Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.

My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.

Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.

Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.

Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?

---

Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...

EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.

a few small, important questions

Music criticism is a baffling thing. Having written reviews, the questions of objectivity and taste are always paramount. As it approaches lay audiences, what else can be said beyond an opinion? How can there be equal measures of education and elucidation about the music? At what point does criticism stop and theoretical analysis begin? Must criticism defend itself by means of observing musical works in a radically lucid analysis to justify whether a work is “good,” “bad,” or “neither?”

espionage (the multichannel way)

I have finally started the "numbers station" project, though it's likelier than not that "numbers station" will not be the final title of the work resulting from the efforts.

I've been scouring the AM and Public Service Broadcasting bands on a 1970 model Panasonic analog radio (that doubles, with a plug-in mike and a squelch controller, as a one-man public address and/or singalong machine) since around 10 PM trying to find suitably weird material to add into the piece -- primarily, obscure broadcasts or static patterns that seem out of place, which is the very essence of a numbers station shout-out.

Of course, I would probably have to explain what a numbers station is. From the end of WWII up until the late 1980s, there were a great many broadcasts in the extrema of AM broadcast bands in various countries, and moreso on shortwave radios, that are completely unexplainable or at least easily explained, Occam-style, as too weird to be part of the aural standard. Occasionally, things like "ATENCION!" or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would interrupt the music or dead air or sideband-rich static and be followed by - in mundane cases - a string of numbers read aloud by a nondescript voice or left-field sonic signals - chimes, gongs, shouts of "ACHTUNG!", and repetitive patterns of numbers that are all, apparently, unbreakable. One extreme example is a three-minute long music-box rendition of a 1930s German pop-tune called "Swedish Rhapsodie" that is followed by the voice of a small child, possibly a young girl, reading an immensely long string of numbers in German. Yet another is a twelve-minute long rapid-fire statement of numbers in Romanian. As you could probably guess, much of these were set up, broadcast from nondescript locations -- brutalist office blocks controlled by the Stasi or KGB or someone's house with a HAM radio -- and the messages relayed at exact times, and only once, on a particular frequency, so that the listener (or "operative") could get the message, translate it, and carry out the instructions. Much like the MacGuffin in The Lady Vanishes, but far more sinister in nature, especially given such messages have occurred just before such pivotal moments as the coup attempt against the Soviet Union in the early '90s or within days of the Berlin Wall falling.

It stands to reason that this might just be an Eastern European trend, but this is not at all the case. Radio Havana has regularly been intercepted as broadcasting secret messages to assumed operatives in the US, and Numbers Stations are in fact more prevalent now than they were 40 years ago. Recordings have been made in the past ten years of numbers station broadcasts in multiple countries throughout the world, far afield from the Eastern Bloc epicenter. (This may explain why the FCC keeps narrowing the available "airwaves" the American people can use and why HAM radio operations is all but illegal now in the United States.) Nonetheless, these eerie, cryptic messages keep getting repeated, and for persons alive during the height of the Cold War and during the nadir-pinnacle of 1960s Soviet control in Eastern Europe, these broadcasts are chilling reminders of quiet, unseen, and ramification-unknown governmental operations existing just below the surface of society, just below the surface of ethical legitimacy, all just below the radar of the everyday people. They're prescient reminders today, too, that worldwide alliances, governmental and idealistic transparency, and communal trust are at the very least in the realm of fantasy, and even more sinister, reminders that as our society continues a push into making every citizen a form of technocrat glued to a computer, there is still plenty of technology out there being used for purposes of ambiguous morality, technology once in every household, technology now slowly being forgotten and relegated away from the control of the citizenry. Think about it - when was the last time, especially if you are under 40, you turned on a radio (never mind an analog radio) in your house that was not a live-stream website -- or at the very least, not on the FM dial?

So, I scanned the ends of the dials for probable signs of covert operations but all I ended up encountering were gospel stations, low-power talk radio stations from Alabama, Louisiana, and Maryland, a few religious stations, Art Bell, and a whole hell of a lot of static. I would sit on a frequency or band for roughly ten to fifteen minutes before trying my luck. Being a Friday night, and a clear one, I thought I'd be able to luck out and get at least Radio Havana or something from Fort Bragg or Camp Lejeune, but alas, I was thwarted. I remember staying up late at night with this same radio when I was in my early teens, focusing on the weather broadcast band on PSB, and then trying to listen "between the cracks" of station bands to see if I could hear the various "ghosts in the broadcasts" -- modulated voices just below the threshold of cognition -- and try to figure out if these were friends or foes...and all the while being creeped out of my mind, fascinated, as though I was hearing a code I couldn't decipher that could have been anything from "Spy: check your mail" to "go commit [atrocious deed here]."

I have found a repository of numbers stations recordings, gleaned from over 50 years of home radio listeners across the world plugging their radios into tape recorders or computers, and while a fair amount of what is there is rather mundane -- how many times can we reiterate the trope of heavy static and sidebands with a barely-audible voice repeating numbers in Spanish or Russian? -- some of what exists (in this library, anyhow) is damn near terrifying. Of course, there's the aforementioned, postmodern-foreboding music box with the child (!) repeating the secret code of numbers; one of a cool, collected woman's voice repeating, as close to a robotic fashion as I've ever heard, a short series of numbers in clear American English; heart-sinking messages following the "Lincolnshire Poacher" in what is clearly a voice owned only by an Iowan attempting to speak German; and, in probably the most bizarre example, a string of English numbers superimposed on a broadcast of German numbers superimposed on a broadcast of Russian numbers, all of which sound like they were cut and pasted on magnetic tape or primitive LPC technologies, which meant someone spent a lot of time creating this one-time use message and wanted to make damn sure it could never be broken except by the recipient, which says quite a bit about the importance of the message. And, of course, there are also the messages broadcast by NATO and the UN -- the "good guys" use the same methods.

A lot of these materials encapsulate a fair amount of, certainly, strong rhythmic material, from which I can hear numerous motivic and ostinato devices arising, and in a few cases, the static and sidebands in some of the material is so rich and dense that, given the proper treatment, I have a narrative and an underpinning in one fell swoop given the breadth and beauty of the resulting spectrum after some cleanup. It seems as though a lot of the elements for this piece are already germinal in the source materials, and all that needs to be done is let the materials' essences gestate so I can cull and pull and twist and lay this out and let it dry and see if needs any more work.

I plan to, at this point, record myself, in somewhat noisy environments, reading my own series of numbers -- in English (with a Kent accent, as much as possible), Spanish, and Swedish -- and I am trying to get recordings of numbers read in Russian and German (I welcome volunteers - for real, this time). I am also working on creating spectra and rhythmic patterns, largely based off of "radio-ish" sine chains and AM swoops, to bring out of the source material textures, and I'm wondering the feasibility of using some pre-recorded snippets of music here and there to simulate the workings of an old, analog radio. There are also sinister bits here and there: perhaps some guerilla field recording and some trick recording is in order, and it may be time to break out the "creepy" and really hammer down the ghost in the broadcast with my own forms of glossolalia-via-microphone. I have a general structure for the piece in place, but right now I'm simply sifting through all of the available alternatives and potentialities before I start layering things in the sequencer.

I'm looking forward to this project, honestly. onethousandwords is a decent piece, but pretty quickly wrought - and somewhere between musique concrete and a soundscape; there's no actual narrative structure to it. basking in the copper look was an experiment for another piece that I'll return to later. So, this will be my first "real" electroacoustic undertaking since contact clusters, or "the piece that got performed a lot in 2008-2009 and almost won Bourges but didn't" -- and it feels good to be working on something I really enjoy and am inspired by, and doubly good that it isn't "dissertation" -- which still needs to be fully completed before I can get too wrapped up in this piece.

I'll keep you posted.

we don't know each other (and we don't want to)

It's always baffling to me how quickly, once a plane lands, practically everyone reaches for their cell phones or gadgets and gizmos. It's the last thing I think about. There seems to be this desperate urge for authenticity: separated from terra firma by five or six miles of vertical lacunarity, separated from loved ones, friends, animals, flora, we reach for the very first thing that reconnects us to the world we know, our selected cocoon, the safety net and support system we hold close to ourselves, and, in some cases, guard and protect -- and maybe are even addicted to.

And yet, airplanes are completely silent, save the roar of the engines. People shunt themselves into seats, determined to survive the interceding hour or five between boarding and disembarquement, attached to everything around them, and always secretly disappointed each time they turn off their mobile device or gadget of whatever stripe. The roar of the body language says all: people hunched over a book, or busied with something business-related; arms folded, head down (or tilted far up, as though sneering from 35,000 feet would be assisted by tipping one's nose up a further few inches), legs crossed, compressing and hugging oneself, really, sheltering oneself from the audacious pursuit of human interaction and connection with perfect strangers, shuttering oneself and pretending the world around them is the only one they know, resigning themselves to ignore the potential richness or mundanity extant in the people surrounding them.

Yet we are so segmented, fragmented as a society. We have lost social graces and dignities and have become cool, reptilian, avoidant. We yearn for meaningful human connections, laud them when we think they arrive, and bemoan their absence or loss as though -- and perhaps rightly -- we have lost a family member. We do not know how to say hello, to be pleasant to each other. Is there a meaninglessness in saying hello or thank you to a complete stranger? Perhaps; there may be a naïveté here, true, but to persist in an environment where any sort of greeting or conversation -- even if it is wholly in passing and consists of nothing more than a word or two and therefore deprived of cerebral, academic, or deep spiritual or profoundly intellectual meaning -- is avoided, loathed, perhaps, or even feared (due in part to the righteous paranoia drilled into us for aeons) and is tantamount to slicing out our tongues, poking out our eyes, and treppanning our eardrums. In short, we exile ourselves to our personal Colonnus with greater sensory deprivation, and we furthermore lose the ability to find connections, find bonds, find the pleasance that is generally inherent in human beings. Everyone wants to fall in love; everyone wants to have friends and make friends. Yet we don't know how to talk to one another; we don't know how to explore the experiences of others in diplomatic fashions; we don't know how to be anything but guarded, isolated, against persons that are ostensibly strangers, all the while conveniently forgetting that at some point in the past all persons we know, love, desire, explore, and long for were all foreign to us, individual entities comprising part of a larger amorphous mass of humanity that we may or may not have sat next to on an airplane from Dallas to Chicago.

This morning, in friendly old Austin, I was procuring some coffee for myself at a coffee bar in the airport, bleary eyed and groggy. I ordered, and the relatively slowhanded barista staff took their time filling my paper vase with an artwork of jitters. On my left, a small-eyed white male in a suit and top coat, most likely a mid-level functionary for a company who at one time left his MBA program idealistic (in the Keynesian sense) that his service would become fruitful and his service would benefit the greater good of his company. About 35 to 40, closely-cropped hair. My mind wanders back briefly, thinking about a few people I love back home, thinking about the growing to-do list for the week. I see the barista put a tall cup of coffee on the counter; by this time, I'd traded places with the businessman. I reach for the cup, gently feel the scald potential as my fingers touch the paper. I hear a growly, surly "hey, that's mine!" in my right ear, and the fellow yanks up his cup, grasps his carry-on, a rotting American Tourister rollaway, and starts walking to the other side of the coffee bar for accoutrements. In a good humor, admitting I'd made a mistake, I say "sorry, guess I was too eager." Unaccustomed, perhaps, the guy wheels around and glowers at me momentarily with a half-angry, half-shocked look. It was bad enough I made an error and thought the coffee was mine; it was only worse when I admitted my fault and tried to establish a connection with him in order to simply apologise for making such a small, stupid error. How dare I break the perverse social contract that people aren't supposed to speak to one another in public if they don't already know each other! How dare I make a reversible error and attempt to make amends! This certainly does not fit into the schema of most people, and for me to doubly dissolve the bonds of this again perverse social contract is anathema to the lonely, isolating experiences so many people live daily, if not even look forward to. I wonder how many people who travel a lot for a living actually look forward to, seek out the pleasure in, checking into their hotel room for one, a room with the ability to be pitch black with the flip of a switch and flick of the wrist to close the drapes, a room with the ability to be silent -- sensory deprivation after being surrounded by persons for so many hours. I wonder how many people are physically repulsed by the thought of human contact simply by virtue of not knowing how to connect with others; I wonder how many people are loathsome of being surrounded by people simply because the isolation and fear of the other and Other deepens and becomes more pervasive and all-encompassing the more one is mired in it.

What do we have to lose? What are we so afraid of? Is it territoriality of some sort -- somehow asserting a yell of "hey, that's mine" in terms of space (which is shared, anyhow, and even private space is not "private"), or "hey, that's mine" in terms of somehow insuring and ensuring the continued integrity of our personhood? Does speaking to a perfect stranger somehow devalue us because it acknowledges the existence of another person and therefore increases their value? Are we that territorial over who we are that we are simultaneously petrified of invading someone else's personhood space by speaking to them, addressing them, acknowledging that they exist? Or are we afraid of divesting ourselves of what makes us fundamentally ourselves -- are we afraid that by initiating contact and perhaps engaging in conversation, perhaps even sharing life experiences to some degree, we lose control over ourselves? AH. That must be it. Certainly, there's more to it and no one answer (except in simple arithmetic) is ever fully correct, but this age-old, rather obvious conceptualisation of control and power. Foucault and Bauman write a lot about societal fragmentation, segmentation, and the concepts and praxis of control and power and how they are lorded over populations, loved and feared and needed by groups, shunned and hated by persons on the individual level while existing within the paradox of the social construct of total obedience and conformity to the societal order. "Society must be defended," indeed. But what is a society that doesn't speak? What is a society that validates, celebrates, even expects, a form of control where its individuals are forbidden from even making contact with each other, even for slight seconds? What is a civilization that refuses to acknowledge itself?

No civilization at all, or, the American marketplace of terrified loneliness and solipsism that is the early 21st Century.

on struggles

It occurs to me that the general consensus of the world is that the inhabitants of this Earth enjoy the conceptualization and the actualization of the struggle. So much so, that this enjoyment of the struggle precludes (and would ultimately negate) any sort of true, total resolution of that struggle.

Were the world citizenry to spontaneously achieve a Utopian idyll overnight, would not there be a nigh-instantaneous Hegelian return to something to fill the absence, a return to a grand-mal dialectic for some/any/all arbitrary reason[s]? If the human-wrought phenomena of the world met some sort of singularity, would human physics interfere and re-demand some sort of overarching jihad in some other avenue of lived experience? While there can be no darkness without light, and vice versa, there cannot not exist the inbetween realm: dawn, dusk. Tepid. Fluid yet solid. This is the murk the human race seems to be caught in, the quagmire in which we seem all too happy to occupy. Some repetitive, circular, perpetual twilight or dawn of our ideas and ideals as gods to be worshiped, striven for, fetishized. We obviously see no limit on the number of, and scope of, our perennial (or self-created, self-designated perennial) struggles, so why stop reifying the Big War of Ideas? Why stop being a sycophantic tribe blindly dancing about the ceremonial fire? Why not be phallocentric in the sheer quantity of struggles? Bigger is better. More is more. We will always find opposition, even in the face of a singular homogeneity - by virtue of the fact that it is, indeed, a unified One that leaves no room for any sort of Other. Pluralism is unattainable so long the collective end-result ideal is a hegemony of Many, a homogeneity of Heterogeny. Any struggle met with resolution can only be resolved by struggling against the resolution, can only be met with the construction of the Differance and the reshaping and re-placing of a power structure.

Any decision made by human minds/hands immediately casts out into the world its opposite effect. This creates a vapor which crystallizes and solidifies as The Struggle. By making a decision, formulating a singularity, we immediately and (im)perceptibly create a new opposition. We create the opposition against people, ideas, the world itself. By eating meat, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of environmental damage, increased world poverty and hunger, spiritual and ethical injustices. By being vegetarian, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of economic negligence or callousness, a complex of perceived (be it real or arbitrary) moral superiority, creation of the opposition to the opposition, other forms of environmental damage not shared by meat-eating...

Struggles group together. They seem to flock together, as birds, as coordinated sounds. Each one cause, struggle, jihad, seems to boost and beget any number, perhaps infinite, of closely-related phenomena, and the chain of relations created from association of struggles to one another ends up dragging the discourse of disparate ideas - say, the relatedness of carbon cap-and-trade in Montreal to women's rights in Saudi Arabia to evangelical movements in Sumatra - into a sort of loosely-woven, yet coherent, net, a net that catches all things buried/open at the hypo/epi/hypercenter which on one hand polarizes and radicalizes the root opposition movements yet on the other hand becomes a Klein bottle net, catching all yet nothing, allowing the arguments to sluice through since the collective effect of this net is to catch only itself and the entire chain of ideological discourse of present day Earth.

Crossroads or a standstill.

This Bear Will Hunt

Being on the Outer Banks in November or December presents a hermetic world, a sphere where memory and deep solitude are encapsulated, the spray from a grey and windblown sea acting as flakes for this microcosmic snowglobe, the cold, breaking water the Outside World beyond the thin ribbon of sand. The hand that shakes the world every so often is that thick, humid, cold southwest wind, a once-warm Gulf Stream breeze chilled by the Pamlico Sound, the salt content reduced but still piquant in the nose. There is a grit in the breeze, perhaps fine sand or crystallized salt, or just the needling of remembering pin-pricking the cheeks as the wind sweeps over and down the dunes, disappearing into the foam and gun-metal-grey clouds, the horizon at some hours an indistinct ash color. There is a loneliness, but a comfortable loneliness. There is a blustery world afoot, but softened by the safe distance from the water and a sturdy coat. Only the face is vulnerable, but the head can always be turned in the other direction to avoid direct confrontation with the elements. Peering into the junction of sky and water sets the mind into a well-controlled nuclear reaction, one thought engendering another begetting another developing another until the end-product of remembering, re-imagining, and re-romanticizing a subject arises, with the rest of the world of thought safely contained by the skull, the most important control rod of the human race.

Or, this is what happened about the eighth time I listened to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest all the way through, which came around 3 in the morning several days ago. This is a review long overdue, perhaps; my knowledge of this band is limited aside from The Yellow House, which was an offering I could have taken or left as it became something that played into the Brooklyn-cum-Montreal world of prep-school indie. Veckatimest may very well be the best album I have heard this year, musically speaking, and stands with Beck’s Sea Change and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret as one of the best “break-up albums” of the past decade. I could not bear to remove my headphones, and I did not shuttle between a few songs as I am prone to do when a new album enters my life and have heard it once through, trying to find the highlights. All twelve pieces on the album stand well together, creating a strong architectural shape – as albums ought to do but frequently do not – in terms of musical material and lyrical content and emotional curve, and while some songs are favored, I have difficulty not dropping the needle on side A and not letting the needle trace its way to the paper; I have difficulty not flipping the album and letting the needle groove again; I have difficulty not repeating this ad infinitum.

I am hard pressed to find a pop group (let’s ditch the “indie” misnomer for a minute) that has zero difficulty in integrating a fresh, “challenging” (for the uninitiated), and consistent harmonic language with timbres and textures that at once evoke and hegemonize all the band’s influences, from The Beach Boys down to The Walkmen. I do not think I can name another pop group that has no problem (and maybe implacable tolerance for) completely nixing the three-chord tonic-dominant scheme in favor of modal harmonies that move more toward Messiaen than Miles. I cannot think of another rock drummer in a band formed after 2000 that has his musicality under more control than Christopher Bear, who dares perform on the set like it is an actual collection of instruments and not a time-keeping device. In terms of form, even though verse-chorus is still popular and in use by Grizzly Bear (time-tested, ear-approved, perhaps), so much through-composed music permeates the album, and the softening of the delineation between verse and chorus, or verse and verse, or reprise, or subject, or sub-subject, or parenthetical phrase is incredibly welcome. Harmonically, the group is right at home with chords in inversion, nebulous tonal positioning, and something that escapes the world of good pop music at large: convincing voice leading and contrary motion. Who knew that the simplest of musical formulas could be employed so well? Much of this is helped by the incisive yet above-reproach gentle voice of Ed Droste (and occasionally his mirror-voice in Daniel Rossen), a mild breeze coming in off the sound that ramps up, withdraws, and occasionally exhibits an edge that, like the fine grit on the southwest wind, causes a head to turn, only to take more benign masochism.

“Southern Point” starts as a sea breeze turning directions, high tide coming a minute into the track, with a peculiarly piquant harmonic world: a vacillation in the verse between minor tonic and flat submediant dominant (that’s i-VI7 for the theory nerds; or if you’re counting, a Ger+6), and constant minor-major mode mixture doused with the “pretty” Major-7th chords in the chorus (is it a chorus, or an extension of the verse?) creates the world of late Brahms if he listened to a lot of Floyd and early Crimson. The tempestuous world between meter and its hypometric counter help propel the piece into the wayward, distant modulations, the drums acting as a marker between horizon and sky, somewhere between Samba and Jack DeJohnette.

Perhaps the most direct, non-confrontational pop song on the album is “Two Weeks,” which has had plenty of indie-station airplay and was even thrown into an iTunes promotion (which, no doubt, helped the album debut at the #8 spot on Billboard). This song, while beautifully constructed – again, Bear is in command of the entire ensemble with his subtle, well-orchestrated percussion – belies the rest of the album. While the preponderance of vocal harmonies in thirds and fourths and usage of the Lydian mode can serve as exemplars, the clarity of the form and the conventionality of the harmonic language (to an extent) may serve as a bad example to the lay audience. Nonetheless, Droste’s lyrics provide the necessary smokiness, ghostliness, and coldness to counter some of the sweetness in the convention. The text of the song, of lingering and forgetting (perhaps – Droste has remarked that the content’s interpretation can be as ambiguous as the words themselves), of sludging through some sort of relationship going nowhere, of asking the questions to which no answers will ever be satisfactory, lends a sadness, a meek anger, to the dulcet gloss:

Think of all the ways
Momentary phase
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Every time you try
A quarter, half, a mile,
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Would you always?
Maybe sometimes?
Make it easy?
Take your time…

The brilliance here is the subtext: the desperation and totality of regret. Droste’s unseen protagonist, facing the cold wind, maybe even spitting into it with the demure of a true Southern Genteel-man, can only take so much of an apparent silence, of an apparent need – and a promise not met, even halfway.

“All We Ask” starts out with a riff that could be placed on The Walkmen’s Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone without question, with a tape-saturated Starburst, but this evaporates as no distortion comes into play, and the lightly chromatic vocal lines accompanied by dominant-substitutes or dominant-add-6th and a repressed, skulking, constant, neurotic percussion part. “Leave us alone,” calls the voice; “lead us all home.” Take us out of our heads. Take away the sea. Take away the sand. Or give it all back. The journey satisfies no one: “I can’t get out / what I’m into / with you,” despite the calls harmonically and vocally to simply leave. Walk out of the cold.

“Fine for now” is the bitter pill of irony on the album. “Done askin’ for your permission / Please understand / We’re all faltering / How’d I help with that? / If it’s all or nothing / Then Let me Go / We’re all faltering / Why’d I help with that?” Rossen gives his slightly-more-crooner-ish voice to the lead character of this mini-drama, stating “There is Time / So much Time,” but for everything to go ever more downhill. The washy nature of the soundworld here: the breakers soaking everyone. No one is unscathed. Even Rossen, as his voice occasionally struggles to overcome the envelopes pushed forward by rolled cymbals and reverb-drenched Telecasters. It’s impolite, of course, to kill the protagonist, but this is what happens: the dominant never appears; tonic-center pedal points linger; 7th scale degrees get thrown around like sea gulls in a gale; fake steel drums pinprick the eardrums, a fleck of warmth in an otherwise cold tide pool; the vocalist writes himself out of the story, unaware.

“Cheerleader” is cheekier, but no less insidious in its handling of a relationship soured: Droste’s delivery is imagined as a series of dialogues with his Other and asides with an audience that doesn’t hear him (or, perhaps still his Other). The bridge is out ahead; we’ll plunge to our watery deaths, but I’ve got to keep driving, because there doesn’t seem to be a good stopping place. This isn’t Chappaquiddick. This is love. That’s the difference. “I should have made it matter.” The problematic relationship the audience has with the text, though, is the statement of making it “matter.” The narrator may be taking on the long-past regrets of the Other while belching “it does not matter” when he can, a calm vine of sour grapes trampled by ponies with their eyes on the next pasture. The lushness of the harmonic language here – perhaps the most added tones and busiest of chordal textures on the album – helps to create the conflict and give the narrator (and the intended audience) a sensation of agoraphobic claustrophobia. Helpless and halting wherever, no matter how close or far to the situation.

Rather than continue the blow-by-blow, I assure you the next several pieces are necessary listening; the subject matter doesn’t vary too much, and the same rich blend of production – warm, close vocals, intimate settings for the drums and backup vocals, with plenty of spatial differentiation and depth differentiation (in short, exceedingly well-produced) – accompanies the beautiful melancholy-without-hatred of the lyrics. I want to focus on three more songs: “Dory,” “Hold Still,” and “I Live With You” – simply because of what happens musically. (“While You Wait for the Others” needs no introduction and comes close to being “Two Weeks” redux)

“Dory” begins over a pedal point on D which bursts into a weird mix of Cole Porter and the Cocteau Twins. The favoring of arpeggiated chords in lieu of solid chords – that is, Peter Buck and not David Crosby (yet another reason I can’t get behind “freak-folk” as a label) – works especially well here (as it does throughout the album) and contributes the open, desolate space “Dory” sets up with the extended metaphor of fish swimming, diving, and dying in the freezing depths due to whatever poor choices they made. But the chorus. Oh, the chorus. D major, Bb major, F major, Ab major. After a world of ct7 chords, chromatic neighbors, and others: the final fade out – the progression over a… D pedal. As it should. Perfect circle – or a spiral, if you go the Tonnetz route and favor the ultimate construction of the harmonic language in tritones and m3s. Which is more probable, given the nebulous character of the chorus’s Bb Major. The production layering and pedal sustain, in tandem with spectral desires of the D major triad, seems to create a world somewhere between B Major and Bb Major in that second chord. This is no mere Procrustean analysis, but a thorough examination of the rhetoric: spiraling out of control of these metaphoric sea-dwelling critters, descending into their grave; the metaphor dives into the music, ending the piece with the circular motion, the mild disorientation after staring into the abyss of the horizon for too long: the shock when the horizon stares back and becomes upside down.

“Hold Still” is – and I cannot put this in better, more mellifluous, or more direct terms – simply a beautiful, effective, moody, and spare piece. The guitar line 1’20” – a Lydian mode with some unresolved dissonances that moves against a I-IV motion – is simply staggering in its effect of facilitating that plaintive desperation that comes with wanting to dive into the wreck of a cold sea but knowing all the ramifications and stripping to skivvies and catching a hypothermia-induced cold a few hours later. “I’ll take our chance / Without compromise / There isn’t anything left to try.” Washing away the sins of memory, baptism as protection against future destruction. Indiscretion only exists on paper. Regret only exists in time; memory only truly belongs to one person: he or she who wants to remember, though nothing can be gained from it. “Here we go again … The story goes on file / As if we never were there at all.”

But go listen to “While You Wait for the Others” anyway. Repeatedly. I have to mention at least the circular self-destruction of sour grapes trampled in a vineyard of “I did nothing to deserve this but fuck you I will lash back and goddammit I missed and shot myself in the foot.” And, here it has been mentioned.

“I Live With You” is gut-turning. One thing Grizzly Bear does masterfully is working the emotional fader. Certainly, well-orchestrated songs, adventurous harmonic language, and exceptional musicality help with this. Still, the achievement here is in the exquisite beauty of the ambiguity:

“You brought us this far / We’ll do what we can / Return / Don’t put me on / Return / Don’t make me beg / Return / And they’ll try / They’ll try /To keep us apart”

Such circular pleading, such unrestrained yearning with the confidence that the Once is the Now, crooned and/or belted out over irregular phrase-length structures and an echoic, if not mocking, youth choir backup texture makes anything that has come out of Montreal in the past ten years look like the dung of a hermit crab. Inconspicuous and straining for meaning. “I Live With You” is the anxiety of isolation. Not being able to leave Corolla once the ferry stops or 12 gets flooded over. The song marries together the malevolence of love with the grace of separation; the hatred of sharing with the earnestness of selfishness.

The album has convinced me, if nothing else, that this world is grossly unfair, filled with victims at every turn, filled with villains before every victim, filled with perpetrators who become the mugged. The wind knocks us all down. We get slapped with a wave yet we dive in for more at the worst possible time. We dream of silent space, a gust to refresh us, and what we get is a white-hot, self-contained apparatus of self-destruction that only we can control. Just this side of neurotic breaks do we stop ourselves and keep ourselves in our own universes, our miniverses, our macrocosms. Just this side of memory and forgetting, of love and desperate hatred, is where I found this album, where I fell in love with this album, where I began to hate myself for not loving this album more. And then I realized: while I wait for the others to make it all worthwhile, I can simply take off my jacket, get chilled to the bone, and cower under the leeward side of a dune until the weather turns.

Which might be in April or May. Until then, the speakers pump the world of brine and grey tides and a narrow love of isolation into me, and I’ll gladly take the abuse. Over and over again. “[I] could hope for some substance as long as [I’d] like / or just wait out the evening.”

The King Has Died; Long Live the King

Michael Jackson, for better or worse, was the embodiment of American culture and of the American society from the beginning of his career.

He was the emblem of the American dream: a meteoric rise to stardom from childhood onward, the iconography of Jackson as a chubby-cheeked kid from a less-than-optimal origin in suburban Chucago grew into suave superstar who created and defied trends and expectations in musical and racial culture and later grew into one of the most enigmatic personalities on the face of the globe, if not in the consciousness of the known universe.

Michael Jackson was the absolute figurehead for what it means to lose one's private life completely to the public sphere. He was the means through which American curiosity-culture galvanized itself and reinforced the legitimization of and addiction to vicariousness and inauthentic living. Jackson was the epitome of a forced and troubled childhood, victimized for ostensibly desiring normality, aggrandized for creating the image of the unattainable superstar. He bore witness to ethical injustices to keep his career intact and continuous, and this ethical calculus rotted away the definitions of right and wrong and eroded the ethical boundaries between perceived good and perceived evil. His life was never his own, truly, even in the most absurdly private moments of his life.

Michael Jackson defined pop culture for more than three decades, having moved from a uniting pop music force to a bewildering disappointment to a grotesque media freakshow subject that helped perpetuate -- rather than report upon -- Jackson's baptism within the waters of moral incongruity and absurd infamy. He supplied the world -- whether through his choice or choice made for him -- with the archetype for the quintessential pop music performer, from the arena set-up to lights to costuming to music videos to merchandising. He literally owned one of the largest cultural exports America had to offer in the form of Disney, but, like so many Americans, made a poor business decision and lost his world along with it.

Michael Jackson was the face of stolen youth, of unattainable dreams and hellish nightmares. He became the butt of millions of jokes and anecdotes as popular culture waited salivating for the next album or moral downfall -- at some point, the delineation between the two in his career was destroyed. Jackson was the face of American jurisprudence to the eye of the common citizen: perceived power and unimaginable wealth -- or its illusion -- automatically required Jackson be guilty of heinous acts or unthinkable deeds, while his fans or virtually anyone who ever heard a Michael Jackson song or made an allusion to "Thriller" continued breaking the speed limit, smoking pot, beating their children, or stealing key chains.

Jackson's legacy is unknown. The permanence and ubiquity of his life -- I hesitate to say private or public since they are essentially one in the same -- create this onus of necessity to understand his impact after death. The everpresence of the legacy of his career during his life practically underscored what it meant to identify as an American, and now that the Age of Plurality has set in, a monolithic figure like Jackson may never again occur.

Jackson was the corporealization of race and racial difference in this country. After the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s seemed to smooth the way for toleration of a race-uniting pop icon, the Jackson 5 attempted to bridge the gap -- unwittingly or not -- between white culture and black culture, yet as a pacifying measure, and not one of any real social dialogue or progress. Michael Jackson's solo career continued to create some unification, but was branded unprofound, inauthentic, and as a false façade of a representative of black culture to white, suburban, race-ignorant culture, and as a traitor to a mainline, politically-charged, dialectic-seeking portion of the African-American community. In any case, wealth and fame were his. Whether symbolically or verily, Jackson lost his blackness more and more as time grew on, yet never became anglicized: he became an outcast of race in the polarized wings of the American body politic, and lost favor with black community he was attempting to run from and lost support from the fearful, tentative white community his career seemed destined to grab hold to. He became raceless, at the cost of losing an identity, whether through chemical treatments or through being stuck in an era of struggle-followed-by-placation.

Michael Jackson became the embodiment of the confusion over what accounting there is or could be regarding gender. Far from a normal sexual-social life due to the inauthentic and non-normative path of his childhood and adulthood, he became a bizarre figure in marriage, an even more bizarre figure in divorce, an ill-suited father, and a tormented man-child, forced back into pre-adult states due to career and societal pressures and apparent questions of gender. The pitch of his voice changed -- going up more than an octave -- from 1989 to now. His medically-altered cleft chin and square jaw suggested masculinity, his collapsed, small nose and high cheekbones suggested femininity. Outlandish, idiosyncratic modes of dress covered any true intentions, and androgyny settled in about him over the span of numerous albums that rarely hinted at the gender or sexuality of love. Jackson was afraid of being male, afraid of being female, while still demanding of himself -- and being forced by the American public, implicitly -- to make a choice where choice is not an option.

Finally, Michael Jackson was the iconoclast of all American culture. It began before it knew it had legs and outran the remainder of the world. It created a halcyon image of itself that was never able to be duplicated, and presented a false image of itself to the world. It was forcefully created and held to impossible standards throughout and the creator of the culture, not the culture itself or the level of meaning within it, was scoured, picked apart, dissected, and left for dead by a hellacious mob of hypocrites. It traveled the world as an emissary of good will of some sort, followed by merchandising and subtle dissatisfaction, and as fame grew, the culture began to skew itself. The culture died an inauspicious death, simultaneously sudden and too soon yet well-timed, with massive questions about the longevity of the impact and imprint. So too is this Michael Jackson's life, a reflection of the culture that created and subsequently destroyed him, a talented, versatile, charismatic performer from Gary, Indiana, a ruddy, nondescript chubby-cheeked kid who had one hell of a voice, who became a sallow, ghostly whipping boy of American culture whose voice was already silenced before it slipped into the ether.

an article in progress

This is taken from an article I am working on about one particular song, "Monitor" by Siouxsie and the Banshees (on Juju, 1981). The lyrics are as below, and what I am posting here is the article in medias res, as it were. You may want to track down the song and listen; I'm not really at liberty to put up a copyrighted song for downloadability.

Rather, if you want a live performance from 1988, I give you the following:


"Monitor"

Monitor outside
for the people inside
a prevention of crime
a passing of time

they come and they go
it's a passing of time
they come and they go
whilst we sit in our homes

sit back and enjoy
the real McCoy
our new air of authority
our sentinel of misery

his face was full of intent
and we shook with excitement
then the victim stared up
looked strangely at the screen
as if her pain was our fault
but that's entertainment
what we crave for in- side
no more second rate movies
from those people outside


Sinisterly enough, Siemens AG in Peenemünde, Germany first used closed circuit television surveillance (CCTV) in 1942 in order to observe, record, and troubleshoot the launching of V2 rockets. In the United Kingdom, the first usage of CCTV in the public sphere came in 1960 when a temporary rig was set up in order to monitor a crowd gathering in Trafalgar Square at the arrival of the Thai royal family. This twin-camera installation was repeated on 5 November 1960 to temporarily monitor any Guy Fawkes day activity in the same open space of Trafalgar Square. In 1961, a London Transport train station boasted the country’s first permanent CCTV installation: the Holborn station on the Central Line received five black and white cameras. Three years later, police in Liverpool began to “experiment” with four concealed CCTV cameras near the center of that city as a means to thwart crimes of property. During the late 1960s, banks and retailers, especially in the United Kingdom, began installing CCTV systems to prevent crime, yet a shift in pragmatic thinking tended toward catching suspects after the crime had been committed. Prevention and deterrence had given rise to becoming courtroom evidence after the fact, from muggings on college campuses to the identification of the perpetrators of the 7 July 2005 terror attacks in London – as well as the inability disprove excessive force or corroborate police claims due to botched operation and faulty logistics. The 1970s saw the largest-scale experimentation in the U.K. and the 1980s saw the largest public-sphere installation of CCTV systems, with the rise of traffic cameras to “monitor” arterial thoroughfares and high-speed motorways in and around London and other larger British cities and the development and employment of “red-light” cameras and other enforcement measures to capture wrongdoers in the act – often correctly. In the post-9/11 climate, reaction to CCTV has become more muted, with moderated and conservative-minded, pro-state persons actually calling for more. Legal challenges have been made in a few relatively isolated cases, but with several thousand CCTV cameras in place on London’s Tube and elaborate systems in airports and sports stadiums worldwide, CCTV is not on the ecliptic. At least in the U.K., funding is more than adequate, with funding for other means of crime prevention disproportionately low. In the London borough of Wandsworth – one of the most socioeconomically deprived environs of London, with high populations of racial and ethnic minorities – has a disturbingly high number of cameras per capita. Moreover, a majority of signs (or lack thereof) on public grounds are classified by at least one source as illegal or not descriptive enough. Nonetheless, benevolent deception from the State – as well as its coercive ability – becomes a framework for creating a form of “architectural incarceration”, a public-sphere prison where the public citizen eventually adapts and applauds monitoring, and welcomes it upon himself.

Surveillance, as a tool and technology, is capable of a “procedural-transformative” nature wherein comportment, activity, social structures, and far more can have meanings assigned, reassigned, and wherein the narrative of everyday life adapts to its presence and even mimics it. For instance, the rapid escalation of CCTV in the UK during the 1990s – despite CCTV already being prevalent and an everyday fact in the decades prior – was due in large part to the existence of the IRA and the perceived threat of terrorism, and little discussion or argument, outside the academic sphere, took place. In an interview, Christian Parenti argues that the debate was “technocratic” and the rise of CCTV in the United States post-9/11 mimics the mushrooming of CCTV in the UK during the 1990s. The transformation of the entertainment industry from pre-designed narrative simulating life into a Reality Mentality that monitored reality (or its own simulation) further erases the conceptualization of public and private. According to Parenti,

[T]he proliferation of surveillance themes within entertainment habituates people to the gaze of authorities and that fame culture is very important to this habituation. The problem for many young people today is not being on camera, it is not being on it. There is a homemade fame culture on the Web, around Webcam communities, people who broadcast their lives. […]Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the surveillance in and of itself … But one might raise the question of how this may habituate us all to constant observation and monitoring.

This system of “surveillance and narcissism” erases the ideal of public sphere and privacy within the public sphere, and aestheticizes surveillance. In some ways, this surveillance-narcissism and its subsequent aesthetic celebration is by no means a novelty. In the Christian pastoral tradition dating back five hundred years, a private citizen was obligated, once a year, to confess to all acts of the flesh that contravened law. Not only did sins come under the realm of spiritual scrutiny, but desires and thoughts articulated solely within the mind were to be expurgated, communicated in as detailed language as possible, and thereby no desire too small or weakness to minute could escape moral authority. The leap to the 21st Century is not a broad one when we consider the stylization of the confessional act, especially one of sexuality or “perverseness.” The viewing audience at home serves as a moral judge and jury when television programs like Taxicab Confessions or America’s Next Top Model air. Certainly, the audience administers some amount of judgment upon villainous acts, words, or deeds, but therein lies the core of the situation: viewership into the most private desires or ideas mitigates privacy’s sacrosanct qualities, and the presentation of material affects its reception. In the least stylized of programming, such as Cops where very little editing of raw footage takes place, with often only one camera, audience members are left to their own prejudices and experiences to filter out and mediate the boundary of breach of privacy. In television shows like True Stories of the Highway Patrol, truth as it is documented is narrated, crosscut, replayed, edited, shown from different angles, overdubbed, and underlaid with theme music, incidental music, and “personal” testimony all with a specific goal in mind: view the suspect or criminal as harshly as possible with no detail left to chance (simultaneously editing which “details” to send to the Confessor sitting on the couch at home).

Television shows like Big Brother, Survivor, Real World, and even Deadliest Catch – as well as web-based reality “showlets” – are all highly stylized and trivialize privacy and remove all power of enchantment, allowing for assumably authentic, private moments to be broadcast to millions while at the same time basking in paradoxical simultaneity of Schadenfroh and Narcissism, dismissing human experience at its nadir yet being titillated, and identifying and co-opting moments of private joy and success. In this manner, what may have been a public space – a backyard, an alley, a boat, a forest on a deserted island – becomes a public sphere: visibility yields to recognition, and accessibility becomes participation; by consistently monitoring the individual’s privacy within the context of hyper-public existence, we see the employment of individual rights (or lack thereof) in some sort of collaborative effort. At every grimace of pain and moment questionable mental judgment, from moments of emotional vulnerability to a desensitization to the abjectified and intensely private (bowel movements, nausea, and so forth) the entire human body becomes a sort of a public sphere within a larger contextually public space. The person loses agency over his or her own body as it is constructed within a fragmentary camera gaze, and through editing and mediation of privacy, the person loses grasp of free choice. Aside from eroticizing or fetishizing the body. the presentation of the person not qua a person but rather a body-object disembodied from the very tenets of humanity – choice, intuition, privacy, and intellect – is an incarcerative measure that imprisons the image of the body-object and tortures it for the benefit of the viewer. This is by no means a new phenomenon, at least in terms of women’s history: maps, poems, pieces of music, and works of art, obviously, have cast women’s bodies as fragmentary objects and even as foreign terrain to be navigated, mediated, and conquered at the hands of men. Men, however, are fairly recent newcomers to this phenomenon. In terms of verisimiltudinous fragmentation of the corporeal, we need not look any further than the most recent Saw “horror” film where torture becomes a method of imprisonment and the abject violence becomes the raison d’être and sublimation of viewing pleasure. In this situation, as in pornography, pure flesh and its decorporealization and extraction from reality becomes paramount despite how far-fetched the visual scenario becomes. The narrative of the imprisoned body-object becomes subsidiary to the experience of the viewer; voyeurism trumps authenticity, separation subverts proximity. Bleakly, the ability to change the channel – to insist that the viewer has ultimate power and would rather remedy his or her own discomfiting situation rather than to remove the body-object and its torment from the public sphere – becomes the ultimate act of free will: so long as the viewer casts his or her gaze on the imprisoned public privacy, the torment continues; once the channel is changed or power turned off, the implication is that all torment ceases. The narrative of the viewer is separate from the victim’s narrative; while one is located within the other, both will continue unabated: the “reality” on the television or monitor or laptop screen will continue, as will the order of the viewer’s. In short, the imprisoned’s narrative is a MacGuffin to real-world existence and experience.

Certainly, Siouxsie Sioux’s lyrics to “Monitor” are affective intellectually on all of the aforementioned levels, and highly effective in its like conflation of surveillance narcissism, and in the confusion of the definition of “public good” or best interest. The questionable nature of CCTV surveillance and the multiple-narrative construction of the lyrics become, then, our starting ground in analysis of the song as a whole.

II: That’s Entertainment: Violence, Voyeurism, Narcissism, and Panopticism

Approaching the song "Monitor" as a text can be deceptive, since "Monitor," lyrically and musically, appears rather straightforward in terms of semantic and semiotic meaning. Certainly, the linearity and economy of the lyrical-musical text seems to undermine any need for critical reading, but it is within this apparent lack of artifice that unapologetically subversive ideals and events unfold. Consequently, the resulting readings of this text, while exacted in performance as linearly as possible, are as fundamentally complex and austere as the song itself. Overall, there is a relative clarity within the text of the lyrics in terms of narrative and logical progression. The text appears unfettered and linear but is deceptively simple as there are several instances of "writerly" events: binary oppositions, references to outside narratives and works of literature, delayed gender identification, and a bitter reversal of fortune and cosmic irony. The song, both musically and lyrically, contains a wealth of multifaceted signifiers, and the performer and audience of the song become signifiers to the internal workings of the text. The structure of the narrative is highly complex, fractalized, self-reflexive, and itself a compelling marker for the previously discussed idea of an audience’s separation from the simulated (or authentic).

Aside from line breaks in the liner notes, the progression of the lyrics is continuous, with few immediate clues to its structural hierarchy. The only repetition within the lyrics comes with the line "they come and they go" which is duplicated two lines after its initial appearance, and the phrase "a passing of time" spread across two separate stanzas. In poetic structure, the lyric is four stanzas in length, with the first three stanzas four lines in length and the final stanza nine lines in length. The total line count of twenty-one, while perhaps coincidental, creates a mild undercurrent through the reading of the lyrics: long the Age of Majority in a number of countries, it has been touted anecdotally as a chronological rite of passage – furthermore, the age at which one became an adult, or, more to the point, became a man. Anthony Burgess, for instance, designed the novel A Clockwork Orange with the twenty-first chapter in mind as point in which the protagonist shirks reckless, violent immaturity. Addressing this aspect later, we turn our attention back to the breakdown of stanzas: the first and third have identical, controlled rhyme schemes in the double rhymed couplet, as the second stanza, weakly referencing the scheme of a sonnet's rhyme scheme, veers away from the strict aabb control. The order of terminal sounds in the second stanza is slightly changed, yet remains regular. A strict rhythmic pattern emerges as a highly ordered set of sounds that is duplicated musically. Viewing syllables that occur on downbeats, we have a great deal of regularity and the create of a caged sensation, an idea of sonic confinement between barlines. This sense of order, this seeming fixation on regimentation, is eviscerated in the final stanza, which bears no structural resemblance to the first three stanzas in terms of rhythm or rhyme scheme. Rhythmically, the stanzas become more and more active until we arrive at the end of the lyric – and end of its violence – as the last few lines of the final stanza resemble those of the first stanza, further increasing a return to the regimented burden. While the pitch realm never changes throughout the song, the narrative of the final stanza becomes grueling, harsh, and chaotic, bursting free from the order imposed while returning to confinement: the entire four-stanza composition is repeated to give the piece a long-term binary structure, and this binary sensibility is simultaneously occluded and magnified, as the first line of the song is superimposed over the continuation of the fourth stanza. This focusing in upon smaller elements of the text, repetition verbatim of the text as a whole -- veritably, replayed from beginning to end -- and imposition of order and control are not coincidences, either, and have their roots in one of the more sinister and insidious forms of social control: video surveillance.

The most ostensibly sensible reading of the lyrics frames the song as a mildly, and at turns chillingly, dystopian frame narrative of the conflation and confusion of surveillance cameras designed to prevent crime that become mediated entertainment to an unnamed audience, either the authority meant to thwart crime, an audience comprised of home viewers as loyal subjects of the State, or some combination of both. The tale includes the seen through CCTV (and presumably on television monitors) that begins nondescriptly: “they come and they go / whilst we sit in our homes.” The audience, through Siouxsie’s singing, is informed it should sit back, relax, and brace itself for the “real McCoy:” in the final, sprawling stanza of the lyrics, an attack, most likely physical and sexual in nature, is carried out in front of a camera and absorbed, with unknown reaction beyond immediate and instant, by the home audience. Yet the song is a narration in itself wherein Siouxsie gives an account of the action – herself a camera of sorts framing the spectacle in a certain manner – for a home audience of real, live, authentic humans – us. The first order of the narrative, the absolute external, then, is the real, live listener: the person or persons absorbing Siouxsie’s lyrics and music. This is the broadest external narrative within this frame narrative, which we will dub Narrative Zero. The second order, Narrative One, is the narrator, moderator, and messenger: Siouxsie herself, with the musical devices operating on equal footing with the lyrical text. The third order, Narrative Two, is the unclarified home audience watching the alternately joyless and exciting from their own construction of reality through CCTV. The attack, enjoyed by home audiences as they “[shake] with excitement” as it happens, is the final narrative, or Narrative Three, and the layer that receives the most telescopic focus: what we have is a recursive voyeuristic spectacle within a spectacle.

The boundary between Narratives Two and Three and the action in both are the most complex yet least abstract in some ways and will be our starting point for exploration. The obvious question is: who exactly is monitoring the situation transpiring in Narrative Three? Who is this audience? Are the viewers of the attack the Police or simply viewers at home indulging in the banal, egregious, and appalling? Who is the victim in the attack, and who is the attacker? The implied violence of the attack – with only one reference to pain – does more to propel the song’s action and disturb Narrative Zero listeners as it removes all specific action.

The final stanza of the lyric presents itself in a rather cinematographically ritualized way: we can envision a family huddled on a couch rapt with attention as a violent, unthinkable act takes place onscreen, with an extra-diegetic camera cutting between the reactions and actions. The conflation between reality and entertainment is a familiar trope to the casual TV viewer, and is ritualized in aggressive participation in entertainment. If, moreover, the attack is State-sanctioned violence for the Greater Good, is it then a vicious circle of “ritual violence” meant to perpetuate order – that is to say, keep the audience captive and imprisoned? Perhaps, but voyeuristically so. “Violence becomes simultaneously the instrument, object, and all-inclusive subject of desire,” writes Girard, where this desire manifests itself in viewership as “man desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess.” Setting aside gender and power for a moment, this conceptualization of possessing refers back to Parenti’s statement and locates the viewers as perverted narcissists, desiring to be in a position of fame, but refusing the consequences and torment itinerant. Girard casts this sort of behavior as the “monstrous double,” wherein we have the Narrative Two audience becoming the attacker, desiring the victim as much as the unnamed, unkown attacker. Girard further creates a construction of violent desire in the triangle of Subject-Object-Rival [FIG 3], and in this case, we can clearly position the victim as the Object, the attacker as Subject, and the Narrative Two audience as Rival, the interchangeable monstrous double with the assailant. The audience is Rival only because it exerts an equal, if only passive, desire for the Object, and ultimately fails at the pursuit. Girard discusses at length the conceptualization of the “surrogate victim” – a non-human object or animal as a stand-in for a human sacrifice; in this case, the sacrifice is indeed human, and the simulations ceased, replaced by the ultimate authentic. The sacrifice occurs to give pleasure and order to the Narrative Two audience, with the symbology pellucid: liberty and freedom from intrusion in the public sphere and a total lack of regard for privacy and sanctity. The Narrative Two audience sees into a most abject, perverse act of humanity, yet Narrative One and Zero audiences are peering into Narrative Two’s home and watching (hearing) their reactions to the attack. The State allows the attack to continue, never intervening; the home audience never intervenes and desires to be attacked. The circular culture of aestheticized fame at the expense of trivializing the sanctuary of privacy is at play. The on-screen sacrifice is the symbolic attack upon public-space freedom, and the home audience revels as it is conditioned to take all on-screen action as fiction. The sacrifice and loss, in this instance, is just one part of a continuum, where continual erosions of civil liberties and impositions of thought controls continue unabated. Girard posits that “it is entirely possible to regard the sacrificial rite as a commemoration of a real event;” here, however, we have a clear inversion, where the real event is taken (however profoundly) by Narrative Two’s audience as symbol. In line with a mentality a fictional (or real) police state may have regarding the imposition of social control and populace order, Girard writes that “even the most violent rites are specifically designed to abolish violence. To see these rites as expressions of man’s pathological morbidity is to miss the point.” This is perhaps most disturbing since Girard implies, out of humanity’s rationality and lack of necessity of animal instinct, that there is no braking mechanism for violent behavior in humankind, and therefore no end to the circle of violent acts and violent retaliation.

The audience in Narrative Two, though, seems to have no quibble with this statement. Continuing as the monstrous double, the audience sees what the attacker sees and Subject and Rival temporarily merge. The attacker initiates the assault, and the result is a chilling return of the audience’s stare: "the victim looked up / looked strangely at the screen / as if her pain was our fault." At the very least, the audience is complicit in the attacker's violence by remaining mute and still, watching rather than reacting. We have here as well a multiplicity within one of the principle tenets within Mulvey's asymmetrical power structure through the male gaze: the attacker was confirmed as male immediately, but the victim's identity as a female was marginalized: it is not announced prominently in the lyrics that the victim is indeed a woman, using gender only as an afterthought. The victim is first named only as a victim, several syllables later given a possessive pronoun within the center of a line. The attacker, male, is introduced immediately, as possessing a face; the victim is given no physical features and is therefore wholly disembodied. While both remain nameless, the positioning of the pronoun in the text attests to the lack of agency the victim has over herself; we are aware of violence in the “cut” from the attacker to the Narrative Two audience, and finally to the victim. The audience, as well, is characterized as excited, anxiously awaiting the next move. While Mulvey speaks specifically about film, recasting her theories into other media is acceptable here: the conflated television-authoritarian surveillance acts as another cinematic screen and frame through which dominant order has been set. Mulvey writes that the “magic of Hollywood…arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” The sexualization and eroticization inherent in the viewing audience creates a form of reified pleasure through the anxiety before mental climax. The only gratification, though, can come from watching “an objectified Other.” All agency of the Other is stripped through voyeuristic intent; all power belongs to the one casting the Gaze – the attacker who becomes the State / home audience; only the attacker is gendered, extending maleness to the State. Between "his face" and "her pain" we have a perfect construct of the most abstract of Mulvey's structural power imbalance: her pain is the male gaze, if not agency over her own body, made double by the gaze of the paternalistic social order observing through the CCTV lens. This marker indicates that a woman can only possess pain and is always a victim through the man's/attacker's eye, always helpless, always weak, always the receiver of torment. The abjection of pain, of suffering, as a possession, as a qualitative thing, is marginalized and described as an afterthought. Woman, then, cannot even possess the pain that is inflicted upon her.

To simply state that every narrative level is an attacker or voyeur is to make overly simplistic the subtleties and layers of the accounts and their subsequent analyses. We have observed the identification of the attacker and victim at the deepest level of the narrative and their tacit repartee with the audience in Narrative Two; however, to fully elucidate theoretical approaches to the lyrics, we must consider the construction of the audience Siouxsie sings about. The attacker-victim binary is sealed within the confines of the television screen, some sort of Videodrome installed by the state for a double-sided social control; the audience exists in its own world, sealed away and insulated from the events of the attack. Mulvey states that “film [and by extension other media] portray[s] a hermetically sealed world indifferent to the presence of the audience.” There is a corroborated theme of transferral and distance present in both lyrics and music. There is a physical distance between what is seen by the narrative's audience – the sexual assault upon the woman victim – and the felt, visceral or tactile. Indeed the only one who feels is the victim through her pain, or to build upon Girard's explorations of violence, through her insulated victimization. The victim is completely isolated during the attack, save the bitterly ironic knowledge that there are onlookers, and is insulated from societal intervention. The audience is enclosed within its own cell, their viewing room or living room, drawn in by their own most unspeakable desires, being duplicitously convinced that what they are "seeing" is make-believe, if we take the conflation of voyeuristic surveillance and generic television programming at face value. The audience is thus isolated from the attack and the firsthand experience, and becomes a collective insulated victim of benevolent deception, as well as a victim of their own curiosity. Furthermore, viewing a slice of reality and taking it for fiction leaves the audience totally vulnerable to be placed in a similar situation for the benefit for others, or as Girard posits, to become the ritualized sacrifice to restore and preserve social order. The audience here, then, identifies with the victim, but other possibilities exist. The audience could be consuming the power and status emanating from the Gaze; that is, they appropriate the attacker’s power as their own, despite it being only virtual. Identification with the victim allows for their own victimization, if not creating a desire for victimization. The lyrics support this inverted desire. About the attack in general, Siouxsie narrates: “That’s entertainment / what we crave for inside / no more second-rate movies / from those people outside.” The total implication here is the audience is fully desirous to fixate on the violent act and through sadistic voyeurism and fetishism – should the “show” ever be rerun – fully support the Panoptical State’s fragmentary treatment of its subjects in line to perpetuate its own social order.

Further to the point of the dual role of the audience and the ambiguity of identity are the issues of fragmentation, gender construction, and confinement. As already stated, the distance between narrative elements is clear and yields an element of voyeurism, and as Doane portends, physical and psychological distance between the Object and Subject become criteria for voyeuristic treatment. Doane’s approach to Mulvey’s gaze reconsiders spectatorship and positions female spectators as powerlessly narcissistic, immersed in the female object, or in need of gender reassignment by taking on (as Doane implies) a disease of masculinization by having to identify with the male. The camera, the CCTV apparatus piping the attack into the audience, obviously has no gender, no sex, though in phallogocentric measures, the camera is the ultimate male gazer. If we follow Mulvey’s logic, we discover that the audience is always female while it is powerless to break the CCTV’s gaze, yet is always male through its regard and power over the screen. Combined with Doane, the audience is hermaphroditic as it identifies with both attacker and victim. This presupposes heterosexual identifications: returning our attention to the victim, the delayed onset of gendering in the lyrics may be more than a device to demonstrate subjugation in patriarchal society. The pronoun may simply be an arbitrary assignment to code a body that is differently gendered yet sexed in automatic, autonomic measures. Further, the “her” in the lyrics as the victim may instead embody another form of supposed radicalism or non-normative the State wishes to impose its order upon and eradicate: homosexuality, and, more specifically, lesbianism. Foucault states that “sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing to be administered.” While this statement deals specifically with coitus, we can logically extend this to the performers and receivers of sexual acts. To this end, it is likely that the hypothetical State discussed is indeed administering sex, the act of sex, and gender and orientation upon the victim.

We have seen thus far that the victim, assumed to be female, is represented through the lens of the camera only as an implied visage: “then the victim looked up / stared strangely at the screen”. We understand that, while otherwise totally disembodied and physically covered, and therefore corporeally disengaged from view, the power is not hers given the direction she in which she stares and the fragmented representation. In Mulvey’s doctrine, the victim clearly has no power. Yet given the implication – if only intellectually – from zero discussion of her body and only the discussion of pain, it is possible to read the victim’s pain in at least two ways: first, she is being assigned a body – either by the State or by Siouxsie (acting as an agent of the State?) – and a sex; second, the pain may very well be a symbolic powerless rejection of heteronormativity. It is possible to read this pain in binary terms, then, as the victim could be suffering palpably as s/he is being forced to become “feminine” and likewise being forced to differentiate as heterosexual. The lack of physicality – and the fragmented, assumptive representation we are given – could similarly be viewed as forcing a genital norm upon the victim. In this way, and for the “benefit” of the home audience in Narrative Two, the victim is an unwilling (and perhaps un-able) pawn under the rule of the State to perpetuate Puritanical norms upon gender and sex: the non-liberation, non-enjoyment, and implicit brutality couple with a manifestation of shame in the absence of body and absence of genitals in order to reinforce a heteronormative genital function. More perplexing is a simultaneous reading that would imply sexual violence – on some level – is acceptable as entertainment ritual, so long as it is only heterosexual. While there is little in the lyric to move beyond this into deploring or aggrandizing homosexual violence, the inclination is that the thrill of power belongs only to a male perpetrator, and the victim’s gender, sex, and orientation are at least beyond necessity of description so long as the State and the audience receive precisely what they want. Under Foucault’s reading of the Benthamist Panopticon, the triumvirate of social correction has played out to its full: the populace is completely supervised and under surveillance, with the unknown victim as the Defendant facing charges from the State; the control is likewise exerted by keeping the home audience confined and transfixed, and confining the victim to an abstract space, preparing for correction; finally, the correction is doled out to the victim – here, as (re)assigning a gender and sexuality against the victim’s will – with a subconscious corrector entering the eyes and minds of the viewers safe at home. We have a multitiered architectural incarceration and a system of confinement that is, despite its internal complexity, hermetic and independent of higher-order narratives.

What, then, do we make of Siouxsie, who relays these narratives to us? Positively, she herself acts as a camera of sorts, framing the narratives in her own textual and vocal declamations, and filtering out all but the most necessary courses of action. This problematizes, in some ways, the entire discussion of the lower-order narratives at this point: what, if anything, is Siouxsie censoring? Despite the matter-of-fact storytelling, does a possibility exist that there is more to the backstory? Assuredly, Siouxsie is an outside observer, yet there is a vacillation between being separated from Narrative Two and being immersed in it. Siouxsie as an active spectator takes on a Dickensian Marley role, providing a cautionary statement to the listeners; as a passive observer, she becomes a simpler non-diegetic voice. Still we have a binary system at work: in the Mulvey system, woman is passive, observant, and must channel desire through masculinization; only man is active. The reversal, though, comes in tense: the first stanza, being expository and fragmentary, has no verbs; the second and third – wherein Siouxsie creates Narrative Two – has present tense action verbs, or active viewing with the switch to participatory. Siouxsie, in the third stanza, becomes the voice of the State with the benevolent deception couched in imperatives (“Sit back and enjoy / the real McCoy”) just before an aside references the Panopticon itself (“our sentinel of misery”). In the fourth stanza – where the Narrative Three/Four attack and reaction occurs – Siouxsie narrates in the past tense, confusing the power and activity and obfuscating her own role and gender. Certainly, there is more at stake within musical markers that shed more light on Siouxsie’s position in Narrative One, and further encodes her as a voyeur – but as self-reflected Object as well.

Our identity, as listeners, participants, and collaborators in Narrative Zero, is constructed as the voyeur with the maximal amount of control, even more so than the representatives of authority who monitor the situation and can intervene as the violent act occurs (or choose not to). We simultaneously have maximum power through our eligibility to remove ourselves from the entirety of the sphere through stopping playback, and we have the absolute minimum of power, since, should we choose to hear, we become ultimately confined and surrogates participating in the violent act that will always unfold identically upon each subsequent listen. This profound helplessness – and a transference of the inner narratives’ confinement issues – is corroborated musically.

A complex network of identities and symbols reveals itself through the musical text, and while much could be written about every aspect of the musical product, we will confine our discussion here to those elements that discuss confinement and objectification, historically, as well as musical-textual devices that satirize the State and a puritanical bent it hopes to enshrine in its subjects.

TEASER

For the curious (or just Cap'n Howdy), I plan to pan/love the following soon:

Winterpills, or who Arcade Fire, Death Cab, and Mates of State wish they actually were
Digging into the attic: Swans
Killing Joke redux: exactly why PiL is overrated and why name recognition takes you everywhere
El-Khoury: worst composer ever (from Lebanon)
Per Norgard's Symphony Nr 3
What does Siouxsie have to do with CCTV and Big Brother

And so on.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz! (Part 0 of 1)

I have a hypothetical for youse guys:

Can Karen O. please, please, please stop plagiarising Siouxsie Sioux? I finally got my hands on a copy of Yeah Yeah Yeah's It's Blitz! and, while it is imminently enjoyable and crispy-pan-fried smooth-butter bizarro-pop, everything reads and sounds as though Karen has basically taken all the naughty bits about bondage, LaPortian discussions about bodily functions run afoul, Foucaultian smatterings of punishment and madness, and Paglia-esque animal-woman conflations from Siouxsie's Juju and Kaleidoscope and smashed it together with Tori Amos at her angriest and run it through a P J Harvey irony press.

Granted, none of this detracts from YYY's efforts. In fact, there is something a bit refreshing about the dance-club-cum-Salo attitude Karen portrays through the album. It is a bit unsettling, as it is a strident departure from the sonic worlds of their first two EPs and Fever to Tell, what with all the multilayered mixing and lack of importance in the guitar for the first few tracks. For instance, "Heads Will Roll" starts out with a keyboard chord progression that could easily have been lifted from Superstition or Peepshow. Karen's vocals themselves have calmed down considerably through these six years, and her Byrne-ish tics are far more prevalent, revealed by (assumably) superior recording equipment, and her tone quality has the struggling-contralto, nigh-emphysematic word-ending quirks that Siouxsie has given us during her solo career.

Musically, the densities are almost staggering. "Soft Shock" has no fewer than four separate streams of thought between the vocoded voice, the keyboard (while playing in unison mostly with the vocoded voice in the bridges, the timbre is separate enough to become its own animal), the guitar-distorted-1, the guitar-not-distorted, drums, bass, another guitar, and at last Karen. "Dragon Queen," while a fabulous song which inexorably combines ELO, Thompson Twins, Sheena E, Speaking in Tongues-era TH, and flecks of funk, is burdened with a huge amount of activity. YYYs pull this off, of course, by keeping the layers spare, like a good Henze symphony, and not ultra-complex, like the worst Ferneyhough piece. Many of the songs do, though, become rather blocky. By this, I mean Penderecki: nothing, nothing, THEN SOUND FOREVER, then nothing. Monomorphic. Static recursively through forward motion. Monotemporal. Fixed images with idiosyncratic character for four minutes or so. I have no clue whether this is a benefit or not; ask me in a few weeks, when I'm drunk or sober or sleeping or not.

Granted, Karen's influences are less visible (audible?) to the audience here but there are so many we could choose from. GBV, New Order, TH, PJ Harvey, Patti, the list could go on. But here, she's shoehorning Siouxsie in between all of those. Let me demonstrate: GBV SIOUXSIE New Order SIOUXSIE TalkSIOUXSIEing HeaSIOUXSIEds, PoSIOUXSIElly JeaSIOUXSIEn HarSIOUXSIEveSIOUXSIEy,... one easily gets the idea. "Hysteric" is a great example of this. As is "Skeletons." In the latter, we have a symphonic bass drum, a martial drum-sticking-line, atmospheric and translucent keyboard riffs, and an ethereal voice discussing -- well, esoteric lyrics in unrhymed couplets with a gothic rendition of permanent, unrequited love over a pentatonic wash of synths. (I give you "Softly" from Superstition) In "Hysteric," we have - albeit updated - an ambivalent take on the so-called journey of amor that we have (in customary deprecating and removed way) in Siouxsie's "Ghost in You." The main differences are that Karen is singing over a chord progression that evades the dominant and sings in a Scottish rip rhythm. Hold on: Siouxsie sort of does that too.

Again: the album stands on its own merits, and I owe it a proper review without post-structuralist doddering, and it shall have one soon after I review everything else new and old that, for some reason, I have the urge to discuss or rip apart. Mainly discuss. But I reserve the right...

I do suggest the album gets a proper listen from you, too. It's rather good.

I also say "finally" a bit tongue-in-cheek since it has been out for two months. I do not get to things quickly enough, it seems, but, that happens to be how I roullez le bon-temps.