Punk energies, from below, are “stolen” by “movement” and “system” from the outset. Critique of immediate calcification of power/energy into Foucauldian “terminal form.” But, prima facie, given this tune’s absolutely typical punk form (musically, it could be any of hundreds of lesser-known bands from the era), the rant ignores sonic/formal elements (focusing lyrically only on the rise of a coopted leadership class). Here, wrongly, @narchy is hummable.
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An attempt to reclaim “simple” status in response to institutions that produce logical, intellectual, and clinical subjectivities. Desperately seeking a content as last wish: “please tell me who I am.” Acutely aware of state coercion (“watch what you say”), but this is just a cover; reclamation and self-making inherently disciplinary. Thinking the birds are “playfully watching me” is wishful: sun logic.
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Lou Reed has only a pair of observations to make, and then repeats. First: “the story of my life” has been a moral one through and through, and its guiding thread is “the difference between wrong and right.” On the other hand, Billy Name (a key participant in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music and Andy Warhol’s Factory scene) has clearly told Lou: “both those words are dead.” The world is now beyond right and wrong, or good and evil, as Nietzsche might say, and Billy and Lou are exploring superabundant life and the will to power in New York’s gay bars and with the help of methedrine. And that, too: “that’s the story of my life.” In short, the singer finds himself between two worlds, in two distinct historical contexts, and each acts as both a break with and an ongoing dialectical critique of the other. Relaxedly gliding between these moments in the ongoing history of nihilism, Reed’s vector points two ways and suggests that metaphysics has been weakened (but still has a part to play).
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The coverage of the Michael Brown and George Floyd protests were almost breathless. What’s new with this iteration of popular uproar? Is it the “bottoming out” that finally leads to racial progress? The further militarization of the police? Rather than seek out an event in today’s headlines, the contiguities are more sobering. Toddy Tee’s grudging 1985 homage to Daryl Gates’ police tank—“it’s coming”—could be taken as both a warning to crack dealers and a protest over police violence and the suspension of the fourth amendment in black and brown neighborhoods. And it would be just fine as that. But there’s also the mayor’s decision to “legalize something that works like that.” Operating during the early height of the War on Drugs, the Batterram was used to strike in indiscriminate discriminatory ways. The police are like “F Troop,” knocking on random doors trying to entrap residents. But these circumstances are a dime a dozen with law-and-order governors and police departments inheriting equipment used during recent wars. According to one protestor from Ferguson, Missouri, the city “could be any town in the world.” Absolutely true, but more often not. As the places add up—Dearborn Heights, Sanford, Los Angeles, etc.—the patience wears thin. Both the media’s hopeful exhaustion and a healthy dose of neighborhood utopianism.
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“Empower” scream hemmed in by slabs of silence: the moment of Butlerian agency that occurs in a loophole/hitch, unanticipated by power. An attempt to “recheck the mind set”–not castigation–without recourse to affect (“can’t give up no love”) or investment in nationalisms (“what’s been dead”). Less a plan than a documentary moment: potential(ity) battles “slips,” faith in representation, and martyrdom.
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This English ballad, uncollected in the Child Ballads, presents a startlingly human picture of the youthful Jesus. He likes playing ball, he resents his mother’s punishments, and he’s quick to anger. He also drowns three rich boys who insult his lowly status, and he does it by conjuring a Moses-lite miracle: a sun bridge is projected across a body of water, and it collapses as soon as the rich boys try to cross over. So Jesus is both absolutely human, and he’s also ready to revolt: proto-politically, he aggressively takes the side of the poor. But he’s also absolutely terrifying, a possible bad seed, and definitely someone you don’t want to cross. As his final act here, while Mary is whacking him with a switch from a withy tree, he curses the tree (the whole species!) and makes it suffer a rotting death from the inside, from the “heart.” Some might call it overkill, but perhaps that’s human, too. A bit of a celebration, then, of a pleb who won’t take shit from no one and nothing.
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Something about man is best understood as a “machine,” but this is not cybernetics: the focus is not on the brain, but on something lower, between the legs. This simple lever needs tending, but beating off is not enough to “take care” of it. Importantly, however, one can easily suffice without a “maiden”; indeed, a “dry camel,” “one hump or two,” will work just as well, provided that you can get the camel to “lie down on its side” and give you time to rub one out on its back. (It may take you ten minutes, and you’ll have to keep shifting gears around a four-note, descending figure, from slow to medium to fast and back again, with only limited wankery.) This machine aspires to sovereign self-sufficiency: the goal is to “solve your own game” without oil or the lubrication of other persons. Indeed, from this perspective, everything outside the machine-self is merely a tool and therefore for me. “Marion,” the discarded, “dry” maiden, had to go because she tried to “incise” every man she met, cutting into, marking, or draining him. So she’s a tool, too—but just beyond his leverage.
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It’s the early 1980s, and industrialism is at its most obnoxious in terms of referencing Nazism and the Holocaust: William Bennett’s Come Organization already has released Buchenwald (1981), the collection Für Ilse Koch (1982), and the two controversially re-edited M.B. projects, Triumph of the Will (1981) and Weltanschauung (1982). And Maurizio Bianchi’s own Symphony for a Genocide (1981) belongs here, too. Pierpaolo Zoppo, a protégé of Bianchi, entered the mix in 1983 with Dedicated to Josef Goebbels, a cassette released on Andrea Cernotto’s Aquilifer Sodality label. There’s a bunch of trax, but no titles, so let’s listen to the opener, which runs about eight and three-quarter minutes. Zoppo is borrowing from M.B.’s early methods of appropriation and transformation; at the heart of the sound is some piece(s) of music, massively sped up and treated with shades of pink and white noise. It sounds like we’re within a sea of sonic data clogged inside a modem, churning and surging with no place to go. It’s an aural cocoon–a sound environment–but what does it signify? Though the trax has no name, the project’s title hyper-contextualizes our experience of it: first, given that Goebbels headed the Propaganda Ministry in Nazi Germany, and oversaw, among other things, the cleansing of atonal music from the Reich, one has to agree with the blogger at “Die or D.I.Y”: “Straight into the ‘Degenerate [A]rt’ exhibition it would have gone, and . . . Zoppo . . . would have been sent to a concentration camp, or just executed without trial.” One can imagine that the original, treated piece of music might be a Nazi march, a Strauss waltz, or even a recording of a tune played at the Mauthausen-Gusen labor camp by the original “Mauthausen Orchestra.” The whole tape, then, might well be a thumb in the eye (or ear). Relatedly, but more subtly, Zoppo certainly seems to be exploring the wide difference between the Nazi-approved arts and Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s earlier aspirations toward noises of violent, technological and social “renewal” in “The Art of Noises” (1913). In which case, we’re witnessing in this trax a fraught, high-stakes attempt to sever the historical link between such futurism and fascism, reclaiming the “infinite variety” of “thirty thousand different noises” as an unresolved challenge to governance.
Read more "“Untitled” (Mauthausen Orchestra)"Corporate pop music’s 21st century message to young women is easy to parse: (1) you are great just the way you are (you are beautiful, no matter what they say!); and (2) you can achieve anything you desire (you are a firework!). You are an amazing being of unlimited potential–a perfect, undetermined sort capable of perfect choice. This is called “empowerment.” But only three score ago, in the mid-1950s, Doris Day was singing to her young daughter: I don’t know if you’ll be “pretty” or “rich.” Indeed, I know nothing about your future, which is absolutely sealed (both opaque and certain). You may wind up in the gutter, or you may die young. It’s possible that there won’t be a “rainbow” in the sky tomorrow, which tinges the trax with Cold War anxieties (the Soviets had tested their first H-bomb in 1953). The phrase, “que sera sera,” is polyglot, and finds first use in English as a sixteenth century heraldic motto, forecasting, at least, a certain shielded defensiveness. In short, and “tenderly,” “what will be will be,” and you can’t fight the future. The (tauta)logic is unimpeachable: tomorrow, one can always claim that “what will be” was. At the joining of such faulty realism and our own fantasies of empowerment, however, there must remain fate and chance, entwined, each the condition of the other’s possibility.
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With(holding). Ominous, wide vibrato reinforces singer’s ability to control the appearance/timing of chance. The doubled governance (and omission)—”chances are your chances are awfully good”—holds the lover at bay. Suggestive hypnosis and (tepid) confirmation lyrical structure re-routes desire across smoothed out, gendered landscape: laying down some serious pavement.
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