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(see this post for the rest of the paper)

Narratively, the show supports individuality and "finding your voice." Musically, however, this expression is heavily constrained by the economic, and consequent aesthetic, realities of the show. Indeed television has historically been fairly hostile towards serial musicals. While there is a strong and critically acclaimed tradition of intermittent musical theater in television—one prominent example being Buffy the Vampire Slayer—musical series have a history of resounding failure. The longest running musical series before Glee was Cop Rock, which ran for 11 one-hour episodes in 1990 before being cancelled as a popular and critical failure^[15]. Cop Rock paved the way, film scholar George Plasketes argues, for musical episodes such as Buffy’s “Once More with Feeling,” which in turn can be said to have paved the way for the return of musical series in Glee^[16]. However, that legacy of the myriad challenges associated with a serial musical looms heavily over Glee’s proverbial head. Therefore, instead of relying on traditional television methods of promotion and fundraising, which seem to be unhelpful for this subgenre, Glee takes the film strategy of cross-promotion. The recording industry, as music scholar Jeff Smith has described, has a long history of alliance with the film industry, and the two symbiotically draw profits to each other by simultaneously promoting a film and the music for that film^[17]. If an audience sees a film and likes it, one can in a sense “double dip” by charging the audience for the movie and then charging them for the separate “complete” soundtrack. Glee adopts this strategy readily, and has so far^[n] released 19 soundtracks (including 5 compilations), 7 EPs, and over 350 singles. There was also a live concert tour between the first and second season.
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(See this post for the rest of the paper.)

In every aspect of its presentation, from narrative to soundscape to production, Glee creates space for queer subjectivity and queer vocality. Even as it caters to the economic needs of cross-promotion, the narrative’s support of “finding your voice”—simultaneously steeped in heteroic discourse and celebration of performative identity—allows Glee to present a wide array of positionalities for aesthetic, and ironically economic, reasons. This contrary and yet mutually dependent relationship between the aesthetic and the economic plays out in terms of vocality through vocal grain and overproduction. Vocal grain’s implication of body already provides queer space, but the overproduced aesthetic also leaves room for queer subjectivity. This can happen through songasm, or through the show itself performing identities as a cyborg, engaging in meatsuit realness as it passes as human. Through overlay and acousmatic presences—including the Acousmatic Chorus—Glee creates structures and paradigms, then subverts them playfully. Even its seemingly normative structures, such as heteroic narrative, the Myth of Spontaneity, and MERM, leave room for queer possibilities through the drag aspects of performativity and its denaturalization of gender and sexuality, and through the heroes’ passage into the Queer Underworld.

This multitude of strategies does not occur in isolation; each thread is expertly woven into a rich tapestry of possibilities that all function simultaneously. Structuring a discussion of all these aspects is exceedingly difficult, because all affect and depend on each other in surprising and intricate ways. What they show is that Glee’s success—unparalleled in the genre of television serial musicals—stems from its universality. It has both normative and queer elements, human and cyborg mythologies, and all sorts of beings can “find their voice” expressed within it.

And yet, it might be interesting to investigate those characters in Glee that don’t have access to their voices. Dave Karofsky (Max Adler) got several important plot lines, but was never shown singing. More glaringly, Terri managed never to sing once in the show, the only cast member with star billing to accomplish this^[x]. And what of the band? Some of the members sing in the background once, and the bassist has a line. Brad the pianist didn’t speak for 3 seasons, and his big speaking part in the season 4 episode “Swan Song” acknowledges his previous lack of discursive power in the show. Why don’t the band members, who presumably have just as much heterosexuality at stake as Finn or Puck, have a heteroic narrative? Perhaps Chion’s equally threatening figure of the muet—the opposite of the acousmêtre in its refusal to speak—appears in these moments.

By not having access to their voices, these are marginalized entities, and the very existence of marginalized identities in the demonstrably queer project of Glee seems an odd tension. But Glee as a series is not done creating new episodes, and continues to rely on these strategies of performativity and meatsuit realness to plumb its margins and find new identities to simultaneously integrate and challenge. The show was commonly criticized (and still is to lesser extent) for being incredibly transphobic, but the inclusion of Unique in the same process of stereotype and musical articulation as the other characters seems to combat this criticism. Indeed, by allowing her to sing, she is given incredible power: access to performativity—and thus the ability to articulate an identity—and access to meatsuit realness—and thus the ability to shatter those aspects of her identity used to stereotype her. Vocality in this show works for nearly every character in this same manner, and indeed these two keys to queerly subversive agency are at the heart of what makes Glee the phenomenon it is.

Addendum, 9 Dec. 2018:
Three years after the end of Glee, it is interesting to revisit this conclusion and note its optimism. While the show did indeed continue to employ these strategies, their radical potential is greatly overestimated throughout this piece. In fact, the reproduced marginality I point to in the final paragraph lays bare the limits of Glee's overdetermined approach and how it ultimately reinscribes the power structures it purports to dismantle. The show puts forward a rather limited notion of queer marginalization that downplays the nuanced positionalities of high school students, as well as proffering a neoliberal model of diversity and inclusion centered around identity categories. To run with the example of Unique, her journey is an important one in U.S. television because she is a black trans girl who gets a happy ending (not to mention her very existence prior to the so-called "transgender tipping point"), and yet her characterization is often stereotypical, played for trauma porn, and tokenizing. She and Coach Beiste, who comes out as a trans man in season 6, have received ample criticism by trans activists, and yet Glee remains one of the few shows to have multiple trans characters who talk to each other, and their assembly of an all-trans choir in the season 6 episode "Transitioning" remains remarkable. Thus, the complex vocal negotiations Glee pioneered as well as the representational strategies it took are politically ambivalent, and this has transferred into TV musicals that have come after it. Indeed, that very ambivalence might have allowed the genre of TV musicals to flourish in the first place, positioning Glee as a transitional series as opposed to a fluke.


Notes
x) Karofsky and Terri sing with the rest of the cast in the final number of the series. Burt also had main billing (season 2) and didn't sing until the final number.

Works Cited

 

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