The Singular Brilliance of Glee

It's been a busy few months, I've moved to Germany and not had much time to finish new blogbook chapters. Things are calming down now though, and I hope to write more regularly in the coming weeks.

However, I did recently collaborate with Georgia Mulligan on a listicle about the television series Glee, which you can find over at her blog: The Idiot Box. Through the format of a deeply subjective ranking of all the characters from worst to best, we try to make sense of this hugely influential show, its successes and its many failings.

I was a big fan of Glee when it started, and continued to find the show fascinating as it progressed through its six seasons, mainly because it deals quite uniquely with the way in which people use real pop music in their lives. As the only musical show to make use of extant songs, which fully exist  within the diegesis of the characters, it presents a listener-focused understanding of how music works, what it can do and what it means. The American pop repertoire is presented not only as an instruction manual for life and love, but as a set of tools and costumes through which action can be taken. The artists referenced in the show — not only their media personas but their song-specific vocal personas — are treated as a pantheon of gods and heroes, whose fables are editable and whose identities are open-source.

Chapter 2.3: What is Music? (Three Deterritorialisations)

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

The previous chapter in this series used a single moment from Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ to discuss the concept of musical power as it is exercised by the vocal-subject. ‘oo heaven knows’: this is the moment when the voice takes control of the surrounding instrumental forces and begins to use it for her own devices. In the terminology that I set up earlier in the series, this is also the moment when the ‘track’ becomes a ‘song’ – the becoming-song of the music.

In these next two chapters, I will focus even closer on this moment, in order to test some of the implications of the framework that I have so far constructed – vocal-subject, objective instrumental forces, song, track, music – for ‘I Feel Love’ and for vocal pop music in general. This is particularly important because of the potentially fraught political and ethical implications of following such easy cleavages (between subject and object, voice and instruments, individual and society), when the sort of Adorno-inspired hermeneutics described in earlier chapters have been so extensively challenged in recent decades by more radical, and more optimistic, bodies of theory. To these ends, I will attempt to embed my analysis more deeply within the highly political aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari, and thence to confront it with the scholarship that arose from the UK rave movement in the ‘90s (Simon Reynolds, Jeremy Gilbert & Ewan Pearson, Drew Hemment), which was so clearly informed by their philosophy from its inception.

Chapter 2.2: Power and Agency in Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject 

The first part of this essay series was about ‘vocal-subjects’ who could resist but never redirect, overpower, capture or possess the ‘objective instrumental forces’ that, along with the vocal-subject, constitute the power division of each ‘songworld’. These were vocal-subjects caught in the dominating and structuring grid of beats, or the oppressive gravitational pull of a particular groove. Giorgio Moroder’s epochal synth groove, which rolls inexorably through the heart of Donna Summer’s 1977 hit ‘I Feel Love’, might seem to function in a similar manner. A pioneering moment in the shift in beat technology from virtuoso disco/funk ensemble to icy electro automation, ‘I Feel Love’’s groove seemed to remove something of the plasticity of the disco beat, alienating it from the act of its production.¹ Like the tracks discussed in Chapter 1.3 (following the distinction that I make between ‘tracks’ and ‘songs’ in that chapter), ‘I Feel Love’ features a deeply coercive, regulatory beat – drilling home an unchanging, driving Moog pattern which would seem to predetermine what is and isn’t possible for the vocal-subject to perform, in terms of melody and rhythm.

However, from the perspective of the vocal-subject (i.e. as the song is experienced, rather than as we ‘know’ it to have been created), I will argue that ‘I Feel Love’ works in a very different way to the tracks previously analysed, even that it qualifies as a ‘song’ rather than a ‘track’. This is predicated upon the agency that Donna Summer’s vocal-subject displays in shaping and producing the ‘terrain’ of the songworld. She performs her control over the beat through a series of ‘high-power musical actions’, which will be the main object of analysis in this essay (already discussed briefly in the previous chapter).

Chapter 2.1: Taking the Initiative: An Introduction to Musical Power Analysis

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

> The key terrain of power struggle in the pop song is the moment of transformation between verse and chorus.

>> There are no stakes higher than this moment.

>>> To control this transformation is to control the direction and meaning of the song, and to subjugate it to particular goals or interests.

Over the course of Part 1 of this essay series, I’ve tried to lay out the fundamental opposition – between ‘vocal-subject’ and ‘objective musical forces’ – that produces what we know as songs. I have introduced the notion of a power relationship between these two elements, instrumental in creating meaning and even political potency, but so far I have focused on a power relationship that effectively works in only one direction. The elements which come together to form the band track, accompaniment track, backing, beat, riddim etc. – the ‘objective musical forces’ – constitute a monolithic environment, flow, space-time, lifeworld, habitus, etc., within which the vocal-subject exists, to which it is subject and against which it can resist with varying degrees of success.

Chapter 1.5: Music and the Societies of Control, or, Why Adorno Would Have Liked Burial

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

Theodor W. Adorno would have liked Burial’s music. This is a ridiculous statement of course, not only because it is impossible to verify, but because if he were still alive when the Burial LP was released – a cantankerous old public intellectual of 102 – he would almost certainly have disliked it, dismissing it with all the other beat-driven commodity music whose slight innovations of timbre, texture and timing still pale in comparison to the radical freedom of 1910s expressionism. But to accept this would be to accept Adorno as the elitist, culturally imperialist music critic, constructing ad hoc theories to valorise his own taste whilst patronisingly proscribing all real agency by non-academic musicians in advance. This is not the Adorno that I’ve been making use of in these essays, and it is not an Adorno that has any real use in contemporary music criticism. Moreover, even if the above characterisation is an exaggeration, I still think any such a gloss on Adorno confuses the conclusions of his theories with their processes and rationale.

To take Adorno’s sociology of music seriously as a critical tool, and not just an ad hoc construction based on his personal tastes or on the music’s actual material relations of production, is to ask: what kind of music would Adorno be promoting if he were a music writer of today?¹ In this essay, I suggest that the exceptional popular and critical reception of Burial can be understood with reference to Adorno, in particular his writing on Mahler, as a particularly ‘truthful’ (or, at any rate, convincing) expression of the contemporary subject within what Gilles Deleuze and others have called ‘the societies of control’. Along with the music of James Blake, I frame Burial’s music in terms of an Adorno-friendly strategy of resistance on the part of a musical (vocal-)subjects, against the oppressive social conditions of the day. What’s more, I will (of course) argue that Burial’s achievement of this relies on a direct engagement with the categories that I’ve been developing over the course of the previous chapters: vocal-subject, objective instrumental forces, song world, technologies of control.

Chapter 1.4: Asymmetrical Warfare: Voice, Topic, Resistance

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

The previous essays in this series have begun to look at the power relationship inherent in all pop songs, between the ‘vocal-subject’ and the ‘objective musical forces’. The last essay in particular concentrated on the power and control that these instrumental forces exert on the vocal-subject, in terms of ‘technologies of control’ (timbral, rhythmic, dynamic, textural), but also ways in which the vocal-subject can resist this domination. The strategies of resistance addressed in those analyses, through co-opting, subverting, derailing or ironising the instrumental forces, constitute what I would call resistance through strength, which is often effected through the unique linguistic power of the vocals, allowing them to assign meaning directly, as well as their strategic placement in time relative to the beat.

In this essay, I will explore some very different ways in which the vocal-subject can resist the power of the instrumental forces – what I’ve previously called the ‘song world’ or ‘situation’ of the song – focusing instead on the possibility of critique and resistance through an affirmation of weakness. Rather than beginning from a discussion of objective musical forces and their ‘technologies of power’, this discussion begins with the vocal-subject and how, through ‘asymmetrical’ power relations and irreconcilable difference, their very weakness can become their strength. With this shift in focus from forces to subject, there is an accompanying shift from class-based politics to identity politics, ethics and post-colonialist thought. Yet the ‘sonic warfare’ metaphor still carries, feeding into the notion of ‘assymetrical warfare’: conflict situations between unevenly-matched groups, such as in guerrilla warfare.

Chapter 1.3: Beat Control, Power Chords

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

In the last two chapters, I set out the concept of the 'vocal-subject' in the pop song, as it exists within the 'song world' given form by the 'objective musical forces'. The relationship between these two elements of the song produces meaning through the distribution of power and control, agency and domination. In the chapters that constitute Part 1 of this essay series, I focus on just one particular direction of this power relation. This particular chapter will focus on the following two questions:

1. How is the vocal-subject dominated and controlled by the objective musical forces?
2. How does the vocal-subject resist this domination and control?

To address these questions, this chapter focuses on those pop recordings in which the objective musical forces exert a relentlessly dominating and structuring force, against which the vocal-subject has very little power. A vocal-subject can be controlled and structured through being 'contained' within a metre and key, coerced into following a certain structural progression or moulded into a pre-established melodic or rhythmic identity. However, these songs actually materialise their forces of domination sonically, allowing for a more overt playing out of power struggles, quite removed from the 'standardising' coercion evoked in Adorno’s critiques of pop and jazz, which allow an ‘illusory freedom’ to be maintained.

The two key musical dimensions by which instrumental forces in pop tracks manifest excessive power and control are: 1) through rhythmic-harmonic repetition, either on a small scale (beat-to-beat) or a larger scale (looped progressions/motifs), and 2) through ‘heavy’ and ‘powerful’ timbres (or textures). We might, after Michel Foucault (2004), label these as two ‘technologies’ of power by which the vocal-subject is subjugated, ordered and controlled. They vaguely correspond to his two categories of regulatory ‘discipline’ and spectacular ‘punishment’, and can be differentiated as below:

Rhythmic-harmonic    Examples: constant beats, grooves, looped progressions, pre-existent cyclic structures, grounds Dance Control Discipline Regulatory Seductive Centripetal ‘Black noise’

Timbre    Examples: thick, dense, heavy overwhelming timbres, distortion, overdrive, power chords Rock Power Punishment Spectacular Coercive Centrifugal ‘White noise’

In the essay that follows, I will discuss the particular qualities of each ‘technology’ of power, making particular use of the work of Steve Goodman and his book Sonic Warfare (2010), but extrapolating his ideas onto the terrain of the song itself, and the sonic battles fought between vocal-subject and instrumental forces.