Last week, in my musings about the thin line between engaging with and becoming caught up in the self-perpetuating, self-justifying hamster wheel of pop culture, I mentioned Rihanna’s gimmick 777 Tour, and the bought-and-paid-for journos who’d participated in it (and bit the hand that passed them their meal vouchers). This week Rihanna will have to serve as my springing off point.
This may occasion some awkwardness, as I know as little about Rihanna is as possible for one who spends eighteen hours a day on-line. (And who went to high school with her sometime touring guitarist!) I know of her tormented creative and personal relationship to Chris Brown, whose ebulliently stupid anthem “Yeah X3” I wholly confess preferring to any of the monotone, lusterless grinders that have rolled off the Rihanna assembly line. I have, in one context or another, heard all of her singles. “We Found Love,” with its refrain “We found love in a hopeless place,” I will forever associate with a parking lot in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, where I heard it piping from the attendant’s booth—a pretty hopeless place, indeed. And at some point during the last year, in an ongoing dreary attempt to keep abreast of “What the kids are listening to,” I watched the music video for her “You Da One,” also off 2011’s Talk That Talk, my dewlapped, laptop-illuminated face frozen in rapt attention for Ri-Ri’s three-and-a-half minute Little Egypt act.
A few words about music videos. One still encounters “MTV-style editing” used as a vague pejorative in some circles, but today the music video has inevitably been accepted as a species of art, as with all things once low, tawdry, and despised—I am writing shortly after “The Art of Video Games” ends its run at the Smithsonian. In its nascent days, the music video was treated with particular contempt by the cognoscenti. One of the salient accusations held that first generation video directors were rifling through the entire back-catalog of experimental and avant-garde cinema, magpies plucking out techniques and images that had been arrived at through long, interiorized processes of artistic crystallization. Wrenched free from their original context, which had been integral to their meaning, these techniques and images were basely used to hawk records—stealing from Maya Deren, say, to give to Madonna.
This accusation was, of course, fundamentally true. One of the more baffling programming endeavors currently underway in New York City is an attempt, at 92 Y Tribeca, to legitimize adman-turned-filmmaker Tony Scott’s garbage movies by pairing films from his gobbledygook oeuvre with avant-garde shorts. I am sure the comparison will prove enlightening, one way or another.
Be that as it may: The video for “You da One” was directed by 31-year-old Melina Matsoukas, an apparently much in-demand director and my near exact contemporary who wrote her graduate thesis at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts on music videos. So, some thirty-two years after the first MTV broadcast (Chronicled in a new oral history that I will almost certainly read in spite of myself) and some fifty after the arrival of the Scopitone, we have moved from pilfering the avant-garde—themselves cultural scavengers, as in Jack Smith’s repurposing of Maria Montez—to expertly pilfering the past pilferers.
“You da One” is a “sexy” video. I am employing scare quotes, because I have roughly as much erotic response to Rihanna as I do to, say, a Styrofoam cup or a slab of Formica. Rihanna’s private dancer show in “You da One,” however, got me to thinking of a video that had a pretty seismic effect on my young libido, released as it was when I was thirteen years old: The Breeders’ “Divine Hammer”:
The video is credited to Kim Gordon, that hip Zelig Spike Jonze, and Richard Kern—and I am willing to bet that the black-and-white segments in which Kim Deal is bending and stretching on a palette for the delectation of a camera perched overhead are the work of Kern. (There is another version of the video, hosted on YouTube by Breeders’ label 4AD, which replaces these segments with interpolations of the band playing. Needless to say, it is not nearly so interesting.)
Kern was one of those down-and-out Manhattan decadents who, along with Lydia Lunch and Nick Zedd, banded together under the rubric of “Cinema of Transgression” in the early ‘80s, all interested in exploring the outer limits of deviant sexuality. Watching Kern and Zedd’s Thrust in Me, in which Zedd throat-fucks his own cross-dressed doppelganger, was certainly a revelation of sorts to my adolescent self when it was rented from Alexandria, Virginia’s late, lamented Video Vault.
What was so enrapturing about the “Divine Hammer” video? What made it hot in a way that, say, MTV’s “The Grind” most assuredly was not? I would venture to guess that it was something to do with a bracing “realness.” Kim Deal looked like a girl you would see around—in fact, she’s from outside Dayton, Ohio, 40 miles as the crow flies from where I grew up—and there is something incredibly intimate and playful in her limbering up, as though she’s getting ready to take somebody—Please, please me!—to the mat.
The simulation of privileged intimacy in Kern’s bedroom shoots, a world away from music-video choreography and studio gloss, would in time combine with the aesthetic of porno from the shot-on-the-fly 8mm smoker era. The result was a popularized, deliberately-awkward amateur-smut aesthetic whose development can be traced through Mark Romanek’s 1997 video for Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” Vincent Gallo’s 1997 Buffalo ’66 (and the pederastic, paneled ’70s rec-room ads by Gallo’s sometime-employer, Calvin Klein), right up through to the adverts by American Apparel that grace the back cover of Vice Magazine, in which Kern’s pictures regularly appear today, supplemented by affiliated online television network VBS.tv’s “Shot By Kern” featurettes. The past decade has seen a concurrent boom in demographic-targeting alt-porn; while grand-dad was content to glance over his centerfold’s Turn-Offs, the contemporary hip consumer wants to know that the young lady whom he or she is about to watch have anal sex is a fan of Alkaline Trio, or, in the case of Sasha Grey—photographed by Kern!—is a card-carrying Existentialist. This is something like the erotic equivalent of conscientious farm-to-table dining, and may even constitute an ethical advancement of some sort. I have no idea.
It was, incidentally, at Vice’s music site Noisey that I found a response to Christy Wampole’s NY Times Opinionator piece on irony (discussed in this space last week), which drew certain conclusions that almost made me want to scuttle to Miss Wampole’s defense: “…often, popular things are popular because they’re really good, or at least aggressively interesting. This is pretty much the entire principle behind capitalism.” A Montreal-to-New York City transplant, Vice has always had a libertarian editorial bent; I suspect certain Canadians (e.g. Neal Peart) are sometimes susceptible to reactionary overpraise of the free market because Canadian content quotas have driven them half-mad with Barenaked Ladies.
The term “popular” is a rather tricky one. Implicit in it is the assumption that the cultural landscape is a level playing field, and that a pronounced majority of consumers have, with all options spread before them, collectively opted to promote certain artists or texts with their monetary “vote.” While this is theoretically true in the everything-available-all-the-time era of the Internet, it is also true that popularity can still be fairly effectively coerced in a number of ways—in the free market United States as in Communist Canada. Certain properties—Rihanna, Gerard Butler, Catherine Heigl—are popular not because they have an intrinsic quality that exercises a magnetic, “aggressively interesting” draw on a significant portion of the consumer population, but because unimaginable amounts of money have been pumped into making them so. The textbook example of manufactured popularity is the ‘80s “phenomenon” of hair metal, essentially a record company conspiracy that entailed shipping vast quantities of units in order to record an inflated Billboard position in the first week on the charts—equivalent to the all-important Opening Weekend grosses. It was a mirage that blew away the moment something, anything else made itself available in rock. (The recent tanked attempt to cash in on hair metal nostalgia by Rock of Ages only proved the nonexistence of the phenomena to begin with.)
To return to “Divine Hammer”: Was Kern and Deal’s flashpoint of “realness” nothing more than another marketable aesthetic that, in its proper turn in the changing of fashions, could vie with airbrushed artifice? Is Sex Sells always just Sex Sells, whether the du jour product is Kim Deal or Rihanna? Is anyone a sell-out anymore, or is worship of the bitch-goddess Success the only abiding standard? Is there still such a thing as “co-opting” by the “mainstream”? Was there ever? Does the avant-garde exist in essence only as a test lab used to gestate ideas and images that can then be disseminated to the wider public, as suggested in The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter? (Canadians, of course!) Why would I, at any given moment, infinitely prefer to re-watch Herschel Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast, made with the crassest possible motives of profit from human degradation, than watch Herbert Biberman’s Salt of the Earth, made with the noblest possible motives of increasing human dignity? Stay tuned for these and other adventures in cultural consumerism on the next Bombast; in the meantime, here’s Juliana Hatfield in her underwear:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.