Body Week 3: Computers made me dance
Dec. 12th, 2004 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus'Wow, I didn't realize you used your body!' said my friend Mika. We were at Belleville, and it was the first time he'd seen me live. The organisers hadn't counted on much embodiment either. They'd set up a DJ table with a mixing desk and foldback monitors, behind which I was supposed to sit or stand and sing immobile. Instead, I went out and stood in the middle of the crowd and did my act from there.
And a rather strange act it's become. I throw my body into a series of pantomimic dances, schottisches, square dances and flings, odd knock-kneed, cutely lame burrikko Japanese girl stances, bum wiggles, hula hoopery, archery and golf mime, Charlestons, disabled-cool and spastic-cool, wheelchair chic, colostomy bag Buster Keaton routines, Marcel Marceau tree-climbing, slow motion moonwalking, ludicrously inadequate body popping and breakdancing, fake stripteases, anthropomorphic cat impersonations... I'm not a choreographer or a vaudevillian, but somehow, from the moment I stopped playing guitar and pretending to be a musician on stage I found myself illustrating the stories, images and situations in my songs with 'quotable gestures' that turned into a sort of clumsy personal choreography. Now I find that I do pretty much the same gestures at the same places in every performance of a song, as if the song had a 'body script' as well as a set of lyrics and chords, an arrangement.
Of course pop songs are multi-dimensional, performed things. They tend to have multiple 'scripts'. There's the management script (how does the song fit into the band's career plan?), the record label script (when do we release this single?), the chord charts and the lyrics and the arrangement script, the producer's script (when do the backing vocals come in, when do we apply the harmoniser effect?), and several live scripts: a dance routine, a lighting script, a pyrotechnics, smoke and effects script, a shooting script if it's being filmed... I think all I'm saying when I tell you I dance my songs when I perform them live is that I've got a pop sensibility, even if I don't have pop discipline or pop resources. I keep things pretty loose and spontaneous, but it's still a pop gesture to involve the body when you present a song. The serious artists here in Berlin tend to sit behind their trestle tables, staring at their laptop screens and prodding at their tabletop cable spaghetti. Stuck behind their Mackie mixers and their austere artistic dignity, they're hardly going to jump onto the table and give us 'Mac The Knife' with all the gestures. Unfortunately. (Fennesz does shake his mane a bit, though, in a 'classical composer' sort of way.)
The weird thing is that my act only became so emboldened and embodied after computers came along. This is post-computer embodiment. It's a direct consequence of the digitization of music. My first shows with a computer came in the early 90s. I felt a bit guilty about having a sequencer running through pre-programmed backing tracks, so I made a point of doing more than just standing on stage and 'asserting authorship' of my songs. I wore a pheasant feather mask, dangled a pierrot puppet, and did ventriloquy shows. I ran around, lay flat on my back, climbed a ladder, used neglected parts of the stage. And, slowly, I developed a 'choreography of repeatable gestures' based on the lyrics of the songs. By taking over the musical chores, the computer freed me up to embody the songs, to become the characters I was singing about. In fact, now I think about it, that pheasant mask and pierrot puppet were props left over from the video shoot for 'Hairstyle of the Devil'. So what computers allowed me to do was bring some of the theatre of music television to my live shows. Now, I think MTV culture is more generally embodied than most live shows where people stand there and play guitars, although it clearly can't compete with Iggy prancing around with a horse's tail and cutting gashes into his chest.
If I'm now more of an actor onstage than an artisan, it's largely thanks to computers. Computers have allowed me to become more human, and becoming more human means -- for me, at least -- becoming more embodied. This is post-digital embodiment, and it's quite different from pre-digital embodiment. Before I performed with a computer, I performed with a band. And, because I'm not Iggy, that meant standing fairly still on stage, playing a guitar. The gestures you could make when you played guitar were the familiar theatrical repertoire of guitar-oriented rock: you could screw up your face a little during the solo, you could point the neck of the instrument down at the ground or up in the air, you could stomp a bit with your feet, you could nudge the back of the guitar with your groin. Basically, you were condemned to play out an endless game of phallic innuendo as you strummed out your chords and twanged your top strings. Now, there's nothing wrong with phallic innuendo -- I'm a big fan of it myself -- but after a few decades of rock music the gestures have all been done better by someone in the past. Who can top Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, Pete Townshend turning into a windmill, or Ziggy fellating Mick Ronson? All that guitar choreography was taken to its limits decades ago, and everything that's come since has necessarily looked a bit lame and wishy washy.
No wonder rock musicians tend to dress a bit retro: they can't but be in thrall to the hip-thrusting, tight-crotch-and-big-belt days when both rock and the sexual revolution were at their high point. Well, society isn't like that any more. Society has got progressively less embodied since about 1972, thanks to things like AIDS, conservatism, and the arrival of computers. Take it from someone whose Cynthia Plaster Caster penis cast has shared a display case with Hendrix's: as far as embodiment goes, the 1960s are going to tower over other decades for a while yet. The embodiment of the 1960s was chemically-assisted (the required disinhibition just wasn't going to happen without dope) and spiritually assisted (there was a goodly amount of eastern spirituality going on, since discredited as 'orientalism'). I think we can eventually regain that embodiment, and some of the things that seemed to distance us from it (computers, for instance) will start to help us attain it. The embodiment of the future will be made possible not by drugs and eastern spirituality, but by electronics and mutant biology: we will have bigger dicks than Hendrix one day, should we want them, thanks to prosthetics and gentech. We will become fully embodied again, but only -- and here's the paradox -- by merging our bodies with machines.
Tomorrow: public body tools, affordable body technologies, accessible body facilities.
And a rather strange act it's become. I throw my body into a series of pantomimic dances, schottisches, square dances and flings, odd knock-kneed, cutely lame burrikko Japanese girl stances, bum wiggles, hula hoopery, archery and golf mime, Charlestons, disabled-cool and spastic-cool, wheelchair chic, colostomy bag Buster Keaton routines, Marcel Marceau tree-climbing, slow motion moonwalking, ludicrously inadequate body popping and breakdancing, fake stripteases, anthropomorphic cat impersonations... I'm not a choreographer or a vaudevillian, but somehow, from the moment I stopped playing guitar and pretending to be a musician on stage I found myself illustrating the stories, images and situations in my songs with 'quotable gestures' that turned into a sort of clumsy personal choreography. Now I find that I do pretty much the same gestures at the same places in every performance of a song, as if the song had a 'body script' as well as a set of lyrics and chords, an arrangement.
Of course pop songs are multi-dimensional, performed things. They tend to have multiple 'scripts'. There's the management script (how does the song fit into the band's career plan?), the record label script (when do we release this single?), the chord charts and the lyrics and the arrangement script, the producer's script (when do the backing vocals come in, when do we apply the harmoniser effect?), and several live scripts: a dance routine, a lighting script, a pyrotechnics, smoke and effects script, a shooting script if it's being filmed... I think all I'm saying when I tell you I dance my songs when I perform them live is that I've got a pop sensibility, even if I don't have pop discipline or pop resources. I keep things pretty loose and spontaneous, but it's still a pop gesture to involve the body when you present a song. The serious artists here in Berlin tend to sit behind their trestle tables, staring at their laptop screens and prodding at their tabletop cable spaghetti. Stuck behind their Mackie mixers and their austere artistic dignity, they're hardly going to jump onto the table and give us 'Mac The Knife' with all the gestures. Unfortunately. (Fennesz does shake his mane a bit, though, in a 'classical composer' sort of way.)
The weird thing is that my act only became so emboldened and embodied after computers came along. This is post-computer embodiment. It's a direct consequence of the digitization of music. My first shows with a computer came in the early 90s. I felt a bit guilty about having a sequencer running through pre-programmed backing tracks, so I made a point of doing more than just standing on stage and 'asserting authorship' of my songs. I wore a pheasant feather mask, dangled a pierrot puppet, and did ventriloquy shows. I ran around, lay flat on my back, climbed a ladder, used neglected parts of the stage. And, slowly, I developed a 'choreography of repeatable gestures' based on the lyrics of the songs. By taking over the musical chores, the computer freed me up to embody the songs, to become the characters I was singing about. In fact, now I think about it, that pheasant mask and pierrot puppet were props left over from the video shoot for 'Hairstyle of the Devil'. So what computers allowed me to do was bring some of the theatre of music television to my live shows. Now, I think MTV culture is more generally embodied than most live shows where people stand there and play guitars, although it clearly can't compete with Iggy prancing around with a horse's tail and cutting gashes into his chest.
If I'm now more of an actor onstage than an artisan, it's largely thanks to computers. Computers have allowed me to become more human, and becoming more human means -- for me, at least -- becoming more embodied. This is post-digital embodiment, and it's quite different from pre-digital embodiment. Before I performed with a computer, I performed with a band. And, because I'm not Iggy, that meant standing fairly still on stage, playing a guitar. The gestures you could make when you played guitar were the familiar theatrical repertoire of guitar-oriented rock: you could screw up your face a little during the solo, you could point the neck of the instrument down at the ground or up in the air, you could stomp a bit with your feet, you could nudge the back of the guitar with your groin. Basically, you were condemned to play out an endless game of phallic innuendo as you strummed out your chords and twanged your top strings. Now, there's nothing wrong with phallic innuendo -- I'm a big fan of it myself -- but after a few decades of rock music the gestures have all been done better by someone in the past. Who can top Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, Pete Townshend turning into a windmill, or Ziggy fellating Mick Ronson? All that guitar choreography was taken to its limits decades ago, and everything that's come since has necessarily looked a bit lame and wishy washy.
No wonder rock musicians tend to dress a bit retro: they can't but be in thrall to the hip-thrusting, tight-crotch-and-big-belt days when both rock and the sexual revolution were at their high point. Well, society isn't like that any more. Society has got progressively less embodied since about 1972, thanks to things like AIDS, conservatism, and the arrival of computers. Take it from someone whose Cynthia Plaster Caster penis cast has shared a display case with Hendrix's: as far as embodiment goes, the 1960s are going to tower over other decades for a while yet. The embodiment of the 1960s was chemically-assisted (the required disinhibition just wasn't going to happen without dope) and spiritually assisted (there was a goodly amount of eastern spirituality going on, since discredited as 'orientalism'). I think we can eventually regain that embodiment, and some of the things that seemed to distance us from it (computers, for instance) will start to help us attain it. The embodiment of the future will be made possible not by drugs and eastern spirituality, but by electronics and mutant biology: we will have bigger dicks than Hendrix one day, should we want them, thanks to prosthetics and gentech. We will become fully embodied again, but only -- and here's the paradox -- by merging our bodies with machines.
Tomorrow: public body tools, affordable body technologies, accessible body facilities.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 03:26 pm (UTC)I assume that you've read Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs and Women and Pepperell's The Posthuman Condition?
Sir, this ain't no book-larnin' from no varsity, see. This here stuff is all stuff I taught maself when I was out on the road. I'm jus' tellin' it like I see it, Sir.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 03:45 pm (UTC)'This mixture of blood, sperm, and feces is certainly meant to shock and offend his Restoration audience in that it gives a less attractive "body" to courtly love poetry...
'...The infamous farce Sodom: The Quintessence of Debauchery has been credited to Rochester. In Sodom, King Bolloxinion declares "buggery" to be the intercourse of choice throughout the land since heterosexuality is so abhorrent and unclean. The play consists of one explicit sex scene after another as the king's subjects, both men and women, find other ways to satisfy themselves sexually than normative heterosexuality.
'Rochester's poems participate in the libertine ethic of bisexuality so prevalent during the Restoration. Being part of the court culture not only gave Rochester his infamous reputation but also access to the aristocratic privilege of sexual liberty and experimentation. His poetic persona explores all the available avenues of sexual activity open to men of his class in the Restoration.'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 04:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 05:16 pm (UTC)Glad though that you see him in your lineage.
To finish and save you having to pop down the library and indulge in some book larnin' here's his infamous Regime de Vivre:
I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven; and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap.
Then we quarrel and scold, 'till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch, growing bold, to my pocket does creep;
Then slyly she leaves me, and, to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then, crop-sick all morning, I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning 'till eleven again.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 04:09 pm (UTC)I haven't read either book, but I will make a note to peruse them in the future.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 04:42 pm (UTC)