Ghosts in the Wax (2)

In his 1928 essay “The Curves of the Needle” Adorno claims that it is exactly the imperfections of a recording, the sounds that point to the material instantiation rather than song, which paradoxically make a record sound human.  The opposite also holds:  the more clear the recording is the more distant, even “alien”, its sound (“as if the singer were being distanced more and more from the apparatus”(49)).  Most striking about this revelation is how relatively early it comes in the history of recorded sound (especially the mass availability of popular music recordings). And what is this humanity which is amplified in the distortion of the human? Invoking Freud, the English critic Mark Fisher coined the term “the technological uncanny” to describe the surplus effects that the material inscription of music gives birth to.  This surplus is a haunt born in the space between content and context, between the fantasy of song and the material inscription of sound.  It is a haunt that was always already there.

Ghosts in the Wax

In his long article in Harper’s last year, “Unknown Bards”, John Jeremiah Sullivan makes the case that the mediation of records, and indeed their fetishization, was not only present very near the beginnings of the post-reconstruction era blues music that became the object of the feverish reification of authenticity, but indeed enabled this music from the very start.  The myth of the “lost” blues greats requires that the recordings were secondary, even haphazard afterthoughts that, to our good fortune, ended up preserving essential music – but essential music the very essence of which lies outside of (predates) the recording. 

Sullivan points out that records were already the very connective fiber of many of these early bluesman, who much like the rabid collectors who would “rediscover” the recordings later, came to the music not by chance encounter with other musicians on some Southern porch, but by seeking out their records.  The myth was built into the story, mediated by wax.

2008 Top Ten

I probably didn’t listen to enough records to do this legit, but since it was requested these are the ten records I submitted to the Village Voice critics poll.

 James Blackshaw – Litany of Echoes (Tompkins Square)

Blackshaw distances himself from the folk tradition that has sustained him thus far by taking an unexpected classical turn and somehow comes into his own in doing so.  This is John Fahey playing Philip Glass.  This is the most beautiful record of 2008.  

Deerhunter — Mircocastle / Weird Era Cont. (Kranky)

Though not a wholly even 2-disk affair, Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. repeatedly offer something that seemed surprisingly rare in a year in which countless bands sought to bathe flimsy songs in either Spector-aping reverb or skeuomorphic recording hiss:  sturdy and shimmering rock songs that sounded better with each listen.  

Birchville Cat Motel — Gunpowder Temple of Heaven (Pica Disk)

A single 40-minute slab of droning organs and feedback.  Both somber and blaring.  A gorgeous exercise in polyphonic stacking.  Thick, translucent, glowing like a thousand flickering neon halos about to burn out.  

Hercules and Love Affair — S/T (DFA)

In 2007 Hercules maestro Andy Butler told me that I was the first writer to interview him.  He told me he loved Yaz and the “theatrical” instrumental ornamentation absent in dance music post-1982.  In 2008 Hercules and Love Affair seemed to be in more magazines than anyone else. Offering up 4 or so tracks that immediately occupy the apex of disco revival in the 00’s will do that.  It’s more than enough to forgive the record’s underwhelming second half. Finally new disco music too gay for the gym’s sound system.

Sam Amidon — All is Well (Bedroom Community)

Old-sounding new takes on very old folk songs.  Simply put, no man and guitar combo struck those archetypal folks notes in as true a fashion as Sam Amidon this year.  

Grouper — Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill (Type)

Though some baristas were visibly shaken, Liz Harris’s decision to plug in her pedal board at the open-mic night took her Grouper project to new levels.   And no matter how much espresso you drink, it’s damn near impossible to stay lucid listening to this eerie reverb-laden beaut. 

Emeralds — Solar Bridge (Hanson)

Wow, people who make dark, textured, droning ambiance have friends — who knew?  Three buds from Ohio come together to make their most realized recording to date, in which all the promising noise experiments in their limited edition CDRs and cassette tapes are focused in a beautiful proper album.

Philip Jeck — Sand (Touch)

This is the music we have when deconstruction has run its course, endlessly splintered and recombined into nothingness.  This is the haunt of desires which both predate and will outlive the style games that occupy music now.  This is music as the memory of music, as memories just beyond reach.  

Silver Jews — Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City)

Oh David Berman we love you, write another book.  

Arthur Russell — Love is Overtaking Me (Audika)

Russell’s best?  Hardly.  But 2008 was the year that many caught on to the fact that every Russell release is essential.  [Captions for Grouper and Emeralds by Tony S]

Russell Write-Up in Village Voice

My review of Love is Overtaking Me, a small measure of evidence that I still do music writing.

More Circuses Please

Zizek tells a story about Stalin that illustrates something key to the function of spectacle, symbol, and power.  During a session in the Soviet parliament, a member of the assembly openly chastised Stalin in a disagreement.  Following this, a lone assembly member stands up and shouts him down, saying something like ‘don’t you know you can’t speak that!” Stalin didn’t respond and afterward the assembly member who openly confronted Stalin was given no reprimand, while the assembly member who attempted to enforce the norms of honoring the leader was punished.  The point is not only that real power doesn’t need proclamation, but that it is degraded when it is transposed from the real to the symbolic. Indeed, there is a structural sense in which one only displays what one fails to possess. 

While the world continues to gawk at the grandiosity and splendor of the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, considering whether it was the greatest show ever staged, a better question presents itself:  what massive lack or national insecurity drives such enormous gesture? 

One highlight included an adorable young Chinese girl singing, or as it turned out, lip-synching.  The song was actually sung by a Chinese girl of the same age, but the real singer was not deemed “cute enough” by authorities.  Oh and those extravagant fireworks over the cityscape:  digitally animated by scores of techies over nearly a year of constant work and slipped to oblivious international television networks via the Chinese broadcast feed.  All this to say essentially ‘please be impressed by us, please like us.’

We’re well served to remember that the Roman authorities didn’t roll out the feasts and circuses to celebrate, but to ingratiate themselves with citizens who had reason to despise them.

The Hipster and the End of History (Part One)

Who do we talk about when we talk about the “hipster”?  It’s a vapid question, but maybe an unavoidable one.  A cover article by Douglas Haddow in the forthcoming Adbusters (recalling Christian Lorentzen’s more competent “Why the Hipster Must Die” in Time Out New York last year) slams this (alleged) group and what he alleges it stands (or doesn’t stand) for.  However, an insurmountable methodological problem prefigures his arguments:  he can’t delineate exactly who he is a talking about.  Haddow derides the “hipster” for not fessing up to being one, but fails to admit how problematic this makes everything he subsequently writes. I don’t think this quandary can be ignored, but it will have to be sidestepped to discuss some more substantive issues. 

Regardless of style of dress, there needs to be some distinction between someone committed to a creative or intellectual project (or some other type of serious commitment) and a party kid who “lives for the scene.”  The former usually makes for good company and community while the latter is probably only good as a soft target for a mugging. It’s always a pretty safe bet in any setting that there will be more tools than not, but there are enough people doing compelling things to caution against catch-all judgements.  But Haddow, in what is really a pretty ham-fisted gloss-job, doesn’t fuss much with particulars outside of convenient anecdotes.  

In place of the “hipster”, he waxes nostalgic for the archetypes of the punk and the b-boy. To quote:

“Punks wear their tattered threads and studded leather jackets with honor, priding themselves on their innovative and cheap methods of self-expression and rebellion. B-boys and b-girls announce themselves to anyone within earshot with baggy gear and boomboxes. But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it.”

I’ve said my piece about punk and the case is actually pretty similar for hip hop:  I think it’s a shame that one of the most vibrant and robust emancipatory cultural formations/events in American history has largely become a self-caricature, an identity to don wholesale rather than form through the assertion of the individual.  On this point I will defend the hipster for avoiding the trap of identity politics — which should be seen as the failure of actual politics.  Haddow seems to ignore how bleak a scene the ’80s were for progressives and/or radicals and that punk and hip hop were cultural identity formations precisely because they — in large part — could not be effectual political ones. A lot of “hipsters” have unearned 80’s nostalgia too, but at least they’ve left its shallow ‘personal is political’ paradigm.  Here the “Hipster” should/could be further defined against the bourgeois “lifestyle” preoccupations of the Whole Foods set (“whole foods, whole people”).

Adbusters, a magazine which itself is more about the aesthetitization of the political than the political itself, is in a rather precarious place to promote this viewpoint.  Indeed, it would seem that many of those offering these critiques are suspiciously close to those they critique.  (There is a sense in which you have to be at the party to complain about how lame it is.)

But the “hipster” can’t shake all the charges at hand.  To call “hipsterism” the “end of civilization” is a bit dramatic, but it does mark a latent belief in the end of history.  It’s the enabling assumption that if history is over then there is nothing left to do other than party and enjoy the endless recombinations and revivals of previous cultural triumphs and – even better – its failures.  It’s an assumption they share — though with resignation — with neo-conservatives (in the US sense of the term): that neo-liberal global capitalism is essentially a dialectic summation.  Thus the the non-committal, apolitical detachment.  

Of course history isn’t over and the response to this thinking should be a forceful no.  The neo-liberal consensus of late capitalism as endgame is wrought with fissures and antagonisms that are more apparent now than in the early ’90s when this thinking gained traction.  Ecology, intellectual property, Chinese “command capitalism” (to say nothing of bio-technology) have proven significant structural impediments to the halcyon aspirations of global markets.  

I’m not here pushing a given ideology or mode of praxis.  Every moment has its own needs and births a different kind of rupture.  The generation of ‘68 had a different program than the generation of ‘89, and it’s backward-thinking to insist on a ‘99 (Seattle WTO) model — to which Adbusters is inextricably linked  – on a generation who wasn’t there.  That said, it is a problem that these issues are hardly being grappled with right now. 

There is no reason to expect or even want a hip subculture uninterested in fashion, but being momentarily ahead of an ever accelerating, self-cannibalizing curve is a rather chintzy consolation prize for assuming the functional role of pro-bono market researcher for industry.  History is a nobler mistress.

 

Playing the “Postmodernist” Card

Jonah Goldberg apparently failed his Postmodernism 101 course and is still raw about it.  His latest stab at quasi-journalism in USA Today sees him zeroing in on the core of Obama’s alleged ethical perversity:  he’s a ‘postmodernist.’  His big reveal:  ’postmodernists’ believe that “reality is ’socially constructed’”.   Oh, the scandal.

Oh Hey CocoRosie, I Thought You Had Died But It Turns Out You Were Only Becoming Fashion Icons in France

I try to stay out of the fray, contemplating sweetness and light, maybe spend a weekend morning perusing the NY Times Magazine — then some schlock like this comes along and ruins it for me. 

For such an overlong article, the writer amazingly either didn’t do research beyond swallowing CocoRosie’s glittery PR pill whole or was so rapt while the Casady sisters prophesized the mystical properties of thrift store clothing that she figured the only fitting sacrifice she could offer was a 10,000 word hymn of praise.  If she had, she would have come across this Washington Post article from a few years back profiling Brooklyn’s “Kill Whitey” hip hop dance parties, at which young upwardly mobile mostly white people unleash their inner clichéd booty dancers while aiming to “kill the whiteness inside of you.”  This Dionysian revelry was enabled the knowledge that real live black people – like the kind who invented hip hop – were unlikely to show up.  The article mentions one Bianca Casady, one half of the precious freak-folkies CocoRosie:

“It’s about being nasty, people come to grind on each other,” said Casady, 23. “It’s like friends being sexual with each other.”

Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitey partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men “really hard-core.” In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that “it’s a safe environment to be freaky.”

Yeah, it definitely complicates things when you are totally terrified of the object of your fetish.  But alas, you can’t have it both ways. Now I’m not trying to get all Kandia Crazy Horse here, but there is no reason why a serious writer should let them off the hook – it serves no meaningful interest.  Consider this litany of highlights from the Times piece in light of the WaPo piece:

“Sierra’s anti-humanity, into nature, lightning, physical endurance. I’m into hustling, selling, cheating people, creative vandalism.”

Her lyrics included refrains like “Jesus loves me/But not my wife/Not my nigger friends/Or their nigger lives.”

“Nowadays, who would want to be white? But back then, in farm country, anything other than button-nosed blonde didn’t fly.”

In the rehearsal studio, the producer and sound engineer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, was playing one of Martin Luther King’s speeches to see if it could be profitably added to CocoRosie’s habitual blend of barnyard noises and broken toys.

“If there’s a poetic to our work, a weird continuity of deliberate mistranslation, it’s what comes off the streets and is purified and reduced by the dollar stores,” she said. “I’ve been reborn by the idea of artificial paradise, an urban hustle. We are finding our way to God through the dollar stores of this world.”

But the Casady sisters’ love of raunchy dancing, Salvation Army slumming, and talk of “urban hustle” must, as the WaPo piece suggests, be considered in light of class status:

[CocoRosie] has just opened an art gallery and tea shop in Montmartre, which exhibits works by CocoRosie friends and protégés. In Paris [where they have an apartment], where they regularly make the covers of style magazines, the sisters are revered as fashion icons, queens of a vegan generation who find their inspiration in a Salvation Army bin rather than on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

More:

“I used to wear this rainbow Afro and these periwinkle vinyl bell-bottoms: this was when nobody was into baggies yet, or the idea that vinyl could be anything but skintight.

Bianca, 26, who is tall and curvy, with an Artful Dodger swagger (she quite often wears a black mustache penciled on her upper lip), tends to dress in a rather sardonic takeoff of homeboy style. That day, she had on a pair of supersize purple-and-gold Adidas sweat pants in velour, with matching sneakers, a black XXL T-shirt bearing the logo Black Pit Bull and a riding coat constructed from two quilted nylon dressing gowns, one of them red tartan, the other pink-and-green-flowery, with large Japanese Manga-esque appliqués sewn on them. Her headdress consisted of waist-length artificial black dreadlocks, surmounted by a crushed velvet mobcap with gold studs. Her face was adorned in white pancake makeup and turquoise eyeliner — and one fake pink eyelash.

Sierra, on the other hand, claims she “wanted to finish high school, go on to college, but my parents wouldn’t let me. They said it would destroy my creativity. They were so right.”

Here’s the kicker:

For CocoRosie, this waifishness is an extreme political stance, a way of countering everything from consumer capitalism to the war in Iraq to environmental collapse: if mainstream rock ’n’ rollers play at being perpetual teenagers, the Casady sisters’ “secret garden” is by contrast almost prepubescent, Edenic, a place where the subversively marginal can flourish and be free.

So the future of emancipatory politics rests in our collective willingness to regress into our own fetal “secret gardens”.  Well, if I am taking all this a little too seriously, you can rest assured that CocoRosie aren’t, because, actually, they “don’t even like music.”

The sisters Casady offer some pretty low hanging fruit here but if they could be written off as merely airy posture-happy fashion-clowns I’d leave them well enough alone.  But these attitudes are a big part of the cultural zeitgeist around here.  I’m not going to take cheap shots at Williamsburg.  It has many qualities I’d want in a paradise, but it’s ever on the verge of becoming the “artificial paradise” CocoRosie and their ilk so obliviously revel in.

 

Seven Studies for a Dying Format

Carillons #1: Stereos and Tape Loops

CARILLONS from Falconator Films on Vimeo.

The impetus for this performance piece (filmed by Bryce Myhre) came from the process of making the song “Voodka”.  By breaking down the song’s many layers into looped sub-mixes on cassette tapes to be controlled separately, the arrangement became freed up temporally and also spatially (for the subject moving through the field of stereos) to be experienced in countless variations while retaining the coherence of the piece.  This potential for multiplicity is one that for has always been latent in “Voodka”.  The initial recording sessions for the song took place before the song had any structure or outline.  Rather, we just recorded a bevy of sounds, textures, and instrumental layers bereft of inherent relation (other than key).  Arrangement was done later in the editing process but I never lost the sense that the song could have been (and still can be) any number of ways. 

Or, this from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Pleateaus, the best ever definition of an assemblage: “neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and different dates and speeds.  To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.  It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements.  In a book, as in all things, there are lines or articulation or segmentarity, strata, and territories; but it is also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.  Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.  All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage”