Changes

Here, close intertextual readings of voice horror moments in popular music and music videos illustrate voice as a register of corporeal transformation. The first section, ‘Dreadful Symptoms: Corpaural Sleuthing’, picks up the delicacy of vocalization detailed in Chapter 2 to argue that, by virtue of the virtuosic requirements of vocalizing, voice sounds out transformation. After this grounding, we plunge into a reading of Michael Jackson’s music video Thriller. Using texts from Kobena Mercer and Margo Jefferson, Thriller is read as an exercise in horror-erotic double valence—a Janus-faced thrill. A moment at the start of Thriller, where ‘Michael’ transforms into a lycanthropic being, is afforded close attention. Just before the transformation takes hold he looks up and snarls ‘Get Away!’ The scene is argued to be an illustration of the horrors of puberty and corporeal changes wrought from without. Voice here is a harbinger of change. The focus then moves to Jackson’s Black or White music video. Here, voice is posited to be evocation of human limits—a chimerical, pan-species, voice of plurality, torsions and horror.