01-Fight-For-This-Love-Main-Version.mp3

It reminded me of something about pop music that occurred to me when The Saturdays’ album came out. I thought, while listening to the album, that it sounded like the Sugababes, which then struck me as odd, as there are obvious ways in which the group are more like Girls Aloud. But while their may be some stylistic similarity between Girls Aloud and The Saturdays, there’s what seems to me to be a more important difference of affect, adds some further distinctions to the concept of cold pop.

What many Sugababes and Girls Aloud songs share (and of course they’re not the only two groups that share this, but they may be the primary contemporary exponents) is an emotional texture built around a tension between the lyrical themes and the downbeat melody. But for the Sugababes, the sadness of the music is simply contradicted by the explicit positivity of the lyrics, built around uplifting themes of strength, recovery, moving on.  The effect is a kind of musical version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which the false emotion of the music is corrected by the rational judgment of the lyrics. This is also the predominant affect of The Saturdays, as might be predicted from the fact that their biggest hit is titled “Up” (which is an excellent track; it’s surprising that it’s not surprising that a top-ten pop hit can be constructed out of the sound of heart monitors and reversing trucks).

One of the most marvelous and remarkable things about Girls Aloud is that they generally resist this compulsory positivity. Instead, the tension in Girls Aloud is between the musical representation of sad passions, and the power that comes from the objective recognition of these passions in the lyrics: a genuinely Spinozist music as opposed to the cut-price Spinozism of CBT (this, I think, also explains why Girls Aloud’s covers are almost always failures, as the conventional pop ballads that have been chosen don’t share Girls Aloud’s unusual affective strategy).

If we have on one side a counterfactual (“it seems bad, but it will be OK in the end”) and, on the other side, the joyful resignation of the sub specie aeternitatis (“I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on”), “Fight For This Love” occupies an interesting middle ground between the two, an ambiguous determination between reassurance and resignation. What’s so great is that this is accomplished via a fascinating manipulation of a contemporary R&B trend. Lots of R&B tracks at the moment take dance synths and apply a kind of shimmering, dissociative fuzz (I suspect the influence of Robitussin). The result alternates between narcotic high and depressive withdrawal. “Fight For This Love” drapes these fizzing synths in strings and dusts them with ringing glockenspiel, the most sugary of R&B tropes. The effect is of a great blanket of candyfloss against which the vocals valiantly struggle. The question becomes not, am I ecstatic or melancholy (two sides, in fact, of the same coin of detachment), but, how can I act in the face of the smothering effects (affects?) of compulsory positivity?

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The other steampunk feature of Girls Aloud is the way in which so many of their best records are unwieldly Heath-Robinson contraptions, like “Miss You Bow Wow,” which seems to be welded together from at least eight different tracks. The track also showcases their knack for lyrics that don’t really make sense, and yet seem somehow evocative: what does “20 minutes in the hotel bar / then I slip into your girlfriends jeans” mean? Was she hanging around the bar in her underwear? Is she seducing the girlfriend? There are some other great turns of phrase on “Untouchable,” including the line I used as the title of this post: “Without any meaning / we’re just flesh and bone / like beautiful robots dancing alone” (which I first heard as “we’re just getting bored”; I probably don’t need to say that I find the idea of bored, beautiful, lonely robots highly congenial). I also see something rather Badiouvian in the closing lines of the album: “We want a party but we’ve got no love.”

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2. “Is it better, is it worse?” Cheryl Cole’s new song is really quite incredibly good: 01-Fight-For-This-Love-Main-Version.mp3 It reminded me of something about pop music that occurred to me when The Saturdays’ album came out. I thought, while listening to the album, that it sounded like the Sugababes, which then struck me as odd, as there are...
3. Bumping in the back room I loved the new Girls Aloud track when I first heard a terrible quality radio rip. I was actually a little disappointed when I heard a proper quality version; it turns out my imagination had inserted a storming gay bassline (not that the real version doesn’t have a moderately storming...

I think the only thing that could make Girls Aloud better would be if they started filming their videos in Britain’s decaying industrial heritage.

In other music news, two great Alabama 3 remixes.

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That’s from 2006; Buster Bloodvessel’s lost a hell of a lot of weight, no?

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Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

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2. Virtual life Good post by Moll on how the Internet has and hasn’t changed our lives. She’s particularly bang-on about Second Life. The odd thing about Second Life is how much effort has been put in to reproducing real life, but worse in every respect. Moving through physical space (but through the...
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Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, in which she takes Joan of Arc as a hero for exemplifying “militant virginity.” This is part of a series of intriguing but, as far as I can see, untheorized, valorizations of bodily integrity, privacy, and autonomy. The continuing slippage between the bodily and the political is interesting; even more interesting, however, is the way this valorization of autonomy proceeds. Dworkin writes of the connection between Joan of Arc’s virginity and her virtue:

Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy…. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female.

What I find so surprising here is that, far from objecting to this connection between autonomy, virtue, virility and manliness, Dworkin seems to embrace it. I’m reminded of Mary Wollstencraft, who argues explicitly in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that the problem with the virtues advocated by (patriarchal) society is not the virtues themselves, but the fact that women are excluded from this sort of virtuousness. But Wollstencraft is more consistent, because less insightful, than Dworkin. Much of Intercourse is taken up with a discussion of the harmful effects of virility and masculine autonomy; yet these same qualities become praiseworthy when exhibited by a woman.

What seems to be lacking is a structural critique; there is no account of the structures of gender, no account of why men oppress women in the way they do. Such oppression is simply taken as a tautology, and thus naturalized, no doubt against Dworkin’s intentions. If gender isn’t defined structurally, how is it defined? I think Butler is right to say that it is defined solely by contrast with biological sex, which ultimately, in a disavowed form, depends on an appeal to biological natures. Gender construed in this way makes it difficult if not impossible to see how effective resistance could ever take place; this is, it seems to me, the value of Butler’s critique of the sex/gender distinction.

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Which reminds me of a number of interesting posts from &catherine, about a particular affective coldness in pop music. What interest me are those songs where apparent melancholy is somehow undercut precisely by the process of transforming emotion into music. The key example for me here is happy hardcore, which manages to preserve a sense of yearning like a specimen caught in amber, against a musical context that seems to expunge any possibility of emotion. I’m reminded of Spinoza’s claim that melancholy is always evil, but anguish can be good to the extent that it checks enthusiasm. Or, Nietzsche’s idea of a pessimism of strength: a cold pop music seems to begin from the essential painful nature of the world, but recognizes the worthlessness of raising this pain as a simple complaint. Instead (and I think happy hardcore is a particularly sharp example again here), there’s an odd combination of desperation and parody, an identification (over-identification?) with horror which works to create some kind of distance from it.

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