Almost exactly two months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Carl of The Impostume fame in a rank Fukuoka nightclub. He'd been kind enough to come see my band on the last night of our tour - a gig that promised to be, and indeed was, a sweaty madhouse with bodies & beer flying around the room. Not only is Fukuoka our bassist's hometown, but it effortlessly lives up to its reputation as a city of hard-drinking yet unreasonably good-looking shit-kickers.
Stumbling offstage a sweaty & smoke-wreathed mess, I joined Carl at the bar for a lively & lengthy chat that meandered from music to trade deficits and everything in between. Since we'd previously only been acquainted as brothers-in-blogdom, it was inevitable we'd wind up talking about life online and, specifically, how so many amateur bloggers are either turning pro or - more often - unplugging completely. Carl was refreshingly upbeat about this cyber-sea change: he felt that the expanse of online existence was helping crush provincial arrogance and petty indignities. "Once people get off their soapbox and take a breath," he said, "they might see that, actually, reality is far more interesting and varied than they might have thought."
I'm considerably more cynical about what's driving this shift. The thing that upsets me about the ballooning number of abandoned blogs is that so many smart, sharp voices have been steamrolled into silence by the bleating glibness of microblogging, the Book of Face, Pintrest, tumblr, Twitter, et cetera ad nauseum. It's a tl;dr world and a great many writers who refuse to reduce their ideas to bumper-sticker sloganeering have simply thrown in the towel.
Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't good writers to be found in abundance online. There's Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker, Glenn Greenwals, Paul Krugman, and Adam Curtis, not to mention the whole of Alternet, Counterpunch and - oh yes - Cracked. But every one of those writers is a reliable shake of the left fist, as essential yet dully predictable as the coffee I sip while reading them. The writers unfettered by assignments or editors, writers with rangy & irregular interests who'd frequently delight, sometimes infuriate, and often surprise me - K-Punk, Ads Without Products, Pere Lebrun's Kasper, Owen, and yes of course Carl too - where have they all gone?
But if I'm so interested in keeping the conversation alive, why haven't I posted a damn thing in over two months? Well, because Carl is right. Every time some rant-worthy outrage would arise (Kony 2012, the coup in Mali, Marine Le Pen, Golden Dawn, HBO's Girls) I'd promise myself a moment to type some appropriate invective... and then life would intercede in all its fluid, multifarious glory and I'd just never get around to it. Gigs, band practice, playing with new microphones, learning a foreign language, perfecting my Italian sausage soup recipe. Reality is indeed interesting and varied.
So why does it still bother me that I've been so absent online? It has something to do with Hipster Runoff - a website that has rapidly degenerated from a once-amusing, affectedly disaffected pomo think-tank into the bastard of Vice magazine and TMZ. The one qualitative buzzword that HRO seems to fret the most over the most is "relevant," and that is precisely what I am guilty of as well. Social media's hyperacceleration of the nanosecond news-cycle means that, between the time that an event occurs and that I finish doing the laundry, the window for pithy au courant commentary has already closed and what I have to contribute is no longer relevant.
But relevant to whom exactly? Who am I trying to impress? What am I missing that I can't elaborate, examine, and enjoy with my friends, my bandmates, my peers, my wife?
Obviously, I need to get the fuck over myself. I should consider myself lucky that anyone outside of my tight little cohort would find anything I have to say interesting. I should also stop kidding myself that this - spewing bile into chasmic indifference of cyberspace - is a priority. That doesn't mean I'm withdrawing exclusively to meatspace. I'm sure, on occasion, something will be so irresistibly aggravating or exhilarating that I'll be compelled back here. Hell, as long as I'm here, the blog's here. Or it will be until some of that unendingly-threatened legislative napalm is dropped on the internet.
But really now: I turn 30 today. I should at least start to consider growing the fuck up.
So there's this website you might have seen 'round, Chunklet, that hits like a bucket of ice water to the smug, disaffected face of indie culture. (They also kick a little dirt at those feckless twee ninnies for good measure.) The point is they're hilarious, and actually fine people aside, playing the invaluable role of subcultural gadfly.
And they're putting out a new book! I managed to blag my way on board as a contributor, so when you sit down with your copy of The Indie Cred Test, I am among those administering the exam. No favouritism, either.
But first we've got to get the book out, and so we humbly ask that you donate towards the book's publication at Kickstarter. I know times are tough and you were really saving for that box set of the complete first season of Glee or whatever, but please. If you want to demonstrate your support for talented, whip-smart writers in a rapidly withering, calcifying literary environment, please contribute what you can.
Studied repetition and precision are unlikely virtues for weedheads...
Really?
I understand the resistance to speaking of music as though it were autonomous, and that every review must now adhere to a metanarrative of some sort, but come on. You can't just ignore shit 'cuz it conflicts with your "angle."
Whenever I read remarks about the dire state of music journalism, I'm shot through with potential guilt - until I go read the examples of what constitutes genuinely shit writing. I then thank/curse The Internet for operating upon such a gross baseline of stupidity that someone of moderate talent (such as myself) sounds like Bangs or Christgau by comparison.
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)
Continuing a look at the albums that logged the most spins on my stereo over the Aughts.
2002: Fugazi, Red Medicine XTC, Drums and Wires
As the first few pages were torn off the 2002 calendar, my mood was gradually improving. I'd spent the winter listening to records that were series of bloody gut-punches from start to finish - Big Black, the Jesus Lizard, and especially the Birthday Party's live album. It had helped sooth my uglier moods, but it was a strictly passive activity: I was without a band & living in a one-bedroom where I daren't plug in any instruments for fear of upsetting my alkie wife-beating neighbour. Stuck noodling on an unplugged SG, I at least wanted to play along to tunes that were a little more energetic than "Nick the Stripper". I was neither ambitious nor studious enough to tackle the finger-sports athleticism of the Dillinger Escape Plan, and a workplace feud had put me right off the gentler dexterity of finger-picked folk guitar.
So I settled on Fugazi's "deal-breaker" record, Red Medicine - often derided by the hardcore faithful for not being "punk" enough, yet too wry & recondite for emo fucks clutching copies of Diary to their chests. Which is exactly why I loved it so much: every repeat listen revealed a new harmonic warp or timbral weft, wrapped up with scathingly funny lyrics. Obviously, it was just a lot of fun to pinball around my living room jamming along to "Bed For the Scraping", but it was equally enjoyable to unravel the ambiguous, serpentine melodies of "Fell, Destroyed" or "Long-Distance Runner", or to parse the guitar-tone patchwork of "Latest Disgrace" or "Birthday Pony". It was impossible to tire of this record.
But Red Medicine also boasted a lot of hooks - not something often associated with post-hardcore slash-and-burn. By the early Aughts, there was already a glut of bands who squeezed every last histrionic drop out of the soft-loud dynamic, who screamed like drama queens, and who could purposefully hammer away at root/relative-minor chords. But Fugazi crafted choruses that could be sung, not just shouted; their riffs were armorial & memorable; and there was swing & groove in their rhythms.
This lead to the (incredibly late) realization that, perhaps, nuanced songwriting really mattered. Blisteringly obvious, I know, but remember that I'd preferred Zappa to Zeppelin and Mike Patton to Pavement over the course of my adolescence. During that time, one band that had been just compositionally perverse enough to attract my attention was XTC. I found it hysterical that a hyperactive pop romp like "Scissor Man" was actually about a serial killer, and the staccato clangor of "Paper and Iron (Notes and Coins)" sounded like Fugazi playing at being the Beatles. I'd also never heard low-gain guitar tones that still attacked with such crackle & whizz. Concerned I'd been buying all these distortion pedals for nowt, I became a little obsessed with this production trick, and so my fandom of XTC became slightly self-congratulatory when, of the various low-volume home-recording experiments I'd been conducting, one of my most successful had been in recreating Andy Partridge's guitar tone on the Black Sea record.
(There was also the fact that XTC had written the unequivocably anti-theistic "Dear God", wherein Partridge kept the tone intelligent and didn't resort to pseudo-occult faith-baiting. This song could be a musical madstone for a young atheist living in the dogmatically faithful United States.)
Though Black Sea is arguably my favourite XTC album, it sags in the middle such that I spent calculably more time listening to Drums And Wires. Also, though Drums is far more sapient & eccentric than the forgettable, naive New Wave of the first two records, it's still got the pluck & pathos that disappeared from XTC's music after 1982, as they fossilized into more of a fastidious songwriting workshop than a band. Consequently, Drums was a reasonable blueprint off which to work as I first attempted writing an entire song in a single key, or slowly accepted that repeating a motif more than once didn't automatically make a song "boring."
And to think that the album I listened to most frequently last year was Dopesmoker. I've come a long way, baby.
Poor Evan Calder Williams... I never give the guy a fair shake. Every mention of him here and every comment I've made on his blog has been from a combative, borderline-bullying stance. But the truth is that we're both Marxists of one sort or another; we both try to imagine means by which capitalism can be choked; and we both have unruly beards that do us no aesthetic service. We're on the same side - and yet I can't read his writing without taking a swing at him.
How ferocious the battles are when so little is at stake.
Anyway, Williams has contributed to Mute magazine an article a propos apocalyptic cinema. It's well worth a read, and makes some interesting distinctions between crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse. Most of my disagreement with the piece is specific & quibbling. For example, whereas Williams tacks to the original zombies-as-consumers interpretation (updated with a Žižekian notion of drive), I think the new glut of zombie films differ significantly in intent from the original Romero movies. The old Living Dead films were satirical critiques of persistent consumption, whereas the current crop are exploitation flicks preying on the audience's fear of the Other. Suppurating blank slates as they are, zombies are floating signifiers for whoever the audience fears are tearing at the fabric of civilised society: leftists may see fascists; Christians may see Muslims; conservatives may see immigrants, gays, or communists. (The heathen/immigrant/homosexual angle is especially persuasive, given bigots' fears of corruption of the blood & conversion by a kind of lobotomisation.)
I also think Williams gives The Road incredibly short shrift when he calls it "a terrible, terrible film." I see why many people wouldn't enjoy it (long, bleak, proud of its own straightjacketed sentimentality) but to call it "terrible" is unfair & inflated. I think the film is as embarrassed as proud of its nostalgia for good ol' late capitalism, especially considering how quickly the film's survivors/survivalists turn to cannibalism. Taking this literally - as an animal "urge" to digest human flesh -, Williams utterly misses the obvious symbolism of the cannibalistic act: that we as a species have eaten ourselves out of house & home, and will continue to do so until the last man gnaws his own kneecaps off rather than suffer from want.
I also get the sense that, as a good Marxist, Williams finds The Road's lack of faith in the collectivist spirit repellent and perhaps inaccurate. Maybe in Santa Cruz, where Williams lives amidst the redwood-shaded spectre of hippie utopianism, a group-oriented, egalitarian approach to survival would prevail. Let's hope it would. But from the rust belt to the Gulf Coast, where the bibles are beaten the hardest and the Gini coefficient is at its widest, American citizens faced with the deprivation & desperation presented in The Road would make the marauding motorheads of Mad Max look like British aristocracy.
A greater problem with Williams' piece is the writing itself - what happens to academics that bleaches any style or wit from their writing, leaving in its place a skree of adverbs and neologic nouns? Most infuriating (and this almost ruined Dominic Fox'Cold World for me) is an over-reliance on stock first-person-plural devices that affect the tone of the dullest college lecturer ever:
To start, we should...
Let us...
What do we mean...
Let us...
To conclude, we should...
No, not "what do we mean," but what does "we" mean? Who is this phantasmic "we" that I, as a reader, have been presumptively lumped into by the writer? What are "we" fighting for, and can I get a deferment?
Ultimately, it's Williams' apocalypse fetishism that bugs me the most. Clearly, he's found his theoretical niche, and I can't begrudge him that, but his pontifical embrace of the eschatological suffers from two problems of perspective. The first is that Williams has never experienced first-hand the truly catastrophic. I'm not asking that he suffer, but anyone in Haiti or the Gaza Strip would probably find him naïve & privileged.
The second is the same arrogance that every post-apocalyptic film appeals to: that "I" am one of the lucky ones, that "I" am smarter-faster-stronger, that "I" will survive.
What are the odds of that? Well, how many heroin addicts aren't William Borroughs or Iggy Pop?
Sometimes I feel like if someone were to parody this blog, all it would take would be a black-and-white photo of some dude screaming into a microphone followed by an apology for not having written anything 'cuz I've been soooo busy lately, wrapped up in vague reassurances that the storm has passed and I'll resume writing with renewed vigor.
Friends, nomads, no-country-for-old-men... do you suffer from ragged nerves? Sleepless nights? A gaseous suspicion of & contempt for your fellow man? In need of a psychic balm that just burns away the tattered fringes of your damaged psyche? Then may I present to you... The Vandelles.
Yeah, so they rock the same black rebel motorcycle schtick that was already second-hand by the time the Reid Bros. got ahold of it. But hey, it's an act we all enjoy and who these days couldn't use a little high-volume, tweeter-shredding treble to wipe their mental slate clean? As an unlikely bonus, the Vandelles actually have good tunes to back up their black-leather-'n'-Fenders mean-mugging. Double bonus: no stupid goddamn haircuts!
Hang on a minute: since when do I, Monsieur Nouveau Modernisme Deluxe, get off plugging retro rock 'n' roll acts? Since today's release of the Vandelles eponymous EP makes them my labelmates on SVC Records, and the more of you that buy the EP, the more SVC can lay out on my own upcoming LP. Ha! Seriously, though, anyone with the internet access to visit the SVC online store can absolutely afford the couple o' quid that the EP costs. If you just can't be bothered to support the dreams of creative twentysomethings, then for god's sake don't blow the cash on another pack of smokes or beer: send it to the Red Cross, you selfish bastards.
So whaddaya think? Did I miss my calling as an ad man? Could I sell sand to a camel or London Bridge to a Yank? Hell no. The fact is my job as a "commercial music composer" is the only one from which I been fired, and I slunk out of the (ahem) formal music press when I suspected I was just a poorly paid hack boosting redundant tripe. Which makes it all the more bemusing that I've started getting review requests from PR people pushing lo-fi folk Johnny-Come-Latelys or whatever. It's at least encouraging insofar that this means someone out there actually reads this damned blog and feels my voice is worth including in the conversation. But still, wow - I have a readership? Flabbergasting!
Similarly, I received an e-mail the other day that not only declared that the writer was a "big fan" (!) but I'd "inspired" him to start his own cult-crit blog, Spots Before the Eyes. Apparently, my quasi-qualified rants have helped his thinking regarding some of the perennial quandaries facing the post-millenial music fan, including (these are quoted directly from the e-mail):
Why don't I like today's Pitchfork music?
This query raises questions of its own: has the web's leading music journal crafted so well-sculpted a niche for itself that "Pitchfork music" is now a recognizable genre? Not quite. I can't think of a single band that encompasses everything the Forkers throw their critical heft behind. To its credit, Pitchfork still casts a reasonably wide stylistic net; on Friday, its reviews covered alt-country, orchestral pop, and black metal acts. That being said, there's a handful of aesthetic & performative tricks that Pitchfork falls for every time, recognizable enough that you could bet money on what rating an artist will receive and walk away with a heavier wallet. Was anyone surprised that the new Vampire Weekend album - a year after the backlash and boasting a newly-earned confidence - received an 8.6 and the "Best New Music" imprimatur? Or that Animal Collective shat out another hippy-dippy bleepfest and garnered a perfect 10? On the other hand, if Mike Patton's next project earns above a 6, or if the Dum Dum Girls' debut full-length earns anything below a 7.8, I'll eat my shoe.
Why aren't I familiar with any of the songs performed on American Idol?
The easy answer, of course, is that they're not worth knowing! But this touches on the diasporic effect digital culture has had. Christopher Weingarten hit the nail on the head, speaking at a Twitter conference last year:
If you read Spin or Rolling Stone in '96, you'd get an article on Nine Inch Nails, an article on the Chemical Brothers, an article on Snoop Dogg, and the internet doesn't work that way. ...It's harder to get exposed to things that aren't in your comfort zone. I have friends that are so deep into indie-rock they don't know what the fuck Katy Perry is, or Lady Gaga. ...I can always learn about stuff that's important to me, that's easy. I wanna learn about stuff that isn't important to me.
Because the internet allows users to custom-tailor the information they receive, it's frighteningly easy to block out anything that isn't a known & comfortable fit - and this goes for political opinions and even facts, not just music. So unless you actively enjoy & ingest the kind of formulaic power-ballads that appeal to foghorn-throated starlets, there's no good reason for you to have idly heard the shit on American Idol.
Why is so much music criticism so shitty?
Well, whenever you deal with a form that encourages the belligerent expression of personal taste as though it were divine writ, you're going read an ungodly amount of self-indulgent pap. The job pulls more than its fair share of unqualified punters attracted by the glamour & apparent ease of the work. ("I just talk shit about a band and get paid for it, plus backstage passes? All right!") It's an occupational hazard, really.
But the internet has only aggravated the issue. With neither copy editors or column space to rein in the writing, music bloggers & online scribes can ramble for thousands of useless, swampy words. At the other end of the spectrum, that people think a 140-character monologue could possibly count as meaningful journalism is surely the death knell of the form.
But let's not forget that music is overwhelmingly a young person's game, by & for teenagers and twentysomethings. Most music journalists simply haven't had the time to mature as writers. A friend who's been devouring the 33 1/3 book series said that the best-written volume by a nautical mile was the one about Hendrix' Electric Lady Land, by a man old enough to have actually seen Hendrix in concert. This means he has literally a lifetime's more writing experience than your average NME hack. Lord knows the reviews I wrote for the Baltimore City Paper were rather shit - because I was some fatheaded 20-year-old in love with his own wordsmith wankery. Give me another ten years and perhaps I'll have something worth saying.
Whether anyone will be listening, of course, is another question altogether.
FYI, I've started contributing to the Waterblog, the media arm of my friends' anti-sharking non-profit PangeaSeed. I'll be contributing columns twice a month, interspersed with themed playlists of decent tunes.
Speaking of which... Tokyo squad! PangeaSeed is holding a fundraising benefit, No Fin No Future, at Super Deluxe in Roppongi on July 30th. It's 3000円 at the door, and proceeds go towards not letting our toothy aquatic friends get dismembered in the name of some culinary "delicacy." A full evening of fun, food, tunes, and toons. Come on down.
It's no wonder why print publications & word counts are dropping like birds over Chernobyl, now that "tweet" and "text" have become verbs. But if anything has rendered music writing obsolete, it's as much the critical overreach that Mark Fisher calls for (rather uninspiringly) as the consumptive nanocycle to which the relay of all information has been reduced. Yes, I'm going to tread that perilously close to hypocrisy: grossly po-faced laptop scribes are writing themselves out of relevance, dagnabbit!
Mark himself knows a bit about critical overreach - such as his touristic retreat into the realm of doom "superstars" SunnO))) that betrayed far more chin-stroking conjecture than genuine intimacy with the materials & their context. Yet, when he accuses Sonic Youth of being the first band to recycle culture into a closed circuit (as opposed to by refraction or expansion), it reads like rhetorical underachievement by his own standards. Bad Moon Rising was considerably earlier than Beck's kitchen-sink po-mo; earlier still than bland tribute acts like Mudhoney or Oasis, so points for that. But weren't there plenty of dead horses beaten to gluey pulps before Bad Moon Rising?
Punk, for example - and specifically the trichordal adolescent hissy-fits peddled by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Those bands made no secret of their intense affection for the eighth-note strum & clang of old rhythm 'n' blues 45s. The only wrinkle separating, say, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" and "Beat On the Brat" is an extra dollop of au current, tailored-to-outrage antagonism.
Yet we can push back even earlier to proto-punk. Perhaps the Stooges' Fun House was the first retroreferential record. The elemental primitivism of rock 'n' roll's nascent wave is echoed both in spirit (the album was produced by Don Gallucci, of the Kingsmen & "Louie Louie" fame) and in sound: "Down On the Street" and "Loose" flex the same gnarly sinew as Link Wray & Duane Eddy's "rebel music", albeit with more explicit incitements to street violence and prurience.
But hell, why stop in 1970? If Sonic Youth are going to be backhanded for their "curatorial" roles, can't the same accusation be leveled at Frank Zappa? His numerous doo-wop homages were as honestly affectionate as his frequent piss-takes of contemporary artists were vicious. (Not to mention his umpteen nods to various modern classical composers.) Come to think of it, what was quintessentially new about any of the music that white musicians - Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Elvis, etc. - stole from Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, so on & so forth?
But this line of argument is more than a little absurd and ultimately useless. To one degree or another, all music nods to its antecedents; torches are passed, picked up, or rekindled. Of course, music is only beholden to the past to the extent it feels the need to either worship or mock what went before. Actually, it isn't impossible to create music in a cultural vacuum, but y'know what music utterly unencumbered by historical context sounds like? The Shaggs.
Not that Mark Fisher has a problem with artists burdened by history - quite the opposite, what with his essays' manifold mentions of "remnants", nostalgia, "ghost genres", and the like. But what makes The Advisory Circle good and Ciccone Youth bad is Mark's boderline-fundamentalist adherence to hauntology. Initially an intriguing cultural phenomenon, hauntology has come to inspire the kind of unblinking fanboy devotion usually reserved for World of Warcraft and Japanese animation, which makes some of these discussions as enjoyable & open as speculating on the afterlife with a Catholic. The greater problem, though, is that hauntology is a dead end and proud of it; miserablist ruminations over doors locked and out of reach; rubbernecking backwards at all the exits along the highway we didn't take.
Well, hang on - that sounds a hell of a lot like... post-modernism. And it is! As Alex of SBA outlined it with laser accuracy, "hauntology" is fundamentally a chicken-wire fenced erected around "good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism" and ironic pastiche. To put a finer point on it, hauntology is the scrapbook of the underdogs & losers of culture wars past, where as po-mo "proper" celebrates every goon who got his 15 minutes.
But I digress. I don't want to prattle on about hauntology today, especially since that conversation's already been had. I do, however, want to call attention to Mark's use of "hauntology" as some kind of meaningful aegis under which he can lump the music he likes, safely squirreled away from the music he dislikes. Clearly he's not concerned with philosophical consistency, because otherwise it'd be fuckin' nonsense to cast the Pop GroupandThe Fall as dub- and kraut-damaged conduits of primal animus & political dissonance... and Sonic Youth as mere retro-necrophiliacs. Oh, it's certainly possible to like any one and not the others, but on aesthetic terms (and even then, just barely), not philosophical ones.
This is how critical overreach functions as a crutch for petty & fickle opinions. The elaborate scaffolds writers erect provide them a form over which to drape their critical assessments; the larger & more laboured the framework, the more solid it seems. This means any bad review is given the appearance of studious consideration & self-accordant logic - a far more noble & ego-inflating position for a writer, rather than have to admit that, for reasons as inarticulable & irrational as emotions, they just don't dig something.*
Mark Fisher obviously anticipated being set upon by rabid Sonic Youth supporters like myself, adopting a Magazine song-title as his first line of defense: "My mind, it ain't so open..." I don't particularly care if Mark enjoys Sonic Youth or not. But it's bloody difficult to contend convincingly that SY are "dilettantes" who fail to "[draw] on any unconscious material" and whose cachet is derived "from gesturing to artists more marginal than them." They are inarguably one of the most influential & inventive guitar bands ever. On the one hand, it's impossible to reimagine the rock landscape of the past twenty years without their influence (or, yes, their latter-day curatorial presence); on the other, they carved such a singular niche for themselves that anyone who wears their influence on their sleeve is simply dismissed for ripping off Sonic Youth. And don't even try to claim they contributed nothing new to the conversation - I would die to hear any obvious forerunners to songs like "Death To Our Friends" or "Eric's Trip".
Is any of this reason enough to like the band? Nah, not really. But please, Mark, instead of taking potshots at a band twenty years past their peak, just say you think Thurston comes off like an aloof dick, that the beats are too loose to dance to, that the sound is all rusty shrapnel & bleating car-horn doppler. Don't say Sonic Youth are "reducible to a set of easily verbally explicable intentions" - at least not without then verbalising what those handily explicable intentions are.
Others have already rushed to Sonic Youth's defense. Zone Styx Travelcard described Bad Moon Rising place on the geocultural landscape most elegantly. Meanwhile, Simon Reynolds acknowledged the "pernicious adequacy" of Sonic Youth's decade-plus holding pattern, arguing that they've perhaps outlived their usefulness for those who keep "keen the blade of one's dissatisfaction, one's impatience." But he still called for Sonic Youth to be afforded what respect they've earned:
[SY's late-'80s run was] a gorgeous noise where No Wave's stringent modernism merges with numinous psychedelia (a new psychedelia, one that barely references anything in the vocabulary of Sixties rock). As irritating as they can be that shouldn't be taken away from them. One might even feel an empathetic twinge for the vanguardist hoisted by their own reinvention-of-the-guitar petard and faced with the problem of reinventing themselves. Why shouldn't they be like Neil Young, an alt-institution, criss-crossing back and forth within the range of sound they've established?
Of course, none of this appears to have persuaded Mark Fisher, who steered largely clear of critiquing the music itself, instead making a series of contextual accusations that could just as easily be leveled at some of his favourite artists. ("Curators... who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff"; "so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn't appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them"; etc.) At times, he appears to deliberately misread Sonic Youth & their place/purpose on the musical landscape, such as when he casts them as an unworthy contemporary standard for "experimentalism" - I don't know anyone obnoxious enough to call the concise pop songcraft of Rather Ripped "experimental". There's something in his tone of a kid who lost cred because he didn't "get" something cool, and now he's come for his revenge.
Ultimately, Mark is picking the wrong battle. When he noted that "the problem with hauntology is its association with a defeated (and defeatist) leftism," he perhaps forgot to what the left owes its apparent & ongoing defeat: the left spends all its time bickering amongst themselves & atomising into combatant factions, each too marginal to function as a foundation.** Meanwhile, the right quashes its petty infighting and rolls out the heavy artillery, intent on little beyond crushing their enemies. Over the hill as they are, Sonic Youth are far from the most stifling, conservative presence in music culture. What other musicians past a half-century in age have remained so curious & engaged in contemporary underground culture? You really want to strike a blow for modernism & encourage breakthroughs into new paradigms? Impatient to hasten the close of one chapter so that we might start a new one?
Kill Jack White.
(*) - Naturally, it works both ways. Not only can critical overreach perform the semantic sleight-of-hand to excuse not liking something for insubstantial reasons, it can also cast the most negligible mediocrity in the most elysian light. After you've called attention several times to the fact the emperor is buck-ass-naked, and several people have insistently shut you up, instead praising his regal & luxuriant threads, you become fairly certain that everyone knows this guy has no clothes - they just like looking at naked people. So it is with music: surely no one's genuinely convinced that the Arcade Fire or Deerhunter are geniuses, but we like to claim so (at length & ad nauseum) just so we can sound more sophisticated that arguing, "It's got a good beat and I can sing along in my car like an asshole."
(**) - Of course, the problem of critical overreach affects political activism too. When parallels are drawn between Ian Tomlinson and Rodney King, Sean Bell, or Burma, it not only cheapens true horror, it sounds histrionic, a cry of "Wolf!" when a chow is sighted. Obviously I'm not condoning physical intimidation by the police, for chrissakes, but am I alone in thinking that Tomlinson (appearing less-than-sportif) might have just pulled a Jim Fixx by total coincidence?
Description of a performance by (a) a pig-in-lipstick has-been pimping themselves of the state fair circuit, or (b) a big fish in the little pond where the chief currency is cred from chin-strokers & dudes in Japanese hand-silkscreened Ts?
Perhaps just incredibly hackneyed scene-blogging with emphasis on the wrong details? At any rate, that the former phrase appears in direct contradiction to the second is why my engagements with members of the "creative class" are infrequent & often hostile.
(Tangentially via Ms. Hopper - and yes, unless the burning of money is part of an anti-Keynesian satirical portrayal of Big Gov't by survivalists who listen to Of Montreal, the gesture is nullified by a recession.)
Could someone please explain to me what exactly Robert Christgauenjoys about music? And how the fuck did this joyless hackademic secure his tenure as The Dean? Can we just guillotine him, mount his head on a handsome teak slab above a plaque that says "B+ Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry," and be done with it?
So apparently the guys behind Gorillaz are back with... Monkey. I'm already looking forward to hearing Marmoset. Basically, Damon Albarn was like, "Blimey! A 1000-page novel about a supernatural chimp running around feudal China! Sounds like an opera to me!" (People seem to have that reaction to almost anything these days.) So he got Jamie Hewlett and Chinese director Chen Shi-Zeng to stage said opera, pizzazzified the tunes to be palatable to skeptical pop consumers (as well as to market the Beijing Olympics), and it hit #5 on the UK album charts, so well done indeed.
But slow down a second: a doorstop-sized novel about a magic monkey? You bet! One of the pillars of China's literary heritage, Journey to the West (西游记) is probably better known by its common English title, Monkey. (Good job, lads, took a lot of time to come up with that one, eh?) Finding its roots in millenium-old Buddhist & Taoist folklore, the epic narrative was anonymously published in the late 16th century and credited retroactively to poet Wu Cheng-En. It possesses a canonical importance equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey in the West, and boasts more than a few of the same narrative features: instructional pop-ins by dead souls? Check. A kingdom unfathomably run by matriarchy? Check. Attempted seduction by grotesque beast-woman hybrids? Check, except now they're arachnids instead of predatory waterfowl.
The story itself? Well, over the course of 100 chapters, the titular simian, Sun Wukong, races through the three-act rise/fall/redemption arc before becoming the disciple of Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (a.k.a. Tripitaka, as he is known in most English translations). Together with the literally-nicknamed Pigsy and Sandy Priest, they travel with the sun to fetch the Theraveda Buddhist sutras from India, for the benefit of the Chinese people. And, as they do in folktales, they live happily ever after.
Though the 5.4 billion of us who aren't Chinese can be forgiven for our unfamiliarity with the tale, it's actually been a remarkably popular cultural reference point since its first Occidental publication in the 1942. In China, it's a perennially popular stage production and has spawned at least a dozen films, the most recent of which starred Jet Li and Jackie Chan (a Hollywood blockbuster is currently in preproduction, with Will Smith rumoured to play Tripitaka). Proto-ambient prog-rockers Jade Warrior peppered their albums with references to the story, including song titles like "Water-Curtain Cave" and "The Mountain of Flowers and Fruit". British and Japanese men pushing 40 probably recall the surprise TV hit of the late-'70s, Monkey Magic. Even otaku mainstay Dragonball was conceived as a liberal adaptation, though that pretense was swiftly defenestrated.
So am I recommending Journey to the West as essential to your post-globalisation edification, or as some Rosetta Stone for primate-oriented global junk-culture? Nah. Bottom-line, Journey to the West is handicapped by that same Achilles' heel as all those other big, important books written before paper replaced papyrus: bad writing.
The narrative sputters with the start-stop-stall rhythm of someone making it all up as they go along. There are innumerable passages fattened with pointless kipple, to the effect of:
And Xuanzang knelt by his mother, his hands folded piously within the folds of his robe. "But mother," he said, as he knelt, "how did you come to recognize me as a man for you have not seen me since I was but a baby?"
"My son," said the mother to her son who now knelt by her side, "I despaired that I would not recognize you as a man for not having seen you since you were but a baby. In my despair I decided that I must mark you, so as to recognize you as a man, and thus bit off the last knuckle of your baby toe so that when I saw you as a man I would recognize you by the absence of the last knuckle on your baby toe."
And mother and son embraced, and there was much rejoicing.
This, of course, after a good half-page was already spent in chapter 8 describing the foresight of such knuckle-severing as it happened. Yeesh.
And then, when it comes to the fantastic blood-fountain battle scenes and magical invocations, they race by with less detail than an AP report of some tribal melee consigned to a sidebar on page 14:
And Monkey and Erlang Shen clashed with a ferocity that cannot possibly be imagined, let alone described, until Erlang Shen was exhausted and Monkey returned victorious to the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.
Then his monkey minions threw a feast, and there was much rejoicing.
Boo. Disappointing. (Dept. of CYA: lest an overzealous Chinese literature major accuse me of mangling the text, the above passages are not quoted from the story; it's called parody, people.)
As a final illustration of how lopsided the story is, please note that chapters 13-99 document the quintet's travels from China to Vulture Peak in India to obtain the sutras, and chapter 100 - the final chapter - describes not only the whole journey back, but also the protagonists' divine recompense in (I shit you not) various bureaucratic posts in Heaven.
A grimly comic footnote about Journey to the West's enduring popularity in China is that Sun Wukong/Monkey was frequently cited by Mao Zedong as a role model for "his fearlessness in thinking, doing work, striving for the objective and extricating China from poverty." Right. A workshy, megalomaniacal chimp prone to hissy fits, who declared war on Heaven for being fired from his post as holy horse-groom for incompetence; who cut such a swath across the celestial palace that Buddha himself imprisoned him under a mountain for five centuries; who only submitted to Tripitaka after being strapped to some alchemical electroshock torture-halo - a good role model. That's like Lenin citing Gogol's madman diarist as an exemplary Bolshevik.
And you already thought Mao was fucked in the head, eh?
So why did I slog through this absurd & seemingly slap-dash epic? Well, aside from a lot of enjoyable picaresque, the friend who lent me the book pitched it as "the story of a flying warrior-monkey whose divine title is Great Sage - Equal of Heaven." Not a hard sell when it's presented as such. Of course, whenever I started skimming pages or furrowing my brow at particularly awkward passages, I kept the issue of translation in mind. Perhaps I was handed the Ford Edsel of English editions, and doubtlessly the cadence gets dismembered when removed from its mother tongue.
That being said, if you've got the time to learn classical Chinese and read a hundred-chapter Lord of the Sutras, get back to me about how that worked out.
Retroreferential Postscript: You know how "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. struck me as the anthem not of third-world animus but of illiquid asset robber barons? Called it. Hoodies with Saturday night specials aren't the only ones who use terror to ply people from their wallets.
The truly maddening thing about the bailout is how close we are to flipping the script in a sweeping way: if only Congress & the Senate looked ex-Goldman Sachs man Paulson in the eye and said, "Yeah, we've got your $700 billion, but this ain't a bailout, this is a buyout. They had their chance and blew it big-time, so no, they can't have their company back once we've resurrected it." But no, instead the gov't is acting like lax parents whose shithead sixteen-year-old just totaled the minivan; shrugging that "kids will be kids," they hand the budding sociopath the AmEx card to rent a car so he can still get around.
So much is written about the foreigner's experience of Japan (guiltyascharged) that it appears to be an inexhaustible entertainment cottage industry - if only it weren't for such a small, self-selecting, and narcissistic audience that creates both demand and supply. What makes so little of it actually worth reading is a pervasive & unapologetic Orientalism, be it fawning Japanophilia or precipice-racist censure, that very few people can - and even fewer do - call "bullshit" on (R.I.P. Westerner's Fear of Neon Sign).
It's one thing when a foreigner as integrated & respected as Alex Kerr produces a polemic as parti-pris-yet-insurgent as Dogs and Demons. It's a whole different rice-ball when a whistle-stop national audit is extrapolated into a crazed indictment of an entire country, its people, history, and culture, as in A.A. Gill's "Mad In Japan" (an essay from his 2002 travelogue, recently revisited by Fucked Gaijin).
Now, I'm not interested in crafting a densely-referenced rebuttal. I'll not even say Gill is 100% wrong: contemporary Japanese culture is nothing if not absurd, and his first impression of Kyoto ("an ugly sprawl of low-rise confusion") mirrored mine. What sickens me most about this bog-roll scrawl is that this is what travel-writing has been reduced to: a gonzo rendering of Bill Bryson's bemused kvetching, fattened by the splenetic supremacy that rancorous harpies like Michael Savage have made their calling card. The only alternative seems to be self-reflexive reductivism, the kind Christopher Hitchens acerbically noted in P.J. O'Rourke's dull tendency to be reminded, where ever he traveled, only of southern California. Either way, people seem hell-bent on convincing themselves they're better off at home. Hollywood (ever the dead skin flaking off of culture's scrotum) is a gleeful co-conspirator, shitting out a steady stream of "noble savage" adventure films (The Last Samurai, The Kingdom) and gornographic exploitation flicks set in exotic locales (Hostel, Turistas).
I'm not asking everyone who comments on foreign countries to heed Chomsky & Zinn's example of following every outward-aimed incrimination with encyclopaedic self-criticism. Not every Chinese commentator need express contrition for the 49 to 78 million people killed under Mao Zedong's regime, nor must every British cultural critic supplicate themselves for their past imperialism (or even their current societal shortcomings). Hell, it can be very well amusing to read something as glibly beserk as
Japan is a lunatic asylum built on a hideous history, vile philosophy and straitjacket culture.
But instead of prosaic slapstick, this is the standard for Gill's intercultural (dis)engagment. This isn't travel writing, this the red-faced bleating of some astigmatic git who'd likely take the Racial Pixie sketch at face value. Lunatics haven't their own nation (island or other) yet, but apparently they can get publishing deals no problem.
.jpg)
Posts
