{"id":672,"date":"2018-09-19T01:55:29","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T01:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/?p=672"},"modified":"2018-09-19T01:55:29","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T01:55:29","slug":"stoever-moylan-rihanna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/blog-09\/stoever-moylan-rihanna\/","title":{"rendered":"Stoever, Moylan, Rihanna."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThat right there, the fact that you and so many white people have this same \u2018black voice\u2019 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\u00a0<\/strong>sexual <\/strong>as you do because my skin color determines how I think.\u201d (Stoever, 8)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cShe doesn\u2019t make sense as much as she makes noise<\/strong>, commuting a story not through words, but phonetic shapings that sound likeshe\u2019s speaking some sort of alien tongue that she\u2019s making up as she goes along, [or] likewords left out in the rain, their definition bleeding\u00a0<\/strong>out into each other until there is nothing but a string of guttural utterances\u00a0<\/strong>set to a pulsating\u00a0<\/strong>beat\u00a0Rihanna doesn\u2019t need you to understand her, she just needs you to\u00a0<\/strong>feel<\/strong>.\u201d (Brian Moylan, W)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In her hit song, Work<\/em>, 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 <\/em>on genius.com, you will see that the moments when Brian Moylan suggests she has descended into \u201ca string of guttural utterances,\u201d are moments when she is most heavily utilizing patois. All this \u201cnoise\u201d 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 Housewives<\/em>episodes for Vulture (subset of NYmag), has developed a listening ear<\/em>(our developed, embodied listening practices which enforce the sonic color line) that cannot recognize Rihanna\u2019s patois as language. Instead, he reduces Rihanna\u2019s voice to \u201cnoise\u201d 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 <\/em>publishing them online under his name. This is the type of \u201cerroneous assumption\u201d 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 <\/em>the lyrics to Work<\/em>in 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cwhite people melting rap and other genres of black pop music into something you could sing with your dorm friends around a campfire\u201d (taken from Jia Tolentino, Jezebel):<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZWe1ngNIypI<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cLove me some RiRi but I do like this version better. you have an amazing voice….\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

(YT user) Rachael Castillo<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cShe took the Caribbean out of it and now you white people love it. Nothing but the same old white washing here.\u201d (YT user) Sophia Mendoza<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThat right there, the fact that you and so many white people have this same \u2018black voice\u2019 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\u00a0sexual as you do because my skin color determines how I think.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-blog-09","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}