PURE/HONEY

Abstract:

Non-Black, cis-heterosexual people co-opt Black queer language and sound in ways that harm and betray Black LGBTQ+ people. This article considers mainstream appropriations of Black queer language and examines the influence and reverence of Black LGBTQ+ language and sound practices from the late 1990s to today. Through a sound study of Beyoncé’s “PURE/HONEY,” the penultimate song on her Renaissance album, I acknowledge and honor the sonic labor, epistemological, ontological fullness and significant influence of Black LGBTQ+ histories on global expressions of sound and language. The sonic labor of Black LGBTQ+ artists that inspire Beyoncé and mainstream society should be acknowledged in the archive and public memory.

Black LGBTQ+ language and sound, although ephemeral utterances and performances, are also rich systems of queered African American Englishes and its accompanying soundscapes. I analyze that language system of Black LGBTQ+ discourse, phonological and morphological features. Beyond this, the soundscapes I analyze are that of Black queer, trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) voices, instrumentations and performances in music, television and mainstream media. These acts are what I consider soundscaping, which is a powerful tool of meaning-making deriving from and further informing Black linguistic tradition, geographies and sonic history. Despite the Black LGBTQ+ community’s soundscaping labor, their cultural authorship is often erased in the process. Beyoncé’s Renaissance commercialized, packaged and disseminated Black LGBTQ+ sound as popular music because it has always been present in the mainstream, which needs to be asserted. Representation and meaning, however, are seriously transformed through the recording of music and performance at live concerts– demanding us to reconsider how we re-piece, re-acknowledge, remember and pay reverence to the cultural makers of music in our everyday engagement with their work.

“PURE/HONEY” is a mainstream cultural product deriving from a robust Black LGBTQ+ epistemology and literacy in performance and soundscaping practices. I use the term soundscaping here to describe the Black community at large, and more specifically the Black LGBTQ+ community’s sonic practices. The distinction is that Black LGBTQ+ soundscaping had initially engaged and shifted the physical world, personal lives and material conditions of community members in the ballroom system. Now, taken to the global soundscape with a tour, Black LGBTQ+ individuals’ roles in shaping global sounds with speakers of the community and not, must be examined. I examine the song “PURE/HONEY” through linguistics, sound studies, Black studies, queer and trans studies, to address how music, artists and audiences remember and perpetuate Black LGBTQ+ life linguistically and sonically.

Keywords: Black LGBTQ+ sound and performance, illegitimated language and sound, soundscapes, Black LGBTQ+ soundscaping, ballroom, mixes, politics of language

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While other songs on the Renaissance album like “HEATED” feature more sonic appropriations of a ballroom commentator’s fast-paced, onomatopoetic , scat-like repertoires, “PURE/HONEY” relies the most on the sonic presence and discursive expertise of three samples: MikeQ ft Kevin JZ Prodigy’s “Feels Like”, Kevin Aviance’s “Cunty (Feels Like)” Wave Mix, and Moi Renée’s “Miss Honey”. The song could be considered as two tracks in one, hence the two names “PURE” and “HONEY”. Notably, the overall flow of the album has no clear beginning and end between the songs, so the duality of sound in one track contributes to the dynamism and ability to pull together so many critical samples. Working with the song as a text, much like a literary work, the preface and conclusion to the song are by renowned artists in the world of ballroom music. The samples serve as lyrical and sonic canon from which Beyoncé’s voice is brought in and dismissed at the end of the track:

1 Cunt (cunt to the feminine, what)

2 Cunt (cunt to the feminine)

3 Cunty (cunt to the feminine, what)

4 Cunty (cunt to the feminine, what)

5 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

6 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

7 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

8 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

9 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

10 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

11 Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)

12 Feminine to pussy cunt, feminine to pussy, what

You cannot talk about ballroom and vogue music without engaging the discursive tool of ‘cunt’. The incantation of “Cunt” from Kevin Aviance’s “Cunty (Feels Like)” sets the foundation of the song, while Kevin JZ Prodigy’s “(cunt to the feminine, what)” and “(cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt)” echoes afterwards. This sonic synchronicity shows a synonymous discourse of cuntiness, or an expression of queer femininity, putting them in conceptual harmony as well.

The concept of cuntiness, as associated with feeling and essence, also shows up notoriously in Grace Jones’ “Walking in the Rain” song: “Feeling like a woman, looking like a man/ Sounding like a ‘no-no’, making what I can.” (Jones 1981). Between Jones and Beyoncé is a critical discursive history, based in Black women’s oral traditions as we acknowledged with “Poets at the Kitchen Table” by Paule Marshall and Centering Ourselves by Olga Idriss and Marsha Houston Stanback. Francesca Royster writes that “Jones may transmogrify this Caribbean tradition into a patois informed by bodily, as well as vocal, manipulations of punk and performance art, but the spirit is still shared.” (Royster 156-157). Black women and the Black LGBTQ+ community’s relationship is shared in many ways on the grounds of discourse but more importantly on the grounds of Black oral traditions and open criticality. The transfer of these discourses into song requires an understanding of an even larger context of Black oral traditions and the geographies that facilitate such a history.

Kevin JZ Prodigy in an interview explains the language and embodied expression of ‘cunt’ by saying, “Cunt is a feeling, cunt is a mood, cunt is not a read. If you feel cunt, you feel soft, you feel feminine. You feel really good. I feel cunt right now. Do you feel cunt?.. ‘Cunt to the feminine, what!’ Exactly. You have to feel it. You feel cunt walking into your place. You work, you feel cunt with it. But bring the cunt! It's an embodiment. It's a formula. Kevin Aviance started that, and I took and ran with it.” (GQ 2023). The call to feeling cunt and feminine embodied expressions is one that Black sonic traditions have crafted since the early 1990s. It also serves as an affirmation of gender-expansive femininities and how such expressions should spark joy in the everyday.

The repetition of “cunty” is mixed in with the “cunt” repetition in “Feels Like”, to the point that they are in dialogue with one another, then sonically intertwined so that you almost can’t hear the difference in speakers. Aviance’s descriptions of cuntiness in this case likens itself to flowery eminence. Whether feeling like a daisy, a lily, a rose, or “an orchid!” (performed in exclamation)– the feeling is clear and visible to all. Aviance opens this feeling to all by repeating at the end: “She's cunt, he's cunt, they're cunt, I'm cunt” which makes cuntiness also a unifying essence of self; one that has no gender attachment. Aviance’s physical performance aligns with the “queer eccentric Post-soul” traditions of “gender code switching [and] facial gestures that might threaten a loss of emotional control one minute and then switch to a cool mask the next.” (Royster 28).

MikeQ

Kevin JZ Prodigy

percussive element

MCing