Sounding Black, looking White: Perceptions of racial identity in pop music

Abstract

This study investigates how listeners perceive racialized linguistic cues in pop songs, specifically examining how Black and White singers are evaluated when using features of African American English (AAE). To create the stimuli, four professional American singers sung two pop songs with paired lyrics, one in an AAE guise and one in a Mainstream U.S. English (MUSE) guise. Using data from focus groups (N= 36) and an online survey (N = 157), participants identified the perceived racial identity of each singer across both auditory-only and audiovisual conditions, specified whether they heard differences between AAE- and MUSE-guise lyrics, and evaluated each singer. Results show that listeners were less accurate in identifying the White singers’ racial identity and that the AAE versions were generally preferred across all singers, suggesting that AAE is largely normalized within the pop genre. Visual cues had minimal effects on singer evaluations, indicating that White artists using AAE were not necessarily viewed less favorably when their racial identity was made explicit. These findings highlight the role of genre and raciolinguistic ideologies in shaping listener expectations when listening to music and contribute to broader discussions on how Black linguistic practices are systematically commodified in the American music industry.