“Some revolution is gonna happen today”: Reflections on Billie and Benjamin
The apparently lovely Billie Piper managed to survive appearing on the repulsive Friday Night Project, in part because, as an actor, she was able to play the part of a celebrity guest, preferable, in the circumstances, to actually being one. Her music made only the briefest of appearances; unfortunate, but not surprising.
“Because We Want To” [MP3], though, is mildly amazing. A pop song from not really all that long ago, but how completely incomprehensible it sounds. Perhaps it is just old enough to have become defamiliarized, giving what is still recognizibly and obviously (banally) a pop song the faint air of the uncanny. Two steps backward in pop history, before Xenomania and Richard X’s modernism, just prior to the Swedish hegemony heralded by “Baby One More Time.” What is uncanny, then, is how unfamiliar the landscape is when we take these two short steps: we get pre-Timbaland R&B modulated by post-acid house production.
As an aside, the complete dependence of British pop since the late ’80s on acid house/hardcore seems to have gone largely unremarked; the best example, of course, are Girls Aloud, whose latest album possibly marks pop’s complete emancipation from rock and roll. Hence the confusion of so many over the structure of GA’s songs; “there’s no chorus”: well, these aren’t verse-chorus-verse rock songs, they’re dance tracks with builds and breaks and repeats (the other complaint about the new tracks is that they fade out in arbitrary places; but of course one of the significant features of dance records is that they are plateaus, they don’t come to a climax or conclusion, there’s never any reason for them to stop). I’d like to try and make an argument that this carries over into GA’s lyrical and affective content, which rejects the interiority characteristic of rock music (Girls Aloud don’t do love songs).
Interesting that this understanding of the present arises out of discussing the past, and perhaps that’s the (Benjaminian) point. The experience of the strangeness of the past can lead us to historicism, to the view that everything has its right time in the unfolding of history (the past is incomprehensible except inasmuch as it explains the present). But when we experience precisely the same strangeness in the present, or what we had taken to be the present, we come closer to Benjamin’s understanding of historical materialism, of the present as radically contingent, not a result of history, but the moment in which history is produced. Or, as Sartre puts it:
Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge. Then, perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at last that new violence which is raised up in you by old, oft-repeated crimes. But, as they say, that’s another story: the history of mankind. The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join the ranks of those who make it.
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“Hence the confusion of so many over the structure of GA’s songs; “there’s no chorusâ€?:”
That’s one of the reasons I love them so much, but also why I love some of the more contemporary guitar-based acts around at the moment like Arcade Fire and Maximo Park. Down with verse-chorus hegemony!
Comment by Marty @ 1/19/2006 2:27 am