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Simon DeBevoise Artist Statement Prof. Maria Sonevytsky 12.12.15
blssm: An Exploration of Cuteness, Consumer Culture and PC Music
blssm is an experiment in aesthetics. Tackling a genre of unlimited ambition and excess, I realized quickly that my project could not be a limp imitation of PC Music; the music mandates instead a full-fledged devotion to the “kitsch imagery, catchy hooks, synthetic colours” (Tank
Magazine, AG Cook) so central to figures like AG Cook, Hannah Diamond, SOPHIE and
GFOTY. I used Hannah Diamond’s “Every Night” as an aural point of reference, reinterpreting the song’s poppy chord progression and setting my tempo to an upbeat 128 bpm. Layering big, shimmering, sawtooth synths over a syncopated kick drum and bass, I created a foundation with which I could engage with the camp and consumerism typically antithetical to the underground music scene yet so integral to the PC Music label. Recreating PC Music’s visual and aural aesthetic, I aim to consider the issues of gender and sexuality at play by framing the genre within discourses on Studio Audio Art, Cyborg Feminism, Japanese Kawaii culture, consumerism, and post-irony.
To best introduce the uninformed listener to PC Music (which, importantly, stands for computer music and not politically correct music), I’ve included lyrics from Hannah Diamond’s
We look good in pink and blue You love me, maybe it's true You say, ‘Baby, how are you?’ I’m okay, how about you? DeBevoise 2 of 7
Diamond’s facile rhymes and innocent lyrics craft an image of cuteness and middle-school naivety that play into PC Music’s brand of femininity. The genre uses studio manipulation of the voice to re-create this aesthetic; by pitching up the vocals, the music steps away from the ugly reality of the lower-pitched adult voice to emphasize a child-like and agent-less persona that is simultaneously robotic and unreal. Often, the syncopated vocals are doubled with a synth as if the singer herself is controlled by the synth melody. For blssm’s single, “forever,” I started with a synth riff and only added the singer’s voice as an extension of my musical vision.
This approach of music first, pop star later mirrors the thought process behind producers
AG Cook and SOPHIE in creating personae for the genre. QT, as an example, is the brainchild of the two producers who, inspired by the interwovenness of pop music and commercial branding, sought to create a pop star devoted exclusively to selling a fictional energy beverage. In interviews and music videos, QT sports an artificial femininity that is designed strictly by male producers tipping their hats to the larger pop reality of female stars backed by male-dominated marketing teams. Creating blssm, I had to consider how to construct a female persona that adhered to the PC Music aesthetic. Consequently, my stake in the persona was not a personal one, in which I could relate to and empathize with blssm, but one of marketing and promotion; I had to create a product that fit PC Music’s valorization of consumption and glossy aesthetics. In this regard, AG Cook and SOPHIE are able to craft female PC Music personae from their male perspectives because their aim is not to recreate authentic femininity but instead to create a musical product, an art object that does not need to adhere to conventional ideas of authenticity because it defines the authenticity of its products by its own standards. DeBevoise 3 of 7
Considering PC Music as a pure embodiment of “Studio Audio Art,” “music as an art object to be created by one group for consumption by another group,” with “emphasis on the composition and final product” (Thomas Turino, 91), AG Cook and SOPHIE distance themselves as far as possible from the participatory, placing emphasis on the commodity and marking the divide between artist and listener as unbreachable. This chasm between product and consumer
“offers the potential to expand the borders of musical sound itself and to realize the creative product of individual imagination through heightened control and autonomy” (89). As noted above, studio manipulations of the voice allow the producers to craft a femininity exaggerated to the point that it is no longer understood to be human. If, as Suzanne Cusick considers, “voices stand for the bodily imperatives of biological sex,” (29), a voice shaped and warped by a machine may transcend traditional gender norms and embody a rare, gender-fluid, desexualized perspective—that of the cyborg. As per Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (456). The duality of humanity and machine aptly describes the thresholds of femininity and sexlessness that PC Music exists within—the genre is, at once, hyper-real yet not wholly removed from human musicianship. Considering the studio manipulated voice as a sonic parallel to Haraway’s cyborg, we may see how both PC Music and “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (475).
Despite its connection to ultra-human cyborgishness, PC Music’s aesthetic depends on a number of outside cultural influences including Kawaii, a highly specific Japanese brand of cuteness. Though it may take inspiration from Kawaii, it is important to note that the genre DeBevoise 4 of 7 subverts and complicates cuteness in a way that Kawaii culture in Japan might not. As a Japanese institutional state apparatus, Kawaii’s pervasive “cute images help maintain a Japanese patriarchal socioeconomic system, perpetuating the expectation that women behave submissively to men” (Akita Kimiko, 47). Because cuteness is idealized and expected, the Kawaii tradition forces women to adhere to a standard of femininity crafted by popular media like Sailor Moon and Hello Kitty, who, “as corporate advocates of the industrialization of modernist aesthetics, sought to develop a new commodity aesthetic in the rapidly expanding fields of design and advertising” (Sianne Ngai, 812). Through exaggeration, PC Music perverts and desexualizes the
Kawaii aesthetic, bringing to light the absurdity of how gendered commodities play into socially perceived notions of femininity. GFOTY (Girlfriend of the year), who frames herself as doltish, wholly domesticated and devoted to her sugar daddy, performs an inflated female submissiveness as a masquerade that parodies and undermines the privileged rich girl stereotype.
Manipulated through studio effects that bend her voice dramatically over stuttering bass lines and harsh synths, GFOTY’s demand, “Can you get me a cab?” in “Dont Wanna / Let’s Do It,” sounds less like an acceptance of her persona and more like a cyborg malfunctioning. In this regard,
“cuteness, taken as a masking or masquerade, ‘can be subversive (undermining male domination)’” (Kimiko, 44). Porting a facade of domesticity and idiocy, GFOTY’s application of cyborg feminism through studio manipulation simultaneously embraces and critiques the absurd patriarchal consumerist standards of Kawaii.
Returning to Kawaii culture in Japan, Jpop superstar Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, who has collaborated with SOPHIE, mixes cuteness with the grotesque, including images of floating skulls, disembodied hearts, and femur bones in her music videos that offset the viewer and DeBevoise 5 of 7 complicate the meaning of Kawaii. To Kyary, “Kawaii is anything that jars you out of your sense of balance and normalcy, and prompts an involuntary response of pleasure” (Jeff Yang). PC
Music takes a similar approach: Hannah Diamond’s earnest plea for connection in “Hi,” “I don't want to be alone in my bedroom, / Writing messages you won't read / I don't want to be alone in my bedroom, / On the internet, wasting time,” alludes to the more troublesome existential despair felt in this age of connectivity and disassociation. Solitude, masked by a blanket of bright chord stabs and catchy melodies, gives Diamond’s “innocent” songs a dark undertone that complicates the seemingly one-dimensional pop star.
As a final summation of the thoughts and inspiration behind blssm, I want to focus lastly on the divide between PC Music’s product and its listeners, who often consume the music ironically or as if the genre itself is a parody. Within my own circle of friends, PC Music grew in popularity because its 90’s aesthetic and trivial lyrics (“We go to Miami/ ‘Cuz Miami is a place”) appealed to the ironic tastes of my friends who, otherwise, consider themselves hip and informed music listeners. By consuming the genre ironically and by publicly acknowledging it as bad music, the listener can socially affirm his or her “good” taste in music. Even I considered my own project humorously ridiculous up until I began to understand the cultural cues and references that fuel PC Music and make the genre more than a facile parody of pop tropes.
Though the genre depends on exaggeration, it is not a parody: like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s subversion of Kawaii through the grotesque, PC Music’s agenda is “not to parody pop culture - that would merely be funny - but to inspect the world’s ugliness and try to reflect it, ideally in a fun and creatively radical form” (Jazz Monroe, Noisey). Though QT’s faux energy drink mocks the “gimme gimme consumerism” (Monroe) inherent in pop music, she is sponsored by Red Bull DeBevoise 6 of 7 and is a participant in the consumerism that her music calls into criticism. AG Cook argues that,
“Challenging something's commercial nature is a commercial tactic in itself, and authenticity is a tricky currency that is often swayed by branding and advertising” (Tank Magazine). Here, the ironic listener misses the point: PC Music’s post-ironic approach engages with and challenges pop culture; the surface-level naivety and explosiveness of the genre make the darker themes of solitude light-hearted and palatable in ways that a parody could not.
My initial interest in PC Music as a blatantly gendered genre stemmed from the girly, high-pitched vocals and dolled-out cuteness that screamed “femininity” in my face every time I watched “Hey QT” or listened to AG Cook’s “Beautiful.” I expected blssm to be a critique, a parody of a parody, one that discredited the trite relationships of Hannah Diamond’s “Pink and
Blue.” Yet, I was surprised by my growing devotion to my fictional character, only now understanding the sheer musical attraction that AG Cook or SOPHIE might feel towards their own creations. As PC Music’s artistic vision congealed before my eyes through interviews and magazine reviews, I could no longer discredit the passion I felt towards blssm as a product that was uniquely mine. Informed by my semester-long study of gender and sexuality in music, I was equipped to address and unpack the concepts at play in PC Music, using Haraway’s Cyborg
Manifesto, Kimoko’s discourse on cuteness, Cusick’s understanding of the performativity of the voice and Turino’s definition of “Studio Audio Art” as key texts that put to words the driving forces behind characters like Hannah Diamond, QT and GFOTY. DeBevoise 7 of 7
Thank You: I want to thank Ruadhan Ward, Flannery Brown and Gabriella Gonzales, whose inquisitiveness informed many of the ideas present in my artist statement, as well as Yuka Suzuki and Maria Sonevytsky for guiding me towards the rich scholarly articles central to my arguments. Additional thanks to Dani Sommerhauser for modeling as blssm and to Gabriella for singing.
Media: blssm - www.soundcloud.com/blssmlove bandcamp - http://blssm.bandcamp.com PC Music - www.soundcloud.com/pcmus Hey QT - https://youtu.be/1MQUleX1PeA Kyary Pamyu Pamyu - https://youtu.be/yzC4hFK5P3g
Bibliography: Akita, Kimiko. "Cuteness: the sexual commodification of women in the Japanese media." Women and the Media. Lanham: University Press of America(2005): 44-57. Cusick, Suzanne. "On Musical Performances of Sex and Gender." Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music. Zürich: Carciofoli, 1999. N. pag. Print. Golsorkhi-Ainslie, Sohrab. "Radio Tank Mix: A. G. Cook." Tank Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2015.