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r.mutt's blog
8/28/07
WHAT IS A POP SONG?
current favourite song in the world: jawbreaker's "accident prone."
the story of dear you, the album "accident prone" is from, has changed dramatically over the last ten years. at the time, a once-genre-defining band destined for the indie-punk canon and institution status had totally and completely sold out. bill stevenson once said to me, "i liked these guys a lot. then they put out a new wave record that sounded like a british guy was singing. i didn't like that so much."
since then, dear you has attained near-weezer blue album status. it may not be in the indie-punk canon and the band broke up almost immediately after the album was released, so they never became an indie-punk institution, but dear you, moreso than jawbreaker's previous and much more highly regarded album 24 hour revenge therapy, has certainly gone down in history as genre-defining. dear you and the first weezer album have everything to do with how modern emo-pop sounds.
me, i love 24 hour revenge therapy. but there are songs on dear you that, if you took away the rob cavallo production, if you took away the digitised vocals and the big reverb stadium drums and the layered and processed guitars that don't actually sound like guitars, would sound just like 24 hour revenge therapy songs. this got me to thinking about whether there is an irreducible element in every song — the songness of the song, if you will — and, if you changed anything to do with this irreducible element, it would cease to be the same song. i think this question has been at the heart of what i've been doing ever since i started writing stupid punk songs when i was thirteen (half my lifetime ago; yikes). this is why i've always been so interested in cover songs, why all of the songs on my pop songs for cégeste album sounded the same, and why my recent work has been playing around with genre. (1. i began to theorise this here; 2. unnecessary heidegger quote: "the Beingness of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness.")
here are four tossed off new songs, averaging 59 seconds in length, that i hastily recorded in a spare hour one afternoon last week.
8/23/07
A FAREWELL TO IDEAS
as an addendum to my recent entry about the limitations of bruce robbins' blame train, here's something t. j. clark recenty said in an interview with the brooklyn rail.
Obviously our book [a collaborative work with the group Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War] takes advantage of certain Situationist concepts and hypotheses, and tries to apply them to current politics. And yes, we do think that the power of the image, and the control of appearances, are more and more part of the very structure of statecraft (and resistance to statecraft). We think the established Left suffers — suffers badly — from an inability to think about the new conditions of social control, and social struggle… Surely the horror of the recent war in Lebanon, and the fact that so much of that horror was played out, often in real time, over a whole battery of image-machines — and that the playing-out as imagery had real political consequences — that it was part of Israel’s “defeat”… surely this points to the emergence in the world out there of a different kind of political process, of political arena.
Nor did it entirely surprise us that Artforum and October had more to say about the book than The Nation. We’re used to the idea that the U.S. Left will maintain a dignified silence if anyone tries to move political thinking beyond the usual Bush-bashing-plus-policy-studies. [...]
All we would say to readers of Afflicted Powers is read the whole of it, not just Chapter One. Certainly the book is concerned with possible destabilizations in the regime of spectacular power. We think that these are happening, and need to be thought about — with and without Debord’s help. But the book never argues that such destabilizations have been the result of a single image-event, or even of a cluster or sequence of image-events. The sources of instability are complex. Some are long-term and tendential, having to do with the problems of social management in late capitalist society. Some are short term, or mid term, and geo-political: resource crises and the politics of oil, mutations in the politics of Islam, the way the absolute vacuum of official U.S. politics provided the space for neo-Christian, neo-Hooverite ideologues to seize power. The book is agnostic on the question of the depth of the new image-instability. But one thing it does not do. It does not say or imply that from now on it’s victory in the realm of appearances that counts. A new thinking of politics, in other words, won’t fixate on the squalid details of the image war. On the contrary: what really concerns us — what Retort goes on looking for — is the emergence of a possible new ground for war against the image in its present form. And that’s a social question—a question of the emergence of new forms of social identity and non-identity, new kinds of social resistance — not a technical one.
i applaud clark's critique of the (soft) left: "It does not say or imply that from now on it’s victory in the realm of appearances that counts." what clark calls "image war" is what robbins is looking for in rhetoric and blame, namely fighting manipulation with manipulation (both in the name of commonsense, morality, justice, truth, etc.).
but what's interesting about clark is that he keeps coming up in public intellectual debates. people who aren't art historians and who don't actually know anything about how art or visual culture work are always peppering their lectures and essays with "tim clark said this, tim clark said that." and these same people — mostly in literary criticism, "theory," and soft cultural studies — keep talking about the power of the image: a regime of the spectacle, an epistemic shift from logocentricity. (clark: "This is what [clark's most recent book] The Sight of Death is aimed against. It wants to discover what images are capable of — and what real wordlessness, in the face of the world of words, looks like.") but, for a very short period of his career, roland barthes was right: there is no message without a code, and visual culture too relies on the logos (and, so, the age of the spectacle is no epistemic shift at all). and while the spectacle and visuality (or, if you will, opticality) are of extreme importance, few commentators have noticed that what compels in the image is not its capacity beyond what words can do, but its very (phantom) materiality and (figured) objecthood. that is, its infinite reproducibility and its assimilability to the taxonomic systems foucault wrote of in the order of things. and, as we know from foucault, this happens to books too (cf. "fantasia of the library"). this is what lukács called the "phantom objectivity" of reification. among recent studies, rey chow's the age of the world target comes the closest i've seen to getting it right.** certainly, she identifies the stakes in the current discourse on images as something far exceeding "the power of what images can do in excess of what words can do [read: as rhetoric, to manipulate]."
**crudely put, chow's book, as its title suggests, takes heidegger's "the age of the world picture" as an exemplar of our times. here, "picturing" has nothing to do with the visual. rather, the perception of the world as a series of pictures takes the world's visual nature as the common denominator of experience and as the locus for comparison (as opposed to any number of other ways of understanding or being in the world). the "world picture" allows the subject to perceive the world at a distance (a topological model of comparison and equivalence that runs through both kantian aesthetics and mechanised warfare — and, i would think, a model that extends to capitalist reification and the bureaucratisation of the holocaust; the common factor here being an elision of face-to-face experience in favour of various forms of dehumanisation).
8/22/07
INDIE ROCK SAMPLER AT URBAN OUTFITTERS
"it's not the bands that sell out, it's the business." what?
this from what steve schroeder once called "music journalism's urban outfitters."
8/20/07
AQUA SEAFOAM SHAME
bruce robbins is wrong about this blaming business. accountability is important; that cannot be denied. nations and corporations must be held legally accountable to some agreed-upon code of conduct. what to do given the absence of an international law that works is a difficult question; this i will grant him. however, his suggestion that we plug this absence with an international moralism also doesn't work. there is a difference between a world of political actors uniting and what we have in the present, which is merely the intersection of pockets of political activitists. activism, as it exists in the present, takes moralism as its premise. it takes blame as its most effective tool to produce accountability and its results too often come prior to reflection. the ends here justify the means. i will not deny a sense of urgency. i can't. but i can't accept blame as a political project for two reasons. firstly, the activism model produces a division of consciousness that i can't square. this top-down model is comprised of a small number of actual political actors and many parties (lower rungs of activists, the general public, nations, corporations) whose actions are manipulated rhetorically (by blame, moralism, etc.).
secondly, i can't help but see the victories of activism as bandages. can a rigorously worked-out ethics produce actual change? i don't know. but this shit isn't working in the present. look at china. when that toy manufacturer who used lead paint committed suicide last week, my mom said, "i'm surprised the chinese government didn't execute him." my question to bruce robbins is, now that the olympics has china thinking about how it looks to the world at large (and particularly to the industrial powers and wealthy markets), what of it? didn't habermas argue that federal republic of germany's "orientation to the west" was getting in the way of actual positive change? so yes, perhaps something may now actually be done about darfur and, yes, the optics are good when china takes a third of the cars off the streets of beijing. but what about this? or this and this?
blame and rhetoric and moralism (and activism) can do good. i admit that. do the ends justify the means? questions of urgency (like in darfur) make that a tough question to answer. but shouldn't all the other terrible ends that come with this kind of accountability disqualify these means?
8/10/07
ALL OF SEPTEMBER, MOST OF AUGUST
my former colleague and shining light of the rock criticism mainstream doug wolk wrote this about young marble giants today: "They weren't even all that quiet — they were just in love with negative space, and their lyrics were so much about things unsaid that the space was formally appropriate."
two observations
perhaps come september i will also continue to deviate from the "turtles on turtles" organisation that this blog has traditionally taken and wholly embrace this pseudo-scientific, spinozist "infinite extension" thing levinson was yammering about.
8/06/07
SERGE GILBAUT TOOK ME ON A DÉRIVE
"Now that's what I call détournement." an open invitation to anyone (patrik, looking in yr direction) to explain what makes the tough alliance situationiste. is it the 100 miles 25 summers and runnin' video? i just don't see it. and what its self-reflexivity does accomplish is undercut by the lionising "these guys are situationiste" hype. perhaps that's the détournement?
p.s. why have i heard nothing about this in the north american media?
8/04/07
REFLECTIONS: ESSAYS, APHORISMS, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS
partisan politics will eat itself: finally, an excuse to call something "asinine."
agamben, the movie: the simpsons movie is about refugee camps.
heidegger is still voodoo nonsense: "But if things ever had already shown themselves qua things in their thingness, then the thing's thingness would have become manifest and would have laid claim to thought."
the condition of vinyl makes me emo: i do not regret throwing down all that money for a brand new copy of claudine longet's colours yesterday, but i am sad that it will never again sound as good as it did last night, the first time i played it.
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