Of Resilience and Men: How Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo Play with Gender in “Where Are Ü Now”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/bt0ja-9ey61
Justin Bieber caught me off guard last year. There I was, minding my own business, listening to a pop station, and this breathy little thing, this delicate vocal wrapped in a halo of shimmering effects starts piping through my car. I didn’t even realize it was him at first; it had been so long since I’d heard a new Bieber song. And I had no clue the production was from Skrillex and Diplo (from their 2015 Skrillex and Diplo Present Jack Ü), which is why I was probably also not ready for the drop, that moment when the song’s tension releases and I’m suddenly gliding across a syncopated bass synth while Bieber’s vocals are pinched into a dolphin call. Somehow, two of the most notoriously unsubtle producers and the posterboy for “too much, too soon” had snuck up on me with “Where Are Ü Now” (WAÜN).
WAÜN’s drop from nowhere isn’t brand new. Subtle soars and understated drops are officially A Thing. More importantly, they do work beyond the sonic aesthetic. In this case, I want to listen to WAÜN in the context of Bieber’s performance of gender, specifically with an ear toward the way Skrillex and Diplo mix elements from dancepop’s 2015 toolkit to produce a track that plays on feminine tropes, which articulate a kind of masculinity. Listening to WAÜN alongside Robin James’s Resilience & Melancholy (2015) amplifies the male privilege at play in WAÜN. James calls attention to the way drops can sonify feminine resilience, and WAÜN’s surprise drop toys with that resilience in a thoroughly heteromasculine way. I’ll first set up how drops usually work, then read James in the context of Bieber’s gender performance as heard in WAÜN.
Drops, at their most basic, are climactic moments when a song’s full instrumental measure hits (hence “drop”), often after some key elements of the instrumental have been removed so that the climax can sound more intense. At that broad level, any genre can employ a drop of some sort. EDM and dancepop drops—the kind that most directly inform the music of Skrillex, Diplo, and Bieber—are bass-heavy and typically follow a soar that intensifies volume, texture, rhythm, and/or pitch: you soar to a sonic plateau or a cliff, and with a “YEEEEEES!!!!!” coast on some wobbly goodness to the next verse.
The pre-chorus soar in the Messengers/Sir Nolan/Kuk Harrell-produced “All Around the World” from Bieber’s 2012 Believe is a solid example. In the video below, the soar starts at 0:45, the chorus enters at 1:00, and the drop lands at 1:15. It’s textbook: the instrumental is stripped back and filtered, and in the opening moments, we hear a descending bass glide. A filter does what its name suggests–it filters out a prescribed set of frequencies so that we only hear a certain range, and in this case it’s the low end that comes through. The effect makes the synths sound like they’re pulsating through water, and the higher frequency overtones take on a shimmery quality. Over the course of the 8-measure soar, the higher frequency range is brought into earshot, and then, on the second half of the eighth measure…nothing. This nothingness is integral to James’s central argument in Resilience & Melancholy: nothingness intensifies what follows. In these eight measures, we’ve glided down to the low end only to soar up up up until all that’s left is Bieber’s voice, confident, nasally, with just a touch of autotune as he sings the titular line that will take us to the chorus. That chorus bangs harder because of the soar to oblivion before it.
WAÜN’s drop lands at 1:09. For full context, start from the beginning and listen for the soar. (If you also need to stare dreamily into Bieber’s eyes, then by all means.)
There’s not really a soar there. No intensifying volume, texture, rhythm, pitch. The not-soar (starting at 0:48) is even a weird length, clocking in at 12 measures after an 8-measure intro and 16-measure verse have established a multiples-of-8 structural rhythm; even if we were expecting a drop, it comes four measures early. The clearest sign we get that a drop is imminent is that moment where the instrumental reduces to a quiet hiss for two measures as Bieber sings “Where are you now?” That hiss is the structural equivalent of the nothingness we hear just before “All Around the World”’s chorus, and with no traditional soar before it, we have just enough time to think “Oh shit, are they gonna….?” before we’re off, clutching tight to Justin Bieber as we ride a dolphin through the more tender parts of Skrillex’s and Diplo’s musical oceans.
Until that nothingness, this could just as easily be one of those heartfelt Bieber tunes where he reaches to the high end of his range for a chorus full of feels. That Bieber? He’s incredibly self-assured, bearing his soul because he’s certain you’ll love him. The bait-and-switch of WAÜN’s soarless drop highlights Bieber’s insecurity in this song—he’s just dolphin calls and “Where are you now”s—by creating expectations for a different persona.
So what we have here is an atypical drop, a drop that calls attention to itself by behaving differently than we expect it to, a drop that’s a study in understatement–all courtesy of three of dancepop’s resident maximalists.
Atypical soars and drops aren’t new, as producers will always toy with musical conventions as a way to disrupt expectations. Skrillex’s own “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” (2010) includes a pre-drop that doesn’t soar at all. In 2015, two big acts in the dance scene, Disclosure and The Chemical Brothers, released singles that don’t soar right, either. Disclosure, whose big 2013 hit “Latch” soared rather traditionally into Sam Smith’s chorus, is coyer on “Bang That” and “Jaded.” “Bang That” includes three separate 8-measure phrases (at 0:30, 0:45, and 1:01, respectively, in the linked video) that never take off, finally settling into a descending bass line (starting at 1:09) that just repeats a rhythmic motif, running out the clock on the final four measures before the chorus. “Jaded,” at the other end of the spectrum, includes only a 4-measure pre-chorus (1:18-1:27) that seems to be sweeping upward like a traditional soar, then roller coasters down and back up over the final two measures. The instability of this soar/not-soar is punctuated with an additional eighth note tacked onto the end of the fourth measure, throwing the chorus off-kilter. The Chemical Brothers employ a similar roller coaster sweep in “Sometimes I Feel So Deserted” that marks out an even eight measures (0:58-1:13) without either intensifying rhythmically or pushing to a pitch ceiling at the drop.
These soars and drops stand out precisely because, like WAÜN’s, they aren’t the norm. To help theorize WAÜN’s not-soar, I want to think with Robin James, whose Resilience & Melancholy hears soars and drops in the context of contemporary race and gender politics. James situates soars and drops as the sonic equivalent of resilience–a performance of feminine overcoming that ultimately only strengthens the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that inflicts the damage that is being surmounted. In other words, women can only attempt to overcome through the damage that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy inflicts upon them. Sonically, the soar is an accrual of damage that is spectacularly (and profitably) overcome in the drop, the music that resiliently endures on the other side of nothingness. Melancholy, on the other hand, is failed resilience, a handling of damage that does not directly profit white supremacist patriarchy and that could sound any number of ways, including like a non-traditional soar. While admittedly these soars and drops aren’t always about gender politics, R&M opens space for us to think about gender and soars/drops together.
I don’t think WAÜN’s non-soar/drop is resilient or melancholic, but I do think it’s helpful to think of it as being about resilience and melancholy. This is where Bieber’s performance of masculinity comes into play. From his earliest poofy-headed, babyfaced performances, Biebs has done a modified bro thing: his heart’s on his sleeve, but mostly as a strategy for sexual conquest. “All Around the World,” again, is exemplary. In the lyrics, Bieber uses his worldly experiences to woo a potential lover, who he also negs, keeping himself in a position of power as someone who knows more, has seen more, and is willing to accept this woman despite her obvious flaws.
In WAÜN, though, I hear his performance of masculinity complicated further, as he tries out a number of more feminized tropes all at once. Lyrically, Bieber is the scorned lover who claims to have done all the care work in his relationship. Visually, he’s the pop icon whose body is ogled, scrutinized, and marked. Vocally, he receives the pitch-shift treatment that has most recently been associated with DJ Snake’s production of diva vocals (think “You Know You Like It” and “Lean On”). He also sings in a breathy style that James has elsewhere noted mimics Ellie Goulding’s vocals. Musically, Skrillex and Diplo give him the soar/drop construction to undergird his pain, a musical technique that most often signifies feminine resilience.
What bubbles up is a heteromasculine play on resilience and melancholy. Skrillex and Diplo liquidate the soar until all that’s left is a nothing-hiss before the drop. In the context of the other feminized tropes Bieber is messing with in WAÜN, this failed soar could feel melancholic, a refusal to spectacularly overcome. Overcome what, though? Bieber gets to sound resilient or melancholic without ever experiencing damage. That’s his male privilege. James points out that one of the most violent outcomes of resilience discourse is the re-enforcement of damage. If resilience is the way women become legible and profitable, then the damage inflicted by ablist white cisheteropatriarchy becomes a necessity, something that must be endured to gain access to power and resources. This is the lynchpin of James’s critique: resilience is a harmful discourse because it ultimately benefits the system it purports to overcome. Melancholy turns resilience logic on its head by refusing to treat damage as something an individual is responsible for overcoming. WAÜN, though, erases damage altogether in its initial drop. WAÜN’s feminized tropes ultimately highlight instead of unsettle Bieber’s performance of hetero-masculinity: what’s more man-ly than accessing power and resources without the threat of institutional violence?
Importantly, these feminized tropes don’t undermine Bieber’s heteromasculine performance; rather, they only seem to add nuance to the slightly bro-ier [that’s a word] Bieber performance we’ve become accustomed to. That’s what I mean when I say WAÜN is about resilience and melancholy; Skrillex and Diplo use the markers of queer or feminine overcoming and failed overcoming to re-construct Bieber’s masculinity, to toss some more ingredients into his manly mix, and the not-soar is a big component of that. Skrillex and Diplo tap into this soar experimentation, then drop it into the middle of a slightly more gender-fluid Bieber.
WAÜN’s high water mark is a few months behind us at this point, but Bieber remains hotter than ever, with “What Do You Mean?,” “Sorry” (another Skrillex production credit), and “Love Yourself” still dominating US and UK charts. Several more singles from Purpose (including two more Skrillex collaborations) are poised to do the same in 2016. Each of these singles extends some of the same tropes Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo explore in WAÜN—breathy vocals, misunderstood and mistreated pop icon, resilience and contrition and care in the face of a failed relationship—and I hear WAÜN’s initial drop as the sonic moment that preps Bieber’s return to the pop charts. He wades back into the mainstream with a more complex performance of heteromasculinity and reaps the profits that come with it.
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Justin D Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, and a regular writer at Sounding Out!. His research revolves around critical race and gender theory in hip hop and pop, and his current book project is called Posthuman Pop. He is co-editor with Ali Colleen Neff of the Journal of Popular Music Studies 27:4, “Sounding Global Southernness,” and with Jason Lee Oakes of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies (2017). You can catch him at justindburton.com and on Twitter @justindburton. His favorite rapper is Right Said Fred.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies — Christine Ehrick
They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis — Tara Betts
Tomahawk Chopped and Screwed: The Indeterminacy of Listening–Justin Burton
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What We Talk About When We Talk Girl Talk
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/fc10y-ezd16
Gregg Gillis, the mash-up artist who records and performs as Girl Talk, is always being talked about by someone. My co-author, Kembrew McLeod, and I risked adding to the overexposure by featuring Girl Talk as the star in the introductory section of our new book, Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Duke: 2011). And yet, I still have more to say about Girl Talk. His latest release, All Day (2010), came out too late for us to cover in our manuscript, but it reflects some aesthetic and legal developments that are worth understanding. But first, I should explain sampling, mash-ups, and what makes Girl Talk so musically and legally interesting to talk about.
Sampling means using existing sound recordings as part of new sound recordings. I leave musical quotation, allusion, and other forms of musical borrowing (or appropriation, if you prefer) out of this definition. In other words, sampling means using sound waves recorded at an earlier time—perhaps (1) editing or manipulating them, (2) combining snippets of multiple existing recordings, and/or (3) adding sounds generated by the sampling artist herself—but using the literal sound waves as basic material nonetheless.
Mash-ups, in my parlance anyway, are a sub-category of sample-based music. A mash-up artist usually does not distort the samples too much; mash-up artists tend to combine just two or three samples at any one point in time—the samples remain recognizable to the listener. And mash-up artists tend to add very few (if any) sounds generated originally by themselves.
Many mash-ups juxtapose only two or three existing recordings for the duration of a typical pop song. Some versions of this approach involve a comical or unexpected juxtaposition, like Britney Spears versus Metallica. Other versions of this approach sound like the sort of thing you’d hear at a club; in other words, it describes something live DJs have done for a long time. Mash-up artists The Hood Internet, for instance, recently released a mash-up of rap artist Nicki Minaj and indie-dance group Hercules and Love Affair by DJ STV SLV (pronounced “deejay steve sleeve,” which I’m pointing out because I think it’s fun to say).
What is unique about Girl Talk is that each of his tracks involves a string of overlapping samples. In an average song like “Like This” from Feed the Animals (2008), he moves from group to group of sampled sources, from Beyonce versus LL Cool J versus Soul II Soul, to the Jackson 5 versus the Beastie Boys, to Pras (featuring Mya and Ol’ Dirty Bastard) versus Yo La Tengo, and so on. Girl Talk’s live performances feature Gillis with his laptop in the middle of an insanely sweaty dance floor. A friend who recently caught a Girl Talk set noted that sweat was condensing on the ceiling of the venue and then dripping back onto the crowd. In short, Girl Talk is high-energy club music.
After the release of Feed the Animals, Village Voice reviewer Tom Breihan famously labeled Girl Talk as “music for people with such severe ADD that they get bored listening to thirty-second song-samples on iTunes.” Breihan also denied that Girl Talk’s music had any “internal dynamics,” which I take to mean that Breihan thinks the music has no narrative arc of, say, loud versus soft or intense versus calm. In both these statements, Breihan’s position is that the samples that make up Girl Talk’s music are disconnected from each other. The samples provide amphetamine doses of nostalgia or energy, but they have no intertextuality or deeper meaning. Girl Talk’s samples are just rapid-fire collections of pop-culture references. Call this line of argument as the name-that-tune critique.
My view, however, is that there are patterns and meaning in Girl Talk’s selection and arrangement of samples. He consistently pairs rap vocals with retro music of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, along with the occasional indie-rock and/or iTunes-commercial hit. Why are his groupings of samples interesting?
One answer is that the backing tracks in hip-hop songs have become stale. In the commercial music industry, sample licensing is required but prohibitively expensive. So Girl Talk is creating a collage in the background with the samples that rappers’ labels wouldn’t pay for or, even more likely, couldn’t have licensed from the copyright owner. This effect of copyright law on creativity is something that Kembrew and I detail in our book, especially Chapters 5 and 6.
Another answer is that Girl Talk finds the lyrical content of hip-hop far more interesting (or at least more provocative) than what’s being said in the classic-rock song. A similar point would apply to The Hood Internet, too, whose twist is that their pairing is almost always very contemporary hip-hop vocals mashed up with very contemporary indie rock. I can’t help thinking that one thing The Hood Internet is suggesting with their compilations is that some hip-hop backing tracks are too boring and some indie-rock vocalists have poor voices or nothing to say—so let’s mash-up the best parts of both.
So what to make of Girl Talk’s hallmark freneticism, the jumping from one group of samples to another group roughly every 20 or 30 seconds? No matter what, the point is that meaning—an argument over interpretation—emerges from the groupings of juxtaposed samples. First of all, meaning emerges when the transitions happen more slowly. The new album, All Day, begins with a two-minute-long pairing of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” against Ludacris’s “Move Bitch” (featuring Mystikal and I-20) and a few short snippets of various Jay-Z raps. The extra time to digest what’s happening tells the listener that the new album is more relaxed, at least at the start. Rather than a sprint, the new album has a longer narrative arc. Gillis may be responding to the name-that-tune critique, adding another dimension to the mathematical complexity of his recordings by varying the speed of his transitions.
More than a response to critics like Breihan, my observations about selection and arrangement as the source of Girl Talk’s musicality relate to his legal stance with respect to using unlicensed samples. Girl Talk and his label, Illegal Art, assert that using samples, transforming them, and placing them in a new context is “fair use.” Briefly, fair use is a doctrine in copyright law that allows certain uses without permission. For instance, a book reviewer can quote from a book without infringing copyright, at least up to a certain amount. Educators can use at least some portion of copyrighted works in the classroom. Transformative use is yet another category of fair uses. We know this category includes parody, thanks to a 1994 Supreme Court decision involving 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” But the courts haven’t told us what else the “transformative” category includes. This is why Girl Talk and Illegal Art garner so much attention from the copyright law community.
The website for the new album has the following legal language at the bottom of the page:
All Day by Girl Talk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The CC license does not interfere with the rights you have under the fair use doctrine, which gives you permission to make certain uses of the work even for commercial purposes. Also, the CC license does not grant rights to non-transformative use of the source material Girl Talk used to make the album.
Creative Commons licenses are ready-made online licensing contracts. A Creative Commons license is a deal creators choose to make with the public, in which the creator gives the public certain freedoms but also requires certain responsibilities. It represents a less generous choice than simply leaving something in the public domain, no strings attached. But it is much more generous choice than asserting one’s copyrights in full.
So what can other people do with Girl Talk’s music under the particular flavor of a Creative Commons license? The short answer is that they can share and remix whatever he owns without getting advance permission. But wait a second. If Gillis’s music is comprised almost entirely of samples of other people’s music (which themselves can be sample-based)—in copyright-speak, if it is a “derivative work”—what exactly is he licensing to the public?
Derivative works created without permission, without being fair use, or without avoiding infringement through some other copyright exception, give their creator no copyright in the parts of the derivative work that include illegally used material. Section 103 of U.S. copyright law punishes people who make unlawful derivative works by denying them any rights. By asserting a compilation copyright, Girl Talk and his label are expressing confidence in their fair use argument. They are at least acting as though they would not be subject to the punishment of Section 103 because they claim copyright for All Day via compilation: Girl Talk’s particular selection and arrangement of samples. Compilations are a special type of derivative work. In other words, compilation copyrights inhere in the “thin slice” layer of creativity that represents the ordering, grouping, and timing of the music.
Meanwhile, Girl Talk is sampling hugely high-profile artists, and listing them on the website: the Beatles, Prince, U2, all of whom are known for asserting their copyrights. Take this together with Girl Talk’s confidence that he won’t lose his “thin slice” copyright under Section 103. We can see that Girl Talk is aggressively claiming fair use. He’s daring people to sue him. And this strategy seems to have made copyright owners less likely to sue.
Interestingly, the “thin slice” the law is concerned with is the same thin slice music critics worry over. My closing point is that the copyright analysis of Girl Talk’s work depends heavily on interpretation of his selection and arrangement of samples. Humanists, including those in sound studies, have a great deal to offer to this discussion. Does Girl Talk’s selection and arrangement rise to the level of “transformative” work? Do we need to settle the debate of the aesthetic value of Girl Talk’s “thin slice” before we can answer the legal question of fair use?
Consider the meta-observation that there are plenty of arguments to be made back and forth about whether Girl Talk’s selection and arrangements are good or bad, original or unoriginal, and so on. Does that observation in and of itself mean that something transformative has occurred? Or is that too cute—setting up a test that no mash-up could ever fail, since it takes only two listeners to have an argument over the quality of a piece of music?
It is a truism that copyright law fails to mesh well with creative practices. But copyright isn’t going away anytime soon. I hope this brief discussion has illustrated how crucial it is to have a continuing conversation among legal scholars and humanists.
Peter DiCola will be reading at RiverRead Books in Binghamton, NY (5 Court Street in Downtown) on Thursday, 4/21 at 6:30 p.m. in support of Creative License. Following DiCola’s reading there will be a roundtable conversation featuring several Sounding Out! writers: Jennifer Stoever (Editor in Chief), Andreas Pape and Osvaldo Oyola along with Daniel Henderson.
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Peter DiCola
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