Hand in Glove

When in the summer i was thinking about Beyonce's single Sasha Fierce gauntlet as an homage to Michael Jackson's single white glove, I was really intrigued to discover their shared debt to Bob Fosse as a choreographer. This edit of Fosse's routine in The Little Prince is pretty extraordinary, a template for almost all of the moves and tics which we now consider to be characteristically MJ:




And then there's Beyonce's debt to, or rather deliberate homage to, Fosse in -- let me finish -- one the best videos of all time. I can't embed it but you can watch it here.

And this synchs up Fosse's original routine, devised for his wife Gwen Verdon, with Single Ladies:



The Fosse-MJ-Beyonce triangulation is so gloriously odd, the way it crosswires certain assumptions about gender and race, subverting projections like the idea that Jackson's performance of Billie Jean at Motown 25 'encapsulated a long tradition of African-American dance movements in one performance' (a view ascribed to Ian Inglis in the wiki for the moonwalk).

While I'm on the subject, I don't think I've ever linked from here to this post about Beyonce, the Sashe Fierce gauntlet as cyber-prosthesis and the etymological roots of cyborg in the concept of slavery.

This is how we walk on the moon

MJ as classic child star -- identity fixed at moment of first success, unable to achieve a viable adult identity because unable to ever leave this persona as a) wunderkind and b) object of desire behind. Frozen in this pre-pubescent mindframe. This compounded by father's violence and philandering: horror of adult sexuality. Career produced then torn apart by the tension created by this as he ages. Androgyny and surgery as attempt to evade post-pubescence, to remain like a child: asexual and, as a universally worshipped image-vessel of pure potentiality, deracinated too. Surgery as refacialization, denial of his father's paternity and the genetic reiterations of repro-futurism. Billie Jean as apex of this -- rejection of paternity, of sex and its reproductive logic -- (see also Dirty Diana). Then the decline as age renders these contortions impossible to sustain. Atonement for the blasphemy against holy ideology of the child in Billie Jean etc... has children w/out sex, has sexless intercourse w/ children...

The moonwalk as attempt to reverse flow of time/space back towards 1969, year of the real moon walk and moonlanding, the year he debuted w/ J5 and was date-stamped, ID-stamped, Id-stamped irrevocably. A survey of the Jackson 5's records could work here too -- as a sort of lost future, an image of the child MJ could not continue to be.

An outline for a piece on Michael Jackson that remained unwritten. I'm glad I never fleshed it out, it was more a ground-clearing exercise in working out what I actually thought MJ was, before then writing something a little less obvious (and I do think a lot of it is obvious), or at least less pop-psychological. I still like the moonwalk idea though: the choreography of nostalgia, a literalization of a will-to-return, the longing to go backwards though time to a prelapsarian safety. Is the 1969 moon landing / J5 debut connection overstated? Maybe, but then why is it called the 'moonwalk'? It's not as if there's any similarity between Jackson's slip-slide reverse (both feet stuck like glue to the floor) and the big, slow-motion forward bounces which everyone knows low gravity imposes on the normal human gait. [The move, as is well-documented, was not invented by Jackson, but Jackson does seem to be responsible for the name by which it's now universally recognised.]

One (and not the only) way that this sketch is superfluous/redundant is that there already is a survey of the Jackson 5's discography by Barney Hoskyns in the latest volume from Zer0:



It also features Mark Fisher, Steven Shaviro, Dominic Fox, Owen Hatherley, Alex Williams, Reid Kane, Geeta Dayal, Charles Holland, Tom Ewing, Joshua Clover, Marcello Carlin, Ian Penman, David Stubbs, Mark Sinker and more. I shouldn't big it up personally as I'm in it, but in the Times Bob Stanley says it's 'one of the year’s best books' and has 'fresh, allegation-free perspectives on Jackson’s life.' Available to order here.

Beards per minute

Given their closer orbit to his normal spheres of listening, I'm surprised Simon missed a whole rash of beards beyond the fuzzy folk types discussed in this Guardian piece (and in his blissblog follow-up).

For starters, minimal techno does not mean minimal facial hair.


Particularly for the acknowledged master of the field.


This minimal-techno-dubstep spectrum clearly needs to be extended as minimal-techno-dubstep-beards, looking at this Perlon new boy:


Then there's Sam Shackleton's former Skull Disco colleague:


There may be a West Country thing going on here . . . Bristol is a pretty beardy town, and Bristol's the connection for Appleblim and Bass Clef:


But that's not all re dubstep:


And Hyperdub connects to:


From which you can go hauntological:


Or stay electro/synth-pop (note the double points scored here for beard plus Shoreditch Slug):


From whom the beard's importance to the post-punk electro disco revival is a step away:


Before you even consider random strands like space disco:



And assorted French hipsters like Sebastian Tellier or Justice who I can't be bothered to picture.

I just hope these oversights don't blow up in Simon's face . . . It can only be a matter of time before Joe Muggs pens a heartfelt screed on the narrowness of his initial folk-orientated Face Fuzz Continuum . . . its pernicious effects as a kind of canon formation; how badly it reveals his ignorance of the openness of the modern beard-wearer to a huge variety of influences beyond the Incredible String Band; etc.

Crazy Rhythms

If I’d known that The Feelies were capable of sounding like Richard Thompson jamming with Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, I would have checked them out sooner. For years I had one unsourced phrase in my head in relation to the band: ‘Hoboken pop squirm’, although the core of the band actually grew up (and remained) in Haledon, New Jersey. I couldn’t even have told you what Hoboken pop squirm was; I assumed it meant weedy proto-indie, a kind of jangly forerunner of Weezer or They Might Be Giants, the wrong side of the river from the bare-knuckle sonic psychosis of post-No Wave downtown.

Crazy Rhythms (their first album) is totally wired though. The sound is like a featherweight boxer: not overpoweringly massive but practically quivering with tensile strength. Although the wiriness of the long-distance runner is probably a better comparison: according to this NY Rocker piece, the two guitarists, Glenn Mercer and Bill Millions would meet daily to go for 3-5 mile runs. Anton Fier, drummer for long enough to record this album but not much longer, must have been the real athlete though: some of these beats, especially ‘Forces at Work‘, the title track, ‘Moscow Nights’, ‘Loveless Love’, are so unerringly, unrelentingly propelled that the stories about him throwing up between songs, and bleeding from the mouth and ears (! flying and/or broken sticks presumably) are fully believable.

When Fier and the rest of the band are locked right in, punk becomes an inadequate reference point, and instead a kind of American motorik manifests itself, with the New Jersey Turnpike’s endless width -- 14 lanes at one point -- replacing the autobahn as the governing metaphor. (‘Forces at Work’: Haledon, Galledon.) That sense of flat width -- an inclination to the horizontal as an organizing principle -- follows through the whole record from the mixing and its separated stereo image to the cover image of the band, lined up from left to right against a pale blue ground. ‘Crazy Rhythms’ is so… flattened, with its beginning and end separated by a guitar-less instrumental break long enough to fit most punk songs into, but one that doesn’t attempt any shifts in dynamic range or solos, just a series of percussion bursts that come and go.

The whole record feels fascinatingly out of place: a Jersey band obsessed with Eno and Kraftwerk, playing on the downtown punk scene -- and released by a UK label (Stiff). Geographical dislocation recurs in the lyrics, from the unreliable out-of-body narration of ‘Boy with Perpetual Nervousness’ to ‘Moscow Nights’, a song arguably no less provocative to mainstream American culture than ‘God Save the Queen’ was to the UK, being a fantasy about defecting to Soviet Russia (on the cusp of the decade of Red October and Red Dawn):

When you smile and say,
‘I thought about it, it's the right time’
And I expect that
You're never returning to the USA
[…]
Well, I don't know
I think it's time for you to face it
You never felt right in our world
You never felt right about yourself
And I think about what it might be like
If I could go alone, if I could go at night
Would it be just like you know you said it would
Would it start the life aglow?

There’s also something oddly out of time about the record. It came out in 1980, making it more post-punk than punk, but the band were playing together downtown in 1976, when Terry Ork started to manage them, so the elements they share with Television (a paradoxical atmosphere: deadpan histrionics), Talking Heads (jittery, spasmodic, but plugged right in to the dancefloor), Jonathan Richman (the lightfooted AM pop of ‘Fa Ce La’) aren’t so much debts as parallel developments that went undocumented for four years.

It’s ahead of, as well as behind, its times. Their understanding of space, bass and percussion anticipates Liquid Liquid’s at points (that break on ‘Crazy Rhythms’, the slow-burn start of ‘Boy with Perpetual Nervousness’). They cut out crash cymbals to keep the to range of frequencies free for the guitars, then compensate with layers of extra shakers, woodblocks, etc that work as powerfully for being left out as when they’re in: dub’s positive use of negative space -- double hisses on the hi-hat that refuse to crowd every bar, rolling breaks on toms and cowbells. Listened to in conjunction with the massively underwhelming follow-up The Good Earth, you realize The Feelies pulled off the same uncommon trick as Pixies, making a first album which is better recorded, more intelligent, more developed, just better all round, than its successor, even down to the crisp, dry, force of the production, almost clinically clear and undistorted, where the second is mushier, messier, duller, more conventional. The Pixies had Steve Albini, The Feelies had their own ideas, developed in the long run-up to the sessions, which they then imposed on their engineer, Mark Abel. And also a certain amount of luck: unhappy with the sound of their amps, they tried plugging their guitars straight into the mixing desk, and then decided to stick with the unusually clean, cold sound that resulted. (Abel: 'That record was the culmination of four years of fantasizing about how they were going to record those songs... they couldn't understand anyone else's ideas... Frankly, I think they dug themselves into a hole, but that's the hole they want and they have a perfect right to sit in it.') It undercuts the garage-punk assumption that distortion equals sublime raging inferno. Glenn Mercer says ‘Stiff requested a demo for a second album. They didn't like it. We were doing a lot of home recording, even more in an Eno mode and less like a rock band.’ With Stiff’s misjudgment and Anton Fier leaving, I wonder if this second album that never happened is one of the great lost albums. The closest thing that exists to it is probably Sonic Youth’s debut EP from the following year, which shares some of that rigorously cool recording aesthetic, the chiming,* intertwined guitars and an accent on percussion. And, come to think of it, elements of the cover design.

* The Feelies are often described as ‘jangly’, but they’re not. They chime. Indie jangles; jingle bells jangle. Clocks, bells, Arvo Part and Steve Reich records chime. The Feelies chime.

Music and theory

Very late on this, but Simon Reynolds on theory and music for Frieze is an excellent read (… and p.s. thanks to Dan Fox for the link to this in the comments)

Via that I found this dialogue (also from Frieze) between Simon R and Kodwo Eshun, from all the way back in 1999. Essential reading as a whole I think, but Kodwo’s first response caught my eye in particular. After that Nuum conference back in the spring, a lot of the Reynolds & nuum naysayers seemed very keen to approve of the presentation by Kode9 and Kodwo… sort of as ‘theory we can believe in’, a move to give them more leverage with which to bash k-punk and SR… if they approve of Kodwo and Kode9, it pre-empts the charge of being knee-jerk anti-theory philistines. But this quote from Kodwo shows the degree to which they’re trying to line up with someone who‘d repudiate much of their standpoint:

Music [has] changed so drastically that it was more pressing to analyse the widening gap between how music sounded and the terms we used to understand it. When I started writing in 1992, most dance writing was still at the level of ‘kicking’ and ‘banging’. There was a fiercely-held anti-intellectual drive that made writing about dance music more of a challenge. […] You get people writing things like ‘the music speaks for itself’ as if it’s the most admirable thing you could say - but it’s just a cop-out. There’s an idea that the writer’s aim is to empathise, to intuit, on the side of the producer against the world.

For me, it seems far more urgent to understand what computerisation is doing to rhythm than to understand that a particular musician was a bad boy who grew up in care and had a really hard time. […] 99% of writing is still socio-historical and my attempt to totally destroy that is probably doomed to failure, but it’s an experiment to show that it’s viable, using the particular example of black electronic dance music, machine music, computer music.

. . .

The Frieze Theory print issue was excellent too. But there's something about the entirety of, or the presumed possibility of, any debate about ‘Theory’, whether for or against... When you read some depressing ‘common sense’ reductive write-off of theory it’s (usually) impossible not to think a) there’s no engagement with the actual ideas in question going on, but instead a flat objection to complexity and/or abstraction in principle and in general, and b) even if you were presented with a compelling take-down of say, Paul de Man’s entire philosophical project from top to bottom, how does that impinge on Foucault? Theory is a sufficiently heterogenous body of critique and inquiry that any generic attack is going to struggle for traction. The flipside of this is that defending ‘Theory’ as a whole skirts dangerously close to being futile and/or reductive.
. . .

Reading around and about the theory debate over the last couple of months, the word ‘precisely’ seemed to leap off the page. It often seems to serve more of a rhetorical function than an author would probably like to admit, cropping up just at the point where two slippery concepts are being linked together, and the more counter-intuitive or unlikely the link, the more likely it is that ‘precisely’ will pop up. It suggests a residual anxiety about abstraction, a will-to-exactitude that kicks in when talking about the conceptual and the conceptualization of the conceptual; so ‘precisely’, with its connotations of incisive, surgical specificity, is often as much the writer assertively reassuring or reaffirming themselves as anything else.

Immaterialism

It's a strange feeling, if you read a lot about the music industry and its impending death-by-downloads, to turn to this piece by Nicholson Baker and read about Jeff Bezos of Amazon and his determination to do the same for publishing.

Bezos and Amazon must believe that e-books, downloaded to a device like the Kindle, are inevitable and that they might as well get in first. They must believe that the earlier they're in, the better their chances of colonizing this new world, setting Amazon up to exploit the pilgrim hordes to come.

This depends on the assumption that technology will make the Kindle or similar e-reader so pleasurable and easy to use that it will supersede the book.

But the same assumption – that ingenuity will find a way – is surely what will prove fatal to them. The Kindle will only work if they can make its DRM work, and no DRM has ever remained uncracked once users reach a certain critical mass. Eventually, readers will have access to an infinite wealth of digital texts for free, and publishing will have exactly the same problem as the music industry: how do you make readers pay for something they can get for free?

Maybe there's a different psychological economy at work in the way people relate to and acquire books, and the way they relate to and acquire music. But it's quite a chance to take.

. . .

I sometimes try to imagine a culture without artefacts – the endpoint of digital in which no-one prints a book, buys a newspaper or magazine, presses a CD (let alone a record), and wonder when it will arrive. And how I will make a living.

Then I remember that in a hundred years' time, humanity will be reduced to small pockets of hunter-gatherer-fisher-farmers, scraping out an existence on small temperate islands, while the continents become uninhabitable scorched wastelands. Assuming the climate stabilizes and these surviving communities start to send out sorties to the old hubs of civilization (like Ballard's Drowned World), as they gather together relics from the old world there will presumably be a huge lacuna. The cultural fossil record will start to go blank from the turn of the century onwards, and with no internet, no electricity, the migration to digital will appear as a kind of universal amnesia. These survivor-explorer archaeologists from the future will find books, records, magazines, CDs, but they will be decreasing to a trickle as the years go by, while even they if manage to fire a computer up, there will be no distant Google server-farm to supply them.

Errata

After this post, it has been pointed out to me that of course three (not two) of Hot Chip attended Elliott School. Forgot about Owen Clarke. Sorry Owen. Felix Martin did not, but he did go to Pimlico School, which unlike Elliott is out-and-out Brutalism (I’m not going to make much of the fact that Felix now stands at the back jabbing at drum machines). Or at least Pimlico was Brutalist. Also, the underground river nearby is in fact called the Wandle, not the Wendle. For this, I blame Michael de Larrabeiti. I’m going to write about de Larrabeiti sooner or later, but if I do it will probably be too long for this blog. I also have this from an Elliotonian correspondent:

it never gets mentioned anymore that some of So Solid also went to Elliott. One of them once mugged me in MacDonalds as a 14 year old. He got expelled for something else later on. Though he was always very friendly whenever I bumped into him later

With heart-warming happy endings like that, no wonder it was declared Britain’s friendliest school. Also some another small corroboration for Owen H’s suggested sympathy between brutalist architecture/grime sonics.

Finally, I think I was harsh on Bukem here. I liked Logical Progression (and recently got very into Woebot’s ambient jungle mix for Fact). But two moments for me stand out for me when I think about the decline of my initial interest in dnb. Owen Hatherley’s description of it: 'by 1998, a ponderous stonerstep for slovenly, unshaven UCL science students in expensive rainwear', here echoes my own experience almost exactly, with the nadir being a Goldie night in either late ’98 or early ’99, rammed with public schoolboys in body warmers. But a harbinger of that was listening to Earth 2 on one of those HMV listening posts and thinking, this sounds like a waiting room.

pic credit: Pimlico School, RIBA via Twentieth Century Society