ABD!

I took and passed my comps on Monday, and as it turns out none of that extended theory mongering RE Walter Benjamin (who I really have little business writing about) came into play at all, and we spent much more time talking about the dissertation project than anything else. I'm kind of letting all of that stuff simmer right now, so i don't want to talk about that. And, I had a few other things, including new clues to the mystery of what the hell kind of guitar that i bought form Screamin' John before I left Fayetteville, and an upcoming radio show on George Mitchell, a blues documentarian that I'm trying to document, but I'm too sleepy now. So we'll save those things for later, over and out.

Walter Benjamin Authenticity Interface

I had thought, or set of thoughts come loose while rereading Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" this morning. Page numbers refer to the 2007 Schocken books/Random House edition of the 1968 Harry Zohn translation. The paradoxical importance of notions of authenticity in (mass market, duplicable, industrialized) postwar popular music is a theme that I keep circling, so maybe that means its good blog fodder. We'll see, but in the meantime, here's Benjamin:

“The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” (221)

– But it’s worth noting that during the postwar period a lot of pop music exhibits qualities that are transmissible only because of the recording process, that are created through the recording and duplication process. (I’m including microphones and perhaps even megaphones here because the amplified sound produced is a shade different in time and history than the original vocalization) Benjamin’s thought here doesn’t take into account the way that the process is utilized to create new forms of “art.” A useful ethnographic exploration of this process in action is Louise Mientjes' Sound of Africa! which locates the recording studio right in the middle of the produciton of musical identities. So here, the multitracked recording creates an art object (Benjamin might argue with that) which has no original referant other than its duplicable form, unless we count master tapes and alternate mixes which do narrate authenticity without most of us ever hearing them and which arent' any more "real" really than the two track mixdown. This is all longhand for the slogan written across Cyclops, the old TV set that the Rex Rootz used to use on stage sometimes which read "The Bands in Yer head."

But: this is right on, and still holds true: “since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former too is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.” (221)

-I have two interrelated thoughts here: one that he’s absolutely right, that whatever the actual conditions of the postwar musical era, we have enough of the cult of the art object hanging over our sense of aesthetic pleasure that we want to make a claim for the authenticity of our experience of the song by locating some essence of what we hear behind or above or beyond the processes by which it comes to us.

The second and related point is that the lack of an original at any point in our experience of the song creates a void that we fill with various significations of authenticity.* These can come from a variety of places in our engagement with the recorded object: one of them is the way that blues record collectors, following the aesthetic that Hamilton** credits James Mckune with establishing among his coterie, locate authenticity in the primitive (“honest” “transparent”) recording of the highly personalized and individualized expression of vernacular tradition. This finds the least-mediated to be a ‘captured’ version of the unmediated and rests on the power of a (seeming) one to one communication that elides space, time, and the social and economic barriers that might sit between player and listener in a real “one to one” moment. This is the same aesthetic of personal authentic testimony that legitimates indie and lo-fi recordings with their audiences, and its similar to the more specific discourse regarding overdubbing in jazz and classical recordings.

Another intervention, one that’s more common I think, is the substitution of personal experience with the duplicated object for the experience that in Benjamin’s formulation accrues within the original object. That is, we think of where we were when we first heard “Sweet Child O’ Mine” or “When Doves Cry” and the various permutations and experiences that we’ve undergone in relation to our continued experiences of those recordings of those songs, which become simply “those songs.” This is healthy I think in the way it allows us to involve ourselves emotionally with music, the way that it defeats the elitism that surrounds high and fine art by placing the experience of them behind barriers that place severe limits on who can see them when.

It’s unhealthy though in the way that it hides the material processes that produce those recordings (the absolute substitution of “the song” for “the recorded song”) and thus hides (in plain view) the material relations that produce and deliver those recordings to us & thus hides the imbrications between our emotional lives and various systems built on alienated labor. Those relations stay hidden usually unless they are summoned into being in a benign way such as the “Live Aid” performances where the apparatus of the music industry becomes all at once a charitable structure, or if they bubble up to the surface as when old blues and R& B artists try to recover lost royalties or when, like during the controversy over Graceland, the power discrepancies between auteur artists and the specialist musicians that they employ to achieve certain effects becomes too audible. In the latter case it’s a conflict between our longstanding, market nurtured affective investment in the headline artist as auteur, and our immediate affective response (renewed and renewing investment in) to the textural, timbered and rhythmic pleasures we find in the songs themselves. It’s a Paul Simon album, but the things we like most about it don’t issue forth from Simon unless we embrace a version of auteur theory so drastic that it flies in the face of the socialist rhetoric that emanated from the French New Wave directors who pioneered auteur theory in cinema. This only works if we recognize it as a Paul Simon album beforehand and maintain that recognition through the intervention of the systems of legitimation that comes down to us through the Western classical composition tradition. It’s a Paul Simon album because he “wrote” all the “songs.”

There are various ways to work around this elision of the material processes. One of them is I’d call the Dischord records method, whereby live performances are privileged by the band’s (Fugazi’s) insistence that they be accessible (all ages shows, $5.00 cover), their refusal to engage in merchandising at the shows themselves, and a general dictum of demystification and transparency regarding the mechanics of business, record making, touring and performing. Another is the renewal of agency post-recording that Hip-Hop DJs pioneered, and which intellectual copyright laws quickly and effectively neutralized, and another is simply the kind of listening engagement (and a kind of song) that brings the material constraints of the process to the surface as a set of references that allow contact between performers and audiences. I had a great example of this, but I lost it somewhere in the flow of words above & I’ll come back and fill it in when I get it back.

-Update: maybe I was simply thinking of the kind of engagement wherein response to the song includes a response to the material conditions of its production and a conscious foregrounding of the songs performative/recorded history. I think that I;m thinking here of how George Lipsitz posits the “hidden histories” of popular music, especially in “Weeds in a Vacant Lot” in Footsteps in the Dark. There’s also probably a brief for taper culture among jamband audiences here too, as a way to substitute an alternate and more audience-controllable set of relations around recorded objects by positing specific recordings of live sets pinpointed to specific dates as the 'real" versions of the songs. You don't want to go too far with this though because there's alot of elision of material performance production in dead culture too, otherwise there would be/have been a wider recognition of the band as a bunch of junkie millionaires by their fans. I mean, at least Stones fans know what they're buying when they pay the ticket.

*I have an immediate want to quibble with this even as I write it, because we don’t, or I don’t, experience that “void” as a lack of anything in particular, that is that I have to work to historically recover the affective power of the aura that Benjamin so credits with the power of the art object, which suggests to me that both his and my engagement are historically constructed rationalizations after the fact intended to explain the power of an experience with music or art of nay kind, a “coming to self” before the presence of a “text” with the stipulation that the “self” one is coming to is historically constructed, is a self we make of the available materials and experiences of our times and places.

**Marybeth Hamilton, Searching For The Blues. It’s a book about the history of the idea of the blues in the hands of folklorists and record collectors. It’s not a complete history of that by any means, as it cuts off at the beginning of the 50s when, to my mind, things really get interesting, and it does the reader a disservice by not pointing them to either Robert Gordon’s Lost Delta Found or Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk, both of which offer expanded understandings of some of Hamilton’s material.. But it does establish a solid foundation for understanding, for instance, how Mystery Train-era Greil Marcus probably heard Robert Johnson and the role of “the blues’ (especially the “country blues” or “delta blues” in the construction of the boomer-rock aesthetic. Hamilton, according to her introduction, is a teenage New York Dolls fan turned academic historian, so maybe there’s a generational conflict that explains Dave Marsh’s vehement trashing of her text in the New York Times Book Review, or maybe she just hit a little too close to home.

(This)Blog's Not Dead!

Alright folks

I do the oral defense part of my comprehensive exams on Monday and i promise after that to be here on a regular basis. I had some illusions that the informal qualities of blog writing might spur me past the pain of academic writing and generate insights that i could then pour painlessly back into my work. Well, such are the rationalizations that have for years supported my tendency to overextend myself. As it turns out, whatever kind of writing i'm doing it has to take a certian amount of care and consideration and/or the real spark of "that just hit me!" or it turns out as shitty as the half-baked or overbaked piece on the Hold steady that was my last real attempt to put words up here in hyperspace.

So there are a number of things on and in my mind that i hope to put up here after Monday, some generated by the process of preparing for comps, others by free floating encounters with popular music. One thing long overdue is an inquiry into the Hold Steady's second album, Seperation Sunday, in which your intrepid reporter tries to figure out why the literal descriptions of the story of the album (teenage runaway becomes meth addict and is saved by christian rock and the Catholic church) sound so dim and unsatisfying compared to the story that unfolds listening to the record itself. But i don't want to write that now, not only because i have other very important things to do, but because i don't want this to become just a Hold Steady blog.

Instead, I'll just sign off by mentioning that it was Vampire Weekend, and specifically the self-reflexive genius of the song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" that really made me want to get this blog back up and running. More in a couple of days.

Boll Weevil - Sid Selvidge

Well, I shouldn't let Youtube take over this blog, but this is hard to resist. I saw Selvidge sing this in Eureka Springs in 1994 and it's been stuck in my brain since. A fine, fine voice.

When You're Down and Out

-the cool stuff you find on Youtube! Mudboy and the Neutrons, or at least a recent version, minus the dearly missed Lee Baker.

Randy Newman - A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

Multiple Oscar winner Randy Newman with a heartwarming song about America...

Well Alright...here we go...

I certainly didn't mean to let this blog lay fallow for so long. The funny thing is that I started it thinking that blog writing would be good exercise, that the kind of automatic, spontaneous, off the cuff writing that I just knew I'd do if I had a blog (because that's what they're all about, right?) would loosen up my muscles and make the scholarly easier. My first post was going to be about The Hold Steady, this great rawk band from Minneapolis who live in Brooklyn and who got me through grading and paper writing at the end of last semester. And i pretty much had it written, in my head anyway. And then these reissues of the first two Pretenders albums came out. Holy shit! What great songs, and live tracks too. And found myself very excited about James Honeyman Scott's guitar playing on those records, and I started thinking about the way he, and the Pretenders first bassist, Pete Farndon died, and it struck me that their lives and deaths, especially their deaths, could have taken place in Hold Steady songs. And if they did, Craig Finn would have invested them with just enough drama and nuance that you couldn't really call bullshit on them, you couldn't quite say "man that's just too much" although you'd want to. Sometimes Finn does pile it on a little thick, like when the fun song about hardcore kids at punk rock shows refuses to stay nice and ends "She had the gun in her mouth/she was shooting up in her dreams/when the chaperon said we'd been crowned the king and the queen." (Massive Nights) And, really, does the world need more hard boiled rock songs about fucked up people? Well, if they're these songs, yes. And maybe I should counter some of those lines with something else of Finn's, but what's the point if you can't hear the band? Because much what's working here is the band. Example: "She Put 900 dollars/on the fifth horse/in the sixth race/I think his name was Chips Ahoy"[BAM! Drums! guitar! Bass! organ!-settles down very quickly into tight groove, driving the next lines: "I got this girl, she don't have to work/she can tell which horse is gonna finish in first/two nights of painkillers make the pain even worse." And you know things aren't going to end well from there, and you're right, cuz the song ends with a nice hooky tail out with Finn singing "how'm I s'posed to know that you're high when I can't even touch you? How'mI s'posed to know that you're high when you won't even dance?" over and over against the same little "oh ho oahoho" backups that punctuated the intro. on the way, there's a great little bass and organ break, a cool guitar build up and a dead stop/explosion into the chorus, and it's all over in a little more than 3 minutes.



Sometimes, alot of the time, the band sounds like a kind of econo-jam version of Thin Lizzy. You get harmony guitars, you get solos, you get killer rock riffs, big thumpy drums and an aggressive, melodic bassist, big choruses, etc, but all packed into short, mostly flab-free songs. At other times, they sound oddly like Bruce and the E Steet band around the first couple of albums, especially the way Finn tries to pack a whole bunch of words into his lines. I mean, when you hear a singer exclaim "these twin city kisses/sound like clicks and hisses/and we all come down and drwon in the Mississippi river" (Boys and Girls in America) and then the band drops out and the piano player steps in with this nice little two handed narrative riff... and then the bass/drums/guitar come back in at almost metal force and volume, and...well, this Thin Lizzy/Bruce thing must be right, because after I thought of it myself, the review in Mojo sai the same thing, with many fewer words!



But the Mojo review also did the same dumb thing that every rock critic who writes about The Hold Steady does...they called them a "bar band." This is because, well, Adam says it's a lack of imagination, an automatic category slotting. and yeah, they do use some bar band moves, sonically. They sound like they step up on their stage monitors sometimes, you know, they aren't afraid of that. Like the way that James Honeyman Scott, in the last waves of the first British punk revolution, wasn't afraid to pour the whole exiled British heavy blues guitar tradition right into the Pretender's songs. Listening to those reissues, especially the live tracks, you hear that rare thing, a rock that's not too hazy to find the punk, and a punk that's not too (willfully) stupid to find the rock. the Hold Steady does this too, but that doesn't make them a bar band.



What does make them a bar band, in a very different way than most critics have meant the tag, is that they, using both words and music, describe situations that arise in or on the peripheries of the lives of people who live in bars (a la Cat Power) more or less, and they describe/enact those situations with drama that those folks would recognize as appropriate, both rhetorically and formally. And this is why couplets like "And the band played 'Screaming for Vengeance' and we agreed/this world is merely manacled/started out ice cream social nice/ended up all white and ecumenical" (Hot Soft Light) mean so much more when you can hear the band behind them, kicking into some hard rock that could make imagine that the next song might indeed be Screaming for Vengeance.



But this is the problem too, and this is the line that Finn's songs walk: the line between describing that life in the romantic and fucked up way it's felt, and romanticizing that fucked up life, the kind of life that left Honeyman Scott and Farndon dead of overdoses before they were 30. I mean, that's not rock and roll cool, that's incredibly stupid! And, maybe the difference between Craig Finn and the folks in his songs is that he knows this...now.



so, that's something like what i was going to write. I had this blaze of inspiration and it all fit together, probably better than it did there. I didn't even mention that the Hold Steady album all those songs are from is Boys and Girls in America. And I would have had a much better ending than this, if i'd ever gone ahead and written it all down.

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