jane dark's sugarhigh!

between the wars (chapter five excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months; this is the last. It is now available. You can get the book here and here, and read more here.

...I was alive and I waited, waited; I was alive and I waited for this — this is pop itself singing, making its own true confession.

But that’s not quite right. It’s a kind of idealism, with pop as an autonomous actor haunting the wings until the times comes round for its aria. Why should we not think it’s empire singing, using a pop song as its prosthetic throat?

This must be part of it as well. There is not, cannot be, a belle époque for pop alone. If pop, to restate the situation, had always meant to be a triumph over time, it was bound to realize itself at this moment which had as its core meaning a triumph over time, inextricable from the collapse of historical opposition. Clocks will still run in circles, but nothing can happen — this is the sense that one returns to over and over after 1989, phrased a thousand different ways. This is the ambiguous exultation of America’s geopolitical belle époque, the seeming restoration of its glory as global hegemon, a glory greatly tarnished over the previous quarter-century. The period from 1988-1991 is, for both pop music and the United States, the emergence of this new formation. It is the antechamber of the unipolar world, of the Washington Consensus and the last Pax Americana which contains within it the spectacle of the nineties economic boom.

Even this temporary verdict on the settling of the political landscape exists mainly as a matter of convention – it takes its social force from the fact that it is believed, rather than from a clear-eyed assessment of the scene. The conflation of liberal democracy and free markets disguises the misprisions of both terms, and the conflict between the political and economic dynamics actually at play. World-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein concedes that “The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the U.S.S.R. have been celebrated as the fall of the Communisms and the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as an ideological force in the modern world. This is no doubt correct.” However, he continues by suggesting that “these same events marked even more the collapse of liberalism.” The disordered world system left by the chaotic thaw of the Cold War became a hothouse for the imposition of “overtly reactionary policies.” Writing in 1995, he asserts that “This rejection of liberal reformism is being implemented now in the United States under the label of the Contract With America, as it is being simultaneously force-fed to countries all over the world by the ministrations of the IMF.” This narrative of turbulence, force, and eventual counterforce does a better job of forecasting the post-millennial scenario of hegemony unraveling. But it is not the story that we liked to tell, liked to imagine we were living, the lullabye of the lull. The last hegemon rested, sated and righteous — a historical sleep relatively unvexed for a dozen years.

That is the full span under the sign of uncontested United States power, and the untrammeled expansion of markets. This boundlessness, this absence of barriers literal and figurative — surely “the Fall of the Wall” stands for this as much as for the specific unification of Germany, or the dropping of the iron curtain. Surely this unbounded sensation is the same as that of the sense of the end of history: a spatial version of the temporal account, a map painted in a single color to match the triumphal, monotonous unfolding of empty time.

This is the political sensation that meets itself in music determined to elaborate the unfettered feeling, the boundlessness, along a variety of axes — starting, as we have already seen, as a kind of excess which cannot be analyzed or contained, the complement of which is an inability to experience actual events. The absence of limit and ground for experience is a kind of fairytale that pop music had been recycling since its dawn, at least since the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle

feeling like you're spellbound (chapter four excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

The Swedish songcraft that would migrate toward the market’s imperial core, and eventually come to sound more American than American pop, has an elaborate genealogy flowing from the seventies and eventually becoming the cataract of what might be described as the Cheiron School of Pop which dominated the millennial moment. The most successful Swedish group in history, after ABBA, falls between those two points — and, inevitably, has their greatest success in the United States between 1989-1991, when they produced a two platinum discs and four Number One singles in the United States alone, en route to 45 million units combined sales.

If there is a pop single that in its form and content reaches jubilantly after life beyond care, beyond prohibition, beyond event — reaches after the entire congealed affect of the era — surely it is the last of these singles, which peaked in May of 1991: a kind of realization, found at the end of the time that concerns this book. Farewell to an idea, or to a few; the song is in several regards a synthesis of elements already seen, a demonstration of the ways of understanding the passage coming to an end, a nightcap for the new morning. Summoning first the light psychedelia of sixties counter-pop (especially “Magical Mystery Tour,” from the intro’s hubbub and tour guide through the video’s requisite enigmatic tour bus), the song’s milieu is regardless of its own moment — the moment of Deee-lite, the Da.I.S.Y. Age, Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold.” Per Gessle’s melody — surely having learned as much from Lennon-McCartney as any song of the period — is in turn pure 1991.

Except more so. Within 100 seconds the song has generated five or six separate melodic parts, each one a hook (Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!, they titled one hits collection) which it proceeds to snap together in varying configurations before arriving at an instrumental break which leads into another bridge and a chorus fade — all in a bit more than four minutes. The profligacy is dizzying, perhaps even exhausting, an aerobatic inventiveness insisting that anything’s possible. The order of the parts doesn’t matter; this is the meaning of the song’s form, the endlessly reconfigurable hooks. Pleasure, mobility, infinitude. Feels like flying. The song is called “Joyride” — how could it be anything else? — and horizonless transit is everything. Cars, trains, planes, balloons, and no particular place to go, but everybody’s going there: “Hello you fool I love you: come on join the joyride.” Things get more imperative: “Be a joyrider!” Promises come easy: “I’ll take you on a sky ride, feeling like you’re spellbound.” Yes, that’s it exactly; the spell, the inexhaustible glide, “sunshine is a lady, rocks you like a baby,” whatever. There will be no coming down; the trance that never comes up hard against anything is the very sign of freedom, “it all begins where it ends” and that’s the good news, every straight line — time’s arrow, space’s borders — having been vanquished. This is Roxette’s second most historically charged song.

i don't wanna, i don't think so (chapter three excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

[....] This shift in self-awareness is captured by Sonic Youth, the film’s transitional figure (appropriately enough, as they’re a musicologically transitional figure between punk and grunge as well, in parallel to their progressive synthesis of free and out jazz, avant-garde minimalism and other more high-brow and experimental tendencies). Tied to New York’s knowing downtown intelligentsia, they’re a band in which the social antagonisms of punk are preserved and ironized at once. Their most successful single, 1990’s “Kool Thing,” dates from the moment in which grunge is at once consolidating punk’s furies while shifting their vector. Over a buzzy guitar that straddles the two genres, Kim Gordon exits the minimal melody for a spoken interlude reminiscent of Patti Smith. “Kool thing,” she wonders with her affected lack of affect, “...what are you gonna do for me? I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” Public Enemy’s Chuck D, rejoining us from Chapter One, exhorts her, “Tell it like it is. Yeah.”

This droll residue of “Left discourse” and its imbricated political others is what grunge will finally abandon. Not every punk-inspired idiom of the era took this same turn. Tobi Vail, who passed the fated slogan [Learn not to play your instrument] on to Kurt, would take part in the refashioning and revitalizing of punk’s oppositional politics which happened in bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and other groups under the banner of “riot grrrl” — a phrase sometimes credited to Vail. The movement’s motto was REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW. But this is exactly why riot grrrl was not grunge, but something else (and, arguably, why it couldn’t achieve similar levels of success even if it wished to). Grunge constituted itself by doing a very specific thing with punk’s will to confrontation: turning it inward.

Another way to pose this issue is to note that the most basic difference between the language of “NOW FORM A BAND” and “Learn not to play your instrument” will turn out to be the most decisive. If both demands are in the second person, one is addressed plurally, and the other singularly. Even more suggestively, it’s clear enough that the former is projected outward, an urgent and even confrontational challenge to anyone who might encounter it. Even the seemingly reversed position of Richard Hell’s famous t-shirt with a painted target labeled “Please Kill Me” (this is a world made entirely of imperatives) is scarcely introspective. “People had some wild ideas back then,” recounts Bob Gruen, “but for somebody to walk the streets of New York with a target on his chest, with an invitation to be killed — that’s quite a statement.” It doesn’t waver from punk’s confrontations; it simply reverses the telescope, which inevitably turns out to be a gun sight.

“Learn how to NOT play your instrument,” in Cobain’s notebook, has the force of an admonition to the mirror. It becomes immediately part of his ulcerous self-doubt, dovetailing with Mudhoney’s hyperbolic self-loathing in sound and sensibility. The motion from one of these stances to the other is central to, and inextricable from, grunge’s way of being. Among many modes, this inward turn is the mode.