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MLL 230 Prof. Roland Erwin P. Rabang

Noel C. Canlas 19 May 2017

Pop Music and the Joyous Ordinary

I.
In John Storey’s chapter on popular music, he lays out the rudiments of a musicology that is
primarily based on differentiating poetry of words from songs that are made not only of words
but also of a performance that modulates words beyond lexical meaning towards the production
of what are called “non-words.” He quotes Griel Marcus who says that “Words are sounds we
can feel before they are statements to understand.” 1 In fact, as an art form that “comes to life”
only in being performed, songs in general and pop songs in particular “celebrate not the
articulate but the inarticulate” since singers depend “not on words but on sounds – on the noises
around the words,” says Frith as quoted by Storey (italics mine). Again quoting Frith, even if
(pop) songs work on the ordinariness of language” (and here we recall ostranenie, or
defamiliarization 2) to make it “intense and vital,” pop song “are not poems.”
The proposal of such distinctions is understandable in the context of identifying the specific
generic qualities of songs so that the criteria of evaluation that is specific to poetry won’t be
misapplied in the wrong field. I won’t deny the existence of a distinction between poetry and pop
songs, but in my opinion, it is a difference that is first a forgetting of the existence of the lyric
genre, the same genre in which songs and poetry were, at some time in the past, one and the
same thing. Secondly, it is a distinction that neglects to mention the huge oral tradition of epic
poetry where bards sang the words in court. Third, it is unexpectedly incognizant of the huge
impact of the written text and printing technology on literature and poetry (from the Aeneid to
Baudelaire at the least) wherein the printed page took over as the dominant mode of literary
consumption, marginalizing a tradition that linked poetry to its performance. Finally, as a
continuation of the previous point, the proposed distinction completely bypassed the historical
avant-garde beginning with the Futurists like Russolo (L'arte dei Rumori or “The Art of Noise”)
and going through the sound poetry of the Dadaists (Hugo Ball, "verse without words") 3 up to
Zaum (Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh) and the concrete and sound poetry of the
American avant-garde, and stretching up to today’s “performance poetry” varieties—major
poetic and literary movements that have restored the sonic, visual, and kinesic dimensions of
literary art beyond the restricted lexic and metric print-visual orientation of poetry since
Gutenberg.
Rather than using such inflexible distinction between poetry and pop songs to revalorize a
cultural category that have been historically and critically devalued as a formulaic commodity
(Adorno et al) for pure entertainment of consumers (whose aesthetic discernment is under
question), the more viable route is to recognize a common goal at the center of all human
techniques of expression. That is, to view the arts as aspiring for the expression of a certain
totality. This can already be gleaned in the inseparable interdependence of words, notes,
instruments, voice, sounds, and kinesics in the performance of either songs or avant-garde
poetries. This totality all art aspires for is not just Life as a whole, which, in itself, remains an
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ideal that is not comprehended by any piece. The habit of seeing works (even cultures) as a
unified whole is a formalist error that loses sight not only of the fragmentary nature of human
perception but also of its mediated construction.
The totality for which any art form aspires for does not stop at the measure of the entire
stretch of Life but, more than beyond this, extends its grasp up to what Maurice Blanchot calls,
in reference to the secret behind the Siren songs, “l’inhumanité de tout chant humain.” 4
But, others say, there was something even stranger in the enchantment: it caused the Sirens merely to
reproduce the ordinary singing of mankind, and because the Sirens, who were only animals—very
beautiful animals because they reflected womanly beauty—could sing the way men sing, their song
became so extraordinary that it created in anyone who heard it a suspicion that all human singing was
really inhuman. Was it despair, then, that killed men moved to passion by their own singing? That despair
verged upon rapture. There was something marvellous about the song: it actually existed, it was ordinary
and at the same time secret, a simple, everyday song which they were suddenly forced to recognize , sung
in an unreal way by strange powers, powers which were, in a word, imaginary; it was a song from the
abyss and once heard it opened an abyss in every utterance and powerfully enticed whoever heard it to
disappear into that abyss.

Ulysses and the Sirens by H.J. Draper c. 1909

And this abyss is where the beyond of music is located, toward which the sirens aroused in
human beings “the hope and the desire of a marvellous beyond, a beyond that represented
nothing but a desert, as if the very source of music had been that singular place fully devoid of
music” (my translation) [“l’espoir et le désir d’un au-delà merveilleux, et cet au-delà ne
représentait qu’un desert, comme si la region-mère de la musique eût été le seul endroit tout à
fait privé de musique”]. 5 A strange reversal at the extreme end of the goal where silence, not
universal noise, overtakes sound (see, for example, Jackson Mac Low or John Cage). Music
aspires for its own beyond, which is at the same time the beyond of the human dimension. This
suddenly reminded me of Diva Plavalaguna in the film The Fifth Element by Luc Besson (1997).
One commentator said that
When composer Éric Serra showed soprano Inva Mula (who dubs the voice of the Diva) the sheet music
for the Diva Dance, she reportedly smiled and relayed to him that some of the notes written were not
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humanly possible to achieve because the human voice cannot change notes that fast. Hence, she
performed the notes in isolation - one by one, as opposed to consecutively singing them all together and
they digitized the notes to fit the music. 6

It is only fitting that an alien female is given the task of performing a piece in which the
“soaring arpeggios” tax the range of the human voice and breath, as if the ultimate final note it
was reaching for that can be performed without dying lies at the threshold where the divine
awaits. At the center of the performance, therefore, is the hope of a certain becoming, the
becoming-inhuman of the song, the passage of that something else above or below the words that
transforms the generic nature of the lyrics into a living incandescent word, the sudden influx of
an unknown vital other wherein the logos suddenly reawakens into the force of a rhema.7 In this
region of purely intense accidents where a je-ne-sais-quoi reigns supreme, the best guide perhaps
will be Vladimir Jankélévitch, the half-forgotten Bergsonian philosopher of music, the inimitable
“bard of daily transcendence.” 8

II.
A note must only exist as the silence of all the rest, as if in hearing the one we also hear all the
others in a virtual ear, a whole spectrum of silent sounds, ghostly and, of course, ineffable by the
limitation of the actual ordinary. Yet, they substantiate the sonority of the single note that steals
its passage into the real domain of sounds. We seem to follow a similar logic in the adjacent
domain of human emotions. Nietzsche writes in part IV of Thus Spake Zarathustra:
Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? 0 my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are
entangled, entwined, enamored; if ever you wanted one occasion twice, if ever you said, “You please me,
happiness! flash! moment!” Then you wanted everything back. Everything afresh, everything eternally,
everything entangled, entwined, enamored. 9

The discourse that affirms the joyous affirms at the same time the mournful, as if they were an
entangled whole, an inescapable binary. One feeds off the other, presumes the existence of the
other. A song or a poem that traverses one topic also implies the other; this is how it can arise,
how it can delimit its affective center. In a popular forlorn love ballad like Dulce’s “Paano” and
the depressive sub-cultural social lament of Yano’s “Esem,” what is essentially absent becomes
the cyclical center of the lyrical loop. As affirmations of the mournful and the absent, they carry
the strange logic of affirming also both the joyous and the present.
In the first, the “disappearance” of the significant other creates a void that vacates all
meaning, purpose, direction, mind, and reality. The opposite scenario it affirms is the presence of
the beloved as an anchor of being and source of joy and meaning. This is the position of the
“empty” subject, reduced to approximate the level of what Antonin Artaud termed “Le cri.” Le
cri is the ground state level of an animal in good or bad circumstance: the cry of triumph, the
wail of sorrow, the shout of danger, the roar of anger, the shriek of fear, the scream of pain, or
the moans of ecstasy. This is language before discursive language, the hyper-articulation of a
primal affect in the velocity of a fierce and expansive Ur-Vowel. This is the becoming-inhuman
of language and sound in general.
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As with Dulce’s piece, the voice of “Esem” is likewise an empty subject, the empty subject of
capitalist desire, a negative mass who is even deprived of a share of panem et circenses. The
similarly generic speaker—and I emphasize generic here for reasons that will appear later—is
the obverse of the good consumer equipped with capital and able to participate in the law of
exchange. Hence, the absent significant other here is Capital, the ultima ratio mundi whose
absence and unequal distribution also corresponded to the unequal allotment of joy and anguish
in the world. Like with Dulce’s generic miserabile, the absence of this center creates chaos, loss
of meaning, purpose, and direction. Both subjects are suddenly swept into a spiral of repeated,
aimless, and anguished existence. Days are just days of wandering, nights are just nights of
suffering. With no center, the sole mode of being they are capable of is this vicious cycle that
almost never ends until the song closes in the actual ordinary, but still trails like an acidic echo
that burns out the remaining presence of the subject down to the last note. Nothing is left but the
red-shifted wail of a circuitous lament for an other in absentia, the potential source of both
suffering and joy.
In the absence of this other, the empty subject cannot move, or can only move in circles. This
non-movement paradoxically energizes the possibility of a minimum state, that of the lyrical
loop, which, by its very lament of that absence, by the non-possession of the absent other,
implies its presence, but only in a great somewhere-else-than-here, off this sphere that satisfies
my being. In short, by invoking the presence of the other as being-somewhere-else (the former
Beloved and the Capital horde in someone else’s arms), the songs reinstate the positive nature
and value of that absent other, keeping it as an ideal good or center to possess, and maintaining
the integrity of a general economy of happiness potentially still within the realm of possibility.
The object source of joy is still there, only that it is not within the sphere of the lyrical loop that,
in affirming its dispossession insistently, invokes it more strongly like a familiar spirit hovering
around it. In a way, this is like a perverted version of catharsis where nothing is really purged.
Instead, like Oedipus realizing that his life revolved around a meaning that did not exist, the
suffering that the lyrical loop recites begins where Oedipus ends.
This joy is beyond, but it exists, a source of virtual comfort. Why joy should be in the form of
a Beloved or a Capital is a question of History, and fundamentally a question of sentimentalist
versus materialist conceptions of joy and suffering. One can say that the songs can only work
within a system where celibacy and penury are the extreme marginal values. The misery that
inheres within these extreme values restates the ideals of Couple and Capital whose arrival in
history as ideals are merely presumed. If they don’t reinstate a politicized subject, it is due to the
generic constitution of the lyrical loop where the emptiness of the subject is crucial in the
evocation of an abstract individual-beyond as a virtual zone of the joyous ordinary as a counter
to its revocation in the generic loop that sings the extreme devalued points of the Social.
Hence, the charge that pop music is meaningless holds absolutely true. The lyrical loop really
does not go anywhere but repeats itself (in contrast perhaps to Classical music that posits a
thematic or tonal center where the score becomes a simple evolved time of linear variations).
This is all the more remarkable since pop music has words and even needs a voice for its
performance. But that is exactly its secret: it inscribes itself in a lyrical loop fixed within a set of
lexicon so generic that it embodies the very nature of language itself as pure signifier, signs
devoid of center or empty of meaning, whose sole energy is the spiralling evocation of an absent
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other in a sonic drone worthy of the notion of the ever controversial “eternal return” of
Nietzsche: 10
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and
everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession
and sequence.

Because it is so generic, the performance of the lyric loop opens up the imaginary space of the
singular or the individual and the possibility of lived meaning as that inhuman beyond which
haunts it perpetually in absentia, as the blood of a new form of abstracted joy that it craves after
(not unlike the shades of Hades) so that it can speak and invoke the fullness it lacks from within.
This is the rarefied joy invoked as a beyond of the pure signifier whose meaninglessness affirms
a virtual meaningfulness around it. Nothing could be closer to what Rodrigo de Souza, the genius
conductor character of the TV music series “Mozart in the Jungle,” has referred to as the goal of
performance: it is to put blood in the music, to find the blood that can animate an otherwise
meaningless script which, in itself, has no real existence except in the totality of its actual and
virtual répétition.
Beyond its current meaning in French (a “rehearsal”), repetition more interestingly echoes an
older association via the root “petition” to "a supplication or prayer, especially to a deity." 11 By
using a phrasal structure similar to magical chants, the lyrical loop is the closest we get to the
induction of shamanistic trance states, a certain type of self-hypnosis that can be generated by its
performance, and opening the body to the kinetic rhythm of the song’s wave function. The
generic nature of the song’s signifiers is thus subjected to a ritual where the performance deploys
a bigger-than-life dramatic scene: words belted out, notes extended to ridiculous lengths, disco
and spot lights blink-flashing, fog effects slow-unveiling; flashy costumes, ornate dance
numbers, big loud speakers, crazy stunts, fantastic sets—all the pomp necessary to fill up the
void in the signifiers that compose it. Because the signifiers are empty with an empty subject
behind it, it becomes all the more potent, for it can be filled up by anyone, sang by anyone.
This is in contrast with the “novelistic” where an object always belongs to someone, where a
place is always ruled by someone, or an action is always attached to someone’s desire, thoughts,
or words. It’s always “he said, she said,” the signifiers don’t float, are always tied down to the
Social, are too full of meaning. No one goes around reciting Madame Bovary’s dialogues while
commuting, or humming Hamlet’s soliloquy in the train. But pop songs are the pure signifiers of
the ordinary, the loop that affirms the presence of the extraordinary as a joyous elsewhere but not
so far away, the hope and the desire of a marvellous beyond where the inhuman lies, that wave
function that propagates itself and virtually surrounds the emptiness of the signifiers, and yet the
very same emptiness that guarantees the joy that truly lies beyond. This empty beat that loops
itself mindlessly is the reminder of that dimension where the signifying chains end; it is this
repetition that, once affirmed in the ordinary, insinuates the possibility of non-repetition, that
rolls the dice of chance towards the singular and the individual.
What better illustration for this than the scene in the film American Beauty (1999) where
Ricky, one of the main characters, films a plastic caught in the wind and “considers [it] the most
beautiful imagery he has filmed.” 12 Nothing, as we all know, is more common, more ordinary,
more mechanically reproduced, more superfluous or superficial, more abject of meaning, than a
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piece of plastic, thrown away, littering the streets. Suddenly, a gutter vortex catches it, lifts it
from the ground, tosses it to and fro, sends it haplessly swirling about, deforming it in
incomprehensible shapes like no other material on earth—all the torsions and the tortures!—until
it is no longer just itself.

Notes

1. John storey, “Music,” in Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture (University of
Georgia Press, 2003), pp. 123-125. The ideas set forth in the chapter on “Music” should not be
identified with Storey’s position. The least that can be said is that the distinction is presented as
is, and that it is bolstered by the use of similarly oriented sources.

2. “Defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение) is the artistic technique of presenting to

audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the
familiar.” See Wikipedia, s.v. “Defamiliarization,”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization. Last edited on 26 March 2017.

3. “Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition, in which the
phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and
syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for
performance.” Wikipedia, s.v. “Sound poetry,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_poetry. Last
edited on 15 March 201.

4. “The Song of the Sirens, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, Tr.
Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton (NY: Station Hill Press, 1999), p 443-445.

5. Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venir (Paris: Ëditions Gallimard, 1959), p. 10.

6. “”The Fifth Element (1997) Trivia,” IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/trivia,

accessed 15 May 2017. Another commentator added: “Diva Plavalaguna sings Il dolce suono,"
an aria from the opera Lucia de Lammermoor. It is one of the most difficult arias because of its
length, its soaring arpeggios, and the high F above high C.” See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBenttZUT7A where the Chinese soprano Jane Zhang
attempts it.

7. See the basic discussion of the distinction between logos and rhema in Wikipedia, s.v.
“Rhema,” https://en.wikipedia.org. Last edited 28 April 2017. Basically, rhema is “inspired”
spoken logos.
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8. Wikipedia, s.v. “Vladimir Jankélévitch,” https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Jank

%C3%A9l%C3%A9vitch. Last updated 21 March 2017.

9. Quoted in Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal
Recurrence (London: Routledge, 2005), p, 83. I liked the translation that Hatab used here, so I
opted to quote it than any other one currently available online.

10. Quoted in Hatab, op. cit., p.1. Italics mine. The passage comes from Nietzsche’s The Gay
Science, section 341. This is my perverted appropriation, of course. The entire meaning of this
concept in Nietzschean thought has never been settled.

11. The Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Petition,” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?

term=petition”, accessed 16 May 2017.

12. Wikipedia, s.v., “American Beauty,”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Beauty_(1999_film). Last updated 13 May 2017.