Music Graduate Colloquium: Jessica A. Holmes (Copenhagen)
Presented by Graduate Studies in Music, the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Colloquium series includes lectures by distinguished guests, Western faculty members, and senior graduate students on all fields of research and creative activity in music.
Jessica A. Holmes (University of Copenhagen)
"Whisper Singing, ASMR, and Mood Regulation: The Representation of Depression in the Music and Reception of Billie Eilish"
Attending over Zoom is free, and all are welcome to join.
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Abstract
This talk analyzes the representation of depression in pop singer Billie Eilish’s music and reception relative to the deeply charged status of depression in the West as an increasingly prevalent clinical diagnosis and lived socio-cultural experience that divides sharply along gendered, racial, class-bound, and generational lines. By naming, claiming, and musicalizing depression amid a polarizing and oftentimes misogynist reception, Eilish departs from foregoing expressions of feminine psychological disturbance in mainstream pop, challenging the longstanding stigmatization of “madness” in women and current generational panic around the prevalence of depression among Generation Z, a transgressive platform made easier by the implicit privilege her whiteness affords. Eilish's semantic, visual, and musical strategies work to demystify an invisible inner turmoil that her fans explicitly identify as “depression,” just as they frame her signature “whisper” singing – its sound, intimacy, and affect – as a coherent marker of and antidote for depression. Further, widespread links between Eilish’s voice and the feminized auditory triggers of ASMR (a popular genre of homemade YouTube sound effects-based performance) and the immersive, solitary listening that headphone and earbud use entails strengthens her music’s appeal as a form of “mood regulation.” In these ways, I reveal that Eilish’s voice and body are the locus onto which fans and detractors project fantasies and anxieties about the intersectional logics of depression that often exceed the singer’s stated intentions, and crucially, psychiatric definitions of clinical depression in ways that ultimately point to the increasing prominence of pop music as a viable creative, albeit unregulated site of public mental health discourse.
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