Summer Conferences, Indigo De Souza, and Good Non-Sovereignty

This year’s Pop Conference has just wrapped, and I was very happy to have attended for the first time. My paper was perhaps an unlike fit for this year’s theme, which focused on club cultures—but I tried to make the case that Big Feelings artists like Indigo De Souza are changing what happens in indie rock venues, at least a little bit.

In the talk, I focused on connecting two quotes that both seem to speak to the same issue. On the one hand is this brilliant clarification made by Lauren Berlant at a 2011 roundtable:

…optimism and trauma do the same kind of thing: [they light] up a part of the brain that makes you non-sovereign. And so the thing that really interests me is the ways that people desire and don’t desire to become non-sovereign, people desire and don’t desire to become attached in a way that makes them lose control. And those forms of losing control are the forms of belonging to the social—because I want to actually be involved with people I don’t know in order to build a world that I can’t see yet. That’s the political. That’s my attachment to the political...That’s what the political holds out: it holds out the possibility of a good non-sovereignty. (Berlant 2011, 46:16)

The other quote is from Katie, a 23 year old artist, art teacher, and musician who identified as white and queer when I interviewed her last September. When I asked her what she wanted people to know about Indigo De Souza’s music, she responded, in part, as follows:

They show you—for like four bars at a time—that they can like blow your fucking mind. They can swell you with sounds and feelings that you’re not prepared for—and then they just take it back and they go back to some other dynamic. They just use it exactly when they want to and no other times…She’s completely in control of every feeling in the room somehow. (Katie M., 2022)

She’s in control; you are not.

To me, this idea connected powerfully to what Berlant was describing, providing an example of a kind of good non-sovereignty. Good non-sovereignty is what happens when  you willingly let go of some aspect of your own self-control out of a sense of security, a sense both that you can afford to do so because of who’s around you and that it is desirable to try. This kind of experience probably isn’t sustainable, but it’s also not metaphorical: in the moment of performance, people who don’t know one another place themselves in relation in order to participate in something collective. For fans like Katie, attending a concert by an artist whose music moves her involves willingly placing yourself in a situation where you will be subjected to a loss of control over your own emotional state. My claim is that doing so helps listeners to process trauma in a safe context, guided through the affective resonance De Souza creates.

In the talk, I focus on two aspects of De Souza’s career that help us to understand both how and why she stages such experiences through live performance. The first is “Real Pain,” the fifth track from De Souza’s 2021 record Any Shape You Take. This track in particular exemplifies De Souza’s approach to traumatic experience with a dense, two minute section in the middle featuring overlapping recordings of her fans screaming, submitted at De Souza’s request. This kind of affective staging of grief is emphatically not about telling a confessional story that narrates a painful experience in the style of a “singer-songwriter” (a term I find odious, but which I invoke here in reference to the kinds of narratives of “personal authenticity” that often get attached to musicians who use their art to engage with painful themes). Rather, this sonic screamspace holds all genres of pain, no matter how, when, or why they occurred; the song thus stages a cathartic vibrational experience oriented toward maximal listener identification, since the point is not being able to identify with a given narrative, but simply the experience of feeling bad. As Ann Cvetkovich has written,

[performance] can make an emotion public without narrative or storytelling; the performance might just be a scream, a noise, or a gesture without a sound. (2003, 286 [my emphasis]) 

Making such emotions public, I suggest, is particularly critical for De Souza’s listening communities, the young, queer, trans, non-binary, and POC communities who are at increased risk of both interpersonal and structural violence. In short, De Souza’s music produces queer-feminist affects that resonate with and are perceptible by her fans, even in the absence of songs “about” any particular subject matter or political issue.

The other aspect of De Souza’s career that helps make such affective identification possible is the way that she treats concert cultures—but I’m going to leave that for another time. I’ll be bringing this material with me to IASPM in June, and am looking forward to talking with more folks about it in the meantime.

—

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. “Public Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant.” Barnard 

Center for Research on Women, May 10.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlOeWTa_M0U. 

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public 

Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. 

M., Katie. 2022. Interview with the author (phone), September 30.