The Disco Tex Essay

It's come to a point where I wonder how I found time in 1984 to do all those 1984-y things that I know I did.

i assume i should download some field mob then?

The section on Bring The Noise and Disco-Tex reminded me of the Lockarm "Bring The Muzik Back" mashup with M (the M 7" is one of the first five I ever bought!) I was listening to earlier. It works because the M track is turned into just as much of a free lunch as the bomb squad production was. The most popular mashup acapella trax (Without Me, Madison Avenue etc.) seem to all have been ones where they were particularly strong and noticable (Without Me) or faded into the background (Don't Call Me Baby) which is why maybe the standouts in retrospect are those where the two trax fought productively for their position -- not just a free lunch, but an underdetermined one.

"We have already said the popsong gets on poorly with other genres. There can be no talk of a harmony deriving from mutal limitation and complementariness. The popsong parodies other musical genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them. Writers on music sometimes tend to see in this merely the struggle of musical tendencies. Such struggles of course exist, but they are peripheral phenomena and historically insignificant...

"In addition the experts have not managed to isolate a singile definite, stable characteristic of the popsong -- without adding a reservation, which immediately disqualifies it altogether as a generic characteristic. Some examples of such "characteristics with reservations" would be the popsong is a multi-layered song (although there exist great single-layered songs); the popsong is a precisely structured and dynamic form (although there also exist popsongs which push musical limits to the point of pure sound); the popsong is a complicated genre (although pop is massproduced as pure and frivolous entertainment like no other music); the popsong is a love story (although the greatest examples of modern pop are utterly devoid of the love element); the popsong is lyrically straightforward (although there exist excellent examples with densely convoluted lyrics)..."
-- M. M. Bakhtin, Blues and the Popsong, 2004

[Conversation today: "What was Hegel's first name?" "George" (laughter) "What? George is a funny name? I guess it is. I think its not quite that."]

First point: yr. Canon of Classix and mine overlap significantly, tho not completely (L'Trimm, Tommy James, Cover Girls, absolutely the food-rap from Sugarhill, a few others) and seems to also overlap in part with that of the (ahem) voice mob given some threads on ILM and etc. I know that I got to this canon absent the voice mob's and yr. "influence" -- which seems that it soldifies it as something "real" beyond critical happenstance. On the other hand I doubt these artists saw themselves as a continuum which then leads to the thought that there's a common "turn" in all of them which is part of the pop dynamic -- i.e. that if not the "context of abundance" then *sumthin*.

Second point: We're inna context of abundance right now f'sure, at least on the hip-hop charts, but are we in a context of free lunches? (and does such a thing exist?) ODB is a free lunch on Enter, but an abundant one on Return. By N**** Please he's neither. Abundance is loose-limbed and gawky like a high-school kid who's read some of the Bible and some of the Koran and madonna's interviews where she talks about Kabbalism and who knows maybe its all true and maybe it all fits together. A free lunch is two years later when he's much more settled and sane but can still tell you all about the Kabbala if it comes up.

Third Point: Why do we want a free lunch anyway?

so its "delineated essayness at all" actually worked as a kind of free lunch in the context of wms: it wz this really strong coherent idea emerging from the massy mass, but NOT damaged or quote-marked into tiresome "i wrote an ESSAY" ponciness by any conventional journalistic formatting...

(as my boss will confirm shd she ever start p;osting to ile, the moment i hate most of my dayjob is HEADLINE HOUR, where we brainstorm to come up with vaguely witty three-word heds for articles — we do it bcz it's "what we do", not bcz there's any joy or sense or creativity or use in it, ie the layout of all modern magazines everywhere demands... i actually find the "everywhere" bit of this acquiescence far more politically depressing than the fact that some ppl buy books by charles murray)

(hegel's real actual name is pronounced "Gay Org")

On the most simple minded level of pleasure in articles, one of the things I like is that you reference favourites like Dyke & the Blazers and Mighty Sparrow and the Dolls and Slade (how you don't link those I don't know! Listen to the start of Personality Crisis then some peak Slade)(and the reggae links run differently: see (Ambrose) Slade's and the Maytals' early days - it's all about rocksteady)(Slade Alive was the first LP I ever bought, incidentally).

Also, have you heard 'Havana Moon' by Richard Berry's non-relative Chuck? That's the Latin-styled prototype for Louie Louie!

The idea of a "rhythmic riff" that persists and mutates (viz. Bo Diddley) had me thinking that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is essentially a Louie Louie cover.

(the ultimate twinning of the concepts of abundance and free lunch = Jesus Christ. When he was around "prophets" were a dime a dozen, you know. And you all know about the famous free lunches.)

It is spifftastic. And since I've actually got the Disco Tex album, it makes for a great soundtrack for it!

Frank, you always make me feel like Stacey Q.

Elvis Presley"

Atari Teenage Riot"

It was me who'd bought those two at once, a few weeks before. I hope someone took it as guidance.

My main question: How does “work” work here?

Work seems to be the assumed-as-negative value behind the free lunch and context of adundance ideas:
“Disco Tex & the Sex-O-Lettes lived in a context of abundance whereas the Dolls merely worked towards one.”
“But what each has in common is that you don’t have to work for it.”
“…the deadly work of self-justification…”
“The concept "free lunch" has nothing to do with "suppressed matter" (e.g. "that which is suppressed in the dominant discourse"), which is work and I’ll let puritans waste their time on it.”

Well sure, I just wanna rock n’ roll all night and party every day, just like the next guy—and actually I’m posting this because I’m avoiding writing writing I should be writing, aka “work”—but I’m still curious as to whether Work = Dud is the necessary ground for taking the concepts here to heart.

(What about the lunch you’ve saved up for all month, practicing your French pronunciation so the waiter doesn’t laugh at you?)

(And then the day comes when you’re supposed to have your anticipated lunch, but just before you leave work, the you discover the boss has ordered pizza for everybody in the office, so you grab a couple of slices on the way out, because, hell, “free lunch!” and then you get to the restaurant, and you manage to get your food down, but you’re feeling kinda logy and you think, shit, why did I have that pizza? This, more or less, has happened to me recently.)

(Maybe the question is: is it disempowering to build an aesthetic around *completely* unanticipated pleasures?)

(In other words: if you’re Roland Barthes, looking for a punctum, the problem is that you’re never sure where your next prick is coming from.)

But I think I’m riffing rather than actually thinking here. I’m constitutionally in the free lunch good/puritans bad camp, so want to delay my giving in to the moment in the argument I’m most likely to give in to. Like when I read Farber’s “Termite Art” essay (to cite an acknowledged forbear here), and he gets to “The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity,” I think: Right On! Down with those sins! But also, there’s a little, embarrassed voice that says: actually, that framing, installing, and treating could be kinda cool…I might like something like that. (Shut up, White Elephant lover!)

So here, my little embarrased voice is saying: what’s so bad about work? (Shut up, Puritan!)

"Free lunch" is dependent on the idea that there also be a paid-for main meal, something that is the (at-least-supposed) official center of attention. And it seems to me that if this is a good main meal, then the freebies on the side will have more leeway, since they can just gallivant on their own without being a threat to the elephants in the center ring. But still, underneath this essay, and not-quite-addressed by it - its unfinished business, and the unfinished business of a whole strain of criticism from Lardner to Ewing - is the question, "just what is it that we're trying to get out from under?" (I asked that off on another thread just the other day, but I forget which.)

"The idea that the teacher should teach kids the subject matter leads to the general demand that a lot of what goes on in the classroom contribute at least in some way to the learning of the subject matter. (This obviously can include naps, jokes, tangents.) The stronger demand, that everything at every moment that happens in class be shown to contribute to the learning of the subject matter, would be quite psychotic. It leads to the demand not so much that kids learn the subject matter but that they visibly engage in activities that people associate with 'learning the subject matter.'"

My argument here is that the psychotic classroom has the symbol stand in for the effects - out of nervousness and superstition, I suppose. My villain is the classroom as an area of well-regulated space where everything has to be justified in advance. It's a nightmare world where every little detail is examined and told, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." Obviously, such a classroom is anti-intellectual, since it forbids you to fool around and experiment and discover the value of things.

You can have a psychotic carnival, which is the same thing as the psychotic classroom except that you've plugged "having fun" in place of "the learning of the subject matter." A lot of pop is this sort of anticlassroom, and that's why it's so boring. Or you could plug "playfulness" or "open-endedness" or "disruption" or "sensuality" or "excitement" or... well, just about any value from any putative "discourse." What bugs me about postpunk, about academic postmodernism, about anything that contains the word situationist, is its underlying puritanism.

Anyway, [John] Fiske may be a puritanical psychoantipuritan; [Raymond] Durgnat isn't. Movie critics have been pretty good on this subject; they've taught me. Manny Farber's a big source:

"The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter, from Motherwell to Andy Warhol."

"Most of the feckless, listless quality of today's art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece."

"The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an over-all pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation, in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity."

...And of course as I said you can substitute almost any value terms and still get the same listlessness: "social meaning song" for "densely wrought European masterpiece," "attempt to decenter the text" for "over-all pattern," "frieze of discontinuities" for "frieze of continuities," "disruptive desire" for "prizeworthy creativity." The problem isn't this or that term of justification, but the attempt to enforce it with a mad, unsleeping watchfulness.

The enforcement procedure is a process of subtracting things, and it is superstitious. E.g., my follow-up sentence in WMS #7:

"People learn from experience that a lot of medicine tastes bad, and they come to think that 'tasting bad' is the active ingredient in medicine. So, when their medicine isn't working, they think by subtracting the sweet stuff they're making it more medicinal."

I was putting together several thoughts from previous issues: my claim back in WMS #1 that hardcore punks and postpunks let the symbol stand in for the effect, the claim in WMS #2 or #3 that the progressive rockers and their alternative-rock equivalents wouldn't play what they couldn't justify, the free lunch/context of abundance riff from WMS #5, and the hallway-classroom spiel from WMS #7. I was also going through a bad time.

As for whether you can cancel a free lunch by acknowledging it, you can acknowledge it and comment on it all you want, make a big deal of it, as long as it's not officially what's going on. If everyone subsequently listens to the song mainly for the thing that's been dubbed the free lunch, then it stops being a free lunch. (Which won't necessarily make it sound worse; and perhaps its jumping to the banquet room will free up something else.)

By the way, I published Why Mildred Skis well before the child molestation charges against Michael Jackson; "Rapeman" had been the name of Steve Albini's new group, a name that RJ Smith called "the lamest of punk jokes." Back in 1989, though many people's image of Michael Jackson had passed over into weirdness, very few were commenting on the consistent menace and anguish in his lyrics; rather, the Michael bashers were treating him as a pop-star grotesque. I no longer call "He came into your apartment/He left bloodstains on your carpet" a free lunch, but it's strong enough to be a potent dinner, too.

But in general, there's the sense underlying this essay that vibrant culture is consistently being numbed and eviscerated as it passes into acceptance and general appreciation. I started off the first Why Music Sucks with the claim "WE are doing something to kill music." I claimed that rock 'n' roll and alternative rock and punk rock and avant garde music and independent music were turning into PBS for the youth (a metaphor that I don't have time to explain, but that'll make sense to American readers). I also said that the PBSification process started with the music I loved most (the '60s Rolling Stones) and indeed arose from some of the music's good points, its power to move people, to foment change, its ability to break out of "entertainment" and to take in life beyond the boundaries of "recreation." And then of the 1987 present I said,

I mean a certain PBS head (attitude), which can include a cult taste for shitty horror movies, pro wrestling, African pop, comic books, Hasil Adkins - all this pseudo-fun is a covering for a mind set that's ruled by PBS. We're making horror movies safe for PBS. We have met PBS, and it is us. I mean an imaginary PBS of the future, with pro wrestling, splatter films, and leftist analyses of the Capitalist Entertainment Industry (scored by a reformed Gang of 4). All rendered lame by the context of our appreciation.

It's no accident that the Disco Tex paragraph I felt most emotionally invested in (the one where Dylan's been hit and realizes that he doesn't need Hattie to act this out for him anymore) ended up in parentheses, as if it could only exist undercover.

The reason I despise discussions of "rockism" is that the term pretends it's the other guy who's destroying music, that the mechanism's in him and not us, like we know better. My 1991 letter to Simon Frith ended:

The first Why Music Sucks started with the claim "WE are doing something to kill music." Lots of people read this and many tried, as vigorously and unconsciously as possible, to change the subject.

[I recently looked at B*nW*ts*n's Zappa book and it managed to make me dislike Zappa more, dislike punk, dislike serialism, dislike everything he tied into it (much of which I like!)]

(which leads me to think i'm on the wrong track since anytime argts. tend to get circular there's usually some big hephalump in the middle of the room which everyone avoiding and talking around)

the funny thing abt ben's zappa book is it made me admire BEN more — potentially rather than actually — and I wish he cd clamber out from under his adolescent hero worships (or force them to dance with one another rather than stand incommunicado in adjacent rooms)

eep i am meeting marcello and kate like NOW i must fly!!

...and I wish he cd clamber out from under his adolescent hero worships (or force them to dance with one another rather than stand incommunicado in adjacent rooms)...

I'm probably just being dumm.

my printer is also broken (heh) so this is imcromprehensible from just reading it on the screen (awful excuse i know).

I did like the bits about slade tho'. a lot of that stuck.

frank: did you get my email abt WMS?

Well, jeez, c'mon...once you remove the possibility of innocence in the matter, I think either I'm not sure you can face the killing-music part without either getting totally dismissive or turning to stone, even if it's important, even if there's a moral imperative to discuss it. It's sort of like going to a fancy birthday party and announcing "You know, millions of years from now, the sun is going to die...what are you going to do about it?" Actually, more like "we're going to run out of oil one day" or "the production of CDs pollute the environment."

Is the PBSification-of-everything part and parcel with the demystification-of-everything (via mass production, mass media, the "celestial jukebox" etc.)?

Is using PBS as a bogeyman another roundabout way of using "middlebrow" as an insult?

Also: as I grow older, the less certain I feel that I know what "killing/destroying music" means.

Speaking of PBS, Kogan what do you think of Nas' "I Can"? This song has to be like the litmus test for "good for you" music except even there I can hear all these latent tensions -- Afrocentrism with a European backbeat, juggling race-run history with an integrationist thrust, whether and how it even matters if Nas' stories are true, deadly like sixth-grade humor when he hollers "que-e-e-e-n" etc.

Getting back to something I pushed on the Koganism thread: do we kill music by making it external to ourselves (i.e. disavowing the parts which are bad for us?) or do we gain from that and only find the crisis when we can't reinternalize it? And do *we* do this at all, or do we just stop surmounting the already extant social-externalization that comes from people taking our feelings and selling them back to us?

girl who is you playin with, back that azzwards

"In other less obvious instances we notice analogous phenomena [to internally persuasive discourse]. We have in mind first of all those instances of powerful influence exercised by another's discourse on a given author. When such influences are laid bare, the half-concealed life lived by another's discourse is revealed within the new context of the given author. When such an influence is deep and productive, there is no external imitation, no simple act of reproduction, but rather a further creative development of another's (more precisely, half-other) discourse in a new context and under new conditions.

"In all these instances the important thing is not only forms for transmitting another's discourse, but the fact that in such forms there can always be found the embryonic beginnings of what is required for an artistic representation of another's discourse. A few changes in orientation and the internally persuasive word easily becomes an object of representation. For certain kinds of internally persuasive discourse can be fundamentally and organically fused with the image of a speaknig person: ethical (discourse fused with the image of, let us say, a preacher), philosophical (discourse fused with the image of a wise man), sociopolitical (discourse fused with the image of a Leader). While creatively stylizing up and experimenting with another's discourse, we attempt to guess, to imagine, how a person with authority might conduct himself in the given circumstances, the light he would cast on them with his discourse. In such experimental guesswork the image of the speaking person and his discourse become the object of creative, artistic imaginiation.

"This process -- experimenting by turning persuasive discourse into speaking persons -- becomes especially important in those cases where a struggle against such images has already begun, where someone is striving to liberate himself from the influence of such an image and its discourse by means of objectification, or is striving to expose the limitations of both image and discourse. The importance of struggling with another's discourse, its influence in the history of an individual's coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One's own discourse and one's own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other's discourse. This process is made more complex by the fact that a variety of alien voices enter into the struggle for influence within an individual's consciousness (just as they struggle with one another in surrounding social reality). All this creates fertile soil for experimentally objectifying another's discourse. A conversation with an internally persuasive word that one has begun to resist may continue, but it takes on another charcger: it is questioned, it is put in a new situation in order to expose its weak sides, to get a feel for its boundaries, to experience it physically as an object. For this reason stylizing discourse by attributing it to a person often becomes parodic, although not crudely parodic -- since another's word, having been at an earlier stage internally persuasive, mounts a resistance to this process and frequently begins to sound with no parodic overtones at all. Novelistic images, profoundly double-voced and double-languaged are born in such a soil, seek to objectivies the struggle with all types of internally persuasive alien discourse that had at one time held sway over the author."

(Which perhaps means that I am my own greatest influence.)

(bearing in mind that i think this word is a wash bcz it obscures too many fundamentally difft interesting relationships between a reader-writer and the earlier writers s/he reads)

But Mark, suppose I'm misreading Meltzer as to whom or what he would find boring, and it's therefore not Meltzer who's the influence but my own imagination as I've projected it onto Meltzer. In that case, it would be my own imagination that takes priority. Hah!

(But my point is that pre-Meltzer I was already writing in a style that could - once I read Meltzer - be defined as "A style that Meltzer would potentially find boring." The people I listed above moved me from somewhere, but how was it that I was where they moved me from in the first place? Which writers and which anxieties brought me to "Frank's prose style in the classroom at age 15," for instance? So I think my list above was too one-sided. If I found myself falling into "generic classroom prose," that prose has to come from someone and somewhere. It didn't spring immaculately from my brow.)

The word "influence" is fine so long as we understand that it's a general term that doesn't specify what the influence is. That's the purpose of general terms, that you don't have to list the specifics. E.g., in the sentence, "After traveling across Europe last summer, I finally saw Daphne and Celeste, and my life was changed," it isn't necessary to specify that "traveling" included hiking, peddling, paddling, rowing, strolling, driving, skipping, crawling, flying, and pogo jumping, but didn't include gliding or galloping. The problem with "influence" is that too many people use it to mean "copying or modifying" and nothing else, thereby passing over such things as "doing anything possible to avoid being associated with." But since Blake and Bloom seemed to think that it's any artistic influence that causes the anxiety, we can keep talking in generalities until you come in with your specific analysis.

most heart-stoppingly sincere moment on a recent rap record, the clipse's "i'm not you": "door handles full of shit/AND I AIN'T FULL OF SHIT!". the more obvious repentant moment is properly spelled out a little later in the song, but this is the real confession: cartoons were the root, but i had to grind AND live with the consequences. information about what and how those consequences mean is here, but you won't see it if you don't look away from the center.