From ‘Bird Song’ to ‘Mother B/Earth’: The new wave vocal becomings of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen

This article develops a close analysis of the vocal practices of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen, situating their experimental approaches within a framework of posthuman feminist theory. I argue that their voices enact what I call vocal becoming: sonic processes that refuse stable markers of identity or species, instead embracing transformation, hybridity and the capacity to inhabit human, animal and inorganic registers. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy of becoming, alongside Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist feminism, I explore how Lovich and Hagen fragment the unified vocal subject, creating assemblages of timbre, register and texture that destabilize normative notions of voice. Case studies include Lovich’s ‘Bird Song’ (1979), in which avian mimicry collapses distinctions between human and non-human, and Hagen’s aesthetic philosophy of Mother B/Earth, where spiritual ecologies and cosmic maternity shape a transgressive feminist poetics of sound. Through rasps, shrieks, falsetto leaps and theatrical distortions, both artists extend the voice beyond humanist boundaries, cultivating new relations to embodiment, gender and planetary life. By theorizing these practices as vocal becomings, I demonstrate how new wave vocality performs a feminist politics of difference – life-affirming, experimental and resistant to hegemonic forms. In doing so, the article highlights Lovich and Hagen’s roles as key innovators who transformed voice into a site of posthuman feminist critique within late-twentieth-century pop culture.