Does Gaga ‘live for the applause’? Or, is it more of a ‘Poker Face’?

As one of the best-selling pop artists of our time, Lady Gaga is a name few would fail to recognise. From ‘Poker Face’ to ‘Telephone’, her artistry has earned her a level of notoriety comparable only to a few other music legends. Along with her success, she’s built a loyal fanbase that she affectionately refers to as the ‘Little Monsters’. At shows, she often invites her ‘Little Monsters’ on stage, whilst at other times, she’s surprised her fans by appearing at a movie premier. Here, Lady Gaga appears to navigate between her identity as an international superstar whilst simultaneously appealing to her fans to recognise her as an ‘ordinary person’. But, how does Gaga manage these apparently conflicting identities and what linguistic devices does she use to achieve this? In her 2018 paper, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson decided to find out:

To examine the ways in which Gaga navigates the ‘ordinary person’ and ‘celebrity superstar’ identities, Valentinsson examines tweets sent by Gaga aimed at her fans and transcripts taken from media interviews with Gaga.

A group of Lady Gaga's superfans - her 'Little Monsters'

Central to Valentinsson’s analysis are the concepts of stance and stance-taking. These two terms describe two aspects of communication. The term ‘stance’ refers to the way that people align or position themselves in relation to some object, person or idea. So when a speaker expresses their attitude towards something, that speaker is taking a stance. The notion of stance-taking refers to the actual process of making that alignment, which is usually achieved through communication. For instance, if you said, ‘I don’t like cheese’, you'd be taking a stance that you ‘don’t like the dairy goodness of cheese’. The Stance-taking bit would be you actually saying those words.

To examine Lady Gaga’s stances in relation to her fans and journalists, Valentinsson first turns to Gaga’s Twitter account where she observes that Gaga often creates a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary people’. She does this through a number of linguistic strategies. For instance, in one tweet aimed at her fans, Gaga uses terms usually associated with the family (‘mommy’, ‘kids’, ‘mother’) to take a stance of intimacy that allows her to align with her fans. In another tweet, which references the two awards that Gaga won at the People’s Choice Awards, she uses the third-person pronoun ‘we’ in the sentence: ‘we won two people’s choice awards’ to include her fans as recipients of the awards. In other contexts, Gaga uses the @ function of Twitter to ‘speak’ to her fans directly, referencing an awareness of issues effecting her fans in real life. Together, these ‘strategies’ allow Lady Gaga to create a stance of alignment with her fans, rejecting her celebrity status, therefore presenting herself as an ‘ordinary person’. 

             

In interviews with journalists, however, Valentinsson observes an altogether different set of strategies used by Gaga. In these contexts, Gaga adopts a relatively confrontational stance. She does this by refusing to answer questions she deems inappropriate or correcting journalists’ comments about her stage performance. For instance, in one interview, asked whether the sexual references in her songs would negatively influence her record sales, Gaga responds by confronting the interviewer with her achievement of selling 4 million records. Valentinsson argues that, by taking these stances, Gaga explicitly creates a stance of disalignment with the ‘media enterprise’ and reinforces her earlier identity as an ‘ordinary person’.

Concluding, Valentinsson argues that Gaga maintains an ‘ordinary persona’ by engaging in stance taking moves that emphasise her alignment with her fans above all other audiences. So, it seems, at least Gaga is not a ‘Judas’ afterall and she’s certainly not as ‘Shallow’ as the media would like you to believe…

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Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn (2018). Stance and the construction of authentic celebrity persona. Language in Society 47, 715–740.

doi:10.1017/S0047404518001100

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Like, it's just like a joke, no?

If you’ve spent even a day casually browsing the Internet, you’re probably aware of the stereotypes of a 'typical white girl'. She goes to Starbucks, she wears Uggs, she dyes her hair blonde and straightens it... it’s a similar concept across Anglophone spheres.

Not pictured: the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

There are, of course, language features associated with the stereotypical white girl too. And in this paper, Tyanna Slobe, a linguistic anthropologist, wanted to investigate how three different online performances utilised these resources to create their mock white girl characters. This relies on a concept known as indexicality – when certain groups use a particular feature more often, it can become associated with that group. For example, the use of the word like is often indexed with young people, as they have led the trend for it being used as a discourse marker.

Slobe also situated her work in the context of two different ideological perspectives. One is that of how mocking certain linguistic resources can perpetuate stigma against them: the language associated with white girls is often used to dismiss them as vacuous or unintelligent, and exploiting those resources can perpetuate that stereotype. On the other hand, they can be knowingly exploited in order to critique hegemonic identities in society. In the case of the stereotypical white girl, the identity can be satirised in order to point out the glaring omission of women of colour in cultural notions of femininity, and the problematic opinions that white women often hold.

Slobe looked at three different performances. One is a genre she describes as Saviour, a form of performance to encourage superficial notions of gender equality. One comes from the popular Sh*t white girls say Youtube series, looking specifically at two videos that discuss what white girls say to black and Latina girls. The third is from the social media platform Vine’s series  Teenage girl problems, where the white girl character is performed in a way that mocks her stereotypical concerns.

Two of these performances contribute to further stigmatisation of the character. One example that Slobe gives of the Saviour genre is an interview with Lake Bell, who adopts creaky voice – where the vocal cords are compressed so that less air passes through them and they vibrate less frequently – to discuss what she calls a “sexy baby virus”. Through performing this voice and indexing it in such a way, she means to imply that young white girls performing these stereotypically feminine vocal traits are responsible for the sexism they encounter in the work place, and the attitudes towards such language. Similarly, in the Teenage girl problems Vine, his performance of the white girl uses exaggerated gestures, eye rolling, and creaky voice to contrast the slow and carefully articulated male character, whilst performing trivial and irrational concerns. By indexing the communicative cues with the concerns, the Vine star portrays an ideological stance that ultimately stigmatises girlhood.

On the other hand, the Sh*t white girls say videos use the persona in a critical way. Franchesca Ramsay, the creator of Sh*t white girls say to black girls, also uses creaky voice to highlight parts of the white girl’s dialogue, but particularly to draw attention to the character’s racism, such as when she describes hair texture that feels like a “Brillo pad”. Similarly, she uses the right? tag question associated with white girl speech to highlight the affirmation the character wants for a racist statement. By specifically parodying the racist elements of the character, these resources satirise the white girl’s behaviour as an embodiment of naïve racism.

Ultimately, there are a number of ideological stances that the white girl character can be used for. So next time you see a meme featuring the character, you could think to yourself about what stance is being adopted, and what ideologies are being perpetuated or criticised as a result.

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Slobe, Tanyanna (2018). Style, stance, and social meaning in mock white girl. Language in Society 47(4): 541-567.

doi:10.1017/S004740451800060X

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

"I'm so Fancy"

Remember Iggy Azalea? Well, if you were just about anywhere in 2014, you might recall her smash hit song 'Fancy' featuring Charli XCX. In fact, that song was so popular that it earnt Iggy Ig's a Billboard award for the 'biggest ever hit for a female rapper'. But whilst she might be one of the most recognisable Hip-Hop artists of the current period, you might also recall that she's faced quite a lot of criticism too with many referencing the difference between her ethnicity (as a White Australian) and her distinctive rapping-style which has been referred to as a 'Blaccent' (literally a 'black accent'). 

But, why does Iggy sound 'Black'? And why do people perceive Iggy to have a 'Blaccent'? These are two questions that Maeve Eberhardt  & Kara Freeman decided to investigate in their 2015 paper.

By transcribing Iggy's entire back catalogue of albums, EPs and mixtapes, Eberhardt & Freeman set about analysing her distinctive rapping style. With newspaper articles referring to Iggy's 'Blaccent', the authors examined her use of features typically found in African American English (AAE) in her rap music. As a speech variety, AAE is typically spoken by Black individuals (i.e., African American) speakers who live in parts of Northern America.

One feature that the authors decided to explore is 'copula absence' which describes the tendency for speakers to pronounce the sentence "he's in here" as "he in here" - in other words, the verb 'be' (is/are) is absent from the sentence.

Whilst this feature occurs in many varieties (including some varieties of British English), in AAE, researchers have found certain patterns that seem unique to the variety. In particular, they have found that speakers tend to use higher amounts of copula absence before certain types of words and that this feature is more likely when the verb occurs before gonna as in "she gonna go home" and least likely before noun-phrases "Marie's in there".

Remarkably, by analysing Iggy's rapping style, Eberhardt & Freeman found good evidence to suggest that she wasn't just using copula deletion randomly but, rather, her use of this feature mirrored the same patterns that native AAE speakers exhibit! However, when they analysed Iggy's interviews, they found that she rarely uses copula deletion.

Iggy in an interview - sounds Australian, huh? 

So, why does Iggy use a variety that's typically spoken by Black African Americans in her rap but not in interviews? One such explanation has to do with the music industry and genre that she's working in: Hip-Hop. As an art-form that originated in Black communities in the U.S., many of these artists come from this community and typically those who speak AAE - think of Jay Z or Lil Wayne. As such, the language associated with this genre of music - the 'Hip-Hop Nation Language' (HHNL; Alim, 2004) - is largely based in AAE and shares many features of this variety.

In order to get by and sell records, it seems then that you need to use the 'code' that's typical of the genre and rap in HHNL. But, as a White Australian, Iggy doesn't really look or sound like a Hip-Hop artist... Hip-Hop in an Australian accent doesn't seem to work! Herein lies the explanation for her performance of AAE.

Eberhardt & Freeman argue that she uses AAE to sound like a 'real' Hip-Hop artist in order to sell records. And she does this quite well- as we've seen she uses the same features in the right 'slots' as a native speaker. But, whilst she might be able to speak AAE like a native speaker, it seems that her performance is still pretty problematic. In fact, there are virtually hundreds of articles on Iggy's 'cultural appropriation' of AAE, with many referencing her use of this variety and her lack of authenticity as a White Australian.

So whilst Iggy may be claiming to be a "a white girl with a flow ain't been seen before" it seems that she's not the "realest" after all...

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Eberhardt, Maeve & Kara Freeman (2015) ‘First things first, I'm the realest’: Linguistic appropriation, white privilege, and the hip‐hop persona of Iggy Azalea. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 19(3):303-327.

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12128

What do hashtags mean?

Anyone who uses social media is probably aware of the ubiquitous hashtag. What started as a simple way to tag topics on internet chat rooms was then adopted by Twitter, and then spread to many other platforms, including Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. The way that the hashtag is used has changed a lot in that time, evolving from a tag into a way of deliberately communicating stances and ideas.

Barbara De Cock and Andrea Pizarro Pedraza found this to be the case when investigating the use of the #jesuis hashtag (‘I am’). You may recall that this hashtag came out of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. People on Twitter used the hashtag #jesuischarlie to express their support and solidarity with the victims after the incident. De Cock and Pizarro Pedraza wanted to investigate the phenomenon further, to see how the #jesuis hashtag construction changed its meaning in different contexts. To do this, they manually observed and monitored the #jesuis hashtag over the course of a year, to better understand how it was being employed. They then developed a script which gathered a sample of tweets using the #jesuis construction between March and April 2016.

They found 407 different constructions, with four broad different uses: one set referring specifically to terrorist attacks; one set to other disasters involving loss of life; one set to other sad news stories; and one set which did not express solidarity in the face of tragedy, but instead were critical or mocking of the whole concept. These were most often used in conjunction with proper nouns, such as Charlie, Belge, ‘Belgium’, or Panama, but occasionally with other kinds of nouns, such as in #jesuischien, ‘I am dog’ , after the death of a police dog during a raid on a flat occupied in Belgium that was occupied by terrorists.

While the original hashtag expressed solidarity with the loss of human life, De Kock and Pizarro Pedraza noticed a broadening of its use through the four categories. For example, the #jesuisEcuador hashtag was for a natural disaster, as opposed to a terrorist attack, but was still employed to express solidarity with a loss of life. The use of the hashtag changed further still regarding other causes; a French spelling reform inspired a hashtag #jesuiscirconflexe, or ‘I am circumflex’, the diacritic used above certain French letters such as ê. While there is nothing tragic about a change of spelling, the hashtag was still being employed as a way of expressing solidarity with those who were unhappy about the proposed change. This also occurred with events which concerned free speech, something that Charlie Hebdo was seen to represent for a lot of sympathisers; the hashtag #jesuisBoehmermann was not used to express solidarity with someone that had died, but rather with a comedian who was being charged by the Turkish president for criticising him in a stand-up routine.

As with many things that are shown to align with a stance, the hashtag has been used to criticise or show disalignment as well, often by using it ironically. For example, Charlie Hebdo themselves employed the hashtag when the Panama papers news broke: when multiple politicians were found to be hiding money to avoid tax. The #jesuisPanama tag was ironic, feigning solidarity with a class of privileged people to highlight their unethical behaviour. The research showed, then, that the hashtag was being used in a variety of ways.

The authors briefly mention the English #I am tag too, pointing to the use of #I am Leicester to express proud support after the unexpected win by the Leicester football team in the 216 Premier League competition So next time you are on any social media platform, and you see the #jesuis tag or the #I am tag, you could have a think about what kind of solidarity the author is trying to show, if any.

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De Cock, B., & Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2018). From expressing solidarity to mocking on Twitter: Pragmatic functions of hashtags starting with #jesuis across languages. Language in Society 47(2):1-21.

 doi:10.1017/S0047404518000052

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather