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.