re-producing pop - citeseerx

A R T I C L E

INTERNATIONALjournal of

CULTURAL studies

Copyright © 2006 SAGE PublicationsLondon, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

www.sagepublications.comVolume 9(2): 167–187

DOI: 10.1177/1367877906064029

Re-producing pop

The aesthetics of ambivalence in a contemporarydance music

● Brent Luvaas

University of California, Los Angeles, USA

A B S T R A C T ● Electroclash is an electronic dance music popular in cities likeNew York, Los Angeles, and London between 2001 and 2004. In this article, I usethe example of electroclash to demonstrate the significance of media instructuring social reality. I argue that electroclash constitutes a set of aesthetictactics for living through the confusions and contradictions of life in a media-saturated, increasingly globalized, late capitalist economy. It is produced by adiverse assemblage of urban youth, whose primary commonality is an ambivalentrelationship towards media. Electroclash artists, I argue, engage with andrespond to meanings within existing media texts. They ironically perform theclichés and representations of popular culture, re-investing them with critical,though often ambiguous new meanings. In these re-readings of media, Iconclude, electroclash artists blur the distinction between celebration andcritique, and ultimately complicate any clear-cut, theoretical opposition betweenresistance and accommodation. ●

K E Y W O R D S ● consumption ● dance music ● mass media ●

performance ● popular culture ● style ● youth

Introduction

Between 2001 and 2004, the style of electronic dance music labeled by thepopular music press as ‘electroclash’ transformed from an underground

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phenomenon, to a dance club craze, to a music-industry marketing blitzand, even more rapidly, to yesterday’s news. By late 2003, just as youngpeople in suburban America began to catch on to this urban music trend,the fashion vanguard in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and London hadmoved on to other things. Electroclash, with its danceable, histrionic popsongs, had become too popular. DJs had begun to spin it on the radio, cablemusic video stations like MTV and VH1 had begun to give it airtime, andthe popular music press had already published dozens of articles about itsartists’ supposed ‘new wave revival’, their nostalgia for 1980s fashion, andtheir obsession with glamour, superficiality and excess. In short, electroclashhad reached its saturation point. The very urban hipsters who popularizedit in the first place had perceived it to have ‘gone mainstream’ and, con-sequently, it ceased to hold meaning as an alternative to commercial culture.In other words, it was no longer cool.

In this article, I analyze the ephemeral, pop culture trend of electroclashas a set of aesthetic ‘tactics’1 (De Certeau, 1984) for living through theconfusions and contradictions of life in a ‘media-saturated’ (Ortner, 1998),late-capitalist world economy. Based on textual analysis of electroclashmusic and performance, as well as eight months of fieldwork in Los Angelesnightclubs and concert venues at the height of electroclash’s popularity in2003, this article is a study of the often contradictory social motivationsout of which electroclash was produced, invested with meaning, and eventu-ally discarded for other, equally transient pop culture phenomena.

In analyzing electroclash, I have two critical goals in mind. First, I useelectroclash to demonstrate the power and influence of media on the verystructuring of social reality for today’s youth. It is no longer possible, Iwould argue, for the younger generations of industrialized nations to thinkautonomously of media, that is, without reference to the categories andtypologies presented in and constructed through circuits of mass mediation.The media today supplies both resources and disciplines for imagining andmaking sense of ourselves and the world around us (Appadurai, 1996), andit is these resources and disciplines with which electroclash is explicitlyconcerned. Media is by no means the only institution of knowledge-production (Foucault, 1978; Abu-Lughod, 2002) at work in the worldtoday, but it is an increasingly important one, supplying and reinforcingmany of the dominant categories and schemas (Ortner, 1989; Sewell,1992),2 rules and resources (Giddens, 1979)3 that structure the experienceof contemporary life. Electroclash artists, I show, are in continual dialoguewith existing, media-promoted schemas. They comment on and challengemedia themes and representations, but there is never any question of whollyabandoning them.

Second, I use the example of electroclash as a vehicle for discussing whatI perceive to be an increasingly common mode of expression within contem-porary popular culture, one which seems to blur the very boundary between

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celebration and critique. Electroclash artists, like any number of self-consciously ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ music scenes, express an utterdisdain for the mainstream music industry. This, in itself, of course isnothing new. Contempt for the commercialization of music has been partof the rock music worldview since its inception (Frith, 1981), and alterna-tive music scenes, such as punk and hardcore, have long been preoccupiedwith keeping their music ‘authentic’, i.e. untainted by commercial interests(Laing, 1997). Electroclash, however, represents a very different tactic ofdifferentiation, one commensurate with the growing presence ofcommercial media in our everyday lives and which seems to hold the veryattempt of escape from the reach of corporate hegemony as futile. Ratherthan avoiding the tropes and clichés of popular music, I argue, electroclashartists make explicit use of them, subverting their meanings and playingwith their underlying conventions. They co-opt the images and sounds ofthe commercial mass media instead of waiting to be co-opted by it, and thenthey use irony as a means of disavowing any ideological link with the appro-priated material. Irony, here, has become a distancing mechanism. It makesit possible to say one thing and mean another. But irony has anotherfunction as well. It makes it OK to have tastes seemingly out of sync withan anti-materialist, anti-corporate agenda. It makes ambivalence accept-able, allows one to have their cake and eat it too – to like commercial pop,arena rock, and MTV and still hate what they stand for. And this is exactlywhat electroclash artists do. They embrace a commercial look, sound, andstyle, even revel in it, while maintaining a decidedly anti-commercial ethic.

Electroclash artists, then, are among a new generation of bricoleurs,culture jammers, and DIY (do-it-yourself) musicians, who challengeconventions they find problematic within commercial culture while simul-taneously seeming to uphold, even celebrate, the very objects of theircontempt. Through acts of ironic distancing and pop culture deconstruc-tion, they enact what Kondo (following Hutcheon) has characterized as‘complicitous critique’ (Kondo, 1997), performing ‘contestatory gestures’(Kondo, 1997: 145) ‘within a discursive field defined by commodity capi-talism and mass culture’ (Kondo, 1997: 105). As such, electroclash exposesthe messy, love-hate relationship today’s youth shares with the mass media,their embittered awareness of its indoctrinating effects but continuedallegiance to its materialist dreams. It demonstrates a set of practices thatultimately complicate any clear-cut distinction between resistance andaccommodation, transgression and compliance.

The electroclash scene?

Justin and Christiana of the electroclash duo T.H.E.M. are self-confessedfashion fanatics and glamour junkies, wannabe pop stars who have decided

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not to wait until they’re rich and famous to live out the over-the-top, self-indulgent lifestyles of media darlings. On any given weekend night, theycruise the boulevards of Hollywood in a bright pink limousine with picturesof their faces airbrushed on the doors, stop by at a nightclub or two, andseek out acquaintances to one-arm hug or air-kiss on both cheeks. Eachstanding over six-feet tall, the duo is quite a sight: Christiana, long and leanin tight black, low-cut dresses and shoulder-length blonde hair, and Justin,carefully groomed and foppish, bedecked in tailored black suits, hairstanding in four-inch spikes on the top of his head. The two seem to havemerged their stage personae with their everyday selves. They’ve modeledtheir lives after music video imagery and converted their public image intoa three-dimensional representation of pop culture excess.

As Justin and Christiana explain, the two friends grew up surrounded bythe recording industry. Justin’s father was the manager of the 1980s popstar Stacie Q, and they were dancers in one of her music videos as kids.While growing up, they met a number of real-life pop stars and claim thattheir own celebrity affectations are modeled on the ones that they experi-enced first-hand. The name T.H.E.M., short for Thee Human Ego Maniacs,developed as a parody of the out-of-control egos they encountered over andover again among their semi-famous acquaintances. Surrounded by thetrappings of celebrity all their lives, Justin and Christiana have deeplyambivalent feelings about pop stardom, commercialism, and the material-ism that runs rampant in Hollywood. ‘It’s in our veins’, claims Justin. It’spart of who they are, and yet, they recognize its problems, its limitations,and its patent absurdity. Justin and Christiana thus occupy a complex posi-tionality towards the media imagery they consume and imitate. They’redrawn to its fantasy of beauty and glamour, yet repulsed by its cynicism, itselevation of money above all else, and its reduction of performers tocommodities that can be bought and sold. Their attitude towards Holly-wood commercialism is an ambivalent position reflected and expressed intheir music, performance, and personal fashion sense, and it is this uncom-fortable merging of iconic representation and ironic distancing that charac-terize T.H.E.M. as ‘electroclash’.

I first met Justin and Christiana after their performance in thebackroom concert space of a seedy Santa Monica bar. Among the grizzled,hardened drinkers of the Westside watering hole, the two seemed hope-lessly out of place, and expressed as much to me after the show. They aremore at home in the glitzy gay bars of West Hollywood, the hipster,pseudo-dives of Silver Lake and Echo Park, the underground loft partiesof downtown LA, places where I would run into them time and time againthroughout the course of my fieldwork. These assorted nightspots, afterall, are the focal points of the ‘electroclash scene’, that fluid socialnetwork of producers and consumers for whom electroclash is a signifi-cant part of their lives.4





Electroclash is not a subculture, at least not as British social theorists havedescribed and imagined them. It is not a community of working-class youthwho turn their disadvantaged socio-economic position into a symbolic assetthrough music and fashion (Clarke et al., 1976; Cohen, 1972). In fact, ithardly constitutes a community at all. Rather, the electroclash scene sharesmore in common with the ‘neo-tribe’ concept described by Maffesoli (1995)or Muggleton (2000). It is a temporary affiliation defined by consumer taste,not a fixed, cultural category bound by common class background.Moreover, the Los Angeles electroclash scene, if it can be described in thesingular at all, is composed of a rather heterogeneous lot: white, middle-class, largely straight, suburban ‘cool kids’ working hard to differentiatethemselves from an imagined cultural mainstream (Thornton, 1996);Latino, mainly gay, working-class youth from East LA and Echo Parkforging countercultural identities out of a common feeling of marginaliza-tion (Fikentscher, 2000); well-dressed, primarily gay West Hollywoodprofessionals who moonlight as clubkids; and scruffy East Hollywood,mixed sexuality hipsters living out their bohemian fantasies in self-imposedurban poverty. Electroclash, after all, stems from diverse origins, and itmaintains its diversity in its various sites of production. It was Larry Tee,DJ, producer, and longtime member of New York’s gay underground dancemusic scene (Fikentscher, 2000), who first coined the term ‘electroclash’ todescribe a diverse set of young performers doing ‘different but related’things with electronic music. However, straight, indie electro-pop bands likeLadytron, Soviet, and the Faint were equally if not more responsible forpopularizing the style.

I do not, however, intend to portray electroclash as an egalitarian oasisof diverse communitarians committed to ‘just getting along’ despite theirdifferences (although, this is how Larry Tee described it to me). In myexperience, sexuality, ethnicity, and class background remain divisiveelements within the larger world of electroclash. A spindly thin, 20-some-thing hipster girl handing out fliers outside the primarily gay nightclub‘Synthetic’ once said to me as I passed by her with my girlfriend, ‘Youshould check out Club 82 here on Sundays. It’s like this, only straighter.’Clubs like the Echo, the venue where both Synthetic and Club 82 took placeat the time of this research, divvy up their nights according to sexual pref-erence, perceived subcultural affiliation, and even ethnicity. Furthermore,participants engage in a range of activities of social differentiation, attempt-ing to homogenize their social spaces to the extent possible. Electroclashevents, like Radio at Star Shoes, often require a password to get in. Otherslike Club 82 vary their prices dependent on how clubgoers dress. And someflat out deny entrance to those who don’t fit the established ‘look’ of theclub. Plus, within clubs, attendees find all sorts of ways to distinguish them-selves from ‘other’ groups. It is, for instance, fairly easy to pick out who’sgay and who’s straight at a nightclub like the Parlour in West Hollywood.





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‘Straight people’, DJ Liz informed me, ‘tend not to dance.’ They’re the onesleaning against the bar, scowling, and swigging beer.

Electroclash is not, then, just another unifying soundtrack of peace, love,and ecstasy, a la rave, techno, and house (Reynolds, 1999; St John, 2003).Its audiences are just as apt to stand back and feign indifference as losethemselves in the rhythm and the vibe. But we shouldn’t confuse this stanceof indifference with actual apathy. Electroclash, was, after all, massivelypopular (and still is in many, principally suburban locales). It was very muchan international phenomenon, spanning much of Europe, the USA, andparts of Asia (particularly Japan), with ties to the larger indie music scene(Shank, 1994), the gay dance music underground (Fikentscher, 2000), andthe international ‘post-rave technotribe’ (St John, 2003). Its defining featureis neither class, sexuality, nor ethnicity, but something much more fluid andintangible: style. As Justin and Christiana exemplify, electroclash above allis about style. The point here is not to claim, as does Maffesoli (1995), thatclass and ethnicity are no longer the salient social categories they once were.Quite the contrary. The electroclash social landscape is riddled with internaldivisions. Rather, the point is that electroclash represents a set of aesthetictactics that exists across such divisions, a style of tongue-in-cheek perform-ance, both on stage and in ‘real life’, indicative of a particular sharedrelationship towards mass media. Electroclash is an effect of, and responseto, the media saturation of late capitalism, the sheer, undeniable presenceof media in our daily lives. It is bound neither to specific localities, norparticular nationalities, but grows instead out of the vast, interconnectedcircuits of media around the globe, the ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai, 1996)that accompany and support the global economic restructuring of moderntimes.

In a now classic formulation of subculture theory, Clarke et al. proposeda model of cultural production in which working-class youth create organic,‘authentic’ forms of collective resistance, which are then co-opted, com-modified, and rendered mainstream by the trend-hungry mass media(Clarke et al., 1976). The trouble is, as Thornton (1996), Frank (1997), andothers convincingly argue, for contemporary youth there was never a timebefore mass-mediation. Young people come to know about youth musicscenes and ‘alternative’ cultural formations through media representations.They first encounter punk, indie rock, gangsta rap, and any number of otherpurportedly ‘anti-commercial’ music styles, including electroclash, throughcommercial sources. It is television, magazines, news, music videos, andeven the occasional sit-com that assume the right and the power to labelmusic scenes, to classify types of styles, label them oppositional orconformist, and either celebrate or condemn them, sometimes both. Thisdoes not mean that young people are merely passive recipients of pre-digested media categories. As electroclash demonstrates, the position ofconsumers towards media is much more complex than this. But there is no





genuine ‘opposition between subcultures and the media, except a doggedideological one’ (Thornton, 1996: 116). Electroclash, after all, is not a labelpeople typically assign to themselves, but rather a style elaborated andarticulated most forcefully by music journalists and recording labels.

Irony, superficiality, and the pursuit of artifice

In fact, between 2001 and 2004 the popular music press had quite a bit tosay about electroclash. Jason Persse of Mixer magazine wrote, ‘Whateveryou called it – electroclash, technowave, tech-pop, new new wave – there’slittle question that it was the most hyped movement of 2002’ (Persse, 2003:50). It’s been described as ‘retrofitted dance pop’ (Miller, 2003: 70), ‘anover-hyped scene that’s more about fashion than music’, ‘a retro-’80s party’(Tremayne, 2003: 14), ‘cheeky’ (Matos, 2003: 71), and my personalfavorite, ‘the most manufactured faux movement since Malcom McLaren’sSex Pistols’ (Tremayne, 2003: 14). Nearly everyone seems to agree: electro-clash is a glamour-obsessed, nostalgic exhibition put on by people moreconcerned with style than substance. What these articles seem to miss,however, is that for the cheeky, electronic musicians performing ‘electro-clash’ this is precisely the point.

In a contemporary take on ‘camp’ (Sontag, 1966) or ‘detournement’(Debord, 1995), electroclash musicians have crafted a style that is con-spicuously artificial and seems to revel in its own artifice. They have raidedthe vaults of pop culture’s past, built their own sound and image as apastiche of vacuous, commercial pop, and paraded it on stage and over theair waves as the second coming of 1980s-style decadent materialism. Bandsgive themselves sardonic names that emphasize their falseness, such as MyRobot Friend, Tracy and the Plastics, and Ladytron. They adorn them-selves in outfits straight out of 1960s science fiction films, bedeck them-selves in PVC, nylon, and plastic leather. Album covers feature pictures ofrobots and machines, or singers posing like fashion models that graced thecover of Vogue in 1984. In their marketing materials and in concert, bandsoften stare vacantly into space, mouths slightly agape like sustenance-deprived fashion models or cyborg mannequins. Electro nightclubs aregiven names like Synthetic, the Plastic Factory, or Fake to flaunt their plas-ticity. And the music itself is composed entirely of electronic instruments,usually synthesizers, laptops, and vocoders, electronic vocal processorsthat convert the human voice into tinny, robotic noise. The accompanyingsong lyrics seem to painstakingly avoid subject matter with any pretenceof depth, lingering instead on such anti-literary themes as child actors (forexample, in Freezepop’s ‘Tracey Gold’), casual sex in public places (forexample in Dirty Sanchez’s ‘Fucking on the Dance Floor’), riding aroundin limousines (for example, in Miss Kitten and the Hacker’s ‘Frank





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Sinatra’), and wearing cool clothes (for example, in Mount Sims’ ‘How WeDo’ or ‘Black Sunglasses’).

But electroclash’s superficial preoccupations, its unoriginality, and itsstress on surface over depth are not evidence of its complicity with cynical,corporate goals of profiting from proven pop formulas. Nor is it some sortof demonstrative proof of this generation’s postmodern reduction of ethicsand meaning to value-free aesthetics (Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1992).Rather, it is through the apparent preoccupation with superficiality andartifice that electroclash artists express meaning. The fakeness and shallow-ness of electroclash music and performance is directly referential to thefakeness and shallowness electroclash performers perceive in the extantmedia products from which they borrow. It is a commentary on the media’sability to manufacture truth, to create and reinforce significant culturalschemas. Electroclash artists strive to uncover and expose the artifice ofpopular culture, its meaning-making power, its contrived conventions, itscynical sentiments, and its recurrent, often oppressive representations ofyouth, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.

It should come as no surprise, then, that electroclash artists borrow exten-sively from the new wave and pop styles of the 1980s, the decade of neonand spandex that gave birth to MTV. On the one hand, the music of the1980s is the music electroclash artists, who are primarily in their latetwenties and early thirties, grew up with. It is the first kind of music theycan remember liking, and the kind of music they consider the most forma-tive in their current musical attitudes and tastes. Playing 80s music, then,has an undeniable nostalgic aspect to it for electroclash artists. But themusic of the 1980s also takes on another, more symbolic and less feel-goodsignificance for them as well. It is described by electroclash scenesters as thesoundtrack of the most materialistic, corporate-controlled decade in history,a time of flashy popular culture that glossed over the grim realities of theIran-Contra Affair, the Cold War, and the growing divide between rich andpoor. For electroclash artists, it has become representational of the materi-alism and cynicism that defines the corporate media, and which is deeplyembedded in its churned out product of mainstream popular music. Severalmusicians, DJs, and scenesters I talked to, furthermore, drew explicit paral-lels between the 1980s and the contemporary moment. They comparedIran-Contra to Bush’s hidden agenda in attacking Iraq, the paranoia of theCold War with the current fear of terrorism, and the lifestyles of today’sHollywood media royalty with the excesses of that famously decadentdecade. Electroclash artists’ revival of 80s style, then, is as much a way ofcommenting on the problems of the present as a nostalgic return to popculture’s past.

Electroclash artists do, however, also frequently borrow directly fromcontemporary popular culture, a fact that somehow gets lost in much of thepopular music press. The look of bands is a merging of 1980s fashions with





the pop styles of the moment, and their antics on stage emulate those ofcurrent popular acts such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake,and Ashlee Simpson far more explicitly than any synth-pop group fromtheir childhood. While electroclash artists often draw inspiration from the1980s, their critical gaze is focused intently on the trends of the moment.

The Fischerspooner concert at the Sunset Strip House of Blues in Septem-ber of 2003 provides a clear illustration of this critical reflection on contem-porary popular culture in electroclash. Their set began as something of across between a Britney Spears concert and a Las Vegas style revue. SingerCasey Spooner wore a ruffled blue shirt tucked into black spandex pants,his hair pulled into a cornrow ponytail. Accompanying him were fourdancing woman with shiny, black tinseled wigs and costumes that resem-bled the workout gear Jane Fonda wore back in the mid-1980s. There weretwo female back-up singers who didn’t seem to be doing much singing atall, and a single, male dancer in white jeans and a matching white t-shirt.It was a well-choreographed, expertly executed, arena-style show repletewith billowing smoke, strobe lights, and confetti.

Then, somewhere into the third or fourth polished, pop number, the maledancer began spurting blood. Viscous red fluid gurgled out of his mouth.Thin streams of crimson sprayed from his wrists. And the audience cheereduproariously. This was the first time in the show that Fischerspooner hadbroken character, cluing in the audience with fountains of fake blood thatthis pop music extravaganza may not be exactly what it appeared. The fakeblood, utterly incongruous with the cliché pop drivel that preceded it, hadthe effect of jarring the audience into a realization that something unlikethe familiar pop culture spectacle was occurring. It served as a ‘key’(Goffman, 1974), an indicator that the performance required a special sortof interpretation. The performance was thus framed as a sort of parody,putting ironic distance between itself and what was depicted.

Although delivered with utmost seriousness, a sort of hyper-seriousnessthat itself functions to frame audience interpretation, the show was fraughtwith slightly skewed rock star clichés and was full of satiric references topop culture vapidity. Casey Spooner changed outfits every other song,occasionally coming back on stage only partially dressed, or donning aridiculous costume like a tiger’s tail or a boxer’s robe. He punctuatedclimaxes and crescendos in his songs by releasing balloons or confetti. Hestood in front of a giant fan that had the sole function of making his hairblow back provocatively. In other words, he took every opportunity toexpose the absolute artifice of his act. Spinning slowly on a turntablebeneath his feet, he ripped the cornrow wig off his head to reveal his ownshaggy blond hair and belted out a sad, slow number, while holding a ciga-rette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. As he ‘sang’, he alter-nately took puffs or swigs, letting the recording of his voice play on withoutbothering to move his lips in syncopation, thereby making it exceedingly





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obvious that nothing the audience heard was being played live. In fact, itbecame a running joke throughout the show. The back-up singers would lipsync the parts originally sung by Spooner, and he would sometimes evensing over the rather mechanical-sounding pre-recorded vocal tracks in hisown genuine, off-key voice. The show’s effect was to simultaneously enter-tain audience members with familiar references to arena rock show conven-tions while making them aware of their status as conventions, that is,fabrications of the entertainment industry, hackneyed and clichéd to thepoint of being almost meaningless.

Electroclash artists, then, attempt to ‘get beyond the dominant mode ofthought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it’, but by ‘renderingit incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the arbi-trary convention it is’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 31). They do not outright reject popculture norms; they expose them through constant, often unflattering refer-ence. Electroclash songs and performances repeatedly index Top-40 clichésand MTV music videos. Their explicit lyrics borrow extensively fromgangsta rap and continually play with the preoccupations with wealth andsex evident in other, more mainstream pop acts. Their album covers alludeto familiar depictions of young women in barely anything at all, and imagesof rock stars lounging in hot tubs, sipping champagne, living the high life,and more or less basking in their successful exploitation of today’s music-buying public. Their songs, in a sort of mock tribute to the contemporary,ultra-popular genres of today, praise the self-indulgent lifestyles of the richand famous and shamelessly promote sex and violence. They strip popularmusic down to what they perceive as its true essence (sex, money, andlooking good), then reproduce it using framing devices that indicate ironicdistance.

Often sung in voices of affected boredom, these songs are intended toreveal the patent absurdity of the rock star fantasy, to strip the lifestyle ofits manufactured appeal through embodying it to a tee and making it appearridiculous. They depict a stylized, glamorized, ironic depiction of the virtuesof excess and, in doing so, call attention to and problematize the taken-for-granted conventions of pop culture representation. In her dance club hit‘Frank Sinatra’, for instance, longtime DJ and musician Miss Kitten ironi-cally praises the excesses of stardom. ‘Being famous is so nice’, she sings, ina dry voice and strong French accent. ‘Suck my dick. Lick my ass. In limou-sines we have sex, every night with my famous friends.’ Here Miss Kittencomments on the preoccupation of current pop hits with a mythologized,Hollywood lifestyle, and mocks the sexual bravado of other, male (she, afterall, does not have a ‘dick’) pop artists. She plays with the performance of asexualized masculinity, using crude language to highlight the profanity andmisogyny already embedded in popular hits.





Deconstructing pop

Electroclash artist Mount Sims, over the blaring music of a bar indowntown Hollywood, described to me his musical ambitions in Jungianterms. He attempts, he explained to me, to take myths ‘engrained in somekind of collective unconscious’ or ‘embedded in the culture’, and ‘mess’ withthem, reinvest them with meaning, or as he put it, ‘just completely takeapart, deconstruct and put [them] back together again’. Sims thinks ofhimself as participating in the dismantling of powerful cultural myths,continually represented within popular media, whose functions, heexplains, are to ‘support law’, and in their place, creating ‘new myths of sexand death’. These new myths, as Sims imagines them, would support liber-ation instead of oppression, individual freedom over subservience to power.

Mount Sims compares his work to surrealist and Dadaist artists, creating‘discontinuities’ through incongruous juxtapositions. His goal is not to hitpeople over the head with his message but to have it affect them on somesemi-conscious level. ‘Most of the time’, says Sims, ‘it’s a little bit inevitablethat something’s gonna reach through, something’s gonna leak through, nomatter how tight, no matter how tight the skin is, something’s gonna leakthrough, it’s gonna sweat some kind of way.’

At one point in his stage show, Sims’ friend Ryan, a local performanceartist, chases after two female dancers who wear what Sims describes as‘modern hoochie, Florida booty-dance’ gear. Sims, meanwhile, continues todance undeterred behind his open laptop computer. Ryan wears a whitejumpsuit and a stereo speaker on his head. His movements are calculated,robotic, reminiscent of Michael Jackson during his ‘Thriller’ period. Ryan,Mount Sims explains, is a modern minotaur, a cyborg merging of man andmusical technology, seducing the flesh-and-blood women on stage for theaudience’s bemusement and enlightenment. He is, Sims explains, themerging of man and beast or, in this case, man and technology, the sexualdrive of testosterone-induced masculinity mediated through cultural appa-ratuses. He is the cultural construct of masculinity, the embodiment of patri-archal assumptions about the nature of the male gender. The performance,Sims goes on to explain, combines pop iconography with cultural mythol-ogy. It dresses up ‘embedded cultural myths’ in the visual vocabulary ofcontemporary popular culture, converting cultural preoccupations intokitschy exhibitionism. Ryan’s technological minotaur is thus made toappear ridiculous, his masculine performance of seduction, composed ofstylized mechanical movements, rendered unnatural and bizarre.

Sitting in front of me in a bleached, dreadlocked mohawk and tight-fittingred t-shirt, the then 28-year-old, bisexual, mixed-ethnicity Sims may not fitthe typical profile of a deconstructionist, but his aims are quite similar.Mount Sims’ performance uses visual references to both pop culture and,peculiarly enough, Greek mythology, to problematize deeply instilled





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cultural schemas. In particular, his stage show is an attempt, though visualrepresentation, to ‘destabilize hierarchical oppositions’ between suchconventional distinctions as male and female, straight and gay, popular andelite, and audio and visual (Hebdige, 1979). As Derrida himself advocated,Sims and other electroclash artists do not attempt to add critique to popularculture, but to expose the inconsistencies already within it. In Derrida’swords, ‘the destructive force of Deconstruction is always already containedwithin the very architecture of the work’ (Derrida, 1986). Electroclashartists, then, attempt to draw this destructive force out, to expose and undosocial conventions by making them explicit in extant cultural forms.

A number of all-women electroclash acts such as Electrocute, Peaches,Avenue D, and Princess Superstar enact a similar critique of media repre-sentations of femininity, using their stage acts to call attention to and de-naturalize gender roles. These performers tend to appear in concert in flashy,highly revealing attire, gratuitous amounts of make up, and quite complexhairstyles. On stage, they act either sexually suggestive or artificiallydemure, playing an exaggerated social stereotype of the prototypicalwoman depicted in the mass media. Wearing elaborate, Barbie-doll hair-styles and extremely generous amounts of make-up, the two women of Elec-trocute, for instance, began their show at the El Rey Theater in Los Angelesin lab coats, posing and moving mechanically like female Frankensteins. Atthe start of their second song, ‘Kleiner Dicker Junge’ (‘Chubby Little Boy’in English), they threw off their lab coats to reveal tight-fitting, silver laméleotards, in which they strutted around the stage and go-go danced. Therest of the show consisted of dancing in tight clothes, flirting with theaudience, and singing songs about eating candy (‘Sugar Rush’), and howmuch they love their ‘daddies’ (‘I Love My Daddy’). During their perform-ance, Electrocute seemed to embody the American stereotype of the pre-teen girl. They made social conventions about the expected behaviors ofgirls apparent through acting in a manner that seemed inspired by men’sfetish magazines and soft-core porn films. The effect was a rendition of‘girliness’ that is playful, provocative, and intentionally a little creepy. Elec-trocute, however, occasionally would break with their girlish demeanor tosing sexually explicit numbers like ‘I Need a Freak’, during which theydanced suggestively and made overtures to male audience members. Onceagain, the effect was disconcerting. Electrocute’s antics always seem put on,over-the-top, and a little contradictory. And so they are intended to be. Elec-trocute are not pretending to play themselves on stage. They are assumingroles based on common representations of women and girls in magazines,movies, and music videos. Incongruous behaviors of electroclash acts (forinstance, Electrocute’s alternating between girlishness and sexual aggres-siveness, and Princess Superstar’s dressing up like a fashion model whilerapping about oral sex), and exaggerated expressions (such as the coquet-tish giggles of Electrocute or the mock-boredom of Miss Kitten and the





Fitness) give away the act. Electroclash, after all, is always about puttingon an act.

Anthropologist Victor Turner has claimed that performance has thecapacity to draw attention to the social system out of which it developed(Turner, 1987: 22). Electroclash acts make use of this capacity. In the caseof Mount Sims, Electrocute, and other electroclash acts, performance islargely an attempt to make hidden cultural processes apparent, to exposesocial conventions and make them appear problematic. In Mount Sims’words:

I’m definitely not trying to be a shock rocker or anything like that. [But] Ithink to shake people out of their complacency is the duty of an artist.Someone has to definitely do it, to [get the audience to] ask the question why[did] I feel uncomfortable? Why didn’t I feel uncomfortable? Why did thatmake me too comfortable? You know, and more [than that to] express, isthat wrong? Is that art? Is that music? Is this representative of anything thatI am? Can I relate to this at all? Or does this make me even more of anoutsider? Those are the questions I want people to step back with. And toquestion themselves, question this place that we live in. And to ask, whatmakes that artistic? What makes that art? What makes this right or wrong?

Performance here is a means of entertaining the audience, while at the sametime making them increasingly conscious of ‘the nature, style, and givenmeanings of their own lives as members of a socio-cultural community’(Turner, 1987: 22).

The blurring of celebration and critique

Electroclash, thus, critiques both the stereotyped representations and thecynical and materialistic sentiments found within popular culture, but thisleaves a couple of unanswered questions. First, is it the intention of electro-clash artists to launch a political assault on the representations depicted inpopular culture, or are they simply having fun with them? And two, is thegoal behind the electroclash performance style truly to criticize our society’spreoccupation with glitz and glamour, or does this style of performanceitself reflect a sort of glamour fetish, disguised and disavowed through theuse of ironic distancing? It seems clear to me that in electroclash music andperformance there is always an element of fascination with the rock starfantasy, the lure of sex, money, and the Hollywood lifestyle, that can’tentirely be explained away as a practice of critique. Fun seems to take prece-dence over politics in electroclash, and it’s important not to overestimatethe political agenda of electroclash artists. Electroclash is, after all, dancemusic, propelled by driving beats and catchy melodies. Despite electroclashartists’ critique of pop culture conventions, their own performances rely on





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such conventions not only to draw attention to them, but also to entertain.There is, then, a blurring between revelry and disdain in electroclash, asimultaneous process of embracing and distancing that, I would argue,stems from lifelong, ambivalent relationships between electroclash artistsand popular culture. Electroclash musicians were, after all, consumers ofpopular culture long before it occurred to them to produce it themselves.

In her work on the Japanese fashion avant-garde, Kondo (1997: 105)suggests that there exists another possibility for subversion outside of‘pristine resistance or opposition’, one which she refers to, followingHutcheon, as ‘complicitous critique’. The avant-garde in the world offashion, she explains, operates in ‘a discursive field defined by commoditycapitalism and mass culture’ (Kondo, 1997: 105). Their designs, and oftenoutlandish runway shows, call into question gender categories and compli-cate orientalist notions of what it means to be Japanese. But such contesta-tory gestures ‘are inevitably mitigated through the fact that fashion is aboveall a capitalist enterprise based on making a profit, that is premised on theproduction of desire in consumers’ (Kondo, 1997: 145). Electroclash artists’contestatory gestures, similarly, are mitigated by the fact that electroclashartists inherited their aesthetic practices from the very music industry theirperformances critique. They continually reference, draw influence from,and, moreover, depend on the existence of a ‘mainstream media’ to maintaintheir ‘outsider’ status. After all, the very logic of alternative music sceneslike electroclash is premised on the notion that there is something to beoutside of. This outsider status, however, is itself unstable. Electroclashartists never push themselves too far away from the object of their disdain.They write catchy pop songs, manipulate pop culture conventions to attractan audience, and build their aesthetic from assembled pieces of pop musicrefuse that they admit they’re fond of, despite often strong, politically drivenfeelings that they shouldn’t be. Their critique, then, is always ‘complicitous’with the very media industry it scorns.

Electroclash is, thus, testimony to the power and influence of popularculture on the lives of Western youth. It is evidence that popular culture isindeed a medium through which ‘imagined selves and imagined worlds’(Appadurai, 1996: 3) are constructed, grappled with, and reproduced(Dornfeld, 1998: 5). Popular music, television, and film are powerful influ-ences on the ways young people see themselves and the world around them(Mankekar, 1999: 8). They are resources for self-imagining, providingconceptual structures that influence in subtle and not-so-subtle ways thetastes, thoughts, and feelings of consumers (Radway, 1984). But electro-clash’s ambivalent performance style also demonstrates that the consump-tion of popular culture and its imitation by subsequent generations of popculture producers are by no means passive acts.

Liz, the singer of the Boston-based electroclash band Freezepop, told methat irony and sincerity are always operating simultaneously in their





performances. ‘They’re always there’, she said, ‘at different levels.’Freezepop’s song ‘Get Reddy to Rokk’, for instance, is a parody of hack-neyed rock music conventions, and yet, Liz admits a certain affection forthose same clichés. Their song ‘Tracey Gold’, similarly, is a sarcastic ode tothe female star of the 1980s sit-com Growing Pains. However, Liz explains,The Duke of Belgian Waffles, who is one of the synthesizer players andsongwriters of the band, ‘had a major crush on Tracey Gold growing up’.The song at once comments on the media’s power to manipulate emotionsand makes fun of one of the members of the band for falling prey to suchmanipulation. The end result is a song that celebrates a minor pop cultureicon of the 1980s while acknowledging the ridiculousness of such celebrityworship.

Mount Sims admitted his own ambivalent perspective during ourmarathon four-hour interview. He acknowledged that electroclash oftenobscures the distinction between celebration and critique. In his own work,he explains, he tries not to ‘force feed’ his message to the audience and,consequently, he says, it probably isn’t possible to tell for sure if he’s criti-cizing pop culture’s preoccupation with sex and money or in fact endorsingit. He prefers it that way. In his words:

Leave it [the critique] unfinished. Let the art finish itself. Or let the listenerfinish the art. You know, let the listener be the one who’s critical. Let thelistener be the one who’s reaching.

He also admits that he too isn’t entirely sure where he stands. His stageshow could easily be read as critique of pop culture spectacle or simply aspop culture spectacle. His concerts are elaborate exhibitions, with femaledancers in skimpy costumes, pumping and grinding against him. MountSims himself tends to dress elaborately in costumes manufactured for himby friends in the fashion industry. He wears the garb of a pop icon, resem-bling a cross between Prince in the 1980s and David Bowie in the glam early1970s, and ultimately embodies the abstracted visual attributes of pop starcharisma. His dancers too appear to conform to Hollywood expectationsof female beauty, curvy and petite in tight-fitting clothes. There is a sensein which Mount Sims, and electroclash artists in general, are struggling withthe allure of the materialist fantasy, a sort of uncomfortable ambivalencearising from a clash between their counter-cultural ideals and their years ofagreeably consuming pop culture imagery.

This ambivalence is perhaps even more apparent in the stage show ofNew York’s W.I.T. (Whatever It Takes). Performing their most popular song‘Hold Me, Touch Me’ at the Electroclash II show in Hollywood, the threewomen of W.I.T. wore ‘matching beige taffeta gowns’ circa the 1920s(Lentz, 2003), their hair perfectly coiffed and feathered like Farrah Fawcettin the 1970s, and assumed poses strikingly similar to the opening sequenceof the Charlie’s Angels television series. They sang sappy, banal, and





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ultra-pop lyrics like ‘Hold me, touch me, hold me tight for just tonight’,while giggling, smiling coquettishly, and making it extraordinarily difficultto tell whether or not they were being serious.

Larry Tee, the writer and producer of W.I.T.’s songs and, as previouslymentioned, the man who coined the term ‘electroclash’, explained to methat electroclash speaks in the language of the ‘zero generation’: young,middle-class Americans who came of age at the turn of the millennium, whofeel disaffected by politics and see explicit social causes as pointless. It is astyle of critique preferred by those who were, in Tee’s words, ‘raised on safesex, salad bars, and the internet’. Many of the electroclash bands I’ve talkedto are self-confessed pop culture addicts. Like most of their generation, theyare children of MTV and Atari video game systems, lifelong pop cultureconsumers inspired to make pop of their own. What sets them apart fromother Americans is not so much their patterns of consumption as their ideo-logical and emotional investment in symbolically distancing themselvesfrom the ‘mainstream media’ they have long consumed.

Irony has become the modus operandi for electroclash bands and, indeed,a broad assortment of today’s youth, because it doesn’t oblige them to giveup either their addiction to popular culture or their counter-cultural ideolo-gies. Irony is the electroclash ‘weapon of choice’, Tee told me, because itdoesn’t require one to take a stand. It doesn’t require political actiondoomed to failure. It doesn’t require an out-and-out rejection of consumerculture. Instead, irony is a way of criticizing what they are continuing todo, what they enjoy and embrace in spite of their oppositional, politicalideologies. Irony is a way of navigating a middle ground between resistanceand accommodation. As Liz Ohanesian, DJ at the West Hollywood electronightclub Transmission suggested to me, ‘Irony has become this veil thatyou hide under just so people can think you’re cool if you like somethingthat’s not.’ The extravagance of Fischerspooner, the affected boredom ofMiss Kitten, and the pseudo-vapidity of W.I.T. are all examples of usingirony as a tactic to avoid taking an explicitly resistant or compliant positiontowards the media representations electroclash artists consume and imitate.It is, as Tee claims, a tactic ‘the zero generation can understand’ and relateto.

Conclusion

The impact of electroclash is visibly waning in Los Angeles. Where thereonce were 10 to 12 popular clubs playing electroclash, now there are onlytwo or three. Where a year ago there were several live electroclash showsevery week, now you’re lucky to find one a month. This is a city that thriveson novelty, and electroclash is already old news. The very same trend-proneurbanites that constituted the electroclash scene have moved on to new





things, or perhaps more accurately, new versions of other old things.They’ve resurrected other music styles from the ruins of pop culture, givenbirth to ‘new’ genres like ‘disco-punk’ (an abrasive, guitar-driven music withdanceable beats), and ‘retro rock’ (another 80s-inspired style that takes itsinfluence from early gothic rock and post-punk). Many of the electroclashbands themselves have changed their styles to reflect the current motions inmusic and fashion. Mount Sims and Fischerspooner, for instance, have bothincorporated a guitar, a live bass, and drums into their music. The irony isstill there, the pop culture indexicality is still there, and so is the tactic ofmanaging ambivalence to commercial culture by ironically performing it.The visual and musical attributes of electroclash, however, have subsided,and the styles that have replaced it undoubtedly won’t last long either. Theyaren’t meant to.

Electroclash was never intended to be an enduring, permanent additionto the Western world’s musical canon. It was part of an ongoing set oftactics for living through the social and economic system in which all of ourlives are embedded, for managing alienation and ambivalence. Electroclashreflects many of the contradictions of late capitalism and the ‘postmoderncondition’ that accompanies it. It displays the cynicism towards media, theinfatuation with imagery, and the ever-presence of commercial culture in thelives of individuals. It does not, however, simply reiterate the cultural logicof the dominant social order. Electroclash music and the urban hipsters thattemporarily embraced it as the soundtrack to the ‘counterculture’ activelyreinterpret the media’s normative meanings. Electroclash artists borrowfrom commercial culture, but never become its dupes. They deconstruct itsconventions, de-naturalize its representations, and participate in changingthe meaning of its popular mythologies.

And these are not simply toothless gestures. As Kondo argues aboutavant-garde fashion, meanings produced by and distributed through themedia regimes of late capitalism are ‘never fully closed’ (1997: 151).‘Moments of instability, ambiguity, and contradiction’ (Kondo, 1997: 151),such as those which appear within electroclash productions, have the poten-tial to destabilize a field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993), ‘ultimatelyexposing and throwing into question its constitutive logic’ (Kondo, 1997:151). Electroclash artists turn profit-driven, commercial formulas into self-conscious kitsch. They transform oppressive gender distinctions intomarkers of ironic sophistication. Their performances expose contemporarymedia representations as cynically manufactured, socially constructed, andultimately oppressive social conventions, then convert them instead intosomething else: something chosen, something fun, something played out inpublic.

Today’s generation of rising rock stars and budding musical entrepreneurswere raised on a steady diet of media messages, but they are no ‘culturaldopes’ (Hall, 1981), molded and manipulated by someone else’s commercial





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motivations. They occupy an ambivalent position towards commercialculture. They are cynical of its reiterated messages but fascinated by itspromise of glamour, its materialist fantasy, and its endless supply of glossy,stylized images and sounds. They do not simply reproduce pop cultureconventions; they re-produce them, remixing, reworking, and reinvestingthem with ambiguity, irony, and more than a little self-mockery.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice andfeedback, as well as Maureen Mahon, Niko Besnier, Sondra Hale, and YunxiangYan for their detailed commentary on earlier drafts. Thanks also to SherryOrtner, Mariko Tamanoi, Karen Brodkin, Kyeyoung Park, Nandini Gunawar-dena, Anjali Browning, and other members of the Culture, Power, and SocialChange (then Cultures of Capitalism) working group at UCLA for valuablecommentary and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented atthe Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu,Hawaii and the Society for the Anthropology of North America annualconference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Notes

1 De Certeau distinguishes between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’. He defines a‘strategy’ as a ‘calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible whena subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientificinstitution) can be isolated from an environment’ (De Certeau, 1984: xix).Strategies are imposed by the powerful onto the less powerful. He defines a‘tactic’, on the other hand, as ‘a calculus which cannot count on a “proper”(aspatial or institutional) localization, nor thus on a borderline distinguishingthe other as visible totality’ (1984: xix). A tactic is employed by the lesspowerful in response to the strategies of the powerful. In De Certeau’s words,it is a means whereby the weak ‘continually turn to their own ends forcesalien to them’ (1984: xix).

2 I am using the term ‘schema’ in the sense employed by Sewell (1992), Ortner(1989), and others, to refer to ‘not only the array of binary oppositions thatmake up a given society’s fundamental tools of thought, but also the variousconventions, recipes, scenarios, principles of action, and habits of speech andgesture built up with these fundamental tools’ (Sewell, 1992: 8).

3 Giddens is quite vague about what he means by ‘rules and resources’, butthey are, for him, the basic building block of ‘structure’, or ‘the medium andoutcome of the reproduction of practices’ (Giddens, 1979: 5).


03_luvaas_064029 (jk-t) 28/4/06 10:42 am 4



4 I have chosen to use the term ‘scene’ here, along with Mahon (2004), Shank(1994), and others to describe the fluid social network of electroclashmusicians and producers, as well as those fans, friends, and supporters withwhom they have routine, direct interaction. I use the word ‘scene’ as opposedto ‘subculture’, ‘music community’, or the currently popular ‘neo-tribe’because these terms imply to me an internal cohesion and a set of definedboundaries which fail to accurately capture the indeterminacy of this aggre-gate of international, multi-ethnic, mixed sexuality musicians and artistsoperating out of multiple cities. A scene is, however, defined by certaincommonalities in style, motivation, and attitude. As Mahon puts it, ‘a sceneis a heady concoction of musical practices, musical knowledge, hair styles,manners of dress, performance and dance styles, and aesthetic values thatmark groups of musicians and music fans’ (Mahon, 2004: 99).

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Publications.

● BRENT LUVAAS is a PhD Candidate in socio-cultural anthropologyat the University of California at Los Angeles. He is currently conductingresearch for a dissertation project on Indonesian teen media and theconstruction of a national, Indonesian youth culture, emphasizing theground-level social practices through which young Javanese make use ofand rework representations of youth in magazines, music and film.Address: University of California, Los Angeles, Department ofAnthropology, 375 Portola Place, CA 90095-1553, USA.[email: [email protected]] ●





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