Back at the beginning of March 2006 I checked out the Wrong Music night that Cardiff's Lesson No1 put on at Clwb Ifor Bach. I wanted to witness for myself DJ Scotch Egg and friends, about whom I'd been hearing nothing but over-excited/ semi-incomprehensible chatter for a good year or so. Hyped-up on the word-of-mouth buzz and from the hilarious/confusing/awesome hyperactive tracks on the Whatever compilation I picked up, I was ready to be entertained. They didn't disappoint. After all, if gameboy-gabba, spastic breakcore beat-boxing, and occasional bursts of death-metal style screaming, mostly delivered in broken English and Japanese doesn't sound like an entertaining night out then I don't know what would. But aside from enjoying myself - particularly Ove-Naxx's set and, later, the just-as-good home-burned CDR I bought from him after a conversation in which pulsating white-noise at the threshold of human hearing and my lack of any knowledge of the Japanese language competed to create total confusion – I was left feeling that what i had witnessed was more than just entertainment. It was something new, something completely different to anything that, after 15 years of immersing myself in electronic music, I would have expected.
The performances were not without precedent, of course. The most obvious – most mainstream - point of reference for Wrong Music is the image that has built up around Aphex Twin since the early 90s, as well as his own musical output since his 'Hangable Autobulb' EPs of 1995 – interestingly just reissued by Warp on CD. This is best typified in the videos directed by Chris Cunningham, especially 'Come To Daddy'. Here Aphex Twin's drill n bass style, which fragments the rhythmic conventions of jungle/drum n bass, introduces vox samples to parodic effect, and generally signifies subversively on mainstream musical and dance culture meets a dark, urban landscape that draws on horror conventions and, visually and musically, makes a link to goth/industrial/metal subculture. Within this strange world, where television sets in perfectly good working order are dumped in the street – clearly an apocalyptic sign! – Aphex Twin is metamorphosed into a ghoulish, monstrous creature, while in turn all the other people in the video seem to be transforming into Aphex Twin. This repeats a notion from the earlier 'Donkey Rhubarb' video, where we see children in Aphex Twin masks, and is later reworked in 1997's 'Windowlicker' video, where it's parodic meaning becomes somewhat clearer. This later video clearly plays upon the conventions of Gangsta Rap videos, and presents Aphex Twin in a Bling-tabulous world where, once again, the effect of his music seems to be to transform everyone into his own hideously distorted image.
This transformation is presented humorously, and has generally contributed to an idea of Aphex Twin as a sort of “mad genius” of the electronic world, but it can be understood as far more than just a sort of crude raspberry. On the contrary, these videos reveal a consistent approach, and one that makes sense both in terms of the ideas circulating in the musical subculture from which this artist emerged, and which comments upon his anomalous position within a more mainstream music culture, as a celebrity of 'pop star' of some description. The repeated motif of the Aphex Twin mask, or of characters transforming into a distorted version of Aphex Twin as they listen to his music, along with the appropriation of elements of a Gangsta Rap fantasy in 'Windowlicker' (stretch Limousine, scantily clad female dancers, fly gold chains...) all add up to a powerful rejection of Aphex Twin's own status as a celebrity. However, these images are equally resistant to the underground cult-of-personality that has grown up around him which, within the underground scene, is arguably just as incongruous as the idea of Aphex Twin as a pop star.
The late 1980s explosion of 'rave' in the UK, fired by US house and techno, was largely driven by the music of individual performers, rather than bands with several members. However, as a result of a fusion of several disparate ideas it simultaneously placed a huge value on collectivity, and a rejection of the star-worship/cult of celebrity that mainstream, and much guitar-based independent music operates within. A number of factors can be discerned: the importance of DJs, rather than the artists, clearly played a part, as did the use of electronic technology and reliance on sampling, all of which were understood to downplay the importance of the individual; equally, the free party and rave scene took off in the UK at a time when it a generalised left-leaning socialist/communist/anarchistic collectivism had currency in youth counter-culture, merging with hedonistic drug-taking to create a group focus rather than an individual one. Dance music simultaneously positioned itself in relation to primal drumbeat, social revolution, and a dehumanised, machinic future-that-had-already arrived, all of which created a focus on the affective, physical aspects of the music, the immediate experience, rather than on the artists as individuals.
Within this context, the idea of a 'Superstar DJ' was a contradiction, and artists seemed to confirm this by releasing music under multiple names and in multiple styles. For this reason, the attention focused on Aphex Twin was right from the start as problematic within the scene which he inhabited as it this refusal to stay put was from a mainstream point-of-view. Thus 'the first Aphex Twin album' was released in 1991 under a different artist name, 'Polygon Window', whilst the first album released under the name Aphex Twin, in 1993, was entitled Classics: a title that defies easy interpretation, to say the least. In one sense, the tracks on this album were indeed 'classics', since it collected together his early, genre-defining techno 12” tracks from early 90s rave scene. Nonetheless, for an artist's first album to be an album of classic tracks recorded only in the previous two or three years defies the entire narrative major labels (and, within literature, publishers) build around successful artists. The title thus implies that the album is an inappropriate form for this music to be released in at all – it's importance has already been established elsewhere – on the dancefloor; and not (only) in being performed live but, on the contrary, as a track played by DJs who had nothing to do with making this music. They, not the record companies, have acted as the intermediary between artist and audience.
The above is not meant to suggest that Aphex Twin necessarily has any coherent strategy here, but the recurrence of these problems and contradictions is plain to see. The musical style and presentation of his next two albums – I Care Because You Do and Richard D. James – deliberately confront one with the question of where he fits in with the music, of how the relationship between the two is to be configured, or disfigured. By persistently foregrounding these questions, Aphex Twin refuses the place assigned him in mainstream music culture. And no wonder, since the narrative options available to him are so limited. Essentially, it comes down to a choice between the Beatles and Elvis, the group journey or the self-destructive star. In this opposition we can see the meaning of the Aphex Twin mask, the repetition of self ad nauseum. In keeping with his sub-cultural roots, Aphex Twin's videos reject completely the idea of his own star status and, through parody, mock the way the music promo video has become important at all. The message seems to be : 'You want to be me? Desire me? Well here I am, again and again, to the point where it is a horror!'. The underlying position seems to be a complete rejection of celebrity, which is treated with ironic detachment if not naked contempt.
If Aphex Twin is typical in many respects of a whole generation of electronic musicians, a first wave born in late 80s rave culture, in terms of the current scene his anti-star stance seems highly anachronistic. In the mid-late 90s narratives of stardom took hold in electronic and dance music and enabled it to score some notable mainstream successes – the likes of The Chemical Brothers and Moby, the huge house scene which is built around big-name DJs who also have Radio 1 shows, the kind of coverage found in Mixmag, etc. - and there was a definite move towards the individual even on the fringes. Regardless of their marginal status, labels like Warp, just by persisting over 15 years with a core roster, have helped create fixed points-of-reference, named artists, who are to varying degrees celebrated as individuals, as stars, alongside the music they release. And in the last few years there has been a definite shift towards a focus on personality in electronic music – which is where my starting point, WRONG music, comes in. These acts are all about presenting a highly eccentric, highly individualistic image, musically and in person. They seem to foster trademark quirkiness and delight in outrageous behavior, rather than the quiet anonymity of machines.
However, given the abrasive nature of the music they are making it's hard to see this in terms of the drawing of electronic music into any mainstream narrative: whatever it is, it's not Elvis. What it seems to be is a genuine home-grown punk movement within electronic music, which, it has to be admitted, has developed a rather sedate and cerebral bent as it has become bedded-down and self-sufficient enough to sustain itself as a more or less closed shop – as typified by, say, The Wire. One of the acts, Germlin, from the UK, was introduced as being 16 (although subsequent research reveals this was a bloody lie, as he's actually 20). With nothing but a beat-up iBook, a microphone, and seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm, he blasted the dance-floor with a jittering, road-drill of drum n bass/breakcore/gabba that was as good as anything I've heard. Watching him I finally understood punk. I also felt old, not least because rather than just experiencing this in the moment, it triggered off exactly the kind of thoughts I'm describing here. If this where the next wave of crossover electronica is coming from – and I can't see many other likely contenders except for dubstep - we need to imagine not an Aphex Twin but an Alec Empire in every high school; one who doesn't even know who Alec Empire is.
Friday, June 22, 2007
The Prison
Here's another text from 7 years ago...
We see ourselves as a trap. The ego, identity, individuality, and the self as cages. Subjectivity, produced in and by culture, is seen as restricting, repressing, alienating: the oppression of the State, or of a distributed network of ideological state apparatuses. Our whole culture, viewed critically, appears as a prison from which escape would be desirable but remains impossible to achieve.
What has prompted this radical self-doubt – this desire to think critically, which means: to be self-critical to the point of masochistic disgust? A failure of confidence, a sense of despair and of weakness. The whole critical enterprise smacks of bad conscience. A guilty self-flagellation, an ascetic self-scourging worthy not just of Christian saints but of Jesus himself, nailed to the cross, bleeding. Much of what is called Postmodernism is a lament on the sins of the fathers who we can neither forgive nor escape becoming in turn. Here are its discursive foundations (or articles of faith):
"Western culture is perverse and dangerous, a plague which has swept virulently across the past 500 years leaving nothing but sickness. But there are no options, no alternatives, no good works that we can perform as a penance, no remission of these sins. And, worst of all, we enjoy what this bloody history has brought us. We enjoy ourselves, we can’t help enjoying ourselves, we revel in the tainted trap of our culture.
"Western culture believes it has found paradise here and now, and even if the price was plunder exploitation and indifference, no one wants to give anything back."
Paradoxically, this gloomy secular despair is more Christian than Christianity itself. The death of God has brought the death of man, man as the measure of all things, man as evolutionary triumph. Now that there is no one else to blame, we blame ourselves.
"The horror! The horror of that nothingness inside and outside, of the guilty little secret inside us all – a dirty, sexual, violent, irrational desire that destroys, selfish, greedy, amoral..."
Blaming the self, that controlling cultural imposition, the worst sort of Romanticism prevails under the sign of alienation.
"All this hurt, this pain and suffering is the result of our alienation from our true, natural selves. Culture is a pestilence, imprisoning and alienating us all, and oh how fervently we pray for salvation!"
But this nostalgia for our true, free selves, unburdened of civilization and its evils, is nothing but displaced nostalgia for God, for the redemption God might bring. And even the hardiest cynicism, which tells us we are brutal and selfish animals and all else is self-aggrandizement and pretension, still, in the end, amounts to a self-defense against the absence of God, the impossibility of salvation. It still accepts the same ground, trades in the same currency, circulates the same canker.
Turning our critical eyes to the past and present we question everything, exposing the expedient, rotten roots of our thoughts, histories, and words; but we never really ask why this should have become necessary. Of course, the assumption is that such a self-examination will facilitate change, enlightened progress. Marx’s famous words underwrite the whole project—"Philosophers so far have only talked about the world; the point however is to change it". But critical theory’s quantitative impact on events is negligible, to say the least. Concepts most people don’t understand are circulated in a decidedly closed economy comprised almost solely of western academics. If anything, such a commerce continues—intellectually—the very imperialistic colonization it claims to challenge, while simultaneously forming a lengthy, ponderous judgement on ourselves which, consequently, appears first and foremost as a confession. Critical theory is a kind of confession of guilt, given in the hope of salvation in the future in the form of enlightened progress.
"If we can only analyze what we have done, why and how we have performed these terrible deeds, then perhaps the burden will be lifted?"
But the more we look, the more we see the scale of the horror, the more everything is dragged down lower and lower into the circle of hell, until—as today—even our very sense of identity is suspect.
"Our troubles began with civilization itself, with the first settlers, agriculture, writing; at the moment a social reality principle defeated the desire for instant gratification, and we deferred pleasure, we were already cast out of Eden, and the sin is inseparable from our self-consciousness itself."
And there is no possibility of going back, no return to paradise, but only the hope of future atonement.
"Perhaps if we stop here, so very weary now after all these millennia, and recount all our errors, we can somehow bring that day of atonement closer? If we renounce everything human, everything we have produced, thought, desired or believed, showing its falsity and arrogance, perhaps then we will be forgiven?"
A sorry tale, which mistakes itself entirely because it still believes that man is the measure of all things, that our deeds are so terrible—and, therefore, so important—that we must castigate ourselves in an interminable self-analysis. As Nietzsche might have said – can someone open a window and let some fresh air into this unhealthy, sickly prison-cell we have built for ourselves out of a seemingly infinite guilt? But we no longer believe there is fresh air outside, or even that there is an outside. Kant’s lack of faith in any possibility of reaching an outside of subjectivity remains. The limits of reason have become the limits of the world itself, in a monstrous human, all to human anthropomorphism. Lacking faith in ourselves and in the world, we have willingly, guiltily, chained ourselves up, carefully, as scholars, bolting every door and boarding up every window.
"How do we escape from this prison?"
We see ourselves as a trap. The ego, identity, individuality, and the self as cages. Subjectivity, produced in and by culture, is seen as restricting, repressing, alienating: the oppression of the State, or of a distributed network of ideological state apparatuses. Our whole culture, viewed critically, appears as a prison from which escape would be desirable but remains impossible to achieve.
What has prompted this radical self-doubt – this desire to think critically, which means: to be self-critical to the point of masochistic disgust? A failure of confidence, a sense of despair and of weakness. The whole critical enterprise smacks of bad conscience. A guilty self-flagellation, an ascetic self-scourging worthy not just of Christian saints but of Jesus himself, nailed to the cross, bleeding. Much of what is called Postmodernism is a lament on the sins of the fathers who we can neither forgive nor escape becoming in turn. Here are its discursive foundations (or articles of faith):
"Western culture is perverse and dangerous, a plague which has swept virulently across the past 500 years leaving nothing but sickness. But there are no options, no alternatives, no good works that we can perform as a penance, no remission of these sins. And, worst of all, we enjoy what this bloody history has brought us. We enjoy ourselves, we can’t help enjoying ourselves, we revel in the tainted trap of our culture.
"Western culture believes it has found paradise here and now, and even if the price was plunder exploitation and indifference, no one wants to give anything back."
Paradoxically, this gloomy secular despair is more Christian than Christianity itself. The death of God has brought the death of man, man as the measure of all things, man as evolutionary triumph. Now that there is no one else to blame, we blame ourselves.
"The horror! The horror of that nothingness inside and outside, of the guilty little secret inside us all – a dirty, sexual, violent, irrational desire that destroys, selfish, greedy, amoral..."
Blaming the self, that controlling cultural imposition, the worst sort of Romanticism prevails under the sign of alienation.
"All this hurt, this pain and suffering is the result of our alienation from our true, natural selves. Culture is a pestilence, imprisoning and alienating us all, and oh how fervently we pray for salvation!"
But this nostalgia for our true, free selves, unburdened of civilization and its evils, is nothing but displaced nostalgia for God, for the redemption God might bring. And even the hardiest cynicism, which tells us we are brutal and selfish animals and all else is self-aggrandizement and pretension, still, in the end, amounts to a self-defense against the absence of God, the impossibility of salvation. It still accepts the same ground, trades in the same currency, circulates the same canker.
Turning our critical eyes to the past and present we question everything, exposing the expedient, rotten roots of our thoughts, histories, and words; but we never really ask why this should have become necessary. Of course, the assumption is that such a self-examination will facilitate change, enlightened progress. Marx’s famous words underwrite the whole project—"Philosophers so far have only talked about the world; the point however is to change it". But critical theory’s quantitative impact on events is negligible, to say the least. Concepts most people don’t understand are circulated in a decidedly closed economy comprised almost solely of western academics. If anything, such a commerce continues—intellectually—the very imperialistic colonization it claims to challenge, while simultaneously forming a lengthy, ponderous judgement on ourselves which, consequently, appears first and foremost as a confession. Critical theory is a kind of confession of guilt, given in the hope of salvation in the future in the form of enlightened progress.
"If we can only analyze what we have done, why and how we have performed these terrible deeds, then perhaps the burden will be lifted?"
But the more we look, the more we see the scale of the horror, the more everything is dragged down lower and lower into the circle of hell, until—as today—even our very sense of identity is suspect.
"Our troubles began with civilization itself, with the first settlers, agriculture, writing; at the moment a social reality principle defeated the desire for instant gratification, and we deferred pleasure, we were already cast out of Eden, and the sin is inseparable from our self-consciousness itself."
And there is no possibility of going back, no return to paradise, but only the hope of future atonement.
"Perhaps if we stop here, so very weary now after all these millennia, and recount all our errors, we can somehow bring that day of atonement closer? If we renounce everything human, everything we have produced, thought, desired or believed, showing its falsity and arrogance, perhaps then we will be forgiven?"
A sorry tale, which mistakes itself entirely because it still believes that man is the measure of all things, that our deeds are so terrible—and, therefore, so important—that we must castigate ourselves in an interminable self-analysis. As Nietzsche might have said – can someone open a window and let some fresh air into this unhealthy, sickly prison-cell we have built for ourselves out of a seemingly infinite guilt? But we no longer believe there is fresh air outside, or even that there is an outside. Kant’s lack of faith in any possibility of reaching an outside of subjectivity remains. The limits of reason have become the limits of the world itself, in a monstrous human, all to human anthropomorphism. Lacking faith in ourselves and in the world, we have willingly, guiltily, chained ourselves up, carefully, as scholars, bolting every door and boarding up every window.
"How do we escape from this prison?"
Is Art Revolutionary?
I was just looking for something on a DVD archive disc and instead I found this, which I wrote 7 years ago today (to the day):
Much twentieth century artistic discourse and practice has, at least for the avant-garde, revolved around the idea that art is revolutionary, and that the essential role of the artist is revolutionary social critique. Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, and the whole move away from representation towards abstraction are more often than not seen in this light. Art, we are repeatedly told, has freed itself from patronage and elitism; art is for the people. Involved in this new vision of art have been a little Marxism, the emergence of new artistic practices and media that seem to operate outside or against more traditional ones (which are associated with the status quo of traditional power structures) and a new idea of creativity as a form of profound, personal, and politically radical activity.
Central to this kind of perspective is the idea that it is possible to subvert or oppose existing power structures and economic regimes through a revolutionary artistic practice: by creating art that escapes or actively resists dominant cultural modes of expression—and which is therefore truly radical—the artist can bring about significant shifts within a society, perceptually, politically, and economically. Such a perspective is apparently opposed but in reality in harmony with the rather “postmodern” idea that any individual action is futile against the inhuman logic of capital, that we are effectively disenfranchised except as consumers, and that even in this role we are mere media slaves, manipulated by the mass media’s hypnotic circulation of images. The main difference between these views does not lie with the way they conceptualise art’s relationship to the political as such, but with their assessment of how suitable the current cultural climate is for a radical artistic practice to begin with. In other words, the former see contemporary art as mounting a successful political challenge, whereas the latter see it as an endless repetition of the same, a stream of always already recuperated banalities, an irrecoverable dissipation of art’s radical potential. And, of course, there are those who see art today as radical precisely because of its banality, superficiality, and artlessness—a clever rejection of the bourgeois expectations which have been foisted onto the shoulders of artists, a refusal to make pretty or even comprehensible commodities.
These ways of thinking about art are problematic partly because they still carry baggage from the art-historical discourse which emerged as part of the Italian Renaissance (with Vasari’s Lives of the Great Artists) and perhaps reached its apogee in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Categories developed within this discourse continue to play far too prominent a role in these kinds of perspectives, despite many years of analysis, deconstruction, and the challenges of post-structuralist and postmodern critiques. The power of these critical revisions is hampered by a confused political investment, and by a failure to define what “art” involves adequately. “Art” remains a deeply confused concept, and all too often remains a almost sacred object of discourse: art must be radical, art must find ways of resisting capitalism, art must liberate its revolutionary potential! Beneath these cries lies a profoundly humanistic and normative theoretical investment in the value of art, in art as a value. But what is that value? What is the place of art within human life? About these questions, no one seems so sure as the rhetoric of revolution they flourish might suggest.
Four major concepts still confuse the debate to a surprising degree, despite many works which attempt to sweep them aside:
The abstraction of art from specific practices into a general concept of a sphere of activity which (to varying extents) transcends historical, social, and economic determinations.
The reification of the products of artistic practice, as “the work of art”, either as cultural or as economic value: the work of art as commodity-value is opposed by the work of art as cultural value, but neither definition of value is particular transparent.
The development of a closed discourse with its own criteria and standards for the judgement of art has an unquestioned legitimacy, but the development of aesthetics as a specialised form of knowledge is co-extensive with the development of capitalism and its authority needs questioning.
Last but not least, the shadows are still haunted by the figure of the artist-as-universal genius, as the concrete embodiment of the transcendental value “art”. The creative one, the divine, the wonder of nature. We don’t have a concept of “talent” distinct from these determinations: talent is just a more egalitarian, bourgeois name for genius.
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