Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism

185 Pages·2015·1.042 MB·English

by  Robin James

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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
First published by Zero Books, 2015
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station
Approach,
Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK
[email protected]
www.johnhuntpublishing.com
www.zero-books.net
For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our
website.
Text copyright: Robin James 2014
ISBN: 978 1 78279 598 8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948080
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no
part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written
permission from the publishers.
The rights of Robin James as author have been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Sweet Nothing
2. Resilience
3. Biopolitics
4. MRWaSP
5. Melancholy
6. Siren Songs
Chapter 1
Hearing Resilience
1. Soars, Drops, Stutters: Some features of EDM-pop
2. The Resilient Noisiness of Neoliberal Pop
Chapter 2
Into the Death
1. Death as Negation or An-Arche
2. Death as Divestment or Non-Resilience
.de 3. Taking MIDIjunkies Into the Death
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
Chapter 4
(Little) Monsters & Melancholics
1. Gaga’s Post-Goth Resilience
2. Rihanna’s Melancholic Damage
Conclusion
Alternatives & Adaptations
1. Bad Investments
2. Post-Soar Biopolitics: We Can’t Stop
Notes
Bibliography
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
Acknowledgements
Thinking is hard and writing is even harder. I couldn’t have finished this book
without the intellectual, moral, and material support of more people than I can
name here.
First, some parts of this book are reworked versions of writing that was
previously published elsewhere. The discussion of the soar in chapter one follows
form my “Loving the Alien” article in The New Inquiry. Rob Horning invited me to
write on Attali, and his brilliant editorial work on that piece shaped my thinking
in that article and in this book. He also edited my May 2013 TNI piece on
Rihanna, which was the foundation for chapter four. Chapter two is a reworked
version of my December 2013 article in The Journal of Popular Music Studies
Trans/Queer Special Issue; I’d like to thank both the guest editors, Tavia Noyng’o
and Francesca Royster, as well as my anonymous reviewer, for their positive
influence on my work.
Other parts of the book began as lectures. I delivered parts of chapters three
and four as invited talks at Luther College (Holly Moore organized this talk),
Rhodes College (thanks Sarah Hansen & Leigh Johnson), Colby College (at Rick
Elmore’s invitation), and Wayne State (thanks Steve Shaviro). Parts of the
introduction and conclusion formed my talk at philoSOPHIA 2014; I’m extremely
grateful to my co-panelists Sina Kramer and Jana McAuliffe, as well as my
interlocutors at the session for their feedback.
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
just not horrible, but is actually positively great.) I’m also grateful for the support
of colleagues at XCPhilosophy, Cyborgology, SPEP, and in the philosophy
department at UNC Charlotte. I’m also thankful for the support of similarly
progressive-minded philosophers, including Tina Chanter, Emily Zakin, Elaine
Miller, Bill Martin, and Darrell Moore, who taught me everything I know, as well
as colleagues at the XCP Collective and at Cyborgology.
More than anyone else, my partner and sound art collaborator christian.ryan
made this book possible. He listens to the first version of every single idea I have,
and provides invaluable feedback. He puts up with ignored chores while I rush to
meet writing deadlines. He keeps me from underselling myself and
underestimating my abilities. Without his intellectual and personal support, I
couldn’t do any of this.
Atari Teenage Riot lyrics are used with the kind permission of Digital Hardcore
Music. I am both excited and grateful that Digital Hardcore Music recognizes the
importance of fair use. It is simply impossible for me, a humanities professor, to
pay for all the lyrics I’d wanted to cite in this book; thus, I’ve had to delete and
either paraphrase or work around lyrics from artists whose rights are owned by
more profit-oriented companies. This means I can’t treat their work with the same
detail and rigor as I can ATR’s.
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
Introduction
1. Sweet Nothing
A number one hit in the UK and a top ten hit in the US, Calvin Harris’s “Sweet
Nothing” seemed to catch on because it, like his 2011 hit with Rihanna, “We Found
Love,” evoked the zeitgeist in a particularly apt and compelling way. Featuring
vocals by Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine), it sets the story of a
woman overcoming her emotionally and physically abusive relationship to
Harris’s trademark EDM soars. The lyrics tell us of a woman who is exhausted,
hollowed out to a shell of her former self; she’s running on fumes, living on, as the
title says, “nothing.” Nothing is all she’s got, so Welch’s character has to figure out
some way to capitalize on it. Welch’s character doesn’t just dialectically turning
nothing into something (as in the first few sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic), she
resiliently recycles “nothing” into the fuel she needs for living.
Instead of becoming some thing, “nothing” fuels a metabolic process, an
explosive reaction that generates energy and momentum. The song’s lyrics depict
Welch’s character as she undergoes this process. More interestingly, its musical
composition performs the process the lyrics merely describe. If we listen closely to
the song and how it works, we can hear how this metabolic process distills energy
from nothing. In the same way that Welch’s character has found the sweet spot at
which nothing alchemically transforms into life force, the song, as I will explain
more fully below, is composed so that “nothing” intensifies and augments sonic
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
last eight beats of the chorus’s first half as Welch sings the song’s titular phrase,
“sweet nothing.” Here, the snare goes from a 16th-note ostinato to a roll, which it
holds for 7 beats as the bass drops out, and the pitch of a windy, “swoosh”-like
synth ascends as its timbre sounds more constrained. The song is closing in on the
upper limits of ability to hear speed and pitch—that is, the point at which we
would hear nothing. The song builds its climax out of “nothing”—both literally,
with the word itself, and metaphorically, by blowing our ears. On the 7th beat, the
soar peaks; the snare roll spills over, on the eighth beat, into a less intense two-
sixteenth-eighth-note motive that echoes the rhythm of the song’s main treble
synth, and which replaces Florence’s vocals as the primary melodic voice in the
second half of the chorus. We land relatively hard on the downbeat of the bridge.
The soar-hit structure works like a weak harmonic cadence in a more traditional,
tonal song. Instead of resolving dissonance, “Sweet Nothing’s” soar-hit compresses
nothing so intensely it explodes into an energetic burst—here, the “bubbly,”
energetic bridge. Nothing isn’t resolved into some thing, but metabolized into the
energy that fuels an explosive climax of musical pleasure.
But this soar, and its repetition later in the song, aren’t’ the song’s main climax;
they’re just intermediary steps up to it. This climax happens at the end of the
chorus’s first repetition, about ⅔ of the way through the song. Here, the
percussion and bass initially drop out, bringing us down to our lowest low so the
subsequent high will seem all the more intense. Welch sings over string synths for
four bars, at which point the soar begins. The instrumentals are basically the same
as in the choruses, but her vocals intensify the affective energy of this soar by,
perhaps paradoxically, cutting their rate of repetition. Instead of repeating
“nothing” more rapidly, Welch sings it only twice, holding it for several bars, once
as the soar builds, and then, significantly, right at the peak of the soar and on into
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.
peak of the original’s soars. What was once excess is now a baseline norm. If
you’re already maxed out from the beginning, it seems like there’s no room left to
build a soar. How, then, do you make the song more intense? You do this by
actually crossing over into the sonic “nothing” that Harris’s soar only suggests.
Harris’s soar maxes out by pushing up against the threshold of our rhythmic
perception. The only way to squeeze more out of it was to cross this threshold into
noise and/or silence. And that’s what Diplo and Grandtheft do. They takes Harris’s
soar, extend it by four measures, and instead of spilling over into a peak, drop the
bottom out (In Chapter 1 I talk more extensively about this technique, common in
dubstep and trapstep, which I call a pause-drop). In the last measure of the first
half of the chorus, the remix cuts all instrumentals and inserts a male-sounding
voice in place of Welch’s natural voice. This male voice says “sweet,” but doesn’t
complete the titular hook; instead of saying “nothing,” he doesn’t say anything. If
the original soars up to a bubbly plateau, this remix falls of cliff, landing hard on
the downbeat of the next measure. Eviscerating and hollowing out the soar only
makes it more powerful—sort of like how Obi-Wan Kenobi warns Darth Vader “If
you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly
imagine.”2 The remix had to “sweeten” the musical pleasure of the original, and
because Harris’s mix already hit the “sweet spot” (it was already maxed out), the
only way Diplo could further sweeten that sweet spot is to pass over into
“nothing,” into a dubby-pause-drop.
“Sweet Nothing” was a very popular song. This concept of “sweet nothing”—
both as an abstract idea, and as a process you undergo (as either Florence’s
character in the song, or someone listening to the song unfold)—must strongly
resonate with audiences across the globe. But why? Why does this song—this
story, this style of composition—seem to really speak to people now, in this
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James, Robin. Resilience and Melancholy : Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=1925433.
Created from west on 2022-10-18 02:09:15.