“We’re not a team. This is a competition.”: the musicolinguistic construction of Korean American femininity in a Korean reality television show

Abstract Music is crucially important in the creation and interpretation of indexical meaning in many mediatized contexts. As this special issue on music and language seeks to highlight, an integrated approach to the study of language and music – or, musicolinguistics – offers a more comprehensive way of analyzing language, especially taking a semiotic approach in contexts where music plays a vital role. This paper examines the semiotic interaction of subtitles, music, sound effects, and other editing effects in a South Korean reality show called Unpretty Rapstar . Language and sound broadly function together semiotically to represent the institutional voice of producers, which effectively overrides that of one contestant, Jessica Ho (stage name: Jessi), whose gendered performance is rendered antagonistic and aggressive. An examination of subtitles and music together – alongside other editing tactics such as camera effects – reveals how Jessi is rendered a disfluent speaking subject. Jessi’s “disorderly” performance of language becomes indexically linked to her performance of femininity as aggressive, unruly, and excessive. I engage ethnomusicologist Christopher Small’s concept of musicking which expands the scope of a musical performance, treating music as a social action which accounts for multiple activities and actors surrounding musical acts or events. Specifically, I attend to the addition of sound effects, tunes, and subtitles – largely added during the post-production phase by editors – and how these contribute to the musicality of an otherwise discursive event, culminating in a final musicolinguistic event: Jessi’s viral diss rap.