The Worst You’ve Ever Sounded

Chapter 5 focuses on the modern epidemic of public shaming. In 2014, someone leaked the raw, out-of-tune vocals of pop star Britney Spears attempting a studio take of her song “Alien.” Shame storms promptly followed. By connecting voice shaming to concomitant practices of sex shaming and slut shaming, the chapter asks what we think we gain when we judge, police, and dehumanize musicians at their worst moments. Do people shame musicians out of a putative love for music? Or is music simply an excuse, or an accomplice? Given the deluge of leakable data today—think of Ashley Madison, Panama Papers, congressional dossiers, revenge porn—provocative analogies materialize between our myths of secure networks (a technical impossibility) and our idealizations of pitch-perfect (infallible, unassailable) lyric voices. The chapter asks whether Spears’s naked voice can be heard not as shameworthy detritus best left on the cutting room floor, but rather as an object of clickbait that always already implicates our own aural vulnerability and consumer complicity.