Further Thoughts On Kelis

I’ve posted briefly about work from Kelis’s “Flesh Tone” before, but here I want to follow through several quick but interesting observations/questions about her recent singles.

1. Afrofuturist feminism in “Acapella,” this time with some theory:

I’ve posted about this topic before, but when reading Tina Chanter’s essay in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, I came across another way of theoretically framing what’s going on here. My previous argument was that “humanist” regimes have discounted the humanity of women and non-whites, and that Kelis’s “Acapella” video shows that a positive valuation of mothers-of-color is possible (only) from a posthuman perspective. The humanist regime of “reproductive futurism,” values motherhood, children, and heterosexual reproduction, but only when it produces “human” babies—i.e., white babies, preferably white male babies. Humanism treats non-white children as pests in need of extermination—just think about the despicable discourses of “anchor babies” and “welfare queens.” Basically, humanism rewards only white people for reproducing, b/c only whites are thought to be fully human.

Chanter makes more or less the same point, framing her claim in psychoanalytic/structuralist terms rather than in Afrofuturist/posthuman terms. (Perhaps too) briefly, Chanter thinks that race is used to determine one’s status as human, which in turn determines one’s eligibility to reproduce. She argues:

If there are certain humans whose humanity is in question, humans who do not unequivocally signify as human, and their failure to qualify as unambiguously human puts them off limits as sexual/marriage partners, this would appear to prescribe that only those whose humanity is not in question are acceptable sexual partners. If skin color becomes a mark of race, and race becomes a way of distinguishing between those who qualify unproblematically as human, and those who barely qualify as human, then racial taboos would seem to function as inarticulate conditions, invisibly built into the incest prohibition (71).

According to Chanter, race functions, like (or rather, in conjunction with) incest, as a taboo prohibiting sexual partnering, and thus reproduction. Chanter is interested in demonstrating that racial taboos work in conjunction with the incest taboo: if the incest taboo mandates exogamy (marriage outside one’s group), the race taboo defines exactly how far “outside” one’s group one may go. To step beyond the racial taboo is to step beyond the human (into bestiality or objectophilia, I guess).

What Kelis does, in her representations both of herself as an artist and as a black mother, is step beyond the human. “Acapella” is a song about her son: “before you, my whole life was acapella.” In the video, she shows herself carrying/caring for her new baby, and even in scenes where he is not on screen, she presents herself as various sorts of animal-human-cyborg hybrids. Thus, the video suggests that black mothers aren’t “human,” because regimes of “humanism” presume the racial taboo Chanter identifies, and exclude the possibility of positively valuing black maternity.

Chanter was my dissertation director, and though it's been years since I've been her student, I'm glad to see that we still seem to be starting in really different places (her film, me music) and arriving at similar ideas. Great minds, blahblahblah...

2. “Fourth of July (Fireworks)” vs. Perry’s “Firework”

In a previous post, I contrasted Katy Perry’s “Firework” with X-Ray Spex’s “Plastic Bag” in order to highlight “Firework’s” commitments to liberal individualism: you’re unique, you’re special, there’s nobody like you, you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps (“maybe reason why all the doors are closed, so you can open one”). Kelis’s “Fourth of July (Fireworks)” obviously uses the same theme as Perry’s “Firework,” but to completely different ends. Unlike Perry’s song, which is an anthem to the autonomous liberal “individual,” Kelis’s song makes a quasi-Beauvoiran argument about the irreducibly relational, political basis of “individual” freedom. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir argues that we are necessarily and irrevocably interdependent; autonomy is a nice idea, but it is incompatible with the fact of embodied human existence. We all rely on others for care, and the division of labor means that we rely on others for a whole lot of other things, too. Because we are interdependent, Beauvoir argues, my individual freedom draws on and contributes to the freedom of others. If I impoverish the freedom of others, I also impoverish my own freedom; similarly, if I empower others, I empower myself. Freedom, for Beauvoir, is relational.

Kelis’s song makes more or less the same claim. Like “Acapella,” “Fourth of July (Firework)” is also about and addressed to Kelis’s new son. Here, she describes the birth of her son as a transformative experience: “Didn’t think I needed you/Never seemed to/But I’m living proof/Nothing I’ll ever say or do/Will be as good as loving you.” Now, liberal models of individual freedom would object to Kelis’s subordination of her own accomplishments to a relationship: she would be sacrificing her own autonomy to the service of another. It is clear, however, that Kelis does not find her relation—importantly, a care relationship—to impede her autonomy, or to be a form of subordination or self-abnegation. She describes this relationship as spectacularly empowering: “You make me high/Just like the sky/On the Fourth of July.” Interestingly, while Perry’s song compares the individual to a single firework (“Baby you’re a firework/C’mon show ‘em what you’re worth”), Kelis’s song compares the individual to the entire sky full of fireworks (You even see this in the titles, which are permutations of the same phrase: one puts “Firework” first, the other puts “Fourth of July” first). In the same way that Beauvoir situates subjects as the products of their relations (to one another, to events), Kelis doesn’t separate herself out from all other fireworks—she is not one isolated phenomenon, but a fabric of interacting phenomena.

3. “Scream”

So, this is merely an aesthetic observation. This song and video seem really, seriously influenced by Chicks on Speed. The monotone, haltingly-syllabified party-rapped, multi-tracked (so, multi-voiced) chorus (e.g., around 0:47) sounds a lot like your average COS track. Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell notes that Kelis sounds like a “haughty electroclash ingénue,” which I take as a sideways reference to COS. Take, for example, this one:

Or this one:

Similarly, the glowy-black-light graffiti aesthetic (first seen at 0:16, and again throughout the 2:16-50 period in Kelis’s video) strongly resembles this COS visual aesthetic:

Or this pic of a recent performance in Vienna:

*

Gaga's New Album: Doin' it again, a treat for the freaks?

In the interview posted here on Idolator, Lady Gaga admits that her forthcoming album is going to be, in all but name, a latter-day Wax Trax industrial-dance work:

Gaga said, “I think that lyrically it’s more poetic. It’s, in a very strange way, the marriage of electronic music with these sort of major, epic—I dare to even say metal, rock ‘n’ roll, pop, anthemic style—melodies with really, really sledge-hammering dance beats. It’s definitely the most innovative of all the music I’ve done so far.”

It's a shame she thinks this is "innovative," given there's an entire label's back catalog that does more or less the same thing.

Would this make her "KMFDM Light" (keeping in mind that the song itself is a sarcastic self-criticism)? Or is she more Thrill Kill Kult? It will be interesting to listen to the new album and trace any musical genealogies...

London’s Burning, part 1.1: Lee Edelman Fought the Law, and the Law Won—Edelman’s response to Halberstam

In a previous post I examined Halberstam’s use of the Sex Pistols to critique Edelman’s anti-relational negativity, and to argue for a “political” (or relational) negativity. Looking beyond Halberstam’s own somewhat narrow punk archive, I turned to The Clash and Joy Division to broaden the parameters of punk aesthetics and politics. The Clash’s negativity is more “political” or “relational,” and Joy Division’s aesthetic is a less messy, more controlled punk.

But now I want to think about Edelman’s own response to Halberstam. Edelman’s objection to Halberstam boils down to an observation that is all-too-familiar within punk subcultures: Halberstam has turned punk itself into orthodoxy. After the initial period of punk experimentation in 1976-77, some punks created and policed dogmatic aesthetic and ideological positions: some argue that The Clash’s post-London Calling work is not “truly” punk because it incorporates influences from dub, hip hop, and even disco; some argue that The Clash ceased to be “punk” when they signed a contract with Columbia Records…and so on. The Straight Edge movement is another example of punk-as-dogma. Anyone who has been involved in various dimensions of punk culture is familiar with the various ways that “punk” aesthetics and ideology can and have become quite reified. Although punk was initially driven by a revolutionary, progressive impulse, some punk communities can actually be extremely conservative. It is precisely this “policing of style” on which Edelman calls Halberstam out:

we might ask what policing style has to do with the ‘politics of negativity.’ Or rather, and here’s the important point: isn’t such a policing of style, even when aimed at destroying too-comfortable, normative social practices, the sort of reactive transgression, permit me to call it anarcho-oedipality, that pays those reassuring norms the flattering tribute of imitation? Doesn’t it suppose, after all, its own reassuringly regulated order in which one can always know in advance what a given style means or allows? Doesn’t it rely on a faith in the fixed self-identity of things, on their legible coherence, unmarked by the rupturing excess of what we might see as the queer remainder? (Edelman 2006. 822).*

Dogmatic/conservative punks presume to “know in advance what a given style means or allows”: only 3 chords, working-class politics, braces and boots, etc.

If we limit our reading of punk to the Sex Pistols, then we theorists engage in precisely this punk dogmatism. Punk is an expansive, multifaceted musical movement; it has significant and formative ties to hip hop, experimental music, and dance music. British rave culture has its roots in punk—i.e., in Factory Records, in Throbbing-Gristle-come-Psychic-TV. Because both punk and hip hop emerged out of Jamacian musical styles and practices, we can’t responsibly theorize punk without also thinking about its debt to Afrodiasporic musical traditions, and its co-evolution with hip hop. So, I really worry about the focus on the Sex Pistols to the exclusion of other punk bands and movements, and I particularly worry about the way these debates elide the actual music and focus exclusively on the lyrical/textual and visual dimensions of punk. Edelman frames crux of his objection to Halberstam’s concept of “political negativity” in terms of the lyrics of “God Save the Queen”:

Affirming, however, as a positive good, ‘punk pugilism’ and its gestural repertoire, Halberstam strikes the pose of negativity while evacuating its force. I focus on her explicit embrace of punk to distinguish the point I make in No Future from the ‘antisocial’ politics she locates in the Sex Pistols’ anthem ‘God Save the Queen.’ Though originally called ‘No Future,’ ‘God Save the Queen’ does not, in fact, dissent from reproductive futurism. It conventionally calls for England to awake from the ‘dream’ that allows for ‘no future’ while implying that the disenfranchised, those ‘flowers in the dustbin’ for whom the song speaks, hold the seeds of potential renewal. “ We’re the future,’ it tells us, against its refrain, ‘No future for you.’ Ironically, given Halberstam’s dismissal of style, its punk negativity thus succeeds on the level of style alone. Taken as political statement, it’s little more than Oedipal kitsch. For violence, shock, assassination, and rage aren’t negative or radical in themselves; most often they perform the fundamentalist faith that always inspirits the Futurch: the affirmative attachment to ‘sense, mastery, and meaning,’ in Halberstam’s words (Edelman 2006, 822).

Interestingly, Edelman seems to oppose “style” to “textual content”: Halberstam’s argument “succeeds on the level of style alone,” yet fails when “taken as political statement.” I worry that Edelman’s quasi-ironic adoption of Halberstam’s supposed “dismissal of style” is in fact his own attempt—conscious or not—to dismiss music. As I have been and will continue to argue both in this blog and in other venues, Edelman’s work often indirectly speaks about music without ever explicitly and directly addressing it as such. For example, there is the passage about the drone sounds in Hitchcock’s The Birds, and there’s the analysis of the Johnny Rotten’s lyrics here. “God Save the Queen” is not meant to be taken primarily as a political statement: it’s a piece of music, and a large part of its invective is directed against mainstream musical tastes. Certainly its lyrical conent and performative context (e.g., on a boat in the Thames on HRH’s Silver Jubilee) are meant to be shocking; however, we must not forget that punk is first of all a musical movement, meant to critique 70s glam, prog, and club music.

I think it would help us all a lot if we actually looked at, you know, the music as music (and not text or visual performance). It might help us clear up some of the conflicts, ambiguities, and questions both in these specific analyses, and in the discourse of queer futurity/anti-futurlity more generally. That’s why I’m doing this series of posts—to develop a more nuanced understanding of theory by examining music as a philosophical text.

*Edelman, Lee. “Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory” in Forum: Conference Debates: The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, in PMLA 121.3, 2006: 821-23.

Dance in the Dark, Little Monsters: preview of my contribution to "Gaga Stigmata" book

I'm excited to be contributing to a collection on Lady Gaga, curated/edited by the people who run the fab Gaga Stigmata blog. My essay, "Dance In the Dark, Little Monsters: On Gaga's Post-Goth Posthumanism" will sound somewhat familiar to readers of this blog. I'm re-blogging below (with my own revised picture) the excerpt published here, on the GS blog:

The following is an excerpt from a longer article to be published in Gaga Stigmata’s forthcoming book. In that piece, Professor Robin James argues that Lady Gaga’s main aesthetic ancestor is goth. Gaga’s work not only has direct musical debts to goth bands, but also takes indirect visual and thematic inspiration from the goth genre. In the following excerpt, James examines how one of Gaga’s songs takes musical cues from the goth tradition, and then demonstrates how Gaga’s work goes beyond that tradition: that is, how Gaga performs post-goth posthumanism.

The most obvious similarity between any one Gaga track and any one goth-y track is between “Dance in the Dark” and Depeche Mode’s “Strangelove.”[i] Both songs are composed around essentially the same treble synth hook. Gaga’s track pulls an “Ice Ice Baby” on Depeche Mode’s original, altering the hook’s melody by turning a quarter note into two eights on the same pitch (basically, making the antecedent phrase a more exact mirror of the consequent phrase).[ii] Overall, Gaga’s sound shares a lot with Depeche Mode – and, to an extent, Yaz (which splintered off from Depeche Mode in the early 1980s). Early Depeche Mode was very synthy and proto-industrial, particularly their 1983-1984 releases Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward.[iii] The videos for “People are People” portrays band members playing parts of the manufacturing process, e.g. corrugated metal, as instruments.[iv]

Screenshot from the video for “People are People”

This use of factory machines and raw materials as musical instruments is more or less what defines industrial music as such. So, while Depeche Mode might not be the most “hardcore” industrial act, the band clearly writes some properly industrial music. In fact, Depeche Mode’s combination of industrial and mainstream synthpop is actually quite similar to Gaga’s own music. “Strangelove” appears on the 1987 album Music for the Masses, which takes the earlier albums’ industrial and synthpop sounds in a more mainstream, poppy direction. “Dance in the Dark” uses guitars in combination with synths and drum machines, as does Depeche Mode’s work on Music for the Masses and Violator. Yaz was even more distinctly synthy and electronic, but, like Gaga’s work, was and still is received and treated as belonging to the post-Moroder electro-dance-pop tradition. Gaga’s powerful and soulful alto vocals are quite obviously reminiscent of Yaz’s lead singer, Alison Moyet. Although her voice may sound like Moyet, Gaga’s songwriting, especially her approach to vocal melodies, is closer to Dave Gahan’s (Depeche Mode’s lead singer). Unlike many industrial bands, which rely on either more aggressive, closed-throated metal-influenced vocals (like KMFDM), or more minimal, often effected, vocals (like Kraftwerk), both craft long, very melodic vocal lines that require some serious singing. Although Moyet was a very strong and expressive singer, her phrases were relatively short and distinct.

So, while Gaga’s image might lead some to think of her as a postmillennial Material Girl, her sound demonstrates that she’s more like a twenty-first century update of Depeche Mode and Yaz: strong female vocals and synthy industrial darkness combined with a pop melodic sensibility. She acknowledges this influence in a press release for The Fame Monster: “this album is a pop experimentation with industrial/Goth beats, 90's dance melodies, an obsession with the lyrical genius of 80's melancholic pop.”[v] Depeche Mode encapsulates all these influences, and is perhaps the clearest and closest of Gaga’s musical influences.

In this section, I’ve discussed Gaga’s music as such, and put her compositional and performance choices in the context of both specific goth/industrial songs and the goth/industrial aesthetic more generally. Above and beyond anything her visual or textual presentation does, Gaga’s music is grounded in a goth dance tradition that stretches from Joy Division to Nitzer Ebb to Wax Trax to Attari Teenage Riot. Like Depeche Mode and Yaz – and, more recently, Nine Inch Nails – Gaga combines industrial instrumentals with long, sung melodic phrases with a classic pop or even musical theater sensibility. Both because Gaga’s own work combines specifically goth references and aesthetic choices with influences from a wide variety of other genres (thus “watering down” the goth references), and because mainstream pop itself bears the influences of industrial and EBM (thus making mainstream pop more “properly goth”), Gaga’s latter-day Wax Trax pop diva sound is stylistically “post-goth.” In Gaga, goth is no longer an indie subgenre, but chart-topping and download/page-view-record-breaking music for the masses.

In the next section, I turn to Gaga’s visual and textual production. Not only is her post-goth status more evident in these contexts, but this is also where her post-goth sexual politics are most evident. Gaga’s sexual politics are more properly “goth” than, say, Depeche Mode’s because the latter artists’ songs often positively represent (and even incite) sexual desire as such, Gaga calls into question the very desirability of sex and sexuality (as an act, as desire, as an identity).

For example, “Dance in the Dark” emphasizes the grotesque and debilitating effects that the performance of heteropatriarchial constructions of femaleness and femininity has on women’s bodies and psyches. The first lines of the song describe the normatively desirable and “sexy” female body as the “monster” created by a Frankenstein-esque beauty industrial complex: “Silicone, saline, poison, inject me.” Moreover, the refrain offers a fairly traditional white feminist critique of the male gaze: “baby loves to dance in the dark/cuz when he’s looking she falls apart.” “She” does not experience pleasure in men’s scopophilic objectification of her body; she cannot bear its weight, and can experience a coherent (rather than shattered) corporeal schema only when she is certain “he” (i.e., patriarchy) can’t see her. A later verse presents non-patriarchal constructions of female desire as monstrous: “Run run her kiss is a vampire grin/The moon lights away while she’s howling at him.” Under the light of the moon – which is traditionally identified with women and their menstrual cycles – rather than under the Apollonian light of patriarchal truth and reason, female sexuality appears inhuman (and, notably, as a classic goth icon, the vampire).

Both Gaga’s and goth’s sexual politics turn on the figure of the monster. Like goth, Gaga uses images and figures of posthuman monsters to critique heteropatriachial norms governing gender and sexuality.

---

[i] Lady Gaga, “Dance in the Dark” on The Fame Monster New York: Interscope 2009. Depeche Mode, “Strangelove” on Music for the Masses, London: Mute, 1987.

[ii] Vanilla Ice’s early 1990s track “Ice Ice Baby” samples the bassline from Queen and David Bowie’s single “Under Pressure.” However, Vanilla Ice (Robert Van Winkle) has claimed in several instances that the bass loop in his track is in fact not the bassline from “Under Pressure” because his bassline has an extra note. See Stillman, Kevin (February 27, 2006). "Word to your mother". Iowa State Daily. http://www.iowastatedaily.com/articles/2006/02/27/news/20060227-archive5.txt.

[iii] Depeche Mode, Construction Time Again, London: Mute, 1983. Depeche Mode, Some Great Reward, London: Mute, 1984.

[iv] Video available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzGnX-MbYE4, accessed 27 November 2010.

[v] See “Lady Gaga Returns with 8 New Songs on ‘The Fame Monster’ from the website “PR Newswire”: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lady-gaga-returns-with-8-new-songs-on-the-fame-monster-63780227.html. Accessed 28 November 2010.

When Maya Angelou and James Baldwin Walked into a Bar…

A great--and true!--story, via Feminist Law Professors' Bridget Crawford:

When Maya Angelou and James Baldwin Walked into a Bar…

Maya Angelou recently donated 343 boxes of her papers to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At the accompanying ceremony/talk, she told a story about a time that she and James Baldwin went to a bar in New York. Baldwin picked her up in a limo and they went to a bar on 44th Street:

“A bar that smelled of Lysol and urine.”

Angelou went to the bar to get drinks while Baldwin went to the restroom.

A “big man, giant man” walked up to her, and inches from her face, told her he was going to buy her a drink. The man didn’t care whatsoever that Angelou was with someone or that she kept saying she didn’t want a drink.

He persisted.

When Baldwin – described by Angelou as “5’5”, if that – on wedges” – returned, he said to the burly guy, “You’ve been looking after her, have you?”

The man said yes.

Baldwin replied, “Well, now you’re dismissed, mother f—-er!”

Hearing the 82-year-old poet say that brought down the house.

That made me laugh out loud.

Text source: NYPL’s Wire, here. Image source here.

It made me laugh out loud, too!

Crunk Feminist Revlections on generations of female rappers

I encourage you to read crunkista's post on Crunk Feminist Collective. It raises some important considerations/issues/questions in discussions about different generations--and competition among different generations--of female rappers.

http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/lil-kim-vs-nicki-minaj/

Most interesting--and important, IMHO--is crunkista's claim that the underlying issue here is about our general tendency to discount the artistic authority of female musicians:

Talent.

That’s really the issue here.

Most of the men with whom I’ve debated this issue, and it has been primarily men who’ve made this argument, keep suggesting that both Kim and Nicki have ghostwriters, and that Kim has no talent. In other words, both of these women should just go sit down with their cutesie catfight. Can we say sexism?

So you have women suggesting that women shouldn’t fight each other, even though it is a time honored part of the art form, and men suggesting that the battle is whack off top because neither of these women is a legitimate lyricist to begin with.

And this is precisely why I think this battle is good for women in Hip Hop. It suggests that we don’t have to play nice to participate. It challenges narratives that attempt to turn Black women of a certain age into mothers against their will. It represents another instance where Kim has done what she always did best for Hip Hop—challenge the narrative scripts of Black womanhood.

I also agree that there is this tendency to want women to be "nice," even and especially in genres like hip hop, where the dis and the feud are highly refined artistic/rhetorical strategies. Crunkista's point also emphasizes that it's important for us to see black women as legitimately angry--mainly b/c white supremacy and patriarchy encourage us to delegitimize and trivialize black women's anger.

A few songs (more or less) about AIDS

It's World AIDS Day. Since nobody seems to talk about AIDS anymore (b/c it's not so much a problem for privileged men anymore, and more of a subaltern women's problem), I thought I'd post some of my favorite songs more or less about AIDS.

First off is Peter Murphy's cover of Pere Ubu's "Final Solution":


While this song is not obviously about AIDS, situating it in its early 80s context makes it pretty indubitably about aids. In the early 80s, in the height of the AIDS panic, it's hard not to hear lines like "Girls won't touch me cause I've got a missed erection" or "Don't need a cure, need a final solution" as about HIV/AIDS (and not, as they were originally, about late 1970s deindustrialized Cleveland).



And, La Tour's "People are Still Having Sex":



Note the line, "People are still having sex, this AIDS thing's not working"

I welcome other song suggestions in the comments.