“That right there, the fact that you and so many white people have this same ‘black voice’ in their heads, is the sonic color line. And the listening ear explains your erroneous assumption that I would find this voice as funny and weird and sexual as you do because my skin color determines how I think.” (Stoever, 8)
“She doesn’t make sense as much as she makes noise, commuting a story not through words, but phonetic shapings that sound likeshe’s speaking some sort of alien tongue that she’s making up as she goes along, [or] likewords left out in the rain, their definition bleeding out into each other until there is nothing but a string of guttural utterances set to a pulsating beat Rihanna doesn’t need you to understand her, she just needs you to feel.” (Brian Moylan, W)
In her hit song, Work, Rihanna adopts a Jamaican patois dialect, slightly different from her native Bajan patois (which comes from Barbados). If you look at the lyrics for Work on genius.com, you will see that the moments when Brian Moylan suggests she has descended into “a string of guttural utterances,” are moments when she is most heavily utilizing patois. All this “noise” is, in fact, composed of words that have a meaning that Rihanna fully intends to convey. However, Jamaican patois, as a dialect, is something that Brian Moylan, a white, male, New York blogger whose main body of work is writing recaps of Real Housewivesepisodes for Vulture (subset of NYmag), has developed a listening ear(our developed, embodied listening practices which enforce the sonic color line) that cannot recognize Rihanna’s patois as language. Instead, he reduces Rihanna’s voice to “noise” to which he ascribes erotic, animal attributes (see the bold text above), fulfilling his white, male sexualized notions of Rihanna as an exotic, brown-skinned woman. Further, his listening ear feels entirely comfortable making these substitutions/reductions and publishing them online under his name. This is the type of “erroneous assumption” Stoever is talking about. Moylan is not writing this piece for black people, especially not black women, he is appealing to a white, male reader who he cannot help but be 100% certain will have heard the lyrics to Workin the same way that he did. A white, male reader who is in on the joke. A white, male reader whose listening hear has been tuned to the same frequencies.
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“white people melting rap and other genres of black pop music into something you could sing with your dorm friends around a campfire” (taken from Jia Tolentino, Jezebel):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWe1ngNIypI
“Love me some RiRi but I do like this version better. you have an amazing voice….”
(YT user) Rachael Castillo
“She took the Caribbean out of it and now you white people love it. Nothing but the same old white washing here.” (YT user) Sophia Mendoza
