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As curator for Creative Time, an independent New York centre presenting art in public space, Mark Beasley was responsible for Hey Hey Glossolalia (2008), a series of performances revolving around the voice, featuring Mark Leckey, Frances Stark, Rammellzee, Liam Gillick and others. Here, he gives an impression of the multifaceted role of the voice in art and culture over the past one hundred years. In Steve McQueen’s 2001 film Girls, Tricky, we are privy to the most intimate and revealing of acts, the recording of the voice. Shot in a dimly lit rehearsal studio, the crowned king of trip hop, Tricky, rocks backwards and forwards, as torso shuddering his words tumble forth. At first unintelligible, phrases coalesce popping like bubbles as they merge. The act is surprising, less for the meaning or content of the lyrics – autobiographical to the point of raw they are typical of the singer – but more for the manner in which the words are achieved. The performance is reminiscent of the ecstatic glossolalic voice, dredged from some unknown wellspring. In the final moment Tricky snaps from his trance, and declaring the final take, the song is complete. Tricky as McQueen suggests ‘is someone who entrusts himself to his own voice.’ Speaking, is an act with consequences, it is a performance with effects. The following text, presented in the dislocated syntax of Marinetti’s suggested ‘wireless imagination,’ presents just some of the means by which the spoken word has taken effect, from bona polari and grindcore to the inimitable death squawks of an African grey parrot. I grew up listening to the radio; television was considered a corrupting and banal force in the Beasley household, and therefore verboten. Early memories of radio theatre and satiric programming ranged from afternoon plays about the troubles in Northern Ireland; Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America to the gilded vocal drag of Kenneth Williams. In short the radio was my first and foremost introduction to the dislocated voice. In that spirit let us tune into the radio.Recorded in November 1947, Antonin Artaud’s radiophonic play To Have Done With the Judgment of God, was scheduled for broadcast on February 2, 1948. The play was written during the years Artaud spent interned at psychiatric institutions, which roughly coincided with the duration of World War II. Artaud, a French playwright, poet, and writer, utilized somewhat alarming cries, screams, grunts and onomatopoeia and developed a glossolalic inventory of word like sounds designed to give utterance to the dissociation of meaning from language. The play was prohibited from airplay partially as a result of its scatological, anti-American, antiwar and antireligious references and pronouncements, but also because of its general randomness, with its cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with percussive elements. Artaud died a little over a month later, profoundly disappointed over the rejection of the work. It was not broadcast over the airwaves again until 30 years later.I am reminded of an interview on a late-night radio show, in which the late performance artist and pricker of social mores Leigh Bowery described his formative years in London. Bowery, born in 1961 in Sunshine, Australia, moved to London in 1980, lured by magazine reportage and the post-punk New Romantic vision. While struggling to survive the early Thatcher years, he took on many jobs, and at some stage, he spent nights working at Burger King. He described how, on those late nights and talking over the Tannoy, he would alter his Australian accent in order to say ‘chicken sandwich correctly’. ‘I have merely decided to talk properly. As Trish says there is not a lot of point in discussing beautiful literature in an ugly voice.’ [1]Bored with teaching undergraduates English literature, Frank Bryant morosely reflects through a whisky glass on his failed marriage and his attempt at becoming a poet. His world is turned upside down by the arrival of Rita, a hairdresser who has decided to find herself by taking an Open University course. Excited by her freewheeling and acute observations, and by the girl herself, Frank also feels a deep sadness as he watches her warm, impulsive reactions be replaced by the sort of cold, analytical approach he so much loathes in other students and colleagues. Educating Rita, playwright Willy Russell’s contemporary reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, reminds us that the voice communicates on many levels. For Rita and so too for Frank, the voice clearly denotes one’s station and social class. Eliza Doolittle, Shaw’s leading lady in Pygmalion, 1913 – later presented on Broadway as My Fair Lady in 1956 – lived her formative years among the costermongers and market traders of Victorian London. In one of the first recorded instances of the mirrored voice or back slang, Victorian journalist Paul Mayhew observed the habits and dialect of working Londoners. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851, gives detailed accounts of costermonger back slang, which was invented as a means to mask meaning, usually from the ears of the newly appointed police force. For example, take an ordinary English word and say it backward. The most common example still in use today is ‘yob’ from the reversed ‘boy.’ More pertinent here in New York perhaps is the term ‘cop.’ The costers reversed ‘police’ to become ‘esclop,’ which became ‘slop,’ then ‘cop.’ ‘Look’ was ‘cool.’ So ‘look out a copper’s coming’ was reversed and shortened to become ‘cool slop.’ You Suffer, is a song by the British grindcore band Napalm Death. The song, written by Nicholas Bullen and Justin Broadrick, during sessions for the From Enslavement to Obliteration demo recording in March 1986, has earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the shortest recorded song ever. It is precisely 1.316 seconds long and consists entirely of the lyrics ‘You suffer, but why?’ Employing the ‘death growl’ or the ‘death grunt,’ the voice and lyrics are sped up to the point of incoherence, a style of singing the band helped define. The use of growling, ‘monstrous’ vocals for ominous effect in rock music can be traced at least as far back as I Put a Spell on You by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in 1956. Though humorous in intent, the 1966 novelty song “Boris the Spider” by The Who features deep, guttural, gurgling growls somewhat similar to those performed by modern death metal and grindcore vocalists. [2]‘Horne: But did you manage to drag yourself up on deck?Julian: Ooh, no, we dressed quite casual… ‘[3]My first introduction to cant – the special language or vocabulary of a particular group – was the polari used by Kenneth Williams in the BBC radio 4 sketch show Round the Horne. Julian and Sandy were two characters on the radio program, played respectively by Hugh Paddick and Williams, with scripts written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. As well as being highly entertaining, Julian and Sandy were notable for being two camp homosexual characters in mass entertainment at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. The characters were originally conceived as two ageing Shakespearean ‘old luvvie’ actors who were doing domestic work (in Kenneth Horne’s flat) while waiting for the next acting job. Polari was used in London fish markets, the theatre, and by the gay subculture. As polari, it was used to disguise homosexual activity from potentially hostile outsiders, such as undercover policemen. Additionally it was a language used in theatre, where the lingo originated, also a place of employ for gay men. The almost identical parlyaree has been spoken in fairgrounds since at least the 17th century and continues to be used by show travellers in England and Scotland.‘Look Pinkie, make a record of your voice for me, so I’ll always have something that tells me how you feel.’ ‘We haven’t got a gramophone.”Whenever you’re away I can borrow one.”You wanted a recording of my voice, well here it is. What you want me to say is, ‘I love you’. Well I don’t. I hate you, you little slut…’ [4] The voice is deceitful above all things. In the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock, we are immersed in a post-World War II seaside tale of spivs, petty villainy, and bedevilment. Greene’s tale is one of love and dishonour involving Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough), a teenage sociopath, and Rose (Carol Marsh) a waitress, and innocent teahouse gullible. Greene pits the snarling voice against the loving. Towards the middle of the film, Pinkie commits, after some persuasion, his love troth to record in a fun fair recording booth. As Rose gazes wistfully through the glass doors of the booth, we hear Pinkie spit his contemptful rebuke, a voice full of loathing and disgust for his new bride. Pursued by the police he falls to his fate at the end of Brighton pier. The voice committed to record is all that is left of Pinkie, and in the final scene of the movie, the grief-stricken Rose plays the record. As we wait for the fateful betrayal of her love, the record sticks and the scene fades to the sound of Pinkie’s voice caught in scratched grooves: ‘I love you,’ – click –‘I love you’ – click – ‘I love you’ – At a later date the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, would call upon the spirit of Pinkie in his purposeful choice of John Lydon, née Johnny Rotten, as the band’s vocalist. Lydon’s staggering, vomitus, impromptu rendition of Alice Coopers Eighteen at McLaren’s shop Sex on the Kings Road was a legendary audition and a defining moment in the formation of the Punk voice. Hatebeak is a death metal and grindcore band, formed by Blake, Mark and Waldo, a 19-year-old Congo African Grey Parrot. The band members do not use their last names ‘to retain the mystery.’ Their music is unique, in that they have an avian vocalist. They are currently signed to Reptilian Records. Their sound has been described as ‘a jackhammer being ground in a compactor.’ The first disembodied voice in film is that found in Fritz Lang’s Testament of Dr Mabuse, 1933, reduced to a floating voice-over neither present nor absent: it is the suggestion of a voice from beyond the grave. The words of Mabuse’s manifesto of crime and terror echo on the soundtrack, whispered in a thin, raspy voice. Mabuse thrives on the modern world of media and international networks. He is kept alive through the technological recordings and transmissions of his voice, delivering his messages while keeping his physical presence hidden, untraceable, and therefore unseizable.Perhaps the most beguiling instance of the disembodied voice in cinema is that supplied by the actress Mercedes McCambridge in William Friedkin’s The Excorcist, 1973. The actress began her career on the radio in the 1940s. Her Hollywood breakthrough role was playing Luz in George Stevens’ 1956 classic Giant, which starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. In her last performance, in The Excorcist McCambridge provided the dubbed voice of the demonically possessed child, Regan, played by Linda Blair. It was a voice that rasped, snarled and growled its way into being. In order to achieve the demonic voice, McCambridge employed sleep deprivation, cigarettes, egg yolks, and liquor. Friedkin explains, ‘It was really something else. She’d just sit there in that chair looking at the screen and go, ‘Aaaaaaaarghh,’ and you would hear these things multiplied in her throat; these strange counterpoint noises; little skittering whistles and strange creaking rattles.’ McCambridge was promised a prominent screen credit; discovering at the premiere that her name was absent, she left in tears. The omission was later revealed to be an attempt by the film’s producers to retain the mystery of the demonic voice. McCambridge sued and the voice of many a teen nightmare was finally credited. ‘These records were so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: “A Wop Bop A Loo Bop”, “Be Bop A Lula“. From these alien incantations was born the quasi-religious fervor with which the British still celebrate pop.’ [5]One of the most eccentric vocalists ever to hit the jazz scene, the African American Slim Gaillard was a legendary figure, thanks to his own invented jive dialect, ‘vout’ – from ‘devout’ – a variation on hipster slang composed of nonsense words (‘oreenie’ and ‘color–vee–tee’ being two other examples). Gaillard was a master improviser whose stream-of-consciousness vocals ranged far afield from the original lyrics, and his laid-back cool made him a popular entertainer from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, especially on the West Coast. Several of his compositions became genuine hits, including Flat Foot Floogie and Cement Mixer. He later appeared in Julien Temple’s 1986 film Absolute Beginners alongside David Bowie singing ‘Selling Out.’In 1972, Marcel Broodthaers staged a silent performance at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park London. Over the course of one afternoon, armed only with a double-sided billboard and chalk marker, Broodthaers proceeded to write, display, and erase a series of words and statements. Texts ranged from ‘Silence’, to ‘The mind of William Blake’, and ‘Visit Tate Gallery’. The artist’s clear and wilful perversity—refusing to speak in a situation of free speech—beguilingly suggests the need and desire for internal reflection in the silence after the voice, after cacophony. To call upon Broodthaers silent manifestation at Speakers’ Corner could be seen as equally perverse; it is rather his suggestion that time should be spent in cerebral reflection of those voices that have gone before that so appeals. In 2005, I restaged Broodthaers performance – accompanied by Phil Coy, artist and director of the film ‘Wordland,’ 2008 – over the course of one afternoon, in the face of our silent presentation words poured forth. On one occasion a member of the public, angered by our silence, screamed at the top of his voice, ‘let loose your voice.’ What is more immediate to us than the voice, in all its hectoring, cajoling, discursive, and passionate exchange? Voices are all around us, as familiar as breathing. Let loose the voice.Mark Beasley is a writer and curator, New YorkNoten[1] Educating Rita, Willy Russell, 1980[2] A further history of the ‘death growl’ is available in ‘Resisting Language (The Silenced Voice),’ by Nicholas Bullen, as part of Hey Hey Glossolalia, Creative Time Books, New York, 2008[3] Julian and Sandy, Round the Horne, BBC radio 4, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Horne[4] Brighton Rock, Graham Greene, 1938[5] England’s Dreaming, John Savage, Faber and Faber, 1991