Colored Music (American Idol as interface)
Posted: February 20th, 2008 | Filed under: Mobilities at the Interface, The room flickers blue and white |
There are more people around than usual in my home lately, so I’ve had to rethink the role of music in the house. My usual noisy stuff wouldn’t fly with the guests, and I couldn’t take myself out of the social mix with headphones. So I thought to turn to songs again, actual melodies with memorable words that are “safe” for a wide variety of people.
For that, I thought to turn to Gospel. This will be an ongoing effort, I’m sure, but as I’m trying not to spend money on music right now, I started my dive into Gospel music with the Urbana Free Library.
I first brought home a collection/box-set - I should have known better. “Testify,” on Rhino records, started off wrong right away. The first song? “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” by the Southern Sons Quartette. Ridiculous. And then “Stalin wasn’t Stallin’” by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet.
I could pick my way through the set and, as hoped for, find some artists to pursue later. There were a few worthy songs. I was looking for recordings of people pursuing rhythm, joined voices, repetition and rhyming towards the end of describing the good and bad of the world, personal failures lamented, injustice decried, promises anticipated. I found some Hawkins family, “Our Father” from the Five Blind Boys, and one I had been especially looking for, the Staples’ version of Uncloudy Day.
But even with a few good songs, it was hard not to let the sounds blend in to the background - I ended up troubled by how quickly the songs become a “sound.” A sound of what?
“Revive your spirits with this jubilant three-CD collection of songs of inspiration,” Rhino says. What spirits? Toward what? Is that what gospel music is for, the musical equivalent of a Smiley Face? Add the cultural divides in place here, the racial divides, and you get close to gospel music as minstrel show. “Let’s bring some of those black boys out to lift our spirits.”
What troubles me is how easily I fall into this way of listening. Rhino’s initiation of an anthology called “Testify” with two novelty songs that allow us to wink and bounce is indeed a lazy editorial choice with some implications in race construction. But what about my own hearing, where I direct my aural attention, how I process a series of sounds, voices, rhythms? What’s going on in my perception that I move so quickly from listening to words to the experience of a whole set of songs as of a single “color?”
Music as operational sign or symbol - music as mood cue, an aid to emotional self-management. I peek in on American Idol every now and then (now with iTunes tie-in!), and it’s pure Adorno in there. Witness the components of the culture machine, this music-interface called “American Idol”:
- Take one performer, chosen according to casting call. Age, geographical location, class, race, gender all considered.
- Lay on this performer a skin of additional coloring, apparel and hairstyle designed to cue musical genre-associations and celeb similarities.
- Deliver this performer a category of songs to choose from - “the 70’s,” “the songs of Marvin Gaye,” “holiday songs,” etc.
- Allow the performer a selection of choices for re-alignment - sing the 70’s song as an 80’s song, the rock song as a country song,etc.
- Supply the backdrop video screen with a choice of stock footage or effects - fire? water? shimmering satin?
- Choose from among a given set of lights to construct a desired themed effect
- Perform (provide input). This is the only apparently unstable element.
- Allow three expert “judges” of pre-determined character/persona to provide brief criticism in the form of catchphrases.
- Allow others - a broader audience who presumedly know less than the judges - to signal their approval via push-button console (telephone).
- Eliminate unwanted users. Repeat.
(I’m not sure where host Ryan Seacrest falls in there. I think he’s probably the television equivalent of Microsoft’s dreaded animated “Paperclip helper.”)
This musical interface is intended to deliver new music - the end product are songs we haven’t yet heard. But the machine seems to be predisposed to producing music that functions as a color, a decorative, mood-setting theme. Paula Abdul actually on occasion has described/critiqued contestant performances in terms of color.
This is what’s come of synaethesia? Once upon a decade, mystical moderns dreamed of universal languages of sound and vision. Somehow we might find the perfect chord to call green to everyone’s mind. Now we’ve achieved this for everyone - every music functions as a sort of color-sign, a symbol that moves us on through to an appropriately indexed sentiment, association, relationship to self or others. A perfectly smooth language, free of the friction of interpretation, yet still full of opportunities for rejection and discrimination.
Everything about this machine is designed to further the production of more colors for the palette of self-constructed subjectivity. Ideally, one day Idol contestants will be able to choose a song by a former American Idol winner to sing. “Tonight, our contestants sing ‘Songs from American Broadway.’ Tomorrow night, they’ll sing from the songbook of former Idol winners!” The songs function as operational symbols in the computation of new operational symbols, efficient and mathematical. Plus, it’s democratic! We all get a chance to get our hands on the buttons!
If it’s not obvious by now, I’m looking at Idol as possible only because these approaches to music exist already. Music is already this operationalized through the soundtracks in retail stores, through the way itunes works, through K-Tel marketing ploys. So when we look at the ways in which musics emerge from such a system, it should come as no surprise that a lot of good, bumpy things get smoothed over. Like the experience of listening to worship or sacred music as a mere “spirit-lifter,” or letting one’s only experience of another race or class set happen through a speaker. Or missing the struggles within an individual song lyric through hearing only song structure or genre, and not the song. The human voice here becomes just another signal from the board, some feedback in response to the pressing of the proper button.
We bought our first washing machine. Instead of a “Start” button, it has “Play” and “Pause” symbols.
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