Why do people do music in different ways?
May 22nd, 2008 by MikeAnd how do some of these assume a role of musician in different capacities? I feel a deficiency of knowledge to answer this, although not because no one has tried. On the contrary many have tried–and there I feel a deficiency in my knowledge too. How have current theories come to care about structurations and struggles of social systems and the role genres of music play in the performance of daily life and historical struggle–symbolic, cultural, economic, and whatever other big category you want to dump into the dead marshes of hegemony, identity, and social change–ahem, that is politics in all its embodied manifests. Why do I care? (Why) Do you care? Need we really bother?
But beyond the solipsisms ever to be had in the more dimly lit and lonely of the rooms of academia, my ambitions with this question on the context of a running BLOG is personal–but by “personal” I do not intend it the more dimly lit way. Rather, how and why is it that different musician personalities compose their selves as they do? When producing not only music, but their selves as composers or producers of music in relation to professions, “personal lives”, rerelationships with signs, fans, audiences…how are they made and making-up their role within the many layerd stratifications of the field of cultural production? And from where in the hell come all these new genres, figures, and types, in which broader cultural or historical motions of force do they make a habitat of musician discipleship and forms do all these many habitats take? How did the continent of music become so genorously huge, and what kinds of people endeavor to live there?
This can involve many more focused questions. How did the figure called Rihanna become Rihanna, why do some people worship at this figure while others go and worship other figures, or worship Rihanna in a pardoic, ironic way? Or, maybe better, since I cannot at the moment claim to speak of the process of this woman’s discipline into a kind of performing artist, I can speak of mine. And even better, I can try to make a kind of story of mine in such a way that it encourages others to share their stories of becoming forms of music discipleship. Moreover, I can actually take the time to make of this a case study of the making-up of musical authority–the disciplines of music–musician discipleship.
Base (Why did I write “Base” here and then forget about both it and why?”)
So this is my proposal. And I will leave it as a proposal to begin because of three reasons mainly. First of all, and least of which, the time commitment I can reasonably devote to this more interesting, and hopefully in the long-run more participatory line, is no more than 3-5 paragraphs a week. Second, blog posts ought not be much longer than that anyway most of the time. Text fatigue? But mainly, as it stands with these four paragraphs, it opens a space of time for the off-chance others might like to begin this story-sharing conversation of music and the constitution of selves, economies, and cultures of bodies political and their signs. I myself will be back by July after my honeymoon to begin to share mine. When you do music what do you do? Why?
Lex (Sunday 01 Jun at 03:58am)
I tend to envision a caricature that one finds sexually appealing, not much unlike the previously mentioned quasi-econoclast Rhihanna, save for a more diverse (eep) vocal range and inferior gams. I digress.
The modern image of “musician” involves, to me, an amalgam of reverse irony, self-aware aggrandisment, and a misappropriated self-sabotaging post-prentension sense of craft, a là Jack White, Feist, Smog, et al. A sort of “yeah, I have no idea what I’m doing, but fuck you, you’ll eat it up” mentality. The true modern music listener is subject to the same criteria as a special-needs teacher: to subject all things to the same standard as those of a potential savant, one whose percieved brilliance may be obscured by one’s pretensions; a sort of guilt-induced misunderstanding that leads one to make a conclusion of brilliance where all that exists is an incomprehensible mess. To wit, that which is inaccesible is genius, and all that is accessible is “tired,” “outmoded,” or has been done at or above the same capacity, or in a more palatable form; that is to say, all that has been said has been said better before. The challenge then, is to bring exposure to one’s own vision as avant-garde, regardless how inept said vision is.
I’ve been drinking, and I haven’t the slightest notion how long these words will sit in moderation purgatory. As mentioned, how I function as an artist, regardless of validity, is to place each moment as a performer as one of Antoine Roquentin’s ex-girlfriend’s Perfect Moments; that is, one of those immortal moments that juxtaposes pedestrian reality with the life of that which is not subject to the notions of history nor critique, and proceed and exist in a vacuum of outside context and serve only those masters which have witnessed said moment. It’s juvenile but I believe each person is similarly delusional, and if not, if truly not, then they are the real artists, and no one will know, can know, the difference. The prentense with which I carry myself is unlikely to be shared by the greats, but like most session musicians, I am there to perform to the best of my ability and little else. There was a point in here somewhere, but my lack of sobriety is surely counteractive to the solemn tone of these essays, and shit. (See, I read them all. Cookies and/or gold stars would be appreciated)
tl,dr: Image is paramount and tantamount to the finished product of a performer, and these pretensions drive the diversity of shit in which we find ourselves similarly immersed. Without these pretenses, we risk homogenity. Or not. Bourbon. I’ll try again later under a different username, though these words may serve as notes for my later editions.
Something about a milkshake and a yard, or…
Mike (Monday 14 Jul at 07:19am)
“My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard…” and something, and something, “but I’d have to charge”. Eggs. Boobs. Frying Pans.
At the gym today I was delivered an interesting semiotic on TMF, which is the Netherlands equivalent of “The Music Channel”. It is an organ of MTV Europe. And they have one of those shows where a middle caliber Dutch music/youth culture celebrity comes on and selects 10 of their favorite music videos. Two of them in particular I really got to watch from my stride upon the elliptical machine.
Now, mind you, by “watch”, I do not mean “listened to” as as well. I was listening to a blend of COH and the contemporary Dutch club mix my gym has going on.
The first was Green Day and U2 performing a collaborative piece whose narrative offered a counter-factual narrative to the deployment of the US armed forces relative to the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. Faux CNN reels of the armed forces technology and organization aiding the immediate survivors of Hurricane Katrina are cut into those sincere black & white segments of rock performers looking sincere; in that particular Bono/Edge and whatever that Green Day singer is named. Billy something…?
After this was that video by the Red Hot Chili Peppers where throughout the video they parodically perform the rock performance styles of famous rock n’ rollers through time- Elvis, Beatles, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister, ACDC, some intense gothic thing, Danzig, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and so then of course also their selves…
While I have certain reservations about the inability of the U2/Green Day to escape military as solution, the moral pragmatism of the story appeals to me. Inasmuch as machines of a military apparatus have been built, to what service are they deployed? And so the public intervention these faces of the rocker seek to interject, or reinforce, or partake in is one which says - ‘think of all the aid and rescue technologically celebrated American choppers might have made possible in the case of this natural disaster; what does the kind heroism depicted in the rescue and care operations of our re-visioning of the history of these events imply about the (?lack of?) heroism in the Iraq war.
It is a naive counter-factual logistically, but somehow I feel like the sentiment is productive in the hegemonic sense where questions are asked or alternatives posed in public by figures who are not so much authorities as they are images and persona possessed of notions of moral truths and equipped to broadcast their work as signs of their possession and positioning. I don’t think this is facile. I find I don’t want to be too cynical about this video. I’ll take anti-war sentiment where I get it, but it certainly seems to have come into fashion within the past three years. But in a soft way. I see also on MTV these case documentary shows, “MTV True Life”. “My Boyfriend is in Iraq”. Four young women, 18-22, and their particular situations and challenges relative to that predicament.
I have no idea what I’m talking about. I thought I was on track to respond coherently to your comments, which were great BTW… I guess maybe it has to do with the use of the rock image. Both the videos assume a political intervention. In the case of the RHCP it is to embody this ironic awareness of the relation between the artist and the fan; to describe or demonstrate rock n’ role as an empty signifier which can be filled, faced, made-up with all kinds of rocker identities; at one level these all seem to kind of do the same thing, but at the same time carve out great differences in community identity implied in partaking in and/or appreciating different of theimages of the available rock artist identities at different points in time and place.
I like this deployment of the image idea. And the RHCP video makes me curious about how these rocker semiotics have moved through time and culture; what they maybe suggest about the vibrancy of their time. The image is deployed; with consequences. The image is pretensous, as you say Lex, and has to be if it is to do its job of producing music. The U2/Green Day and the RHCP videos are both equally pretentious in their assumption of the story-telling role which grants authority to intervene or comment on military-governmental, he intervention in the affairs of another field/discipline as well as artistic-identity politics, and to intervene on artistic-identity affairs and the situation of the history of the discipline of ‘rock’, its own discipline. And so, they do what other genres of knowledge do and assume the capacity to be an amplifying force for some myth or imaginary between or within fields of discourse and whatnot.
I’m sure shitloads of research has been done on music videos and celebrity image. I’m sure a lot of it is really lame too.