the mass psychology of pop

More pop and psychoanalysis! Following on from something I wrote yesterday in my own blog, I’ve been thinking about Allison Anders’ film God Give Me Strength, and her assertion that poised pop is often capable of more emotional depth than the literalism of emo, etc, precisely because its sleek surfaces can call a kind of aural unconscious into being. Interesting. (But depth isn’t always interesting, anyway. Heh.) Kristen Vigard’s rendition of Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello’s “God Give Me Strength” is the centrepiece of Anders’ film, and it’s so fucking beautiful that it makes me cry. Apparently Bacharach and Costello’s demo made Anders cry, too, but Vigard’s dignified performance for the film is far superior to Costello’s own histrionic attempt on Painted From Memory. Vigard’s voicing is just so. She has it down. And this is what opens up a space for our own projections. In the film, Illeana Douglas’ songwriting character is at her wits’ end, having been fucked over again, and pours everything into a bittersweet lament, “God Give Me Strength”, to open her career as a performer. She sings it plaintively for a genius producer of the Brian Wilson mould — Matt Dillon’s character. He paces around her as she sings, and her voice only really cracks at the climatic line, “I want him to hurt”. His eyes widen. Later, after an awkward silence, he can only manage, “Wow. What a sad song”. It is.

“I still deam of Organon.” Many people know that Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” is based on the life of the Wilhelm Reich, a scientist who thought he could control the weather by harnessing “orgone energy”, and who was hounded to death by the US Government for peddling his “orgone accumulators”. But what’s usually glossed over is that Reich was a member of the German Communist Party and the author of the “seminal” book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was the most notable attempt to synthesise Marxism and the psychoanalytic realm up till Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. His troubling, radical thesis: that people’s willing participation in fascism is connected to forms of repression that are at once more general and yet also intimate, e.g. sexual repression. (Here’s a very funny distillation in a few words.)

Hey, what’s this got to do with Kate Bush? Oh well. Ummm… Anyway, note Bush’s traditionally “musical” approach to sampling, in which samples are put to service as simulated instruments — it’s all Fairlights, Linn drums, etc. standing for a string orchestra. Incidentally, I bought the album on which this track appears, The Hounds of Love, on the same fateful day as getting Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, whose approach to samples couldn’t be any more radically different. I recently had an interesting conversation with a hip-hop historian who told me that the rise of hip-hop coincided with the US Government abrogating its responsibilities to fund the teaching of music in public schools. Of course, that had been the teaching of the Western classical musical tradition, in which Kate Bush is so steeped. So in the ambivalent absence of such a framework in the consciousness of kids in the ’70s, the sounds of the street — unlike the African American pop of previous decades — embraced forms that broke wildly from Western musicology. Interesting!

Flux = great, for letting me rant again.