"At the insistence of Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were portrayed as musical naifs, barely able to hold their instruments... Their power was to lie in a lack of concern about talent and ability because the message was one of authenticity, albeit in a highly and always already mediated way... The Sex Pistols, though, were close enough to nihilism, first in the hands of Lyndon's lyrics, where everything is to be demolished, then in the capering form of McLaren's manipulable Pistols... The second format of the group can be taken as a logical outcome of the first: having broken down initial resistance, and shown the emptiness of society, and reflected it back, what else was there to do but wallow in the exposed spectacle of collapse...?" Hegarty, 95.
I thought this passage really summed up the amateur aspect of noise that's been attractive to me throughout the course, and the political role I think noise plays well. Noise's position as a great equalizer, disregarding ability or technical skill, makes it an incredible medium for outright statement and pure emotion. Hegarty talks about part of the Pistol's power coming in their ability to usurp the cultural critique of elites as a means of judgement or degradation of their "art" by embracing the aesthetic of failure and destruction as their medium. While he backs off the "authenticity" claim for the second stage of the band, he seems to give the members of the Pistols credit for their behavior outside their onstage performances (if the performance ever truly ended for them) in living the lifestyle of destruction and nihilism that gave them a sense of credibility.
What all this adds up to is my thought that noise is a crucial weapon for the proletarian/uncultured/existentially incensed in society. It serves as a means of expression without equal for accessibility, requiring only a willingness to purge oneself of neuroses or challenge an audience with something boldly, and with abandon. Indeed, the amateur noise artist is the bravest and most profound statement, because it cannot be mediated by their own skill or ability. It becomes pure expression because it can't be controlled, merely stopped or started. Where Merzbow can articulate an oscillation or frequency, the amateur orchestra can only play its heart out, all or nothing. I love that noise provides that opportunity.
The final ellipses I'll touch on in my last section.
"Smith has complained that Merzbow offers a paradigm of collectablitiy and cultural capital, aided by a rhetoric of extremity. I would argue that Merzbow gets around this by limited editions, releasing on many different labels, in different formats, thus making collecting farcical, extremely effortful and unlikely to succeed - thereby presenting a deconstruction of all collecting." Hegarty, 157-158.
So this probably is petty, and I'm happy to admit that, but I really can't get over Merzbow's position as the ultimate noise. I see how the sonic agony he creates is "ultimate" noise as sound but to me that's far different from the idea of noise. And likewise I respect his work's necessity as an antithesis to "music" and as a philosophical statement on, "what is music?" "what is noise?" but again, this role rings untrue with my idea of noise. Perhaps it can best be summed up as I feel noise is too broad to have a single "kingship" that Merzbow seems to have been crowned with. It comes with a certain hollowness I feel about his music, a shallowness that relies on the esoteric, the feeling of a joke being played on his audience.
It ties in with Smith's argument at the start of the excerpt. I completely agree with Smith that Merzbow plays into a paradigm of cultural capital. As Hegarty himself admits, it takes commitment to truly process and begin to see a Merzbow album as music, and the ability to lord that over someone must be irresistible to Noise music buffs. I can just see a version of Jack Black's character in High Fidelity ripping on some noobie for only being into entry level shit like Noisembryo, and not having tracked down the tape version of Timehunter yet. Inexplicably, Hegarty fights fire with fire, arguing that Merzbow defeats the "paradigm of collectability and cultural capital, aided by a rhetoric of extremity" by creating a rhetoric of extremity in the content and distribution of his material. The impossibility of the task only increases the level of cultural capital that comes in a collection, only increases the prestige of appreciation. While it could be argued that Merzbow uses volume to increase the likelihood of disconnect, which would prevent the value of the cultural capital (I've heard X obscure album you don't know/Well, I've heard Y obscure album you don't know) with a game of one-ups-manship that ends in stalemate, I would argue that his use of high profile releases like Merzbox, Metamorphism, or the BMW/Mercedes one off (all of which Hegarty uses to defend Merzbow) reinstill the cultural capital. Where 50 hours of independent Merzbow releases loses cultural capital, Merzbox holds it. Where a limited run of Metamorphism confounds access, excessive packaging returns the mystique, and draws attention to the rarity. By publicizing his obscurity and impenetrability, Merzbow defeats any authenticity his releases may have in those veins, and plays into the cultural capital of his work.
Ultimately, I just don't see Merzbow as the noise messiah. There's a vacuousness I can't shake from his work and behavior. Not a vacuousness of nihilism or intention, but an emptiness that defies its true purpose to all but him. A joke only he gets to laugh at.
-future-
Truthfully, I believe the future of noise is boundless. Things I've heard in this class have surpassed not just the bounds of what I thought constituted music, but the bounds of what I would have considered organized sound. Far be it from me to claim a broad direction for the future of noise, I'll instead speak to the future of noise for me personally, tied in with the recently formed BPO noise project. And then, in the end, I'll play Nostradamus anyway.
My academic background is largely in Film theory, and the cultural pondering that goes hand in hand with it. Through many of my courses over the past few years, "post-modernism" as a vast and vague specter has been present as a thought in most of them, and I've grown rather fond of its innate noisiness. Post-modernism seems to celebrate the proliferation of content, but to me, the chaotic torrent of ubiquitous media and mediation can be nothing other than noise.
Our media landscape is built around impossibly large catalog of information and opinion, be it the internet or the 24 hour news cycle. Further, our demand for an on-demand marketplace encourages a feedback loop of content and confirmation for media companies to generate material and maintain viewership. A clear example of this is the contrasting political dramas of Fox News and MSNBC, simultaneously creating two parallel myths for their viewers to follow. Their cycles of content generation (news stories) and confirmation (spin and punditry) create dueling realities of identical events for their respective viewership. After enough time, their brands of "reality" become reality for their viewership, and content that is outside their "reality" is all noise. For longtime viewers of leaning political coverage, what does not play in concert with their established sense of reality is dismissed as misinformation, ignorance - noise. The result is a society polarized not just by opinion, but by planes of reality.
The irony of this phenomena is that none of these media spheres on their own actually constitutes the "true" reality - a factual understanding of world events. I believe that the future of noise (if for no one other than myself) will come as a rejection of the new construction of these "realities" as the self-determined fallacies they are, and employ noise as a equally legitimate (if somewhat farcical) analog that presents its own "reality": there is no reality.
The platitude "art is a reflection of the time in which it is created" sometimes holds, and my experience with BPO is one of these cases. The first (spontaneous) BPO jam took place at a rehearsal for the Mee-Ow house band (usually Motown and modern pop covers) in the heat of the NUDivest debate. Refusing to take a position on either side of the issue, as I am both uniformed and unwilling to argue for exercise, I saw the debate as a microcosm of the wider cultural phenomena of selective realities. While both sides have completely legitimate points, equally wrenching arguments of ethos, and can duel reputable articles and reports for days, neither side could budge from their trenches. In real "boots on the ground," "3rd party omnicient narrator" reality, both sides have elements of truth, hyperbole, propaganda in their arguments. But in the "reality" of either side, word is gospel, and the other side is not just wrong, but evil. After being entrenched in a cycle of media leaning one way or the other, there is no unmediated reality, and the other side is harmful, backward, dangerous, noise. The worst noise of all was the spiral of venomous racial, paranoid, and spiteful diatribes from all sides leading up to, and after the debate and decision. To me, if either side is noise depending on your viewpoint, all sides are noise from no viewpoint. And after viewing the lead up and aftermath, I can't help but think outright noise would have been more productive.
BPO draws on a number of elements we've touched on this quarter that attract me. I love the element of amateurism in the group - Tommy has always wanted to front a band, and has never done vocal work like this, and I've always, always wanted to play drums in a band, but can't play competently in practical drumming situations. I think the outlet for base aggression attracts Tommy and I as well. I cut all the fingers on my right hand from basically punching cymbals our first rehearsal, and Tommy lost his voice in 15 minutes. In part we were expressing our own existential rage, and in part (I'll stop speaking for Tommy here) I was channeling the simmering contempt I felt around Northwestern during the Divest buildup. It felt like it was important to show noise as an unreality to people, a mirror to reflect the untruth of the "truth" provided by one's daily rounds on the internet.
I believe the post-modern media landscape is, for better or worse, the dawn of a new era in interpreting the world. And as the landscape progresses, and the commercialization of news, the proliferation of "clickbait" sites like fucking Buzzfeed, and the splintering and sub-genrefication of "truth" continues, noise will be there to rage against the dying of collective reality. Eventually people are going to get to the point where something needs to set them off, where they need something to set them off. And Noise can be the thing to say,
"I want you to get mad! I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to write your congressmen. Because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street. All I know is first you got to get mad."
And maybe someone will hear it. Or maybe it will just collapse in a heap on the stage, to the roaring applause of all who missed the point.
The Butt Plug Orchestra:
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