Upgrade This?
1. My friend Ted was talking about how Justin Timberlake instead of Madonna as the new Britney--it is a strong thesis, which I think rests of the erotic ease that both contribute (i.e. the work is disguised, the ease and the suave is pulled to the forefront) Madonna has always made her politics more explicit though
2. I said to teed that it's also about Nashville, both soul and country came out of Nashville, and for the first time since the 70s we have a few significant pop workers, who know the semiotics of both hip hop and r/b...JT is the biggest of those
3. It might also be the robot, the assuming of the robotic, and the realizing that the denial of self is not nessc. coincidental with the denial of voice. (I.e. one of the saddest, and most humane songs of the last 5 years, is the vocodered hell of technologic by daft punk because it seems to be not only talking about the nature of music, but the nature of humans, the narrative implied in that song, is the narrative of Justin Timberlake an the narrative of pop post 2000--i.e. Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,
Trash it, change it, (Mail) - upgrade it,
Charge it, (Point) it, zoom it, press it,
Snap it, work it, quick - erase it,
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
Load it, check it, quick - rewrite it,
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag and drop it, zip - unzip it,
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it,
View it, code it, jam - unlock it,
Surf it, scroll it, (Pause) it, click it,
Cross it, crack it, (Switch)- update it,
Name it, read it, tune it, print it,
Scan it, send it, fax - rename it,
Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it,
Turn it, leave it, stop - format it)
4. He bought the samples, he used the samples, he upgraded his world from Lou Perelman to Britney, from Britney to Madonna, he called the right producers, he made music that was a careful and elegant bricolage of American soul, country, r and b, hip hop, it was the smoothness, the robotic delight, that made him a star...(its also why the Martin Luther King Junior line in Beyonce's upgrade this doesn't jar, because the physical and the meta physical are one, the martin doing to the people, the ring as a tumor, and let me upgrade you, mutually destructive instincts smoothed over to something pretty leading to the upgrading as status (c/c with Kayne's diamonds of Sierra Leone and Gold Digger) , is a computerized hope for the America dream, so a boy from Nashville and a girl from Houston become king and queen of upgrade pop (except Beyonce's daddy was a record producer, so maybe her life was already planned--its tough to know who's ambition is who's on the road to the top, and JT's success is to successfully hold the middle when everything else goes tits up.)
5. Maybe its also a revision of the old chuck berry line--the men don’t know but he little girls understand, except its the men know, the little girls understand, the pop sugar feasts and the indie kids dance.
6. Which means you listen to Justin Timberlake, no matter what, you listen to him, if all the disco you can stomach is LCD Soundsystem (not that LCD Soundsystem isn't genius, but its a different kind of genius, disco always had a kind of faded glamour, a keep dancing fast enough they wont take it away from us vibe, and JT is convinced that nothing will ever go away, LCD Soundsystem is the ersatz, exhausted, lets fuck shit up, because we are already fucked up--its the depressive coda of the simple pleasures that JT loves--or to put it in another way, its the system crash of the upgrade we are talking about earlier, break's Asimov’s third law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Pop will eat itself, but it will never die, and to point out its sadness is to point out its logical inconsistencies.
7. Which sort of brings me to Timbaland's solo album--you can hear Timbaland directly and indirectly all over this shit, he is the originator and the survivor of this aesthetic, of the throw everything to the wall, of the super processed, of the vocodored, of the nu-ryhtym nation, of the upgrade this. The solo album, which I don't think sold as well as it should have, and was as collaborative enough to be almost not be a solo album (i.e. it included guest artists on nearly every track, from Nina Simone, to Missy Elliot, from the Hives to M.I.A but the two most relevant to the subject of this essay, are Elton John and the previously discussed Justin Timberlake and Elton John
8. Elton John, with his brown cowboy work from the 70s, and his peach tree road stuff from the 90s, is one of the connectors’ b/w the south, the north and Europe, and we are talking about the intersections b/w the north (Detroit/New York), Europe (France/ England) and the south (Atlanta, Houston, Nashville)
9. The interesting thing, or one of the interesting things, that Timbaland does to the Elton track, is he strips the words, Elton’s words are a weird combination of hyper sincerity and bullshit hype, of the depth of emotion and the flatness of surface—so to take all of the emotion out of it, and to make the piano do the hard work, is to figure out what a hook does, what a beat does, what a break does, what words do in their absence, its an act of essentialism, of four/four beats extending to their logical limits.
10. It recasts pop history as one that is against language, the ripping apart, the working through of history that has been timberlands project, cuts through the narratives of Daniel or rocket man. The stuttering start, and the slow extension and then retraction of keyboard, waiting, waiting for the voice, and then the voice absent, listening to the end, a name check, and virtuoso's on the 88 keys--like Scott Joplin or Jerry Lee Lewis or Screaming Jay Hawkins or Kate Bush, all are here, in the staccato, and the rhythm versus percussion polyphony fight that makes up pop in general. That it is the last non-bonus song on the album makes it a tying up, for an album that is chaotic, collaborative, abstract, and difficult.
11. So it is the opposite, then of Elton, of Beyonce, of JT, of all the people we are talking about—the talent then of Timbaland, the part of the upgrade that is the most valuable is to make discordant ideas synthesize, and by picking out individual ideas, the history o the ideas, it breaks the illusion, it causes the robot to blow smoke out of its ears.
12. To upgrade though, is to have work from the beginning, to have something to synthesize from, and to synthesize to. So Timbaland working on his own, as opposed to a high powered consultant for heeled clients, recognizes the slickness of the ideas being talked about, he overstays his welcome by indicating the mechanics of pop which is strange, because this is a genre that would seem to have all of the meta issues sorted out or transparent. We are living in an age where he slickness of surface and the earnestness of the heart, the mutually destructive appetites of brain and loin are placed on the table for mechanical analysis. He scatters his report though, and doesn’t even treat it like one---his work with john (and it is even unclear if John is alive or mechanized here) shows the consequences of upgrading.
13. If Timbaland is the motherfucker at the corner of the party, playing too cool and together, understanding too much about the process to be truly involved, then Britney is the whole island of broken toys. Her work was always too human, too delicate to be truly robotic. Lonely and isolated, it’s cognitive dissonance was the exact opposite of the sleekness of JT or the self aware earnestness of Kayne, or the eroticized coldness of Beyonce (side note: Beyonce should really push to cover Grace Jones pull up to the bumper baby the studio has made so many advancements, and she could make it sound less efficient). The secret (or at least under spoken narrative about Britney is that of the machine taking over—she has become more mechanized and less human the more she has fallen apart.) That is a 20th century narrative, of the robots taking over, or being a robot instead of a human, it is the horror of technology found in Metropolis, in 2001, in Ballard’s Crash or the Atrocity Exhibition, in Summer Toys Last All Day Long, or the Terminator. Britney is no longer popular, because she is not cybernetic, because she is fearful of the robot taking over her body. The consensual merging of body and technology is nowhere to be found in her work.
14. Her first number one hit, is hit me baby one more time, processed to all hell, but human, and historically girl pop, with hints of The Crystal’s He Hit Me and It Felt Like A Kiss. Her voice is slight, but not delicate, beautiful and adolescent. It contains a short but significant piano motif, which is not bombastic, or cut apart, and is very clearly an acoustic instrument. Born to Make You Happy is a ballad about her loneliness and her sadness. Lyrically attached to Carole King, with a definite electronic beat, but which once again contrasting once again on her natural, can ignore, teenage girl voice. Oops I Did I Again, starts with space noises, and the video features a narrative from Mars, Britney makes her self an alien, literally. The first major electronic manipulation of vocals. Lucky, profoundly nostalgic, but nostalgic for a time she could not remember, self-consciously meta, and ironic, disassociate. The narrative begins to tip from the music of Britney to the consciousness of Britney. The upgrade starts. Me Against the Music—the Madonna single, who knows the pop music history, and who has flirted with becoming a robot since the mid 80s, growing into a maternal figure, the discussion becomes who will be her successor, she stages an event seemingly out of H Rider Haggard at that years MTV Video Music Awards, with Britney and her pop rival Xtina in dresses, kissing Madonna in Black Leather. That Xtina retreats into literal Burlesque, making herself over into Doris Day for the neo-retro crowd, and Britney falls deeper into madness. Madonna latter realizes her successor will be one who synthesizes better then he creates, namely JT. Toxic—avant noise, and genuinely separate from Britney’s other work, the harshness will be tamed by people like Rhianna and Beyonce, It is also one of the most profoundly self loathing songs, the self awareness, and the terror of losing control is profound. That it is now more electronic then human, and that the voice found in her earlier work is now lost, is clear. Everytime, this would be the one that would disprove my thesis, a beautiful and fluttering ballad, with a genuine piano and almost no electronic effects. But the video ends with her suicide, any attempts to be a pop star leads to destruction, the desire to be full with the pleasure of music cannot be found here. The robot is not the literal mechanical voice, the too pure production, but the ability, to, in the words of Marianne Faithful “slide through life on charm” That Britney’s last album was so chaotic, so broken, the exact opposite of the new trends for hermetic sealing of emotion into semiotic deconstructions of desire. That Britney has to name herself, that she begins the album by the almost fetishistic naming of self, is the exact opposite of the third person pseudo humility found in the works mentioned. Britney cannot upgrade this, because she is essentially human, and to upgrade is essentially anti-human.
14. Which is not to suggest that there is work that manages the aesthetic of upgrade pop, but whose lyrics integrate an unstable narrative. The most explicit of these is Kayne West’s Stronger, a work so dense with contradiction and complexity that it risks being not heard at all. Beginning with a Daft Punk motto:
Work it harder make it better,
Do it faster makes us stronger,
More than ever, hour after hour,
Work is never over, sung through out, as sung by faceless vocoders. Which seems to be a condensation of thru a lens of Nietzsche, it combines themes of sexual athleticism, the prosperity gospel, pure ego, nostalgia, and label dropping high commerce, envy, and authenticity. The song is so dense, so self contradictory, that the speed, and smoothness of Kanye’s flow are the only thing that prevents the whole thing collapsing into it’s own interior contradiction. The charisma and devotion to aesthetics of Warholian surface mean that the audience does not unpack words like:
Heard they do anything for a Klondike,
Well, I'd do anything for a blonde dyke.
Those 16 words have all of the positives, and all of the negatives expected of hip-hop, and of upgrade pop as well. They are literally dense, packed so tightly into the structure of the song that pulling them apart is like pulling one string out of a sweater. They combine desperate pleasures, have an incongruous rhyme, and an elegance of form that matches Herrick or Marvell in its rakish wit. It is also homophobic, and misogynist, assuming that owning women, and converting women are the rewards for fame. That he keeps talking about how this deeply artificial, almost baroque construction of social, cultural, and religious referents are about being as natural as possible, one is reminded of the gang of four’s the natural’s not it: “the problem of pleasure/is what to do for leisure” –these works are not boring, they are the opposite of boring, but they maintain a kind of louche insistence on seen it all and done it all, with women, with men, with purchases, and with locations.
15. Listening to it live in concert with Justin Timberlake and Kanye—that JT is able to keep up with the speed, with the artifice, and with the combination of aesthetic and spiritual under texts, is to appreciate how much goes on under seemingly placid waters. Even the age difference—Kanye writes about how “I’ve been on you since Prince was on Appollonia” or since “OJ wears Isotoners”. JT would have been born before those cultural touchstones, but age matters less then the elegance of desire. Evensongs about political eruption or emotional meltdown are more about the nature of he song’s construction then the emotions themselves. The assumption that the separation of emotion from source, means less emotion, must be avoided however. The emotional coldness of JT’s Cry me a river, or the meta-contextual awareness that he is creating a love song, makes a song so over wrought, creating a maze of real emotion, expected emotion, historical emotion (is he quoting Julie London?), assumed history outside the text ((is he really talking about Britney) and distance (who is saying I guess I must be leaving)—the video, with its voyeuristic under currents and its LA modernism, that hides in plain sight, has a dark and penetrating voyeurism. The song’s artifice, its blankness, and its obsessive over production, indicate that the upgrade can be used as a gloss, as a way to paint over scandal, to burry bodies under slick concrete. The same can be found in the more problematic Diamonds from Sierra Leone. This is a man who lauded Jacob the Jeweler, who had Christ with a Crown of Thorns made as a bling-pendant, who loved money with out guilt. But he creates a 6-minute opus, about what it means to love those diamonds—what the hip-hop community has done to Africa, in loving that excess. Starting with the tinkling piano that is meant to indicate seriousness, then strings that stab, like the score to psycho, using a symbol from Shirley Bassey’s Diamond is Forever, he combines drama, luxury, desire and violence in the first five seconds—once again it is packed. The first verse is a selfish desire to keep all other luxury, that only diamonds are attached to a kind of eternal suffering. Once again, the density, the obsessive, rude mechanical that packs moral and aesthetic signifiers, the assumption that technical acuity, all make the essential message, a wariness of late capitals exploitation, more real. The irony, then, to revel in artifice, to revel in the precise combining of historically relevant tropes, means that the message is not hidden but emerges slowly, like a strip tease from Lucille St. Cyr.
16. What conclusions can we draw? They seem like simple ones, ones that we have learnt before—that he operatic extenuates emotion rather then dismisses it, that smooth surfaces do not mean placid depths, that to be human is to be suspect, in a tecnophillic world, that dancing quick enough means the audience is suspected, that an object of great care and beauty can conceal more easily, contradictions, that just because it looks pure does not mean that it is poison, and that which looks perfect, is often corrupt. To pay close attention to texts that seem so sleek, that slide by without the unpacking, is also needed. JT is famous because of that sleekness, because of that slipperiness; Kanye is famous for similar reasons. Not to say they shouldn’t be, but be careful if you really need the upgrade.
