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The Time Is Now: Acceptance and Conquest in Pop Music1

2012; Wiley; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1533-1598.2012.01316.x

1533-1598

Rossen Ventzislavov,

Latin American and Latino Studies

But the merit of a work of art is not measured so much by the power with which the suggested feeling takes hold of us as by the richness of that feeling itself: in other words, besides degrees of intensity we instinctively distinguish degrees of depth or elevation. – Henri Bergson In what follows, I will try to critically discuss the underpinnings of contemporary pop culture from a very specific, and admittedly limited, angle. As a consumer of contemporary popular music, I have, on numerous occasions, encountered a curious tangle—any given work that belongs to this problematic class can invite aesthetic judgment of a seasoned, educated kind although simultaneously remaining immune to considerations of authenticity, originality, artistry, and longevity, all customary markers of aesthetics proper. This paradox teases out a new problem for aesthetics today—that of locating pop music in the listener's ear, sufficiently far from claims of understanding what we like and not too close to claims of liking what we have understood. The part of the proverbial beholder is assumed by the (willing) consumer of popular music, someone who simply likes what they hear or at least they think that they simply do. My interest here is less in the passive dynamics of such liking and consumption, and more in the active forces that create the conditions for these forms of listenership. The two dimensions in which my study will operate are thus, first, the element of conquest inherent in the proliferation of pop music and, second, the forceful illusion of authenticity that distinguishes most of the musical works in question. The corresponding questions I will try to answer will be: Can the infectious character of pop music's dissemination and acceptance be reconciled with some understanding of art writ large? And, does pop music's claim to authenticity square with authenticity as a proper aesthetic category? These matters, and especially the initial paradox I identify, would not gain any traction if it were an easy task to define pop music apart or even away from music-as-art. This, however, should be, and is, difficult when pop has voraciously adopted and intensified the relevance of the aesthetic categories that its very existence undermines. One solution to these tensions that I will suggest is to view pop music as an artistic event of a very strict temporal order—the short-term falling of tropes of various origin and aesthetic merit on uncritical ears. This vantage point may help lay the groundwork for an aesthetics of pop music that is not painfully at odds with traditional aesthetic judgment. In the few theoretical steps I will take toward this daunting goal I will refer to Dennis Dutton's comprehensive essay “Authenticity in Art,” to some of Deleuze and Guattari's work in A Thousand Plateaus, and, expectedly, to a few current examples of pop music. Before I go forward, I will try to provide operational definitions for some of my key terms. I will use the expression “pop music” to refer to any musical work, which is intentionally produced for the widest audience possible, is purposely marketed as such, and is at least remotely successful in fulfilling this intention. To this I also add musical works that are not explicitly meant to reach a considerably wide audience but which by some whim of the zeitgeist, manage to do so. What this definition presupposes is a music market that involves the commercial transfer of hard or digital copies of musical recordings, organized live performances, and the dissemination of all manner of promotional materials. By “conquest” I mostly mean the tangible demographics of popularity (charts, sales statistics, media exposure, concert attendance, etc.) but also the dimension, internal to the individual experience of music, of surrendering to the perceived aesthetic or other value of any particular work, which I also identify as “liking.” By “originality” I mean a loose, pre-aesthetic criterion of perceived difference and novelty in a work of pop music that in great part facilitates its conquest. These definitions, particularly the third one, are imperfect for two reasons—first, they reflect the general difficulty of placing pop music within a strict critical framework, and second, their limitations mirror the modest purposes of the present inquiry. If any of these difficulties are surmounted by its end, my paper will have achieved enough. As my main case study in pop music I have chosen Lady Gaga, an artist against whose hegemonic currency some of my notions are thrown into high relief. And here is the first difficulty: How do we tailor the term “artist” so as to include pop music personae such as Lady Gaga? I, as a frequent reader of various pop music reviews and articles, am well accustomed to the identification of such personae as artists, but at the same time often remain suspicious of their status as such. One reason might be the objective difficulty in locating the depth and elevation Bergson speaks about in most of their works. Another reason might be my reluctance to grant them access to what I have come to accept as the pantheon of art, a place to which Schiele, Chaucer, and Mozart, to name a few, do not require a visa. However, to draw the boundaries of this pantheon, I must be operating on assumptions of the historicity, aesthetic worth, and cultural significance that its rightful dwellers have been bestowed by many others before me. In this, I see two different kinds of acceptance emerging—acceptance-as-process and acceptance-as-transaction. When Jay-Z raps in one of his songs “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” he provides a clue as to what I mean by acceptance-as-transaction. Instances of such acceptance invariably externalize the criteria for liking or consuming music—we are shown or even more often directly told what to like (or do) through a taunt (“Who is the best rapper alive?”), a come-on (“Do I know you from somewhere?”), an order (“Free your mind and the rest will follow!”) and, consequently, are left only the choice of a predetermined response. This call-and-response approach, also amply used in most live pop music performances, externalizes the simplicity and immediacy of the listening/watching experience. It is thus not unlike the acceptance of the terms of monetary transactions or any other transfer of rights. In contrast, the granting of acceptance-as-process is, as the name suggests, a gradual coming to terms with a work of art, but also with the conditions that define it as such. The greatest difference between the two kinds of acceptance is, as far as I can see, that the traditional acceptance-as-process requires some critical framework although acceptance-as-transaction seems to be comfortably effective without it.2 But this is just the tip of a very peculiar iceberg. Other factors which contribute to the transactional nature of pop music are its temporal specificity, the transparency of its production, delivery and success, and, last but not least, the immediacy of its aesthetic tropes. As to the first factor, pop music's temporal dynamics, it is clear that pop personae and their creative output always exist in the present tense. The requirement of longevity, so central to the appreciation and the acceptance of art proper, is here replaced by the imperative of current relevance, the cutting edge, or as in the title of one Lady Gaga song, “The Edge of Glory.” The space this imperative carves out is often reducible to what economists identify as the “point-of-sale:” How else would Lady Gaga's “Edge of Glory” fare on the popular stage if it were not strategically removed in time from the chart successes (and sales receipts) of other pop acts’ edges (e.g., Aerosmith) and glories (e.g., Bon Jovi)? In the following passage, Johannes Eurich offers an important insight into the issue of music's incursion into the present moment: “Music is one of those objects of transition that create time and survive it. It is able to open up a world beyond the everyday where the need for interpreting identification of the individual is also accepted and answered as a new experience of the possibility to arrange it in a subjective way” (68). What this suggests is that music brings the temporal dimension of our existence to our attention. Eurich associates this with a special brand of empowerment whereby the listener is afforded the ability to twist the temporal order into a subjective psychological diorama. My only objection to this picture is that, in the case of pop music specifically, the exploding of the moment is largely enacted on the listener rather than by her. In other words, the subjective re-arrangement of time that Eurich writes about is built into the experience of pop music by design and owes little to the listener's will or imagination. The reason for this is that pop music explicitly refuses, in Eurich's terms, to “survive time,” to literally be remembered beyond its moment of glory, or to figuratively perpetuate itself as part of an individual's self-identification. Ultimately, if given the choice between permanence and transience, Lady Gaga may have better reasons to choose the latter.3 The transparency of the production, dissemination, and market success of pop music is another element of its transactional approach to acceptance. Since the advent of music television, all wheels and levers in the mechanism of pop music have apparently been laid bare. The audience is allowed into the recording studio, the pop persona's private life, and the record producer's mind. But even before music television, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get business model of pop music had been sufficiently externalized by the well-publicized concerns of public image, chart performance, ticket sales, etc. Examples that immediately come to mind are the established tradition of two pop entities battling it out at the charts (e.g., The Beatles/The Stones; Blur/Oasis; 50 Cent/Kanye West) and the frequent public feuds over dubious honors (e.g., Aretha Franklin's reclaiming of the title “The Queen of Soul” from Tina Turner after a recent telecast when said title was bestowed upon Turner by Beyoncé, a younger performer and obvious aspirant for the same honor). It is interesting that although openly laying a stake on art and artistry, such pop phenomena are in no way reliant on critical acclaim—quite the opposite; copyright controversy and critical failure are as likely to bring success as any substantive praise. Similarly, as the case of Lady Gaga suggests, musical mastery has no straightforward relation to a performer's standing on the market.4 All pop music requires of itself is—quite literally—to colonize the public imagination. The question of imagination is an important one for any approach to an aesthetics of pop music. Imagination is important because it seems to be integral in the manufacture of pop phenomena but almost never in our response to them. I recognize at least two ways in which the audience's imagination is colonized and rendered null—first, through pop music's use of every possible resource toward the creation and promotion of never-before-seen spectacle and, second, and more subtly, through the careful crafting of the outlandish pop personae themselves. As to the first, the example of Lady Gaga is again of great relevance—for her Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's 30th Anniversary Gala performance, different aspects of her public performance were handled by conceptual artist Francesco Vezzoli, architect Frank Gehry, artist Damien Hirst, clothing designer Miuccia Prada, and movie director Baz Luhrmann to name a few. Even the wildest and most singularly creative audience member is bound to have been left speechless by such an ostentatious and variegated display of artistry. Fittingly, the song Lady Gaga debuted at the event was titled “Speechless,” and the event itself was billed as “The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again.” All of the above are signifiers of exclusivity, but what is excluded, most significantly, is the possibility that somebody somewhere can even come up with an event more spectacular. This, of course, is not yet enough to qualify such spectacles as proper art, even though the ambition is certainly there.5 In his “Performance and the Postmodern in Pop Music,” Tony Mitchell touches on the problem of the listener's imagination. One of his case studies is the postpunk band the Jesus and Mary Chain. Mitchell is interested in the fact that the band's work exemplifies the opposite of the tendency I have identified in pop—their music, lyrically and aesthetically, insists on leaving things to the fan's imagination. In the words of the band's singer Jim Reid, this alternative ethos is expressed as follows: “It would be possible to tell you what all the songs are about but there wouldn't be any point in it because, first of all, it encourages people not to figure it out for themselves, not to use their imagination, and also it could destroy anybody else's idea” (quoted in Mitchell 278). Needless to say, such sensitivity to the end-consumer's intelligence automatically disqualifies the respective band from the race at the pop charts. Another instance of the co-optation of the public's imagination is the forging of pop personae. The latter is a complex process whereby fact and fiction concerning a star are introduced to the public at certain intervals, usually with a view to keeping interest in them alive, especially when there is a new product to promote. The age-old salesperson's formula that what we see is what we get is immediately applicable to the tactics of creating and selling a pop persona. For example, a performer like Marilyn Manson is compelled to insist that his persona fully permeates his being off-stage.6 In addition to having, like Manson, chosen a culturally bipolar alias, Lady Gaga also likes to remind us that the extravagant trappings of her public engagements are a natural continuation of an equally strange private life.7 The message in such pronouncements is that the pop persona is generously available as a reference point for the fans’ self-identification—if the performer wears her alien fashions at home, her fans should feel free to do the same, too. With Lady Gaga in particular, the identification loop closes in even tighter through the exploitation of all manners of perceived social marginality. She refers to her fans as her “little monsters” and part of what draws them to her (and “Mother Monster” to them) is ostensibly the communal refusal of mainstream norms. This type of communion in pop music, as Ken McLeod argues, can be a healthy social factor.8 But at the same time, it is always tempting to read other forms of conformity and marginalization within it. A certain ambiguity about categories like originality and authenticity seems to pose further difficulties for the smooth identification of pop music as an art form. Lady Gaga is, in name and in person, both an explosion of idiosyncrasy and a veritable Frankenstein patched up from parts of easily identifiable pop cultural parentage. Her claim to artistry runs deep enough to include proclamations of association with an artist like Andy Warhol and, yet, the pronouncements she makes about art remain transparently glib: “Music is a lie. It is a lie. Art is a lie. You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true” (quoted in Strauss 71–72). It would be glib in turn to dwell too long on the pronouncements of a pop persona. As to the lyrical content of Lady Gaga's songs, I readily defer to Nancy Bauer, whose June 20, 2010 entry, “Lady Power,” to the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone persuasively argues that popularity and empowerment in the case of Lady Gaga all but equal intellectual maturity and responsibility. Instead of asking what makes Lady Gaga original, we should pose the question: What makes people believe the lie and, as millions have done, almost make it true? A good answer is implied in cultural critic Theodor Adorno's critique of the commodity society. According to Adorno, in such a society the category of the new is “not a substantive but merely an apparent one,” and “what is new about the commodities is their packaging” (qouted in Bürger 61). And indeed, Lady Gaga's appeal is not because of the substantive newness of what she does but to the adept repackaging of pop culture tropes and references. The general public's ignorance of these references is what accounts for buying into Lady Gaga's “art” and its purported originality. Without knowledge of the multiple personae of David Bowie, Bjork, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Nina Hagen, Roisin Murphy, Peaches, Marc Bolan, Grace Jones, Alice Cooper, etc., one is much more likely to be seduced by the scandal, the androgyny, the fashions, and the crypto-intellectualism that we, in such a short time, have been conditioned to expect from Lady Gaga. The tropes of pop are in fact so firmly in place that they often take precedence over what is supposed to be the main event, i.e., the music. Reviewers of Lady Gaga's work have noted the discrepancy between the relative blandness of her dance anthems and the borrowed piquancy of the rest of her presentation (Strauss 71). The music is also generic enough that a recent Lady Gaga release has garnered criticism for the uncanny similarity it bears to a popular hit from the early 1990s.9 As a result of such observations, with which I mostly agree, Lady Gaga naturally becomes vulnerable to accusations of inauthenticity. It is a useful exercise to consider Denis Dutton's comprehensive study “Authenticity in Art” to try and establish whether or not any of the traditional applications of this aesthetic category are relevant to Lady Gaga and the larger culture within which she dwells. Dutton's essay makes the distinction between nominal and expressive authenticity. The former is a category concerning “the correct identification of the origins, authorship, or provenance of an object, ensuring, as the term implies, that an object of aesthetic experience is properly named” (Dutton Part 1). The latter category covers what Dutton calls “committed, personal expression, being true musically to one's artistic self, rather than true to an historical tradition” (Dutton Part 3). As to the first criterion, nominal authenticity, there can be no clear-cut satisfaction in the case of pop music and certainly not at all in the case of Lady Gaga's oeuvre. Some examples Dutton gives of perceived violations of nominal authenticity are such that the work of Lady Gaga hardly passes even the most liberal sieve. If “forgery is defined as a work of art whose history of production is misrepresented by someone (not necessarily the artist) to an audience (possibly to a potential buyer of the work), normally for financial gain,” then, at least by such standards, Lady Gaga's music and its presentation remain suspect (Dutton Part 2). In addition to the Frankensteinian efforts in borrowing from other performers to create the Lady Gaga persona and the direct musical derivations mentioned above,10 recently even the origin of the moniker “Lady Gaga” has been disputed in the courts of law.11 To put such violations in perspective, I would like to bring forward an example of pop appropriation that is as extreme as some Lady Gaga has been charged with, and yet retains an air of artistic ingenuity. The work in question is a song, “How Beautiful You Are,” by goth-rock band The Cure, whose lyrics repeat the (translated) text of an 1869 poem by Charles Baudelaire almost verbatim. One thing that, in my mind, makes this particular case interesting is the fact that the band never signaled any explicit desire for chart domination with this, or any other of its songs. In addition, the stylistics of this band and its larger oeuvre presents an almost seamless fit for the mischievous, exploratory tone of Baudelaire's poem. As a result of this fortunate symbiosis, it becomes much more likely that a listener will feel invited to join in the performers’ fascination with the French poet, than if the historical references were obfuscated by a screen of pretend originality done for the sake of winning the listener over at all costs. The Cure were not attempting a break-in at the pantheon, but rather humbly introducing one of its inhabitants to an unsuspecting public. This gesture might not pass Dutton's criterion of nominal authenticity, but it demonstrates that its violations can sometimes be tasteful affairs. As to expressive authenticity, the case against Lady Gaga seems even stronger. The caveat that such authenticity is measured by personal expression, insofar as it is independent from a historical tradition, is truly damaging to any illusion of authenticity on the part of most pop personae. Again, Lady Gaga is special in the liberal amount she licentiously borrows from the pop music tradition, to the point that she readily identifies with a number of her ostensible precursors. In a single interview, she can claim the inheritance of Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and, most enthusiastically and arguably misguidedly, Andy Warhol. However legitimate such appropriations may be deemed elsewhere, they remain appropriations of the damaging kind in terms of expressive authenticity as Dutton sees it. And yet, Lady Gaga remains somehow bigger and more alluring than the sum of her parts. In defense of pop, then, what could be unequivocally said is that it simply somehow works. In trying to understand the efficiency of pop music and, as a corollary, its relation to art writ large, I find a passage from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus especially helpful. Below, I will quote a lengthy portion of this passage and then will try to apply some of its insight to the issues already outlined: The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not an indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain … . The stagemaker practices art brut. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their own posters. (Deleuze and Guattari 316) It might be too generous a gesture to yet again search for signs of art in the debris of pop. From what Deleuze and Guattari give us, the proposition does not appear attractive either—although they do not specify their meaning, their use of “art” does not seem to stray from the traditionally accepted one.12 Still, the philosophers’ pluralism invites, or at least allows for, certain alternative readings. If we accept their understanding of art as an archetype of appropriation, it might become a little easier for us to accept pop music as art. The passage above attempts a reversal of the old Aristotelian dichotomy of nature versus art—if “coral fish are posters,” then nature's wonders are derivable from the details of human expression. By means of this reversal Deleuze and Guattari try to develop the logic of appropriation to its constitutive limit—the conquest of art over tangible territories (an audience, a domain) becomes a conceptual conquering of being and nature. In order for any of these contentions to become relevant to pop music we have to shake the conceptual and ontological implications and look squarely into the territorial ones. And indeed, the notion of forceful conquest befits the image of the pop persona—a force whose expressive qualities do not have to, or as we have seen are very rarely able to, constitute a proper subject or even a proper name, but which invariably make it possible to carve out a domain. The domain here is of course that of sales, charts, concert attendance, and other such statistical signifiers. But, still, thinking about pop music and its successes in these Deleuzian terms seems to open a tangent of similarity between it and what the aesthete calls art. What I would like to add to this picture is the consideration of velocity. It is a trivial observation that pop music has a short shelf life. What has been heretofore insufficiently explored, however, is the relation between this fact and the numerous problems one runs into when trying to locate pop music within a larger aesthetic framework. It is true that we simply like pop music when we like it at all. The uncritical qualifier “simply” is emphatically built into the experience of pop music and is integral to its conquering potential. As I have tried to argue, for all of this to become possible, the listener must necessarily be devoid of all outside references—she must necessarily be, as it were, caught by surprise. Lending one's ear to a tune in such circumstances is akin to having one's ear colonized. For what else could account for the customary succession of the celebratory rush, the instant identification with its purveyor, and, soon after, the cloying hangover of overexposure associated with our experience of a piece of pop music? The speed of pop contracts this succession to a point where one's attention becomes a function of a fast-moving market and not, as common sense would have it, vice versa. In fact, I would argue that one's attention is not one's own at all, but is rendered public through its conformity to a listening public and through its acceptance of publicly sanctioned tropes. And if this begins to smell a little too much like art, with all the trappings and determinations of an art world replaced by market forces, it is no coincidence that it does. Still, it is useful to remember with Arthur Danto that acceptance-as-process allows for the gradual accrual of a critical dimension into the experience and evaluation of art, while acceptance-as-transaction relies on the blitzkrieg tactics of conquest. The difference remains one of velocity—in order to make her mark, Lady Gaga has to crash and burn in the face of all traditional aesthetic considerations and she has to do it fast. If pop music is a kind of art, it is the kind that happens too fast for the art to be seen, heard, or remembered. This is, perhaps, how pop is afforded its young age and its old critics.