Postmodernist Music: The Culture of "Cool" Vs. Commodity
(Shop as Usual . . . and Avoid Panic Buying)
A.S. Van Dorston
Sometime in Summer '90 (In my decentered, schizophrenic
state, time is meaningless.)
The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgment on postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgment on us as well as on the artifacts in question.
(Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate", 63)
Postmodernism in American culture is a condition that simply cannot be denied. In the forms of recording, performance and video, music has played an increasingly essential role in American culture, and has gradually become a part of the postmodern condition since at least the late 60s. Postmodernist music, in commodified, popular forms, and in less commodified, less popular forms, can be read as a text in which trends in political ideologies, economics, and aesthetics can be found within American culture.
One of the best readings of postmodernist music is E. Ann Kaplan's Rocking
Around the Clock, in which she gives readings of music videos shown on
the cable station MTV. But while Kaplan says MTV is the definitive version
of postmodernist music, other scholars like Stephen Connor, Larry McCaffery
and Tony Mitchell find some avant-garde rock music and performance, reggae,
dub, ska, World music, rap, and other more marginalized ethnic minority music
to have equally valid postmodernist characteristics, and they're just as well
versed in high-falutin' French postmodern theorists as Kaplan is. There are,
in fact, a wide variety of interpretations of postmodernism, which creates
much confusion in any discourse about postmodernism. For example, there is
controversy about whether aesthetic and political distinctions can be made
between commodified postmodernist music examined by Kaplan in MTV, and slightly
less commodified, "cool" postmodernist music. There is a strong
argument that there can be such distinctions, and the distinctions show the
cultural/political changes postmodernism is bringing to the music industry.
They also show how people as consumers, spectators, and participants accept,
oppose, or fail to notice the changes. A small number of participants include
postmodernist bands and musicians like the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith,
Laurie Anderson, John Zorn and Negativland. Their songs/performances/texts
are largely reactions against more undesirable qualities of consumer postmodernism,
against canonized modernism and against cultural hegemony, while retaining
many characteristics that qualify them as postmodernist.
Kaplan documents the bulk of undesirable qualities in her description of
postmodernist videos in MTV; a postmodernist phenomenon that's "here
to stay." If Kaplan's prediction that it does and will continue to dominate
American music culture, it could be a long, joyless stay. She describes the
postmodernist properties of the music video channel within the parameters
of cultural studies and screen theory, even though by definition postmodernist
MTV is a constantly changing format that defies generalizations. Postmodernist
MTV threatens to render any attempt to codify specific arguments obsolete.
Kaplan often ends up trying to sidestep such complications by describing
it in unstable, negative terms -- (not) narrative, (not) centered, offering
(no) position for the spectator. The nature of the topic almost forces ambiguity.
Kaplan does not offer any aesthetic critique of MTV, because of what she perceives
as the "obliteration of aesthetic distinctions" in a medium, which
"constructs subjects unable any more to distinguish an `inside' from
an `outside,' `fiction' from `reality'" (Kaplan, 153). Within the MTV
universe, artistic criticism is also obsolete.
Kaplan does give some feminist perspectives. In MTV's blurred distinctions
between subject and image, women are most often the target of objectification
and commodification. The channel has a white male perspective in which the
phallus is the signifier and MTV addresses desire for the phallus in the psyche
of both genders. Androgynous dress in videos can be read as men avoiding their
fear of femininity by possessing it (Kaplan, 89). It is all consistent with
a channel symptomatic of Reagan's America in materialism, racism and sexism
(Kaplan, 30).
Kaplan says it is important for feminists to confront the postmodernist
challenge in MTV because the reduction of the old notion of "self"
to "image" could permanently reduce the female body to merely an
"image." The new postmodern universe, "with its celebration
of the look, the surfaces, the self-as-commodity, threatens to reduce everything
to the image/representation/simulacrum" (Kaplan, 151).
In Kaplan's criticism of MTV, she does not go as far as to compare the video
format to other cultural forms and texts, such as avant-garde and noncommercial
music. Instead, she describes in detail a postmodernism that can render a
spectator into a state of mind that can range from merely annoying to downright
dangerous. The most annoying factor of MTV is the way it attracts and snares
its audience. It evokes what Roland Barthes calls a "split subjectivity"
within the audience, which calls up a desire for plenitude which we somehow
hope to achieve by continued consumption, delivering us from the condition
of emptiness humankind as suffered before the development of surplus in advanced
capitalism. With the coming-up-next mechanism, MTV keeps us in an excited
state of expectation, promising that the next segment will fulfill our material/emotional/entertainment
desires. But it never does. MTV has the most extreme aspect of what Kaplan
calls the "televisual apparatus;" commercialism. MTV is one continuous
advertisement, its "flow broken down into different kinds of ads."
The channel keeps the spectator in the consuming mode more intensely than
other mediums because its items are all so short (Kaplan, 143).
Kaplan uses the metaphor of Foucault's Panopticon in which the guard surveys
a series of prisoners through their windows. The TV producer is the "guard"
and the spectator is the prisoner who watches "in a sequestered and observed
solitude." The spectator/prisoner has a remote control to flip channels
with. The prisoner has the illusion of being in control of the "windows,"
whereas in fact the desire for plenitude that keeps the spectator/prisoner
watching is forever deferred (Kaplan, 4). MTV is about nothing but consumption.
But if the illusion of imminent satisfaction through some kind of purchase
is broken, some people/spectators might see the social/psychological problems
developed in the time spent being suspended in a state of unsatisfied desire.
If the theories of some scholars are coming true, at least some versions
of postmodernism (depending on definitions) are changing the way people think
and use language. Jameson sees the disappearance of the sense of history as
the "schizophrenic state." It is the effect of language -- instead
of signifiers and signified in postmodern texts being coherently organized
in a comprehensive chain, or narrative, the flow of words/images in things
like MTV are such that the reader/spectator cannot associate any meaning or
recognize boundaries and differences, past and present. The state of being
fixated on the detached signifier (like MTV), isolated in a present from which
there is no escape is Jameson's schizophrenic state. Videos on MTV create
a grab-bag out of western cultural history to dip into at will, obliterating
historical specificity. Kids will grow up with the "televisual apparatus"
with a consciousness that no longer thinks in terms of a historical frame.
Jameson sees such a schizophrenic mode of relating to the world as a language
disorder. It is a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers, having
no sense of time as continuous. She/he
is
condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of
his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable
future on the horizon . . . The schizophrenic experience is an experience
of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers that fail to
link up into a coherent sequence.
(Kaplan,
146)
Jameson notes that a person in such a state cannot experience in words their larger contextual and temporal meanings, so he/she focuses in on their literality, their presentness, their sensory elements, not seeking to look beyond to broader signification.
Jacques Derrida calls this a decentering experience, which is ultimately
unpleasurable because it refuses the plenitude and unity we all desire, "makes
us vulnerable to dominant commercial forms that tap into this need with their
complicit ideologies" (Kaplan, 148). In other words, this form of postmodernism
is no fun.
From reading Kaplan's detailed deconstruction of MTV videos, this form of
postmodernism is also, in equally elegant words, stupid. It is easily predicted
that simulations in video would essentially replace the "real" and
distinctions between the two would become obsolete. As Baudrillard put it,
the collapse between the real and its representation puts an end to the real
as referential by exalting it as a model. Not that it matters, with the construction
of decentered, schizophrenic spectators who can't tell the difference and
wouldn't care if they could.
But what makes videos distinctively postmodernist is the random borrowing
or simulation of motifs from other halfway decent artists, works or texts.
This form of pastiche signifies a new lack of orienting boundaries, a tendency
to incorporate rather than to "quote" texts. It lacks any sort of
sense of humor to be parody. More often than not, it lacks any cynicism, oppositional
voice, or even intelligence to have a sense of humor other than a bastardized
form of traditional "frat humor." It is a revolt against meaning
for no reason other than laziness. Jameson explains further:
like
parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic
mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry,
without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter,
without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared
to which that is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody
that has lost its sense of humor.
When MTV, in postmodernist fashion, blurs distinctions between past, present
and future, along with blurring separations between popular and avant-garde
art, between aesthetic genres and artistic modes, it doesn't take any particular
stroke of genius. Again, in MTV land it doesn't matter because the pastiche
is less than entertainment, it's merely filler between the machine-gun rounds
of consumer advertisements.
But to Marxist critics like Jameson and Lawrence Grossberg, it matters.
It matters that postmodernist texts like MTV refuse to take up a secure (or
even insecure) critical position from which to speak. They believe contemporary
youth culture is in danger because it does not take an explicitly critical
stance toward on-going events. Kaplan herself agrees that decentering, or
"the loss of any position from which to speak -- of mechanisms for critical
evaluation of social structures and ideologies -- that characterizes postmodernism,
is something to worry about" (Kaplan, 152).
Such a threat is real because of the lack of oppositional discourses. On
their It Will Take A Nation of Millions to Bring Us Down album, Public
Enemy said "This time, the revolution will not be televised. Indeed,
can there be a revolution in a youth culture made up of decentered, schizophrenic,
voiceless spectators? Only in a sense that any revolution that takes place
will only exist on the television screen. Kaplan believes any attempts at
oppositional discourses struggle against their reduction to glamorous "media
events," to the surfaces/textures/images of opposition rather than to
it’s actually as something that challenges the status quo.
While in some European nations there may be a genuinely oppositional youth
culture, Kaplan says this is no longer true of America. "What we have
predominantly is a uni-dimensional, commercialized and massified youth culture,
not really organized by youth itself but by commercial agents, that has absorbed
into itself, and trivialized, all the potentially subversive positions of
earlier rock movements" (Kaplan, 152). Kaplan does admit there are small
sub-groups that are important but because they are marginalized and lacking
access to the media, they are powerless, at least in comparison to the power
of "commercial apparatuses," in which television is able to use
any kind of potentially subversive counter-culture before it has even had
time to identify itself as such. As a result, oppositional discourses are
never given an opportunity to structure a community that might gain sufficient
power to produce real changes in dominant discourses.
So when MTV borrows from the powerless sub-cultures and divests them of
their revolutionary implications for commercial reasons, it reduces them largely
to the "radical chic." In anything seeming like dissent on MTV,
there turns out to be nothing behind the representations/images (Kaplan, 54).
Such representations are thrown into a stew, a decentered mass absorbing
all types without noting (or knowing) their historical origins, for they have
all been erased, traces remaining only in some aspects of dress (50s, mod,
punk, etc.). Kaplan points out that the displacement of history and ideology
with commodity -- the look/style-self-as-commodity is another postmodern characteristic.
The dilution of oppositional stances, and even censoring of groups like punk
or ethnic minority bands that stand too far toward the edges of dominant culture
might lead one to conclude that rock is dead, or that it has come to the end
of its line. Kaplan says, "In fact, innovative and important music is
being developed outside of this 'mainstream,' but is only heard or seen by
those aficionados who make efforts to follow developments." So Kaplan
knows there is more than MTV, she just doesn't know what the hell it is.
There are indeed oppositional discourses that have varying success at being
oppositional, while at the same time having many of the postmodernist properties
described by Kaplan, Baudrillard, Jameson and others. By success, I mean artistic
expression outside the confines of advertising and MTV that avoids the reduction-to-a-spectacle-for-television-syndrome
so it can express social/political criticism, and even manipulate media spectacles
in often humorous ways, as demonstrated by the music group Negativland.
So why would Kaplan ignore the existence of such music? "Pop musicologists"
like Andrew Goodwin and Simon Frith believe it is because of Kaplan's scant
knowledge of even the pop musicians whose videos she analyzes, let alone any
other music. They also criticize "the exaggerated, hyperbolic claims
some postmodernist screen theoreticians have made for rock video as an exemplary
postmodern art form" (Mitchell, 274).
While Kaplan is an expert on the rock video as a postmodern phenomenon,
she does not acknowledge the contrast between the commercial postmodernist
rock and any other sort of "cool" postmodernist music. She examined
only the "hot universe" in the mix of avant-garde with kitsch in
MTV rather than the "cool universe" of avant-garde and punk music.
In keeping with the pattern of Kaplan's often undefined postmodern jargon,
I'll neglect to define "cool" in anything but uncertain negative
terms.
To see how pseudo-hipsters (in a postmodern era, where the "real thing"
is irrelevant, how could anything be anything but pseudo?) distinguish the
"cool" from the "uncool" is difficult. (Pseudo) Marxist
notions of "selling out" to the capitalist market are no longer
the simple litmus tests that they used to be. Nearly everything is mixed up
with corporate music industry one way or another. So "cool" postmodern
music, while not totally escaping the properties of commodity, is not merely
filler between commercials, or a commercial in itself. In turn it avoids the
effect of turning a reader/spectator into a decentered, schizophrenic, paralyzed
vegetable. "Cool" postmodernist music does not exclusively use pastiche.
Parody, humor and fun are also important.
Kaplan may not call the more elitist, snooty school of music concerned with
social/political criticism and parody and avant-garde techniques postmodernist.
But it at least has two factors of postmodernist music -- it has the capacity
to articulate alternative or plural cultural identities of groups belonging
to the margins of national or dominant cultures, and it celebrates the principles
of parody, pastiche, stylistic multiplicity and generic mobility (Connor 186).
Through collaboration, the use of allusion, self-reference and sampling,
music outside of the sphere of MTV can be fit into the postmodernist self-consciousness
and intertextuality, often without the problems such as commodifying women
into "images" and losing its potency as an oppositional discourse.
While some postmodern theorists will urge that there are no absolute grounds
of value, Stephen Connor says questions of value and legitimacy do not disappear,
but gain a new intensity; "and the struggle to generate and ground legitimacy
in the contemporary academy is nowhere more intense than in debates produced
by and around postmodernism" (Connor, 8).
The distinctions between types of postmodern music may seem contradictory
when postmodernism is supposed to be about the erosion of the older distinction
between high culture and so-called mass or popular commercial culture. It
is indeed a controversial issue, one that is not easily resolved. Stephen
Connor adds:
.
. . it is difficult to be sure of being able to distinguish on purely stylistic
terms a 'good' postmodernism which, sitting on 'the postmodern gilt market'
of the national archives, can 'return those images to the world of social
relations', from a 'bad' postmodernism, which will merely 'leave its viewers
gazing at a flat screen.'
(Connor, 163)
It's easy to see how there could be such a wide variety of notions about
postmodernism in the "world market of ideas" which postmodernist
theory institutes and participates in. In its elasticity and theoretical centerlessness,
postmodernist theory "is like the Toyota of thought: produced and assembled
in several different places and then sold everywhere" (Connor, 19).
It is easier to identify the differences between the commodity and the "cool"
from a pseudo-Marxist, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-oppositional perspective.
While the value can be seen in the free, intertextual play of signification
of postmodern video/performance, which the spectator/listener/dancer is free
to interpret or discard in a hedonistic process of consumption, one can't
merely exalt in a perpetual joy of meaninglessness forever. Other aspects
of fun, humor, emotional expression and protest are also desirable among less
commercial, less commodified subcultures.
Another facet of "cool" postmodernism is an agenda of counter-hegemony.
Such an agenda goes against leading hegemonic features of postmodern society
including the increased power of advertising and the electronic media, the
advent of universal standardization, neocolonialism, institutional xenophobia,
racism, sexism, homophobia, the schizoid pastiche of the fading sense of a
history, and the "consciousness industry." Baudrillard's "consciousness
industry" is the new predominance of technologies and practice concerned
with the exchange, promotion, distribution and manipulation of signs, from
raw information, to cars, to fashion, to the 'images' of pop stars, actors
and governments, as well as the fabrication of public opinion. Counter-hegemonic
postmodernist culture "might offer ways of resisting or surviving its
most baleful tendencies" (Connor, 45).
But one cannot expect too much from "cool" postmodernism, as it
will always be a part of the subcultures, maggots trying to scale the garbage
heap of mainstream commercial culture. For instance, it cannot be expected
to wrestle control of the mass media from narrow or oppressive commercial
interests. Jean Baudrillard argues that it is not possible simply to take
over the form of the mass media and change their content to any good purpose,
"since what is oppressive about the media is precisely the ‘code’ that
in their very form they embody." This code functions by the denial of
response or exchange in mass communication. "A mass medium talks to its
audience," says Baudrillard, "while never allowing that audience
to respond to it and, indeed, confirms its audience's muteness by simulating
audience response, via phone-ins, studio audiences, viewers' polls and other
forms of bogus `interaction'" (Connor, 53). The mass media fabricates
non-communication, making it impossible for any significant populist takeover.
The idea of counter-hegemony in postmodernism is catching on, such as Hal
Foster's idea of a postmodern `culture of resistance' -- a counter-hegemony
consisting of resistance and interference, which requires us "to see
in the social formation not a `total system' but a conjuncture of practices,
many adversarial, where the cultural is an arena in which active contestation
is possible" (Connor, 241). This opens possibilities such as a group
faxing bogus news to Time magazine, or Negativland creating a fictional
link to a murder case and watching the unsuspecting mass media turn it into
a "real" event.
While counter-hegemony is a reaction to some of the more undesirable aspects
of postmodern society, it is also a reaction against the products of modernism.
Cultural hegemony is itself a product of modernism. It is the second revolution
in culture in the 20th Century according to Charles Newman. The first was
one in which innovation and experimentation swept across art and cultural
activity throughout the West, destroying old certainties and urgently politicizing
artistic activity. The second revolution, less dramatic but more important,
was when "universities and other cultural institutions took over the
various forms of modernism, canonized its works and artists, draining away
its political charge and set about the immense work of managing and administering
it" (Connor, 12). So the point of resistance for some forms of postmodernist
culture is not modernism per se, but the second revolution which has assimilated
and institutionalized modernism, resulting in a progressive withdrawal from
general questions and responsibility and increasing collusion with a system
that divides knowledge into specialisms to disallow in advance any radical
or effective engagement with general issue, according to Edward Said (Connor,
13).
In terms of music, Jameson gives the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling
Stones as examples of the high modernist moments in rock. In similar fashion
to the "second revolution," 60s music was then canonized and incorporated
by 1970s culture industry. It's an accelerated history that does not produce
as linear break of postmodernism. In reaction to modernism, the pose of aristocratic
aloofness from mass culture that had always functioned as avant-garde's despised
opposite was put aside. This meant the embrace of Kitsch and popular culture
like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Kurt Vonnegut. Another reaction, according
to Connor, is to recapture and purify avant-garde strategies and ideals; to
praise the "situational" and participatory art of Laurie Anderson
and John Cage, all whom require an active reflection up on its nature as a
work of art from the audience (Connor, 238).
Not everyone views the reaction to modernism as a bunch of lofty avant-garde
artists. Charles Newman called them "a band of vainglorious contemporary
artists following the circus elephants of Modernism with snow shovels"
(Connor, 65). Arthur Kroker and David Cook similarly described the audience
as "an electronically composed public of serial beings which, smelling
the funeral pyre of excremental culture all around it, decides of its own
unfettered volition to celebrate its own exterminism by throwing its energies,
where attention is the oxygen of TV life, to the black hole of television"
(Connor, 172). Postmodernism, whether it is "cool" or not, is indeed
a messy phenomenon. It is difficult to argue any specific place and time that
a decisive postmodernist mutation has taken place in rock music. During and
after punk, new forms were incorporated, tamed and recycled as commodities
(such as new wave) -- to the point where it became more difficult to distinguish
authentic "originality" and commercial "exploitation."
One of the better early examples of postmodernist avant-garde is the Velvet
Underground, one of the first bands to begin to fundamentally alter the essential
nature of their medium. While Dylan's and the Beatles' mid-sixties experimental
albums used technical advances (overdubbing and multi-tracking effects) to
achieve "modernist aims," the Velvet Underground, along with some
of the more radical work of Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart, contain the
true origins of postmodern work.
Like fictional innovators from the same period in the mid-60s (Robert Coover,
Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenik, Thomas Pynchon, for example), the Velvet
Underground systematically and self-consciously began to reexamine and then
openly disrupt their genre's conventional assumptions about formal unity and
beauty, about the 'proper' ways to manipulate their medium's elements. With
help from Andy Warhol, they presented multimedia performances that "mixed
musical styles and messages in a way ideally suited for expressing the multiple,
contradictory textures of postindustrial urban life" in the form of the
"Plastic Exploding Inevitable." The Velvets presented their dissonant,
minimalist three-chord progressions within a dissolving, non-hierarchical
pastiche of Warhol movies, dance, light shows, improvisational poetry -- "a
cacophony of avant-garde noise, light, and humans interacting with images
and sounds" (McCaffery, 4).
Influenced by Jazz innovator Ornette Coleman's unconventional notions of
dissonance and harmony, they experimented with the effects of repetition,
of the accumulated and chance effects of feedback, and even the concepts of
boredom and willful crudity so that a tension develops between the tight,
monotonous formal structure and bursts of piercing sounds and pure noise in
songs like "European Son" and "Sister Ray." Up until
then, says Jacques Attali,
noise
had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an
aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated
with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague . . . But just as death is
nothing more than an excess of life, noise has also been perceived as a source
of exaltation, a kind of therapeutic drug . . .
(Mitchell, 279)
Along with setting the pattern for industrial noise and postpunk bands like
SPK, Einsturzende Neubauten and Sonic Youth, the Velvets also foregrounded
the concepts of rock musicians as image or mechanical simulacrum (an extension
of Warhol's fascination with the mechanical and reproducible qualities of
life and art, the artist-as-machine) in ways that anticipated David Bowie,
punk, and more recently, Madonna. McCaffery comes the closest to believing
there was some sort of break between modernism and postmodernism in music
-- "in short, the Velvet Underground ushered in the postmodern era of
self-conscious, self-referential rock" (McCaffery, 4).
But artists in the 70s had a slightly different environment to deal with
than the Velvets. Musicians and their counterparts in fiction and painting
found themselves simultaneously immersed in and critical of a culture "industry"
of ever-expanding proportions that seemed increasingly impossible to ignore.
McCaffery found that there emerged as a result a parallel attitude towards
the (manipulation of) images, sounds, and language that we consume as they
consume us -- "the elements of consumption that, for probably worse,
now define Western culture" (McCaffery, 27). Some of the "cool"
postmodernist artists that emerged decided to plunge into, digest, and then
subvert the profusion of visual, sonic and information sources that run our
lives.
Patti Smith emerged as a central figure of the early seventies New York
pre-punk scene. A published poet, actress, and rock critic, Smith's musical
performances blended punk's abrasive sounds with a lyrical content and style
heavily influenced by Rimbaud, Genet, Sam Shepard, and William S. Burroughs.
In particular she was fond of applying Burroughs's cut-up methods to her songs.
Cut-ups in literature is a notion in which the work of randomly selected writers
can be cut up, juxtaposed, and "sampled" in a form of collage writing,
which had already exerted some influence on some of David Bowie's songs (Mitchell,
287). Smith's songs ranged across the history of rock music and lyrics for
snippets of words and musical phrases that interacted with her own language
and dense, mysterious thickets of sound patterns, tempos and rhythms.
Laurie Anderson shared many of Patti Smith's roots in the New York art scene,
including dada, androgynous stage personas that confounded sexist stereotypes;
both relied upon lyrical styles that emphasized collage and reflexiveness
as a means of exploring their mutual, obsessive fascination with language
and its failure to communicate our most basic fears, longings, and sensory
impressions. Anderson also was influenced by Burroughs, consummated in collaboration
when Burroughs provided the lyric for her song "Language is a Virus."
Anderson's music, however, needed to be seen in an even wider context of
performance art than Smith's and the Velvets'. Her shows were a synthesis
of literature, theater, music, photography, stand-up comedy, film, architecture,
poetry, fantasy and dance, which were eventually collected into her "magnum
opus" -- the two-evening, eight-hour-long United States, Parts I-IV
tour in 1984-5. We can see her use of projected words on both stage and screen,
where her body often becomes a screen it its own right, such as placing a
light in her mouth to silhouette her face in her video, "O Superman,"
a reflection on communications technology and consumer capitalism. She becomes
Warhol's [wo]man-as-machine when she wires herself up for sound and plays
her body as an amplified percussion instrument. She even transforms her body
electronically in the "O Superman" video into a Buddha and then
an abstract shape, literally embodying the electronic technology she is critiquing.
Anderson's waving hand refers to the image of a hand raised in greeting on
the Pioneer spacecraft. Anderson uses this image to signify ambiguity of communication
-- "In our country, good-bye looks just like hello" (Mitchell, 285).
The multimedia arrangements of text, image, movement, and musical sounds
employ technologies to present a bemused, often bitterly funny view of technology.
The same technology is sometimes used in non-narrative and often nonrepresentational
ways, bypassing direct address. Anderson also exerts full creative control
over her videos and films, giving her an artistic authority that is rare in
the world of rock. The characters presented in pieces like "Stephen Weed,"
"Hey Ah," and "Talk Normal" are presented to the spectator
in a fragmented, alienated process of "showing," which enables the
performers to mediate between characterization and narration. The "cool,"
decentered, postmodern form of presentation bridges performance art to rock
music.
There have been at least four scholarly essays published to date on Anderson's
work. Anderson has herself legitimized these judgments by acknowledging the
postmodern condition as one of the motivations behind her film Home of
the Brave:
it's
not a mistake to call something postmodern now, because there actually is
no present . . . It becomes very difficult to produce something which doesn't
immediately become grist to the media mill . . . That's one of the reasons
I did the movie, because I work in such a transitory medium, the minute I
do something it all disappears.
(Mitchell, 284)
But unlike the humorless, positionless pastiche of most postmodernist video,
Anderson does relentless political critiques of the American democratic circus
("The Big Top"), suburban alienation ("Talk Normal"),
and examines issues central to postmodernism; "the slipperiness of language,
the way that our alienation and confusion are produced by Big Science and
the media, how words and images are created in today's world -- and how we
are inundated and affected by them" (McCaffery, 27). She also illustrates
a postmodern concern with undoing the problematics of surfaces, of flatness,
and of appearance. Her performances, as Hebdidge has said of pop art, "remind
us that which is obvious matters, that surfaces matter, that the surface is
matter" (Mitchell, 286).
Like Anderson, John Zorn takes for granted a certain sophistication in his
audience that didn't exist thirty years ago. Those who aren't so disorientated
in a schizophrenic decentered postmodern hell that they can't think are familiar
with what Robert Coover has called the "mythic residues" of society
-- "those shards of cultural memory and artifice that simultaneously
help organize our responses to the world and tyrannically limit the options
of those responses (McCaffery, 27). Like Donald Barthelme and Coover, Warhol
and Jasper Johns, Zorn asks his audience not to attempt to deny or ignore
these elements but to play with them and recognize our perceptual relationship
to them. Zorn also recognizes that traditional sources of these mythic residues
-- the Bible, myth, the revered classics of art, painting, music, and literature
-- have become gradually superseded by the materials and structures of mass
and popular culture.
But rather than whine about this "fall" as Lynne Cheney, Allan
Bloom and their reactionary foundations did, he created a fresh hybrid of
materials, including Charles Ives, Harry Partch, surf music, bebop, jazz fusion,
funk, grind/speedcore thrash/metal, Japanese music, film noir and Carl Stalling,
the composer of the Loony Tunes cartoon soundtracks. The synthesis of these
frees them of their fixed meanings, unleashes a flood of hidden resonances.
His albums The Big Gundown, Spillaine and Naked City
arose from his work with Hal Wilner's tribute album projects for Thelonious
Monk and Kurt Weill. While seen by many as blasphemous or merely parodies,
the "slippage" and endless play of signifiers, and the denial of
textual closure all help account for their intuition that no text has a final
meaning or interpretation. Not even the author's or composer’s can be privileged
over any other.
Spillane is a montage of found sounds that Zorn associates with Mickey
Spillaine, his work, and detective films (windshield wipers, rain falling,
screams, gunshots, phone rings, bar crowds) and musical signatures (cocktail
lounge tunes, jazz, blues, film scores) organized with a snub of technology
-- recorded live with no overdubs.
Even more frantic in its rapid pacings and heterogeneous nature of its materials,
Naked City is the perfect follow-up to the Velvet Underground's vision
of the simultaneously exuberant and decaying noise of postindustrial, postmodern
society. It is the Carl Stalling soundtrack to a demented cartoon yet to be
made.
Many of the oddly "natural" or "real" sounds Laurie
Anderson and John Zorn use in performance are simulacra produced by a computerized
synthesizer, the first of which used by Laurie Anderson was the Fairlight
CMI sampler, invented by two Australians in 1979. The sophistication of the
technology has increased exponentially in the following decade, dragging with
it a fundamental shift of focus, address, and emphasis in music performance;
the art of sampling. Samplers are able to process and recycle any type of
sound, including sections of other pop songs, and reproduce them as musical
motifs. Frank Owens commented on this art of sampling:
there's
something strangely indecent about this music in the way it denies the deferred
gratification traditional pop is based on -- the pop song as a narrative structure
that one follows to reach the joy at its center, the pop song as extended
foreplay leading to climax. Instead you get music that is a string of climaxes,
like a movie made up entirely of car chases or exploding buildings.
Sampling is an art of mechanical reproduction in which new digital technologies
are being used to deconstruct old texts, and has become a focal point of postmodernist
performance in a decentered process of instant pastiche and recycling, and
a willingness to live off its own history and forms. It is a process that
uses William Burroughs's notion of cut-ups much more successfully than Patti
Smith.
One group of "cool" postmodernists who have been especially successful
in going beyond even parody to play with and manipulate the texts around them,
even creating "real" news fiascos to supply new ammunition for their
work, is Negativland. The members are an anti-group -- a middle-aged polar
antithesis of the Village People. They are computer programmers, graphics
designers, nursery school teachers, telephone salesmen and cable TV installers.
The band formed in 1979 as a result of local avant-comic love shows and Don
Joyce's radio show, "Over the Edge" on KPFA-FM, Berkeley. Three
albums on their own Seeland record label resulted from their collaboration.
On the shows they organized samples under themes, such as anything to do with
"w/holes." "Well, that's h-o-l-e-s, and it could also be w-h-o-l-e-s,
right? So, that's enough. That's enough to do a show on . . . We call it 'Receptacle
Programming' from the [free form call-in] phone aspect of it," said Joyce
(Shurtluff, 37). Negativland also played with the ambiguous, blurred distinctions
between "reality" and "fiction."
DON: We have a definite appreciation for found
stuff, even if it's our own stuff.
(Glass, 49)
FCC and copyright laws have yet to figure out what to do with the increased
use of sampling in postmodernist music. Despite Negativland's brutal criticism
of American commercial culture and power elite, they have had few problems
with the law.
Almost
everything we do is illegal. Usually I do it first and find out later . .
. of course I steal a lot of stuff. I just play all kinds of things like on
TV and radio and records . . . People just, you know, basically want to be
entertained. They don't care whether what you're doing is actually legal or
not.
Negativland's first truly ambitious work was cut from literally a million
tape edits to reinflate the classic story of going home to suburbia on A
Big 10-8 Place. Threaded throughout the aural collage are directions to
180-G, leading to a house in a nearby California suburb.
DAVID: Somebody followed the directions and went
there and disturbed the people who live there.
CHRIS: Do they have a copy of the record?
MARK: Imagine if you were this normal family
in the suburbs, would you like it if you got a record album in the mail that
described to the whole planet how to get to your house? It would terrify you!
CHRIS: Talking about your dogjuice and your orange
carpet and the ants in the mailbox.
DAVID: Whipped cream on the Corvair. That was
one thing left out. [long silence]
(Glass, 49)
However elaborate Negativland's albums are, they cannot satisfactorily present
their montage of postmodernist text/es on the record album medium. Like Laurie
Anderson, they are more successful with the live multimedia performance with
videos, film, ad-lib sampling, etc. Instead of using album material at their
shows, Negativland produced completely new, conceptual spectacles, such as
the "Mercury Monarch" show in which they gave away a group member's
car in a game show format, and "The Last Supper" based around food
and religion, complete with kids dressed as singing/dancing toast. "A
live show has to be more than listening to a record. It has to be very tactile
and visual. We try to think about that -- all of the different aspects of
what 'being present' means, which is sound, sight, smell and everything"
(Shurtluff, 37). When asked to do a video of "Theme from A Big 10-8 Place,"
Negativland declined. Mark:
If
we were going to make videos, we weren't going to turn around and make videos
to our music. We'd start from scratch and make something totally new. The
radio show doesn't try to be the records and the live shows don't try to be
the radio shows. They're all different and they all try to utilize the medium
to its best advantage.
Negativland decided to use the mass media itself to its best advantage after
their Escape From Noise album, featuring the tracks "Christianity
Is Stupid" and "Time Zones," featuring a well-known personality
at ABC who has his own talk show. The found speech on the album is examined
and repeated, revealing many rhythms and melodies not apparent after one listening.
A reviewer in Greed magazine said,
That's
the point of the album - you don't need bands to make up songs for you. They're
out there happening all around, on radio talk shows & television soap
operas, on playgrounds, in McDonald's, at riots, on subways . . . If you can't
listen to this album, how can you even go outdoors? It's a sonic life. Live
it.
"Christianity Is Stupid" features a found sample vocal of Reverend
Estus Pirkle from a sermon recorded in 1968. It consists of a loop repeating,
"Christianity is stupid. Communism is good. Give up," and ends with
"Shop as usual . . . and avoid panic buying." It was soon going
to be used for an even grander effect. Shortly after the story appeared about
David Brom ax-murdering his father, mother, sister and brother in Rochester,
Minnesota, an article mentioned that it may have resulted from an argument
over a music tape that David listened to. The Broms were described as a devout
Roman Catholic family.
After canceling their 1988 concert tour when it appeared they would lose
money, the group decided to send a phony press release to their label SST
Records which attributes the cancellation of the tour to pressure from "Federal
Official Dick Jordan" who has advised the band not to leave town pending
an investigation in to the Brom murders. The release implied the tape in question
in the Brom case was their song "Christianity Is Stupid." The NY
Times article was distributed with the press release.
Many stories soon appeared, restating the "facts" from the Negativland
press release with no trace of skepticism, even though no one verified the
story with the source, Negativland. When Hal Eisner from KPIX Channel 5 interviewed
the band, they did not comment on their link to the Brom case, but discussed
the American news media, their appetite for the sensational and their tendency
to create their own "news." This discussion was cut from the air,
and the lead story took the purported connection for granted, and included
footage of the Brom family being carried from their home in body bags. Many
following stories got the "facts" wrong as a result of their dependence
on other media stories as their only source material. "It is now abundantly
clear that the major source for news is other news," wrote Negativland
in their liner notes for the Helter Stupid album, the result of this
hoax.
We
all swim in an ocean of mass media that fills our minds with people and events
with which we have no actual contact at all. We commonly absorb these media
presences as part of our own "reality," even though any media experience
consists only of one-way, edited representations of reality. Negativland uses
this electronic environment of factual fictions as both source and subject
for much of our work, keeping in mind that to experience a picture of a thing
is not to experience the thing.
In a postmodernist fashion, Negativland tossed a pebble in the mass media
ocean, watched the ripples turn into tidalwaves, sampled them and played them
back in a sharp-witted aural collage including the Channel 5 tapes and a call
from Rolling Stone that would make any newsperson red in the face.
In their version of counter-hegemony, Negativland condemns the media witch
hunt that sells papers at the expense of all involved and sensationalizes
the story for all it was worth without checking the facts. In turn, they condemn
the "uncool" properties of postmodernist society -- information
for commodity, not knowledge, lack of interaction and accountability in media,
and the creation of an uncritical audience of decentered, schizophrenic spectators
who will consume any bogus "facts" from the "media meat grinder."
But no matter how clever Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Negativland and other
avant-garde musicians are, it is difficult to find a truly counter-hegemonic
ideology within "cool" postmodernism without the inclusion of the
groups that have consistently had their voices stripped away by cultural hegemony
-- ethnic and minority groups. Perhaps more important than the postmodernist
white avant-garde, rap, or Hip hop is the most accessible form of music with
postmodernist characteristics right now. Black kids in the inner cities who
have forever been voiceless in American music, and in turn positionless (why
bother having political ideologies if nobody can hear them?) are now becoming
more visible.
Like the intertextuality of sampling and versioning in Dub/Reggae borrowing,
scratching had a liberating effect on the possibilities of rapping. Musicians
and non-musicians could manipulate and cut up texts with simple, inexpensive
equipment. Poor kids who wouldn't have access to fancy synthesizers could
become scratch-and-sample disc jockeys overnight with a couple "wheels
of steel" (turntables) and amplifiers. Scratching with white rock records,
70s funk and a variety of other musical texts would produce a uniform flatness
of surface sound to go along with a dance beat. D.J.s could selectively take
any sound and leave behind the posing rock star hero attitudes provided by
corporate rock, toss aside the leads, re-edit other peoples' texts and call
them their own. Mark Sinkler describes it as aggressive re-edits dropping
unrelated phrases and song-shards in over the original.
Hip
hop is the celebration of a lack of a center, and any broadcast message from
any network anywhere can burst in over the scratch-static. We don't have to
believe it. Probably we shouldn't. All we have to do is listen.
(Mitchell, 288)
By 1985, millions began to listen. The intercultural audio collages of Run-DMC,
Public Enemy and Ice T reached so many people that more whites have recently
started buying rap than blacks. At such a level of popularity, the very qualities
of the music that make it postmodernist also put it in danger of becoming
a more commodified, "uncool" form of postmodernist music. In the
process of consumption, rap can be decontextualized. Many rap songs become
dance club hits because of the special effects rather than sociological realities.
White culture may not hear the sound of a black subculture as much as they
dig the entrancing grooves. They hear the "Collapsing Effect" --
that sense of sonic rupture and seizure that rap embodies, the uneven surfaces
and jagged textures (Mitchell, 289). Any sample of white culture becomes to
white consumers a postmodern cultural frame of reference perhaps more important
than the political content of its lyrics.
The increase in popularity of "World music," largely African,
has also standardized the music, its appeal relating largely to its surface
sound, particularly since few of the lyrics of the songs are in English. For
that reason it has proven less durable than rap.
Despite the inevitable commodification of rap, its consistently bold social
and political voice provides a much needed contrast to the apolitical commercials/videos
on MTV. What matters is that more people are exposed to the messages of black
subcultures now than before rap, and more people have a chance to express
themselves. Dick Hebdige's study of Caribbean music reveals truths about oppositional
culture that can also be applied to the increasing multiplicity of American
cultures, that "the important thing about styles like ska, dub, rap and
hip hop are the opportunities they give for affirmation of the cultural identity
of subordinated social groups in the West Indies and in Britain" (Connor,
186).
Such spontaneously eruptive music that has often been kept invisible by
official white rock celebrates the power of subcultural forms simultaneously
to bind together social groups -- counter to the effect of much postmodernist
culture, and to express the plurality of cultural and ethnic experience. Unless
markets for other forms of music on television open up, such music is restricted
to the home, clubs, bars, and radio. With the increasing numbers of alternative
radio stations, this isn't so bad, according to Hebdige. Radio can be used
to "decentre" and "redistribute cultural power." In somewhat
romantic terms, he says radio is the embodiment of postmodernist cultural
mobility --
There
are no age or dress restrictions with a radio. You don't have to get past
burly bouncers to get to the music. All you have to do is switch the radio
on and turn the dial. And you don't have to stay in one place all the time.
You can travel up and down the wavelengths from Cape Town to the Caribbean
via Brooklyn and Clapham Junction.
George Lipsitz says obscurity can be the best thing to happen to some music,
allowing them to develop the "cool" characteristics of postmodernist
music. In his study of Mexican rock culture in Los Angeles, he said ethnic
minority cultures are key performers in the postmodern world, because their
exclusion from official culture allows them to cultivate a sophisticated capacity
for ambiguity, juxtaposition and irony. In fact, their marginality gives them
more authority as a cultural voice than official culture --
Because
their experience demands bifocality, minority group culture reflects the decentered
and fragmented nature of contemporary human experience. Because their history
identifies the sources of their marginality, minority group cultures have
a legitimacy and connection to the past that distinguishes them from more
assimilated groups. Masters of irony in an ironic world, they often understand
that their marginality makes them more appropriate spokespersons for society
than mainstream groups unable to fathom or address the causes of their alienation.
But despite any inherent superiority or "coolness" marginalized
subcultures may have, their potential to change the mainstream and commodified
forms of postmodernist music is severely limited by a postmodern world. Any
sort of decentering and undermining of the structures of the rock industry,
each eruption of cultural difference, only serves to stabilize the mainstream,
by spreading and diversifying its boundaries. "This form of cultural
commentary can easily itself become a quasi-commodity, forming part of a ritualized
exchange in an institutional and commercial economy of ideas and intellectual
styles" (Connor, 189). The mainstream now steals from counter-culture
and turns it into a successful commercial commodity, but with no sense of
history or critical position. It takes the metanarrative of music and fragments
it into decentered musical forms that can sometimes be identified with particular
youth and ethnic subcultures, but often with no one. Fred Frith has described
this phenomenon as "a culture of margins around a collapsed centre"
(Mitchell, 275). Yet the margins themselves are threatened -- their ethical
awareness in the recognition of important diversity of voices and interests
is in danger of being smashed into a flat, commodified pancake.
If the "cool" subcultures can't save the mainstream from the more
dehumanizing effects of postmodernism, they can probably survive on their
own as consistently small, marginalized, self-contained communities. But what
is everyone else to do? What, as Hard Harry so eloquently asked, even screamed
in the movie Pump Up the Volume, can kids do when everything has been
done? How can they express themselves when they have no voice, when there
is no subculture to take refuge in, when fascist government agencies like
the FCC prevent the possibilities for underground communication like Hard
Harry's pirate radio station? The leading postmodern theoreticians haven't
got a clue.
People like Grossberg think they will be able to adapt to a schizophrenic
state - "Survival for this new youth seems to demand adaptation to and
escape from, the hegemony rather than a response to the historical context
in which they can find themselves" (Kaplan, 147). Connor believes the
task for a theoretical postmodernity of the future "must be (without
dissipating its energies in fantasies of potently defeated marginality, or
narrowing into self-promoting professionalism, or acting as the cultural legitimation
of the alienating effects of the 'information society' of late capitalism)
to forge new and more inclusive forms of ethical collectivity." He calls
for a common frame of assent "which alone can guarantee the continuation
of a global diversity of voices" (Connor, 244). Kaplan is almost as ambiguous
when she addresses the scholars, the educated elite rather than a younger
generation --
As
culture workers, we do not want to return to the error of insisting upon fixed
points of enunciation labeled "truth" . . . but we must continue
to articulate oppositional discourses -- recognizing them as discourses rather
than an ontological truth -- if we are to construct `new' subjects not totally
defined by the reading formations of the postmodernist "cold" universe.
Important in this effort is more analysis of the televisual apparatus as it
works to construct subjects unable any more to distinguish an "inside"
from an "outside," "fiction" from "reality."
It is a somewhat elitist notion that the scholars can instill bullshit detectors
(if they could actually trim down the jargon enough to make sense to everyone)
within young people being raised in a postmodern world; to make sure they
can still think critically before they are totally lost in a decentered, schizophrenic,
nearly thoughtless existence. While it is a noble cause that can actually
be pursued, the answer to the question of what exactly will happen to oppositional
discourses, subcultures, and even "cool" forms of postmodernist
music and culture in a stage of capitalism that is advancing to the point
where nearly all communication will be allowed to happen only to benefit corporate
and institutional profit and nothing else, is anyone's guess.
SOURCES
Connor, Stephen. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction
to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell,
ALBUMS
Various albums by Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Velvet Underground, John
Zorn and Negativland.
Especially:
Negativland. Escape From Noise. SST, 1989.
Negativland. Helter Stupid. SST, 1990.
