Another Helping of Popcon (aka Part 3)

Continuing my belated review of goings-on at the EMP Pop Conference 2009 (now two weeks back), some highlights from panels that I saw. Before anyone asks about my own presentation, it needs some revision before it’s fit to be read (a talk is more forgiving), and I’m considering trying to make a little YouTube documentary out of it, once I master the Keynote-to-video conversion process (and figure out how to incorporate Auto-Tune the News!).

Marvin Gaye sings “Can I Get a Witness” on television 1965

Robert Fink, “Ain’t That … Peculiar? Selling Masochism at Motown, 1962-1969″

As usual I came in a bit late to the Friday 9 am panels, so Fink’s 11 am presentation was the first where I was fully alert and in note-taking mode - and what a presentation it was. Its main thesis was that mid-60s Motown marketed Marvin Gaye as a “shy lady killer” whose songs portray a forever-suffering lover, and that in doing this, Barry Gordy & co. were picking up on an inherent quality of masochism in Gaye’s psyche as someone who grew up with a violent, religious, crossdressing father - “scared and fascinated by male coercion.” Masochism in that circumstance, Fink suggested, is a kind of subversive rejection of “the law of the father” - as Gaye’s song “Ain’t That Peculiar?” put it, “How can love grow from pain?” But Motown “boiled those contradictions down” to the image of “an attractive young black man who appeared to become aroused when you hurt him.” (In questions, Fink agreed that there are a lot of questions about who the audience is for this and how they received it - was Gaye meant to seem like his [presumably black] lover’s slave, and what’s the intended irony? He noted that Gaye had a lot of contempt for his sixties audiences.)

Fink, a leading musicologist from UCLA (indeed one of the pioneers of applying musicology to pop) and an affable, commanding speaker, then took his analysis to a riskier level, paralleling the Motown backbeat (with its roots in gospel handclaps, simulated in the studio “vividly enough to make the palms sting”) to a “slap” or even to “a whip falling on flesh.” He demonstrated how Marvin seemed to respond to this subtext, not only by “audibly wincing” on words such as “hurt” and “pain” but by vocally weaving and bobbing around the backbeat in a song like “Can I Get a Witness?”, like a boxer, “avoiding the blows as they fell.” (Fink introduced some Freudian talk here about the passive-aggression of the masochist, including their tendency not to be punctual, which seemed rather more flimsy, though the account of Marvin having to be literally dragged to the studio in his later Motown years was suggestive).

When Gaye was able to get out of his Motown contract and make his epochal singer-songwriter records after 1971, Fink suggested, he “mostly tried to find a less painful relationship to the beat,” and shifted his subject matter from his personal pain to a more collective racial and human suffering - though in 1982, not long before his death, he recorded the explicit “Masochistic Beauty.” Fink closed by showing Gaye giving a rare late performance of “Ain’t That Peculiar?” at the 1980 Montreux Jazz Festival when he broke off into a (rather weak) drum solo - “now he is the one doing the beating, which may be the closest thing to a happy ending this masochistic story has.”

Greil Marcus, “The Songs Left Out of ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”

This was one of Marcus’s typically mesmerizing imaginative readings of art-music texts, this time of the slide-show version of Nan Goldin’s important, excruciatingly intimate document of her “recreated family” and its poisonous pursuit of sexual, narcotic and other pleasures, of naked bodies, desperate embraces, bloodspattered walls, empty beds and finally masoleums. In its installation form the show comes with a soundtrack of classical and pop music - to Marcus “the images are the music and the songs are the words.”

He admitted that his initial impulse to make his own alternate mixtape for the images was “an obnoxious conceit - nothing is missing,” but felt that there was in a sense an answer song to Goldin that would deal with the fact that Goldin’s “Ballad” never surrenders its “hipster cool” - he pointed to Lonnie Mack’s 1963 single “Why?”, an underrecognized song he considers “the greatest deep-soul record ever made” (a risky claim, considering that Mack is white). It’s a breakup song, which Marcus convincingly showed is like a slow procession up a staircase to the roof, where the singer seems poised to throw himself to his death - yet in the last verse shows up intact, writing his lost love a letter, as if he’s been saved by the symbolic suicide that the song itself enacts. Marcus didn’t quite draw out the connection, but he linked the Mack song and Goldin’s imagery by remarking, “there’s a coverup that art makes, that only art can expose.”

I’m not sure Marcus illuminated Goldin’s photo series beyond what I already knew and felt about it, but he certainly put Mack’s song permanently on my mental jukebox.

David Cantwell,, “My Mother Wants a Man with a Slow Hand, or I Think Conway Twitty Might Be My Dad: A Not Entirely Disinterested History of ‘Sweet, Sweet, Country Lovin’ “

Of all the papers I heard in Seattle that weekend, this wonderfully titled piece might be my top nominee for immediate publication, from Cantwell, a longtime contributor to No Depression and one of my music-writing heroes and influences. He opened with a very funny but also disconcerting childhood anecdote about his parents fighting over his mom uncharacteristically saying in 1973 that Conway Twitty was sexy (a fight he joked might have led to his sister’s conception). Cantwell then made a case for Twitty as the country equivalent of Al Green, “a grownass lover man,” and his song “You’ve Never Been This Far Before” as a very rare pop case of sex actually being depicted in the act, “like we’re listening in on someone’s eye-rolling pillow talk.” He moved on to the question (using Ellen Willis’s tongue-in-cheek categories of “classical” and “baroque” sex) to ask “What sort of sex is country music sex?”

Almost always, it’s “classical with a vengeance,” he said, noting that the fatalism of country is often overstated by romanticizing outsiders and that most country is cautious and cautioning, about limits, guilt and the fear of isolation - that “heaven’s just a sin away.” As Merle Haggard put it, in country “we don’t make a party out of lovin’.” Conway Twitty in many ways stands out as the baroque exception, perhaps of a moment in the early 70s when sexual realignments were so widespread as to reach even the forbidden places of Nashville. This paper opened a lot of ears both to Twitty and to David Cantwell (though I think he ought to have played some of “This Far Before” for the uninitiated, er, so to speak).

Michaelangelo Matos, “House is a Feeling”

I missed most of Matos’s intriguing case for Chuck Roberts’ 1987 a capella speech from “My House” as a “post-standard” - a piece of music constantly used as a “tool,” as a one-size-fits-all enhancer to other music, rather than one that’s directly covered. (What else would be a post-standard? “Good Times”? “Apache”?) Luckily, he’s published the whole thing on his own blog. Go enjoy.

Douglas Wolk, “My Other Body is a Temple”

In my notebook all it says is, “Douglas Wolk kills it.” I hope that he converts the talk into an online video of some sort, but even then the performative aspect of his incredible presentation will to some extent be missing. In brief, Douglas was talking about how he was never a dancer, and didn’t really have the physical relationship to music (and thus perhaps the sexual one) that others did, but then discovered that by, first, making mixtapes and later by becoming a DJ, he could in some ways transcend that limitation, in the physicality of making other people dance “for” him.

It was a funny and poignant essay in itself, but it self-reflexively transcended that level in its presentation - the text was actually spoken by recordings of other people’s voices, while Douglas “DJ’d” the talk itself, mixing music clips, videos and the text together, silently, totally unspeaking, as if he were invisible, behind the podium. Beyond the obvious meta-commentary, I also thought he was commenting on the process of commenting upon music - how as critics, too, we’re disembodied voices, far removed from the dance floors and cars and kitchens and bedrooms where music operates upon listeners’ bodies, and yet we attempt in some way to recondition that experience, like wizards behind the curtains. And that may reflect some of our own shortcomings, but Douglas’s treatment of that fact was free of the usual ressentiment (and self-hatred), treating it instead as a merciful grace. Bravo.

Graham Raulerson, “The Jocker and the Hoosier Boy: The Politics of Bowlderization in ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ “

This was a great history of the gradual unsexing and depoliticization (and then re-sexing and recuperation) of Harry McClintock’s famous hobo-topian, Depression-era tune. In its original version, the song was directed by a hobo “jocker” to a punk, a boy, a naif, whom he’s trying to seduce for sexual favours with promises of showing him to a preposterous Eden of “cigarette trees” and streams of alcohol. That is, it’s a song of exploitation. But in his own later, cleaned-up version (McClintock even claimed not to remember how the original went), he changed it into an anarcho-populist propaganda tune - McClintock was a Wobbly, and this was in some ways a psychedelic vision of a Wobbly anti-work paradise to be brought about by its main strategy, the General Strike. Later versions updated the sensibility to a more Sixties-style countercultural one.

And then at the end of the line comes the video above, Darius “Hootie” Rucker as an exoticized black cowboy promising a frat-boy-fuck-topia where “the breasts grow on trees,” surrounded by hick-face cheerleader girls in service to, as Raulerson put it, “a King that wants you to ‘have it your way’.” (A perfect definition of the capitalist superego aka Lacan’s Big Other.) The pharmico-phenomenology of the song has passed from bacchanalian booze to escapist acid to soporific pot and saturated fats here, in a masterwork of Bush-era revisionist nostalgia that, as Raulerson said, “instead of hiding sex to bring out the politics, does the reverse.” I kind of wished he’d generalized out a bit from there (can we point to other cases in pop of that sex-politics dialectic in pop?) but otherwise no complaints.

One more part to come before the end of the week.