Stop Making Sense: Rap Lyrics and the Economy of Intelligibility, by Loren Ludwig

by justindburton on May 20, 2013

Guest Editor Elizabeth Lindau brings to the IASPM-US site a series of essays on the topic “Stop Making Sense: The Unintelligible in Popular Song.” During the month of May, we’ll explore what it is to sit just on the edge of reason in popular music.

Syllables

…nowadays these kids, jeez, don’t give a shit about lyrics. All they wanna hear is a beat and that’s it…
-Eminem “Syllables” (2010)

The lyrical economy of rap has changed.

With guest appearances by Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Stat Quo, and Ca$his, Eminem’s track “Syllables” decries a listening culture that is no longer sufficiently invested in deciphering emcees’ richly coded rhymes. (Un)intelligibility of lyrics has historically served as rap’s primary strategy for generating scarcity, for limiting access to the race and class otherness that white, suburban listeners have sought in hip hop culture. Despite the friendly populism of early party rap (“now what you hear is not a test, I’m rappin’ to the beat”), emcees quickly established strategic obfuscation as a key to hip hop authenticity. As the familiar story goes, as soon as hip hop spread outside the streets of its urban cradle, “the street” emerged as a master trope marking the boundary between “insider” and “outsider” status. This boundary was articulated largely (though not exclusively) through lyrics that partook of a centuries-old tradition of Black double-voicedness.

The fuck am I busting my brain for? It’s just the way the game go, oh, it takes two to tango. You call this a lame flow? You bought the shit, I guess you to blame too. I just found the angle.
-Jay-Z “Syllables” (2010)

But that whole lyrical economy depends on listeners who are deeply invested in deciphering emcees’ carefully crafted rhymes (otherwise, as Jay-Z opines, “the fuck am I busting my brain for?”). Rap’s first several decades were marked by lyrics that drank deeply of complex African American rhetorical strategies, Caribbean-inflected urban vocalities, and production techniques designed to make lyrics more difficult to understand (think Public Enemy). There are exceptions, of course, but for every KRS-One, with his clear, pedagogical sing-song diction, there is a Wu-Tang Clan, whose members embed their messages in 5 Percenter code and protean urban slang.1 As rap became a global phenomenon in the 1990s and early 2000s, it faced the familiar opposition of two competing priorities: widespread appeal versus the capacity to capture the values and aesthetics of specific, local communities. This negotiation has played itself out largely in the arena of lyrical intelligibility, and is a key context for “Syllables”’ polemics.

As a teenager in rural New England, my own hip hop fandom was initially thwarted by an exasperating inability to understand the words in a music whose primary attraction seemed to lie in its lyrics. One cliché of suburban hip hop fandom is the vision of legions of teenage boys crowded to the front of a stage joyfully bellowing verse after verse of recondite rhymes along with a favorite emcee. This expression of fandom reveals a deep investment in lyrics, of hours spent listening and memorizing. Shouting lyrics in unison with an emcee stakes a powerful—if highly conditional—claim to a hip hop identity. Eminem’s live performance of “The Real Slim Shady” at the MTV Video Music Awards 2000, which featured nearly a hundred “clones” of the emcee (“who dress like me, walk, talk and act like me”), dramatized this very dynamic.

“Intelligibility” in rap lyrics is often as much a matter of comprehension as it is perception of actual words and sentences. Rap has seen open season on both of these domains. Wayne Marshall documented the pervasive influence of the West Indies on New York hip hop culture. The 1990s, for example, saw a proliferation of emcees who “spoke from a kind of creolized subject position, containing as much patois and ragga-style flow as more traditional hip-hop stylistic markers.”2 As a teenager in Massachusetts, this code shifting was bewildering. Lyrics like “buddha bless my head and the eyes are red,” with its play on “bud” (a botanical term) and “Buddha” and reference to—then—utterly alien cultural practices were completely unintelligible.3 Only later would I learn of the nearly century-old tradition of “reefer” songs by such masters of strategic unintelligibility as Louis Armstrong and Slim Gaillard.

You don’t hear what I’m saying. Me fin-nini-na Fee-fi-dididee-yay, just give me my check and I’ll be on my way. Sunny bunny money and funny You ain’t even listening and I just took your money.
-50 Cent “Syllables” 2010

Missy Elliot’s “Work it” (2002) stimulated a frenzy of hip hop hermeneutics that exemplifies the mode of hip hop fandom whose loss Eminem et al seem to mourn in “Syllables.” There, Missy’s phrase “I put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it” is played backwards and re-inserted into the hook by producer Timbaland. Online and in person, listeners—particularly younger and less production-savvy ones—attempted to “figure out” what on earth Missy was saying. Comments beneath Youtube videos of Missy’s track reveal myriad creative interpretations of Timbaland’s backmasking.4 Many listeners offer mondegreens—such as “It’s your fault the pussy aint wet yet”—that are in keeping with Missy’s famously explicit lyrics.5  Of note here is the fact that Missy is known for tracks that emphasize “a hot beat and a catchy hook” (to borrow “Syllables”’ dismissive phrase) over an effusion of lyrics.  That many listeners invested their hermeneutical efforts in deciphering Missy’s reversed verse challenges, perhaps, “Syllables”’ polemical distinction between listeners who care about lyrics and those who “[only] know the chorus, ‘cause the chorus repeats the same four words for us.” Of course, listeners oriented to Caribbean cultural practices are tipped off to Timbaland’s studio trickery by Missy’s phrase “reverse it,” a gambit familiar from recorded Jamaican dub and from live DJ performances in which the exhortation “DJ, rewind!” triggers a dramatic momentary reversal of the playback medium. However, given the wide dissemination of Missy’s track outside such culturally literate communities, her momentary “unintelligibility” serves as a tantalizing mystery to many listeners who are simultaneously—likely—drawn to her decisively “catchy hook.”

50 Cent’s gibberish “Me fin-nini-na fee-fi-dididee-yay” in “Syllables” seemingly invites no such listener investment (either in the form of knowing identification or hermeneutics). Rather, 50’s unintelligible utterance is a performance of apathy over craft, a gesture that both illustrates the emcee’s assertion that “you ain’t even listening” and discourages interpretation through a pointedly uncommitted delivery. Yet elsewhere in his verse, 50 exhibits his characteristically deft flow and self-referentiality (“Go shorty, it’s your birthday, you made it just in time to hear my wordplay”), qualities that helped position him as an icon of lyrical facility among just the sort of hip hop fans that “Syllables” seems to claim no longer exist.6 How might we decipher 50’s complex gesture of “talkin’ out both sides of [his] mouth”—simultaneously dismissing listeners who “ain’t even listening” while rewarding fans who appreciate (and are familiar with) the rapper’s capacity to engage in lyrical subterfuge?

On one hand, 50’s appeal to listeners who are sufficiently invested in lyrical hermeneutics to know where not to spend their interpretive energies (e.g. on “Me fin-nini-na fee-fi-dididee-yay”) suggests a familiar process of winnowing hip hop insiders from outsiders. “Syllables”’ tropes of sneering commercialization (“I just took your money”) and resistance to a dilution of core values (whatever those happen to be) by uninitiated fans confirm that these emcees imagine themselves addressing an audience that will know to ignore their parody of strategic unintelligibility. This willfully perverse gesture—“let’s record a track lamenting fans who ignore lyrics by writing lyrics that any real hip hop fan would ignore”—has Eminem written all over it.7 On the other hand, “Syllables” lyrics seem to express a genuine concern with the deflation of lyrical currency. The catch, of course, is that only those listeners who are already invested in listening to lyrics will discern the message of the song. In the absence of an imagined population of fans who seek to exchange the coin of lyrical comprehension for a share of hip hop identification, “Syllables” comes across as solipsistic “surplus,” as an overproduction that drives down the value of the whole endeavor. Perhaps this explains why the track was never released, but rather was “leaked” online some three years after it was recorded. Perhaps not. Either way, “Syllables” articulates an anxiety about the “value” of lyrics in hip hop that is only partially defused by its closing tableau, uttered in the voice of Eminem’s cynical record mogul:

Nobody gives a damn about them syllables, sillyle-ables, whatever they are. I don’t care if you gotta rhyme Smo, Joe, toe and glow. Now get out there and sell some goddamn records!

Loren Ludwig is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Grinnell College. He completed his Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2011. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Musicological Society, his dissertation (“Equal to All Alike”: A Cultural History of the Viol Consort in England, c.1550- 1675) explores the social nature of amateur chamber music for viol consort. The project investigates how consort music shaped understandings of social intimacy, the nature and propriety of the passions, and the relationship between language and music. In addition to his work on early modern musical culture, Loren has research interests in African American music as well as the twentieth-century history of performance practice.  Loren is currently researching the history of the “Yankee” viol and in the early nineteenth-century development of American vernacular music.

Elizabeth Lindau is Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at Gettysburg College. She completed her Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2012 with a dissertation titled “Art is Dead. Long Live Rock! Avant-Gardism and Popular Music, 1967-99.” Liz’s essay “Goodbye 20th Century! Sonic Youth Records John Cage’s ‘Number Pieces’ ” appears in Benjamin Piekut, ed. Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, in press). This fall, she will join the faculty of Wesleyan University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music.

  1. Actually, though KRS-One often seems to prioritize intelligibility (I once saw him ask his DJ to “bring the beat down {in volume}” so that everyone could hear his lyrics more clearly), he also engages in the sorts of acronym- and numerology games shared by many New York-based rappers of his generation (see, for example, his “bacronym” of his stage name: “Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone”). ↩
  2. http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/isam/NewsletS05/Marshall.htm ↩
  3. Black Moon & Smif ‘N’ Wessun’s “Headz ain’t ready” (1995) ↩
  4. Whether this constitutes a textbook example of “backmasking” (versus simply the use of a “reversed” sample) is debatable—I use this term advisedly to suggest that the “reversedness” of the phrase is, on some level, intended to be perceptible as reversed. ↩
  5. http://forum.letssingit.com/topic/3307/missy-elliots-work-it/1. Another vocal constituency of online commentators is clearly invested in “debunking” such interpretations by explaining the studio technique responsible for the “unintelligible” portion of the phrase (see, for example, this Youtube video that features the entire hook in reverse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ppYcGB1eVw). ↩
  6. Compare 50s initial phrase in “Syllables” to his 2003 hit “In da Club”: “Go shorty, it’s your birthday, we’re gonna party like it’s your birthday…” ↩
  7. Consider, for example, Eminem’s performance of “The Real Slim Shady” at the MTV Video Music Awards 2000 (discussed above). Em’s lyrics there famously dismiss the possibility of the emcee winning a Grammy and then go on to imagine a comical Grammy Awards ceremony seating scenario involving Britney Spears, Christine Aguilera, Carson Daly, and Fred Durst. During the MTV awards performance, Eminem actually rapped those lines (“Christina Aguilera better switch me chairs…”) at the very moment that he paraded by several of those (unlucky) artists in the real-life televised awards ceremony. ↩

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Stop Making Sense: Are You Bold Enough to Reach for Love? Janelle Monáe and the Gaps of Nah-Nah-Nah, by Justin D Burton

by justindburton on May 15, 2013

Guest Editor Elizabeth Lindau brings to the IASPM-US site a series of essays on the topic “Stop Making Sense: The Unintelligible in Popular Song.” During the month of May, we’ll explore what it is to sit just on the edge of reason in popular music.

janelle-monae_metropolis

“Tell me: are you bold enough to reach for love?”

The answer comes in the form of perhaps one of the most popular nonsense lyrics in music: nah-nah-nah. The Beatles used it to get Jude’s attention. Master P made ‘em say it. Adam Duritz’s December was so long it was all he had left. Makavelli chanted it as the rejection of a ride-or-die duality. And Will Smith has gotten jiggy with it—as have the Beach Boys, Bieber, and Rihanna, among others.

Nah-nah-nah offers a richness that courses through popular music—a something that mustn’t be spoken, a nothing that might be more than we imagine. It stands in the place of explicit content, allowing taboos to pulsate beneath the surface of, say, some good vibrations. It props up verses, filling out couplets and taking up spaces that can’t survive lyrical voids. It points to something and nothing all at once, even as it is the easiest lyric for an audience to learn and the likeliest to be sung back. In those moments of audience feedback, nah-nah-nah becomes a re-sounding gap in meaning that pulls listeners into the song and leaves them to occupy that gap. This sort of nonsense lyric, in the hands of a master of popular music styles like Janelle Monáe, who slides in and through the sounds and creative practices of a world of postcolonial artists, can summon a variety of gaps that require re-sounding listeners to fill the spaces and shape the meaning of the song’s musical and lyrical text.

Consider (Janelle Monáe alter-ego) Cindi Mayweather’s question: “Are you bold enough to reach for love?” Cindi puts the question to the listener because by the time she asks it, we already know her answer. Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis: The Chase Suite opens with the announcement that Cindi (Android #57821) has fallen in love with a human and is “now scheduled for immediate disassembly.” It is in “Many Moons,” the third track on the EP, that Cindi asks this question of us. Even as she hurtles toward her own death, chased down by bounty hunters armed with chainsaws and electro-daggers, she invites us to consider sharing in her fate, to become bold enough to reach for love. And as the nah-nah-nahs rise up to pull us into the song, we’re left to ponder the gap where Monáe has placed us.

All signs point to a futuristic setting, and it’s a nightmarish place. Cindi’s hunters are tipped to her whereabouts by an all-seeing surveillance system, and she introduces herself in “Violet Stars Happy Hunting!” as an alien, a slave girl on the run. With these few broad strokes, Monáe situates herself in an Afrofuturist discourse that folds past onto future in a manner that sounds gaps in the present. Afrofuturists sound these gaps in different ways. While Sun Ra visits a broken present from a utopian future that draws on the power of the ancient past, Kool Keith’s future is a dystopia pock-marked by the unchanging sames of colonialism’s past.1 In each case (and in the many more instances of Afrofuturist creativity), the past and future bend toward one another and leave the listener to ponder the gap that is the present. Elsewhere, Monáe sounds herself in a global discourse, as examined in Shana Redmond’s analysis of “Cold War,” “a production that highlights the lived realities of the marginalized through articulations of alienation,” articulating her performance beyond the bounds of US slavery and in the context of a broader postcolonial, black Atlantic discourse.2 Given Monáe’s tendency to sound herself in a postcolonial context, and given Afrofuturity’s concern with aesthetic practices throughout the black Atlantic, I’m approaching the Metropolis where Mayweather lives as not just a city that signifies on the histories of US slavery, but one that sprawls across postcoloniality, drawing on experiences and creativities in a global context.

Monáe constructs the dystopia of Metropolis at least in part as a postcolonial reflection on the objectification of bodies past and future, here and there, especially in the video that accompanies “Many Moons.” Here, Monáe visually steps outside of the Metropolis narrative even as she draws on its component parts and even as the song still sounds that narrative. The audiovisual experience of “Many Moons,” then, neither exists apart from the album version of the song nor merely provides a visual analog to that song; rather, the audiovisual marks an affinity between the audible and visual media without joining them seamlessly.3 This affinity extends Monáe’s postcolonial elements, as we find ourselves at an auction of android slaves, all of whom look like Monáe/Cindi. The entertainment is provided by Cindi Mayweather herself, who sings and dances as the androids parade up and down the runway accompanied by graphics documenting the bids placed on each of them.

The idea of an auction of objectified and commodified persons (persons whose humanity is crucially underestimated) flows easily from what we learn of Metropolis on the EP, but the event itself exists apart from the narrative of the album. The misogyny of the event also grows from the album, where Cindi is tabbed for disassembly while her human lover, Anthony Greendown, is named but not indicted, sentenced, or in any way reprimanded for his actions.4 The audiovisual version of “Many Moons” crosses back over to the album version as Cindi dies at the end of both. While she is presumably run down by the bounty hunters on the album, in the video she dances herself to death, rising steadily into the air as her movements and the music climax. She is suspended before the audience in a scene that recalls the bodies of lynched victims being displayed before bloodthirsty crowds—the human-technological forbidden love of Metropolis drawing on the anxieties of miscegenation that led to the terrorizing of blacks in the US for centuries.

The gaps are multiplying. As Monáe collapses past and future onto one another, we’re asked to contemplate two instances of “Many Moons”—the audiovisual and album versions—alongside human/technology hybridity, male/female duality, colonization and postcoloniality, and the short distance Cindi travels from love to death. As Cindi asks whether we’re bold enough to reach for love, we hear nah-nah-nahs filling a tune that has sounded in a call-and-response pattern throughout the chorus. These nah-nah-nahs exist in the musical space where we expect to hear words. In the lyrics shown below, all words in parentheses outline related tunes.

Oh make it rain, ain’t a thing in the sky to fall
(The silver bullet’s in your hand, and the war’s heating up)
And when the truth goes bang, the shouts splatter out
(Revolutionize your lives and find a way out)
And when you’re growing down instead of growing up
(You gotta ooh ah ah like a panther)
Tell me: are you bold enough to reach for love?
(Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah)

The entire chorus seems at odds with itself, as the call-and-response dialogue cross-talks, the soloist driving toward love, the responsorial vocalists toward violence. So when we arrive at nah-nah-nah filling the tune of revolutionary ideals, we return to the initial concept: as listeners, these nonsense lyrics re-sound through us; if they have meaning, we transmit it from the gaps.

Paul Gilroy theorizes “what cannot be spoken” in black popular music as moments that sound racial trauma across the Black Atlantic and comment “on the inadequacy of language for expressing certain truths.”5 In Ian Baucom’s reading of Gilroy alongside Frantz Fanon, he suggests that Gilroy creates scholarly solidarity with Fanon “through listening and re-creating, paying attention and remaking” Fanon’s work.6 The result is a scholarly call-and-response where Gilroy re-transmits ideas similar to Fanon’s even as he fills in the gaps. Reading Gilroy’s idea of racial trauma into “Many Moons”’ nah-nah-nah, we may be able to enter into a similar relationship with Monáe. As listeners, we can re-transmit nah-nah-nah and fill in the gaps Monáe has opened up in her work.

By shaping her listeners into re-sounders, Monáe asks us to consider what it would mean to be bold enough to reach for love in the present gap. That is, once we observe the way past and future fold onto one another to bring Cindi Mayweather to the brink of death, might we find a way to re-sound nah-nah-nah in the present so that the racial trauma, the misogynistic trauma, the trauma of colonial binaries can be prevented from re-transmitting from our past through this present into her future? By asking directly—Are you bold enough to reach for love?—Monáe invites her listeners to become ethical collaborators instead of silent bystanders to Cindi’s death. She seeks listeners who fill the gap with re-sounding solidarity.

Monáe herself, “through listening and re-creating, paying attention and remaking,” re-transmits a variety of sounds and images from the past and present, from her tuxedo uniform to her old school soul vibe to the postcoloniality woven into the fabric of her audiovisual output. In Cindi’s phrasing of her question, we find Monáe re-transmitting another singer who sounded as if he were from the future, who chose the boldness of love over violence. Nestled in her dystopic vision of Cindi Mayweather’s future, Monáe deploys nah-nah-nah next to the lyric that points us back to Jimi Hendrix, who was “bold as love” in projecting a utopian future, “the alternative possibilities of the not-yet,” as Gilroy describes it.7 Monáe pulls in her collaborator-listeners in juxtaposition to the clearest moment of hope in the Metropolis narrative, suggesting we may yet create a future that is kinder to Cindi.

It doesn’t last.

Cindi dies, and as her life bleeds out, we hear a slew of societal ills stutter past her lips, the weight of an unchanged past that sealed her fate as well as a rejoinder to Monáe’s listeners who did not, apparently, re-sound nah-nah-nah as we should have. Cindi’s death is punctuated by a lullaby, the last two lines of which remind listeners one last time of the stakes.

Shang- Shang- Shang- Shangri-la
Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah

Shangri-la? Utopia? Are you bold enough to reach for love? Monáe wants to hear it in the nah-nah-nah.

Justin D Burton specializes in popular music and culture, especially focusing on hip hop, technology, and the critical race theory. His ongoing research combines these interests, reading contemporary popular music through the lens of posthuman theory. He currently teaches in the Popular Music Culture program at Rider University and currently serves as the Web Editor on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch.

Elizabeth Lindau is Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at Gettysburg College. She completed her Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2012 with a dissertation titled “Art is Dead. Long Live Rock! Avant-Gardism and Popular Music, 1967-99.” Liz’s essay “Goodbye 20th Century! Sonic Youth Records John Cage’s ‘Number Pieces’ ” appears in Benjamin Piekut, ed. Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, in press). This fall, she will join the faculty of Wesleyan University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music.

  1. I’m drawing here on examples used in J. Griffith Rollefson’s “The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti-Essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith,” Black Music Research Journal 28:1 (2008): 83-109. ↩
  2. Shana Redmond, “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s ‘Cold War,’” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23:4 (2011): 400. ↩
  3. Stan Hawkins and John Richardson elaborate on this idea in their analysis of “Toxic” in “Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of Intoxication and Mediation,” Popular Music and Society 30:5 (2007): 605-29. ↩
  4. It’s worth considering that Anthony dies before the EP starts, as he doesn’t appear anywhere in the action except as Cindi reflects on him in the past tense—past because he’s dead or because her own imminent death tells her she’s seen him for the last time? ↩
  5. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 211-12. ↩
  6. Baucom, Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening,” Contemporary Literature 42:1 (2001): 35. ↩
  7. Gilroy, “Bold as Love? Jimi’s Afrocyberdelia and the Challenge of the Not-Yet,” Critical Quarterly 46:4 (2004): 112-25. ↩

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Stop Making Sense: Words Over Here, Words Out There, by Thomas Swiss

by justindburton on May 13, 2013

Guest Editor Elizabeth Lindau brings to the IASPM-US site a series of essays on the topic “Stop Making Sense: The Unintelligible in Popular Song.” During the month of May, we’ll explore what it is to sit just on the edge of reason in popular music.

Today’s post comes from Thom Swiss, who responded to the “Stop Making Sense” call with an assemblage. Justin Burton (editor for IASPM-US) “organized” that assemblage in the prezi above, which you can explore using the navigation buttons which will allow you to move from one piece of the assemblage to the next, as well as with an “autoplay” feature that will control the pace of the presentation for you. At any point in the presentation, you can grab and drag the screen around. For some theoretical background, read Swiss’s explanation of his assemblage here.

Thomas Swiss is Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. His writing and teaching focus on interdisciplinary subjects, including new media, creative writing, and the cultural studies of education, and he is dedicated to issues pertaining to equity and social justice in both research and teaching. He is also a poet, and he teaches a course on teaching creative writing for graduate students. His most recent book of poems is Rough Cut, published by the University of Illinois Press.

Elizabeth Lindau is Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at Gettysburg College. She completed her Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2012 with a dissertation titled “Art is Dead. Long Live Rock! Avant-Gardism and Popular Music, 1967-99.” Liz’s essay “Goodbye 20th Century! Sonic Youth Records John Cage’s ‘Number Pieces’ ” appears in Benjamin Piekut, ed. Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, in press). This fall, she will join the faculty of Wesleyan University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music.

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Stop Making Sense: “Don’t Duplicate My Rhythm:” DNA and Valery’s Transverse Relations, by John Melillo

by justindburton on May 7, 2013

Guest Editor Elizabeth Lindau brings to the IASPM-US site a series of essays on the topic “Stop Making Sense: The Unintelligible in Popular Song.” During the month of May, we’ll explore what it is to sit just on the edge of reason in popular music.

DNA

As I went along the street where I live, I was gripped by a rhythm which took possession of me and soon gave me the impression of some force outside myself. It was as though it were making use of my living-machine. Another rhythm overtook and combined with the first, and certain strange transverse relations were set up between them. They combined the movement of my walking legs and some kind of song I was murmuring, or rather which was being murmured through me. This composition… went far beyond anything I could reasonably produce with my ordinary, usable rhythmic faculties. The sense of strangeness…became almost painful, almost disquieting.                                                                                                      Paul Valéry, “Poetry and Abstract Thought”

When I listen to a song by the No Wave band DNA, I sense that I am in the same inspired yet difficult position Valéry describes. I do not merely listen to a song: I am gripped by a “force outside myself.” It is as though I experience exactly those “transverse relations” of rhythm upon rhythm, sound upon sound which Valéry (and he is certainly not alone in this formulation) painfully, disquietingly feels as antecedent to poetry and song. For instance, a song like “Not Moving” (included in Brian Eno’s influential 1978 No New York compilation) produces this enigmatic, noise-ridden state through a strange concatenation of distorted electronic keyboard pulses, strict and stark drum beats, all-over Cy Twombly-ish guitar scribble, and the slurred, wretched, and distorted voice of singer Robin Crutchfield. All this moves from one inchoate sound form to another. These transversals possess me. Even the brilliantly awkward transition into the B section of the song’s ternary form (:35) creates a kind of cut that forces a reevaluation, a new relation to the sound forms previously there. I am in the midst of cross-talk and cross-purpose that force me to move three ways at once and stay still, too. My “living-machine” resides within an anxious space, a space of something-about-to-happen and anything-can-happen. Where am I?

DNA’s willful inarticulateness tells me I am neither here nor there. I am simultaneously locked within and knocked out of the rhythms, timbres, and mouth-sounds of their songs. As Simon Frith has argued, in popular music “inarticulateness, not poetry, is the … conventional sign of sincerity” (Sound Effects 35), but DNA’s inarticulate vocal and musical gestures refuse the forms of identification and “soul-to-soul” empathy that typical pop songs provide. Simulating neither an expression beyond expression nor a way of speaking beyond words yet through words, DNA’s performed unintelligibility—their emphasis on a texture of transverse relations—constructs a poetic space that simultaneously entices and confuses, invites and repels. In this complicated listening position we do not overhear and appropriate a lyric enunciation or spontaneous overflow of emotion; instead, we nervously but pleasurably bask in a kind of sonic effulgence, an all-over, malleable and yet immobile radiance of sound.

Within this effulgent texture of crossings, voice—that privileged locus of identification—exists in a radically altered space, where it is neither the over-arching sound form in the music nor merely another instrument. It exists in the midst of noise, yet it still contains the sense of a making-sense. To return to “Not Moving,” Crutchfield’s language and the ways in which he enunciates that language create a dynamic stasis borne out of opposing movements. The lyrics themselves reference this movement and negation:

When you went this way
I went that way
Where are we going?
We’re not moving
Not moving not moving not moving not moving not moving not moving
not moving not moving

These words are extremely difficult to understand and transcribe, as they come to us through a matrix of effacements. And this is not merely a question of volume. Before voice even arrives, the instrumentation counters and muffles it. The instruments refuse to melodically mimic voice or create the resonating relationship of figure / ground that harmony provides. They are neither metaphoric nor preparatory. Instead, they seem to be working at cross-purposes. The musicians are simultaneously together and apart—each wrestles with his / her own instrument (and the traditions of that instrument) while also organizing the group in song. There are repeated motifs but the sounds act less as narratives of harmonic or linguistic progress and more like layers or strata of sound. Robin Crutchfield’s distorted electronic organ “hook” emblemizes this individual and collective push and pull: while he blurs frequencies in a splashy glissando, he also articulates a single, piercing final note that gives shape to the song’s opening. The high scraping of Lindsay’s guitar (typically the most anthropomorphic instrument in pop music) and the flat power of Ikue Mori’s drums similarly remain caught between slurring / choking and articulation. In other words, the sounds in the song internalize the static dynamism that is “not” (and yet) “moving.” These transverse relations do not accede to the communicative (even if “inarticulate”) relation of voice.

When voice does arrive in the song, it also internalizes this sonic situation. Crutchfield’s dysprosodic performance refuses traditional musical, poetic or linguistic sound shapes. It erases itself even as it is being formed. Crutchfield’s mouth reproduces English in a way that desynchronizes his singing body and the metrics of pronunciation. At the same time, he leaves just enough of a trace of the forming words to allow us to listen for a possible articulation. Voice, here, does not emphasize reference or expressivity but rather what Northrop Frye calls charm: “the hypnotic incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical response, and is hence not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power” (Anatomy of Criticism, 278-279). The “magic” of DNA, however, is not only this inviting and involuntary physical response but also the anxiety that meaning might happen at any moment. This cross-talking atmosphere of compulsive but disembodied rhythms—these transverse relations that offer themselves to a listening ear attuned to and confused by the sounds it encounters—might at any moment cohere. This systematic reduction and reconstruction of voice (which is also found in the vocal performance of DNA songs without lyrics, such as “Grapefruit”) echoes the ways in which modernists like Valéry, T.S. Eliot and the Dada sound poets sought to “save” poetry by deemphasizing representational narrative and emphasizing instead language’s connection to sounds and rhythms beyond individual subjects and national boundaries.

DNA, however, reimagines this modernist desire for a form of contact and affection that traverses ossified relations between self and other. By transforming the process of erasure into an act of choking, a grinding of body against language, instrument and self, the band explicitly resists even the consolation of finding sense beyond sense. Instead, choking happens at the point where cross-rhythms meet, where the relation of a voice to a melody, a sentence, a song, a language, an atmosphere, a beat, a body come together and grip the self. The intense vocal performance of “New Fast” perfectly illustrates this: not Barthes’s “the grain of the voice” but rather the grind of the voice. One way to hear the burst of sounds Lindsay emits around :15 is “don’t duplicate my rhythm,” but we might hear this as if he were saying, “do not redouble, redeem, and repeat one’s self in this rhythm. Instead, take this strangled, stuttering sound and let it—and you—be exposed, threatened and open.” DNA perform the inarticulate as the movement by which a bare voice bursts out of noise and by which noise bursts in on voice and meaning. Like Valéry’s reverie, for DNA this process remains always and everywhere in potential, there and not there in every sound, every voice, every walk along the street.

Works Cited

DNA on DNA. No More Records, 2004. CD.
Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Print.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.
Valéry, Paul. “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” The Art of Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. Print.

John Melillo is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at the University of Arizona for 2011-2013. He specializes in poetry and twentieth century British and American Literature. His dissertation, “Outside In: The Sound of Noise from Dada to Punk,” examines the influence of noise–environmental and musical–on poetics and poetry during the twentieth century. John studies the relationship between sound and meaning in a variety of literary and cultural contexts, from the rhetorical strategies of modernist poets to the contemporary performance of punk music. In addition to his academic research in noise, John writes music criticism and plays guitar and sings, most recently in the pop/noise project Algae and Tentacles.

Elizabeth Lindau is Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at Gettysburg College. She completed her Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2012 with a dissertation titled “Art is Dead. Long Live Rock! Avant-Gardism and Popular Music, 1967-99.” Liz’s essay “Goodbye 20th Century! Sonic Youth Records John Cage’s ‘Number Pieces’ ” appears in Benjamin Piekut, ed. Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, in press). This fall, she will join the faculty of Wesleyan University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music.

Correction: A previous version of this essay stated that Arto Lindsay, not Robin Crutchfield, wrote and sang the song ‘Not Moving.’ Thanks to Alan Schneider at No More Records, who produced the reissue of DNA on DNA, for correcting this.

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IASPM-US Website: Call for Asst Editor, 2013-15

by justindburton on May 3, 2013

iaspm-us_logoFINAL_300dpi

The United States branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music invites applications for the position of Assistant Editor of the organization’s website, iaspm-us.net. The successful applicant will be expected to fulfill a two-year appointment starting June 2013. The Assistant Editor will work in cooperation with and under the direction of the Editor-in-Chief during the first year of the appointment, assisting with content-related and technical matters pertaining to the website in maintaining ongoing IASPM-US web projects and also in developing new content. In the second year, the applicant will assume the role of Editor-in-Chief, taking over primary website duties and helping to select and train a new Assistant Editor.

The organization seeks a graduate student or junior scholar whose primary research interests fall under the broad category of popular music studies and who demonstrates administrative skills that speak to the applicant’s ability to generate content and function as one of the primary faces of the organization to the public. Editorial duties should require approximately 15-20 hours per month. The position is voluntary and carries with it a seat on the IASPM-US executive committee.

Applicants should submit a letter of application detailing relevant experience and vision for the site, a CV, and two letters of recommendation to iaspmus@gmail.com (Subject: Assistant Editor Application) by 30 May 2013. Any questions should be directed to the outgoing editor, Justin Burton (justindburton@gmail.com) and the incoming editor-in-chief, Mike D’Errico (theatticbat@gmail.com). The selection committee will include Justin, Mike, Robert Fink (IASPM-US President), and Anthony Kwame Harrison (IASPM-US Executive Committee At-Large member).

IASPM-US represents the United States branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. IASPM-US has been an important part of the popular music landscape since the early 1980s and serves as a forum for a range of scholarly and other approaches to popular music. We hold true to the goals of our parent organization in the belief that popular music has much to teach us about this world. We place an emphasis on the writings and other activities of US-based scholars, journalists, and musicians–focusing not only on American music but also on musics from across the globe, and “Music 2.0″ made and consumed in virtual soundscapes.

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DJing in Japan, by Mark Katz

by justindburton on May 1, 2013

In our interview with Mark Katz about his book Groove Music (Oxford 2012), he mentioned a long section on DJing in Japan that didn’t make it into his book. Below is an excerpt from that section. Many thanks to Mark for sharing!

shibuya crossing

Crate diggers who don’t believe in Heaven have never been to Shibuya.

One of 23 wards in the city of Tokyo, Shibuya was, as of the summer of 2008, home to more than 30 independent record shops within its five square miles, many of them specializing in hip-hop vinyl.1  To get a sense of Shibuya’s discological riches, take a short stroll down Inokashira Dori.  Start at the famous Shibuya crossing, perhaps the busiest intersection in the world, where thousands of pedestrians scramble across the wide expanse of asphalt with each red light.  (This type of intersection is actually called a pedestrian scramble—all traffic is stopped while pedestrians cross in every direction at once.)  On any given weekend night this hip section of town teems with such a variety of subcultures as to belie the commonplace notion of Japanese homogeneity.  Hip-hoppers sport thick gold chains and baggy jeans, hipsters pose in porkpie hats, Edwardian dandies share sidewalk space with greasers, goths, and punks, drunk salarymen ogle packs of ganguro girls with dyed blonde hair and fake tans, and a sprinkling of gaijin, or foreigners, take it all in with varying degrees of bewilderment written on their faces.  English-speaking gaijin will smile at the famously inscrutable “Engrish” slogans inked on the t-shirts of passersby:  “Just Say No to Babylon,” “Wake Up the Candys,” “Property of Pittsburgh,” and “Exchange Hot Words Over Mistress Eat Too Much,” are a few of the ones I noted during my 2008 visit.

Leave the vast space of Shibuya crossing, with its multistory video screens embedded into glass-walled buildings, and head up Center Gai, a narrow street bathed in the neon and noise of pachinko parlors, gift shops, fast food restaurants, and the rear entrance of the massive HMV record store.  After exploring HMV’s stock of CDs, exit the front and turn left on Inokashira Dori.  Disk Union is on the same side of the street just a short stroll away.  Kept within its four floors are thousands of vinyl hip-hop and R&B records, as well as DJ equipment and turntablist instructional videos.  On a weekend night this is a fine place to observe serious diggers at work.  Young men in t-shirts and jeans stand shoulder-to-shoulder over the bins, necks bent at a slight angle, flipping quickly through the discs while scanning their covers in a wakeful version of R.E.M.  Their faces remain serious, passive, though occasionally they betray a flicker of emotion as they pull a record out and set it aside.  In the next set of buildings and up three floors, Warszawa Imported CDs and Records occupies a space the size of a studio apartment, which it probably once was.  From Warszawa continue in the same direction along this canyon of neon.  Hollywood Hip-Hop Wareshop, a clothing store, and Ishibashi Music Store, which stocks DJ equipment among much else, sit close by.  The next record shop is Homebass Records (“Hip-Hop, R&B, Reggae, Breaks, and Gear”) on the second floor of a very narrow building.  Fifty feet further finds Dance Music Records, which looks across the street to Broadway Hip-Hop and Sports Gear, whose sign carries the New York Yankees distinctive logo.  (Hip-hop clothing stores seem to outnumber the hip-hop record shops.  According to one report, there were more than 300 such fashion outlets just in central Tokyo in 2003.2)  Dance Music Records, associated with a record label of the same name, is one of the larger independent stores in the neighborhood.  (Shibuya itself is made of several neighborhoods; all the stores I describe here are in Udagawacho.)  DMR has a spare, industrial look with polished concrete floors and racks of vinyl and tables of equipment.  Both of its two floors have a DJ booth; hip-hop blasts from the first, techno and house from the second.  DMR is not the only record store at this address (Udagawacho 36); it apparently exists in some sort of harmony with its smaller competitors:  4DJ’s, Hi-Hat Records, and Grand Gallery Select CD Record Shop.

Another minute up the street—here the neon canyon gives way to drab low-slung structures—and on the other side of Inokashiri Dori, a cluster of shops dominates Udagawacho 11.  (Tokyo addresses, by the way, rarely use street names.  Rather, they refer to the neighborhood and building number.  To make matters more difficult, adjacent buildings are often not numbered consecutively.  All of this makes Tokyo addresses exceedingly unhelpful without a map.3)  For the gaijin looking at the jumble of signs in this upsloping alley, an English-language obscenity will likely catch the eye first: “FUCK PC/REAL DJs USE VINYL.”  This slogan, in red and yellow capitals overlaying a photo of two Technics 1200 turntables in battle mode, advertises two stores that sit on the left and right sides of a cracked concrete staircase, Disc Jam Records and Disc Jam DJ Gear, which, as might be expected, are devoted to the world of analog sound.  Also on the right side is Mother’s Records, another small shop devoted to vinyl, and two clothing stores with Afrodiasporic influences, Riddim Driven (Jamaican/reggae fashions) and Panty (“Black Adult Men and Ladies Celeb Brand”).   On the left side, next to Disc Jam Records, is Yellow Pop Used CD and Record Shop and Grow Around, a hip-hop clothing store that also sells Notorious B.I.G., Chuck D., and Flavor Flav action figures.  All of these stores sit hip to hip, and could fit comfortably within a hundred-foot circle.  Back down the alley and facing the street is a duplex structure housing Quintrix Disc Lounge, Manhattan Clothing, and Manhattan Records.  The last-named is one of the more popular record stores in the area, and is almost exclusively devoted to hip-hop vinyl.  Upon entering the store the visitor is embraced (or perhaps assaulted) by the flesh-jiggling bass emanating from the first-floor DJ booth (the second floor has its own), which sits under a large portrait of the late MC Notorious B.I.G., making it look like something of a hip-hop shrine.  Upon exiting the store to the right, the last stop on this tour leads down a dark, graffiti-covered alleyway.  The name of the ground-level shop, Still Diggin, suggests a devotion to the DJ, though in fact its focus is the aerosol arts.  Its shelves hold row upon row of spray paint cans, along with ventilator masks, clothes, and sneakers, as well as a small selection of secondhand vinyl.  Three floors above is Guinness Records, a cozy place that, like its neighbor, Manhattan, sells largely hip-hop vinyl.  Spend some time listening to some rare grooves (perhaps some $100 Sugar Hill Records test pressings) at the Technics 1200-equipped listening stations and then head back down the stairs and to the street.  Before stepping back into the chaos, notice the centuries-old statue of Jizo serenely guarding the alley.  The traditional Buddhist protector of children, Jizo continues his work here in Shibuya, perhaps protecting Tokyo’s youth from the bullet-ridden fate of some of their hip-hop idols, like Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, whose music can be found on every block.  If uninterrupted, the walk I just described from Shibuya crossing to the Udagawacho Jizo should take no more than ten minutes.  If browsing, allow for several hours to a lifetime.

DJ Ta-Shi

DJ Ta-Shi

When, during a visit to Japan in 2008, I told the DJs I met of my astonishment at the proliferation of record stores, their response is almost uniform:  lament.  Apparently, what I had seen was just a shadow of this vinyl village’s former self.  “All my favorite stores have closed,” sighed DJ Ta-Shi.4  (One of the most beloved of the closed stores was Cisco, actually a collection of five shops based in the area now occupied by Disc Jam, et al.  That hillock of Shibuya real estate had once been commonly known as Cisco Slope.)  We will return to consider reasons for this decline, but now I want to consider what should be clear from this selective (and I must stress selective) tour of Shibuya’s record stores:  Tokyo is, from any number of perspectives, unparalleled in the world in its devotion to hip-hop culture, hip-hop music, and especially the hip-hop DJ.  American DJs readily admit this.  Consider the opinion of Rob Swift, who had visited there ten times between 1998 and 2007:  “I think people in Japan really respect and admire the DJ.  They study the art form with an intensity that doesn’t exist in the states.  They apply themselves and go out of their way to know everything about whatever interests them.”5  DJ Cash Money, the mention of whose name still evokes awe among Japanese DJs, puts it even more strongly.  “They’ve done so much homework.  They know more about our music than we know about our music.  It’s so funny, they know so much about my history, and sometimes they’ll talk to me about it.  I’m like, man!”

Tokyo is particularly beloved by American DJs for its vinyl stock. Cash Money explained to me how in 1989, “I had one of my craziest digging experiences there.  I walk in this store, and this guy had all these James brown 12-inches, like original 12-inches, like promo records.  I mean, he had so many records.  I asked him, ‘How much would you want for you to close this store down?’  I ended up spending $10,000.  Yeah, I shut the store down.  I left all my clothes at the hotel.  I took all the real expensive records on the plane with me, and he sent the rest of them.”6

  1. Japan Record Shop Map Book, 22nd ed. (Tokyo:  Hensyukouboukyu, 2008).  The nearby Shinjuku section of town actually has more stores—42 according to the directory—but the Shinjuku specialty is rock, not hip-hop. ↩
  2. Yo Takasuki, “Japan Grows its own Hip-Hop,” BBC News, 17 December 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3324409.stm ↩
  3. A useful map is Tokyo City Atlas:  A Bilingual Guide, 3rd ed. (Tokyo:  Kodansha International, 2004). ↩
  4. DJ Ta-Shi, interview with author, 1 June 2008 Tokyo. ↩
  5. Rob Swift, e-mail message to the author, 11 January 2008. ↩
  6. Telephone interview with DJ Cash Money, 23 June 2008. ↩

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IASPM-US Interview Series: Mark Katz, Groove Music

by justindburton on April 30, 2013

Katz

In Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Mark Katz explores the scratche(r)s, mixe(r)s, and battle(r)s of hip hop DJ history. The book is full of interviews with musicians explaining their craft and reflecting on the role of the DJ in hip hop, and Katz wrote it with the explicit goal of producing a book for hip hop DJs as much as for the rest of us. The result is an accessible and fun read that takes seriously its promise to the musicians whose story it tells.

Groove Music

Justin D Burton: In your 2004 book, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (2nd edition published 2010), you have a chapter on DJ battles, and you discuss in the intro to Groove Music how this book grew from that chapter. But you covered a lot of ground in Capturing Sound; what was it about DJs and hip hop that suggested that you’d enjoy working on a full-length book project on this subject rather than expanding something else from Capturing Sound?

Mark Katz: My chapter on DJ battles for Capturing Sound condensed about four years of research into a little over twenty pages. I touched on (among other things) race, gender, ethnicity, virtuosity, discourse, and, of course, technology, any of which I could have explored in greater depth. Capturing Sound came out in 2004, so when I started thinking about a topic for my next book, DJing was a natural choice. What clinched it was a grant I received in 2005 from the National Science Foundation (with historian Rayvon Fouché) for a project on turntablism. So I had a great project and some money to fund my research. Now, I’m leaving out a few details. One is that Groove Music wasn’t my second book–in 2006 I came out with The Violin: A Research and Information Guide, a book that I had been writing in my spare time since I was a grad student. The other is that Groove Music was originally going to be co-written with Ray Fouché. As it turns out, he was told by his chair that a co-authored book wouldn’t get him a promotion, so we reluctantly decided to work on our own projects. But it turned out well–the NSF is getting two books for the price of one, and I was able to be obsessive about every last detail of my book without driving Ray crazy.

But let me circle back to the question of what attracted me to the subject in the first place. Part of the appeal was visceral: I loved the sound of scratching and it was thrilling to watch these amazing musicians at work, especially in the adrenaline-fueled battles I attended. But there was an intellectual appeal, too. Here was a playback device—the turntable—that a group of Bronx kids transformed into a musical instrument in the 1970s, and in the process created a new form of music, and really, way of life. I wanted to know why and how this happened when and where it did, how this art form developed in the decades since, what it meant to those who created and practiced the art, and what it means for our understanding of music and technology. So many burning questions!

I’d like to pick up on that last point about DJing and turntablism starting at a certain time in a certain place.  In your chapter on early DJs in the Bronx (Chapter 1), you push back against a longstanding trend in hip hop studies that reads early hip hop art forms as primarily oppositional, political practices. Without glossing over the difficulties of living in the Bronx in the 1970s, you return repeatedly to the idea that hip hop DJs were primarily trying to create a good time for party-goers. Is the equal emphasis on fun something you would’ve stressed at the outset of this project, or did this evolve for you as you researched for and wrote the book?

My thinking about the birth of hip-hop definitely evolved as I was working on the book. When I started my research I had heard the stories about the the Bronx in the 1970s—about the poverty, the crime, the poor state of public education, and so on—and I had heard various scholars and others link the rise of hip-hop and the hip-hop DJ directly to those dire conditions. It’s tempting to make that link, and of course there’s some truth in it—obviously the hip-hop pioneers were influenced by their surroundings. But after speaking with some of these pioneers myself, it became clear that they didn’t devote their years to DJing primarily to make a political statement, or to combat oppression or what have you. They did it because they loved music, because they loved records, because it gave them a rush to get crowds dancing or to win DJ battles, in general because it was deeply meaningful to them. I was also influenced in my thinking by the hip-hop scholar Joe Schloss, whose book Making Beats offers a nuanced discussion of this issue, and makes the excellent point that if we buy into the view of hip-hop as culturally determined we then leave little room for the agency of the musicians. It’s interesting, classical music scholars often face the opposite problem: they need to fight the “great man” theory of history and make sure that cultural factors are not ignored when studying changing musical styles and trends. In Groove Music I tried to find a happy medium, one that would account for the role of the individual and the role of society in the development of this art form.
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IASPM-US Website CFP: Music Scenes: Reflections on Performance

by justindburton on April 29, 2013

iaspm typewriter

Music Scenes: Reflections on Performance From the birth of recorded popular music to the emergence of auto-tune and other digital audio tools, anxieties over the “death” of live performance have run rampant. Most recently, Beyonce’s admission to singing along to a pre-recorded track at President Obama’s inauguration led one writer at The Telegraph to state, “Miming will be the death of live music performance… singers who lip-sync during concerts insult their audience and undermine their peers.” Indeed, entire genres of music—from classical to hip-hop—are perceived to literally live and die based on the vibrancy of their live performance scenes. Academics have been equally suspicious of “threats” to live performance, questioning the validity of writing about an art form whose public reception is often experienced in such an ephemeral and fleeting manner. The emergence of interdisciplinary fields and methods such as Sound Studies, Performance Studies, and Sensory Ethnography attest to these concerns. As Carolyn Abbate asks in her controversial article “Music—Drastic or Gnostic”: “Where are material presence and carnality, where has live performance gone, when it produced our love for music to begin with?” Yet, despite these fears, many musicians continue to use public performance as a primary creative and financial outlet, audiences continue to attend sold out shows and festivals, and industries continue to thrive on the live music market. The IASPM-US website seeks 1,000-1,500 word essays, performance reviews, or alternative multimedia submissions (interactive web projects, podcasts, short video documentaries or presentations, etc.), presenting and reflecting on the public performance of popular music. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Immediacy, Temporality, and/or Affect in Performance
  • Technology, “Liveness,” Mediation (virtual performance, technologies on stage)
  • The Performing Body (carnality, sensuality)
  • Performance and Identity
  • Ethnographies of Performers and their Publics
  • Pedagogy and Performance Practice

No matter the submission format or topic, including both text and multimedia (audio or video footage, SoundCloud or YouTube examples, images) is highly encouraged. Deadline for proposals is 22 May 2013.  Please submit drafts and multimedia files as attachments to Mike D’Errico at theatticbat@gmail.com. Accepted submissions will appear on the IASPM-US website during June 2013.

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IASPM-US Interview Series: Christina Baade, Victory Through Harmony

by justindburton on April 24, 2013

Baade

In Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (Oxford 2011), Christina Baade delivers a fascinating account of the BBC’s activities during the Second World War. Victory through Harmony won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2012, and will be out in paperback later this year. It is a worthwhile read, and not only because the book demonstrates an impressive command of the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham Park, near Reading, which contains a huge amount of materials chronicling the BBC’s involvement and influence in musical and cultural Britain. There is an overwhelming amount of material, but Christina delivers the information in a format beyond just a blow-by-blow account, including a helpful synthesis of the integral—and sometimes subversive–place of popular music in Britain during World War II. Christina and I had a long conversation over Skype this summer, complemented by an e-mail exchange.

Victory through Harmony

Samantha Bassler: What were the origins of this study — was it your PhD topic? How did it evolve as a topic, and what made you interested in this topic for the dissertation?

Christina Baade: I first encountered the topic in a seminar on “The Dangerous in Music,” taught by David Crook at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, when I was a grad student. While looking around for a term paper topic, I ran across a passage reporting that the BBC had banned crooners during the Second World War. “That’s strange. Why?” I thought. The question launched me on a term paper in which I explored popular music and propaganda at the wartime BBC. There were themes of gender, sexuality, and nationalism, interesting musical genres, and intriguing series like Music While You Work, which was broadcast in factories—all bound together by this powerful public broadcaster and total war. I was hooked, and I began to think about it as a possible dissertation topic.

Fortunately, I was able to speak with Michele Hilmes, a radio and media scholar at Wisconsin, who had begun to do a great deal of research on the BBC (see her 2011 book, Networked Nations). She urged me to visit the BBC Written Archives Centre, which I was able to do when I went to a conference in London. It’s a great archive—a beautiful space, knowledgeable staff, lots of people doing interesting research on a wide range of topics, and a huge breadth of material. When I began looking through my first set of files, I was amazed at the level of detail they contained and the sheer quantity of documents. So, I had a topic that fascinated me; a topic that would touch on larger questions on the interrelationship between music and media, popular music and gender, and transatlantic musical exchanges; and the archival material to ground my discussions.

As a general piece of advice for young researchers, how did you manage to organize your book? If from your dissertation, for example, did you write your dissertation as a book, or develop it after the dissertation was completed? Any general advice on getting a book published and the process involved, or on writing for publishing early on in academia?

The book covers many of the same topics as my dissertation, but it is a very different piece of writing. In many ways, I look at the dissertation as my first draft attempt to work through a massive archive of material. After I finished, I spent a number of years focusing on articles and conference papers, in which I dug deeper into jazz, gender issues, and issues of Americanization. The book I proposed and eventually wrote was much tighter thematically and theoretically than the dissertation, and I think it benefited from my growth as a scholar in those intervening years.

So, I’m certainly no model for how to quickly turn one’s dissertation into a book. My general advice is to not be afraid of revision and rethinking, to use shorter papers and publications as opportunities to work out questions related to the book project, and to speak with mentors and people in your field about which presses are the best fit for your work. I also found the peer review process at OUP to be enormously beneficial. It wasn’t just a hurdle before contract and publication; rather, it was an opportunity to get really useful feedback from both Norm Hirschy, the editor with whom I worked, and the anonymous reviewers. Even if OUP had decided not to publish my book, it would have been better for having gone through the peer review process there. I’m sure that’s true for many presses.

I was very interested in the idea of the ‘Phony War’ and the BBC’s involvement in it. Have you seen this web site? Really interesting. Clearly, the British as a people are partly defined because of how they suffered during WWII. How do you think this war shaped their music tastes, or do you think that the same type of music would have been popular whether there was a war or not?

That’s a great website. I used it in researching VE Day and music for the book’s conclusion. I think the site speaks a great deal to the BBC’s continued role in shaping and promoting narratives of British national identity—here, using an interactive, online platform to create a public, accessible (and highly searchable!) archive of people’s wartime accounts. Really cool.
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New IASPM-US Editor-in-Chief: Mike D’Errico

by justindburton on April 23, 2013

IASPM-US is excited to announce that, effective 1 June 2013, Mike D’Errico will become the editor-in-chief of the organization’s website. Until June 1, Mike will work in tandem with the current editor, Justin Burton, in the everyday running of the site as well as in selecting an Assistant Manager to start in June 2013 (call for applications coming soon).

DErrico_Pic

Mike D’Errico is a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Musicology and the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. His research interests and performance activities include hip-hop and electronic dance music, video games and generative media, and sound studies. In addition to his work with IASPM-US, where he is editor-in-chief of the website and student representative to the executive committee, Mike is the technical editor for two UCLA music journals, Echo: a music-centered journal and Ethnomusicology Review. As Editor-in-Chief of the IASPM-US website, Mike’s primary vision includes maintaining the flow of popular music scholarship to the site’s front page, continuing to foster the interorganizational collaborations that strengthen IASPM-US and its place in the field of popular music studies, increasing multimedia content on the webpage as much as possible (audio interviews, audio and video podcasts, diversifying the audiovisual elements of the web interface), and increasing the social media presence of the organization.

Welcome, Mike!

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IASPM-US Interview Series: Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing

April 22, 2013

Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Wesleyan 2011), takes an intriguing tact to explore the realities of a 19th century invention: the live music fan. Through the words of middle-class, urban men and women, Daniel Cavicchi creates a sort of archival-ethnography, and paints a picture of people who, for the first time, [...]

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IASPM-US Interview Series: Timothy Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism

April 15, 2013

In his book The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture, Timothy D. Taylor uncovers the veiled history of music used in advertising in the United States. Beginning with music’s role in early radio broadcasts, Taylor synthesizes musical characteristics of particular eras with ever-evolving approaches to making and using music for the [...]

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IASPM-US Interview Series: Murray Forman, One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount

April 8, 2013

Copious research of television station corporate documents, close readings of television programming, and nuanced theorization about the development of music performance during the era of television’s ascendance into mass popularity has resulted in Murray Forman’s One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press, 2012).  As [...]

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2012 Woody Guthrie Award Winner(s)

April 1, 2013

Nona Willis Aronowitz, ed, Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press) This curated project demonstrates Ellen Willis’ importance as a female critic writing in the male-dominated era of 1970s rock. Willis’ writing is truly interdisciplinary, breaking down boundaries between journalism and scholarship as well as between fandom [...]

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IASPM-US Website CFP: “Stop Making Sense”: The Unintelligible in Popular Song, Guest Editor Elizabeth Ann Lindau

March 29, 2013

Simon Frith has written that pop lyrics “celebrate not the articulate but the inarticulate, and the evaluation of pop singers depends not on words but on sounds—the noises around the words.” While lyrics often captivate us, great pop songs do not require eloquent poetry. Singers and lyricists can often communicate emotion and meaning more directly [...]

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