Free as a Bird? Thinking with the Grain of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Butch Voice

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Across a prolific, genre-spanning career, Meshell Ndegeocello has persistently avoided music industry labeling. This chapter considers the adequacy of conceptions of the butch voice and female masculinity as modalities for summing up her aesthetic strategy. More central than her transgression of customary modalities of history and memory, the chapter suggests, is the persistent quest for freedom in Black music by any means musically necessary. Suggesting that the butch voice is both heard and silent, the chapter moves toward an aesthetics of redaction in her most recent music, especially in albums devoted to cover songs.</jats:p>