The F Word

George Orwell had this to say about the poetry of W.B. Yeats:

Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist...the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that “all this”, or something like it, “has happened before”, then science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny.

Orwell was paying particularly close attention to Yeats's poem "The Second Coming", which characterises history's movement as one of 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre'.

If history moves in spirals then progress is impossible: it's an analysis that feels strangely appropriate for one of the most divisive publications on the British market at present: Conor McNicholas's weekly music magazine NME. The cover of the 05/05/09 issue contained a phrase that would rank highly in a hypothetical list of "The Most Glib Statements I Have Ever Encountered in the Media" (along with "Blackberry for Everyone", displayed in the window of a T-Mobile store in Glasgow). The phrase ran as follows:

FLEET FOXES: THIS SUMMER'S MGMT?

Not only does this analysis feel utterly redundant - surely Fleet Foxes were last summer's Fleet Foxes? - but its logic is also deeply dubious. For, like the contemporary culture industry, with its constant reiteration of old themes, styles and crazes under the "Retro" rubric, it subscribes to the selfsame cyclical view of history that Orwell finds so troubling in Yeats's writing. While purportedly celebrating innovation, the NME actually apotheosises the past by figuring it as a pair of shoes that are repeatedly filled, vacated and refilled. The more things change, the more they stay the same - this is the implicit message of the NME's obssession with all things emergent.




It's tempting, then, for those who loathe the NME with a passion - and there are many such individuals, not least among the generation that is the magazine's prime target demographic - to have done with it and label the publication Fascist (this is not a generational instinct - viz. Jennifer Saunders in a December 1982 episode of The Young Ones directing the term at a party-crashing Father Christmas). Mutatis Mutandis: "Translated into political terms, the NME’s tendency is Fascist...the theory that music moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of real innovation." Tempting, but perhaps not advisable, as such labelling has recently been recognised as deeply problematic. Fallacious even: Mike Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, known colloquially as Godwin's Law, penalises those who revert to a Reductio ad Hitlerum form in order to win a debate, based on the adage that, 'As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one'. Godwin explains his creation thus:

In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons. And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the specter of Nazi book-burning...invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope).

To safeguard against this 'particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons', Godwin's law recommends that we consider the use-value of an argument to be nullified once the Reductio ad Hitlerum rears its ugly head. So where does this leave me? Where does it leave my contemporaries that dislike the NME even more strongly than myself? Is my instinctive equation (I came up with the bare bones of this argument in a supermarket queue the instant I had read that headline) of Yeatsian fascism with one of the cornerstones of British music journalism just another contender for the award of my own devising, "The Most Glib Statement I Have Ever Encountered in the Media"? I'll risk it: for the stock it sets in historical reiteration; and for the truly conservative core it retains while paying lip service to innovation, I hereby declare the NME to be - in the Yeatsian mode, and with a small f - fascist.


Sources:

Orwell, George. "W.B. Yeats (1943)", The Occidental Quarterly Online, May 12, 2009. http://www.toqonline.com/2009/05/orwell-on-yeats/ [accessed 25/05/09]

Yeats, W.B. "The Second Coming", The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 2006.

Godwin, Mike. "Meme, Counter-meme", Wired, issue 2.10, Oct 1994. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html [accessed 25/05/09].

A Seasonal Non-Sequitur

For many, the joys of summer are signified by the phrase 'cloudless skies'. I, however, side with Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, whose manifesto affirms:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

Clouds are undoubtedly one of the highlights of the natural world. And their formation obeys one of the most poetic principles of physics: like pearls and the bubbles in champagne, they condense around atmospheric impurities known as 'condensation nuclei'; particles that are anomalous, unwanted, adulterated.

This is also the principle that informs the music of the Argentinian actress-turned-musician, Juana Molina (pictured below). Her subtle, off-kilter songs condense around "mistakes", as she explained in a 2006 interview with the Independent's Phil Meadley:

"I had a problem at this big folk festival in Seattle when the rented keyboard I was using wouldn't load my music samples. The audience were waiting a long time and a few yelled out that I should just sing with my guitar, so I started to sing the keyboard parts with the voice, and it sounded great. So when I returned to the studio I decided that I should sing like the keyboard notes, and that the behaviour of the singing should follow suit. Even if it was out of tempo or didn't fit with the other notes, I had to sing it. So a new world of de-tuning and out-of-time notes opened up to me. I discovered that the note that didn't work at the beginning becomes so beautiful that you build everything around it. It's like the story of the ugly duckling that grows up to be a swan."

A profoundly skewed song such as "La Verdad", from Molina's third album Son, is as beautiful as any pearl or any cloud. I don't long for cloudless skies this summer, not when so much of what is great in this world is founded on imperfection.


Sources:

"The Manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society". http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/manifesto/ [accessed 13/05/09].

Meadley, Phil. "Juana Molina: A Musician Taking Flight", The Independent, Friday 21st July 2006. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/juana-molina-a-musician-taking-flight-408661.html [accessed 13/05/09].

The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire

'This will never end 'cause I want more
More, give me more, give me more'.

With these lines opens one of the most remarkable records of the year so far. Fever Ray (Karin Dreijer Andersson)'s "If I Had a Heart", the first of the ten tracks that make up her self-titled debut album, is ostensibly sung out of a dark place: the distorted voice sounds demonic, the title suggests a lack of humanity. Thus, Mark Pytlik of Pitchfork justly describes the song as 'a shivering, timely meditation on greed, immorality, and lust for power that dovetails nicely with AIG and Madoff '. But whatever "If I Had a Heart" may have to say about the banking crisis, I personally find its opening lyrics redolent of a wholly different concern: that of narrative. However demonic the delivery, these lines are in many ways the right way to open an album. They imply an unquenchable desire which will drive and sustain the musical narrative about to unfold. It has to end, despite the vocalist's assertion of the contrary; but it will not end before its' time: 8 songs in, Dreijer Andersson sings, 'it ain't over/I'm Not Done'.

The well-behaved Chivalric lover knew that wooing wasn't all about results. There was a finer art to be had out of "making love" in the Medieval sense - that is, courtship - than in the contemporary sense. In the most unexpected places, the influence of the Chivalric code is still felt today. It exists in every Richard Curtis film, strung out on sustained desire whose realisation signals the end of the story. It is written into the majority of serial television dramas, which defer narrative consummation by ending every episode with a brief 'Next Week On...' teaser. Wish-fulfillment is the enemy of narrative. This is why Madame Bovary, Flaubert's 'novel about nothing', features a wedding very early on, too early on. Boundless greed is the healthiest of narrative principles; our imaginations have been weaned on what Milan Kundera, in a short story of the same name, calls The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire.


Two exhibitions in the recent history of Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery stand out for their involvement with these issues: last summer's blockbuster, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's The House of Books Has No Windows; and Claire Barclay's Openwide, which closed on the 12th of April. Both exhibitions used the same vocabulary of stagecraft. Barclay's exhibited works - including the specially-commissioned "Subject to Habit" (above) and the objects from across Barclay's career assembled in a sort of site-specific mini-retrospective entitled "Openwide" - looked poised for performance; their component parts resembled props from some arcane ritual. Crucially though, they never did perform for us. They remained in an elegant state of poise.
Most of Cardiff and Bures Miller's installations, on the other hand, actually did spring into activity, resembling personless dramas; uniting light, sound and found objects into short performances that were repeated over and over. They were noisy, kinetic gestamkunstwerks, where "Openwide"was mute and inanimate. But Barclay's work was not stagnant - it required the imaginative input of the desiring viewer to give it life, to break the poise. In Cardiff and Bures Miller's "The Killing Machine" (pictured below), the desiring viewer's task was blunter and more straightforward: the poise could be broken by pressing a big red button.



Wish-fulfillment came too readily in these installations, and the result was a creeping sense - intended or otherwise - of dissatisfaction and alienation. Some of Cardiff and Bures Miller's narratives, such as "Opera for a small room", were very long; but even so they could not contain the longevity of a Claire Barclay installation, whose imagined narrative lasts as long as desire permits it. For better of for worse, Barclay's installations occupy the position of a chaste White Knight, humbly beseeching our consideration with all the thrill of ambiguity, while those of Cardiff and Bures Miller are sexual deviants with no concern for formalities. This may be why it was the latter that was selected for the festival season: amid all the surrounding hubbub, instant-yet-slightly-disappointing gratification carried more weight than chastity ever could.

It's difficult to avoid the negative connotations carried by both sides of this debate. Either we allow greed to be our guiding principle and favour the chivalrous installations of Claire Barclay, or we accept culture as just another dazzling spectacle which sates our desires before they grow monstrous, but - perhaps - weakens our imaginative faculties at the same time. Difficult, but possible. For the Golden Apple of Eternal Desire may have left our economy in ruins, but it is also part of what makes us human, by turning us into readers and not just receptors. There is no escaping it; in art, as in love, the ellipsis will always prove more compelling than the full stop...


A different version of this article appeared in The Student, 17/02/09.


Sources:

Pytlik, Mark. "Fever Ray: Fever Ray", March 20, 2009. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12845-fever-ray/ [accessed 13/05/09].

Kundera, Milan. Laughable Loves. Kent: Faber and Faber, 1974.