The Noise Piece (Director’s Cut Part Two)
Hearing Through Mikal Gilmore’s Ears
"As I went out one morning/to breathe the air around Tom Paine"
—Bob Dylan, ‘As I Went Out One Morning’, John Wesley Harding, CBS (1968)

Jean Baudrillard, one-time member of 60s pro-Situ group Utopie, is surely today far more compromised by semi-mass outreach than any of rock culture is. Even before he was whirled up into the Top Ten world-wide arts-centre success (transl.: potential sex with the mid-cult world), this theorist — in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) and The Mirror of Production (1973) — was running little more than a cheeky pirate number on a market-tested Situationist line, his work an ultra-cynical satire satirising even satire.

Attali’s theory of commodification is merely off-the-peg Baudrillard.

As for the Sits, dig a bit into anti-art artist Debord’s deft shtick, and it’s all sub-surface reversals, anti-media tracts fuelled by cannibalised matter of distinct residual power, matter by deliberate strategy lifted straight from whatever is being attack. Debord’s movies feed on cinema; his journals chew up newspapers and comicbooks; best of all, his books vampire the classics of Euro-literature and philosophy. Détournement is a poncy name for a classic tactic or anyway art-tic shared by projects as varied as Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Projects, Public Enemy’s ‘Bring the Noise’ and the Sugababes’ UK#1 ‘Freak Like Me’: this is a trick which uses exactly what you’re abusing — and claiming to be abused by? — which gathers, digests, re-organises and vomits up that which has power compacted in it, that which has power over the gatherer, that which the vomitor is threatened by and so drawn to: and this is because — as Debord and Benjamin half-knew, as Baudrillard and Attali dare not believe, as Public Enemy and the Sugababes care not a shred about — a badly drawn Superman-type comicstrip can mock and unmake the whole of received Marxism. The channelisation of desire doesn’t neutralise or negate desire, any more than the channelisation of electricity neutralises or negates electricity. As libraries with books and records, batteries store power. Repetition is what delivers this kind of battery of its powers, like a genie rubbing a lamp.

So yes of course if you prefer, you can carry on thinking "stock-piling" is futility, and sneer at all storage; you can declare that "rock" (the first music unashamedly to revel in its own plastic-fantastic materiality and low tradeable object-hood) merely means nothing new can ever happen. In which case the libraries you despise are actually the librarians who made them possible: records, books and people all lumped together and sweepingly condemned.

Bangs’s childhood dream, of a cellarful of all recorded noise, seems a fantasy of containment, the whole hurting world safely corralled here, in this quiet, safe bunkerworld. And anyway Bangs is dead, and we can’t re-animate him and ask him: for a glimpse of the terror and pain this collector-fantasy can writhe into, we need Meltzer’s astounding, powerful, torrential 1999 return to high-public rock-crit, ‘Vinyl Reckoning’, a hateful-hatefilled perceptive-blinded angry-unhappy tirade-hommage to Benjamin’s essay on book-collecting (unintentional reference? yeah, right... cuz he doesn’t actually mention it, right?), in which mounting fury and disappointment are checked off against damaged and near-unplayable LPs as he hoiks them out the shelves — the detailed howl of a betrayed man, deserted by his own offspring, his youthful hopes and strategies, his fucking vom-smeared cum-spattered record collection jesus...

More than 30 years before, the 20-odd pages that make up his sustained because fragmented celebration of Repetition-qua-Phenomenon in The Aesthetics of Rock (pp 74-93) pounds Attali-theory to pink-sac detritus as history, as prophecy, as philosophy or as music-criticism, long hard years before Mitterrand’s one-time economics Euroguru even began pretending he knew who Jimmy [sic] Hendrix was. "PAPA OOM MOW MOW": start here, "Surfin’ Bird" as Themroc cannibal chant, and dive into glancing, glinting flash-idea, about repetition as fuck-beat, repetition as anti-intellect, repetition as joke-machine, repetition as unspoken respect, repetition as yelled respect, repetition as magnification of tiny but significant differences, repetition as reduction of irrelevance of vast but passé differences, repetition as self-awareness, repetition as premanufactured habit, repetition as unconscious tic, repetition as cynical machine-pop indifference, repetition as life, repetition as death, repetition as story, repetition as non-story, repetition as other things not yet considered…

OR: "… By the time of Genet’s The Blacks the ambiguity is quite heightened, with men posing in multi-leveled disguises and even integrating themselves with the audience; in a similar context, Jasper Johns has produced a painted sculpture of a pair of ale cans, heavier than the real ones but seemingly just as real (and what’s a Ballantine can anyway and does it depend on who makes it and all that?). Rock’n’roll realises that its songs function within life itself more than any previous art historically ever has and that this secondary level also functions in the primary context, while all levels are involved in the art-life problem; to rock this all resolves into a perfectly acceptable reductio ad absurdum. That form of repetition which exists in relationships between these levels often takes the form of quotation..." Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, p84.

OR: "Once music has become regular and change can be felt against a patterned background, all its Heraclitean flux of Democritean atoms can be intensified in contrast to this regular background. But musicians like John Cage and Ornette Coleman have abandoned an explicit regularity for one merely implicit and relative within a chaos of irregularity, anti-regularity, a-regularity, and random regularity. But the most radical form of chaos is order, in fact a permanently contingent order. At any time in history music is such an Anaxagorean crystallisation from the haze of psychological tempority; but today, after a music of paradigmatic ‘disorder’ has become historically prominent, a music with a high degree of regularity, particularly one whose regularity becomes ultimately monotonous regularity, is even more radical. It has changed into even more a vehicle in which change is so vital. Here is where rock’n’roll enters. All music is overstatement of a sort, any music after Cage and company is overstated overstatement, and rock’n’roll is overstated overstatement taken as subtlety (as well as itself). Rock’n’roll using the unknown tongue is music on all the ordered levels that music may attain… only in rock’n’roll is the unknown tongue the natural, logical outcome of development. And only in rock does the tongue define its own importance self-referentially…" Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, pp117-19.

OR: "Hey — this should be something — five, three, two: topically inappropriate generic speculation in the manner of a crabby Kant scholar often bordering on sheer flummery: Re (Kant’s) synthetic a priori: why does Cage accept only the most accidental of synthetics, and not very many (if any) levels of active synthetic (e.g., ‘human participation’ within the experiential Gestalt)? Why must the hand as dealt be so clean, so antiseptic for both dealer and dealee — white gloves f’r godsakes? Possibly the sickest aspect of the whole thing: he doesn’t seem to allow for ‘faking it’—shortcuts, feigned compliance w/too stringent rule modules, saying you do when you don’t (when who the hell would know the diff?) — as even a sometime factor, a goddam variable, in the move from ‘concept’ to ‘actualisation’" Meltzer, ‘Ten Cage Reviews’, San Diego Reader, 1995 (review composed by rolling dice; reviewer sacked as a consequence, or so he says… )

Like, every gunshot on every film soundtrack causes the state to tremble? Sometimes noise is just the noise of someone making a noise…

In 1987 a clever if glib reviewer named James Wolcott, already en route from punk-ghetto to Vanity Fair, gives Meltzer, Bangs and Tosches their famous nickname, the "noiseboys". In 1987, Carburetor Dung is published, and the war begins. Who will be first to canonise-sanctify-defang Bangs; who will rescue him as Undead Glam Power? In 1987, Meltzer and Marcus each provided an introduction to the reissue of Aesthetics. Marcus’s — a generous, contentious, possibly overwhelmed essay on philosophy, pop and the legit-illegit flipflop — opens with the announcement "I’m most of all convinced that the book is not a joke…" (Meltzer, finally responding in 1999: "key word: ‘convinced’ — thanks MUCH, you fucker.") So, how seriously anti-serious ARE Meltzer’s pranks? Yes OK a gagline explained is a gagline debangsed, but Meltzer’s anger, Meltzer’s utterly conflicted fury — at much much more than Marcus — run way deeper than that... At the time, in 1987, in his own intro, he retreats into a claim that there are whole passages in Aesthetics he no longer understands: theory as momentary brilliance mired in the sludge of time. If only he hadn’t been so disenchanted — so lazy? so pigfucked off his best game? — he could have reanimated the sludge, built better bombs into the intellectual legitimation he so craves and so hates, bleed better hidden monsters all over the soon-to-be-approved maps.

Meltzer’s 1999 response comes in ‘Vinyl Reckoning’, a valedictory address to rockwrite until someone forgets, that’s an all-out assault on the world he’d long ago created, complete with furious sideswipe at Marcus 12 years too late — in which Meltzer’s retreat from conviction-comprehension has apparently become acute self-torture: "I am the prophet of, of… oh, it’ll come to me. It’s, it… was… well, um, I FORGET." Again. This baby I fathered, nothing new CAN ever happen, it’s all just sales-pitch for the leisure industry, it was-is-will-be ever useless piss moan...

So why so whiny? Because the explanatory density of the justification you yourself supply, dear, reader, admiringly projected away from yourself, is unwelcome fan-attack noise to the author-artist-critic, despite himself. Yes yes yours to use, except you and you and you… Rock = Come As You Are (unless of course you are just that leetle bit too uncool and square for Mr Über-AntiCool…)

Our Tune, Their Racket
"Crucially, where electronic music (from the underground to the pop charts) is obsessed with control, the click steps in to privilege limits. Nothing new, certainly, since Cage articulated a philosophy of chance, but in the context of the computer age, where Moore’s Law dares musicians to max out their processors and perfection is always just a compile away, the click cuts through the asymptote to the Ideal. To create click-music is to harness failure, whether the crackling of the patch cord or the system-crash in mid-sample."
— Philip Sherburne, "click/", [Milles Plateaux sitename here]

Locked into a theory where every activity is code, where real behaviour is constantly announced to "stand for" some abstract sociological judgment (assumed without justification presumably because it’s the glue-bearing cliché holding a certain intellectual clique together), the various anti-rock Frenchmen (comedy semi-exception: cyber-pinhead Moles) have tremendous difficulty — as quasi-radicals often seem to — working out what they consider the reality of the imagination actually to be. ‘A Reasonable Guide’ wanders straight to the heart of the matter: it never even thinks to freeze the fan — the mobile element, the potential free radical, knowledgeable and wilful — into mere sneered-at symbolic stasis. Bangs also knows one Slash-heavy fact that Attali uses his bogus Xena myths to evade: that if the Sacred Noise of times past were an official carnival moment — a licensed time to bleed heads of pressured steam and cathect oppressed stress — where does that leave Noise Fest or Pigfuck Days or the LMC Experimental Music Festival today, or anything much so organised? Yes, there’s always playing Sun Ra greedily loud on a walkman on a crowded bus. Noise is always now: move past, it’s art, or dirt, it has no history. Well, not quite. I was once threatened by a junked-up crustypunk for playing the Beatles quietly on a walkman, on an empty bus. Sometimes noise just sounds like noise: noise intended ain’t noise at all, but signal. It’s colour, or context: a burr or a click or a blaat signifies the ultratechno-of-tomorrow or music-for-telephones or crackly pre-acoustic jazz in the 20s or the Unexplained Hum at 3AM.

Anyway besides whatevah, for Bangs, punk didn’t violate rock’n’roll, it rescued it. No Wave wasn’t the anti-Elvis, but the Return of the King in his revenant obnoxious essence. To the Bangs generation, true disruption — music without redeeming aspect — wasn’t Pigfuck, or Metal, it was Disco. So couldn’t this just mean that value aka irredeemability simply to switch over to Disco — but to many weaned on the year-zero myth of inadvertent Stalinist erasure, genuine disruption might actually have come from decent history, from the unspoken facts revealed by painstaking academic examination, instead of the instinctual reaction of convenient legend. Who brings the noise to the noisebringer? What is the prophecy of prophecy? A joke explained is a joke debangsed: "One step above the sublime, makes the ridiculous," wrote Live Skull pigfucker Tom Paine, in The Age of Reason (1795), "and one step above the ridiculous, makes the sublime again…" Yeah yeah honour the flipflop bizbiz buzbuz — but if Hendrix is rocknoise AND punk is rocknoise, then you need to be a quiet noiseboy AND a wild-style academic to determine exactly how is it that ragtime and swing and soul and disco are ALL subsumed into the machine-stage of repetition, and still seem to have usable borderlines between them, to be called on and conjured with. Decent history disrupts bad legend. As Danny Baker — former disco-boy, failed chatshow host, ex-sleb face of Daz washing powder — points out, in Sniffin’ Glue: the Essential Punk Accessory, saying the unsayable, by (correctly) rereading the overstated punky prog-hatred: "Plainly Mick Jones and Joe Strummer had ELP albums and were having fun with it back then — we all loved rock music."

Yes, a nightclub in darkest East London, but — even though played by the gorgeous Aaliyah — the Queen of the Damned is here not to sing, to perform, to entertain. She enters with a slinky robotic sashay which is very nearly nothing but ridiculous, as ridiculous-fabulous as her daft yeah-right Egyptian accent, as ridiculous-fabulous as the eternal serene glow of her non-acting popstar smile. Except none of them are quite ridiculous, after all: menaced as per story by the exotic goth goons who infest this club — into which vampires lure pretty hipsters and feed — you see how beauty and even incompetence might, after all, indicate extreme counter-noise. In a world where to survive is to acknowledge a rigid restraint, to be in thrall to a calibrated subtlety of pre-fab romantic nihilism, a being who simply doesn’t care if *SHE* seems silly or showy or fabulous or uncool or out-of-time-and-place is suddenly the scariest and most violent of all. Because *SHE*’s free, and they’re not: out of a Sun Ra vision of the benighted hecatomb of the fabulous past, erupts this flexed black Xena firestorm, the Empress of Radical Night arrived, to sashay and to elbowsmash and to devour.

Disco’s real gift was sometimes just this stuff that was there, a chart-delivered free lunch, and you knew everyone heard it that heard it, but had no idea if anyone but you heard it, its complete and utter brilliance being its just being there if you want it, or there to walk away from and ignore. Like a Ninja Warrior Queen arrived aboard the BangBus, to deliver blowjobs or broke-nosed misery as her whimsy takes her, the sheer sheeny strings and in-crowd feel in a disco hit intensify the shopgirl fuckbeat purpose, because they say class but aren’t, or because they say class but are, or just because they’re there and fun, whatever they say. Kings and queens on the dancefloor tonight, and inside the exclusion zone for a change. Meltzer could unfold the classical philosophy back out of the Poni-Tails and Frankie Avalon, because setting it free gave it power, or because setting it free from there gave it power, or because setting it free from there didn’t matter. Since it had power anyway, after all. Like the sheer idiotic unrepeating range of music-ideas thrown up and then just thrown away in Prog: no one noticed, no one cared. There if you want it: just listen to the Clash. Maybe Danny Baker’s ELP joke isn’t a joke — what if it’s painstaking historical examination disguised as a joke? The unspoken is calling your name: listen. For a change.

Rectal Intubation with Intolerable Hot Enema (You Wish)
The most disruptive whisper in Sonic Boom 2000, the pioneering Ford-funded Hayward Gallery exhibition of soundsculpture, was of course an act of friendship: so quiet but so exact that you wondered, actually, if curator David Toop hadn’t conceived and staged the entire exhibition just so this could happen. All down one wall hung Max Eastley’s wriggling aeolian robots, Phantom Drawings of a Procession of Ghosts, humanoid figures of gently strung wire, which danced, awkwardly, affectingly, to all intents and purposes silently, to a tiny motor and the breeze of the passing gallerygoer.

The second most disruptive is — inadvertently? — a tribute to the sly and adept motility of the showman whose clout enabled the entire project, surely? Sonic Boom 2000’s centrepiece was Eno’s Civic Recovery Centre proposal (Quiet Club). Well, a passing Eno-Hater announces himself reminded of a scene in the movie Soylent Green — and the soothing waiting room where the unwitting client is in fact waiting to be converted into food — without quite grasping what he’s just admitted, hatred notwithstanding. This "intent" business is tricky, isn’t it? If noise is genuinely your Good God, why not three sharp cheers for Eno’s soft-spoken, chillin’ warning-monument to corporate cannibalism? Yes, Boom was beset with contradictions and unclarity of intent, disappointment piling on small disappointment as we moved from room to room. For the winkling of Eastley into the Hayward, a price must be paid.

So, what is this price? The inclusion of Eno? Hardly. A quarter of a century gone, his Obscure label — prototype of the territory this exhibition yearns to resketch — featured not only Eastley, but Toop and John Cage. Were questing Roxy Music fans really served so miserably by all this? At the very least, you can see Obscure as a swerve through generosity and deadpan careerism, a deftly reversible free-lunch-for-all. No, if the pretext — belated attention paid Eastley — is deserved, the trade-off that swamps it is this plain, physical, acoustic fact, that a rattle here disrupts a murmur there. A screech in this room muffles a whisper round that corner. Who mumbles misses; a large crowd of private dancers does not a radical musical make. Sometimes noise just muffles understanding, or usefulness, or point... The commercial condition of possibility of a show like this is unfortunately as follows: that the actual interesting muttered core stories of such a project — the tensions, the subtle collusions — are missed or evaded or left buried. Somewhat obvious example: a crew of lifelong professional art-world gentle-voiced noiseboys, jockeying for galleryland’s specific adoration, will disrupt one another. Who chose how who was placed next to who? How were squabbles resolved? This would have been a great Boom catalogue: the practical mechanics of sound-sculpture curation, the emotional maintenance of the teetering vanguard. Or Mr John "Plunderphonics" Oswald for once not Unmasking the Loveless Music Industry by Collage and Cut-up, but instead exploring the micro sound-clash arguments of his colleagues. Or were there no arguments? Such selfless, well-mannered art-world noiseboys. Shake a record collection the right way, you get angry cats in a bag: not this depressive high-art passivity. Where’s the Eno-Cage fuck-fiction? At the Hayward, presenting now the noise omitted by capitalist hierarchy from the charts, you get an avant garde in which all respect all, and ambition is an unspoken.

Undermined by obvious expectation — anticipated noise is ritual not disruption — the Gallery achievement can only ever be meagre. Yes, Oswald can mock the pop icons he parasites off, but his slash-free technique — his insight, such as it is — never takes wing against his fellow radicals. As long as he can’t and won’t turn the same techniques inward, the context ain’t abundant, but inert: the physical collage of intention and necessity delivers nothing but obscurantist rustle, and (in Oswald’s case) rampant flesh-eating envy. Michael Jackson is the target which put Oswald on the avant map: at the heart of Jacko’s vast Mad Ludwig II fairycastle, circled as it is with grim yokel villagers bearing flaming torches (and that’s just his FANS haha), might not Michael, this very weird, monstrously gifted fellow — ruinous faults and all — nevertheless actually be sculpting message-in-a-bottle sound art, hidden in the plainest sight, that’s better, deeper, stronger or stranger than ANYTHING in Boom? If even the risk that he might be is a priori ruled out — if Gorguts and Cryptopsy are by definition as disbarred from the Hayward as — oh, I don’t know — So Solid Crew and Eminem, then what exactly does the inclusion of Oswald achieve, except bad faith?

So here, late the same autumn, are irrepressible duo Daphne and Celeste on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, BBC2’s comedy-celebrity pop panel-game, which features two teams of current off-mainstream stars, defensively mocking pop. The host is acerbic stand-up Mark Lamarr, formerly third-string presenter of unlamented crappy Friday night pop-variety show The Word: team captains are fat stand-up Phill Jupitus (formerly ranting punk-ish bill-filler Porky the Poet) and gangling stand-up Sean Hughes, kind of a Dublin slacker Garry Shandling w/o the material. With two guests each, usually one old-school and one new-school popstar, the teams are fired what-happened-next, complete-the-lyrics, name-this-tune and other undemanding diversions.

The overall tone is a rancid broth of smugly hip break-the-frame gamesmanship, and everything-in-pop-is-worthless-including-us pre-emptive ragging. In its nastiest moment, a former celebrity (the singer from Rose Royce, say) is invited to take part in a usual-suspects-style lineup, along with four lookalikes. Lamarr tags each one of the five with a ‘witty’ insult: the panels then guess which is the genuine "has-been". This can be breathtakingly demeaning: current micro-celebrities sneering at their peers for the crime of not currently being famous.

So welcome as guests Brooklyn teen duo Daphne and Celeste! And it’s the Pistols on Bill Grundy, only better! D&C, motormouth muppetoid sweethearts with a couple of UK chart hits (‘Ooh, Stick You!’ and ‘U-G-L-Y’ "you could make an onion cry!") and little sense of alt.rock propriety, turned Lamarr into Grundy, with Jupitus his disheartened sidekick.

The script goes like this: the girls don’t stop talking. Lamarr is visibly annoyed, as if anyone cares who ‘wins’ or ‘loses’ ; as if the rules of this quiz matter to a single watcher. They talk over his carefully prepared ‘anti-industry’ gags. Then they talk some more, at helium pitch and Paglia speed. Old man Lamarr tries to police them, to shut them up. They find his pompous rudeness funny, the whole situation funny. Two irrepressible Brooklyn-Jersey girls, they join in with vivid abandon: they take too long acting out songs. It’s all a game. Their subversion is to refuse to sneer: they love Gwen Dickie, they love Graham Gould of 10cc (another guest), they love everything.

Jupitus, hack purveyor of Unearned Attitude, visibly deflates. It’s as if he’s been faced with the ghost of his own youthful rebellion: he sees himself in a mirror, plump fraud of a cog, faking revolt against the machine even as he smoothly contributes to its runnings. Lamarr isn’t even this perceptive — he’s simply too angry at these whippersnappers making a mockery of his micro-celeb laziness: he doesn’t notice how reactionary his anti-industry cool has become, what a hypocrite he is.

The machine is the thing that makes the noises you need to harness, gallery as technology, TV studio as feedbacking amp. "Noise" the phenom is nothing if not the direct product of recording tech (even Attali got this right). That the present was born in the close-miking of Coleman Hawkins’ million-selling 1939 recording, for Bluebird/Victor, of ‘Body and Soul’: gliding alongside the flesh of the tune, a near-imperceptible (till you played and replayed it) micro-ecology of life-giving parasites — pops, clicks, sighs and creaks which told you this was a real play in real time… And that the future was born with Metal Machine Music, which Reed insisted (correctly) was as good as Xenakis. Because the thing that’s just THERE with MMM is that it’s the prettiest music Lou ever made: cuz he just left his robots to it.

Take just one stockpile presentation machinery. Jaworzyn’s Scum List. Mix in the listeners — the consumers, the fans, the bottled piss-throwers, the resistance — and what d’you get? Obsessive scholarship d’abîme? Cash-for-trash vampire skyscrapers and girl-skinning careerist curators? Whispering aeolian robotsOr ‘Freak Like Me’ at #1 in the UK charts the same week J.Oswald is on the cover of The Wire?

The phrase ‘Killing Joke’ is not self-explanatory
Sometimes noise can just be saying what you mean, when generally you avoid it. As follows: in the two decades since his death, didn’t the walls of Bangs’s perverse anti-social fuck-em-up humanism actually become the world all around? On the dank floor of the web, Obsessive Libraries of Crazed Riot mushroom. Who are the victims here, who the devouring demons? Noise has won: it is the culture at large. And if the culture at small continues to pretend to pretend that unleashed fan-will could not robo-sashay at any moment through every avant-distant underground club, eating coolster face, that indie hatred of Pop Idol is a mark of Pop Idol’s power, not its weakness, how small does such a culture deserve to remain, exactly? In this war in plain sight, we are all victim-vampires now, the reserve army of the blooded…

So kiss me in a way that I’ve never...
From: Mark Sinker
To: Frank Kogan
Cc: [...]
Subject: A Message from My Unconscious
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999
I printed out VINYL RECKONING and then stayed up till three last night reading it. As a result, my first response was a note straight from my unconscious: a dream. In it, I and some other Wire types — such as current editor [name withheld to avert Google] — visit Meltzer. He is fresh-faced, quiet-spoken, at least ten years younger than me, and feeds us sandwiches and rather nice little homemade pork pies. As we lounge on his vast open-air bed, reminiscing, he digs out ancient correspondence — for example the prankish collages I sent him to get him to write for Wire. I then go into the bathroom, and — with a single touch to a tap — succeed not only in destroying his toilet (an elaborate Rube Goldberg affair involving a galvanised bucket) but knocking it all out into the street, along with most of the bathroom wall and plumbing, down onto a great pile of rubble on the pavement. I am upset, perhaps not as much I ought to be. Meltzer is clearly both devastated and very angry, but manages nevertheless to be very sweet to me about it. End of dream.

Needless to say, in my waking life, I have never met him, or corresponded — and of course he must be at least ten years OLDER than me…

From: Frank Kogan
To: Mark Sinker
Cc: [...]
Subject: Responding to the Unconscious
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999

Mark — I think that your unconscious is making a mistake…

Stewart Home Can Suck My Cock Till I Cum Blood
"For sheer repulsiveness coupled with the monotony of incoherence, ‘Hound Dog’ hit a new low in my experience": Melody Maker reviewer quoted in Simon Frith’s Sound Effects (Pantheon, 1981), p.166.
In an issue of Monitor I can no longer dig out of my newspaper-skyscrapers, a writer whose name I’ve forgotten — unlike co-conspirators Paul Oldfield, David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds, she decided against a transfer to the Premier League, the mid-80s Melody Maker — delivered herself of a rant which I’ve NEVER forgotten. To the effect that some crowd of laddos at an avant-garde art-opening — more precisely the 1986 Jamie Reid career retrospective, tenth anniversary of punk, Pistols artwork priced in the high thousands — had taken it on themselves to create an elaborate, impromptu sculpture, of wineglasses and human shit, and left it for fellow art-lovers to marvel at (and act like they’re cool with). So who, this writer asked pertinently, gets to clear this mess up, risking both injury AND infection? Some underpaid middle-aged woman as excluded — by definition? — from the joke as she was from the gathering. Not all piles are stockpiles: garbage can be horrible noise w/o being a strike against the status quo.

URBAN MYTH #1: In 1978, female factoryworkers at an unnamed record-packaging plant threaten strike action, over the Buzzcocks b-side ‘Oh Shit’. URBAN MYTH #2: an unnamed galleryworker somewhere comes across one of Joseph Beuys’s fat sculptures, and — angrily muttering — cleans it up. URBAN MYTH #3: for a while there, the risk was that rockcritic R. Meltzer — maybe the greatest writer on post-war jazz never (really) allowed to write about post-war jazz — would be declared best-known, and even best-loved, for throwing cake at David Johansen at a record-company record-launch party, and sending jellified kitten foetuses through the mail. Why’s this matter? Because the potential irritant of the explanation we ourselves supply, belligerently projected away from us, catapults the writer back into the pantheon after all, Noiseboy regnant, with all the room to manoeuvre he needs. I mean, Attali on one flank, DeRogatis on the other, what a huge giant generous effective sludgepond he had otherwise nearly flung himself back into, to be sure… On his unfettered, uncompromised own.

Well, we ALL have to look at YOUR FACE…
"[Elvis] was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection."
—Lester Bangs, ‘Where Were You When Elvis Died?’, Village Voice, August 1977

Attali’s noise-signal dance of recuperation/subversion bugs up badly the moment it gets beyond its title because, actually, it can’t even provide a map to compare-contrast Nina Canal, Sonny Sharrock, Robert Hampson, Hans Reichel, Leigh Stephens, Stefan Jaworzyn, Jad Fair, Donald Miller, Pat Place, Pat Smear, Jim O’Rourke, Arto Lindsay, Keiji Haino, Justin Broadrick… To navigate from Glitchcore to JapaNoise to Sludge-Death to Soundclash to boots to the Sugababes. To parse the ineffable three-word bandname subculture which vomited up Old Man’s Child, Thou Shalt Suffer, Long Winter’s Stare… Maybe Marinetti wanted to immolate the libraries, to divert canals — Nina Canals — through them; Russolo — the musician in the band — threw himself into a codification of types of engine purr. Me, I always liked Chuck Eddy’s idea, of mapping musical genres via cloud types — CUMULUS CONCETUS = grey and billowing; CUMULONIMBUS = towering, angry and severe; STRATUS = light, grey and flat; CIRROCUMULUS = puffy and rippled; CIRROSTRATUS = high and transparent, able to put a halo round the moon…– which has the twin virtues of being extremely scientific and extremely silly.

In fact Attali’s noise theory can’t even provide a shared map to judge the relative worth of Ascension and Aaliyah and Alia. Where Slash Fiction — aggressively departing from the stereotype, of fan literature as obsessive uncritical blather — has become the major underground/internet outlet for a cultural criticism undogged by self-important anxious professionalised academoid tepidity, deliberately and confidently present in the creative feedback loop, Noise swiftly became little more than a template for pre-stressed in-group prejudice, for the re-entrenchment of complacent non-motion, of the world-is-crap-because-we-feel-crap.

‘Vinyl Reckoning’ seems to be making much the same noises — world-is-crap-I-feel-crap — and like Attali it overly disdains maps while blatantly working from a very self-centric one… but a very particular half-unsaid signal floods out of it, all the same, which of course Meltzer’s eloquence and anger and sheer vivid brains, directed — almost certainly unconsciously — at blurring his own role in the realisation of his own role, make it extremely easy to miss. Meltzer failed to doubleback his way out of Pigfuck: its Attalian abstract distance and commodity generalisation suited him, not because he shared them — anything but — but because their dour negativity gave him an easy public excuse for opting out. As in, since even the subculture conjured up by my friends and fans is fundamentally stupid, why bother?

Announcing yourself the world’s most undeluded is merely an aggressive way of saying "I have no friends."

We get to what Meltzer is avoiding saying — saying so quietly, so loudly — by switching back to Bangs, of course. Bangs the fan-humanist, as horribly as he often behaved — unaddressed BO as essence of bachelor allure — stepping back from the worst, the laziness, cowardice, malice, self-loathing, to say, yes, all these horrible human bodynoises are what we share. Instead of an idealised nobility — the overweening better angels of our nature — Bangs took as point-source of celebration the common root of our mutual needs: our weakness, our stupidity, our need to fit, our sly chuckling darkness. No place to stand — no place to stand, anyway, where all noise goes sweet and gentle, no exclusive little coterie-club where harmony is all there is, you and I discourse without dissent on ‘them’ and ‘us’. ELP versus Hendrix? Disco versus the Pistols? The starting point of ‘Reasonable Guide’ is a joke about Lydia Lunch. Bangs and friends, out eating together, realise "Orphans" is playing on the jukebox, Muzak-style ("No more ankles and no more clothes/Little orphans running through the snow/Little orphans in the blood"). "Enjoy your food foax!" chuckles someone present. How cool would it be if the entire actual reason for the ‘Guide’ — as Pigfuck’s founding gesture — was just to retell this anecdote?

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!: Lydia’s No Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was on Migraine Records, corporate slogan ‘World’s Lowest Signal to Noise Ratio’...)

And if the reader disagrees? They merely adjust, to the dictates of their own particular hypercool taste orthodoxy. Susan Sontag mocking rock as a source of "aggressive normality"; or Meltzer dissing Bowie as an in-crowd snob and a fop…

Except — because it still operates at the level of packaging — even this concedes too much to Attali’s gluey generalisations. Let’s switch back further still, and text-precisely, back to Bangs the Xenakis fan. And let’s recall that noise had emerged as an object of study not in acoustics — and certainly not in sociology — but in cybernetics; that cybernetician Moles was Xenakis’s colleague and inspiration; that early computer designers battled in the 40s to translate information into mathematical form, revealing that every message was made up of signal and noise, and that all sound (which includes all noise) would one day issue from the same vast synthesiser; that computers were scorned in the radical 60s, even by the few who affected to approve figures like Xenakis; and that to most music lovers, Xenakis’s book Formalized Music — charts, diagrams, page after page of hardcore algebra — is far more horrible-noise than his works are, even Hibiki-hana-ma, with its 800 loudspeakers. Maps as attacks on noise-as-revolt: maps as anathema in the unreadable mould of Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique? Ditto his ease with mathematics, his quick grasp of cybernetics, his will to render chaos intelligible. If you choose to draw maps within Free Jazz, within Pigfuck, within Dark Metal, how the Niflheim can you only depend on political economy? What are the conditions of possibility of a radical comprehension? Organised armed resistance? Decent painstaking history? A bodyguard of gumby decadence? A bit of bloody peace and quiet?

Attali’s FOURTH AND FINAL STAGE — the lift-off into release and freedom — he somewhat bafflingly refers to as ‘Composition’. Well, as lo-fi electronics improvisor Gordon Mumma once said, "I consider that my designing and building of circuits is really ‘composing’." The Xenakis-blueprint for the Doomsday Composing Machine, the global computer-synth with presets for order and chaos, choice and chance, interwove scores as maps with circuits as maps with recordings as maps (a triple strike — you’d think — against just-there-if-you-want-it). But nothing even in the great Greek prophet’s vision of his Radiant City-of-the-Future quite compares to the image of Bangs — Bangs as composer, you as composer— wandering New York with his little boombox, waging war on the roots of rap with Diamorphoses or Bohor, turned up to eleven. When intention is acknowledged as a two-way fight, noise becoming signal and signal noise is central to it....

I no longer really care — I have spent far too long in Attali’s hopeless head — but I actually begin to think this two-way fight may be what Attali means by "composition": it is "not easy to conceptualise." he says, and "it appears as a negation of the divisions of roles and labour as constructed by the old codes" and "the listener is the operator". And I can make him mean Free Jazz by this, or Gangsta Rap, or (lord save us) Culture Jamming, or even Buffy meets Big Brother slash-fiction… But unable to give it up even once how he feels about music — what he loves and how much he loves and wants to recue it — he veers off into a chasm of tumbled, ivied, awesome, awful, comfortable ruin, all set about by nice ice-floes and lava-flows…

Conditions of Possibility: Able to Put a Halo Round the Moon
"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone when we’re uncool" —Lester Bangs as a character in the movie Almost Famous
The most disruptive whisper in the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s quasi-autobiographical tale of rock journalism in the early 70s, is less its portrait of industry routine as it smothers utopian hippythink, than the intense sweetness of its recollection of Lester Bangs: schoolkid rock-crit William is struggling to escape an over-protective mother, who distrusts rock culture — in good wised-up lefty fashion — as a debased commercial swindle. When William goes on the road with Stillwater, minor rockband in turmoil, his first assignment, and discovers the practical and emotional challenge of the honest reporting of something you admire, Bangs seems to be being lauded — he’s certainly phoned a lot — as the utterly independent, non-starfucking, say-anything break-loose DeRogatis-shaped journo, icon of perceptive who-cares integrity, unswayed by the music industry or the magazine-publishing industry. Meltzer, mocking the film in his essay ‘Third Spud from the Sun’, affects outrage at such misuse-misgrasp of his old dead buddy — how can a mild nothing like Crowe, known in his day as a likeable celebrity-friendly shill at best, claim the influence of Bangs, of all people? Yet Meltzer is actually strangely ambivalent about the exact nature of the misgrasp. On one hand, how dare this future yesman claim to worship the never-captured rogue (how can noise be mistaken for signal?); on the other — for which see for example his third-or-fourth stab at an Obit, Dead Men Don’t Deconstruct, in Spin in 1988 — wasn’t Bangs, the old clown, the biggest most deluded shill of all (it was signal all along, and never noise)? Who exactly’s projecting his own conflicts unhappily away from himself here…?

Like, er, reserving his deepest revulsion for Crowe’s too-loving mom Elaine — worrying about her kid abandoned in rock-drugs hell, Elaine chases him, hounds and embarrasses him, fusses... Meltzer contemptuously cites Happy Days, and gets just bizarre about this particular plot formulation: "Has there ever been such parental non-exclusion in an alleged rock film since Bye Bye Birdie?" This, in an argument demanding that — in the name of the Bangs legacy — truth trump convention! Lester B, it’s possibly worth pointing out, survived his own mother by barely six weeks — now go write your own…

Two thing are happening here, one ordinary, one perceptive. In MeltzerBunkerworld, that Pigfuck/Darmstadt-type retreat, rock’n’roll means — as Stillwater and their groupies blithely proclaim — "No Attachments, No Boundaries", and parents are eternal squares, not seen, not heard. Here noise is the space, of tie-free bachelorhood eternal and indivisible, in which you can leave yr unwashed socks lying on the hall carpet, and radical noiseboy parenthood entails (presumably) the "violent " disruption of its own children’s eardrums… But against this, Meltzer’s unspoken signal calls out loud and jealously exact. What matters to William, alone and scared and excited on tour with Stillwater, isn’t Lester B’s cheerful anti-social fuck-em-up posturing over the phone, his tireless Be-Yourself-Trust-No-One shtick (which proves fairly unhelpful anyway, in practical regard to writing and delivering the piece), but the fact that he comes to the phone at all... William creates a war of Moms and sides with the surrogate, Bangs: by undeclared implication, Meltzer is schoolteacher Elaine, quoting Goethe, aware when culture turns to commodity, wised-up, unhappy, visionary, rejected...

Dark and unforgiving as it is under its nice surface, Almost Famous has a happy and therefore highly unlikely ending. Too soon to tell if ‘Vinyl Reckoning’, which in its unfettered thrashing rage, catapulted Meltzer back up into the Rockcrit mainstream, will prove happy or otherwise. Can parenthood — the kind of valued mom-dom that Meltzer claims he’s relieved he never had — ever also entail the violent disruption of its own children’s eardrums? Where does noise end and abuse begin?

"If love," wrote Bangs in his Elvis obit, "truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other’s objects of reverence." And (of course), that almost-too-perfect formulation, "erection of the heart". Meltzer, his still-living smarter punk buddy, a punk-age Alia reduced to playing in supperclubs after the war, howls against love: the barely contained fury in Reckoning is a blood-sprayed map of a life’s betrayal. Love is the trap! Betrayed by everything, everyone he ever loved: only a fool expects anything else. Hence the unspoken message screaming off the material — the unintended signal, inescapably compelling — love me, love the Jame Gumb in me, the obsessive, angry, girl-skinning collector in me. Yes, he makes it viciously hard. He despises Marcus for providing a Meltzer-map, for believing that Meltzer is worth your attention, worth a map. He distrusts you because you say you like him: what kind of an idiot-clown-shill does that make you? Me, I want/need no friends.

The backtrack of betrayal travels this-wise: it hurts this much because you can never quite be sure — and can probably never really admit — how much you were actually the betrayer not the betrayed. What he can’t say clear, his infinite unnameable, is the Name of Love: to do so makes him the fool (yet if he ever once had, who’s to say what he couldn’t have made of his baby…)

Unspoken signal turns back to noise — forever. Yes, and this leaves us where? Bangs is still dead. "Thanks MUCH, you fucker."

Undelivered Maps of an Age Yet to Come #1
[Note to self: insert up-to-speed digression on glitch-core, Mego, crackles in digital coding, foregrounding the program, culture jamming blah blah. Quote Achim Sz. Note net-covergence of uncensored fan desire — slash sites — to cheap-TV phenom of viewers-as-unpaid (pop)stars: a porn-mainstream feedback disruption loop ha ha. Delany>>Cage>>you… unlicensed rough-trade prostitution zone as system clash/backup. Work out way actually to deliver brilliant free-lunch ‘Xena Kiss’ gag. Then poke fun at Deleuze and Guattari, obviously.]

On the Wings of Madness…
STAGE THREE: The Vampire Lestat, bored with being bored — "a greedy fiend who risked the secret property of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals" (Rice, Queen of the Damned, p18) — realises that humankind in its present state no longer rejects but adores the monstrous. He hates that he can’t exist in the world, that he has to destroy what he loves, and leaves New Orleans (home of Wynton and the Ancient Geeks). Joining struggling band Satan’s Night Out, in the handy nearby non-avant pop genre of Industrial Techno-Goth Death Metal, he becomes — yes you’re laughing but are you sure you entirely grasp the true butt of the joke? — an overnight worldwide rock superstar, and the rabid media-chatter ripples of this celebrity, the projected fan hunger-anger thereto — the mass human yearning for a utopia of voracious excess — awaken Aaliyah, Slashporn Disco Queen of the Ever-Blooded, from endless alert sleep. She who must be contained. "Deritualise a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialise its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalise its consumption, then see to it that it is stock-piled until it loses its meaning…" Vampirism commodified, the bloody crime in plain world-wide sight, protects the demon from retribution. Nothing can happen any more!! When slowpoke vampires foregather at the single live show, in Death Valley of course (rockstars are stars because they respect the power of some clichés), angry at this vulgar music-industry shattering of their modest bourgeois harmony, they find they face not Lestat (= Meltzer) but Aaliyah herself, Black Xena of Dreadful Aspect. Insane with lust and resentment, the vampires rush the stage in pitiless waves; grinning Aaliyah eats them all.

Sometimes noise just sounds like noise.

"Where’s Raoul Veneigem Now?"
"17. It is the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum. Number Two: Kiss Alive!!"
—Bangs on Metal Machine Music, Creem, March 1976

Gallery as technology; TV studio as feedbacking amp: for light-entertainment current-affairs interviewer Bill Grundy, the Sex Pistols were just another stupid rock-industry exploitation mini-story, here today, gone tomorrow. Who the hell remembers Slik? Grundy was bored, drunk, aggressive with self-disgust — surely he meant more to his producers than this. And he goaded and he coaxed and he provoked, and John and Steve swore a little, and suddenly — brilliantly — the Pistols were on every front page, The Filth and the Fury, evil youth demons, legendary dragonslayers, a boot up the backside for the music industry, whatever thenever blah blah piss moan.

What no one ever ever says, oddly enough, is that it’s Grundy — not Johnny, not Steve, not even star-eyed Sioux — that’s the Situationist in situ, the noiseboy, the "true punk". They’re nervous little kids saying "shit" on national TV, and Grundy is the drunk who suddenly sees past all the leisure industry’s illusion-mongering strategies to the infinite unchanging repetition of manufactured pop culture. And wrecks his career saying so. Yay Bill.

Which is why the story doesn’t end here, with "the media’s illusion-mongering strategies". You want proof how lame, lazy, barren and boring the subject is, as a "critical, avant-garde" topic-trick? Even Grundy gets it. Which is why, if Attali’s a sideshow, Meltzer’s something else altogether. However irredeemable the last original noiseboy needs us to think him, he is not just some half-wit old fart drunk content to out the biz as a swindle…

It’s not about the music, stupid. Except of course they really could play and they really did matter, stupid.

A mind moves, in agony, towards the thought that daren’t yet be faced: that if your records stopped fighting, then it’s just you that changed, not them. If you fall out of love with all the world, it ain’t always all the world’s fault. If you don’t take out your own trash, sometimes it takes you out. The radicality of extreme isolation/angry disgustedness — yes yes of course things are wrong with the world — may just be a self-reinforcing spiral of blindness, not to say meaning-drained madness. And the heart-point of this particular spiral is not ultimate gorgeous Empress-of-the-Nightmare illegitimacy but just who-cares times a million. Madness is whatever kinds of thinking there will never be a history of: ungleeful human wolfhowls. Like the retold dreams of others, unutterably tedious. Which is why we hope we don’t get sat by on the bus; why we recoil from reaching out and into that hateful loneliness, to turn it down just a touch.

Where IS Bill Grundy now? If I were Bangs Undead, I’d go find him. And if Grundy’s not dead either, well, you know, buy him a drink — or at least sit by him on the bus for a time, and gently pry the beercan out of his hand, and even help him get, you know, help...

Pre-Dawn Chorus: A Ticket for Iron Maiden Maybe?
STAGE FOUR (AND FINAL): Publication on the net of The Rise and Sprawl of Horrible Noise

History is held in suspension within the recorded-stockpiled personal archive. Channelising and repetition don’t douse desire, or neutralise it: they postpone and intensify it. Meaning isn’t emptied: it’s filled, compacted, filled, compacted, filled, compacted… Noise invasion happens all the time; mostly when no one’s around to notice. It’s no big deal: better than this, it’s a persistently recurrent small deal, heartbeat-sure sign of life and possibility. The dialectic of commodification travels this-wise: a promise broken delivers the betrayed, angry, actively eager to right a wrong. And even the fabulous not-quite-free internet, connecting ‘all’ to ‘all’, also amplifies a Worldwide Web of Loneliness: a routed, stored, pent-up supercircuit of lack and isolation. Featured theme: noise? You spook yourself — laugh, dance, feed, think — with the Unsaid… An unplanned, unpromised, unexpected, bonus, a free lunch — the disco yelp, the bright conceited humour of vamp-empress Aaliyah’s robo-sashay, the voracious brainstorming all-that-and-more energy of fan-fic — it keeps you going without buying you off. When you know that maybe only you ever noticed it anyway, you and the arranger-artist, just two against the Worldwide World of the World.

Birth-hungry ululation echoes in her head. Yet Alia continues just to sing — because all music contains the fragile flipflop-détournement of absolute listener/maker equality-tenderness, and because of course beauty is no more or less a trap (or a weapon) than food, however rotten the trash that piles, in the changed-unchanged state of Tunisia.

© Mark Sinker 2001-02

The 13th (and last?) issue of Frank Kogan’s Why Music Sucks, most elusive grail-zine of the scattered Pigfuck Nation (available from Frank Kogan, PO Box 9761, Denver CO 80209-0761, USA, $6 ppd. UsS/Canada, $9.50 for Western Europe, must be in US funds, email edcasual@earthlink.net for price variations in other territories). rockcritics.com, an invaluable labour-of-love resource, has a whole wing devoted just to Bangs. ‘Vinyl Reckoning’ is collected in Richard Meltzer’s A Whore Just Like the Rest; ‘Third Spud from the Sun’, the Cameron Crowe piece, is collected in the otherwise disappointing Da Capo collection Best Music Writing 2001. The Monitor writer whose name I forgot was Hilary Little: I guess I could have slipped that into the paragraph in question, but my informant described her as "One of the most remarkable people I've ever known," and i wanted to record that too.