Death Metal and the Power Over Life

This post is not making claims or coming to conclusions, but setting up a line of inquiry for further research. I have a pretty good sense of the overarching idea, but I need some more firm evidence to back it up, and I still have some questions that I need to think through.  If you have any suggestions for either of those, I’d love to hear them.

For the last year or two I’ve been trying to find, in musical practices, an example of specific techniques for subverting neoliberal biopower. What I mean by neoliberal biopower is this:

1.    It’s not about content, but about formal relationships, particularly relationships of rate, frequency, amplitude, meter—what Deleuze and others (like Jeffery Nealon, Jasbir Puar, etc.) call relationships of “speed and slowness.”

a.    So, for example, while classical liberalism cares about your identity (the ‘content’ of your true inner self), neoliberalism cares only about things like your test scores, your BMI, or population-wide rates of mortality and morbidity, etc. In short: frequency not truth.

2.    It’s not about exchange and conquest, but competition and intensity. See my previous post on “pushing it to the limit.” In short: maximalize everything, as long as you don’t ever touch the upper or lower asymptote. Or: you can tweak the frequency, but not the amplitude—or, you can tweak the frequency only to the extent that it doesn’t thereby affect the amplitude.

3.    It’s a power over life: the object of the logic of intensification is the life of privileged groups. “I want more life, fucker,” as Roy says at the end of Blade Runner.

a.    If it promotes hegemony by intensifying the life of privileged groups, then death is biopolitical neoliberalism’s unassimilable outside. Foucault makes this clear in Society Must Be Defended.

b.    So death is subversive only for some privileged groups; death is not at all subversive for those groups already left to die (“bare life” etc.).

So how do you subvert neoliberal biopower, the metric, frequential intensification of life?

I’ve been chewing on this question for a while. I’ve come up with a few suggestions: Martha Rossler’s work on “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained,” the Guerilla Girls’ use of statistics, even the concept of a hangover. Puar suggests that such subversion is “non-metric.” Now, I actually disagree with Puar here. The ‘non-metric’ is an attempt to escape meter/frequency/the logic of intensity; I agree with Foucault that this idea of escaping power is really a misunderstanding of how the power over life works. The point is not to liberate ourselves from meter. It’s to fuck with meter so that it works in unexpected ways: meter has a differently-metric effect, or something like that. There has to be some musical example of this differently-metric meter, right? And I’ve been looking for examples, and even found a few. So, when Deleuze is talking about pure relationships of speed and slowness in 1K Plateaus, he could just as easily be talking about Steve Reich’s process music (the small-scale details and large-scale form unfold simultaneously, etc.). So something like “Violin Phase” or “It’s Gonna Rain” are examples of this differently-metric meter.

So while I had been able to find a few examples of differently-metric musical practices, I hadn’t been able to find ones that connected this metric tweaking back to the issue of life. Until I was walking my dogs yesterday and Genghis Tron’s “Board Up The House” came on the internet radio:

Notice around 1:20-2:20 (where the vocals first come in): between their use of mixed meters and their obscuring of the downbeat, this sounds non-metric. It’s not; it’s actually highly regular, and the musicians are being scrupulously attentive to timing.

I know this song isn’t exactly death metal proper, but it did, at times, remind me of death metal. So, in what might be loosely called death metal, we have an example of exactly the sort of differently-metric subversion of “meter” I was looking for. So the metric practices are explicitly related to death. Death metal—and again, I’m being very loose with this term; there are a bazillion subgenres and related genres that also use this practice—combines the Deleuzian side of my theory of neoliberalism (the speed and slowness, the logic of intensity) with the Foucaultian side of my theory of neoliberalism (biopolitics, the power over life). Duh, right? I can’t believe it took me this long to think of this. But now that I’m here, there’s plenty to think more about, such as:

Death Metal:

1.    Verges on the non-metric. It’s actually hyper-metric, extra-perfectly quantized, metered music. To play in a group with that much complexity within an individual part, and among different parts, requires some very expert, attentive playing. And, this quantization actually surpasses the limits of electronic/digital instruments: human players can push beyond the parameters of a particular synth, patch, effect, etc. The human players can tune themselves to 11 or 15 or whatever.

a.    Posthuman implications of this: humans are more machine than machines

                                               i.     Subversion by hyperperfection; too-perfect repetitions of the frequency

b.    In contrast to humanist liberty-in-imperfection/analog

                                               i.     Subversion by imperfect repetition (Butler)

2.    This hyper-quantized metricality is actually more perfect than our ears are capable of perceiving. The performers have surpassed the sonic point where we can distinguish among individual sounds—we just perceive one continuous sound bloc, in the same way we see  still frames projected at a rate of 24per second as continuous motion..

a.    So it sounds like nonsense, when in fact it is very rigorously ordered. It’s the logic of intensity pushed past the limits of our perceptory faculties (if not the limits of the logic itself).

b.    This is not liberation; it’s not doing whatever you want, it’s not autonomy, it’s not chaos.

c.     In fact, it’s very highly coordinated interactivity.

3.    So why is this musical/aesthetic strategy connected to DEATH? If you’re writing a song with an explicitly death-focused aesthetic and lyrical content, why choose these musical practices to express that aesthetic and that content?

a.    In a way, the metric practice I identify in this post is characteristic of most “hardcore” musics: hardcore punk, ‘ardcore, jungle (think of how the Amen Break gets broken down and reconstituted in really abstract, nearly unrecognizable ways).

b.    So the question is: what’s the specific relationship between this musical practice or aesthetic and the idea/aesthetic of “death”?

                                               i.     Is it that this subversively-metric practice expresses/parallels is white guys’ attempts to not live an appropriately intensified life? What I mean is: Death metal is a largely white, largely male genre. Neoliberal biopower is very interested in intensifying their lives, in giving them more and better lives (especially if they’re straight or homonational). So for them subversion involves not intensifying their life, or at least not intensifying it in the appropriate ways. So maybe this metric practice is an inappropriate logic of intensification? And its inappropriateness gets registered as death? (I.e., you’re not living the right life, you’re not working hard enough on improving your human capital, so you might as well be dead?)

Readers, help me find a super-great example for my book. What death metal/tech death/grindcore/cybercore/etc. tracks or bands should I be listening to?

I’ll be working on these ideas and questions for a while, and  you should expect revised versions of this post in the future.

Hangover the Limit: More on neoliberalism as a system of musical organization

I’ve been writing a lot about how the logic of biopolitical neoliberalism manifests in musical practices. For example, here is post about the contrast between classically liberal tonal harmony and contemporary EDM-influenced pop structures. I want to pick up where I ended this post. I said:

Foucault’s neoliberal subject “is never called upon to relinquish his interest” (BOB 275); instead, he ought to “directly multiply” it “without any transcendence” (ibid) or telos. This subject is not regulated by prohibitions (which require renunciation and domestication of desire), but by “the principle of maximum/minimum” (Foucault BOB 17). This subject tries to keep his experiences “at the border between the too much and the to little, between the maximum and the minimum fixed for me by the nature of things” (Foucault BOB 19). The minimum is a valley, the maximum, a peak; once I hit either of these, I change course, cycling back to the alternate limit.

If, as I argued there, neoliberalism creates tension by building rhythmic and timbral intensity toward an upper limit or asymptote, then it frames musical, aesthetic, and other pleasure as a matter of “pushing it to the limit,” as the cliché goes. Jeffery Nealon calls this “the logic of intensity.” Stuck between a predefined maximum and minimum (amplitude, frequency), “in a world that contains no ‘new’ territory—no new experiences, no new markets—any system that seeks to expand must by definition intensify its existing resources, modulate them in some way” (Nealon 82).[i] To modulate a relationship means to “speed it up or slow it down” (Nealon 82)—i.e., to push it to the minimum or maximum threshold. This modulation is both how neoliberal power enforces itself, and how it might be subverted. There is nothing inherently hegemonic or counter-hegemonic about the form or logic itself; the political effects depend on a number of factors, and are often mixed anyway. Here I want to think about how this form or logic manifests in contemporary music, especially at the level of compositional form, and how contemporary music might suggest counter-hegemonic uses of this logic—sort of meta-modulations that don’t just work on the effects of a specific manifestation of the logic of intensity, but that modulate the logic itself.

To that end, I examine two Taio Cruz songs: one, because it literalizes this musical structure in its lyrical content (and thus might clarify some things for the less musically literate among us), and the other because it might indicate one tactic for subverting the logic of neoliberal/biopolitical power. In other words, it might be an example of how to use this logic in counter-hegemonic ways; even though it doesn’t meta-modulate the song’s logic, it suggests one way we might go about such a meta-modulation.

Push It

Tonal harmony and classical liberalism are both conquest narratives: they’re about “eating the other,” the overcoming of difference and its assimilation to a more firmly and resolutely centered identity/subject. Conquest involves overwhelming the border between the proper and the foreign, and resistance involves disobeying the prohibitions that keep you on the margins, questioning your constitutive exclusion (or abjection) from the political. In the neoliberal logic of intensity, however, “you are offered experiences for doing work on yourself rather than opportunities for confronting, overcoming, or otherwise consuming some ‘other’” (Nealon 82). It’s not a matter of flouting, breaking, or crossing boundaries, but of mining the resources you already have. You push yourself to your utmost limit: you try to be as efficient, as smart, as wealthy, as healthy, as happy, etc. Or, as Taio Cruz says in his song “Troublemaker,” you have to “put that thing on full throttle” and “do it all for the now.”

The lyrical content of this song talks about the logic of intensity: like the production of the track, it’s about maximalism. As the lyrics in the bridge say, “Let’s take it to the top/push it to the limit.”

The bridge, beginning around 2:22, also demonstrates the logic of intensity at a musical level.

2:22-2:25            First iteration of the phrase

2:25-2:29            Second iteration of the phrase

2:30-2:33            Second half of phrase (“to the limit) is repeated double time: “to the limit/to       the limit/to the limit/limit/limit/limit”

2:34-2:36            Silence

2:36                     Return to chorus

2:50-2:54            If you listen to the snare part here, it also exponentializes in rhythmic            intensity to effect a build-to-climax.

So, instead of creating forward motion and musical excitement by conquering secondary key areas (as in the Clarkson song I discuss in the post I cited above), this song creates musical interest by dividing the measure into increasingly smaller rhythmic fractions: first there’s “take it to the top, push it to the limit,” then there’s “to the limit,” then there’s “limit”. The snare part at 2:50 does the same sort of rhythmic subdivision. The number of repetitions is increased, as though it were being driven to the point at which our ears could no longer perceive any separation between rhythmic events (sort of like how we see images projected at a rate of about 24 frames per second as a continuous moving image). Instead of crossing this asymptote, the song drops out entirely into a measure of (more or less) silence. Then we return back the regularly programmed schedule of peaks and valleys. This is the normal, regular use of the logic of intensity, the one neoliberalism uses to maintain specific intensities of life for specific groups.

In the next section, I discuss how another of Taio Cruz’s songs might suggest irregular uses of the logic of intensity.

Hangover

At the level of musical organization, this song is a pretty regular example of the logic of intensity.[ii]  However, at the level of lyrical content it suggests a metaphor for meta-modulating the logic of intensity. A hangover is the effect of pushing oneself beyond one’s limits: too much alcohol, too fast, not enough water, etc. It’s evidence that one was too intense in one’s drinking and partying. Being strung out or burnt out might be additional versions of this same general metaphor. You are hungover because you were immoderately intense. Because you are hungover, you cannot be intense enough today—you’re not as productive at work, or even at having fun, as you could be, because you are stuck with a headache, or nausea, or worse. A hangover is where last night’s excessive intensity impedes your ability to maximize the intensity of whatever you do today. In a way, hangover is like sonic feedback, where past sounds return to effect and distort the current process of sound-making.

Hangovers suck. This is another reason they are, I think, a productive example of subverting or meta-modulating the neoliberal logic of intensity. It’s not like this subversion liberates you, makes you feel better, more free, more empowered, or whatever. Actually, it’s a huge pain in the ass (or head, or stomach, etc.). This meta-modulation comes at a cost, and it may not be the case that this cost is sustainable; it may even be counter-productive for counter-hegemonic work. So the most effective strategies for subverting hegemonic logics of intensity may not actually involve the explicit crossing of a limit/asymptote. It may be about combining a number of regular signals (that stay within the defined min and max) so they interact in irregular ways. (I’ve referred to this before as “crossing the streams”).

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[i] Nealon, Jeffrey T. “Empire of the Intensities” in parallax vol 8 no 1 (2002) 78-91.

[ii] There is a little bit of a musical “hangover”: at the end of each chorus/build, the four-bar phrase pattern is broken with an extra 2 bars. The last phrase of each chorus is effectively six bars total.

Music Geek-Out #14: Peter Murphy's "Cuts You Up"

The next two songs in the playlist are my brief, brief nod to pre-90s goth.

First is Peter Murphy's "Cuts You Up," off is 1990 album Deep. Murphy used to be the singer of iconic 80s goth band Bauhaus, which is most well-known for their "Bela Lugosi's Dead." This track is featured at the beginning of lesbian-vampire-film classic The Hunger. (Seriously, watch the linked video. In the first few minutes, Murphy manages to out-act everyone else in the film, including and especially David Bowie...and then you should compare the Bauhaus cover of Ziggy Stardust to Bowie's original...and voila, you can thank me for sending you down that YouTube hole.) But anyway, the track:




Back before Nirvanna, this song is what indie music--then called "Modern Rock"--sounded like.  The timbre of this song (especially the warm, warm bass timbre), the tone colors, the arrangement, and particularly the mixing--all this is just quintessentially late-80s/early-90s Modern Rock. I also really like Murphy's approach to the vocals in the bridge: here, he sets the rhythm and accents of the vocals against and in tension with the rhythm of the instrumentals. This is similar to, for example, what he does in Bauhaus's "Dark Entries."

After Murphy left Bauhaus for a solo career, the remaining members formed the group Love and Rockets; Daniel Ash had a side project, Tones on Tail. I particularly like ToT's track "Go!"

Murphy has a really great back catalog of covers. I recommend his version of Pere Ubu's "Final Solution," and Joy Division's "Transmission."

Music Geek-Out # 13: Guided By Voices "I Am a Scientist"

Guided By Voices is a Dayton band, and they were in heavy, heavy rotation on WOXY. 



I chose this song for two reasons: (1) it's one of my favorite GBV songs, and (2) in German, "science" or "Wissenshaft" has a more broad connotation than in English; it can refer to the liberal arts and sciences, not just the hard or natural sciences. So, philosophy is a "science" in the Wissenschaft sense. At a party full of philosophers, what better than a song about being a "scientist" in this sense?

Is It Ethical To Eat Chick-Fil-A?

Chick-Fil-A has always worn its spiritual and social commitments on its sleeve (or wing). As a recent press-release explains, 

From the day Truett Cathy started the company, he began applying biblically-based principles to managing his business. For example, we believe that closing on Sundays, operating debt-free and devoting a percentage of our profits back to our communities are what make us a stronger company and Chick-fil-A family.

This statement was a response to the ongoing controversy about comments the Chick-Fil-A CEO made about the company’s donations to anti-LGBTQ organizations (which the HuffPost reports as totaling around 2 million dollars in 2010).

Debate about the ethics of Chick-Fil-A patronage has exploded in feminist, LGBT, and queer social media. If they are so actively anti-gay, if they are using the profits they earn from your purchase to support ex-gay “conversion” therapy, Focus on the Family, and the like, should continue to contribute to their profits?

This is a really complicated issue: it involves intertwined political and social problems, and it involves some thorny aesthetics-ethics intersections. The issues can’t be reduced to a simple boycott-or-not question. In fact, choosing to boycott certain retailers or products is often more about feeling a sense of one’s own ethical superiority, and less about affecting concrete change. (Especially in this case, there’s a lot of class-based snobbery about fast food.) No matter what specific retailers or products we abstain from, the alternative options generally aren’t much better—their problems may be different, but they’re still moral problems. Boycott Wal-Mart because of its low wages and discrimination against women, but Target has a history of donating to anti-LGBTQ organizations; boycott H&M because of their use of sweatshop labor and anti-union practices in the US, but American Apparel has some serious labor and sexual harassment issues of its own. Basically, no company, no product is spotless. Spotlessness, ethical innocence should not be the goal—it’s a futile pursuit. The issue is how to sort out the least bad option(s), all the while making concrete steps toward substantive change.

The Chick-Fil-A case is really helpful in explaining how making compromises can actually contribute to real-world progress. Homophobia is not the only moral problem at the company: there are employment justice issues (minimum-wage fast-food workers) that bleed into racial justice issues, there are animal justice issues (battery cages), there are environmental justice issues (what’s their carbon footprint?), the list goes on. As a UNCC WGST student commented on our program’s Facebook page, boycotting the campus Chick-Fil-A might jeopardize the jobs of the people who work at the location—people without college educations, people who need this job, people who have no involvement with decisions about corporate policy (because if they did, their working conditions would probably be a lot better). A boycott effectively says that justice for (often middle-class) LGBTQ students and their allies is more important than justice for the Chick-Fil-A employees. We have to think who gets thrown under the bus—and fast-food line workers are not exactly the most structurally or institutionally privileged bunch.

So rather than see this as an all-or-nothing issue—which the question of boycotting does—why not use this as an opportunity for coalition-building? Why not try to address all (or at least a significant number) of the intertwined justice issues at Chick-Fil-A? Wouldn’t it be more productive, more powerful, and, uh, more ethical, for LGBTQ groups to work with groups like SIEU (Service Industry Employees’ Union), animal rights groups, and environmental groups? It’s a many-pronged problem, and attacking it on all fronts seems like it would be more effective than attacking only one.

Now, I should admit that I’ve never actually purchased anything at a Chick-Fil-A. I haven’t eaten chicken since the Clinton administration (1996ish), and while waffle-cut fries do sound appealing, I usually only get fast-food fries after I’ve been out late dancing, partying, and socializing. Chick-Fil-A isn’t exactly the type of place to be open at 3am on a Sunday morning, so I’ve managed to avoid them, if only circumstantially. And, you know, I buy non-organic dairy, shop at Target, etc. etc. So please don’t mistake me for some paragon of moral purity. Cause I’m not. I’m not here to scold everyone into being as morally virtuous and praiseworthy as I am, because, you know, I’m pretty imperfect. But the point is: everyone is at least a little complicit. This should not excuse our moral/ethical imperfections, but it does mean that the road to better ethical practice is going to be pretty messy and difficult. As my students say, ethics is a dirty business.

But what if you do like Chick-Fil-A? Is it ethical to eat there? Well, yes, if you’re also doing something to mitigate the effects of the profits they’re getting from your transaction. That something could be donating to or volunteering with LGBTQ, labor, animal, or environmental organizations, it could be writing local, state, and national legislators about policy issues, it could be educating yourself and others about justice issues and what to do about them. It’s pretty common, and, as I’ve argued here, politically and ethically permissible to aesthetically enjoy something you find politically and/or ethically disgusting. So you can like the taste of Chick-Fil-A and still hate their politics. Like I said: this is knotty and complicated, and defies simple answers.

The important thing is to not get caught up in ideals of moral purity. These frameworks focus so narrowly that they obscure the interconnections among ethical issues. When we think we’ve achieved moral purity (say, by abstaining from Chick-Fil-A), we’re actually unaware of our complicity in other moral problems (e.g., are the labor, animal, and environmental issues any better at Wendys or TGI Friday’s?).

Music Geek-Out #12: (London) Suede's "Beautiful Ones"

Wow, I've dropped the ball on this series. Sorry! Lots of summer writing, a book proposal to get out, articles to get out, all that jazz.

Anyway, this is part of a playlist I did for philoSOPHIA 2012, hosted at Miami U in Oxford, OH. The playlist reflects both the catalog of the old WOXY/97X radio station, which used to be run out of Oxford. 

Next on the playlist was (London) Suede's "Beautiful Ones":



Suede is the most interesting of the "Britpop" bands, from a feminist/gender studies perspective. Lead singer Brett Anderson was known for his androgynous, almost femme performance demeanor. It's also worth thinking about how Anderson's non-macho gender presentation was interpreted alongside Suede's "indulgent" pop sound; their music was the opposite of hard-core, it was just fun and enjoyable.  Like their singer, Suede's music was "androgynous": a little too pop/femme, but with enough indie-rock stubble to prove its authenticity, its real value, etc. So, there's a lot to say both about Anderson's gender presentation, and the gendering of Suede's music vis-a-vis Britpop more generally. That's why I chose this song for the playlist, and not, say, some Blur. Sure, I could have chosen "Girls and Boys," but that is too upbeat for music that's supposed to play softly underneath lots of shop talk, catching up, networking, etc. I chose this particular Suede song because beauty is obviously a well-established feminist issue.

And, I'm referring to them as (London) Suede because, though their name is really "Suede," there was a US musician who sued them, claiming to already have performed under that name. So, because of this legal technicality, they went by "London Suede" in the US.

From New Wave to No Wave #2: New Wave, Same Old Whiteness

This is a continuation from an earlier post. There I discuss Sara Ahmed's work on the politics of disorientation. In this post, I look at the ways that New Wave's musical disorientation re-centers conventional accounts of whiteness, specifically, white (men's) anxieties about their bodies.

New Wave and No Wave are both part of the post-punk rock and pop scene of the late 70s and early 80s. They are each heterogeneous genres; sometimes their boundaries (what bands get included or excluded) are more the result of convention (what critics, fans, and radio programmers treat as belonging in the genre) than of actual stylistic, aesthetic, or socio-political similarity. Simon Reynolds’s Rip ItUp & Start Again is a really good introductory overview of both scenes, their intermingling and their divergences. Theo Cateforis’s new book, Are WeNot New Wave?, also looks like it will be a great resource (I can’t wait to read it!). I’ll be using Cateforis’s previously-published account of Devo’s work below; there’s an interview with him about his new book here on the IASPM-US blog.

Some New Wave bands (like Devo, which I discuss below, or early Human League, for example) and most No Wave bands used similar aesthetics and composition/performance practices: minimalism, repetition, abrasive and/or dystopian themes and timbres, abrupt and jerky affects, halting and awkward covers of rock and pop songs, and the like. In other words, there is a common interest in making music that doesn’t sound conventionally “pretty” or “pleasurable.” New Wave and No Wave are rock-based outgrowths of post-punk, but they repudiate rock’s aesthetic conventions; they don’t follow rock’s norms for what counts as a “good” song or performance. It’s anti-pop (or rather, it’s pop that’s anti-rock), in the way that Dada is anti-art: the thing that’s likeable about it is how conventionally unlikeable it is.[i] (Both genres get this from punk, which, though confrontational and amateurish, was actually, at the level of musical practice, often very conventional. All you need is three chords to start a band—the same three chords that everyone from Chuck Berry to Beethoven use as the basis of their songs.) In other words, new wave and no wave styles each, in their own ways, capitalize on disorientation, on rock audience’s disorientation. I want to take this aesthetic similarity and use it as a means to distinguish between two distinct political approaches to whiteness. While New Wave, at least in its artier, more avant-garde incarnations, might have more aesthetically in common with No Wave, it has more politically in common with classic rock…at least with respect to its approach to whiteness.

New Wave and No Wave emerged at a time when white rock musicians’ understandings of the racial politics of the genre were beginning to change.  And this change wasn’t necessarily motivated by white anti-racism; it is likely that this shift is due to generational tension among whites (thus keeping whiteness at the center, non-white people and identities persist in their instrumentality and marginality). One of the ways white artists in the late 1970s could distinguish themselves from the previous generation of white rock avant-garde, which was their present-day rock mainstream, was by adopting different attitudes toward and techniques of cultural appropriation. In the late 1950s through the 1960s, the racial politics of white rock relied on a black/white binary: whiteness was disembodying and alienating, and blackness, particularly black masculinity, was sensous, sexual, and “authentic.” White (mainly male) rockers thus treated black music and the masculinities expressed in it as a means for white people to re-connect with their aesthetic and corporeal sensuousness. So, 60s white rockers turned to black music as a cure for white squareness and alienation. 70s white (male) rockers developed several alternatives to their older brothers’ white hipsterism. Some, like Devo, still associated whiteness with alienation and squareness, but rejected the detour into blackness. Devo took an alternate route through hyperbolized white squareness, and other bands, like the Ramones or the Lounge Lizards appropriated 1950s white pop culture (the former sincerely, the latter ironically, both obscuring its appropriation of black and southern European immigrant cultures). Or, one could find a different detour through another, preferably more exotic, style of blackness, like reggae, ska, Latin jazz, hip hop, anything but the plain ol’ Delta Blues. Think of it as a turn from the Mississippi Delta to the Caribbean, sometimes detouring through Britain or the Bronx (or both).  Or, one could look to appropriate across an entirely different, more distant body of water—the Pacific. If blackness represented authenticity and “realness,” Asian cultures, especially Japan, represented the future. (As The Clash say, “Give me Honda, give me Sony.”) So, some avant-garde bands, in an attempt to emphasize their avant-ness, appropriated and/or fetishized Asian femininity as a means to identify with a sort of orientalized version of the future. (Lydia Lunch and  Siouxie Sioux come to mind here). Just think of the opening scene of Blade Runner, where we see a picture of a Geisha projected on the side of a mega-skyscraper. Or, finally, bands could claim race-blindness or race-neutrality…which, as we know, is really just adopting a position of white privilege. Anyway, the point here is that avant-garde white rockers of the late 70s were looking to distinguish themselves from the racial politics of 60s and early 70s rock, and there were a lot of ways to go about this, not all (or most) of them any less racist than the practices they were rejecting.  

These philosophical/political approaches to witeness are not universal to the subgenres with which I identify them; rather, I take two “representative” artists—Devo and James Chance—to tease out two different political approaches to generally similar aesthetic material. So, this is not a historical thesis about what bands did or thought, but a philosophical analysis of concepts, discourses, and judgments. I’m taking works by Devo and Chance as examples of the philosophical approaches to whiteness. More specifically, they represent two ways white people problematize their whiteness, or treat their whiteness, their white racial identity, as a problem.

So, I’m being kind of fast and loose with my use of “New Wave,” and I admit that. No Wave is a smaller, more contained scene, but New Wave is more or less an umbrella term that can refer to everything from the synthpop of early Depeche Mode and A Flock of Seagulls, to the avant-pop of Talking Heads, to the goth-y pop-rock of The Cure.  I’m interested in a specific slice of that New Wave pie, the bands that use disorientation, awkwardness, discomfort, dissonance, irregularity, and other anti-pop aesthetics. So, the Talking Heads sometimes do this (e.g., “Psycho Killer”), Public Image Limited definitely does this, as do the early Human League, The Au Pairs, Pere Ubu, and more “noisy” British proto-industrial bands like Cabaret Voltaire, The Normal, and Throbbing Gristle. In some ways, this is the darker side of New Wave. I’m mainly using “New Wave” as a foil for No Wave. I take Theo Cateforis’s reading of Devo as New Wave exemplar as a means to call attention to specific features of No Wave. So, while Devo’s aesthetic and political practices might not be universal among New Wave bands, that’s fine, because I’m not arguing that they are. I’m using Devo as exemplary of a particular strain or approach within the very heterogeneous New Wave, a strain that throws No Wave aesthetics and politics into particularly clear relief. So, Cateforis’s reading of Devo might not be representative of “New Wave” in general, but it does represent an approach that, as I will show, clearly contrasts to strategies that are representative of No Wave in general.

Following Theo Cateforis’s analysis of whiteness in Devo’s songs and performances, I argue that what Cateforis identifies as “the whiteness of the New Wave” is actually continuous with the approach to whiteness that characterizes mainstream rock music from the 1950s through the 1970s.[ii] Now, because New Wave is really heterogeneous and contradictory as a genre, there is no single approach to whiteness and to race across the genre. So, I want to clarify that I’m focusing on a very narrow and specific type of “New Wave whiteness.” In short, the approach to whiteness that Cateforis calls “New Wave whiteness” isn’t actually that new. Devo, like the classic rock bands they parody, treat whiteness as a problem for white people: it is alienating, inhibiting, domesticating (and thus potentially feminizing), technocratic, and all around no fun. Whiteness is, in other words, really “square.” Devo takes the squareness and critiques it not via explicit dis-identificaiton, as the Rolling Stones do, but by parody and exaggerated identification. Devo performs a musical argument ad absurdam (taking something to its most extreme expression, at which point it breaks and reveals its faults).[iii]

The (D)evolution of Whiteness?

            Cateforis centers his analysis on Devo’s cover of the Rolling Stones “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” This approach is particularly productive, because the Stones and Devo adopt opposite approaches to the same underlying assessment of whiteness. Both bands think mainstream whiteness—or rather, white masculinity—is alienating and dehumanizing. For example, Devo thinks white America has “become enslaved…to a stringent mechanized work ethic” (565) that prioritizes “self-denial and self-control” (568). Whiteness is so rigid, rule-bound, and immersed in intellectual and technological pursuits that it blocks white people’s abilities to experience aesthetic, sensory, and sexual pleasure. This is not a new idea—it has been around since at least the late 19^th century (See my articles in Contemporary Aesthetics and The Journal of Black Masculinity for more on this point.). So, both Devo and the Stones think their whiteness is a problem. The Stones address this problem by dis-identifying with whiteness: they reject white cultural norms and appropriate (what they understand to be) black musical and corporeal styles instead. In the mid 20^th century, it was a common stereotype that black men were not alienated from, but in fact too strongly connected to their bodies, bodily pleasure, as well as aesthetic virtuosity and aesthetic pleasure. So, many whites adopted this stereotypical blackness, hoping it would “cure” their problematic whiteness. (Ingrid Monson’s article on white hipness is excellent on this topic.) This is the approach the Stones took, and it was common among both British Invasion and US rock bands in the 60s, and 70s.

According to Cateforis, what was new or “novel” about Devo was “their dehumanized, robotic approach to the music,” “their suburban-robotic image,” and “the way in which they had sacrificed ‘hip humping’ dancing for ‘the choreography of synchronized robots” (565). Uncoordinated, awkward, unadept at sexually suggestive dancing, and “suburban,” Devo performs an exaggerated whiteness. Performing “a white male [body] too controlled and too disciplined to appear natural,” Devo critiques “white middle-class emotional sensibility, where abstinence and repression are designed to regulate the white body, to conquer its fleshy imperfections and elevate the spirit over the troubled torso” (581). This is what is “new” about them: they don’t attempt to reject white “squareness,” to escape from it in black music; rather, they explicitly adopt white “squareness” in order to point out its flaws. 

How do they do this?

Devo used various compositional and performance tactics to create “discomforting” affects (Cateforis 567): (1) rhythmic irregularity, in the form of (a) asymmetrical meters, (b) an obscured downbeat in the instrumentals (the “skip”), (c) asynchronous downbeats in the instrumentals and the vocals; and (2) sabotaging the standard “tension-release” structure of a rock song (only tension, no release).

(1) Rhytnmic irregularity: Cateforis argues that Devo’s “use of rhythms could act directly on the body, encouraging a rigid, robotic, and discomforting reaction in their audiences” (Cateforis 567). For audiences accustomed to regular meters (4/4, 2/4, or cut time), asymmetrical, “odd meters like 7/8” (Cateforis 567) produce a sort of Heideggerian broken-hammer effect: expecting something with two or four beats per measure, the seven-beat pattern disrupts their habitual responses to music; the awkwardness of the uneven 3+4 or 4+3 division of each bar is augmented by the fact that their bodily response to the meter is mediated by their conscious awareness of it—they can’t just follow along by habit, they have to pay attention. Similarly, Devo obscured the downbeat in their cover of “Satisfaction.” According to Cateforis, this cover uses a modified reggae convention for “dropping” or “skipping” the downbeat—so, the reggae convention won’t sound right to rock audiences, and Devo’s modification “seems to bear little relation to a reggae beat” (Cateforis 572). The instrumentals do not establish a recognizably rock or a recognizably reggae downbeat. The difficulty in locating the downbeat is exacerbated by the fact that the vocals put the emphasis on different beats—the vocals follow the rock convention of emphasizing 1 and 3, while the instrumentals emphasize 2 and 4. The song feels “out of synch” (Cateforis 574) because it fails to identify a definitive downbeat. This “serve[s] to jolt the listener, making one acutely aware of the skewed relation between the voice, body, and music” (Catefories 574). In this wayDevo would use odd, awkward musical structures to prevent listeners from relying on implicit understanding. They would force listeners to respond with “self-conscious control.” This “self control required to avert the physicality of other dancing”—i.e., regular dancing to classic blues-based rock—highlights in Richard Dyer’s words the ‘triumph of mind over matter’ that constitutes a white cultural ideal” (Cateforis 568). So, Devo used musical awkwardness to turn listeners’’ attention to the awkwardness, nerdiness, and squareness of white bodies.

(2) All tension, no release: Devo used formal structures to intensify the affective anxiety and discomfort generated by the rhythmic irregularity. More specifically, they excised and/or reworked the tension-release structures the Stones used in their original version of “Satisfaction,” so that the song built tension, but did not release or resolve it. “The original,” Catefories argues, 

is a classic model of what musicologist Richard Middleton has referred to as the ‘tension/release’ popular song form. The Rolling stones set the ‘tense’ tone immediately with the timbre of the opening distorted guitar hook…the release comes during the chorus” (574-5).

Like all tonal songs, the Stones’ “Satisfaction” uses carefully planned and controlled dissonances to build harmonic tension, which is then released—either partially, through modified cadences, or fully, in a perfect cadence—when the band hits specific chords. The dissonances are resolved into consonances. In Devo’s version, however, tension is built not harmonically, but formally: the band pushes against audience knowledge of the original Stones version of the song, delaying or deleting the musical events (i.e., harmonic development, cadences) that the audience anticipates. “The tension here,” in Devo’s version, “arises from…incessant repetition played against our knowledge and expectations of the original’s form” (Cateforis 576). So, instead of building to a “climactic point of tension” (Cateforis 576) as the Stones do, Devo uses repetition to interrupt the buildup. It’s a different kind of tension that they build: they’re not developing teleologically toward a climax and denoument; they’re repeating “monomanical[ly]” (Cateforis 576), exponentially intensifying discomfort. So, if the Stones build and release a sexualized sense of friction, Devo augments anxiety and irritability.[iv]

 

This qualitative shift is apparent in Cateforis’s description of the difference in Jagger’s and Mothersbaugh’s vocal performance:

Jittery and unpredictable, Mothersbaugh’s delivery in ‘Satisfaction’ provides a vastly different subject position than the confident tones of Mick Jagger’s British homage to the American R&B blues shouter…Mothersbaugh’s use of these quirky, nervous vocal patterns helps to intensify the images of awkward, twitching human bodies wracked and overrun by anxious neuroses” (579-580; emphasis mine).

Devo builds tension by “intensifying” rhythmic, vocal, and formal irregularities. White audiences experience these musical irregularities as intensifications of their own “awkward, twitching human bodies.”[v] As Cateforis puts it, “the quirky vocal exaggerations and the frantic bodily motions all came to be trademarks of new wave’s particular white-tinged style” (582). The perceived musical “problems” express or augment the white body problem.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

Devo’s awkward, twitchy, glitchy approach to the white body does not begin from a new political approach to whiteness or the white body problem. In their cover of “Satisfaction,” whiteness is a problem for white people because it causes and/or contributes to the white body problem. They do develop a new response to this problem. Instead of dis-identifying with white cultural practices and aesthetic norms, as the Stones did with their appropriation of the Delta blues,

 What new wave did reject, at least from a musical standpoint, was the expressive history of the blues and other African American forms as any kind of unequivocal authenticity. The tight, nervous constriction of the new wave beat defused any attempt to assimilate the presumed ‘naturalness’ of the black body” (583).

So, as Cateforis argues, Devo’s awkward, disoriented, herky-jerky aesthetic is an attempt to dis-identify with the previous generation of white musicians’ solution to the problem of white alienation.[vi] And it is here, in the approach to stereotypical blackness, that New Wave and No Wave overlap: No Wave musicians also reject the previous generation of white musicians’ attempts to “assimilate the presumed ‘naturalness’ of the black body.” If racist stereotypes about blacks, and racist logics of cultural appropriation, are what cohere white aesthetic and corporeal schemas—if these racist stereotypes and practices are what allow whites’ experiences of their bodies and of music feel seamless and smooth—then, argue No Wavers, it’s best to just renounce seamless, smooth, pleasurable relations to our white bodies and our white music.

While New Wave and No Wave both rejected the classic rock response to whiteness, their motivations are different. New Wave and No Wave think whiteness is a problem, but they disagree as to what, exactly, the problem with whiteness is. Devo, like the Stones, thinks whiteness is repressive for white people. As Cateforis argues, “new wave accepted and even celebrated the cultural contradictions and awkwardness of its own whiteness” (583). So, their refusal to appropriate blues, rock, and R&B styles is motivated by the desire to more intensely focus on white people and their/our issues.[vii] The No Wave bands I will analyze below can be interpreted as critiquing the racisim that underwrites white identity. In my reading, the musical irregularity or “contortion” in the works of James Chance his ZE Records lablemates interrupts whites’ experiences of white privilege. Their songs suggest that whiteness is discomforting for whites because it is oppressive for black people. (I’m narrowing it to blacks here because the racial politics of mid-20^th century US pop music followed a black/white binary, even if, in practice, that binary was troubled by, say, the role of Nuyoricans in early hip hop.) While their music continue to engage with African-American musical styles and practices, what it does not assume that this interaction will somehow suture whites’ uneasiness with their white bodies. Rather, this engagement with African-American musical traditions makes white people feel more uneasy with their white bodies, not just because they are white, but because they are implicated in white supremacy. Put differently, the No Wave songs I’m interested in don’t express the worry that white people couldn’t get any satisfaction; they express the worry that whites’ “satisfaction” was predicated on racism. Thus, these songs can be interpreted as subverting and stunting what whites have learned experience as musical and physical satisfaction. Thus, in New Wave, whiteness has the effect of regimenting and quantizing both the music the body; awkwardness is the effect of too much organization and control. In No Wave, whiteness has the effect of disorganizing both the music and the body; awkwardness is the effect of critiquing the devices one might use to get a foothold on oneself, one’s relations to other people, to the environment, etc.

            I’ll discuss No Wave more extensively in a later post. But for now I just want to clarify that I’m reading No Wave as philosophically suggestive, and not as a historical phenomenon. I’m doing a reading of songs and performances from the perspective of a contemporary audience. I’m not making claims about the original context, about the musicians’ intended meanings, their personal and/or professional politics, etc. These artworks, regardless of authorial intent or original meaning, allow for if not encourage certain readings/interpretations today. I take No Wave as an example or case study, and use it to think through some philosophical issues related to the politics of whiteness and white embodiment. But more on that later.

OH, and!: At some point I need to think more carefully and extensively about the relationship btw this Devo cover of "Satisfaction," the Benny Benassi "Satisfaction" track, and the ways that "Swagger like Mick Jagger" gets dropped in postmillennial electro-influenced tracks with AutoTuned vocals. Is this indicative of some recognition, by whites, that black music is techy and futuristic, not just "authentic" and roots-y? Basically, it seems like the traditional associations--among race, masculinity, aesthetics, authenticity, subjectivity, etc--are all scrambled, or something. Something interesting is going on and I want to think more about it.

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[i] Simon Reynolds describes No Wave as “on the slippery cusp between art and anti-art” (145).

[ii] Cateforis, Theo. “Performing the Avant-Garde Groove: Devo and the Whiteness of the New Wave” in American Music, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 564-588.

[iii] “Moving their bodies in a series of sharp, jerky motions, they proceeded to reduce one of rock’s most sacred cows, the Rolling Stones ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,’ to an absurd procession of minimalist, stunted riffs and nervous vocals. To many, the band’s performance was a bewildering, antagonizing intrusion into their weekend entertainment” (Cateforis 564-5; emphasis mine).

[iv] “In the original version, this section [and I try] serves as a build-up of controlled tense anger. But in Devo’s hands, the irregular stuttering resembles more the voice of someone with a nervous tic” (Cateforis 580)

[v] It’s worth noting that these twitching bodies are noticeably awkward only because their habitual musical experiences are disrupted. Anyone who has played an instrument knows that it involves a lot of awkward, “twitchy” movement: crooking one’s neck to play violin or viola; rapid, stylized, difficult movements of the fingers over strings or keys; odd facial expressions; etc.  We, both as instrumentalists and listeners, have just become habituated to the movements and postures involved in playing a musical instrument. We don’t read regularly musical bodies as awkward and twitchy. So, musical irregularity can point out the bodily irregularity required to perform music.

[vi] “Devo’s stiff bodily movements ultimately defuses and mocks the emotive, sexualized gestures typical of the late-seventies male ‘cock rocker,’ the aggressive masculine performer stereotype” (Cateforis 579)

[vii] Cateforis argues that New Wave’s rejection of mainstream musical and political norms “could only ever be a revolt against the self” (583).