thread for random crit theory bloggers discussing pop music

Drugs in Milk makes a few notes on my Lady Gaga post which points out LG’s articulation of the monstrousness of fame-as-drive. The strange repetitious motion of the drive (the pleasure of the mouth moving and not the food within it, not the object within it following Zupancic) describes the function of fame and yet its ubiquity seems to signal something even more troubling. Referring to fame as ‘the fame’ acknowledges the fact that fame appears as an objectless object (a process – becoming famous) which itself is representable as a collection of objects (the contentment of wealth). Fame functions as the running together of the scopic and invocatory drives (sight and sound) as a doubly partial relation (and only partial relation) to the big Other.

As Zizek concludes in “The Big Other doesn’t Exist”:

“Thus, the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist” (as the efficient symbolic fiction) has two interconnected, although opposed, consequences: on the one hand, the failure of symbolic fiction induces the subject to cling more and more to imaginary simulacra, to sensual spectacles which bombard us today from all sides; while on the other, it triggers the need for violence in the Real of the body itself (cutting and piercing the flesh, or inserting prosthetic objects into the body).”

“Hysteria,” says downtown New York queer performance legend Justin Bond, “is the wave of the future.” Two recent events in the news — the new pat-down policies of the Transportation Security Administration, and the release of Kanye West’s fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — strongly hint that the future may be now. From the wall-to-wall cable TV coverage of the federal government’s latest iniquity to the hoopla over whether to co-sign or berate Kanye for acting out grandiose and abject male fantasies, we are all speaking the hysteric’s discourse now. But if that’s the case, then who are we speaking it to?

Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “abject mother” suggests that young men experience a revulsion toward the maternal body in their process of self-definition; the maternal body marks the boundary of self and not self (Oliver 59). Certainly there is a non-sequitur link between Eminem’s mother and his masculinity, particularly since he seems to need to prove his virility and control by imagining her suffering. In “Kill You,” he uses the word beef (to fight) to refer to his struggles with women and particularly his mother, and the use of the word in the chorus suggests a specific masculine posturing intended to reveal his strength and resolution. However, it is also clear that he has more grievances toward Debbie Mathers-Briggs than is common among adolescent males attempting to break the maternal bond.

This can involve many more focused questions. How did the figure called Rihanna become Rihanna, why do some people worship at this figure while others go and worship other figures, or worship Rihanna in a pardoic, ironic way? Or, maybe better, since I cannot at the moment claim to speak of the process of this woman’s discipline into a kind of performing artist, I can speak of mine. And even better, I can try to make a kind of story of mine in such a way that it encourages others to share their stories of becoming forms of music discipleship. Moreover, I can actually take the time to make of this a case study of the making-up of musical authority–the disciplines of music–musician discipleship.

Base (Why did I write “Base” here and then forget about both it and why?”)

So this is my proposal. And I will leave it as a proposal to begin because of three reasons mainly. First of all, and least of which, the time commitment I can reasonably devote to this more interesting, and hopefully in the long-run more participatory line, is no more than 3-5 paragraphs a week. Second, blog posts ought not be much longer than that anyway most of the time. Text fatigue? But mainly, as it stands with these four paragraphs, it opens a space of time for the off-chance others might like to begin this story-sharing conversation of music and the constitution of selves, economies, and cultures of bodies political and their signs

As far as pop’s adoption of hardcore tropes goes, my favorite might be The Saturdays’ “Missing You,” which renders rave synths enormous and looming, like icebergs crashing together. Its lyrics also contain a fine Lacanian analysis of drive and its relation to objet petit a: “I just want you to be / stuck in this circuit forever / so don’t freak out if I leave / I just miss, missing you.”

Over at Twitter a few good people have been attempting to get the tag #badiourap to be a trending topic, spitting their Badiou inspired rhymes into the Twitterverse. I encourage you to join in if you have a Twitter account and attempt to make this as big as it deserves to be.

favourite languages that u cannot read

8===D~~~

There's no doubt the insterstitial Agambenian flourishes of Klaxons' sophomore Gesamtkuntswerk reveal a numinous poetics not easily divorced from their predecessors in the Rick Robinson canon. But what about Irigaray? The Belgian theorist has long been a favourite, and ultimately the schizoid rave stabs of nurave production legends Simian Mobile Disco aren't easily elided. One thing is certain though - Klaxons' fecund introjection of such tropes is sure to make them crucial listening in the years ahead.

Two recent events in the news — the new pat-down policies of the Transportation Security Administration, and the release of Kanye West’s fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — strongly hint that the future may be now.

http://i.imgur.com/zl5ZT.jpg

ur brekkin my hed.

The interplay of the intertextuality of Western concept, taste, and imagination about the black body as a vanishing frontier in 'Lemme Smang It' is profound. The poetics and hermeneutics of the song make interesting intertextual juxtaposition. Yung Humma and Flynt Flossie resist postcolonial tropes by refusing to strip their protagonists of their phallic symbol.

Are we supposed to guess which of these are real and which are made up?

Google confirms my hunch - of nakhchivan's posts only the Klaxons one is fake, the others are just very special.

Stravinsky represents all the regressive, destructive complications of a solidarity desperate to maintain the illusion of identity. To Adorno, Stravinsky’s music is a calculated mechanism of unintentionality and lightness (differing from Schoenberg’s heavy sound masses) and a mass ornamentation summoning the audience to rally together and annihilate their own subjectivity. Adorno dissects how Stravinsky’s music embodies modernism’s paradoxes, incorporating a romanticized primitivism while yet retaining an impressionist ephemerality of rapidly changing styles. Ritual and sacrifice are significant problems in Stravinsky’s music, and Adorno describes their manipulative function in quelling individual subjectivity, exacerbated by Stravinsky’s mastery of style: a style which is both the culmination of history and also ironically its own nihilistic undoing. He notices the ubiquitous trend when he suggests that Stravinsky unwittingly strikes the same nerve as the psychologist C. J. Jung: “The search for musical equivalents to the “collective unconscious” prepare for the transition to the establishment of the regressive community as a positive achievement” [121]. The same regressive impulse extends to the false identification with nature in music: “The pressure of reified Bourgeois culture incites flight into the phantasm of nature, which then ultimately proves to be the herald of absolute oppression. The aesthetic nerve quivers to return to the stone age” [113]. Almost unflinchingly, the reader freely associates Stravinsky’s ritualist spectacle with reprises of the same in contemporary culture (Lady Gaga’s primitive masks embedded in a stylized futurism and the neo-pastoralism now prevalent in ‘experimental’ drone and electronic folk music, not to mention precious back-to-the-land motifs in contemporary art).

that is a fairly faithful skim of adorno on stravinsky, though i like the 'Almost unflinchingly, the reader freely associates Stravinsky [with Gaga]' as if that were the most obvious comparison in the world

Sometimes I enjoy guessing "which piece of pop culture has been cited as an example of Bakhtin's concept of polyphony today?" and then googling to find out if I'm right. I always am.

Yet the „ordeal of aporia‟ installed by the doublebind is, Derrida argues, the very condition of analysis, and
indeed of anything happening at all. It is that „endless and bottomless divisibility‟, that resistant residue, that
energises the search for origins or solutions by indefinitely postponing them. Without it, no event,
responsibility or decision would take place. „Not even analysis‟, writes Derrida. „Not even the place‟ (37).

3. Just (Radiohead)
Bartleby, like Hannah (so far) never does speak up. He never does „open his mouth properly‟ and „yield‟ to
his interlocutors‟ rage for explanation, to misquote the opening quote from Freud. But the man in the music
video for Just, by the English band Radiohead, does yield.6 Lying in the middle of the street, he finally gives
up the secret; gives in to the increasingly agitated and hostile demands of the passers-by who gradually
assemble around him (including a policeman, another man of the law), demanding to know why he is lying
there. (But note: the „dialogue‟ in the video is conveyed by subtitles: viewers do not hear any of the words;
they read them. And they are not the words that Thom Yorke, the frontman of Radiohead, is singing as he
watches the drama unfold from an upstairs window). Possible

How, then, might revolution exist within the gap? If the disequilibrium, the difference between the signifying and signified series, the difference between South Africa and the glamorous lifestyle alluded to by Jay Z, encourages revolution, how does this take form? Deleuze states that the two series, though seemingly disjunctive, actually communicate and coexist. This coexistence encourages the development and distribution of singular points (51). Sense, is thus, according to Deleuze, distributed in each series. The singularity, for Deleuze, circulates between the two series, thus encouraging displacement in relationship to itself. Thus, the empty space or displacement becomes an esoteric word. But, this still leaves the question, which I am struggling with: How exactly does an esoteric word encourage revolution? I feel as though if this can be deciphered, than the import of considering what stoicism encourages, might be identified, and, furthermore, utilized.

favourite languages that u cannot read

― seminal fuiud (NickB), Friday, February 11, 2011 2:11 PM (2 hours ago)

this entire site belongs here: http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/

idk 'not saying' that this shit is a priori terrible but s/thing abt the nexus of post-struc & kinda 'theoretically aware' popkult like gaga is like a honeypot to every shitty grad student ever

I'm amazed at how generally lucid these theory takes on music are compared to if you did the same thing with visual art. this doesn't annoy me nearly as much as when art historians go all theory

Congratulations Tim you win new ILM board description. (PS who is it right now?)

1. state something either crushingly obvious or obviously trollish

2. dress it up in reheated marxism and 5 dollar words

3. ????

4. PROFIT

To be fair it works better for TV or film, mostly because "polyphony" has a separate non-crit theory meaning in music anyway. I did this for The Wire yesterday and came up spades, but that was pretty obv.

Gaga theorists get a lot of mileage out of Bakhtin's stuff on the carnival, quell surprise.

ya but it' crushingly obvious stuff

idk i just think of /bakhtinian/ as a highflown pejorative

on carnivalesque, yeah, I'd agree. Not sure how polyphony or heteroglossia could be pejoratives highflown or otherwise.

no the word bakhtinian, used as shorthand for carnivalesque, demotic/bawdy/'hebephrenic' as big theodor wiesengrund would have blogged had he lived long enough to own a macbook

that one that beings with "hysteria" is by Tavia Nyong'o -- he was in the last Best Music Writing book, and read this piece ("Touch the Junk") at one of the events for it -- and it's terrific, in my personal opinion-thing

ya i wouldn't discount it tout court, but 'Two recent events in the news — the new pat-down policies of the Transportation Security Administration, and the release of Kanye West’s fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — strongly hint that the future may be now.' is pretty bad, the usual mistaking of the contingent/marginal/random for some great rupture in the libidinal economy

there was a really good piece on lady gaga written a couple of years back, on how she's not particularly original, watered down bowie, madonna, etc... bit rockist but well thought out, v.smart, but not in an stuffy, academic way. can't find it now. by an american guy, iirc.

ha, something i have been thinking about a lot lately is the way that stuff usually presents as groany to readers but is also exactly the kind of proper Lead articles are expected to have.

xpost i mean the opening-thesis thing, lead-wise. music-writing seems to work better without bold leads, but whatchagonnado

http://i.imgur.com/1vKC2.jpg

http://www.music-dash.co.uk/siteimages/covers/editors05.jpg

there was a really good piece on lady gaga written a couple of years back, on how she's not particularly original, watered down bowie, madonna, etc... bit rockist but well thought out, v.smart, but not in an stuffy, academic way. can't find it now. by an american guy, iirc.

― http://i56.tinypic.com/xnsu1g.gif (max arrrrrgh), Friday, February 11, 2011 11:31 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

i know camille paglia looks a little mannish but come on

damn

Yeah nabisco, music writing is more like:

"Then Steve ordered another pie, and as I sat there watching him eat it piece by piece I couldn't help but feel that we were not the intended audience for Born This Way's purported carnivalesque splendour..."

There's no doubt that Mumford and Sons will have been informed by the great Russian philogist's revification of late mediaeval insurrectionary peasant pageantry, but lead troubador Marcus Mumford will have thought to combine such insights with the highly-wrought melodicism of Eel Pie Island based scamps Larrikin Love. But what about Hard-Fi? The Slough based Cioran fans will have been riled by such 'cataleptic chicanery', and it remains to be seen how they will see fit to respond to what many listeners will have seen as a studied provocation by the Kings School alumni.

phiLOLogist amirite

There was not a word of that Mumford and Sons paragraph I understood.

http://www.elibrary.az/docs/wtn.pdf

lol

The flora of the Autonomous Republic is richer than the other botanical-geographical regions of Azerbaijan. Its territory is not so large but in this region we come across 2963 speices of superioresplants, they assemble in 880 generics and 168 families.

There are 29 species of fish which concern bony fish classes in the rivers and lakes of the Autonomous Republic.

Try telling that to Noel Gallagher. He will have decided his dinner already, and no persuasion would see him change his mind.

this thread is amazing

The aural sign of 50 Cent – his lyrics and vocals – consists of stories of drug dealing, violence and gun play that would seem just as hyperreal to the album’s intended audience (Perkins calls it “white-bread America”) as Disneyland. It should be noted that 50 Cent’s intended audience is largely the same as Disneyland’s – middle class white America – and the purpose of both is the same; to convince people of the “fiction of the real.
— Me. I came across this old paper from 2004 (shit!) on 50 Cent and Baudrillard. KEEPING IT UNDERGRAD!

(that is a quote btw)

Consider that all images of Björk and Acker are remixes of remixes, and that the artists function mainly as conduits for cultural application of identity; thus, the images are points of struggle, manifestations of Donna J. Haraway’s “cyborg” model, particularly of her second “leaky distinction” between the human/animal organism and the technological construct, where “machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”

It is enough for us to say that dubstep artists is only a name for musical components of the subject “dubstep music,” in such a way that the genius of openings (the thematic continuities of arrhythmia) and that of points (the temporal discontinuities of sampling) are both incorporated into the same subject. Without at least this, it couldn’t be proven that the dubstep-event was really a caesura in the world of “dance music at the end of the 20th century,” because its consequences could have been too narrow or incapable of treating difficult strategic points with success. The local antinomy, internal to the subject, of dubstep constitutes the essential proof of dubstep just as in the case of the subject that Charles Rosen has named the “classical style,” the names “Mozart” and “Beethoven” prove with a quasi-mathematical rigor that what drew itself inaugurally under the name “Haydn” was an event.

next level

real badiou, rmxd?

At the beginning of "Get Me Bodied", Beyonce announces a cryptic set of numbers amid some seriously spacey-sounding reverb: "9... 4... 8... 1." Ominous pause. "... B Day." Now, as it turns out, this set of numbers refers to the day of Beyonce's birth: the 4th of September, 1981. This, it would seem, is her birthday - literally, birth-day, the day of her birth, her B Day. So perhaps what the phrase 'get me bodied' refers to is the incarnation of the godly power of Beyonce in the form of flesh. Previously she'd been just an immanent force in the universe, but what the B Day marks is the becoming-flesh of Beyonce, her getting a body.

omg why r u doing this why am i clicking this

If, as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying, everything is a duplication of something else, then perhaps everything is postmodern, in which case nothing is really postmodern except for the entire gestalt of our world. If the "post" in postmodern signifies novelty, and everything is postmodern, then perhaps novelty is not possible, perhaps nothing can ever again be "new."

Durst continues to scream "BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BRING! THAT! FUCKING! BEAT! BACK! BACK! YOU SUCKER! FUCKING SUCKER!" until a bandmate intercedes, yelling "Fred, shut up, alright? This is me telling you to shut up! Shut up! Shut—FRED, SHUT THE FUCK UP!" The manner in which Durst's screaming continues beyond the end of the song, and actually works against the song as his band mate must silence him, illustrates the paradox inherent in the use of linguistic excess by new metal vocalists. Out of a desire to break free of the bonds of languages which new metal vocalists feel are assimilating them, they strive to use their own languages or use language in their own way. "Pollution" demonstrates that, despite helping to create a sense of originality and authenticity, these efforts produce utterances that forge no meaningful connection with their surroundings.

just raised the game itt

'then perhaps novelty is not possible, perhaps nothing can ever again be "new."'

huh? korn already disproved this by introducing bagpipes into headbanger vernacular.

now i have this mental image of baudrillard and korn sitting at a senate hearing, conferring for a moment, and asserting those things

"so you're alleging that novelty is not possible?"
whisper whisper whisper
"yes, senator, that is our current position"
etc.

http://i.imgur.com/ybRb3.jpg

"Deftones' Chino Moreno and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, as well as Jonathan Davis, increase the ferality of their performance by using emotive elements such as squeals, moans, whimpers, sobs, and bodily elements such as pants, snarls, and sounds of the throat, teeth, tongue, and lips. Here, "[t]he body in the voice, or embodied voice, is celebrated for exceeding rational meaning through a tactile 'grain' and jouissance (in Roland Barthes' terms) or a corporeal signifiance (as Julia Kristeva puts it)" (Nehring 131). These elements make the music far less rational-sounding than previous emotive angry music, and are indicative of an increased confusion induced by postmodernity."

as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,
as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying,

big theodor wiesengrund

taxonomy of bigness finally exceeds my intellectual grasp.

i could maybe potentially copy and paste some stuff from my masters dissertation here, but i think just putting myself in this context would amount to some kind of emotional suicide.

When doing a crit theory honours thesis and then masters thesis I considered tackling pop culture but immediately saw in my mind's eye my future self pointing and laughing.

now i have this mental image of baudrillard and korn sitting at a senate hearing, conferring for a moment, and asserting those things

"so you're alleging that novelty is not possible?"
whisper whisper whisper
"yes, senator, that is our current position"
etc.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, February 11, 2011 8:46 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

that one deserves linking for posterity

http://postmoderndays.blogspot.com/2005/04/postmodernism-simulacra-and-new-heavy.html

We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the "inside
out" (‡ l'envers), of the "turnabout,", of a continual shifting from top to
bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties,
humili- actions, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. Mikhail Bakhtin

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer.
It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way.
Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful.
But nevertheless it is inevitable. Martha Graham

Can you meet me halfway, right at the borderline?
That's where I am gonne wait for you
I'll be lookin' out night and day
Took my heart to the limit, and this is where I stay. Black Eyed Peas, Meet me Halfway

Meudon, 1912: Serge Diaghilev, impresario of Ballets Russes, in a rage enters the splendid villa on the outskirts of Paris, with one intention: to disturb and forever end the events unfolding in the villa's surrounding garden. Here, he knew he would find his lover, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, almost naked, dancing in the dubious private audience of Auguste Rodin. Diaghilev’s infamous jealousy, history books inform us today, is the reason that only one 19 cm large draft of the bronze sculpture was delivered to posterity. A second, more apocryphal version of the affair, emerged 76 years later in the publication of Jean Cocteau's diaries. "The statues ended", the diary states, when Nijinsky in his second meeting with the artist, "turns around and Rodin, fly open, is masturbating.”

The Rodin-Nijinsky connection offers yet a third narrative regarding the relation of desire and art: This time evolving around the sculptor's relentless, aesthetic quest for sculptural movement and the dancer's goal to make movement sculptural. This is another story of desire, straining and bending boundaries along the lines of their reciprocal becoming, desiring to possess each other, be like one another, and exploring of the body as tool to unravel the energy, passion and ecstasy common to human experience.

The religious motif is notable in both Mariah Carey and George Clinton – even if in one case it revolves around blind faith (faith in the DJ and in ‘a song’ – in the sirenic seduction of art), in the other around scientific knowledge (which, however, is put to the procreative purposes of a sex machine). This religious tonality is not unusual for pop music. In an unexpected twist to the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, Derrida has suggested that, far from religion and science being opposed, ‘technoscience’ supports a discourse of ‘salvation’: the two forces (faith and knowledge, precisely) ‘always have made common cause, bound to one another by the band of their opposition’.

"The procreative purposes of a sex machine"

http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/zizekgaga-communism-knows-no-monster/

Zizek showing the kids how it's done.

im at birkbeck

*hangs head in shame*

i hate comedians

haha

Comic gold.

hope a lot of #monsters do go and get rowdy on all the assorted bloggers/communist apologists when gaga fails to show

Like Syd says, “words are words.” At the most minimal level, they are words, made up of letters, that our society has decided means something. Who is really to say that a table is a table, when you think about it? Jacques Derrida is the father of the deconstructionism movement, and believed that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticizes the very language needed to explain it. So, is Odd Future taking language and meanings down to the most minimal level? At the very least, they are kind of making me reevaluate what is popular and why, especially with their recent mainstream appearances.

On the other hand, it’s completely possible, and more probable, that I am still trying to justify all the money spent on tuition at a private college. Maybe it’s a combination of both, but finding a real-world application from something I’ve learned in an English class has happened like two times, at most. I think Odd Future just likes to yell controversial shit, and try to scare people for the fun of it. Like Syd alludes to, people don’t need to keep listening if it offends them. It’s like people have an unconscious need to be offended, which feeds Odd Future even more. And now, as I end this little piece, I’m more confused than ever. Modernism, along with deconstructionism, structuralism, and even postmodernism, were not my friends, so revisiting them hasn’t been super fun, but I nonetheless wanted to explore the similarities between modernism and Odd Future.

Who is really to say that a table is a table, when you think about it?

i know someone who begs to differ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4I-8bOJ30g

whoever that person is they do not qualify as a 'crit theory blogger'

we are all crit theory bloggers noooow

I nonetheless wanted to explore the similarities between modernism and Odd Future.

*barf*

i dunno, i had this whole long thing i was working on ages ago about adorno and left 4 dead, i used to think k-punk was occasionally readable, i don't think the crossover of Theory and pop is necessarily unfertile ground?

no but odd future certainly is

stfu, blogger

i did see someone's doctoral thesis on radiohead in waterstone's the other day tho, and mentally went COME ON

(xp)

kinda disappointed w/ the odd future theory glosses hence that rather endearing lil apologia excerpted above

twitter/tumblr & other cultural outpourings = pharmakon
'yes but see their music is engineered by a lesbian' = objet petit-a

*doffs cap*

Bikes-R-Better 2 points 1 month ago

I will attempt to convey what I think feminism might look like. French feminist Luce Irigaray suggests that we live in a world constructed by phallocentric discourse. Miley Cyrus is a clear example of a construction of the phallic mechanisms. She is a commodity to be traded for propagation of relationships between men. Think about those that own the record companies. Irigaray suggests that anything created within the phallocentric discourse that we are all, at this point, living within is in itself phallocentric. In order to transcend this discourse we must attempt to return to a pre-verbal state in order to find what is essentially feminine. To try to represent that which is inherently feminine with a system of language which is inherently phallocentric will only convey an idea of the feminine as it relates to the masculine, and not as it is in and of itself. As someone who identifies as a heterosexual white male, I approach these ideas with humility and an open mind. If my views seem in anyway myopic, obtuse or misinformed, please help me to clarify.

r e d d i t