voicing chocolate rain

Music: The The: Dusk (1993)

Some stay dry; others feel the pain.

I read in the newspaper this morning that Internet celebrity Tay Zonday (real name, Adam Bahner), a very smart American Studies graduate student at my alma mater, has been at the center of a publicity explosion. He's been on television numerous times (most notably on the network show i-Caught, CNN, and Jimmy Kimmel Live). His claim to celebrity circulation is a bad YouTube.com video of his musical genius, "Chocolate Rain." His voice seems unusually low for such a young face (he is 25), and the song's topic and lyrics are—well, they are cheesy.

The story in the Austin American-Statesman this morning detailed the tension in Zonday's celebrity: although the song is about the suffering of racism, its popularity concerns a deliberate avoidance of that topic. All but one of the parodies on YouTube.com seem to highlight the mismatch of the vocalic body (that is, the imagined body we tend to associate with voices) and Zonday's boyish figure instead of race. This mismatch---which Michel Chion has also termed the "acousmatic voice"---is the publicity propellant. It is the same uncanny effect that Citibank used to promote its identity-theft program. It is the same effect that is central to horror films (think here of the prank caller inside the house, or Mother's voice in Psycho).

What's interesting to me about this video is the intersection of race, the acousmatic voice, and Internet publicity. Zonday has said that while he is disappointed the video doesn't encourage critical thought, he recognizes its popularity has to do with its "quirkiness." Of course, part of its kitsch appeal has to do with the word "chocolate," which has long been associated as a fun/funky term in popular music for black folks (we can thank Parliament and the blacksloitation films for that)---and it seems whenever this fun term is used in a serious way it draws ridicule. To his credit, on interviews Zonday often overcomes the ridicule by attempting to bring attention back to race when he is given the chance. He is sometimes astonishingly blunt, which is refreshing to hear and read.

What is implicit in many of Zonday's remarks---and this is really fascinating stuff to me---is the way voices are raced. In their interesting book on the social science of speech, Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave argue that our brains are "hardwired" to instantaneously imagine a body for voices that we hear (bearing out Conner's theory of vocalic bodies in his book Dumbstruck). The most fundamental attribution is that of gender, which is not hardwired, but rather, for cultural reasons and a hardwired over-reliance on binarism, the second object lesson of self-consciousness (the first, of course, is "me" and "not me"). Nass and Brave suggest that further associations of identity are also culturally learned later; next comes geographical location (which is associated with accents) and, finally, class and race. They suggest among least reliable attributions is, in fact, that of race (think of the stink over Hootie and the Blowfish many years back; white voice, black vocalist). Nass and Brave suggest we cannot help to make these attributions because of the way our brains process information.

Zonday's deep, baritone voice and articulate speech contracts with the funk implicit in the word "chocolate," so certainly there is an attribution of class and race here. "Chocolate" needs to be pronounced with a grain that reeks James Brown's sweat or Bootsy Collin's whiney pelvic thrusts. Aside choosing the right word to express the suffering of racism, however, Zonday's voice itself simply does not play by the vocalic rules of race. This is, in part, a consequence of his musical background (or rather, lack of it); the video is "weird" because Zonday's voice refuses to submit to our tidy categories---of the way in which we have been taught to recognize black voices.

I think Zonday's (usually implicit) suggestion that the attention given to his song and video is racist is correct, but perhaps for reasons that we hear, not necessarily for reasons that we see. The party-line of critical race studies usually adopted by (of course) white people, including this white guy, is that race is socially constructed. The argument usually goes like this: believing is seeing, that before one sees race she has internalized the categories that make it possible to recognize it. What this video teaches us, though, and I think in a way that is much more persuasive once it is pointed out, is that believing is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, hearing.

I think this point has important implications for how we teach critical race studies to our students in the classroom, which usually orbit race as "color." I am not sure what those implications are at the moment, but it will be my project to figure it out in Spring 2008, when I'm on leave. I'll be studying the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" audio archive at the Library of Congress. The circulation of Zonday's voice is a startling and useful way for me to think about the human voice vis-à-vis publicity and identity construction and authenticity. And the idea of a sonorous archive. In a very odd way, "Chocolate Rain" challenges many of the assumptions of those at the LoC who put together the audio archive of "slave voices." Well, hmmm. I'm still thinking about it.

At this point if you've not seen the video on-line or on television, then you probably live in a electricity-free shack in Montana, but here it is nevertheless: