I was listening to Pink Moon the other day--a late discovery for me, something I'd heard of but never really listened to until I got to grad school, and even then didn't really take to until the second year of my M.A.--and thought that for as good an album as it is (great songs, interesting arrangements, possibly the most perfect overdub in history [the piano line in "Pink Moon"]), it's an even better guitar album. Besides the fact that John Wood's production is a textbook example of how to record an acoustic guitar (it really is a joy just to hear that tone), Nick Drake is in brilliant form as a guitarist: not quite as freewheeling as some of his earlier work (like "Man in a Shed," for example, or much of Bryter Layter), but in full command of his talents, liquid runs mixed in with great chord work and lines that split the difference between chiming and droning ("Road," one of my favourite pieces of guitar music, being the best example of that). In fact, for all its simplicity--a guitar and an equally resonant male voice--Pink Moon achieves much of its singular power because of the inventive guitar playing. The circular chord progression underneath "Parasite" is an absolute necessity for its emotional content to hit at the right level and in the right places, a point that's often overlooked in attempts to ape Drake's sound and aesthetic.
Of course, there have been some successful copies of his work. I say copy rather than extension or development, because the song I have in mind--"Round the Bend" by Beck--is essentially a photocopy of "River Man," probably Drake's signature tune (interestingly, that's not Beck's only "borrowing" on the album: "Already Dead's" verses indulge in a bit of plagiarism at the expense of the Foo Fighter's superior--and wonderfully shouty--"I'll Stick Around"). The deliberate evocation of Drake's most recognisable song (prior to Volkswagen introducing a whole generation, myself very much included, to "Pink Moon") is a key part of the retromania-fest that is Sea Change. As an album, it feels mannered to the point of suffocation: a "serious," "mature," "artistic" work, Sea Change is very conservative in its template of sad man plus slow acoustic guitar songs. The best tracks are the ones that steer furthest away from this--"Round the Bend," obviously, but also "Paper Tiger" (the only track with a real semblance of life), "End of the Day" (with its gestures to some kind of casiotone country), and "Sunday Sun" (in its distorted climax)--but even they are indebted to specific strains of the past. That's not a problem in an of itself, but when that debt is figured as some kind of guarantor of authenticity--either in the sense that the music of the past was somehow "real" music in a way that today's music falls short of (e.g. rockism and calls for the return of rock), or that the emotions that the artist wishes to convey can be presented in their "realest" form in a style of the past (e.g. yearning and 1950s ballads)--the retromaniacal impulse becomes one of tail-chasing stagnation, curatorial consumption rather than creation.
I've not followed Beck's career all that closely since Sea Change--in fact, I gave the album to an ex-girlfriend and never bothered to get it back--but what has popped up on my radar has fallen into this same kind of retromania. His record club project, while great fun for its participants I'm sure, (the recording sessions certainly seem like they were a blast) is perhaps the most damning example of this: track for track covers of "classic" albums (something that the Flaming Lips have also gotten into as they've settled down into increasingly less interesting work), without even the wink and nudge of the Moog Cookbook or Camper Van Beethoven's version of Tusk. Was this retromaniacal turn an inevitability for Beck? Hidden in his gleeful appropriation of junk culture and slacker attitude, was it a time bomb waiting to appear?
Certainly, by Mutations (named after Os Mutantes), Beck's urge to cite, to curate and to copy, had already begun to overwhelm him, parody clearly slipping into pastiche (a transformation completed in toto on Midnight Vultures). "Nobody's Fault But My Own" is the best of Beck's sad sack mopey ballads, but its sitars and Orientalisms are already as caught up in some period piece vision of the late 1960s as anything Oasis ever did. The real turn on Mutations is one toward "craft," and specifically songcraft as understood to mean very conventional and traditional notions of guitar driven music. Odelay's collage may have been a dead end, but it was also a force that managed to counterbalance the guitars and the reliance on folk, blues, and country throughout. For all its craft, Odelay is a different kind of self-conscious from Mutations, one that is equally exhausting and stifling in the end, but that also feels comfortably of its time (even if that means it sounds surprisingly dated in some ways today) in a way that its follow up abandons. Or rather, doesn't abandon, but rather reveals to be irrelevant: Mutations' influences--tropicalia, bossa nova, 1970s singer-songwriter music--is as up to the moment current for 1998 as are Odelay's influences for 1996. The difference is that Mutations is about its influences. Not doing anything with them, not transmuting them, but instead making them very apparent. They are the surface and the content, the purpose of these songs. Mutations, despite its title, changes nothing. It has the good taste to cite accurately and completely.
Looking back at his career arc, the later Beck's subsumption in overt retromania seems inevitable. One Foot in the Grave, his lo-fi folk album from 1994 (the phase of his career most obviously referenced by Sea Change), is designed to separate out a certain strain of his music and present it in its "authentic" form, "bolster[ing] his neo-folkie credibility the way the nearly simultaneously released Stereopathic Soul Manure accentuated his underground noise prankster credentials," as Stephen Thomas Erlewine puts it. As a poster child for a certain form of indie rock's postmodern 1990s, an artist who was considered both cutting edge/hip and commercially viable, Beck seems like a useful signpost for investigating what happened to so forcefully propagate retromaniacal culture in the 2000s. The various phases of his career, for example, are an obviously different kind to that of Madonna (another postmodern artist who straddled the cutting edge/hip and commercially viable realms) or David Bowie (certainly a modernist [at most, a "limit-modernist," to use Brian McHale's term], whose "characters" explore an idea of persona that no early twentieth-century modernist would be uncomfortable with). It seems to me that a more careful and patient reading of Beck's oeuvre might reveal some points toward the definition of a retromaniacal artistic temperament, which might be a useful tool for analysis and criticism going forward.
I've written about good taste and records before. Generally, I'm of the opinion that good taste is largely a curse; the bands and artists whose work deliberately appeals to good taste are rarely satisfying listens. While albums and bands can, in hindsight, seem to devolve into good taste (Bark Psychosis being a prime example with Hex, an album so perfectly in line with what's now "good taste" its wonder must surely be imperiled for the first time listener), there's a certain something--Fredric Jameson might call it an old-fashioned, modernist, "unique" style--that elevates such music above its influences, confluences, references, and progeny. Ultraista's self-titled debut album comes carefully packaged in not just good, but excellent taste. The press blurb on Temporary Residence's website notes the band's fondness for "Afrobeat, electronic an dance music, visual art, and tequila," a set of influences that lead them to produce their album "of highly infectious, exquisitely crafted electronic kraut-pop." To make it even more appealing, of course, the album is available (for a limited time only! Act fast!) on coloured vinyl. Oh, and it's Nigel Godrich's (he of Radiohead-producing fame) band, along with session musician Joey Waronker (famous to me for his drum work on R.E.M.'s Up) and Laura Bettinson, so you know the kids will love it.
To put it bluntly: Ultraista are not capable of transcending their good taste. Indeed, their good taste is so conspicuous, so all-encompassing, that the album becomes kind of interesting despite itself. Good taste in music like this often registers as pleasant anonymity--it sounds good because I know it sounds good, so it doesn't actually have to sound like anything--and Ultraista's debut is no exception. The concern to appear hip turns the album into a rigidly controlled screen, a surface that's impossible to get beyond. Studiously mixing the same three or four elements (essentially: metronomic, Teutonic funk drums; buzzing, swirling synths; icily detached vocals), the band's sound presents itself as a blank, a cipher. You can hear anything in this music: it's contemporary (parts of sound more like The King of Limbs than The King of Limbs did, others are vaguely in line with chillwave), it's retro (crucially, though, it draws from the 1990s rather than the 1980s, all mid-period Stereolab and early Broadcast), it's indie that has a shelf of European techno on vinyl to impress visitors with. For the most part, it's not even possible to distinguish the songs on the album by saying "that's the one with the . . ." or "it's the one that goes . . .," because its compositions are more of a piece than Music for Airports. In short, it's aggressively bland in its good taste, its pleasant anonymity.
This is where it gets interesting, though, because nothing can be so bland and anonymous without transforming into something else. One of the most overworked remarks on a piece of music is Brian Eno's description of My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" as the "vaguest music ever to have been a hit," but I honestly do feel that something similar is at play with this album. Just when it's on the point of dissolving, when it has reached a point of maximum blankness, it becomes bizarrely appealing. Temporary Residence credits the musicians with "masterful control over the pure anatomy of a pop song," and the description is not wrong, though for different reasons than the label would suspect, I think. This is pop music transformed into observed pop music--it knows very well how pop songs work, and it's able to demonstrate how they work to the listener without ever doing the things pop music does. This isn't music that inspires an emotional response in the way that a Top 40 hit will, but it offers a clinical deconstruction of how the Top 40 hit does this by turning the pop song into the unreachable world behind the screen of Ultraista's music.
Take opener "Bad Insect," which rewrites Radiohead's "Bloom" and suggests how pop music can be exhilarating without actually ever raising your pulse. Emotionally, this music is flat, devoid of affect, and more interesting for it. The minimalism in terms of sound design works to the song's advantage in focusing attention on the surface. This is taken to even greater extremes in the middle of the album, with "Our Song" and "Easier" anonymous enough to become almost offensive, to retain a certain grain of reality, a kind of productive irritation that suggests the songs are as much theorizing about the music they sound like as functioning as actual songs. Indeed, the album falters at its busiest, when the spell of its good taste, its vagueness, is broken. The songs that fall victim to this (hyper)activity become genuinely irritating, as on the grating "Smalltalk" or the chirpy "Static Light."
Perhaps the oddest song here is "Gold Dayzz," which ends up with a kind of sub-Trish Keenan vocal that sounds lazy in the wrong ways, a curse that also plagued the Godrich-helmed King of Limbs. Bettinson's detached vocals are put to quite good effect elsewhere, though, as on "Strange Formula"--which is practically sub-zero in its icy loops of voice and synth--or the brilliant closing troika of "Party Line" (the album highlight), "Wash It Over," and "You're Out." What makes "Party Line" immediately noticeable is its deviation from the rest of the album's tonal palette. Foregrounding a piano line that feels snatched out of an adult alternative song designed to soundtrack graduations, the song supports itself with buzzing synths and a gently insistent bass that work brilliantly to catch the ear. The final two tracks are content to drift along aimlessly, threatening to lose all semblance of form at any moment, to lose sight of the pop structures they so carefully work to ape and to dissolve into pure sound, and the better for it.
Ultraista is, ultimately, an odd release. It seems too studied and mannered to have had its most appealing qualities (vague formlessness, anonymity) in mind. Nevertheless, the songs here tend to work as a kind of new twenty-first century ambient art-pop, plundering the cool bits of the past and reassembling them into the precise shapes that are now able to be only just heard and distinguished from the general background noise of life--a YouTube video playing in the background of your cubicle while you do work, the sound turned down so as not to disturb coworkers. Ten years ago it would have been a hit, and ten years from now it might be again (or it might sound like nothing at all, its good taste silencing it), but at this moment Ultraista's debut is weirdly adrift. As I listen to it, I think about Neil Kulkarni's "A New Nineties" series at The Quietus. Whereas his columns reclaim an alternative decade to the Alternative decade, Ultraista are like a band of Rip Van Winkles who fell asleep when bands like Eleven were making albums like avantgardedog and that dog. were making Retreat from the Sun and awoke in 2012. Whether there is any place for them (or any point to them) remains the question, though; where Rip eventually settles into a blissful senescence, free to be the idle raconteur he always wished to be, I think Ultraista will never quite find another time they fit into.
I apologise for the lack of updates lately. The work that I get evaluated on/paid for has to take precedence over this blog sometimes. I do have a few long things in the offing, though, that will hopefully go up within the next week or so, and I'm working on a few reviews to have up in the meantime. For now, I'll offer some food for thought about criticism, via a few passages that have me thinking about what it is I'm trying to do here and why.
The first, from Robertson Davies' excellent novel The Rebel Angels, is Arthur Cornish's statement of his ambitions to Maria Theotoky:
"I am going to be a patron. . . . Of course Uncle Frank put some money in the hands of living artists, and spotted some winners and encouraged them and gave them what they want most--which is sympathetic understanding--but he wasn't a patron on the grand scale. . . . [which is a] great animateur; somebody who breathes life into things. I suppose you might call it a great encourager, but also a begetter, a director who keeps artists on the tracks, and provides the power--which isn't all money, but any means--that makes them go. It's a kind of person--a very rare kind--that has to work in opera, or ballet, or the theatre; he's the central point for a group of artists of various kinds, and he has to be the autocrat. That's what calls for tact and firmness, but most of all for exceptional taste. It has to be the authoritative taste artists recognize and wants to please. . . . You're taken aback because I lay claim to exceptional taste. It's queer what people are allowed to boast about; if I told you I was an unusually good money-man and had a flair for it, you wouldn't be surprised in the least. Why shouldn't I say I have exceptional taste?"
The second comes from Giovanni Tiso's blog Bat Bean Beam(a real treat if you haven't checked it out before), the obviously applicable "An Essay on Criticism:"
So is disliking anything at all bad in itself? Again it's hard to say but there may be something of a clue in the first line of the song. "It's okay to not like things." It's not good or fine. Merely okay. We don't really endorse it, but if you must, then at least try not to be a dick about it. . . .
Do many people really feel that the problem with the internet or society in general is people hating on the things that they like? Who does that anymore? Are there even any genuine snobs left? Are there cultural critics willing to argue that, say, reality television is bad for its public and for society, and that if you watch Police Ten 7 you just might be an arsehole? Or is it true on the contrary that even the most derivative or exploitative manifestations of mass culture have been almost universally subsumed under the rubric of taste, concerning which, as we have known for some time, there can be no dispute? . . .
Everything must pass through the social networks, therefore everything must be liked . . . If all goes according to hype, soon there will be no publishers nor editors and so the logic of this social layer, that is to say of efficient consumption, will be alone in governing access to information and ultimately most forms of culture. It's the future we bought, the future we agreed to. It plays in chunks of sixteen seconds to the sound of an upbeat tune.
The final comes from K-Punk, perhaps most clearly articulated on his site in this post (and from which I'll quote for not having another source handy), but more fully developed in the final chapter of his book, Capitalist Realism:
Nothing could be a clearer illustration of the famous failure of the Father function, the crisis of the paternal superego in late capitalism, than a typical edition of Supernanny. . . .
Rather like many teachers or other workers in what used to be called "public service," Supernanny has to sort out problems of socialization that the family can no longer resolve. A Marxist Supernanny would of course turn away from the troubleshooting of individual families to look at the structural causes which produce the same repeated effect.
The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to [be] based on rejecting. In a culture in which the "paternal" concept of duty has been subsumed into the "maternal" imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children's absolute right to enjoyment. . . . The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of "gatekeepers" to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego--the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting--is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenege or educate? . . .
Late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. . . . But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. (When will there be a Channel 4 programme called "You Are What You Read?") What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about "feeling good." To tell people how to lose weight, or how to better decorate their neo-liberal burrow, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist.
While not necessarily identical, and while not necessarily always in agreement with each other, these three examples point to an important function of criticism, one that I'm increasingly feeling that I could do a better job pursuing in my writing here. I can't make claims to exceptional taste--if I could, why would I have not only bought, but enjoyed the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (and I can't even lie and say it was because of Madonna's awesome "Beautiful Stranger;" I wanted to hear R.E.M.'s cover of "Dragging the Line")--but I can probably do more talk about the wider implications of the cultural objects I discuss and review. After all, as Lukacs notes in "Class Consciousness," in the undeveloped proletarian consciousness, issues of culture "occupy an almost wholly isolated position in the consciousness of the proletariat; the organic bonds connecting these issues with the immediate life-interests of the proletariat as well as with society as a whole have not even begun to penetrate its consciousness." If what I write on here is to do any good, obviously I need to start pushing beyond my own isolated position.
No, I'm not dead. And no, I haven't given up on this blog. Unfortunately, there hasn't been much time over the past month for me to write things here. I'll try and get back into the regular swing of things over the next week as I'm on a break for Thanksgiving. This post will be kind of piecemeal, something of a scattered collection of fragments that I hope to have time to revisit and turn into something more coherent over the next week or so.
I’m really scared for my generation,
you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr
has become. Because it like, it reminds me of those clique-y girls in
high school that used to make fun of everyone else and define what
was cool, but in five years, when you all graduate, that shit doesn’t
matter. No one gives a fuck about that shit. Instead of kids going
out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images
and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just
kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest
turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those
things. They just emulate. It’s scary man, simulation life that
we’re living. It scares me.
When I first read that, particularly the second half, my initial reaction was "someone mail Drake some Baudrillard." His statement is shot through with postmodern anxiety of the kind that Baudrillard was so good at articulating--the obsession with the image, the screen, the simulation, all of it suggests that for Drake the hyperreal is the real (or at least the reality of his experience), and this realization, coupled with the ongoing attempt to live within the hyperreal, is not just disturbing, but frightening. And really, who better to live out these anxieties than someone for whom the internet has played a key factor in his successes? The fact that he originally gained fame for his acting, and so references to him for the unfamiliar are prefaced by "the guy who played Jimmy on the new Degrassi..." makes it doubly interesting: has Drake himself ever been anything other than a simulation, the simulacrum of Aubrey Drake Graham? Is this the specific anxiety of the hyperreal subject whose persona is constructed on a foundation of "being real?" His guest verse on the Weeknd's "The Zone" features his advice to a female (whom one could charitably call a groupie) to "Be you." Ambiguous at the best of times, the source of the advice--a musician who has generated heated online debate about his authenticity even as the very complexity of that questions has generated praise for him--renders it all but impossible to parse.
Perhaps even more interesting is the specific target of Drake's fear: Tumblr. The internet itself does not scare him, nor do Facebook or Twitter, but Tumblr does. Of course, five minutes browsing through Tumblr is enough to suggest some possible reasons. For one, it is the consummate form of online culture as curating: Tumblrs, by an large, seem to be about the careful development of an aesthetic (and possibly a persona in the case of more personal Tumblrs) that is reflected through content shared with the public. Crucially, the content is rarely annotated or captioned. The context for the content is generated by the content itself, through the interactions of the various elements selected for display and especially through the juxtaposition of high culture-low culture objects. When commentary is present, it's usually either ironic or bathetic. Memes, and riffs on those memes, feature heavily. This is not the rough and tumble, anything goes world of 4Chan, but the pristine and immaculately manicured lawns of the digital suburbs. It certainly seems like a short jump from Tumblr to "The Mold of Yancy." Of course, Drake's own carefully manicured persona, the self-consciousness, the realness of him, is very obviously reflected back by Tumblr. I'll leave you to draw the pretty obvious and reductive Freudian conclusion this seems to be heading toward and instead suggest that the anxiety stems from the as yet imperfect simulacrum revealed by its reflection in Tumblr. A reminder of the hyperreal's failure to totally triumph over the real. I haven't given Take Care enough of a listen to see how this all plays out in the music yet, but I'll try and get to that before the end of break.
For now, though, I'll do my own curating. Some Baudrillard that seems appropriate in light of Drake's comment on Tumblr. From The Ecstasy of Communication:
Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens. (12)
The private space undergoes the same fate. Its disappearance parallels the diminishing of the public space. Both have ceased to be either spectacle or secret. The distinction between an interior and an exterior, which has just what characterized the domestic stage of objects and that of a symbolic space of the object has been blurred in a double obscenity. The most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of the media. . . . The entire universe also unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen. This is a microscopic pornography, pornographic because it is forced, exaggerated, just like the close-ups of sexual acts in a porno film. All this destroys the stage, once preserved through a minimal distance and which was based on a secret ritual known only to its actors. (20-21)
We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. . . . It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible; it is the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication. (22)
The uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsessions of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual. . . . What matters above everything else is proving our existence, even if that is its only meaning. . . . The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning. As a result, sexuality is relegated to a position of secondary importance, to an already luxurious form of transcendence, of a waste of existence, while the absolute urgency is simple to verify existence. (29-30) [This makes particular sense if the simulacrum is thought of as reproducing via the image, the point of its existence]
The solicitation of and voraciousness for images is increasing at an excessive rate. Imageshave become our true sex object, the object of our desire. The obscenity of our culture resides in the confusion of desire and its equivalent materialized in the image [Zizek's commentary on Occupy Wall Street, its purpose and the dangerous temptations to which it could succumb (i.e. settling for being the image rather than the manifestation of the desire of the 99%) seems interesting in this context]; not only for sexual desire, but in the desire for knowledge and its equivalent materialized in "information," the desire for fantasy and its equivalent materialized in the Disneylands of the world, the desire for space and its equivalent programmed into vacation itineraries, the desire for play and its equivalent programmed into private telematics. (35)
This withdrawal, which we know well, is that of the subject for whom the sexual and social horizons of others has disappeared, and whose mental horizon has been reduced to the manipulation of his images and screens. He has everything he needs. WHy should he worry about sex and desire? It is through the networks that this loss of affection for oneself and for others has come about, and it is contemporary with the desert-like form of space engendered by speed, the desert-like form of the social engendered by communication and information. (42-43)
That's it for now. I'll come back to this, though, and hopefully tie this (to a certain extent) to some of my thoughts on Facebook.
It feels like it's been forever since I've updated, but I think it's only been a week. Every time I've sat down to write something it's felt like there's been fifteen other things I should be working on (and usually there actually have been about twelve).
Anyway, some thoughts from my morning commute:
1. Real Estate's new album Days could not have come out at a better time. Smart marketing for it to appear just as the weather took a turn for the cooler (and it's pretty cold here today: there was frost this morning on my walk to the bus stop)--I would not want to listen to this album in the summer, but in the fall it sounds just right. In a lot of ways, Days seems like it could fit into the category Nitsuh Abebe describes in this article on "indie" as the new "adult contemporary:" it's fairly slick and well-crafted (that most damning of adjectives); I could play it for my parents and I doubt they'd find much fault in it; it vaguely sounds like a lot of other music that people would describe as "pleasant." There are certainly enough potential ways for Real Estate to seem dull: they really only trade in two or three emotions (nostalgia, yearning, resignation) and only deliver those emotions in about two styles (jangle-y and breezy). Hell, when they change key it's a pretty big deal. I can't help but love the band, though. They remind me of early R.E.M. (to pick a famous example--"It's Real" wouldn't sound out of place on Reckoning [in fact, I often pair it with "So. Central Rain" in my mind for some reason]) and The Postage Stamps (to use a not-so-famous [read: not famous at all] example; check out "The Ocean" and tell me it wouldn't fit right in). The high point on Days for me, and at this point it's a strong contender for the high point in their career, is "Municipality:" despite seeming so laidback and straightforward, the song captures a kind of vaguely haunted and slightly wistful vibe that I'm a sucker for. There really isn't the sense of mystery that made R.E.M.'s early stuff so fascinating, but there's a delightfully human aspect to Real Estate that no amount of increased studio polish can quite mask. I don't think Days is going to be my pick for album of the year (it wouldn't seem right somehow--it's just so unassuming), but until winter hits it's the perfect music for the weather.
2. "Ray of Light," a song I've long had a bizarre fascination with (I'm convinced that there's a way to use the video to introduce the concept of postmodernism to students), sounds (and looks) like "Big Time Sensuality" (eitherversion) with the fun and the sensuality taken out. I know it's supposed to feel and sound sexy, and it does a great job at providing a reasonable facsimile of a sexy dance track, but it's because the song tells me it's supposed to feel and sound that way (as opposed to say, this, which to me does a great job of striving for the same thing as "Ray of Light" but also of being incredibly fun thanks to those neon synths in the chorus) that it ends being neither, really. It also helps that both Bjork and Karen O are not "good" dancers--the seeming transcendence that their dancing communicates at key moments seems much more genuine than Madonna's dancing throughout "Ray of Light." All that being said, it's a great song.
And another thought from later in the day:
3. Julie London's "Cry Me a River," which came on in the barbershop as I was getting my hair cut, isn't too far from something that could've been on Third. I wouldn't be shocked to hear it coming out of either "Small" or "Hunter," and even after "The Rip" it wouldn't be too much of a stretch. Actually, the more that I think about it, a cover of this song might result in something that fits nicely between Portishead and Third--I'd at least be more interested in it than "Chase the Tear."
A week on and people are still stopping me when they see me to say they enjoyed my talk. I guess it must have gone well.
An interesting moment today in class: while discussing evaluative criteria and the difference between personal and more universal criteria, I had my students list their favourite movies and why they liked them. Then, I asked them to come up with candidates for the greatest movie of all time. Looking at the list, I was amazed at the time period it covered. For all you could tell from my students' lists, movies came into being somewhere around 1994. One student offered Back to the Future (1985) as his favourite movie, but that was the only movie older than Happy Gilmore (1996) and Pulp Fiction (1994) on either list until I put on my own favourite movie, The Shining (1980), and suggested that we consider some movies from before the 1990s on our greatest movie of all time list. We eventually added Star Wars (1977) and Rocky (1976), both franchises that had installments come out in the 1990s or 2000s, with Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Rocky Balboa (2006) respectively. With some prompting, I managed to get someone to suggest The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Godfather (1972). Thinking back, I'm fairly certain the same thing happened last year when I did this activity--one student finally spoke up and said something about greatest movie of all time meaning "classics" like The Sound of Music, etc.
I'm tempted to chalk this up simply to their age--if my students turned 18 this year, they were born in 1993 (!!!). However, it seems like my peer group in school had a much broader sense of the past than this group. What they do seem to know--movies like Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and Rocky, for example--are among the most frequent subjects of pastiche/parody in the culture (although a straight pastiche of any of those films would seem pretty dated at this point). Is that what makes them known for my students, I wonder? There is no embarrassment in discovering bits of culture this way--long before I'd ever seen Citizen Kane, I'd picked up the basics from the numerous parodies, homages, and appropriations of that film that showed up in the first few seasons of The Simpsons.
What strikes me as really odd, though, is the hard cut off somewhere in the 1980s for pop culture references that students make and/or appreciate in my experience (even the 1980s are pushing it--the number of students who have never seen Jurassic Park [1993]is mindblowing). Generally, my students seem to react to bits of culture that come from before the 1980s as being separate somehow, belonging to a group of cultural objects they neither consume nor judge, that have no impact on them at all, really (actually, anything from before their birth seems to flummox them--they are baffled by clips from early seasons of The Simpsons, in my experience). I'm not certain, but I'd bet that most of my students reject the idea of the greatest movie of all time coming from any period other than their own lifetime (some of their suggestions: Titanic [1997], Remember the Titans [2000],and Avatar [2009]). I wonder if it's just the result of living through a much more baby boomer saturated culture and a wave of 1970s revivalism that gives me that sense, though.
Is this some kind of response to postmodernism? Are my students--who have no knowledge of anything other than a postmodern culture (I'm not sure that I do, to be honest. I was born during high postmodernism and grew up with irony as the only appropriate response to any event)--unable to process cultural materials that are not themselves clearly postmodern? Do they require cultural materials that are not obviously postmodern to be (re)presented in pastiche in order to acknowledge them and to pass judgement on them?
These questions are probably just the result of extrapolating wildly from a very tiny dataset, but it would make sense in some ways. The endless return to the 1980s (and even the Back to the Future answer feels very "now" more than a recognition of the quality of a cultural object from the past--the kind of retro-future chic of that movie is a prominent [if not dominant] cultural discourse these days) doesn't appear to be slowing down even as the 1990s revivals ramp up to full speed. The time between emergence and revival of cultural materials is shrinking. Already my students seem to regard the time before widespread internet access (and high speed internet access, at that) as something of a fairy tale. How soon before they start to ignore it entirely?
This is not a plea for cultural conservatism or the preservation of the past or anything like that. I'm just curious about how my students actually perceive and experience the cultural landscape. If anything, I would be interested in my students focusing even more on the future and even less on the past--ideally, it would be the yet-to-come that grabs and fires their imagination. Maybe in such a situation, the past will become more available and the immediate past will become more forgettable. A new futuremania (futurama?) to cure retromania, and a futuremania free of irony, kitsch, and ultimately retro underpinnings. My students have a chance to write about just this topic for their next essay, so I will be anxiously awaiting their responses.
At its recent F8 conference, Facebook introduced some new features and announced its future plans. The presentation of one of the centrepieces of this new Facebook, Timeline, went like this. As I watched that, read a little more around the web, and listened to Chris Cox's presentation, a more appropriate introduction to the new Facebook came to me:
It's been a little over a week since I deleted my Facebook account. After the F8 conference and hearing Facebook executives candidly talk about their goals for not only users' experience of Facebook, but of the internet as a whole (see, for example, this account: "Facebook's goal is to become the social layer that supports, powers and connects every single piece of the web, no matter who or what it is or where it lives").* I decided that as I'd been increasingly unhappy with Facebook for a few years and had been toying with pulling the plug on my account for close to two years, last Thursday was the time. More than one person on the internet has compared the new Facebook to a digitalpanopticon, and while I can understand that comparison, I think there are slightly more interesting (and perhaps more accurate) comparisons to be drawn, ones that shed light on the active dangers that Facebook could pose (the video above is a good start). More on those comparisons in a second.
My immediate experience of getting rid of Facebook was one of relief. I'd done it: I could quit Facebook. Of course, conveniently, Facebook allows you to return to your account at any time. Just log back in. It's so seductively easy. For most of the past week and a bit, I've lived with a pretty constant, low level amount of guilt: I should be checking Facebook. Why aren't I checking Facebook? What am I doing on a computer if I'm not checking Facebook? Why did I delete Facebook? The first time I felt these questions welling up in my subconscious, I knew I'd made the right choice.
I'm not entirely cut off from social networking, though. I'm an active tweeter, and I have a Google+ profile (which, at least among the people in my circles, seemed to be slowly coming to life in the wake of Facebook's announcements, only to return to its ghost town feel by the end of the weekend). More knowledgeable men than I have pointed out that Twitter and Google aren't that much better than Facebook: really, "all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter." Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable with my remaining social networking services than I did with Facebook. While Twitter and Google may yet be planning to dictate the way that I experience the internet, they've the advantage of not being quite so open, so proud about it as Facebook (well, perhaps Google is as proud, but in something of a different way).
My displeasure with Facebook had been growing for almost the entire length of my membership. I had been a late, and involuntary, adopter of Facebook when it arrived at my undergraduate institution. The initial round of excitement had faded and Facebook was not much more active than is Google+ currently. This state did not last--a new round of users boosted the amount of content, Facebook continued to develop its platform--and I became a fairly active user. However, when games, quizzes, and other apps started to appear on Facebook, I began to find it increasingly frustrating. Site redesigns seemed to make it impossible for me to get any meaningful content from Facebook. When you became able to block individual categories of posts (say, all those that had to with Farmville, to pick a particularly odious part of the Facebook experience) I briefly became more active on Facebook, but the inundation of information about others' lives (many of whom were, at this point, complete strangers to me, regardless of the educational institution we attended together) continued unabated. I realize the latter is partly my fault--the number of people I was "friends" with on Facebook was probably larger than it needed to be (though it never approached the thousands that others have--I think at its height my list contained ~180 people, and I'd scaled back considerably in the final few months)--but it became oppressive, and there seemed no standard social protocol by which to deal with that situation. Privacy concerns that were increasingly the focus of any and all news about Facebook and its services and Facebook's own push to convince people to document their lives in an increasingly up-to-the-minute fashion (much like how some people use Twitter) just became too much for me. I had come to the end of the relationship I was willing to have with Facebook.
Some of this has already been taking place on social network like Twitter, as Laura June points out, with the result that "the people Tweeting as they experience [an event] are not experiencing in the traditional sense: they are sharing as they experience the experience, which in turn alters the experience. If you always see yourself through the eyes of a perceived crowd, your experience is altered, as is your behavior." This, it seems to me, is the digital panopticon. As at any moment we could become the focus of the crowd, our experiences and behaviours could come under scrutiny, we must consciously modify our behaviour. Farhad Manjoo's complaint that "My problem with 'frictionless sharing' is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste" because "On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing" highlights the extent of Facebook as a digital panopticon: without being able to avoid sharing our experiences, we must be increasingly self-conscious of what experiences we are having. Complete surveillance means complete self-consciousness; or, as Joe Moon puts it: "removing friction from sharing just displaces that friction. If everything I do on the web is under the public gaze, I have to reflect for a moment before I take any action . . . It simply moves the friction from sharing onto the activity, in the worst kind of self-censorial way."
However, the new Facebook--and more importantly the Facebook to come--do not stop at this digital panopticon. For Facebook, even that self-consciously mediated auto-sharing leaves too much to an individual who may be unwilling to share everything. Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal about his belief that "'You have one identity. . . . The days of your having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. . . . Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,'" and it's easy to see the new Facebook as a way implementing this belief as a kind of social/cultural law or structure of power. If an awareness of frictionless sharing leads me to mediate my online behaviour--if I make sure that I'm only sharing what projects and maintains a certain image of myself--I am, in Zuckerberg's mind, demonstrating a lack of integrity (it seems like existentialists could--and should--be going to town on this idea).** The subject of the digitial panopticon, the digital disciplinary society, still needs to be disciplined and punished for deviance. There can be a private self that attempts to escape the strictures of that disciplinary society (until that private self is, and one should read this in Delbert/Charles Grady's voice, corrected). Thus, to return to Laura June, "The changes Facebook is on the cusp of making push us over that cliff, so that you don't even need to Tweet the experience; you're just along for the ride, with other people watching as you go. The experience isn't yours, not fully."
With the new Timeline and Ticker, two services that would on the one hand catalogue and organize our lives for us according to Facebook's algorithm--one that "understands that some moments have resonance that lasts through the years. . . . that comes eerily close to emulating human memory"--and on the other hand turn our lives into a real-time record of all of our web activity, Facebook is no longer presenting itself as a representation of reality, or even a manager of reality, but rather the creator of reality--a reality fed by our ids and projections, a reality we can only accept as existing when that very existence covers over the manufactured and managed nature of its construction (were Baudrillard alive to see it, I think he might call this the perfect crime). Thus, even if I attempt to mediate my online existence, Facebook will ultimately be creating my digital identity (one that it sees as synonymous with my offline identity). My identity will be my account at Facebook, and I don't even get to choose what that identity is anymore: Facebook will do that for me. At the moment I join Facebook, I become interpellated; I am a subject of its ideology and its structures of power, and I exist only within the rules of those structures: outside of Facebook, I am nothing because Facebook cannot see that and tell me what I am.***
The new Facebook is part of a control society, not a disciplinary society, to use Deleuze's terms. In place of the organization of time and space in rigid and discrete units that characterizes a disciplinary society, the control society is made up of controls that "are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry . . . controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point" (is there a better description of apps spread across the web that link back to Facebook?).Within such a system, there are no longer individuals or masses: "Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks.' . . . The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network" (the button that invites one to share, that greets every web browser at the bottom of every web page [or so it seems]). Up-to-the-minute, frictionless sharing achieves the goal of the control society, knowing "the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant;" for Facebook, this is not just a physical position to be known, but a mental and a psychic one as well. In the face of this, Deleuze suggests we might "create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control." What that might look like in the context of Facebook's proposed omnipresent social layer is a question of vital importance, I think. Not being on Facebook will not be enough to create these vacuoles, these circuit breakers.
There are other dangers as well. This conversion of life into a machine-curated archive for which the present and future only exist to provide materials that will be constructed into a narrative geared for maximum emotional impact--one that "takes these thousands of seemingly inconsequential events, discards the irrelevant ones, finds the most emotive, the most visual, the most striking and emotionally touching moments and pulls them into sharp focus"--is a digital end of history. As Mark Fisher points out, via T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in his discussion of Children of Men: "the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. . . . A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. . . . .A culture of commemoration is a cemetery." Or, to put it another way, Facebook can remember it for us wholesale. Facebook wants to be our Rekal, but it's even better than a fake trip to Mars: Facebook will turn our lives into the exciting, arty, sexy things we've always wanted them to be here on Earth, no memory implants required (yet?). As McClane tells Quail: "'You're not accepting second-best. The actual memory, with all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions--that's second-best.'" Facebook, through its instantaneous (re)construction of the event, gives us an impossible reality we cannot but accept as the real, though a reality we can only experience in retrospect. This is the seductive promise of McClane and Rekal, Inc.: "'You can't be this; you can't actually do this. . . . But you can have been and have done. We see to that. And our fee is reasonable; no hidden charges." There is of course a difference between these two things (the impression of having done something and actually doing that thing), but Facebook might be able to overcome that gap through its control over our identity; for Joe Moon, the archive model is "a conflation of the record of the event with the event itself, or even a privileging of the record over what gives the record its meaning and power. At the same time it (ingeniously) adds to the pressure to record all meaningful events on Facebook in order to make sure it becomes part of your identity."
Zizek notes that The Truman Show (along with PKD's Time Out of Joint) is an example of "The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy . . . that of an individual living in a small, idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lived in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show." There is something seductive about this fantasy, though, which elevates it beyond simply belonging to the paranoiac: it is the scenario in which one is a star whose every action is invested with significance and who thus lives in a kind of narcissistic utopia in which he or she is the most important anything in the universe. We do not all live in a small, idyllic Californian city, though, so this fantasy can only ever remain just that. However, consider the pitch made to Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in Total Recall (the film adaptation of "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). The seductive promise offered by the new Facebook might be said to be the fulfillment of the fantasy of not being ourselves. "What's the same about every experience you've ever had?" Facebook asks. When we, just like Quaid, can't answer, it tells us: "You!" Something like Facebook's new algorithm for structuring our lives and experiences offers us that fantastic self and his/her idyllic consumerist paradise life--but only, of course, in retrospect. This scarecely matters, though, as only the Facebook version of reality will count as reality. One will have been Truman, which is enough to be Truman. In a society of control that is increasingly aligned with the needs of capital--even and above the needs of capitalism--the pressure is mounting to meet those fantasies for the denizens of this society of control. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher points out that one of the major points at which capitalist realism can be challenged is through an appeal to "the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy." The new Facebook, it seems, could quite conveniently be set to work satisfying some of those desires, removing a key form of resistance to capitalist realism and all it entails. Deleuze's call for vacuoles of noncommunication seems ever more important in this sense.
In the face of all the potential for messianism here--some kind of Morpheus figure to offer us a pill and set everything right--it seems much more likely that we'll be Rachel without a Deckard, never knowing if there is anything behind our digital selves or not. And if there isn't, what would we do?
*This, I think, sets up the science fiction scenario that capital has been waiting for the internet to deliver for some time. Facebook, as the sole social layer of the internet (should it achieve its goal), makes deals with companies to promote their apps on Facebook. Soon, as Adrian Short points out, it makes no sense to have a traditional website anymore--the real action takes place via a company's Facebook app. Given that frictionless sharing makes it impossible for a person to hide his/her online activities (provided that they allow an app/website access to their Facebook account, which seems like it will become part of the standard terms and conditions of any web-based activity before too long. In the process, frictionless sharing will become mandatory, not optional), and given that the new Facebook algorithms seem designed to know its users better than they know themselves (in terms of organizing content according to emotional resonance, significance, etc., etc.), capital will have unprecedented access to the consumer's life and experiences. If the goal of capitalism now is to sell lifestyles not products, Facebook's services essentially package its users as lifestyles-in-waiting. The spatial aspect of this is also fascinating: will Facebook (in becoming the social layer of the internet) become the sole space on the web? Will people surf? Will there be any need to leave one's Facebook page?
**Interestingly, listening to the Spice Girls is the example given of a piece of information that one does not want to share in virtually every piece about the new Facebook. Quite what the Spice Girls did to deserve this level of opprobrium I'm not sure. While their later career was perhaps not as successful as their earlier ventures, surely their reputation as part of the "girl power" movement in the 90s--however facile it may have been--should place them above the level of shame that requires one to actively hide or lie about the act of listening to them, shouldn't it?
***This calls to mind a chilling possibility. Michael K's terrifying statement "[M]y father was Huis Norenius. My father was the list of rules on the door of the dormitory" might be equally true for users of the new Facebook: their father is Facebook (and its terms of service, and its policy toward the internet and digital personas, etc.). Yet, if Facebook becomes the new "father" for its users, does its digital nature--Facebook has never been the body of the father that could be killed--always-already render it phantasmagorical, in contrast to the symbolic father of the Law-of-the-Father? As Zizek points out, such a figure projects a "phantom-like, spectral omnipotence," unlike the symbolic father, and is "perceived as uncastratable: the more [its] actual, social, public existence is cut short, the more threatening becomes [its] elusive fantasmatic ex-istence"--Facebook has, in some ways, never had an "actual, social, public existence;" is its authority of this phantom-like, omnipotent, uncastratable type?
This morning at 8:30 I turned 25. Happy birthday to me! Seeing as how one of my students told me yesterday that he's 24, this is probably a good thing: I'm still officially older than all of my students. The prevailing trend from friends who've wished me happy birthday today is something along the lines of "I can't believe how young you are." I'll take that as a good thing--a sort of maturity for my age--rather than a "My god, you look so terrible I'd never believe you're only 25!" type of thing. How did I spend my birthday, you ask? Scrambling to finish reading for class and giving a presentation. About the usual, then. Birthdays are usually good for flushing out a few long lost friends and reestablishing lines of communication, though, and that's definitely been the case today.
A few thoughts to make this post not a total waste.
1. I can't believe that no one has used thissong in the opening scene of an action or gangster movie. It seems like any director with a movie set in an urban space who wanted to introduce his/her protagonist as some kind of tough, gritty, impossibly cool figure would jump on this. I can see it now: various quick-cut establishing shots of the city, a pause and a black screen for an instant, then at 2:12, BAM!, shot of protagonist walking down the street. Perfect. If there's a movie that does this already, I need to see it yesterday.
2. Pitchfork did an interview with Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian) in anticipation of the release of Era Extrana today. It's a good read and confirms my impression (based on a five minute or so conversation with Palomo after a show) that he's a genuinely nice guy. I was particularly struck by Palomo's statements that:
I can’t pretend that I don’t
subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and
old music simultaneously. In order to generate something that’s
indicative of the future, we’re trudging around this cultural
wasteland of the past and finding these little pieces to play around
with and recontextualize. It can all feel like one big collage piece. But it was important for me to not use
any pre-existing material and completely self-generate this album on
both the audio and visual sides. You can’t always just put color
filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and
look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes
you so far. . . .
[A]ll you can do is ignore the annoying
hum of the machine and focus on making art that makes you excited to
be alive.
and
Well, Era Extraña translates
into a couple of things, but the thing that I thought was really
funny was that the word in Spanish for "strange" is also
the word for "to miss something." It’s rooted in the same
sensation. And I do have this eerie feeling of rapidly-approaching
singularity, or the idea that by the time that I’m 33, reality will
not exist in the same plane as it did before. It's cool, but also a
little creepy.
On the one hand, this seems like the legacy of life after postmodernism: irony is dead and tired, we've murdered the real, history is done, there's nothing left but to make pastiches until the sun goes nova. On the other hand, though, "making art that makes you excited to be alive" and considering the combination of "strangeness" and "miss[ing] something" that the album's title conjures up seems to underscore the connection of Neon Indian specifically--and chillwave in general--to hauntology. I've only had a chance to give the album one listen, but I'm very interested/excited to see what it reveals on deeper listens.
3. I had a great meeting with a professor yesterday that left me feeling a lot less panicked about, well, everything. Sometimes it's nice to hear someone say banal platitudes like "it's not a race," "everything will be fine," "don't worry," etc., etc. I floated a vague dissertation idea that was well received (and somewhat backfired when I mentioned that I'd written my MA thesis on a similar topic--now the professor wants to see my MA thesis and I'm mortified at what the response will be. I'm really proud of having done it, but the thinking and the writing [oh god, the writing] is kind of embarrassing at this point), and after lying awake the other night worrying that I have no direction or purpose in my academic life, I now feel like I have a path to follow, even if it's shaky and not really constructed yet. It's enough to let me sleep, though, which is all that matters at this point.
I went to see a jazz poetry concert last night put on by the group City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. It featured several exiled writers reading work, usually in collaboration with the band Tarbaby and the saxophonist Oliver Lake. I can't say that I'm a huge jazz fan--I like some Miles Davis stuff like In a Silent Way--nor can I say that I'm a huge poetry fan (I like some poets, but it's never the literature I turn to for fun or pleasure; I'm a fiction man, myself), so I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed basically the entire program. While Lake's soloing took a little getting used to, composed as it was of as many squawking and clicking noises as it was actual notes, I could immediately appreciate Tarbaby's ability to see totally free and trending toward chaos before suddenly shifting into moments of breathtaking ensemble playing. Hind Shoufani was the star poet of the evening, in my opinion: her performance enhanced her words--which would have been potent enough on their own--without becoming a kind of tedious or pretentious "performance" that detracted from the impact of the poem, which unfortunately could not be said for all of the poets.
However, there was one giant distraction that plagued the entire evening for me: an enormous screen behind the performers projecting the livefeed being streamed of the event. I kept thinking about Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil and his discussion of the televised event doing away with the need for spectators, the soccer game played in the empty stadium with spectators only seeing the game on television. The screen last night, so much bigger than anything else, with the performers digital selves looming like giants over the flesh-and-blood performer was a temptation. It was so hard to continue to look at the person reading, at the band members playing, when the screen showed so much more of them: the angles would change, the performers would each get a closeup, etc., etc. In the context of the concert--one that started with a pointed reminder to turn off all cellphones and to cease texting for the duration of the concert, while at the same time reminding us we could follow the events in real time on Twitter--the screen, the presence of the internet feed standing over and above the actual action, dominating the stage, the focal point of the concert, really, seemed obscene, in the sense that Baudrillard outlines in The Ecstasy of Communication:
Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when every-thing becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. Obscene is that which eliminates the gaze, the image and every representation. . . . It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible; it is the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication.
At one point, the camera was pointed in such a way that there appeared an infinite regress within the screen, a screen showing a screen showing a screen showing a screen and so on until the image quality didn't allow me to see any more screens. The temptation made obvious in the language of the temptation, the visual: you can see so much more on the screen. . .
Everything about the screen, the constant temptation that was more visible than the events being shown on the screen (despite our seats being about ten feet from the stage), offered to manage our experience of the concert more effectively than we could ourselves. When several of the poets read in their native language, the screen became ever more of a temptation, projecting English words over the image of the performer. I felt guilty when I forced myself to keep looking at the poets, reading in languages I don't speak or read or hear.The screen would tell us who to pay attention to and when (by changing angles and zooming in on the person who was most important at that particular instant), but it would also help to transport the seduction of hearing language (even--or, perhaps more accurately--especially if it was a language you couldn't speak) into information and communication, converting possibility into fact, into something whose meaning, always already fixed, could be given to us on a screen. Even the interactions of the musicians with the poet, a force that would, in its impossibility to be fixed, aid seduction, was drained of energy. The flat, determined meaning of the poem on the screen reflected back on the music and coloured it with same meaning. Interaction, obscurity, spectacle, theatre were all denied. Baudrillard emphasizes the value of these in-visible characteristics to the process of seduction, the signs that won't signify, the words that won't give up their meaning:
All these terms, torn asunder at the cost of unbounded energy, are ready at any moment to extinguish one another, and collapse to our greatest joy. Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm of intensity and charm. . . . Seduction only comes through empty, illegible, insoluble, arbitrary, fortuitous signs, which glide by lightly, modifying the index of the refraction of space. They are signs without a subject of enunciation, nor an enounced, they are pure signs in that they are neither discursive nor generate any exchange. . . . As such the signs of seduction do not signify; they are of the order of the ellipse, of the short circuit, of the flash of wit (le trait d'esprit). . . . Such is the gaze, whose force resides precisely in it not being an exchange, but a double moment, a double mark, immediate, undecipherable. Seduction is only made possible through this giddiness of reversability . . . which cancels all depth, all in-depth operation of meaning: superficial giddiness, superficial abyss.
On a night that promised so much giddiness, such an abyss to lose oneself in, to be seduced by, the presence of the screen was disappointing, one more browser window on my laptop, only now intruding into the rest of my life. At a moment when it seemed the Real might irrupt, the hyperreal appeared, once again, in its place.
Simon Reynolds' latest (and last) guest blog over at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyondon the atemporality of the omnivorous listening generation's music (an omnivorousness that is a product of not only the increased access/availability of more music on the internet, but the consequent decrease in any sense of limitation/closed horizons to a musician's output) is a good one. One of Reynold's big points--via a piece by Justin Davidson in NY Mag--is that "with the musical past's archives splayed open, there is a constant temptation to regress;" he goes on to note that the music of a band like Battles comes across as closer in spirit (and in sound) to jazz-fusion or 70s prog rock than any kind of futuristic, forward-thinking, new millennium music, or, as he puts it: "both their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz fusion."
The problem with this echoing is the sense of atemporality that inevitably seems to accompany it. In the words of Reynolds: "The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or 'superhybrid' styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire has a pronounced 'retro' air. These ideas and ideals have been around for what feels like forever." Whereas the jazz fusion or prog rock bands of the 70s were exploring and incorporating contemporary influences, "What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of atemporality: more and more elements in a new band's make-up cease to relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through the archives." So instead of prog rock picking up on folk or classical or contemporary black music, as Reynolds points out, or jazz fusion's engagement "with that moment in the 70s when soul music got looser and smoother and more electronic, and electric jazz started taming the wildness of improvisation with the slickness and structure of the pop song," as Jess Harvell mentions in re: Thundercat's new album, we have bands in 2011 engaging with moments in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, etc. and producing music that is not, in an distinguishable way, beyond that earlier era (Reynolds has written about this extensively [and I gather Retromania, his new book, explores this idea in some depth], and Mark Fisher has also discussed this on his blog).* This seems different than hauntological music, obviously, because whereas that features, according to Fisher, "cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present," and whose purpose is to "preserv[e] . . . demands [for the radically new] in conditions where--for the moment at least--they cannot be met,"** this atemporal, omnivorous music is purely archival or curatorial: it highlights a dead style without advancing it, or by simply adding it alongside other dead styles, without the production of any kind of real cultural affect--it's the musical equivalent of the Ark of the Arts in Children of Men. In contrast with the superhybrid, the hauntological foregrounds the unanswered questions, the unexplored possibilities; it captures what is still alive in the "dead" genre but has been repressed, the ghost of the past-future and its potentially utopic energies.
The inevitable product of these "superhybrids," though, can only ever be pastiche, in Jameson's sense:
the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs. . .
Those blind eyeballs are unable to see unresolved questions or contradictions in the genres that are hybridized. What's more, they don't want to see them, don't want to have speak with a live tongue, because of the work and effort that goes into actually having and sustaining the necessary "ulterior motives," convictions, or beliefs. Nigel's answer to Theo's questioning of the purpose of the Ark of the Arts in a dying world--"I just don't think about it"--is the answer of the pastiche maker: there is nothing behind the mask of the art, no belief it can reference, so no viewers are even necessary. In this environment, the cleverest recombinations or resurrections of past genres wins. And those that are deemed cleverest are those whose chosen genres have been archived, or curated, for the present audience by the most prestigious curators/archivers (cf. Soul Jazz's Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound compilation, or the Ethiopiques series, or the granddaddy of the them all in some senses, Nuggets--and this is not to denigrate the music found on those compilations: most of the songs on Tropicalia are fantastic, and I own and enjoy several volumes from Ethiopiques).*** Who revives these genres becomes more important than why the particular genre is revived, or its resonance with the current cultural moment. Consequently, the wrong advocate, the wrong curator, can sink a genre's chance for successful revivification (in the sense of restoring to activity, but not to life or vigour--this is rarely revitalization).
For Reynolds, this "looks a lot like the way fashion
operates. Or indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is
immune from being abruptly and utterly devalued." The
consequences, he notes, are rather dire:
the principles and
practices of 'flux and mutability' have long ago shed their former
subversive and utopian charge. Worse than that: they have become
inverted, to the point where if anything they suggest the static and
dystopian. Because in some fundamental and profoundly perturbing way,
'flux' and 'mutability' are actually isomorphic with the economy,
characterized as it is by precariousness and the imposition of
'flexible' work patterns.
This music works as an ideal
soundtrack for the ascendance of non-places and non-time in the
modern working world, or what Fisher calls "Itime, a distributed
or unpunctuated temporality," which has been characterized by a
"reflexive impotence in the face of a neoliberal ideological
program which sought to subordinate all of culture to the imperatives
of business." The reissue and compilation cycle work in tandem
with the atemporal, omniverous musician: he or she creates a
"superhybrid," and in explaining its roots in [insert
various genres/locales/time periods here], sets in motion (if the
musician is successful) the machine that gives us back those genres,
locales, and time periods, like so many butterflies on a corkboard.
New superhybrids arrive, along with their new butterflies to display,
etc., etc. Isn't this just the music of the Last Man who lives at the mythical End of History? The man for whom everything is a museum piece?
It seems to me that, in some ways, the worst offender in this whole phenomenon has been krautrock and its champions. While Can, Neu!, Faust, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Popul Vuh, Amon Duul, Ash Ra Tempel et al. could be incredibly forward-thinking (they could also be stultifying in being totally of their moment), the idea in certain circles seems to have become that German music of the 1970s is the endpoint for experimental leanings and tendencies. How do we know that a band is getting more "serious" and making more "challenging" music? They play a rigid 4/4 beat and say the word "motorik" a lot in interviews. What are recycled analog synth washes and occasional bits of string or flute in the hands of such bands? Attempts at channeling the same "kosmische" music that poured out of Germany three and four decades ago. The annoyance I felt at the sort of reflexive praise automatically heaped on any band with even a whiff of krautrock coming off their music (and again, I'm not blind to my hypocrisy here: there's a footnote praising Stereolab in this very post!) came to a head for me following Portishead's album Third. I should note that I'm a huge fan of Third: it's a great record, and it might be the record I've listened to most over the past three years. Indeed, going by the metric Nick Southallsuggested recently for determining a favourite album--"how often you've listened to a record through choice"--you'd have to call Third one of my favourite albums (interestingly, if I sat down to write a list, I'm fairly certain Third would struggle to make the top ten, and maybe even the top twenty).
Perhaps, then, it's just a matter of overexposure, but when Portishead debuted "Chase the Tear," with an accompanying video that could've been made at any time since the 1970s it looked like, I'd had enough. This was good music by most reasonable standards--it sounds good, it's got a catchy melody, it's well-played and produced, you can even dance to it if you want--but it's not "new" in any sense other than the song was written in 2009. It's not likely to lead to "new" music, either. "Chase the Tear" is pointed firmly backwards, but it exists now--it is the mask, the dead language, that characterizes pastiche. Nevertheless, a lot of the language in reviews of the track suggested that this is music that is going forward. And I just couldn't be excited by it. I still can't. This is the same band who largely abandoned the samples that made up its first album (or sampled instrumentals played by the members) by the time they got to album number two for fear of repeating themselves. Now, it's not hard to say that a lot of Portishead's aesthetic was always looking backward, but it was never felt to me as much of an open plagiarism of the past, a copy and paste job of dead genres and styles, as it does on "Chase the Tear" (even when they were literally copying and pasting bits of the past to make new music!).
The problem, in a nutshell:
What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across music history and across the globe. This ought to provide them with a palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of launching pads and diving boards works out well.
But most artists aren't strong enough to withstand such an influx.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with musicians having a set of influences from the past (it would be hard to say that the Thundercat album I just gave a fairly positive review of doesn't have a few influences from the 1970s and 1980s, say), but there is something "wrong"--and I think Reynolds does a great job identifying just what that is--with the automatic assumption that omnivorous listening habits and infinitely extendable spheres of influence automatically lead to new music. The facts seem to be pointing to the conclusion that they don't, or at least that they don't often enough. What we're left with the rest of the time is pastiche, a poorly reproduced simulacrum of the past that won't leave us alone, and which denies even the possibility of nostalgia for that past or an investigation of the promised-futures trapped within it, the desires that capitalism (and neoliberalism in particular) "captur[ed] . . . [but] which it could not satisfy." To close with Fisher's words--a few sentences that underscore, I think, the continued importance in considering the hauntological, even if its internet vogue might be long gone--"A genuinely new Left must be shaped by those desires, and not lulled, once again, by the logics of failed revolts." If there's to be any kind of post-capitalist society, it seems to me, its art won't sound (and look) like it's ensconced in the accompanying lulling cultural logic, either.
*I should say that technology also seems to be an interesting factor here: not that technology has stopped expanding and developing w/r/t music and production, but wrestling with technology and its possibilities doesn't seem as public and exciting as it has in the past, probably because outside of autotune--which very people are actually "experimenting" with in any meaningful way, to say nothing of its age: it's hardly contemporary technology, given the speed of technological advancement these days--there is little public grappling with technology when it comes to music. The technology that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s, synthesizers (particularly analog ones), are not quaint retro touches, the domain of middle aged men able to drop ridiculous amounts of money on Moogs and ARPs and Oberheims, etc., etc. It is, as Adrian Utley from Portishead agreed in an interview a few years back, a hobby like owning a caravan (or a set of golf clubs). Circuit-bending and software that allows user-written programs might be the closest thing to this, but they hardly seem like public interactions of music and technology (was Radiohead's "Go to Sleep," featuring Greenwood's guitar solo passed through Cycling74's Max/MSP the most public example of this? That was back in 2003. . .). But then again, is it really that different than his guitar solo on "Paranoid Android?" And that was running through even older technology. . .
**That post I've linked to on Fisher's blog, thanks to the series of abstracts it contains, is one of the easiest and best summaries of hauntology and capitalist realism available on the web. A great resource, there.
***I'm also not necessarily denigrating bands who do this: Stereolab are one of my favourite bands ever, and they essentially functioned as highly selective and successful curators for a large part of their career. Ditto Portishead (but I'll talk about them more in the body of this). And of course there is a difference between genealogical exploration of a genrescape (I love that term!) and an investigation of its constituent parts and simple curatorial presentation; two very different kinds of critical apparatus are involved in these acts.
