Page - 55 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

Voicing the Technological Body | 55www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 sexual intercourse, the more so as the verses are about stereotypical “boy meets girl” situations. Although this reading may seem bawdy, it picks up on a genre-typical com- bination of technology and eroticism that can similarly be heard in another schlager recorded by Kuttner, “Die schöne Adrienne hat eine Hochantenne” (“The beautiful Adrienna has an elevated antenna”). Even the blurring of traditional gender differ- ences, sometimes heavily transgressive, became part of schlager culture. As Anno Mungen has demonstrated, gramophone recordings of the 1920s could emphasise the queer practices of cabaret artists like Kuttner or Paul O’Montis precisely because of the technological disembodiment of the voice.20 The absence of the singing body from a gramophone recording emphasised the possibly unclear identification of the singer’s gender and sexuality. The next important step in the history of recorded music was certainly primarily economic, namely the emergence since the 1950s of affordable music technology like transistor radios and of “teenagers” as a new youthful group of buyers. The evolution of post-war youth culture, with rock’n’roll as one of its main characteristic practices, is strongly linked to the distribution and use of affordable music technology. As early as the 1920s, recordings had offered the opportunity to listen to stars of the time, like Enrico Caruso, to a relatively large group of people, even though they could not af- ford tickets to a live concert. Only after the Second World War, however, did recorded music become a mass media product, when it was transmitted to and consumed by a large new and young market via radio and cheap vinyl.21 Moreover, rock music created a new type of star singer, like Elvis Presley, who embodied youth for a large youthful audience.22 From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, the most common way of listening to popular song was via recordings or airwave transmission, and more re- cently also via digital channels. Disembodied, technologically transmitted voices have become the regular vocal sound in Euro-American popular music. The star system, an important part of that musical culture, is based on the technologically constituted presence of mostly absent idealised bodies. Youth is a part of the bodily performanc- es of youth culture and belongs to the technological presence of star bodies. It is a component of audible star images that become mediums of memory over time: we can still listen to Elvis’s youthful voice. Even as a later generation we can perceive the audible markers of a now historic youth culture. As the example from the 1920s has shown, the phonographic disembodiment of voices led to artistic challenges to supposedly fixed gender and sexual identities at an early stage of technological development. It has often been observed that the urban popular culture of the 1920s already included many progressive elements in aesthetic as well as political terms. Evidently that period also saw a potential for challenging 20 Mungen 2012, 169–180. 21 Cf. Frith 1981. 22 Cf. Shumway 2015.