by Ann Powers
Many musicians explored this interface between meat, machine, and network as the 2000s progressed and everything from smart phones to implants rendered it more present in the everyday. An interesting hybrid of cyborg identity and a naturalistic, soulful sound surfaced when the Atlanta-based singer Janelle Monáe burst upon the scene in 2007, entrancing critics and a cult audience with her highly conceptual, retro-flavored music. Working with a team of likeminded producers and multimedia artists who called themselves the Wondaland Arts Society, Monáe created an alternate world in her music, influenced by the Afro-Futurism of science-fiction writers like Octavia Butler and funk pioneers like George Clinton. In her first few releases, Monáe actually took on a post-human alter ego named Cindi Mayweather to tell a dystopian, Bladerunner-like tale of rebellion motivated by transgressive love between this cyborg and a human. Monáe and other alternative-pop favorites like the Swedish dance music innovator Robyn and the English duo Goldfrapp conceptualized the erotics of the cyborg in their songs. But their embodiments of the role were limited compared to what Spears managed: a fusion of the real and the robotic that seemed instinctual.
Yet as her music became more electronic and lyrically explicit, the breezy Britney who laughed off her own contradictions collapsed beneath their weight. A 2004 quickie marriage to her backup dancer Kevin Federline produced two sons but ended acrimoniously in 2006. The next year, Spears suffered a very public nervous breakdown, including an episode where she shaved her own head in a San Fernando Valley salon—an attempt, perhaps, to erase the allure that was so fluid within her music but had become a trap in her everyday life. She was hospitalized, entered and exited drug rehab several times, and lost custody of her children. At age twenty-six, in what seemed like a subplot from a cyberpunk paperback, Spears actually lost custodianship of herself—her financial self, at least—when her father was appointed her conservator, managing all of her money and property. This arrangement is still in force today.15
This “tragedy,” as one Rolling Stone cover story described it, did not interfere with Spears’s stardom. Ever the cyborgian slave to her pop career, Spears barely stopped working, and in her darkest personal hour she became a darling of many who had long questioned her value and impact. Blackout, her fourth album, was released in the midst of her personal struggles. Her production was more experimental than ever, but her voice was so processed and blended into its background vocals that her actual human involvement seemed questionable. Spears the artist wasn’t simply e-mailing her heart; she had herself become code. The machine had become the matrix, as Sadie Plant had predicted in a 1996 essay: in Latin, matrix means “womb,” and pop’s electronic space of reproduction allowed female artists like Spears to endlessly replicate themselves.16
Within a few years, any controversy about embracing these strategies within pop stardom had fallen away, at least for women. Lady Gaga openly wore prosthetics in her videos. Rihanna mimed sex with a robot during her arena tours. Katy Perry went for a vintage vibe that recalled Britney’s “Oops” video in her song about mating with an alien, “E.T.” And in the video for her 2008 hit “Single Ladies,” which signaled her usurpation of Spears as pop’s definitive female star, Beyoncé Knowles figured out her own way to be more human than human: she danced and sang with naturalistic fervor while brandishing a Matrix-style “cyberglove.”
Spears continued to have hit singles and tour, did a stint as a judge on the singing competition X Factor, and maintained a less hectic if still lonely-seeming personal life, with multiple marriage engagements and the continued conservatorship of her father. In the mid-2010s, she settled into a Las Vegas residency, which many pop stars considered a crowning achievement. Her 2013 single, “Work, Bitch,” was a Top 20 single though it plummeted fast. In it, she tied together the themes of her life’s work: bodily perfection, human being as self-production, and the labor of the inexhaustible post-human pop star. “You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti? You want a Maserati? You better work, bitch!” she intoned in the flat, even tone of the GPS that came standard on the luxury cars named in the song. The body, the machine, the work: for Britney Spears, as for her listeners, it was increasingly all one.
ALL THE SINGLE CYBORGS
By 2008, though she continued to sell records and occupy the tabloids, Britney Spears no longer held the center of the spotlight where eroticism and popular music commingled. A phalanx of rivals had developed their own styles of uncanny pop allure. The main one was a multitalent who’d been active in pop for as long as Britney herself. Beyoncé Knowles first gained fame in the late 1990s in the girl group Destiny’s Child. Going by just Beyoncé, she released her first solo album in 2003, at age twenty-one. She immediately became the leading voice marrying hip-hop rhythms to R&B melodic theatrics. By 2008 she was one of the top-selling artists in the world and a celebrity in a career-enhancing though well-guarded relationship with the rapper and record executive Jay Z. But she still needed a breakthrough moment. To use a then-new term describing what happens when something spreads like crazy on the Web, Beyoncé needed to go viral.
She did it with the video for “Single Ladies,” a B-side from her third album, I Am . . . Sasha Fierce. The clip, directed by Jake Nava, was an afterthought made during the same session that produced a much more expensive one for the ballad “If I Were a Boy.” The song “Single Ladies” is a hip-hop romp characteristic of Beyoncé’s up-tempo style, a dance-floor confrontation between a skittish boyfriend and the woman he won’t marry that taps into gospel’s call-and-response tradition by way of cheerleader routines and the playground chants used by 1960s girl groups. The message is socially conservative—“If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it”—and the video is simple. But the performance Beyoncé and her two dancers gave ended up being the perfect conduit for the increasingly fluid sense of self and erotic life online it granted.
In the video, the trio enacts an intensely physical dance routine within what photographers call an infinity cove: a cornerless, all-white space that makes them seem to exist somewhere otherworldly. (Madonna used the same effect in her “Lucky Star” video.) Their leotards and jazz-hands moves take inspiration from the late Bob Fosse, a choreographer who represented the Broadway aspirations long harbored by Beyoncé, a fan of both Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross. But the routine also borrowed from a street style known as J-setting, which originated with Southern college drum majorettes and had been taken up by young gay men within the world of nightclub drag competitions. J-setting is a bodily form of call-and-response in which the lead dancer initiates moves that her seconds quickly imitate to create the effect of an endless movement loop. Beyoncé’s dance, a reflection in a queer mirror, exists in a kind of metaphorical infinity cove, where a star is imitating queer club kids imitating college girls imitating Broadway stars. It’s a replicant dance, ready to be imprinted on any viewer’s DNA.
Beyoncé connected her retro-futuristic dance routine to the fluctuations of cyberspace by way of a striking piece of jewelry. The three-piece accessory, made of titanium by jewelry designer Lorraine Schwartz, was alternately known as the roboglove, the cyberglove, and the gling. Beyoncé conceived it as an emblem of the “superpower” possessed by her alter ego Sasha Fierce—the confident, sexually forthright, drag-androgynous force who took over when shy Miss Knowles took the stage. The roboglove transformed Sasha Fierce into an avatar, a creature brought to life by technology. Invoking the gloves worn by users of the first iterations of virtual reality, who could prosthetically “feel” and manipulate their experience in a computer world, Beyoncé’s roboglove defined the “Single Ladies” video as a product of cyberspace, infinitely reproducing itself there, and accessible to anyone who logged on and found it.
It didn’t take long for “Single Ladies” to attract responses on YouTube, the video-sharing website that since 2005 had become the visual hub and leveling ground for megastars and amateurs, diarists and parodists alike. The first known “Single Ladies” imitation came from t
wenty-seven-year-old dancer Shane Mercado only five days after the video was released. The forcefully flamboyant Mercado brought the routine back into the queer vernacular, stressing its bumps and grinds as he performed in his bedroom in a strategically disassembled, nipple-baring leotard. Beyoncé approved, and Mercado had a brief moment on the talk-show circuit. “I locked the door and just went for it,” he told daytime host Bonnie Hunt, explaining that he shared an apartment with his mother and didn’t want her walking in. “I had a blast. And one website actually nicknamed me ‘Heyoncé.’” Mercado held the spotlight as “Heyoncé” for only a moment. He had a rival the very next day: Chris McMillon, aka Angel Pariz, executed the routine with even more androgynous aplomb as a caption flashed across his video screen: “I AM A BOY!! A BOY!” McMillon never gained even the small amount of mainstream attention Mercado enjoyed, but the two videos together added up to something: a claim on the “Single Ladies” dance as an open route to the multiple identities being online could offer.17
Soon, seemingly every Beyoncé admirer was using “Single Ladies” as a portal to a new way of being: one 2009 list of tributes includes a trio of plus-sized, self-described “big girls,” an Asian American a cappella group, a baby, a male comedian diapered like a baby, a Barack Obama impressionist, the teen idol Joe Jonas, a football team, and Justin Timberlake, who performed the routine along with comedian Andy Samberg and Beyoncé herself on Saturday Night Live.18 Writing about one of the many flash mobs of dancers who recorded “Single Ladies” videos in public—this one was in London’s Piccadilly Square, and involved one hundred participants—the blogger Alex Watson declared the phenomenon to be a triumph of virtual reality. “It is, essentially, VR,” he wrote. “Actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.” Beyoncé had always been a forward-thinking pop star who’d marketed herself through whatever new technology was available: ringtones, iTunes, exclusive deals with game companies like Nintendo. But with “Single Ladies” she gracefully stumbled onto the central nerve in the rapidly evolving system of synapses connecting people online, across old boundaries of being.
Viral connection was the new reality for Beyoncé’s fans, the first generation to grow up connected via the Internet. “Our neurochemical response to every ping and ring tone seems to be the one elicited by the ‘seeking’ drive, a deep motivation of the human psyche,” wrote the social scientist Sherry Turkle in 2011. “Connectivity becomes a craving; when we receive a text or an email, our nervous system responds by giving us a shot of dopamine. We are stimulated by connectivity itself.”19 Turkle, who in her influential 1984 book The Second Self celebrated forging new identities via computers, had become cautious. Like the adults who wrote teen advice books in the 1950s, she recognized the freedoms offered by new technologies, especially in identity building and erotic intimacy; but she also feared that these changes would prove damaging, pushing youths, especially, too far away from healthy, normative behavior.
Young people were at the vanguard, but everyone was rapidly becoming wired and trying to figure out how to negotiate the Matrix. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser noted several threats in their 2008 book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. These included the insecurity of online information, which could make people victims of crimes ranging from online stalking to identity theft; the fact that online games produce the same biological responses in players as does pornography in viewers; and the risk-inducing pressure young people felt from peers to put forth an impressive online persona. Online life was shaking identity to its core and rewriting the rules of intimacy as it did so. Andy Clark’s idea of “the soft self,” of human experience enhanced by devices (like smart phones) that do not penetrate the skin but still fundamentally extend or at least change the possibilities of what we can do as biological beings, complements Turkle’s description of “the collaborative self,” negotiating reality as a “life mix” of online and offline encounters: “These days always-on connection leads us to reconsider the virtues of a more collaborative self,” Turkle wrote. “All questions about autonomy look different if, on a daily basis, we are together even when we are alone.”20
Though the “Single Ladies” video parodies were generally good clean fun, countless people were also using the Internet to create and share explicit erotic material. Whether having fully realized sexual encounters or simply posting cute photographs on MySpace to attract virtual friends, online adventurers were always engaging some level of risk. Palfrey and Gasser cited “instability and insecurity” as the two major elements in these new online ways of being, warning that “one’s identity in the digital age changes frequently, and not always through the volitional acts of the person whose identity is at stake.” Sounding like worried suburban fathers handing their teens the keys to the car, they continued, “Just as the digital identity of a Digital Native is at once rich and interesting and easy to create, it is also fragile and vulnerable to manipulation and falsification.”21 As experts had done before, they singled out youths as the most at risk from societal changes no one could stop, facing their biggest challenges within the realm of the erotic.
Young people dominated the “Single Ladies” parodies. In 2010, the video of a dance team of eight- and nine-year-olds performing “Single Ladies” in midriff tops and spangled boy shorts caused nationwide outrage at the sexualization of grade schoolers, but also garnered more than two million views. The ensuing conversation was as much about the fetishization of children as it was about YouTube, yet the virality of the video that went far beyond the obscure arena of amateur dance made the girls seem particularly threatened. “The girls weren’t meant to be viewed by millions of people,” one dancer’s father said during an interview on Good Morning America. Behavior that might not seem overtly sexual in context, parents feared, could be used against these children, exploited by those seeking erotic stimulation without permission.
The Dance Precisions troupe performance of “Single Ladies” entered a world in which sex tapes stolen from or secretly leaked by celebrities (many of them rock or pop stars) were being traded for money; where Web-based communities like the rapid-fire sharing platform Chatroulette allowed participants to surprise visitors with scenes of them masturbating or performing other lewd acts; and where young women, particularly, faced threats from stalkers and predators within social media environments with increasingly unstable borders. At the same time, the chance to transform on the Internet, to develop sexual and emotional confidence and forge relationships otherwise made impossible by distance and other meat-world limitations, was impossible to resist. Negotiating this risky territory became the number one preoccupation within many Americans’ private lives. How could a person enjoy the possibilities of online dating, social media connections, and erotic self-display on sites like YouTube without utterly giving herself away? No other question haunted desire so powerfully in the mid-2000s.
It was Beyoncé who gradually evolved a way of being public in private that could serve as the ultimate guide to this new, volatile erotic realm. Always a perfectionist deeply concerned with control, the singer developed an approach to social media that seemed revelatory while maintaining strict borders around both her day-to-day life and her creative process. After “Single Ladies,” Beyoncé became the standard-bearer for twenty-first-century pop stardom, even in a crowded field that included many equally commercially successful pop divas. She did so by developing a persona artfully balancing the conflicting elements of life as a collaborative self: experimentation with self-preservation; connection to the many with strong ties to the very few; exhibitionism with modesty; openness to fantasy with dedication to keeping it real.
What had “keeping it real” become in the twenty-first-century imaginarium? For Beyoncé, that question was grounded in a sense of the performing self as both distinct from and evocative of her day-to-day ways of being. The biography she shared with reporters was of a shy child who “just . . . changed” when she beg
an performing at talent shows in grade school. “I don’t have a split personality,” she told one in 2004. “But I’m really very country and would rather have no shoes on and have my hair in a bun and no makeup. And when I perform, this confidence and this sexiness and this whatever it is that I’m completely not just happens.”22 Beyoncé often said the most important quality she’d learned from the women who taught her to perform—the nuns at her grade school, and her mother, who was also her career mentor and costume designer—was discipline. Self-control allowed her to become free in performance while maintaining distance from that wild behavior offstage. This was a shift from the rock-star behavior expected from musical celebrities since at least the 1950s; it also distinguished Beyoncé from her early rival Spears, whose inability to manage her personal life contributed to her self-diminishment within her own music. Beyoncé could wear the virtual reality glove while maintaining an even-keeled naturalness that identified her as relatable. Her pop stardom was not unlike that of the superheroes who resurged in popularity during the video game–dominated 2000s: Spider-Man, Batman, and Iron Man, donning costumes to perform daring deeds and then vanishing as much as possible into normal lives.