Seeing vs. Believing: Gauging Perceptions of Racial Identity and Authenticity in Pop Music

This study investigates how audiences construct perceptions of racial identity and authenticity while listening to pop music, showing that White artists’ use of Black linguistic forms leads to greater ambiguity and contested notions of legitimacy. Prior research demonstrates that, in American high performance contexts (Coupland 2007), White artists often deliberately co-opt Black linguistic and cultural forms for social and commercial gain (e.g., Bucholtz and Lopez 2011, Eberhardt and Freeman 2015). However, the ways in which U.S. audiences perceive and ideologically interpret such appropriative performances remain unexplored, particularly when confronted with conflicting identity cues, such as a White singer engaging in linguistic minstrelsy (Bucholtz and Lopez 2011). To address this gap, this study employs semi-matched guise focus groups, in which participants listened to original, professionally recorded songs performed by Black and White singers in both African American English (AAE) and Mainstream U.S. English (MUSE) guises, evaluated paired lyric clips, and then viewed the purported face of each artist to assess how auditory and visual cues jointly informed their perception of each artist. Results show that participants consistently demonstrated high accuracy in identifying the Black singers’ racial identities, but had greater difficulty classifying White singers, particularly the White male performer. The salience of specific AAE features also varied: while some (e.g., fortition of /z/ before nasals) were highly marked and interpreted as strongly inauthentic or appropriative when used by White singers, others (e.g., copula omission, habitual BE) were more often perceived as genre-appropriate or went unnoticed. These findings point to the powerful role of raciolinguistic ideologies and genre conventions in shaping audience perceptions of racial identity and artist authenticity, and provide empirical evidence for how the commodification of Black cultural and linguistic forms in pop music is both masked and perpetuated within the American music industry.