A Universally Repulsive Voice

When Reading Barthes' "Music, Voice, Language" I thought a lot about his claim that a voice cannot be neutral between being loved and repulsed. He writes, "This always different object is assigned by psychoanalysis to the category of objects of desire-or of repulsion:there is no neutral voice-and if sometimes that neutrality, that whiteness of the voice occurs, it terrifies us, as if we were to discover a frozen world, one in which desire was dead." (Barthes, p.280) I quickly thought of many voices I loved and hated and thought it would be most interesting to make a post about a voice that is hated; enter, Britney Spears. She has one of the most repulsive voices I have ever heard from someone attempting to sing. While her auto-tuned studio voice sold countless records and is doubtless still earning her royalties, if it weren't for modern technology, she would never have been considered a successful singer. In this video, she makes a painful attempt to manipulate her voice into something admirable, but fails miserably. Her voice is repulsive, there is no other interpretation.