Throw Yo' Voice Out: Disability as a Desirable Practice in Hip-Hop Vocal Performance

Authors

  • Alex S. Porco University of North Carolina, Wilmington

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v34i4.3822

Keywords:

Hip-Hop, Voice, Performance, Poetics

Abstract

Disabled bodies and disabling spaces— especially the recording studio— shape the sound iconicity of hip-hop vocal performances. The disabled voice is the audible sign by which hip-hop artists trouble cultural definitions of the self and other; exceptionalism and failure; the natural and techno-mediated; comedy and tragedy; and aesthetic play and seriousness. Hip-hop vocal performances also function as self-conscious acts of transvaluation that challenge the discursive dominance of ableism. A materialist approach to vocal performance resists reducing voice to a silent metaphor for race, oppositionality, or liberation; and it emphasizes, instead, the physiological and social processes that render hip-hop voices unique, particular, and audible. It emphasizes the agency hip-hop artists possess in seeking out disabled bodies and assuming disabled identities for aesthetic and political ends. Thus, the body is returned to the analysis of style.

Downloads

Published

2014-12-06

How to Cite

Porco, A. S. (2014). Throw Yo’ Voice Out: Disability as a Desirable Practice in Hip-Hop Vocal Performance. Disability Studies Quarterly, 34(4). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v34i4.3822

Issue

Section

Humanities, Arts, and Media