Flight of the Conchords: Recontextualizing the voices of popular culture¹

Abstract

Folk-comedy duo, Flight of the Conchords, have become one of New Zealand's most successful musical exports, having attracted a large international audience through their American-produced TV series. One of their central comic devices is to stylize well-known singers and their music. This article focuses on how Flight of the Conchords shift their phonetic style towards that of various target personas, and how they maintain their own voices as comedians in the process. An acoustic analysis compares Flight of the Conchords' pronunciation of four vowels (KIT, DRESS, TRAP, and GOAT) to the pronunciation of the pop singers being stylized. Both Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie manipulate their vowel production towards that of the targeted personas. They also maintain some distance from their targeted roles through a range of devices including the use of exaggerated phonetic style. Through their performances, Flight of the Conchords recontextualize and parody a range of popular cultural products, continuing the enregisterment of certain phonetic styles with the voices of well-known characterological figures.

Enregisterment: How linguistic items become linked with ways of speaking

“…The concept of enregisterment helps us see how linguistic variation becomes linked with (and may help create) contextual variation of any kind. The idea has proved fruitful in the study of language standardization (Agha 2003;Dong 2010;Frekko 2009;Jaspers & Van Hoof, 2013;Managan 2011;Romero 2012), genres and situational varieties (Babel 2011;Donaldson 2013;Madsen 2013;Squires 2010;Wilce 2008;Williams 2012), and ways of speaking associated with personas or identities (Bennett 2012;Gibson 2011;Marzo & Ceuleers, 2011;Newell 2009;Podesva 2011), social groups (Eberhardt 2012;Henry 2010), and social relations (Goebel 2010). Much of the sociolinguistic research about enregisterment has had to do with linguistic forms that are linked, by linguists and/or by laypeople, with places (Beal 2009(Beal , 2012Campbell-Kibler 2012;Cramer 2013;Remlinger 2009;Slotta 2012).…”

Overshooting Americanisation. Accent Stylisation in Pop Singing – Acoustic Properties of the Bath and Trap Vowels in Focus

“…In his auditory analysis, Coupland (2011: 586) points to exaggerated aspiration of [t] (in the word "hit") in Chuck Berry's spoken introduction to his live version of "Maybellene". Gibson (2011) provides an acoustic description of stylisation in the performance by Flight of the Conchords, a New Zealand comedy duo. In their song entitled "Inner City Pressure", a parody of Pet Shop Boys, KIT and DRESS vowels are hyperperformed, in particular at the very beginning of the piece, being, respectively, more raised and open.…”

Parodies of whiteness: Die Antwoord and the politics of race, gender, and class in South Africa

“…In other words, in metaparody speakers are not mocking an individual who 'speaks this way', but rather mocking an individual who 'mocks an individual who speaks this way.' Research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology over the past ten years has identified numerous instances of metaparodic language use (e.g., Chun 2004Chun , 2007Clarke & Hiscock 2009;Bucholtz 2011;Bucholtz & Lopez 2011;Gibson 2011;Pietikäinen 2013Pietikäinen , 2016, particularly in staged and/or mediatized performances. Chun (2004), for example, provides a detailed analysis of Asian-American comedian Margaret Cho's voicing of a stereotypical 'Asian mother' persona in her stand-up comedy routine.…”

“…In this case, while there is some evidence for the explicit juxtaposition of opposing values (as in the combination of sex, materialism and religion in Yolandi's prayer), our primary warrant for reading the performance as parodic is Yolandi's use of hyperbolic linguistic styling. As numerous scholars have argued in the past (e.g., Chun 2004, Gibson 2011, hyperbolic uses of language help to create role distance between the animator and the (staged) figure being animated. In the prologue, Yolandi does not voice an 'authentic'-sounding nouveau riche woman, but rather a caricature of this persona.…”

“…She is also mocking, and hence critiquing, the ideological regimes of race in America that enable such mockery to exist (and to be funny) in the first place. Similarly, though in a less ideologically fraught context, Gibson (2011) describes how the New Zealand musical-comedy duo Flight of the Conchords use both parody and metaparody in their 2007 television series of the same name. In one episode, Gibson describes how Brett, one member of the duo, seems to mock his own habit of wearing sweaters with large images of cute animals on them.…”