In my first review, I had initially promised to write about one random record review a week, but clearly I have not lived up to that expectation. Although I'm still interested in following through on the project, my suspicion is that I'll probably produce one of these columns every month, rather than every week, so that I can focus on other political and cultural events.
The random review for this posting is the debut, self-titled album by the duo, Electronic. For lack of a better term, Electronic was a sort of super group, a collaboration between New Order vocalist, Bernard Sumner and Smiths guitarist, Johnny Marr, and contained collaborations with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys. The group was formed after the collapse of The Smiths, and during a brief hiatus of New Order. The album's initial single, "Getting Away With It", featuring Tennant, was quite successful, and the album received a fair amount of both critical success and sales, although it's not a record that has survived in the memory of fans in the same way that the work of the constitutive parts of the band have survived. Although I picked this record out randomly, it does seem like a decent time to reevaluate it, given the recent indifference.
For folks who know me, it shouldn't surprise them that I had interest in the band, having been a fan of each of the groups that made up the project. If one compares Electronic to its constituent parts, the band certainly sounds nothing like The Smiths, and links more closely with the records made by New Order in the period. However, it would be a mistake to think of the project as simply a continuation of the work that Sumner produced in New Order, Technique and Republic. Rather than drawing primarily on that sound, the record shows a strong influence from the 'Baggy' scene that arose in Manchester in the late 1980's, work that actively tried to fuse popular forms of dance music with rock music. While the vast majority of Marr's guitar work doesn't match his work in The Smiths, neither does it match the sounds produced by New Order, particularly the last two albums. While it's difficult to deny that there is some interesting experimentation on the album, it certainly also dates the record badly in some ways, reflecting some of the cul de sac's of sound produced within the subgenre.
To move into the songs of the album, the initial track provides a good reflection of many of the qualities already discussed above. The song opens with a strong guitar riff, and engages with the "Baggy" tradition of mixing rock guitar riffs with dance rhythms and synthesizers. It would be hard to deny that the song's positive qualities; it's pretty catching, and the oscillation between the rock oriented guitar riff and the more traditionally New Order sounding synth lines work pretty well. The lyrics are fairly consistent with Sumner's work, and while not spectacular, do a pretty good job of building on the insulated and paranoid mood of the song. However, the attempt and bringing a hip-hop influence on the vocals through the awkward and semi-rapped sections of the song, don't particularly work well, and badly date the song. However, the positive aspects of the track outweigh its more problematic aspects of the song, marking it as an artifact of the era, but one worth looking back at.
The next two tracks move away from the "Baggy" sound of the initial track, taking on a sound that links up with the classic sound of New Order, rather than sounding like the New Order of the late 1980's. The first of the tracks, "Reality" is the weaker of the two tracks, sounding like a weaker track from Brotherhood or Low-Life. "Tighten Up" shows even more fidelity to the New Order sound, sounding like the best work of the band. Additionally, Marr's guitar work constitutes some of the stronger work on the novel. It avoids the awkward rhythmic influence of the "Baggy" movement. The fourth track of the album, "A Patience of a Saint", is one of two collaborations with the Pet Shop Boys and sounds a lot like a Pet Shop Boys song. The hit single, "Getting away with it," uses the semi-spoken vocal approach found in the initial song with a greater degree of success, but these four songs gesture towards a significant issue with the album, which is its lack of cohesion. There are moments that Electronic doesn't sound like a single band let alone a band producing a single album.
The second half of the album contains a greater degree of consistency than the first half of the album, with the notable exception of the instrumental, "Soviet" and the hip-hop oriented final track, "Feel Every Beat." The dominant tracks on the album produce some of the most consistent moments on the album, although they don't show the consistency of the later albums. The tracks avoid the awkward inconsistencies of the early tracks and gesture towards a band that isn't merely its constituent parts, although the New Order influence is still significant on them. The two exceptional tracks constitute some of the weakest tracks on the album. "Soviet" is a fairly innocuous ambient track. It's not bad, but it's extraordinarily forgettable, while "Feel Every Beat" stands out as the worse track on the album, drawing on the more mechanical sound of hip-hop influenced, "Baggy" sound. It's probably the most dated song on the track, and is pretty tedious, rhythmically and lyrically. It's probably the only song on the album that would make the album better with its absence.
Despite the fact that later albums have a great deal more sonic consistency, this is still the Electronic album that I am most likely to listen to. I don't know if it's because I heard it at a particular time in my life or that I kind of like the weird mix-tape quality it has. Other than that, the album takes on the intense, paranoiac inferiority that is reflected in a lot of the work of New Order, but isn't quite the same. It's a music that gestures towards the alienation and conflicts of the burgeoning neo-liberalism of the time period, but without ever expressing the political dimension of the crisis. Although there's no particular reason for this album needs to be remembered as a lost classic, but it includes five or six really good songs, along with a few decent songs, and a couple real clunkers. At very least, you can probably find it really cheap in some sort of used form.
Showing posts with label music criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music criticism. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Random Record Review I: Killing Joke--Fire Dances
In my effort to come up with some approach to keep myself writing, I thought that I might take up a bit of record reviewing. Rather than looking at new records, however, I'm going to write reviews of records randomly chosen from my collection. I'm not sure that it's going to translate into a lot of folks reading, but it seems like a good way of working on my writing skills as well as listening to records that might have been left moldering on the record shelves. Additionally, it will renew my commitment to writing about music, which has dropped off a bit, lately. My tentative plan is to turn this into a weekly exercise. The first choice is the 1983 Killing Joke album, Fire Dances, and album that I am fairly certain was purchased from Cheapo Records in Minneapolis, although I probably couldn't tell you which of the stores in the chain it was purchased from. I'm reviewing the LP version of the record, rather than the reissue with bonus tracks. In any case, here goes....
Truth be told, my engagement with Killing Joke as a band has been fairly limited. I own this lp, an earlier album, and the cd reissue of the 1985 lp, Night Time. Like a lot of other folks, I first heard Killing Joke on MTV's 120 Minutes, through the video for "Eighties", which is on Night Time, and is, fairly predictably, my favorite lp from the band. My general impression is that this aesthetic choice identifies me as a fairly casual fan of the group, rather than someone in the inner circle of their 'fandom.' From the little research that I have done on the band. Fire Dances was released after a brief hiatus of the band, caused by singer Jaz Coleman and bassist Youth's escape to Iceland in order to "survive the apocalypse." (The election of Thatcher and the Falklands War seem about as reasonable as it gets for signs of the apoapocalypse, I guess. The album also features a minor line-up change, as Youth was replaced by Paul Raven on bass. In any case, let's move on to the music.
To begin, the record fits fairly comfortably within post-punk generic conventions, which are admittedly fairly broad. With the exception of the dance oriented, "Dominator", the songs are built on a fairly conventional vocals, guitar, bass, drum set up. With the guitar and bass taking the same sort of melodic and distorted sound of bands such as Joy Division and early Siouxsie and the Bansheees. (Early Echo and the Bunnymen might even be a better reference than Joy Division.) It moves away from some of the denser, more metallic sounds that linked the earlier records of the band with the efforts of Amoebix amongst other acts, to a lighter and more open sound. The drums break out of that tradition, though. They're up in the mix, and are the most obvious reference to the sort of proto-industrial sound of the band, pushing towards the mixture of percussion and repetition that would dominate that particular form of dance music. It also contributes to the communal feeling contained in the lyrics, which becomes explicit in the song "Let's All Go (To The Fire Dances" and is expressed through the chanted lyrics, "Move in on them" contained in the synth driven track, "Dominator." (A track that seems to stand between DAF and the later work in Nitzer Ebb) It's a communalism that is remains subcultural in nature, calling for gatherings of song, dance, and sex, rather than any sort of explicit political change. (They also feel a little bland, and Jaz Coleman's normally powerful and distinct vocals lose a little of both those qualities with the communalist effort.)
Overall, it's a pretty decent record, and the songs do a pretty good job of holding your attention. The lyrics aren't spectacular, but there's nothing particularly embarrassing in them. Bass and Guitar provide fairly good texture and melody throughout the tracks, but I'm not a big fan of the drums at times, which fall into the kind of stiff rhythmic qualities that often define the electronic industrial dance music that was later influenced by this sort of sound. It's unfortunate that the band didn't draw more explicitly on some of the dub influences that you could find in their earlier music. The tracks that worked the best were the ones that stayed in the more conventional post-punk/rock that would define the band's next album, Night Time. The one exception is the track, "Dominator", which managed to do the best job of linking the band's sound to the dance aesthetic than the others, which felt a bit forced at times. (I'm particularly thinking about "Rejuvenation", but the first half of the album feels a little rhythmically forced.) Additionally, there's a bit of a tendency for the songs to blend together. Nothing stands out in the way that they do in some of the other albums. To tell the truth, the album strikes me as a transition between the earlier albums, and the direction the band would take with Night Time and the albums of the late 1980's (which I haven't heard, but are evidently slightly boring in their attempt to repeat the success of Night Time with reduced results.) So, I liked the record, and I don't see myself getting rid of it, but I also don't see it getting a lot of repeat play, either.
I think I'll leave it there. Hopefully, I will get to another random record choice some time next week.
Truth be told, my engagement with Killing Joke as a band has been fairly limited. I own this lp, an earlier album, and the cd reissue of the 1985 lp, Night Time. Like a lot of other folks, I first heard Killing Joke on MTV's 120 Minutes, through the video for "Eighties", which is on Night Time, and is, fairly predictably, my favorite lp from the band. My general impression is that this aesthetic choice identifies me as a fairly casual fan of the group, rather than someone in the inner circle of their 'fandom.' From the little research that I have done on the band. Fire Dances was released after a brief hiatus of the band, caused by singer Jaz Coleman and bassist Youth's escape to Iceland in order to "survive the apocalypse." (The election of Thatcher and the Falklands War seem about as reasonable as it gets for signs of the apoapocalypse, I guess. The album also features a minor line-up change, as Youth was replaced by Paul Raven on bass. In any case, let's move on to the music.
To begin, the record fits fairly comfortably within post-punk generic conventions, which are admittedly fairly broad. With the exception of the dance oriented, "Dominator", the songs are built on a fairly conventional vocals, guitar, bass, drum set up. With the guitar and bass taking the same sort of melodic and distorted sound of bands such as Joy Division and early Siouxsie and the Bansheees. (Early Echo and the Bunnymen might even be a better reference than Joy Division.) It moves away from some of the denser, more metallic sounds that linked the earlier records of the band with the efforts of Amoebix amongst other acts, to a lighter and more open sound. The drums break out of that tradition, though. They're up in the mix, and are the most obvious reference to the sort of proto-industrial sound of the band, pushing towards the mixture of percussion and repetition that would dominate that particular form of dance music. It also contributes to the communal feeling contained in the lyrics, which becomes explicit in the song "Let's All Go (To The Fire Dances" and is expressed through the chanted lyrics, "Move in on them" contained in the synth driven track, "Dominator." (A track that seems to stand between DAF and the later work in Nitzer Ebb) It's a communalism that is remains subcultural in nature, calling for gatherings of song, dance, and sex, rather than any sort of explicit political change. (They also feel a little bland, and Jaz Coleman's normally powerful and distinct vocals lose a little of both those qualities with the communalist effort.)
Overall, it's a pretty decent record, and the songs do a pretty good job of holding your attention. The lyrics aren't spectacular, but there's nothing particularly embarrassing in them. Bass and Guitar provide fairly good texture and melody throughout the tracks, but I'm not a big fan of the drums at times, which fall into the kind of stiff rhythmic qualities that often define the electronic industrial dance music that was later influenced by this sort of sound. It's unfortunate that the band didn't draw more explicitly on some of the dub influences that you could find in their earlier music. The tracks that worked the best were the ones that stayed in the more conventional post-punk/rock that would define the band's next album, Night Time. The one exception is the track, "Dominator", which managed to do the best job of linking the band's sound to the dance aesthetic than the others, which felt a bit forced at times. (I'm particularly thinking about "Rejuvenation", but the first half of the album feels a little rhythmically forced.) Additionally, there's a bit of a tendency for the songs to blend together. Nothing stands out in the way that they do in some of the other albums. To tell the truth, the album strikes me as a transition between the earlier albums, and the direction the band would take with Night Time and the albums of the late 1980's (which I haven't heard, but are evidently slightly boring in their attempt to repeat the success of Night Time with reduced results.) So, I liked the record, and I don't see myself getting rid of it, but I also don't see it getting a lot of repeat play, either.
I think I'll leave it there. Hopefully, I will get to another random record choice some time next week.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
On Dubstep (Or What I Really Don't Understand About It's Recent Success))
Up until recently, I was pretty excited by the increased popularity of dubstep. I had been listening to the subgenre for quite a while, going back to the early releases by Kode 9 and the Space Ape and Burial that I discovered through the British music magazine, Wire. Through that publication I discovered Skream, Shackleton, Pinch, and Horsepower Productions, and others. In a significant manner, the genre helped me develop an interest in electronic music, getting me into everything from Underground Resistance to minimalists like Robert Hood and Ricardo Villalobos, to artists such as Four Tet, Rhythm and Sound, Lone, and Ekoplekz, not to mention a lot of significantly older stuff. To put it another way, early dubstep allowed me to recognize the value of electronic dance music as an art form. However, I recently realized that when I talked about dubstep, I meant something substantially different than most folks. It turns out that the dominant force in dubstep in the United States is some guy called Skrillex, who is kind of terrible. Although I shouldn't be terribly surprised, dubstep has mutated in the U.S. context from its moody and syncopated origins in its original U.K. context to something boring, macho, and mechanical in the United States. To give you a sense of the contrast in sound, here are some of the U.K. acts that I am interested in.
With this small and somewhat random sampling, I think a number of things are pretty clear. Dubstep is developed out of the British electronic music scene,
particularly out of remixes of 2-step garage music, drawing on the rich
Caribbean influence on music in the U.K. (To get a good sense of that
hybrid influence, listen to the Ragga Twins and Shut Up and Dance) 1. the music is fairly diverse. The different songs fit comfortably within the genre, but we're offered a number of mutations, oscillating between the digidub influences heard in Skream and the Digital Mystikz to the percussion heavy work of Shackleton. 2. The dub influence translates into an interest in that genre's interest in exoticism, which turns into an exploration of the the structures of migration found in the UK, particularly in the the work of Dust and Blackdown. We're offered a diasporic and post-colonial musical formation. 3. The music tends towards the paranoiac and introspective in tone, rather than extroversion and aggression. Portishead's Geoff Barrows argues that its a form of music best appreciated on headphones, wandering the empty streets at night. To put another way, it's not all that macho. Additionally, all of these tracks work well outside of a club setting, creating innovative and interesting music that bears introspective listening as well as dancing.
However, the music of Skrillex is considerably different, losing the experimentation and introspection found in the earlier examples in the subgenre. Instead, we're offered a version of dubstep that is far more rigid, and at times, mechanical approach to rhythm. With it's heavy mixture of vocal sampling, relatively uptempo beat for the genre, and musical aggression, we find ourselves with a far more banal and uninteresting form of the genre. Apparently, a lot of this stuff is called Brostep, now. What I find disappointing is that it seems that this banalization seems the only way for the genre to move into the mainstream, destroying the very qualities that made it worth exploring in the first place. I've long since abandoned the need for purity and exclusivity in the music I listen to. If Shackleton sold like hotcakes, it would still be worth listening to, but I don't think that this is going to happen. Instead, the dance floor is being transformed into another homosocial, yet heteronormative space, equivalent to the locker room. The tedium of the genre's sociality is reflected in the formal qualities of the music. Aggression when used creatively can produce interesting results within the genre. The problem with contemporary dubstep is that it's aggressiveness is so tediously predicable, sounds rote and strangely dialed in. The last record by The Bug offers a useful contrast to the predictable sounds of contemporary dubstep.
However, the music of Skrillex is considerably different, losing the experimentation and introspection found in the earlier examples in the subgenre. Instead, we're offered a version of dubstep that is far more rigid, and at times, mechanical approach to rhythm. With it's heavy mixture of vocal sampling, relatively uptempo beat for the genre, and musical aggression, we find ourselves with a far more banal and uninteresting form of the genre. Apparently, a lot of this stuff is called Brostep, now. What I find disappointing is that it seems that this banalization seems the only way for the genre to move into the mainstream, destroying the very qualities that made it worth exploring in the first place. I've long since abandoned the need for purity and exclusivity in the music I listen to. If Shackleton sold like hotcakes, it would still be worth listening to, but I don't think that this is going to happen. Instead, the dance floor is being transformed into another homosocial, yet heteronormative space, equivalent to the locker room. The tedium of the genre's sociality is reflected in the formal qualities of the music. Aggression when used creatively can produce interesting results within the genre. The problem with contemporary dubstep is that it's aggressiveness is so tediously predicable, sounds rote and strangely dialed in. The last record by The Bug offers a useful contrast to the predictable sounds of contemporary dubstep.
The question posed by the process of mainstreaming of dubstep is a fairly simple one, where is the genre going, and what impact will this have on electronic music as a whole? Despite the fact that we can still find a number of creative records coming out, I'm not terribly optimistic about the prospects within the genre. As the genre moves into the stadiums, I suspect we're going to find more figures such as Skrillex. In a certain sense, the commercial failure of electronic dance music in the 1990's was ultimately a positive, rather than a negative thing, leading to experimentation, and putting a stop to the proliferation of mainstream acts such as Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and The Crystal Method (who brought the same sort of macho appeal to the genre.) I'll be curious to see if the current crop of artists stall out like the earlier batch of artists, or if the stadium phenomenon is successful, in either case, most of the interesting music will probably be on the margins.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Proletarian Science of the Pet Shop Boys vs. The Bourgeois Ideology of Crimethinc, or, desire within the ruins of subculture in late capitalism
s "It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television." Sarah Schulman, People In Trouble
This posting has a somewhat curious origin. A couple days after I had posted my critique of Crimethinc, I happened to listen to an old Pet Shop Boys song, "In The Night,"while at the gym, using some machine that approximates the motions of running. It really struck me that the Pet Shop Boys were able to provide a much more nuanced and deeper analysis of the relationship between subcultures and structures of domination than is offered by hundreds of pages of analysis created by Crimethinc within the context of a four minute pop song. The group's analysis is developed through reference and analysis of a phenomenon during the Nazi occupation of France, the Zazou.
The Zazou movement was an early form of youth culture, which formed as a sort of informal opposition to the occupation of France, and the collaborationist, Vichy Regime. Zazou was a nation wide phenomenon, but were most often associated with Paris. Neither a formal group, nor aligned with the Resistance, the Zazou expressed their discontent through elaborate forms of dress, avoidance of work, and an identification with jazz culture. The combined transgressive effect of this is captured by a comment of a participant, Pierre Seel, “The Zazous were very obviously detested by the Nazis, who on the other side of the Rhine, had since a long time decimated the German cultural avante garde, forbidden jazz and all visible signs of…degenerations of Germanic culture…” (libcom.org) The elaborate dress was a way to flouting government policies on the rationing of cloth. The refusal of work's political significance should be obvious from anti-capitalist standpoint, but it was also a refusal of a nationalist narrative of labor, as well. The name of group was probably drawn from the songs of Cab Calloway, and the embrace of jazz simultaneously challenges the conservative racial nationalism of Vichy and shows an affinity with the aesthetic avant-garde of surrealism and dada.
Seel gestures toward the other transgressive thread that defined the subculture, the rejection of the rigid notions of masculinity that not only defined fascist Vichy, but simultaneously defined both the nationalist and PCF's versions of resistance culture. They do so through their refusal to organize their libidinal energies within the logic of sacrifice, a sacrificial commitment to the nation. Instead of operating within Schmitt's logic of the political, that is a space in which one is willing to kill or die for a cause, the Zazous create a critical the stylization of ephemera, a position which Dick Hebdige identifies as the form of subculture, par excellence. As Neil Tennant notes, "I was just fascinated that they were totally out of the context of their times; that you had this beaknik culture in the middle of the Second World War in occupied Paris." Tennant goes on to link the untimeliness of les Zazous to conversations about love and the meaning of life, as well their contempt for the 'masculinity' of the conflict between the resistance and Vichy. The rage of the fascist response focused precisely on these refusals, recognizing the stylizations of les Zazous, particularly their long hair, as a refusal of nationalist ideology. "They became Enemy Number One of the fascist youth organizations, Jeunesse Populaire Française. “Scalp the Zazous!” became their slogan. Squads of young JPF fascists armed with hairclippers attacked Zazous. Many were arrested and sent to the countryside to work on the harvest." (libcom.org)
The first three stanzas of the Pet Shop Boys song capture this dialectic of revolt and repression.
Zazou, what you're gonna do?
There's a lot of people coming for you
Zazou, comment allez-vous?
A knock on the door in the night
That Zazou, he don't care
Dark glasses, long hair
Takes his time, sneers at men
Some ugly people want revenge
That Zazou, he sleeps all day
Then down to Select or Le Collisee
Sips his drinks, orders more
Says what he thinks and it's a crazy war
There is a difference in emphasis between the narrative offered by the Pet Shop Boys, and the one that is found in the account in libcom, which can be linked to the implicit purpose behind each of the narratives. For libcom, the purpose of reporting the history of the group is pretty simple. Libcom is interested in looking at the ways that les Zazous constitute a form of resistant self-organization. It is part of a larger libertarian, anti-capitalist project arguing for a non-vanguardist revolutionary practice. We can see the power of people in revolt, and the ability to create an alternative social logic within the most repressive of societies. The subculture gestures towards a set of lines of flight from the logic of the mass worker, mass production, etc. It contains a refusal of a type of production, and, simultaneously, a gesture towards a logic that uses the commodity form, but is not caught within the commodity form.
The difference in the Pet Shop Boys narrative is immediately signaled by Tennant's claim that the movement was 'non-political.' The narrative of the song is far more interested in exploring the practices within the continuity, or perhaps as a untimely precursor of subculture, and more implicitly, the discotheque as a social and cultural space for gay men. The song shifts the narrative of les Zazous from a narrative about men and women to a distinctly male figure who stands in for the movement as a whole, and it strips out the historical particularities one gets in the lib.com narrative. The figure of the Zazou is defined by a set of traits that can run through any number of subcultural practices. He is linked to a narrative of subcultural stylization (through the gestures towards dark glass and long hair), social antagonism through that stylization, and club culture.
The figure within the song is singular. The narrative focuses on his passage through the public streets of Paris, rather than the collective intimacy of the club or the disco. Within that context he is the one who hates and is hated, and that mutual antagonism can only be understood within the context of the non-normativity of his stylization. The Zazou is hated because he refuses his role as a man in the public sphere through his refusal of the sacrifice of war, but also through the blank refusal of the gaze through his sunglasses and the refusal of the norms of masculinity through his long hair. He also refuses the normative dialectic of conversation, remaining voiceless until his exit from the street in the club. The figure of the Zazou then can be linked to the long history of the drag queen, which emerged antagonistically into the public through the Stonewall revolt, the history of gay liberation, as well as the transgressive intermingling of disco, often noted to be one of the only genuinely integrated social phenomenon in the United States.
And yet there is still a profound ambiguity in this position, which is immediately apparent with the next couplet. "Zazou, what you're gonna do?/ A knock on the door in the night" This couplet immediately shifts the narrative from a timeless story of aesthetic revolt to a moment of decision. The figure of the Zazou is left in this moment of suspension, indicating a vacillation, an inability to critically respond to fascist domination even in his own defense. Within this context, Tennant makes the following analysis of his own song, "The song looks at the moral implications, because the Nazis hated them and the Resistance hated them, because they were fatalistic and didn't participate in the resistance, and the song asks whether that's collaboration. It revolves around the chorus - "Well, there's a thin line between love and crime/And in this situation/A thin line between love and crime and collaboration" - because the fact of the matter is that if you're not really against something, you're for it, and in a way they collaborated with the Nazis just by carrying on a normal life. So, in the end, I am criticizing them."
And despite Tennant's conclusion, the song itself remains open, oscillating between the valourized revolt of the Zazous and its refusal or inability to enter into the political. That oscillation pivots on the following lines of the song.
And when the soldiers strut, all he cares about
Is love
When the flags are out, all he cares about
Is love
Well, there's a thin line between love and crime
And in this situation
A thin line between love and crime and -
Collaboration (-ration)
Although the chorus ends with the possibility of collaboration discussed above, its put into a context of a refusal, a refusal of the logic of militarism, and a refusal of the logic of nationalism. That double refusal is countered by an affirmation of 'love,' or perhaps more bluntly, the narrative logic of romance. That narrative is simultaneously the most banal narrative possible, dragged through the mud of decades of terrible pop songs, popular novels, and films, leaving us to wonder where the sentiment begins and the commodity form ends, and yet at the same time, it gestures to something that escapes both the logic of that form and allows for the Zazou to see the common nationalism and militarism contained in the logic of both the resistance and the conservative politics of Vichy. The very banality of the lines gestures towards a sort of double bind between a unrepresentable logic that gestures toward the sort of revolt demanded by the radical project demanded by Libcom, and infinite ability for capital to translate romance into its own reproductive logic of exploitation.
At this point, perhaps we should bring in the context of the release of the song, which came out as a B side to the "Opportunities" single, as well as being released as an extended remix on the first Disco complation released the same year. It occurs at the height of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the beginning of a full scale counter-offensive on the part of capital that continues to this day. On one side, we can see the release of the 1984 album please and the later singles tied to the collapse of a set of political possibilities contained in musical subculture, with the collapse of punk and post-punk as the end point of a terrain of ruins (please note that this narrative doesn't work quite as well in the English context, which I can discuss more in detail if you would like, but you could probably glean more on this from Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb) Disco also had collapsed in both its mainstream and avant-garde forms, and the electronic music dance scene that would replace it was only beginning. Finally, the HIV crisis was devastating the gay community with the conservative administrations of Reagan and Thatcher acting in almost open complicity with the disease.
The album please was then produced in this curious moment between capital's complete co-optation of subculture into post-Fordist consumerism, and the simultaneous indifference of dominant political institutions and temporary inability of the gay community to respond to the AIDS crisis. Within that context, there is a curious erasure of the political in the narratives of the song, remaining caught up in the adventures of lovers, hustlers, and criminals, who are caught within the web of the bourgeois city without a horizon. The songs offer us small moments of release, of joy, but only within the logic of a mutual criminality captured best by the song, Opportunities and Two divided by zero, which offer narratives of romantic escape through a criminality that mirrors the exploitative criminality of capital at a micro level. It is a replay of Brecht's analogy between the one who steals from the bank and the greater criminality of the bank owner. However, it does so without the revolutionary horizon of the proletariat. At the same time, the crisis of AIDS leads to an aporia within the gay community, neither the privatized terrain of the disco nor the older narratives of liberation offering an adequate response to the crisis.
Within this context, we can see the Pet Shop Boys intervention as a presentist historical narrative, presenting a productive contrast to both the nostalgia of libcom, as well as the willfully stupid naivete of Crimethinc. It neither looks back at older forms of revolt as loss, nor does it pretend that our capital is the capital of the protestant ethic, the continual error of CrimeThinc. It recognizes the only way to understand the history of subculture is to understand it as a history in ruin, or perhaps a history of ruins, defined by the dialectical oscillation of lines of flight and apparatuses of capture, a dialectic that neither progresses nor fully contains, but repeatedly mutilates. We are marked by this history of mutilation, but not as a common phenomenon. Instead, it constitutes and is constituted by histories of race, of gender, of sexuality, replicating and transforming the violence and constitutive division of the proletarian body in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Please see Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch) And yet at the same time, the logic of "In the Night" is not fully that of please, containing a historicity that both informs the present, and at the same time, while unable to contain a horizon, gestures towards the very contingency of the present.
I plan on offering a second part to this narrative through a reading of ACT-UP and the Sarah Schulman novel, People In Trouble. I intend to argue that these might give us resources to think through the process of revolutionary reconstitution in the same way that the Pet Shop Boys allow for us to recognize the shifts in subculture, capital, and the thread of desire, and the aporia that faced counter-systemic movements at that time. However, my argument will depend on an understanding of ACT-UP as crisis itself, and the knowledge coming out of the ruins of ACT-UP through its own contradictions. I recommend the following website as a starting point.
This posting has a somewhat curious origin. A couple days after I had posted my critique of Crimethinc, I happened to listen to an old Pet Shop Boys song, "In The Night,"while at the gym, using some machine that approximates the motions of running. It really struck me that the Pet Shop Boys were able to provide a much more nuanced and deeper analysis of the relationship between subcultures and structures of domination than is offered by hundreds of pages of analysis created by Crimethinc within the context of a four minute pop song. The group's analysis is developed through reference and analysis of a phenomenon during the Nazi occupation of France, the Zazou.
The Zazou movement was an early form of youth culture, which formed as a sort of informal opposition to the occupation of France, and the collaborationist, Vichy Regime. Zazou was a nation wide phenomenon, but were most often associated with Paris. Neither a formal group, nor aligned with the Resistance, the Zazou expressed their discontent through elaborate forms of dress, avoidance of work, and an identification with jazz culture. The combined transgressive effect of this is captured by a comment of a participant, Pierre Seel, “The Zazous were very obviously detested by the Nazis, who on the other side of the Rhine, had since a long time decimated the German cultural avante garde, forbidden jazz and all visible signs of…degenerations of Germanic culture…” (libcom.org) The elaborate dress was a way to flouting government policies on the rationing of cloth. The refusal of work's political significance should be obvious from anti-capitalist standpoint, but it was also a refusal of a nationalist narrative of labor, as well. The name of group was probably drawn from the songs of Cab Calloway, and the embrace of jazz simultaneously challenges the conservative racial nationalism of Vichy and shows an affinity with the aesthetic avant-garde of surrealism and dada.
Seel gestures toward the other transgressive thread that defined the subculture, the rejection of the rigid notions of masculinity that not only defined fascist Vichy, but simultaneously defined both the nationalist and PCF's versions of resistance culture. They do so through their refusal to organize their libidinal energies within the logic of sacrifice, a sacrificial commitment to the nation. Instead of operating within Schmitt's logic of the political, that is a space in which one is willing to kill or die for a cause, the Zazous create a critical the stylization of ephemera, a position which Dick Hebdige identifies as the form of subculture, par excellence. As Neil Tennant notes, "I was just fascinated that they were totally out of the context of their times; that you had this beaknik culture in the middle of the Second World War in occupied Paris." Tennant goes on to link the untimeliness of les Zazous to conversations about love and the meaning of life, as well their contempt for the 'masculinity' of the conflict between the resistance and Vichy. The rage of the fascist response focused precisely on these refusals, recognizing the stylizations of les Zazous, particularly their long hair, as a refusal of nationalist ideology. "They became Enemy Number One of the fascist youth organizations, Jeunesse Populaire Française. “Scalp the Zazous!” became their slogan. Squads of young JPF fascists armed with hairclippers attacked Zazous. Many were arrested and sent to the countryside to work on the harvest." (libcom.org)
The first three stanzas of the Pet Shop Boys song capture this dialectic of revolt and repression.
Zazou, what you're gonna do?
There's a lot of people coming for you
Zazou, comment allez-vous?
A knock on the door in the night
That Zazou, he don't care
Dark glasses, long hair
Takes his time, sneers at men
Some ugly people want revenge
That Zazou, he sleeps all day
Then down to Select or Le Collisee
Sips his drinks, orders more
Says what he thinks and it's a crazy war
There is a difference in emphasis between the narrative offered by the Pet Shop Boys, and the one that is found in the account in libcom, which can be linked to the implicit purpose behind each of the narratives. For libcom, the purpose of reporting the history of the group is pretty simple. Libcom is interested in looking at the ways that les Zazous constitute a form of resistant self-organization. It is part of a larger libertarian, anti-capitalist project arguing for a non-vanguardist revolutionary practice. We can see the power of people in revolt, and the ability to create an alternative social logic within the most repressive of societies. The subculture gestures towards a set of lines of flight from the logic of the mass worker, mass production, etc. It contains a refusal of a type of production, and, simultaneously, a gesture towards a logic that uses the commodity form, but is not caught within the commodity form.
The difference in the Pet Shop Boys narrative is immediately signaled by Tennant's claim that the movement was 'non-political.' The narrative of the song is far more interested in exploring the practices within the continuity, or perhaps as a untimely precursor of subculture, and more implicitly, the discotheque as a social and cultural space for gay men. The song shifts the narrative of les Zazous from a narrative about men and women to a distinctly male figure who stands in for the movement as a whole, and it strips out the historical particularities one gets in the lib.com narrative. The figure of the Zazou is defined by a set of traits that can run through any number of subcultural practices. He is linked to a narrative of subcultural stylization (through the gestures towards dark glass and long hair), social antagonism through that stylization, and club culture.
The figure within the song is singular. The narrative focuses on his passage through the public streets of Paris, rather than the collective intimacy of the club or the disco. Within that context he is the one who hates and is hated, and that mutual antagonism can only be understood within the context of the non-normativity of his stylization. The Zazou is hated because he refuses his role as a man in the public sphere through his refusal of the sacrifice of war, but also through the blank refusal of the gaze through his sunglasses and the refusal of the norms of masculinity through his long hair. He also refuses the normative dialectic of conversation, remaining voiceless until his exit from the street in the club. The figure of the Zazou then can be linked to the long history of the drag queen, which emerged antagonistically into the public through the Stonewall revolt, the history of gay liberation, as well as the transgressive intermingling of disco, often noted to be one of the only genuinely integrated social phenomenon in the United States.
And yet there is still a profound ambiguity in this position, which is immediately apparent with the next couplet. "Zazou, what you're gonna do?/ A knock on the door in the night" This couplet immediately shifts the narrative from a timeless story of aesthetic revolt to a moment of decision. The figure of the Zazou is left in this moment of suspension, indicating a vacillation, an inability to critically respond to fascist domination even in his own defense. Within this context, Tennant makes the following analysis of his own song, "The song looks at the moral implications, because the Nazis hated them and the Resistance hated them, because they were fatalistic and didn't participate in the resistance, and the song asks whether that's collaboration. It revolves around the chorus - "Well, there's a thin line between love and crime/And in this situation/A thin line between love and crime and collaboration" - because the fact of the matter is that if you're not really against something, you're for it, and in a way they collaborated with the Nazis just by carrying on a normal life. So, in the end, I am criticizing them."
And despite Tennant's conclusion, the song itself remains open, oscillating between the valourized revolt of the Zazous and its refusal or inability to enter into the political. That oscillation pivots on the following lines of the song.
And when the soldiers strut, all he cares about
Is love
When the flags are out, all he cares about
Is love
Well, there's a thin line between love and crime
And in this situation
A thin line between love and crime and -
Collaboration (-ration)
Although the chorus ends with the possibility of collaboration discussed above, its put into a context of a refusal, a refusal of the logic of militarism, and a refusal of the logic of nationalism. That double refusal is countered by an affirmation of 'love,' or perhaps more bluntly, the narrative logic of romance. That narrative is simultaneously the most banal narrative possible, dragged through the mud of decades of terrible pop songs, popular novels, and films, leaving us to wonder where the sentiment begins and the commodity form ends, and yet at the same time, it gestures to something that escapes both the logic of that form and allows for the Zazou to see the common nationalism and militarism contained in the logic of both the resistance and the conservative politics of Vichy. The very banality of the lines gestures towards a sort of double bind between a unrepresentable logic that gestures toward the sort of revolt demanded by the radical project demanded by Libcom, and infinite ability for capital to translate romance into its own reproductive logic of exploitation.
At this point, perhaps we should bring in the context of the release of the song, which came out as a B side to the "Opportunities" single, as well as being released as an extended remix on the first Disco complation released the same year. It occurs at the height of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the beginning of a full scale counter-offensive on the part of capital that continues to this day. On one side, we can see the release of the 1984 album please and the later singles tied to the collapse of a set of political possibilities contained in musical subculture, with the collapse of punk and post-punk as the end point of a terrain of ruins (please note that this narrative doesn't work quite as well in the English context, which I can discuss more in detail if you would like, but you could probably glean more on this from Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb) Disco also had collapsed in both its mainstream and avant-garde forms, and the electronic music dance scene that would replace it was only beginning. Finally, the HIV crisis was devastating the gay community with the conservative administrations of Reagan and Thatcher acting in almost open complicity with the disease.
The album please was then produced in this curious moment between capital's complete co-optation of subculture into post-Fordist consumerism, and the simultaneous indifference of dominant political institutions and temporary inability of the gay community to respond to the AIDS crisis. Within that context, there is a curious erasure of the political in the narratives of the song, remaining caught up in the adventures of lovers, hustlers, and criminals, who are caught within the web of the bourgeois city without a horizon. The songs offer us small moments of release, of joy, but only within the logic of a mutual criminality captured best by the song, Opportunities and Two divided by zero, which offer narratives of romantic escape through a criminality that mirrors the exploitative criminality of capital at a micro level. It is a replay of Brecht's analogy between the one who steals from the bank and the greater criminality of the bank owner. However, it does so without the revolutionary horizon of the proletariat. At the same time, the crisis of AIDS leads to an aporia within the gay community, neither the privatized terrain of the disco nor the older narratives of liberation offering an adequate response to the crisis.
Within this context, we can see the Pet Shop Boys intervention as a presentist historical narrative, presenting a productive contrast to both the nostalgia of libcom, as well as the willfully stupid naivete of Crimethinc. It neither looks back at older forms of revolt as loss, nor does it pretend that our capital is the capital of the protestant ethic, the continual error of CrimeThinc. It recognizes the only way to understand the history of subculture is to understand it as a history in ruin, or perhaps a history of ruins, defined by the dialectical oscillation of lines of flight and apparatuses of capture, a dialectic that neither progresses nor fully contains, but repeatedly mutilates. We are marked by this history of mutilation, but not as a common phenomenon. Instead, it constitutes and is constituted by histories of race, of gender, of sexuality, replicating and transforming the violence and constitutive division of the proletarian body in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Please see Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch) And yet at the same time, the logic of "In the Night" is not fully that of please, containing a historicity that both informs the present, and at the same time, while unable to contain a horizon, gestures towards the very contingency of the present.
I plan on offering a second part to this narrative through a reading of ACT-UP and the Sarah Schulman novel, People In Trouble. I intend to argue that these might give us resources to think through the process of revolutionary reconstitution in the same way that the Pet Shop Boys allow for us to recognize the shifts in subculture, capital, and the thread of desire, and the aporia that faced counter-systemic movements at that time. However, my argument will depend on an understanding of ACT-UP as crisis itself, and the knowledge coming out of the ruins of ACT-UP through its own contradictions. I recommend the following website as a starting point.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Music Criticism and the Jungle Brothers "Crazy Wisdom Masters" Bootleg (subtitled: aesthetics and failure)
I want to make a bit of a tangent from the group of topics that I have been dealing with for the past few days, and return to the discussion of music that I had brought up in a couple posts. Something that I have been thinking about over the past few years is a particular rhetorical trope that is common in pop music journalism, the notion of a record or a group being 'ahead of its time.' It's a label that gets applied to a wide variety of bands, but its a term that is most often applied to the work of bands such as the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. According to this approach to analyzing music, the value of the music of those bands is reflected in the influence they had on contemporary music. In the case of the Stooges, it is their influence on punk and metal. In the case of Velvet Underground, it is their influence on gads of college rock bands. (The primary narrative of rock journalism is that of the hidden father, it would seem. We get nothing of the playfulness of Shklovsky in this process, no analogies to chess, no escape from the hetero-normative model.)
Don't get me wrong. I love those bands. I remember hearing The Stooges for the first time on a alternative rock station some time in the '90's. They played "I Wanna Be Your Dog." I had never heard anything like it before. I particularly remember the sound of bells that were added by John Cale's production, which introduced a droning quality to the piece, a quality also found in the vocals of Iggy Pop. It was simple, repetitive and hypnotic. I was obsessed, and it took quite a bit of time to track down that record in that period before the internet, and boutique record reissues. My relationship to Velvet Underground doesn't have that immediate narrative, but those are records that I still listen to all the time.
But I'm not sure why The Stooges relationship to a pack of mediocre punk rock bands or Velvet Underground's relationship to bunch of bad college rock band offers a very compelling explanation for why those records are so unique, so compelling. Isn't that evident in the records themselves? In addition, I'm skeptical of the value of influence. After all, the first Dre lp and the first Snoop Dog lp led to a spate of terrible records in hip-hop, but despite their all too obvious misogyny, the two records are interesting and innovative records sonically. For me, a pair of films make the point even more clearly. George Lukas' Star Wars and Quentin Tarentino's Reservoir Dogs respectively led to a decline in Hollywood and Independent film, but I like both of those films. Perhaps, the most productive approach to influence is the antiquarian approach, but this is drifting a bit.
I've been thinking about this because of some material that I came across recently on the 'internet' recently from the original recordings from what would eventually become the Jungle Brothers third album, J Beez Wit The Remedy. For those who are unaware of the band, the Jungle Brothers were hip hop group that was associated with the informal Native Tongues coalition that included groups such as De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, and Black Sheep. The groups could be connected through their common interest in expanding the sound of the genre. They sampled jazz fusion albums, country music, sixties pop music, as well as a greater palate of R&B and funk. In addition, their approach to MCing moved away from the aggressive, shouting approach that defined earlier acts such Run DMC, the Beasties, etc. to smoother, more laid back approach. Lyrically, the groups oscillating between taking on serious political topics and a return to the sort of playfulness that defined early hip-hop, although, in retrospect, some of that political engagement was more conservative than initially thought. (Something that Boots Riley has noted.) But, I think that misses out on the primary political engagement of the movement. Instead of looking to lyrics for politics, it would be better to look at the formal experimentation of the groups as their primary engagement, demanding hip-hop, which was so often not taken seriously by the record companies as product (to paraphrase a Roots sample) be taken seriously as an art form, as something that could move beyond novelty and the single format. Form was the politics of the groups, operating through a combination of virtuosic play, which might be tied to the constant referent of jazz, juxtaposition, that is a commitment to originality and creativity in production and sampling, an alternative take on masculinity and sexuality, and a continuation of hip-hop's move from the single format to the album format.
The band put out its first record in 1988, Straight Out of the Jungle, and its second album, Done By the Forces of Nature, in 1990. Both those records were received fairly well, both critically and commercially, but didn't get the attention that were given to the more ambitious albums put out by De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest. If you contrast the records, its fairly understandable. The Jungle Brothers records lack the aesthetic coherence of those albums. In addition, the records sample creatively, drawing from a variety of sources, but lack the kind of virtuosity found on the Prince Paul produce De La Soul and Tribe. Compared to Three Feet High and Rising or that really long title Tribe album, the JB's albums feel kind of patchy and tossed together, although definitely worth the listen. (Here are a couple examples from those records.)
However, the group made a notable shift for its third record, working with outside MC Torture/Sensational and working with producer Bill Laswell, who was both involved in the avant-funk group, Material, and was contributed to Herbie Hancock's "Rock It." There was a clear intent on the album to produce a more aesthetically demanding and complex form of hip-hop. The tracks bring in an even wider range of sample material, ranging from more diverse jazz sources to the Stooges. Laswell, who had a foot in both hip-hop through "Rock It" and the aesthetic avant-garde through groups like Material and Last Exit, was a perfect choice to produce the material, reflecting the group's aesthetic interests. At the same time, there was a commitment to remain in the continuity of hip hop. Reviewer Joe Kenney does a good job of expressing this juxtaposition, contrasting the group's work with other work's in the genre's avant-garde. "Some of Tricky’s stranger concoctions are similar, and DJ Spooky as well, but neither artist strives to stay as true to the hip hop beat as the Jungle Brothers. Because, no matter how weird these four songs are, the bass still shakes your subwoofer, and the beats crush." The record simultaneously holds a commitment the flow of hip hop and the strategies of disruptive juxtaposition, noise, and dissonance of the avant-garde, and it really works. I felt the same kind of excitement when I heard these tracks as I did when I first heard the Stooges, or the Pistols, or Public Enemy. (hint: if you want to here some of the other material from the bootleg, and some of its much better than this, there's this crazy place called the internet, and you can find this with 'The Google'.)
Unfortunately,Warner Bros. didn't see fit to release the record as it was produced, and put out a considerably modified version of the record in the form of J Beez Wit the Remedy. The modified record neither fit in with the mainstream hip-hop at the time, nor did it hold on to the aesthetic innovation contained in its original form. Despite some shining moments on the record, it leaves it soggy and awkward. It's an understandably forgotten record, moldering in cut-out bins and used record shops. The original form of the record has only been heard by a few people in its entirety. There is a bootleg 10" from 1999, and a few other tracks have leaked, but it's difficult to imagine the album getting the proper release that it really deserves. At the same time, it's difficult imagining that the record would have sold, even if it had gotten a proper release. It's sound is alien to the main trends within hip hop, it still is. The Jungle Brothers quickly abandoned this approach to hip-hop, and have continued to produced decent work, but nothing of the innovation that can be found in the early work. In addition, hip hop in its underground and mainstream forms has made no effort to take its approach as an influence. It's an aesthetic cul de sac.
To return to the topic I introduced this posting with, I feel that popular music criticism is far too obsessed with paternity and continuity, and doing so it loses out on the messy complexity of aesthetic production. The untimeliness of material such as this, cul de sacs whose untimeliness deny the comfortable dialectical synthesis of the 'before its time' narrative, allow for this process to be recognized. At the same time, the record has to be heard as a singularity, a particular aesthetic approach. It's value exists in its own particular form and history. Granted, there are pitfalls to this approach, tedious forms of fetishization and snobbery that are always the danger of the arcane, but as left activist and science fiction author Chandler Davis notes, "diehard adherence to a heresy is in general less menacing to free inquiry than matter-of-course adherence to orthodoxy: because the heretic, being constantly challenged, is deprived of the illusion that his rut is the whole road." (Chandler 75)
Don't get me wrong. I love those bands. I remember hearing The Stooges for the first time on a alternative rock station some time in the '90's. They played "I Wanna Be Your Dog." I had never heard anything like it before. I particularly remember the sound of bells that were added by John Cale's production, which introduced a droning quality to the piece, a quality also found in the vocals of Iggy Pop. It was simple, repetitive and hypnotic. I was obsessed, and it took quite a bit of time to track down that record in that period before the internet, and boutique record reissues. My relationship to Velvet Underground doesn't have that immediate narrative, but those are records that I still listen to all the time.
But I'm not sure why The Stooges relationship to a pack of mediocre punk rock bands or Velvet Underground's relationship to bunch of bad college rock band offers a very compelling explanation for why those records are so unique, so compelling. Isn't that evident in the records themselves? In addition, I'm skeptical of the value of influence. After all, the first Dre lp and the first Snoop Dog lp led to a spate of terrible records in hip-hop, but despite their all too obvious misogyny, the two records are interesting and innovative records sonically. For me, a pair of films make the point even more clearly. George Lukas' Star Wars and Quentin Tarentino's Reservoir Dogs respectively led to a decline in Hollywood and Independent film, but I like both of those films. Perhaps, the most productive approach to influence is the antiquarian approach, but this is drifting a bit.
I've been thinking about this because of some material that I came across recently on the 'internet' recently from the original recordings from what would eventually become the Jungle Brothers third album, J Beez Wit The Remedy. For those who are unaware of the band, the Jungle Brothers were hip hop group that was associated with the informal Native Tongues coalition that included groups such as De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, and Black Sheep. The groups could be connected through their common interest in expanding the sound of the genre. They sampled jazz fusion albums, country music, sixties pop music, as well as a greater palate of R&B and funk. In addition, their approach to MCing moved away from the aggressive, shouting approach that defined earlier acts such Run DMC, the Beasties, etc. to smoother, more laid back approach. Lyrically, the groups oscillating between taking on serious political topics and a return to the sort of playfulness that defined early hip-hop, although, in retrospect, some of that political engagement was more conservative than initially thought. (Something that Boots Riley has noted.) But, I think that misses out on the primary political engagement of the movement. Instead of looking to lyrics for politics, it would be better to look at the formal experimentation of the groups as their primary engagement, demanding hip-hop, which was so often not taken seriously by the record companies as product (to paraphrase a Roots sample) be taken seriously as an art form, as something that could move beyond novelty and the single format. Form was the politics of the groups, operating through a combination of virtuosic play, which might be tied to the constant referent of jazz, juxtaposition, that is a commitment to originality and creativity in production and sampling, an alternative take on masculinity and sexuality, and a continuation of hip-hop's move from the single format to the album format.
The band put out its first record in 1988, Straight Out of the Jungle, and its second album, Done By the Forces of Nature, in 1990. Both those records were received fairly well, both critically and commercially, but didn't get the attention that were given to the more ambitious albums put out by De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest. If you contrast the records, its fairly understandable. The Jungle Brothers records lack the aesthetic coherence of those albums. In addition, the records sample creatively, drawing from a variety of sources, but lack the kind of virtuosity found on the Prince Paul produce De La Soul and Tribe. Compared to Three Feet High and Rising or that really long title Tribe album, the JB's albums feel kind of patchy and tossed together, although definitely worth the listen. (Here are a couple examples from those records.)
However, the group made a notable shift for its third record, working with outside MC Torture/Sensational and working with producer Bill Laswell, who was both involved in the avant-funk group, Material, and was contributed to Herbie Hancock's "Rock It." There was a clear intent on the album to produce a more aesthetically demanding and complex form of hip-hop. The tracks bring in an even wider range of sample material, ranging from more diverse jazz sources to the Stooges. Laswell, who had a foot in both hip-hop through "Rock It" and the aesthetic avant-garde through groups like Material and Last Exit, was a perfect choice to produce the material, reflecting the group's aesthetic interests. At the same time, there was a commitment to remain in the continuity of hip hop. Reviewer Joe Kenney does a good job of expressing this juxtaposition, contrasting the group's work with other work's in the genre's avant-garde. "Some of Tricky’s stranger concoctions are similar, and DJ Spooky as well, but neither artist strives to stay as true to the hip hop beat as the Jungle Brothers. Because, no matter how weird these four songs are, the bass still shakes your subwoofer, and the beats crush." The record simultaneously holds a commitment the flow of hip hop and the strategies of disruptive juxtaposition, noise, and dissonance of the avant-garde, and it really works. I felt the same kind of excitement when I heard these tracks as I did when I first heard the Stooges, or the Pistols, or Public Enemy. (hint: if you want to here some of the other material from the bootleg, and some of its much better than this, there's this crazy place called the internet, and you can find this with 'The Google'.)
Unfortunately,Warner Bros. didn't see fit to release the record as it was produced, and put out a considerably modified version of the record in the form of J Beez Wit the Remedy. The modified record neither fit in with the mainstream hip-hop at the time, nor did it hold on to the aesthetic innovation contained in its original form. Despite some shining moments on the record, it leaves it soggy and awkward. It's an understandably forgotten record, moldering in cut-out bins and used record shops. The original form of the record has only been heard by a few people in its entirety. There is a bootleg 10" from 1999, and a few other tracks have leaked, but it's difficult to imagine the album getting the proper release that it really deserves. At the same time, it's difficult imagining that the record would have sold, even if it had gotten a proper release. It's sound is alien to the main trends within hip hop, it still is. The Jungle Brothers quickly abandoned this approach to hip-hop, and have continued to produced decent work, but nothing of the innovation that can be found in the early work. In addition, hip hop in its underground and mainstream forms has made no effort to take its approach as an influence. It's an aesthetic cul de sac.
To return to the topic I introduced this posting with, I feel that popular music criticism is far too obsessed with paternity and continuity, and doing so it loses out on the messy complexity of aesthetic production. The untimeliness of material such as this, cul de sacs whose untimeliness deny the comfortable dialectical synthesis of the 'before its time' narrative, allow for this process to be recognized. At the same time, the record has to be heard as a singularity, a particular aesthetic approach. It's value exists in its own particular form and history. Granted, there are pitfalls to this approach, tedious forms of fetishization and snobbery that are always the danger of the arcane, but as left activist and science fiction author Chandler Davis notes, "diehard adherence to a heresy is in general less menacing to free inquiry than matter-of-course adherence to orthodoxy: because the heretic, being constantly challenged, is deprived of the illusion that his rut is the whole road." (Chandler 75)
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
A Talk on AMM
This is a talk that I gave on the improv group AMM for a visual studies conference some time in 2004, I think. It's interesting going back to one's earlier work. Re-reading this, I can see some bad habits I had as a writer at the time. (I suspect that I will feel the same way when I go back to this work.) I have a tendency to put large sections of quotations into the work without providing the analytical work necessary. In addition, I don't think that I pushed the theoretical implications of failure as far as I could have pushed them. The paper is a little too neat for the topic at hand, and there are questions around subjectivity, collectivity, and authorship that could have been pushed further. A last note, the quotations from Prevost are drawn from his text, No Sound Is Innocent. The Chakrabarty Quote is from Provincializing Europe, and the Judith Butler Quote is from Precarious Life. This is obviously not a formal academic setting, but I thought I would cross some of my t's, at least. Here goes:
“Be reasonable—demand the impossible!”
--Paris Slogan, 1968.
“Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
--Rosa Luxemburg
“Failure,” as Cornelius Cardew states, “is an interesting concept. He links it with goals, with intentional qualities. Intention produces failure. The products of the processes that we go through will never quite match up to the initial expectations that we have for them. The question then becomes what do we make of this gap? Do we see a lack in the situation, or do we see a lack in the forms that are used to engage in that situation? In his discussion of subaltern history, Dipesh Chakrabarty opens up a space for a need for a politics that pushes at the boundaries of known discourses, a “struggling, or even groping, for nonstatist forms of democracy that we cannot not yet either understand or envisage completely.”[1] Chakrabarty in part links this to a politics of despair, that is to say a politics that recognizes the limitations of its own forms and looks for its own demise in its experimentation. I want to look at the practices and the theories of the improvisational group AMM as a way of thinking through what that might mean.
I suppose if I was to begin anywhere, it would be within the current situation. After all, Michel Foucault insists that all histories are in some way histories of the present. The present that haunts me is the state of the anti-war movement, a movement which flashed so brightly for such a brief moment and then disappeared just as quickly. It was a movement that was a profound failure, not because it failed to literally stop the war, but because it failed to produce a new form of politics that could deal with the current state of things. That failure, the failure to produce new forms, comes out of the fear of failure, or perhaps more precisely that the results of that politic will spin out of control of the grasp of its organizers.
This question, that is the question of the production of new forms, is one that preoccupies me. If I were to express the project for most of my intellectual work, it would be the relationship between artistic movements and revolutionary movements. This interest focuses on the question of form, or to put it another way, what I am curious about in this intersection is the way that the explosion of new forms of revolutionary movements make unspoken demands on the way art is made. We can see this in relationship to the 1848 revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the revolution of 1968 to just name a few examples. These movements put artists in a position where their former approaches to their craft becomes meaningless, or at least needs to be extraordinarily modified. I have no doubt that the ways they create new forms of art and of life also interfere with the formation of those political revolutions, but I emphasize the former given the radical size disparity between the mass movement of revolution and the relatively small size of artistic movements.
This is particularly evident in the 1968 revolution, the first revolution, at least on one of its poles, that started from a demand for new forms of life, rather than out of the desperation of poverty or tyranny. This revolution was not only against capital and the state, but also against the older forms of counter systemic movements. It constitutes both a great crisis within communities of artists and intellectuals, and also a great burst of creativity. This can be found in film, painting, theater, etc. Perhaps the best example is the radical shift that occurs in the films made by Jean Luc Godard, which embrace the notion of producing a cinema that cannot be recognized as cinema. Music obviously wasn’t exempt from this process.
We can draw two major sources of artistic transformation that produce the thought and practice of AMM. The first occurs in the field of modern classical music. The cultural dominant of the 1950’s in this field is serialism, which simultaneously challenges the musical forms of progression created in older forms of classical music, and simultaneously demands its own forms of crushing conformity. The response to this form primarily comes from the United States in the form an outside art that puts more and more emphasis on forms of aleatory sound, sounds that are not necessarily consciously constructed by the composer, such as Cage’s producing score on chance, etc. This trajectory also increasingly emphasizes the production of music as an arrangement of sounds rather than as notes.
The second source can be found in the transformations that are occurring within jazz at the same time. This transformation can broadly be placed under the rubric of ‘free jazz’, although it had many other titles at the time and since then, such as fire music, the new thing, etc. Within this movement, there contained the same aleatory elements, but it also had another element that one could not necessarily find in the first. This focuses on a shift in cultural politics which sought to engage in the black cultural nationalism that was beginning to be emphasized in the mid-60’s. The other interesting trend was towards producing new forms of collectivity. The most interesting and long lasting of these was Chicago’s the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, but it was only one of many such artists’ collectives formed at the time. These were not only directed towards organizing concerts, but also took on pedagogical and political functions that tied into both the civil rights movement and the new left.
AMM brought these two trends together within the context of the postwar welfare state of England. The earliest members of the collective, Keith Rowe, Edwin Prevost, Lou Gare, and Lawrence Sheaff all came out of the jazz scene in one form or another. Whereas composer Cornelius Cardew came out of the environs of the avant-garde of classical music, first working with Stockhausen at Darmstadt, and later working within the vein of the American scene. Their combination was driven by a desire for new forms on both sides of the discussion. Prevost argues that, “In 1965, AMM began a radically different kind of music-making. The prevalent notions of musical theory, practice, hierarchy, and structure…were replaced by the creation of, and engagement with, a sound world in which there was not even a formal beginning and ending. And, and from its first raucous explosions, it knew too that it was not only speaking in a new language but that it was talking about things not perceived in any musics the member-musicians had heard elsewhere.”[2]
These are, of course, bold claims, but in the wake of Richard Wagner, not unusual ones. I think that the interesting innovation on AMM’s claim to a unique status in the development of the avant-garde was its linkage of this claim to radically new democratic practices. That is to say that AMM didn’t link its status to the position of the genius, which has haunted so much of avant-garde practice. Instead, the players produced this new form through collectivity, and more precisely, new forms of collectivity. This precisely links the concern with aleatory practices of the avant-garde with the forms of collectivity and cultural memory that are emphasized within radical jazz circles. But it takes the form of an interference between the two that produces a completely different form altogether, that will later be described by Prevost as a mode of dialogical heurism.
This notion is developed by Prevost to come up with a way of describe dialogic relations between music that go beyond the structures of call and response that are developed by folk and blues forms and later get taken up by jazz. He describes it in the following terms; “Dialogue is the interactive medium in which the products of heurism are tested. Sounds are placed: placed in contrast to, in parallel to, in imitation of, in respect of, without regard to, other sounds. Minds struggle, coalesce, defer or acquiesce. Inner debate meets outer debate. Instant decisions dictate the immediate direction of the music…” This creative dialogue is directed towards finding new sounds, new possibilities. This can only be found in open forms of dialogue.
Perhaps it would be best to give a brief description of the practices of AMM in its early incarnation. The group would play for about an hour and a half to two hours and a half. These performances were frequently defined by large sections of silence as the musicians engaged or stopped engaging with each other in any number of combinations. These concerts were free. There is some debate over the roll of the audience within this experience. Promoter Victor Schoenfeld felt that “the original relationship with the audience was dictated by AMM: “we’ll let you listen, but only if you let us play.” This presents the audience as being dictated to in a way. Whereas drummer Prevost tends to emphasize the engagement of the audience with the music, going as far as to point out the “almost proprietary relationship” that some members felt towards the music. I tend to find Prevost’s view more productive, as that it emphasizes the sense of interconnectivity that is felt within the improv community.
This is a question that Prevost deals with explicitly in an interview. He explains that new listeners of improvised music have been produced as listeners in the rules structures of their former listening experiences, whether this is classical music, rap, etc. In his words, “The suffer what I call an aesthetic mismatch.”[3] There needs to be some way of allowing for that listener to understand the rules of the conversation that is occurring through sound. There is a “kind of specific analytical framework for free improvisation, as there is for every other kind of music. To deny this fact is in a way to deny entry for others into this world, and it also hampers the music’s development.”[4]
Within that physical context, the musicians developed very distinct ways of engaging with each other. Prevost states, “There are, of course, no traditional roles in AMMmusic…. Decision-making and identity comes from the manner in which AMM treats its own history. It is beholden to each player to find a role within AMM. No specifics of performance are ever discussed. There is no formulated logic of direction; no particular encouragement to do a particular thing. AMMmusicians prefer not to know if a fellow musician has a strategy for a particular performance.”[5]
This creates a condition where the collectivity of AMM is placed in hands other than the conscious wills of those involved in its production. This frees it up from coagulating into any particular form. It plays emphasis on ‘potentiality.’ There is no way of knowing whether the concert will be an enormous failure or a spectacular success. But at the same time, this music was produced in an atmosphere of a certain continuity. Unlike the practice of fellow improvist, Derek Bailey, AMM continued to work with each other over a long period of time, and that practice was dependent on a long series of conversations over matters of philosophy, religion, and politics. But, at the same time within that context, there was an emphasis of taking the music out of the hands of a sovereign individual, whether individual or collective.
This moved to produce a form of music that sounded considerably different than other forms. This frequently came out of the use of instruments in non-traditional manners, or the use of random debris within the production of sounds. Prevost points out that frequently listeners would have difficulty labeling which instrument produced the sound. This lead to a frequent negative interpretation of their project, that it was not music at all. As Prevost notes, “I was first alerted to the idea that ‘free’ or ‘total’ improvisation was different from all other music-making when told what I did was not music! (In retrospect I am astounded by so impoverished a perspective: though it hardly discouraged me or my peers; quite the reverse.)[6]
What is so fascinating in that statement, is the ‘failure’ of AMM to produce something that would be recognized as music was considered a matter of success, even a matter for excitement amongst the members. AMM was concerned with pushing this as far as possible, introducing any number of aleatory elements to the music. “Indeed, seeking failure itself was a possible route to success! For AMM these ‘controlled accidents’ were practiced variously: through random radio frequency switching: rolling empty tin cans across (and often off) the stage: testing the bowing qualities of an unknown metal sheet.”[7] The possibility for new sounds was no longer in the hands of the genius or even the craftsman; rather it was in the hands of the detritus produced within the context of a consumerist post-war welfare state. The material conditions of the collective are always at play within the production, and we are always aware that we do not choose the stage that we act upon.
Cardew captures the goals of this process best in a comment in his essay, “Towards an ethic of improvisation. “We are ‘searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician is at the heart of the experiment.”[8] This statement sets up an understanding of the production of music that cuts across the binary of the individual/collective. The individual becomes the site of experimentation and creation, but this individual, who is both experimented and experimenter can only exist within the context of a collective formation. After all, it is precisely the intervention of the unknown in the form of an exteriority that allows for change to occur, for the experiment to be meaningful.
I think that we can think about the meaning of this within two conceptual frameworks. The first is the idea of undoing the subject that gets developed in the latest work of Judith Butler, particularly in her thoughts on a politics of mourning. This may sound counterintuitive, but both the music practices of AMM are tied into a certain notion of ecstasy in the sense that Butler invokes it. “To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief.”[9] The great joy that is desired through the collective improvisations of AMM and the mourning that Judith Butler describes both describe a situation where the subject is moved somewhere else.
The process of grief or of mourning that Butler describes is an incredibly difficult one. We can see this in her description of the process, “one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, but finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.” It is a process of transformation that one is never in full control of, which will bring the subject somewhere that cannot be predicted in advance. And contrary to common sense notions of mourning, it should be a process that is communal and political.
This expresses an idea very similar to Prevost in his practice of training musicians for improvisation. “No one is instructed or commanded, and the only recommendations are to put focus upon the instrument or material they are using in a fresh way…. And as a consequence each time in the moment of making music to try to do something—no matter how minor—that they have never done before: to move away from their normal habitual responses and to explore this environment. It is then suggested that they uses their own investigations in a progressive dialogue with the other musicians with whom they are playing.”
I think that both of these processes point to a vulnerability that is crucial to a genuinely radical politic, but a vulnerability that is all too often refused by those within radical politics. There is no real possibility of transforming the world, without simultaneously transforming yourself. I don’t think that this is easy. It means being swept up by your work, by the movement. It means giving up the illusion of your autonomy as an individual. The experiences of a genuinely radical movement, whether artistic or political, are at times joyful to an inexpressible level, but they are also defined by despair, paranoia, and exhaustion. What the common trope to these affects is that they cannot be contained comfortably within the logic and reason of the liberal individual.
This process is obviously not an isolated one, and is tied to collectivity. Even the loss of an individual exposes the profound interconnectedness of an individual with an other, but we are discussing the situation of music being produced in an ensemble. In her other latest book, Butler links this idea of undoing the subject to the broader topic of democracy. “Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the “right” in midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is “right” and what is “good” consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know and what we need, and to recognize the sign of life—and its prospects.”[10]
The old social democratic politician, Edward Bernstein, loved to say, “The process is everything, the goal is nothing.” While I don’t think that Butler is precisely saying that, I think that it is pointing to a relationship between ends and means that sees the ends of a process being produced precisely through its means. This exists in a constant open constitutive process, one that is precisely productive because of its multiplicity, its antagonisms, its contradictions. This goes against even the contractual minimalism that rational choice insists upon. It means leaving those goals open to this in all of its ambiguity.
This dissonance isn’t something exclusively linked to a hostile outside to the warmth of the interior of the group. AMM isn’t precisely a Janus faced structure. The agonistic structure of the music has played out within group dynamics. There were extreme tensions within the production of the group itself. Lawrence Sheaff was encouraged the leave the group just after the first album was produced. There was a brief time that the group played as two units due to the conflicts between Rowe/Cardew and Prevost/Gare over Maoism and the direction to go in response to that philosophy. Just recently, there has been another split in the group between Rowe and Prevost over the very texts that I have quoted.
In this sense, we get a reflection of the very ‘failures’ that are so often found within the political practices that occur in the new left. The experimentation leads to incredible rifts and fractures between and within groups. One can only think of the many permutations that come out of the Students for a Democratic Society for instance. This is traditionally read as the weakness of the new left. While I don’t want to downplay the real sense of frustration and pain that came through these moments, I also suggest that we see this in productive terms as well. These splits represent moments of difference and experimentation as well. One should remember what Dutch Communist Anton Pannekoek said on this issue, that there is no particular reason to unite behind a losing strategy
The second conceptual framework can be linked to a notion of the unconscious. The production of the new, ‘the wonderful configurations produced by failure” come out of a collective process that linked to a structure of alterity. As drummer Eddie Prevost puts it, “Any creative act works towards an otherness. You experience it a few times and hope that it will come back, but you don’t know if it will. The playing is sometimes just a ritual and if you’re lucky you get beyond it. You have to build into the ritual the possibilities of that happening.”[11]
The unconsciousness that is being expressed here is not the unconscious of Freud or of Lacan, although it doesn’t preclude their existence. Instead I would like to read it in terms of an unconscious of practice. This is a space in which I feel least sure of my ground. I would be tempted to focus this unconscious in a firmly Marxist footing, with the concepts of Luxemburg, Lenin, etc., and I wouldn’t be wrong. But for the members of the group, this concept is also tied to any number of non-Western practices such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc. The importance of this form of alterity is clearly important to the group and remains a horizon for my understanding.
These two elements combine to produce a sense of sociability and a politic that creates other possibilities. Prevost continually links this to the broader conditions of the society that artists and their audiences live in. He discusses “Every peer group, faction, gang, party, etc., share life experiences and ensuing expectations; they are the substance of a sense of belonging. Together with this goes a language, necessarily created to express nuances of meaning and limit comprehension to those within the group. This semi-secret language not only conveys messages to group members and excludes those not sympathetic, but it also offers an alternative to the perceived established means of expression and the cultural priorities which dominate and control it.”[12]
This reading is in part in a sociological mode, but I think that it has more possibilities than this. I am tempted to read it back upon the practices of Prevost and AMM itself. This ‘semi-secret language’ can be a form of art, a form of politics, or perhaps something that is outside of both of those. It points to a form of opposition that doesn’t operate in the sad logic of a statement such as “in the service of”, which constitutes so much of what constitutes politics and political art today. Instead, it reads the formations of subculture as an opposition that occurs in its own modes of sociability and language. Prevost insists upon this even for groups that fall out of his aesthetic tolerance, such as punk.
Prevost reads the political possibilities of art immanently in its practices, rather than in the ways that it can be submitted to any politic. As he states, in an interview with Wire magazine, “I repudiate ‘politics first and art later’, an idea which has surfaced again understandably in these threatening times. Politics arise from our view of the world and what world and what kind of world we live in. Art is a powerful tool and a powerful cipher in making such choices. The way musicians play, the way they interact with each other, where they take their material from, their relationship to the materials for sound making, as well as how and where they place their music in the world, are all features of ‘the artwork’.
[1] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 107.
[2] Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 9
[3] Ibid., 4
[4] Ibid., 4
[5] ibid., 25
[6] Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 1
[7] ibid., 19
[8] Prevost, 9
[9] Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics”, Precarious Life, 24.
[10] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 227.
[11] Eddie Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, x
[12] Eddie Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 172
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