Strawberry Jam - Animal Collective - 2007
Sometimes when I’m hanging out with my friends that would much sooner listen to Rush than Animal Collective, they ask me to play them “some of that weird shit I listen to.” Often, I put on Strawberry Jam.
“The zeitgeist of hyperspace that is emerging, initially freighted with technology and cybernetics, requires that it be consciously tuned to an erotic ideal. It is important to articulate the presence of this erotic ideal of the Other early. This is an opportunity to fall in love with the Other, get married and go off to the stars; but it’s only an opportunity and not evolutionarily necessary.”
T. McKenna
0. Introductions
Whereas it was perhaps once appropriate to say that the line between pop and avant-garde is one drawn in sand, doing so commits a great injustice to both the proposed genres and the conversation of what constitutes contemporary music. The debate is too dense to encapsulate in physical metaphor, particularly one with accepted dimensions and shape. Since the rock and roll explosion of the 1950’s pop and avant-garde have become necessarily reflexive, each either responding to the accessible, mainstream or most-widely-consumed with refrain or dissonance— seeking to imitate or distance itself as much as possible. With the advent of electronic and computer technologies, especially the internet, however, the production and process of musical creation has become increasingly one of synthesis, imitation, and disguise— no longer are we playing the same sequences, we are casting masks out of sound. However, whereas the postmodern gestures post-rock and roll instrumental acts are enact grim recognition that what can be done has been, contemporary avant-pop, which characteristically employ digital instrumentation and sampling nod to that which has been done in celebration— imitating without parody, reproducing the visceral ecstasy of pop music in alternative contexts. Toni Mitchell in Performance and the Postmodern in Pop Music cites the droning 90’s noise rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain as a premier example: “The Jesus and Mary Chain’s sound is a pastiche of the repetitive, cumulative chord sequences of Lou Reed’s legendary 1960s band the Velvet Underground, the throbbing frenzy of the Doors, and the manic minimalism of the 1970s Detroit duo Suicide, all seminal influences in the history of rock” (Mitchell 276). The practices of these contemporary artists are paradoxically new in their approach while applying the same rhythms, structures and tones— many of which are synthesized or literally sampled verbatim. Additionally, samples, of water running or an industrial clanging of pipes for example, are used to compliment rhythm— creating meaning with the meaningless. Baltimore’s Animal Collective is a group of musicians who employ such techniques, growing from the churning freak-folk of their early Here Comes the Indian, Danse Manatee and Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished to the deliberate, carefully enacted pop of 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion.
Animal Collective is David Portner, Noah Lennox, Brian Weitz and Josh Dibb who assume the aliases Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deakin, respectively. They’re a curious bunch, preferring to be referred to as a collective rather than a band or group as the lineup on a given album varies by circumstance (Only Avey Tare and Panda Bear are present on 2004’s Sung Tongs, all four on 2005’s Feels and 2007’s Strawberry Jam, and three, missing Deakin, on 2009’s Merriweather). Each album is an effort to create something entirely different, though inescapably derivative, of the album that proceeded it. The transition from organic, guitar-based songs, to electronic samples was one of accident in the time between Feels and Strawberry Jam. Lennox explains, “I had a lot of trouble getting my guitar in there, I didn’t have a whole lot of money to ship a bunch of stuff over equipment-wise. But what I did have was this little SP-303 sampler. Eventually I got another one, so I could mix songs, or parts of songs, together. I just developed a way of writing songs on these things, because they were all I had” (Nasrallah). The result was something not new, Strawberry Jam being nine years younger than Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children, 33 younger than Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets and 39 younger than The Beatles (The White Album), but original in its self-awareness. Contemportary avant-pop, electronic and computer music each use many of the techniques characteristic of postmodernism, identified by Peter Manuel as:
“pastiche, especially involving the combination and juxtaposition of elements from disparate discourses and subjectivities; self-referentiality and intertextuality, calling attention to the artificiality of the medium; and blank parody, subjecting all discourse to an alternately deadpan or grotesque irony, and negating (unlike modern or pre-modern parody) any implicit perspective of healthy normality” (Manuel 229).
Digital sampling and Animal Collective are together an appropriate and interesting lens through which to explore the employment of the aforementioned in contemporary music.
The problem of producing original art is articulated with grace in the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land:
“APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers (Eliot).”
˙(3 llıǝu) ”ʎʇıxǝldɯoɔ ɔıɯɥʇʎɥɹ puɐ ɔıpolǝɯ ‘ɔıuoɯɹɐɥ ǝɹoɯ puɐ ǝɹoɯ pɹɐʍoʇ uoıʇnloʌǝ uɐ sɐʍ ɯsılɐɯıuıɯ lıʇun dn ɔısnɯ ʎɹnʇuǝɔ-ɥʇ02 ɟo ʇuǝɯdolǝʌǝp ǝɥʇ ɟo ɥɔnɯ ǝɔuıs ‘sɐıq sıɥʇ puɐʇsɹǝpun oʇ ʇlnɔıɟɟıp ʇou sı ʇı ˙˙˙sʞɹoʍ ɹıǝɥʇ uı suɹǝʇʇɐd ɯɥʇʎɥɹ 4/4 ɹɐlnƃǝɹ ƃuısn ɟo ɐǝpı ǝɥʇ ʇɐ ɟɟoɔs sɹǝsodɯoɔ ɔısnɯ-ʇɹɐ ʎuɐɯ“ ‘ɔısnɯ ɔıuoɹʇɔǝlǝ ʇuǝɹɹnɔ ɟo sɔıʇǝɥʇsǝɐ ǝɥʇ puɐ ɯɥʇʎɥɹ :sʇɐǝq ǝɹnsɐǝld uı sǝʇou llıǝu uǝq ˙ʎdnɔɔo oʇ ǝpɹɐƃ-ʇuɐʌɐ ɹoɟ ǝɔɐds pǝʇıɯıl ʎlƃuısɐǝɹɔuı ǝɥʇ suɐoɯǝq ooʇ ɔısnɯ ‘ǝɹnʇɐɹǝʇıl ǝʞıl ˙ɹǝʍolɟ llıʍ ʎǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʇ sǝdoɥ uı sǝɹnʇɐǝɟ pǝɹıʇ ɟo ƃuıɹǝʇɐʍ ǝɥʇ ‘ʎʇılɐuıƃıɹo ɟo ʎʇılıqıssodɯı ǝɥʇ ʇnoqɐ ʎɐʍ ǝɯos uı sı ɯǝod ǝɥʇ
Pop music followed a similar pattern— its birth, for the purposes of this paper in the rock and roll explosion of the 1950’s, a minimalist response to the complexities and inaccessibilities of jazz. The genre evolved cyclically into experimental territory until it was cut down once more in the 1970’s by punk rock, the 1980’s by hardcore, the 1990’s by drone and shoegaze, etc. Mary Russo and Daniel Warner note, “It is possible, but again only in a metaphysical way, to think and talk about music as something that undoes. In as much as it isn’t semantic, doesn’t have that bedrock of meaning, other than having other ways of circumscribing it, it is a deconstructive mood. That all-pervading equivocality and instability is a difficult thing to live with if you’ve accepted it” (Mitchell 279). In many ways, nihilism has replaced whatever voice had fronted music in movements past, and that each epoch of musical art serves to undercut its former in a ferocious refusal to echo it— an ironic effort considering the necessity of reference in rebellion. The practice of digital sampling however, rejects the facade and incorporates the postmodern gesture of pastiche without the prerequisite sneer. Grossberg notes, “Of all the positions within postmodernist debates, Baudrillard’s is the one most willing to celebrate the practices and situations it describes. Yet, the celebration takes a particular form: it is celebration in the face of inevitability, an embracing of nihilism without empowerment, since there is no real possibility of struggle” (Grossberg 175). Present celebration is inherently involving of past cues, which take form in contemporary music as samples and gestures rendered previously. This element of the creative process is highly indicative of the postmodern aesthetic pastiche, in both practice and apparent purpose. Indeed, Jameson writes,
“Pastiche is like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour” (Jameson 114).
By formally involving the past and transforming it to generate something new, postmodern electronic music reconstructs and reevaluates identity and meaning, using borrowed ingredients to constitute a collective whole that is at once referential without remorse and original in its product. “One of the results of this process, as Frederic Jameson has pointed out,” writes Toni Mitchell, “is an increasing predominance of pastiche, incorporation, and even outright plagiarism as an overriding feature of current artistic forms, supplanting the notion of the original author, and expressing “the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture…” (Mitchell 273).
While they are not without their similarities— production of sound without the necessity of vibration, which is present in all acoustic instruments, from the strings in pianos to the drumheads of timpani— the sampler, and by extension digital sampling as a process, is not to be confused with the synthesizer. While the synthesizer imitates the organic tones produced by acoustic instruments, one stage of removal from the natural, the sampler records and then reproduces acoustic sound as digital data, able to be warped and manipulated as the artist sees fit. This removal from the original sound is not unlike the removal postmodernism discusses in reference to information, media, and, perhaps most notably, reality. The manipulation of sound allowed by sampling enacts Baudrillard’s hyperreal, “The simulation of something which never really existed,” in its both its untraceability and unrecognizability from point of origin, and the insignificance of the search. The sound is what it is, whether it is real or not. Benjamin Weill writes that computer music “…superimposes a mediated layer to the architectural environment where it is presented, as if to materialize the increasing blurriness between real and mediated spaces” (Weill 524) and quotes Anthony Discenza’s observation that, “we find ourselves
(click that, it’s “important!”)
“I feel like where our heads are at these days, trying to do this kind of music— I feel like we’re in this strange gray area. There are elements to the music that are very club-oriented; there’s a lot of bass, and it can have really repetitive rhythmic parts. But it meanders a little bit too much to be fully “club” stuff, and there isn’t quite enough heavy energy to be more like a rock show. So I feel like we’re in this weird space. I understand how people might be like, ‘I don’t really understand what’s going on.’”
In music the hyperreal takes new form, burying individual sounds under layers of texture, rendering them indecipherable from the whole. What is important is the piece of music, and its reality is in its subjective experience.
-
Identity, Experimentation and Rapture
Besides contributing sonically to the landscape of their songs, the lyrics of Animal Collective’s songs are closest wedded to a number of features indicative of the postmodern human condition, such as defamiliarization, ontological conflict, and alternative perspectives on reality, particularly in dealing with time and age.
On “Fireworks,” Portner sings, “I can’t lift you up ‘cause my mind is tired, it’s family beaches that I desire/ That sacred night where we watched the fireworks/ They frightened the babies and you know they’ve got two flashing eyes/ And if they are color blind, they make me feel, that (I’m) you’re only what I see sometimes.” It is an interesting lyric considering the lyrical focus of the album on both childhood, looming adulthood and the prospect of parenthood. Here Portner reflects on the pluralized nature of human consciousness, our capacity to and habit of transmigrating our perspectives to others, by comparing his consciousness to a child’s. It is an inescapable aspect of human nature to consider oneself through the lens of another, inventing opinions others have of one, and as such both being constantly influenced by cognitive process and putting on a performance in an effort to control others’ perspectives. Babies don’t do this. The song uses an image of fireworks to exemplify a strictly sensory experience, one unstained by subjectivity and thinking, and parallels it to the way babies experience the world— by sense rather than constituting identity through memory and past experience.
“Cuckoo Cuckoo” opens with a disjointed, disoriented warble “how I lost my boy,” a strangely expositionary introduction to a song that erupts with frightened rage at the imagined loss of a child and the symbolic death of the personal child when one ages: “And I can’t hold what’s in my hand/ Don’t do any good to say this isn’t what I planned/ And little kids sliding down the steel park slide/ Little kids can’t play with things that died/…/ And where’s my mom I want to hold her tight/ She’s so far away from crowded nights.” The song enacts the torment of the sentiment itself and the personal crisis of its consideration by juxtaposing angelic swoons and piano twinkles against a thunderous cacophony of noise. Jacques Attali defines noise as:
“The term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague … But just as death is nothing more than an excess of life, noise has always been perceived as a source of exaltation, a kind of therapeutic drug…” (Mitchell 279).
Noise in the song serves to enact the interference that occurs when one ages and also the inherent distortion of reflection— one can never observe a moment past except through the lens of the present….
blah blah etc. etc. whatever it just gets more boring from there.
But if you read all of that, B^D
Alopecia - Why? - 2008
Alopecia is the kind of album that one comes around a handful of times in a lifetime of listening. It is largely genreless, culling gestures from contemporaries that are immediately recognizable— Yoni’s hip-hop cadence and sensibility, a solid rhythm section with all the guitars and pianos expected of “indie” rock— but these do less to organize the album amongst its peers than to act as vehicles for Alopecia’s sweat and swagger, an airing of personality too frightening for other modes. It is at once revolutionary and unimitatable, both in how it sounds and the places it’s willing to take us.
In Alopecia we are witness more to the postmodern human condition than we are perhaps comfortable with. The perversion of the frame through which we watch the action of the album is distinctly human— our individual experience of the universe is highly subjective— and the lens here is dirty, it shakes because the hand that holds us quivers, and it is difficult and unimportant in the moment to differentiate between the real and imagined. If we believe that the encounters voiced are rooted in truth we’re denying ourselves the real pleasure of observing them. Perhaps instead Yoni is lending us at different intervals opposing sets of eyes: the manic, the devastated, the indifferent, the paranoid, the obsessed— so as to allow us visitation into these possibilities, “Here, take a look through this one.” The capacity of man to wear these eyes speaks to how we are now, we are flighty and conflicted, at once insane and sane in an insane world. Hamlet’s downfall was madness, but Lear’s was indecision. Burrough’s Lee saw monsters. In Alopecia we stop and ask ourselves if the monsters are not ourselves.
So, of course, the lyricism is incredible. The album has the thematic and symbolic depth of the best contemporary poetry, and prevents itself from going too far overboard by rooting itself to a few concrete images and sentiments: sickness, death, what it is to be a father’s son, among others. We’re never asked to observe the absurd, only to appreciate the absurdity of the everyday. For an album so harrowing and paranoid, juxtaposition of lyric against light instrumentation relieve us enough between the economically deployed moments of true beauty (“While I’m alive I’ll feel alive, and what’s next I guess I’ll know when I’ve gotten there”), allowing delicately some momentary gasps of air before submerging us back into ourselves. The presentation, however, is where it all comes together. We can call this a hip-hop album without much regret, and as such it pounds away underneath its lyrics, both driving and enacting them (which, one might argue, is how songs should always work). But Why? hits it just right, the feedback is well-earned, the bells tasteful and complimentary to everything else going on, the awesome bleepy bit at the end of “Brook & Waxing” thematically appropriate.
Alopecia isn’t for everyone, but it is willing to take up that charge. I can’t speak as to whether its a good thing to relate, but it is like so many things inescapable; hearing phrased that which you’ve felt and wondered if you’re the only one.
For the next 2 months or so I’ll be writing a bit on what I consider required listening— 52 albums to listen to, swim around in, consider and maybe grow to adore “before you croak.”
Lightning, Thunder, Strike - The Go! Team - 2004
It’s funny, when I think of “video game music,” the sonic image conjured is not that of horns and thundering bass drums from the dusty milk crate backlog of hip-hop’s dirtier, nor songs melodically driven by what I’m pretty sure but can’t be positive is some kind of flute— complimented by occasional chants, and not of those nu-tribal variety but the “we will not be defeated!” of dusty-kneed tee-ballers. Lightning, Thunder, Strike, while certainly attracting some audience upon its debut, seems perhaps best known for its contribution to LittleBigPlanet. The double take of those hearing “Get It Together” without a game controller in hand is always amusing, but the song and activity compliment each other in a way that is appropriate if not masterful. We have here an album more about fun and togetherness and shared victory than anything. It at once recalls game-day, too captured by joy to allow the memory to be hazed and so distanced by layers of samples and endless filters like too many records trying “nostalgic” attempt, and acknowledges how we’ve all gotten a little older and a little harder, but damned if we don’t still like to play. For this reason, “Get It Together” is the perfect video game song, a baseball stadium chant in the comfort of your dormitory. And if you’ve traded in Chumbawamba for J Dilla or Big League Chew for a smoking bong, well that’s just fine.
The fleeting duration of The Go! Team’s debut album is a bizarro pep rally. All of the elements are there, the band marches on while the cheerleaders yip call-outs, etc. etc. But the difference here is that we get the impression that everyone is playing together, everyone is represented, and we all want the same thing. Joining the high school bleacher creatures are buzzsaw surf-guitarists, private-lesson pianists, turntabling crate-diggers (or bloggers for that matter), and that quiet kid from 5th period English playing some of the most heart-stoppingly virtuosic harmonica you’ve heard. And those of us just joining for the spectacle are armed with our hands and our own voices. This is an album you know just about all the lyrics to on one listen because you learned them while singing along.
Ps. This is easily the best youtube for this song imaginable.
