The Afterlife: Ray - Georgia - Jamie

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece, as it incorporated music in a sense I did not expect to cover. Although we have been reading texts from deceased authors, we have not yet discussed how to deal with music, voices, and the memory of a star after death. Immediately I thought of the movie Selena, where Jennifer Lopez plays the role of murdered Tejano musician, Selena Quintanilla, and post-film pursues her own career in music. However, I posted about Selena last week, and I see that Russel already posted about the movie this week.

The next thought I had was of Ray, a film about singer Ray Charles, who is played by singer/actor Jamie Foxx. In the movie, Ray Charles' voice is used as Jamie Foxx performs for missing (or dead) body of Ray Charles.

"But can the human voice exist independently of the singing body? Sound recordings, at times, are voices surviving the body that one produced them; invisible and devoid of body, the singer is somehow there in the presence of voice... What replaces the sound of his voice is the act of singing;... one singer is thus portrayed through the singing of another." (36)

I loved this quote because it asks such a profound question that, as a fan of music and musicians who have passed, I have never considered. I have felt sad when artists are pass away - that their music, message, personality, and care to the community is gone - but I have not ever really thought about the absence of seeing a performance due to the performer's death. After considering this article all week and re-reading it today, I feel that what is most missed is the fact that the music/voice will no longer produce new music.

Re-voicing and the acting that goes into re-voicing was another interesting aspect of the article that stood out to me. Because singers have a career of performing, they each develop their own forms of expressing authenticity in their performances. When a singer portrays someone else who was a singer, a battle occurs to make sure the mannerism and performance reflects that of the true person the actor is attempting to portray. On page 42, we learn that during these lip-syncing or voice-over scenes, close-ups are generally not used, so as to not disturb the audience's perception and following of the story. In the scene I chose from Ray, I noticed the lack of extreme close-ups. After watching a performance of the real Ray Charles singing the same song from my clip, however, I realized what an amazing job Jamie Foxx did at acting/reproducing that feeling of authenticity in performance.

To think about how that differs when musicians just stop producing music because of age or life situations, like Janet Jackson's recent news of postponing her tour to start a family, is obviously different but still interesting to consider.