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There's Nothing Ironic About Glee Club

2009-05-25T20:08:00.003-05:00

It's been a weird last half of the decade, though maybe "weird" doesn't cover it--awful and dark and mean and petty would be better, probably. And yet most of our popular art has not really dealt with modern culture in any significant way over the past five years. This was not the case of the first half of the decade, when popular culture, and particularly music, seemed caught up in an eternal present tense. The iconic pop of that period, along with major TV shows like Sex and the City and The Sopranos, relentlessly engaged with the now. The moment might have been created by a SATC episode or a Destiny's Child video, commented on by Britney or David Chase, and pushed forward by Justin Timberlake or Survivor.

But somewhere around 2004, the present tense became too fraught, too full of importance and horrors, for pop to find any way in. In a political moment when change was largely decentered, with one-party rule requiring us to wait for a self-hoisting even once the petard was clearly visible, pop could play no leadership or rally role even if it wanted to, and was left instead with a moment it had a hard time figuring out what to do with. To ignore it, as most pop did, simply made you look out-of-touch and past your prime, but short of the kind of direct engagement with current that allowed some of the decade's most significant artistic products (e.g. The Colbert Report) to flourish, it was hard to deal with our particular times in any real way.
Those aside, what we got mainly looked backward, whether for comfort and resonance with the present, like Amy Winehouse and Mad Men, or entered innovative continuations in established realms, like Gossip Girl and 30 Rock and, uh, pretty much everything else in pop music that wasn't Amy Winehouse. Those things that did offer something new, like Lost, didn't seem to have any necessary connection to outside events, but registered instead as regular old artistic innovation, not in dialogue with anything but itself.

And so it's nice that we've had such a clear historic and chronological break here. The election of Obama and the economic crisis, which are essentially simultaneous in the longview, make it very hard to continue as we were before. So much of the culture of the 00s was and is tied up with the particular kind of economic prosperity that we can now mark as part of the past, and while the destruction of that culture does not negate the good things that came out of it, such desctruction does make it very hard for pop creators to regard it as normal. Almost every single significant piece of pop culture from the previous part of this decade would, if it were created today, either look very different or much less relevent. Almost everyone on television was affluent--not even middle class, but affluent--and the shiny bliss that 00s pop does so well reeks, as it was intended to do, of money money money. While there are undeniably artistic creations that were forward-looking enough to see this coming, it's likely that there's a slow but major change coming, and it would be really great if we could finish off the decade with a little bit of forward-looking pop.

Which is why I liked the first episode of Glee so much: it is the first TV series that's about this decade rather than a part of this decade. How the rest of the series will go remains to be seen, but for now it has definitively staked out its position on the 00s truth and reconciliation committee. For one thing, it's the first show I can think of to draw from a form firmly situated in the current decade, rather than drawing from 80s and 90s forms as even the best current series do (with, again, the exception of brand new things). Bring It On came out in 2000, and the show is clearly working in the tradition of that movie (and maybe 1999's Election as well), a form old enough now that the Wayans brothers have gotten around to parodying it. The genre is obviously indebted to some old forms (sports movies, 80s b-movie ensemble comedies) but makes something new by taking a minor thing and portraying it in precisely the terms its most dedicated participants see it in. This shit was serious, and because image was serious to the participants, the movies took image seriously, too. This did all sorts of good things for a visual form that ultimately requires you to believe things that aren't true anyway, and Glee plays that forward.

The characters, too, are products of the decade. Rachel, the main female singer, is essentially a fameball, which is not something we're used to seeing. Usually, the pretty girl who wants to be famous is either hilariously untalented or actually destined for stardom. But Rachel doesn't seem to be either. She's good at singing, but not great, and her personality is too self-conscious to take her to easy success. She's a scrabbler and a striver, ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, trying and trying without really having a project to tie it to. She uses modern technology just because it seems to be what the kids to or as a way of furthering the plot, but as an integral part of her personality: she puts herself out to the world beyond her peer group through digital media as a way of seizing success. Mercedes, meanwhile (who I hope gets developed more!), is the daughter of ANTM, embracing that weird Beyonce feminism that I guess is what Girl Power turned into. And, of course, the girlfriend of Finn, the main male singer, is the head of the celebacy club, and as such the representative of cultural conservativism, another high point of the decade. She's an obvious one, but Rachel and Mercedes strike me as believable characters that I know lots of in real life but would not expect to see on TV, and kudos to the show's creators for catching that.

But this isn't just Bring It On: The Series. A key moment in the pilot is where Finn confronts his fellow football players and gives a great little speech which starts like this: "We're all losers. Everyone in this school. Hell, everyone in this town. Out of all the kids that graduate from this school, maybe half will graduate college and two will leave the state to do it." This is true, but it would have been unthinkable to express such a thing earlier in the decade. It would have violated the ethos of total committment that dominated the 00s--one which produced some great results for pop, if not so much for government. While the glee club is maybe just another competitive activity, the show is clear that it's a pretty stupid one, and all the characters except Rachel seem to know that. They do it, then, because they like it, because they get something out of it. It's smaller than cheerleading but bigger than just being a quiet nerd trying not to be noticed. I like that, even without the football player, the characters aren't just a clique to themselves, but are individuals from different circumstances doing something for the pleasure of it. What the show endorses, then, is not victory or social stasis but mastery. When Mr. Schuester takes over, his goal is for the club to win a championship, but that motivation on its own fails to sustain the club's momentum. What propels them to some kind of unitity is, rather, a committment to excellence, to artistic acheivement beyond the validation of others but simply to know for yourself that you and others have done something good, and the moment at the end of the episode captures precisely that. And it captures, moreover, joy, the other thing Mr. Schuester says he was interested in. While that emotion was certainly conjured by many of this decade's best pop products, it's hard to say it was a concern of them. Success always seemed to matter more than happiness. Glee seems interested in asking what it would be like if that evaluation was reversed.

Then, of course, there is "Don't Stop Believin'," the song that the group sings at the end. My thoughts went not to the finale of the aforementioned Sopranos, which also ended with that song, but to the pilot of Freaks and Geeks, which ended with "Come Sail Away" by Styx. The final moment of The Sopranos struck me as being essentially the same as the final moment of Seinfeld, and its use of the Journey song had less to do with pop music than with TV and with audience expectations, a sort of forced "let's go out on a high note!" kind of thing. But in Freaks and Geeks, it was all about the song and its resonance to the particular characters. That's sort of the mirror image of what's happening in Glee. Here, Journey is being celebrated for its universal appeal, for the freakish and essentially inexplicable ability of that song to appeal to everyone everywhere at least a little bit, and the metaphor being drawn is not the any of the characters' situations but to the enterprise on which they have mutually embarked. The experience of pop is an unavoidably collective one, made eternally in the context of others, and while that opens up all kinds of great possibilities, it also means you have to go wherever pop goes, and you might not always like it. When you find yourself in that situation, the trick may be to find that one sweet spot, the thing that everyone can agree on that turns the momentum back toward you, tacking the ship gradually back to the course you would prefer. Glee is most certainly a part of that effort, and I am excited to see where it goes.

Audio/Visual

2008-12-10T11:55:00.003-05:00

Watching the Powder Blue trailer and reading the description of "one of those montage previews full of quick erotic cuts set to a familiar indie-centric score" makes me think a little harder about the way indie music is used in TV and films. Its use here is striking because the placid, comfortable sound of the music is in sharp contrast with the scenes of strippers, poverty, liquor stores, hospitals, age, and black people, if that makes sense. To put it another way: indie is so firmly aligned with white, middle-class values, lives, and concerns, and the small stakes of everyday living, that to see it paired with these images makes them rise above their possible association with a Cops sorta thing. Either they're being used to suspend disbelief by pairing realistic scenes with unrelated music, or they're being used to connect the likely middle-class audience with the concerns of these characters and assuring us that they will be placed in a context familiar to us, or--and this is the point here, so you know--there is actually something about indie music that really is connected to scenes of high drama and hard living.

And this prompts the question: when is indie going to start writing about the sort of things that it's used to soundtrack? When are there going to be songs about teenagers overdosing in Mexico, people dying in hospitals of obscure diseases, sad strippers, moments of revelation after a physical and spiritual trial, etc.? Sure, there are some songs about these topics, but judging by the genre's televisual use, these should be the dominant themes. And given how much of a boost these televisual uses can give to the market share of an indie song, there's a strong possibility that the iTunes bump happens not just because of the wider exposure, but because the coupling of sound and image brings out something in the song that wasn't previously obvious, some connection between the sounds being made and the themes onscreen. The continued use of indie songs on soundtracks seems like a market opportunity not just through the adaptation of existing product but through the creation of new product that can work in this way without the outside influence. I've argued before that The OC's use of a particular sound made other people pursue that sound, and I've no doubt that people are having an emotional experience in interacting with these records not entirely unlike what they have by watching the TV show they might be used in. But there still seems to be more room for expansion.

Just Say Yes

2008-12-04T21:18:00.000-05:00

I'm sure everyone's discussed this already, but I'm just now hearing Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is absolutely fantastic. And, of course, there is the twist ending: Romeo and Juliet live! And this was intentional:

I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn't so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it's a tragedy. I thought, why can't you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?

I love this, of course, but it also sounded weirdly familiar. And then I remembered that it's sorta how I ended my piece on Hamlet 2. To quote myself, if I may:

That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself.

It seems disrespectful to make a sad ending happy. But if art is really important to you, if you really love it, then it should feel real to you, it should feel like it's part of your life, because you are so intimately engaged with it. Part of the power of these made-up stories is that they seem believable, and when weighted with the kind of aesthetic power that a great artist can conjure, they take on the feeling of prophecy. Change the story and change your destiny, or that's how it feels. And it feels that way because the tragedy of the situation speaks to you a little too strongly. That Steve Coogan's character in Hamlet 2 was able to change his life is the happy ending, but the sad part is that he identified with Hamlet in the first place, in all his emotionally disturbed, hallucinatory, father-issue-having glory. Sure, he was eventually redeemed, but that's just a story too. When you get to that key change at the end of "Love Story" it really does kill; as manipulative and base a move as it is, it really fucking tugs at something. And when it's over, and you look back, you have to think about why Swift is identifying with Romeo and Juliet at all. It's not actually that great of a love story; it's much more a story of infatuation and manufactured drama. But that's what feels real to teenagers. By enacting a happy version of the play, Swift is admitting her own enmeshment in the original Romeo and Juliet story, and that's sad, in a way.

These sort of fantasies are all over pop (see also Twilight), and they tend to get dismissed as escapist or illusory. That seems unfair to teenagers. Few, if any, really think they live in these worlds pop creates, and while I'll certainly admit there's danger in their very real assimilation of some of that world's attitudes (see also Twilight), I think there's also value in the way they actually use them. Life for teenagers already is a Shakespearean tragedy, at least to them, and to pursue art that took on that worldview would simply be to strengthen their own self-image in a not particularly salutary way. If a kid can do this--can take something that reflects their life and reimagine it into something good--that seems like a remarkable act. Just as we have fantasies of the bright-eyed kids turning dark, it seems worth wondering what would happen if an angsty teen (and no teen worth knowing isn't angsty) were able to imagine transcendence.

The thing is: there's an angsty teenager inside all of us, a grumbling undercurrent insisting that the world is shitty and we are all diseased and there's no one you can trust. To that inner goth, pop screeches and wails with dissonance. But it doesn't have to. Cultural critics worry that things distract us from reality, help us avoid reality, obscure reality. But sometimes reality, as they say, bites, and to take that tragedy and turn it into a comedy would not be the worst thing. Pop's power is, in no small part, its ability to imagine a world much like this one, but shinier--and to make it, whether you submit to its charms or not, believable.

The BoingBoing Effect

2008-10-29T20:47:00.003-05:00

I wrote a post for Idolator this week about "the BoingBoing effect." It attracted some attention and caused a bit of a kerfuffle[1], but the post didn't really get across the theory so well, so let me take to this wonderful place of no word limits and indulgent readers to try and hash it out a little better.

First off, I like BoingBoing. It's a great place to kill time, because they're very good at what they (mainly) do, which is finding "wonderful things."[2] But I've seen this happen to people. They already have tastes and opinions that are somewhat similar to BB's. (So do I, for that matter.) They start reading BB, and because it aligns so strongly with their tastes--and because it's updated so frequently--it becomes one of their primary internet sources. Once your primary filter of information becomes a group of people who mainly agree on things, you start to pick up on what they think. Now, again, these people (and, again, me for that matter) already have somewhat similar opinions to those of BB's writers, particularly the main writers, Cory Doctorow[3] and Xeni Jardin, so it's not like the site is magically inculcating a worldview in people who have no exposure to it otherwise. But when you mainly get the world through people who share your filter, it strengthens and hardens. Heavy BB readers become much more sure of their anti-copyright opinions and think they are much more important. And they become much less tolerant of opposing opinions, because so is BB.

(I want to make clear here that I'm not exempting myself from this phenomenon. I have most certainly had my nascent opinions confirmed, strengthened, and made shrill by my reading habits in the past, whether it be my opinions about music, or politics, or...I dunno, TV? This just hasn't happened with me and BB, for reasons that will be clear shortly.)

This is a somewhat different phenomenon than we've become familiar with on the internet in general. People like Cass Sunstein talk about the problem the internet being so filtered that you can go just to the sites that agree with you for news. This is something slightly different. People don't go to BB to have their opinions about copyright confirmed. Most likely, they go because someone's sent them a link about a robot made of Legos that eats cheese or something. People aren't going to BB, or sites like it, for a filtered set of opinions, but a filtered set of tastes. And that kind of filtering is absolutely crucial to the internet. But when a taste-filtering site gains enough authority and cohesion for its overall message to seem convincing to its readers, it can become the other kind of site. I'd argue this happened with a lot of the liberal politics blogs. I used to be able to read Daily Kos, for instance, because it was a good source of news that I might not find otherwise, especially during the first term of the current administration. And their takes on these stories seemed somewhat reasonable and obvious. But over time, as they gathered together a certain argument about politics, everything they posted tended to be interpreted through that particular filter. And this itself acted as a sorting device: it drove out people like me, who had different opinions, but it drew in more extreme people, who liked (as Sunstein has warned of) seeing their opinion confirmed. And by banding these people together, and giving them comment boxes and diaries to write to each other in, it made them feel not only that their opinions were right, but that their opinions were important.

And that's really the problem with all this. You will get absolutely no argument from me that the DMCA is a horrible piece of policy and bad law, and I've studied it enough (I actually read the damn thing) to tell you why and how. I absolutely think it should be overturned. But you know what? I also think there are way more pressing problems, and when copyfighters like BB couch their arguments in the apocalyptic terms that a self-selected ideologically focused userbase breeds, it makes them seem ridiculous, and it makes the whole argument less effective. The DMCA and associated rulings and laws are bad because a) they contradict existing copyright law, b) they have no relation to the realities of technology as they currently exist, and c) they stop people from doing stuff that there's no reason for them not to be doing. Those are three fantastic reasons to overturn a law. But BB--like a lot of monomaniacal (holla!) sites--have taken their legitimate arguments and turned it into an all-encompassing worldview. Somehow this is all tied up with "corporate culture" and people making art and all like that. None of which most people care about. People barely care about copyright issues in the first place; bringing up street artists and fucking Burning Man only makes the issue seem less relevant. Nerds (again, which includes me) have a real problem with thinking that they, and people who think like them, are right about everything, and everyone else is wrong. The reality of BB is that nerds are an interest group like any other interest group, and their interests are probably less important to the health of our democracy right now than a long list of other policy issues. That may seem unjust somehow, but it's simply a reality that you have to accept. That's not to say that they shouldn't keep working to overturn the DMCA or bringing to light the many negative consequences of the law. But you have to stop painting this as somehow a failure of American society and culture. It's not. It's just that no one cares, and rightfully so. We're going to work on the economy and health care first, if that's all right with you guys. Talk to us in six years.

And then, of course, there is their stance on the music business.

As happens a lot with my writing, when I criticize something, this tends to get taken as an endorsement of what the people I'm criticizing see as the opposite side. (Criticize liberal bloggers, for instance, and it's assumed you're either a Republican or a Clintonian shill.) So when I ragged on copyfighters, this was seen by certain commenters as an endorsement of the major labels and the RIAA and so forth and so on. This has happened a few times now, and well, I'm kinda sick of it. I do have a take on the whole end-of-the-music-biz issue, but it's too complex to fit in most posts. Here, though, I can go nuts. So if you'll indulge me.

The bottom line of all this is that everyone is going to have to accept that things are going to get a little worse. Everyone--the music biz, music listeners, and musicians. The music biz is going to have to accept, just as the copyfighters say, that their practices are driving away consumers. They are also going to have to accept--and this may be the real problem--that the glamorous good times of the music biz are at an end, maybe forever. No more parties in sex clubs. No more expensing cocaine. No more being a "cool" marketing executive. The industry is going to have to become a lot more financially efficient. This is, of course, already the case for the workers in the trenches, who are doubling up on duties and getting laid off and receiving no raises for years on end. The people that are going to have to accept this, unfortunately, are the executives. And they have no real reason to except the survival of their business. Compared to free cocaine, keeping your company profitable seems less important.

Bands have probably made the adjustment already. Sure, they get rockstar perks if they can, but the fact that there are so many songs about acting like a rockstar means that most people aren't living like rockstars anymore. Bands know what's up, and while they don't like it, they've largely learned to live with it. They've cut costs, become more efficient, and downgraded their expectations. They've had to in order to survive.

Listeners, though, need to make an adjustment too. They have to--have to--accept that they can't not pay for music and expect it to still be around, at least not in the same form. We have to remember that the current situation has only arisen in the last few years. That means that there's still funding out there, that bands are still hoping things will blow over. But if the music biz continues to be unprofitable, then companies simply won't be able to get funding or credit anymore, which means they won't be able to pay for the things necessary to distribute even free music, like mastering, server space, bandwidth, and so forth. And while bands never expect to make a living making music, if it becomes clear that making music is becoming a hobby--something you put lots of your own money into without any hope of return--then a lot fewer people are going to be able to make music at all. Just like with the music biz, it's not in the self-interest of individual listeners to accept this. Indeed, it's a fantastic example of the tragedy of the commons. Which means, duh, that government's going to have to step in and do something about it. The DMCA isn't working because it's unreasonable. So someone will have to convince them and help them to craft a common-sense solution that fucks over everyone a little so the whole thing can keep rolling. And the shrill BB ideologues aren't helping with that.[4]

The people in this debate need to recognize that the people in the middle, ultimately, are the bands. People in bands want to make money from music, but they also want to get music for free, because they like music and are broke. Musicians are the ones actively navigating this landscape every day. The other two sides are pulling from opposite sides of the spectrum, and that makes them extremists. Yes, record companies use over-the-top language, unfairly recruit the government for their side, and are clinging desperately to something that's slipping away from their grasp. But copyfighters are also using over-the-top language, recruit the masses of self-interested listeners for their side, and are clinging desperately to something that I think they know, in their heart of hearts, fundamentally isn't sustainable.

BoingBoing's music coverage consists almost entirely of articles about how musicians that are giving their music away for free are still successful. What they don't cover are the many musicians who give their music away for free that aren't successful, or how much less money musicians that give their music away for free are making than they would have otherwise, which seems a little unfair given that they were the ones who put in the labor to make the product in the first place, not to get all Marxist or anything. The idea is constantly brought up that you don't need money to make music anymore, that it's not costing anyone anything, and so why shouldn't it be free? To which I say: bullshit.

I suspect that the people promoting this idea are mainly writers, since writers are one of the few groups who can make art without any up-front money.[5] But almost every other artistic genre requires money to do, from a little to a lot. Visual art is fundamentally impossible without money, since you have to buy materials. Movies are impossible without money, at least if you want to make a good movie and have lighting and sets and like that. Classical music and opera are certainly impossible without money, at least if you want to actually perform them. And dancers need costumes!

The key caveat here is "if you want to make a good" whatever. It is possible to make music totally for free (assuming you are middle-class and have a computer already). But it's very limiting in terms of what you're going to do. Maybe one of the key problems with music no longer coming to listeners as a physical object is that they tend to think the production of the music involved no physical objects either. But most music does, at least if it's going to be good, and physical objects, regrettably, cost a lot. Sure, Girl Talk's music can be made with nothing but a laptop. But do we really want all our music to sound like Girl Talk?

Look, as I hope I've made clear here, record companies are odious, odious things, and I've worked for them; I've had enough friends summarily fired by major labels to not have a particularly bright view of them, either. But one of the harsh realities of art is that bad people and things can create great art as well as good people and things. This applies to major labels as surely as it does to alcoholics. Major labels, for all their flaws, are very good at giving artists money to make art (even if they're bad at giving artists money they are owed after they make the art). The vast majority of great pop music was made under the auspices of major labels, and that's not an accident. Money is necessary for music to sound good. Artistic visions should not have to be cheap to be realized. We would be much poorer off as a culture if that were the case.

So what are we going to do about all this? Nothing, I suspect. Everything will implode in a few years, and everyone will freak out and finally come to a solution. It would be better for everyone if that didn't happen, because it's going to make pop music a much different beast than it is now. But hey, what can you do? In the meantime, there are always pictures of inflatable yetis.

[1] Ending, as these things always do, with me telling someone they look like a douchebag.
[2] I don't get the whole pro-Disney obsession, especially given their stance on corporate culture otherwise--it seems really contradictory, but whatever.
[3] If your first exposure to the site is through this post, this might seem slightly off, since Doctorow no longer contributes too much content. But he was, and is, a guiding force. Check out the archives for 2006 and before if you're curious.
[4] I mean, for fuck's sake, this is industry regulation at this point. It's like mining policy. Who cares if you're not a miner?
[5] Aside from the money it takes to feed and house them while they're writing, but that doesn't count, I guess.

Dancing Like She's Never Danced Before

2008-09-01T01:01:00.000-05:00

I'm with Rich--Hamlet 2 is really, really, really good. He's saving his take for the DVD, but here's mine. (I'll go light on the spoilers, but I am going to talk about plot points. This shouldn't be too big of a problem, but come back after you've seen it, if you'd rather.)

If you want to know what Hamlet 2 is about, just check the structure. Sure, it's got a standard overall arc, which the movie itself makes fun of with Mr. Marsch's (the drama teacher and main character, played by Steve Coogan) repeated references to inspirational-teacher flicks like Mr. Holland's Opus, Dead Poets Society, and Dangerous Minds. Yes, there's a setup, a period of trouble, and then a successful resolution. But how does it resolve? After what amounts to a really long build-up, we get to see the performance of the titular play--and that's it. After the performance, there's a brief (and fantastic) epilogue, but it's only a couple minutes long. The thing the movie was leading up to was not the resolution of various emotional and character arcs--the kids don't learn any lessons, and Marschz's romantic interest exists purely as a gag--but the actual performance of the play itself. What matters is not the journey the characters went through, but the journey the play itself went through. The movie, in other words, is about the unpredictable and ignoble nature of the creative process.

As any critic can tell you, creative types are rarely what we want them to be. Sure, every once in a while there's a David Byrne who's as culturally literate, thoughtful, and intentional as we critics are (or, at least, like to think of ourselves as being). In the main, though, artists, writers, and musicians are the kind of people who we'd be embarassed to know if they weren't geniuses. They're boorish, dickish, passive-aggressive, fickle, emotionally stunted, alcoholic, abusive, and/or pathetic. They have an extremely difficult time maintaining healthy relationships, with any friendships or marriages characterized by neediness, selfishness, leechiness, and sulking. They are, in short, losers--jobless wrecks of humanity who are so pathetic that you can't engage them in a conversation without feeling kinda guilty that you're a normal, together person. Worst of all, at least from the critic's standpoint, they are generally incapable of talking about their creations, either coming up with simplistic explanations revolving around their own personal issues or refusing to explain them at all.

And this is exactly what Marschz is for almost the entire movie--in fact, that's where the humor comes from. He has to roller-skate everywhere because of a past DUI, and he's not very good at roller-skating. When he breaks his sobriety, he ends up pantsless on a couch in the middle of a field. After getting him to wear a caftan so that his testicles are at room temperature, his wife leaves him with their roomate, who it turns out is the one who actually impregnated her. Marschz says it himself: "My life is a parody of a tragedy." And yet, after a life as a loser, his last-ditch effort succeeds wildly. In the world of the film, whether or not we think so, his play is a masterpiece both creatively and commercially. How does he do this?

The movie's explanation, in a memorable line, is this: "It doesn't matter if you have talent as long as you have enthusiasm." This is a funny little epigraph for the current generation, but it's also true. Marschz has enthusiasm in spades, and it's that enthusiasm that allows the play to be a success. His enthusiasm draws talented people to him, and this pathetic loser is at the center of a group of very successful people: a great actor, a great lighting designer, great security guys, a great lawyer. And when they all work together and deploy their talents in service of Marschz's enthusiasm, they produce something that is well and truly moving.

What's funny about this is that the creative process depicted in the rest of the movie gives no indication that this will be the case. A sequal to Hamlet is, as many people point out over the course of the film, a horrible idea, and Marschz has given no indication at any point that he's a good enough writer or director to make up for that questionable decision. And at no point does he suddenly develop a full artistic sensibility, complete with taste, thematic complexity, and nuance. It works because he pours all those loser qualities out in such a charming way that, when surrounded with an aura of success and competence, it seems to glow with meaning. None of which, it becomes clear, he actually intended. When one character argues with her mother that "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is intended as a critique of celebrity, Marschz interjects, "That's an oversimplification." The Christians who come to the foot of the stage to protest change their minds when they come up with their own interpretation, that "Jesus kicks the devil's ass!" All the while, the play, in which Marschz is simply working out his own issues with his father, continues on its merry way, oblivious to the storms of meaning being kicked up on its periphery. That, indeed, is why it works. Because people are able to pin their own meaning to it, it speaks to them on a personal level. Marschz's "parody of a tragedy" life is ultimately so knowable that it forges a multitude of connections with otherwise disperate identities. The restraint that taste imposes is generally crucial. When absent, it is almost always embarassing and cringe-inducing. But sometimes--when surrounded by talent--tastelessness allows for such an openness that beauty can rush through.

That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself--and a pretty powerful one, I might add. Don't get me wrong: this is a deserved cult classic in the making, and there are a lot of hilarious testicle jokes that I was a bit Shue about. But it's also a really smart and, I think, important piece of art.

A Big, Big Love

2008-07-22T14:22:00.005-05:00

Gigantism Muxtape (1:12:57)

1) Kronos Quartet - Marquee Moon
2) David Byrne - Glass Concrete and Stone
3)Tangoterje - Diamonds Dub
4) Mazzy Star - Fade Into You
5) Blur - This is a Low
6) Boris - Farewell
7) Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1
8) LCD Soundsystem - Great Release
9) Scott Walker - Such A Small Love
10) Nina Nastasia - Ocean
11) Carla Bozulich - Medley: Time Of The Preacher, Blue Rock Montana, Red Headed Stranger
12) Dirty Three - Sue's Last Ride

(click on any song to start it streaming)

In my entry about John Luther Adams and hugeness from a while back, I didn't give a whole lot of musical examples of what I was talking about, so here's a muxtape that does the job fairly well. I'll talk about these a little bit later, but now I want to approach the subject using another example--a visual one.

This is a scene from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away:

In this sequence, the main character, Sen, is traveling on a train from one end of the spirit realm to the other, from a city to the country. Her companions are three former villains that she has converted into friends: a spirit called No-Face who almost destroyed the bathhouse where she worked, a giant baby who tried to kill her (now transformed into a tiny but rotund cat), and the witch Yubaba's henchmen (transformed into a small bird, which carries the cat around). In terms of pacing, it's a significant break in the film. Previously, Sen has been going almost every minute, either working or collapsing from exhaustion, in a very urban environment populated by many people in a small space working frantically. Now, she simply sits, nearly wordless, for around two minutes, as we watch the train travel through the landscape. The lack of words signals pretty clearly that we're going to see an animator's showcase, and Miyazaki delivers with a perfect evocation of hugeness.

The subject has already come up in the film. Sen's clients at the bathhouse are larger-than-human scale, not only physically, but because they are incarnations of various natural phenomenons (rivers, turnips) that are much vaster than anything in our direct experience. The bathhouse, too, is so huge that we never get a clear picture of its layout; Sen seems to be constantly finding new rooms. And the plot itself is a kind of hugeness, with Sen pursuing not a single goal, but a series of goals suddenly thrust upon her, all under a rules system that she never really understands.

Two of these aspects are represented in the train sequence. The train travels on top of a body of water whose edges we never see, and the distance covered is so large that night falls over the course of the trip. But what's really interesting here is that she passes through a kind of city of ghosts, or maybe even an echo of a real city, as small signs of a recognizable reality are visible just at the edge of the tracks, even though beyond is only more water. Neon signs fly by the train's windows, disconnected from any building but still very real; as on a real train journey, we might wonder what's going on in the areas we're not disembarking. Shadow people wait at a train crossing, and a real house sits on a small island. This sense of whole stories being missed, unusual for a work of fiction, is most explicitly brought up when the train pulls away from a platform. Shadow people get off the train, and stream into an exit, but a shadow girl watches the train leave, seeming somehow dismayed. Was she waiting for someone on the train? Who is she? For that matter, what is she? Is she a spirit, a real person, or what?

I wrote on the old blog about foggy music and cities:

Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.

This is the feeling being evoked here. Traveling through suburban and rural areas you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have a pretty good idea going on with the people you pass. But cities are so dense and so heterogeneous that, even when you're alone, you can look up at offices and apartment buildings and get a sense that there must be a thousand things going on there that you can't even guess at--stories being told, lives being lived, activities taking place that you've never even heard of. This density of unknowingness is a kind of hugeness to me, because it is essentially unknowable: too many people, not enough time. The crowd becomes a mystery, as perplexing in its individuation as bugs or stars.

The tendency when talking about art these days is to talk about its social significance, its expression of issues of identity or power relations or cultural conflicts. This happens everywhere, whether in the academy or among critics or just people talking. Is a movie too violent? Is an album fake? Does a TV show present negative portrayals of women? Does media attention to celebrities send the wrong message? That's fine, but it causes us to overlook perhaps the oldest purpose of art: to give some expression to our experience of the unknowable. Music, especially instrumental music, is perfect for this, because it is almost never literal. It's always abstract, and when it "means" something, it's because it's expressed a particular feeling or idea without actually saying anything about that particular feeling or idea. This is a pretty incredible thing. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Why do some things do it better than others?

Don't worry, I'm not going to get all fucking spiritual here. But if God is shorthand for "we don't know, but it's pretty impressive," then it's no accident that so many religions use music as part of their worship. Music can express that sentiment better than anything. And that's why musical expressions of hugeness are so affecting, I think. When a hundred-plus piece orchestra plays together, it's a model of that mammoth complexity that we look at with awe--urban populations and the vast variety of insects and the distance to the moon. And it's not a possibility being much explored these days, either in music or in the writing about it. This is not to say that it's never done, of course. In terms of writing, Said the Gramophone has been doing it for five years now, and doing it really well. Sean, Dan, and Jordan write about music not (just) in terms of how it sounds but in terms of how it makes them feel and what images it evokes. But as Sean and I have discussed on many occasions, the STG aesthetic is slightly different than what I'm talking about. I may be misreading him, but his interests seem more in small beauty, the wonder of the everyday. I like that. But that's not what we're talking about here.

To get at that, let me return to the train scene. The thing I haven't talked about are the two small things, the bird and the cat. They are, to use the Japanese term that I think would be appropriate here, kawaii--cute and innocent. They're funny, with their jumping and sleeping. But don't let the humor fool you. Without smallness, hugeness is meaningless. We need something to place it against as a comparison. Hugeness on its own seems fake, like an airbrushed drawing of mountains on the side of a van. Even hugeness accompanied by an expression of awe doesn't help us grasp it. But put against something cute, something innocent, something that accepts the unknown for what it is because there is so much else unknown in a kawaii life--then we, as viewers and listeners, feel like we have some sort of control over that hugeness, some understanding of the mystery. If a single composer can understand that feeling enough to write it down, if a conductor or performer can grasp it enough to draw it out in sound, then maybe we, too, can handle it. We turn to music not for a depiction of the unknown, because we can experience that any time we like. We turn to music for an ordering of the unknown, an abstract explanation of vastness beyond our comprehension. The low end rumbles and one hundred people slowly build up a roar, controlled precisely by a person with a small stick. On a giant screen, one hundred people have worked for months to create a sequence that takes our breath away. That order rubs off and stays with us. And it's not just limited to that. Let me leave you with one more self-quote:

The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.

I've Been Covered

2008-06-25T12:02:00.003-05:00

I can be heard in this week's edition of the BBC show Songlines, which is about "Halellujah." Go here and scroll down to "Monday." The version about the football player is pretty awesome. My riff around the 21 minute mark will hopefully become a post here shortly.

(Only available for a week--I'll try and upload a copy later.)

Public Image Unlimited

2008-06-21T19:06:00.003-05:00

Lots of great stuff coming up in reaction to the previous post, two of which are elsewhere. It got a link from Songs About Buildings And Food, a blog so good that it makes me wish I liked The Hills so I could better understand what he's talking about. (And I mean that sincerely!) Laguna Beach and all its offshoots are a pretty perfect example of what I'm talking about--MTV has built a whole programming bloc out of televising reenactments of the gossip-worthy moments in a particular real-world social group, and people love it. That's no accident. As stupid as MTV's programming can look to adults, it's generally ahead of the curve on these things.

Also, for those of your that are uncomfortable applying this theory to "lightweights" like Miley and Britney, Alex Rawls sees a connection between my model and Bob Dylan's construction of character. I think that's true, but only insofar as Dylan is a singularly iconic character. There's a difference between the obsessive information completism of fandom and the social capital of gossip, which relies on widely shared knowledge.

I Can't Wait to See You Again

2008-06-17T21:08:00.012-05:00

Adults are confused by Hannah Montana. Why were her concert tickets going for hundreds of dollars? Why does she have a 3-D movie? Who is this Miley person? Is she really the daughter of the "Achey Breaky Heart" guy? And he's her dad on the show? How does that all work, exactly?

It is true that the Hannah Montana gestalt encompasses an odd number of identity issues. On a normal TV show, there would be the character, Hannah, and the actress, Miley Cyus. The character would not appear outside the show, and the actress' real life would not be reflected on the show itself. But from the beginning, that line was blurred. The character named Hannah Montana is the secret identity of a character named Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart's dad, who knows her secret, is a character named Robbie. Robbie is played by former country star Billy Ray Cyrus, and his daughter on the show is played by his daughter in real life, Miley Cyrus. (Who isn't actually named Miley, but let's not even get into that.)

So far, so good; it's really just one step removed from Jerry Seinfeld playing a character named Jerry Seinfeld, right? What makes it confusing is that there are also albums associated with this particular gestalt. The first album, Hannah Montana, was credited to the character Hannah but one song was sung by Miley Cyrus as herself and her dad as Billy Ray Cyrus. The second album, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus is a double album, with the first disc being credited to Hannah and referring to the show's world and the second disc being credited to Miley and referring to the actress as a real person. There is then a concert movie, in which Miley performs songs as herself and as Hannah Montana.

To sum up: the character Hannah Montana has released an album and toured. The actress who plays Hannah has also released an album and toured, but always in combination with the character she plays. She has also sung a song as herself with the actor who plays her dad on the show, who is actually her dad. And who also sang "Achey Breaky Heart."

The reason I go through all this rigamarole is to show that, when you try and lay it all out, it is a fairly tangled web of connections that can be confusing if you're not immersed in it. And yet, for all its structural complexities (!!!), children have no trouble grasping how the Hannah Montana universe works. There's a good reason for this: for all that Hannah Montana might seem like a fantastically complicated postmodern art experiment (think Nikki S. Lee), she fits seamlessly into the current media/entertainment environment. And this is especially true for children. Adults are too tied to their formative experiences with straightforward entertainment television to really grasp what's going on. But for those people growing up in the reality show era, Hannah Montana makes total intuitive sense.

John Ellis' essay "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon" is a useful touchpoint for explaining all of this, though I don't want to get totally behind its occasionally overwrought "OMG postmodernism" tendencies. His take, basically, is that an individual performer had a a "star image" made up partially of their actual performances and partially through entering into "subsidiary forms of circulation" (see?), which is his way of saying "publicity." By giving interviews and being written about in the press and having your picture taken, a performer creates an image (tough, sexy, stoner, slutty, whatever) that then works as a way of informing the public's understanding and anticipation of their performances in films. To simplify: Brad breaks up with Jen and starts dating Angelina, so let's go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

That may be true from the perspective of, say, a film studio interested in making money. But from the perspective of everyone else, the really interesting thing about all this, the thing we followed and remembered, wasn't the movie. It was the actual story of Brad breaking up with Jen and dating Angelina, and why, and what would happen next. Ellis would consider this to be a failure--that the system has failed in its intended purpose if the movie in question is less memorable than the story surrounding it. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone that would speak kindly of our "obsession with celebrity," as it is generally put. But that, to me, seems unproductive. This system that has evolved is intensely fascinating--that's why, after all, we're all "obsessed" with it. And that's interesting. So rather than (just) criticizing this, we should recognize it as a new form of entertainment. Or, rather, a new incarnation of a very old form.

Mass media did not invent entertainment, though previous forms of entertainment might not seem very, er, entertaining to a modern audience. The Reign of Terror, for instance, was a form of popular entertainment. So were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is why they lasted for three hours. (More bang for the buck!) These are momentous events that represent practices (public executions, public speaking) that reach far back into human history. Perhaps we should think of another ancient human behavior as entertainment: gossip. I'm not alone in suggesting this by any means, but I have a slightly different take on it. Whereas others think of it in terms of its effect on the people doing the gossiping (display of social status, strengthening bonds, enforcing norms, etc.), I'd like to discuss the things that gossip collectively creates. In other words, I'd like to talk about gossip as narrative.

Humans seem to have an inherent tendency toward narrative. We form stories out of the bits and pieces of our lives in order to make some sense of them--to figure out what caused us to get where we are, or to at least feel like we know what made us get here. This urge extends to other people. We get pleasure out of learning other people's stories because to have a glimpse into others' lives helps us make further sense of the world. This is clear in our consumption of pop culture, especially TV, but is also clear in longstanding traditions of oral history and folk stories and even, arguably, news reporting. These are all stories about lives lived.

The great advantage of gossip is that it structures true stories about others in a way most advantageous to pleasure. Because bits of gossip are things we're not supposed to know, they give us the thrill of the illicit as well as the clarity of a secret revealed. Moreover, because the story is being revealed in pieces, we get the sort of tension and release dynamic that structures most great narrative works. At first, we don't really know what's going on. A problem is introduced. Then, we get more information. Tension builds. What is going on? What is she going to do? Is he going to find out? And then, finally, there's a break and things are resolved--or, they're not, and we get to speculate endlessly about what happened in the perpetual glow of limitless possibility. The slow drip of information keeps us coming back for more, keeps us interested in these stories, keeps us engaged with those around us. I can't wait to see you again, we say to our informant, and our informant can't wait to see us, either.

This is precisely what's going on with modern-day celebrities. For all that paying attention to news about Britney feels illicit and wrong, we are ultimately doing nothing more than following someone's story, doled out teasingly in daily doses. Rather than sitting and passively having a story told to us, we are expected to figure it out for ourselves from fragments of news, from photos we have to decipher, from actions the main character didn't want us to know about. We process these and judge these and try and decide what kind of character we're dealing with. The phrase "soap opera" is intended as a kind of pejorative when applied to such cases, but it's entirely accurate. The fact that the story is about a non-fictional person ultimately matters little to the end-of-the line consumer who's following the gossip. All it does is make the whole thing less predictable, since real people don't always follow stock storylines, and give the events an extra charge of verisimilitude. And let's not moralize around the bush here about people being exploited. If you are a celebrity and don't want to be the subject of gossip, there is a simple solution: move out of LA. There aren't paparazzi in Ohio. Britney in particular is an interesting test case for this, since for all her problems, she seems to have a collaborative relationship with the media.

All reality shows did was serve as a factory floor for generating these sorts of stories about people's lives. The thing that makes something like America's Next Top Model a reality show, of course, isn't the competition aspect of it--that's just any old talent show. What makes it a reality show is the Real World element. By putting all the girls into a house and filming their interactions under the always-fraught conditions of communal living, producers are able to generate stories that they can then edit skillfully into compact narrative chunks. The gossip that would normally have to come from a secondary source is here related directly by the cameras that film the offending behavior. And each week, good reality shows are able to edit their material in order to make clear in viewers' minds what kind of character each contestant is.

But from the beginning, reality shows never limited themselves to the show itself. The first American reality show of the post-MTV era, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, was successful in no small part because of the "controversy" that erupted in the media after the show aired. The idea of the program (on Fox, natch) is that a bunch of women would compete to marry, sight unseen, a multi-millionaire who was watching on monitors in a hidden room. At the end of the show, he would pick one, and they would get married then and there. This is indeed what happened, but because of the setup, we ended up with very little information about the multi-millionaire in question, Rick Rockwell (whose name makes him sound like a character in a Marvel comic). Afterwards, however, we found out a number of things about Rockwell that were textbook examples of gossip, because they complicated the simplistic public image he'd tried to construct for himself. He had multiple restraining orders placed on him, and was probably an abuser. He was not actually a multi-millionaire, but just some guy that dabbled in real estate. And theirs was not a fairy-tale marriage, but one that was quickly annulled.

At the time, this seemed like a disaster for Fox, and commentators predicted that this would be the end of reality shows. In hindsight, we can see that it demonstrated just how potent reality shows can be. By promoting an unknown into the public eye, we're able to find out their story from scratch. Reality show participants are, in essence, each their own little novel (or maybe just short story), a new character whose life story we now get to hear. They might not be very good novels, but the best selling ones rarely are.

This, then, became the model for reality shows. Bad ones stayed self-contained, because no one cared enough about them to unearth dirt on the contestants. But good ones generated coverage simply as a result of being interesting. Since what was happening on the shows was essentially gossip to begin with, these external pieces of information just became part of the overall narrative. Again, this is a violation of Ellis' idea of the star system. The gossip wasn't working as contextual information to enhance our viewing of major motion pictures, but creating its own gestalt, its own story told in bits and pieces. But this is what the modern media is built on. Political campaigns work this way as surely as American Idol does. And, to be honest, I think it's pretty awesome. If we were more willing to be honest about what we found entertaining and to embrace this as a source of pleasure rather than a source of shame, we might be willing to endorse strategies that took pleasure as a positive force rather than a debased one.

Anyway, point being, if this is all second nature to you--if the construction of character through multiple streams that duplicate and build on existing information just seems like the way the media works--then Hannah Montana fits right in. Taking the show on its own, we have essentially a superhero narrative; taken in context with the identity issued detailed above, it's basically Keeping Up With the Kardashians, except less soul-destroying. There's a family on a show that's like a family in real life, and sometimes the family on the show/in real life does stuff like make albums or release, uh, movies. This isn't confusing, but elevating. Instead of sealing all these things off from each other behind characters and fourth walls, they're able to mix and mingle as they would in real life. This is ultimately the real power of gossip-based narrative: it tells a story like we would get it in real life. Each episode is a phone conversation, the gossip is what you hear from other people or see at the grocery store. We rarely find out life stories all in one gulp (except when we're drinking with strangers), but slowly, as they're lived. We have to get through a lot of banality to reach the dramatic high points. Not coincidentally, this is how the best fictional shows on TV construct their narratives as well (think Ugly Betty, or even more appropriately, Gossip Girl). Hannah Montana's real strength is that it does all this without ever calling attention to its constructedness or to its radical collapsing of information streams. It comes off as easy as breathing, as the most natural thing in the world, and to its young audience, it most assuredly is.

ADDENDUM: Two related things that I couldn't figure out how to work into the actual entry: this quote from Rebecca West, via Marc, and of course the whole microfame thing. There's more to be said about YouTube as a medium, but that's another post.

Strikeouts are boring

2008-06-17T16:13:00.003-05:00

“I think we live our lives the best we can,” Kevin said. “We’ve grown up with the idea that even when you’re at the top, act like you’re at the bottom. We’re growing and learning together, and it is important for us to stay true to the family that we are.”

- Kevin Jonas

This quote, from one of the Jonas Brothers (a pop-rock band that's been shot to success by the Disney machine), would seem to be fodder for people who want to dismiss commercial pop music, especially that music that can be accurately described as the product of a machine. It's a horrifying combination of banal and cliché, so inconsequential that your eyes can pass over it multiple times without really catching the meaning. It would seem to reveal its speaker as someone who does not think very deeply about things and who is terminally lacking in personality. Compare it to a quote from Dylan or Lennon and it's like a rice puff. Whoever said this does not match up with our idea of what a musician is supposed to be.

On the other hand, if an athlete said it, it would sound perfectly normal. In fact, it falls right in line with Kevin Costner's advice to Tim Robbins in Bull Durham:

Costner: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time."
Robbins: Got to play... it's pretty boring.
Costner: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.

Say nothing, in other words, and it doesn't hurt you. Say something interesting and it's only going to cause trouble.

The difficult thing for critics dealing with commercial pop stars is precisely this kind of advice. Underground musicians get publicity for saying crazy things to the underground press; commercial pop artists, especially those with a young audience, can only lose sales from saying interesting things. So they're media-trained into oblivion, and come out with the kind of meaningless quotes you see above. For an athlete, that would be fine. Ultimately, we get our ideas of their personalities from their performances; the things that create meaning are their actions on the field. But for a musician, it's a hard thing to get around.

Musicians are not athletes because they are not creatures of action. Words and voices are a big part of their chosen profession. And so, when we're trying to make sense of musicians, we tend to regard speaking in interviews as a kind of extension of singing in songs. When we create our impressions of a musician's personality from their performances, this involves listening to what comes out of their mouths. If what they say in interviews is part of this, and what they say in interviews is boring, then they themselves must be shallow.

This causes a few problems. First, as various folks have pointed out, it leads to critics overvaluing "eccentric" pop stars. We might not pay attention to someone with a bucketful of hits until they give a wacky interview or take on an unhinged public persona. Objectively, regular mainstream pop music is no less worthy of our attention than any other genre, so we shouldn't require pop stars to act like eccentric geniuses before we pay attention to them.

There's a bigger issue, too. As much as I like the star system, as much as I think it's valuable and sit is awe of its ability to create meaning, it's just one way that meaning is created. There's no reason that we can't judge musicians in the same way that we judge athletes: look at their performances alone and marvel. Musicians don't have to create a persona, and they don't have to embody a social force. We can appreciate them as machines of grace, admiring the ease with which they produce beauty. It's certainly not the way I always want to approach music. But if a musician seems off-putting, it's one way to be able to appreciate the music they make regardless.

Everybody's Stupid But Me

2008-06-06T09:22:00.001-05:00

I've got a piece up on Idolator about a recent kerfuffle on a certain other site, and anti-intellectualism. Enjoy.

Scenes From a Blog

2008-05-13T13:09:00.002-05:00

Scott over at Pretty Goes With Pretty has a couple of reactions to my No Age post that are worth reading; he's much more positive about local scenes, and negative about the internet, than I am.

Letters From the Earth

2008-05-13T11:16:00.002-05:00

If you're interested in music, you owe it to yourself to read Alex Ross' article in the New Yorker about composer John Luther Adams. You should also listen to the sound file at the bottom, a recording of his piece "Dark Waves." Regular readers will know (or will have gotten the sense) that I have little patience for hippies, and so the fact that I am endorsing a guy who writes pieces about "the land" should tell you just how good this is.

It's unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to "good music" are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra's image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud. The three loudest experiences of my life are standing directly in front of Luke Jenner's amp at a Rapture show, taking my earplugs out for a second while performing Glenn Branca's "100 guitars" symphony, and playing in the back of the violin section for a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. Sure, none of the instruments in an orchestra are electronically amplified, but there are 100 people all playing at the same time. Even if they were all paying harmonicas, that would be pretty loud. Once you start putting trumpets and cymbals and violins in there--lots and lots of violins--you can make a hell of a racket. That we think of orchestras as quiet has something to do, of course, with the fact that the audience is supposed to be quiet at performances; the noise of the music is not being amplified by the reaction of the crowd. And orchestras certainly have a much broader dynamic range than do rock bands. Somehow, we've come to think of these giant collections of musicians as restrained and quiet.

Rock bands, on the other hand, had to become seen as loud. Jonathan Richman had it right in "Fender Stratocaster" when he described the sound of that most iconic of rock instruments as "so thin it's barely there." We think of Jimmy Page and John Bonham as having these massive, gigantic sounds, but listen to "Black Dog" after you've played the John Luther Adams piece for a while. The guitar sounds tinny now, the drums thin. Partially, of course, this is just a technical issue. Guitars occupy a fairly narrow sonic range, and even with a pitch shifter they can't reach the robust heights that a violin can. The drums fill in some of that spectrum, especially with the cymbals taking over the upper register, but they're recorded we have to perform technical tricks to make it sound as rich as an orchestra does. And we still have to make sacrifices. The kick drum is simply smaller than a full bass drum or timpani, and so we can boost its low end, but then we give up some of the thump. Thump or whoomp: each serves an important purpose for rock, but it's hard to have both. Rock bands have tried to imitate the feel of an orchestra, even going so far as to add orchestral instruments, but ultimately, orchestras make a noise that rock bands simply can't, and you hear that noise in "Dark Waves."

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I may lament the absence of orchestras from our musical life, but in terms of classical music, my alligiences ultimately lie with string quartets. This should come as no surprise; after all, quartets are structurally almost identical to rock bands, sans drummer. Four people, working without a conductor, have to listen to each other to follow along, and play off what everyone else is doing. They're lean but versitile. Even the parts are similar: the first violin is the lead singer, the second violin is the lead guitar, the viola is the rhythm guitar, and the cello is the bass. Not everyone writes for quartets this way, but you certainly could.

It's interesting, then, that Adams' work echoes many of the values associated with rock. Certainly "music you can live with" is pop's economic motor, and his emphasis on texture is key to rock's appeal, too. In the piece Ross focuses on, "The Place," you find classically rockist ideas, and I'm using that in a neutral way here:

“The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound. “The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season...

“Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea—tuning the whole world—stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth.”

This emphasis on place speaks strongly to rock's standards. The idea of localism and of community play a strong part in rock's mythos, of course, from local scenes to regional music. But in placing the piece not only within a particular environment but within a particular room, Adams echoes rock's strange obsession with "hearing the space." On a good rock album, supposedly, you can hear the room it's recorded in, and the particular venues bands play have meaning. Even live recordings are as much about the particular place of the performance as the performance itself.

So maybe "loud" is the wrong word to use here. Maybe what I'm really talking about is hugeness. Ross describes "Dark Waves," in a lovely turn of phrase, as suggesting "a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes." You can mass enough Marshall stacks to produce more decibels than an orchestra, but you never quite get that sense of hugeness. Again, this is partially a technical issue. With 100 people, you can get a much higher variety of sounds, and these can then build up to sound occupied, dense and rich. Because you have so many different instruments, you have all these different tambres. And because you have all these violin, viola, cello, and bass players playing the same part at the same time, the minute variations in each individual person's performance combine into this slightly fuzzy yet coordinated recitation of the part. Rock, again, tries to get this effect by technological manipulation; that's what chorus pedals are for. (Chorus, for those who are unfamiliar, is the effect that, when applied to a guitar, makes you think of 80s hair metal bands.) But it never quite sounds right.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Listen to "Dark Waves." Surely that's a sound worth producing; hell, it almost sounds like metal. The feeling I get from the piece is essentially the same one I get from watching a thunderstorm: an ineffable physical reaction to some immense externality. I feel isolated from other people but wrapped up entirely in this phenomenon. I get that feeling from other classical music, too. If I get it from other places, it would probably be Carla Bozulich's Red Headed Stranger album, which used similarly indistinct sonorities and dynamic shifts. But I liked the smallness of that; for all its virtues (it's certainly in my top ten for the current decade), it ultimately evokes a distant storm more than one passing over you.

I'm not just saying that there's something to be gained from reconsidering the orchestra. I think Adams has a lot to say to non-classical composers in the way he approaches familiar problems and issues in unfamiliar ways. And art music in general has something to say to lots of other styles; it always has, and as much as we might consider it to be a remote thing, it always will.

In Terms of Tunes

2008-05-08T15:49:00.002-05:00

I didn't say much about No Age's actual music in the post yesterday, but if you're curious, I think Matthew pretty much covered it.

Punk Grammar

2008-05-07T10:32:00.008-05:00

We are all afraid of turning into our parents. It may be a short-lived fear, and it may turn out that we like turning into our parents, but there's an inevitable anxiety there. It's a way of transmuting the unavoidable change of aging into something we can control. Time marches on, but we can remain cavalier about certain social niceties, keep our sense of adventure paramount over our sense of safety, and avoid wearing slacks. These aspects of personality seem like something we have control over. The biggest thing, maybe, is that we don't want to lose touch with that art that was important to us as youths. We want to stay relevant, up-to-date, and so forth and so on, but at the same time our tastes are mostly fixed somewhere in the past. The music that mattered to us as youths dictates what matters to us as adults, but because music keeps changing, our efforts to keep up inevitably result in us being out-of-date.

The problem with my generation, the generation that grew up with grunge and became indie, embraces a somewhat different consideration. It's not the anxiety of influence so much as it is anxiety about influence. When we were growing up, the biggest thing we had to fight against musically was the influence of our parents' generation. The idea that the music of the 60s is the only music that matters is pervasive and incredibly powerful to a general audience. Worse, kids like me tended to approach adult music through boomer bands like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Marley. Thus attempts to come into our own understanding of music inevitably demanded a rejection of that whole canon, while at the same time, again, our tastes were formed in that context, and so those standards never really go away. The music that resulted rejected certain tenets--social relevance, poetic lyrics, melody, careful production--while keeping others, like authenticity, sincerity, and an emphasis on guitars. What resulted certainly sounded, at times, like boomer music, and even had some explicit connections; most notably, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo was (0r is, perhaps) a Deadhead.

In the end, it's probably safe to say that we failed. Most younger listeners in the indie-rock demographic still come to adult music through boomer staples, and many stay there. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and countless artists derived thereof dominate musical tastes across all ages. The question, then, is whether we should try and shape the tastes of the younger generation(s) in the same way the boomers did. Surely kids need to get out from under this myth of the 60s just as much as we did, and the music of the 90s offers a viable, yet complementary, alternative. There already is a myth of the 90s, that has been muted somewhat, but is still going strong, at least if sales of Nirvana t-shirts are anything to go by. But if we do that--if we impress our tastes on the young--does that make us as bad as the boomers?

Which brings us, of course, to No Age.

No Age is a two-man band from Los Angeles who have just released their second record, Nouns, on Sub Pop, the Seattle label that was responsible for much of the grunge boom. Though their name is a reference to the hardcore punk label SST, they sound like an amalgam of noisy indie bands like Built to Spill and Sonic Youth (who, in fairness, did release an album on SST). More importantly, at least for the sake of this post, they emerged from a scene centered around a club called The Smell, an all-ages venue that serves vegan snacks and offers $5 haircuts; a picture of the club serves as the cover of No Age's first album. Its communitarian spirit recalls the hardcore ethos of the 90s, and it has spawned various other noisy bands like the Wives and Mika Miko. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article for the New Yorker that spelled out the club's mythos explicitly, making sure to mention that it lends out books and zines. Though the band's connection to the club is interesting, it's not a necessary factor for embracing their music, which works within an established genre and would make sense to fans of similar bands.

It's interesting, then, to read the band's two Pitchfork reviews, one for the new album and one for their first album, Weirdo Rippers. The first review, by Brandon Stousy, places the band precisely within this genre, throwing out references to Harry Pussy, Lync, and Kicking Giant, none of which I've ever heard of before. (Nor do I feel particularly bad about this.) It pinpoints their appeal more broadly, however: "No Age bring back the DIY energy of Kicking Giant and Lync and '90s zines and, importantly, a life away from computer screens." There's a clear broadening of scope there: few can relate to Kicking Giant and Lync, but the appeal of "'90s zines" has only increased since we no longer have to read them, and we can all feel a certain longing for the pre-internet days, I guess. (Can we?)

In contrast to the first review's focus on sounds and influences, the second review frames the band entirely in terms of their scene, mentioning The Smell in the first sentence and through the two opening paragraphs before returning to it again in the final paragraph. Only two paragraphs of the review deal exclusively with the band. Despite having a different author, the second review (written by Amanda Petrusich) echoes the appeal the first review invoked: "regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet," Petrusich writes, and though "being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008," she still finds it "thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands."

Thus, it's not only that the band's success beyond the noise/ex-hardcore community is being explained in these terms of being a throwback to a 90s social context, but that the case for its continued success is being made in these terms as well. The reviewing inducting the band into Pitchfork's "Best New Music" category begins and ends with a discussion of The Smell and the way it resembles the lost utopia of zines, community centers, and vegans.

I'm not sure if this is necessarily a good thing. For one thing, the best and more enduring American indie bands of the 90s, if they were part of a scene at all, existed on the outskirts of that scene: Nirvana, Yo La Tengo, Slint, Pavement, GBV. You wouldn't put any of these at the center of an artistic community like you would No Age, and it's hard to see how any of them would have been diminished by having the internet exist. The two exceptions would be Sleater-Kinney and Neutral Milk Hotel, neither of whom I like, so maybe this is just a matter of taste.

Then again, maybe it's not. Unless we're going to make an argument that there was something unique about that social environment that made bands different--a charge it would seem hard to sustain given that most of this decade's successful indie bands have sounded like variations on indie bands from the previous two decades--then the reason to hail a return of hardcore flair would be that the experience itself is worth preserving. Moreover, at least in the case of No Age, a band's association with that experience would have to say something about their artistic worth. There's a weird dance going on in that last part of the equation: the extrinsic narrative is being brought in as part of the artistic experience, and while I think that's a good thing to do--it's why I love pop, in part--I'm not sure how it squares with the expectation of authenticity that goes hand-in-hand with the valuation of this sort of music. Once we start valuing process over product, I'm not sure that we've having an artistic discussion anymore. Sure, I wish music now was more aware of, say, sexism, but would a return of "community-sponsored, community-supported art space[s]" really make that happen?

The first part of the equation, though, is where this whole thing gets tricky, and where the problem of anxiety about influence comes in. If we think that this was a valuable experience to have, and if we think opportunities to have this experience no longer abound, it should follow that we want to encourage what few there are so that kids these days can be fortunate enough to have the same kind of adolescences we did. Putting it that way is stacking the deck a bit, so I don't want to lean on this too heavily. Certainly the present decade has all sorts of problems, and there are many aspects of "the 90s" that I wouldn't mind seeing return. If there's anything that argues against merely accepting the social environment as it is, it's that it changes every seven years or so.

But ultimately, the things I want changed aren't specifics, but generalities. I would like to see more awareness of sexism, but I don't necessarily think that it needs to come via take back the night marches. Requiring that a new generation deal with the same issues in the same ways seems like Boomeritis. "Political problems? Well then, by gum, you need protest singers and protest marches! If you're not doing that, well then, you're not really dealing with the problem, and you don't really care! Unlike us! We cared, man!" Replace "protest singers and protest marches" with "hardcore music and community centers" and you have the critical discourse surrounding No Age.

What exactly is so bad about the internet, though? I no longer live in the kind of major urban area where community centers allowed great bands to flourish; I'm back where I grew up, in upstate New York, where there are no great bands (though there are community centers). The internet is now doing what it did for me as a teenager: allowing me access to this wider world and informing me about what's going on. For kids in Baltimore or LA, that information was available within driving distance, or from their friends; I had--and have--to go out and find it. You know what the big bands play in my current town, people? Ska. If I don't have the internet, that's what I'm into.

And it goes beyond that. If you want to see what it looks like when we become our parents, check out the idea that the internet is getting in the way of kids these days having an authentic indie-rock experience. That's only true if the internet is somehow inauthentic, e.g. not a culture of its own, and I think refusing to acknowledge that is much more evidence of being out-of-touch than not liking emo. Lord knows I'm no internet utopian, but it seems strange to deny that there are real communities online. They may not be able to give each other haircuts or provide venues for bands to play, but none of that is necessary for vital art to happen. There can still be the kind of encouragement, critique, and one-upmanship that we associate with productive artistic communities. When CSS first emerged, they made a good case for being a product of internet music culture, having gotten many of their influences from MP3blogs like Matthew's (if I'm remembering correctly). I think because the idea of online music is so debased for critics and musicians, bands may be reluctant to acknowledge these sorts of influences. But they're undeniably there.

I'm not sure indie is going to do itself any favors, ultimately, by clinging to the processes of the past. Certainly a longing for paradise lost is fine, and there's nothing wrong with reverence for the past. But indie was birthed out of the idea that new technologies (like 4-tracks, cassettes, and photocopying) could change the way music is made. Once new technology comes, that should change it again, at least if it wants to remain a vital form. Ultimately, we may end up no different from previous generations, soft and happy at middle age, listening to the music of our youth and thinking it the pinnacle of human achievement. That's fine, and good; no one's going to stand up for the music of an era except those who lived through it. But that doesn't mean we have to impose an arrested development on those who come after us in the same way the baby boomers tried to, and continue to try to. Let's not become exactly like our parents.

So Very Special

2008-04-29T11:12:00.002-05:00

Let's get something straight here: Prince is not covering Radiohead here. He is, rather, making "Creep" a Prince song, which is to say he is bringing it within the Prince scheme of rhetoric. This is not merely an instrumental thing, nor even a stage gesture thing, though the gesturing offstage is pretty great. The particular moment it happens is at the end of the second verse.

Recall: here, Thom Yorke usually says "You're so fucking special." That "fucking" is key, because it's supposed to sound snide. It's an insult. Prince, on the other hand, does not say "fucking." And not just because he doesn't swear anymore; he could have said what Thom goes with in the radio edit, which is "very." Instead, he changes the entire line, and in doing, he changes the entire meaning of the line. Prince says: "I think that you're special."

This is probably the best distillation of Prince's verbal seduction technique anyone's ever conjured. That Prince is awesome and desirable goes without saying. Prince's argument for why you should sleep with him takes that for granted. Of course you want to sleep with Prince; everybody wants to sleep with Prince. But it's also true that Prince probably wants to sleep with everyone, too. Prince desiring you is not news. Prince walks around desiring things. That's what he does.

Prince's argument for why you should sleep with him, then, is that you guys could do something really special together. Prince wants to sleep with you because he thinks you're amazing. You are his equal, and being the equal of Prince is pretty special. It's all over his stuff, but maybe best expressed in "Gett Off": "twenty-two positions in a one-night stand / I'll only call you after if I say you can," and, of course, "tonight you're a star / and I'm the big dipper." Prince does not think that you're hot, or that he's good in bed; Prince thinks that you are the awesomest thing ever. That you are, in other words, special.

So the fact that he changes that line then changes the line after it. When he yells "I'm a creep," it really seems like he meant to say "freak." He turns this chorus of self-loathing that even Thom Yorke was embarrassed about for a while into, well, a Prince song, a statement of sexual licentiousness. I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, I get freaky baby, and you can get freaky with me. The weirdness that was a source of embarrassment for Yorke is, here, a source of pride. And when he changes "I don't belong here" into "we don't belong here," it turns self-consciousness into "this party is lame, let's go find something as fabulous as we are." Prince brings you in, includes you in this fantastic Prince world that he has constructed.

What he's done here, then, is turn a song that regards an object of desire with debasement and disgust into a song that regards an object of desire as something to be connected with, included, freaked. It is, I think, an absolutely astounding bit of pop magic, a slight of hand so deft as to reveal itself only with a wink.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

2008-04-21T07:48:00.003-05:00

Hi readers. As you may or may not know, I am currently a grad student, and I could use your help with some research. If you are an American citizen or current resident of the U.S., please take my survey. It's very simple and should take, at most, five minutes to do, but will be very helpful to me. Thanks!

The survey

You Can't Fight Forever

2008-04-18T20:47:00.001-05:00

I neglected to link it below, but Todd's paper, on anti-rave laws in Britain, is online. You should read it.

Four Minutes (To Save the World)

2008-04-18T09:12:00.003-05:00

I haven't said anything about the EMP conference here because I've had something of a hard time figuring out how to organize my thoughts. While there were excellent presentations, particularly J.D. Considine's and Todd Burns', I came away with a general sense of unease, but without anything specific to hang it on. Specifically, I was uneasy about many presenters' understanding of the conference's theme: politics.

Now, though, I think I've found a good example of what troubled me in a post by a conference attendee, Carl Wilson. I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Carl here--I really am just trying to get at a persistent point of view that irks me. Most critics who espouse that point of view are unreadable, at least by me, and so I wouldn't be able to find an example in their work because I don't read them. Carl, on the other hand, I am happy to read, and consistently do. He is a very good writer who occasionally wades into this stuff and makes me cringe. I don't think it makes other people cringe, though. So that's what I'm trying to get at here: the source of the cringe.

Carl's post is not about the conference itself, but about Barack Obama's recent "bitter" gaffe. Nevertheless, I think it gets at something fundamental about how many cultural critics think about politics. Carl talks about how the gaffe reflects a problem the left has with understanding where people's beliefs come from and how valid those beliefs are.[1] He compares it to Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, with its theory that working-class small-town Americans had been duped by the right into giving up their economic self-interest in favor of socially conservative politics that did them no good, and to his own pre-book attitude toward Celine Dion. To quote:

I thought a lot about these questions with regard to Celine Dion. There was a time when I would have figured that listening to Celine, like going to big blockbuster Hollywood movies, was a kind of false consciousness - being seduced by a materialistic Disneyland escapism that says nothing about real people's lives. I could have written a "What's the Matter with Celine Dion?" critique parallel to Frank's, claiming that people were being duped into listening to fairy-tale fantasy music sold to them by the very people who were strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence.

But when I listened to Celine's music more and talked to her fans, I realized that she did, in fact, reflect her audience's values and concerns back to them in complicated ways - how to be at once strong, modern and feminine, for example, or the fate of tradition and family and community in an era of globalization and mass media - and that the more "rebellious" music that I used to think superior to the mainstream is often indifferent or hostile to those values and concerns. So why should they want it?

I came to think that everybody has a "false consciousness" of one kind or another, because everybody's cultural tastes are the product of their social experiences and position (including critics and rebels and radicals, seeking affirmation in the beliefs and culture they approve). Which is the same thing as saying no one has false consciousness. It's not that all beliefs are equally valid, but you won't get anywhere by assuming or claiming that other peoples' beliefs are inauthentic...

If we want to assert the importance of multiculturalism, adventurous art, minority cultures, reproductive freedom, then we have to recognize that some other people are equally attached to and serious about their religions, their social values, their leisure activities, their "American" culture.

Coming from my particular cultural viewpoint and set of beliefs, to conflate "adventurous art" and "reproductive freedom" is ludicrous. In the sense that they are both things that people can have different beliefs about, they're in entirely different categories. Disagreeing about reproductive freedom is a matter of ethics and practicality. We can argue about whether the rights of a fetus are more important than the rights of a woman. We can argue about adoption, poverty, rape, or, if you want to be really tolerant toward the conservative viewpoint, "post-abortion syndrome." Such an argument can proceed from a well-structured ethical system to factual discussion about the practical consequences of different policies toward reproductive freedom.

Disagreeing about adventurous art, on the other hand, is a matter of taste. And while taste is important, the arguments you can have about it are based in nothingness. You can never really "win" an argument about the avant-garde. You can win an argument about abortion. And that's as it should be, because abortion policy has real, demonstrable consequences. I can acknowledge and respect your viewpoint on adventurous art because, if it's different than mine, it has no consequences for me. This is not the case for actual matters of politics, for matters of policy. If a lot of people dislike gay marriage, that means a bunch of my friends can't get married. If a lot of people like Celine Dion, I occasionally get annoyed while in a department store. That's not just a difference of degree, but a difference of kind.

Unless, of course, you really do think that cultural disagreements have substantial practical consequences. Carl does, I think. When he says that Celine represents people who are "strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence,"[2] that's not just department-store annoyance. That is a sort of cultural genocide, and in that case, you can have a ethical argument about cultural issues.

Which, again, seems crazy to me. But there is an entire field of study devoted to just such an idea. They've constructed a complicated--some might say a bit conspiracy-esque--theory on how cultural actions have an impact on power relations and social structure as great as, or even greater than, economic interests or public policy. You can string it together from Habermas to Zizek to various other people, all working under the assumption that culture maintains the power relations in society by distributing the ruling class' dominant messages to the public and inclucating hegemony, the new word for "false consciousness." (Note: this is the only time I will say stuff like that in this post, I promise.) And the perspective came up again and again at the conference that cultural actions--which is to say, artistic actions--had real and substantial (and almost always negative) effects on entire communities. This seems plausible when it comes to individuals, and certainly the role of culture in shaping people's identities is undeniable. But that's not what people were saying. Their arguments ran more along Carl's lines, that a strip mall eradicates the culture of a community. Moreover, there was a creepy strain of intentionality going on there, that zoning boards let strip malls in precisely so that they could accrue the benefits of destroying a community's culture. Over and over again, the most misused word in academia was invoked as shorthand for "corporations and governments are trying to destroy cultures because that is beneficial for their nefarious interests": neo-liberalism. One guy even used it to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, which there may be some sort of literature on, but which from a political perspective seemed as sensible as calling Jerry Falwell a socialist.

I don't want to bite off more than I can chew here; this is a big, big argument, and at the heart of it is a basic disagreement about how the world works. A cultural disagreement, I guess. So I'm just giving my own particular viewpoint here. Carl points out, rightly and usefully, that lefties have their own sort of "false consciousness" where they're always seeking out things that reinforce their beliefs. I think the perspective I'm highlighting here is a symptom of that. At a certain gut level, it feels right to dislike strip malls and Disney stores and multimational corporations. But which came first here? Does the elaborate theoretical framework exist, in part, to justify these beliefs? And if so, are these beliefs rational, or are they...taste? Is opposing Disney Stores merely a matter of aesthetics? From that same rationalist perspective (which, I understand, the Zizek dude dislikes?), the negative consequences of a Disney Store opening seem hard to pin down, and though we might all agree that they're distasteful, it's hard to compare it to, say, the closing of an abortion clinic, or a change in the gas tax, or welfare reform. Which actually has an effect?

So let's focus on culture for a second, to get out of this comparison. I don't think that the only problem here is the conflation of art and politics. There's also, and more immediately relevently, the consistent attempt to apply ethical standards of judgment to cultural matters. I'm happy Carl points out that we need to respect where other peoples' tastes come from. But I'm not sure you get a cookie for that. Being curious and respectful of what other people like isn't the goal of criticism, but the base standard for responsible criticism. I'm aware that this is not necessarily a consensus view, and I've heard many people say their minds were opened by Carl's book on Celine, which made a great argument for the value of understanding why people like things we dislike. And lord knows I sit around and bitch about bands I think are shit. But I recognize that this is play--that bitching about shitty art is part of art. It's how more art gets made, for one thing.

I don't think that people at the conference really acknowledged this distinction. They seemed very serious about the evils they were cataloguing. They were making ethical arguments. But as I said above, the only way you can make ethical arguments about cultural matters is to assume that not following proper ethical standards has some sort of practical effect on the culture itself. In Carl's formulation, "communities' cultures" are being driven "out of existence"--are being destroyed. But this argument springs from a not entirely convincing vision of what culture is and how it works. In this vision, culture is a single, unchangable thing, that is how it has always been, and when it interacts with changing conditions, it doesn't change, but is, instead, destroyed. Here is the local culture, a pure and unmediated thing; here is the strip mall coming in; and there goes the local culture, which no longer exists, replaced with corporate culture. Different culture are, here, like salmon roe: distinct, unchanging elements that don't interact with each other but merely wait to be consumed, and, once they come into contact with a larger element, are obliterated.

To my way of thinking, though, culture is more like a sourdough starter. It's a basis from which other things spring, that people can take from without destroying, and which reacts to the infusion of new elements by changing, not by ceasing to exist; in fact, we have to "feed it" in order to keep it alive. Any culture, no matter how "traditional" it might seem to us, is historically contingent, socially constructed, and contested. Rewind a few hundred years, or even a couple of decades, and it will look very different. Cultures have always come into contact with new things and changed, always been up for debate. By the terms we use for talking about art, almost any local culture is inauthentic. And that's how it should be. Culture doesn't thrive by standing still, it thrives through play and debate and negotiation and change. This is not to say that any change is positive--I'm happy to talk about positive and negative cultural changes. But to say that negative changes aren't changes but destructions reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of culture itself.

To bring it back to where we began: the problem isn't that we think people's beliefs are inauthentic, it's that we think their culture is authentic. The only authentic cultures are dead ones, certified and frozen by the museum treatment. Any culture worth worrying about is inauthentic as hell, and if it can't take a damn Disney Store, it's hard to see how it would've lasted very long at any point in history.

This taking of culture at face value is persistent, and, I think, unhelpful in our attempts to understand art, pop, and all the rest. To frame these debates in ethical terms is to attempt an impossible argument--to transmute taste to policy. It doesn't work. If we're going to talk about art, for god's sake, let's do it on its own terms. Let's not try and justify our tastes by making the tastes of others seem evil; let's try and figure out what's going on with those tastes in the first place, and what they have to say about the society they're situated within.

[1] Though he doesn't seem to acknowledge the contextual information about the quote that's come out, which makes clear that Obama was not so much espousing his own views as--to steal Carl's excellent language--reflecting the likely views of a potential volunteer in San Francisco in such a way as to help the volunteer be more tolerant toward the Pennsylvania voters they were going to be canvassing. Obama has stuck to his statement for political reasons--saying it was a gaffe would be a sign of weakness, and he's done very well so far with embracing his embarassments--but I think what it reflects is less Obama's own intolerance (though, let's be honest here, a black man might be forgiven for being a little intolerant toward rural Pennsylvanians) and more his continuing effort to try and get the left to think abut things in a moderate way while not necessarily giving up their actual beliefs. Maybe the difficulty he's run into reflects his occasional clumsiness at doing that, or maybe it reflects the problem with local primaries becoming national news.
[2] While this is in the context of discussing his old position, the only thing he reverses about that position is that the people who like Celine have been duped--he still believes that their communities' cultures are being etc.

Do You Know What That Means?

2008-04-09T07:56:00.003-05:00

Webbie - "Independent"

The obvious reference here is Destiny's Child, not just to the two "Independent Woman"s, but to "Bills Bills Bills." But instead of being a response song, this is more of an...agreement song? It recasts professional women in the hip-hop ideal: rich, hard-working, ambitious, and only needing the opposite sex for, well, sex. And it does so, somehow, almost entirely approvingly. These are good things for women to be.

The video undermines this a little at the beginning with its scantily-clad female students, but then actually goes beyond what the song itself claims. "Female Doctor Wins Nobel Prize," reads a fake newspaper headline, hilariously but accurately, and as the video ends, an impeached white male president has been replaced with a black female president. (With, awesomely, a full contingent of hot female Secret Service agents.) You could talk about that one for days in the current political context (the dream Democratic ticket!), and it'll probably be even more notable as a historical document a few years down the line.

What I like about this is not just that it's feminist--which it is--but that it's a specific kind of feminist. Rather than being a sex-positive feminism like you might be able to claim, were you drunk enough, that Li'l Kim espouses, or a third-wave feminism of Beyonce, the song is straightforwardly endorsing a traditional 60s, women's lib, second-wave kinda feminism. The idea of women assuming traditional male roles and becoming powerful and independent is straight outa Ms. magazine. I don't want to give the impression here that I'm saying this is unusual for hip-hop: this is unusual for any pop music, especially in the present decade, where we're lucky to get a little post-feminism thrown our way. Moreover, it's coming from men. Not only is it praising the idea of an independent woman, but it's making fun of men for opposing it.

This might not be entirely clear, since it's being expressed in the language of pop. Indeed, you could criticize the song for contradicting itself and the video for contributing to the exploitation of women, etc. etc. But in its chosen context, this is silly. Pop has always picked surface over depth, beauty over truth, and while this does not mean there is no truth or depth (just as truth often walks hand-in-hand with beauty), you can't read those surface elements as endorsing anything but aesthetics. Feminism, on the other hand, has never been so good with aesthetics. When it does try and move towards beauty, it seems to move toward feminity-as-it-is-lived and away from justice issues. So does that mean that pop, with its emphasis on aesthetics, can't be feminist?

"Independent" says nope. Where many previous attempts to integrate feminism into pop have either been non-threatening (see The Mary Tyler Moore Show), overly serious (see riot grrl), or critical of its contradictions (see Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, ad nauseum), "Independent" really does deliver a traditional women's libber message in a forthright, positive, and unmistakable way. And it does so by presenting feminism's arguments not as arguments but as foregone conclusions--as facts. This is pop's power. By being explicitly part of the mainstream, any piece of pop implies that all it contains is within the mainstream too. Webby isn't making a case for women being independent, powerful, and professionally successful--he's saying that they are all those things already, and men should recognize and respect that, because otherwise they aren't going to get laid.

And that's why it's not a contradiction. Female doctors exist, and so do inappropriately-dressed teachers and their nubile students, at least in the realm of pop. The video is just presenting them side-by-side. By so doing, it takes feminism out of the realm of the contested. It's over; feminism won. And ain't that grand? What's not to like about independent ladies? After all, as Webby points out, they can buy their men some nice-ass Gucci hats.

I Will Survive

2008-04-07T21:21:00.004-05:00

Just popping in from hell month (affectionately!) to throw a few notes your way:

1) If you liked my last EMP paper, I am going to be there again this year. Rachel Arnold and I will be presenting a paper on pop songs used as campaign songs. The paper will probably show up around these parts in the future.

2) Generally I think Stanley Fish is a tool. But apparently if you give him 40 years to think about something, he can come to a pretty reasonable conclusion on it, at least if his article about postmodernism is anything to go by. It's pretty close to what I think about all them Frenchies these days: they weren't trying to disprove rationalism or claim that physical reality doesn't exist, they were just pointing out the socially constructed nature of things and kinda leaving it at that. I don't know if that's what they were actually trying to do, but it seems like the sensible way to think about them. That said, though, there were significant differences between them, and they're important. In retrospect, we can probably call Derrida and Baudrillard the Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin of theory: provacateurs who probably didn't mean all of what they said, and don't really need to be taken seriously, even if some people do. Barthes is kinda the Robin Williams: playful and entertaining, but harmless, if occasionlly annoying in the repetativeness of his schtick. And Paul de Man is just crazy.

But--and not to be a grad student talking about Foucault here, but--Foucault is genuinely important and generally right. His histories applied the deconstructive mindset to concrete and meaningful subjects, and what he turned up helped make strange questionable truisms. In a way, what he did is basically what Gallileo did; both questioned widely-held assumptions that had a real effect on people's lives. But where Gallileo did it with geography, Foucault did it with language. And that has to be attributed, at least in some small part, to the Frenchies, or at least the environment they whipped up.

I go on about this because the rection to Fish's post is just baffling. Comment after comment complaining about postmodernism! Who knew? And this is why I point out that not all French theorists engaged in the kind of rhetoric Fish is talking about (and people are complaining about). There were some that did do legitimate work that really called into question certain things. Many people would, I suspect, agree with Foucault's take on mental illness. It's unfortunate that certain theorists have given the whole enterprise a bad name, but it's really confusing how, after Fish spends a good number of words laying out a reasonable position, people still get really worked up about deconstruction. I mean, it sucks that the one dude went to McGill and had to read Derrida, but I think most English departments these days provide ample opportunity to engage in traditional studies of literature. All the postmodernists went off and formed critical studies departments, didn't they? Oh, what do I know. Maybe Foucault isn't even part of this group.

3) I had previously posted about how much I liked the video for Mariah's "Touch My Body," but I only now realize that I really like the song too! It's dirty but assertive, the melody is really strong, and I like that Mariah's standing up for both her own sexuality and her control of the situation. The sweet way she sings "I will hunt you down" is amazing. I think it's my single of the year right now.

4) Oh yeah: thanks, Universal, for making my entire BYOP post a moot point by removing "Becky" (and two other songs) from the final version of Get Awkward. You are a bunch of enormous cameltoes.

I Can't Even Imagine Watching

2008-03-18T20:20:00.002-05:00

I was on CBC Radio One today, on the show Q, talking about "Hallelujah." The podcast is here--I start around 18 minutes in.

CBC listeners, the "Hallelujah" essay is here.

For regular readers, new content very soon. And possibly more on Hallelujah (!), or at least Jeff Buckley, since apparently not everyone agrees with me about him.

Elsewhere once more

2008-03-12T22:45:00.002-05:00

Oh, I was at Idolator again today. Of interest here would be this post on the Afganistan version of American Idol.

It Could Be Dangerous Living In This Valley

2008-03-10T12:30:00.004-05:00

If there's a contemporary band that's fallen prey to the cult of the serious, it's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Their first EP had a song about b-movies, and their early shows generally involved lead singer Karen O getting soaked with beer, whether by her own hand or by others'. They put out an album that was mainly about fucking and being awesome. Then their second album came out and it was about loneliness and sadness and ennui and it sounded like a cut-rate Nigel Godrich (that signifier of sincerity) had been allowed to spew his seed all over the tracks. What happened?

What happened was "Maps," and more specifically what happened was people missing the point the first time around. Initial reactions to the YYYs were either predictably rapturous or skeptical, reading their exuberance as shallow, fashion-victim Brooklyn kids playing simple music for simple times. But upon the emergence of "Maps," and its ascendence to minor-hit heaven, critics changed their minds. Oh, it was said, they can be serious! How great!

And look what happened: Karen O started taking herself seriously. The songs on their debut, Fever to Tell, were made from riffs and chants and sounded amazing. The songs on their second album, Show Your Bones, sounded like songwriting. We could get songwriting anywhere. Fever to Tell sounded like experimental music (Nick Zinner's playing may have recalled tha blooze, but it also sounded like Alan Licht) that functioned as rock and pop. They had managed to be experimental (notably, "Maps" was about the lead singer of furrowed-brow noiseniks Liars) without taking it seriously. But when they got so much positive reinforcement for "Maps," it signaled that this was the direction in which they should continue. What got lost was that no one might care about the YYYs in the first place without "Art Star" and "Pin."

And so Karen O embarked on one of the most symbolic journeys a rock musician can take: she moved from New York to LA.

New York is audible in almost every song the Yeah Yeahs released before the move. Sex is a quality New York and LA share, of course, but they approach it in different ways. Where, musically speaking, New York is dirty, cheap, snotty, and brash, LA is sleazy, opulent, self-important, and emo. Both of these sets of qualities can produce great music, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs thrived with songs that strutted--musically and lyrically--and fed off the energy of a city that's covered in grime, unforgiving, and intolerant of anyone taking themselves too seriously (unless you take yourself really seriously). Los Angeles encourages indulgence, but "Maps" was great because of its context within a set of songs that seemed to express an entirely different attitude. Its beauty and sincerity seemed to be let go reluctantly--it was buried on the b-side, after all--and so it came across as a kind of secret, a glimpse of the soft side of a strong, charismatic person. This is appealing in a way that an entire album of "Maps" is not. Because of the refusal to acknowledge the majesty of "Our Time" and "Tick," to recognize the entirely valid (and even important!) things those songs were doing, the exception got emphasized, and the context was lost.

Now, this is not to say that I entirely dislike Show Your Bones. The referentiality and undeniable strut of "Phenomenon" is great, and "Cheated Hearts" is as good as anything on Fever to Tell. But I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs of that first EP and first album filled a void in music extremely well. They made really great, noisy, shouty music that, as I say, worked as rock or pop. Many (many!) other bands tried to do this, but the YYYs suceeded because they had the right attitude and because every member of that band is really good at what they do. With Show Your Bones, that was lost, and the void returned.

Which is all a very long way of saying that the void has been filled quite well by Be Your Own Pet.

Now, it's a little off-putting at first to hear lead singer Jemina (!) because she does sound a whole lot like Karen O. But, crucially, she sounds like the Karen O of Fever to Tell, and since the YYYs are not making that kind of music anymore, the slot is up for grabs. I'm not entirely sure they did that on their first, self-titled album, but their new one, Get Awkward, hits the mark with room to spare.

If there's an explanation for their success, it's probably their focus on youth. As Mark Richardson says, "Much has been made of the members of Be Your Own Pet's average age," but when you're face-to-face with the album, the actual hard fact of how many years they've been on earth doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that their primary subject is the actual experience of being a teenager. Anyone could write these songs, and musicians of BYOP's age can, and do, focus on more "adult" (think "serious") themes and sounds. Karen O doesn't really sing about being young very much, except for maybe on "Our Time," and Nick Zinner's guitar doesn't sound as indebted to contemporary sounds as do BYOP's riffs. BYOP's breakthrough, then, is that you can capture the Fever to Tell energy by writing punk versions of High School Musical.

The most successful song by this criteria is "Becky," a story-song (like "Down By the Water," or "Art Star") about a girl whose friend betrays her trust and who she subsequently murders. (And which you can find here, for a while, at least until the album is out and you can buy it yourself.) It works because it is the exact opposite of high school poetry: instead of translating the banal emotional crises of adolesence into the astract language of the moon and suffering and so forth, Jemina sings very matter-of-factly about what's going on: "you signed my yearbook and that was pretty rad," "I really loved going to your slumber party," "now I'm stuck in fuckin' cellblock two." (Were I to be going through such an experience as a teenager, I would've come up with something more like "lost in a black cloud" or something. Boring!) Moreover, the actual emotions aren't dramatized, so we get "you told my secrets and it caused me a lot of pain." In other words, it refuses to take itself seriously. What it is is what it is: not timeless emotion but a simple tale of betrayal and homicide. And this is great, because timeless emotion dramatized into abstract language of the moon and blood is, generally, the same everywhere, and done better by adults. But this is specific, and therefore interesting, because it's different.

What really makes it work, though, is the attitude, which is why it can lay a claim to that YYYs energy. The character's reaction to this pain and hurt is not to go off and write poetry, but to fight back. It "doesn't matter anyway," she yells in the chorus, and "we'll kick your ass, we'll wait with knives after class!" When there's not beauty, this is what you want--action, violence, attitude! Familiar situations made awesome. And when she finally does the deed, no Lars van Trier art-directed execution for her, just the workaday grind of "juvey." It's dirty, cheap, snotty, and brash.

None of this is to say that the song is one-dimensional. She's not an unstoppable badass, but a kinda crazy kid who has regrets, who's sad, but who still blames her victim for making her into a murderous felon. The heightening of an everyday situation makes it fun, but the confusion and denial make it believable. When, at the end, she declares that "I don't regret what I've done,'cuz in the end, it was fun!" it's a good motto to live by, but in the context of the song it comes off as maniacal.

The key point, though, the part that really makes this rich and complex, is the breakdown, in which the male members of the band, who had been howling "Beckyyyy!" under the chorus, chant, "We don't like Beck-y, anymore!" But who is Becky? The only other time she comes up is in the line "It was great how you made me a friendship bracelet, but I didn't know you made one for Becky's face lift!" This implies that she's the girl to whom the vicitm betrayed the narrator, the "other girl." So why don't they like her anymore? Shouldn't it be the killer they dislike? Well, no--the killer is their bandmate, so they're on her side. What this does is to bring the other girl into the story, to give her a little spotlight. In the midst of all this over-the-top killing, we get a little glimpse of the third character standing in a corner, sad and left out--her best friend killed, another girl in jail because of it, and arguably because of her, and thus made an outcast by the other kids, who blame her for the whole thing. It's like Blur's "Country House," where after a whole song of arguably simplistic stereotype-bashing, a chant emerges of "blow, blow me out, I am so sad, I don't know why," humanizing what had previously been a cipher. We see it from their perspective. This is art.

The funny thing is that there is an entire song on Get Awkward about the perils of moving to LA. It's called "The Kelly Affair," and it's available here, where you can also read Marc Hogan's take on it. Of course, it's mainly about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, since the fake girl-band in that movie changes its name from "The Kelly Affair" to "The Carrie Nations," which is mentioned in the first line of the song, and Jemina yells a famous quote from the movie over the breakdown. ("Nothing like a Rolls!") But why does the movie resonate with BYOP enough for them to write an entire song about it? I think it's because they're from Nashville, an industry town but not for teenage punk bands, and they see moving to LA as a step toward being assimilated; it's their way of dealing with the minor fame they've built up, just as Show Your Bones was at least partially about the same thing. But where Karen O sings of alienation, Jemina makes fun of the whole idea by relating a career move to a camp classic. "It could be dangerous," she sings, and while the lyrics list pills, sex, and parties as the dangers, for a band like BYOP the danger is in losing the energy and snottiness that people have responded too--in becoming the YYYs. That, two albums in, they've managed to avoid that fate says good things about their music and their future.

(For the record: I previously worked as an accountant for the company that booked Be Your Own Pet's tours, but I no longer have any association with them. And, believe me, they book lots of bands I've bad-mouthed.)

I am elsewhere again

2008-03-07T09:48:00.002-05:00

I'm guest-blogging at Idolator today. Come say hi!