shantih shantih shantih

I will admit that this out.com article on the blonde pop star whose name rhymes with Baby Zaza is the best argument I’ve read that she’s the embodiment of postmodernism. It’s true. She is a mind-bending whirl of influences. She steals like the hurricane; she is everything and nothing, a mirrored disco ball reflecting the tiny desires of millions -nay, brillions!- of fans. I say this sincerely. She is apocalyptically famous.

Unfortunately, all that means nothing, because postmodernism is dead. It died decades ago, with the rise of Andy Warhol — a thought that brings to mind the famous moment in Watchmen, when the heroes are abruptly told that the villain enacted his evil plan “thirty-five minutes ago.” They are left standing with their fantastic, useless toys dangling in their hands, in shock. It’s already over. The moment a subversive idea becomes popular is the moment it dies, and postmodernism was already pretty popular before the pop star whose name rhymes with Maybe Baba arrived -out of breath; covered in gold dust and wearing a borrowed bra- to become its belated messiah.

Now, what the fuck was postmodernism? This is not a joke or a philistine complaint; since it’s such a complex term, it’s a question we all must answer individually. Personally, I define it as it seems most often used: a philosophy holding that to be perfectly and elaborately allusive is the highest aim of art, that meaning beyond the superficial is an illusion dreamed up by pompous Victorians — and that all of this is to be celebrated, because in the absence of possibility for change, our only options are celebration and complaint.

That’s an exciting idea, but not for long. It’s true that its foundation was strong. Allusion is a cornerstone of good art; then we have the genuine headiness of the idea that nothing means anything, that we’re all essentially failed moral actors. I don’t want to belittle the strength of this idea. There is a good deal of truth in it. The only problem is that, once you believe it, it’s hard to believe anything else at the same time, which means you’re missing out on a crucial part of critical thought.

To believe anything from this position of freeing hopelessness, or to leave said position entirely, requires us to become people of faith — an increasingly stigmatized decision for modern intellectuals, which is why many intelligent and vigorous people have believed in nothing for decades. You can look at them in museums. Also, unfortunately, in universities and libraries and cafes and parks and private homes. These are perfectly intelligent, wise people; it’s just that they’ve decided that nothing they do can have the remotest effect on a yawping and bizarre universe, and the only fit topic is, indeed, how yawping and bizarre it all is.

This is boring. Anything is boring which refuses to engage. And when I look at a pop star like the one whose name rhymes with surprisingly few neutral-sounding words, all I can think is: we should be done with this. We should be beyond a point now where we are dazzled by a commentary on a commentary on a commentary. Nothing is ever interesting which exists only for its own sake — and the great example is fame-for-fame’s-sake, even if it’s fame-for-the-sake-of-parodying-fame. There is nothing clever about parodying something that’s already parodic. All you’re doing there is tapping into a rich vein. It helps to be a sharp needle (to switch veins, from ore to blood) — but it’s not required. Other recent pop phenomena, women who don’t seem all that sharp, prove that readily enough.

What would interest me more would be a New Obscurity. How such a movement might work, I don’t know — whether its members would simply reject traditional publication, or would reject publication entirely; whether they would dress in plain gray clothes or dress as wittily as they might otherwise, only refusing to photograph themselves or be photographed. I don’t know if they would prefer to be invisible or despised. I certainly can’t find an example in my own life, since I can’t separate fame from success any more than most of my contemporaries.

I say “most” because I’m convinced that there are New Obscurantists already, and perhaps have been in every century; you just haven’t heard of them. But because of the way we were raised, New Obscurity is impossible for most of us. Perhaps that’s actually best; you’d spend so much of yourself resisting the desire for raw recognition (with its attendant scent of postmodernism’s corpse) that you’d never write about anything else.

But if we want to resist it to a reasonable degree, I think an insistence on our own terms will help. Artistic fulfillment, and a sense of power over our work, can help to keep us from despairing if we go unrecognized and thus fail the official culture’s test of worth. If we work carefully, producing what we want without a specific eye to being seen at any cost, we can still quietly grab the rest of the world, all that she hasn’t yet (in partnership, of course, with the many fans and thousand predecessors and corporate identities she represents).

So, like most arguments which start out big, this one ends small, and with the usual little individualist plea: please deny this woman, in her human and metaphorical forms, by producing things with some kind of perspective, and occasionally for yourself alone.

PS This post has been obviously influenced both by “Three Guineas” and Thief (the plot of which eventually concerns itself with a secretive faction of warrior librarians, a sort of New Obscurity Militant, though they end up failing because they don’t really have anything to say).

PPS If I’m going to link to it, I have to take at least a token moment to complain about the Out article’s fervent belief that it speaks for the entire “gay community” by attempting to speak for those camp-oriented,  assimilationist, apolitical, postmodern-minded individuals who happen to be homosexual male fans of the pop star.

Out is theoretically aimed at both men and women, and more importantly, it’s theoretically aimed at everyone who may enjoy the company of their own gender from time to time — which must make it awfully hard to write for, much like writing for a magazine aimed specifically at strict heterosexuals who have nothing else in common.

To the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

Critical Failures (which is what I’m called in my private life) was in New York and then, after a brief break, in Portland. This extensive course of family-mandated and personal travel doesn’t explain why I’ve been conspicuously silent, but it probably hasn’t helped.

The real reason is that I haven’t been particularly inspired lately. I’m seeing a lot of things and consuming a lot of media. Some of the media has been good, and some of the things have been remarkable, but the good things have tended to be the kind that don’t benefit from elaboration. Likewise, the mediocre ones haven’t been the kind to suggest long posts on their potential improvement.

So here’s a simple list of what I’ve been thinking about, just to clear my mental cache.

The overrated art of the lead

I taught writing for a couple of years, and I’ve been blogging for several months now -shifting in style, in the process, from an unread faux-professional music blog to a general unread blog about music and books- and I think, more than ever, that the punchy lead paragraph is an overrated concept. High-school students are still told to write them, and they shouldn’t be. Journalists are more likely to pull it off. Still,  I think it is vaguely magical thinking to imagine that any but the best or worst opening sentence will affect whether the article is read or not. Surely, unless the author is brilliant or terrible, the topic plays the biggest role.

If my subject doesn’t contain an obviously outstanding anecdote, these days, I just try to jump into the content as quickly as I can. For awhile, I tried to open with a “striking” statement of opinion, but since what strikes the writer and the reader may be very different, that meant trying to guess and directly address the reader. Some of my best writing is directly addressed to a reader, but that’s because I do some of my best writing in Emails and MySpace messages and IM. That’s different from addressing an infinite number of strangers as if all will share your careful judgement of what is a remarkable fact or hooky rhetorical question, which I think pulls you from the moment well enough that your style will stumble.

All of this will be truer for me than for you, as such things usually are. Some writers are great and effective producers of leads, but I don’t think enough people have that inherent talent for it to be the universal writing advice that it is. It’s like advising all writers to use simile heavily.

On the inevitable Tori Amos comparison. (Wrongly unmentioned: G. Kulka.)

I’ve always been annoyed by the critical practice of describing female performers by their relation to, and precise distance from, Tori Amos. Posting on it has been difficult, though. It’s hard to pin down exactly what bothers me about it.

At the most basic level, of course, it bothers me because an Amos comparison turns me right the fuck off. I’ve spent a solid decade in close, regular contact with a wide variety of Tori Amos fans, and as a result I’ve tried very hard to like her. I’ve heard every album. I’ve seen her live (and she was very good). I acknowledge her skill at the piano, her unique songwriting, her strong perspective; I see what the fuss is about, but that doesn’t mean I very often want to hear her. I’m not a fan. As a result, if I’m reading a review that compares someone to Amos at all, I don’t tend to follow up – and this is a shame, because pretty much every warbly female singer-songwriter gets the Amos-as-reference-point at least once.

Then there is the Amosing-as-dismissal. This started as a Kristeen Young thing. It’s strange, but almost inevitably, first-time listeners who like her call her “an angry Kate Bush,” while the ones who dislike her compare her to Amos. I heard it, too, at first. They do share an inborn vocal tone, and they both write unconventional piano parts. But where Young’s playing is loud and discordant, Amos’ is quiet, elegant and restrained; where Amos’ voice is naturally low and takes a complicated breathiness as its trademark, Young’s is piercing and sobbing, and makes frequent leaps from a mid-t0-high, almost falsetto rock belt into an extremely high classical note. Amos’ and Young’s classical training is respectively in piano and in voice, and that makes a vast difference in how they rebel against it.

All this is to say that, while I’m well-used to hearing this particular comparison, and to refuting it instinctively and at length, I also recognize its sway – its appeal to that lineage of female performers, running more or less from Kate Bush in 1980 to Bat for Lashes in 2009, and through Amos and Bjork somewhere in between. This appeal is a powerful method of dismissal: you are a child of this performer, a parent of this; I have now categorized you, and will therefore never see you as exceptional. This is particularly problematic because that lineage is not even real. It is an easy, false perception based on the (relatively) rational assumption, upon being shown the rock canon, that the few confessional women [or male New Wave moaners, or sweet-toned Northern Irish alternacrooners] in it must represent a distinct and specific plotline.

In turn, this type of perception is based on the common belief that artforms are collective – that it is possible for an unusual artist, for example (as I recently read a reputable person saying of Amy Winehouse) to represent “an aberration” against a more unified general narrative of collaborative progress.

I think that this is pure English-department crap, and I think so only because I spent many years fully convinced that I was very clever for thinking something like it.

So – yes; on one level, I’m just perpetually annoyed because a favorite singer sometimes gets a comparison I don’t like; on another level, I’m similarly snitty because I don’t really like Tori Amos, and if I see Hanne Hukkelberg compared to her, than I’m less likely to seek out the interesting work of Ms. Hukkelberg, even though I know better. On yet another level, it bothers me because it exposes my own willingness (as earlier) to believe in ideas, like quantifiable artistic lineages, which I actually think are nonsense. It’s also annoying for much more universal reasons.

This entire post goes double for Bjork and, in fact, triple for Ms. Bush.

Double.

Triple.

Another thing to hate about academic and music criticism.

I know, I was waiting for one too!

The modern critical ideal is to constantly challenge the work, to ask it to justify itself. The possibility that we might learn something from the work, that it might be in a position of natural authority over its audience, is not considered at all. After having been a graduate student, you’d think I’d be able to trace this transition to a specific moment in academic history, but all I can do is bleat “‘Death of the Author,’ Roland Barthes?” at you; that would require a titanic misreading of Barthes, though (he offered increased power to the reader, but only in the name of admiring the book, rather than trying to guess the mind that made it), so I can’t imagine that’s it. We should just face the fact that Barthes is the only serious Frenchman I can remember, because he’s the only one I like.

Anyway, whoever’s fault it is, we’re living in an era where the academy has an interrogatory view of art, and has educated its students to maintain the same. And I think that’s a problem. Any good piece, produced with minimal interference, should be in a masterly position over us. It will have flaws and failings, like any teacher, and it will have better students than others (its author, presumably, the best student of all), but we should respect it and take what we can. Not sit on our knees, obviously, and admire with mouths open. Whether or not that’s legitimate, we’re much too cynical for that to even be an option. We must rank and discuss. But we should also not speak in a  judgmental mode of works that are in any way interesting.

I mean, if it sucks, that’s one thing. I might not agree that it sucks, but if you think it has nothing, of course I’m not denying your right to dismiss it. It’s silly to spend time dismissing it, but you and others might have some fun, and goodness knows that if you are a popular critic I’ll read your dismissal compulsively whether I want to or not, so whatever. I’m talking more about praise of things we do like. To praise something -”this is the best album I’ve heard in months!” is also to assume power over it, to take that teacherly role away from it, with the result that we really get nothing out of a piece except pure aesthetics. And pure aesthetics are sexy, but even Oscar Wilde wasn’t really defending them. What you want is an aesthetic and a moral education without pedantry, and a passionate empathetic swoon.

So where do we end? Be nicer to art. Hug an artwork today (doing so won’t make you stupid, though it might cause other problems, depending on the context)! Bye!

Is it actually possible to talk about music on the Internet…

…Without sounding like music’s gentle family doctor, telling it that it has syphilis?

I don’t think so. This was never intended just to become a blog that says douchey things about Morrissey, and yet, somehow, here we are. Today, I was trying to write a post about Patrick Wolf, who I have a tendency to perceive as somewhat brilliantly soulless. Who was that insight helping? Me? No. You? No. Patrick Wolf? Definitely not.

Maybe the fault’s in me. Maybe if I were just somehow better, I could write about music in a human way: about the voice, the references, the shape of the songs, without descending into the banal. Or alternatively, about the personalities – without doing someone some imaginative libel.

But I think it’s down to the form. Music is itself. It is unique among forms in that you can’t simulate its effect with anything but more music. This kind of thing works across some media; you could conceivably paint a scene from a novel and thus comment on it in an original fashion; you could conceivably write a good song about a play. But not, empathetically, never can you translate from popular music to nonfiction writing. Popular music is uniquely personal. The singer becomes the artwork; a critique of the artwork becomes a critique of the singer. And how barbarous to write a critique of a person! To discuss them, of course, is reasonable enough, but to write about them formally? Academically?

How can I explain Kristeen Young’s delivery of 1997:

What, in your lonely world, were you thinking? Were you thinking?

What, in your naive world, were you thinking? Were you thinking?

Or Neko Case’s of 2006:

And that’s as funny as real love

And that’s as real as true love

-any better than they explain themselves? How well can anybody?

The real shame is that these things reflect back, as they always do. I feel many musicians write more now with an understanding of music critics – not so much what they want, as what will resonate with them, make sense to a somewhat more removed worldview in which personae are built very deliberately. It inevitably becomes a more mannered, more formal, more professional form. This is an inevitable part of the descent of an artform, but it’s sad to see happening, if it is happening.

Bad taste, class identity, Nina Hagen.

All my ideas are middle-class. You can tell because my sense of what’s great is inseparable from the illicit thrill of bad taste.

(in this case, Taste (n): The 19th-21st century, middle-class concept of the social appropriateness of a given aesthetic piece.)

Probably, this has been helpful to me. It’s important to get that good art is usually tasteless, and great art is always tasteless, and I didn’t always understand that. But, yeah, I know that point of view isn’t really a rebellion. Of course the highest artistic ideal of an intelligent middle-class person is something that’s both good and gauche; it’s the most agonizing contradiction we can think of.

For some reason, it made sense to begin a post about the great freak sirens of New Wave and early goth -Kate Bush, Hazel O’Connor, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich, and so on down the cliff- with that little commentary. These artists have never done what you’d think for me. The explanation is very different for each, and I don’t think it’s either a lack of talent or a question of taste, though at sad moments, I worry that I’m just too damn boring to appreciate something quite as tasteless as, for example, Hagen. At these times I find myself caught between the overwhelming boredom of most music, and the sense that most music that is trying to be interesting is “a bit too out-there.”

But is it? Is this woman shocking?

I know that this song (“Naturtrane,” 1978 ) is very strange, and it gets my attention in a good way (Hagen probably comes the closest of this loose constellation of artists to working for me) but I really don’t know if it offends my taste. It offends my sense of song construction, yes, because I can’t engage with something that has no melody (and that’s not middle-class, that’s just centuries of Western music, but really, the mainstream of Western music has drifted away from melody, so let’s give the academic agony a break and just say it’s me). But the song doesn’t offend the way I want; it doesn’t injure me. I can admire this kind of cry of big modern horror, but doesn’t grasp my thought and emotion in a way that shouldn’t happen in public. It’s a highly-stylized voice moaning in a void.

I think, most of all, that I would like to hear strange music made by people with mainstream influences – strange music with the audacity to look at the mainstream, want it, and try to beat it over its own head.

Inadapté

Michael Bracewell said (ages ago, not sure where) that the official line on what humans want has changed from money to mental health. I think it’s made another turn, though a very slight one – we’re not meant to want mental health now, but well-adjustedness.

Well-adjustedness is as classic as the New Look, but only recently has it become our primary imagined goal, the thing that reviewers and writers assume all artists are trying to reach. It has something to do with a hard-ass, macho backlash against the antidepressant revolution which changed the winds toward idealizing mental health in the first place, and it also has something to do with early reality TV – nobody wants to be like the people on American Idol who feel great about themselves, but don’t understand the role in the fame system which is so clear to everyone else.

This has had an unpleasant effect on the level of allowance people will give artists who, in the first place, caught a lot of flak for being dramatic or unhappy or camp. The crucial possibility that their work is tempered with humor is just not considered anymore, even though it’s currently in vogue again for serious music to have jokes.

I wonder what ideal will be next, after well-adjustedness; maybe the economic crisis will cycle it back to money again.

Tired of clever people

We made the Internet, and then we had to figure out what to do with it, so we created a berserk culture of perpetual dispute in which irony, dropping out or a retreat into sensitive obscurity are the only options for people interested in retaining functioning senses.

(I’ve just been vaguely scarred by reading Chuck Klosterman’s Chinese Democracy review at the A.V. Club, and ensuing thread – which is strange because that isn’t a particularly good example of what I’m complaining about; Klosterman is really such a pre-Internet, retro figure. No, I didn’t like the writing and have no investment in Guns’n'Roses. There’s already a long list of very famous bands I don’t know and want to, and I will get to all of them first. But really, it was just quite sweeping, too unironic in its worship of narcissism, and eager to make the cleverest possible points. Just, in other words, like 99% of criticism, as those lucky seven to ten readers who caught the Morrissey post I made and deleted this morning will attest.

I am tired of clever people. It’s actually very easy to synthesize the main interest points of a series of texts so that you’ve demonstrated a trend – which is, again, all that most critics do, in and out of the academy. What’s difficult is explaining a small opinion without destroying one’s subject or oneself. Who does this? Not me yet, if ever. Oscar Wilde. Susan Sontag. Roland Barthes - really, I know that the pretentious director from Slings and Arrows cites him, but Mythologies is often accessible and always beautiful and already a blog before they even had an Internet. In a poppier vein I would cite Paul Morley, Jon Savage and Michael Bracewell.

I think that the only reason Klosterman’s largely inoffensive piece triggered my Internet Complaint, above -and I’ve typed a version of the Internet Complaint in an almost mantra-like fashion more than once before- is that I was exposed to it. I clicked it voluntarily despite having no interest in the band or the writer, and this is because the Internet creates this need to know what everyone is saying about everything, all the time, for your own self-protection, and I resent that despite knowing I can pretty much break out of it at will by not clicking shiny photos of Axl Rose’s face. In other words, I resent the Internet in a brattish way.)