"photography poisons the world"

Philosophy by way of character(less) assassination - David Thomson,  delicious, on Madonna cinematic uuuurv

He concedes that perhaps a case can be made for M as a singer and dancer...  perhaps implicitly admitting this is not his critical province especially.

Well, okay, let me barge in here Dave... 

In my non-humble opinion, they are two undeniably great M songs - which doesn't mean I would ever actively seek them out (do people actually listen to Madonna albums at home? all the way through?) but I wouldn't switch the channel if they came on the radio, or better, the TV

Those two songs are "Into the Groove" (pure dance-happiness - "only when I'm dancing do I feel this free" - for 3 minutes I believe her) and "Vogue". The latter being her manifesto (and in fact, a crystallisation into a couplet of Thompson's argument above - "strike a pose / there's nothing to it" - the "nothing" here to be understood as the Void,  rather than "nothing to it" as "it was easy, now it's your turn" - a glammed-up mass-culture version of Desperate Bicycles exhortation to DIY). Which it's clearly not - not easy at all, expensive and strenuous rather. Think of the (wo)man-hours that went into the dazzle and razzle of the "Vogue" video. The teamwork involved, the might of money behind it. 

After those two there's the smatter of decent tunes - "Justify My Love", "Ray of Light", some of the  husky-voiced teenage-joyburst early tunes like "Holiday" and "Lucky Star" (which Stubbs played as a deejay in the early '80s as import 12-inches, and which I taped off him, with zero intimation on our parts that this NYC postdisco ingenue was destined for anything more than a Vicky D or Shirley Lites level of name-recognition / fond memory going forward)

The rest though....  first and foremost on the level of pure sound, so labored and effortful (c.f Michael Jackson and Prince, those unnatural naturals). Then this unappeal is aggravated by the aspiration / affectation to Seriousness and Big Ideas - Signs of the Times to be read. "Prayer", "Papa", "Material", "Virgin", "Bonita", "Live to Tell" ...  A voice practised enough that through the down payment of  immense exertion it's become proficident, able to  hit the right notes and make the appropriate expressive gestures (singing as a subset of the dramatic arts rather than incantation)... but never ever gives off that sensation of aerial ascent that marks the true singer - those who are born to sing and for whom there is actually precious little else they can do on this earth 

The dancing - similarly sinewy with rehearsal

Madonna abolished glamour as aura, the haze of strange allure that made certain figures inherently magnetic - something in the eyes, the smile - the Bolan X factor -  and replaced it with this  hard-won / hard-working mechanically-achieved glamour where you can see the undergirding, the pinions and the straining pulleys -   

glamour without illusion: we know what it cost....  

we also understand the audio-visual end product as a collation of references, back to an earlier age when people really believed, really worshipped, in the Stars...   an unfallen state of idolatry

That's why there is only the most passing reference to M in S+A, in the Aftershocks section, on her one true tour de force, "Vogue" - a prototype for "Faceshopping"?

1990, March -- Madonna’s B&W retro-glamour video for “Vogue” either pays tribute to  or coopts New York’s gay subculture of balls and costumed competition, to create an anthem of escape-through-fantasy and magical masquerade. Learn from the screen gods and goddesses who “gave good face”, advises Madge;   “strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.” 

 

Boley - played - GEEETAR-ARR

Guitar World interview with Tony Visconti on the criminally underrated licksmanship of Marc Bolan

choice morsels:

Visconti's fondest memories of producing T.Rex

“I loved that the sessions were very live. I also loved the fact that he dressed to record. He wore his stage gear and his platform shoes. He’d be jumping up and down like he was on stage; everything was really great fun. We also invited friends to the sessions, so he liked to see maybe five or six people bouncing about in the control room. He always loved an audience.“

"Everything you hear on a T. Rex record was a live recording; nothing was replaced later on.

"He listened to the early blues players a lot. We both loved R&B and Little Richard. Little Richard was a huge inspiration to Marc. Marc turned me on to James Burton, those great solos on the Ricky Nelson singles.

"His technical knowledge guitar-wise was not great at all. He knew a handful of chords, the right ones, of course, for rock ’n’ roll. He invented his own technique with that very fast vibrato – he had very strong hands.

"He was cut from a different cloth; he invented himself. He had his own thing. To compare him to Ronson and Fripp and others I’ve worked with is difficult as his recording career was too narrow. Ronson worked with loads of other people so you get an idea of where he stood and how he could adapt his style. We can’t make that comparison for Marc because he never really played with other artists. Marc is criminally underrated as a guitarist. All rock ’n’ rollers love T. Rex, and there’s a little bit of T. Rex in every rock ’n’ roll band.“

worth a read for interesting stuff about the use of strings on the records  and the backing vocals from Flo and Eddie

acting, mirroring, and the multiplication of selves

 “With the development of radio and film, one’s opinions, emotions, facial expressions, mannerisms, styles of relating, and the like were no longer confined to the immediate audience, but were multiplied manifold.....  Television has generated an exponential increase in self-multiplication. This is true not only in terms of the increased size of television audiences and the number of hours to which they are exposed to social facsimiles, but in the extent to which self-multiplication transcends time – that is, in which one’s identity is sustained in the culture’s history. Because television channels are plentiful, popular shows are typically rebroadcast in succeeding years.The patient viewer can still resonate with Groucho Marx on You Ben Your Life or Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows on The Honeymooners..... 

“People can choose the actors they wish to identify with or the stories that will bring fantasies to life. Increasingly, this also means that in terms of producing a sense of social connection, any given actor may transcend his or her own death; viewers can continue their private relationships with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean long after the physical demise of the performers. With television, a personage may continue a robust life over eternity.”

“We appear to each other as single identities, unified, of whole cloth. However, with social saturation, each of us comes to harbor a vast population of hidden potentials – to be a blues singer, a gypsy, an aristocrat, a criminal. All the selves lie latent, and under the right conditions may spring to life.... The populating of the self not only opens relationships to new ranges of possibility, but one’s subjective life also becomes more fully laminated. Each of the selves we acquire from others can contribute to inner dialogues, private discussions we have with ourselves about all manner of persons, events, and issues. These internal voices, these vestiges of relationships both real and imagined, have been given different names: invisible guests by Mary Watkins, social imagery by Eric Klinger, and social ghosts by Mary Gergen, who found in her research that virtually all the young people she sampled could discuss many such experiences with ease. 

 “This syndrome may be termed multiphrenia, generally referring to the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments. This condition is partly an outcome of self-population, but partly a result of the populated self’s efforts to exploit the potentials of the technologies of relationship. In this sense, there is a cyclical spiraling toward a state of multiphrenia..... It would be a mistake to view this multiphrenic condition as a form of illness, for it is often suffused with a sense of expansiveness and adventure. Someday there may indeed be nothing to distinguish multiphrenia from simply “normal living.”

"A multiphrenic condition emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being. One bears the burden of an increasing array of oughts, of self-doubts and irrationalities. The possibility for committed romanticism or strong and single-minded modernism recedes, and the way is opened for the postmodern being"

"Increasingly we emerge as the possessors of many voices. Each self contains a multiplicity of others, singling different melodies, different verses, and with different rhythms. Nor do these many voices necessarily harmonize. At times they join together, at time they fail to listen one to another, and at times they creates a jarring discord.”

"Concepts of truth, honesty, and authenticity now turn strange. Not only do attempts at characterizing the actual person – the workings of the mind, the human spirit, or the biological individual – become suspect. The very concept of an internal core – an intentional, rational agent – also begins to fray.”

"With the demise of rational coherence, a longstanding demarcation of self-identity also recedes from view. For it is the sense of continuity – that I know I am I by virtue of my sense of continuous sameness – that for centuries has served as the chief criterion by which a self is to be identified"

“Under modernism, the individual seemed an isolated, machinelike entity – reliable, predictable, and authentic, propelled by a core mechanism embedded not too deeply within the interior.”

"[Saturation/postmodernism]sets the stage for ersatz being, that is, the capacity for entering immediately into identities or relationships of widely varying forms...  if identities are essentially forms of social construction, then one can be anything at any time so long as the roles, costumes, and settings have been commodiously arranged.... The possibility of ersatz being has also encouraged the development of industries for identity production.... the deterioration of the traditional community is hastened by the emergence of symbolic community. Symbolic communities are linked primarily by the capacity of their members for symbolic exchange – of words, images, information – mostly through electronic means. Physical immediacy and geographic closeness disappear as criteria of community"

all quotes from Kenneth J. Gergen's The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (1991 - before the internet became a cultural dominant and long before social media, Instagram etc) 

the pantomime of politics / the Actor Index (anti-theatricality watch round-up)

After reading Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice, a book that turned my head around, I'm hyper-attuned to anti-theatrical tropes which seems to pop all over the place in many different contexts -  particularly in politics, but even in a discussion of football and the unexpected almost-triumph of the England Team....

Here's Hugh Muir in the Guardian on Gareth Southgate, for instance - but also taking a swipe at Boris & Co:

"To me, he is just a prominent example of a British type we used to revere: thoughtful, strong-willed and confident but not flashy, centred, emotionally intelligent and decent. If he seems exceptional now, that’s not just about him but also because our lives are being shaped by characters who mask any pretension to decency or seriousness or even intelligence to succeed in the pantomime that is political life.

"Worth noting that, away from the hullabaloo, there are others like Southgate in our world-beating creative arts, in public administration, in our big and small commercial companies, and together they support one conclusion; there really is no need in our public sphere for so much showboating and immaturity."

There are ironies here, given that the histrionic arts are clearly part of football - the hamming up of injuries in the hope of getting a free kick or a yellow card on an opposing player, the rolling around in agony that dissipates suspiciously quickly as soon as the spotlight moves on....   the arms-wide gestures of appeal made by players to the referee etc

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here's one of the most striking examples of anti-theatricality I've come across recently(ish). George Monbiot on Twitter last November bemoaning the prominence of actors in our public life and suggesting it is literally a measure of our decadence:

"This might sound strange, but I think we can judge the health of a public culture by what I call the Actor Index. This measures the proportion of featured interviews in the newspapers that are devoted to actors. The higher the proportion, the greater the trouble we’re in

"Now I have nothing against actors. But, by definition, we value them for their ability to adopt someone else’s persona and speak someone else’s words. Fetishising actors reveals an obsession with images, rather than with the realities they obscure.

"Guy Debord argued that “the spectacle” (the domination of social relationships by images) is used to justify the “dictatorship of modern economic production”. It disguises and supplants the realities of capitalism, changing our perceptions until we become “consumers of illusion”.


"I don’t have the stats to support my impression (hello media students). But it seems to me that the proportion of featured interviews devoted to actors, rather than to people whose skill is to speak their own words and do their own deeds, has been rising steadily for decades.

"It has now reached the point of absurdity. I'd guess that roughly 60% of big featured interviews are now with actors, rather than with fascinating people in thousands of other walks of life. Something strange is happening, and it astonishes me that so few people seem to notice.

"Of course I don’t mistake the media for society. I know that most media organisations have an interest in avoiding what is true and troubling, and directing our minds to the s But there’s clearly a market for this obsession, so I think it’s fair to see this apparent phenomenon as reflecting public culture, while recognising that this culture is shaped to a large extent by the private interests of the press. spectacle, disguising the realities of capitalism.

"Debord’s book Society of the Spectacle, published over 50 years ago, was remarkably prescient. I think it describes to a frightening degree the world in which we now live, but which was only beginning to take shape when the book was written.

:But how do we know how far we have progressed towards his frightening vision? I would like to propose the Actor Index as a measure of the extent to which we have succumbed to the spectacle, and have become consumers of illusion. In other words, as a measure of our sickness.

"As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live - Debord".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The accusation that a politician is an actor rather than a legislator or the real-deal is a common trope - there was a whole right-wing conspiracy theory that A.O.C. was an actress reciting lines she'd been fed rather than a serious, well-informed politician. Here's an example of the trope coming from the other, left-wing angle:

Michael Marshall Smith says of Marjorie Taylor Green:

"As with Boebert — they aren't politicians. They both literally just got elected. They have done zero legislative work. Their only job is saying stupid, inflammatory things, to dumb our politics down yet further, to read the Fox and MAGA script. They got cast, rather than elected."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Trump commentary is littered with theatrical tropes:

" Trump is an increasingly symbolic figure — Norma Desmond with the nuclear codes and sycophantic butlers in his ears on a West Wing Sunset Boulevard soundstage"  

- Olivia Nuzzi (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/capitol-riot-senior-trump-official-calls-him-a-fascist.html)

from the same article: 

“This is like a plot straight out of the later, sucky seasons of House of Cards where they just go full evil and say, ‘Let’s spark mass protests and start wars and whatever,’” the senior administration official said.

 "With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real). Still, we’ve learned something from this game, in the same way we learn something about an audience when it laughs. We have learned that the Republican Party, or much of it, has abandoned whatever commitment to electoral democracy it had to begin with. That it views defeat on its face as illegitimate, a product of fraud concocted by opponents who don’t deserve to hold power." - Jamelle Bouie, New York Times

Earlier post on this blog about Trump and anti-theatrical tropes. 

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Even an avowed glam believer and supporter of artifice and image-excess like Mark Fisher could get tangled up in the politics of authenticity: 

"Camp centres on play-acting & distanciation: that's why it's the form of postmodern subjectivity par excellence: I don't believe but nevertheless I play along.

"Dysphoria, meanwhile, involves both a disdain for play-acting & an inability to achieve any distance, including oneself."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Indie rock is tortured by the contradictions of being a performer and trying to present truth. Example:  the song "Pop Lie" by Okkervil River

"The song's lyrics, like other lyrics from The Stand Ins and its predecessor, The Stage Names are about the misconceptions and deceptions that surround the perceptions of fame... With a barely hidden hint of the bitterness of a disillusioned fan forced to grow up and throw away dreams, yet also with the wearily resigned acceptance of a performer now charged with creating them, Sheff has lived the lie from both sides and implies that we are all participants in it. Some of us tune in more knowingly than others, of course, but most of us are willing, wanting, even begging to believe. And who can blame us for being complicit with the chorus Sheff has crafted here? As the song closes, Sheff names himself the liar, but when presented so perfectly, even this admission of insincerity can only add up to adulation. In fact, everything about this track seems engineered to inspire exactly the sort of devotion it derides. The "Pop Lie" is persistent" - Christel Loar, PopMatters

".... Will Sheff's emotional victim King-Lear-played-by-Jonathan-Richman mode can go both ways; here he is simply handing down utter contempt, and it is glorious. It's intriguing that the arrangement is more bubblegummy than you'd expect from their usual hankering after resonance, so it invites consideration as the cultural target, but it's synth pop from 1979–80 that is no particular pied piper threat today—much more something, well, I'd like. I've made more peace with popular content than Will, and I'm surprised at how enthusiastic I am to hear such an articulate denouncement of it. What a joyous emotional tangle this is—betrayal seething, our singer is in a condemning mood, but the invective keeps pointing straight back to the very man on stage with the microphone. One of the most sophisticated pieces of social science in years looks at the pop fandom system, and is utterly horrified: fans carefully select entertainment whose self-serving lie best propitiates their self-serving vanities. In Sheff's unimprovable words, "the man who dreamed up the dream that they wrecked their hearts upon." Half the rhymes in the song are to "-ated," and with that constraint, dig the social architecture set up in the following: "Get completely incorporated/By some couple who consummated/Their first love by the dawn/A falling star wished upon/That fried in the sky and was gone." This isn't just he done her wrong, this is, for one thing, a bunch of people: crowd dynamics. This is, okay, the first couple witnessing the second couple, and getting "incorporated." The fourth wall of the relationship in isolation is broached, and we see the pop lie at work: fame, peer pressure, whatever, mediated the romance, but it is not really a guiding star. It steals what it needs for a third party's music career, or whatever, and then is gone over the horizon. "

- from Scott Miller, Music: What Happened? 

"Pop Lie" lyrics

All sweetly sung and succinctly stated
Words and music he calculated
To make you sing along
With your stereo on,
As you stand in your shorts on your lawn
Get completely incorporated
By some couple who consummated
Their first love by the dawn

A falling star wished upon
That flashed in the sky and was gone
And, mouths wet and blonde hair braided
By the back room the kids all waited
To meet the man in bright green
Who had dreamed up the dream
That they wrecked their hearts upon
He's the liar who lied in his pop song
And you're lying when you sing along
And you're lying when you sing along

So, here's to car seats so cruelly weighted
And here's to faces already faded,
At the end of the day
When they just threw away
The only good thing that they owned,
And now they're pinned down and strangulated
But, at the food court, the float's inflated

And people line up to see
The man who dreamed up the dream
That they wrecked their hearts upon
He's the liar who lied in his pop song
The liar who lied in his pop song,
And you're lying when you sing along
Oh yeah, you're lying when you sing along

Week by week it climbs up and comes on,
And we're feeling all right, though we know it's all wrong
I'm ashamed to admit that I cannot resist what I wish were the truth but is not
And I truly believe we're not strong
And we'll sing until our voices are gone,
And then sink beneath that manicured lawn

This is respectfully dedicated
To the woman who concentrated
All of her love to find
That she had wasted it on
The liar who lied in this song

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Punk too, is, hopelessly confused on this issue of how the Real can be presented on stage and on record, how to exorcise the inherent theatricality of performance.... 

Johnny Rotten's struggles with this are worth a separate post, but for now, how about this - 

anti-theatricality oozing out of this Malcolm McLaren commentary on the Royal Family from 2002 I came across, which is ironic given the role of agit-prop theater / publicity set-pieces in his management style:

"The royal family is a celebrity brand with an immense PR machine behind it. It's just another business, except we pay for it and they profit by it. A neat trick. However, the royal family is England's biggest show business act. They are people who are brought up to a certain way of life, who are given the means to extend their knowledge and to extend their understanding. But they are not given the opportunity to use their minds in connection with it. They are a brilliant metaphor for all that is pretentious, deluded, selfish and insincere about England. They made me finally face the fact that I had to be a rebel in this society - to be an outsider - with all of the penalties this would entail, or else accept the hypocrisy of England and its monarchy.

"On golden jubilee day, will those TV cameras, acting as part of some Ridley Scott production and image-making apparatus, eventually burn the Queen out? Maybe the media will top itself and ultimately become responsible for turning the monarchy and its golden jubilee celebration into simply another super-expensive beer commercial for fascism? And include the rest of us as unpaid extras on the most expensive theme park on the planet. This is show business: Paul, Mick and all will no doubt be there for Ma'am."

Earlier post on anti-Royalist / Roundhead / undandy Jeremy Corbyn and the discourse of anti-theatricality.

-   

Sladespeech

 An article in Tribune magazine by Rose Dymock about a novel -  Paul Mendez's Rainbow Milk - that uses phonetically spelled Black Country dialect - i.e. the same sing-song accent and archaisms that Slade grew up with and that filtered into the song titles:

"To those outside the West Midlands, the difference between Birmingham and the Black Country seems trivial, but for those who live there, it is akin to asking a Scouser what part of Manchester they’re from.

"... One of these key defining characteristics is the accent and dialect. To outsider ears, the two are often conflated into one homogeneous—and usually called ‘Brummie’—accent. While the flatter, more monotone Birmingham accent is more recognisable on TV and film.... the Black Country accent is its own, unique beast.

"There is a sing-song quality to the Black Country accent, but the most distinctive element is the use of dialect words that aren’t found anywhere else – with grammar and phrases that have been preserved from Middle English. It isn’t unusual to hear a young woman referred to as ‘wench’, or people greeting each other by saying ‘how bist’ or ‘you’m alright’ (how are you). Mendez manages to capture the accent of the Black Country in such a way it is impossible not to slip into rounded vowels and comforting sounds of the voices as you read.... 

"It’s not standard English—vowels are stretched into two syllables, words shortened, letters dropped from the text entirely—but Mendez manages to keep it both distinctive and recognisably comprehensible. It never becomes a caricature, dismissing an entire region as thick or unattractive; it is simply another layer of characterisation, a throwaway moment that feels oddly personal." 

Slade used the phonetic spelling in the song titles, I think, as both an expression of regional pride and a class thing - identifying their constituency as early school leavers, those who left aged 16 - or was it even 15 in those days - with minimal qualifications and likely heading into employment in manufacture, heavy industry or some kind of apprenticeship. What Slade manager Chas Chandler identified as a "wage packet audience"  - which is something I quoted in the book and realised later ought probably have to explained to younger readers, as it's a reference to a time when  young working class people would not have had bank accounts and were paid in cash (which they took home and gave a chunk of to their mum for bed-and-board in most cases).

Which was not precisely Slade's background / destiny - Holder went to grammar school and was most likely heading to teacher training college or university until rock'n'roll called him, Jim Lea applied to several different art schools and had been in a Youth Jazz Orchestra... 

But the mispelled titles did communicate a "we don't need no education", truant aura that went along with the raucous basic rock'n'roll and Dave Hill's SuperYob shtick 

And as you can see below, Black Country ways of saying are being banned in some schools in the area: 

Another piece on Slade's native tongue. 

"cold and bony"

Go_A - SHUM - Ukraine 🇺🇦 - Official Music Video - Eurovision 2021

Go_A - ШУМ (Official Video)

Slady

 

mirror mirror (slight return)

 

David Sylvian 1984

"preparations for a journey. bamboo forest. Kyoto"

pic by yuka fujii