Critical Review - Andes 10-17

The Andes essay brought up some interesting points regarding authenticity in the punk community, and how punks of different ages and class distinctions each construct the punk identity differently. "Poseurs" come in several possible variations: those who dress "punk" but don't know the unspoken rules of hardcore shows (for example, if someone falls down while moshing and you don't help them up, you betray your neophyte status in the subculture); those who just wear the clothes because their trendy but don't embody punk values; and those who dress punk and listen to the music just to piss their parents off. What separates the authentic punks from the poseurs is the internalization of the punk ethic, or the adoption of the punk "state of mind." Of course, a precise definition of this state of mind would be impossible to agree upon within the subculture, but what is important is that a state of mind cannot be mass-produced or sold in stores. If punk authenticity is judged by commitment to an ethic, how do incorporation, commercialization and "trendiness" function within this scene?

Andes highlights a quotation by one self-proclaimed punk who claimed others were not really punks because they did not have Doc Martens -- ironically, this reliance on commercial status for subcultural identity is exactly the "middle class bullshit" that punk opposes. Since the punk ethic cannot be reproduced and sold, the commercial incorporation of punk cannot be an authentic spreading of the subculture. However, it could create "poseurs" who could potentially gain the subcultural capital of "punk rock gods." After all, the poseur-punk binary is not very concete; specifically, as Andes says, a person can change between these two identities over time, and often genuine punks started out being viewed as poseurs. The gender and age divides are clear in this subculture, and since it is seen by many as a working-class culture, and suburban teenage punks might be seen as "just pissing off their parents" even if they are actually committed to punk values. 

Critical Review on Salvato, 10/13

Salvato focuses on controllability, especially control of the body, as indicative as professionalism. As an example, he looks at Britney Spears experiencing a "descent from professional to amateur" around 2007, and how in order to "control the amateur body" she is absent from the cover art, and her voice is drowned in electronics on her next album, and how this is ironically labeled a "brilliant" album by the mainstream media. In this context, he says, the term professional "signifies slick, glossy, untroubled, and untroubling" (76). Here he equates the mainstream use of "professional" to refer to a type of dispassionate, neutral behavior. Chris Crocker can never be seen as a sincere figure, part of the "manufacture of sincerity" because he is deemed an unstable body, whose excesses of crying, emotion, bodily movements, and other behaviors allow him to be marginalized as an amateur. 


I found it interesting that in Salvato's view, the idea of professionalism is linked to a restoration of confidence in the American social order. The narrow view of professionalism disenfranchises voices that might go against the grain of the dominant social order. However, counter to this narrowness is the potential for democratization via the internet and technology, and the dichotomies of professionalism will inevitably be challenged. Why is it important that society's amateur/professional dichotomy, as interpreted by Salvato, is centered on the body and body control, and what/whose agenda is this dichotomy serving? 

Witch House Field Notes

I am approaching these fieldnotes from a combination of virtual and live research methodologies. The live component brought me to AS220 last night for a show that included Dream Boat, a local band that was billed as "monolithic Witch House sounds." I later found out, in talking to them after the show, that they did not actually associate themselves with the microgenre of witch house, and that the description on the AS220 website was actually the words of someone at their label, amdiscs. While their live set sounded hugely influenced by Salem, White Ring, oOoOO (basically, most of the music coming out of the Disaro and Tri Angle labels), with similar samples, noise and vocal filtering, it wasn't surprising that they rejected the "witchy" label. The label of "witch house" seems to be much more concrete for sites and blogs (like Pitchfork) that fetishize the splintering of genres in the internet age, and it is used more fluidly among the musicians themselves that fall roughly into this category. For example, the terms "drag" and "rape gaze" have also been used interchangeably, but haven't caught on nearly as much. Most bands themselves don't want to put themselves inside a microgenre as micro as "witch house," but these labels are useful for internet consumption and discovery of music. Musicians roughly within this genre also tend to a more ironic stance concerning this issue of identity within the genre, such as in Travis Edegy's blog post entitled "13 ways to make a great witch house song" ('#1: don't listen to any "witch house." create with your inner witch'). Note that Edegy himself puts quotes around "witch house," unsure whether to lend this label any credibility.

One topic that I plan to research further in this project is the subject of translocality and the importance of the internet in the emergence of this music. Talking to Dream Boat, they mentioned one of their influences was chopped-and-screwed rap. The connections between screwed rap and witch house are interesting. Chopped-and-screwed rap was popularized mainly by DJ Screw in Houston before his death in 2000. According to a New York Times article on DJ Screw and witch house (which gave the mainstream confirmation of witch house as a genre, even moreso than Pitchfork), Robert Disaro of Disaro Records started the label in 2007 after being a chopped-and-screwed fan in Houston, where the sphere of influence of screwed rap mainly was. However, Salem (more specifically John Holland of Salem) was making music at this same time that was heavily influenced by the sound and techniques that had been used by DJ Screw in the last decade. Salem was influenced by this sound by hearing it on the internet in Michigan, not because they had any knowledge of the chopped-and-screwed scene in Houston. In such a young genre, these translocal connections are impossible to ignore in studying the emergence of the genre.

Critical Review 10/10 - Miller "Just Add Performance"

Having experience with Guitar Hero and its fanatical players, I would agree with the article's perception of the gender imbalance among GH players. All of the hardcore players I knew in high school who could play "Through The Fire And Flames" on Expert were males; however, this doesn't seem too anomalous considering the male bias in video games in general. As one part of the chapter mentions, Guitar Hero and Rock Band are not strictly video games, given the performative aspect that makes them similar to karaoke in certain settings. On the one hand, consumers of video games are disproportionately male, but karaoke usually draws a more 20s-30s female pop-oriented crowd. The game, in its capacity to entertain both players and onlookers, has feminizing aspects, insofar as it "draws attention to the unstable, performative nature of identity" (143) through the staging of virtual (through an avatar) and live "performances." 

The aspects of the game by which "hegemony is queered . . . and subverted through overarticulation" (143) are the cause of homophobic backlash on the internet, and South Park's treatment of players as "fags." It is also the aspect of the game which allows almost anyone -- even people who would not normally perform musically for a crowd -- to entertain a whole room or bar by performing with a video game controller. The player/performer, in front of their TV or in a bar, is playing the part of a "rock god," and bringing that affect to the audience, mostly by bodily gestures. Do you agree with what the chapter suggests, that Guitar Hero performance draws attention to the nature of gender as performative? Also, is it the male aspects of rock culture or those of video game culture that are responsible for the high proportion of male GH players?

Critical Review of McRobbie (10/6)

McRobbie's discussion of the "hyper-reality of pleasure" (291) brings up the relationship between the body, the music, and technology - or, as she says, the "new technologies of the mass media." In the technological '90s, 24-hour new broadcasts are possible, so it is also possible for a DJ to sustain a rave for days on end. From this image of rave, the music seems to function as a means to a state of (possibly drug-enhanced) bodily pleasure. The neverending sets of dance music are meant to be trance-inducing, to create a certain state of consciousness and a social state between the partiers. This social state functions as a space in which to perform the new sexual norms of youth culture, such as the "emancipation" of young people, especially girls, from romance, and the introduction of "friendship, equality, and difference" into the "vocabulary of relationships" (423). As McRobbie discusses, the way rave manifests, and the "signs, symbols, objects, styles and other signifying texts" are a result of social tensions, for example the combination of the excitement of the event, the hyper-sexualized feminine form, and the fears surrounding AIDS and other dangers present at raves. How does this complicated set of social pressures and attitudes translate into a subculture, and into a reimagining of "modes of femininity"?

McRobbie makes the point that raves, during which "a saturnalia of body and mind" sometimes went on for days, transmitted the club culture of black and gay 1980s culture in the UK to white, working-class groups in the '90s. I see strong parallels to Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour," which caused a similar transmission of subculture information into the white working-class public in an earlier time period. She also used this aspect of the rave scene to connect it with an earlier drug culture, the hippie subculture of the Sixties, since raves often verged on becoming days-long peace gatherings similar to hippie festivals. This, to me, seems more subversive to the superculture than any other aspect of the rave subculture, since this claiming of the "right to party" threatens the social norms that keep economies running. In this sense can rave culture be considered political, in its definition of a space where youth can exist outside the norms of the superculture?