Some cultural references to stuttering / famous stutterers
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Tim Booth of the band James apparently had/has a stutter. Their first album was called Stutter and comes highly recommended though it has no stuttering references bar the title. They did have a song called Stutter which turned up as a live b-side to their 1990 release of the Come Home 12" single. The lyrics are very pertinent to the condition: "There's a beast in my mouth, It's out of control, Beats with will of its own... I think it's taken control, Spits out your emotion, Left a deep impression, Expression". *
U.S. R&B singer Joe had a hit single called Stutter which revolved around the premise that his girlfriend was stuttering because she was lying to him! The song itself utilises stuttering as a stylistic motif, especially in the remix with rapper Mystikal. *
The Clancy Brother had a song called the Stuttering Lovers which uses stuttering as a hook within some of the verses. Lyrics are available here. *
Avant Garde comnposer Alvin Lucier has used his stutter as the active component in his most famous piece, I am Sitting in a Room. Another piece also available at this link is fully described as 'The Only Talking Machine of Its Kind in the World" for any stutterer, stammerer, lisper, person with faulty or halting speech, regional dialect or foreign accent or any other anxious speaker who believes in the healing power of sound ' *
Michael Gira of seminal post No Wave New York band the Swans told me he used to have a stutter when he was younger. I asked him how he overcame it but I can't remember exactly what he told me. It was something along the lines of concentrating hard and working on it; he didn't mention using a specific method or programme.
Robert Frazer, famous London gallery owner and part of the Rolling Stones 1960s set (he is immortalised in a treated photograph of himself and Mick Jagger by Richard Hamilton taken shortly after the infamous raid on Keith Richard's house, which is part of the permanent collection in Tate Britain) had a stutter. I'm not aware of him doing anything about it, or how he coped with it, apart from a apocyrphal story in Bill Landis's biography of Kenneth Anger
The famous Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, had a stutter in his early years which he apparently managed to overcome. There must be some Phd thesis out there somewhere on how it influenced his writings! Please let me know it you find one.
Andrei Tarkovsky's film, Mirror, opens with a scene of a young boy being treated (cured) of his stutter through hypnosis. I have not found anything to suggest that Tarkovsky had a stutter himself and he certainly is not afraid of talking when I have seen him interviewed!
Marshall McLuhan, cultural theorist, referred to language as a form of organised stutter. Speech being composed of bits of chopped up sounds. When you sing, you don't stutter, as singing is a means of stretching language into long, harmonious patterns and cycles.
Del Torro's recent film, Pan's Labyrinth, includes a secondary character who is a anti-Franco revolutionary with a pronounced stutter. He is captured by the Franco forces and submitted to a torture sequence administered by the Captain. At the beginning he is taunted by a promise that he will be freed if he manages to count to three without stuttering. While he makes it to two he succumbs at trying to enunciate three and thus the torture begins. The film is very well made and the sequence is important to the development of the sadistic character of the Captain. The soldier's stutter is not inherent to his predicament (he was one of the few soldiers left alive after a firefight) and is simply used a weakness to be exploited in his subsequent torture. The soldier is not portrayed as particularly brave or idealised in any way and he does end up talking to his inquisitors in the end (though most people would under such circumstances).
Irish television channel, RTÉ2, screened a drama about a stutterer living in deprived conditions as part of their Prosperity series in September 2007. The short film follows the lead character, a stutterer, who skips school with his friend through their experiences during that day. The stuttering is realistic, and the main character is teased quite often by other characters through parody and by other means. There is an interesting power dynamic between the two characters, with the stutterer being very much the dominant character despite his disflunecy. The main character does not seem to often allow his stutter to hold him back, and we see him, among other scenarios, blocking while asking for something in a shop. The shock ending is a bit unsettling and perhaps not appropriate, though on balance the film in intelligently made and not exploitative of the main character's stuttering. A streaming video was hosted at the RTÉ website; the relevant episode is Gavin's story.
London rapper Scroobius Pip has spoken about his stutter in interviews. He states that he feels that it has helped him develop as a rapper as he was constantly looking for words to substitute when he felt he was going to be disfluent. He raps directly about his stutter in '1000 words' which is currently hosted on his myspace account (25/5/2008). *
U.K. band, Ben's Brother, have a song called Stuttering (Kiss Me Again) which utilises a stuttering motif and lyrics that seem to refer to some of the feelings that could be associated with stuttering. I have yet to determine whether any of the band actually have a stutter. *