Mum's the Word

“He’s got such an extraordinary voice—it could be black, white, male or female.” ¹ This was Simon Frith’s comment on singer Antony Hegarty, of the band Antony and the Johnsons, on the occasion of their success in the 2005 Mercury Music Prize. The biggest surprise is that this vocal ambivalence should be thought surprising: pop music has always offered privileged space for gender and race play, and since records removed the body from sight, radical imaginings of the vocal body have been free to run riot within listening practices. It is tempting to follow, analytically, the particularly transgressive route taken by an Antony; it would, no doubt about it, throw light on the vocal variables of masculinity. But in a sense this is too easy. I want instead to focus on examples of “gender trouble” arising within what seems to be the more mainstream lineage of male singing—the “dark center” without which Antony’s provocative sounds, with their transgendering implications, would lose their power (but which is itself defined only in relation to its exclusions and disavowals). I will note in passing, however, the potential importance of the generic territory that Antony occupies: as some critics have remarked, his exquisitely melancholic, even masochistic explorations of loss, hopeless love and death carry his Mercury-winning album, I Am a Bird Now, ² towards the thematics of torch song, in origin and by tradition a female genre. Although there are precedents for this appropriation, in the work of gay singers such as Marc Almond and Boy George, playing provocatively with vocal register and timbre in the context of this specific generic choice remains unusual, and I will return to this point.