The Spiral in Permanent Revolutions: Gurren Lagann via Gilles Deleuze

THE GENETIC DIVERSITY RESULTING FROM GAMOGENESIS IS THE KEY TO EVOLUTION. IT'S THAT THAT KEEPS SPIRAL POWER MOVING FORWARD.
- Leeron Littner

At first glance, Gurren Lagann looks like a generic example of Shonen anime.  Its story is hackeneyed: young man starts into the world from his small town and quickly gathers a group of eclectic friends to face down a global-level threat. As it follows this basic format it is easy to mistake Gurren Lagann for an earnest tribute to its forerunners, counting such classics as Getter Robo, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Gundam Wing and other exemplars of the "Real Robo" and ,"Super Robo" genres as its wikipedia-obvious influences.  You could see it falling well in line with its better known, longer running contemporaries like One Piece or Naruto. But Gurren Lagann transcends the limits of its genre-siblings and forerunners by pushing the conventions of Shonen to the edge of absurdity in a single season-length statement.  This manic, concise, and ultimately critical spirit makes Gurren Lagann one of the most interesting anime I have come across.

The show affects its aesthetic and narrative feats by finding spirals at the heart of the genre and bringing them to the forefront. Watching this theme develop on-screen, you're surprised that you hadn't thought about it when viewing Gurren Lagann's act-alikes (assuming you hadn't); Shonen repeats the cycle of get stronger, beat boss, discover new threat.  It shares this narrative structure with video games, particularly early generation RPGs that were severely limited in gameplay diversity by virtue of their hardware and thus were forced to repeat variations on a theme.  But limited structure can sometimes make for the most inspiring art, and Gurren Lagann achieves baroque-pop greatness by taking this repetition and expanding it in a profoundly exuberant way. Far from being fanboy gushy about its influences, this expansion is accompanied by a surprising self-awareness that allows the show a critical reflection that is all too often missing from its fellows. This reflective stance transforms Gurren Lagann into a meditation on desire.



Already in this trailer you can see that Gurren Lagann does not shy from an overt traditional masculinity and a certain teenage puerility.  This may turn some off from the show; it certainly made me more wary when I started watching it (especially since some scenes are explicitly transphobic).  I think the show can be legitimately criticized for its shortcomings, but I also think that it embraces its kinks as part of the territory; when you're going to create the ultimate Shonen, you have to be willing to express its weaknesses just as much as its strengths.  This willingness to capture the entirety of the genre, flaws intact, defines the progression of the show.  It is "orgasmically" structured; each "circle" in the "spiral" of its narrative structure follows the aforementioned build-up, climax, recovery cycle.  And what's interesting is that the characters suffer the consequences.

Note: This next section will make a hell of a lot more sense if you have seen the series.  If you have not, hopefully I have piqued your curiosity enough that you'll go try it, maybe watch it, and come back.

Take, for example, the transition between the first and second major arcs of the series. Simone acts as a subject orbiting around an object of desire in both, the object of the first arc being Kamina and his desire to "break through the heavens," his desire for freedom, and the second being Nia and her desire to discover her purpose.  When Team Gurren has a center, it becomes what Deleuze calls "fascicular"; it spirals outward and echoes the power of its origin in an expansive and exploratory way.  For example, Team Gurren's escape through the ceiling of the hometown, the destruction of the four spiral generals, and the acquisition of Dai-Gurren act as echoes of Kamina's willingness to "drill" through the established order through sheer will in the first arc act as good examples of this echoing.  The more important note here is that in the interstitial period, when Team Gurren has no definite focal point, it flops.  Simone's depression and the establishment of the well-intentioned totalitarian world state after the second arc leap immediately to mind here.  It's easy to argue that the third and final act of the series is about Simone finding and expressing his conjugal desire for Nia.  But there are two interesting weaknesses to this third desiring relationship that beautifully illustrate the question that animates the series.

The first is that Simone's desire for Nia isn't strong enough.  When the Anti-Spiral traps Team Gurren in the alternate dimensions where they act as other selves, they stay stuck there.  It takes Kamina's reappearance and reactivation of Team Gurren's old desire, that is to say Kamina's desire, for freedom to jar them back into the fight. Trapped by their otherwise mediocre and everyday desires, they rely on Kamina's strength to galvanize them to their utmost potential.  Kamina here becomes more than an "individual" or a "symbol"; in this sequence, Kamina is a becoming.  Characters that are becoming-Kamina are each transformed in entirely different ways, each striving to reach their utmost expression.  Nowhere is this better captured than when Kamina explains that when he doesn't believe in himself, he relies on the him that Simone believes in, the becoming-Kamina in himself that defies his insecurities and transforms him into an expression rather than an individual.  This is further validated by the scene where Simone tells Kamina he'll "always be in his heart" and goes on to destroy the Anti-Spiral; Kamina has ceased being a person or a symbol, and become a freeing affect.

The second weakness of the central relationship of the third act is that after this final desire is consummated in the symbolic marriage of Simone and Nia, both characters are finished and the series is over.  It's easy to forget that Gurren Lagann ends on a cliffhanging, bittersweet note; the bulk of the characters take up becoming-Kamina again and presumably go on to challenge the spiral nemesis, but Simone ends up tired and comically impotent (skip to 21:56, unless you want to see the whole final episode and/or hear the Four Year Strong-esque end theme):



This is what I find truly fascinating about Gurren Lagann; every productive and strong force in the entire show relies on the drive to freedom of becoming-Kamina.  To me, becoming-Kamina is a perfect example of Deleuze's successful war-machine, the nomadic flow that continually escapes established boundaries on its own novel flight path.  When becoming-Kamina, Team Gurren creates, steals, and destroys with an anarchist glee; when forced to become sedentary, they lapse into a sometimes dangerous or aimless segmentation. The stand-out reference for this "reterritorialization" is Rossiu's world-state.  The series takes pains to make it explicit that his carefully planned order is born of his original religious resentment and is parasitic on the raw desire unlocked by Kamina; he tries to control, quantify it, and reduce it to its utility, but cannot fully contain its flow (as a perfect example, consider the Grapearls; mass produced based on Gurren Lagann's technology, they ultimately cannot come close to matching it).  Eventually the war-machine starts up again and the state relinquishes control when the Anti-Spirals shatter Rossiu's carefully constructed equilibrium.  Kamina and Team Gurren are a line of flight that breaks free from centered structures, including the identities of Kamina and Simone themselves.

Team Gurren is stuck vacillating between their self-sustaining collective desire and their centered, serial dependence on their cycle of become stronger, win the battle, and suffer refraction.  This assemblage is the basis of the startlingly interesting dynamic exploration that makes Gurren Lagann worth watching and worth thinking about.  At times, Team Gurren use their alliance and shared desire to act as a multitude straight out of Hardt and Negri's Empire.  At others, they fall into the "black hole" of hierarchy and complacency.  Their task (and perhaps ours) is either to find a practice of desiring that doesn't rely on a constantly collapsing structure of desired objects, but instead puts emphasis on sustained "plateaued" force (Trotsky, Deleuze/Guattari) or accept that the tragic structure is our lot and heroically embrace this fate (Camus, Zizek).  Or, to put it in appropriately melodramatic terms, are we up in the sky with Kamina, or stuck on the ground with Simone?

Inebriated Friends #1

 REMEMBER THE BUBBLE BOBBLE THEME?!

Here are some links to things that we like:

Following up on my post about Young Money and post-modernity, here is a fantastic Jamesonesque Marxist analysis of Lil B as symptom of late capitalism.  I had a feeling someone had written this before I'd seen it and I'm glad that they did.

While we're on the topic of pop music, there's a careful investigation of the role of empty center that Britney Spears plays on the Billboard Charts over at Hooded Utilitarian.  Thought provoking and fairly discouraging.

A series about Pokemon theme songs by our good friend Jacob on the blog of our good friends Ashley and Andreas.  A well-written and mildly traumatizing trip down memory lane.

In keeping with the high-flown, slightly overreaching video game writing that's been going on, here are a few more Tim Rogers posts, these ones about Earthbound and Shadow of the Colossus.

In keeping with nothing (but fascinating nonetheless!), here's a response to the Werner Herzog documentary Encounters at the End of the World written by an interview subject in that movie.

Here's an old video about Charlie Rose that fills me with dread.

Next up, our first installment of "Don't Drink This"

Chet Baker and the Ghost of Jazz

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
- Peter Allen

We were talking about music recently and my favorite interlocutor offhandedly brought up free jazz.  I took the opportunity to consider my relationship with the style and realized I don't particularly care for it.  Not because I think it's in any way inherently bad; I simply have no way to connect to its world.  Admittedly I haven't tried horribly hard to access said world, but it made me think more about what jazz I did connect with and why I felt that connection was possible.

I realized in the process that the jazz artist I have listened to most consistently is Chet Baker.  As per usual, I immediately tried to figure out if my taste for Mr. Baker was a product of a theoretical commitment.  And, as per usual, it was.



I recently posted on Young Money as post-modern troupe.  In that post, I talked about 40's beats and how ghostly they were; much of his work is made from half remembered, echoing melodies and muted bass thumps.  His music, at its best, is devoid of bombast and conveys a sense of unplaceable loss.

I feel the same way about Chet Baker.  Androgynous, high beyond belief, and totally alienated, Baker's take on jazz standards sound like they've been slowed down and played back through an android.  Just as Wayne's unique style comes in large part from the effects of the syrup that he constantly consumes, you can hear the heroin dripping off Baker's voice into the microphone.

Imagery aside, I think that Baker resonates with me because in large part I think the time of jazz is long past.  The Western musical event of the early 20th century, jazz has long been marginalized by pop music.  As the latter style dominated the mainstream in the second part of the last century, jazz worked in (relative) obscurity to push all the way to the extremes available to it, including fusing with other genres.  Jazz became dispersed into the bloodstream of music as improvisation and fusion became rote. As a result, I'd argue that playing jazz today is always retro, always an act of nostalgia.  What used to be controversial, alternative, and sexual is now tame and routine.  Jazz in the 21st century is the persistent echo of jazz in the 20th.

Baker's music acknowledges and embraces this fact. His inverted return to the pop-jazz standards that epitomized the genre at the height of its popularity brings the place of the genre today into stark relief.  The fall of the billboard pop machine due to pirating, the demise of physical music, and the corresponding rise of the internet as distribution medium has allowed for unprecendented experimentation. I would argue there are two dominant paradigms in music production today, both of which often overlap with the other.  The first paradigm is the modern one, a brutal new approach to experimentation where music goes to places it simply has not before and the bounds of genre (and the category of music itself) are stretched and twisted, at times to the point of nihilism.  See here Death Grips, Wolf Eyes, and/or The Dillinger Escape Plan.  Many of these new experiments incorporate elements of jazz to help them get that much closer to musical oblivion.  The second paradigm is the post-modern, the self-conscious remixing, reuse, cross-breeding, appropriation, or detournement of old styles and decades (at times, centuries) of music.  See Lady Gaga, Bloc Party, Pac Div, and/or The Gaslight Anthem, each of which revives a set of nostalgic tricks to new effect. For an example of the fusion of this radical experimentation and self-conscious callback, I can think of no band better than Animal Collective. Anything that diverges from these agendas risks being accused of being unoriginal or worse, being boring.

In my mind, Baker performs the same revitalizing inversion for jazz, post-hoc.  His versions of standards, like 40's beats, have the numbness of something long lost.  And what is lost here is the entire style and history of which he is a part.  In a lot of ways, Chet Baker was playing jazz's eulogy before it died.

I'm On One: Young Money as Postmodern Prototypes

I WISH THAT I COULD HAVE THIS MOMENT 4 LIFE
AND IN THIS MOMENT I JUST FEEL SO ALIVE

- Nicki Minaj, "Moment 4 Life"


Hip-hop has always been fairly amenable to the themes of post-modernity. Repetition, artificial modification, endless reference, and an affirmation of alternative cultural possibilities have been a part of its canon since it began.  Within this inherently timely genre, I would argue that the rappers of Young Money are the most forthrightly post-modern group of rappers performing today.

It is easy to assert that someone like the (formerly) Pitchfork-approved Das Racist or their similarly liberal arts-educated compatriots hold this dubious crown.  I think that reading Heems, Victor, and Dap as post-modern is to have a overly simple grasp of the concept at hand.  Their self-conscious, hyper-referential statements, while utterly fantastic in their own right, are too ironic and winking to be the kind of pluralist case study that embodies the condition that I'm trying to get at. As anyone who has read Heems' Tumblr can attest, there is a very real political and personal (dare I say ideological?) coherence to both his and Victor's musical approach.

It's put best when it's put simply: Das Racist can often just be too clever for their own good.  While shouting out Spivak seems like everyday conversation coming from Heems, a lot of Victor's material can at times sound forced, like he wants to make the most of his Wesleyan education.  His inter-song echoes are at times a little too deliberate, a little too name-droppy.  Similarly, after a few mixtapes Heems' constant references to food start to sound gimmicky and lazy rather than apathetic and charming. Das Racist is too held together, too aesthetically, culturally, and musically neurotic, to be the hodge-podge, transgressive group that they are sometimes thought to be.  Their message is post-modern, but their self-consciousness is not.

By contrast, Young Money is a collective of outré misfits.  They include a free-associating drug addict from New Orleans, a Canadian of mixed race who grew up on television and takes one of his major stylistic conventions from Twitter, a multiple-personality rapper who identifies with a mass produced, hypersexualized plastic toy, and a skinny Comptonite of Vietnamese and Jamaican descent who started on a pop-punk record label. This is already a pretty promising genealogy.

Cosmopolitanism aside, what is really exceptional about Young Money is that they're a case study for the ability of modern pop music to make statements unlike anything before it.  Certainly, they've been vetted by a number of faceless bureaucracies who made sure that they're marketed correctly, as any artist that makes it onto Billboard must be. But what's interesting is what perseveres through this filtering process.  

I'll use DJ Khaled's "I'm On One" featuring Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne as a grounding example:

The first thing to notice here is the production.  The beat on a typical Khaled track is often a straightahead, club-minded affair ("All I Do Is Win") or tries for a pseudo-menacing cell-phone thug swagger ("I'm So Hood"), but that's compromised here as he plays to his co-stars. This is in large part because Drake's favorite producer Noah "40" Shebib and frequent collaborator T-Minus both contribute here.  This is the only song on We The Best Forever that diverges noticeably from the Khaled formula (to be fair, the Boi-1da produced Future has a sort of similar sobriety to it).  The ghostly, brooding mood on display here is a direct pull from the feel of much of Drake's recent material. Many of 40's songs make you feel as though he heard the Top 40 when he was smashed at the club last night and he's spent all day trying to rewrite them with a hangover.  This atmosphere is a key part of why I find Drake's music so interesting; the conventional boom-bap excesses of his contemporaries are present, but with an accompanying nagging, alienated, and cynical feeling that this is a ride that has been ridden many times before and will be again.

This wary, distant musical perspective is mirrored in Drake's lyrics.  He is obsessed with his own fame, but he has a perpetual consciousness of its finitude.  Whenever he makes any claim to timelessness, it rings false.  He's at his best when he seems totally overwhelmed with his condition and puts himself at the mercy of the forces that pushed him there.  This quietist self-consciousness is what many find unappealing (or "soft") about Drake, but it's the very real awareness of the narrative of which he is a part that makes him a fascinating figure. Unlike Das Racist's carefully obfuscated earnesty and self-consciousness, Drake's faux-struggle with his fame has all the pomp and insistence of a mission statement.  Here he admits, "All I care about is money and the city that i'm from/ ima sip until I feel it ima smoke until it's done/ I don't really give a fuck and my excuse is that I'm young/and I'm only getting older".  None of this sounds particular triumphant; it's the sound of a person realizing his predicament, his inability to act in the face of his realization, and the inevitable end that is on its way.  When he says "get it while you're here boy/ cause all that hype don't seem the same next year boy" we have a feeling that even though this is directed to a faceless up-and-comer, Drake is intimately familiar with the emotions on hand.

Let's skip Rick Ross for now.  His relationship with Young Money is interesting in its own right and in some ways he is the perfect marketable, post-Tupac "gangsta" rapper, but he's not important to our thesis at the moment.

This is a fairly conventional (read: lazy) verse for Wayne.  The brags and posturing of his generation of artists are here, but, as ever, his free associations set him clearly back in his own territory.  "Put an end to your world like the mayans" is a particularly relevant line here (as was his "and honestly i'm down like the economy" line when it was written for Jay Sean's "Down" at the depth of the recession) because it captures Wayne's appeal perfectly.  His prolificacy and his willingness to collaborate with whoever's hot at the moment is a key part of his domination of the charts.  In a sense, Wayne is the perfect "social networking" rapper; each song allows him to post a new status that keeps him up to date (fellow "Lil" individual and follower Lil B stretches this format to its obvious conclusion).  The benefits of this connectedness to pop culture (though at times he's a bit late to the party; see the Inception-style video for Six Foot, Seven Foot made half a year too late) and chameleonlike ability to change with his climate should be familiar to anyone that has read Foucault's analysis of biopower in his lectures at the College de France. Adapting to the trends of the market allows you to tap its power and it's in (mostly) simple, populist mediums like rap and folk that this headline-reading approach  is best embodied. In both genres, there is more emphasis on what is said (or how it is said) than on the melodic content of any particular phrase. This comparison isn't particularly novel, but I think it's apt.

In the final calculus, Young Money keep my attention because they capture the moment.  This is also why I think they so embody post-modernism; their catholicity and marketability make them look like they were magiked up on a corporate hard drive somewhere like some kind of fucking Rei Toei rap crew. They will not hold up in twenty years.  It's only because of their ability to adapt and willingness to inject themselves with new cultural DNA that they've lasted this long. Sure, I can imagine Drake's rap-noir or Nicki's schizophrenic cast of characters retaining some merit or influence in that scene-to-come, but the songs simply will not have the late 200X bite that they do now. The Young Money collective is deathly aware of the fact that pop music, now more than ever, isn't so much about works as it is about processes. All they can do is try to hold on to the cutting edge.