Distant Music: Recorded Music, Manners, and American Identity Jacklyn Attaway
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2012 Distant Music: Recorded Music, Manners, and American Identity Jacklyn Attaway Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES DISTANT MUSIC: RECORDED MUSIC, MANNERS, AND AMERICAN IDENTITY By JACKLYN ATTAWAY A Thesis submitted to the American and Florida Studies Program in the Department of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2012 Jacklyn Attaway defended this thesis on November 5, 2012 The members of the supervisory committee were: Barry J. Faulk Professor Directing Thesis Neil Jumonville Committee Member Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii I dedicate this to Stuart Fletcher, a true heir-ethnographer who exposed me to the deepest wells of cultural memory in the recorded music format; Shawn Christy, for perking my interest in the musicians who exhibited the hauntological aesthetic effect; and to all the members of WVFS Tallahassee, 89.7 FM—without V89, I probably would not have ever written about music. Thank you all so much for the knowledge, love, and support. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge Dr. Barry J. Faulk, Dr. Neil Jumonville, Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, Leon Anderson, Dr. John Fenstermaker, Peggy Wright-Cleveland, Ben Yadon, Audrey Langham, Andrew Childs, Micah Vandegrift, Nicholas Yanes, Mara Ginnane, Jason Gibson, Stuart Fletcher, Dr. Misha Laurents, Dr. Mona Behl, Dr. Elise Jensen, and the members of WVFS Tallahassee. Thank you for all of your expertise and support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1-Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2-Hauntology .................................................................................................. 11 Chapter 3-Hauntological Aesthetic Effect ..................................................................... 33 Chapter 4-The Sound of Aesthetically Haunting Recorded Music ................................ 57 Chapter 5-Manners and American Identity ................................................................... 89 Chapter 6-Conclusion ................................................................................................. 106 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 111 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ......................................................................................... 117 v ABSTRACT This thesis discusses Derrida‘s theory of Hauntology, establishes a theoretical framework for an analysis of the hauntological aesthetic in recorded music, and explores the hauntological aesthetic in reference to Victorian spirit photography and contemporary recorded music of producer-musicians such as Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink. By describing and analyzing the recorded music of said producer-musicians, this thesis reveals how aesthetically hauntological recorded music expresses American anxieties concerning the effects of changing technologies and cultural transitions. In effect, this thesis shows how American ideologies operate as ―ghosts,‖ and how one can better interpret and understand these core values by combining aesthetics and history through the medium of recorded music. vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Since the late 1990s and early millennium, a new aesthetic in visual art and recorded music has emerged and become popular in underground culture. In recent criticism, this aesthetic has been cycled through various terms and music genres. Often associated with the Ghost Box Label music and ―New Weird America,‖ ―Americana,‖ and ―Hypnogogic Pop‖ music micro-genres, the hauntological aesthetic effect, named for Jacques Derrida‘s term ―hauntology,‖ is an aesthetic experience that expresses a post-utopian retro-futurism—a mourning the loss of the past‘s belief in the possibility of an yesterday‘s idealized tomorrow. The hauntological aesthetic, rather than simply mourning the past, mourns the past‘s hopes and dreams for the future. Recorded music that exhibits the hauntological aesthetic effect is characterized by a low fidelity sound often described as ghostly, spooky, old, far away, distant, and haunting. The origin of the aesthetic is old-sounding, "haunted" music, and a new niche group/ musical movement is sampling the music, or trying to recreate the sound. Achieved by recording with obsolete technologies, through creatively innovative recording processes such as recording in old homes, under bridges, and even in caves, or by various production methods of layering intentional "dirt" or surface noise, the hauntological aesthetic in modern recorded music expresses a quality of sonic distance and aural crumble much like that of the early 20th century‘s 78 RPM recordings. With age and wear-and-tear, time has placed its own layers of sonic ―dirt‖ on American folk and blues 78s from the 1920s and 30s. In this regard, these early recordings, later collected on The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, John Fahey‘s American Primitive: Raw, Pre-War Revenants, Volumes 1 & 2, and other compilations, exhibit the hauntological aesthetic on their own. Modern recorded music that seeks to intentionally synthesize the ravages of time on the physical and sonic integrity of a recording demonstrates a construction of the hauntological aesthetic. This intentional synthesis of the past—said aesthetic—in recorded music sounds ―spooky,‖ ―ghostly,‖ and ―haunting‖ and creates an uncanny sense of the past. Listening to Grizzly Bear‘s 2006 release Yellow House, one notes 1 how songs seem muffled and distant, buried under years of rotting floorboards and decay, each track a hazy sonic footprint of the place where the majority of the album was recorded—in the aging Cape Cod home of lead singer Ed Droste‘s mother. Texas turned San Francisco musician and producer Greg Ashley utilizes strange spaces such as highway overpasses and personal homes to achieve the distant, ghostly sound on his solo work and the recordings of his band Gris Gris. Both artists‘ recordings exhibit the distant and resonating sound of older recordings though both are contemporary. While aesthetically evoking the aural crumble of analog recording—which can be traced back to early recordings of the 1920s and 30s—recorded music that exhibits the hauntological aesthetic often stylistically expresses the sounds of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. Furthermore the hauntological aesthetic in recorded music demonstrates a longing to negotiate a transformation of our cultural consciousness. In America, this cultural phenomenon exhibits how changing technologies create fears of dramatic cultural change, more specifically possible shifts in and even the loss of cultural memory. With the common usage of the internet and cell phones, communicative and media technologies have evolved beyond their progenitors. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a great leap in communicative technology occurred with the surge of inventions and discoveries that brought forth electric wiring, photography, telegraphy, the telephone, the phonograph, and radio. Within 50 years, the world changed from years of only postal communication to the possibility of immediate, long-distance verbal exchange. The voice of another person could not only travel miles to allow one to hear it, but the voice could also be preserved and played back and broadcasted even over many more miles for even more people to hear it. In the midst of this great technological leap, many anxieties concerning the resulting culture changes arose. People feared that their traditions would be drastically altered or even destroyed by the onset of the new technology. Many worried that religious, economic, and family values would be swiftly and irrevocably changed for the worse by these new technologies. Religion became threatened by the very existence of new technologies as many felt their machinations challenged God. Economically, industrialization would increase employment and possibly do away with obsolete services, but it would also change the way people worked and possibly the core 2 principles of the American work ethic. Family structures would be affected by the countless number of husbands and sons who would leave the family farm to find work in the transforming economy. As communities evolved from the spread of new communication methods, so too would the family and further, the individual. Many people viewed the new technologies as unstoppable, ―unseen forces‖ swiftly revolutionizing America. With all the sudden shifts in American traditions, a great deal of anxiety and a need to understand all ―unseen forces‖—not just the new technologies altering America—arose. Spiritualism, then internationally becoming a prominent feature of late Victorian culture, spread throughout the United States with the spirit rappings heard by the Fox sisters near Rochester, NY. With Spiritualism‘s growing popularity, the séance and its comparative aesthetics (such as