'Deconstructionist' Music

well like i say it was definitely a "thing" in the 80s, difficult to read a Melody Maker or NME without somebody dropping a Barthes reference and that was undoubtedly feeding from/into the mindset of a certain set of musicians, probably a result of critical theory first taking off in unis at the end of the 70s/beginning of the 80s

just need to work Vanilla's "No Way No Way" in here somehow, or ponder how Artful Dodger's "Movin' Too Fast" functions as a paean to différance at the same time as it gets the dancefloor moving

aporiae between the vocal and the musical content are a v. long-standing trope tho, way way before Jacques D et al

kind of the least intersting approach to deconstructive music tho, i like yr reading of Live at the Apollo better

deconstruction is an interpretative practice so i'm hesitant to suggest that a particular album is more deconstructed than another. if anything, music seems to resist deconstruction more than other mediums since genre + sound already seem fluid + boundaryless / undermining initial hierarchies. i think there are questions of ownership tho that make sense to read deconstructively - who owns a particular sound or genre (both culturally but also in terms of essential performer/listener relationship) - is it in lipstick traces where marcus writes that a really punk concert would include a moment when an audience member takes the stage and says, "ok, now this concert is over it is my concert now" etc (or maybe frank?).

i'm not too fond of deconstructivism as an umbrella term applied to skeletal, disjointed rock music but to each its own i guess.

some stuff from the top of my head not too dissimilar to the maple/beefheartian offbeat approach described upthread:

first 2 gastr del sol records

storm and stress (ian from don cab trying his hand at more abstract, jazz-not-jazz kinda territory. the guy's guitar playing was pretty unique during this period, to say the least)

gorge trio - dead chicken fear no knife (1st record only. the later stuff sounds more like skronky improv vignettes)

natural dreamers (john & chris from deerhoof. surprisingly melodic anti-rock)

the italian band starfuckers and its offshot sinistri

joan of arc - the gap

rope - widow's first dawn

grand ulena - gateway to dignity

i guess i'm done now, will try to come up with more of this later.

http://f.cl.ly/items/3t0f0z2l0m3Y041T2h1P/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-04%20at%2010.07.40%20AM.png

I bet Derrida was a right laugh at parties.

Deconstruction, as I understand it, doesn't produce any post-rock.

kinda more interesting question to me is what music texts would be theoretically productive pieces fertile for deconstructionist reading. for me mahler (esp #9) - who fastens low brow ideas about film scores (obv this is esp true about adagietto in #5) + almost carnivalesque 3 ring circus performance sounds to his otherwise more deliberate composition (or the insertion of his heartbeat - this biological rhythm - into classical genre).

max i swear i have seen you earnestly attempt to explain deconstruction on one of these threads

haha on several of these threads, probably

most recently on the lupe fiasco thread

kinda more interesting question to me is what music texts would be theoretically productive pieces fertile for deconstructionist reading. for me mahler (esp #9) - who fastens low brow ideas about film scores (obv this is esp true about adagietto in #5) + almost carnivalesque 3 ring circus performance sounds to his otherwise more deliberate composition (or the insertion of his heartbeat - this biological rhythm - into classical genre).

― Mordy, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 2:29 PM (6 minutes ago)

lol i don't think mahler himself anticipated visconti et al

how did lupe fiasco get turned into deconstruction. oh wait was he 'deconstructing' the word 'bitch'? right.

actually, i saw kanye using the tag #thewordbitch and i thought he was trying to cross-reference scritti politti

i ain't sayin' she's a heidegger

obviously the deconstructionistiest ray charles is 'what'd i say'

has anyone done a narrative history of the word 'deconstruction' in the wider culture

i don't think it needs to spend much time in ex-polys and green gartside cuz it's more of a slate.com thing

Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom

Opinion: The Private Sector Built Everything - Private Sector - Fox ...
nation.foxnews.com/private.../opinion-private-sector-built-everythin...
3 Aug 2012 – One of the more amusing distractions of this campaign has been the post-modernist deconstruction of Obama's "you didn't build that" comment.

this is like a HUGE pet peeve for me, admittedly largely b/c complaining about it allows me to show off

but i do find it REALLY annoying when ppl are like "lil b is deconstructing rap music" or "deadwood is a deconstruction of the western"

fashion is a big part of this, most of the daily mail results are from catwalk shows w/ margiela et al

i get a bit pissy about people using post-modernism for post-structuralism but hey language goes where it wants

Hot new looks you'll love | The Sun |Woman
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/.../Hot-new-looks-youll-love.html
1 Aug 2007 – "The Mac is essential - wear it over skinny jeans with flat pumps. ... include the deconstructed look: Wear your skinny grey jeans with a drapey

is 'deconstructed' operating in its high-falutin' way there though or is it just ... you know, deconstructed

it seems parallel to the 'deconstructed' food 'trend'

fashion journalists, even for the sun, have probably been exposed to actual deconstruction rhetoric at some point from some couture types

then they use the term as shorthand and it quickly becomes 't shirt made to look shitty in artisanal way'

like a lexical analog to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_line

i'm taking this thread to concern "deconstruction" of a rather mechanical sort that's only tangentially related to derrida and the subtleties of his theories. like deconstructed clothing or w/e.

deconstruction here = the willful disassembly and reorganization of familiar object-types, so that the results superficially resemble what they're "supposed to be" while at the same time denying some of the expectations that are typically brought to things of that sort. this sort of deconstruction might be said to resemble a tzara/burroughs/gysin-style cut-up, in that it explores the territory generated by reconfiguring the component parts of existing texts, though it depends less on chance for authorship. if the word deconstruction does not seem appropriate to this use, any acceptable other might be substituted.

the italian band starfuckers and its offshot sinistri

starfuckers were the first rock band i thought of in response to this thread, along with US maple and black dice. that's probably because i was introduced to them by a review which described their music as a "deconstruction of rock", but they definitely seem to approach the genre as a box of puzzle pieces without a single correct solution. infrantumi sounds like an album assembled out of pieces left over from other songs, stray beats and whispers jigsawed together by chance as much as intention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3DUpQVBcNg

didn't they have something to do with this lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7v2vFvJWX8

obligatory "deconstruction is a way of reading, not of writing" post, if the point hasn't been made already

I wonder if car dudes get mad about "turbo-charged"

I've always considered Here Comes the Indian by Animal Collective as a deconstruction of the album format. It's sequenced just like a normal rock-album, with the hits a the start (here the drums and harmonies of Native Belle and Hey Light), then a less catchy 'filler' mid section (the abstract drones and soundscapes of Infant Dressing Table, Panic and Two Sails On a Sound), one last hit towards the end (the 6/8 punk of Slippi, as soon as it has fulfilled it's role as a shot in the arm it devolves into a caribean drum-along) and then a moody slow-burner to finish off (yet another weird soundscape, Too Soon). The dynamics of it seems to be completely normal, while the sounds and compositions are quite out there.

I always thought the White Stripes did this sort of thing. They took elements of a style (blues, country, folk metal, punk, garage...) and then presented them in bold minimal strokes.

As Chris Handyside says of the first album; "Minimal to the point of sounding monumental, this Detroit guitar-drums-voice duo makes the most of its aesthetic choices and the spaces between riffage and the big beat."

They took elements of a style (blues, country, folk metal, punk, garage...) and then presented them in bold minimal strokes

Yes but as has been mentioned upthread that has nothing to do with deconstruction.

Pussy Galore felt more "Deconstructionist" to me than White Stripes, blues-wise

As for the term--I feel like there isn't really any Deconstructionist art, but rather art whose creators have read Derrida and do stuff to try to make you aware of that.

It's an easy mistake to make – to literally interpret the word 'deconstruction' and applying it to various forms of music. But I think if you stick to the Derridean meaning, you'll find that music has been deconstructive for quite some time. I think the interpreting sheet music is inherently deconstructive. Various forms of avant-garde composition, jazz and free improv were toying with Derrida's concept of deconstruction before he developed the idea.

Sorry about all the typos.

assume those posts abt anco and the white stripes are jokes? cuz the anco album is just sensibly and traditionally sequenced, and the white stripes were just a two-piece blues rock revival outfit.

Contenderizer always manages to save my sorry arse by understanding and reiterating what I meant to say in a way that actually makes a whole lot more sense, and for that I salute you mister.

Let this thread not get bogged down in theoretical semantics, (although I'm sure many here are very keen for that to happen). Let's also not take 'deconstruct' to mean simply 'experiment'. I'm talking about a very specific method of experimentation here rather than a stringent adherence to Derrida and his theories. Again I think Contenderizer summarises that approach best in his post upthread.

tbf and i don't mean to sound hardman here but you used the term incorrectly in a way that a lot of ppl use it incorrectly. it's understandable, but it's not theoretical semantics to point that out.

Something like Emptyset might apply to this area - sculpting a sort of untechno out of blocks of solid noise rather than filling silence with beats.

Pussy Galore felt more "Deconstructionist" to me than White Stripes, blues-wise

this is OTM, in that pussy galore seemed to present their music as a sort of comment or attack on rock music & culture. same is true of the butthole surfers and sonic youth. in retrospect such stances seem more indicative of american punk's attempt to come to terms with its affection for classic rock than anything truly subversive, but at the time a lot of fans and critics seemed willing to accept distressed rock music as a "deconstructive" antirock gesture.

isn't the idea of stripping down music to specific bare elements more like minimalism?

Fair dos Mordy. Like contenderizer, i'd also seen the term applied (in reviews and articles) to the bands I mentioned in the OP, and felt a thread running through them that I liked and wanted to know more about. Sorry for being confusing.

isn't the idea of stripping down music to specific bare elements more like minimalism?

sure, but reconfigured and repurposing the stripped carcass is something else. the white stripes were blues rock minimalists (of a sort). starfuckers and black dice weren't just stripping down, they were breaking and remaking; calling attention to the wounds, joints and cavities; making the familiar sound strange.

"reconfiguring"

the late great is persuaded that there was neither ever hip nor square and certainly neither term ever had anything to do with jazz

and I'm not really convinced that the kind of irony you're talking about is so superior to the cynical, sarcastic amoeba irony you dismiss. basically to find MFT ironic you have to think it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein which is kind of an adolescent and musically provincial attitude.

no you don't! this is your baggage on the word "irony" - you're hauling a bunch of assumptions and bizarre accusations to the table to stick to your point, which is rooted in zero. " it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein" <--- this exists in your brain, but seems so attackable to you that you place it externally. nobody's saying it, except you.

maybe what coltrane, et al. were trying to do was posit that "hip" and "square" were meaningless signifiers...and moreover that perhaps it was hip TO BE square.

les rallizes denudes = music as event-machine!

i think he might have genuinely enjoyed "my favorite things" and "greensleeves"

greensleeves is a fuckin' jam who fronts on greensleeves???

lol upper m

i think he might have genuinely enjoyed "my favorite things" and "greensleeves"

the only people who contest this are the phantoms in yr brain tho

that's how i usually describe ILXors to my IRL friends

lol

do I know you by an old screenname I can never keep track of who people turned into

I'm singing greensleeves right now

one time in like school or something we were reading the canterbury tales and had to do some sort of performance based on diff stories and I went up in front of the class and sang greensleeves for like 5 mins because I forgot to do my hw

that strat did not work as well in math class

kids do your hw or you'll post itt

you might remember me as v4hid or m00nsh1p. otherwise our only connection is i think some superfans of yours from encinitas.

oh no shit! dude some of yr thoughts on music had a real impact on how I listen way back glad to know which person you are.

maybe what coltrane, et al. were trying to do was posit that "hip" and "square" were meaningless signifiers...and moreover that perhaps it was hip TO BE square.

^^^

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Maple

"who banded together with the intent of becoming the numismatists of rock and roll."

haha, who changed this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ZUYOIh8Wg

also how did this thread digress into a huge debate about coltrane and his ostensible kitschiness?

the usual way--one poster made a claim, two hundred posters registered disagreement.

i just listened to "my favorite things" yesterday with my family and was struck by how straight the reading of the song sounded

my parents who are definitely jazz squares and rodgers/hammerstein fans did not jump out of chairs and go "wtf is this madman doing to this song?!?"

When I read DL's opening post a few minutes ago I immediately thought "Big Flame!" - seems to me they were doing something close to what Dog Latin was on about in the mid-80s, in a post-punk / indie context. The reason I mention this is because they referred to themselves (half-jokingly I assume) as "cubist" - their last single was entitled "Cubist Pop Manifesto" and cubism might be a better comparison for the tendency DL was getting at than deconstruction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KrkJ28c0fk

There's something to watch, not the most "cubist" of their stuff but whatevs.

Cheers Tim, I'll check this out.