Category Archives: Popular Culture

Woodstock, Day 4

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2xnEv9aF60

Jimi Hendrix, “Voodoo Child”

Monday, August 19, 1969: Among those who played Woodstock that four day weekend were Janis Joplin, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, and the very unhippie show-stoppers, Sly and the Family Stone.  Jimi Hendrix closed out the concert — to a very small audience because almost everybody else had already gone home.  His performance therefore was sort of like Woodstock’s Woodstock: more people claim they were there than actually were there.  (The one person I know who did go to Woodstock sorrowfully admits that she, like many others, left Sunday afternoon to be home for Monday and so missed this celebrated performance.)

Despite hippiedom’s self-declared ethos of revolution, Frye didn’t see it that way:

The conception of “participatory democracy,” which requires a thorough decentralization, is also anarchist in context.  In some respects this fact represents a political picture almost the reverse of that of the previous generation.  For today’s radical the chief objects of loyalty during the thirties, trade unions and the revolutionary directives of Moscow, have become reactionary social forces, whereas some radical movements, such as the Black Panthers, which appear to have committed themselves both to violence and to racism, seem to descend from fascism, which also had anarchist affinities.  Similarly, anarchism does not seek to create a “working class”: much of its dynamic comes from a bourgeois disillusionment with an overproductive society, and some types of radical protest, like those of the hippies, are essentially protests against the work ethic itself. (“The University and Personal Life,” Spiritus Mundi, 29)

Hendrix’ iconic rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” after the jump.

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Video of the Day: Arcade Fire

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The anthem that brought Arcade Fire to international attention in 2006, “Rebellion (Lies)”

It’s our first birthday today, so let’s have a little fun tonight.

Montreal’s Arcade Fire seems to be the hottest band in the world right now, beloved by everyone from David Bowie to Jon Stewart, on whose show they played two sets last week (and Jon almost never has musical guests).  They also seem to be some of the nicest people you’d care to meet; there are six of them playing three times that number of musical instruments.  They make the cliche about Canadians being sweet tempered and polite a heroic virtue — and explode the myth that that somehow makes us boring.

Their new album, The Suburbs, is at the top of the charts and is receiving rave reviews.  Why, here’s one now.

After the jump, audio of “Month of May” from The Suburbs.

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Madonna

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12wP5W2R0wY

Madonna at her peak with 1989’s “Express Yourself”

Today is Madonna‘s birthday (born 1959).

This entire video is starkly based (as much of the best popular culture is) upon the archetypes of descent (or katabasis) and ascent.  Here’s Frye on katabasis in Frye Unbuttoned:

To descend is to pass through the chattering, yelling, gibbering world of the demons of repression to the quiet spirit below.  As Eliot says, contradicting the Sybill, it not easy to go all the way down.  To reascend is to bind the squalling demons into a unified creative power. (157)

Madonna, in this instance, seems to be cavorting at the top of the chain of being and undermining male authority with her unabashed sexuality, while also waiting for a beleaguered lover to find his way up to her, leaving a hellish world of darkness and violence behind.  Note that the declared intent of the song is not merely to encourage women to express themselves, but to insist that men do the same in order to secure a fully requited love.  This video arguably marks the dawn of Third Wave feminism as a force in popular culture: sex positive and confidently empowered.

I couldn’t find the identical video with the superior electronic remix of the song, but you can listen to it after the jump.

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Andy Warhol

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBjqMMN6D5E

The first nine minutes of Warhol’s “Blow Job” (1964).  As I outlined in a post yesterday, this is the first in a series of posts today exploring “obscenity” in the arts.  We’ll be citing Frye extensively in the posts that follow.

Today is Andy Warhol‘s birthday (1928 – 1987).

Here’s Frye in “Foreward to English Studies in Toronto“.  As with the reference to Warhol from Words with Power cited in an earlier post (“Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger”), what is interesting about it is that Frye invokes Warhol to illustrate a bigger point.  In this case, it is the contextualizing experience of art and the role of scholarship in understanding it:

At every step in the liberalizing of the curriculum, some academics will say: “Why should we set up courses and examinations in that?  Shouldn’t students be reading that on their own?  We’ve got a library, haven’t we?”  In one generation Edmund Blunden’s colleague would have applied this to the whole of English literature; in the next it would have applied to contemporary literature; in the next to the study of films, television and pop culture.  In my experience such objectors do not read that sort of thing on their own, but apart from that, there are two very important facts left out of their assumptions.  One is the immense psychological difference between cultivating a leisure-time activity and studying the same material within the context of a university course.  It is a little like, though considerably subtler than, the difference between looking at a row of soup cans and looking at them in Andy Warhol.  The other is the schizophrenia set up in the teacher’s mind.  Two of my teachers at Victoria were Pelham Edgar and John Robins, both interested in the modern novel and Canadian literature.  But all reference to such subjects in lectures devoted to Shakespeare and The Rape of the Lock, had to be bootlegged, so to speak, and lectures got very digressive as a result.  It was very important to our education as students to be told about the short stories of Hemingway and the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott — it was difficult for us to read these authors “on our own” when we did not yet know they existed.  Edgar, Pratt and Robins at Victoria, and Woodhouse and Brown at least at University College, did very important work in Canadian studies many decades before they got into the curriculum.  (CW 7, 597-8)

After the jump, a superior PBS American Masters documentary about Warhol.  Must-see, if only for the wonderful contemporary footage and extended excerpts from his movies.  (Please note, however, that the entire documentary is comprised of two 90 minute episodes, and only the first part of the first episode is offered here, so Warhol’s early years and early successes aren’t included.  However, the second episode dealing with Warhol at the peak of his success until his death is posted in its entirety.  This really is worth the investment of your time, and I hope you’ll watch it.)

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P. D. James

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Today is P. D. James‘s 90th birthday.

Thanks to Bob Denham’s wonderful compendium, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, we have at our fingertips what Frye had to say in his notebooks about the detective novel.  Here’s a selection:

Why am I obsessed with detective stories?. . . I’ve completely forgotten the Freudian explanation I came across recently.  In my own terms (which wouldn’t of course exclude Freud) a really top-flight detective story has two levels of meaning throughout.  Every sentence, every fact given, may be potentially a “clue”: it has its surface meaning in the narrative, and its teleological meaning as part of what you “see” in the final cognitio.  Also, of course, the descent of the police as a Last Judgment symbol, reaching for the guilt that’s in everyone, and the scapegoat as the primal anxiety symbol. (Unbottoned, 66)

The detective story is written backwards, & belong to creative & dream time, not to the ordinary beginning-to-end, cause-and-effect time.  It’s written in the way one composes a dream after having the alarm go off.  This event-to-cause order is the mythical as distinct from the historical order. . . . I think my dream life demands these stories. (ibid.)

There are some Freudian reasons (except that I’ve forgotten what they are) for the appeal of detective stories: Freudianism itself owes much of its popularity to the same kind of appeal, Freudian therapy of neurosis being essentially a search for who done it in childhood.  Or what done it. (ibid.)

I have often wondered why I’m so hooked on detective stories. . . . One thing that occurs to me is double meaning: a casual remark or incidental episode suddenly becomes relevant in that second world where the murderer is identified.  Miniature apocalypse with Satan cast out and all the other details moving together in identity. (ibid.)

You can watch a complete television adaptation of James’s Shroud for a Nightingale by linking here.

Video of the Day: Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk

But is it art?

Yes.

And if you have any doubt about that, go to YouTube and have a look at the outraged comments of some of the viewers.  If they’re this angry over something so innocuous and mundane — and a number of them are very angry — then something meaningfully disturbing is happening here.  A sample: “I mean WTF?!?” and “This is the ugliest thing I have ever seen” (which is not, of course, beside the point).

Frye makes just a couple of references to Andy Warhol, and they are made, interestingly enough, to illustrate a larger and more important point he is trying to get across to his readers.

Here he is in Words with Power, for example, with reference to ecstatic metaphor:

This is an intensification of the imagery that imitates the descriptive mode, an emphasis on the “thingness” of the objective world, which we find in, for example, Beckett’s Watt and Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, and in William Carlos Williams’s insistence on “not ideas about things but the thing itself,” also the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens.  In various forms of painting, such as the pop art of Andy Warhol and in the popularity of Zen Buddhism, with its technique of training one to see, not another world but the same world with a new intensity, there are parallel developments.

And with that in mind, here’s one more comment from a viewer at YouTube:

Honestly, sometimes I think these artistic so-called geniuses just do whatever the fuck passes through their heads and then try to pass it off as hip and edgy. But at the end of the day, kids, it’s just a guy eating a hamburger.

Well, the “end of the day” could also just be the darkness before the dawn, if we insist upon resorting to those kinds of cliches.  For example, after the jump you’ll find six minutes of Warhol’s eight hour film Empire.  (And, by a remarkable coincidence, tonight is the 46th anniversary of its filming.)

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Saturday Night Video: New York Underground

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Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs “Maps”

New York, if it hasn’t always been the home of alternative music, seems always to have been home base — the place you’ve got to get to if you want to score.  Los Angeles has reliably turned out commercially viable music for decades.  But New York has just as reliably been the proving ground for the artistically adventurous but commercially tenuous: from the Velvet Underground to Patti Smith to Talking Heads to The Strokes and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.  And, oh yes, a tatty little punk band from Queens — the borderline-unlistenable Ramones — famously began their tour of Britain on July 4th, 1976 and ignited the culture-shifting punk movement there: almost as though the American Revolution had returned to its roots and left in its wake an entire subculture.

What has always defined the New York underground is the notoriously indefinable attribute of cool, an elusive combination of something and something-or-other.  It is tough and street smart, but has a surprisingly nostalgic streak manifested by poignant tunes with inviting sing-a-long choruses (see, for example, Karen O in the video above, apparently swallowing her grief throughout before spontaneously releasing one lone tear late in the song).  How?  Why?  It’s evidently life in the big city — you take it as it comes, but invariably take it home with you.  The key to it is irony, which, as Frye says, is the point at which we rather unexpectedly return to myth.

It would have made sense to present these songs in chronological order, but in this case it seemed more appropriate to begin in the present and move back to origins, if only to remind ourselves just how clever and variable and consistent the New York underground has always been.

If I may plug just one of these videos, it is Talking Heads’ “And She Was.”  As art school nerds, Talking Heads were as much interested in the visual as the musical, so their videos are always superior.  This particular video is 25 years old, but you’d never know that to see it.  It perfectly captures the whimsy of a song about a suburban housewife who possesses an unexplained ability to fly.

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“It was a dark and stormy night. . .”

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This year’s winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize is Molly Ringle for this cubic zirconia of a gem:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.