Thoughts on John Maus and (Black) Experimental Music

(This post is an unsolicited continuation of Rory Ferreira (AKA milo)’s letter published earlier this summer over at Impose)

"And my sense of rhythm acts like a force field/ protecting me from you or you from me (tone it down driver!)/ what's that in your gun holster? oh this, its the de-negritizer/ I shoot myself with it until I'm whiter than Peter Piper/ now I'll be able to bow before our world leader's might or/ tell them that the shackles on my Adidas sneakers need to be tighter/ 'cause right now man, I'm free like a zebra in Zaire/ so I'll hop in a time machine and have my lineage wiped clean/ and I'll entertain yuppies as they buy tight jeans and Thai cuisine" —Busdriver as featured on milo's "the gus haynes cribbage league"

John Maus

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Synth-pop musician John Maus has an agenda. He is knowledgeable about experimental classical music (Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage etc.) but is also steeped in continental philosophy—he holds a degree from the European Graduate School. His decision to work in the pop-music idiom is informed by his philosophical training: “I take seriously this claim of Gilles Deleuze… that perhaps it’s our task as artists to make intensive use of a major language.” Maus considers pop to be both a major language and something of a singularity within music history because it for the most part does without thematic development and major/minor tonality- the staples of western music, which is to say that now both “experimental” music and pop music have cast aside musical conventions and, as such, either might be an exemplary idiom for a political radical to be working within. A great pop performance leads to a sense of atavistic recognition between audience and performer, while experimental music becomes a contest in elitist one-upsmanship. In other words if you want to express yourself, write a three chord anthem, not a twelve-tone row. I’m not persuaded by this argument, partially for the same reason as milo: it disregards black music.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago

When John Maus talks about experimental music and conflates it with elitism, he is speaking exclusively about white classical composers. Avant-Garde jazz groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Sun Ra Arkestra are coming from a similar place as Maus but create better, more politically dangerous music; his argument seems to hinge upon an ignorance of experimental black musicians. Both the Art Ensemble and the Arkestra play music that expresses black consciousness and identity, and the volatility therein. The Art Ensemble’s catch phrase is “Ancient to the Future”; often on stage some members would wear tribal war paint while trumpeter Lester Bowie wore a lab coat. Their work contains the entire spectrum of African Diaspora musics, rock elements and the clatter of found percussion instruments, all subservient to the purgatorial wail of the blues. This melting pot aesthetic doesn’t lead to an atavistic music, where distinctions between white and black experience fall away. The breaking down of musical and cultural boundaries in search of an underlying unity ends with the abortive and sneering conclusion that existence itself is a boundary; the Art Ensemble’s mastery of jazz, classical, rhythm & blues and Caribbean styles expresses with claustrophobic intensity the terror of black American experience in the present (I’m writing primarily about the Ensemble’s hey-day in the 70’s and 80’s). The group’s presentation is simultaneously an homage to and mockery of History, their sound an orgy of overblown saxophones, speechlike trumpet and jocular drums. Instead of providing a release from the present (negro spirituals come to mind), the Art Ensemble of Chicago celebrates the present in all its ugliness, and what a perverse celebration it is.

While the Art Ensemble translated the collapse of history and linear progress into music, Sun Ra was more whimsical. He famously claimed to be an angel from Saturn; in his own words:

“I realize that people got feelings, and I reach toward their feelings, not their minds. Because they’ve been brain-washed. Why should I try to reach something that’s brain-washed? But their spirit hasn’t been brain-washed… I’m really not a man, you see, I’m an angel. If I was a man, you see, I couldn’t do anything, because man always fails you know, he’s so limited… I use my music as a sound-bridge for them to walk across the void.”

Sun Ra

During Ra’s lifetime, Arkestra (an approximation of the ebonic pronunciation of ‘orchestra’) members lived together, abandoning their families in order to pursue music. Sun Ra was a radical and a futurist (he was one of the very early proponents of synthesizers), a man of the people and a recluse. He was very much aware that he was considered a novelty by many music fans, but was apathetic towards his reception. His music often implored people, black people in particular, to face the realities of their situation; he demanded this but deflected questions of progress and action because he was just a concerned interstellar agent. Like the Art Ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra’s wild sound reproduced the crisis of black identity. Whereas John Maus makes use of a “major language”- pop music- in order to be seen, Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble make vigorous use of experimental languages in order to give life’s ambiguity and distortion full scope.

We like noise-rap crew Death Grips a lot here at the Spook (check out Owen’s post on them here). Their music and career arc shed light on how experimental music functions in society. First, it is important to recognize that Death Grips is a continuation of experimental rock drummer Zach Hill’s oeuvre (that is, they were never seeking mainstream acceptance or success). Infamously, the band was dropped from Epic Records after they leaked their album No Love Deep Web, which Epic financed, directly prior to the official release date. The cover was, fittingly, a picture of Zach Hill’s penis with “No Love Deep Web” written on it in sharpie.

MC Ride and Zach Hill

In Jean Baudrillard’s The Agony of Power, he distinguishes between two modalities of power: domination and hegemony. Domination is characterized by interpersonal antagonism and exploitation. In hegemony, which historically can be seen as domination’s final phase, the connection between human intent and power disappears. What emerges is a network of complicity; critical thought no longer targets sectors of power but uncovers ways in which works, movements and values collude with global capitalism. The “negative” thought of the Hegelian slave or Dostoevskian Underground Man might persist, but it is rendered impotent and by the virtue of its impotence is complicit with hegemony. MC Ride’s lyrics embody Baudrillard’s polemical intensity. On “Come Up and Get Me”, the title proves to be more of a plea than a provocation:
My stone wall it's on dog gaze duct taped to the ceiling/ Stucco cave make me illi okay, okay feel me/ I'm in an eight high abandoned building/ No daylight one midnight lamp lit twenty-four seven/ Murdered out windows two exits/ Street or nosedive to the next life in seconds/ and suicide ain't my stallion/ So I'm surrounded…I'm epiphanic amnesia

Baudrillard writes:

“A bitter truth: Radicalness is on the side of the intelligence of evil… we must look to the side of evil for the clearest indications, the harshest reality. Only those who show no concern for contradiction or critical consideration in their acts and discourse can… shed full light on… the absurd and extravagant character of the state of things, through the play of objective irony."

“For us…the continuity of history is shattered; we live in an instant and disincarnate currentness in which we take no more trouble… than to prolong history or rather the end of history, immersed in the euphoric banality that Heidegger called the second Fall of humanity.”

“Globalization automatically entails…fragmentation and deepening discrimination-and our fate is for a universe that no longer has anything universal about it-fragmentary and fractal-but that no doubt leaves the field free for all singularities: the worst and the best, the most violent and the most poetic.”

Jean Baudrillard

MC Ride’s lyrical content deals with these dark topics (for instance, the euphoric banality of voracious drug consumption and sex on tracks like “Spread Eagle Cross the Block” and “I Want it I Need it (Death Heated)”), and Death Grips’ sound resonates with people, which is partially why they got signed to Epic. By Baudrillard’s logic, Death Grips’ “nihilistic” sound ought to be prime material for corporate exploitation, but the group’s allegiances were never paid to careerism. If global capitalism is an unscrupulous, “evil” discourse, experimental music is a prima facie irrelevant discourse. In experimental music, personal expression is possible because the musicians have no concern for political agency. Baudrillard claims that only those in formal positions of power can “shed full light” on the state of things, but Death Grips, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra’s Arkestra all play music on behalf of disenfranchised people—a growing category—and I think that the song of the disenfranchised contains more truth than the pronouncements of the cynical. John Maus is clearly a thoughtful dude, and he is limiting himself by ignoring not only the black experimental tradition, but also the heights of viciousness and vulnerability found in hip-hop from Big L to Death Grips.

Modernism and Pop Music: The Wrap-Up

This is my fourth and final post on modernism and pop music. Check out the other posts in the series here, here, and here.

Pop music is a probabilistic phenomenon.  For many media corporations, selling music comes down to a careful management of resources: gather up the most promising "talent", maximize their marketing, and then hammer the target audience.  But there's a final element that needs to be considered before these corporations restart the process: see what sticks.

Marketing dollars fail, scandals arise, and tastes change.  Corporations are forced to take a diversified approach because even with advanced metrics you can't always control taste.  So while what makes it to us from our friends at Universal and Sony has been selected and filtered, it still retains a modicum of differentiation.

The three acts that I've discussed in this series have each had different experiences with major labels.  The Weeknd is currently on the way up with a Universal contract.  Death Grips were thrown out of their deal with Sony for conduct not befitting of employees.  DEP has remained ardently independent.  All three remain nebulous figures to the people making decisions because while they are producing something that doesn't appeal to large swathes of a popular audience, each also has a direct relationship to an ardent fanbase. This fanbase has been established largely because of the internet.  This fanbase doesn't care what label they're on or how the music is being made.  This fanbase only cares how they can get their hands on it.

This situation of pop music is emblematic of the crisis of the newest breed of modernism that pervades our lives.  As anyone on the street can tell you, the first world is replete with choices, especially when it comes to media.  And this is especially true of music.  As recording technology becomes continuously cheaper and more mobile, the barrier for entry into the aural marketplace becomes nearly negligible.  Your "distributor" is Bandcamp and your "marketing" is Twitter.  The music industry has been forced into a conservative position; in order to hold on to the market, Viacom and friends have to resist or channel this decentralization.  Holding "competitions" and insisting that their artists have made it to the big leagues are familiar tactics from this playbook.  This strategy works, for the most part.  Ms. Minaj and Mr. Bieber have safe careers.  The industry may be dwindling, but it isn't going away.  Nobody is holding their breath for musical anarchy.

But the issue that I am highlighting here isn't really about the success of the music industry in this conflict.  It's about what this conflict represents.  Distributive technologies, the latest being 3D printers, lead to decentralization, for better or for worse. And industries that depend on the control of ideas are forced to adapt.

One way of thinking about epochs is as ways of defining limits.  Each era has a set of limitations that present it with a set of questions that it can answer. One aspect of Modernism is that it is an experimental epoch; instead of setting a limitation that allows us to ask a question, Modernism makes its limitation into a question. Just how much decentralization can we stand before we hit the hard limit of nonsense?

It's easy to dismiss this as blandly theoretical, but consider the full context.  Each of the artists that I've written about here are themselves decentralized.  The Weeknd tries to express the Jungian shadow of modern R&B.  Death Grips gets their energy from the nihilist void at the center of mainstream hip-hop.  DEP pushes the virtuosity of metal and then find themselves in jazz.  They all reproduce the larger movement of the industry within their own expressions.  And the industry has to confront the question of decentralization every day.

And so the industry at times acts uncomfortable because it recognizes that as an aggregate entity it's having to stretch into something it doesn't recognize.  It's having to embrace things that it can't deal with in order to keep up. When Death Grips gets corporate money in order to waste it in self-sabotage, they have found a real limit, for better or worse. After all, one of the problems of modern markets (and modern institutions) in today's context is that they have problems protecting themselves from things (and people) that are willing to destroy themselves.

We're fated to live in interesting times, and the music industry is an expression of that.  If you keep your eye on them, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of where the rest of us are going, and how we're going to get there.

Melt Sounds: Miss Machine and Impersonal Construction (Modernism and Pop Music 3)

DESTROYER, THERE'LL BE ANOTHER JUST LIKE YOU

- The Dillinger Escape Plan, "Sunshine the Werewolf"

This is my third post on modernism and pop music. Check out the first two posts in the series here and here.

I stumbled upon The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was getting into metal in middle school and Between the Buried and Me's The Silent World was the heaviest record that I had ever heard.  Miss Machine had just come out and I was immediately interested when I saw reviews touting it as the brutal end of the genre.  I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it, but I was never impressed by it musically.  I was struck by it as a statement. Fair warning: if you had a hard time listening to Death Grips, it doesn't get any easier here.



In the original post that inspired me to write this series, I described Dillinger Escape Plan as an exploratory band. But it's not easy being truly experimental in metal.  They have choppy waters to navigate. The metal world, despite its increasing diversification, has often been slave to various images of inane masculinity.  From the moronic "virility" of the eighties to the tortured "pathos" of the aughts, the melodrama of metal through the ages is not hard to document.  Metal has also been a platform for every conceivable political perspective.  The genre is full of skinny metalcore guys that read Noam Chomsky's political writings alongside Game of Thrones, bizarro-country reactionaries, and unrepentant European neo-fascists. But DEP manages to deftly avoid these genre cliches and move toward something different.  Alongside their mathcore contemporaries The Locust and Daughters, DEP embrace the raw complexity of metal while eschewing the Power Rangers guitar heroics of acts like Dragonforce.  They embrace the intensity of metal while moving beyond the adolescent sentiments of their grindcore forebears.  In this respect, Miss Machine-era DEP fits cleanly into the constellation of other acts that we've covered in this series; like The Weeknd and Death Grips, they distill undertones of a genre into a well-formed and groundbreaking modern statement.

While DEP may indulge in some genre conventions, their particular brand of jazz-metal reveals the technically monstrous undergirding of the genre when the tradition and the histrionics are melted away. Like both The Weeknd and Death Grips, Dillinger Escape Plan modulates and contorts the human voice until it becomes profoundly impersonal.  I'm reminded here of their fellow mathletes Converge, whose lyrics would fit perfectly into a particularly erudite and fatalistic high school student's poetry diary, but whose vocal approach mutilates the human voice beyond recognition. Skipping away from this sort of underlying attempt at poetics and the genocidal pretensions of bands like Dimmu Borgir, DEP's lyrics display a distinctively cryptic cynicism.  Take, for example, the first lyrics of the opening track of Miss Machine, "Panasonic Youth", which reads like a mission statement for the rest of the record:

We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture
And followed them to the end till the gears ground cold
And relentless, there was no remorse, we had none,
We kept on with no trace of a regret

Miss Machine is relevant and original because DEP realized that modern metal's narrative arc has been stuck in a rut, and conceivably entirely exhausted by the efforts of genre adventurers like Isis.  Even its literary forays have been fairly unimaginative. As captured by the lyrics above, DEP turned away from the straightforward agendas of its medium brothers and embraced the idea of metal as product.  Instead of sounding like organic compositions, the songs on Miss Machine sound like they were built.  And they weren't built with new materials; they were made out of scrap.  Any concessions to melody sound like they were cut out of another song because it was all that the bandmembers had on hand.  The "music" consistently takes a backseat to a haphazard structure.  Take, for example, "Set Fire to Sleeping Giants".  The weakest moments of this song sound like the blandest seconds of modern metal, but they're salvaged by the incorporation of careful jazz elements and a coda of unceasing hammering:



Black metal outfits have spent countless hours trying to convince us that their picture of the evil and explicitly anti-human nature of the world around us is a dangerously close look at reality.  DEP paints a much more convincing picture. They describe a world that is profoundly apersonal, consisting of melted together machines, both human and non-human.  The album cover of Miss Machine is instructive here:



In "Sunshine the Werewolf", Greg Puciato yelps "We fucked like a nuclear war".  In DEP's modernity, weapons, machines, and people overlap and muddle, bringing catastrophe to orgasm and vice versa.  This is not to say that Miss Machine represents a clean break from every record before it.  As mentioned above, DEP's originality is born from their commitment to the genre that birthed them. They managed to capture, for a moment, the ends and the limits of the genre of which they are a part.

PCP and Late Capitalism: The Death Grips Demolition Machine (Modernism and Pop Music 2)

OUT OF THE SHADOWS BARRAGE OF WITCH TONGUE COBRA SPIT OVER APOCALYPTIC CULT KILLER CAULDRON SMOKE STOMP MUSIC SERIOUSLY YAH
- Death Grips, "Guillotine"

This is the second of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.  You can read my first post on The Weeknd here.

It's hard for me to be anything other than intensely enthusiastic about Death Grips. I mentioned them in the first post on this blog as part of pop avant-garde that is attempting to push the nihilistic elements in pop music as far as possible.  They manage this by combining hip-hop and noise into a lean, hard, and nasty statement:



Death Grips takes the masculine, violent posturing of hip-hop and pushes it to the point where it nears unintelligible noise, no longer easily gendered or understood. They have a real affinity with the subject of my last post, The Weeknd.  Where the Weeknd (at his best) takes the sex and drugs out of hip-hop and distills them into a hedonistic final statement, Death Grips takes the violence out of hip-hop and uses it to brew up a clanking mess.  At times we'll recognize a sentiment or a turn of phrase from mainstream music, but it is contextualized by a frantic psychosis.  We've seen this sort of move before, the most eminent examples being Scarface's work ("Mind Playing Tricks On Me") and Gravediggaz' "horrorcore" efforts.  Death Grips even has a musical relative in early Insane Clown Posse.  While the juggalos take the violence of hip-hop to the point of cartoonishness, Death Grips takes it beyond serious.  And it's easier to take Death Grips at their word than, say, the frustrated kids in Odd Future.

 In an interview earlier this year with Pitchfork, Zach Hill (the Hella-alum drummer behind the project) talked about extensively about the band's inspiration. He talks extensively about having conversations with other, unseen forces that pervade our day-to-day life. This sort of New Age spiritualism typically has an ineffective monist sheen to it, but coming from Death Grips it takes on a sort of terrifying, Lovecraftian hue. In this aspect of their image, Death Grips is participating in a movement in 21st century culture that includes Erowid and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void. This line of thinking takes a cue from Castaneda rather than from Patrick Bateman or  the hippie movement; it has moved beyond the holistic humanism and pragmatic hedonism of 20th century experiences to the nihilist experiments of drugs like DMT.  

It is, in some ways, all too appropriate that the members of Death Grips stayed in the iconic Chateau Marmont while recording their major label record, since they inhabit and express the structural underside of violence that allows the cultural superstructure of Hollywood to emerge.  In a world where Billboard feeds us partial and incomplete cultural narratives about how life is, Death Grips attempts to show us the cultural conflict at the point of application.  The warm fuzz of late capitalist pop music is presented here with a sense of real perspective: half-quotes twisted in a conflicted mess of noise.  And through the clamor, the human voice that can be heard is alienated and furious.

Insofar as they have a positive political agenda, it comes through in songs like Klink.



Here, Death Grips has taken the political concerns of hip-hop and, in the footsteps of Dead Prez and Public Enemy, push the message out to the political fringe.  Picking up the banner from the violent anti-police rhetoric in classics like Fuck tha Police, Death Grips uncovers the political undertones of this sort of anti-authoritarian violence with lines like "Six feet deep beneath the streets so they can't never say shit again/Fuck the man with a thick broomstick and put a black flag on the end". Here again, there is no pretense of a macro-political agenda. Insofar as Death Grips has a political stance, it is a strictly tactical one; they are concerned with political conflicts, not with political narratives. They have a profound interest in the "Deep Web", a supposedly uncensored and unpoliceable network that, alongside other groups like The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, is part of the rising constellation of tactical anti-authoritarianism on the web.  In this light, it is unsurprising that the band has been dropped by Epic Records after leaking their own album.

For all of their hallucinatory imagery, Death Grips has their bloodshot eyes locked on the brutality of the modern situation. I can't resist leaving you with a few words from the perpetrators: