Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer? : Gender and Sexuality 2

And another translation of an old piece, this time on one of the most widely wellliked albums of the last decade. The features of Hissing Fauna are wellknown. Cheerful, bouncy dancepop hiding dark, disturbing, depressed lyrics. The story behind the album is wellknown as well: Traveling to Norway to provide healthcare for his little daughter, Kevin Barnes, singer and central songwriter of Of Montreal, got a severe depression – understandably, Norway is a sad place... - which drove him and his wife apart. The album was written after his wife left him, but luckily the couple got together again just before it was released, ensuring a happy ending and a less depressed mood on the ensuing albums. The tale as it is told on the album is slightly different, though. Themes of multiple personalities and gender and sexuality has been added. Kevin goes to Norway, becomes depressed, and other elements of his personality begins to bubble up inside of him. His wife leaves him, and on the central, 12 min monolith The Past Is a Grotesque Animal, he suffers a mental breakdown, after which he takes on the personality of Georgie Fruit, a middle-aged, transsexual, black man. The rest of the album follows Fruit, as he dances through town, trying to immerse himself in an orgy of transsexual promiscuity.



Lets repeat that part: He has a MENTAL BREAKDOWN and becomes transsexual and promiscuous. And this breakdown is caused by the dissolve of his heteronormative life. Not the most progressive view on sexuality, to say the least. On the second half of the album, we have some really dark lyrics. How about: 'Eva, I'm sorry, but you will never have me / To me you're just a faggy girl / and I need a lover with soulpower' (Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider) Or: 'There's that girl that left me bitter / Want to pay another girl to just walk up to her and hit her / But I can't I can't I can't'. (She's a Rejector) So we've got the coupling of 'queer' sexuality with first of all mental instability, but also with violence against women, and a use of the word 'faggy' as a put-down. I can't understand why it hasn't been focused on more by the media or the blogosphere, it seems unfortunate at first glance, to say the least. Where Magnetic Fields emptied gender roles of any and all connotations, and used that strategy to talk about prejudice, then Kevin Barnes uses 'perverse' sexuality to show the abnormal, the sick, the disturbing parts of his mind.



And this was what I had planned to write, when I first started writing this piece, a long time ago. Magnetic Fields = Good, Of Montreal = Bad. But during the research phase, I had to read the lyrics more carefully, and that made me reconsider my opinion. The point behind the queerness was a bit more complicated than I originally thought. I found a possible explanation in a key passage from the aforementioned The Past Is a Grotesque Animal: 'I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met / who could apreciate Georges Bataille / Standing at a Swedish festival / discussing Story of the Eye' I do not know a lot about Georges Bataille or Story of the Eye, but wiki is your friend and... it is perverse to say the least. Eros and Thanatos are mixed, as the main couple copulate while people expire apparently. Blood and semen and pee is mixed, and eyes are inserted into stuff... And this is what brought Kevin Barnes and his wife Nina Barnes together in the first place... This is a central piece of information, it shows their heteronormative relationship to be founded on a common interest in perversity! Paradoxically, perhaps... So then, the second part of the album could be seen as trying to regain heteronormativity, through a reconnection with perversity! And it is an important detail, that he doesn't dare to live out the perversity! As the lyric says, he can't he can't he can't! It is a failed attempt at rediscovering perversity. Now, I don't know enough about Marquis de Sade and Bataille and stuff like that, but the second part of the album seems to be inspired by their books, as the narrator tries to describe the unhealthy part in him by emerging himself in perversity. And that he fails to do so becomes a bit sad, he doesn't dare to go through with it.



Would it have been a problem if the album had just simply coupled mental instability with diverting from normative sexuality? Not really. It is important to remember, that the album at most only claims to be a description of the specific breakdown of Kevin Barnes. Therefore, it never proposes that all promiscuous or transsexual people are mentally unstable. Or the other way around, that all mentally unstable people are promiscuous or transgendered... And besides, I can think of few things more boring, than a description of a mental breakdown, that has been sanitized to be more politically correct. And besides besides, the detail with Georges Bataille shows that there was never any heteronormativity to begin with. But I honestly think it is a problem, when discussions of the album glosses over the complicated lyrics on it dealing with sexuality and perversity. Because it IS an unhealthy view on gender and sexuality, it seems to me as if it is meant to be, and is meant to show how badly unstable Kevin Barnes has become. And that it passes without much comment into the public sphere seems to suggest that this theme is something that reviewers/bloggers are perhaps not really focusing on. There was a discussion some time ago (less time ago when the Danish version of this post was posted, it is still an interesting essay), on a difference in the ways race is presented by Coco Rosie and Vampire Weekend, and in some ways, their strategies mirror the strategies I have claimed to be central to Magnetic Fields and Of Montreal. Like Vampire Weekend does with race, so does Magnetic Fields treat gender and sexuality as if there is no problems related to them, thereby perhaps normalizing both things in society. And Coco Rosie as well as Of Montreal draws attention to how messy and problematic the common discourse on race and gender and sexuality still remains. But the problem is, not a lot of attention has actually been drawn to the gender/sexuality question, at least in the case of Of Montreal. I haven't seen a lot at least. And if that is the case, then it might point to a blind spot in our culture as a whole.

[Part I: Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs]

Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs : Gender & Sexuality 1

This is not a defense of 69 Love Songs. This is not a re-review. I happen to think that this albums is one of the best albums ever, but this post is not trying to establish why this is a great album. This album is one of the least reviewable ones there is, to look at it and decide what the ratio of good to bad songs is, is kinda missing the point. I have a hard time figuring someone who won't find at least a few songs they will love, and a few songs they will think of as filler.

But some of the specialness with this record stems from how it portrays gender and sexuality. Throughout the record, the sound shifts, the genre shifts, the gender roles shifts, we have happy songs, sad songs, platonic love songs, explicitly unplatonic lovesongs, lovesongs from boy to girl, girl to boy, boy to boy, girl to girl, a single boy to dog one, although luckily that's one of the platonic ones, and a whole lot of songs where the gender of singer and sung-to is indeterminate. It all becomes overwhelming and confusing. And in this way it manages to question our normative genderroles. If not in society as a whole, then at least in popular culture and in the normal lovesong. This is a discussion of how the album does that, a discussion of how Gender and Sexuality functions throughout these 3 discs and 69 songs. And oh, this is a translation of a blogpost originally written in Danish. Sorry if the syntax is a bit weird here and there, I'm working on my translating skills.



As I said, the album is overwhelming. There is so many songs, and no clearcut development. The placing of the first and last song seems alphabetically determined, from Absolutely Cuckoo to Zebra, and while the first song is about the early stages of love (the precise opening lines are 'Don't fall in love with me yet / we've only recently met) the last one is about a lover who has been given everything, but remains unfulfilled (which could be seen as a slightly aggressive, though kinda humorous, attack on the listener...).But there is no narrative, the album seems made for the CD-age, for the shuffle button or the creation of personal mixtapes. It is therefore a bit difficult to figure out where to start, but let me begin with a song from CD 3: Acoustic Guitar. Seems like a simple lovesong, although lesbian. Girl wants guitar to play well, so she can get girl back. But doesn't this subject seem to fit better, if the voice of the girl is meant to sound like a young man? The idea of a suffering artist, trying to get the girl through his artistic ability, that is normally a role associated with men. And why determine the gender based on the voice? In The Night You Can't Remember, the male voice is definitely meant to portray a woman, as she gets pregnant during the story... And in The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side, the deep voice is supposed to be a young infatuated man (probably about 16, he is the only one of his friends with a car) but he really sounds less like a young man than the singer of Acoustic Guitar. It's probably just a traditional boy-girl lovesong, just performed by a woman.



But if that is the case, then we should probably reconsider several other songs. Like Come Back From San Francisko. Once again, it is a woman singing, the song is aimed at someone meeting 'pretty boys in discos'. If the singer is a woman, well then the addressee is bi-sexual, boy or girl, hard to tell. But it probably makes more sense if it is once again the voice of a young man, and all the involved are gay men. Again in Reno Dakota where the woman sings 'Have I annoyed you / or is there a boy who / well he's just a whore' It makes more sense if they are all supposed to be boys.



But why talk about 'sense' in situations such as these? Because we have certain preconceptions of gender roles. Boys play guitar, boys dance in discos in San Francisco. Once you realize this, the role of gender becomes kinda muddled in a lot of songs. On of the most wellknown songs is The Book of Love, which is mainly about the features of aforementioned lovebook. But, while the singer is a bass, in the chorus he inhibits the role of the receptor in the relationship, traditionally associated with women: 'I love it when you sing to me / you could sing me anything' and 'I love it when you give me things /you aught to give me wedding rings' Why not just place a woman in the narrating role of this song? But on the other hand, why not just a man who likes to receive presents? And who knows whether the giftgiver is male or female, the song never offers any kind of answer to that question. But a lot of songs really don't, yet we always just presume that they are heterosexual lovesongs. I have read several 'alternative' interpretations of love songs, proposing that they are actually about love of heroin, but very few ones that propose the song to be about homosexual love, or even just love from girl to boy instead of the more common opposite.



The theme of gender as construction, and gender as performance, runs through the record, constantly being varied and repositioned. And at this point, I would like to offer a ridiculous overinterpretation based on a drawn out explanation of a bad joke. Bear with me. It's about that boy-dog lovesong, Fido Your Leach Is Too Long. Every verse ends with the joke, that we presuppose the singer will use a dirty word: 'You scare me out of my wits / when you do that shit/-zu, Fido! Your leash is too long' and 'I don't care what you fo(ck)/-xhounds do, 'cos your leash is too long' It's an old joke, but under the circumstances it could be seen as attaning a more significant meaning. The humor arrives from the fact that we prematurely judge what the next line is supposed to be. We become prejudgmental! As we finish the sentence before we have all the facts, so does we in everyday life 'finish' the views we hold of people before we have all the information! It is completely human, piecing together a mental composite image out of all the signs we receive, we do it in language, we do it all the time everyday, without contemplating it. We cannot function in a highly complex information society without doing it all the time! Judging that the weather must be cold because people are wearing lots of clothing, judging that the driver of a big SUV must be environmentally insensitive, judging that a gay guy must be overtly effeminate, or a gay girl must be really butch and hate men. In essence, it is all graduations on the scale of prejudice! Though of course, the consequences are completly different. I don't want to make it sound like Stephen Merrit + co trivializes prejudice. But they do show how common it is, and how hard it would be to completely get rid of it.

So what are we supposed to do to fight prejudice based on gender or sexuality? Well, the record does not hold the answer. In the end it just presents a lot of different people and doesn't judge them differently whether they choose to live up to normative genderroles or subvert them. How you present yourself is always a performance, the amount of acting you want to do is up to you. One moment in A Chicken With It's Head Cut Off it says Let's Just Be Lovers, and the next one we should pretend to be bunny rabbits... The message I get from the record is that love is always a mix of Just Being and Pretending. As long as you are aware of this, and tries to be the least judgmental person you can be, then it'll probably work out. Kind of an old school hippie vibe.



In that way, 69 Love Songs end up questioning our genderroles and conceptions of sexuality. Not by drawing attention to how arbitrary and oldfashioned they are, but simply by discretely destabilizing them, through several songs that doesn't really make sense. As a good friend of mine – who blogs about music in Norwegian – pointed out, the title of the album points to a sexual position that gay and straight couples alike are able to perform. And so would any pairing of boy and girl be able to 'perform' the scenarios sketched out by these oftentimes brilliant songs. As I said, I don't want to argue whether this album is a masterpiece or a classic or whatever. But it has a rather unique and nuanced view on gender, for a rockalbum.

[Part II: Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?]

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

In my opinion, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea needs to be reconsidered. But not quite like this... Or this... Or this... The thing is, I think the complaint about a certain kind of indie, which Simon Reynolds has dubbed cutesy-poo, is entirely well founded. And I think a lot of people, fans and detractors alike, would put NMH in that category. But I think they are all wrong.



Let's begin with the first suite, The King of Carrot Flowers pt 1-3. It's about lost youth, well more than that, it's about the process of losing youth. It uses common tropes: Once we were young and created our own kingdoms in the woods. But your parents marriage disintegrated. And we discovered sex. And we discovered how pathetic our parents were... The image of the father imagining ways of killing himself: 'Each one a little more than he could dare to try' shows to me one of the most pathetic figures of lost authority. Yeah, all in all, we grew up... Well, where does the narrator turn after he has lost the original authoritarian figures in his live? We quickly get an answer, as he bellows: 'I love you Jesus Christ!!! Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do!!!' And then the music changes from nice and folksy to noisy, distorted, and uncomfortable. In my mind, this shows a narrator adrift in the world, clinging to the straw of religion to avoid being confronted with the horrors of a world.



What is most well known about the record, is that it is inspired by the diaries of Anne Frank. Does that mean, that the narrator embraces the horror and evil of his world? Well, no. It is just a further deferral. When he sings 'I which I could save her in some kind of timemachine' it is not noble or deep or anything. It is pathetic. There are countless people suffering in the world today, I recently read that 5 mil children died of hunger or malnutrition last year. Quite conceivably, he could save several of those kids, without needing any kind of scientific miracle machine. But he has closed his eyes to the world, and chosen to focus solely on a tragedy of the past. It keeps being a defense mechanism. I consider it disturbing and uncomfortable. And the music plays up that angle as well, being noisy and heavily compressed. It sounds awful, which is a point I think most people gloss over, talking about it being an unfortunate victim of the 'loudness war' or stuff like that. No. It is not meant to sound good. The sound mirrors the content, which is loud and ugly.



The nineties, when Neutral Milk Hotel and the rest of the Elephant Six collective made their most enduring records, was a weird decade. Not that I remember, I had just turned 13 at the turn of the millennium. But looking back at the culture of the day, I sea a weird mix of unproductive irony and directionless rage. The wall had fallen down, the cold war had ended with the west triumphant, the 'end of history' had been declared. And yet the world kept on being a so-so place. When bands were political, like Public Enemy or the Norwegian Black Metal bands, it was a churning rage, pointed in any and all directions at once. People were attacked in interviews – PE – or in real life – BM – without it really seeming productive. And then there was the American indiescene, with ironic slackers like Pavement or Beck, who didn't seem to have anything to say to begin with. Neutral Milk Hotel gets lumped together with these other 'ironists', as there surface of 'feyness' and 'quirkiness' is seen as somehow hiding how superficial and shallow they actually are. But there are two kinds of surfaceness. One hides the fact that there is nothing underneath, just a vacuum of vapidness and selfimportance. But the other kind hides SOMETHING. It's a focus on the surface for the sake of not having to bother with the real pain deep below the surface. To this group belong Neutral Milk Hotel. When The Impostume first talked about NMH, he mentioned Dave Eggers as being kind of similar. But Dave Eggers belong to the first group, along with a lot of other American writers, chief among them Jonathan Safran Foer. It is another writer whom NMH reminds me of: David Foster Wallace. Now, it is easy to say, that the biographies of both Jeff Mangum and Foster Wallace show them both to be much troubled individuals, not easily fitting in to the description of them as being 'fey' or 'quirky' impostors (I actually once saw a pillaging of Foster Wallaces writing being capped off with the notion that he probably laughed all the way to the bank. I wish he had...). But don't get lost in biography, look at the art! It is not happy or fey or anything, it is sad and disturbing. Foster Wallaces last short story includes an artist forming the letters HELP out of his own feces. How could we not catch up on that? At the end of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the Two-Headed Boy finds a real girl: 'She is all you could need / She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires and retire to sheets safe and clean / But don't hate her when she gets up to leave'. You know who would never leave you? Some perfect imaginary girl you've created out of a dead girls diaries... In this way, Anne Frank enters a long line of 'angelic' girls, being used by male writers as symbols of goodness and innocence, and denied their own messy humanity in the process. She is in good company, the lineage probably starts with Dantes Beatrice.



I love this album. It really speaks to me. But it speaks to all the worst parts of me. The part that would read about a hunger catastrophe in Africa, and would immediately go on facebook to air my rage at the capitalist system, instead of finding some charity to send money and actually help. The part that withdraws into the safe world of art and culture, whenever I get confronted with parts of the world I dislike. The part that plays really deep at social gatherings, and claims to be profoundly moved by TS Elliots The Waste Land – another work that uses allusions and intellectual games, to hide the real pain. And I kinda suspect it speaks to a lot of people in the same way. And I kinda suspect a lot of people aren't willing to admit this fact. The album has in my view become sanitized over the years, into this cute, clever, deep, work. But it is a poor example of this kind of work. And it was never meant to be to begin with. As I said at the top, it needs to be reconsidered. The common view is really safe and boring compared to what it really is: Brave. Emotionally naked. Disturbing. Often embarrassing. Noisy. Off putting. Singular. Great.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the Centrifugue, a place where culture and theory is set in motion. This is my new blog. My name is Frederik Bové, and I'm a Dane, studying Modern Culture and occasionally blogging about it as well. I have been blogging in Danish, and now I thought it would be time to make the switch to English. The reasons are threefold: One is the old one, I consider my opinions meaningful and important, and I want to voice them in a language spoken by much more people than Danish. Yeah, I know, delusional, and who will read this blog anyway, but still... Small steps to begin with and so forth. Secondly I want to improve my English writing abilities. Hopefully the amount of spelling mistakes will decrease, and what I'm trying to say will become more and more clear. Thirdly, I'm currently an exchange student at University of California, San Diego, and I want to show the people I know from over here what I'm thinking and writing about. Yeah, the third reason is probably the most important one.

But why that weird name? Well, it is based on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, who distinguished between two kinds of language: Centripetal and Centrifugal. Centripetal language closes in on itself, creating less and less confusion, but also less posibilities for selfexpression. It is the language of ideology, the language of the communicative systems described by Niclas Luhmann, systems such as capitalism or religion, systems that sorts language based on binary oppositions such as profit/no-profit or sacred/profane. Centripetal language is a force of efficiency through (over)simplification, and ultimately of conservatism and narrowmindedness. Centrifugal language is the opposite, it centrifuges the language and whirls it out into the world. It is a force of liberty, of possibility, and perhaps in a minor way a force of anarchy.

Ok, but then... why Centrifugue instead of Centrifuge? The reasons are threefold:

1: Centrifugue means centrifuge in Spanish. In this way, the name indicates one of the main centrifugal forces: Translation. Constantly translating between languages keeps a culture openminded, and constantly translating between linguisticly based systems - be they societal systems ie contrasting monetal values with religious values, or more narrowly theoretical systems ie just trying to use the language of filmanalysis on music or vice versa – keeps the possibilities of different fields open.

2: Centrifugue contains the word 'fugue' in it, drawing attention to another Bakhtinian term: the 'polyphony' he located in the works of Dostoevsky. The different articles on this blog will hopefully in some way or other add up to a polyphonic fugue of theory and culture, loud enough to make the walls of Babylon come tumbling down. Hopefully.

3: The domain centrifuge.blogspot.com was already taken... Yeah, once again, the third reason is probably the most important one.

So then, this was a short explanation of thoughts and hopes for this blog. It will probably be a lot more clearer when I start to post some kind of content in here. Hopefully soon. I got a (small) cache of Danish posts I'm going to translate/rewrite and mix up with newly written content.

Hope you'll like it. Have a nice day.
Frederik