Listening to Whisperers: Performance, ASMR Community and Fetish on YouTube
Imagine this, only virtual. Image borrowed from Genista @Flickr.
PercussiveThoughts is giving me a facial. The voice tells me about the “little scrubbies” in the exfoliant, and I begin to hear their delicate sibilance on my temples. If I’m lucky, a pleasurable, tingling sensation might begin somewhere on the back of my head and travel down my spine, turning my facial into something closer to a massage. The sole caveat is that I’m not really being touched at all.
This is ASMR, “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” a pseudo-medical designation whose native soil is YouTube. The term pulls together a range of physiological and affective states: goosebumps, chills, relaxation, melting, tingles, and so forth. PercussiveThoughts and her fellow vloggers (I call them “Whisperers” here and explain why below) aim to trigger these frissons through a cornucopia of techniques. Sound is paramount; Whisperers scratch rough surfaces with their fingernails and percuss everyday objects with fingertip drum-rolls. And, of course, they whisper, sometimes using lozenges or gum to increase the opportunities for swallowing and lip-smacking.
What’s interesting about these videos is how they manage to traverse the gap between the sonic and the haptic. There is, of course, something familiar about this leap. Like the magician’s hat that produces rabbits and endless handkerchiefs, an audio speaker produces a volume and variety of sound out of proportion with its small, blank visage. In the case of Whispering, however, sound is transduced into touch, and the taut membranes of the listener’s headphones become coterminous with his own skin.
Apart from Steven Novella’s suggestion that ASMR might be a mild form of seizure, it does not yet appear to be a subject of scientific research. So Whisperers have taken on the role of amateur scientists themselves, with YouTube serving as a public petri dish. For this very reason, Novella has also cautioned against the assumption that ASMR is a real physiological phenomenon at all, since feedback loops of suggestion on the Internet might create “the cultural equivalent of pareidolia.”
Whisperers, however, have no doubts. And while the ASMR acronym is a recent development, many Whisperers say their first encounters with the phenomenon occurred sometime before their first exposure to the Internet and often before adulthood: during make-believe tea parties, while watching their classmates draw or braid each other’s hair, and, perhaps most commonly, while watching The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross.
The audience for Whispering is anyone who can have this experience, which apparently isn’t everyone. Contrary to the soporific themes of their videos, Whisperers and their fans identify themselves as having awakened to a special form of pleasure. Some have even made videos recounting their first experiences. The downside of this ability is the anxiety about its social acceptance. Whisperers sometimes opt for anonymity in their videos, revealing their faces only after much encouragement from fans. Rarely do they they let their family and friends in on the secret.
That this familiar, tingly feeling has assumed a pseudo-medical acronym is hardly coincidental. ASMR isn’t just pleasurable, it’s therapeutic. Hundreds of YouTube comments attest to the power of ASMR to help relieve them of insomnia, anxiety, and panic attacks. Nor has this dimension been overlooked by Whisperers themselves, who regularly perform as doctors or therapists in their roleplay videos. This is particularly interesting in light of recent scholarship on human/machine interactions. In Addiction By Design, Natasha Schüll shows how therapy for video-poker addiction can take the same format as the gambling itself, namely, “ongoing technological self-modulation to maintain equilibrium” (250).
Homemade Whisper videos, while habit-forming, are clearly not the sort of intricately-engineered machines that Schüll writes about. Nor do they wreack the same sort of havoc (depletion of one’s life-savings, deterioration of one’s physical health, etc.). And yet, both are arranged in problematic feedback loops of self-medication. The slow-paced, low-volume respite that Whisper videos offer is made all the more necessary by the fact that viewers must go online to watch them. This paradox is amplified by YouTube’s advertisements, which will sound especially abrasive because viewers tend to turn the volume up while listening to Whisper videos. That some of the more popular Whisperers earn money from their videos only complicates things further.
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“No, we don’t get as many men here as women,” PercussiveThoughts says, as though responding to a question from me. Of course, I wouldn’t be so rude as to contradict her – I know better. To judge from the comments below, she gets plenty of male visitors. And her colleague ASMR Velous confided during an interview that around 70 percent of her viewers are men. For this reason, some Whisperers have made gender–neutral or male-oriented videos.
A man getting a facial. Borrowed from FoundryParkInn @Flickr.
Gender is a major, and sometimes contentious, topic of discussion in the Whisper Community. In the YouWhisper web forum, the discussion topic “Gender Preference?,” has the greatest number of views (more than 170,000). In general, female Whisperers are more popular than their male counterparts. The three most popular male Whisperers that I could find–WhisperMister1, MaleSoothe, and TheLyricalWhispers–each have fewer than 5,000 subscribers and their per-video view-counts tend to peak around ten or twenty thousand.
Not long ago, GentleWhispering, one of the better-known names in the Whisper community, set off a series of heated back-and-forths with her ~FeminineGrace & Charmforsleep~ video. In it, she discusses universal traits of femininity while brushing her hair absent-mindedly. Whatever one might think of her opinions, the fact that GentleWhispering’s viewership dwarfs all other Whisperers to date suggests that something in her technique is working. My guess is that it has a great deal to do with her hands.
While giving Russian language lessons on a chalkboard, she points to a word with her middle, ring, and pinkie fingers while keeping the chalk poised delicately between her thumb and index finger. When she is about to touch the fabric of an armchair, her fingers arch back–rather than claw forward–as though to ensure that the contact is as light as possible. And, like so many other Whisperers, she takes any opportunity to tap hard objects with her well-kept fingernails.
The “femininity” of GentleWhispering’s hands is the performance of a soothing, caring touch, and her whispering voice is the transubstantiation of this touch through sound. Sometimes, she even short-circuits the analogy by massaging the microphone directly.
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But even the performance of gendered touching does not quite explain how these sounds and images manage to reach through the speaker and screen. After a second glance at these videos, we might wonder if the preponderance of partial objects has something to do with it.
I’m talking about all of those disembodied hands stroking opposite hands or displaying objects detached from their collections. Often, for the sake of anonymity, the Whisperer’s eyes are kept out of frame, leaving only an expressive mouth, like CalmingEscape’s, with its signature tics and swallows. If even the mouth is too revealing, the camera gazes down at covered breasts, ”objects,” in a Freudian panoply of sexual cathexis (is it a coincidence that some Whisperers even roleplay as the viewer’s doting mother?). One has to wonder what effect is achieved by this strange summation of partials.
In spite of widespread insistence that these videos are not sexual, the comparison with sexual fetish is too obvious not to make. Sticking with Freud for a moment, the hyper-presence of the Whisperer would seem to disavow the separation implicit in internet communication. Her mouth speaks individually into each of the listener’s ears while also hovering on screen. Her hands animate dead objects through rappings and close-ups. In her omnipotence, she can even tell us what to do.
Fetish or not, the word “whisper” is a perfect synecdoche for this fragmentary whole, and that’s why I’ve used it instead of ASMR. A whisper is, by definition, “unvoiced.” The cheeks, mouth, teeth, and tongue accomplish the acoustic filtering that gives words their shapes, but the larynx produces noise rather than tones. Lacking pitch, a whisper might be called only a “part of speech.” And yet it speaks volumes by shifting the register of communication. Whatever is said in a whisper gains the aura of genuineness, honesty, and intimacy.
Of course, in a YouTube video, these qualities are suspect from the moment one clicks the play button. But perhaps this is what makes Whispering work. One hears in these videos, above all, the effort of performance. It is the performance of gender, as discussed above, but more generally the performance of interaction, intimacy, and proximity. What every Whisper video whispers is “Let’s pretend!” And nothing proves this better than the fact
that some popular Whisper videos contain rather unpleasant sounds. Consider TheWhiteRabbitASMR’s dentist appointment video. If one is willing to grit one’s teeth through the long sections of abrasive drilling, it’s because she so adeptly crafts the intimate space of fantasy in which it takes places.
The pleasure of pretending was made clear to me when ASMR Velous recounted her childhood tactic for inducing ASMR. “I would constantly trick people into pretending to do things. I had this little play kitchen set, and I would cook up imaginary food for people and make them pretend-eat it really slowly and make those eating sounds like [chewing sounds], and I would just sit there and be all tingly. And I just loved it….I made up this game with my friends, where we would basically mime a profession and the other person would have to guess the profession you were miming. That was another way for me to trick my friends into pretending to do stuff.”
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PercussiveThoughts is wrapping things up. “That completes your facial… So you can sit up. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I’m really glad you enjoyed it.”
I did enjoy it! But thank goodness it’s not really over; I can just hit the reload button. No matter how many times I do, I know that my pores won’t be any cleaner when I look in the mirror. But that’s not the point. Rather, Whisper fans take pleasure in the intimacy and complicity of pretending. That complicity applies even to the skin of the listener, a surface as vibrant as the skin of the speaker.
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Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?
Carlos Santana by Flickr User Momez
This may be a given but I have to ask: Why is the music of Carlos Santana considered “Chicano music?”
It’s true; I am a fan. And as a fan I never question why I love the music, but I often ask myself what it is specifically about the music that resonates so strongly with me. I could say that I love Santana because I love a soulful electric guitar voice, because I admire the musicianship of the band, because I feel the “sabor” they sing about, because I’ve always loved Santana. But these parts surely do not make up a satisfying the “whole.” There is something else, something about listening to the music that amplifies my sense of identification as a Chicana with other Chicanos and Mexicanos. This happens whether I’m among raza, in the various communities I call home, or whether I find myself feeling very far from Aztlán. I’ve witnessed the effect of the music – maybe you have too – when it comes on the car radio, at backyard family BBQs, and friend’s living room dance floors, the music gets your body up and connects you to your Chicano roots.
In this sense, Santana is forever part of the Chicano sounded imaginary. For Chicanos, identifying with the music of Carlos Santana may have a special meaning that has something to do with a particular Chicano/Mexicano subjectivity. Yet, for non-Chicanos, Santana still retains their quintessential American rock band status. Most of their airplay is on mainstream radio, rarely if ever on Spanish-language stations. So Santana can be thought of at once as “puro” Chicano or “classic rock,” except that Santana is a straight up fusion band. This is why I have to ask, is the music of Santana “Chicano” music? And I further wonder, could I be Chicana without Carlos Santana?
…Oye Como Va…
Before the Rob Thomas & Carlos Santana collaboration on the Grammy award-winning album Supernatural (1999), before the phenomenon of “Smooth,” there was classic Santana. The Santana that produced the self-titled debut album Santana (1969) and Abraxas (1970). The songs “Evil Ways,” “Black Magic Woman,” and “Oye Como Va” from these two albums are on constant rotation on “classic rock” stations well after forty years since they first hit the airwaves. Even if you’re not a fan or a music connoisseur, when listening to “Oye Como Va” or “Smooth” it’s easy to recognize a distinct “Latin-ness” about them. In part, this is because of the fusion of Spanish and English lyrics with rock, blues, jazz, and Afro-Latin musical styles. For Chicanos, this particular fusion of language and sound might also resonate as something familiar and close to home – if sound can be a home. A quick search on YouTube will lead you to the classic 2000 Grammy Awards Performance of “Smooth” and a wealth of competing claims by fans (and foes) in the comments section.
Fan 1: “SANTANA ERES LO MAXIMO, VIVA MEXICO!!!!!!!!”
Fan 2: “Salsa baby, Oye Como Va is universal, Carlos is the man!!!!”
This was a special and high-profile performance so these comments are exceptionally spirited. But, YouTube is full of spontaneous, impassioned, (albeit anonymous) examples like this on any given day. I highlight these two as sort of placeholders for the idea of how sound and music mighty carry significant meaning toward subject formation in an everyday sense. These fans claim Santana both for Mexico and for the world, respectively, because they reflect a strong sense of Mexican or Chicano pride. In the first comment, the very enthusiastic fan could easily be a Mexico City native, maybe a Chicano wanting to sound like a Chilango –“ERES LO MAXIMO” is not a Chicano Spanish expression. The second fan’s comment is all in English and could be Chicano simply based on that—but those are slightly secondary points. As I suggested earlier, for Chicanos, Santana’s music has the potential to reflect a sense of ethnic history and culture. Sound can be a home. After all, the first comment claims Santana’s music for a whole country with “VIVA MEXICO!” helping to affirm the feeling that this fan and Carlos are Mexicanos together, across time and place.
When I was studying music in college, Mexican, Chicano, or Latino music was not part of the curriculum. Instead, in my private piano lessons, I would gravitate toward pieces by Spanish or Latin American composers as a sort of “good enough” way to stay in touch with my latinidad. This helped, but the fact is that Latin American art songs have much more in common with the Western musical canon than they do with my experiences and Chicana consciousness. In other words, it was a reach to identify with these composers solely because we shared a language. What would I miss in a too quick move to identify with the Latin-ness of Santana’s music this way? Would I hear only the Spanish spoken in the song? If so, then gaining a sense of my Chicana/o subjectivity by claiming “Oye Como Va” (for Aztlán?) relies on partially subsuming the specific Caribbean contexts and poetics of the song. Is this song originally Cuban, Puerto Rican? It’s really just a party song. “Oye como va, mi ritmo, bueno pa’ gozar, mulatta” Eso! Does it really matter now if Santana’s version has re-defined it for all time?
In a way, the second fan expresses a more complex desire: “Oye Como Va is universal.” Everyone knows that Carlos Santana is Mexican, some know that he is also an immigrant, and still others may have read that he grew up in Tijuana. As part of American rock music history, Santana’s roots are firmly planted in San Francisco and the Bay Area and it is well known that Santana played at the historic Woodstock Festival of 1969. Clearly, amongst other identities, Santana is a classic American rock band with long and wide appeal. But from the beginning, along with creative fusions of rock, jazz, blues, and salsa, it has been the distinctly Afro-Latino percussion core that defines their emblematic sound. And this is exactly how and why dwelling on these details in the sound of Santana matters. If Santana comes to mean or signify something like “pur0 Mexicano” or “pur0 Chicano” (in a brown pride or brown power sense) then that purity is already so productively and interestingly troubled because there is nothing remotely “pure” about Santana’s music.
Therefore, to identify with the music means confronting those complex fusions of language, race, and music that make up the Santana “sound.” To partly answer my earlier question, “Oye Como Va” is a composition by the renowned Puerto Rican timbalero and band leader Tito Puente, but the musical form, a basic cha-cha-cha, is Cuban. The song has other authors as well, that both Santana and Puente name. But ultimately, this song and indeed much of Santana’s music, comes in wake of much older histories of African diaspora, migration, colonization, artistry and spirituality.
Santana fans. Image by Torreãu Sul.
…Sounding Home…
In a way, I’ve always felt that Santana’s music was making a black/brown connection, that racial boundaries were necessarily crossed or brought together because of the many histories that flow through the music. As a child of Mexican immigrant parents, I grew up listening to a wide repertoire of Afro-Latino music – elegant danzónes, romantic boleros, joyous cumbias, mad mambos, as well as more traditional Mexican music. Maybe that is also part of why listening to Santana reminds me of home. But this is perhaps too simple a response.
Santana’s music and popular image has been engaged in positive but also problematic ways in Chicana/o cultural production. Most recently, I noted this in a performance of the play New Fire, by Cherrie Moraga, in San Francisco. At a critical point in the drama, the evocative love song “Samba Pa’ Ti” is used to introduce a male character and a difficult, sexually violent scene. Moraga’s larger critique is of violent Chicano patriarchy and masculinity. The play is offered as a healing ceremony. But the association of this song, which features a famous guitar solo, with that specific scene is profoundly jarring. My sense was that Moraga selected Santana for the play’s soundscape it served as a shorthand for “Chicano.” Here, it was made to bear the history of violence of brown men against brown women and girls. This made it difficult for me to identify as a Chicana–queer and feminist–with Carlos Santana at that moment, and some time after. Surely this is also part of what “home” means.
Santana’s music interests me for these reasons, which go beyond the sounded Chicano imaginary in my headphones. What I find worthwhile in thinking further about Santana’s “sound” is how in the many acts of claiming Santana for oneself, one’s country, or one’s community, I can trace the way in which Chicano and Caribbean histories, both racialized and gendered, touch and cross in the music. That is, I see this as an invitation for the listener to reimagine notions of race, nation, gender, and sexuality even while dancing and singing along. In these ways, I see meaningful possibilities for imagining Chicana/o as a sounded subjectivity. I am certain that my sense of who I am, how I think, and how I walk in the world has been shaped by a life-long relationship with music and sound. And although being “Chicana” to me is not the same for anyone else, Santana’s music helps me to imagine a connection, a musical lineage I can trace and take part in. Santana is not my parent’s music. It’s not even my generation’s music. And, it’s not my only musical identity. But, even so, I couldn’t imagine being Chicana without Carlos Santana. Because when I listen, I do hear it, I hear how it all goes, together, and that is so, so good. “Give me your heart, make it real, or else forget about it!”
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Wanda Alarcón is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley where her research involves reading Chicana and Caribbean “stories” together in a decolonial feminist vein. When she’s not living the glamorous grad student life she likes to make zines about po’try, learning new songs on her childhood piano, cooking for her loved ones, and exploring NorCal with her main squeeze. A native Los Angelena, she is beginning to appreciate thinking and writing about her beloved hometown from afar. Music helps bridge that distance. So do the trees and ocean breezes. She lives and loves kibbutz-style in Santa Cruz with her partner por vida, Cindy, their two sassy cats Lucy & Mona, and dear housemate, Ella.
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