Behind the Counter

There are multifarious venues in which men pursue their ostensibly macho yet embarrassingly geeky hobbies: paintball courses, model shops, video game arcades, automobile showrooms, firing ranges, sports stadiums, and record stores. Each arena has its own unspoken protocols & faux pas, and fraternal jocularity barely veils competitive contempt.

After many years of compressing my music collection to suit my itinerant lifestyle, I finally got back into the record-collecting game - coincidentally just as several friends were doing the same. Our rationales for doing so were myriad: the archival character of a good LP collection; the concerted listening the format forces; our disdain for the contentless stockpiling that digital culture encourages; the likelihood that analog media will be the only ones that survive the imminent collapse of civilization. (Okay, maybe that's just my concern.) But we all grudgingly confess that a chief motivation is that golden smugness of watching jaws drop in jealously at a particular gem in your collection.

The great lie of record collecting is that you can find anything if you just look hard enough. That's like saying you can be a rock star if you just try hard enough. It overlooks the primacy of location & luck in achieving success. I was reminded of this (not that I needed to be) while doing some crate-digging along Oldham Street in Manchester: some speedy-fingered bastard beat me to the last copy of The Fall's tenth single by a couple of hours. Right place, wrong time. But while my leisurely breakfast cost me "Kicker Conspiracy", I was able to score a couple of records well below what I'd have to pay either online or back home in Tokyo.

It only took me about two hours to scour every record store in Manchester's north quarter (at least the stores that weren't dedicated wholly to techno). Mancunian bin-divers obviously rely far more on luck than location to unearth microgroove jewels. It's quite a different story in Tokyo - but of course it is. The megalopolis has 28-times as many people as Manchester, packed into 19-times the space. There are more record stores within a 10-minute radius of my apartment than there are in all of City Centre. Why shouldn't it be easier to find damn near any LP in Tokyo than in Manchester?

The peculiar thing about record-hunting in Tokyo is the method of vinyl's valorization. As opposed to a straightforward expression of supply-V-demand, records are priced according to their cultural cachet - regardless of their physical scarcity. For example: between post-rock's place as a dominant idiom in Japanese rock, and their 2008 reunion tour, My Bloody Valentine are currently enjoying unprecedented popularity among the Japanese hipoisie. This means that it's almost impossible to find a copy of the Glider EP for under ¥3500, even though there are sometimes several copies in the same store. Conversely, Nick Cave doesn't carry much currency in Japan, which means I can scoop up a copy of From Her To Eternity for pocket change (as opposed to the extortive $45 for which it's currently listed on eBay).

In such instances, it's very tempting to feel superior to the shop stewards, as though I've robbed them while staring eye-to-eye. The truth, though, is that pricing records according to their social value is probably another expression of Japan's collectivist tendencies. The record market isn't built around speculation & scarcity; if I'm lucky enough to find an album I adore for a bargain-bin price, it actually impoverishes my social standing, marking me as an outsider instead of ahead of the curve. An unloved copy of an obscure album is the sound of Japanese society shooing me away: "No one cares about your weirdo musical proclivities, nerd!"

Bring the Noise, Postgrad-Style

Been a bit skint on content 'round here recently, eh? Forgive me, I've been preparing for my presentation at next week's noise conference at the University of Salford. I'll be part of the first panel, on "Post-Punk Noise" (July 1, 11:30am in room AH012 of Adelphi House; chaired by Sheila Whiteley), alongside Michael Goddard, who will be speaking on The Gordons/Bailter Space & The Dead C. Despite the butterflies in the belly, I'm quite pleased to be the very first panelist of the whole conference because afterward, I can kick back and actually enjoy the three-day brain massage instead of cold-sweating over my presentation. Topics on docket include:

• Noise as a Political statement in Riot Grrrl and Tweecore (Rachael Neiman)
• Xenakisian Sound Synthesis, Its Aesthetics and Influence on 'Post Digital' Computer Noise (Christopher Haworth)
• Releasing the Inner Idiot: Noise Music, Marginality and Madness (Marie Thompson)
• The City as an Aural Map (Deepa Ramaswamy)

...and so much more. I'm going to come home either 25 IQ points higher, or woefully confused.

Reproduced below is the abstract of my presentation, which I submitted to the call for participation. Inspired by Ian Svenonius' "Rock 'n' Rolligion" essay in The Psychic Soviet, it grew out of an idea I first kicked around here several years ago: that the theological analog of noise music was atheism. As I'll be elaborating next week, I quickly decided this wasn't a compelling comparison: noise rock, as typified by its early American practitioners, is more directly paralleled by Pentecostalism.

A few things have changed between by initial proposal & the final paper, especially how I frame noise music in Japanese society; the conclusion has also taken on a more theoretical tone. But the gist is essentially the same. Anyone not attending the conference who has an interest in reading the paper, please e-mail me. Endnotes are included in the comment section.

Make a Joyous Noise: The Pentecostal Nature of American Noise Music

American noise music is intrinsically different from that of other, less-religious cultures. European noise music can be understood as a response to “the collapse of the industrial city,”(i) while Japanese noise music may be an uncanny inversion of traditional ongaku (“enjoyment of sound”). But American noise music finds its symbolic roots in another American original: Pentecostalism. A nation forged by religious die-hards and prone to recurrent flurries of theological fervor, the United States is a professedly Christian country. Yet since the Second World War, religion has been supplanted by pop music as America’s sociocultural fundament. According to punk polemicist Ian Svenonius, this “radical transformation… from the Christian doctrine of denial to a new capitalist religion of eating a lot”(ii) was a consequence of postwar wealth and power, as rock ‘n’ roll was constructed as “a capitalist cult”(iii) that “worship[ped] the tenets of the market economy: consumerism, newness, and planned obsolescence.”(iv)

In order to seduce converts, rock and pop music necessarily resemble the Christian template, down to its constituent sects: “Work cults like indie rock resembled Seventh-day Adventists, garage and rockabilly purists resembled the Amish (for whom history had stopped at a certain moment),”(v) etc. Noise music is modeled upon Pentecostalism, a movement born (again) in 1906 “designed to reproduce in contemporary time the church originally established on Pentecost, A.D. 30.”(vi) This reductionist approach was constitutional to the late-1970s No Wave scene (wherein American noise music became recognizable as such), whose bands abandoned canonical (blues) forms and “rearrang[ed] the basic building-blocks of music.”(vii)

Dispensing with constrictive protocols and hierarchical divisions between “conduit” and audience, both noise music and Pentecostalism are “drawn to the irrationality posited by the possibility of any, all and no meaning,”(viii) baptizing its participants in “the power of a spectacle that is physically oppressive”(ix) – volume for the former, the Holy Spirit for the latter. Further, both seek to return its participants to a pre-lingual, pre-subjective state via “abandonment of the priority given to consciousness, knowledge and the mediations of language… creat[ing] new affects and compounded emotions… for which there is no language.”(x)

Ultimately, the same dangers threaten to extinguish both noise music and Pentecostalism as potent forces. The first is institutionalism: the ossification of practice and “a rapid accumulation of stock gestures”(xi) that signify “authenticity” while betraying the opposite. The second is success. Noise music that ceases to be noisome loses its essence, becoming mere music. Meanwhile, should Pentecostals live to see the Second Coming, it would put a literal end to their faith. “Success would, in any case, signal the end…”(xii)

The 27 Club

Of which I can now never officially be a member.

For Fans of La Furia Roja

Not that I had a horse in this race, but...



A word of advice to Spain: possession might be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth is doing something with it.

Mad-Libs With Norwegian Black Metal

I realize it may be gauche to repost something I myself wrote, but I feel like the point is valuable enough not to be left sulking at the ass-end of a comment thread...

I did read Abebe's piece on Pitchfork RE: the NYT/M.I.A. fracas, and it was indeed pretty good. Though the whole cloak metaphor was thoroughly ground into glue. And as much as I'd like "to not act like she's speaking for anything beyond her own messy self," such dubious hair-splitting lets people apologise for incredibly dangerous politics/artists/aesthetics. Let's replace "M.I.A." with "Burzum" and "militarized underclass" with "white-supremacist pagan theocracy" and see how quick people are to "swallow the music and spit out the cloak" - and whether or not embracing the medium while rejecting the message seems acceptable in the first place.

Besides, Maya Aruplragasam herself insists that her listeners don't make such distinctions. Pity for her fans that are busily crafting the narrative (as ventriloquised by Simon Reynolds):

"of course pop stars talk drivel about politics, of course they're all about empty gestures and sensationalism and pointless provocation. That's what makes it pop, what makes it good pop actually. It's pop music, what did you expect?"

Honest Question

Crooks & Liars asks what I've been wondering myself: why is Helen Thomas (who held G.W. Bush's feet to the fire more than any other White House press corps suck-up) ignominiously shoved onto an ice flow because people confused anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, while bloody Ann Coulter & Glenn Beck are not only still on the air but are boosting books by Nazi sympathisers?

Two Hundred and Fifty Yen, Bitches!

In case you don't know how much that is.

And in case you don't know what this is.

More conversation on record collecting in Tokyo a bit later... now's the time for a celebratory spin!

Imperial Violence On a Blockbuster Budget

Several months after the fact, but more scorn can always be heaped upon apologias for military-industrial oppression, am I right?

Unlike the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, I didn't like The Hurt Locker - not that it's utter shit. The script suffers from a post-24 lack of narrative focus, but the film's strengths are plain to see: the actors acquit themselves admirably, and the cinematography is gritty & gripping. But like Quentin Tarantino's magnum o' post-modernism Inglorious Basterds, Kathryn Bigelow's film is a smug tribute to American hegemony. While Tarantino reiterates the United States' claim as the sovereign of narrative (fictional and, it's presumed, otherwise), Bigelow cheerleads the great American pastime of the last half-century: state-sanctioned violence.

As many a writer has been hasty to point out, The Hurt Locker is ostensibly a film expressing America's disillusionment with military endeavour. Instead of the square-jawed stoicism & heroics of WWII epics, we witness the tears, dread, incessant stress, and boderline breakdowns of the modern American soldier. But this doesn't encourage the United States to holster its weapon and retire to the quiet discomfort of being a former imperial power. Quite the opposite: by emphasizing moral ambiguity & displaying its scars (psychic & physical, societal & personal), The Hurt Locker shows that we are intimately aware of the chronic difficulty of military engagement - and yet we accept these hardships because such are the costs of the imperial adventure. We accept these hardships because of our nobility, our conviction, our strength of will. The locals are an anonymous throng of shape-shifty brown folks whose true intentions are foggy & dubious, but we are not so cowardly to deny our mission. Though our methods are flawed, our intentions are good. Though we doubt & struggle, we will not betray our commitment.

This is the same self-assurance of moral superiority that Žižek saw in the "darkening down" of such modern bastions of justice-in-action as James Bond and Batman. The "Boy Scout in blue" certitude of old-school superheroes doesn't reflect the endless complexity of contemporary society. As our iconic lone wolves suffer from all-too-familiar faults (e.g. doubt, vengefulness, lapses in reason) they reassure us that they understand the full scope & equivocality of the situation, while enacting their mission precisely as though there were no obscurity or ambiguity. Before, we enjoyed our violence because it had the full weight of Good & Truth behind it. Now, we enjoy our violence because it is difficult, invigorating, sadomasochism as proof of our dedication & macroscopic understanding. And make no doubt that we enjoy it, as attested by the the absurd slo-mo pimp stroll army recruitment ad of The Hurt Locker's final minute.

Bigelow's next project is slated to be "an adrenaline-filled exposé of life in the notorious triple border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay." I'm curious to see how bare she'll strip the scenario of social, economic, and military entanglements so dense it makes Traffic look like a Jim Jarmusch short. No doubt the film will prove that, asymmetric enforcement be damned, America has the intestinal & technological fortitude to make the difficult decisions in the War On Drugs, and the darkly-pigmented locals will be dealt with all the depth & feeling of a first-person shooter.

Syncretism As Ponzi Scheme

Plagiarism, while nothing new, can still be damnably annoying. But given that every new technology of the past 20 years is about reproduction, re-representation, and relay of information, artistic theft has swollen to comical dimensions. So The XX ripped off a second song at the same time - yeah? Only two uncited sources? Fucking amateurs. These days, you've either gotta monopolise a single inspiration like a timber wolf standing over a fresh kill, or steal from so many simultaneously that Bernie Madoff looks butterfingered by comparison. I'm talking Bomb Squad, El-P, Disco Volante-era Mr. Bungle, not the sloppy smash-'n'-grab of Girl Talk or some post-Koyaanisqatsi day-glo bullshit.

Mrs. Bronfman Jr.'s New Clothes

On one hand, I'm embarrassed that, a month later, the internet is still aflame with intense detraction & defense of M.I.A. before her new album's even hit the shelves. On the other, the tide has turned in favour of her haters, thanks to Lynn Hirschberg's instantly infamous NYT profile of the pop star. For several thousand joylessly skeptical words, Hirschberg observes M.I.A. play dress-up, self-mythologize, confuse knowledge of with solidarity with, make facile juxtapositions of first-world glamour & third-world aspiration, and repeatedly refer to herself as a "terrorist" in the same blasé tone with which Liam Gallagher discusses his hairdo. It's awkward if marvelously entertaining to witness M.I.A. tar herself as (in Simon Reynolds' words) "bullshit artist of the decade". Even ex-flame/producer/co-cultural appropriator Diplo dog-piles atop Ms. Arulpragasam: "She can’t really make music or art that well."

Hirschberg's first brush with journalistic notoriety came in 1992, with her persona-defining profile of Courtney Love in Vanity Fair. This has prompted M.I.A. boosters to cast the NYT piece as character assassination (slight return), though I'd say Hirschberg specializes in selling her subjects surplus rope. Much has been made of silly ephemera - who bought the truffle fries?! - but possibly dumber than M.I.A.'s own shallow shibboleths is her fans' renewed insistence that we take her seriously as a political artist by, er, not taking seriously her political statements. It's apparently enough that she merely exists as a marble-mouthed fashionista raising her fist, outside the realm of the usual sledgehammer-subtle suspects of "political" art: punkish anarconservatives (Rage), crunchy socialiberatrians (Ani), and earth-mother superfreaks (Badu).

Among the more eloquent defenses of M.I.A. is Mike Barthel's elaboration on her role as "globalism's enfant terrible", but even he falls back on the old canard: "The provocation was itself the point." I'd accept such an excuse when the provocation is transgression of form or process, but with regards to content, shit-talking for the sake of talking shit is doomed to one of several failures:

1. The provocation fails to provoke. Congrats, you're boring.
2. The provocation succeeds, at the expense of banalising the provocative.
3. The provocation succeeds to the point of returning the threat to the provocateur, who stands by the ever-present escape hatch of "not meaning it."

And to that end, through her incessant backpedaling & self-rationalization, M.I.A. has renovated "not meaning it" from emergency exit to a revolving door.

Content cannot eschew politics or meaning; it cannot substitute for itself vacuous beauty. Content without conviction is cowardice, and let's not be so obtuse as to confuse "conviction" with "literal advocacy of". Writing a song about Josef Mengele does not necessarily constitute an endorsement, but there is no way for it to be winkingly void of intent or ideology. Even Genesis motherfuckin' P-Orridge criticized Whitehouse for their commentary-free employ of "extreme"/taboo content. Meanwhile, the only subject for which M.I.A. has consistently stood up is her own ego.

So her politics are pure shin-kicking, the content is symbolically unstable, but evidently we're not meant to "take the statements of someone who has worn pants that light up at face value." This bequeaths M.I.A. the sole purpose of channeling subjectivity. She is a purely aesthetic identity, Barthel argues:

MIA seems interesting to me not so much as a conveyor of rigorously conceived political treatises and moral clarity, but as the vessel for a particular viewpoint that’s largely absent from US culture. ...MIA’s great gift is for aesthetics, and while we’re accustomed to thinking of that as meaningless superficiality, probably the primary reason Americans don’t care about global culture is because its aesthetics are so, well, foreign to us.

After 25 years of Live Aid, enviro-globalism, My Beautiful Laundrette, Youssou N'dour guest spots, and the Sublime Frequencies label, I seriously doubt that many (non-xenophobic) Westerners are unfamiliar with the aesthetics of the third world. What they're unfamiliar with is the political subjectivity of the third world: the poverty, the disease, the instability, the fear. These are affects of which most Americans & Western Europeans have no genuine experience. Even if M.I.A. were more interested in performing as the third-world political subject than goofing on American gangsta-ism, reconstructing such a subject in the first-world would be impossible. She instead prefers some kind of horrid first-generation immigrant buffoonery.

What I particularly enjoy about Barthel's argument, though, is that it comes from a fellow who, just two months ago, wrote the following:

...it’s possible that, in becoming cynical about art’s ability to comment on the wider world, we find ourselves in a situation where the self—identity—is the only source of truth. And as such, those artistic creations considered valuable by any particular individual are the ones that impress that individual—that “speak to me,” as the saying goes. Thus, we find an emphasis on aesthetics and referentiality. ...With culture, you have the totality there before you to examine, and the meaning is constructed rather than manifest. ...Art becomes valued not for its discursive possibilities, but purely for its expressive features.

Well, then... projection of meaning, an insistence upon referring to instead of being referent, and the solipsistic dead-end of identity politics. Yeah, I'm going to agree with Barthel-circa-March on this one.