Royal Music Association - Philosophy Study Group July 2012

Clothes Make the Singer

I have already noted that part of kd lang’s appeal apparently derives for her following
from what some call her cross-dressing.

There is, and for this reason I will refrain from citing it here, a well-known and massive literature on this topic.

I confess that I find kd lang's style of dress unremarkable -- and I have never understood why only a man might be permitted to wear a comfortable jacket, covering most of his body with decent tailoring, and be thought to look well-dressed but women were seemingly required to uncover theirs.

This exactly double standard holds when it comes to song and dance shows, think Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and only Gene Kelly or more recently Patrick Swayze (and both had good,
muscular reasons to do so) take a care to opt for form fitting dance clothes — I will not
mention Dean Martin or kd lang’s Tony Bennett because they, of course, exemplify the
point.

The form-fitting clothes rule is hard on middle-aged women singers and these days and for some time now, Madonna has struggled to match the bodies of her more youthful competitors and then too there is the always debated issue of damaging one’s voice by starving oneself.

But and apart from the fear of death that manifests itself in our obsession with weight, or any kind of bodily change, as Nietzsche points out, kd lang’s own sexuality seems to make all the difference.

At the same time the constant comment, 'she looks like a man' -- a claim often referring only to her style of dress  --- refers more than anything else to her lack of undress.

A lack of undress, indeed, which she manages to pull off to great success in video performances of Sexuality, where what makes the erotic difference is not her skirt (her fans will not forgive me for this observation) nor the quasi-Greek choral group of Rottweilers at the end of the video (Woody Allen will not forgive me for this reservation, and only Woody Allen or, maybe, Percy Adlon would regard the Rottweilers as a kind of Greek chorus), the same Rottweilers that seemingly ascend the staircase with kd lang, exactly not nude, at the start of the video or at any time throughout -- she even stands chest high in a swimming pool still fully clothed. Instead, and even still, it is  her own bodily comportment, with chairs, a mirror, cracked glass, a piano, balconies, pools, an entire, seemingly vacant or abandoned house, jello, cherries (ok already), pitchers of milk (no less), and the teenager's favorite tv show, refrigerator tv (wherein one sits in front of an open refrigerator, rapt with attention for minutes on end, as if something might transpire, if only one waits long enough) all and quite apart from her own body.