Madame Liquidator: The Music of Mermaids, Oceanic Sounds, and the Power of Women’s Creativity
I first met Madame Liquidator during my graduate school years in the North Carolina Triangle. She worked at a family-owned restaurant, Taste of Jamaica, in the Hayti District of Durham, which was nestled amidst the Ghanaian grocers and Senegalese hair braiders and Botanicas filled with Orishas: a microcosm of the Black Atlantic in this business district built by emancipated African Americans at the turn of the 20th Century. Madame Liquidator was the auntie of the owner, Miss Erica, and she would put on Derek Harriot records and tell us about her days as a professional stage dancer in the reggae dancehalls of Jamaica in the 1970s.
When I asked her where she got her name, Madame Liquidator told me that in her heyday, her talent was known to “turn all the men to liquid.”
Madame Liquidator’s presence at the restaurant would ebb and flow. With the same style in which she had once wound her way through the musical circuits of Kingston, she looped through the growing Caribbean neighborhoods of 1980s New York, and circulated through odd jobs for her friends in the Jamaican diaspora. Eventually, I headed off to fieldwork in Senegal and the restaurant closed its doors.
But Madame Liquidator’s stories kept me aware of the relationship of feminine fluidity to the movement of popular music: when the subwoofer in my Taurus hits its warmest, lowest notes and all of my stress is sublimated in the bass vibrations; when a gospel singer moves from a word into a melismatic riff at the Back Pentecostal Church in Newport News; when the San Francisco dancefloor destratifies from a collection of individuals into a web of heat and touch. There is a poverty of language with which to study the medium of musical liquidity—this feminine force of musical flow. I imagine Madame Liquidator’s description of her own musical affect as a cipher for the unseen “liquidations”–the destratifications, unravelings, and loosenings–that accompany women’s and girls’ engagements with music. Amidst a popular music historicism based on charts, genres, chord structures, and texts, I argue that transformative musical creativity can be felt in the erosion of formal and discursive fixity at the water’s edge.
Notions of liquidity, flow and fluidity line the history of popular music. They work as metaphors for sonic qualities and creative processes. They inhabit the musical imagination in the figures of flowing streams, floating vessels, liquid muses, and drowning teardrops: Blondie’s “Tide is High,” The Dubliners’ “Irish Rover,” The Beach Boys‘ “Surfer Girl,” Cocteau Twins’ and Styx’s odes to the mermaid Lorelei, Duran Duran’s “Rio.” These songs are not only themed on water; they infuse buoyant, tidal rhythms and soundscaped instrumentals into their productions. Liquidity has been a critical space for feminine musical presence and, I will argue, self-authorship, that has always run beneath an overwhelmingly masculine popular music commons. Madame Liquidator surfaces again and again in the tides of popular music; most recently, she appeared in a series of ocean-saturated music projects that call themselves Seapunk: a loose electronic genre inhabited by female and femme producers inspired by tropical rhythms, mermaid lore, and the oceanic themes of ‘90s digital art.
Much more than a topic, theme, or form, feminine flow is a musical feeling: the substance of …according to Luce Irigaray:
Yet one must know how to listen otherwise to hear what [woman] says. That it is continuous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible, diffusable, ... That it is unending, potent and impotent owing to its resistance to the countable; that it enjoys and suffers from a greater sensitivity to pressures; that it changes-in volume or in force, for example-according to the degree of heat... that it mixes with bodies of a like state, sometimes dilutes itself in them in an almost homogeneous manner, which makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical; and furthermore that it is already diffuse "in itself~': which disconcerts any attempt at static identification . . .
Iragiaray’s feminist ontology inspires us to move away from an analysis of products and production to ask questions about the materiality of musical movement itself—emerging genres, experimental forms, embodied practices, and transpersonal and even transhuman relationalities. It also calls for fluidity in theorization, a liquid analytic, that overflows the quantativity of musical charts and numbers to value musical experience, and the embodied dimensions of music writing. This approach is especially useful for making the affective strains of women’s creativity legible. It attends to underground and in-between musical flows that may never see the popular stage nor face the global media industries, but is immensely influential in the tides of musical change and stylistic emergence. It also provides a context for imagining musical creativity beyond a paradigm of musical development—the notion that a new commercial genre takes from and eventually supersedes previous modes—and attending to the abundant well of sounds, styles and sensations from which all artists are invited to draw.
In the context of emerging critical discourses that seek out alternative feminist genealogies in popular music (particularly recent work on Beyoncé and Nina Simone) the notion of liquidation opens a new approach to the question of feminine difference in pop. It lmd the count ours of feminine flow as it works through the channels of popular media, which are of themselves highly responsive to emergent contexts. Rather than reproduce binaries that govern pop discourses (white/black, masculine/feminine, feminist/antifeminist), pop fluidity allows artists to embody otherwise contradictory modes of self-making; to simultaneously inhabit the mainstream and its Other.
Drawing from work on Black aesthetics, media ecology, and feminist materialisms, I sound a feminine ontology of musical practice that emphasizes the fluidity of affect, movement and self-writing over notions of genre or identity. For this volume on the theory and politics of ambiguity, I argue that this musical movement—this flow—constitutes a different kind of musical materiality: an always-returning force that, over time, is the wellspring of musical transformation. I imagine liquidation not as the decomposition of a presumed whole—the dissolution of a business for the sake of fast cash, for instance—but as an inevitable process of loosening that any temporary pop crystallization must necessarily undergo. Liquidation is a mode of musical practice as formidable as that of composition, but it leads us to a different kind of work as we weigh the action of cultural saturation, suspension, and erosion alongside the politics of pop articulation, composition, and representation.
Liquid Materialisms
Witness the flow—from hip, to limb, to fingertip and tiptoe—that guides the bodies of young Cuban devotees of the Orishas. In ritual dance, these girls embody the water deity Yemaya, a figure who winds throughout the belief systems of the Black Atlantic and inhabits the seam at which the river meets the sea. They wear billowing deep blue silk dresses over seafoam white skirts, moving with the rippling rhythm of the drummers: a rhythm made from and for Yemaya herself, who moves through the bodies of these ritual participants.
How to weigh the embodied, feminine flow of creativity beyond conventional modes of musical textuality—the structures of the rhythm, the watch count on the Youtube video, the length and nature of the live recording, the language of the chant, the accuracy of the dancers’ response to the drummers’ work? It is much more difficult to assign value to the feminine force that inhabits this music—the power of the feminine deity, the social influence of the priestesses, the hidden ways in which the dancers themselves guide the drummers. This poverty of aesthetic language is accountable for the notion of “women’s music” that is secondary to “music” itself: an echo, dependent on the enunciation of the former. In imagining emerging feminisms, Rosi Braidotti, echoing Irigaray, sounds an emergent feminist practice that breaks established regimes of representation (in which the figure of woman represents the absence of masculine subjectivity) to recognize the primacy of feminine being beyond conventional notions of gender or genre.
As Irigaray points out, women’s “otherness” remains unrepresentable within this scene of representation. The two poles of opposition exist in an asymmetrical relationship. Under the heading of “the double syntax” Irigaray defends this irreducible and irreversible difference not only of Woman from man, but also of real—life women from the reified image of Woman-as-Other. This is proposed as the foundation for a new phase of feminist politics.
Within the patriarchal regime of binary representation, women’s musical production is feminized—that is to say, marked by its absence of masculine musicality—in essence, by its lack of music, itself, exactly. Instead, we get something music—like, or music-lite: ephemeral voices, ambient sensations, breathiness on the loose.
For a popular music industry based in the historical sale of sheet music, the marketability of signal-clear radio novelties, and, later, three-minute singles, feminine creativity was uncontainable in standard product forms. Edith Piaf and Bessie Smith, for instance, each produced pop songs that capitalized on the formats of their time—melodramatic ballads to loves lost to foreign wars and pop-jazz ditties, respectively—but they perforatively oversaturated these forms to innovate upon and, ultimately, overflow and transform established pop genres. Both artists flourished in the realm of live performance, where creative license flourished allowed for a kind of creative play that animated their studio recordings. Later, the long player (LP) format allowed for greater recorded experimentation by women vocalists, particularly in the genres of jazz, exotica and, later, folk and singer/songwriter music, Roberta Flack and Joni Mitchell amongst them. Home recording in the indie rock era allowed genre experimentalists PJ Harvey and Cat Power, among many others, to enrich their production with unconventional formats and vocal elements. The digital age, which offers multimedia experimentation and new models of publicity and distribution, has witnessed immense genre innovation by women artists. A different set of metrics works to recognize the recurring musical influence of fluid creativity on the pop scale.
Irish artist Enya, a prodigious member of Celtic family group Clannad, found her solo work marketed in the “New Age” category to phenomenal international attention. Reviews of her phenomenal 1988 Geffen release, Watermark, and its emblematic single “Orinoco Flow” focuses on the music’s lack of conventional structure—a common critique of the New Age genre—and overlooks the influence of the traditional sea chanties, the phonemic wordplay of the Irish poets, or the soundscaped aesthetic of Irish folk music that inflects her work. From Robert Christgau:
“Whilst humanizing technology, perpetrating banal verse in three languages (I'm guessing about the Gaelic after reading the English and figuring out the Latin), and mentioning Africa, the Orinoco, and other deep dark faraway places, her top-10 CD makes hay of pop's old reliable women-are-angels scam. At least the Cocteau Twins are eccentric. At least [Emerson Lake and Palmer] were vulgarians. D+”
Beyond his assumption that the foreign—language verses must be banal, or that the refrain (“Sail away, sail away, sail away”) becomes less material each time it is chanted, Christgau’s suggestion that the artist is posing as an “angel” and appealing to listener’s orientalist tendencies hardly seems so condemnable in the crotch-centered world of howled punk verses from which contemporary pop criticism emerged in the 1970s. In fact, the delimitation of a Celtic soundscape was very political for Irish nationals beset with the ongoing violence of the anti-colonial Troubles, which were met with heavy urban bombing in the year of the album’s release. Under the auspices of rejecting feminine stereotypes, criticism of the album was overly concerned with what the music was or was not—discernible, eccentric, vulgar, or grounded—rather than what it did. What’s missing are the kinds of embodied memories and affects that concern the amateur—and largely female—critics on the Youtube page for the video:
Reminds me of my beautiful mother and when she'd always play this song when I was young.—aicMadSeason
As beautiful and enchanting as Celtic music and singers are, no one can even come close to touching how incredible Enya's music is. Her music and songs are just so rich and deep.—Wildturkey1960
My teacher used to always play this woman's music and nothing else could ever compare to how relaxing it is. I could never find it because I couldn't remember the words, only the melody.—Damian Trahan
I remember this song from elementary school. The librarian always played this song when I walked in the library. That's when I first heard this song.—Gilligan Hunter
One wonders how many women vocalists, particularly those drawing from indigenous musical aesthetics, have been marginalized to "New Age" by the media industries that mistake soundscape for lack of structure, deny the political possibilities of sensory communication, or are unaware of the global postcolonial context from which the music arises.
Nearly twenty years after Christgau’s dismissal of Enya’s work, Tyler Remmert from Pop‘Stache digs into electronic music producer Grimes, a leader in the Seapunk movement who commands a largely female fan base. Where, for Christgau, Enya’s ephemerality suggests a stereotypical (and anti-feminist) anglicism on the part of the feminine pop artist, Remmert takes Grimes’ “mood and inflection” as an undeveloped attempt to strive beyond the trapping of the feminine musical text in order to be worth “looking at.”
While it’s not an exactly novel approach to songwriting…, a tangential lineage can be drawn, essentially, from the 20-something grooving to Grimes at the Mercury Lounge and her mother, relaxing in Middle America. Grimes, like Enya, is noticing that mood and inflection matter more to her art than lyricism, which is potentially a large step forward for the singular girl making music. By aesthetically differentiating themselves from the riot grrls [sic], or the singer—songwriters that bear their soul, Boucher and Rose have stepped onto a road…that might lead to a trailblazing, atmospheric new way of looking at hip, female artists.
Both Christgau and Remmert—with very different arguments about musical values in hand—either neglect to engage or actively reject the work the music does on the listener’s body. Enya’s stylings lack the eccentricity and vulgar accessibility that could make her aesthetic worthwhile. Grimes’ “mood and inflection” may, in Rennert’s terms, “matter more to her art,” but do not merit any further description. Grimes would disagree:
“The thing that I hate about the music industry is all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Grimes is a female musician’ and ‘Grimes has a girly voice.’ It’s like, yeah, but I’m a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work.”
The political agency of music is rendered inaudible when read solely through its status as a standalone product rather than in the substance of its relationality: its intersubjective feeling. What’s missing is the question of affect: the capacity of music to work upon and through bodies, to form new bodies by bringing other bodies together, to give life to a body of creativity that holds the potential to transform the styles and industries it flows into. How can criticism weigh and value the immediate sense of relaxation or even trance that Enya fans describe? How to engage the way in which Grimes work beyond the textual aspects of “mood and inflection” ( “This music seems excited and its tones sound determined.”) to produce a musical complex in which sounds, lyrics, texts, tones, and composition work in tandem upon the bodies of listeners? In attuning my critical apparatus to the sensory bodies of the artists and audiences, I open up the question of a different political register: soundscape, production, circularity, or other non—teleological modes of understanding the music.
The properties of feminine flow—as metaphor, ontology, and practice—inflect different kinds of musical form and musical knowledge. In a patriarchal light, the measures of pop success—public appearance, the wielding of technology, the decision-making power of studio production, management, or marketing—are species most often inhabited by men. An alternative approach, based on the musical senses and musical experience, accounts for the critical importance of musical flow to new forms, articulations, and projects in popular music, from the enunciation of novel hip-hop styles to the emergent dance—floor politics of “liquidarity,” as described by Luis-Manuel Garcia in his study of underground dance culture: an emergent and flexible mode of belonging articulated in the thickness of the EDM club. The embodied, sensory musical realm, Barry Shank tells us, is nothing if not political: “The experience of musical beauty, when it emerges from unfamiliar sounds or surprising combinations of sounds quite common, has the capacity to redistribute an auditory sensible and to change, thereby, the sonic sens of the political.” This kind of work calls for an embodied, ethnographic, or practice—centered engagement with its subject matter that overflows the textual, generic, and conceptual categories that work to discipline popular music studies. A new generation of scholarship traces a range of musics, including Transatlantic dance pop, European club scenes, global sound technologies, and American hip-hop in terms of their affect, sound, dance, and vocality.
Cultural studies has turned to philosophies of ontology–that is to say, the question of the state of being and of relations between beings–of what is and what matters–to ask why we have historically chosen to focus on certain materials for documentation, analysis, historicization and contextualization, and why others become immaterial to us. We revisit and interrogate the nature of where the substance of communication lies, how to make the unseen, embodied, and otherwise felt dimensions of musical affect legible, and how we account for the materialities of aesthetics when we wrestle with a legacy of musical study based on texts. The boom in sound studies as a critical inter-discipline evidences this concern. Beyond the sonic, ontological questions, we access other less—legible aspects of musical experience: its circumlocutions, intersubjectivities, sensations, ideas, memes, elisions, and anti-texts.
Take Me To The River
After introducing herself as an Aquarius/Pisces for her 1969 performance at Morehouse College, Nina Simone interpreted the African American gospel standard, “Take Me to the Water,” which was later re—versioned by Reverend Al Green for his hit, “Take Me to the River.” She improvised new lyrics atop the refrain of her own recorded arrangement of the song, which appeared on her 1967 High Priestess of Soul:
As long as it’s water/Then I feel at home
If it soothes me, it moves me
What’s remarkable about the Morehouse performance is Simone’s transition from singer to dancer in the tumbling refrains of the song, rising from her pianist’s bench to dance an extended interlude, undulating contrapuntally, hips and shoulders, rolling her arms as if to signify waves in a style similar to that of the Yemaya devotees in ritual trance. From the musical break, extending the aural dimension of the music into embodied physical movement.
This performance, and the mixed Creolisms it synthesizes in its instrumentation and style, evidences the critical historical fluidity of musics. The original recording, undergirded by sparse production, is lyrically open, leaving room for vocal improvisation. Simone oversaturates this space with spontaneous paens to the water, stretching the repeated refrain until it takes on new rhythmic patterns, taken up by her backing band while she dances across the stage. Her locus of music—making moves from the instrument and mouthpiece to the swaying feminine body: the kind of aesthetic fluidity Daphne Brooks locates at the heart of Simone’s work. “As a response to these narrow definitions of black sound, Simone turned other corners and crossed over and out of constricting musical divides, challenging her audiences to consider and perhaps more importantly to listen for the meaning of liberation in black female performance.”
“Take Me to the River” presences the artist’s productive relationship with bodies of water, which led her to spend a great deal of time in self—imposed political exile on the beaches of the Black Atlantic. Simone describes her sojourn in Barbados as a space where she “drifted along, trying to adjust to changes in [her] life,” enjoying “simple pleasures” on an island where “surf rolled up outside my window, just beyond the swimming pool.” It was a place where the artist’s imagination became unbound: “Barbados—as usual—tried to convince me that nothing beyond the horizon existed…” Simone spent more time near the tide during her years at another reach of the Atlantic, in Liberia, where she loved to walk on the beach. Simone’s liberatory musical praxis drew from these oceanic experiences.
The Morehouse performance drew from the roots of Black vernacular music, the provenance of the “Take Me to the Water” hymn as one of a host of gospel songs (“Goin’ down to the River of Jordan” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” among them) that were used for immersion baptisms and infused with longing for return to a promised land on the “other side.” Many songs of enslaved African people in the New World locate waterways as both a space of longing and for mobility—routes by which they might steal away to freedom. “Wade in the Water” was a classic spiritual that referred both to the baptism of believers in white or blue robes, and to the routes by which enslaved people could evade surveillance as they escaped to the underground railroad. Beyond the referential and metaphoric valence of these texts, Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant locates a politics of otherness that, independent of the institution of colonial domination, lies in the oceanic abyss and moves through waterways. He limns, in the medium of water that joins diasporas to homelands, a Poetics of Relation:
For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea’s abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange.
Glissant’s work established the discourse of creolité based on the cultural confluences of his diasporic home: a global subjectivity based not in notions of distinct, essential identities, but in the transformative interrelations of an always-emergent cultural ecology. For populations separated from their homelands by the middle passage, belonging is established through the arts, poetry, music and movement: an alternative political economy. In approaching Simone’s work as fundamentally relational, instead of emplaced, her politic of musical cross-cutting, reassemblage, sampling, seasoned re/turn, and deconstruction relationship to the body of popular music becomes legible.
Mami Wata’s Global South
Pop liquidity works through routes: always—already crisscrossed cultures in global translation and transition. The sea was the medium for capitalist globalization in the form of an expansive European modernity, which sought first to dominate and control the seas and waterways, and then to colonize the lands across the waters. The white/patriarchal domination of water worlds remains present in pop genealogies: on Martin Denny’s exotica album covers, decorated by smiling Polynesian women on the beach, in the luxury liners that rush through the history of music television, atop the Neptune—like domination of the California coast with surfboards and the colonial sublime of yacht rock. But for populations for whom globalization has meant domination, domestication, and immobilization—the formation that is the Global South—waterways are both the route of return to ancestral homelands and toward the possibilities of different futures. Harry Belafonte’s Civil—Rights—Era “Banana Boat Song (Day O),” the song of a grounded night—shift dockworker longing for his long—lost ancestral home even as he hides the deadly presence of a black tarantula in his product, for instance, has a very different valence from that of Christopher Cross’ Reagan—era “Sailing,” in which the narrator, already rich with daydreams, imagines a “miraculous” trip to a land in which “serenity” and “tranquility” can be maintained eternally.
As digital globalization transforms the media industries, a contemporary cadre of interethnic global pop artists is emerging from populations who hold water in ritual esteem: women, the African diaspora, colonized peoples of global coastlines. Mami Wata—or, in Latin America, Yemaya or Yemanja—is a global figure who appears wherever colonial ships touched the cultural landscape. Her identity, according to Henry James Drewal, is “as slippery and amorphous as water itself,” embodying sacred figures from a host of seaborne cultures—a Hindu water goddess, the Catholic saints, a Polynesian snake cult and, most recognizably, Yoruba belief from the region surrounding the Nigerian coast. In Bahia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Senegal, Ghana, and Liberia, popular music is infused with her devotions, rhythms and movements. Popular material culture and fashion in these regions also draw from the Mami Wata persona: sometimes she is depicted as the three Greek sirens; others, as a Hindu water snake goddess; other times, she is said to carry a golden mirror that she uses to lure sailors into marriage in keeping with European mermaid tales. The diasporic nature of Mami Wata’s character speaks to the long processes of waterborne globalization that have led to contemporary circumstances of mass global migration and upheaval.
Mami Wata’s powers, however, extend far beyond economic gain. Although for some she bestows good fortune and status through monetary wealth, for others, she aids in concerns related to procreation—infertility, impotence, or infant mortality. Some are drawn to her as an irresistible seductive presence who offers the pleasures and powers that accompany devotion to a spiritual force. Yet she also represents danger, for a liaison with Mami Wata often requires a substantial sacrifice, such as the life of a family member or celibacy in the realm of mortals. Despite this, she is capable of helping women and men negotiate their sexual desires and preferences. Mami also provides a spiritual and professional avenue for women to become powerful priestesses and healers of both psycho—spiritual and physical ailments and to assert female agency in generally male—dominated societies.
According to Drewal, Mami Wata and related water goddesses have become more prominent as rapid urbanization transforms the African coastline and new modes of global migration take root amidst Black Atlantic populations.
Two artists have anchored contemporary pop movements that surround and collect in Caribbean creole cultures: Rihanna and Beyoncé, whose vastly differential stylings have been nonetheless conflated by the notion of a pop “Battle of the Divas.” [Insert Figure 1 here] Rihanna, whose Caribbean homeland is thick with images of mermaids and Afro—Pentecostal water rituals, self—consciously evokes the figure of Madame Liquidator time and again in her videos, her photo shoots, and notably, in her shimmering, loosened vocal stylings. Her video release for “Pour it Up,” in particular, evokes an aesthetic of liquidation—in this sense, the relationship between the undulations of the feminine body and the redistribution of paper money toward circulation exclusively between women dancers and patrons (who are, in the end, one in the same). A send-up of the woman-as—exotic-dancer trope in hip-hop, rock, and country videos alike, Rihanna poses here as both sexual purveyor and consumer in an underwater strip club filled with meticulously-lit, lush, drops of liquid bouncing off bodies, walls, and floors. In her earlier clip for “Man Down,” Rihanna flips her thigh—length red weave around her body while dancing on a raft and in the surf, describing her revenge against an abusive partner, punctuating her story with loose patois wordplay. In addition to her musicalaesthetic fluidity, the artist is also styled to a mermaid aesthetic for photos, with her crystal formalwear cut into fishtails and her magazine cover shoots featuring flowing hair and lapping Caribbean beach lines.
Like the critique of Enya and Grimes, a host of articles, tweets and posts mocked Rihanna’s liquified, patios vocal play on her 2016 release, “Work.” Again, a gaggle of lay critics (something BuzzFeed called, simply, “The Internet” in their article on the backlash against "Work") reduced the song’s increasingly passionate, affective audibility—inspired by the increasingly destratified movements of a dancehall stage performer, or the climactic arc of a well-coordinated sexual encounter—to the “problem” of its illegibility. Given the way the song captivated Rihanna’s digital fandom, evident through a host of high-visibility dance videos dedicated to the song by choreographers Kiki Palmer and Matt Steffanina, one wonders whether if it was the Black woman artist’s sexual self—possession that made the white/masculine gatekeepers of “The Internet” so uncomfortable. No matter; the song was the artist’s 14th Billboard “Hot 100” chart—topper, ranking her the third—most charted artist in pop history, just ahead of Michael Jackson.
Beyoncé, a native of the Gulf port city Houston with roots in the Afrodiasporic Caribbean, evokes two distinct water goddesses on her last two releases. The figure of Yemaya dances through the hidden flows of Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled video album, steeped as it is in sea foam, sunsplash, and an elusive politics of pop transformation. Most notably, on a song dedicated to her daughter, “Blue,” Beyoncé wears a shimmering blue Carnivále costume and rolls in the lapping surf, her waistlength blonde hair waving in the water. As the video album draws to a close with a lullaby, she disappears into the ocean with her daughter in her arms. “Drunk in Love,” the album’s signature track, features an extended series of shots of Beyoncé as water goddess, dancing in the moonlight tide as her loving husband looks on, peripheral to the album’s decidedly feminine cosmology. She will, she says, ride him like a “surfboard.” Critically, the fan base for this album was largely women, and its market appeal tapped into a feminine marketplace that lovers’ rock has also occupied: body-oriented music, circulating lyricism and thick vocal production, and a certain musical timelessness that sacrifices novelty pop hooks for the sake of sensational immersion. Whatever the inspiration for these artistic choices, the oceanic aesthetics and imagery of the work offers a certain aesthetic timelessness that contrasts with the teleological impulse of dance music production and hip-hop stylistic innovation alike.
Beyoncé’s surprise May 2016 video album release, Lemonade, was quickly met with critical interest in her references to river goddess Oshun, said in many traditions to be the sister to Yemaya. Wearing the billowing yellow robes of Oshun’s Caribbean devotees and wading into the slow-moving waterways of the Gulf Coast, the artist, according to Joan Morgan, evokes the persona of artist to powerful ends:
Like the patron saint it claims as its sire, the film utilizes Oshun’s needle to stitch the album’s singular story into a larger diasporic narrative of community comprised of black women’s struggle, sacrifice, survival, and transformation. Of all the tools Oshun is said to carry, perhaps the most powerful one is her mirror. The layperson mistakes this for a sign of her vanity. Those of us who know her a bit more intimately however recognize the mirror as the tool Oshun holds up to our faces when she requires us to do the difficult work of really seeing ourselves.
The artist’s engagement with these watery goddesses likely emerges from the confluence of her creole milieu on the cusp of the Black Atlantic, from her own artistic interest in Yoruba-influenced imagery, and from the influence of her many collaborators, many of whom themselves have personal engagements with the legacy of the Yoruba-influenced Orishas. Beyoncé’s work, steeped as it is in sea foam, sunsplash, watery ritual and an elusive politics of pop transformation, plays with the question of whether or not she is a feminist—a question that, for all the albums’ representational richness, is an obsessive one for the pop blogosphere. Beyond the neoliberal strongarm that is bad online cultural criticism, Beyoncé makes space for exuberant women to locate safety and exaltation in the water: to immerse themselves in performative fluidity against the soundbytes and clickbait.
Pooling the Pop Undercommons
Madame Liquidator’s transformative creativity is marked by the erosion of formal and discursive fixity at the water’s edge, where powerful practitioners of pop are hiding in plain sight. TLC’s “Waterfalls” has enjoyed an extended commercial life, with nearly 37,000,000 plays on Youtube—nearly 61 times the amount of plays for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” which beat TLC out for the #1 Billboard spot in 1995, their mutual year of release. The production is undergirded by a buoyant wah-wah guitar rhythm and sparse, rolling high hats; its cautionary lyrics lull into a loose, unrhymed chorus saturated with motherly wisdom: “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls/please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.” The visual aesthetics of the video match the production and theme; the three members of the group are transparent water figures, dancing in a water world absent any masculine presence. A few years in “Waterfalls”’ wake, Aaliyah’s iconic, wah-wah and tom-tom saturated 2001 release, “Rock the Boat,” featured her undulating on the prow of a yacht or emerging from the surf. Her team of white—and—blue—clad backup dancers pair up and dance together, recalling Yemaya’s bisexuality and love of her own mirror image. No males appear in the scene. Because Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash just hours after the island video shoot, she has been memorialized as a mermaid by fans; notably her album sales skyrocketed after the video’s release in the wake of her death.
Another enduring voice with an unusual pop career arc, Sade, has taken decade-long hiatuses between albums while staying true to her singular, aquatic aesthetic: a hazy contralto described by Diva Devotee as “rounded, velvety, and effortless.” At the confluence of the quiet storm and lovers’ rock genres—formats that feature women singers and largely women fan bases–the Nigerian-British artist (who grew up near the shores of both nations) often accompanies her hazy contralto with compositions based on or in the water, including her song on 1992’s Love Deluxe, “Mermaid,” and in the video for “Ordinary Love” from the same album. In the latter video, the artist inhabits a mermaid figure on a halfshell who, surfacing to dry land to find a lost love, longs to return for the water. As she inscribes diaspora and longing into the seascapes of her work, Sade flips the scripts of the exoticization and fetishization of the creole woman to possess a waterborne representational mobility.
When American vocalist Jhené Aiko tapped into the diasporic/aquatic aesthetic with her 2011 self-released mixtape, Sailing Soul(s), she found heavy critical comparison to Sade for this very reason: immersed in watery production and fluid vocality, Aiko figures the Global South in her lyrics and in the nuances of her style, referencing her Japanese, Native American and Afro—Caribbean heritage. A vocal wash of chorus and echoplexed, waterlogged kick drums muffle through the song, plucked strings ping like water droplets, and samples of Polynesian instrumentation that recall the sonic trips of the exotica genre punctuate the production: sliding steel guitars, harps, extended unstructured vocal improvisations that call attention to the textures of the (always feminine) voice. Rhythms become more circular and less punctual, less linear and progressive, as the ambulatory function of the music is subverted for non-landlubbing movement; drums are often filtered through phasers that make them sound as if there are bobbing just beneath the surface. If Rock’n’Roll’s most enduring, muscular form was by design climactic, built around the singular, driving masculine orgasm, then the oceanic works differently upon the body, sustaining an even stratum of aural pleasure. Whispering female voices and other “soft” vocal techniques are known to stimulate the human ASMR reflex, a rolling sensation of bodily stimulation most like an extended, full-body female orgasm.
The modes of saturation by which these works encounter the pop milieu are an alternative to the colloquial Billboard “hit” single. They ebb and flow through the history of popular music; many become timeless anthems used over decades of high—school graduations and American Idol auditions. Others collect in digital form, as a tumblr account or an online playlist that collects digital followers and embeds itself in others’ digital presences. Rarely, if ever, do they gain novelty as beacons of new, distinct pop genres; in fact, they are difficult to place in terms of a genealogy of pop development. Popular music studies, like most social sciences, cultural studies, and humanities, concerns itself with formations–genres, charts, soundscan tallies. Following Hall, Hebdige, and the Birmingham School, new movements in media and cultural studies are concerned with conjunctures: historical and spatial convergences that Lawrence Grossberg describes as the “articulation, accumulation, and condensation of contradictions, a fusion of different currents or circumstances.” Conjunctures come together in the form of a cultural formation: crystallizations, or objects, enmeshed in the sounds and styles of pop production. While the formations themselves are measurable and subject to analysis, the processes by which these formations materialize, hang together, and fall away are not met with an adequate critical vocabulary. But this movement is also material as the fluid substratum of musical ebbs and flows can also become the subject of pop studies.
Conjunctural analyses of genre formations are the core of what we do in popular music studies. Their makeup, however, is illuminated by that which emerges between them. It’s a question of what counts as material: we can much more easily historicize genres, sub-labels, hits, compilations, and scenes than we can the unquantifiable affect, the cyclical flow, and the movements of pop. So what happens when we liquidate the object of pop studies? I use Madame Liquidator’s description of her own musical affect as a cipher for imagining the unseen destratifications, unravelings, and loosenings that accompany powerful feminine engagements with popular music. These, I hold, are imbricated in the pop milieu. When we pay attention to the contributions of women to pop, we can now not only study that which is complicit in its formation, or that which is directly resistant to it, but we can also look at that which is external to pop, which washes through and infuses it: that which supersedes and outlasts it. This is a question of aesthetics and performances that endure, that connect, and flow beyond these points of crystallization. As concerned as we are with pop formations, we also engage that which precedes and underlies them. The liquid feminine emerges at times in pop in between conjunctures. It is the movement between movements.
Sigmund Freud muses on a force he calls the oceanic–a notion inspired by metaphysicist Baruch Spinoza’s conatus ad motum: the material will towards becoming that characterizes all bodies. Freud locates this flowing stratum of being beyond the institutions, social structures, bodies, and psychological complexes that undergird his psychoanalysis. The oceanic is the force that drives these structures into being and transformation. It is evidenced through feeling—rather than recording—an event, object, or performance. It opens a clearing to an ontological pool that lay beneath the formations of civilization, the objects of reality, and our perception of them. In 1927, Romain Rolland inspired Freud’s later work by accessing this notion of an eternal, oceanic sublime that lay beneath the object relations that structure the ego:
"By religious feeling, what I mean—altogether independently of any dogma, any Credo, any organization of the Church, any Holy Scripture, any hope for personal salvation, etc.—the simple and direct fact of a feeling of 'the eternal' (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic). This feeling is in truth subjective in nature. It is a contact."
The oceanic impulse toward social destratification is confluent with the sensibility of a different age than Freud’s, to be sure, but Madame Liquidator’s is a new age with an edge: a present, liquid utopia. Its contours are sounded by women who are less likely to grab the mic than to wait for its noise to die down so they can be heard doing their thing in their natural register. A sensory approach to popular music, attuned to confluences, relations, and affects, amplifies the otherwise elusive work of music’s feminine, and often otherwise illegibly feminist forces.
Seapunk Ahoy!
Seapunk, an emerging movement in pop liquidity, took form in the early 2010s and quickly caught on with the arts blogosphere is a decidedly feminine assemblage of heavily visual music projects. Awash with nostalgic graphic design elements rendered in the acid-washed techno-utopianism of ‘90s “3—D” digital art—jumping porpoises, sunny ocean scenes, and highly saturated, pixelated fluorescents—the genre’s visual culture appeals to millennial women and girls who once loved the mass—produced t—shirts and school supplies of pop designer Lisa Frank. This self-consciously aesthetic femmescape was accompanied by a body of electronic music produced almost exclusively by and for women and girls. The unofficial anthem of the movement was 2012’s “Genesis,” a song by electronic producer and vocalist Grimes. Both the artist, dressed in white robes and draped with the water goddess’ hefty blonde snake, and her shimmering seaborne avatar, played by dancer/rapper Brooke Candy, evoke specific aspects of Mami Wata’s oeuvre. In addition to emerging from the water in a shimmering bodysuit and flowing pink dreadlocks, Candy wears a jeweled bindi on her foreheads that, thanks to Indian sailors on British colonial ships, was incorporated into original Yoruba depictions of the watery goddess of globalization.
The movement was immediately dismissed by the New York Times in an article titled, “Little Mermaid Goes Punk: Seapunk, a Web Joke With Music, Has Its Moment.” Tellingly, the article focuses on the genre’s most visible male promoters and its trademark fashion trend: the flowing, pastel—colored hairstyle that has stuck with millennials for half a decade. But since its emergence, the not—exactly—a—genre genre has transposed its sound—deconstructed, saturated with female vocals, themed on oceanic themes—into other non—genres, from the amorphous publicity phenomenon of “witchhouse" to the more established realms of chillwave and darkwave. These latter two categories are both more commercially viable and readily recognizable than the ambiguity of seapunk; these are also more likely to be inhabited by male producers who sample female vocalists than women artists in their own right. What remains constant in this cresting pop aesthetic is the articulation of fluid vocality—those same chorus, reverb and flanged effects—with visual depictions of women in, on, or of water. As the World Wide Web solidifies into a thickly stratified commercial structure, seapunk reminds us of the subaltern possibilities that these transnational networks engender. The aesthetic is reflected in open—ended beats and rhyme structures, collaged depictions of happy porpoises and technicolor seashores, and, much more often than not, women artists experimenting with a feminine, sonic utopia. Azalea Banks, often citing her devotion to Yemaya, purposefully mines the sea goddess’ image with her mermaid gear and references to Atlantis, produced a mixtape, “Fanatasea” and an event named the “Mermaid Ball” in the Bowery Ballroom in 2012. Soon, a host of established artists followed suit with their own takes on seapunk, largely in terms of their visual styling: Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga adopted mermaid hair and clothes and Rihanna’s team animated her stage performances with projections of digital dolphins and seascapes. Suddenly, the “inexplicable microgenre” went global.
Drawing from images of the Afrodiasporic ocean goddesses and the self-conscious girliness drawn from the hyper-animated digital 1990s, seapunk and its aesthetic wake speak to an emergent, ecological, and decidedly queer feminism in which the questions of diaspora and subjectivity are renewed in the digital register. In her “Water Me,” FKA Twigs describes her desire to be nourished by a lover who refuses to “water” her and make her grow. SZA’s 2014 “Babylon” begins on land and follows her, robed in white, into a baptismal pool in the wake of a heartbreak. Woman producer Tommy Genesis’ “Hair Like Water Wavy like the Sea” places her and her sister-in-chillwave Abra alone on a rocky shore, while Dutch producer/vocalist Sevdalzia’s “Sirens of the Caspian” references the watery folklore of her Iranian homeland. Each of these artists references Mami Wata style: a serpent around the neck, an ornate nose chain, loose, flowing hair, a deasturated, blur—tinged ocean setting. Beyond liquid themes, these highly stylized, highly unique compositions have in common an oceanic aesthetic, which saturates and blurs the lyrical, aural, and visual sensory registers, and leads each artist to an alterity of her own.
Both the digital realm and the sea hold immense creative potential for millennial women and girls: the digital wormholes of Youtube are saturated with the work of women producers and/or vocalists who theme their work on the oceanic—particularly in the years since 2010, when web 2.0 opened up to a new register of highly sensory media technologies, from faster HD sound to new formats like Instagram and Tumblr. Many seapunk-influenced artists conceptualize their work in terms of digital art installations, particularly feminist multimedia artists Pussykrew, Sevdaliza’s visual collaborators, and the “fluid portraits” of FKA Twigs/Bjork collaborator Jesse Kanda. The subjective fluidity enunciated across web 2.0 articulates new global modes of brownness and queerness that were previously invisible. As Drewal notes the emergence of Mami Wata devotion in the growing coastal African city, mermaid themes are emerging wherever the Global South takes root. The mermaid figure—interethnic, interspecies, unconventionally mobile—enunciates a kind of queerness that makes her at once the object of the male sexual gaze while remaining, accounting to her fins and fishtail, sexually impenetrable. She is meant to exist for herself and for other mermaids; interactions with landlubbers tend to end disastrously.
Even as it liberates new modes of subjectivity, digital globalization has mobilized new modes of—as the blogosphere puts it—“cultural appropriation” as suburban teens gain access to and fascination with a world of cultural signs and symbols. These modes of gaze and consumption are also a tension present in the presenting of female-vocalized dance music as the foundation of an emerging music-festival culture that is restructuring the global music industry. These festival fields, on one hand, invite many more female participants than club-based DJ events and have spawned a fashion industry, saturated with bindis, pastel washes, and shell bikinis. Women at these festivals, attuned on one hand to the utopian impulse represented by the sampled female voice and destratified performance space, are also subjected to the subjective gaze of masculine sexual longing. Male electronic producers, inspired by an often different approach to the global sea, turn to Black vocal practices and Afrodiasporic spirituality, to represent their status as cosmopolitan consumers: musical tourists. In spaces in which both racialized and gendered bodies are central to both sound and spectacle—albeit in very different registers, a feminine—and often feminist—solidarity is emerging, but also, problematically, so is a desire for the consumption, integration, and even dissolution of the global “other.” The tension between these colonial desires and decolonial impulses are lain bare in the thickness of the musical production: a fusion of the daydreamy sublime of yacht rock and surf music and the liberatory possibilities always-already embedded in feminine voicing.
Emergent Pop Formations
How to approach the very real political possibility of a Madame Liquidator: rarely recognized as an artist in her own right, but nonetheless fundamentally substantial to the creation of musical formations, communities, and worlds? This is an explicitly feminist intervention, working to nourish a conceptual lexicon by which critics can articulate both the musical work that women, girl, and feminized subjects—particularly those of the Global South—do, but also engage practices that have been cast as feminine—backup singing, stage dancing, improvising, reversioning, inspiring—by conventional discourses on popular music. In doing so, I argue that the figure of a hidden field of work—one largely authored by women practitioners—will come to light. By opening up the feminine as a primary space of musical creativity that precedes and resists the patriarchal system of musical valuation, commodification, representation and classification, I hope to also enrich the vocabulary by which we can recognize the work of the rarely recognized—but deeply influential—work of popular music’s Others. It should be noted that, given its marginalization by critical gatekeepers, musical flow has been historically constituted an unrecognized space in which feminine and feminized people are free to cultivate new aesthetic modes.
The object of musical study is the materiality of its movement, rather than the forms that seem to crystallize from it. As we have seen from generations of musical performance, the most rigid musicalities are the ones that fall away, while its plastic counterparts: fragments, riffs, styles, samples flow more readily through time and space. Given the limitations of conventional critical discourses on popular music and feminism(s), the notion of liquidation offers a different kind of access to the question of feminine musical power as it works through popular channels. Rather than reproduce binaries that govern pop discourses—binaries based on colonial formations and power relations (black/white feminine/masculine, feminist/antifeminist)—pop fluidity allows artists to embody otherwise contradictory modes of self—making; to simultaneously inhabit the mainstream and its Other. Drawing from work on Black aesthetics, media ecology, and feminist cultural theory, I illustrate a feminine ontology of musical practice that emphasizes the fluidity of affect, movement and self-articulation over the politics of subjectivity.
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