Lady Gaga – The Edge of Glory (video)

When “The Edge of Glory” came out, I described it as like Jason Nevins remixing Kelly Clarkson; should probably have clarified that this was intended as praise, an attempt to convey the splendid excessiveness of the song. Indeed, the song has become my favorite track of the year, and the more I listen to it the more it seems to be even more overstuffed than a Jason Nevins remix. Much the same could be said of Born This Way, and while the continuing parade of terrible lyrics, ridiculous outfits, and 13-minute videos got a bit wearing, I think it’s important to maintain fidelity to the Gaga event. The ambition (and Gaga’s obsession with making sure we know about the ambition) and the failure is kind of the point; Katherine St Asaph’s description of the album as “like the patterns you can use to cast invulnerable 73-foot-tall shadows on the wall behind you with your scrawny Wizard of Oz hands” remains the best explanation of what it’s doing, at least when it works.

The Saturday's – All Fired Up (video)

Another of my favorite tracks was similarly preposterous in its size. The Saturdays’ On Your Radar is the logical endpoint of the increasing indistinction between dance and pop which has coincided with the Saturdays’ time in the charts, largely abandoning conventional pop song structures in favor of dance builds and breaks, taken to an absurd (and, when it works, as in the case of the Xenomania produced “All Fired Up,” brilliant) lengths. Two widely cited bits of musical journalism discussed something related: Daniel Barrow on songs constructed around a textural and emotional intensification, or “soar,” and Simon Reynolds on “digital maximalism.” Both articles are kind of weak, and would have benefited from more historicization of their objects; I mean, Reynolds writes about music which “is up!, preposterously euphoric but genuinely awesome” without mentioning gabba? And confining his discussion to dance music misses how widespread this kind of maximalism is, or what wider cultural trends it might be tapping in to.

Britney Spears – Till the World Ends (video)

The distinctive thing about the maximalism in the charts this year is the apocalyptic tone. You can see this to some extent in the Gaga and Saturdays videos, but the central exponent here was Britney. Appropriately, because she was already developing this trend back in 2007 with the release of Blackout. At the time, I rather underrated the album, seeing it as part of the narcotic rave&B trend that developed from FutureSex/LoveSounds, but it’s actually doing something else, not withdrawing from the world but attempting to obliterate it. The political significance of this apocalyptic maximalism is something I didn’t really focus on in my own review of Britney’s album (although it’s not incompatible – the proletariat, after all, is the class whose destiny it is to abolish its own conditions of reproduction), but The New Inquiry joined the dots between the barely-suppressed insurrectionary fervor of apocalyptic maximalism and the forms of struggle that have been emerging recently.

2NE1 – Can't Nobody (video)

This year I started paying attention to K-Pop, which seems to be an entire genre devoted to maximalism. Last.fm has been periodically playing me K-Pop tracks for a while, although the only one I can remember is Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” from 2009, which is amazing. Anyway, Girls’ Generation are great and all, but their recent tracks are a bit restrained compared to their stuff from 2009, and the last thing I want from K-Pop is restraint. But through YouTube’s knowledge of related videos, Girls’ Generation led me to 2NE1, who are if anything even better. This year they released a mini album featuring a great synth-poppy track, “Hate You,” and a slightly confusing entry in the self-esteem pop genre, “Ugly,” but their best song remains last year’s “Can’t Nobody,” which is just fantastic: the amazingly swagged out rap at the beginning, the diva-ey chorus, the screeching tire sounds,the bit in the video with Minzy wearing a suit….

On the topic of maximalism and swagger, Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne was released to howls of frankly bizarre protest about its supposed excess. The worst of these was probably Ryan Briles’s at The Activist, which calls the album “upper class propaganda.” This is so fucking stupid, and is an interpretation which could only be sustained by failing to pay attention to the album itself and the last, IDK, 20 years of hip hop. Yes, Jay-Z is a petit-bourgeois black nationalist rather than a revolutionary socialist, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a worked-out theory of the relationship between material success and the liberation of poor black people, and the album continually thematizes this complicated relationship (perhaps most straightforwardly on “Murder to Excellence”). I don’t know that Watch the Throne is a great album, but it’s better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, because MBDTF was about Kanye’s individual and internalized pathologies and self-loathing, which aren’t really all that interesting subjects, while Watch the Throne expands the frame to consider the social context which produces these pathologies. I’m also still mad that that Ryan Briles post completely fails to get Kanye’s very funny joke about forcing his son to be a Republican “so everyone knows he loves white people,” from the album’s best track, “New Day.”

Lil B – Unchain Me (video)

I don’t know if rap hasn’t been very good this year, or if I’ve just lost interest, or what, but the only really good hip-hop album I can think of from this year is Lil B’s I’m Gay. It’s not entirely clear what makes this an album, as opposed to the over 9,000 mixtapes Lil B also released this year, particularly a he put the album up for free download almost as soon as it had been released, but it is both better and more coherent than the mixtapes. Lil B obviously has the most innovative flow in rap since forever, and aside from the entertainment value of his meme-generating lolcat rap, he’s working through a bunch of issues in an honest and interesting, if not always right, way.

Katy B – Broken Record (video)

Also, I guess, falling in the category of maximalism would be brostep. I’m a bit confused by the attempt to delineate brostep, perhaps because “bro” is a bit of an alien category (we don’t, quite, have bros in England). A lot of the dubstep purists’ criticism of brostep reminded me of dismissals of donk a few years back; the difference is the way the process of Bourdieuvian distinction works rather differently in the US than in the UK. In the UK, the crassness of donk was signified primarily in class terms, with donk unsophisticated because northern and working class. In the US, the racialization of class means that the distinction works differently: the crassness of brostep is signified as white and (thus also) middle class; hence the relatively priveleged fratboy brostep listener is contrasted with the faux-bohemian hipster. Which is to say, I’m not at all convinced that the category of brostep has any real coherence, beyond a general name for big, hooky, populist rave tunes. And if that’s what brostep means, the biggest brostep record of the year would be Katy B’s On a Mission, although Katy is no bro.

Last few things about which I don’t have much to say about. Cher Lloyd’s is really good (even “Swagger Jagger” is good if you can persuade yourself to not hear the “O My Darling Clementine” bits, but “Playa Boi” and “Dub on the Track” are better). Selena Gomez released a fairly consistently good album, Demi Lovato released a less consistent album which did have some pretty good tracks. Beyoncé released the best album of her career. Nicola Roberts released a very good album, Florrie and Sky Ferreira released good EPs, Menya and tAtu split up.

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“Yoü and I” is comfortably the worst song on Born this Way (well, on the standard edition; bonus track “Black Jesus / Amen Fashion” is basically everything bad that people who don’t like Lady Gaga say about her songs); an all too accurate re-creation of a dark period of early-90s MOR, painful for all of us who remember the 16-week reign of terror of  “(Everything I do) I Do it for You.” The video is good, though, following Gaga’s usual pattern of stitching together signifiers in the hope of creating some kind of theoretical life. My favorite thing about the video is the presence of Gaga’s drag alter-ego, Joe Calderone. Partly this is just because of a personal, erm, interest in women in masculine clothes, but it also brings up, or at least reminds me of, various questions about essentialism and gender.

With Joe Calderone, Gaga is playing the part of a guy, but not just any guy; he’s a sideburned, smoking, white-T-shirted James Dean sort of a guy. This is something that drag performances often emphasize – that there is no such thing as masculinity as such, but rather, any masculinity is always a particular masculinity (and the same goes for femininity too, of course). Interestingly, though, when I thought about this while watching the video, it wasn’t the contemporary philosopher of drag, Judith Butler, who came to mind, but Aristotle. Plato believes that the fundamental things that exist are the universals or forms: the dog, the chair, the man, and the things we encounter in the world exist only insofar as they resemble these universals. Aristotle rejects the possibility of these detached universals, arguing instead that forms are always particular; there’s no the dog, dogness only exists as it is embodied in this dog or that dog.

So, does this mean Aristotle’s theory of forms is an appropriate basis for a post-structuralist theory of gender? Well maybe. The “Yoü and I” video has a kind of bride-of-Frankenstein theme, with a somewhat sinister guy attempting to stitch together an artificial woman. But he fails to produce a viable woman; the failed artificial woman cannot live, and so must be killed. In Aristotelian terms, not all possible organizations of matter are genuine forms (or essences), capable of sustained existence in real particular things. Butler identifies the problem: the constraints on which forms are genuine and which are not “not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (Bodies that Matter, v). The problem isn’t, strictly, the theory of forms itself, though (indeed, unless we’re going to abandon intelligibility altogether, we are going to have to somehow distinguish between real and unreal forms); rather, the problem is the specific, and violent, imposition of particular forms in a particular social and political context; as Butler puts it, “which bodies come to matter – and why?”

 The mermaid and the robot in Gaga’s video are two opposing poles of the abject, monstrous or chimeric body. The mermaid is natural and perfectly capable of existing, it just can’t exist in our world (on dry land). The robot is artificial, but seems to have, through a more self-conscious embrace of this artifice, willed itself into an existence that eluded the Frankenstein’s bride. I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be a narrative in the video, but I like the idea of a progression from mermaid, to Frankenstein’s monster, to robot; here, the very attempt to impose on the mermaid what is supposed to be the essential, and subsistent, female form, is what destroys her; but this destruction is canceled in the manifestation of a new, artificial form, the robot. What this reveals is the contingency of essence: which forms exist and are inhabitable is not pre-determined or knowable in advance, but depends on contingent processes of manifestation, processes of appearance which retroactively produce their own essence. This isn’t Aristotle’s position, certainly, but it seems to me that Aristotle’s emphasis on the particularity of form is a more useful place to start thinking about the problems of exclusionary intelligibility than positions which simply reject an unexamined “essentialism.”

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There’s something interesting about the importance this gives to commercial typography, which is something of a neglected art these days (of course we’re surrounded by commercial typography, but it’s no longer appreciated as an artform in the way I think it was in, say, the 50s).

The video reminds me of Grant Morrison’s belief that corporate logos are secret sigils of magical power. Benjamin makes a similar point:

The writings of the Surrealists treat words like trade names, and their texts are, at bottom, a form of prospectus for enterprises not yet off the ground. Nesting today in trade names are figments such as those earlier thought to be hidden in the cache of “poetic” vocables. (The Arcades Project, G1a,2)

There’s something utopian about the “Who Says” video, about the idea of advertising that isn’t selling a product except for gentle reassurance. Benjamin writes well about the utopianism of advertising:

Many years ago, on the streetcar, I saw a poster that, if things had their due in this world, would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes, and copyists just as surely as any great poem or painting. And, in fact, it was both at the same time. As is sometimes the case with very deep, unexpected impressions, however, the shock was too violent: the impression, if I may say so, struck with such force that it broke through the bottom of my consciousness and for years lay irrecoverable somewhere in the darkness. I knew only that it had to do with “Bullrich Salt” and that the original warehouse for this seasoning was a small cellar on Flotwell Street, where for years I had circumvented the temptation to get out at this point and inquire about the poster. There I traveled on a colorless Sunday afternoon in that northern Moabit, a part of town that had already once appeared to me as though built by ghostly hands for just this time of day. That was when, four years ago, I had come to Lützow Street to pay customs duty, according to the weight of its enameled blocks of houses, on a china porcelain city which I had had sent from Rome. There were omens then along the way to signal the approach of a momentous afternoon. And, in fact, it ended with the story of the discovery of an arcade, a story that is too berlinisch to be told just now in this Parisian space of remembrance. Prior to this incident, however, I stood with my two beautiful companions in front of a miserable café, whose window display was enlivened by an arrangement of signboards. On one of these was the legend “Bullrich Salt.” It contained nothing else besides the words; but around these written characters there was suddenly and effortlessly configured that desert landscape of the poster. I had it once more. Here is what it looked like. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It  was loaded with sacks bearing the words “Bullrich Salt.” One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words “Is the Best.” But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word “Bullrich Salt.” Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image for things that no one in this mortal life has yet experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia? (The Arcades Project, G1a,4)

But this utopianism is double-edged, as it is itself an attractive quality that can be mobilized by advertisers; then the presentation of utopia becomes a demand that the viewer inhabit that utopia (presumably by buying the product). This is particularly true of pop songs which are, as it were, adverts for themselves, and explains (aside from the specific awfulnesses of Katy Perry and Pink) the joylessness of so many of these empowerment anthems: happiness becomes an obligation; I think this is what JR calls the “normative weirdness” of the genre. The songs brook no argument, they peremptorily tell the listener what they are (“you’re a firework,” “you’re fucking perfect”) or what they have to do (“don’t you ever feel…,” “don’t be a drag”). The indirection of “Who Says” kind of avoids this, by posing a question which encourages the listener to take a certain stance in response; there’s something positive, I think, about presenting empowerment as a performance that can be adopted rather than an intrinsic property (I thought of this because I misread JR’s tweet as being about “performative weirdness”). The idea of happiness as norm remains, though, which runs the risk of being all the more patronizing when its the pretty and successful Selena Gomez who is telling us to cheer up.

Which is a long winded way of saying that you should listen to “Love You Like a Love Song” instead of “Who Says.” LYLALS is by far the best thing Rock  Mafia have ever done. The dubsteppy bass obviously draws on recent Dr Luke stuff in the manner you would expect from Disney’s in-house hacks, but it combines it with a fascinatingly melancholy in both the melody and the lyrics. There’s the ennui of the first line (“it’s been said and done / every beautiful thought’s been already sung”), and the extraordinary one-sidedness of the lyrics, which leave it completely unclear if the song is about requited, lost, or unrequited love.

The video also features Selena dressed as an androgynous robot butler, of which I approve. Also also, Allen Ginsberg reading “America,” from which the title of this post comes.

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These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. (The Communist Manifesto)

Britney’s Femme Fatale is excellent, and unexpectedly so. It’s produced by Dr Luke, surely one of the most overexposed producers today, but, while it certainly uses plenty of Dr Luke’s current favorite tropes, it’s different in interesting ways from, as well as being much better than, the rest of his current product. Evidence of Dr Luke’s versatility? Or of Britney’s godlike genius, her mysterious ability to bring out the best in her collaborators, even when she doesn’t appear to have any obvious input through the rockist-approved methods of songwriting or production?

Dr Luke’s ubiquity gives us plenty of other material against which to compare Femme Fatale, and so to isolate its particular genius. The two best points of comparison are Katy Perry and Ke$ha, Dr Luke’s other two flagship artists. They all share Dr Luke’s thudding, monotonous beats, but the meaning of this monotony becomes different in each case. Ke$ha deals with this by adopting a vocal style (and writing lyrics to emphasize it) that lurches drunkenly around the beat, skipping ahead of it then getting confused and dropping behind. This is why Ke$ha’s songs always have an air of desperation, a sense that partying might be an escape but is also something remorseless to be escaped from.

Katy Perry has none of this ambivalence, throwing herself with gusto into Dr Luke’s sledgehammer beats. As with Ke$ha, Perry’s songs work on a relationship between the beats and the voice, but where Ke$ha builds up a tension between the two, Perry’s voice reinforces, indeed endorses the beats (a point well made by the “official lyrics video” for “Teenage Dream”). What gives Perry the authority to give this kind of imprimatur to the beats is the organic humanity of her voice, as set against the mechanical repetitiveness of the beats. The naturalness and authenticity of Perry’s voice is always foregrounded (unlike Ke$ha, her voice is almost never processed in a way that draws attention to the artificiality). Her voice thus naturalizes the authoritarian dimension of the rhythm, re-iterating their command as a kind of natural, bodily discipline. It is in this way that Katy Perry’s music is fascist; an aesthetic of fascism it shares with the films of Leni Riefenstahl.

Žižek rejects the idea that “the mass choreography of disciplined movements of thousands of bodies: parades, mass performances in stadia, etc.” in Riefenstahl is fascist in itself, because “such mass performances are not inherently fascist; they are not even ‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by left or right. It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers’ movement, their original site of birth.” But Žižek misses the point that there are fascist and non-fascist forms of bodily discipline, and Riefenstahl’s is indeed fascist. We can see the distinction  by comparing Triumph of the Will with Man with a Movie Camera.

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The discipline in Triumph of the Will glorifies the body as organic, making the body part of an ordered whole in which, as in an organism, the parts are given their purposes by their relation to the purposes of the whole: the army marches in a single direction, at the command of a single voice. Fascist discipline instrumentalizes the body. Man with a Movie Camera also involves mass coordinated movement of bodies, but in a rather different context.

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In this scene, where would-be swimmers coordinate their movements as they learn to swim, discipline isn’t directed towards any larger purpose, indeed, it is an element of play, the opposite of purposiveness. This, indeed, is what’s most startling and liberating about Man with a Movie Camera: it is a hymn to the modern industrial city and worker which rejects productivism throughout. Vertov makes this point most specifically through an image that is repeated, with modification, throughout the film, a spinning wheel which occurs as  cogs, as part of the mechanism of a textile factory, and as a merry-go-round.

With this image, Vertov associates the circular, non-directed character of machinery with the non-teleological nature of play. The productivist associations of factory machinery make this seem odd, but it probably shouldn’t; machinery is, after all, automatic, functioning as it does without any direction of its own. Vertov is here dramatizing what we Derrida calls the commodity’s “automatic autonomy,” and suggesting this as an image of purposelessness which technology under socialist control would make available to humanity. Thus the great difference between socialist organization of the body and fascist organization of the body: to put it schematically, socialism rebuilds the body as part of the machine and thereby frees it for purposeless leisure, while fascism builds the machine into a great body and subordinates us all to that body.

Which brings us to Britney. Rather than setting up a a division between mechanical beats and organic voice, Femme Fatale integrates the two by taking up Britney’s voice and making it part of the machine. As the Rolling Stone review point out, “on nearly every track, Britney’s voice is twisted, shredded, processed, roboticized,” to a fairly remarkable extent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this distortion is the duet between Britney and her autotuned double in the genuinely strange “How I Roll,” or the spoken breakdown in “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” (which I’ve excerpted here as it’s otherwise one of the less interesting tracks on the album), which out-Ke$has Ke$ha. But drawing attention to the distortion draws attention back to the organicism of the undistorted voice;  I think the vocal production works best slightly more subtly in “Inside Out,” one of the best tracks on the album, in which Britney’s voice fades in and out of distortion, and in and out of the backing track, getting lost among both the thudding beats and the bleeping and twinkling synths (which are reminiscent of both Britney’s earlier “Piece of Me” and Sky Ferreira’s “One”).

I think Alex Macpherson said something on Twitter about the way “Hold it Against Me” plays its dubstep bass off against the pop sweetness of its superstructure, and that’s something that occurs throughout the album. At the same time as Britney’s voice is drawn into the artifice of the production, the monotony and remorselessness of the beats is transcended and freed, becoming the artificial autonomy of the machine, producing musically a similar effect to the one Vertov produces cinematically. On Femme Fatale, Britney becomes “a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and … consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market,” and suggests a possible way out through this commodification.

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First of which is my favorite track of the year, Sky Ferreira’s “One.” It does something kind of marvelous with the futuristic sheen that’s become omnipresent in R&B and pop music, making it break down, that is, represent technological breakdown. The vocals don’t just stick, they corrode, while the bright keyboard line sharpens to approximate shattering glass (reminiscent of an earlier track by producers Bloodshy and Avant, Britney’s “Piece of Me”). I imagine this is what it sounded like inside Goldman Sachs’s high-frequency trading computers on May 6. Everything else Sky Ferreira has done seems to be pretty awful (“One” wasn’t even released in the US, we got this dreadful Pink impersonation instead), but she’s apparently written a song with Klas Åhlund, so there’s some hope she’ll get close to producing more stuff this good.

Robyn may have boxed herself into a similar corner by making what is, as far as I can tell, a perfect record, “Hang With Me”:

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Of course, a throbbing electropop tune and a melancholy vocal isn’t exactly new territory for Robyn, but in “Hang With Me” every last beat is in exactly the right place. The subtlety with which the apparently monotonous beat builds during the verse is masterful, with the payoff arriving as the song fizzes and explodes as the chorus starts. It’s also interesting to see how this changes the inflexion of the lyrics compared to the acoustic version, emphasizing the ambiguity of the “blissfully painful insanity” Robyn predicts. In the acoustic version, “tell me once again / how we’re going to be just friends” is bitterly sarcastic, predicting the inevitable heartbreak described in the chorus, but the musical rush of the single turns that around, with Robyn apparently committing to the pleasure of being  ”reckless, headless” (and what a brilliantly apropos malapropism that is, combining “heedless” and “head-over-heels” so smoothly it didn’t even occur to me it wasn’t the right word until I saw it pointed out in reviews). This is emphasized in the video (especially in the bedroom/stage performance montage at 2:50), which also serves as a beautiful portrait of the perhaps soon to be dismantled infrastructure of post-war collectivity. Best video of the year? Probably.

Making a list of the tracks I’ve liked this year, Robyn’s Body Talk was probably the album the contained the largest number; this would certainly be true if you took the three Body Talk EPs as a whole. It’s interesting that this bold three-EP project ended up turning into two-EPs-and-an-album, suggesting that the album form isn’t as dead as we’ve been led to believe. Something similar is true of Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis project, originally intended as a series of EPs, but with the second two parts released together as her The Archandroid album. Alex Macpherson’s review of The Archandroid is a fine piece of music writing, which criticized the album for its theatricality, it’s adoption of styles and performances without any emotional connection. That’s precisely why I like the record, though; I’m suspicious of any music that doesn’t foreground its artifice.

Theatricality is also important to Nicki Minaj, somebody I  don’t think I’ve gushed about sufficiently. As the picture above shows, she’s really quite adorable; actually, she’s way more adorable than that picture shows. There’s her habit of making ridiculous faces (a deliberate tactic, she says, to stop herself being seen as a sex object); her endless supply of slang; her role as benevolent aunt to her fans, the “Barbies” and “Kens” (like Lady Gaga, she’s managed to make pop a matter of filiation instead of, or at least as well as, consumption); her parodic inhabitation of gender norms in the hyper-gendered world of hip-hop (warning, this is an interesting video for an utterly awful song). Also, obviously, making great records. I’m a bit surprised that a lot of people seem to think that her debut, Pink Friday, isn’t a fantastic record. Yes, it’s not all as good as her guest spot on “Monster,” and “Right Through Me” isn’t very good, and “Check It Out” has will.i.am on it, but there’s so much good stuff on the album. “Roman’s Revenge” is spectacular, but I think a lot of people have missed the tracks where Nicki’s rapping is understatedly, effortlessly brilliant, especially “Dear Old Nicki,” in which Nicki narrates her career, conducts a conversation with herself, and explains her multiple personas, through some really great rhymes, without drawing attention to the incredible skill involved. Also there are some great beats; I particularly like “Save Me,” which reminds me of an old Streets remix (though Nicki’s part in the track is admittedly pretty forgettable), and “Blazin,” in which Kanye pulls one of my favorite happy hardcore tricks, pitching up a male stadium-rock vocal to sound like a house diva, and also gets comprehensively out-rapped, again, by Nicki.

Both tracks are examples of the ongoing, and as far as I can tell accidental, world domination of the hardcore continuum, with various forms of hardcore making up the default setting for hip-hop and R&B and, therefore, for most pop music. At the beginning of the year, we had the fantastic Oakland grime of J Stalin, and there’s also Berkeley group The Pack taking some influence from wonky, or whatever they’ve decided that microgenre’s called now (I know people don’t like the name “wonky,” but “dubstep” is a much worse name, and that doesn’t seem to have done the style too much harm). The Pack’s Lil B also has a fascinating and bizarre solo career, producing innumerable tracks including “I’m Bill Clinton,” “I’m a Princess,” and a personal favorite, “I Look Like Hannah Montana.” I guess if Drake is making hashtag rap, Lil B’s freestyles would be lolcat rap, employing the same kind of grammatical generativity as internet memes. But then there’s also stuff like this or his Rain in England album.

As far as pop’s adoption of hardcore tropes goes, my favorite might be The Saturdays’ “Missing You,” which renders rave synths enormous and looming, like icebergs crashing together. Its lyrics also contain a fine Lacanian analysis of drive and its relation to objet petit a: “I just want you to be / stuck in this circuit forever / so don’t freak out if I leave / I just miss, missing you.” The actual hardcore continuum has produced over 9,000 new microgenres that I have ignored, two pleasing sides of wonky have continued. In Ikonika’s hands, computer-game sound effects aren’t just nostalgic, but she manages to recreate in audio form the epic grandeur of 8-bit computer games, or which our imagination somehow managed to infuse into them. And Girl Unit continued to make dance music the transplanted home of crunk’s grandiose swagger.

I discovered a few things last year that I probably should have known about earlier; Nicki Minaj being the most noteworthy, as she’s been around, and awesome, for a few years. Someone else I’ve been sleeping on is Javiera Mena, who released her first album in 2006 (which I still haven’t heard), and a new album last year. She could be reductively, but not all that inaccurately, described as the Chilean Sally Shapiro, or, if we’re going to get into a slightly more involved neo-indie-italo taxonomy, Mena is somewhere between Shapiro’s icy melancholy and Doe Deere‘s popiness; “Luz de piedra de luna” is one of the poppier, and also best, tracks on the album. Something else I was late to was Rihanna’s Rated R, which I didn’t hear until well into last year. Her new album is not as good, although it’s pretty good and has one great track, “Man Down,” which I’m pretty sure is the best pop-reggae track since “All That She Wants.”  I’ve been surprised, though, that a lot of reviewers have described Loud as being lightweight and fun; compared to Rated R, sure, it’s more fun, but the overall tone of the album is still pretty uncomfortable, especially “Only Girl in the World,” which seems to be a come-on to someone with an unhealthy obsession.

What else was there? Pretty disappointing albums from Kelis and Shakira, though in both cases the singers’ distinctive voices made the songs less dull than they otherwise would be. Disney shelled out for slightly better songwriters than usual for Miley Cyrus’s and Selena Gomez’s albums; including, on the latter, Fefe Dobson, who has a new album of her own, unfortunately not as good as her unreleased second album (though I do like “Ghost”). And there were Lady Gaga’s videos, of course.

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2. “I just need an ice-pick” In other music news, the new J Stalin album, Prenuptial Agreement, is AMAZING. It’s the best hip-hop record I’ve heard in a long time, probably since The College Dropout. It’s great enough that there’s a rapper called J Stalin; it’s really icing on the cake that he produces tracks as...
3. Ain’t no party like an Esco party I hadn’t realized that late-90s pop-R&B producers Stargate—responsible for such classics as “S Club Party” and Brandy’s version of “Another Day in Paradise”—were still in business. Actually, they’ve been keeping quite busy, but I only noticed when they turned up on Nas’s new album, producing anti-American anthem “America.” Not what...

This might suggest a familiar narrative of spoiled innocence, in which disappointed naïveté sours into petty, reactive, vengeance. Swift herself endorses this conception of “meanness” when she attacks a critic as “a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life,” in the track “Mean,” which itself serves to prove that this is not true of Taylor Swift’s own meanness. The thing about this track, especially, is how joyful it is: the jaunty beat is accentuated by handclaps, while Swift’s voice is overdubbed to give it the quality of a playground chant. This track and  “Better Than Revenge” are so brightly cheerful in their cruelty, they give the whole album a delightfully untroubled conscience.

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1. New year, same ter­rible Guardian jour­nal­ists I don’t usually read the Guardian‘s music coverage, so I’d forgotten how incompetent a music writer Alexis Petridis is. I was reminded more forcefully than I would have liked by today’s review of Lady GaGa’s album, a six paragraph review that contains, generously, four sentences that mention music. Even those...
2. “While you’re getting your cry on, I’m getting my fly on” It took me an unconscionably long time to listen to Rihanna’s Rated R (and, given my slow pace of blogging of late, even longer to write about it); unconscionable because it’s such a great record, a development of some of the best features of Rihanna’s earlier records. Luckily, the forthcoming...
3. In which I psy­chol­o­gize people who dis­agree with my taste in pop music What is it about Kesha that disorients people’s critical faculties? I suppose the Uffie comparisons sort of make sense, inasmuch as they’re both young women sort-of-rapping over electro-ish beats (the difference being that Kesha has funny lyrics and tunes). The same logic I suppose might lead to the Lady Gaga...

Even as emotionally invested as I am in Radio 1, though, the reactionaryness of the coalition is obviously more worrying, although it does occur to me that there is a way in which New Labour was more neoliberal than the coalition are. It’s an often-remarked paradox that the transition to  neoliberalism under Thatcher didn’t involve a movement of power away from the state, but rather a centralization of power in order to allow for the dismantling of local state structures and the imposition of market mechanisms. The marketization of society, that is, required that the state increase its separate and sovereign political character. But the state under New Labour was anything but a unified sovereign; it frequently seemed to have no idea what it was doing at all. Think of higher education policy, in which the government was obsessed with the idea that everyone should attend university, while seeming to give no thought to what the distinctive value of university education might be (thus the policy managed to be both elitist and philistine at the same time).

This kind of incoherence isn’t a mistake or a weakness, though (it’s not that the state under New Labour acted less than before, but that it acted less coherently and autonomously); it’s an extension of neoliberalization to the state itself. The new government does seem more ideologically coherent, however, and I’m not sure how this will end up manifesting itself. Where next for the state in neoliberalism? A recentralization to impose a new mode of neoliberal accumulation (but the coalition seems to have no more idea than anyone else what this would be)? Or a neoliberalism that finally really does try and do without the state, rather than reconfiguring or redeploying it (an idea which is both terrifying and insane)?

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2. Lib­er­alism: threat or menace? Why shouldn’t we call out Lib Dem “betrayal”? Because they haven’t betrayed anyone. To think that they have reinforces the mistaken belief that, when they describe themselves as “progressive,” they mean “left.” But Lib Dem progressivism isn’t just a fluffy sort of not quite socialism, it’s a specifically liberal version...
3. Labour MP: em­ploy­ment is pun­ish­ment Well, that’s not what John Denham is actually saying. He doesn’t need to say it or even think it, as it’s the implicit New Labour model behind this bold policy initiative: Unemployed people convicted of crimes should receive tougher sentences than those with full-time jobs or caring responsibilities, a leading...

It may have taken me so long to get round to this because, for reasons I no longer understand, I wasn’t that impressed with “Russian Roulette” when I first heard it. I think to get it I needed to hear it in the context of some of the other tracks on the album. It was coming across the marvelously bizarre video for “Hard” on MTV that got me to look again at the album. “Hard” encapsulates the theme that is explored throughout the album: objectification as self-preservation, feminine superficiality as a kind of cold armor with which to avoid the pain which comes from interiority. In about half of the tracks on the album, this nihilation of subjectivity (aided by Rihanna’s internalization of the affect of auto-tune) takes on an apocalyptic edge: in “Hard, ” this comes out most strikingly through the use of a sample from “Can You Feel It,” slicing off the rumbling bridge just before it resolves into the chorus (“Can You Feel It” of course has its own apocalyptic, or messianic, video).

This superficial swagger runs through many of the most enjoyable tracks on the album,  the dubstep-meets-Stargate of “Wait Your Turn” (I’m not sure that this isn’t just an artifact of MP3 encoding, but there’s something reedy and overdriven about the synths in this track that give the impression of a song so powerful as to strain against its technological limits) and “G4L,” and also in “Rude Boy” another track which benefits from being heard in the context of the album. Heard as a single, the track is quite light-hearted, a dancehall-inflected come-on; it’s only close proximity to “Russian Roulette” that emphasizes the icicle-like ringing coldness of the synths.

You can see my heart beating
You can see it through my chest

“Russian Roulette” itself marks the other side of the album, the ballads that function as an internal critique of this tactic.  The mistake lies in thinking that emotions exist internally, which would allow the assumption of superficiality to partition pain away from the self. What this misses is that the surface is precisely where emotions are, because, far from being part of our unique internal being, emotions are constituted by and constitute what we show of ourselves to others (to paraphrase Putnam, feelings aren’t in the heart). We see this to heartbreaking effect in “Te Amo.” The track is haunted by the ghost of “La Isla Bonita,” a tragic holiday romance in which the fantasy of a carefree sexuality comes up against what is evidently, for Rihanna at least, an absolute limit, gender. The Spanish here doesn’t signify the exotic so much as it signifies incommunicability (“won’t somebody tell me what she said”), the limits to commonality and connection and the inescapability of the pain that lies there.

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1. So, the di­rector of the forth­coming t.A.T.u. film used to work on Coro­na­tion Street. Perfect. It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the...
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The problem with MIA’s new video is not, as Anna Pickard claims, that it is “too shocking,” it is that it is not shocking enough. The video’s big “reveal,” that the state’s violence is directed at the redheaded, turns any possible shock into pure silliness. Now, I imagine someone will say that I’m missing the point here, that prejudice directed against redheads is really no more silly than prejudice directed against black people or Muslims, and that by showing us this, the film makes a serious point about the arbitrariness of racism. This is wrong: racism is indeed unfounded and constructed and arbitrary, but it is not silly. The mistake here lies in thinking that, because racism is based on a social construction rather than a biological reality, it is therefore unreal, a mere error or fiction with only a mental existence in the psyche of racists. But in fact there is little more real than social constructions, because they create, and exist through, a material reality of practices and distributions of people and things. By eliding this materiality, and suggesting that an alternative racial reality could be produced simply by an arbitrary switch of what signifiers are racialized, the MIA video flatters its liberal audience, reinforcing the belief that racism a matter of ignorance or error that can be avoided by the sufficiently enlightened.

Worse, perhaps, the video ends up letting the actual racism and violence of the US state off the hook. The first half of the video presents us with a mystery: who are these police, and why are they raiding this building? The moment when we see the bus full of red-haired young men functions as an explanation, an explanation which immediately places us in an alternative reality in which the US features a number of signs of oppression that suggest places out side the US: Northern Ireland (murals) or Palestine (kids in keffiyehs throwing rocks). The problem is, that this, it seems to me, strongly suggests that we should see the first half of the video as also part of this alternative reality; but police raids of this sort are of course no “alternative” at all to actually existing US reality.

I don’t think I’ve written much about MIA before, not just because I don’t like her records very much, but because I’m rather uncomfortable with the fact that I don’t like her records. Oh, I can come up with any number of plausible reasons why, but they all seem to have a borrowed kettle quality to them: I have too many reasons for not liking her, none of which are finally quite persuasive. I don’t like the superficiality of her gestures towards politics, but why is this a problem when I’m so happy to take as interesting the surface features of other artists, from Lady GaGa to tATu? Is it that I’m happy to let the girls talk about fripperies like gender and aesthetics, but politics is SRS BSNS that should be left to the men? Perhaps I judge MIA differently because she presents herself as serious about politics; but, again, why do I let my interpretation of her work be determined by  MIA’s interest in politics when I’m more than happy to ignore Britney’s lack of interest? This suggests, I think, a potential problem with popism’s otherwise admirable commitment to the death of the author, which is that it tends to work better when the interpretation of the record is wholly disconnected from the artist’s self-understanding. The problem is that this requires the artist to be ignorant: the female (usually; feminized, in pop, almost always) pop star is forced into the position of the subject not supposed to know.

Or another thing; I dislike the appropriations involved in MIA’s presentation of herself as speaking from a generic third-world position (this is most annoying in the uncredited “baile funk” tracks on Piracy Funds Terrorism, which may be Diplo’s fault rather than MIA’s, and the cringeworthy line about how she “puts people on the map who’ve never seen a map,” which is MIA’s fault); but, for all that I could make arguments about self-made native informants, she surely does have an experience as someone growing up in Sri Lanka and working in the western music industry that qualifies her to say something about the third world; why is it that I somehow want to deny this?

I find myself in the odd position of not being able to trust my judgment about MIA; but I’m pretty sure “Born Free” isn’t as good a record as “Jimmy.”

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2. The Big Brother Truth Move­ment One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and...
3. And you shouldn’t fucking talk about telekinesis Bush’s press conference a few days back reminded me of the much-ridiculed line from a White House aide about the “reality-based community”: The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious...

Scruton attempts a phenomenological analysis of pop music, comparing Crystal Castles with Elvis, claiming that “the difference here is not material; it is phenomenological—a difference in how repetitions are heard.” And this is true, although not perhaps in quite the way in which Scruton thinks: the problem is that Scruton cannot hear what is happening in the music he condemns. This illustrates something interesting about aesthetics, and indeed phenomenology; we might think that aesthetic responses are due simply to unmediated sensory impressions, but what Scruton illustrates is that, in the absence of an ability to cognize the input of our senses, we have no aesthetic response to them: Scruton cannot hear pop music because he doesn’t understand it.

I’m not sure Scruton himself realizes this; his claim that the pop music he dislikes “works like tickling” suggests he does indeed think an unmediated aesthetic response is possible, and his unreflective, didactic assertions about the music he does like imply a belief in the naturalness, even obviousness, of his own responses, even if they can then give rise to more detailed elaboration. I disagreed with Ian in his comments over his description of Scruton as an “emotivist,” but he’s likely right; even if Scruton represents a sophisticated form of emotivism, he is at bottom engaged in the cognization of a fundamentally unmediated aesthetic response.

For someone who actually can write about pop music, see jane dark on Jordin Sparks.

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