Remix Review: RZA’s N.Y.C. Everything

The whole point of remixes is to show a track in a new light.  MF Doom does this with expertise, aplomb, and above all, insight.  His take on classic Wu-Tang, Enter the 36 Chambers of DOOM, meticulously takes apart these hardcore classics and infuses them with no less fuzzy, yet subtler, somewhat loose instrumentals.  My favorite track off of this album, probably exemplifying the extreme of mood-shifting, aesthetic-warping remixes, is Dumile’s re-imagining of RZA‘s N.Y.C. Everything off of Bobby Digital in Stereo.

Remix:

Original:

The original track goes hard, and is gritty as hell.  This much is changed, as is immediately perceivable.  It still goes hard, but not hard in the sense of impact.  MF Doom shifts the downbeat to the back beat of the original track, a daring and profound move; RZA‘s flow is excessively punctuated, and he allows himself to stay loose and trail off between downbeats.  But in the remix, the track is everything but punctuated, especially because the new drum track is heavy on its own downbeat.  The result is RZA‘s once bold, in your face flow, unhinged and freeform, with no anchor.

Who is Bobby Digital?

This whole track begins to feel like an homage to Gil Scott-Heron, his slam poetry and his music (though with a hellish tinge), especially with the vintage instrumental lines.  But MF Doom doesn’t just throw in the electric piano and smooth bassline for the hell of it.  It has the appropriate subtle air for a nebulous track such as the one that he wants to create, while having a drive that goes independently of RZA‘s vocals, making them even more freeform by contrast.  The chords say ‘film noir’, but the beat adds a specific poignancy.

The One and Only King Geedorah

Part of the aesthetic going on here is the rapport between MF Doom and RZA‘s respective nerdinesses.  Both of them love comics and superheroes- Bobby Digital is a perfect album for MF Doom to draw from, since RZA embraces the idea of a comic book-style alter ego for the concept.  All in all, the grittiness of the instrumental meshes brilliantly with the comic book aesthetic to create a sort of gritty,streets of New York (but also after-the-apocalypse) landscape,  almost as if Scott-Heron had resided there, writing songs about Watchmen.  The unhinged vocals constantly give the feeling that there’s something left to be said that didn’t quite fit or that words didn’t quite capture; after all, who would be able to truly describe what MF Doom has evoked with RZA‘s track?  Sometimes you have to listen to what isn’t being said.

Schizoanalysis Wolf

Advice Deleuze

Why can’t American culture be this straightforward?

There’s a lot of humor to be found in the language barrier.  The so-called ‘Engrish’ world of English language, Latin-alphabet chic from East Asia, especially Japan, typically makes for  a good laugh.  Misspellings, poor grammar, among other things, tickle our fancy in a strange way.  But what is the funniest to people, it seems, is blatant misappropriations of homonyms, unholy crossbreeding of miscellaneous cultural icons, or even words that simply sound nice together.  It’s really where culture comes in, as opposed to just language in error, where it starts to get really interesting.  As funny as a sign in a park reading ‘Please do not empty your dog here’ might be, what really resonates with us are shirts such as the one depicted here.  What might seem to be a mish-mash of misappropriated signifiers often says more about our own culture than we are comfortable having thrown in our faces.

Who doesn't?

There’s a lot going on on this shirt.  First, the Apple Computers iRun words with incorrect capitalization aesthetic is here.  It has become synonymous with chic, especially now with the iPad, iPhone, and countless softwares named i[Verb].  We typically don’t accept just any appropriation of the iWord verbal device as consumable.  We like to deceive ourselves into believing that we have more integrity.  There are all sorts of layers to what is acceptable as advertising from what corporations, what borders on tacky, what we will let ourselves buy into.  There are all the nuances before we get to the core of a marketing ploy that says ‘This will make you cool.’  Obviously it takes some credibility so say that.  And you need language to express and elaborate on this credibility; the credibility stems from all sorts of nuances that are dashed to pieces by the language barrier, at least when monoglot.  That is, a Japanese company has all the credibility in the world that it can express in Japanese.  And in an interesting development, using English is a device as much as certain Japanese phrases, or certain imagery might be a means to a certain end.  Japanese culture has all its own nuances created by its advertising.  But that English that is expressed can only be expressed in a very blunt, un-nuanced way.

Japanese culture is not in some way crass or blunt- but all the English might well be, expressed without nuances whatsoever that we as English speakers can understand.  We don’t know this company’s ad campaign, we can’t read their website, we don’t know their other products, we can’t appreciate the function of such a shirt as a status symbol.  We can only take away that which is in English.  The result of this is the rawest, most visceral signifiers that look ludicrous to us at the surface, stimuli that we put so much value into burying, because after all, classiness is something that we want to evoke so as to not feel guilt in our hedonistic indulgence, or even more, part of the enjoyment as the permanent disruption of our pursuit of this indulgence; these stimuli are part of a greater, subtly arranged, and above all, unresolvable context; they are all brought to the surface, completely devoid of qualification, and we feel repelled or uncomfortable, or laugh at it as ludicrous.  When a non-English speaker watches American television, they will miss the nuances of the advertisement, and see house music, sneakers, and sex: all the things young, hip men are supposed to love, or even iLove.  Not understanding the burial of these signifiers is this: they can then be appropriated into Japanese advertising that creates its own fantasmatic image of being an urbane, if lecherous English speaker.  These stripped down signifiers taken out of context have their own function in a different cultural context.  But these things are the objects of drives that we, as English speakers, prefer to circle around rather than to acknowledge.  You buy sneakers, but the nuances in how you came to buy them bury the purchase as a truncated attempt at achieving sneaker-fulfillment, because you did not buy everything you saw in the ad (the success, the fame, the physical attractiveness and fitness); to simply buy them is inherently to be disappointed.  The goal of the ad is ultimately not to convince us otherwise, but rather to convince us that the discontinuity in our expectations of attaining this object of drives, the truncated ‘oh.’ feeling is falling short of something which actually exists.  So the act of purchasing and enjoying a pair of sneakers must be obscured in a wash of signified athleticism, coolness, class, etc, all of which together evoke an image for us to pursue, but never find.  You are attempting to buy an attitude, or even more, an entire social milieu.  You are attempting to buy the fantasmatic social landscape in an advertising.  So a shirt as the one above is offensive to look at for subjects of English-speaking culture, because it disrupts this orbiting  of the a.  It brings us right to the a, removing it as part of a whole which is consequently destroyed.  This shirt is a disarmingly honest cultural artifact.

An Open Letter to the RIAA

Dear RIAA,

Your desire to protect artists and exercise monopolistic control over that which gets counted as media in the 21st century is honorable, something I think we can all agree on.  However, if you think the characterization of this behavior as ‘piracy’ is getting you anywhere, you simply aren’t using your heads.  We all read about pirates and saw movies when we were kids; that shit looked like too much fun (the alcoholism, rape and other such things were mercifully omitted) .  I have fond memories of stories and movies of pirate valiantly evading capture to swashbuckle another day, whatever that meant.  And Blackbeard was just the

I mean, who wouldn't want to be this man?

bigger badass for having his head put on a stake.  All this said, I think the bottom line is, we all have too many fun memories of pirates from our childhood, to be anything but completely galvanized to steal music off the internet when we hear it described as piratical.

Really, the last thing the RIAA should be doing, is the honor 4chan kids and limewire lurkers (if there are even any of those left) of calling them pirates!  The last thing you want to do with a criminal is contribute to their already glaring megalomania.  So this is what I propose: the legal terminology for the heretofore-known-as ‘music piracy’ should be renamed ‘music necrophilia’. This is the analogy: not only are you ‘killing’ music in the sense that it could have been sold, but you are defiling it repeatedly every time you listen to it without paying.  It’s at least as apt as boarding the music’s ship at sea.  Just in general, the analogy of theft does not hold up in the digital world, and is seen as laughable.  But in all honesty, this would be the most effective strategy that the RIAA could come up with:

“You wouldn’t kill someone and have sex with their dead body.  You wouldn’t exhume a corpse only to make sweet love to numerous orifices that did not previously exist.  Downloading music for free is necrophilia; and that’s against the law.’

If this became the RIAA’s next big campaign, I can guarantee you that it would take music ‘pirates’ down a peg or two.  The last thing you need to give criminals is a positive self image.  Not that pirates aren’t depraved, but it’s the fun kind of depravity.  Necrophiles, on the other hand, are only role models for a small niche of 4chan users.  Mainstream music piracy would plummet over night.

Much love,

Arthur

Meta-Pep Talk

Some Thoughts on ‘Berlin Calling’ and Schizophrenia

A scene concerning a schizophrenic episode of a mentally unstable DJ stuggling with PDA psychosis in the film Berlin Calling, struck me as very powerful.  The scene, obliquely at first glance, depicts schizophrenia in a much more profound way than just by calling attention to the fact that DJ Ickarus has gone off his meds.

Once released from the ward, Ickarus is put on heavy antipsychotic and sedative drugs.  At a certain point in which he is rendered lame from the high doses, he flushes the entire prescription down the toilet.  The pills being flushed evoke an image of not the onset of a schizoid episode, but rather conversely, their own purpose and effect.  A million colorful singularities, pieces of the real, abused and crushed into a rigid framework of language.  The audience is then hit with a certain insecurity.  We feel unhinged, frightened at the impending lack of a signifying dimension in Ickarus’ world.

Ickarus, tormented by the medication, flushes it; the instant reaction would be relief.  But insecurity ensues.  The lack of the medication provides large scale security and reliability, but an unadressable, inexplicable insecurity persists.  This is a brilliant reversal: similarly, the signifying dimension forces the overwhelming, countless tiny singularities of experience onto meaning.  In a sense, this is a luxury or a comfort.  However, the emergence of the unconscious as a result of this, and our inability to express or pursue our actual desire (Jacques Lacan is nodding in his grave), persist as an undercurrent.  The visual narrative breakdown of Ickarus’ signifying dimension with the lingering fear that exists by comparison is a direct analog to the assimilation of that same Symbolic Order; the pills could well be read as kernels of the Real, being forced into the symbolic order (here, plumbing), with the lingering dread of Ickarus immediately afterward as the death drive.  This meta-reversal directly precedes Ickarus’ schizophrenic episode, the most powerful scene in the film, foreshadowing a breakdown of Ickarus’ assimilated signifiers.

Ickarus am Bahnhof, or, The Schizo on a Stroll

Gilles Deleuze has a lot to say about schizophrenia.  He and Felix Guattari describe a certain ego death; a subject may experience an ego as delineated by exclusion by traversing all other modes of existence, every other person doing every other thing that happened, happens, and will happen.  They describe schizophrenia best as a sort of traversal, going ‘I am Jim Morrison, I am Caesar, I am Joan of Arc,’ and ‘miraculating’ production as a productive dead end.  The schizo’s appropriation of all production robs such production of any signifying power, and as such, gives way to direct experience.  A schizo is then, the homo historia, the man living out history, but also the homo natura, man in nature, as Deleuze and Guattari put it.  Disarmingly miraculating that which was produced and is being produced in the same direct way as experiencing nature; that is the state of Schizophrenia, and the state of DJ Ickarus am Bahnhof.

He traverses the station, feeling, touching things.  His headphones blast music he made, but at the same time the rattle of the U-Bahn and the chaotic footsteps and ambiance of the crowd blend into the music.  The foot steps start to sound in time- to him the footsteps do not evoke people, just as his music does not evoke intent.  But the intent which it may have evoked before his signifying breakdown surrounds him.  Ickarus may well have felt the Berliner aesthetic while on a subway car, the grittiness of the stations a powerful influence into what music from Berlin should sound like.  But now this music he created is robbed of meaning, or, possibly, open to meaning everything, just as the sounds of the Bahnhof could mean the music.

This sonic depiction of schizophrenia is already brilliant, but the shots of Ickarus exploring and experience the Bahnhof drive the scene home.  Shots of him are cut in quick succession; he moves through as many points as possible.  There are points at which he walks on the tracks, seems to look at the subway cars as if he plans to jump, but these images evoking suicide, while overpowering, should be taken in context.  He is simply exploring and experiencing something devoid of meaning, completely alien to him.  The evocation of suicide also goes alongside evocation of delighted curiosity and wonderment: yes, he is suicidal.  But he is also thrilled to be alive, and while he is both those things, he is also everything between them, and everything outside of them.  The idea of suicide or of excessive happiness dissolve, regardless, as Ickarus’ conception of the self is something different from ours.  He could no more kill himself than he could kill the Bahnhof, the sound of footsteps, and could no more feel fulfillment than a subway train.

Schizophrenia has never been so brilliantly depicted.

Space Expert EP

Space Expert's Eponymous EP

So pretty much what’s happened here, is that four gentlemen, including myself, were thrust into a band-type scenario and had the results recorded by the wonderful human beings Stephen Reader and Ali Rudel.  We play a sort of post-rock wash, but with a solid rhythm.  Nick, the guitarist and lead singer, is all about alt-rock, even though that is now a curse word.  TD, our lead guitarist, is all about the space rock, with the big pedal board and an Isis-esque, post-metal sound.  Paul, on bass, maintains sexiness levels.  And I’m the one who listens to a lot of screamo.  If anyone in your band should listen to Daitro and City of Caterpillar, it should probably be the drummer, because I feel like screamo drums can bring the most to the table (as opposed to screamo guitar and bass, which take far more cues from other genres).  That said, you can download our EP for free here.