Postmodernity and Pop Music: a Postmodern Analysis of the Music of A.G. Cook
1. Deconstruction of Comprehension
Postmodernism and postmodernity is an antireductionist discourse of plurality and populism. If modernism was defined in relation to the victorian enlightenment, than postmodernism can be defined in reaction to the proponents of modernism. Like modernism, postmodernism involves the rejection of the distinction between high and low forms of art, distinctions of genre, and elaborate formal aesthetics. In place of these, postmodernism, like modernism, suggests reflexivity, fragmentation, an emphasis on subjectivity and impression. In contrast to modernism, which laments the fragmented nature of the world and sees artistic production as a method of the reclamation of meaning, postmodernism celebrates the ideas of discontinuity, provisionality, and incoherence (Klages).
In addition to a celebration of fragmentation, the other major function of postmodernism is the critique of grand structuring narratives of culture and history; more specifically, an
“awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice” (Klages). Postmodernism suggests an “end of the historical discourse of progress,” “a new depthlessness, which finds prolongation in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image… a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the forms of our private temporality”
(Alvesson, Deets)(Jameson).
This weakening, and move away from structuring narratives allows for the “presence of and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features” (Jameson). These
“‘mininarratives’ are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability” (Klages). The small “stories” that postmodernism tells are those of the “‘subject positions’ of individuals,” as the discourse of postmodernism prefers the “decentered knowledges” of “people who engage with the world from the irreducible perspectives of their own experience” to grand narratives revolving knowledge structures (Agger).
The postmodern work then is one that rejects generalizations of experience, or claims to irreducibility or internationality. Its themes and interests are often those of the constructed nature of people/reality, the “fluid and hyperreal nature of the contemporary world,” the roles of mass media and information technologies, the “‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the gradeB Hollywood film, of socalled paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories...materials they no longer simply ‘quote’… but incorporate into their very substance” (Jameson).
“Are you ready to experience this unlimited experience? refresh your senses but don’t forget not, not to refresh the page” (Cook).
2. Analysis of a Cultural Artifact
“Look at your house, and process the objects that don’t fall into a sustainable binary.
There is a logic to the items that one in a million don’t possess… in the club, people use material things to increase their chances of a pickup, such as: diamond rolexes, prada bags, and versace outfits. I guess it makes them feel special”(Cook).
This is the sort of content that fills the spaces between hooks and breakbeats in the mixes being produced by AG Cook and the members of his record label PC Music. The media being created by Cook seems to function as a sort of postmodern treatise on the nature of mainstream contemporary music and the culture surrounding it. For the sake of analysis, I will focus on one mix and the accompanying interview given by Cook for Tank Magazine’s August 2013 issue.
The Radio Tank Mix mix begins with two pieces produced by Cook specifically for the mix. Both of these tracks place themselves within the genre of sugarcoated pop music aimed at english speaking teenagers and preteens. Neither would seem odd or out of place next to a song by Miley Cyrus. These songs set a tone for the rest of the mix, which I will argue parses the relationship of pop music production in contemporary 3rd stage consumer based capitalism with the near ravenous consumption of media by members of postindustrial economies.
As the second song in the mix drops out, it’s high pitched strings are replaced by what sounds like choral singing and a recorded piece of dialogue between two teenagers on the subject of making out while mom and dad are home. This type of transition is common in Cook’s Radio Tank Mix. These interludes often seem to qualify or are in some way referential to the tracks that immediately precede them. The voices present in these spaces are posited as potential listeners or sources of inspiration for the accompanying music in mix. For example, one of the interludes includes dialogue from a 1980’s radio advertisement for an Aphex Aural Exciter. A device which was/ is still used to make garage and basement recordings sound professionally mastered. A piece of audio that, here, is clearly referring to the production style of the songs included in the tracklist. By production style, I am referring to the crisp highs and loud mastering often associated with top 40’s style pop music. In addition to the more contemporary pop production which makes up most of the mix, the track listing also contains pop music and audio excerpts from the 80s and 90s.
Cook blends these pop sounds of various eras with those of contemporary electronic music, creating a sonic environment in which music loses any sort of timestamp: TLC is paired with soaring dance breaks; and the Latvian singer songwriter Mirdza Zīvere sounds natural squished between a rhinestone encrusted jumpstyle breakbeat, and what appears to be a dramatic reading of Katherine Applegate’s Beach Blondes. This blending can be seen as a rejection of the myth of historical progress as suggested by postmodernity. The homogenization of media through remixing and the remastering of audio allows for the leveling of ground between pieces of audio from various stratas of culture; through this tactic, Cook’s Radio Tank Mix becomes a confluence of “low” and “high” cultures, mainstream and the alternative/ underground, pop and pulp sources, and their surrounding narratives.
For instance, an audio excerpt from the fairly well known sitcom Freeks and Geeks, which depicts a character saying “it’s so stupid that you like him. I mean just because he’s a cheerleader and you’re a jock,” which suggests a rather radical reversal of traditional gender roles, is followed by a rather aggressive track by an underground jungle/drum and bass MC, Mr.
Traumatik, whose lyrics sound like they were written based on an extended period of playing first person shooters. As different as these two elements may seem, this pairing reads in the mix as not much more than a slight change in tone against A. G. Cook’s hyperactive soundscape.
The devaluation of individual pieces of media suggests within the material a deep vacuity. In the interview accompanying the mix, A.G. Cook describes his interest in pop music, and its related commercial imagery, as being primarily due to its “potential to be overwhelming, extravagant, and banal all at the same time” (GolsorkhiAinslie). Rather than treating these components of contemporary pop music with disdain, Cook revels in them. His mode of working is one where the the typical “shock value and direct irony [associated with artwork concerning contemporary culture] is replaced with ambiguity and uncanniness” (GolsorkhiAinslie). This sort of genuine investment in the production of contemporary popmusic, seems to almost illustrate the celebration of the quotidian and the fragmentary suggested by postmodernism.
Due to the evenness of the work, the act of consumption, even by the most sophisticated listener, becomes akin to that of the layman; the consumer here is positioned as a product of the postindustrial economy: one who is adrift within the society of the spectacle here referring to a postmodern idea of spectacle as the physical experience of consumption based economy, rather than a Marxist one which positions the spectacle as a machine of the bourgeois and cannot differentiate between cultural productions. By this, I mean that the often illegible nature of the work seems to attempt to suppress more nuanced readings due to its closeness with that which it intends to comment on. This, however, as a method of commentary, ought to be praised as a postmodernist mode rather than admonished.
In short, perhaps, what A.G. Cook’s music does well is to reveal the ways in which contemporary pop music is intrinsically linked to the postmodern state of existence through:
1. its engineering of the relationship between consumer and cultural product
2. the legibility of a genuine interest in the process by which contemporary pop is produced
3. the relationship between the relative legibility of intent and the nonlegible nature of content
4. the fragmentary nature of the musical arrangement/ composition with respect to content and especially concerning the relationships created between discrete pieces of media
5. the rejection of any idea of historical progress with respect to the evolution of genre
6. the incorporation of global voices/ sources with respect to sampling and the composition of mixes
Works Cited
A.G. Cook. Radio Tank Mix. 2013. MP3. Agger, Ben. "Illuminations: Agger." Annual Review of Sociology (1991): n. pag. Illuminations: Agger. University of Texas, Arlington. Web. 08 Dec. 2014. Deetz, Stanley A. "Critical Theory and Postmodernism Approaches to Organizational Studies."
The SAGE Handbook of Organization Studies. By Mats Alvesson. London: Sage Publications, 2006. N. pag. Homework Market. Web. 8 Dec. 2014. GolsorkhiAinslie, Sohrab. "RADIO TANK MIX: A. G. COOK." Tank Magazine. N.p., Aug. 2013. Web. 08 Dec. 2014.
Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric
Jameson." Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson. Marxists.org, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2014.
Klages, Mary, Dr. "Postmodernism." Bdavetian.com. Benet Davetian, 2012. Web. 07 Dec. 2014.