I’ve enjoyed the three Pop Music Conferences sponsored by the Experience Music Project more than nearly any other conferences I’ve ever been to. I think this is because of the way the Pop Conference isn’t exclusively academic, but puts academics together with journalists and other music writers. The atmosphere is more relaxed, and much less narrow, than at your typical academic conference. Also, being a popular music conference, the connection between intellectualizing and passion for the material being discussed was much more evident than is ever the case at “proper” academic conferences.
Harvard University Press has just released This is Pop, edited by Eric Weisbard, which collects papers from the first yearly Pop Conference. It’s a good read, giving a variety of takes on a wide range of music and a wide number of topics.
My main complaint is that there’s far too little coverage of black music; “rock ‘n’ roll” remains the volume’s overly narrow focus. (There are excellent articles by Gayle Wald, on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Daphne Brooks, on “post-soul satire”; Kelefa Sanneh on hip hop; and Robert Walser on Earth, Wind, and Fire; but that’s only four essays out of 25).
While there’s no way I can comment on everything in the volume, there was one issue that came up in a number of essays that gave me pause. This has to do with “populism” in musical taste. Ann Powers, for instance, argues for the virtue of boringness and unoriginality in popular music. She says it provides reassurance, which is what many people use music for. And she pretty much says that “we” (meaning critics, I think) should appreciate the virtue of any music that appeals to any group of fans; to do otherwise is elitist and condescending. She goes so far as to reproach herself for having originally despised the White Stripes because their basic appeal is to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters who in fact know nothing about music of the past, or anything beyond their own little circle of mutual admirers. She gives a lengthy mea culpa, saying it was wrong of her to “unthinkingly limit the range of fans we really bother to try and understand.”
Powers’ theme is echoed in a number of other articles. Joshua Clover pretty much equates all value judgments about pop music with Adornoesque elitism; Robert Walser says it’s a good thing that Earth, Wind, and Fire is smarmy and cliched, because what they are really about is the “affirmation of community”; John Darnielle praises “hair metal” for creating a utopian sense of equality between band members and fans.
Now, I’ll admit I am summarizing these arguments a bit caricaturistically, in order to set up my own polemic. And I’ll note before I go any further that all four of these critics, and especially Powers and Clover, are among my favorite music writers overall, because of their passion and intelligence and ability to make unexpected connections.
But still… I’m unwilling to go so far as to say that an understanding of the social dimensions of popular music — and obviously, one cannot understand pop music at all if one abstracts away the social dimension of reception, fandom, etc — necessarily means suspending one’s own judgments, and approving of whatever any group of people do.
White supremacist rock bands and their audiences are one obvious (because extreme) example; but I would argue that the fact that the White Stripes’ music and image are calculated to appeal to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters is a valid reason to despise the band; and for me, the same goes for music that is designed to appeal to Texas Republicans, or to fundamentalist Christians, or to frat boys (the latter because they are the torment of every class I teach). (Come to think of it, President Bush fits all three of those categories).
(And I know I’m being unfair to Christian music; 99% of it is dreck, but there are beautiful exceptions like Aretha singing gospel, or the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real).
Another way to put this is to say that the “populism” which is so important to so many pop music critics right now is a vacuous category, because it is merely the negation of the elitism that these critics mostly fear. I have no interest in taking an elitist position, like Adorno, or like the indie rock and alternative hip hop purists who reject anything that departs a hair’s breadth from their rigid strictures. But I don’t think elitism vs populism is the right issue to be discussing anyway. Like the closely related high vs low culture argument, it has a history, but in our present media-, celebrity-, and commodity-drenched culture it is completely irrelevant and meaningless. There is no high or low culture any longer, except in the minds of reviewers for such inane repositories of witless blather as The New Criterion — and ironically, in the minds of certain pop music critics as well.
Another way to put this is to say that I don’t think the desire for originality and innovation is somehow an elitist modernist prejudice which ought to be purged from our souls. That’s way too puritanical an approach to take. (What we need to get rid of, instead, is the prejudice that “innovative” and “popular” are mutually exclusive. Where the modernists were elitist was in their assuming that innovation only took place in abstruse, difficult contexts. But today we all know, or we should, that, for the last fifty years, low-budget horror movies have been way more innovative than high-prestige art films; and that Timbaland is much more of an innovator than Sonic Youth or cLOUDDEAD or Autechre, much as I like and admire all of the latter).
Nor am I saying that we ought not to approve of anything that’s immoral or “politically incorrect.” I will continue to defend — as I have in this blog — music like that of, for instance, the Ying Yang Twinz, who are vile misogynistic assholes, and poseurs who pretend to be “ghetto” because they know that will make more suburban white kids buy their albums… but who have brilliant beats and great maximalist production.
It’s just that, with so much music out there, and with it reproducing so promiscuously, thanks to file sharing and mash-ups and remixes and iPod playlists and iPod “shuffle” settings and so on, it seems self-defeating to disavow singularity (by which I mean the serendipity of recombination) in favor of a “populism” that is as moribund as the elitism it opposes.
I’ve enjoyed the three Pop Music Conferences sponsored by the Experience Music Project more than nearly any other conferences I’ve ever been to. I think this is because of the way the Pop Conference isn’t exclusively academic, but puts academics together with journalists and other music writers. The atmosphere is more relaxed, and much less narrow, than at your typical academic conference. Also, being a popular music conference, the connection between intellectualizing and passion for the material being discussed was much more evident than is ever the case at “proper” academic conferences.
Harvard University Press has just released This is Pop, edited by Eric Weisbard, which collects papers from the first yearly Pop Conference. It’s a good read, giving a variety of takes on a wide range of music and a wide number of topics.
My main complaint is that there’s far too little coverage of black music; “rock ‘n’ roll” remains the volume’s overly narrow focus. (There are excellent articles by Gayle Wald, on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Daphne Brooks, on “post-soul satire”; Kelefa Sanneh on hip hop; and Robert Walser on Earth, Wind, and Fire; but that’s only four essays out of 25).
While there’s no way I can comment on everything in the volume, there was one issue that came up in a number of essays that gave me pause. This has to do with “populism” in musical taste. Ann Powers, for instance, argues for the virtue of boringness and unoriginality in popular music. She says it provides reassurance, which is what many people use music for. And she pretty much says that “we” (meaning critics, I think) should appreciate the virtue of any music that appeals to any group of fans; to do otherwise is elitist and condescending. She goes so far as to reproach herself for having originally despised the White Stripes because their basic appeal is to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters who in fact know nothing about music of the past, or anything beyond their own little circle of mutual admirers. She gives a lengthy mea culpa, saying it was wrong of her to “unthinkingly limit the range of fans we really bother to try and understand.”
Powers’ theme is echoed in a number of other articles. Joshua Clover pretty much equates all value judgments about pop music with Adornoesque elitism; Robert Walser says it’s a good thing that Earth, Wind, and Fire is smarmy and cliched, because what they are really about is the “affirmation of community”; John Darnielle praises “hair metal” for creating a utopian sense of equality between band members and fans.
Now, I’ll admit I am summarizing these arguments a bit caricaturistically, in order to set up my own polemic. And I’ll note before I go any further that all four of these critics, and especially Powers and Clover, are among my favorite music writers overall, because of their passion and intelligence and ability to make unexpected connections.
But still… I’m unwilling to go so far as to say that an understanding of the social dimensions of popular music — and obviously, one cannot understand pop music at all if one abstracts away the social dimension of reception, fandom, etc — necessarily means suspending one’s own judgments, and approving of whatever any group of people do.
White supremacist rock bands and their audiences are one obvious (because extreme) example; but I would argue that the fact that the White Stripes’ music and image are calculated to appeal to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters is a valid reason to despise the band; and for me, the same goes for music that is designed to appeal to Texas Republicans, or to fundamentalist Christians, or to frat boys (the latter because they are the torment of every class I teach). (Come to think of it, President Bush fits all three of those categories).
(And I know I’m being unfair to Christian music; 99% of it is dreck, but there are beautiful exceptions like Aretha singing gospel, or the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real).
Another way to put this is to say that the “populism” which is so important to so many pop music critics right now is a vacuous category, because it is merely the negation of the elitism that these critics mostly fear. I have no interest in taking an elitist position, like Adorno, or like the indie rock and alternative hip hop purists who reject anything that departs a hair’s breadth from their rigid strictures. But I don’t think elitism vs populism is the right issue to be discussing anyway. Like the closely related high vs low culture argument, it has a history, but in our present media-, celebrity-, and commodity-drenched culture it is completely irrelevant and meaningless. There is no high or low culture any longer, except in the minds of reviewers for such inane repositories of witless blather as The New Criterion — and ironically, in the minds of certain pop music critics as well.
Another way to put this is to say that I don’t think the desire for originality and innovation is somehow an elitist modernist prejudice which ought to be purged from our souls. That’s way too puritanical an approach to take. (What we need to get rid of, instead, is the prejudice that “innovative” and “popular” are mutually exclusive. Where the modernists were elitist was in their assuming that innovation only took place in abstruse, difficult contexts. But today we all know, or we should, that, for the last fifty years, low-budget horror movies have been way more innovative than high-prestige art films; and that Timbaland is much more of an innovator than Sonic Youth or cLOUDDEAD or Autechre, much as I like and admire all of the latter).
Nor am I saying that we ought not to approve of anything that’s immoral or “politically incorrect.” I will continue to defend — as I have in this blog — music like that of, for instance, the Ying Yang Twinz, who are vile misogynistic assholes, and poseurs who pretend to be “ghetto” because they know that will make more suburban white kids buy their albums… but who have brilliant beats and great maximalist production.
It’s just that, with so much music out there, and with it reproducing so promiscuously, thanks to file sharing and mash-ups and remixes and iPod playlists and iPod “shuffle” settings and so on, it seems self-defeating to disavow singularity (by which I mean the serendipity of recombination) in favor of a “populism” that is as moribund as the elitism it opposes.
Of course it’s ludicrous to discuss Larry Charles’ Masked and Anonymous as a movie. It only signifies as part of Bob Dylan’s oeuvre, as a kind of self-mythologizing metacommentary on his persona(s) and his music.
For what it’s worth, Masked and Anonymous has a barely coherent plot, apocalyptic themes, and gnomic utterances by everyone in the cast. Dylan himself is the enigmatic absence at the center, much as he was in his earlier cinematic opus, Reynaldo and Clara. He sings and plays, and everything in the movie revolves around him, but his actual lines are few and far between, and his actual role in the narrative (such as it is) is minimal and passive.
Now, I’m not one of those Dylanologists, like Greil Marcus and Christopher Ricks, who analyze every line, every tic, every verbal or musical allusion in Dylan’s collected works for hidden depths of significance. It seems to me, when I’ve read such analyses, that they don’t get me very far into understanding the affective power of Dylan’s music. And power the music does have, although intermittently: for every masterpiece like Bringing It All Back Home or Blood on the Tracks or Love and Theft, there’s been a real stinker like Self-Portrait or Street Legal or (sorry, gospel fans and Dylan revisionists) Slow Train Coming.
Masked and Anonymous is interesting for Dylan’s ravaged look — although when he’s on stage, or otherwise opens his mouth, he seems to have weathered his 62 years much better than this look itself would indicate — and in general for the game it plays of making Dylan charismatic precisely by denying us any possibility of an affective connection to him. Nothing is more alluring than the impossibility of pinning another person down: this is what fuels fascination, with a love object or with a celebrity. Dylan just pushes it to an almost absurd ne plus ultra, by being impenetrable to the point of an apocalyptic collapse into a black hole, or some other form of uninterpretable nothingness. There is actually no solution to the enigma, because there isn’t really anything there at all. It’s stupid, but realizing this somehow doesn’t free us from being under the enigma’s spell.
But what does this really tell us about the music, as opposed to the artist’s persona?
(I’m aware, of course, that one can only imperfectly separate the two).
Penelope Cruz’s character in Masked and Anonymous remarks at one point that Dylan’s songs are great because they are completely open to interpretation, they can mean anything you want them to. I don’t believe this for a second; I think that the ambiguities and jokes and mysteries that the Dylanologists enumerate at such exhaustive length are really just smoke and mirrors, distracting us so that the emotional impact of the songs can punch its way through our defenses, and wrench us inside. (And I don’t mean to imply that Dylan has just one emotional tone, either; there’s a great distance between the prophetic surrealism of Bringing It All Back Home, the excruciating intimacy of Blood on the Tracks , and the old man’s jesting apocalypticism of Love and Theft; and the bad albums I mentioned above are themselves failed experiments in generating other affects and moods).
So my final take on Masked and Anonymous is something like this: I enjoyed it, sort of, though not enough to want to ever see it again; I don’t buy its intimations of summing up what/who Dylan really is (and I really don’t care); but I did love how the soundtrack was suffused with versions of Dylan’s songs played by numerous other bands and musicians, in various languages in addition to English, as if the entire world of sound and music had been recreated in Dylan’s image (if that is not too mixed a metaphor).
Of course it’s ludicrous to discuss Larry Charles’ Masked and Anonymous as a movie. It only signifies as part of Bob Dylan’s oeuvre, as a kind of self-mythologizing metacommentary on his persona(s) and his music.
For what it’s worth, Masked and Anonymous has a barely coherent plot, apocalyptic themes, and gnomic utterances by everyone in the cast. Dylan himself is the enigmatic absence at the center, much as he was in his earlier cinematic opus, Reynaldo and Clara. He sings and plays, and everything in the movie revolves around him, but his actual lines are few and far between, and his actual role in the narrative (such as it is) is minimal and passive.
Now, I’m not one of those Dylanologists, like Greil Marcus and Christopher Ricks, who analyze every line, every tic, every verbal or musical allusion in Dylan’s collected works for hidden depths of significance. It seems to me, when I’ve read such analyses, that they don’t get me very far into understanding the affective power of Dylan’s music. And power the music does have, although intermittently: for every masterpiece like Bringing It All Back Home or Blood on the Tracks or Love and Theft, there’s been a real stinker like Self-Portrait or Street Legal or (sorry, gospel fans and Dylan revisionists) Slow Train Coming.
Masked and Anonymous is interesting for Dylan’s ravaged look — although when he’s on stage, or otherwise opens his mouth, he seems to have weathered his 62 years much better than this look itself would indicate — and in general for the game it plays of making Dylan charismatic precisely by denying us any possibility of an affective connection to him. Nothing is more alluring than the impossibility of pinning another person down: this is what fuels fascination, with a love object or with a celebrity. Dylan just pushes it to an almost absurd ne plus ultra, by being impenetrable to the point of an apocalyptic collapse into a black hole, or some other form of uninterpretable nothingness. There is actually no solution to the enigma, because there isn’t really anything there at all. It’s stupid, but realizing this somehow doesn’t free us from being under the enigma’s spell.
But what does this really tell us about the music, as opposed to the artist’s persona?
(I’m aware, of course, that one can only imperfectly separate the two).
Penelope Cruz’s character in Masked and Anonymous remarks at one point that Dylan’s songs are great because they are completely open to interpretation, they can mean anything you want them to. I don’t believe this for a second; I think that the ambiguities and jokes and mysteries that the Dylanologists enumerate at such exhaustive length are really just smoke and mirrors, distracting us so that the emotional impact of the songs can punch its way through our defenses, and wrench us inside. (And I don’t mean to imply that Dylan has just one emotional tone, either; there’s a great distance between the prophetic surrealism of Bringing It All Back Home, the excruciating intimacy of Blood on the Tracks , and the old man’s jesting apocalypticism of Love and Theft; and the bad albums I mentioned above are themselves failed experiments in generating other affects and moods).
So my final take on Masked and Anonymous is something like this: I enjoyed it, sort of, though not enough to want to ever see it again; I don’t buy its intimations of summing up what/who Dylan really is (and I really don’t care); but I did love how the soundtrack was suffused with versions of Dylan’s songs played by numerous other bands and musicians, in various languages in addition to English, as if the entire world of sound and music had been recreated in Dylan’s image (if that is not too mixed a metaphor).
Blonde Redhead‘s latest album, Misery is a Butterfly, is utterly gorgeous. Minor keys, static rhythms, slow melodies, angular, dissolving riffs, Kazu Makino’s high-pitched, ethereal vocals: these all convey, not a message, but a mood. This is blank-affect music, rather than high-pitched-excitement music.
By “blank affect,” I don’t mean affectlessness, but almost the reverse: an affect, or an intensity, that is so strong as to be “without qualities,” without labels or narrative reference points. A pure state of feeling, rather than a state of feeling something (or other) in particular.
That is to say, Blonde Redhead doesn’t tell stories; rather, it envelops me, drawing me into a zone of “mere being” (reference both Giorgio Agamben and Wallace Stevens), a state of disillusioned, quiet agitation (only such a desperate oxymoron can point to how this music at once convulses and soothes me). Absorbed in the music, I float, rocked by gentle waves that nonetheless are the echoes, or the aftershocks, of ferocious churnings deep below.
Nothing really happens in this music, and nothing can happen. Not because I am safe within these sounds, but precisely because I am absolutely unsafe, because the disaster has already happened. The music of Blonde Redhead confirms and registers this disaster; it is subdued only because it comes afterwards, when the storm has already done its worst. I look through the emotional wreckage, pick up the scattered fragments of my heart, and feel at peace: not the resolute peace of a determination to rebuild, but the peace of knowing that such a rebuilding will never take place, the assurance that I will never get back anything of all that I have lost.
All this is gorgeous, rather than bleak. Melancholy has never been so seductive. Blonde Redhead’s music seduces me like a hot bath, a bath heated almost to the point of intolerable pain. I can barely force myself to get in, but once I am immersed, once I surrender myself, I am suffused by a kind of suffering that is indistinguishable from bliss.
Most of the reviews I have read of Misery is a Butterfly have emphasized how different this album is from Blonde Redhead’s earlier work: the harsh dissonance on the guitar is gone, the rhythms are more straightforward, and the basic guitar/drums/vocals setup (no bass) is supplemented by keyboards, horns, and (I think) strings. But to my mind, these differences don’t amount to much. The production may be more conventional than in the earlier albums, but the mood or affect hasn’t been changed: it has only been deepened, intensified, metamorphosed more fully into itself.
Blonde Redhead‘s latest album, Misery is a Butterfly, is utterly gorgeous. Minor keys, static rhythms, slow melodies, angular, dissolving riffs, Kazu Makino’s high-pitched, ethereal vocals: these all convey, not a message, but a mood. This is blank-affect music, rather than high-pitched-excitement music.
By “blank affect,” I don’t mean affectlessness, but almost the reverse: an affect, or an intensity, that is so strong as to be “without qualities,” without labels or narrative reference points. A pure state of feeling, rather than a state of feeling something (or other) in particular.
That is to say, Blonde Redhead doesn’t tell stories; rather, it envelops me, drawing me into a zone of “mere being” (reference both Giorgio Agamben and Wallace Stevens), a state of disillusioned, quiet agitation (only such a desperate oxymoron can point to how this music at once convulses and soothes me). Absorbed in the music, I float, rocked by gentle waves that nonetheless are the echoes, or the aftershocks, of ferocious churnings deep below.
Nothing really happens in this music, and nothing can happen. Not because I am safe within these sounds, but precisely because I am absolutely unsafe, because the disaster has already happened. The music of Blonde Redhead confirms and registers this disaster; it is subdued only because it comes afterwards, when the storm has already done its worst. I look through the emotional wreckage, pick up the scattered fragments of my heart, and feel at peace: not the resolute peace of a determination to rebuild, but the peace of knowing that such a rebuilding will never take place, the assurance that I will never get back anything of all that I have lost.
All this is gorgeous, rather than bleak. Melancholy has never been so seductive. Blonde Redhead’s music seduces me like a hot bath, a bath heated almost to the point of intolerable pain. I can barely force myself to get in, but once I am immersed, once I surrender myself, I am suffused by a kind of suffering that is indistinguishable from bliss.
Most of the reviews I have read of Misery is a Butterfly have emphasized how different this album is from Blonde Redhead’s earlier work: the harsh dissonance on the guitar is gone, the rhythms are more straightforward, and the basic guitar/drums/vocals setup (no bass) is supplemented by keyboards, horns, and (I think) strings. But to my mind, these differences don’t amount to much. The production may be more conventional than in the earlier albums, but the mood or affect hasn’t been changed: it has only been deepened, intensified, metamorphosed more fully into itself.
Rhythm Science is the new, and first, book by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
DJ Spooky’s albums (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Viral Sonata) and mixtapes (Under the Influence, Modern Mantra) are powerfully sharp and complex works. What’s great about these CDs is how they manage to be, at the same time, wildly eclectic and yet tightly focused and singular. Miller/Spooky is on the cutting edge of true, radical hybridity: his work is about citation/sampling/cutting-up as tools of innovation and metamorphosis.
Spooky’s music thus stands as a sharp reproach both to the superstitious reverence for “roots” (which usually means white people idolizing and exhuming a long-ago musical form pioneered by people of color, while ignoring or scorning what said people of color are doing now, in the present) and to the shallow, faux rainbow hybridity that corporations love (We Are the World, United Colors of Benetton). In contrast to both these trends (which have more in common than either of them would want to admit) DJ Spooky insists on making it new: breaking with modernist forms and categories, embracing the flux of postmodern commodity culture, is the only way to be true to that radical modernist imperative.
Rhythm Science, the book, is Miller/Spooky’s explication of, and meditation upon, his artistic methods and goals. The book’s motto could be the sentence of Emerson’s that is quoted on page 68: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” Miller doesn’t make a linear, philosophical argument, so much as he mixes theory, history, anecdote, autobiography and scientific research, all of these flowing in and out and free associating from one page to the next.
What Rhythm Science really is, is a manifesto: the first important avant-garde artistic manifesto of the twenty-first century. It’s a utopian book, in that it focuses, with hope, on the maximal potentialities of the remix in postmodern, network culture. I find it bracing and refreshing, because of how it provides a corrective to my own tendencies to be pessimistic about how those potentialities will most likely be captured, co-opted, and crushed by giant corporations before they have had a chance even to blossom. In his writing as in his music, Paul Miller works to “keep hope alive,” something we desperately need right now, in these horrendous times of George W. Bush and Mel Gibson.
The design of the Rhythm Science book also needs to be mentioned, because it is both innovative and beautiful. The book is designed to mimic both a vinyl record and a CD, with a hole in the center; pages of collage (abstract images, vector graphics, and quotations sampled from the text) alternate with pages of actual text, and the pages themselves differ in texture, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth. There’s also a CD that comes along with the book, in which Spooky/Miller mixes electronic sounds with voice recordings of great modernist authors (Tzara, Artaud, Joyce, and Stein, among others).
As an object, therefore, the book eschews linearity and embraces the audio-tactile aesthetic that Marshall McLuhan identified with electronic media. And this design itself really is something new, rather than being (as too many recent hip media projects have tended to be) an imitation of the style that Marshall McLuhan pioneered in the 1960s in collaboration with Quentin Fiore (in books like The Medium is the Massage).
Rhythm Science is the new, and first, book by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
DJ Spooky’s albums (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Viral Sonata) and mixtapes (Under the Influence, Modern Mantra) are powerfully sharp and complex works. What’s great about these CDs is how they manage to be, at the same time, wildly eclectic and yet tightly focused and singular. Miller/Spooky is on the cutting edge of true, radical hybridity: his work is about citation/sampling/cutting-up as tools of innovation and metamorphosis.
Spooky’s music thus stands as a sharp reproach both to the superstitious reverence for “roots” (which usually means white people idolizing and exhuming a long-ago musical form pioneered by people of color, while ignoring or scorning what said people of color are doing now, in the present) and to the shallow, faux rainbow hybridity that corporations love (We Are the World, United Colors of Benetton). In contrast to both these trends (which have more in common than either of them would want to admit) DJ Spooky insists on making it new: breaking with modernist forms and categories, embracing the flux of postmodern commodity culture, is the only way to be true to that radical modernist imperative.
Rhythm Science, the book, is Miller/Spooky’s explication of, and meditation upon, his artistic methods and goals. The book’s motto could be the sentence of Emerson’s that is quoted on page 68: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” Miller doesn’t make a linear, philosophical argument, so much as he mixes theory, history, anecdote, autobiography and scientific research, all of these flowing in and out and free associating from one page to the next.
What Rhythm Science really is, is a manifesto: the first important avant-garde artistic manifesto of the twenty-first century. It’s a utopian book, in that it focuses, with hope, on the maximal potentialities of the remix in postmodern, network culture. I find it bracing and refreshing, because of how it provides a corrective to my own tendencies to be pessimistic about how those potentialities will most likely be captured, co-opted, and crushed by giant corporations before they have had a chance even to blossom. In his writing as in his music, Paul Miller works to “keep hope alive,” something we desperately need right now, in these horrendous times of George W. Bush and Mel Gibson.
The design of the Rhythm Science book also needs to be mentioned, because it is both innovative and beautiful. The book is designed to mimic both a vinyl record and a CD, with a hole in the center; pages of collage (abstract images, vector graphics, and quotations sampled from the text) alternate with pages of actual text, and the pages themselves differ in texture, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth. There’s also a CD that comes along with the book, in which Spooky/Miller mixes electronic sounds with voice recordings of great modernist authors (Tzara, Artaud, Joyce, and Stein, among others).
As an object, therefore, the book eschews linearity and embraces the audio-tactile aesthetic that Marshall McLuhan identified with electronic media. And this design itself really is something new, rather than being (as too many recent hip media projects have tended to be) an imitation of the style that Marshall McLuhan pioneered in the 1960s in collaboration with Quentin Fiore (in books like The Medium is the Massage).
Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox does for (popular, recorded) music what his previous books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser’s Ecstasy, did for movies and books respectively. That is to say, Sonata for Jukebox is a wide-ranging meditation on the uses and meanings of music: how we make sense of it, what it means to us, and what role it plays in our lives.
I’ve perhaps used the pronouns we/us/our too freely in the last paragraph. For part of what distinguishes O’Brien’s writing is the way he moves so carefully (but also fluidly) between the singular and the general: that is to say, between the personal and autobiographical, on the one hand, and cultural and generational commonalities on the other.
Sonata for Jukebox contains brilliant essays on Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. It also contains beautiful stories about O’Brien’s bandleader maternal grandfather, his radio-DJ father, and his own adolescence and young manhood, including reminiscences of friends who committed suicide. What brings all these discussions together is a subtle and ever-ramifying discussion of how music organizes (here I go again) our lives: our memories, our relationships, and our senses of ourselves.
This is great for several reasons: the elegance of O’Brien’s prose; the wide range of his musical (and more generally) cultural citations; his thoughtfulness about the effects of recording technologies, and more recently, digital technologies, on the texture of everyday experience; his uncanny ability to evoke and anatomize a Zeitgeist (that of the 1960s, for example).
O’Brien doesn’t have any easily summarizable theories: he’s an essayist and poet, not a philosopher. But his writing is informed equally by theoretical speculation and by empirical concreteness; which means that it is both intellectual and cosmopolitan, in the best senses of both these words.
Sonata for Jukebox is most valuable to me because of how it offers a way to think about music; my own sensibility is very different from O’Brien’s, but I am inspired by his ability to move between what the music sounds like and the circumstances (at once technological and social and personal) in which it is listened to, and on from there to what it stands for, what it is associated with, how it is woven into memory and desire and fantasy and hope and dread.
O’Brien was born in 1948, which makes him six years older than me. He concentrates on the music he listened to in his youth; though he is clearly very knowledgeable about more recent developments, his emotional allegiances are to the songs from back then. Of course he is right that, in our lifetimes, much more than was the case earlier in the 20th century, popular music has primarily been marketed to the young. Still, this means that O’Brien gives more importance to nostalgia, and to temps perdu, than I myself would be willing to do; or, to put it in inverse terms, this means that I (still) connect music more to the future (instead of the past) than O’Brien does; I would want to emphasize (as he does not) the role of (popular, recorded) music as a kind of ongoing exploration of “possibility space” or of the “virtual.”
Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox does for (popular, recorded) music what his previous books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser’s Ecstasy, did for movies and books respectively. That is to say, Sonata for Jukebox is a wide-ranging meditation on the uses and meanings of music: how we make sense of it, what it means to us, and what role it plays in our lives.
I’ve perhaps used the pronouns we/us/our too freely in the last paragraph. For part of what distinguishes O’Brien’s writing is the way he moves so carefully (but also fluidly) between the singular and the general: that is to say, between the personal and autobiographical, on the one hand, and cultural and generational commonalities on the other.
Sonata for Jukebox contains brilliant essays on Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. It also contains beautiful stories about O’Brien’s bandleader maternal grandfather, his radio-DJ father, and his own adolescence and young manhood, including reminiscences of friends who committed suicide. What brings all these discussions together is a subtle and ever-ramifying discussion of how music organizes (here I go again) our lives: our memories, our relationships, and our senses of ourselves.
This is great for several reasons: the elegance of O’Brien’s prose; the wide range of his musical (and more generally) cultural citations; his thoughtfulness about the effects of recording technologies, and more recently, digital technologies, on the texture of everyday experience; his uncanny ability to evoke and anatomize a Zeitgeist (that of the 1960s, for example).
O’Brien doesn’t have any easily summarizable theories: he’s an essayist and poet, not a philosopher. But his writing is informed equally by theoretical speculation and by empirical concreteness; which means that it is both intellectual and cosmopolitan, in the best senses of both these words.
Sonata for Jukebox is most valuable to me because of how it offers a way to think about music; my own sensibility is very different from O’Brien’s, but I am inspired by his ability to move between what the music sounds like and the circumstances (at once technological and social and personal) in which it is listened to, and on from there to what it stands for, what it is associated with, how it is woven into memory and desire and fantasy and hope and dread.
O’Brien was born in 1948, which makes him six years older than me. He concentrates on the music he listened to in his youth; though he is clearly very knowledgeable about more recent developments, his emotional allegiances are to the songs from back then. Of course he is right that, in our lifetimes, much more than was the case earlier in the 20th century, popular music has primarily been marketed to the young. Still, this means that O’Brien gives more importance to nostalgia, and to temps perdu, than I myself would be willing to do; or, to put it in inverse terms, this means that I (still) connect music more to the future (instead of the past) than O’Brien does; I would want to emphasize (as he does not) the role of (popular, recorded) music as a kind of ongoing exploration of “possibility space” or of the “virtual.”
I like DJ Cheap Cologne’s Double Black Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album mixed with Metallica’s Black Album) a lot better than DJ DangerMouse’s Grey Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album mixed with the Beatles’ White Album). (Instructions on how to get both albums can be found on the Banned Music website. Basically you have to download the files with BitTorrent).
As I noted here before, the Grey Album doesn’t really work: the Beatles samples don’t fit well with Jay-Z’s vocals, but neither does the contrast between them make for an interesting enough tension.
Cheap Cologne’s mix, on the other hand, is a match made in heaven. It’s as musically convincing to me as Jay-Z’s original album was. The loss of funkiness in the beat is compensated for by the way that Metallica’s power chords meld almost seamlessly with Jay-Z’s rapping: the same kind of (over)emphatic (macho?) insistence is pounded into your head by both artists. In conventional gender terms, you might say that not only do Jay-Z and Metallica both exclude even the slightest trace of the feminine, they both do so in pretty much the same way, by creating a kind of totalized, hermetically sealed musical space in which no alternatives seem possible, no flexibility is permissible, your only option (unless you turn off the music altogether) is to submit utterly.
Which is finally my problem with both Jay-Z and Metallica: they are both very, very good at what they do, but I don’t particularly cherish what it is that they do.
Still more Jay-Z remixes are available via the Jay-Z Construction Set. I haven’t had the time (or energy) to assimilate them all — much as I like the project of remixing Jay-Z in all sorts of ways conceptually, there are still lots of other things that I’d rather listen to — but MC ScottD’s Hot Buttered Soul Remixes and Kev Brown’s Brown Album both sound pretty interesting.
I like DJ Cheap Cologne’s Double Black Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album mixed with Metallica’s Black Album) a lot better than DJ DangerMouse’s Grey Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album mixed with the Beatles’ White Album). (Instructions on how to get both albums can be found on the Banned Music website. Basically you have to download the files with BitTorrent).
As I noted here before, the Grey Album doesn’t really work: the Beatles samples don’t fit well with Jay-Z’s vocals, but neither does the contrast between them make for an interesting enough tension.
Cheap Cologne’s mix, on the other hand, is a match made in heaven. It’s as musically convincing to me as Jay-Z’s original album was. The loss of funkiness in the beat is compensated for by the way that Metallica’s power chords meld almost seamlessly with Jay-Z’s rapping: the same kind of (over)emphatic (macho?) insistence is pounded into your head by both artists. In conventional gender terms, you might say that not only do Jay-Z and Metallica both exclude even the slightest trace of the feminine, they both do so in pretty much the same way, by creating a kind of totalized, hermetically sealed musical space in which no alternatives seem possible, no flexibility is permissible, your only option (unless you turn off the music altogether) is to submit utterly.
Which is finally my problem with both Jay-Z and Metallica: they are both very, very good at what they do, but I don’t particularly cherish what it is that they do.
Still more Jay-Z remixes are available via the Jay-Z Construction Set. I haven’t had the time (or energy) to assimilate them all — much as I like the project of remixing Jay-Z in all sorts of ways conceptually, there are still lots of other things that I’d rather listen to — but MC ScottD’s Hot Buttered Soul Remixes and Kev Brown’s Brown Album both sound pretty interesting.
The World of Arthur Russell is the most gorgeous music I have heard in ages. Russell (1951-1992) was an 80s disco producer with an avant-garde/classical music background. (See Sasha Freire-Jones’ article in The New Yorker for background). All Russell’s songs have a driving disco beat, a rhythm that’s less straightforward than it might seem at first, but that makes them instantly accessible and infectious. At the same time, there’s always something about them that’s deeply weird: a bit of unexpected instrumentation, a vocal that just seems somehow off, an out-of-pace shift of tonality…
Russell’s music is too quirky and strange to be called simply “charming”; but too quicksilver to be taken ponderously. It seems just the right thing to be listening to right now, on one of Seattle’s (rare) sunny days; there’s always a tinge of melancholy, but one that only seems to enrich the music’s overall cheerfulness (cheerfulness in the Nietzschean sense, gai savoir).
The World of Arthur Russell is the most gorgeous music I have heard in ages. Russell (1951-1992) was an 80s disco producer with an avant-garde/classical music background. (See Sasha Freire-Jones’ article in The New Yorker for background). All Russell’s songs have a driving disco beat, a rhythm that’s less straightforward than it might seem at first, but that makes them instantly accessible and infectious. At the same time, there’s always something about them that’s deeply weird: a bit of unexpected instrumentation, a vocal that just seems somehow off, an out-of-pace shift of tonality…
Russell’s music is too quirky and strange to be called simply “charming”; but too quicksilver to be taken ponderously. It seems just the right thing to be listening to right now, on one of Seattle’s (rare) sunny days; there’s always a tinge of melancholy, but one that only seems to enrich the music’s overall cheerfulness (cheerfulness in the Nietzschean sense, gai savoir).
Jacki-O’s “Pussy” (or, in the censored-for-radio version, “Nookie”) is the latest rap song (following Lil Kim, Khia, and Missy Elliott, among others) in which a woman celebrates her “wet and deep” orifice.
What’s fascinating about Jacki-O’s song (and — depending upon your perspective — either deeply weird or all-too-symptomatic of normative conditions) is the balance it negotiates between pleasure on the one hand, and power and money on the other.
The lyrics mostly celebrate pussy power as what can “pay my bills… I don’t pay for weed, I get in clubs free… Girls, we got power cuz’ we got pussy.” Jackie-O boasts that men are just slobbering to sample what’s between her legs: “He need this pussy/ He smell this pussy/ He wanna taste this pussy/ You gotta pay for pussy.”
In hip hop’s current battle of the sexes, this is probably only to be expected, as a response to male power. Money continually trumps desire on both sides of the fence. (Remember, the most woman-positive thing Jay-Z can ever bring himself to say is: “ladies is pimps too.” And even Missy reminds her girls to “get your cash” when you are getting off). Still, there’s nothing here that matches Lil Kim’s demand for clitoral pleasure from her men (“How Many Licks”), or Missy’s gleeful hymn to the vibrator, thereby dispensing with men entirely (“Toys”). Jacki-O seems concentrated on cash and luxury (emphasized in the video), to the exclusion of all else.
Does the pussy have more than instrumental value for Jacki-O?
Here’s where, I think, the song means more (and differently) than the words. The music sets a heavy beat against an almost nursery-rhyme-like melody (reminiscent of the Ying Yang Twinz’ “Naggin'” (a misogynistic battle-of-the-sexes song itself, with a “Part 2” ladies’ response). This makes the song sillier, and more playful, than it would be with a different instrumental track. (“Pussy” mash-ups, anyone?) And Jackie-O’s sultry, slightly slurry voice suggests an immense narcissistic pleasure, rather than calculation for gain.
Where Missy is comfortably laughing and gossiping with her girlfriends, and where Lil Kim is both boasting to the world of her sexual prowess, and warning her men that they’d better have what it takes to keep her satisfied (all this amplified by the irony of the video for “How Many Licks,” which turns Kim into a series of commercial sex-toy dolls), Jacki-O sounds like she is only talking to herself. Which makes it seem like the cash is only an alibi for the pleasure, rather than the reverse.
Of course, as Freud (among others) says, nothing’s more seductive to heterosexual men than a woman who seems totally narcissistic and self-contained, so that apparently she doesn’t need them; so maybe Jacki-O’s voice in this song is really nothing more than a calculated ploy after all. And it works: she did indeed seduce me to buy her song for 99 cents (plus tax) from the Apple Music Store.
Which brings it all back to performance. We are always performing, calculatedly putting on various personas. But we cannot do this with impunity; we always become, to some extent, what we are merely pretending to be. Which is part of what popular music does for its listeners: it seduces us, it gives us points of identification and irony, as it slides from one identity to another, forever proclaiming authenticity in the most artificial, factitious way possible, exploring/exploiting the fault lines of our culture.
Jacki-O’s “Pussy” (or, in the censored-for-radio version, “Nookie”) is the latest rap song (following Lil Kim, Khia, and Missy Elliott, among others) in which a woman celebrates her “wet and deep” orifice.
What’s fascinating about Jacki-O’s song (and — depending upon your perspective — either deeply weird or all-too-symptomatic of normative conditions) is the balance it negotiates between pleasure on the one hand, and power and money on the other.
The lyrics mostly celebrate pussy power as what can “pay my bills… I don’t pay for weed, I get in clubs free… Girls, we got power cuz’ we got pussy.” Jackie-O boasts that men are just slobbering to sample what’s between her legs: “He need this pussy/ He smell this pussy/ He wanna taste this pussy/ You gotta pay for pussy.”
In hip hop’s current battle of the sexes, this is probably only to be expected, as a response to male power. Money continually trumps desire on both sides of the fence. (Remember, the most woman-positive thing Jay-Z can ever bring himself to say is: “ladies is pimps too.” And even Missy reminds her girls to “get your cash” when you are getting off). Still, there’s nothing here that matches Lil Kim’s demand for clitoral pleasure from her men (“How Many Licks”), or Missy’s gleeful hymn to the vibrator, thereby dispensing with men entirely (“Toys”). Jacki-O seems concentrated on cash and luxury (emphasized in the video), to the exclusion of all else.
Does the pussy have more than instrumental value for Jacki-O?
Here’s where, I think, the song means more (and differently) than the words. The music sets a heavy beat against an almost nursery-rhyme-like melody (reminiscent of the Ying Yang Twinz’ “Naggin'” (a misogynistic battle-of-the-sexes song itself, with a “Part 2” ladies’ response). This makes the song sillier, and more playful, than it would be with a different instrumental track. (“Pussy” mash-ups, anyone?) And Jackie-O’s sultry, slightly slurry voice suggests an immense narcissistic pleasure, rather than calculation for gain.
Where Missy is comfortably laughing and gossiping with her girlfriends, and where Lil Kim is both boasting to the world of her sexual prowess, and warning her men that they’d better have what it takes to keep her satisfied (all this amplified by the irony of the video for “How Many Licks,” which turns Kim into a series of commercial sex-toy dolls), Jacki-O sounds like she is only talking to herself. Which makes it seem like the cash is only an alibi for the pleasure, rather than the reverse.
Of course, as Freud (among others) says, nothing’s more seductive to heterosexual men than a woman who seems totally narcissistic and self-contained, so that apparently she doesn’t need them; so maybe Jacki-O’s voice in this song is really nothing more than a calculated ploy after all. And it works: she did indeed seduce me to buy her song for 99 cents (plus tax) from the Apple Music Store.
Which brings it all back to performance. We are always performing, calculatedly putting on various personas. But we cannot do this with impunity; we always become, to some extent, what we are merely pretending to be. Which is part of what popular music does for its listeners: it seduces us, it gives us points of identification and irony, as it slides from one identity to another, forever proclaiming authenticity in the most artificial, factitious way possible, exploring/exploiting the fault lines of our culture.
You can find a list of websites that are making Danger Mouse’s Grey Album available for download at greytuesday.org. WIll EMI Records really be able to shut down all these sites? Illegal Art has had it up for several weeks now.
You can find a list of websites that are making Danger Mouse’s Grey Album available for download at greytuesday.org. WIll EMI Records really be able to shut down all these sites? Illegal Art has had it up for several weeks now.
Apropa’t, by Savath and Savalas, is the latest album by Scott Herren, who is better known for the music he releases under the name Prefuse 73. (You can purchase it digitally from Warp Records online, for considerably less than it costs as a CD. Also, the download is in the form of unencrypted mp3 files).
This music is very different from Prefuse 73. It’s slow, dreamy, and somewhat folkish, with no glitches and not much of a beat. Herren is collaborating here with vocalist Eva Puyuelo Muns, who sings ethereally in Catalan and Spanish.
What I love about this album is how it evades attention,and never quite coalesces. The lovely melodies never quite come into focus. The music slips and slides right past my center of awareness. It’s as if I’d been (oxymoronically) hypnotized into distraction. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea how, musically speaking, Herren accomplishes this.
Apropa’t, by Savath and Savalas, is the latest album by Scott Herren, who is better known for the music he releases under the name Prefuse 73. (You can purchase it digitally from Warp Records online, for considerably less than it costs as a CD. Also, the download is in the form of unencrypted mp3 files).
This music is very different from Prefuse 73. It’s slow, dreamy, and somewhat folkish, with no glitches and not much of a beat. Herren is collaborating here with vocalist Eva Puyuelo Muns, who sings ethereally in Catalan and Spanish.
What I love about this album is how it evades attention,and never quite coalesces. The lovely melodies never quite come into focus. The music slips and slides right past my center of awareness. It’s as if I’d been (oxymoronically) hypnotized into distraction. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea how, musically speaking, Herren accomplishes this.