Pop Music Where?
Part 2: Fleshy Semiotics
published in Virgin Press No.21, Melbourne, 1982
A
long, long time ago I vaguely remember seeing a picture
of a female body builder in the Melbourne "Sun". It was
just that a photograph, uncropped, with a few lines of caption
underneath that served only to reinstate the photograph
as a depiction of some sort of social oddity, a physical
abnormality, a human novelty. Morning newspapers like the
Melbourne "Sun" are often largely made up of this type of
photographic tableaux, wrenched from their peculiar settings
and thrust in your face in the morning where and when you
encounter them as "Other" (the weird, the strange, the taboo,
the curious, the threatening, the laughable, etc.) in a
bleary eyed state over your breakfast or while you commute
to school or work.
The
concept or reality of a female body builder, in its "weirdness",
presents us with a compounded fracture in the construction
and maintenance of our everyday life. Not merely a freak
("That's Incredible") a novelty ("The Sun") a joke ("The
Benny Hill Show") or an innovation ("Wide World Of Sports"),
but a ragged tear in the heavily textured fabric of our
society, cutting across a number of social codes. The image
of the female body builder is a vessel of ambiguity, a physical
amphibian, a cultural hermaphrodite - not simply because
of the various transgressions that the body itself contains,
but more so because of the uncanny "normality" that such
a body can carry, i.e. a woman involved in a competitive
exhibitive sport; a woman in tune with the fundamental physiological
nature of her being; a woman whose body is a creative tool
of beauty; a woman who can be just an capable of and applicable
to any activity that men are involved in. The compounding
of this fracture, this rupture, is actually caused not by
transgression as such, but by its escaping the stain of
taboo through exhibiting itself as some sort of threat in
stasis, suspending its potential. The poetry of physique
becomes the metaphor of transgression as the female body
builder flaunts it (the body as object) while the transexual
(for example) does it (the body as act).
But
I was in my early teens when I first saw that photograph
and none of the above thoughts entered my head. Sometime
later, I saw a similar photograph stuck up on a notice board
in an office where a friend worked. Later still, a similar
photo appeared in "Art & Text", and inbetween these
instances I would come across Body Building magazines in
newsagents, art and photographic journals at friends' places,
and news or sports items on television. And right up until
now (even as I'm half way through writing this article I
come across the October 182 issue of "Life" which features
a cover story on this very subject) this photographic image
of a female body builder, this curio of popular culture,
still seems to be of the same highly polished surface of
"Other" that triggered my initial response of curiosity,
amazement and amusement when I first saw this image some
ten years ago. The image, society, and myself (as subject
) are bound together in a calm yet solid configuration of
exposition and reaction; each determining one another, threatening
one another, mirroring one another.
In
October this year I found myself attending the 1982 National
Body Building Championships, held at the Cronulla Sutherlands
Leagues Club (situated on the beach that provided the location
for the "Puberty Blues" novel) and - you guessed it - there
were female body builders struttin' their stuff. However,
within this competition, this peculiar environment untainted
by "Other ness", female body builders were only part of
a whole range of categories of body building, incorporating
youths, amateurs, professionals, juniors, seniors, men,
women, and couples. It was like a family picnic smorgasboard
on Muscle Beach. Here, the oddity of the female body builder
was somewhat nullified, not only because of a female body
builder being part of a homogenous family of the sport,
but because the environment of this social spectacle exuded
an air of sexual and social ambiguity, an atmosphere of
cultural displacement and misplacement where stereotypical
figures, patterns of behaviour and codes of entertainment
were severed from their "normal" contextual functionings.
This was a place that would make "That's Incredible" irrelevant,
"The Sun" boring, "The Benny Hill Show" humourless, and
"Wide World Of Sports" outdated. Some relative descriptive
impressions follow :
After
queuing for about half an hour (it was packed) I stood up
with everyone else while they played (on cassette) "Advance
Australia Fair", an experience which set the tone for a
uniquely uncomfortable evening. From hearing stray comments
all over the place it appeared as though it was the girls
who dragged the boys along to this event not to mention
that the boys were as enthusiastically critical of the men's
bodies as they were of the women's bodies. And I'm almost
certain that all the "slinky spunky women" that paraded
between the bar and their tables got their fashion hints
not from "Vogue", "Mode", "Women's Weekly" or "Dolly", but
from "Playboy". It was no wonder that I found the environment
extremely confusing although I appeared to be the only person
there who found it that way. Undoubtedly, the whole event
was - for performers and audience - a celebration of one's
physical image, of one's body. It was a communal event that
I was not really a part of. And this is all happening before
the curtain gets raised.
So
- the curtain gets raised and an endless stream of bodies
starts. A continual blur of flesh in haphazard shapes and
sizes and configurations ; a swarm of muscle, a storm of
tissue. But wait a minute - do my ears deceive me ? Is that
Sergio Leone's "Once Upon A Time In The West"? Giorgio Moroder's
"Midnight Express"? Strauss' "Sprach Zarathustra"? The themes
from "Exodus", "Star Wars" and "Superman"? Pete Townsend's
"Pinball Wizard"? Deodato's "Theme From 2001"? My ears certainly
weren't deceiving me but my headache was certainly getting
worse. My problem was not simply in trying to rationalize
the various tensions, ambiguities, pulses and effects that
circumscribed this social event (how everyone appeared to
be inter reacting and how I related myself to such a perspective).
I was more overcome by the songs that were used as musical
backdrops to theatrically generate a mood appropriate to
an aesthetically contrived display of "physical beauty".
The songs themselves obviously performed this intended function,
yet their usage in this context of body building sprouted
a strangely self-contained branch in the mythological sprawl
of these songs. In reference to popular culture, our accounting
of, for example, Sergio Leone's music ( as either generic
style, cultural influence, harmonic construction or auteur
formulation ) would be lacking if we did not include such
disparate elements as Spaghetti Westerns, Adam & The
Ants, 20th Century Avant Garde Music and Body Building Contests.
But
before we can go further, we must surrender ourselves to
the realization that cultural analyses are merely food for
a never ending hunger that constitutes culture as being
the all consuming machine of obesity that it is. We can
theorize aspects, effects, elements, layers, components,
but whilst we theorize, they are ceaselessly mutating, feeding
off not only one another's movement but through our attempts
to hold them still. Today, I say that (for example) pop
music is this or that ; tomorrow I have to change in someway
what I had said. Popular culture digests my circulating
hypotheses and viewpoints leaving me to stomach their contradictions
as husks of dead protein.
I
could feel a certain appropriateness with the joining of
most of the selected music with the spectacle of body building,
yet the joining was not totally smooth. Another fracture
was struck, this time in the fusion of cultural elements
(song and sport ) as well as in the apparent lack of general
recognition of any sort of fracturing existing. I viewed
the situation as "weird" while everyone else was simply
watching the body building oblivious to the multitude of
cultural misplacements that seemed to be occurring. The
effect of these physical/musical vignettes, these mutant
texts, was subsumed by the primacy of their function. This
time the "Other" was being replayed onto me. Still it remains
that Leone, Moroder, Strauss, Townsend and Deodato would
not likely have envisaged themselves as belonging to a group
that could provide music appropriate to the sport of body
building. On top of this, most of the songs or music pieces
used were wrenched from existing fictional constructs (film
scores and themes; classical symphonies; rock operas; pop
songs) all of which were founded on individual status and
cultural identity. Thus, I'm watching muscles being flexed,
hearing voices around me giving sexually implicative commentaries
on the aesthetic and critical worth of said flesh, and thinking
of scenes from films, record covers, magazine interviews
- anything and everything from the mythological lucky dip
that forms the basis for the reading of popular culture.
A theoretical headache engulfs me as everyone and everything
talks to me at once.
What
we have here is a disjuncture in readings, an 'unconnection'
of interpretations. Even though I might be according the
event of the songs' usage their total breadth and depth,
it is more likely that only one or some of their many skins
is needed for application and generation within any one
cultural instance. Consider the process of selection, usage
and interpretation involved in the coupling of a given piece
of pop music with a display of body building (a process
that includes body-builders, song and audience). It seems
obvious that no dogma of purity is revered here at all:
the song is utilized not as an iconographical whole, as
a textual object per se, but as a textual element, a few
layers of tissue from the body of the text. The process
of selection involves then not one text against another
text, but - more specifically - some textual tissue against
other textual tissue. The process of interpretation is then
hinged on the joining of that tissue (the specifically required
theatrical effects from "within" the selected song) with
the effect of the display of body building, so that the
actual body-building display locates, points out and surfaces
the required level or part of the song that is deemed relevant
to the intention of the display. Thus, "Pinball Wizard"
might superficially have nothing to do with the flexing
and posturing of muscle in a competitive sports context,
yet a conversable exchange exists as the former augments
the latter and the latter contextualizes the former. Their
specific meanings are gauged and determined not by the broader
parameters of Culture, Mythology or History but precisely
by one another.
After
seeing the 1982 National Body Building Championships I remembered
being told of the "unconventional" selection of music that
strippers currently employ in their striptease acts. Once
back in Melbourne I visited "The Barrell" cinema in Swanston
St. (a main street in the city) wherein I consumed the one
hour lunch time strip show, two porn movies and three solo
strip teases. (The city strip shows in Melbourne are comparatively
lacking in the glittering auratic quality and recognition
of them being a form of entertainment based on notions of
art or craft than, say, Kings Cross or similarly famous
resorts of vice. The strip shows I am talking about do not
advertise such finesse or style, but exist as a less glamourous
form of cultural exchange.)
Here
was another confusing environment, another experience that
gave me a headache. There is, however, a very apt way of
describing the atmosphere at "The Barrell", although this
description will probably only have meaning and relevance
to the (mythical?) "male" reader. For what its worth, it
was like being in a public toilet where you're urinating
with all these other men, connected by your sex (though
not neccessarily your sexuality), no one saying anything,
everyone almost denying their presence. The tone of the
afternoon (like the men's toilet) was extremely deadened,
devoid of any changes in tempo or surges of energy. There
I was with a room full of other men ranging from around
20 to around 60, all of us in silence, fixated on our involvement
with the proceedings. I'm not sure whether, again, I might
have been the odd one out at this particular social gathering
(at times the analyst is ironically and unromantically the
lost soul of culture) but for sure the afternoon had a marked
absence of the bawdy rowdy bravaro and participation that
one generally associates with strip clubs. "The Barrell"
seemed to transmute sexual titillation and gratification
into an almost pleasureless perfunctory activity, a banal
social rite. But aside from what might be dubious subjective
impressions and presumptuous sociological observations,
the fact remains that the stripteases were tedious while
the porn movies were cop-outs. Both were quite pathetic
at generating any fundamental effect at all, and amounted
to a fairly unceremonious facade, an event of flatness that
held very little on its strained surface.
Strangely
enough, my real pleasure was got from the pop music used
for the stripteases. Songs used at "The Barrell" (and reportedly
at "The Shaft Sinema" and the "Silver Screen Art Cinema")
were Manhattan Transfer's "Chanson D'Amour"; Lipsync's "Funky
Town" the theme from "Endless Love"; Wings' ''Let Me Roll
It To You"; Flying Lizards' "Money; Rick James' "Super Freak";
Kelly Marie's "My Heart Beats Like A Drum"; Kim heart's
"Love At First Sight". (The real and the imaginable start
to blur when one realizes that virtually any pop song might
and could be used in such ways.) Like the Body Building
Championships, there was obviously no real novelty at play
in the usage of such music, as their usage defined and was
defined by a new context - that of their very usage. It's
a dumb fix of irony that is at work here, namely that one
might identify and recognize elements being used (pop songs
and their histories) but when one exercises that recognition
one is actually negating the uniqueness and specificity
in question.
Another
fracture is thus struck: I recall (or I am recalled to)
an image of the strip tease, of the theatrical ritual of
strategic titilation. It is an event of stylization ,of
signifying all that goes with the image - the standardized
burlesqued music, big and bold in its gaudy brass arrangement;
the tacky cardboard chic regalia that poses as a glittering
guardian of costumery for the soon-to-be-revealed body;
the stage settings that in their garish bombardement of
the stripper serve to flatten out her body, to pictorialize
her as an illustration, a reinstatement of her figure as
the image of body, the trigger for arousal. All these conventions
of style and presentation each present themselves as a cloak
of anonymity, devoid of any specific personality, identity
or status - music, costume, stage and gesture conglomerately
exist in terms of the loudness of their volume. For sure,
this is a solid image that exists and proliferates now -
yet where was that image at "The Barrell" ? The fracture,
the contradiction, exists in that we have a cultural image
that appears to not exist in the very culture that gives
it its image. Anonymity was absent at "The Barrell". The
strip teases were pregnant with cultural specificity - a
girl dressed in an Olivia Newton John disco leotard stripped
to the Flying Lizards' "Money" against a back drop of Comalco
aluminium foil and 60's psychadelic light and slide effects,
using a long Mae West-type feather as a theatrical aid to
deadpan disco dancing and tired sexual gestures. What might
have used to have been something as concrete as a "cultural
image" is, for now, a cultural montage, an historical multiple,
a textual Freak.
More
so than the Body Building Championships, "The Barrell" strip
shows are definitely connected to an extant image of its
environment as a spectacle. The selection of music utilized
in the Body Building Championships was surprising despite
my having no expectations at all as to what would happen
on that night. The music of the strip shows, however, went
against the grain of my expectations, tenuously stretching
the viability of whatever modes of convention foregrounded
such an event, causing erosion in whatever theorization
or rationalization that served to fragilely hold strip shows
in their place in popular culture. Inasmuch as there were
fundamental differences in operation at each of these events,
what was said about the songs in the Body Building Championships
could be said for "The Barrell'' strip shows - the former
gleaned musical slivers that conveyed a sense of proud being,
an aura of perfection and a feeling of triumph; the latter
appropriated music that implied a a vague presence of sexuality,
either lyrically or musically.
Whereas
the first installment of these "Pop Music there ?" articles
concentrated on what was essentially the interpretation
of popular culture, this second installment has concentrated
on (examples of) the usage of popular culture. Furthermore,
the conclusion, if any, would be that this usage is of a
very specific type, a type conditioned by popular culture
(a state of currency) in that the rigidity of modes such
as intention and selection is exploded into a frenzied sprawl,
each and every decision founding a new and particular qualification
for action and effect, essentially unable to be held against
social or cultural theory. Why Sergio Leone? Why ''Money''?
The catch is that popular culture never hears those questions,
never finds answers. All we have left is the historical
markings of Culture (what else is "Culture"?) - a Grand
Canyon of unanswered questions. I pause here to suggest
that you might follow the markings and undertake an expedition
to some body building displays and strip clubs.
