Garageland! Authenticity and Musical Taste
First show with The Carpetbaggers! @The Manor.
Today’s post is a bit of a confessional. Reflecting on Andreas Duus Pape’s post a few weeks back, Building Intimate Performance Venues on the Internet, I can not help but admire how closely Andreas relates podcasting with intimacy, and therefore; authenticity. Although it would be simple to critique this point as a case of circular reasoning (Podcasts are intimate because they are authentic. Podcasts are authentic because they are intimate.), I cannot help but wonder if there is something deeply honest and deftly earnest about this claim. Speaking as a musician, I believe that authenticity is a quality that cannot be conjured. It, like a feedback loop or proof of will, seeks only itself. But, how does the desire to be authentic shape performance? Does it affect what we listen for and who we listen to?
My adventures as a musician started in high school with a second hand guitar and a lot of free time. It only took a year before my pastime became something more like an obsession. First was my high school band: The Nosebleeds. The Nosebleeds played revved up versions of 50s and 60s rock and roll while all the other kids were covering Blink 182 and Operation Ivy. We were cool – really! Even at this early stage it was clear to me, authentic rock bands played old-school rock music. Even my punk guitar heroes from the 1970s like Mick Jones and Captain Sensible knew how to cop a Chuck Berry riff and Little Richard groove. After 3 years of humid Jersey shore dive bars and fluorescent high school talent shows we called it quits. Honestly, we just got bored. Also, our ace repertoire of fifteen songs was beginning to wear a little thin. . .
After The Nosebleeds came The Carpetbaggers. This was a sea-change in compositional direction. Instead of playing punky renditions of Twist and Shout, we affected a country twang and sang songs about travel and broken hearts. If you caught us on a good night, we would even throw a bit of Sonic Youth into the mix and evoke a wall of feedback out from silence. We played in New Brunswick basements and central Jersey bars and recorded an EP on an abandoned Tascam 1” reel to reel. Buzz words being thrown around at the time were: rootsy, alternative and raw. I had pulled the covers back from a revved up Chuck Berry only to find a wonderland of Americana – washboards, harmonicas, and acoustic guitars – waiting. This was, of course, what those rocker’s back in the day were inspired by – right? If The Carpetbaggers weren’t the real thing, who was?
When The Carpetbaggers broke up I joined one last band, The Acid Creeps. At this point, there would be no turning back from my descent into nostalgia. We aimed to resurrect the late sixties go-go bar house band. Taking care to acquire vintage Fender amplifiers, vintage reissue guitars, and even a knockoff Vox Continental organ. If that wasn’t enough, my sister sewed us matching orange paisley shirts which complimented our skinny black ties and sunglasses. We imagined ourselves as a period perfect garage band, exactly the sort we had seen in movies. We covered everything from Iggy Pop’s, I Wanna Be Your Dog, to The Sonic’s, Psycho, and the Detroit Wheels version of Little Latin Lupe Lu (which we all preferred). Only in our mid-twenties, we were experts (or snobs, depending on your perspective) at defining and defending what authentic garage music was, and what it was not. Before breaking up, we created a yellow 7” vinyl tomb to forever keep our music. It was named “The Bananna Split EP,” and at the moment it all seemed perfect. Authenticity, sold for five dollars at a show.
Bananna Split EP w/ Full of Fancy.
Reflecting, five years later, on these three epochs of music making – it is hard not to blush. Not only did I, for at least a year, consider each band the singular most authentic band ever; authenticity, as an ideal, began subtly to change the way I viewed myself. I transformed from Aaron the Weird Al Yankovic fan to Aaron, the garage rock expert in about 8 years. Wherever I looked for authenticity, I found it, and it was real. Not only that, but at the bar, we convinced ourselves and our friends of this notion. Conversations about which bands got it, and which did not, were frequent – if not mandatory. The answers became standard too: The Exploding Hearts, The Murder City Devils, The Misfits? They all got it. Bands like Metallica; for the most part, they did not. These conversations forever led us to equate the authentic with the obscure; a rabbit hole that twists and darts endlessly.
Authenticity in music is like feedback: powerful, seductive and dangerous. It is a very real, yet elusive concept that invites imitation and when left unchecked, can spread like a contagion. Although I love revisiting the music of my old bands, I cannot help but hear them now as a set of key moments in a greater life narrative. Iterations of myself left behind in an ongoing dialogue about authenticity. A dialogue, which, to this day, affects what music I choose to listen to, and what music I choose to avoid. Although none of my bands were truly “the real-deal,” it would be odd to claim that any were not authentic. Rather, this concept, authenticity animated each band – it kept us all going, and brought our music to life. My bands were authentic because I believed in them. I believed in my bands, because they were authentic.
AT
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Aaron Trammell is co-founder and multimedia editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD student at Rutgers University.
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GLaDOS, the Voice of Postfeminist Control
Warning, spoilers ahead. Image borrowed from ElderGeek.
Much has been written about Portal, it has won at least seven “Game of the Year” awards and has been ranked as the “Best Game of all Time” by Gamesradar. Perhaps because both the hero and antagonist are women, it has also been the object of several cultural critiques. One blogger writes, “GLaDOS [the game’s villian] is the archetypical oppressed woman.” In an article published by GamePro (a mass-market game review magazine) GLaDOS is considered a “feminist icon.” Although “feminist icon” is a bit extreme, GLaDOS does have a lot to do with feminism. When seen in light of Rosalind Gill’s (2007) essay, “Postfeminist media culture,” GLaDOS, and her wry, disembodied voice, hold striking parallels to the immanence of surveillance in today’s world.
GLaDOS and Chell. Borrowed from gryphonworks @ deviantART.
At their core, the games in Valve Software’s Portal series are relatively straightforward: you are put in control of a female character named Chell, who is attempting to escape from the Aperture Science Laboratory complex. Equipped, mainly, with a portal gun (think Yellow Submarine, “Hole in My Pocket”), Chell traverses precipices, laser drones, acid pits and everything in-between. As she navigates and manipulates these obstacles, a disembodied Orwellian voice guides Chell from one puzzle to the next. This is the voice of GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), a self-aware computer who runs the joint (at least in Portal 1) and is keeping you around for further “testing.” Where Portal is claustrophobic, just you and GLaDOS, Portal 2 is a little more dynamic. A third character, Wheatley, is introduced. In both games, however; there is an inescapable feeling of surveillance and scrutiny. GLaDOS’s monotonous voice is everywhere, the robotic platforms of the Aperture complex are the only appendages of her body to be found.
What to make of the GLaDOS’s character? Although she is helpful at first when guiding Chell through the early tests, GLaDOS quickly adopts a sarcastic tone – putting Chell down, and belittling her mistakes. G. Christopher Williams of PopMatters reads into the backstory a bit. He points out that GLaDOS is modeled on the personality of the Aperture Science CEO, Cave Johnson’s, wife: Caroline. In the second game there is a tape of Johnson elaborating:
Brain Mapping. Artificial Intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this—and I’m gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place.
Now she’ll argue. She’ll say she can’t. She’s modest like that.
But you make her.
Hell, put her in my computer. I don’t care.
GLaDOS, then, has a bit of a history. Within this history there is a glass ceiling. GLaDOS has had a dampening sphere installed to limit her “irrational thinking,” and curb her “misbehavior.” Tellingly, this sphere whispers terrible ideas to her in a babbling male voice. At the end of Portal 1, Chell destroys the dampening sphere, and GLaDOS is free to get revenge on the society that has caged her. At this key moment, the tonality of her voice shifts from accommodating to sultry.
This change in voice accompanies a change in disposition. As Chell continues her adventures in Portal 2, GLaDOS returns with a set of suspiciously cutting remarks. Several barbs are made about Chell gaining weight, being unintelligent, and being adopted. In the sequel, GLaDOS is especially critical of Chell’s body. These pot-shots figure perfectly into Gill’s (2007) hallmarks of postfeminism: 1) the increased self-surveillance of the female body, 2) the increase of surveillance in new social sectors, and 3) a focus on the psychological transformation of one’s self, or interior life. Chell, the avatar, isn’t being judged on her weight (or lack thereof). Instead, GLaDOS’s remarks cut to the player, who recognizes that neither they nor Chell fit GLaDOS’s ideal. Although, in the narrative, GLaDOS typifies an extension of invisible and disembodied surveillance into new spheres of life, her comments act to foster self-surveillance in the embodied player.
GLaDOS’s comments have even jarred some users in the Steam Users’ Forums (Steam is Valve’s online distribution platform). In a thread entitled, “Portal 2 Sexist,” one user, loodmoney, asked if anyone else found GLaDOS’s fat jokes off-putting. To this, another user, Killalaz replied, “GLaDOS is trying to discourage/dishearten the testers. Chell is a woman, what bothers a woman more than being called fat? Not much. . .psychological warfare so to speak.” Although Killalaz may be reading too literally into Portal 2’s narrative, he is right about one thing: to some extent, GLaDOS, and therefore Valve Software, is waging psychological warfare on us all. Later in the thread another user, BC2 Cypher, demonstrates the extent that attitudes of self-surveillance can work to mold one’s psyche, “I don’t see the issue he’re. I actually used to BE fat. Lost 72 pounds when I was 15. 232 – 160. It’s not like Chell is even fat. That is the joke.” The real joke, if there is one, is that so many players are content to reduce GLaDOS’s comments to a self-contained dialogue between fictional characters. What is heard, actually, relates directly to the way dialogue from Portal is internalized. In these forums, the voice of GLaDOS is reproduced; it mediates the bodies of some fans (by supposing an ideal weight), and surveils the bodies of others (by guiding the dialogue).
But, when I play Portal, I occasionally smirk at GLaDOS’s comments. They are cutting satire. If GLaDOS is a feminist icon, it is because she is a voice that everyone carries with them at all times. The voice in our heads, that causes us to judge and shape ourselves, while simultaneously passing unkind judgment on to others. GLaDOS is iconic of the postfeminist condition – a condition where surveillance is assumed and internalized. And, our bodies are shaped through the hyper-mediation of games like Portal, and characters like GLaDOS, as they replicate themselves in web forums, and in our own voices.
AT
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