“You can hear an ocean roar”: Mimesis, distortion, and the voice at its limits in Tomahawk’s “God Hates A Coward”
- May 24
- 14 min read
This essay was originally developed as part of a seminar on contemporary rhetorical theory and cowritten with communication scholar and disability activist Reece Littleton. We analyze Mike Patton's vocal delivery in a 2002 performance of "God Hates a Coward" by Tomahawk, drawing on affect theory to unpack the relationship between the preverbal intensities of language, the meaning of the voice, and technological manipulations of the body.
Abstract
The voice is a crucial site of negotiation between meaning and the body. Listening to “God Hates A Coward” by Tomahawk, we argue that tensions in the voice (vocal compression) and in the technology (audio distortion) work together to produce a sense of uncanny instability based on the materiality of the voice, signal, and signification at their intensive limits. Our analysis highlights the affective qualities of the voice and the affective materiality that grounds the representational capacity of language. Moreover, Patton’s performance illustrates and enacts key ways in which the materiality of signification is facilitated by technology as an extension of the body and the voice, challenging binaries between affect/signification; nature/culture; anatomy/technology.
Theoretical context
Affect is understood as the physiological precursor to emotion. Brian Massumi (2002) contrasts signifying qualities (the form of content, i.e. its "indexing [an effect] to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context" [p. 24]) with affective intensities. He argues there is no straightforward correspondence between qualities and intensities; content and effect. “This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic” but that “if there is a relation, it is of another nature” (p. 24). Specifically, he suggests affect is prior to signification and always exceeds it as an autonomous remainder, though signification reacts on affect through patterns of resonance or interference. In this section we draw on the works of Daniel Stern and Anna Gibbs to explore the mechanisms of resonance and interference underlying musical experience. We settle on a Peircean account of semiotics in order to pivot away from signification as a relationship of representation between a sign and its object, and toward a vocabulary that treats the signifying process as itself affective and material.
Approaching the phenomenon of presubjective intensity from a cognitive-psychological perspective, Stern (1985) provides a more precise account of vitality affects as premodal sensations shaped by differential relations of intensity over time. Preceding the subjective experience of sensory modality as well as qualification, vitality affects are characterized not by a particular meaning, association, or emotional valence, but by activation contours – “elusive qualities [that] are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging,’ ‘fading away,’ ‘fleeting,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘crescendo,’ ‘decrescendo,’ ‘bursting,’ ‘drawn out’” (p. 79). Stern writes about an expressiveness in vitality affects as a type of inherent item in each behavior humans display. Rather than falling back on affect’s ability to always exceed signification, Stern suggests that the intensities Massumi describes have particular forms that can be identified and described. Channeling Stern, we view music as meaningful in part as a system of viewer-listener vitality affects which can be unpacked through close listening to the expressive dynamics of a vocal performance.
Synthesizing contemporary philosophical and psychological approaches, Gibbs (2010) describes mimesis or mimetic communication as corporeal forms of mimicry and imitation. These can be both voluntary and intentional as well as involuntary and preconscious. Affect here functions as the powerful vector unifying mimetic modes from innate mimicry to complex empathy. For Gibbs, mimesis operates not on representation but on affect contagion, i.e. the circulation of affect between bodies. Here the formal similarities produced across bodies is as important as the transformations that are produced through mimesis. Importantly for us, this view refuses to delineate between types or tiers of mimetic communication based on dichotomies between involuntary/voluntary, nature/culture, etc. Rather, this notion of mimesis as a “borrowing of form” (p. 193) produces sociality as a biological function. Gibbs therefore suggests that an account of mimesis therefore requires the ability to move between humanist and nonhumanist modes of inquiry. The former focus on subjectivity and treat mimesis as a socially situated, historically changing, and culturally specific phenomenon. Nonhumanist perspectives focus instead on asubjective becomings produced through prepersonal forces, capacities, and intensities always preceding and extending beyond the subject. This oscillation does two things for our analysis: (1) it lets us read the coupling between Patton and his audience simultaneously as a culturally situated performance and as a shared becoming that does not belong exclusively to singer or listener; (2) it raises a problem of semiotics, since mimesis operating at every level from the bioneurological to the linguistic requires a framework that treats non-symbolic signs as primary rather than residual. For this reason, we take up the language of Peircean semiotics to negotiate mimetic becoming as an affective rather than representational process.
A distinction that is often drawn in the literature is the difference between affect and signification, with affect theorists treating the former as primary. For Saussure, a signifier is the formal qualities of the sign in relation to other signifiers; the signified is the concept provoked by the signifier in relation to other signifieds. Barthes describes “the grain of the voice” as its signifiance (i.e. the semiotic process underlying and exceeding signification); not the soul of the lungs but of the throat, where "phonic metal hardens and is segmented ” (p. 183). [1] While Saussure's framework was canonical in French structuralism, poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their solo and collaborative writing, take more interest in the pragmatist semiotic tradition of American philosopher C.S. Peirce, whose tripartite definition of the sign was established decades earlier but was less influential in France. Pierce splits the sign into three parts: (1) the representamen (the formal qualities of the sign, roughly equivalent to the signifier); (2) the object (what the representamen refers to); (3) the interpretant (the effect produced in an entity by the representamen-object relation, i.e. its affective capacity). Objects are further differentiated as immediate (the interpretive possibilities of the sign, roughly equivalent to the signified) or dynamic (the real referent the sign approximates but never fully captures). For Deleuze and Guattari, this allows the semiotic process to be formulated in terms of immanent force relations rather than hierarchical representation-at-a-distance. While Saussurian semiotics accounts only for arbitrary and conventional symbols, Pierce classifies symbols alongside indexical signs (representation by causality) and iconic signs (representation by resemblance). In pragmatist semiotics, the prototype for a sign is no longer the spoken word that represents a mental concept, but a footprint in the ground that represents evidence of real events (language is one of many such events).
The addition of the interpretant specifically outlines semiosis as a process rather than a structure: whereas the signified and its set of relations is where the Saussurean sign stops, for Peirce each interpretant becomes a new representamen requiring its own interpretant ad infinitum. This third element does two things for us: (1) allows for an account of temporality (which Derrida would eventually do to Saussure’s terminology using the concept of différance); (2) undermines an essential dichotomy between signification and affect, fitting with Gibbs’s account of mimesis as simultaneously representational and presignifying. Following the pragmatist tradition, the order of images and symbols through which humans navigate reality is not in opposition to the inaccessible Lacanian real; rather (in Deleuze’s terms) every event of signification intervenes in reality by opening new virtual possibilities that could be actualized. Moreover, for Gibbs and other authors following Deleuze, the signifiance that leaks through the interpretant (exceeding the representamen-object relation) represents a surplus transduction value, “a veritable becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 10).
Artifact description
“God Hates A Coward” is the 4th track off the eponymous debut album by American experimental rock supergroup Tomahawk. The most popular version of the song on YouTube is their live performance at the Big Day Out festival, recorded in Sydney, 2002. The performance showcases the band’s live energy and stage antics (such as wearing police uniforms), and has been widely shared on forums like Reddit. For this reason, the clip has circulated beyond the band’s fanbase and is a common entry point for new listeners. Its positive popular reception, despite the song’s dark and experimental themes, makes it culturally significant in the socially situated context of rock music.
A steady phrygian ostinato in the bass creates a dark, claustrophobic atmosphere. A few measures in, the guitar joins in with a chromatic riff that evokes action-thriller soundtracks while adding to the dissonant texture. Vocalist Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle; Faith No More; Fantômas; Peeping Tom; Dead Cross) raps the song’s verses into a respirator rigged with a microphone. The harsh delivery and distortion effects render the lyrics difficult to discern, but they deal with themes of abuse and violence through surreal imagery that is equally evocative and provocative. The distinct vocal delivery is characterized by escalating intensity and pitch throughout each verse, building to the chorus when the instruments open up from palm mutes and closed high hats to play the same riff and groove at full volume. Patton belts the chorus refrain of “my day” into a clean dynamic microphone with a delay effect. Halfway through the song, there is a whispered bridge sung into a third microphone with a modulation effect.
While all instruments contribute to the affective power of the song and facilitate its cultural circulation and acclaim, we focus on the voice as the site of negotiation between affective and signifying force. First, we apply the concept of mimesis to describe this negotiation as a productive coupling between Patton’s body and that of the audience. Next, we explore the ways in which the symbolic meaning of lyrics work at the level of affect. Finally, we extend these arguments about the coupling of bodies and signification to account for the microphone as an extension of the body. We argue that the resulting sense of uncanny instability exposes the voice, signal, and signification at their intensive limits.
Analysis
Mimesis
The tension in Patton’s throat expresses itself both mimetically (indexical representation as reproduction of vitality affects in the listener) and nonrepresentationally (as hypercompression of dynamics and sometimes frequency, both technologically exaggerated). The voice is loaded with semiotic force that builds an impression of a body at its limits. It breaks into something on the edge of a scream and whisper. Flesh is tangible in the breathing, which does not signal a break between clauses but almost another type of phoneme next to vowels, sibilants, and plosives.
Here Gibbs’s two optics converge on a single mimetic event: the coupling that forms between the body in the voice, the voice in language, and the respirator microphone that mediates the three. On one hand (read as an asubjective becoming) this coupling produces singer, voice, and microphone as mutually constitutive – not a subject/object relation in which Patton deploys the mask, but a configuration through which voice passes as prepersonal flux. In switching between the respirator, the clean dynamic microphone, and the distorted dynamic mic (as well as in the juxtaposition between the post-processed studio recording and the temporally fixed live performance), the voice is less un/mediated than modulated in its continual flow. As soon as the physical barrier between viewer/listener and vocalist is removed, we no longer hear the speaking, yelling, and screaming of a human subject but the deterritorialized singing voice that lives in the abstractions of musical codes. On the other hand (read through the humanist optic) the respirator and the muffled voice carry a dense semiotic load – industry, toxicity, muzzling, dehumanization, suffocation – that the audience is culturally situated to receive. The clip's wide circulation on YouTube and other online forums evidences the cultural legibility and signifying power of this image. What both optics describe in the artifact, they also describe in the listener. This is what Gibbs means by subjectivation: a process that simultaneously forms a subject-position and produces a surplus exceeding it. The voice at its biological and technical limits does both at once, (1) interpellating the listener into a recognizable position (the audience for confrontational experimentation with the <rock band> format) and (2) exceeding that position through the resonance and interference patterns of affective contagion, opening strange, deformed potentials the already-formed subject does not contain.
The effects of the embodied tension and mechanized distortion are therefore less a matter of forming an image in the mind of the audience (someone enraged and muzzled like an animal; object of disgust and fear producing sympathetic tension). Rather, it is the formation of a coupling between singer and audience characterized by becoming-tense, becoming-animal, and ultimately becoming-imperceptible as subject-object relations dissolve. Stern’s notion of vitality affect is helpful here. As premodal patterns of intensity over time, vitality affects form the sensational substrate for subjectivity. The transduction from movement to sound to the synesthetic convergence of sounds in the sensorium does not produce similarities, but difference. These pseudo-sympathetic responses invoked by Patton’s performance constitute a surplus transduction value. Consider the symmetrical vowel progressions in the first two lines, a recurring trope throughout the song. The line “flesh rodeos yeehaw it” illustrates the loose phonetic palindrome based on tongue placement (see spectrogram and visualization below). This mimetic tone painting (alignment of symbolic and affective content) produces the effect of something resembling a literal flesh rodeo, filtered through the respirator microphone and acting in turn as a pattern of variable pressure on the body of the listener (see spectrogram). In the materiality of the voice at its physical and technical limits, there is no longer a performing subject nor the object of listening but mimesis as affect contagion (Gibbs), leaking across performer/listener and through the instruments in an ecology of musical experience.
Quality & intensity
Here we find a shear pressure between the symbolic meaning of the words and the materiality of the voice. For example, most sources transcribe the fourth line of the song as “keep you up like a fluffier girl ain't that enough, sir? look in the sewer for my pedigree.” The spectrogram shows the corresponding “scooping” contour. Whereas the word “up” signals the pitch contour conceptually, but the melodic action is accompanied in the first instance by the appropriate pornographic simile of “fluffer” (tone painting) followed by an interpellating question (see spectrogram below). Describing his process, Patton explains, “It’s gotta be preverbal. I gotta just be making sounds. I gotta be, like, a second guitar player[…] if I’m writing words, I’ll do a baby-talk version first to see if those sounds work. Then I’ll try and find words that fit those sounds” (Simonini, 2013). These preverbal sounds have a long history in popular music, including artists like Kurt Cobain (who describes a similar writing process) as well as the tradition of scatting (i.e. improvising melodies using nonsense syllables) in jazz. The voice itself is infinitely differentiated (unlike symbolic communication) but therefore carries no distinctive elements (Cavarrero, 2003/2005). The only possible form of differentiation (as opposed to the substance of pure differentiation) is a binary relationship that excludes gradations. The distortion in Patton’s voice and accentuated by the microphones deemphasize intelligibility and call attention to what Barthes calls the grain of the voice – the materiality of language itself.
The fact that there are no published lyrics to the song (leading fans to produce multiple different interpretations online) further focuses attention on the grain of the voice. There is broad consensus on the clearer lines, especially when he removes the respirator microphone and switches into dynamic mics, which are equally effect-laden but emphasize the intelligible frequencies of the human voice (~500Hz–5kHz). Many of the lyrics still only leak through in fragments. The impressionistic effect produces an enthymeme where the listener is invited to make sense of disparate disturbing images. This highlights not only the affective qualities of the voice, but the affective materiality that grounds the symbolic meaning of language. As Nietzsche (1873/1979) reminds us, what we understand as semantic meaning is nothing more than the metaphorical layering of sense impressions: “a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one” (p. 81). Patton further reminds us that meaning is not separate from the sensuousness of the voice, but is itself a temporal, material process of sense-making.
Technological mediation
Bernard Stiegler takes up the question of subjectivity in relation to technology, arguing that humanity evolves through a process of epiphylogenesis, i.e. the buildup of cultural memory through techniques and technologies. The deterritorialization of the hands (freed from locomotion, free to carry) and therefore the mouth (freed from carrying, free to speak) results in "the pursuit of the evolution of the living by other means than life" (p. 135). The speaking voice and the tool-using hand are two poles of the same phenomenon. Technics are therefore mutually constitutive of human subjectivity as synthetic subjectivation (Wiley & Elam, 2018). Cavarero (2003/2005) agrees with Barthes that song can communicate (or reveal) the uniqueness of the body, as opposed to the arbitrary convention of symbols. For her, “The task of the voice is therefore to be a pathway, or better, a pivotal joint between body and speech” (p. 15). We add to this account that by articulating body and speech, the voice therefore articulates both body and speech with a whole technical apparatus and machinic assemblage; as the gas mask distorts Patton’s speech, it foregrounds the uniqueness of the body in his voice, as well as the fact that this body is never fully contained and autopoietic but always constituted in synthetic couplings with altogether different strata of matter.
By virtue of being neither pure human symbol use nor technological artifice separate from the undifferentiated (i.e. infinitely differentiated) corporeal body, the intensive materiality of Patton’s performance posed a serious challenge to its quantification. Deleuze (1977/2024) outlines two ways to look at music. On one hand, the form of expression of music is the machining of sound; singing is the voice deterritorialized and mapped to a musical diagram (e.g. 12-tone equal temperament tuning). On the other, the form of content is also deterritorializing as a becomings-molecular. Before 1830, Deleuze suggests, these becomings-molecular consisted of a desexualization: a becoming-woman and becoming-child personified in the castratti. In the romantic era, music opened to becoming-animal, becoming-elementary, and other nonhuman forces that have since come to characterize all forms of popular music. From the perspective of music's plane of consistency (as opposed from the perspective outside, on the side of expression or of content) there is no form, "only haecceities, i.e., combinations of intensities, intensive compounds" (p. 9). In tracing phonological data, we run against these becomings of the voice. Building on Wagner’s screams, cries, and wails that Kittler (1986/1999) identifies as evidence of the order of the real leaking into that of the symbolic, Patton’s growls, whispers, and shrieks do not merely cut through the symbolic order, but call attention to the limits of the real, i.e. the fact that the real itself is always already mediated through technology. His lines of flight do not connect but run transverse to dichotomies of voice and instrument; signal and noise; any and every frequency.
Conclusion
This analysis of Patton’s vocal performance has explored the affective intensities of the voice and the materiality that grounds the representational capacity of language. Tensions in the voice and in the technology work together to produce a sense of uncanny instability. Affect theory and related scholarship allow us to explore the affect qualities and materiality as rhetorical. In the analysis section, the focus was on mimesis, quality, intensity, and technological mediation concerning Patton’s vocalization. Moreover, Patton’s performance illustrates and enacts key ways in which the materiality of signification is facilitated by technology as an extension of the body and the voice, challenging binaries between affect/signification; nature/culture; anatomy/technology. In challenging these binaries between affect and signification, Patton’s performance is an embodiment of presence and technical mediation in the study of affect in the voice and the capacity of language.
Notes
[1] Note that "soul" is etymologically "breath” – a metonymy of both the lungs and the throat.
References
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Cavarero, A. (2005). For more than one voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression (P. A. Kottman, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2003)
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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
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Simonini, R. (2013, January 1). An interview with Mike Patton. The Believer, 11(1). https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-mike-patton/
Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant : A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Routledge.
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus (R. Beardsworth & G. Collins, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1994).
Wiley, S. B. C., & Elam, J. (2018). Synthetic subjectivation: Technical media and the composition of posthuman subjects. Subjectivity, 11(3), 203–227.
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