July 05, 2009
more like a pop song (introduction excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
...a meditation on the rather crude but not yet resolved question of whether pop music has much to tell us about what Jameson calls “the Real of History” — and if so, how so? To what, by the late 20th century, could popular culture testify?
Jameson’s own theoretical apparatus allows the pursuit of this testimony —in particular the claims made in The Political Unconscious and “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” He seems to have glimpsed in advance the situation of Fukuyama’s phantasmatic vision:
“....premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.”His failure to foresee claims about “the end of history” may indicate only that some hubris is beyond imagination.
Nonetheless, Fukuyama must be taken seriously, not least because of the purchase his narrative and slogan found in culture at large, the arena where pop becomes pop and circulates. Fukuyama’s version is more like a pop song, after all: a formula which seems at once to tell a total story and condense it into a slogan, a logo, an image. Is that not what the perfect chorus is for — in which “the end of history” becomes a hook so catchy and memorable, so improbably pleasing to repeat, that it spins around in globe in a blink? It seems finally a better explanation for the structure of feeling organized by any number of the songs this book measures, songs indexed inextricably to “1989.” It’s easy enough to believe that the “wind of change” blowing through the song of that title — the most famous pop song of 1989, or rather “1989” — is the last such wind ever, a perfection and culmination. This is a version of what pop music was always trying to convey; perhaps pop had been biding its time until 1989 came along to make sense of its sensibility.
Certainly, to follow the example, Scorpions had been waiting a good while. A perfectly successful concern, they had survived the years with the usual fraternal bickering, substance abuse, personnel changes, and a few international hits (most of them from the 1984 album Love at First Sting) since their formation in 1973. As suggested earlier, there is an account of no little interest in which the story of “1989” begins around this moment. Fukuyama tells part of it himself, with his usual focus on the political:
The current crisis of authoritarianism did not begin with Gorbachev’s perestroika or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It started over one and a half decades earlier, with the fall of a series of right-wing authoritarian governments in Southern Europe...Jameson, as it happens, dates postmodernism to around 1973 in his essay, though working at the crossroads of culture and political economy — his periodizing facts are different. But the grand narrative of 1973 will have to told elsewhere; only bits and pieces are rifted through this present work. For the moment, suffice to say that after a decade and a half, Scorpions were well-positioned to capture what they would call “the magic of moment.” They were from the city of Hanover, in what was the English zone after the second World War. Lyricist and vocalist Klaus Meine, born in the year of the Berlin Blockade, had long experience writing for the Anglophone global pop audience (might one say “Anglobal”?) The band specialized in keening power ballads, with all the demographic traversal they imply — and they were comfortable, even happy, with clichés like “magic of the moment,” that find their best context in the cross-market, transnational pidgin of anglopop.
This pidgin is of course a site of endless compression, homogenization, emulsification of specifics into the the sheen of the general — a machine for cliché. But also a machine for slippage, and oddities. It is worth noting the ignored fact that there is no “The” in the band’s name. This is only one of the insistent mistakes revolving around the signal song of the events in question; another is the habit of pluralizing the title as “Winds of Change.” Apparently, at the moment there was only one wind — that would seem to matter. It rhymes with Fukuyama’s account of all changes as part of a single change, a single historical vector leading toward a unified terminus. All news is one news.