Lauren Elkin is a UK-based American writer who has recently followed up her cultural study of the representation of the body in art history, Art Monsters (Chatto & Windus/FSG, 2023), with her highly-anticipated study of the voice—and particularly the gendered voice—in music history, Vocal Break. Elkin pulls from her own history, and her background in musical theater and vocal performance, to bring her sharp, incisive authorial voice to bear against questions of the audible voice, and particularly to examine the point where the voice shifts between registers—the vocal break. I wrote to Lauren Elkin to dive deeper into questions of vulnerability, authenticity, and the ever-present pitfalls of what she calls the “Mermaid’s Dilemma.” The following is a transcription of our e-mail exchange.
I was fascinated by the epigraph from The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous. Can you unpack your decision to open the book with a quote that links laughter, song, and gender in a way that pays tribute to one of the most important intellectuals of second-wave feminism?
Cixous’s work has been so foundational for me, The Laugh of the Medusa in particular in the way it encourages women to give voice to their creativity and their desires. We are so often told to pipe down, told our voices are shrill or strident or too much in some way — I’m thinking for instance of the way the right instrumentalized Kamala Harris’s laugh to make her seem unstable and unpresidential. The laugh, for Cixous, is deliciously subversive, as is the voice.
The quote I use as my epigraph comes in a passage where Cixous is talking about the way our body passes into our voice when we speak: “she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body.” I don’t mean to suggest anything so essentialist as the idea that women are by nature more embodied when they speak or sing: only that they are perceived to be. There is something extra in women’s speech, which she calls the song: something that once we’ve been touched by it will continue to affect us ever after. Likewise: I’m not suggesting this is true of every woman’s voice, but I wanted to highlight the way some voices stay with us, the deep and permanent marks they leave on us, whether that’s the voice of someone we love or a singer we revere.
Each chapter is accompanied by an image (or, in the case of some chapters where the appropriate image was unattainable, the absence of an image). Given your background in art history and your authorship of a cultural study on bodily representation (Art Monsters), the choice of these images feels deliberate. Can you elaborate on the decision to accompany each of these chapters on voice and song with an image?
Thank you for picking up on this! In a book that’s so much about the way women who sing are judged by/reduced to their appearances, I wanted to think about another kind of visuality that could be more constructive, more about dreaming correspondences between the aural and the visual that would open up into new zones of thinking about embodiment and voice. I write about mermaids a lot in the book, not only the fish out of water aspect which has always been very important for me, especially the part of the story where she gives up her voice in order to have the life she thinks she wants. In the book this becomes a way of thinking about pandering and speaking/singing the way we think we have to in order to be heard, and I spend much of the book fighting against ideas of cool and authenticity and vulnerability which are all weaponized against women when we use our voices. I wanted to find a visual echo for this — for the power of the female voice, its hybridity, its ability to shape-shift. I knew I wanted to include the image from the Disney film where her voice is a ball of fire in her throat (we ultimately were denied the rights to use it!), and the scene from Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” video where her face is in the dark but her mouth is lit up as if there were a light inside of it. All of that is echoed in Nancy Spero’s amazing series Notes in Time (1979), from which I took the slogan about gorgons and sirens refusing passivity and silence.
I remember seeing a lot of Kiki Smith’s work a while back and thinking how much it resonated with this work I was putting together about the voice – so when I searched for images of the mermaid in her oeuvre I wasn’t surprised to find these beautiful, delicate pencil-works depicting these hybrid bird-women (the original sirens) and mermaids, and women in the midst of becoming one thing or another. The book is so much about transformations, and passages between different states (for me, most recently, the experience of perimenopause) – I was delighted to find, when I went to see the little mermaid statue on a trip to Copenhagen, that the sculptor didn’t make a choice to represent her purely in mermaid or human state, but in both at the same time, with the outline of her human legs visible in her tail.
Then of course there are Nancy Spero’s sheela-na-gigs, a reference to (and possibly inspiration for?) PJ Harvey’s song of that title. I wanted one of those to be on the cover of the book but unsurprisingly, my publishers didn’t go for it. I love that Spero did them not only as singular sheelas, solo exhibitionists, but collectively: a whole chorus line of sheela-na-gigs, with linked arms and spread labia.
A big chunk of the material in this book was originally intended to appear in Art Monsters, but I realized there was so much to say about taking up vocal space that I decided to cut it and give it its own book (this one). So I also liked including bits of feminist contemporary art as a means of further strengthening the ties between Art Monsters and Vocal Break.
I wanted to think about another kind of visuality that could be more constructive, more about dreaming correspondences between the aural and the visual that would open up into new zones of thinking about embodiment and voice.
There are some fascinating epigraphs to each of the twenty-nine chapters, quotes that are culled from sources as diverse as Anne Carson, Bertold Brecht, and Martin Luther. How did you go about choosing the quotes that would serve as the epigraph to each chapter?
I love this attention to the paratextual — thank you. I had a lot of fun with it all. I had been noting down good quotes about singing and the voice, ever since I started prepping Art Monsters, so for a while now, and I had a good trove of them to draw from. I couldn’t front-load it with epigraphs so I decided to let the chapters have as many voices in it as I felt they could each hold. I did something similar in Art Monsters, interjecting citations between slashes, often. Citation is important to me, as a feminist practice, as a scholarly practice, but also as a writer I really love the sort of impression or intuition you can get from juxtaposing citations and my own writing. I don’t like to spell things out; I like to make space for the reader to make of it what they will, and the epigraph is just a brilliant space to do that. But I also wanted to underscore, visually and practically, the idea that singing is a citational practice, as Masi Asare and others I quote in the book argue. We’re never purely singing like “ourselves”; there is no “true voice.” Vocality is always a blend of our own timbre and embodiment and the sounds we’ve listened to most intently.
At the beginning of Vocal Break, you write, “I want to think about [vocal] breaks and flaws as not necessarily accidents, but as aesthetic tools” (8). In many of the cases you study, the vocal break seems like a successful lens for elaborating an anti-classical aesthetics of vocal performance. Where do you expect to go from here? Do you anticipate future studies on the vulnerability of the voice, and the value of its ambiguity? Do you anticipate shifting this paradigm to further areas of study and bringing the idea of the vocal break to other areas of cultural criticism?
I don’t have any lofty institutional goals here — I mean, it would be amazing if the music industry and the media stopped treating women differently from men; if they stopped obsessing over public women’s lives and focused more on their art; if they learned how to listen to and write about music from a technically and critically informed perspective; it would be amazing if Broadway started letting female singers sound like someone other than copy pasta Idina Menzels.
I suppose what I would really like to achieve here is to reassure young singers that they don’t have to sing a/ like everyone else or b/ like their “true selves” — because a/ is nauseating and b/ is an illusion. I would love to help young singers understand that their voices are always going to — as I’ve just said above — be a combination of people they’ve listened to as well as their own particular sound. I think it’s hugely important to listen to other singers, without either judging them or competing with them, just to see what they’re up to, and to let them give us permission to do what we need to.
That goes for anyone who makes anything — I’m thinking specifically of writers, because that is where these lessons are most applicable for me at this stage in my life. But I wish someone had told me these things when I was 15.
What is the relationship between your background as a vocal performer and the authorial voice that you have developed over the course of your professional career as a writer? Can you explicitly link any of your skills as a writer with your training in voice, or are the two pursuits unrelated?
They are deeply related! One of the stickiest clichés people trot out to young writers all the time is that they have to find their voice. Find your voice? It’s right there! You’re using your voice the minute you set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). I think there’s something similar happening here: there’s the idea that you’re possibly going to write like other people for a while, before you write like yourself. I, for instance, tried to write like Jeanette Winterson for years. And maybe we need to try to write like other people for a while, before we can shed their voice and find maybe some element of it has been absorbed into our own. I couldn’t understand this as a singer, probably because I didn’t do it for long enough. I have however managed to stick it out (at least this far) as a writer, so I’ve been doing it long enough to see how my “voice” is something that has developed over time, which I’ve learned to trust. It was there all along, but it wasn’t, like, sitting there waiting to be found.
On page 293 of Vocal Break, you explicitly link the “Mermaid’s Dilemma” with the broadscale theft of the authorial voice for the training of the LLMs that power chatbots like ChatGPT. You call for laws to be passed to protect the voice of writers from theft by the “evil sea witch,” or in other words the tech bros. Can you elaborate on exactly what is at stake for authors in the struggle to protect their intellectual property?
Definitely. I’m also thinking about the passage where I compare using Autotune to doping in bike racing. I saw an interview the other day with the writer Yann Martel being asked if he used AI to write, and he was like “that would be like paying someone else to have sex for me.” All the pleasure and joy is in doing it yourself. Why would you get a machine to do it for you?
So that’s the first thing. The second part is obviously that those of us in the arts earn our livings through whatever the thing is we’re good at – the singers sing, the writers write, etc. What we do cannot be replicated by a machine — much like the sexual experience. And why would you want to read something a machine wrote or sang instead of something a human did? I can see using it in some kind of experimental sense, to extend human capacity, or complicate it, to glitch it, as I write about with regards to Laurie Anderson, or Afrika Bambaata, or Holly Herndon, or Charli XCX, but in each of those cases as in most, I even want to say all cases, human embodiment and consciousness is inarguably the core element in art. I think it is possible for a machine to write something that sounds like a human wrote it — but that’s because humans can pander, humans are capable of writing things that are bad. I’m thinking for instance of the piece that was published in Granta that turns out to have been written with AI. It’s pretty bad — it’s mimicking “good” (read, experimental, muscular) writing, whether a robot or a human is responsible for it.
That’s the aesthetic argument. Then there’s the anti-capitalist argument, which I also refer to in the book in the Autotune chapter: the idea that Autotune erases the craft and labor of singing, and “de-skills” female singers, in Catherine Provenzano’s terms: it is all too often a man in the production booth doing the tuning, they are not usually asking permission, and women are rarely granted access to any role in the music-making business apart from being the singer.
I’m thinking of something Joni Mitchell said twenty years ago, which Sophie Gilbert quotes in her excellent book Girl on Girl:
I heard someone from the music industry saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.
They don’t even need to know how to sing: the machines can do it for them.
I can see using [a machine] in some kind of experimental sense, to extend human capacity, or complicate it, to glitch it…but… human embodiment and consciousness is inarguably the core element in art.
At certain points in the text, you reveal that you suffered a degree of reticence towards the seriousness of your own project, particularly in light of the attacks on female bodily autonomy and the conservative, reactionary backsliding of so many political movements in the United States and in Europe. How has the response been to the text so far? Have there been any reactions or responses that confirmed your initial hesitations, or are people receptive to the validity of vocal studies as an area of intellectual inquiry?
So far it’s all been very positive: no one has said you’re thinking about singing at a time like this?? But then it’s early, and it hasn’t come out in the US yet. However I will say I felt reassured in my project — which was finished by this point — when people started protesting the murders in Minneapolis in choir formation. There is something so powerful about people singing together. Not that it ought to have achieved anything per se — but I think it galvanized a lot of people, and made them feel less alone. I think there’s great revolutionary possibility in song, and there may still be more to come. I hope, anyway.
Do you have any advice for young singers attempting to navigate the vocal break? And similarly, do you have any advice for young writers attempting to navigate their relationship with their authorial voice?
I mean — there are some singers who are going to master it, and good for them, it is so hard and mostly thankless, the work of a singer. But I hope the ones who can’t do it learn to live with it, and work with it, and find value in it.
I think I would say the same thing to young writers, who have more freedom, I think, than singers, or at least singers who are training in a certain tradition. There’s no one codified way to write. Especially in English, we can absolutely mess about with our language – I’m thinking of Cathy Park Hong’s post-colonial critique of English in Minor Feelings, “I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry—who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out…”
I think there’s great revolutionary possibility in song, and there may still be more to come.
While some elements of the text read as cultural history and analysis, other elements read as autobiography and memoir, blending your own teenage and young adult experiences with your insights into the cultural phenomena surrounding female vocal performances in the 1980s and 1990s. I imagine that it must have unearthed a complex mix of emotions to revisit the discographies of your favorite artists from a formative period in your development. Can you give us any insight into the process of returning to the music of your teens and twenties in the course of research for this book, and whether you experienced it with joy, with sadness, or with a mix of emotions?
What a lovely question. It was mostly with great joy. Much of it I have carried with me through the decades — Tori Amos, PJ Harvey — and some of it, music I didn’t write about but could have, like Paula Cole or Fiona Apple or Sarah McLachlan — was completely intact in my memory, I remembered every note, every nuance. Some of that was embarrassing (“how did I ever think this was good?!!”) but mostly it was very healing, like visiting an old friend and singing with her. I’m amazed how much of it has held up though – Little Earthquakes and Boys For Pele are two of the greatest albums of the 20th century and better than a lot of what we’ve had in the 21st as well. I made a Spotify playlist for the book and I was listening to it on the way to the BBC yesterday to do an episode of “Women’s Hour” and it went (on shuffle) to “Shoeless Joe” from Damn Yankees, the 1990-whatever revival recording, which I reference briefly in the book because my best friend from camp Emily used to sing it on the bus at the top of her lungs and it’s one of the happiest memories of my childhood, Emily letting loose with her vibrato like the singer on the recording. It made me very emotional! That brassy Broadway presentational exhibitionist go like a bat outta you know WHEEEEEERE. I have been trying to cover up the Broadway influence for years, because it’s not cool, it’s not intellectual, savvy people are supposed to hate musical theatre, but it’s the music I grew up on and loved and it’s part of my brain matter now.
Vocal Break is now available from Chatto & Windus.
Lauren Elkin is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She also writes a newsletter called Serious Ladies. An award-winning translator, she lives between Paris and London.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 