Garbage ??? Bleed Like Me
Straight-up raw-power brass-knuckle test-tube modern-pop-radio shit. Like I said earlier, great artists create for a great audience, and as much as I love my independents and my obscurities, there is a potency and a hunger in music like this???music that???s hell-bent on getting heard by everybody???that I cannot get from my beloved failers. There is much to be said for music that challenges and surprises, but there???s also a lot to be said for the compressed telepathy that only really occurs in pop music: just when you want to hear the chorus again, there it is; you want the guitar to come up a little, and here it comes; you need something different, and a chord change flowers. There are worse things and there are better things, but there really is nothing quite like that completed circuit. As calculated and as scrubbed-clean and as fake-dangerous as this record may be, as much as I know it???s mostly a musical science experiment, I cannot deny it.
If I may be allowed to posit a post-Hegelian counter-argument on your point of "creating for an audience." (Because seriously, what's the point in "huge co-sign"-ing and "word"-ing and "truth"-ing and "that's my dude"-ing one another here? It's a bit like knocking on an open door, no?) Besides, I really enjoy reading what you write and, if nothing else, this may allow me to read more.
I can't say I remember anything about Garbage except that I preferred not hearing them, so my theories may be weak as they extend to Garbage specifically. Luckily, my anti-audience argument is not specific to Garbage. Actually, not that I've done it, but I would suppose I have more of those Garbage-type records (popular/audience pleasing) than the "failers" you describe. I'm thrilled to no end by popular music, and this isn't an either/or argument.
Just so there's no misconception that I am coming into this otherwise beautiful thread just to sling mud, let me use your suggestion as an example and add an item to my list of Records That Have Shaped My Adult Life.
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band -
13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (Constellation Records, 2008)
Joan Acocella, in her book,
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, talks about the open relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, specifically their transparent, analytical, objective approach, which was Sartre's design. Sartre was short, had a walleye and a nervous tic that made him roll his eyes and shrug his shoulders constantly. He could not get chicks. Beauvoir, on the other hand, was a
proto-dimepiece. This open relationship, then, served him more than her.
Consider the mother of feminism in a relationship where she not only has to listen to her partner's exploits, but she must analyze her feelings about the dalliance and debrief with Sartre. Not only that, but while she was working on
The Second Sex, Beauvoir was corralling her female students to be Sartre's lovers, a practice she was fired for. Speaking as someone who has undying love for Beauvoir (how can you not love someone with the stones to write a 4 volume autobiography?), it's a lot to reconcile. It demonstrates those beliefs that we can't admit, but that are embodied in our knowledge. Edie Brickell was onto something:
"I'm not aware of too many things / but I know what I know if you know what I mean."
Freud was too, in
Civilization and Its Discontents.
This record,
13 Blues, is kinda my Sartre. It's got it's tics. It complexly delivers both
Nausea and
The Roads to Freedom.
When I heard this record, it wooed me in such a way that the things I knew (the things I was conscious of) were reaffirmed and the things I wasn't aware I knew (my unconscious truths) were evinced in the music. To me, this is the beautiful part of a record, and often the part that is totally overlooked for the other, obvious stuff.
I told a bunch of my friends how much I enjoyed this album, people who I thought would share my enthusiasm, and I was met with wide indifference. My man Dave said, "That's those Godspeed dudes, right?" and kinda stopped there. Zoe, a woman I generally agree with on just about everything said, "those guys with the long songs... it's a bit self-indulgent, don't you think?" Nathan, one of my best friends said he couldn't really get past the voice. "It's terrible, really."
It's like NPR. They want to do a service and expose people to new music, but in order to justify the airtime, a record has to have that smear of banality that we tell ourselves is "wide" appeal. They have to KNOW before they KNOW. There's enough of a need to engage, but not enough to engage in (not to get all Lacanian) The Real.
Speaking of Known Knowns,
a lot of fun was made of Rumsfeld when he made his now classic
briefing where he warned the public of impending terrors that we don't even know we know.
I don't want to attribute too much genius to Rumsfeld, but he pretty much echoed Karl Marx, who, in
Capital, said, "They don't know it, but they are doing it."
Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep.
--Edie Brickell
My problem then, with most of this Garbage-like NPR-type music is that it half steps in hopes of not overstepping. Its message resides in its very abstention from delivering a message. This abstention is sustained by an implicit trust that it's "bringing it" without ever being aware of what "it" is.
What Marx was driving at (and Rumsfeld, hopefully by mistake), I think, is what most philosophy strives for. That is, not to solve problems, but to redefine them.
Marx said, "the ultimate form of belief is deconstructionism." Ideology, at it's core, then, is the faith that behind everything (image, race, religion, nation, class) there is something
human, something individual, that cannot be reduced to such terms. Something that lives to interpret all this incoming data. Something that separates us from one another (and separates us from blocks of clay). Therefore, the most anti-ideological act is to fully identify with an ideology. That is what we fear most in fundamentalism. The elimination of anything individual for the sake of total subservience to the ideology.
The culture, and by extension, the music, of the '60s and '70s was engaged in a pursuit of realizing the unknown knowns. They were looking for something they didn't know they wanted. That's the spirit of radicalism. The results of this are often historicized in the simple terms: "flower power", "black power", "women power", rock stars, stage shows, costumes, "Anarchy in the UK", etc. Rarely do we hear of what Freud called "the uneasiness in culture."
There is no culture. Culture is a living interpretation of everything all-the-time.
It's no surprise that today, the implicit horizon of understanding in our culture--what we are most concerned with--is global catastrophe. It's easier to imagine a death wave or burning sun bringing the end of life than it is to imagine a radical change of capitalism and our daily life. Everyone is preparing for the unknown. What we accept, unlike our generations past, is the capitalist market system, as flawed as it is. Everyone just sort of slumpingly accepts. Or, as Keynes said, "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
This is reflected in all aspects of culture,
film, TV, fashion, music.
If fundamentalism is full identification with an ideology, than these "standard" popular records that try to "bring it" without pursuing anything beyond the Known Knowns really function as their own counter agents. The very thing that causes the illness is itself, the medicine. Fundamentalists, blindly reiterating their ideologies. That is to say, the Garbage-like NPR-type music is a lot like non-alcoholic beer. You
want something without the
thing itself. It's silly. Debord described this as, "a deranged imitation of a deranged life, a production skillfully designed to communicate nothing. It serves no purpose but to while away an hour of boredom with a reflection of that same boredom."
These NPR-type records, for me, neither solve problems (which is easy) nor do they redefine problems (which is much harder). Rather than avoiding the standard traps, these records fall right into them. The kind of shit that
All Songs Considered live for. There is always the desire to establish what is perceived to be
just beyond normal. We want something to wow us without the disruption to our daily lives. I argue this doesn't exist. There is no such thing. Fake Danger isn't Danger Lite, it's, as my girl said, "so not dangerous at all." We
feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
Music amplifies those distant ideas floating around your otherwise meat-and-bone skull. There is an inherent risk in dealing with the unknown. That's not to say that I listen to only dissonant, underground,
well-ignored noise. I actually listen to NPR and a lot of those NPR-type records. In fact, Thee Silver Mt. Zion was actually
featured on NPR in a rather uncomfortable segment, so there's that.
It's not a matter of finding things that are deep, or unknown, or underground, or intentionally weird. Nor is it what soulstrut is obsessed with, being the first on the scene. That's stupid. Music, at it's best, and most modest, should be an individual telling of what it means to be free, rather than a research methodology that previously sold well.
I just can't take these people serious who claim something as "that real shit" when they offer repetitions of the mundane as examples of uniqueness. There are implicit ideological presuppositions which regulate such activity as to make someone claim, "You can't deny this shit bumps." This assertion implicitly contextualizes the spectacle as part of some deeper truth. "
Justin has been a part of some very original music." This misshapen hermeneutical attitude is crucial to fundamentalist ideology. What does it mean for something to be very original?
My wife and I went to see Thee Silver Mt Zion and during one of the exchanges with the audience (when you have a string section and 20-minute songs, you have to allow time for tuning) the singer called Bob Dylan an "asshole" and claimed, after some political debate about the war, that he wasn't trying to get anyone to do anything. Rather, he said, "I'm up here speaking for myself, I'm not telling
you anything."
This is the paradox in music that so many music writers and NPR-types completely miss. And this is the exact reason that when folks talk about the history of punk rock (
as we've done here) it's usually as it relates to The Sex Pistols instead of Crass. They (writers, NPR-types) use the same language and apply the same reference points to two different paradigms. There are bands (most notably, Fugazi) who simply refuse to participate in the "entertainment" aspect of music and, therefore, the writers in that field are left to assume. Those assumptions are usually wrong, and the bands do nothing to correct them, because it doesn't really matter since they operate outside of that sphere.
Making them popular is a resistance against taking them seriously.
Afterwards, my wife and I were walking home discussing the show, and she said it was off-putting to hear the singer slag Dylan. I was of a complete opposite opinion, perhaps because I'd seen Fugazi in the '90s (during the big grunge boom) and watched kids try to get Ian MacKaye to sign an autograph. "Why should
I write my name on
your shirt." It was an insult to the kids. The question challenged presuppositions about the band. To the band, I suspect, asking for an autograph is like knocking on an open door. You're already inside.
"What does it mean to be free?"
The rejection of the premise that is crucial to fundamentalist ideology. When you get out of those known knowns--away from the level at which the obscene logic operates, away from the level of explicit beliefs--and into the territory of the unknown knowns, that is when music functions as something original. I don't this this territory belongs only to the underground, Willie Nelson is probably one of the best examples of what I describe.
The crux of my argument against your "great artists create for a great audience" is that the audience can't really be a viable consideration. Who are they? A "hit" record can't be a hit until it's made, and when it's being made no one has heard it. The space time continuum can't be wrinkled. We've got to wait and see. Record companies spends hundreds of thousands marketing records to lubricate their "audience," but in the end there is still people asking "what does this mean to me?"
There are musicians aware of this paradox who don't make records
for you. Music, for them, is an investigation of some unknown knowns. The music doesn't care what you think. Selling the record is superfluous, but, paradoxically, it's not finished until it's sold (complete circuit). It's more complex than this, obviously, but for the sake of brevity let me just say these records that are made as the result of an individual pursuit have more urge for survival than those made specifically to be "sellable."
For this reason, I will always love Penny Rimbaud more than I love Bob Dylan, even though I probably listen to Dylan more than I listen to Crass.
When I was a teenager Big Black and Ministry displayed the same dynamism to me. As I get older, though, those Jourgensen-related projects are of no interest while I am still engaged with stuff like "The End of Radio." This is, I think, because that which has a Marxist deconstructionism endures while the other just sort of shows it's ass.
Big Black -- The Hammer Party
Like Butch Vig???s clean-up man said: ???I tell myself I will not go / even as I drive there.???
(To continue our discussion from
that other place about Mr. Ego,
this is your chance to confront he who is secretly envious of the male condition. "I think I fucked your girlfriend once... maybe twice, I don't remember....")
It's this specific misunderstanding that typifies what I am talking about. The way you and I have both logged the same hours on
Hammer Party but have come to two different conclusions. Who is right? This immediate coincidence of two extremes is what I enjoy about music. Could we both end up in two disparately different places after
listening to Garbage? I doubt it. I don't think Garbage asks anything of us. It's just a block of clay, sitting there.
I think we have enough records like that. Plenty. They outnumber these others 20:1. "Places no respectable man would be seen."
I realize I've written thousands of words
towards this Silver Mt. Zion record without any real specifics on the record itself. So there you have it, I'm taking up residence on the other side of the NPR coin of music writing. Instead of applying idealist faux-truths surrounded by adjectives to records anyone's mom would like, I am making a ??i??ekian postulate on the pursuit of unknown truths.
It's late, I have insomnia, and the Sex Pistols are still the face of anarchy in the UK while Penny Rimbaud tends the garden at the Dial House.
That Simone de Beauvoir could be subservient to Sartre, who was obviously her subordinate, while writing the touchstone of feminist philosophy has a lot to do with the complexity and way we think about music. When we take the Garbage route, in hopes of honing the absolute musical expression, we obliterate the little bits that make it more than just meat and bone. Ideological fundamentalism perpetrated through sound.
Fundamentalist Rock is the monolithic monologing yawn.
I swear all I ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever believed in was all of us together all alone.
--Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La-Band
