From Earth Angel to Electric Lucifer: Castrati, Doo Wop and the Vocoder

Abstract

The transformed, angelic voice is in a precarious position—between corpus and void, heaven and earth. As “sacred monsters” of the Baroque, the castrati had voices described as otherworldly and “strangely disembodied.” An amalgam of male, female and childlike qualities, the castrato voice is angelic in its liminality, a kind of tonal apotheosis. The 1950s, a time preoccupied with heaven, from winged cars to airwave Earth Angels, saw a curious renaissance of this Baroque ideal. With doo-wop, the seemingly sexless voice of the singer shares the trait of sounding angelic with the mythic androgyny of the castrati—both blur gender lines through vocal manipulation. Technology also allows the transformed voice to lose all traces of the body, as in Bruce Haack’s psychedelic song cycle The Electric Lucifer, “a battle between heaven and hell” which employs a voice put through a prototype vocoder to represent both angel and devil. Here, the voice is free to achieve multiple unearthly identities. This presentation will examine the imbrication of heavenly narrative and transformed voice in popular music, focusing on how this disjunct between voice and body can be understood as prism through which to explore shifting socio-political anxieties and desires.