Sometime in Summer ’90 (In my decentered, schizophrenic state, time is meaningless.)

Postmodernism in American culture is a condition that simply cannot be denied. In the forms of recording, performance and video, music has played an increasingly essential role in American culture, and has gradually become a part of the postmodern condition since at least the late 60s. Postmodernist music, in commodified, popular forms, and in less commodified, less popular forms, can be read as a text in which trends in political ideologies, economics, and aesthetics can be found within American culture.

One of the best readings of postmodernist music is E. Ann Kaplan’s Rocking Around the Clock, in which she gives readings of music videos shown on the cable station MTV. But while Kaplan says MTV is the definitive version of postmodernist music, other scholars like Stephen Connor, Larry McCaffery and Tony Mitchell find some avant-garde rock music and performance, reggae, dub, ska, World music, rap, and other more marginalized ethnic minority music to have equally valid postmodernist characteristics, and they’re just as well versed in high-falutin’ French postmodern theorists as Kaplan is. There are, in fact, a wide variety of interpretations of postmodernism, which creates much confusion in any discourse about postmodernism. For example, there is controversy about whether aesthetic and political distinctions can be made between commodified postmodernist music examined by Kaplan in MTV, and slightly less commodified, “cool” postmodernist music. There is a strong argument that there can be such distinctions, and the distinctions show the cultural/political changes postmodernism is bringing to the music industry. They also show how people as consumers, spectators, and participants accept, oppose, or fail to notice the changes. A small number of participants include postmodernist bands and musicians like the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn and Negativland. Their songs/performances/texts are largely reactions against more undesirable qualities of consumer postmodernism, against canonized modernism and against cultural hegemony, while retaining many characteristics that qualify them as postmodernist.

Kaplan documents the bulk of undesirable qualities in her description of postmodernist videos in MTV; a postmodernist phenomenon that’s “here to stay.” If Kaplan’s prediction that it does and will continue to dominate American music culture, it could be a long, joyless stay. She describes the postmodernist properties of the music video channel within the parameters of cultural studies and screen theory, even though by definition postmodernist MTV is a constantly changing format that defies generalizations. Postmodernist MTV threatens to render any attempt to codify specific arguments obsolete.

Kaplan often ends up trying to sidestep such complications by describing it in unstable, negative terms — (not) narrative, (not) centered, offering (no) position for the spectator. The nature of the topic almost forces ambiguity. Kaplan does not offer any aesthetic critique of MTV, because of what she perceives as the “obliteration of aesthetic distinctions” in a medium, which “constructs subjects unable any more to distinguish an `inside’ from an `outside,’ `fiction’ from `reality'” (Kaplan, 153). Within the MTV universe, artistic criticism is also obsolete.

Kaplan does give some feminist perspectives. In MTV’s blurred distinctions between subject and image, women are most often the target of objectification and commodification. The channel has a white male perspective in which the phallus is the signifier and MTV addresses desire for the phallus in the psyche of both genders. Androgynous dress in videos can be read as men avoiding their fear of femininity by possessing it (Kaplan, 89). It is all consistent with a channel symptomatic of Reagan’s America in materialism, racism and sexism (Kaplan, 30).

Kaplan says it is important for feminists to confront the postmodernist challenge in MTV because the reduction of the old notion of “self” to “image” could permanently reduce the female body to merely an “image.” The new postmodern universe, “with its celebration of the look, the surfaces, the self-as-commodity, threatens to reduce everything to the image/representation/simulacrum” (Kaplan, 151).

In Kaplan’s criticism of MTV, she does not go as far as to compare the video format to other cultural forms and texts, such as avant-garde and noncommercial music. Instead, she describes in detail a postmodernism that can render a spectator into a state of mind that can range from merely annoying to downright dangerous. The most annoying factor of MTV is the way it attracts and snares its audience. It evokes what Roland Barthes calls a “split subjectivity” within the audience, which calls up a desire for plenitude which we somehow hope to achieve by continued consumption, delivering us from the condition of emptiness humankind as suffered before the development of surplus in advanced capitalism. With the coming-up-next mechanism, MTV keeps us in an excited state of expectation, promising that the next segment will fulfill our material/emotional/entertainment desires. But it never does. MTV has the most extreme aspect of what Kaplan calls the “televisual apparatus;” commercialism. MTV is one continuous advertisement, its “flow broken down into different kinds of ads.” The channel keeps the spectator in the consuming mode more intensely than other mediums because its items are all so short (Kaplan, 143).

Kaplan uses the metaphor of Foucault’s Panopticon in which the guard surveys a series of prisoners through their windows. The TV producer is the “guard” and the spectator is the prisoner who watches “in a sequestered and observed solitude.” The spectator/prisoner has a remote control to flip channels with. The prisoner has the illusion of being in control of the “windows,” whereas in fact the desire for plenitude that keeps the spectator/prisoner watching is forever deferred (Kaplan, 4). MTV is about nothing but consumption. But if the illusion of imminent satisfaction through some kind of purchase is broken, some people/spectators might see the social/psychological problems developed in the time spent being suspended in a state of unsatisfied desire.

If the theories of some scholars are coming true, at least some versions of postmodernism (depending on definitions) are changing the way people think and use language. Jameson sees the disappearance of the sense of history as the “schizophrenic state.” It is the effect of language — instead of signifiers and signified in postmodern texts being coherently organized in a comprehensive chain, or narrative, the flow of words/images in things like MTV are such that the reader/spectator cannot associate any meaning or recognize boundaries and differences, past and present. The state of being fixated on the detached signifier (like MTV), isolated in a present from which there is no escape is Jameson’s schizophrenic state. Videos on MTV create a grab-bag out of western cultural history to dip into at will, obliterating historical specificity. Kids will grow up with the “televisual apparatus” with a consciousness that no longer thinks in terms of a historical frame.

Jameson sees such a schizophrenic mode of relating to the world as a language disorder. It is a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers, having no sense of time as continuous. She/he

is condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon . . . The schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers that fail to link up into a coherent sequence.

 

(Kaplan, 146)

Jameson notes that a person in such a state cannot experience in words their larger contextual and temporal meanings, so he/she focuses in on their literality, their presentness, their sensory elements, not seeking to look beyond to broader signification.

Jacques Derrida calls this a decentering experience, which is ultimately unpleasurable because it refuses the plenitude and unity we all desire, “makes us vulnerable to dominant commercial forms that tap into this need with their complicit ideologies” (Kaplan, 148). In other words, this form of postmodernism is no fun.

From reading Kaplan’s detailed deconstruction of MTV videos, this form of postmodernism is also, in equally elegant words, stupid. It is easily predicted that simulations in video would essentially replace the “real” and distinctions between the two would become obsolete. As Baudrillard put it, the collapse between the real and its representation puts an end to the real as referential by exalting it as a model. Not that it matters, with the construction of decentered, schizophrenic spectators who can’t tell the difference and wouldn’t care if they could.

But what makes videos distinctively postmodernist is the random borrowing or simulation of motifs from other halfway decent artists, works or texts. This form of pastiche signifies a new lack of orienting boundaries, a tendency to incorporate rather than to “quote” texts. It lacks any sort of sense of humor to be parody. More often than not, it lacks any cynicism, oppositional voice, or even intelligence to have a sense of humor other than a bastardized form of traditional “frat humor.” It is a revolt against meaning for no reason other than laziness. Jameson explains further:

like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which that is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody that has lost its sense of humor.

 

(Mitchell, 278)

When MTV, in postmodernist fashion, blurs distinctions between past, present and future, along with blurring separations between popular and avant-garde art, between aesthetic genres and artistic modes, it doesn’t take any particular stroke of genius. Again, in MTV land it doesn’t matter because the pastiche is less than entertainment, it’s merely filler between the machine-gun rounds of consumer advertisements.

But to Marxist critics like Jameson and Lawrence Grossberg, it matters. It matters that postmodernist texts like MTV refuse to take up a secure (or even insecure) critical position from which to speak. They believe contemporary youth culture is in danger because it does not take an explicitly critical stance toward on-going events. Kaplan herself agrees that decentering, or “the loss of any position from which to speak — of mechanisms for critical evaluation of social structures and ideologies — that characterizes postmodernism, is something to worry about” (Kaplan, 152).

Such a threat is real because of the lack of oppositional discourses. On their It Will Take A Nation of Millions to Bring Us Down album, Public Enemy said “This time, the revolution will not be televised.   Indeed, can there be a revolution in a youth culture made up of decentered, schizophrenic, voiceless spectators? Only in a sense that any revolution that takes place will only exist on the television screen. Kaplan believes any attempts at oppositional discourses struggle against their reduction to glamorous “media events,” to the surfaces/textures/images of opposition rather than to it’s actually as something that challenges the status quo.

While in some European nations there may be a genuinely oppositional youth culture, Kaplan says this is no longer true of America. “What we have predominantly is a uni-dimensional, commercialized and massified youth culture, not really organized by youth itself but by commercial agents, that has absorbed into itself, and trivialized, all the potentially subversive positions of earlier rock movements” (Kaplan, 152). Kaplan does admit there are small sub-groups that are important but because they are marginalized and lacking access to the media, they are powerless, at least in comparison to the power of “commercial apparatuses,” in which television is able to use any kind of potentially subversive counter-culture before it has even had time to identify itself as such. As a result, oppositional discourses are never given an opportunity to structure a community that might gain sufficient power to produce real changes in dominant discourses.

So when MTV borrows from the powerless sub-cultures and divests them of their revolutionary implications for commercial reasons, it reduces them largely to the “radical chic.” In anything seeming like dissent on MTV, there turns out to be nothing behind the representations/images (Kaplan, 54).

Such representations are thrown into a stew, a decentered mass absorbing all types without noting (or knowing) their historical origins, for they have all been erased, traces remaining only in some aspects of dress (50s, mod, punk, etc.). Kaplan points out that the displacement of history and ideology with commodity — the look/style-self-as-commodity is another postmodern characteristic. The dilution of oppositional stances, and even censoring of groups like punk or ethnic minority bands that stand too far toward the edges of dominant culture might lead one to conclude that rock is dead, or that it has come to the end of its line. Kaplan says, “In fact, innovative and important music is being developed outside of this ‘mainstream,’ but is only heard or seen by those aficionados who make efforts to follow developments.” So Kaplan knows there is more than MTV, she just doesn’t know what the hell it is.

There are indeed oppositional discourses that have varying success at being oppositional, while at the same time having many of the postmodernist properties described by Kaplan, Baudrillard, Jameson and others. By success, I mean artistic expression outside the confines of advertising and MTV that avoids the reduction-to-a-spectacle-for-television-syndrome so it can express social/political criticism, and even manipulate media spectacles in often humorous ways, as demonstrated by the music group Negativland.

So why would Kaplan ignore the existence of such music? “Pop musicologists” like Andrew Goodwin and Simon Frith believe it is because of Kaplan’s scant knowledge of even the pop musicians whose videos she analyzes, let alone any other music. They also criticize “the exaggerated, hyperbolic claims some postmodernist screen theoreticians have made for rock video as an exemplary postmodern art form” (Mitchell, 274).

While Kaplan is an expert on the rock video as a postmodern phenomenon, she does not acknowledge the contrast between the commercial postmodernist rock and any other sort of “cool” postmodernist music. She examined only the “hot universe” in the mix of avant-garde with kitsch in MTV rather than the “cool universe” of avant-garde and punk music. In keeping with the pattern of Kaplan’s often undefined postmodern jargon, I’ll neglect to define “cool” in anything but uncertain negative terms.

To see how pseudo-hipsters (in a postmodern era, where the “real thing” is irrelevant, how could anything be anything but pseudo?) distinguish the “cool” from the “uncool” is difficult. (Pseudo) Marxist notions of “selling out” to the capitalist market are no longer the simple litmus tests that they used to be. Nearly everything is mixed up with corporate music industry one way or another. So “cool” postmodern music, while not totally escaping the properties of commodity, is not merely filler between commercials, or a commercial in itself. In turn it avoids the effect of turning a reader/spectator into a decentered, schizophrenic, paralyzed vegetable. “Cool” postmodernist music does not exclusively use pastiche. Parody, humor and fun are also important.

Kaplan may not call the more elitist, snooty school of music concerned with social/political criticism and parody and avant-garde techniques postmodernist. But it at least has two factors of postmodernist music — it has the capacity to articulate alternative or plural cultural identities of groups belonging to the margins of national or dominant cultures, and it celebrates the principles of parody, pastiche, stylistic multiplicity and generic mobility (Connor 186).

Through collaboration, the use of allusion, self-reference and sampling, music outside of the sphere of MTV can be fit into the postmodernist self-consciousness and intertextuality, often without the problems such as commodifying women into “images” and losing its potency as an oppositional discourse.

While some postmodern theorists will urge that there are no absolute grounds of value, Stephen Connor says questions of value and legitimacy do not disappear, but gain a new intensity; “and the struggle to generate and ground legitimacy in the contemporary academy is nowhere more intense than in debates produced by and around postmodernism” (Connor, 8).

The distinctions between types of postmodern music may seem contradictory when postmodernism is supposed to be about the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular commercial culture. It is indeed a controversial issue, one that is not easily resolved. Stephen Connor adds:

 . . . it is difficult to be sure of being able to distinguish on purely stylistic terms a ‘good’ postmodernism which, sitting on ‘the postmodern gilt market’ of the national archives, can ‘return those images to the world of social relations’, from a ‘bad’ postmodernism, which will merely ‘leave its viewers gazing at a flat screen.’

 

(Connor, 163)

It’s easy to see how there could be such a wide variety of notions about postmodernism in the “world market of ideas” which postmodernist theory institutes and participates in. In its elasticity and theoretical centerlessness, postmodernist theory “is like the Toyota of thought: produced and assembled in several different places and then sold everywhere” (Connor, 19).

It is easier to identify the differences between the commodity and the “cool” from a pseudo-Marxist, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-oppositional perspective. While the value can be seen in the free, intertextual play of signification of postmodern video/performance, which the spectator/listener/dancer is free to interpret or discard in a hedonistic process of consumption, one can’t merely exalt in a perpetual joy of meaninglessness forever. Other aspects of fun, humor, emotional expression and protest are also desirable among less commercial, less commodified subcultures.

Another facet of “cool” postmodernism is an agenda of counter-hegemony. Such an agenda goes against leading hegemonic features of postmodern society including the increased power of advertising and the electronic media, the advent of universal standardization, neocolonialism, institutional xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, the schizoid pastiche of the fading sense of a history, and the “consciousness industry.” Baudrillard’s “consciousness industry” is the new predominance of technologies and practice concerned with the exchange, promotion, distribution and manipulation of signs, from raw information, to cars, to fashion, to the ‘images’ of pop stars, actors and governments, as well as the fabrication of public opinion. Counter-hegemonic postmodernist culture “might offer ways of resisting or surviving its most baleful tendencies” (Connor, 45).

But one cannot expect too much from “cool” postmodernism, as it will always be a part of the subcultures, maggots trying to scale the garbage heap of mainstream commercial culture. For instance, it cannot be expected to wrestle control of the mass media from narrow or oppressive commercial interests. Jean Baudrillard argues that it is not possible simply to take over the form of the mass media and change their content to any good purpose, “since what is oppressive about the media is precisely the ‘code’ that in their very form they embody.” This code functions by the denial of response or exchange in mass communication. “A mass medium talks to its audience,” says Baudrillard, “while never allowing that audience to respond to it and, indeed, confirms its audience’s muteness by simulating audience response, via phone-ins, studio audiences, viewers’ polls and other forms of bogus `interaction'” (Connor, 53). The mass media fabricates non-communication, making it impossible for any significant populist takeover.

The idea of counter-hegemony in postmodernism is catching on, such as Hal Foster’s idea of a postmodern `culture of resistance’ — a counter-hegemony consisting of resistance and interference, which requires us “to see in the social formation not a `total system’ but a conjuncture of practices, many adversarial, where the cultural is an arena in which active contestation is possible” (Connor, 241). This opens possibilities such as a group faxing bogus news to Timemagazine, or Negativland creating a fictional link to a murder case and watching the unsuspecting mass media turn it into a “real” event.

While counter-hegemony is a reaction to some of the more undesirable aspects of postmodern society, it is also a reaction against the products of modernism. Cultural hegemony is itself a product of modernism. It is the second revolution in culture in the 20th Century according to Charles Newman. The first was one in which innovation and experimentation swept across art and cultural activity throughout the West, destroying old certainties and urgently politicizing artistic activity. The second revolution, less dramatic but more important, was when “universities and other cultural institutions took over the various forms of modernism, canonized its works and artists, draining away its political charge and set about the immense work of managing and administering it” (Connor, 12). So the point of resistance for some forms of postmodernist culture is not modernism per se, but the second revolution which has assimilated and institutionalized modernism, resulting in a progressive withdrawal from general questions and responsibility and increasing collusion with a system that divides knowledge into specialisms to disallow in advance any radical or effective engagement with general issue, according to Edward Said (Connor, 13).

In terms of music, Jameson gives the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones as examples of the high modernist moments in rock. In similar fashion to the “second revolution,” 60s music was then canonized and incorporated by 1970s culture industry. It’s an accelerated history that does not produce as linear break of postmodernism. In reaction to modernism, the pose of aristocratic aloofness from mass culture that had always functioned as avant-garde’s despised opposite was put aside. This meant the embrace of Kitsch and popular culture like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Kurt Vonnegut. Another reaction, according to Connor, is to recapture and purify avant-garde strategies and ideals; to praise the “situational” and participatory art of Laurie Anderson and John Cage, all whom require an active reflection up on its nature as a work of art from the audience (Connor, 238).

Not everyone views the reaction to modernism as a bunch of lofty avant-garde artists. Charles Newman called them “a band of vainglorious contemporary artists following the circus elephants of Modernism with snow shovels” (Connor, 65). Arthur Kroker and David Cook similarly described the audience as “an electronically composed public of serial beings which, smelling the funeral pyre of excremental culture all around it, decides of its own unfettered volition to celebrate its own exterminism by throwing its energies, where attention is the oxygen of TV life, to the black hole of television” (Connor, 172). Postmodernism, whether it is “cool” or not, is indeed a messy phenomenon. It is difficult to argue any specific place and time that a decisive postmodernist mutation has taken place in rock music. During and after punk, new forms were incorporated, tamed and recycled as commodities (such as new wave) — to the point where it became more difficult to distinguish authentic “originality” and commercial “exploitation.”

One of the better early examples of postmodernist avant-garde is the Velvet Underground, one of the first bands to begin to fundamentally alter the essential nature of their medium. While Dylan’s and the Beatles’ mid-sixties experimental albums used technical advances (overdubbing and multi-tracking effects) to achieve “modernist aims,” the Velvet Underground, along with some of the more radical work of Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart, contain the true origins of postmodern work.

Like fictional innovators from the same period in the mid-60s (Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenik, Thomas Pynchon, for example), the Velvet Underground systematically and self-consciously began to reexamine and then openly disrupt their genre’s conventional assumptions about formal unity and beauty, about the ‘proper’ ways to manipulate their medium’s elements. With help from Andy Warhol, they presented multimedia performances that “mixed musical styles and messages in a way ideally suited for expressing the multiple, contradictory textures of postindustrial urban life” in the form of the “Plastic Exploding Inevitable.” The Velvets presented their dissonant, minimalist three-chord progressions within a dissolving, non-hierarchical pastiche of Warhol movies, dance, light shows, improvisational poetry — “a cacophony of avant-garde noise, light, and humans interacting with images and sounds” (McCaffery, 4).

Influenced by Jazz innovator Ornette Coleman’s unconventional notions of dissonance and harmony, they experimented with the effects of repetition, of the accumulated and chance effects of feedback, and even the concepts of boredom and willful crudity so that a tension develops between the tight, monotonous formal structure and bursts of piercing sounds and pure noise in songs like “European Son” and “Sister Ray.”  Up until then, says Jacques Attali,

noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague . . . But just as death is nothing more than an excess of life, noise has also been perceived as a source of exaltation, a kind of therapeutic drug . . .

 

(Mitchell, 279)

Along with setting the pattern for industrial noise and postpunk bands like SPK, Einsturzende Neubauten and Sonic Youth, the Velvets also foregrounded the concepts of rock musicians as image or mechanical simulacrum (an extension of Warhol’s fascination with the mechanical and reproducible qualities of life and art, the artist-as-machine) in ways that anticipated David Bowie, punk, and more recently, Madonna. McCaffery comes the closest to believing there was some sort of break between modernism and postmodernism in music — “in short, the Velvet Underground ushered in the postmodern era of self-conscious, self-referential rock” (McCaffery, 4).

But artists in the 70s had a slightly different environment to deal with than the Velvets. Musicians and their counterparts in fiction and painting found themselves simultaneously immersed in and critical of a culture “industry” of ever-expanding proportions that seemed increasingly impossible to ignore. McCaffery found that there emerged as a result a parallel attitude towards the (manipulation of) images, sounds, and language that we consume as they consume us — “the elements of consumption that, for probably worse, now define Western culture” (McCaffery, 27). Some of the “cool” postmodernist artists that emerged decided to plunge into, digest, and then subvert the profusion of visual, sonic and information sources that run our lives.

Patti Smith emerged as a central figure of the early seventies New York pre-punk scene. A published poet, actress, and rock critic, Smith’s musical performances blended punk’s abrasive sounds with a lyrical content and style heavily influenced by Rimbaud, Genet, Sam Shepard, and William S. Burroughs. In particular she was fond of applying Burroughs’s cut-up methods to her songs. Cut-ups in literature is a notion in which the work of randomly selected writers can be cut up, juxtaposed, and “sampled” in a form of collage writing, which had already exerted some influence on some of David Bowie’s songs (Mitchell, 287). Smith’s songs ranged across the history of rock music and lyrics for snippets of words and musical phrases that interacted with her own language and dense, mysterious thickets of sound patterns, tempos and rhythms.

Laurie Anderson shared many of Patti Smith’s roots in the New York art scene, including dada, androgynous stage personas that confounded sexist stereotypes; both relied upon lyrical styles that emphasized collage and reflexiveness as a means of exploring their mutual, obsessive fascination with language and its failure to communicate our most basic fears, longings, and sensory impressions. Anderson also was influenced by Burroughs, consummated in collaboration when Burroughs provided the lyric for her song “Language is a Virus.”

Anderson’s music, however, needed to be seen in an even wider context of performance art than Smith’s and the Velvets’. Her shows were a synthesis of literature, theater, music, photography, stand-up comedy, film, architecture, poetry, fantasy and dance, which were eventually collected into her “magnum opus” — the two-evening, eight-hour-long United States, Parts I-IV tour in 1984-5. We can see her use of projected words on both stage and screen, where her body often becomes a screen it its own right, such as placing a light in her mouth to silhouette her face in her video, “O Superman,” a reflection on communications technology and consumer capitalism. She becomes Warhol’s [wo]man-as-machine when she wires herself up for sound and plays her body as an amplified percussion instrument. She even transforms her body electronically in the “O Superman” video into a Buddha and then an abstract shape, literally embodying the electronic technology she is critiquing. Anderson’s waving hand refers to the image of a hand raised in greeting on the Pioneer spacecraft. Anderson uses this image to signify ambiguity of communication — “In our country, good-bye looks just like hello” (Mitchell, 285).

The multimedia arrangements of text, image, movement, and musical sounds employ technologies to present a bemused, often bitterly funny view of technology. The same technology is sometimes used in non-narrative and often nonrepresentational ways, bypassing direct address. Anderson also exerts full creative control over her videos and films, giving her an artistic authority that is rare in the world of rock. The characters presented in pieces like “Stephen Weed,” “Hey Ah,” and “Talk Normal” are presented to the spectator in a fragmented, alienated process of “showing,” which enables the performers to mediate between characterization and narration. The “cool,” decentered, postmodern form of presentation bridges performance art to rock music.

There have been at least four scholarly essays published to date on Anderson’s work. Anderson has herself legitimized these judgments by acknowledging the postmodern condition as one of the motivations behind her film Home of the Brave:

it’s not a mistake to call something postmodern now, because there actually is no present . . . It becomes very difficult to produce something which doesn’t immediately become grist to the media mill . . . That’s one of the reasons I did the movie, because I work in such a transitory medium, the minute I do something it all disappears.

 

(Mitchell, 284)

But unlike the humorless, positionless pastiche of most postmodernist video, Anderson does relentless political critiques of the American democratic circus (“The Big Top”), suburban alienation (“Talk Normal”), and examines issues central to postmodernism; “the slipperiness of language, the way that our alienation and confusion are produced by Big Science and the media, how words and images are created in today’s world — and how we are inundated and affected by them” (McCaffery, 27). She also illustrates a postmodern concern with undoing the problematics of surfaces, of flatness, and of appearance. Her performances, as Hebdidge has said of pop art, “remind us that which is obvious matters, that surfaces matter, that the surface is matter” (Mitchell, 286).

Like Anderson, John Zorn takes for granted a certain sophistication in his audience that didn’t exist thirty years ago. Those who aren’t so disorientated in a schizophrenic decentered postmodern hell that they can’t think are familiar with what Robert Coover has called the “mythic residues” of society — “those shards of cultural memory and artifice that simultaneously help organize our responses to the world and tyrannically limit the options of those responses (McCaffery, 27). Like Donald Barthelme and Coover, Warhol and Jasper Johns, Zorn asks his audience not to attempt to deny or ignore these elements but to play with them and recognize our perceptual relationship to them. Zorn also recognizes that traditional sources of these mythic residues — the Bible, myth, the revered classics of art, painting, music, and literature — have become gradually superseded by the materials and structures of mass and popular culture.

But rather than whine about this “fall” as Lynne Cheney, Allan Bloom and their reactionary foundations did, he created a fresh hybrid of materials, including Charles Ives, Harry Partch, surf music, bebop, jazz fusion, funk, grind/speedcore thrash/metal, Japanese music, film noir and Carl Stalling, the composer of the Loony Tunes cartoon soundtracks. The synthesis of these frees them of their fixed meanings, unleashes a flood of hidden resonances.

His albums The Big Gundown, Spillaine and Naked City arose from his work with Hal Wilner’s tribute album projects for Thelonious Monk and Kurt Weill. While seen by many as blasphemous or merely parodies, the “slippage” and endless play of signifiers, and the denial of textual closure all help account for their intuition that no text has a final meaning or interpretation. Not even the author’s or composer’s can be privileged over any other.

Spillane is a montage of found sounds that Zorn associates with Mickey Spillaine, his work, and detective films (windshield wipers, rain falling, screams, gunshots, phone rings, bar crowds) and musical signatures (cocktail lounge tunes, jazz, blues, film scores) organized with a snub of technology — recorded live with no overdubs.

Even more frantic in its rapid pacings and heterogeneous nature of its materials,Naked City is the perfect follow-up to the Velvet Underground’s vision of the simultaneously exuberant and decaying noise of postindustrial, postmodern society. It is the Carl Stalling soundtrack to a demented cartoon yet to be made.

Many of the oddly “natural” or “real” sounds Laurie Anderson and John Zorn use in performance are simulacra produced by a computerized synthesizer, the first of which used by Laurie Anderson was the Fairlight CMI sampler, invented by two Australians in 1979. The sophistication of the technology has increased exponentially in the following decade, dragging with it a fundamental shift of focus, address, and emphasis in music performance; the art of sampling. Samplers are able to process and recycle any type of sound, including sections of other pop songs, and reproduce them as musical motifs. Frank Owens commented on this art of sampling:

there’s something strangely indecent about this music in the way it denies the deferred gratification traditional pop is based on — the pop song as a narrative structure that one follows to reach the joy at its center, the pop song as extended foreplay leading to climax. Instead you get music that is a string of climaxes, like a movie made up entirely of car chases or exploding buildings.

 

(Mitchell, 286)

Sampling is an art of mechanical reproduction in which new digital technologies are being used to deconstruct old texts, and has become a focal point of postmodernist performance in a decentered process of instant pastiche and recycling, and a willingness to live off its own history and forms. It is a process that uses William Burroughs’s notion of cut-ups much more successfully than Patti Smith.

One group of “cool” postmodernists who have been especially successful in going beyond even parody to play with and manipulate the texts around them, even creating “real” news fiascos to supply new ammunition for their work, is Negativland. The members are an anti-group — a middle-aged polar antithesis of the Village People. They are computer programmers, graphics designers, nursery school teachers, telephone salesmen and cable TV installers. The band formed in 1979 as a result of local avant-comic love shows and Don Joyce’s radio show, “Over the Edge” on KPFA-FM, Berkeley. Three albums on their own Seeland record label resulted from their collaboration. On the shows they organized samples under themes, such as anything to do with “w/holes.” “Well, that’s h-o-l-e-s, and it could also be w-h-o-l-e-s, right? So, that’s enough. That’s enough to do a show on . . . We call it ‘Receptacle Programming’ from the [free form call-in] phone aspect of it,” said Joyce (Shurtluff, 37). Negativland also played with the ambiguous, blurred distinctions between “reality” and “fiction.”

DON:        We have a definite appreciation for found stuff, even if it’s our own stuff.

MARK:     When you talk about something on the radio show that’s really going on with enough bizarre details that people believe that it’s real, then you throw in enough things that you just made up or that fit in with what the rest of that particular show’s about, then you create that weird middle zone where people don’t know what they’re hearing, psychodrama, or

DON:        Docu-fiction.

MARK:     Like that time I accidentally bit off a piece of my tongue on the air.

CHRIS:     But that was real.

 

(Glass, 49)

 

FCC and copyright laws have yet to figure out what to do with the increased use of sampling in postmodernist music. Despite Negativland’s brutal criticism of American commercial culture and power elite, they have had few problems with the law.

Almost everything we do is illegal. Usually I do it first and find out later . . . of course I steal a lot of stuff. I just play all kinds of things like on TV and radio and records . . . People just, you know, basically want to be entertained. They don’t care whether what you’re doing is actually legal or not.

 

(Shurtluff, 37)

Negativland’s first truly ambitious work was cut from literally a million tape edits to reinflate the classic story of going home to suburbia on A Big 10-8 Place. Threaded throughout the aural collage are directions to 180-G, leading to a house in a nearby California suburb.

DAVID:    Somebody followed the directions and went there and disturbed the people who live there.

CHRIS:     Do they have a copy of the record?

MARK:     Imagine if you were this normal family in the suburbs, would you like it if you got a record album in the mail that described to the whole planet how to get to your house? It would terrify you!

CHRIS:     Talking about your dogjuice and your orange carpet and the ants in the mailbox.

DAVID:    Whipped cream on the Corvair. That was one thing left out.[long silence]

 

(Glass, 49)

 

However elaborate Negativland’s albums are, they cannot satisfactorily present their montage of postmodernist text/es on the record album medium. Like Laurie Anderson, they are more successful with the live multimedia performance with videos, film, ad-lib sampling, etc. Instead of using album material at their shows, Negativland produced completely new, conceptual spectacles, such as the “Mercury Monarch” show in which they gave away a group member’s car in a game show format, and “The Last Supper” based around food and religion, complete with kids dressed as singing/dancing toast. “A live show has to be more than listening to a record. It has to be very tactile and visual. We try to think about that — all of the different aspects of what ‘being present’ means, which is sound, sight, smell and everything” (Shurtluff, 37). When asked to do a video of “Theme from A Big 10-8 Place,” Negativland declined. Mark:

If we were going to make videos, we weren’t going to turn around and make videos to our music. We’d start from scratch and make something totally new. The radio show doesn’t try to be the records and the live shows don’t try to be the radio shows. They’re all different and they all try to utilize the medium to its best advantage.

 

(Glass, 48)

Negativland decided to use the mass media itself to its best advantage after theirEscape From Noise album, featuring the tracks “Christianity Is Stupid” and “Time Zones,” featuring a well-known personality at ABC who has his own talk show. The found speech on the album is examined and repeated, revealing many rhythms and melodies not apparent after one listening. A reviewer in Greedmagazine said,

That’s the point of the album – you don’t need bands to make up songs for you. They’re out there happening all around, on radio talk shows & television soap operas, on playgrounds, in McDonald’s, at riots, on subways . . . If you can’t listen to this album, how can you even go outdoors? It’s a sonic life. Live it.

 

“Christianity Is Stupid” features a found sample vocal of Reverend Estus Pirkle from a sermon recorded in 1968. It consists of a loop repeating, “Christianity is stupid. Communism is good. Give up,” and ends with “Shop as usual . . . and avoid panic buying.” It was soon going to be used for an even grander effect. Shortly after the story appeared about David Brom ax-murdering his father, mother, sister and brother in Rochester, Minnesota, an article mentioned that it may have resulted from an argument over a music tape that David listened to. The Broms were described as a devout Roman Catholic family.

After canceling their 1988 concert tour when it appeared they would lose money, the group decided to send a phony press release to their label SST Records which attributes the cancellation of the tour to pressure from “Federal Official Dick Jordan” who has advised the band not to leave town pending an investigation in to the Brom murders. The release implied the tape in question in the Brom case was their song “Christianity Is Stupid.” The NY Times article was distributed with the press release.

Many stories soon appeared, restating the “facts” from the Negativland press release with no trace of skepticism, even though no one verified the story with the source, Negativland. When Hal Eisner from KPIX Channel 5 interviewed the band, they did not comment on their link to the Brom case, but discussed the American news media, their appetite for the sensational and their tendency to create their own “news.” This discussion was cut from the air, and the lead story took the purported connection for granted, and included footage of the Brom family being carried from their home in body bags. Many following stories got the “facts” wrong as a result of their dependence on other media stories as their only source material. “It is now abundantly clear that the major source for news is other news,” wrote Negativland in their liner notes for the Helter Stupid album, the result of this hoax.

We all swim in an ocean of mass media that fills our minds with people and events with which we have no actual contact at all. We commonly absorb these media presences as part of our own “reality,” even though any media experience consists only of one-way, edited representations of reality. Negativland uses this electronic environment of factual fictions as both source and subject for much of our work, keeping in mind that to experience a picture of a thing is not to experience the thing.

 

(Negativland, Helter Stupid)

In a postmodernist fashion, Negativland tossed a pebble in the mass media ocean, watched the ripples turn into tidalwaves, sampled them and played them back in a sharp-witted aural collage including the Channel 5 tapes and a call fromRolling Stone that would make any newsperson red in the face. In their version of counter-hegemony, Negativland condemns the media witch hunt that sells papers at the expense of all involved and sensationalizes the story for all it was worth without checking the facts. In turn, they condemn the “uncool” properties of postmodernist society  — information for commodity, not knowledge, lack of interaction and accountability in media, and the creation of an uncritical audience of decentered, schizophrenic spectators who will consume any bogus “facts” from the “media meat grinder.”

But no matter how clever Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Negativland and other avant-garde musicians are, it is difficult to find a truly counter-hegemonic ideology within “cool” postmodernism without the inclusion of the groups that have consistently had their voices stripped away by cultural hegemony — ethnic and minority groups. Perhaps more important than the postmodernist white avant-garde, rap, or Hip hop is the most accessible form of music with postmodernist characteristics right now. Black kids in the inner cities who have forever been voiceless in American music, and in turn positionless (why bother having political ideologies if nobody can hear them?) are now becoming more visible.

Like the intertextuality of sampling and versioning in Dub/Reggae borrowing, scratching had a liberating effect on the possibilities of rapping. Musicians and non-musicians could manipulate and cut up texts with simple, inexpensive equipment. Poor kids who wouldn’t have access to fancy synthesizers could become scratch-and-sample disc jockeys overnight with a couple “wheels of steel” (turntables) and amplifiers. Scratching with white rock records, 70s funk and a variety of other musical texts would produce a uniform flatness of surface sound to go along with a dance beat. D.J.s could selectively take any sound and leave behind the posing rock star hero attitudes provided by corporate rock, toss aside the leads, re-edit other peoples’ texts and call them their own. Mark Sinkler describes it as aggressive re-edits dropping unrelated phrases and song-shards in over the original.

Hip hop is the celebration of a lack of a center, and any broadcast message from any network anywhere can burst in over the scratch-static. We don’t have to believe it. Probably we shouldn’t. All we have to do is listen.

 

(Mitchell, 288)

By 1985, millions began to listen. The intercultural audio collages of Run-DMC, Public Enemy and Ice T reached so many people that more whites have recently started buying rap than blacks. At such a level of popularity, the very qualities of the music that make it postmodernist also put it in danger of becoming a more commodified, “uncool” form of postmodernist music. In the process of consumption, rap can be decontextualized. Many rap songs become dance club hits because of the special effects rather than sociological realities. White culture may not hear the sound of a black subculture as much as they dig the entrancing grooves. They hear the “Collapsing Effect” — that sense of sonic rupture and seizure that rap embodies, the uneven surfaces and jagged textures (Mitchell, 289). Any sample of white culture becomes to white consumers a postmodern cultural frame of reference perhaps more important than the political content of its lyrics.

The increase in popularity of “World music,” largely African, has also standardized the music, its appeal relating largely to its surface sound, particularly since few of the lyrics of the songs are in English. For that reason it has proven less durable than rap.

Despite the inevitable commodification of rap, its consistently bold social and political voice provides a much needed contrast to the apolitical commercials/videos on MTV. What matters is that more people are exposed to the messages of black subcultures now than before rap, and more people have a chance to express themselves. Dick Hebdige’s study of Caribbean music reveals truths about oppositional culture that can also be applied to the increasing multiplicity of American cultures, that “the important thing about styles like ska, dub, rap and hip hop are the opportunities they give for affirmation of the cultural identity of subordinated social groups in the West Indies and in Britain” (Connor, 186).

Such spontaneously eruptive music that has often been kept invisible by official white rock celebrates the power of subcultural forms simultaneously to bind together social groups — counter to the effect of much postmodernist culture, and to express the plurality of cultural and ethnic experience. Unless markets for other forms of music on television open up, such music is restricted to the home, clubs, bars, and radio. With the increasing numbers of alternative radio stations, this isn’t so bad, according to Hebdige. Radio can be used to “decentre” and “redistribute cultural power.” In somewhat romantic terms, he says radio is the embodiment of postmodernist cultural mobility —

There are no age or dress restrictions with a radio. You don’t have to get past burly bouncers to get to the music. All you have to do is switch the radio on and turn the dial. And you don’t have to stay in one place all the time. You can travel up and down the wavelengths from Cape Town to the Caribbean via Brooklyn and Clapham Junction.

 

(Connor, 187)

George Lipsitz says obscurity can be the best thing to happen to some music, allowing them to develop the “cool” characteristics of postmodernist music. In his study of Mexican rock culture in Los Angeles, he said ethnic minority cultures are key performers in the postmodern world, because their exclusion from official culture allows them to cultivate a sophisticated capacity for ambiguity, juxtaposition and irony. In fact, their marginality gives them more authority as a cultural voice than official culture —

Because their experience demands bifocality, minority group culture reflects the decentered and fragmented nature of contemporary human experience. Because their history identifies the sources of their marginality, minority group cultures have a legitimacy and connection to the past that distinguishes them from more assimilated groups. Masters of irony in an ironic world, they often understand that their marginality makes them more appropriate spokespersons for society than mainstream groups unable to fathom or address the causes of their alienation.

 

(Connor, 189)

But despite any inherent superiority or “coolness” marginalized subcultures may have, their potential to change the mainstream and commodified forms of postmodernist music is severely limited by a postmodern world. Any sort of decentering and undermining of the structures of the rock industry, each eruption of cultural difference, only serves to stabilize the mainstream, by spreading and diversifying its boundaries. “This form of cultural commentary can easily itself become a quasi-commodity, forming part of a ritualized exchange in an institutional and commercial economy of ideas and intellectual styles” (Connor, 189). The mainstream now steals from counter-culture and turns it into a successful commercial commodity, but with no sense of history or critical position. It takes the metanarrative of music and fragments it into decentered musical forms that can sometimes be identified with particular youth and ethnic subcultures, but often with no one. Fred Frith has described this phenomenon as “a culture of margins around a collapsed centre” (Mitchell, 275). Yet the margins themselves are threatened — their ethical awareness in the recognition of important diversity of voices and interests is in danger of being smashed into a flat, commodified pancake.

If the “cool” subcultures can’t save the mainstream from the more dehumanizing effects of postmodernism, they can probably survive on their own as consistently small, marginalized, self-contained communities. But what is everyone else to do? What, as Hard Harry so eloquently asked, even screamed in the movie Pump Up the Volume, can kids do when everything has been done? How can they express themselves when they have no voice, when there is no subculture to take refuge in, when fascist government agencies like the FCC prevent the possibilities for underground communication like Hard Harry’s pirate radio station? The leading postmodern theoreticians haven’t got a clue.

People like Grossberg think they will be able to adapt to a schizophrenic state – “Survival for this new youth seems to demand adaptation to and escape from, the hegemony rather than a response to the historical context in which they can find themselves” (Kaplan, 147). Connor believes the task for a theoretical postmodernity of the future “must be (without dissipating its energies in fantasies of potently defeated marginality, or narrowing into self-promoting professionalism, or acting as the cultural legitimation of the alienating effects of the ‘information society’ of late capitalism) to forge new and more inclusive forms of ethical collectivity.” He calls for a common frame of assent “which alone can guarantee the continuation of a global diversity of voices” (Connor, 244). Kaplan is almost as ambiguous when she addresses the scholars, the educated elite rather than a younger generation —

As culture workers, we do not want to return to the error of insisting upon fixed points of enunciation labeled “truth” . . . but we must continue to articulate oppositional discourses — recognizing them as discourses rather than an ontological truth — if we are to construct `new’ subjects not totally defined by the reading formations of the postmodernist “cold” universe. Important in this effort is more analysis of the televisual apparatus as it works to construct subjects unable any more to distinguish an “inside” from an “outside,” “fiction” from “reality.”

 

(Kaplan, 153)

It is a somewhat elitist notion that the scholars can instill bullshit detectors (if they could actually trim down the jargon enough to make sense to everyone) within young people being raised in a postmodern world; to make sure they can still think critically before they are totally lost in a decentered, schizophrenic, nearly thoughtless existence. While it is a noble cause that can actually be pursued, the answer to the question of what exactly will happen to oppositional discourses, subcultures, and even “cool” forms of postmodernist music and culture in a stage of capitalism that is advancing to the point where nearly all communication will be allowed to happen only to benefit corporate and institutional profit and nothing else, is anyone’s guess.

SOURCES

 

Connor, Stephen. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989.

Glass, Seymour. “Negativland Interview.” Greed. Summer, 1989. 45.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, & Consumer Culture. Methuen, New York, 1987.

McCaffery, Larry. “White Noise, White Heat: The Postmodern Turn in Punk Rock.”American Book Review. March/April, 1990. 4.

Mitchell, Tony. “Performance and the Postmodern in Pop Music.” Theatre Journal. Winter, 1989. 273.

Shurtluff, Kevin Fernandez. “Negativland: don’t step on the grass unless you do.”Alternative Press. July, 1990. 36.

 

ALBUMS

Various albums by Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Velvet Underground, John Zorn and Negativland.

Especially:

Negativland. Escape From Noise. SST, 1989.

Negativland. Helter Stupid. SST, 1990.