its significance as object is ascribed by its appropriation as translative of a
language. Shane says 'when I played the guitar ... all the guys I have ever played
with admired me'. 'Admiration' operates as a crystallisation of the masculine quest
for recognition through public displays of prowess, being in this case, a technical
mastery of the bass and an acute ear for music. This quest unfolds within a system
of social antagonisms that register Shane's corporeal experience of being 'hearing
disabled' in verbal exchanges.
The playing of the guitar is a means by which Shane re-stages his masculine
status away from the subordinate position he occupies in verbal social exchanges.
The point is the prowess and others' acknowledgements of it. It is interesting,
however, that the gendered dynamics of musical performance in the band work to
reproduce the masculine discourses that exclude and subordinate Shane's gendered
status in oral conversation. Shane replicates the abuse and marginalisation his father
directed at him when he did not fulfil the requirements of 'tough driving' by abusing
specific band members with recourse to the sexist slander of 'fairy boy'. Any
association with the characteristics and expectations associated with the feminine
are reiterated as undesirable, unworthy and abject Other.
These targets of abuse, who Shane says 'can't cut it because they don't feel it ...
and they play like a fairy boy' are transient members who are expelled from the
band at Shane's command. Shane's aesthetic judgement ('this doesn't sound good')
is necessarily an ethical judgement ('you do not know how to be good') as the quality
of rhythmic relationships constitutes a perceived quality of social life and 'appro-
priate' and 'inappropriate' masculinities. The statement 'not good' is a means to
mark not only a poor quality of sound, but also the failure of the expected capacity
of the young men to possess this 'art of hearing'. What this affirms are the
complexities and contradictions of Shane's masculine identity as it is constituted
within the gendered matrix of power he is compelled to both reiterate and oppose.
While the gendered meanings taken up in these performative productions are part
of hegemonic, misogynist and homophobic culture, they are, following Butler,
'denaturalized and mobilized through their recontextualization' (Butler 1990,
p. 138), thus denying hegemonic culture of its claim to coherent gender and disabled
identities.
Covering masculinity: the significance of alternative rock

The story that we have thus far outlined is that of Shane where Shane's personal
narrative illustrates music as integral to identity formation and its inseparability
from a masculinity symbolically and materially denied through an 'imperfect' body.
His story indicates that hearing impairment can be a corporeal imperfection that is
often only visible to those who also similarly embody a hearing disability or are
closely familiar with those that do. This means that Shane labours between the
visual surface, the cues of otherness that the visual surface might mask or deliber-
ately or inadvertently signal, his interior world, and the imagined interior worlds of
others. Shane's visually engaged narrative also demonstrates that he seeks a mas-
culine and heterosexual identity as and in spaces of ambivalence. Still further he
seeks a masculinity with a difference, yet a masculinity still firmly within the
boundaries of a legible heterosexual masculinity.
Cues and clues to the intensity of this visual labour exist in Shane's music
preferences and practice and revealingly in cover versions. Shane's band plays
covers of songs by alternative rock bands that have had mass air-play on both
mainstream and alternative radio stations at a multi-national level. Cover bands
traditionally draw crowds in local live music venues. However, bands that do covers
have lowered status as they are not viewed as 'authentic' bands. Yet bands playing
covers provide band members and audiences alike with the opportunity to partici-
pate in different subcultures. This admixture of music preference and practice is both
metaphoric and material for Shane, mirroring and refracting deep streams of
pleasure and connection.
Without wanting to overstate either preference or practice, it is, we believe,
worth taking some time to consider the visual aspects of the bands and CDs that
provide Shane with a rich site of engaging with his identity. Indeed, during the
interview Shane pulled two CDs from his collection when talking about the bands
and albums he favoured. The albums were Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk
(1989) and Nirvana's In Utero (1993). The covers of these two albums provide
another stratum to the visual place and play of music in Shane's affective and
material engagement with identity. The packaging of the visual imagery of an album
is a marketing tool that brands and sells. Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers are
iconic bands associated with in-your-face statement and non-conformity.
Within the alternative music genre, the imagery on Mother's Milk and In Utero
spoke to the times in which they were produced. In the late 1980s and early 1990s,
increasing attention was being given to masculinity and resistant, non-normative
forms of music. Alternative rock, at least with Nirvana, challenged normative
masculinity. Kurt Cobain, band leader, is infamously known for statements about
being gay as a heterosexual man. At the crude end of analysis it could be said that
Cobain maintained the power and privileges of normative masculinity, yet the claim
he made of himself puts him at odds with the robust and homophobic end of
heterosexuality.
The cover of Nirvana's album In Utero entails an extended montage and visual
play on masculinity through women's bodies. The central and front image is a
porcelain-like figure, reminiscent of Sandro Botticelli's 1484 painting Birth of Venus.
The naked woman has angel wings. Internal organs, such as the bowel, skeleton,
muscles, veins and arteries are in part exposed. Under the exposed internal muscle
structure of the body are two breasts, patterned like brains in a vine-like tattooing.
Inside the insert and among a series of other images there is a male body, at least
judging by its head features and body shape, yet it is pregnant, with one half of
the stomach exposing a baby in utero. While there are many possible readings of
these images, at the very least they illustrate an ambivalence about bodies and
masculinities that are imbricated in femininities. While the body is held open for
inspection and introspection, and in some sense the normative body is in
question, there is no immediate surface reading of the disabled body. Yet, the
difference and ambivalence marked by images and stylisation of the masculinities
of the bands, and band members, certainly open the space for Others to conjoin and
affiliate with the movement from the normative to the non-normative. The images
accompanying In Utero underscore the band's reputation as reckless, smash and
trash.
The image on the cover of Mother's Milk (1989) is a photographic head and
torso of a young naked woman whose head is tilted with eyes downcast, resem-
bling a Madonna pose. Her left nipple is covered by a semi-open red rose and in
her crossed arms she holds the band members who are supplicant to her. A figure
is draped across the palm of the woman's hand partly under her thumb and nestled
into the crook of her arm - it is a figure draped like the male body in Jacques-Lois
David's 1793 painting The Death of Marat. The image on the back of the CD
insert is a montage including a large elephant which occupies the background
in the left. The elephant has a long trunk and large tusks that connote power,
dominance and the phallus. Two of the band members hold their left arms at right
angles, flexing their muscles, yet they wear white Y-fronts before Calvin Klein
elevated the Y-front to the status of sexual icon. To their right is the band leader,
Anthony Kiedis. In contrast to his fellow band members, Keidis is wearing boxer
shorts and has his cheek blown out as if stifling laughter - perhaps an ironic
reference to the absurdity of all that is behind him. Underpants, Y-fronts, boxer's,
trunks - men exposed on the back cover, yet ambiguously nurtured on the
front.
In some ways then, it is of no surprise that these bands are a source of pleasure,
inspiration and respite for bodies and identifications that are invisible in prevailing
popular culture imagery and ideation. The two bands whose music Shane covers
persistently twist and bend the normative male body. It is perhaps theatre and the
wilful troubling of the male body that holds open an 'in-between' access to other
forms of being which do not sever all ties with the normative.
The ambivalence and openness of the male body in music and the specific
instances that Shane is inspired by, occur through visuality and through sound.
Indeed, the bands, their visual practices and their music can be read to provide a
space of difference and one that can be as loudly sounded as it is possible to endure.
The very strength of the sound is a distortion and in turn makes space for distorted
and altered sound. It is where the conventions of sound can be acceptably eschewed
with an eschewing that is not only pleasurable but releases sound to open
interpretation. What we are also suggesting, therefore, is not merely that people
with hearing disabilities 'feel' the music, perhaps or perhaps not more acutely
than others, but that sound as a medium of expression and as a space of possibility
may be as significant as any other aspect of music to people with hearing
disabilities.
At every turn, however, the parody and critique of these bands maintain the
centrality of both white heterosexuality and an able body. Yet there is much in them
that speaks beyond either the blue- or white-collar masculinity - both of which are
reductive typifications of masculine 'bread winning' but which continue to figure
strongly and especially so for young men aspiring to mediate their working-class
origins. It does well to remember at this juncture that people with disabilities are
over-represented in low-paid jobs and poor working conditions. Shane has strug-
gled with employment and the struggle has been directly related to his hearing (see
Loeser 2002, 2005; Loeser and Crowley 2006).
Both Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers ply an excess in which it is possible
to suggest that masculinity is central as well as in some sense failed. This failed
yet retrievable masculinity sits alongside Nirvana's ironic name as a playful
melancholia at once exceeding the real and mundane while invoking an almost
morose sensibility. In contrast to this are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose
playfulness is happy in an ecstatic, power-charged and goofy way. Dick Hebdige
suggested of the early sub-cultural punk movement that while it included 'horror
circus antics', it also 'eloquently condemned' a 'divided and unequal society'
(Hebdige 1979, p. 115). The visual imagery and display as well as the lyrics of the
music of the bands that Shane covers certainly comment on a divided and unequal
society.
As a concept, 'cover' ranges in meaning from wrapping and swathing, through
concealing and obscuring to shielding and protecting. Cover bands may well be
hiding a lack of musical initiative and creativity, but equally they may be read as
honouring and promoting a critical, resistant and collective action that rejects the
strictures of normative embodiment and persona. Jodie Taylor describes '. . . music
as a non-literal signifier and as a space in which identity can be realised and
performed' (Taylor 2007, p. 3). Still further she notes that, 'Music effectively medi-
ates identity and provides a space for one to negotiate their identity in relation to
social power structures, and music is especially important in doing this when social
discourse fails' (ibid., pp. 3^1).
Judith Halberstam and others have argued that masculinity tends to manifest
as non-performative. The question of authenticity in identity has since taken on
particular meanings in the discourses of gender as masculinities (Connell 1987, 1995,
2000; Whitehead and Barrett 2001), sexualities (Buchbinder 1994, 1998; Epstein 1994;
Mac an Ghaill 1994; Yang 1997; Petersen 1998), race (Riggs 1989; Mercer 1994; Dyer
1997; Stecopoulos and Uebel 1997; Riggs 2006) and non-normative masculinities
(Halberstam 1998). Here we would argue that while Shane's story illuminates the
extreme labour involved in the making of masculinity, especially if read in socio-
logical terms, his affiliation with and affirmation of covers, and particularly with
bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana, are both ironic and multiply
non-contradictory. The cover of the cover, that uncovers and recovers, inheres the
ascendancy of a resisting masculinity, one in which the display of its artifice and
creative possibility are inseparable from what precedes or conditions it. It is the
ampersand, the and, that provides source and sustenance of possibility, being neither
one thing nor its absolute other.
Summary
Shane's interview shows masculinity as a (per)formative production where musical
performance affects and effects different conceptualisations and knowings of mas-
culinity, hearing and hearing disability. The performance of music, by way of
familiarising oneself with the different sound vibrations of the chords of the guitar
and the notes, forms the structures in which Shane's masculine conduct comes to be
appropriated and defined by him and others. In the moment where Shane 'talks' by
way of musical sounds in the genres of rock and roll and alternative rock, his
hearing disability melts away into the matrix of playing. The playing of the bass
guitar and the sound it produces act as a discourse mobilised for the purpose of
confirming social belonging and 'insider status' through the production of mascu-
line meanings that can be understood and heard. The fact that rock music as
masculine discourse privileges the 'feelingfulness' of sound as the language in
which a desirable masculinity is created illustrates the convergence between forms
of masculinity and tactility. Music as auricular materiality provides a central means
through which Shane navigates the gendered interactive world and his relationship
toit.
Feminist musicologist Susan McClary claims that 'music does not just pas-
sively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of
gender organisation (along with other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted,
contested and negotiated' (McClary 1991, p. 8). Shane's story illustrates the ambigu-
ous convergence and redistribution between hearing disabled and gendered identi-
ties across and within different contexts of social interaction. The constricted
structure of opportunity for self-assertion and the abject status he occupies in the
verbal exchange makes the pursuit of music appear an arena in which Shane can be
judged solely on his own merit.
These contradictions and contestations that occur in specific spaces of interac-
tive engagement reinforce an argument that masculine and hearing-disabled iden-
tifications are always fractured and experienced differently across intersecting and
antagonistic practices and positions. These identities are not contained and static but
fluid and exchangeable, permeable and unstable, excessive and transgressive.
Although the gendered meanings taken up across sites are part of hegemonic,
misogynist and homophobic culture, they are, following Butler, 'denaturalized and
mobilized through their recontextualization' (Butler 1990, p. 138), 'a re-enactment
and re-experiencing of a set of meanings constituted in time, and instituted in ...
space' (ibid., p. 140). Masculinity is consolidated through reiterated performances
that are not 'natural' or 'self-evident', but rather contingent on the perceptions and
sensory interpretations of self and others.
Acknowledgements
To Sam and Rachel: for the love and labour of hearing with a difference.
Endnotes
1. With apologies for the licence taken with Toni and focus within sociology, the legacies of this
Morrison's notion of this 'wholly racialized social-scientific positioning remain attached,
world' (Morrison 1993, p. 4). albeit often loosely, to 'cross-dresser', 'trans-
2. In sociological discourses, embodiments and gender', intersex and other gender and sexual
identities such as 'homosexual', 'lesbian' and identities and typologies. The borders of dis-
'transexual' have historically figured in the ability, sub-culture, deviance, etc., are malle-
literatures of 'deviance'. While the past forty able, yet who and how the margins are
years have seen the disappearance of this term populated remains relatively fixed.
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Discography
Nirvana, In Utero. David Geffen Company produced with special arrangement with Sub Pop Records
GEFD-24536. 1993
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mothers Milk. EMI-USA, A division of Capitol Records Inc 7 92152-2. 1989

A Natural Ear For Music

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A Natural Ear for Music?

Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities

A natural ear for music? Hearing

CASSANDRA LOESERt and VICKI CROWLEYJ

fCommunications and Gender Studies, School of Communication, International Studies and

Covering masculinity: the significance of alternative rock

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