“So You’ve Been Musically Shamed” by Associate Professor William Cheng

Professor William Cheng’s article, “So You’ve Been Musically Shamed,” appears in the September 2018 edition of the Journal of Popular Music Studies:

"In July 2014, an anonymous source leaked the raw audio of Britney Spears’s confessional ballad 'Alien.' Haters pounced on this star’s denuded voice, gleefully seizing on the viral artifact as a smoking gun for Spears’s deficits and for the pop industry’s artistic fakeries more broadly. My paper situates this flashpoint of Spears-shaming within late-capitalist archives of public humiliation, cyberleaks, and the paternalistic scrutiny of women’s bodies and voices."

Read the full article here.

Read an interview with Professor Cheng here, on the University of California Press blog.