Are We NOT MEN? (part one)

[koganbot]

Been saying that these days the voice of adventure in popular music is young and female, though so far my argument is more loose ends than fabric, and I find counterexamples as soon as I find examples (e.g., male EXO is certainly adventurous, I just wish I liked them more).

Watch on YouTube

To put it negatively, pop music doesn't seem to have a viable adulthood, and masculinity (or whatever) stops making sense — or stops making excitement, anyway. (This last is a lot less true in the dancing than the singing, and I'm more and more questioning whether "popular music" is the right term anyway, "music" being too limited a descriptor. "Popular" is limited, too.)

So, on cue, Rock Critic Roundtable is hosting a discussion regarding NOT MEN, inspired by the relative absence of men (and boys, presumably) in Dave's recent year-end best-ofs. (Absence of male performers and frontmen, that is, not producers and execs.) He's asked Sabina, Jonathan, RGR, and Alex to be the convo, and invited us to the peanut gallery.

From the peanut gallery I have these questions:

--How much is Dave's experience shared; not just voting for female performers rather than male, but which performers, for what reasons? I'll note that the U.S. charts are happy to welcome males. But the Freaky Trigger Top Ten for 2011 was women from start to finish (though that's as performers, front people; if you go by writer-producers, I know just offhand and not visiting Wikip that Teddy Park was at number four and Klas Åhlund was number six, and I'm sure there were others as well representing the uterus-deprived). I get the feeling that, no matter a shared preference for women (which I'm not sure they all have), Dave and Alex seem to be coming from a similar place but RGR, Jonathan, and Sabina aren't nearly as close (to each other or to Dave and Alex). But maybe nonetheless there are telling similarities.

--So in what sense is this judgment (female performers better than male) a phenomenon of a group or a social class or a social category? E.g., in the early '60s a whole bunch of males in their teens or early twenties in the London area art schools were listening to American r&b and blues and rock 'n' roll, often reaching back to the early and mid '50s. Is our current preference for young women performers at all similar to that (similar people in similar circumstances, somewhat influencing one another, forming similar tastes and interests, a sense of where to reach out and away from themselves to find themselves, or to find something, and where the tastes don't match, at least having similar focuses regarding what to disagree on, etc.)? So, which young women, singing which styles and contents? (Richards, Clapton, et al. didn't fasten on just any black American performers, but particular ones, from whom they made something particular of their own.) I think the issue here is at least as much social class as gender.

--In what ways other than gender is Ashlee Simpson, for example, NOT DAVE and NOT ALEX?*

--Continuing that example, how come guys do a worse job than Ashlee of telling the story of Dave and Alex? Were there ever any male performers of the past that Dave and Alex could recognize as telling at least a somewhat similar story (say, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed)? If so, what's the difference between then and now?

--Regarding RGR fave Screeching Weasel: I hadn't listened to them in over a decade, but I'm listening right now, and they're... I don't mind them, but they are 50 million kinds of weak compared to the Stooges and Sex Pistols and Rocket From The Tombs and Guns N' Roses. Maybe I need to blast them louder (which I can't 'cause it's late at night). I suppose one reason that Blackout was my Raw Power of 2007 (comparison made here) was that there was no Stooges Raw Power released in 2007. But I don't see how anyone coming on as a "punk" in 2007 could have done a Raw Power, or how any self-defined punk ever will again, whereas a non-punk like Britney can. So I don't consider my changes in listening since 1973 actual changes in taste, but rather getting what I always got but from different sources. And sure, I've broadened into attempting ballads and such, but still, what moves me now isn't much different from what moved me then, it just, I don't know, has different notes, and styles, a different look, and is made by different social groups. But Britney's closer than the Screechers to rock 'n' roll. (Yeah, I know, I've been making this argument for at least 26 years. Broken record.)

Btw, where I would go in response to Dave's question is to the last full paragraph of my first Rock Critic Roundtable several months ago, 2011 having been The Year In Which Until Almost The Very End I Way Underrated LMFAO:

Bom aspires to Mariah but does a better Britney, even if it's just a joke. LMFAO portray themselves as desperate dance dolts, though they're actually good with timing. In Big Bang, G-Dragon is quite the smoothie, but feigning clumsiness here, he lets himself loose.

One of those cited, Bom, is a woman. But the basic thought here is of needing to go to parody or a derogatory self-portrayal to unleash something in oneself that one is actually good at. And while Bom does quite well anyway (her band finished #4 in the Freaky Trigger poll), it seems as if LMFAO can't function without those constraints. (I say "it seems" because I've yet to hear anything other than their singles.) In a convo with arbitrary_greay on the boyband thread, I said:

"Sexy And I Know It" sounded like a deliberate comic exaggeration and goof in the original too [not just in the Aaron Carter mashup by DJ Bedbugs]. The wink was always there. Which isn't to say LMFAO don't mean it on some level — they realize how average-looking, non-studs they are, that's part of the whole setup and joke; but an underlying message, for them and their fans, is that drunk-ass party slugs like them are doing fine, are as sexy as they need to be (especially when everyone's drunk).

The thing is, LMFAO, being such blustery guys, could never do what 2NE1 do, go "Even if you were me you'd be envious of my body" and do it straightup, no hedging, no taking it back. And conversely they couldn't turn around, like 2NE1, and say, "Don't lie to my face tellin' me I'm pretty... 'cause I know I'm ugly" and make it sound true, every bit of the pain, as 2NE1 do. Guys like LMFAO would just sound pathetic/bathetic.

I guess my thesis (or something) is that Teddy Park, who wrote "Even if you were me you'd be envious of my body" and "Don't lie to my face tellin' me I'm pretty... 'cause I know I'm ugly," couldn't be the one to sing those lines, either, not convincingly. Has to be girls.

Finally, here's a wonderful but also somewhat horrifying performance where a young Korean woman is utterly warm and inviting in a dance with a young man who's supposed to be responding in kind — I think — but seems utterly paralyzed and petrified. The thing is, a typical sexualized r&b performance in America where the guy was confident and responsive would probably bore the fuck out of me.

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*Also, despite Autobiography continuing to work for Dave and Alex through their twenties, and me through my fifties, I doubt that those songs could have been written by her and for her if she had been much older than the 19 years she was when she (along with Shanks and DioGuardi et al.) actually created the album.

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Dudes from Infinite doing a better job with the Troublemaker choreography than Hyungseung and Hyuna (I mean, than Heungseung - HyunA is fine obviously):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT4QSOfR0RE

Sometimes I wonder if it's not fear that if the performance is too good, it'll be banned, that keeps the original Troublemaker pair from realizing their full potential. It has to be clear that the sexiness is for the sake of performance - that it's not real - you have to constantly think about how act in a way that makes it clear that you're acting, not actually a couple. Hyuna doesn't worry about that and just goes for it, Hyunseung thinks too much about what he's doing - perhaps?

[koganbot]

Holy fucking shit!

I think it's possible that Mat or someone once linked this for me before and I didn't have time to look. Anyway, I'm embedding it:



Since when are HyunA and crew upset if they get their live performances banned? She already ran into trouble with "Mirror Mirror" and "Bubble Pop!" without any detriment to her career. But again, this is another instance where I don't understand Korea. I mean, are the fans in Korea so utterly clueless as to believe that (a) if the performance is effective that it must mean that HyunA and Hyunseung are dating, or (for that matter), (b) if HyunA is dating someone, they the fans can no longer fantasize being her boyfriend (or her boyfriend's girlfriend), unable even to postulate that the pair could break up (if the fans insist that the fantasies be grounded realistically, which is absurd anyway)? If HyunA/Hyunseung had been ordered to further tone down the choreography, they could have compensated by having Hyunseung actually generate some warmth.

My guess is that it's automatically assumed that Sungyeol and Sungjong are not actually a couple, though I don't see why this assumption needs to be so. I surmise that performing in drag makes the performance more "not real." Imagine if Sungyeol hadn't been in drag! Was this performance a one-off, or did they repeat it?

(For readers who don't follow K-pop, Infinite are a successful idol band — not up to the popularity of Super Junior or Big Bang, but one that's scored several top 10 hits, including the excellent "Be Mine."*)

This reinforces what I said about LMFAO, GG, etc., that in some circumstances guys (well, people, but especially guys) have to signal "JOKE" in order to effectively let loose their passion — unless I'm misreading this performance and it's not at all clear that this is a joke. I'm not one hundred percent certain. I'd like to think that the delighted audience is also uncertain.

*Be the way, the video for "Infinite" inserts a brief clip of Peggy Cummins firing a gun in Gun Crazy, a powerful, poignant noir from 1950, a precursor to Bonnie & Clyde.

[descriptivist.livejournal.com]

I believe this performance was a one-off for the concert, as they did different solo stages for their next concert, including one where Sungjong was in drag (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H956cYGCt6k). (Sungjong is usually perceived as "the girly one", "prettier than a girl", etc., so part of him playing Hyunseung was as a conscious effort to "show his masculine side".) There's a bunch of "Trouble Maker" cover stages floating around on Youtube - IU did one recently - but the only other same-sex pairing I can think of is when Hyunseung himself reprised it at a recent Beast concert with Dongwoon covering for Hyuna, in cutesy drag, i.e., JOKE:


There's also the role of fanservice to consider, where part of the enjoyment is from the fantasy that Sungyeol and Sungjong are or could be a couple. I'm not sure how that plays into making their performance more or less enjoyable than the original, though.

[koganbot]

Hyunseung looks like he's enjoying himself a lot more in this version than in the real one. ("The real one.")

[descriptivist.livejournal.com]

Re: fanservice, from an interview in Inkigayo Magazine (http://infiniteupdates.tumblr.com/post/24753786703):

Sungjong: Although it seemed like I would definitely do the female role and Sungyeol hyung would do the male role, it was switched. This is what you call the charm of a twist. But there were points that were a bit too much. Even though my fingers were curling a lot because it’s a choreography with a lot of skinship with another male and he’s my member hyung, I just held it in, thinking that our fans would like it.

Sungyeol: With the mindset to show all sides to ourselves during the first solo concert, we prepared this with the thought of showing shocking things and our normal selves all at once. We broke away from Sungjong’s ‘cross-dressing mold’ and I also did a shocking performance by ripping my clothes during the stage because I wanted to show sexiness in that one song as well. Now thinking about it, we really did all kinds of things. I’m slightly regretting it because the aftermath was quite strong…

[koganbot]

I just held it in, thinking that our fans would like it.

I wonder which fans he has in mind. The fanship as a whole? —I couldn't guess, but I'm thinking that "fanship as a whole" is quite possible; but since apparently there was an "aftermath" — a backlash? or, opposite to that, people delightedly thinking the two might be gay? or both? — did they miscalculate?

Nonetheless, it was convincing that they were thoroughly enjoying themselves — even if, to some extent, Sungjong wasn't actually enjoying himself (assuming he's telling the truth in the interview, and that the translation isn't misleading).

It's all intriguing.

Allkpop:

The boys put on wonderful performances throughout the night that had the crowd bumping, however, one performance stood out above the rest. This performance was one put on by members Sungyeol & Sungjong as they transformed into HyunA & Hyunseung of Trouble Maker. Sungyeol performed just like HyunA would… except for the fan service part where the chest is exposed while Sungjong took the role of Hyunseung.

Ningin:

Speaking of the parody stage, we already told you guys how Sungjong took on the role of Hyunseung while Sungyeol was HyunA. However, the fans that attended the second day of the concert were in for the ultimate fan service as Sungjong and Sungyeol actually kissed! Yup, that’s right! A lip-to-lip smooch.

Do you have any more information regarding the "aftermath"?

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Well, it was just a theory, I'm not saying that's what Hyungseung's actual problem was. But as far as fans getting up in arms when their chosen idol has too much chemistry with an opposite-sex performer (singer, actress, another fan at a fanmeet etc), this is a real thing that really happens. It's why idols constantly talk about having to "secretly" date, why they can only ever date each other (which makes Kpop even more of an incestuous circle), why there's only ever one *symbolic* girl or guy to which all of the members of a group address their attentions in music videos, etc etc.

As far as why it happens, it's probably because the fans are young? Like middle school aged - at least the most active and vocal ones are? And it's probably because Korean fans of idol groups are really pandered to, even at the expense of the performers' mental health or artistic credibility. So this kind of bad behavior, throwing tantrums when your favorite gets too close to "another woman" or is too sexy with some ugly dude, threatening the interloper or punishing the performer by leaving the fanclub, is - if not encouraged - also not discouraged.

No one stands up to the (young) fans and tells them they should be able to keep a sense of perspective about their fantasies, basically. The closest would probably be the unspoken agreement between industry and fan, "I acknowledge that these people might have dating lives I don't know about, however I don't want to hear or see anything about it and it's your job to make sure I don't."

Same-sex fanservice within a group is totally other thing, though... presumably it's not as threatening, or maybe it's just that both parties are in the group and so the relationship also belongs to the group and hence to the fans. Male-male pairs are also a known popular thing with women in Asia and elsewhere (e.g. BL manga), and there's lots of literature about why this might be the case. I dun wanna site anything, but maybe the appeal is that it's a relationship that could plausibly happen yet also "can't exist," meaning it's either an imagined perfect relationship between people who spend 16 hours out of every day together, or it's a messed up dysfunctional secret taboo thing which illustrates their psychological problems. Or maybe it's popular with gay fans because they can relate to having to keep that kind of secret or having those kinds of "not okay" desires. Anyway.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

And another reason to do fanservice: it makes the audience curious. Are they really together, is it an act? Who are these people who are seemingly OK with sharing sides of themselves that most people keep private?

I think Infinite (and/or their management company) understand this principle very well. The point is to intrigue the audience. Big Bang are good at this too, but in their case they are juggling twin urges towards secrecy and confession (and not maintaining strong boundaries between fantasy and reality); Infinite, on the other hand, are mysterious because they rotate the fanservice around so it's not clear whose idea it was in the first place.

[koganbot]

By the way, the video for "Infinite" inserts a brief clip of Peggy Cummins firing a gun in Gun Crazy, a powerful, poignant noir from 1950, a precursor to Bonnie & Clyde.

Er, I mean the video for "Be Mine."

[petronia.livejournal.com]

lollllll a m a z i n g

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Right??? Infinite are in general pretty fanservice-friendly, in that way that says they have bigger fish to fry than whether or not they're perceived as "really gay" or "really feminine" by the fans.

[koganbot]

Ha! I'm so out of it I had to go to Wikipedia and look up "fanservice"!

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

LOL, sorry about that. But that wikipedia article is pretty good!

[koganbot]

OK, Dave's posted his round one recap, and he kindly links us.

(1) "Are there any concepts to add to Sabina's 'I want that,' 'I am that,' 'I want to be that'?"

Scores of concepts, I'd think. E.g., "I like how it sounds," "It tells an interesting story," "WTF?" "It's witty," "I've never seen that before," "I wonder what the world is like that created this song," "this would sound good on my next Eardrums mixtape," "She's got a good beat and I can dance to it," "It will have a calming effect in the background as I work on this math problem," "the crowd will go crazy when I flash her picture on the screen," etc. etc.

As much as I identify with the lyrics to Boney M's "Calendar Song," I've never thought, "I want that," "I want to be that," or "I am that" when listening to Boney M (who may well be in my top twenty groups ever).



(2) "I, for instance, can probably objectify women, quite literally, just by absorbing lots of objectified imagery, whether I consciously identify with it, think critically about it, etc.

I have little idea what Dave means by "objectify" here, and I don't think he does either. Is a buzzword, and I'd can it. It's not pulling its weight, and if you don't believe in Descartes' mind-body split (and you shouldn't), you should steer clear of terms like "subject,"* "object," "subjectify," "objectify," "subjective," "objective," etc. You can look at something with lesser or greater understanding, and with a narrower or broader interest.** Period. Socially, there are relative differences in power hence relative differences in how much one gets to act and how often one has to respond (but everyone acts and responds). The words "subject" and "object," being either/or, just confuse those issues, add nothing useful. (The trouble with the mind-matter dichotomy is that it leaves everything out. Well, leaves out everything that isn't a mind with an observing eye, on the one hand, and things being observed, on the other. Which means it leaves out all action and all interaction and all use, which for practical purposes is everything, even if you're just gazing at the stars.)

*Unless you're talking about parts of a sentence.

**"A narrower or broader interest." E.g., a bank teller can undertake a transaction with a customer without thinking of him as anything but a customer, without caring what brought him here or what's going on in his life. Or she can notice that he's really sexy, and still not care what brought him here or what's going on in his life. So what? Or maybe she wonders where he buys his clothes. Has he suddenly transformed from an object to a subject when she wonders this? Suppose, to make small talk as they're waiting for the electronic approval to go through, and to be friendly and therefore bring him back as a customer, she asks him where he shops. Again, so what? I feel that the term "objectify" hand-waves at a theory when actually there is none.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Frank, I think "object" in the way "objectify" is used is not opposed to "subject" but to "person."

[koganbot]

Of course you're right, and I was going off on a pet peeve and ignoring what Dave was trying to get at. (Someone on the 'Net being unfair to Dave Moore! Stop the presses!)

I should learn not to make it a habit to wade into things when I know I don't have time for immediate follow-through. I have to give a talk tonight, and I've got to concentrate on that before I pay more attention to this. But my gut instinct tells me that ultimately my peeve is right. E.g., regarding something like aegyo, for instance, which I'm sure I don't understand, the question isn't "Is some girl letting some guy objectify her" (I think a lot of the audience for cuteness and pressure for it is from females as well as males, and men surely see cute women as human beings) but rather, "Is its context still tied to women being socially and financially dependent on men,* or can it work outside that dependence? How does it play when the financial restrictions change?" [*This statements is simplistic, since it's not as if men aren't financially and socially dependent on society, too, or that they've got freedom of demeanor. But the inequality still leans heavily one way, I gather more so in Korea than in the U.S.]

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The real weirdness is that, per the research Dave linked, you can prove that both sexes see women's bodies as being less tied to their identities as people, and more simple aesthetic objects of pleasure... but how sexual can an image be if it is not a person?

"Object"-ification

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I should have been (much) clearer in my link to that study. What it says, to the extent that I understand it, is that in certain types of representation of women (in bikinis in advertisements, say) both men and women process the images less like the subject in the picture is a human and more like the subject in the picture is a literal object -- say, a bucket, or a tree. All this tells us, I think, is "women in bikinis, unlike men in bikinis, process through our brains as quickly as other objects, and slower more quickly than male bodies and human faces." But it does say there's literally a cognitive difference in processing the picture of the woman compared to processing the picture of the man. What we don't know is what kind of impact that has, whether other kinds of pictures have the same effect, etc. etc.

The bigger point isn't really about objectification (even if I think that the picture of Ashlee looks more like a bucket than a human being on the cover of her album, I don't think that has much influence on anything I've ever heard in or said about her album), but about figuring out which of our mental processes are conscious and which aren't.

And I still think that, here in the conscious world, it's OK for us to say things like, "OK, that happened, but why is it more important than what I'm consciously aware of?" In some cases, unconscious processes may indeed lead us to do something we hadn't consciously thought of, as when we yawn upon seeing someone else yawn. If what we want to understand is "why we yawned," then yes, unconscious processes are important. But to understand what it is about Autobiography I love, I think that "It is possible to see Ashlee as an object with which I can have sex" is pretty low on the list of things I care about -- not because it's not, in some sense, true (though I'm not sure it is), but because even if it were true, it wouldn't really help me understand what's going (in this instance). That's not true of all music, but it's true of that music.

Re: "Object"-ification

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

And maybe to extend the "yawn" bit -- I may literally yawn because someone else yawns, but that doesn't mean that it holds true that when someone yawns at something, I in turn find what we're listening to more boring.

Studies seem to have made some interesting discoveries, but kind of "parlor-trick-style," that others' reactions can cause us to change our reactions in the aggregate; but it doesn't tell us much about individual behavior. Voting in a school makes it statistically more likely for people in general to vote for school reform initiatives. But it doesn't hold that someone who has a strong, expressed opinion about school reform will change their vote because they voted in a school.