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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies
Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Volume 9(2): 167187
DOI: 10.1177/1367877906064029

Re-producing pop
The aesthetics of ambivalence in a contemporary
dance 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 like

New York, Los Angeles, and London between 2001 and 2004. In this article, I use
the example of electroclash to demonstrate the significance of media in
structuring social reality. I argue that electroclash constitutes a set of aesthetic
tactics for living through the confusions and contradictions of life in a mediasaturated, increasingly globalized, late capitalist economy. It is produced by a
diverse assemblage of urban youth, whose primary commonality is an ambivalent
relationship towards media. Electroclash artists, I argue, engage with and
respond to meanings within existing media texts. They ironically perform the
clichs and representations of popular culture, re-investing them with critical,
though often ambiguous new meanings. In these re-readings of media, I
conclude, electroclash artists blur the distinction between celebration and
critique, and ultimately complicate any clear-cut, theoretical opposition between
resistance and accommodation.
KEYWORDS

performance

consumption dance music mass media

popular culture style youth

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

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phenomenon, to a dance club craze, to a music-industry marketing blitz

and, even more rapidly, to yesterdays news. By late 2003, just as young
people in suburban America began to catch on to this urban music trend,
the fashion vanguard in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and London had
moved on to other things. Electroclash, with its danceable, histrionic pop
songs, had become too popular. DJs had begun to spin it on the radio, cable
music video stations like MTV and VH1 had begun to give it airtime, and
the popular music press had already published dozens of articles about its
artists supposed new wave revival, their nostalgia for 1980s fashion, and
their obsession with glamour, superficiality and excess. In short, electroclash
had reached its saturation point. The very urban hipsters who popularized
it in the first place had perceived it to have gone mainstream and, consequently, 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 electroclash
as a set of aesthetic tactics1 (De Certeau, 1984) for living through the
confusions and contradictions of life in a media-saturated (Ortner, 1998),
late-capitalist world economy. Based on textual analysis of electroclash
music and performance, as well as eight months of fieldwork in Los Angeles
nightclubs and concert venues at the height of electroclashs popularity in
2003, this article is a study of the often contradictory social motivations
out of which electroclash was produced, invested with meaning, and eventually discarded for other, equally transient pop culture phenomena.
In analyzing electroclash, I have two critical goals in mind. First, I use
electroclash to demonstrate the power and influence of media on the very
structuring of social reality for todays youth. It is no longer possible, I
would argue, for the younger generations of industrialized nations to think
autonomously of media, that is, without reference to the categories and
typologies presented in and constructed through circuits of mass mediation.
The media today supplies both resources and disciplines for imagining and
making sense of ourselves and the world around us (Appadurai, 1996), and
it is these resources and disciplines with which electroclash is explicitly
concerned. Media is by no means the only institution of knowledgeproduction (Foucault, 1978; Abu-Lughod, 2002) at work in the world
today, but it is an increasingly important one, supplying and reinforcing
many of the dominant categories and schemas (Ortner, 1989; Sewell,
1992),2 rules and resources (Giddens, 1979)3 that structure the experience
of contemporary life. Electroclash artists, I show, are in continual dialogue
with existing, media-promoted schemas. They comment on and challenge
media themes and representations, but there is never any question of wholly
abandoning them.
Second, I use the example of electroclash as a vehicle for discussing what
I perceive to be an increasingly common mode of expression within contemporary popular culture, one which seems to blur the very boundary between

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celebration and critique. Electroclash artists, like any number of selfconsciously alternative or independent music scenes, express an utter
disdain for the mainstream music industry. This, in itself, of course is
nothing new. Contempt for the commercialization of music has been part
of the rock music worldview since its inception (Frith, 1981), and alternative music scenes, such as punk and hardcore, have long been preoccupied
with keeping their music authentic, i.e. untainted by commercial interests
(Laing, 1997). Electroclash, however, represents a very different tactic of
differentiation, one commensurate with the growing presence of
commercial media in our everyday lives and which seems to hold the very
attempt of escape from the reach of corporate hegemony as futile. Rather
than avoiding the tropes and clichs of popular music, I argue, electroclash
artists make explicit use of them, subverting their meanings and playing
with their underlying conventions. They co-opt the images and sounds of
the commercial mass media instead of waiting to be co-opted by it, and then
they use irony as a means of disavowing any ideological link with the appropriated material. Irony, here, has become a distancing mechanism. It makes
it possible to say one thing and mean another. But irony has another
function as well. It makes it OK to have tastes seemingly out of sync with
an anti-materialist, anti-corporate agenda. It makes ambivalence acceptable, 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 exactly
what electroclash artists do. They embrace a commercial look, sound, and
style, 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 challenge
conventions they find problematic within commercial culture while simultaneously seeming to uphold, even celebrate, the very objects of their
contempt. Through acts of ironic distancing and pop culture deconstruction, 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 capitalism and mass culture (Kondo, 1997: 105). As such, electroclash exposes
the messy, love-hate relationship todays youth shares with the mass media,
their embittered awareness of its indoctrinating effects but continued
allegiance to its materialist dreams. It demonstrates a set of practices that
ultimately complicate any clear-cut distinction between resistance and
accommodation, transgression and compliance.

The electroclash scene?

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

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not to wait until theyre rich and famous to live out the over-the-top, selfindulgent lifestyles of media darlings. On any given weekend night, they
cruise the boulevards of Hollywood in a bright pink limousine with pictures
of their faces airbrushed on the doors, stop by at a nightclub or two, and
seek out acquaintances to one-arm hug or air-kiss on both cheeks. Each
standing over six-feet tall, the duo is quite a sight: Christiana, long and lean
in tight black, low-cut dresses and shoulder-length blonde hair, and Justin,
carefully groomed and foppish, bedecked in tailored black suits, hair
standing in four-inch spikes on the top of his head. The two seem to have
merged their stage personae with their everyday selves. Theyve modeled
their lives after music video imagery and converted their public image into
a three-dimensional representation of pop culture excess.
As Justin and Christiana explain, the two friends grew up surrounded by
the recording industry. Justins father was the manager of the 1980s pop
star 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 that
their own celebrity affectations are modeled on the ones that they experienced 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 and
over again among their semi-famous acquaintances. Surrounded by the
trappings of celebrity all their lives, Justin and Christiana have deeply
ambivalent feelings about pop stardom, commercialism, and the materialism that runs rampant in Hollywood. Its in our veins, claims Justin. Its
part of who they are, and yet, they recognize its problems, its limitations,
and its patent absurdity. Justin and Christiana thus occupy a complex positionality towards the media imagery they consume and imitate. Theyre
drawn to its fantasy of beauty and glamour, yet repulsed by its cynicism, its
elevation of money above all else, and its reduction of performers to
commodities that can be bought and sold. Their attitude towards Hollywood commercialism is an ambivalent position reflected and expressed in
their music, performance, and personal fashion sense, and it is this uncomfortable merging of iconic representation and ironic distancing that characterize T.H.E.M. as electroclash.
I first met Justin and Christiana after their performance in the
backroom concert space of a seedy Santa Monica bar. Among the grizzled,
hardened drinkers of the Westside watering hole, the two seemed hopelessly out of place, and expressed as much to me after the show. They are
more at home in the glitzy gay bars of West Hollywood, the hipster,
pseudo-dives of Silver Lake and Echo Park, the underground loft parties
of downtown LA, places where I would run into them time and time again
throughout the course of my fieldwork. These assorted nightspots, after
all, are the focal points of the electroclash scene, that fluid social
network of producers and consumers for whom electroclash is a significant part of their lives.4

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Electroclash is not a subculture, at least not as British social theorists have

described and imagined them. It is not a community of working-class youth
who turn their disadvantaged socio-economic position into a symbolic asset
through music and fashion (Clarke et al., 1976; Cohen, 1972). In fact, it
hardly constitutes a community at all. Rather, the electroclash scene shares
more 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 the
singular at all, is composed of a rather heterogeneous lot: white, middleclass, largely straight, suburban cool kids working hard to differentiate
themselves from an imagined cultural mainstream (Thornton, 1996);
Latino, mainly gay, working-class youth from East LA and Echo Park
forging countercultural identities out of a common feeling of marginalization (Fikentscher, 2000); well-dressed, primarily gay West Hollywood
professionals who moonlight as clubkids; and scruffy East Hollywood,
mixed sexuality hipsters living out their bohemian fantasies in self-imposed
urban poverty. Electroclash, after all, stems from diverse origins, and it
maintains its diversity in its various sites of production. It was Larry Tee,
DJ, producer, and longtime member of New Yorks gay underground dance
music scene (Fikentscher, 2000), who first coined the term electroclash to
describe a diverse set of young performers doing different but related
things with electronic music. However, straight, indie electro-pop bands like
Ladytron, Soviet, and the Faint were equally if not more responsible for
popularizing the style.
I do not, however, intend to portray electroclash as an egalitarian oasis
of diverse communitarians committed to just getting along despite their
differences (although, this is how Larry Tee described it to me). In my
experience, sexuality, ethnicity, and class background remain divisive
elements within the larger world of electroclash. A spindly thin, 20-something hipster girl handing out fliers outside the primarily gay nightclub
Synthetic once said to me as I passed by her with my girlfriend, You
should check out Club 82 here on Sundays. Its like this, only straighter.
Clubs like the Echo, the venue where both Synthetic and Club 82 took place
at the time of this research, divvy up their nights according to sexual preference, perceived subcultural affiliation, and even ethnicity. Furthermore,
participants engage in a range of activities of social differentiation, attempting to homogenize their social spaces to the extent possible. Electroclash
events, like Radio at Star Shoes, often require a password to get in. Others
like Club 82 vary their prices dependent on how clubgoers dress. And some
flat out deny entrance to those who dont fit the established look of the
club. Plus, within clubs, attendees find all sorts of ways to distinguish themselves from other groups. It is, for instance, fairly easy to pick out whos
gay and whos straight at a nightclub like the Parlour in West Hollywood.

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Straight people, DJ Liz informed me, tend not to dance. Theyre the ones
leaning 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 lose
themselves in the rhythm and the vibe. But we shouldnt confuse this stance
of indifference with actual apathy. Electroclash, was, after all, massively
popular (and still is in many, principally suburban locales). It was very much
an international phenomenon, spanning much of Europe, the USA, and
parts of Asia (particularly Japan), with ties to the larger indie music scene
(Shank, 1994), the gay dance music underground (Fikentscher, 2000), and
the international post-rave technotribe (St John, 2003). Its defining feature
is neither class, sexuality, nor ethnicity, but something much more fluid and
intangible: style. As Justin and Christiana exemplify, electroclash above all
is about style. The point here is not to claim, as does Maffesoli (1995), that
class and ethnicity are no longer the salient social categories they once were.
Quite the contrary. The electroclash social landscape is riddled with internal
divisions. Rather, the point is that electroclash represents a set of aesthetic
tactics that exists across such divisions, a style of tongue-in-cheek performance, both on stage and in real life, indicative of a particular shared
relationship towards mass media. Electroclash is an effect of, and response
to, the media saturation of late capitalism, the sheer, undeniable presence
of media in our daily lives. It is bound neither to specific localities, nor
particular nationalities, but grows instead out of the vast, interconnected
circuits of media around the globe, the mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996)
that accompany and support the global economic restructuring of modern
times.
In a now classic formulation of subculture theory, Clarke et al. proposed
a model of cultural production in which working-class youth create organic,
authentic forms of collective resistance, which are then co-opted, commodified, and rendered mainstream by the trend-hungry mass media
(Clarke et al., 1976). The trouble is, as Thornton (1996), Frank (1997), and
others convincingly argue, for contemporary youth there was never a time
before mass-mediation. Young people come to know about youth music
scenes and alternative cultural formations through media representations.
They first encounter punk, indie rock, gangsta rap, and any number of other
purportedly anti-commercial music styles, including electroclash, through
commercial sources. It is television, magazines, news, music videos, and
even the occasional sit-com that assume the right and the power to label
music scenes, to classify types of styles, label them oppositional or
conformist, and either celebrate or condemn them, sometimes both. This
does not mean that young people are merely passive recipients of predigested media categories. As electroclash demonstrates, the position of
consumers towards media is much more complex than this. But there is no

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genuine opposition between subcultures and the media, except a dogged

ideological one (Thornton, 1996: 116). Electroclash, after all, is not a label
people typically assign to themselves, but rather a style elaborated and
articulated 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 to
say about electroclash. Jason Persse of Mixer magazine wrote, Whatever
you called it electroclash, technowave, tech-pop, new new wave theres
little question that it was the most hyped movement of 2002 (Persse, 2003:
50). Its been described as retrofitted dance pop (Miller, 2003: 70), an
over-hyped scene thats more about fashion than music, a retro-80s party
(Tremayne, 2003: 14), cheeky (Matos, 2003: 71), and my personal
favorite, the most manufactured faux movement since Malcom McLarens
Sex Pistols (Tremayne, 2003: 14). Nearly everyone seems to agree: electroclash is a glamour-obsessed, nostalgic exhibition put on by people more
concerned with style than substance. What these articles seem to miss,
however, is that for the cheeky, electronic musicians performing electroclash 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 conspicuously artificial and seems to revel in its own artifice. They have raided
the vaults of pop cultures past, built their own sound and image as a
pastiche of vacuous, commercial pop, and paraded it on stage and over the
air waves as the second coming of 1980s-style decadent materialism. Bands
give themselves sardonic names that emphasize their falseness, such as My
Robot Friend, Tracy and the Plastics, and Ladytron. They adorn themselves in outfits straight out of 1960s science fiction films, bedeck themselves in PVC, nylon, and plastic leather. Album covers feature pictures of
robots and machines, or singers posing like fashion models that graced the
cover of Vogue in 1984. In their marketing materials and in concert, bands
often stare vacantly into space, mouths slightly agape like sustenancedeprived fashion models or cyborg mannequins. Electro nightclubs are
given names like Synthetic, the Plastic Factory, or Fake to flaunt their plasticity. And the music itself is composed entirely of electronic instruments,
usually synthesizers, laptops, and vocoders, electronic vocal processors
that convert the human voice into tinny, robotic noise. The accompanying
song lyrics seem to painstakingly avoid subject matter with any pretence
of depth, lingering instead on such anti-literary themes as child actors (for
example, in Freezepops Tracey Gold), casual sex in public places (for
example in Dirty Sanchezs Fucking on the Dance Floor), riding around
in limousines (for example, in Miss Kitten and the Hackers Frank

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Sinatra), and wearing cool clothes (for example, in Mount Sims How We
Do or Black Sunglasses).
But electroclashs superficial preoccupations, its unoriginality, and its
stress on surface over depth are not evidence of its complicity with cynical,
corporate goals of profiting from proven pop formulas. Nor is it some sort
of demonstrative proof of this generations postmodern reduction of ethics
and meaning to value-free aesthetics (Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1992).
Rather, it is through the apparent preoccupation with superficiality and
artifice that electroclash artists express meaning. The fakeness and shallowness of electroclash music and performance is directly referential to the
fakeness and shallowness electroclash performers perceive in the extant
media products from which they borrow. It is a commentary on the medias
ability to manufacture truth, to create and reinforce significant cultural
schemas. Electroclash artists strive to uncover and expose the artifice of
popular culture, its meaning-making power, its contrived conventions, its
cynical sentiments, and its recurrent, often oppressive representations of
youth, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.
It should come as no surprise, then, that electroclash artists borrow extensively from the new wave and pop styles of the 1980s, the decade of neon
and spandex that gave birth to MTV. On the one hand, the music of the
1980s is the music electroclash artists, who are primarily in their late
twenties and early thirties, grew up with. It is the first kind of music they
can remember liking, and the kind of music they consider the most formative in their current musical attitudes and tastes. Playing 80s music, then,
has an undeniable nostalgic aspect to it for electroclash artists. But the
music of the 1980s also takes on another, more symbolic and less feel-good
significance for them as well. It is described by electroclash scenesters as the
soundtrack of the most materialistic, corporate-controlled decade in history,
a time of flashy popular culture that glossed over the grim realities of the
Iran-Contra Affair, the Cold War, and the growing divide between rich and
poor. For electroclash artists, it has become representational of the materialism and cynicism that defines the corporate media, and which is deeply
embedded in its churned out product of mainstream popular music. Several
musicians, DJs, and scenesters I talked to, furthermore, drew explicit parallels between the 1980s and the contemporary moment. They compared
Iran-Contra to Bushs hidden agenda in attacking Iraq, the paranoia of the
Cold War with the current fear of terrorism, and the lifestyles of todays
Hollywood media royalty with the excesses of that famously decadent
decade. Electroclash artists revival of 80s style, then, is as much a way of
commenting on the problems of the present as a nostalgic return to pop
cultures past.
Electroclash artists do, however, also frequently borrow directly from
contemporary popular culture, a fact that somehow gets lost in much of the
popular music press. The look of bands is a merging of 1980s fashions with

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the pop styles of the moment, and their antics on stage emulate those of
current popular acts such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake,
and Ashlee Simpson far more explicitly than any synth-pop group from
their childhood. While electroclash artists often draw inspiration from the
1980s, their critical gaze is focused intently on the trends of the moment.
The Fischerspooner concert at the Sunset Strip House of Blues in September of 2003 provides a clear illustration of this critical reflection on contemporary popular culture in electroclash. Their set began as something of a
cross between a Britney Spears concert and a Las Vegas style revue. Singer
Casey Spooner wore a ruffled blue shirt tucked into black spandex pants,
his hair pulled into a cornrow ponytail. Accompanying him were four
dancing woman with shiny, black tinseled wigs and costumes that resembled the workout gear Jane Fonda wore back in the mid-1980s. There were
two female back-up singers who didnt seem to be doing much singing at
all, and a single, male dancer in white jeans and a matching white t-shirt.
It was a well-choreographed, expertly executed, arena-style show replete
with billowing smoke, strobe lights, and confetti.
Then, somewhere into the third or fourth polished, pop number, the male
dancer began spurting blood. Viscous red fluid gurgled out of his mouth.
Thin streams of crimson sprayed from his wrists. And the audience cheered
uproariously. This was the first time in the show that Fischerspooner had
broken character, cluing in the audience with fountains of fake blood that
this pop music extravaganza may not be exactly what it appeared. The fake
blood, utterly incongruous with the clich pop drivel that preceded it, had
the effect of jarring the audience into a realization that something unlike
the familiar pop culture spectacle was occurring. It served as a key
(Goffman, 1974), an indicator that the performance required a special sort
of 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-seriousness
that itself functions to frame audience interpretation, the show was fraught
with slightly skewed rock star clichs and was full of satiric references to
pop culture vapidity. Casey Spooner changed outfits every other song,
occasionally coming back on stage only partially dressed, or donning a
ridiculous costume like a tigers tail or a boxers robe. He punctuated
climaxes and crescendos in his songs by releasing balloons or confetti. He
stood in front of a giant fan that had the sole function of making his hair
blow back provocatively. In other words, he took every opportunity to
expose the absolute artifice of his act. Spinning slowly on a turntable
beneath his feet, he ripped the cornrow wig off his head to reveal his own
shaggy blond hair and belted out a sad, slow number, while holding a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. As he sang, he alternately took puffs or swigs, letting the recording of his voice play on without
bothering 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, it
became a running joke throughout the show. The back-up singers would lip
sync the parts originally sung by Spooner, and he would sometimes even
sing over the rather mechanical-sounding pre-recorded vocal tracks in his
own genuine, off-key voice. The shows effect was to simultaneously entertain audience members with familiar references to arena rock show conventions while making them aware of their status as conventions, that is,
fabrications of the entertainment industry, hackneyed and clichd to the
point of being almost meaningless.
Electroclash artists, then, attempt to get beyond the dominant mode of
thought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it, but by rendering
it incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the arbitrary convention it is (Bourdieu, 1993: 31). They do not outright reject pop
culture norms; they expose them through constant, often unflattering reference. Electroclash songs and performances repeatedly index Top-40 clichs
and MTV music videos. Their explicit lyrics borrow extensively from
gangsta rap and continually play with the preoccupations with wealth and
sex evident in other, more mainstream pop acts. Their album covers allude
to familiar depictions of young women in barely anything at all, and images
of rock stars lounging in hot tubs, sipping champagne, living the high life,
and more or less basking in their successful exploitation of todays musicbuying public. Their songs, in a sort of mock tribute to the contemporary,
ultra-popular genres of today, praise the self-indulgent lifestyles of the rich
and famous and shamelessly promote sex and violence. They strip popular
music down to what they perceive as its true essence (sex, money, and
looking good), then reproduce it using framing devices that indicate ironic
distance.
Often sung in voices of affected boredom, these songs are intended to
reveal the patent absurdity of the rock star fantasy, to strip the lifestyle of
its manufactured appeal through embodying it to a tee and making it appear
ridiculous. They depict a stylized, glamorized, ironic depiction of the virtues
of excess and, in doing so, call attention to and problematize the taken-forgranted conventions of pop culture representation. In her dance club hit
Frank Sinatra, for instance, longtime DJ and musician Miss Kitten ironically praises the excesses of stardom. Being famous is so nice, she sings, in
a dry voice and strong French accent. Suck my dick. Lick my ass. In limousines we have sex, every night with my famous friends. Here Miss Kitten
comments on the preoccupation of current pop hits with a mythologized,
Hollywood lifestyle, and mocks the sexual bravado of other, male (she, after
all, does not have a dick) pop artists. She plays with the performance of a
sexualized masculinity, using crude language to highlight the profanity and
misogyny already embedded in popular hits.

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Deconstructing pop
Electroclash artist Mount Sims, over the blaring music of a bar in
downtown Hollywood, described to me his musical ambitions in Jungian
terms. He attempts, he explained to me, to take myths engrained in some
kind of collective unconscious or embedded in the culture, and mess with
them, reinvest them with meaning, or as he put it, just completely take
apart, deconstruct and put [them] back together again. Sims thinks of
himself as participating in the dismantling of powerful cultural myths,
continually represented within popular media, whose functions, he
explains, are to support law, and in their place, creating new myths of sex
and death. These new myths, as Sims imagines them, would support liberation 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 hit
people over the head with his message but to have it affect them on some
semi-conscious level. Most of the time, says Sims, its a little bit inevitable
that somethings gonna reach through, somethings gonna leak through, no
matter how tight, no matter how tight the skin is, somethings gonna leak
through, its gonna sweat some kind of way.
At one point in his stage show, Sims friend Ryan, a local performance
artist, chases after two female dancers who wear what Sims describes as
modern hoochie, Florida booty-dance gear. Sims, meanwhile, continues to
dance undeterred behind his open laptop computer. Ryan wears a white
jumpsuit 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 and
musical technology, seducing the flesh-and-blood women on stage for the
audiences bemusement and enlightenment. He is, Sims explains, the
merging of man and beast or, in this case, man and technology, the sexual
drive of testosterone-induced masculinity mediated through cultural apparatuses. He is the cultural construct of masculinity, the embodiment of patriarchal assumptions about the nature of the male gender. The performance,
Sims goes on to explain, combines pop iconography with cultural mythology. It dresses up embedded cultural myths in the visual vocabulary of
contemporary popular culture, converting cultural preoccupations into
kitschy exhibitionism. Ryans technological minotaur is thus made to
appear ridiculous, his masculine performance of seduction, composed of
stylized mechanical movements, rendered unnatural and bizarre.
Sitting in front of me in a bleached, dreadlocked mohawk and tight-fitting
red t-shirt, the then 28-year-old, bisexual, mixed-ethnicity Sims may not fit
the 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 visual

representation, to destabilize hierarchical oppositions between such
conventional distinctions as male and female, straight and gay, popular and
elite, and audio and visual (Hebdige, 1979). As Derrida himself advocated,
Sims and other electroclash artists do not attempt to add critique to popular
culture, but to expose the inconsistencies already within it. In Derridas
words, the destructive force of Deconstruction is always already contained
within the very architecture of the work (Derrida, 1986). Electroclash
artists, then, attempt to draw this destructive force out, to expose and undo
social 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 representations of femininity, using their stage acts to call attention to and denaturalize gender roles. These performers tend to appear in concert in flashy,
highly revealing attire, gratuitous amounts of make up, and quite complex
hairstyles. On stage, they act either sexually suggestive or artificially
demure, playing an exaggerated social stereotype of the prototypical
woman depicted in the mass media. Wearing elaborate, Barbie-doll hairstyles and extremely generous amounts of make-up, the two women of Electrocute, for instance, began their show at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles
in lab coats, posing and moving mechanically like female Frankensteins. At
the start of their second song, Kleiner Dicker Junge (Chubby Little Boy
in English), they threw off their lab coats to reveal tight-fitting, silver lam
leotards, in which they strutted around the stage and go-go danced. The
rest of the show consisted of dancing in tight clothes, flirting with the
audience, and singing songs about eating candy (Sugar Rush), and how
much they love their daddies (I Love My Daddy). During their performance, Electrocute seemed to embody the American stereotype of the preteen girl. They made social conventions about the expected behaviors of
girls apparent through acting in a manner that seemed inspired by mens
fetish magazines and soft-core porn films. The effect was a rendition of
girliness that is playful, provocative, and intentionally a little creepy. Electrocute, however, occasionally would break with their girlish demeanor to
sing sexually explicit numbers like I Need a Freak, during which they
danced suggestively and made overtures to male audience members. Once
again, the effect was disconcerting. Electrocutes antics always seem put on,
over-the-top, and a little contradictory. And so they are intended to be. Electrocute are not pretending to play themselves on stage. They are assuming
roles based on common representations of women and girls in magazines,
movies, and music videos. Incongruous behaviors of electroclash acts (for
instance, Electrocutes alternating between girlishness and sexual aggressiveness, and Princess Superstars dressing up like a fashion model while
rapping about oral sex), and exaggerated expressions (such as the coquettish giggles of Electrocute or the mock-boredom of Miss Kitten and the

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Fitness) give away the act. Electroclash, after all, is always about putting
on an act.
Anthropologist Victor Turner has claimed that performance has the
capacity to draw attention to the social system out of which it developed
(Turner, 1987: 22). Electroclash acts make use of this capacity. In the case
of Mount Sims, Electrocute, and other electroclash acts, performance is
largely an attempt to make hidden cultural processes apparent, to expose
social conventions and make them appear problematic. In Mount Sims
words:
Im definitely not trying to be a shock rocker or anything like that. [But] I
think 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 didnt I feel uncomfortable? Why did that
make me too comfortable? You know, and more [than that to] express, is
that wrong? Is that art? Is that music? Is this representative of anything that
I am? Can I relate to this at all? Or does this make me even more of an
outsider? Those are the questions I want people to step back with. And to
question themselves, question this place that we live in. And to ask, what
makes that artistic? What makes that art? What makes this right or wrong?

Performance here is a means of entertaining the audience, while at the same

time making them increasingly conscious of the nature, style, and given
meanings 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 the
cynical and materialistic sentiments found within popular culture, but this
leaves a couple of unanswered questions. First, is it the intention of electroclash artists to launch a political assault on the representations depicted in
popular culture, or are they simply having fun with them? And two, is the
goal behind the electroclash performance style truly to criticize our societys
preoccupation with glitz and glamour, or does this style of performance
itself reflect a sort of glamour fetish, disguised and disavowed through the
use of ironic distancing? It seems clear to me that in electroclash music and
performance there is always an element of fascination with the rock star
fantasy, the lure of sex, money, and the Hollywood lifestyle, that cant
entirely be explained away as a practice of critique. Fun seems to take precedence over politics in electroclash, and its important not to overestimate
the political agenda of electroclash artists. Electroclash is, after all, dance
music, propelled by driving beats and catchy melodies. Despite electroclash
artists 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, a
simultaneous process of embracing and distancing that, I would argue,
stems from lifelong, ambivalent relationships between electroclash artists
and popular culture. Electroclash musicians were, after all, consumers of
popular 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, following
Hutcheon, as complicitous critique. The avant-garde in the world of
fashion, she explains, operates in a discursive field defined by commodity
capitalism and mass culture (Kondo, 1997: 105). Their designs, and often
outlandish runway shows, call into question gender categories and complicate orientalist notions of what it means to be Japanese. But such contestatory gestures are inevitably mitigated through the fact that fashion is above
all a capitalist enterprise based on making a profit, that is premised on the
production of desire in consumers (Kondo, 1997: 145). Electroclash artists
contestatory gestures, similarly, are mitigated by the fact that electroclash
artists inherited their aesthetic practices from the very music industry their
performances critique. They continually reference, draw influence from,
and, moreover, depend on the existence of a mainstream media to maintain
their outsider status. After all, the very logic of alternative music scenes
like electroclash is premised on the notion that there is something to be
outside of. This outsider status, however, is itself unstable. Electroclash
artists never push themselves too far away from the object of their disdain.
They write catchy pop songs, manipulate pop culture conventions to attract
an audience, and build their aesthetic from assembled pieces of pop music
refuse that they admit theyre fond of, despite often strong, politically driven
feelings that they shouldnt be. Their critique, then, is always complicitous
with the very media industry it scorns.
Electroclash is, thus, testimony to the power and influence of popular
culture on the lives of Western youth. It is evidence that popular culture is
indeed 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 influences on the ways young people see themselves and the world around them
(Mankekar, 1999: 8). They are resources for self-imagining, providing
conceptual structures that influence in subtle and not-so-subtle ways the
tastes, thoughts, and feelings of consumers (Radway, 1984). But electroclashs ambivalent performance style also demonstrates that the consumption of popular culture and its imitation by subsequent generations of pop
culture producers are by no means passive acts.
Liz, the singer of the Boston-based electroclash band Freezepop, told me
that irony and sincerity are always operating simultaneously in their

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performances. Theyre always there, she said, at different levels.

Freezepops song Get Reddy to Rokk, for instance, is a parody of hackneyed rock music conventions, and yet, Liz admits a certain affection for
those same clichs. Their song Tracey Gold, similarly, is a sarcastic ode to
the female star of the 1980s sit-com Growing Pains. However, Liz explains,
The Duke of Belgian Waffles, who is one of the synthesizer players and
songwriters of the band, had a major crush on Tracey Gold growing up.
The song at once comments on the medias power to manipulate emotions
and makes fun of one of the members of the band for falling prey to such
manipulation. The end result is a song that celebrates a minor pop culture
icon of the 1980s while acknowledging the ridiculousness of such celebrity
worship.
Mount Sims admitted his own ambivalent perspective during our
marathon four-hour interview. He acknowledged that electroclash often
obscures 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 isnt possible to tell for sure if hes criticizing pop cultures preoccupation with sex and money or in fact endorsing
it. He prefers it that way. In his words:
Leave it [the critique] unfinished. Let the art finish itself. Or let the listener
finish the art. You know, let the listener be the one whos critical. Let the
listener be the one whos reaching.

He also admits that he too isnt entirely sure where he stands. His stage
show could easily be read as critique of pop culture spectacle or simply as
pop culture spectacle. His concerts are elaborate exhibitions, with female
dancers in skimpy costumes, pumping and grinding against him. Mount
Sims himself tends to dress elaborately in costumes manufactured for him
by friends in the fashion industry. He wears the garb of a pop icon, resembling a cross between Prince in the 1980s and David Bowie in the glam early
1970s, and ultimately embodies the abstracted visual attributes of pop star
charisma. His dancers too appear to conform to Hollywood expectations
of female beauty, curvy and petite in tight-fitting clothes. There is a sense
in which Mount Sims, and electroclash artists in general, are struggling with
the allure of the materialist fantasy, a sort of uncomfortable ambivalence
arising from a clash between their counter-cultural ideals and their years of
agreeably consuming pop culture imagery.
This ambivalence is perhaps even more apparent in the stage show of
New Yorks W.I.T. (Whatever It Takes). Performing their most popular song
Hold Me, Touch Me at the Electroclash II show in Hollywood, the three
women of W.I.T. wore matching beige taffeta gowns circa the 1920s
(Lentz, 2003), their hair perfectly coiffed and feathered like Farrah Fawcett
in the 1970s, and assumed poses strikingly similar to the opening sequence
of the Charlies 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 difficult
to tell whether or not they were being serious.
Larry Tee, the writer and producer of W.I.T.s songs and, as previously
mentioned, the man who coined the term electroclash, explained to me
that electroclash speaks in the language of the zero generation: young,
middle-class Americans who came of age at the turn of the millennium, who
feel disaffected by politics and see explicit social causes as pointless. It is a
style of critique preferred by those who were, in Tees words, raised on safe
sex, salad bars, and the internet. Many of the electroclash bands Ive talked
to are self-confessed pop culture addicts. Like most of their generation, they
are children of MTV and Atari video game systems, lifelong pop culture
consumers inspired to make pop of their own. What sets them apart from
other Americans is not so much their patterns of consumption as their ideological and emotional investment in symbolically distancing themselves
from the mainstream media they have long consumed.
Irony has become the modus operandi for electroclash bands and, indeed,
a broad assortment of todays youth, because it doesnt oblige them to give
up either their addiction to popular culture or their counter-cultural ideologies. Irony is the electroclash weapon of choice, Tee told me, because it
doesnt require one to take a stand. It doesnt require political action
doomed to failure. It doesnt require an out-and-out rejection of consumer
culture. Instead, irony is a way of criticizing what they are continuing to
do, what they enjoy and embrace in spite of their oppositional, political
ideologies. Irony is a way of navigating a middle ground between resistance
and accommodation. As Liz Ohanesian, DJ at the West Hollywood electro
nightclub Transmission suggested to me, Irony has become this veil that
you hide under just so people can think youre cool if you like something
thats not. The extravagance of Fischerspooner, the affected boredom of
Miss Kitten, and the pseudo-vapidity of W.I.T. are all examples of using
irony as a tactic to avoid taking an explicitly resistant or compliant position
towards the media representations electroclash artists consume and imitate.
It is, as Tee claims, a tactic the zero generation can understand and relate
to.

Conclusion
The impact of electroclash is visibly waning in Los Angeles. Where there
once were 10 to 12 popular clubs playing electroclash, now there are only
two or three. Where a year ago there were several live electroclash shows
every week, now youre lucky to find one a month. This is a city that thrives
on novelty, and electroclash is already old news. The very same trend-prone
urbanites that constituted the electroclash scene have moved on to new

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things, or perhaps more accurately, new versions of other old things.

Theyve resurrected other music styles from the ruins of pop culture, given
birth to new genres like disco-punk (an abrasive, guitar-driven music with
danceable beats), and retro rock (another 80s-inspired style that takes its
influence from early gothic rock and post-punk). Many of the electroclash
bands themselves have changed their styles to reflect the current motions in
music and fashion. Mount Sims and Fischerspooner, for instance, have both
incorporated a guitar, a live bass, and drums into their music. The irony is
still there, the pop culture indexicality is still there, and so is the tactic of
managing 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 wont last long either. They
arent meant to.
Electroclash was never intended to be an enduring, permanent addition
to the Western worlds musical canon. It was part of an ongoing set of
tactics for living through the social and economic system in which all of our
lives are embedded, for managing alienation and ambivalence. Electroclash
reflects many of the contradictions of late capitalism and the postmodern
condition that accompanies it. It displays the cynicism towards media, the
infatuation with imagery, and the ever-presence of commercial culture in the
lives of individuals. It does not, however, simply reiterate the cultural logic
of the dominant social order. Electroclash music and the urban hipsters that
temporarily embraced it as the soundtrack to the counterculture actively
reinterpret the medias normative meanings. Electroclash artists borrow
from commercial culture, but never become its dupes. They deconstruct its
conventions, de-naturalize its representations, and participate in changing
the meaning of its popular mythologies.
And these are not simply toothless gestures. As Kondo argues about
avant-garde fashion, meanings produced by and distributed through the
media 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 potential to destabilize a field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993), ultimately
exposing and throwing into question its constitutive logic (Kondo, 1997:
151). Electroclash artists turn profit-driven, commercial formulas into selfconscious kitsch. They transform oppressive gender distinctions into
markers of ironic sophistication. Their performances expose contemporary
media representations as cynically manufactured, socially constructed, and
ultimately oppressive social conventions, then convert them instead into
something else: something chosen, something fun, something played out in
public.
Todays generation of rising rock stars and budding musical entrepreneurs
were raised on a steady diet of media messages, but they are no cultural
dopes (Hall, 1981), molded and manipulated by someone elses commercial

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motivations. They occupy an ambivalent position towards commercial

culture. They are cynical of its reiterated messages but fascinated by its
promise of glamour, its materialist fantasy, and its endless supply of glossy,
stylized images and sounds. They do not simply reproduce pop culture
conventions; they re-produce them, remixing, reworking, and reinvesting
them with ambiguity, irony, and more than a little self-mockery.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and
feedback, as well as Maureen Mahon, Niko Besnier, Sondra Hale, and Yunxiang
Yan for their detailed commentary on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Sherry
Ortner, Mariko Tamanoi, Karen Brodkin, Kyeyoung Park, Nandini Gunawardena, Anjali Browning, and other members of the Culture, Power, and Social
Change (then Cultures of Capitalism) working group at UCLA for valuable
commentary and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at
the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu,
Hawaii and the Society for the Anthropology of North America annual
conference 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 when
a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific
institution) 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(a
spatial or institutional) localization, nor thus on a borderline distinguishing
the other as visible totality (1984: xix). A tactic is employed by the less
powerful in response to the strategies of the powerful. In De Certeaus words,
it is a means whereby the weak continually turn to their own ends forces
alien 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 that
make up a given societys fundamental tools of thought, but also the various
conventions, recipes, scenarios, principles of action, and habits of speech and
gesture built up with these fundamental tools (Sewell, 1992: 8).
3 Giddens is quite vague about what he means by rules and resources, but
they are, for him, the basic building block of structure, or the medium and
outcome of the reproduction of practices (Giddens, 1979: 5).

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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 electroclash
musicians and producers, as well as those fans, friends, and supporters with
whom they have routine, direct interaction. I use the word scene as opposed
to subculture, music community, or the currently popular neo-tribe
because these terms imply to me an internal cohesion and a set of defined
boundaries which fail to accurately capture the indeterminacy of this aggregate of international, multi-ethnic, mixed sexuality musicians and artists
operating out of multiple cities. A scene is, however, defined by certain
commonalities in style, motivation, and attitude. As Mahon puts it, a scene
is a heady concoction of musical practices, musical knowledge, hair styles,
manners of dress, performance and dance styles, and aesthetic values that
mark groups of musicians and music fans (Mahon, 2004: 99).

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BRENT LUVAAS is a PhD Candidate in socio-cultural anthropology

at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is currently conducting
research for a dissertation project on Indonesian teen media and the
construction of a national, Indonesian youth culture, emphasizing the
ground-level social practices through which young Javanese make use of
and rework representations of youth in magazines, music and film.
Address: University of California, Los Angeles, Department of
Anthropology, 375 Portola Place, CA 90095-1553, USA.
[email: [email protected]]

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