nah pop, no style

Perhaps surprisingly, two parts of my weekend (cultural consumptionwise) that resonated a great deal with one another were the Negativland documentary Sonic Outlaws and the John Fahey album “The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites.” What, you may ask, ties together a mid-’90s film about the state of intellectual property and culture jamming and a record recorded in 1964 by an educated young white man imitating the style of older black musicians? Allow me to postulate.

A theme that the Negativland movie kept returning to was this: in a media-based culture in which cultural texts — songs, stories, etc. — are passed along via record, and in which those records (regardless of medium) are considered to be the strict property of the producer, the continuity and subtle mutationism of “folk culture” are all but disallowed. Mark Hosler and Don Joyce keep returning in the film to the idea that what they attempt to engender through their band is, strangely enough, a return to folk culture: while it may seem what they’re doing in terms of appropriating modern media texts in as postmodern a manner as possible, structurally they’re effecting a return to the same sort of cut-and-paste, retell-and-improve methodology that was until very recently in history the most prominent way to transmit culture.

Now, I’m not about to tell you that John Fahey was a product of folk culture — while I’m no Fahey expert, as best I can read it, Fahey’s playing emerged from a canon of recorded music, both that of European composers and, clearly, that of Southern “blues men.” Here comes my point: what Fahey played represented a fusion of his main influences that managed not to stray incredibly far from either (when he passed off some of his early work as being that of a “Blind Joe Death,” he fooled even some folk music experts), but at the same time combined the two to create pieces that transcended either and made something brand new and perhaps “experimental.”

John Fahey copped entire melodies but at the same time created something totally new with them — fused styles and entire musical vocabularies in the same way that the earliest jazz musicians did with European and African music. Fahey was fully aware of what he was doing, but let’s not fool ourselves: so did the jazz giants. (I remember reading, I believe in the Cage chapter of The Bride and the Bachelors, the assertion that in fact, Coltrane and Davis et al. were reading the existentialists just like the white intellectuals of their time; perhaps much of what we hear and repeat about the “natural inborn genius” of the jazz virtuoso is simply mythologizing and slightly racialist/culturalist assumption?)

Just as Fahey’s early work sought ambitiously to fuse American roots music with more “high culture”-oriented European composition, Negativland in the ’80s and ’90s concerned themselves with combining the composition of music with the overwhelmingly hypersaturated media landscape of the time. They, too, appropriated entire lines and verses and semiotic vocabularies in order to create art that both reflected their environment and made statements about the nature of making cultural texts.

An amusing point in the Negativland film comes when it’s pointed out that U2, on the Zoo TV tour, used spliced video from live satellite feeds — clearly copyrighted material — on their bajillion TV screens. This, only a few years after Island sued Negativland for copyright infringement. Similarly, while Fahey was copping lines and techniques overtly in the interest of his art, scores of British bands were becoming massively popular doing much of the same: copying the styles of American blues artists (and eventually simply copying one another copying American blues artists).

The fluidity of the mutationism is what’s key here: someone like Fahey or Negativland, working consciously within the context of “folk culture,” is open to reappropriation of their work. Someone like, say, The Rolling Stones, working as a mainstream rock band within the business culture of the music industry, will appropriate blues techniques but won’t allow for their own material to be appropriated by the next generation (see The Rolling Stones v. The Verve).

I’m not feeling well lately and I’m not sure why, but hopefully it involves something that will go away soon. Understand? Regardless, not feeling well allows me to indulge in some things I would otherwise feel I didn’t have time for. I’ll write for you some reviews of some of these things soon. These things include:

• Hot baths.
• Animaniacs episodes.
• Sonic Outlaws, the documentary about Negativland and related things.
• New (to me) music: John Fahey’s “The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites,” Daniel Higgs’s solo Jew’s harp album (”Magic Alphabet”), and Frida Hyvönen’s “Until Death Comes.”

I may or may not rent “Annie Hall” tonight. I like that movie.

Last night — went to that “Te Cafe” place on Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill. The folks there were friendly, the tea selection quite satisfying. When pressed on the subject of their “Cherry Almond Cheesecake” flavor, they conceded that really, it’s just cherry almond, and they’re not even sure who put the “cheesecake” part on the tea list, and it doesn’t really taste like cheesecake at all.

It was a pretty quiet joint, and now and then I felt slightly conspicuous, as Friend of Andy and I were carrying on a somewhat (good-naturedly) (absurdly) argumentative conversation, and I felt like perhaps everyone around us was probably listening instead of doing their homework, and thinking that we really must hate each other. At least that’s what I would have been doing.

Anyway, sure, thumbs up. Kind of lame name, and WYEP on the radio, but that’s sort of to be expected. Why does Squirrel Hill get the neat chill places like this, and I’m stuck with Crazysexycool Mocha, home to lots of insane people and really loud music, in my neighborhood? I guess that could easily be explained, but I won’t bother.

Also, this gem from the “Everyone’s a Critic” feature in this week’s City Paper, reviewing the circus, needs to be remembered:

“I love elephants — they’re big, they’re huge, they’re larger than life.”

I’m nearly certain those were the exact words of Christopher Columbus when he got back after first discovering elephants. Perhaps she could have worked in something like, “they’re gray,” or “they have wrinkly skin,” but I guess that really essentially summed up the elephant in a good concise sentence.

Howdy!

Last night’s show went off utterly hitchless and was a good time — Cinemechanica and Slingshot Dakota both were great, and the locals were super and endearing as always, and while we were all having that good time, a lot of rotten politicians were unelected.

On the newspaper comics tip: “Sally Forth” is kind of funny this week: yesterday, Sally’s mom remarked that Hillary is in fifth grade every time she visits, evidence that “Simpsons”-style hyperironic humor trickle-down effect is gaining speed; today, Sally told her mother that all the money the Forths bring in goes to “extravagant balls” they hold every two weeks called “Forthnights.” That’s two days in a row of actually chuckling at “Sally Forth.” I hope it’s that the jokes are getting better and not that I’m becoming desensitized to unfunniness. Also, Mary is getting way pissed that the new tenant at Charterstone is taking her advice-giving business away from her. I suspect soon, without Jeff Cory to make her feel like a natural woman and without messed-up neighbors to depend on her for help, not to MENTION without Aldo to keep her on her toes, she’s going to start losing her sense of identity and perhaps dive into a horrible depression and/or act out in a violent way.

You heard it here first.

Today is vote day, don’t forget. I need to do all the last-minute things, like figure out where my polling place is this time around, and resign myself to the fact that I have no idea where my voter ID card is and go do the dance you do for them when you can’t find your card.

Tonight is also the show I’m doing at MoFo — Isha & Zetta releasing a CD and headlining, Cinemechanica, Slingshot Dakota, and Sleep Little One Sleep. 7 pm, $6. I should’ve worked out a discount if you bring proof of voting, but I didn’t realize a long time ago when I first started promoting the show that it was election day.

The Slingshot Two got in last night, tried to tell ghost stories, ate Cinnamon Life and are preppin’ for Pittsburgh fun today (or perhaps lying around relaxing on a rainy day; who am I to say?)

I’m wearing my squeaky shoes today.

Also, I’m developing ideas for new features for this space: discussed last night were possible sleep aid reviews, tea reviews, and/or tea-as-sleep-aid reviews. If you have any other clever ideas as to what I can write, send them along. Keep in mind that I’m too busy with everyday banal stuff like homework to really do much of anything serious on here, so I’m mostly just jerking your chain.

I’m at the parents’ house, and thus on a slow computer and wanting to get back to watching TV, but I can’t not talk about this thing that makes me immensely angry: read this Post-Gazette story. You know how I feel about the sort of “investigative reporting” that Marty Griffin does if you read my post a while back about Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series. I normally defend reporters because I realize that the corporate structure of the news business and the profit motive are what fuels sensationalism, but I’ll lay it down: Marty Griffin is the most vicious, pathological reporter in Pittsburgh and has finally driven someone who had serious problems, and who could have sought help for those problems, to kill himself. I hope he’s ashamed of himself, and I hope he’s learned a lesson and loses the bullshit “ruthless investigator” routine. If I were KDKA, I would have canned him long ago, but he definitely shouldn’t have a future in the press now.

The Nietzsche Family Circus.

It’s kind of like those Dysfunctional Family Circus comics, only instead of inserting offensive captions, it lifts Nietzsche passages for captions.
An early favorite here.

Knowing the nature of Negativland’s craft, and never having seen them live before, I was a bit ambivalent going into the show Tuesday night. It seems like a live show would be inferior to their recordings just because the actual content is nearly all prefabricated and the “performance” lies simply in synthesis; at the same time, one can be fairly certain that these guys can pull off something good, or else they’d cancel their tour and take responsibility for someone else’s homicidal tendencies.

When they were but young, Negativland was doing things with sampling and mashing that weren’t being done by too many people. Sure, there had been an avant garde working with tape loops since not long after the invention of magnetic tape as a medium, but it was just that — a fringe that was doing cool stuff, but not in volume. With the rise of technologies that make mixing and sampling a lot more accessible and less time-consuming, mixing and mashing has become a fairly commonplace practice known to the mainstream, and it stands to question how essential Negativland is today: can Negativland remain relevant?

In order to remain relevant, they have to — and do — take on the most important contemporary issues in a manner that’s both more critical than what their counterparts are doing and more reflexive. Negativland in 1987 reflected the contemporary explosion of information culture at the time, and Negativland in 2006 reflects the culture of 2006, not 1987.

The show — essentially a two-act semi-improvisational play set in the studio of a radio station (It’s All In Your Head FM) — deals ostensibly with the existence of God, and in a more complicated manner with the arguments about it and the issues that spring forth from them. The first “act” looks more at a simple atheism-vs.-theism binary that characterized much of the cultural argument of the West in the late 20th century. Just before the intermission comes what can be interpreted as a terrorist attack, and the second act, much more morose, explores the tortuous complications of the culture wars in a (yes, I’m gonna say it) post-9/11 world.

Act one represents postmodernity in conflict with fundamentalism, and places science (our “current best guess”) as the new way of thinking that religious fundamentalism is reacting to. It concentrates mostly on Judeo-Christian fundamentalism and makes a sound argument against the existence of God. It features a lot of self-referential humor (e.g., a gospel-sounding version of “Christianity is Stupid” mixed in with a lot of other samples of songs discussing God) and what one might call the Negativland equivalent of slapstick (a radio-show feature in which a zookeeper shaves a monkey to show the physical similarity to humans and ostensibly support evolution as a theory).

Act two blows the “safety” of act one out of the water by presenting the real, much more complicated problems we’re faced with in relation to religion, science and their role in global and local politics. Negativland points out the flaws in the traditional binaries we encounter and propagate oftentimes in leftist rhetoric. It’s easy for us to look at science and rationalism in opposition to oppressive Christianity, and to look at other, more “exotic” religious traditions (obviously most notably Islam) in opposition to oppressive Christian hegemony, and not to give much thought to the fact that we’re on some level supporting two things that are diametrically opposed: rationality and oppressive religions (which happen to not be the hegemonic religion in our country).

It’s not an original point in the least, but it’s one that isn’t often discussed in activist circles because such an argument can be seen as counterproductive to the immediate goal (upending the “Christian right” and the general stranglehold that Christian discourse has on our own culture). But perhaps that’s as short-sighted a view as any: perhaps the project of upending Christian hegemony by any means possible is a very temporary one, one that can’t possibly bring about the ultimate desired end (freedom from the oppressive forces of organized religion).

The nature of the show is such that, while this is the main question being grappled with, tons of other factors overlap throughout the “broadcast” (just as happens in an information-rich, image-saturated culture). We’re presented with Freudian hypothesis, both as a vehicle for furthering the cause of science and rationality and defeating religious oppression and as a structural model for looking at the struggle between rationality and supernatural thought. We’re faced the entire time with a choice between wearing a blindfold and surrendering to the idea of this presentation as an imagined radio show or watching the band members/players play a radio team on stage. We’re thinking about media monopolization, we’re accosted by cultural artifacts (especially the records being played) as vehicles in ideological arguments about the nature of being.

It’s a lot to cram into the two-and-a-half hours (or so) of the show, but part of the reward is that so much is presented that the audience is forced to filter the information they’re given and choose what to contemplate. It also clearly mimics the fast-paced and jumbled communication environment we’re faced with today and both parodies mass media communication and challenges us to respond to it.