I Can't Wait to See You Again

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.

Labels: britney, gossip girl, hannah montana, narrative, reality tv, theory, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 9:08 PM 17 Comments

Strikeouts are boring

“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.

Labels: jonas brothers, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 4:13 PM 3 Comments

Four Minutes (To Save the World)

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.

Labels: carl wilson, emp, politics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:12 AM 15 Comments

I Will Survive

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.

Labels: academia, announcements, emp, notes, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:21 PM 6 Comments

Making the Rules

I just read the two-chapter exerpt of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about the Celine Dion album, and one part kinda jumped out at me:

"[I]t’s curious how often critics’ “own enjoyment” still takes us all down similar paths at once."

This reminded me of an article I was reading last week trying to figure out why thousand of different news journalists all seem to come up with the same stories on a daily basis, and why the nightly newscasts on the different networks all lead with the same stories despite not discussing it with each other. The answer was that there are certain news rules, which can be divided up into "regulative" and "constituative" rules, the former of which decides how news is to be gathered and the letter decides what is news. So, for instance, ideas about balance and objectivity would be regulative rules, but the thousand of little signposts journalists have in their head about what exactly is a story in the first place are constituative rules. So for music critics, there are clear rules about how a review is to be set up and what processes you should go through before writing a review (even when these rules are violated, they are consciously violated, as when Meltzer writes a review without listening to the album or Pitchfork posts a YouTube video of a monkey drinking his own pee as a Vines review), but there are also a shared, constantly shifting set of guidelines about what's an important album and what's not. The records that get lots of critical notice aren't necessarily the albums individual critics love the most; they're just the albums most critics will pay attention to and write about, no matter how strong their feelings. The fact that something obscure lands near the top of a year-end list doesn't necessarily mean everyone agrees it's the best, it's just that lots of people think other people should be listening to it. The precise things that make an album attract lots of critical attention are hard to nail down and can't usually be consciously included, but once an album lands in that category, it's easy to see the signs.

The article also talked about, though, the fact that these rules aren't naturally occurring; they come from the audience that the journalists are serving. So ideas about how a review should be written come from what an audience needs from a review, and rules about what constitutes a meaningful, important album come from critics' perception of the public's need-to-know. This was, after all, why critics ultimately felt secure ignoring pop music: the public was taking care of that on their own. But just as some stories are news because the public is perceived to need the information, critics think the public needs to be informed about difficult musics. Wilson says it himself: "my usual critical leanings [are] toward knotty music like art rock, psych-folk, post-punk, free jazz or the more abstract ends of electronics and hip-hop. I write about such sounds in the belief that 'difficult' music can help shake up perceptions, push us past habitual limits." Music critics elucidate the public by picking these albums, they don't express their own tastes.

We all like to think we're unique snowflakes, of course, but music critics--and, to a certain degree, serious music fans--are also professionals. There are rules. And we do fight about them, but these fights always seem to have as one view the idea that the rules don't exist. But they do, and they come from a very particular place: the public. The article also talks about how the public's needs for news journalism are now changing, so news rules may change too. The music industry is changing, and music critics tried to change what the public wants from music criticism. It seems like they failed, though, and the old patterns are still in place, strong as ever.

(crossposted from poptimists)

Labels: carl wilson, critics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:56 PM 1 Comments

Media Violence: A Contrary View

I'm currently doing a review of the literature on TV violence, and it is enormously frustrating. All the meta-analyses insist that there is a widespread and definite consensus on the connection between televised depictions of violence and violence in society, that images of murders and deaths leads to actual murders and deaths. But then when you look at the evidence being used to conclude that, the proof simply isn't there. What it proves is that when you watch isolated examples of media violence, for a short time afterwards you are more likely to act more agressively than you would have otherwise. But being more agressive is a long, long way away from violent crime, and no one's worried about TV violence causing more shoving.

The typical study used to prove the connection goes something like this: you do an experiment where you get two groups of kids and you show one group some violent scenes and the other some non-violent scenes, then you let them play together and see how they act. And yes, it's been pretty well proven that the kids who saw the violent clips will act more agressively. But they are not going out and murdering people. Certainly we can all see that acting more agressively could conceivably eventually lead to being more murderous, but if all you can prove is that seeing Batman cartoons makes kids pushier, it would take a whole hell of a lot of cartoons to get them to the point where they're knife-wielding maniacs.

Showing that televised violence causes short-term aggression doesn't show that TV violence actually results in an increase in violent crime. The few studies I've seen that do attempt to prove this are highly problematic.[1] For instance:

According to Centerwall, prior to television's emergence in the United States, the national homicide rate was 3 per 100,000. By 1974, the homicide rate had doubled. Centerwall agues that this increase is directly linked to massive exposure to television throughout the culture.

Now, those of you not making your living as media-violence researchers can probably already see a few problems with this claim, mainly having to do with other changes besides the invention of TV in that period, like increased urbanization, changes in firearm technology, drugs, etc. But what makes me actively angry is that the statistic he's quoting is not true.

Take a look at this graph of the national homicide rate since 1900 and see if you notice anything:



Centerwall is not only picking two data points extremely convenient to his argument (the little valley around 1942 and the spike around 1972), but the ones outside his cherry-picked range directly contradict his hypothesis. In the 30s, prior to the introduction of TV, the homicide rate was at the highest level it would hit until the 70s, and in the 10 years following the introduction of TV, the homicide rate hit--and maintained--the lowest level since 1910. If Centerwall was looking at this same graph, and presumably he was, he was doing something awfully close to lying.

Plus, though Centerwall couldn't have known about it since he was writing in 1989, the current homicide rate is pretty darn close to the homicide rate when TV came around. This is something you'd think today's supporters of media violence effects would have to explain if they want to continue to insist that media violence causes violence in society. Or has TV itself gotten less violent? The beginning of the current decline seems to roughly coincide with the premiere of The Sopranos, and so by that evidence, extreme media violence has actually served to lessen violent crime.

The counter to these sorts of points is that there is no way to experimentally prove that TV violence leads to homicides, since for practical and ethical reasons you can't do it. After all, how would you? Force someone to watch so much violent TV that they eventually snapped and killed someone? Following around enough people--and, judging by the above graph, enough people would be around 50,000--to find one that actually committed murder so we could analyze their TV-watching habits?

But it seems to me that if you can't prove that media violence leads to violent crime, then you can't say that media violence leads to violent crime. And people, even well-informed people, do. Here, for instance, is a quote from an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

[T]he epidemiological evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.

Certainly we can all agree that excessive exposure to violent imagery is probably not the best thing, and children should probably be kept away from violent TV shows to whatever extent is practical. But even leaving aside the many other objections to TV violence research--that it confuses the existence of violence in the mass media with people's actual viewing of violence in the mass media, that people generally don't watch only violent programming or only the violent bits of programming when watching TV, that agression is not violence, and is certainly not violent crime--the fact that the agreed-upon findings (i.e. that exposure to TV violence leads to short-term agressive behavior) cannot be linked to any actual increase in violent crime, except by willfully misinterpreting statistics, shows that no responsible person should be making such outrageous and inflammatory claims. And, clearly, no one should be claiming that there is a consensus that media violence leads to real violence; if it exists, it is a false one, and I think to anyone concerned with responsible scholarship, it is a troubling one.

[1] Inside-baseball qualification: I'm ignoring Gerbner's cultivation theory here, because to me it seems to argue not for violent crime as a media effect, but for fearfulness or acceptance of consumerism. Lord knows I could be wrong though.

Labels: media studies, theory, TV, violence

posted by Mike B. @ 3:14 PM 4 Comments

Libertarian Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Comedy Central recently started running a cartoon called Lil' Bush. It's set loosely during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, with all the players in the current political scene present as children. The main characters are the main characters in the original G.W. Bush administation, except with "Lil'" in front of their names: Lil' Condi (who has a crush on Lil' George), Lil' Cheney (who talks like a mix between Boomhauer and the Penguin), and Lil' Rummy. Also, Lil' Jeb, who acts like a dog for some reason. It's been generally panned, seemingly because it debuted as cell-phone-only content, which is always mentioned, and despite the fact that the creator, Donick Cary, wrote for The Simpsons, which is almost never mentioned.

It's a great show, though, in large part because it's not a Robert Smeigel-style one-off, so it can't just coast on the "Bush is a small child!" concept. It has to function as a cartoon in addition to functioning as a satire--it has to work in the way a regular ol' non-satirical cartoon does. And while it does engage in some parodying of its less-respectable cartoon forebears, with its opening credits featuing the Lil' characters jamming as a band for no particular reason a la Jem and many plots being resolved in schematically the same way they would be on Heathcliff[1], it still provides potent does of the silliness and absurdism that people have always come to cartoons for. (Take a look at old Looney Tunes shorts sometime and ignore the fact that all that stuff has become conventions and a common grammar. Is a talking meatball really that much more ridiculous than a coyote building a series of elaborate traps to catch a trickster bird?) The characters' status as children allows them to be cute--which is good--and also makes the offensive things more offensive. So, for instance, in the episode where the gang goes to camp ("Camp Lil' Camp David"), it allows the writers to tweak, revel in, and exploit all the conventions of a "going to camp" episode. The familiar structure provides opportunities for character-driven jokes (all Lil' George cares about is pranking), while at the same time the expectation of light conflict makes the discovery of an Al-Quaeda training camp as Camp Lil' Camp David's rivals (and the subsequent sending of a video in which one of the campers apparently has body parts sawed off) more surprising and thus more funny. The overall argument is not that Bush is dumb, but that Bush is unserious--in a world filled with real threats and real consequences, he blithely pursues his own individual interests and is saved only by a combination of luck and priviledge.

It's also notable, though, because it's the first of a number of attempts[2] at making sustained, character-based fun of the current administration to succeed both as comedy and as politics, the former in that it's funny and the latter in that it has a coherent and accurate point. You might recall Will Ferrell disowning his impression of George W. Bush as making him seem too nice of a guy and too harmless, more like a lost puppy than someone dangerously unfit to govern. Most other anti-Bush humor has been too self-righteous and desperate to really work as comedy, which requires both sympathy with and superiority to its subject.

The most obvious comparison, of course, is with the other show Comedy Central aired about George W. Bush: That's My Bush! It was created by South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone and premiered shortly after the 2000 election (they said they were prepared to do one about Gore if he won, although I forget the less-hilarious title they had picked for his version of the show) and it wasn't very good, having little relation to any of the actual people being represented. Bush was just a lovable schlub, the other adminsitration members were his frustrated handlers, and the whole thing proceeded self-consciously as a parody of old laugh-track sitcoms. (See above about rising above your concept.) Non-Americans seem to like it, of course, but non-Americans seem to regard opposition to Bush as heroic rather than, you know, something at least half the country has done for most of his term. It didn't last more than three months.

It did, however, suggest some interesting things about Parker and Stone, which were later more or less confirmed in their movie Team America: World Police. It was doomed from the start given that it was their cinematic follow-up to the South Park movie, i.e. probably the Funniest Thing Ever, but it did fairly well for itself when it stuck to wonderfully ambiguous jokes about jingoistic action movies and jingoism in general. The rest, though, was their Ouroboros moment, a likely byproduct of too much time spent in Hollywood: everyone with an anti-war viewpoint was a celebrity who didn't know what they were talking about. While we can all agree that Sean Penn should shut the fuck up, I don't think we spend too much time thinking about it, and whatever point they had to make seemed to be limited to a three-square-mile area of California. They seemed far less interested in expressing any kind of fundamental truth or meaning than they did in pointing out how people who are obviously wrong are obviously wrong.

Which is another way of saying that they're libertarians. A libertarian is what you say you are if you're a white male member of the entertainment industry who wants to talk about politics without alienating certain segments of your fanbase, and it basically means you're a liberal, but not one-a them wussy liberals like Tim Robbins[3]--think Bill Mahr. You still talk about things being "politically correct," even though no one else has for 15 years. The theory is that this makes you look like you don't care about, and in fact hate, ideology and political parties, which is kind of like saying you're a baseball fan but think teams are stupid. Small-l libertarianism (which Stone and Parker have basically admitted to) is an almost entirely superficial way of thinking about politics, like constructing an ideology out of Maureen Dowd columns. "Everybody is wrong but me" is their rallying cry, and while that's an undeniably attractive one to consumers from crochety old men to emo kids, it's not a political viewpoint but an apolitical one. It's an attempt to opt out of something no one who interacts with other human beings can avoid. The social contract's a bitch, ain't it?

As usual, we can probably blame the boomers for this. They came along in the late 60s and decried politics based on one issue, Vietnam, that would have essentially corrected itself just as effectively without their help. They've lionized this moment ever since, despite the fact that what was accomplished through politics before them and outside them (school integration by the force of the friggin' military, civil rights, all of Johnson's great society programs) far outstripped anything brought about by their politics of no-politics; they also let douches like John Kerry have political careers. The party system has never been the same, although structural changes like open primaries account for a decent portion of that, and declaring yourself an independent, above the messy fray of politics and too smart to engage with other people's opinions, which are inevitably wrong, has increasingly been the thing to do. People have somehow gotten the impression that a political party is useless unless it precisely mirrors each and every one of their personal views, that unless a given candidate agrees with them on every issue, or even if they're insufficiently strenuous on a particular issue, then politics has failed. But the whole point of politics is that you can't always get what you want in a society of several million people. Politics is the process by which we negotiate the different things people want, need, think are right, and think are wrong, which unless you set up the kind of convenient scenarios Parker and Stone have a tendency to do, are rarely clear-cut. You're not supposed to get what you want in politics, and that doesn't mean politics doesn't work, but that it does.

Then again, maybe Team America: World Police was just ahead of its time. Back in 2004, when it seemed like no one was against the war, criticizing the few people who were (however incoherently and self-centeredly) speaking out against it seemed like strangling the baby in its crib, and to align yourself with a conservative viewpoint that has actually been since proven wrong. But before they were, the climactic speech seemed, well, a little too jingoistic:[5]

We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!

In restrospect, though, Trey and Stone have always been decidedly sympathetic to the left, even if they do criticize it[4], and in this post-Iraq world, that speech reads more like a corrective to the isolationist drift that the Bush doctrine has set liberals on. War's bad, sure, but so are genocides and civil wars and all sorts of things that we might be able to stop. As Madeline Albright said, if we're paying for this giant military, we should use it. Just because the current administration picked maybe the absolutely wrongest country possibile to intervene in doesn't mean that intervening in countries is bad, no more so than adding kimchee to strawberry shortcake means that kimchee is bad, and if we can accomplish the kind of things we did in Bosnia et al--well, if the dicks can do some good, what's wrong with a little fucking? It all depends on what you define as an asshole.


[1] The analysis of which was a watershed moment in structuralist criticism for me, at least as an eight-year old. I somehow never managed to crack the code of Scooby-Doo until I was well into my adulthood, which is super embarassing.
[2] There's an odd tradition of long-lasting political humor that I've never quite understood. The most famous example is The First Family, a parody of the Kennedies released in 1962 that sold enough copies to be as ubiquitous as Journey and Frank Sinatra at garage sales and used record stores. Essentially, the things being made fun of are all as time-sensitive as, say, the astronaut who wore a diaper, but peeing-astronaut jokes are told on TV and then disappear, whereas Presidential humor gets enshrined on albums and DVDs. Maybe that's just because Presidents stick around so long and inevitably do a lot of things you can make fun of, but regardless, it's interesting.
[3] In the 80s I guess this would be "like Alan Alda," which I only know from reading old comic strips and still don't really understand.
[4] Conservatives who think South Park is on their side would seem to think making fun of liberals necessarily implies you're against, say, gay marriage, in which case all my friends should be fighting with each other a lot more.
[5] And apparently endorsing the invasion of North Korea due to Kim Jong Il being a space alien.

Labels: cartoons, comedy, libertarians, lil bush, politics, south park, theory, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 7:46 AM 2 Comments

Recombinant Pop

To what degree does metaphor shape reality? In 1946, ENIAC, the first modern digital computer, becomes operational; in 1953, Watson and Crick announce the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA; a few years later, transistors replace vacuum tubes as computers' primary physical component, and the digital age kicks into high gear. Before was analog, with individual elements constituting a fungible whole. Now there are bits: discrete units that are in one of two states, forming no whole, and thus able to be reordered and added to or taken away from. Part of one bit can never pass into another bit, because nothing constitutes them beyond themselves. They are discrete, interchangeable units. Early programming methods, like punch cards, emphasize this granularity.

DNA, it turns out, works in a similar way. It is built from four separate nucleotides, each occupying a place on the DNA strand, and with a matching nucleotide joining it in the other helix. They're bits, but with four states instead of two. By changing the state of a given element on the strand, you change the output. Each unit is the same; only the information it relays is different, and this is changeable.

Obviously the model of recombinant DNA suggests a certain metaphor, and that metaphor takes a different form with digital computing. Would computers have developed as rapidly as they did without the presence of this metaphor? John von Neumann says why not, but he wanted to bomb Russia before they could get the bomb themselves, so maybe he's not the guy we should be listening to. [1] Still, perhaps it's not the best example.[2]

So let's take music. And let's take ourselves. We sit around and we listen to music on computers, read about music on computers, talk about music on computers. Some of us--many of us--make music on computers, or DJ on our computers. And those of us who write about music do, as a group, like certain things you don't really find lots of other people liking, at least not as a group's canon. We like extended remixes, mixtapes, mashups, DJ sets. We like hip-hop that refers to its own history, that uses samples smartly, that's been chopped and/or screwed. We like rock music that alludes to literary or musical antecedents, and music that sounds like chart pop but isn't. We like[3] Jacques Lu Cont, Destroyer, Girl Talk, Kanye, Soulwax, the Scissor Sisters. Look at that list: dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It doesn’t make any sense; surely that's not a genre. Is it?

Consider the metaphor through which all of that is viewed. Here we are at the computer, looking at pixels on a screen produced by information contained in bits, or listening to sound encoded as a series of numbers. We can take songs out of their context on an album and put them up on a blog (at this point, we're actively encouraged to do so). We can take part of one song and mix it with part of another song with the greatest of ease. We can hear lyrics and cross-reference them with other lyrics, hear a sample and look up its source, then download it. The world comes to us now in bits. So let's call it something. Let's call it recombinant pop.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time: composers writing pieces based on themes by other composers, or quoting past works or folk tunes in their melodies; early recording artists stealing all sorts of things from their contemporaries (see below)[4]; and all sorts of things in other artforms, from portraits with another painter's work in the background to the real-life figures in the Inferno to, shit, the Book of Revelation. But where before these referential touches were largely filigrees, now they're the crossbeams. Technology has played a huge role in this, in ways so obvious that they don't really deserve explicating, but in short, music-making technology has now made it easier to use existing music to make new music than to play your own, and the internet's ability to provide almost any piece of music from the entire history of recorded sound has expanded the amount of existing music available to any individual exponentially. Whereas before, there were severe technological restrictions on reusing music[5], now there are almost limitless possibilities.

Recombinant pop, then, is a genre that's different from most other genres in that it's defined not by the set of sounds it uses, but the method by which it's made. (Kinda like 12-tone.) If a rock band plays a song that consists of four harmonicas playing an hour-long staggered drone, that's not rock music, even if they wrote the piece by getting together in a practice space with drums/guitars/bass and jamming until they came up with something cool. But if you make a song by throwing together a bunch of pre-existing sounds, it's recombinant pop. The use of identifiably pre-existing pieces of music as the elements of creation are prized rather than inspiration. Inspiration plays a part, but that presupposes originality, which is obviously a non-starter here. Craft matters--craft always matters, but here even more so, because there aren't the excuses of "energy" or heroic artistry to fall back on. What did you pick? How did you use them? How does it sound?

It's also defined, though, by how we listen to it. This isn't unusual: different people can hear Wilco as jazz or rock or indie, and they can comfortably fit into all those genres exclusively yet simultaneously. It just depends on how you hear it. So recombinant pop can be, as said above, dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It can always be appreciated without knowing the referents. But once you start hearing those, and seeing their connection with each other and with what lies outside the song, it's part of this genre.

Let it not be said, however, that this isn't an aesthetic experience. One of the things recombinant pop has shown us is that aesthetics can absorb meaning. When you hear a recognizable sample in a song, your reaction to it isn't predicated on stopping and thinking about the release date and cover art of the song being sampled.[6] It's more like a joke: an unconscious reaction to something familiar being found where you didn't expect it to be. There's a bear in that closet! There's Elton John backing Biggie! That horse farted! You got Sting to willfully misinterpret his own song!

That's the recombinant part, but what about the pop? Well, one of the interesting things about this kind of music is that it's always contextual. The meanings being conveyed are necessarily of-the-moment, since meanings aren't fixed. There's a reason mashups almost always feature a current pop song as one of their elements, and it's because that frisson of combination comes from the temporary rubbing up against something that's endured.[8] (Also known as the "rappin' grandma" effect.) Similarly, referential rock or hip-hop always refers to something the intended audience will be familiar with, but this body of knowledge also changes, and so the reference is temporary, or at least floating. This quality of explicitly and self-consciously existing within a particular place in time is a big part of recombinant music's power.

But people tend to see this as a negative. Mashups, for instance, are often called too easy, or flavor-of-the-week. But this is exactly what people say about pop, and have said about pop since people were making the pop music that we regard today as fully canonized classics. (The Beatles!) Far from being a negative, though, maybe this is what recombinant pop is aiming for. It's created by people who feel alienated from or shut out of the pop mainstream, and so they create an alternate form of pop, still populist and transitory, but narrowcast enough to seem credible within the subcultures they operate, although ironically enough this credibility has the capacity to attract a wider audience.

If I sound a bit reserved in my praise, it's because the most prominent examples of this form--remixes and mashups--are still in their infancy. But we can see improvement: from "A Stroke of Genius," mashups moved through Ozymandias' fifteen-minute-long megamixes and Cex/Kid606's jamming cut-ups and beats under strung-together rap verses to Girl Talk's carefully orchestrated production of what can be legitimately called an album. Remixes, too, have begun to move from enjoyable-but-simplistic "make it dancier" exercises to true reinventions. To be pretentious, here's what I said about it in a recent review:

It would be interesting to see the remix collection taken more seriously as an
artistic form. Just as some bands have taken to covering entire albums, a
remixer could take an album and remix every track, with an eye less for their
individual impact than for their coherence and the way in which they play off
the original in productive and illuminating ways. Sure, there was that rash of
album-length mashups, but those lacked the access that a remixer has to not only
the a capellas but every individual track. It's unlikely that a band would offer
someone else that kind of freedom, and even less likely that someone else would
want to invest the time necessary to make it work. But it sure would be
interesting, no?

This is just one avenue the form could pursue, but there are many others. One of its great advantages is that it actively encourages incorporating outside influences, and so individual artists might begin to borrow from their peers, rather than keeping strictly to non-recombinant sources. It's exciting to watch.

What could kill it, though, is the law. The law has its problems, and certainly needs to be changed; since you're on the internet, you probably know the usual suspects. But what's interesting is that the law hasn't changed all that much, at least not in terms of your standard-issue we-made-some-msic-and-are-putting-it-out-on-some-sort-of-physical-object scenario. In Douglas Wolk's book on James Brown's Live at the Apollo, there are a number of songs whose history, as he recounts it, sound nothing short of criminal. People steal songwriting credit, people steal other people's riffs, people blatantly replicate a hit song and release it without any compunctions. Some of this is illegal and some of it isn't, but if an established record label today caught wind of it, this would likely be enough to halt the release, let alone if it was sampling entire verses from other songs. The reason isn't that they would get successfully sued so much as they would get threatened with a lawsuit, and dealing with that costs time and money[9], especially when you're in the kind of legal gray area that these sorts of examples represent.

The point, though, is not that the law is too harsh, but maybe that the labels are too lawsuit-happy. There's a whole spiel here that I've probably written elsewhere, but suffice to say that once you're a corporation the benefits to litigation start to drastically outweigh the drawbacks. Despite all the quasi-legal/clearly illegal business that Douglas details in his book, though, it seems like the people involved didn't really sue each other. Oh sure, lots of people got really screwed, and they probably should have sued. But if they hadn't been able to release a song that had a legally questionable background, it's unclear how music would have developed. Douglas points out (I think) that James Brown basically invented funk by yelling over cover songs until the song part disappeared, and if those songs weren't there for him to yell over…who knows?

So the law needs to be changed, yes, but in the meantime there is a model to emulate. One of the benefits of grabbing from your peers is that, if they're doing the same thing, there's far less impetus to start flingin' lawyers. This sort of arrangement is already in place to a certain degree, with mixtapes and Illegal Art and unofficial remixes released online. This, too, is in its infancy, so we'll see where it goes.

The law is the ultimate example of a metaphor that's become reality. Words are written and they become actions: because someone wrote that you aren't allowed to pee in public, if you do, someone can come around and lock you up. If something takes on the designation "illegal," that changes the reality in which it operates. Meanings shift, contexts change, but law stays the same.


[1] Damn fine job with the game theory, though.
[2] Although SIGARCH did put out a paper on the double-helix model of computing in 1986, so it can't be that far off.
[3] Or liked, anyway.
[4] Unexpectedly, I'm finding myself echoing a Congressman in this. I like this a lot, mostly because when netnerds get on the subject (and boy do they ever), they come at it like it's some social justice issue, whereas it's, you know, playing a Beatles song and a Jay-Z song at the same time--not exactly gay marriage.[7] This is presenting it as a political/legal issue, which is way more interesting.
[5] Check out the specs on the old samplers--wahoo sampling and all, but you only got a few short snippets to work with on even the best equipment.
[6] By the way, Mark, if I'm a poptimist, then this is popism, OK? I'm not going to claim that particular term at this juncture, but come on. Pleasure's opposed to difficulty, not meaning. Modernism, dude!
[7] (insert your own joke here)
[8] Presumably one day people will be pairing current Swizz Beats productions with whatever pop style is popular then, which I imagine will be something along the lines of children chanting political slogans over pitch-shifted whalesong. Hott!
[9] Since the company's gone under, maybe now some of this shit can be told. Of course, this is all ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY. Remember when "The Ketchup Song" was a huge hit? The label I was working for distributed a single released by a label we had an agreement with, and this single was a blatant rip-off of "The Ketchup Song." (I think it may have even been credited to "The Catsup Girls.") Well, the problem is, the company that released the actual Ketchup Song distributed our label internationally. Who knows what happened, but suffice to say we dropped the single, and the company putting out the cash-in song sued the hell out of us. I won't say how much money it cost just to get that dismissed, but it was enough to finance the release of at least two albums.

Labels: comedy, pop, recombinant pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 10:17 PM 0 Comments

Everyone's a Cynic

It's hard to think of a show that's ever had as good a year as The Colbert Report did in 2006. It was its first year of existence, and no one was really sure it was going to make it. The Daily Show didn't really seem like something you could spin off, let alone spin off with someone whose best-known bit was "This Week in God." Good stuff, but how is that a half-hour program?

Well, suffice to say the show justified its existence. By the time it broadcast its last episode in December, one devoted entirely to a guitar duel between Colbert and one of the Decemberists, the show managed to attract both a devoted fanbase that Colbert delighted in exploiting as well as guests of increasingly high stature. And they did all this without significantly changing their approach. They just waited for people to come to them, and it worked.

What is that approach? In a nutshell: effusive cynicism. The Colbert Report is undoubtedly the most cynical show in America, and it's paid off enormously for them. You realize just how cynical it is when you compare it to its sister program. The Daily Show promotes the image of a sane oasis in a crazy world, never content simply to show you what's wrong when they can also explain why it's wrong[1], albeit sarcastically, and they even go so far as to suggest alternate policies at times, again sarcastically. But sarcasm is a language we all speak now, so much so that it no longer sounds like a foreign tongue. The most sincere among us (left-wing college students, say) routinely use sarcasm as a way of belittling our opponents, and it's worked its way into modern usage enough that we hear the sincerity simultaneously with the sarcasm. There's no translation, only synonyms. Begin a sentence with "Yes"[2] and it's as sure a reversal as slapping "ne" and "pas" around a French verb.

The main exceptions are the correspondents / "experts," of which Colbert was one before he left. They deliver their reports with a straight face, and this is a big part of the humor. But after their segments, they almost always talk with Stewart, and here the "we are sanity" feeling comes back in: they make some outrageous statement that's recognizable as an exaggeration of what someone else has said, and then Stewart plays the straight man and asks them the questions we ourselves would ask them if we didn't know they were making a joke. It's effective, but it's giving the audience an out, making the correspondent into the object of ridicule before our eyes rather than requiring the audience to make that leap.

On Colbert's show, this almost never happens. The attitude seems to be that the things they're parodying are so obviously absurd that they don't need to hold the viewers' hands. There's no critique necessary, no explanation of why the things they're saying are wrong. The correspondent stands alone, with no one to question him except his guests, who rarely succeed. This is a bleak view of society, one that simply repeats what it hears, raises its eyebrows slightly, and waits for a laugh.

The thing is, the laughs didn't really come at first. If you watch those early programs, people don't really get it: jokes fall flat, and guests seem genuinely outraged at the things Colbert is saying, even though they're on a network called "Comedy Central." No one seemed to know quite how to handle him, whether they should play along or take him at face value. It's hard to say if they'd be funnier now, if the jokes simply weren't up to snuff, but in terms of approach, it was essentially the same. Did this mean that their cynicism was unwarranted, that in fact things weren't so bad that you could offer up a simple parody in place of show-and-tell jokes?

Well, yes and no. Certainly people are actually laughing now, and comedy does require passing a certain tipping point of laughter before people really feel comfortable braying along, so maybe it's just that momentum built enough for them to cross that barrier. But the cynicism has been validated in unexpected ways. People have noted the ways in which Colbert's show has come to resemble the shows it's parodying, like The O'Reilly Factor, particularly in regards to the devoted fanbase mentioned above. Colbert has built up a cult of personality around himself, so much so that he's able to get his fans to engage in coordinated collective action, and the ability he has to control his audience, down to the second he wants them to stop cheering, is a little scary.

This isn't a criticism of the show, though--it is the final proof of its cynicism. By managing to encourage this level of devotion, they've shown just how easy it is--so easy that a comedian can do it. And the appeal of this sort of rhetoric is so strong that even when it's being used sarcastically, it's incredibly effective. Colbert's fans read through the cynicism and take the sincerity they see on the other side just as fervently as O'Reilly's fans do. If this were The Daily Show, this might be something to discourage. But the genius of Colbert's show is that it's absolutely committed to its cynicism. It's ridiculous that people will do whatever Colbert asks them to do, it's ridiculous that he could get Henry Kissinger to introduce a guitar duel and the newly-elected governor of New York to judge it. They've created such a good imitation that it functions in exactly the same way as what it's making fun of, and that's spectacular.

It's still cynical, though, and that's important to keep in mind. As effective a piece of performance art as The Colbert Report is--utilizing mixed media, enabling interaction, drawing power to itself and using that power without restraint, just as its subject would--it all springs from a fundamentally cynical point of view. This rings false: cynicism seems to encourage a disassociation with the corrupted world, so devoted to its criticism that it is unable to engage with the things it's criticizing, and when it's criticizing society, the cynic sits outside it. Colbert has shown that you can be incredibly cynical (completely aware of the ways in which the object of study fails, clear-eyed in your evaluation of its faults) and yet use that knowledge, not simply throw it out there to prove your own superiority. They've seen exactly what's wrong with these sorts of shows and gone and pranked the world, making their points but also so cynical that they don't care if they cause exactly the same ill effects as the original. Why not? Doesn't it just prove their point more? And if you don't get the point, don't you deserve what you get? That's one way in which cynicism can be a productive force.

This is sorta-kinda the subject of an essay by Geert Lovink (!) entitled "Blogging, the nihilist impulse." It's not the greatest read in the world, full of the autistic shorthand that's infested academia, and prone to statements like "there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their 'nature' and divide them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this." Don't mess with Lovink, man, that dude can do the nearly impossible!

Anyway, this is a problem for me because there's no passage I can really quote to highlight what I'm interested in without subjecting you all to sentences like "It is constituted by cold enlightenment and by confession described by Michael Foucault." So, to summarize, Lovink[3] notes that blogging came about in this millennium, and the tenor of blogs is primarily cynical. This isn't an indictment, just an observation, and the consequence has been that there aren't grand movements (which are inherently suspicious), but the aggregation of lots of individual opinions, all of which can still think they're precious unique snowflakes, into a received wisdom.

He's right, and it's useful to acknowledge the inherently cynical nature of blogs. When I try to explain that, say, the Gawker sites aren't necessarily expressing a firmly-held and well-thought-out opinion, they're just paid to mock everything, being able to cite cynicism will help. It's also a frustrating tendency of internet culture these days, one that leads to things like blogs being thought of as worthless even by their creators and so not worth the effort to make into art rather than brands, but that's for another time; for now, it's just nice to have a name.

His point about this cynicism being useful is a good one, I think. The example of The Colbert Report highlight one strategy for utilization, but might there be others? I think so. Take pop music, for example. Almost no one involved in pop isn't cynical about it, and yet it still inspires devotion. You can see the machinery behind the music--the product placement, the obvious marketing plans, the unmistakable demographic targeting, the record company's tracklist calculus, the parade of new talent--and still enjoy the music for what it is. No one doesn't become cynical about pop, so much so that this is now a standard part of the life of a pop fan, even if fans generally won't admit it. (It's understandable--part of the pleasure of rejecting pop is thinking you see what other people don't, even if millions of people have seen it before you--but it's still unfortunate.) But people still listen to pop, still like pop, still make pop out of a love for the music. You can be cynical about something without invalidating it.

This is merely cynicism counterbalanced, though. What's interesting about pop is the ways in which cynicism can actually increase your admiration for the music. Once you're aware of the way the machine works, you can follow it and use your knowledge to become a better listener, by doing things like noticing and following particular producers and songwriters. Moreover, by being aware of the commercial obstacles that pop faces on its way to a finished CD--a condition unique to pop these days, since only pop musicians need to worry about getting someone else's approval for what they release, whereas everyone else can just burn a few thousand discs in their basement--you can gain a greater appreciation for the difficulties the artists face, and this often leads to a deeper enjoyment of their music.

Lovink said something else in there, though, something else that's notably wrong. He thinks this cynicism is a post-bubble thing, a reaction to the repudiation of the net's early utopian promises and grand schemes; like an embittered failure, so burned by his unrealized hopes that he thinks the world is shit. Well, something else happened in 2001--or, rather, two something elses happened. We got a new President, and…well, you know.

An article recently mentioned the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and it was like suddenly remembering a dream you'd had. This used to be an inspirational moment for the left, and while I'm sure it's still an inspirational moment to some, it seems impossibly distant now. Fighting over trade policy instead of occupying armies: it's almost hard to imagine. This isn't an indictment of Seattle--far from it--but an illustration of why the mood's shifted since the end of 2000. There's no reason to think the internet couldn't have been dominated by a bunch of Googles, modest start-ups that still had a gleam in their eye, but with reduced expectations and more realistic business plans. But, as I've said elsewhere, we all went a little crazy after 9/11, on all sides, and it's produced a range of reactions. But certainly there's little choice but to react to the right's version of going crazy with cynicism; there's simply no other option, given how shameless they've become. If the tenor of our times is cynical, well, there are quite legitimate reasons for that.

Point is, we don't pick the conditions under which we make art any more than we pick our upbringing or our talents. Maybe it'd be nice to have some more non-cynical art, but that's not the reality we live in right now. Pointing out the usefulness of cynicism is really just a way of pointing out the usefulness of anything that's imposed upon us from outside, be it totalitarianism or boundless prosperity or an excess of penguins.[4] Art is creative but also reactive, and since you don't get to choose what there is to react against, it's necessary to find ways to work with anything, and those ways always exist. As long as we're going to view art through the context of its times--and that's forever--this will be a concern, and not an unimportant one, either. But as Colbert demonstrates, you need to bring yourself back into the world, to use those forces to make art within it and around it and, maybe, to contain it.


[1] There's even a common moment now where Jon Stewart turns to a particular camera and addresses a newsmaker directly, with humor but without irony.
[2] "Yes, throwing yourself off a cliff would be a great idea." "Yes, democracy certainly is on the march in the Middle East!" Tone matters, but not that much.
[3] I'm giggling every time I type that, by the way.
[4] This, obviously, leads to penguin sculptures, penguin ballets, etc.

Labels: colbert, comedy, cynicism, daily show, politics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 12:30 AM 3 Comments

CSS, "Pretend We're Dead"

A disappointment, but only because it sets itself up to be one. Covering the L7 hit, they get it so right in the beginning, when they (intentionally, I presume) use the same keyboard sound found on Elastica's "Connection," and then on the bridge they conjure a legitimate dance breakdown before going back into a version of the hook that utterly transforms the hard rock into synth-pop. It's brilliant, highlighting the thread that connects dour 90s indie to shiny 00s indie, the same one that turned riot grrl, the genre from which "Pretend We're Dead" originates, into Le Tigre's synth-prop, coaxing the part of grunge that danced alone in its bedroom into the light. It's really smart, and genuinely revelatory.

But what follows the two parts I've highlighted above obliterates all those new meanings, because then the guitar comes in, and the guitarist has decided to use the exact same distortion sound you'll find in the original version of the song. It runs over the more delicate synth bits and drowns them out, making the cover into karaoke, where it can't help but fail. Where once it was a reinvention, now it's merely a gesture. "Look! The 90s!"

Call it the oppression of the original. You see this all the time: bands do a cover and feel the need to be faithful, but that's only useful when you're introducing people to the original, and that's not really why any bands except for famous ones do covers. Everyone else does a cover to draw people into your show by giving the audience something recognizable, and so, the thinking goes, if you don't play a cover exactly like it was originally, no one will recognize it, and so there's no point. Bands often approach playing covers as a technical exercise, and while that can be productive--you figure out how to make your instrument sound like the one does in the original, and maybe you've never made it sound like that before; maybe you can make it sound like that on some of your own songs--technical exercises aren't really much fun to listen to. More than anything else, though, bands cover songs they like, and they think that changing the song would be disrespectful; it's OK to do that to cheesy 80s songs, but not, you know, Jawbreaker or some shit.

If I could figure out why this attitude persists (and it absolutely does--check out any tribute album you care to, and a minimum of 75% of the entries will be "respectful"), I would do a full post about it, but I can't, so I just have a catchy name for it. RIP Baudrillaud and all, but if we're going to accept that we're in an age of reproduction, surely the original shouldn't continue to have this much power. The oppression of the original persists because our assumptions about artistic production and the purity thereof persist. And yet they're breaking down. Artists own their own creations and should have a say over their use, and yet when they say that they'd rather their albums not be downloaded for free, this is counter-revolutionary. We live in the midst of an embarassment of digital riches and instead of harvesting from what's around us, we deem that inauthentic and coo over the handmade, as if hands on a metal needle really differs from hands on a plastic mouse. The cover is the place where this is most apparent, but arguably the original's hegemony is what accounts for a lot of the problems we see right now. Time to go!

Labels: css, pop, theory, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 12:02 AM 2 Comments