Farewell Masked Men

 Daft Punk made a brief cameo in the Aftershocks coda to S+A, as pioneers of the becoming-animation of pop in the 21st Century (alongside Gorillaz):

“Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz – Damon Albarn and pals hiding behind cartoon alter-egos - and the anime style videos for Daft Punk’s  “One More Time” and “Aerodynamic” refloat the Archies idea of the imaginary pop group. It’s a sideways recognition of the increasingly fantastical turn taken by pop video, with stars approaching the status of figments spun into existence by teams of technicians: make-up artists, hair stylists, lighting crews, video and audio postproduction. Singing itself has become hyper-real: vocal deficits compensated for, or strengths drastically boosted, by the chopping up and re-stitching of lines or even single words from different takes, with the composited performance further tinted and perfected using pitch-correction technology.  The audio signature of 21^st Century pop is set to become the superhuman glisten glazed across the radioscape by AutoTune and Melodyne. As similarly intensive processes of editing and computer-generated imagery weave their way into video, the borderline between a human star and an animated creation gets decidedly blurry.

You could call it digital glam, or digi-glam for short. It’s the logical extension of pop video’s nonrealistic and nonsequential traits.  (A significant threshold was crossed in the late Eighties with the multiple costume changes and senselessly shifting backdrops in promos like Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and Madonna’s  “Express Yourself” and  “Vogue.”). Just like sound in the ProTools  era, moving images have become a moldable goo of binary code to be recombined in Frankenstein fashion. As the 21^st Century unfurls, scenes in film and TV lose integrity as real-world spaces, with material composited to improve the compositional balance – why not drop a church in the background?  Postproduction technicians known as graders or colorists tweak the visual palette dramatically, contrasting hues to make figures “pop” out of their surroundings.  Film it flat and fix it in the mix – that’s the ethos now.  The kind of Photoshop trickery long used in fashion photography becomes routine in video, with “motion retouching” applying a perfect sheen to singers with blemished complexions (often by “sampling” skin-tissue pixels from elsewhere),  removing lipstick from teeth, or shaving down the nose of a very famous pop star who appears later in this epilogue.

Daft Punk sing about “Digital Love” in 2001. But by decade’s end, they’ve fallen out of it and are analogue-curmudgeons decrying the very techniques they’d exalted and excelled at.   On 2013’s Random Access Memories, they implore “Give Life Back To Music.”  Trop tard, mes amis: pop has entered the uncanny valley of no return.

My tribute to "Digital Love" at NPR Music.

Daft Punk also appeared in this recent piece I did for Tidal on masks, masquerade, disguise and greasepaint-thick make-up in pop history: 

"Daft Punk started wearing their trademark robot helmets to both preserve their privacy and extend their sci-fi glam aesthetic. Thomas Bangalter once told me that the futuristic kitsch of the headgear was a way of “playing with anonymity and showmanship at the same time.” The artwork for Daft Punk’s debut album, Homework, features a Kiss poster, but the duo’s biggest influence is Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock musical Phantom of the Paradise, whose protagonist is a vengeful musician who hides his deformed features behind a silver mask. “Phantom embodied everything we liked when we were 13 — rock, glam, horror, movies,” Bangalter said. “It’s the film we’ve watched the most number of times, and it’s about a guy with a leather wardrobe and a mask.” Daft Punk also see their helmets as akin to the superhero’s cape: “We love the idea of the person who has the powers, but no one knows who he is.” 

Phantom of the Paradise - essentially a glam rock movie - also makes a cameo in S+A: 

"Movies about rock, rock-about-rock – there was a lot of it about in the first half of the Seventies. Brian De Palma’s 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise could be seen as a “glam movie,” what with its Jobriath-like star Beef and the Alice Cooper parody The Undeads. Combining rock satire and campy horror movie, Phantom of the Paradise is the tale of a Spector-like Svengali called Swan and his diabolical schemes. De Palma also lampoons the nostalgia craze along the way:  Swan declares that “the future of rock’n’roll is its past” and one of his bands is the Sha Na Na-like revival troupe The Juicy Fruits."   

  

glamnimation (Mok rok)

Rock and Rule - sounds like an Alice Cooper anthem





"musical science fiction animated movie" could hardly be more glam really

Iggy and Lou Reed contribute





Plot has whiffs of Ziggy Stardust, Phantom of the Paradise, Richard O'Brien and Jim Steinman

but is ultimately it's own uniquely overripe concoction of cobblers


"The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States populated by mutant humanoid animals....

"An introduction states that in 1983, a nuclear World War 3 had erupted between the Soviet Union and the United States of America which destroyed the human race, leading to the creation of humanoid animals.

"Mok, an aging yet legendary rock musician, is on the search for a very special voice that can unleash a powerful demon from another dimension, his dwindling popularity driving him to destroy the world in vengeance and immortalize himself in the process. After travelling around the world looking for the right voice, he returns to his hometown of Ohmtown, a remote, storm-ravaged village famous for its unique power plant. Meanwhile, at a nightclub, Omar, Angel, Dizzy and Stretch perform in a small rock band. As Angel performs her romantic ballad to a mostly empty audience, Mok hears her sing; he realizes that Angel has the voice he needs when a ring he is wearing reacts to her voice. Mok invites Angel and the band to his mansion outside of town, where the band is formally introduced to him and his assistants, the "Rollerskating Schlepper Brothers" Toad, Sleazy and Zip. Mok incapacitates Omar and Stretch with hypnotic "Edison Balls" as he takes Angel on a stroll through his garden and tries to convince her to join him. Although Angel is unaware of Mok's true intentions, she refuses to abandon her band. Unwilling to admit defeat, Mok kidnaps her and takes his blimp to Nuke York, where his summoning, disguised as a concert, will be performed.





"Following their ejection from Mok's mansion, the band find out what happened to Angel and they follow the blimp in a stolen police car. Before they reach Nuke York, they are arrested by a border guard. Meanwhile, Angel attempts to escape with the unwitting help of Cinderella, the sister of the Schleppers. While sneaking through the ventilation system, Angel overhears Mok confirming his plans with his computer. At this time, the computer informs Mok that the only way to stop the demon is with "One voice, one heart, one song", but when Mok asks who can do this, the computer replies that there is "no one". Angel and Cindy escape the building and head to the zero-gravity dance club "Club 666", unaware that the Schleppers are following them. Dizzy's aunt bails out Omar and his friends, and tells them of the club. Angel and Cindy are intercepted and taken back to Mok's apartment, and the band tries to follow. Omar eventually bumps into Mok, who uses an impersonator to fool Omar into thinking that Angel has fallen for Mok. To manipulate Angel, Mok captures the band and tortures them with a giant Edison Ball to force her to agree with his demands. He also brainwashes them to ensure that they stay out of the way. The Nuke York concert turns out to be a disaster due to a power failure. Because the invocation requires a titanic amount of electricity, Mok relocates the summoning to Ohmtown, whose power plant has enough energy, though Zip expresses childlike doubts about whether their actions are good or evil. During the concert, a power surge causes overloads all over the city. The shock also brings Omar and his friends out of their hypnosis.

"Stretch finds a poster advertising Mok and Angel's concert and Dizzy sticks with him to save her. After confessing that Omar saw Mok and Angel together, Stretch tries to remind him it's all mind games. Omar, still believing Mok's earlier deception, refuses to help Dizzy and Stretch stop the concert. They go without him in a stolen police car, but crash at the concert too late, as Mok forces Angel to summon the demon with her song. But Omar has a change of heart and arrives to free Angel from her electronic shackles before the demon can turn on her. When the demon attacks Omar, Zip seemingly sacrifices himself to save Omar's life. Angel tries singing to force the demon back, but her lone voice has no effect. But Omar joins in harmony with Angel, and thus the creature is weakened and driven back into its own dimension. Mok is thrown into the portal by the vengeful Toad, and as he is sealed away, he realizes that "no one" did not mean that the demon could be stopped; it meant instead that "no one voice" could, acting alone; two voices and two hearts singing as one were needed for the counter-spell. The audience believes the confrontation to have been part of the concert's theatrics, and the band continues their song in triumph."

I wonder if Daft Punk are fans

the military-entertainment complex, or, Why I called the book "Shock and Awe"

wrote this in early 2001, reflecting on my unfaves and overrateds of 2000, and discussing in particular the beginnings of a disappointment with recent R&B for both its rhythmic stagnation and the fact that ultimately it was just "showbiz-with-a-beat":

"It's sort of a cross-the-board antipathy that goes from R&B to all the white-out teen-oriented versions of blackpop from Britney to the legion of boy bands.... As pop music goes, on a certain level, it's irresistible... but mainly in the sense that a conquering army subjugating all in its path can be said to be hard to resist.

"The remorseless, ruthless, invincible precision with which this vidpop is programmed, edited, choreographed, groomed... definitely verges on the militaristic. And the "artists" involved, whether it's Aguilera or Aaliyah or whoever, are like figments spun into existence by squadrons of technicians *--make up artists, hair stylists, lighting crews, postproduction special effects, recording engineers who tint and pitchshift the vocals, chop up the best takes down to single words and re-stitch them together... The amount of energy and effort and money and micro-management that goes into one 2 second shot in a video, or one bar of the record, it's staggering... 

"These stars are cartoons, robots, ciphers, logos, branding devices.... and while I suppose there's a sort of Baudrillardian hyper-real/posthuman/simulation-pop buzz to it... I dunno, is it backward of me to prefer the early Eighties New Pop era? Where there was a striving for glamour yet at the same time the charm of all-too-evident flaws and fallibility and untampered, untreated fleshly reality-- I'm thinking of Altered Images or Human League... or going back further, Marc Bolan (who, with just a mane of corkscrew curls and some glitter on his cheekbones, was more otherworldly and alien than any of today's digitally enhanced popstars). 

"This faux-animation element to modern vidpop, the way that the choreography and film techniques are designed to make humans move in ways that resemble the characters in videogames, is why you've got this spate of pop groups taking the next logical step and hiding themselves behind cartoons: Gorillaz, Daft Punk's anime-style promos and robot shtick. William Gibson's Idoru--the purely computer-generated star-as-figment--is just around the corner."

That bit led me (eventually!) to Shock and Awe - both the project and the book title ** 

This next part of the unfaves section from early 2001 is one of the first steps on the path to Rip It Up and Start Again. (This would be another key earlier step).

"I'm also, gotta admit, starting to feel a certain intellectual exhaustion with the whole rhythm-as--the-star, rhythm-as-melody approach. When everything else about a record sucks--the song, the star, the cultural ramifications--maybe a "dope beat" alone ain't sufficient. Rhythm, melody, lyrics, compelling persona.... It's not entirely unprecedented to have the whole package: Sly Stone, Prince, P-Funk... there's even a few white examples I can't be bothered to list.

"Perhaps what I'm imagining in the back of my brain is some kind of eventual revolt against the utter victory of "black" musical values (rhythm-and-production as more important than song/lyrics; nouveau riche/aspirational, licking-the-arse-of-the-status-quo lyrics/attitudes) and the return with a vengeance of rock pretentiousness/bohemianism. Simon Biddell has been banging on about "vision" as a concept that needs to be reintroduced to the critical lexicon---the idea of being transported, by music as well as by lyrics and charisma, into an individual's very particular view of the world---and citing the likes of Beefheart, Mark E. Smith, Sly Stone, Peter Hammill as exemplars. And in a lot of ways I kind of concur, if only out of boredom, desire for an all-change: a massive movement of sonically over-reaching and lyrically over-ripe art rock would be just the ticket right now. (Some would say that's what the best of modern hip hop is anyway--today's art rock--and maybe they're right--which reminds me, you gotta hear the Cannibal Ox album). 

"Of course, as Biddell concedes, the idea of "vision" leads back down the perilous path towards auteur theory, the expressionist fallacy, and so forth... But maybe it doesn't have to be so backward: Radiohead, for instance, have shown that you can have the vision thing and the riddim thing at the same time. PiL, Roxy Music, Can, Joy Division---all utterly bang-up to date rhythm-and-production wise, all utterly vision-ary. And there was this great moment in the late Seventies/early Eighties, when people tried to fuse punk and disco, "white" and "black" in really suggestive ways. How did we ever learn to settle for less, adapt to the split consciousness of liking parts of things but not the whole?"


* more developed version of this argument in this Aaliyah piece

** the historical origins of "shock and awe" in military theory as the strategy of rapid dominance

"military-entertainment complex" = a coinage of Bruce Sterling

in S+A the element added to the conception of the military-entertainment complex is the notion of propaganda - the idea that advertising is propaganda for corporations and brands, that PR (or management hustle) is propaganda for performers/entertainers/artistes etc etc.

it struck me suddenly that people talk of a publicity campaign  or advertising campaign or press campaign, in the same way that people talk of a military campaign or a political campaign -  campaign: operation of an army in the field, from "champagne", open country