Unpopular Culture: The Real Housewives, From Natural Disasters To 9/11, From Thesis Hatements
Unpopular Culture: The Real Housewives, From Natural Disasters To 9/11, From Thesis Hatements
T E L E V I S UA L C U LT U R E T E L E V I S UA L C U LT U R E
Unpopular Culture
Sascha Pöhlmann is an associate professor in American Literary History at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
240 mm
Unpopular Culture
ISBN: 978-90-8964-966-9
AUP. nl
9 789089 649669
15 mm
Unpopular Culture
Televisual Culture
Series Editors:
Sudeep Dasgupta, Joke Hermes, Jaap Kooijman, Markus Stauff
Unpopular Culture
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Table of Contents
Introduction 7
What is Unpopular Culture?
Martin Lüthe & Sascha Pöhlmann
Big Fish 41
On the Relative Popularity of Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway
Dominika Ferens
Dissenting Commodities 81
Negotiations of (Un)popularity in Publications Critical of Post-9/11
U.S.-America
Elizabeth Kovach
Contributors 331
Index 337
Introduction
What is Unpopular Culture?
It all started with Anal Cunt. That is probably neither a sentence you thought
you’d ever read in an academic text, nor is it one we thought we’d ever write
in one. But it is true anyway, and so this introduction has to start with it,
since what it is about started with it, too. One day, over the very unpopular
food in the cafeteria at the Amerika-Institut of LMU Munich, we compared
notes with some colleagues on what might be the most outrageous and of-
fensive music. No such discussion worth its salt can occur without reference
to Anal Cunt, a band who were very strong contenders for the disputed title
of ‘the most offensive band in the world’ until main member Seth Putnam
died in 2011. Abbreviating their own name to A.C. on album covers was
about the only concession the band ever made to the rules of the music
market or good taste. Their first EPs—such as the 88 Song EP and the 5643
Song EP—do not feature any song titles or even songs or lyrics that were
written before the recording process, and the music fully deserves the
‘noisecore’ label (a genre that has its roots in what could be considered a
classic of unpopular culture, Lou Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music).
When Anal Cunt signed to the Earache record label, they discovered what
would become their trademark: while their short songs, usually under a
minute in length, never quite reached the musical excellence of grindcore
greats such as early Napalm Death or Brutal Truth, their song titles ensured
their place in the history of extreme music. Adolescent, nihilistic, ridiculous,
and (self-)ironic, Anal Cunt perfected the art of the titular insult, trying to
indiscriminately offend everyone, including their own fans, their record
label, other bands, any social minority or majority, and even themselves.
Their 1994 album Everyone Should Be Killed begins with ‘Some Songs’ and
‘Some More Songs’, but also already includes gems such as ‘I’m Not Allowed
to Like A.C. Any More Since They Signed to Earache’, ‘When I Think of True
Punk Rock Bands, I Think of Nirvana and the Melvins’ or ‘Selling Out by
Having Song Titles on This Album’. Their 1997 album I Like It When You Die
presents their trademark use of the second-person address in song titles
such as ‘You Keep a Diary’; ‘You Are a Food Critic’; ‘You Have Goals’; ‘You
Play On a Softball Team’; ‘You Go to Art School’; ‘Your Best Friend Is You’;
‘Your Favorite Band Is Supertramp’; ‘You Live in a Houseboat’; ‘You Are an
8 Martin Lüthe & Sascha Pöhlmann
Interior Decorator’; ‘You’re Old (Fuck You)’, ‘You (Fill in the Blank)’ and the
classic ‘Your Kid Is Deformed’, which is even a pretty good song. The next
album, Picnic of Love (1998), did yet another unpopular thing by offering
lyrics so sweet they make your teeth hurt just by reading them, with song
titles such as ‘Saving Ourselves For Marriage’; ‘Greed Is Something That We
Don’t Need’; ‘I Couldn’t Afford to Buy You a Present (So I Wrote You This
Song)’; or, ‘In My Heart There’s a Star Named After You’. Yet, the album that
followed, It Just Gets Worse (1999), turned out to have a prophetic title, and
with this record the band pushed things too far, for critics and fans alike.
Like many underground bands in extreme music scenes, their relative
popularity was heavily dependent on their cultivation of unpopularity,
with music that was too noisy and lyrics that were too offensive for most
people, pleasing those in the know who wish to irritate, if not shock others
with their taste in art (a phenomenon not limited to youth cultures, but also
found in high culture, perhaps exemplified best by Dadaism).
Yet, Anal Cunt managed to offend even those who enjoyed offending
others with their music, since the humor in their song titles became increas-
ingly questionable, going for a wholesale insensitivity toward anyone and
everyone by intensifying the homophobic, racist, and misogynist themes
that had been present before, and which had been somewhat accepted
as conforming to the rules of a transgressive genre by a heteronormative
scene that was predominantly white, male, and lower- to middle class.
With songs such as ‘I Sent a Thank You Card to the Guy Who Raped You’,
‘I Sent Concentration Camp Footage to America’s Funniest Home Videos’,
or ‘Laughing When Leonard Peltier Gets Raped in Jail’, the self-irony didn’t
seem to cut it anymore, and the limits of political correctness kicked in
with those who had previously enjoyed their violation with adolescent
rebellious glee. While the declaration that ‘Everyone in Anal Cunt Is Dumb’
might have added sufficient irony to make I Like It When You Die a joke
many people could laugh at, a similar move of stating that ‘Being Ignorant
Is Awesome’ was no longer enough to sustain the precarious balance, and it
was all downhill from there. Media such as the German Rock Hard magazine
stopped covering the band after main member Seth Putnam made some
particularly anti-Semitic statements, and the grindcore scene—which is
traditionally rooted in anarchism and still espouses (extreme) left-wing
values to a significant extent today—partly turned its back on Anal Cunt,
especially as Putnam collaborated with extreme right-wing bands. While
the band had always sought to be controversial, it was now controversial
in the very scene that has always espoused an aesthetics and politics of
provocation and controversy, and it thus uncovered some of the rules of
Introduc tion 9
The volume moves from literary to televisual culture with Dan Udy’s
essay ‘Secrets, Lies and The Real Housewives: The Death of an (Un)Popular
Genre’. Conceiving of the un/popular as that which splits viewers into two
opposing factions, where ardent fans clash with critics and wider audiences,
Udy presents the reality TV or docusoap show The Real Housewives and
the wider media network it is part of as an example of how audiences that
embrace such productions simultaneously reject them, based on a norma-
tive notion that they should reject them by certain cultural standards. Thus,
Udy identifies the unpopular as both closely related to camp and as the
productive force behind the complex cultural notion of the guilty pleasure.
Jeroen de Kloet and Jaap Kooijman consider a similarly un/popular media
phenomenon in ‘Karaoke Americanism Gangnam Style: K-pop, Wonder
Girls, and the Asian Unpopular’, highlighting particularly how unpopular
culture helps describe issues of cultural transfer, translatability, and, indeed,
marketability in a globalized world. They analyze why K-pop remains
globally unpopular and propose the notion of ‘karaoke Americanism’ to
understand global cultural flows and disjunctures. They examine the
pop act Wonder Girls as an example of this, describing not only their (un)
popularity in different cultures, but also their appropriation in different
contexts that attest to the political potential of karaoke Americanism.
While they acknowledge that this speaks of the continuous power of the
United States when it comes to the production of popular culture, they also
describe recent developments in terms of geopolitics, fragmentation, and
the digitization of culture that may help challenge this hegemony.
Florian Zappe continues this intermedial approach in a different way
in his essay ‘“When order is lost, time spits”: The Abject Unpopular Art
of Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge’. Zappe draws on the work of Julia Kristeva
to theorize an abject unpopular culture at the radical fringes of popular
culture, which rejects its empty gestures of rebellion by dwelling on the
threshold of the unsettling and intangible qualities of the abject. He does
so by analyzing the work of performance artist Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge,
whose use of abjection as an aesthetic principle on all levels of his life and
work—particularly in the context of projects such as COUM Transmis-
sions and Throbbing Gristle—locates him not only in the excluded middle
between the two poles of bourgeois ‘high’ and popular ‘low’, but in the
intangible center of a triangle consisting of ‘high’, ‘low’, and ‘pop’ culture.
Christian Schmidt then shifts the focus of the collection more firmly
towards music in his essay ‘“Famous in a Small Town”: The Authenticity of
Unpopularity in Contemporary Country Music’. He explores the ways in
which popularity and unpopularity are part and parcel of contemporary
Introduc tion 13
One could say that this dialectic of popular culture is driven by the unpopu-
lar; that is, the counternarrative within popular culture itself that prevents
it from becoming what Ross dismisses as the ‘conspiratorial view of ‘mass
culture’ as imposed upon a passive populace like so much standardized
fodder, doled out to quell unrest and to fuel massive profits’ (4). Ross argues
not only that the histories of high and popular cultures must be told together
to make sense, but also that they need a history of intellectuals, or those
dates and movements and towards a more subtle investigation of the mood,
pace and preoccupations that underline British art of this period.’ This
anti-mainstream attitude characterizes many considerations of unpopular
culture. Moreover, it already points toward one of the most useful under-
standings of the term as a third concept that breaks open the dichotomy
of high and pop culture, denoting that which is not part of a (perceived)
mainstream mass culture but not part of a bourgeois high culture either.
This was the mission of SCRAM magazine, ‘a journal of unpopular culture’,
which chronicled ‘the neglected, the odd, the nifty and the nuts’ (SCRAM),
or the now-defunct Tangents magazine. Similarly, the annual Festival of
Unpopular Culture in Adelaide or the Institute for Unpopular Culture in
San Francisco (IFUC) celebrate and support non-mainstream art. In its
mission statement, the latter declares its determination to help ‘alleviate
artists’ needs to cater to public taste and opinion in order to survive’ (IFUC).
The normativity behind such contrasts and distinctions is obvious: here,
art is supposed to be absolutely autonomous, independent of commercial
considerations and critical or public reception. Popularity is understood
as something that should not even have to cross the artist’s mind in the
process of creation since it is a potential source of corruption of the art
itself, a view of art and artist that is rooted in Western Romanticism and
especially Modernism. Unpopularity is therefore desirable for the ‘true’
artist, and maybe even a measure of the cultural value of his work. At
the same time, the statement draws attention to the standards by which
cultural popularity is most often measured today, and it defines ex negativo
standards of unpopularity. The following aspects of un/popularity seem
the most crucial to us:
of high and low, since it is often located in very different contexts and is
opposed to, if not even hostile to, the bourgeois environment that defines
high culture. At the same time, works of unpopular culture do not buy into
a simple dichotomy of class that would oppose a bourgeois elite (defined
by capital, education, etc.) to the masses of a homogeneous working class
and their respective separate cultural spheres. Unpopular culture can be
so elitist that even T.S. Eliot might want to tell its devotees to loosen up
and live a little; try discussing the sufficient criteria of what makes for
true Black Metal or Underground Rap, or the rules of selling out in any
field of cultural production that opposes the mainstream, and you will
find out soon enough that only very little is popular about these alleged
fields of popular culture. A conceptualization of unpopular culture may
show that such strict conventions of inclusion and exclusion are similar
but obviously not identical to those of high culture, which also demarcates
its territory by carving out a particular sphere of the unpopular from mass
culture; but, while it also justifies its unpopularity aesthetically, it does so
in reference to a very different notion of cultural value. Unpopular culture
thus can be considered the disruptive element that resists and complicates
the simplifications of binary oppositions such as elite versus masses or
highbrow versus lowbrow. Both high and pop culture can be unpopular
culture, but neither defines the term, nor do both concepts taken together
do so.
What unpopular culture does is draw attention to the aesthetic and
political value judgments that are at the heart of the high/pop culture
divide, and it shows that, while Postmodernist theory has taught us to shy
away from such judgments, we still make them every time we consider,
appreciate, consume, and reflect upon a cultural artifact, as cultural critics
and as fans. It highlights the fact that both high and pop culture are always
loaded terms that can never be used neutrally, innocently, or merely descrip-
tively; if cultural studies has shown anything, then it is that such a thing as
‘mere description’ is impossible. Unpopular culture thus intervenes in the
alleged neutrality of this discourse, drawing attention to considerations of
aesthetics—‘good’ music, a ‘really bad’ novel, a video game that ‘sucks’ but
‘is fun’, a ‘camp’ performance, a ‘B’ movie, a ‘cult’ classic, ‘offensive’ lyrics,
and so on—that have supposedly vanished from critical considerations
of culture as they opened up toward the popular, but which, in fact, have
only become implicit where one may as well make them explicit. Therefore,
unpopular culture simultaneously highlights the normativity of high and
pop culture and embraces its own normative position instead of pretending
not to have one. Rather, it inquires into the rules of that very normativity
Introduc tion 21
For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing
from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of
‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers’ still on hand, and at last
suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I
had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express,
filling the man‘s wagon,—706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I
bought of Munroe four years ago and have ever since been paying for,
and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I
have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more
substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two
flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin.
Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were
given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred
volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. (Journal 459)
Introduc tion 23
The study of unpopular culture, then, is a critical inquiry into these ‘certain
circumstances’ as well as these ‘other goals’, and Halberstam’s work shows
that it should not take itself too seriously if it wants to challenge what is
all too serious, and that it must retain a questioning perspective on its
own ideologies, as the case of Thoreau shows. After all, for him, as for the
contemporary indie band, it is always easier to celebrate and romanticize
one’s own commercial failure as true artistic integrity if one simply cannot
get the damn public to buy one’s stuff. Many critics agree that it was this
unpopularity that made Thoreau rewrite Walden so that it might be more
popular and marketable: as Robert F. Sayre has it, the book ‘was advertised
in A Week as soon to be published. But the commercial failure of his first
book discouraged the publisher from undertaking a second, and throughout
the early 1850s Thoreau reworked Walden into the form in which we know
it’ (Thoreau, Walden 1052).
24 Martin Lüthe & Sascha Pöhlmann
having to read Franklin’s Autobiography when you have to, but enjoy it
when you do it because you want to; or you might hate reading Pride and
Prejudice no matter how free you were in choosing to do so, as Mark Twain
kept saying, for example, when insisting in Following the Equator that ‘[j]ust
that one omission [of Jane Austen’s books] alone would make a fairly good
library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it’ (312). Unpopularity always
has a context, and by definition there is no unpopularity without context;
the concept itself presumes a certain audience (even if it does not contain a
single member), and it does not describe a property intrinsic to the cultural
artifact itself, but one that is always somehow inscribed upon it. Twain does
such inscribing on Austen’s texts in the quotation above, questioning her
popularity by demanding her radical unpopularity; more often than not,
however, such power lies not with individuals but with groups of people
who exert sufficient influence over the discourse to attest or deny (un)
popularity. The study of unpopular culture, then, is also the study of audi-
ences, and it tends to be concerned more with the reception of cultural
artifacts than with their production, since unpopularity presupposes an
audience. At the same time, considerations and aspects of unpopularity
are certainly part of production of the work as well as the work itself, and
it would be reductive and misguided to consider the study of unpopular
culture as a kind of reader-response criticism in which all popularity is
produced solely in the recipient.
There are many different aesthetics of the unpopular, never fixed but
ever-changing in different times and cultural contexts, but present nonethe-
less, and they can be described in relation to their historical moment of
production and reception. Unpopularity can be sought, produced, and
used for different purposes; it can be a source of aesthetic liberation from
the constraints of popular taste or from those of critical esteem. Yet, at
the same time, popularity and unpopularity are always somewhat beyond
control, even though manufacturing consent has been part of the capitalist
cultural industry for a long time. This may be one of the strongest subversive
potentials of the unpopular in a society that defines popularity in terms of
commerce, and this is where the aesthetics and the politics of unpopular
culture become indistinguishable: its irreducible ability to surprise the
cultural market, to deny popularity where it should be granted, to create
something that cannot be used, to find the niches and loopholes and blind
spots in a system of commerce that should not have any. At the same time,
the unpopular is always in danger of being made popular, of being bought
and sold, and any subversive potential can always be integrated within the
very system it seeks to undermine. If ‘any System which cannot tolerate
Introduc tion 27
heresy [is] a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall’ (Pynchon
747), then capitalism has avoided its downfall by being exceptionally good
at tolerating (i.e. incorporating) heresy against it. You can always offer the
underground anarchist punk band a million-dollar record contract and
ask them to become Blink 182; in fact, the Sex Pistols have always been a
product of the very industry they allegedly attacked. (Then again, we can
only imagine what would have happened if someone had offered Anal Cunt
a similar contract.)
Nevertheless, unpopular culture can potentially subvert the very founda-
tion of the popular and offers ways of rethinking even the most dominant
of ideologies. If popular culture—just as much as high culture—is being
used to create the people in the first place, not as a culture for the people
but a culture constructing the people as a people by giving them a history
and an identity, then unpopular culture is the disruptive element in this
construction, resisting its homogenizations and omissions, opposing the
complete smoothing of a striated cultural space. In Empire, Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri first pose the crucial question ‘what is a people and how
is it made?’ and then go on to argue that this construct is the result, and not
the foundation, of the national and its Modern homogenizations: ‘Although
“the people” is posed as the originary basis of the nation, the modern concep-
tion of the people is in fact a product of the nation-state, and survives only
within its specific ideological context” (102, emphasis in original). Both high
culture and popular culture have participated in this homogenizing process
of identity formation, and one will find sites of resistance to this power of
the national with the global unpopular cultures that offer a multitudinous
Other to the Empire of high and low, pop, or mass cultures, although they
also pervade and partake of them, and they both support and resist their
mechanisms. Within this national and global cultural industry, it may well
be unpopular culture that is still able to tell the stories and histories nobody
wants to hear, sing the songs nobody else wants to sing, show the world what
it does not want to see, and ultimately give the people what they don’t want
because what they want was never what they really needed.
Notes
1. For a solid overview and brief history of grindcore and its political outlooks,
see Salmhofer.
2. For an excellent study of Modernism and commercialism, see Catherine
Turner‘s Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars, in which she
28 Martin Lüthe & Sascha Pöhlmann
Works Cited
‘The 2013 Festival of Unpopular Culture.’ Format Collective. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto: U
of Toronto P, 1997. Print.
Bloom, Harold. ‘Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.’ Wall Street Journal. 11 July 2000.
Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
—. ‘Dumbing Down American Readers.’ The Boston Globe. 24 Sep. 2003. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Fiedler, Leslie. ‘Cross the Border—Close the Gap.’ Playboy (December 1969): 151, 230, 252, 254,
256, 258. Print.
Folsom, Ed. ‘Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary.’
The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Grossberg, Lawrence. ‘History, Politics, and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies.’
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen.
London: Routledge, 1996. 151–73. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Hardack, Richard. ‘‘Or, the Whale’: Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory
of Unusability.’ Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 11.3 (2009): 7–26. Print.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.
Institute for Unpopular Culture (IFUC). Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London:
Routledge, 1981. Print.
Nash, John. James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Perry, Grayson. Unpopular Culture: Grayson Perry Selects from the Arts Council Collection.
London: Hayward, 2008. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London: Vintage, 1995. Print.
Redhead, Steve. Unpopular Cultures: The Birth of Law and Popular Culture. Manchester: Man-
chester UP, 1995. Print.
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Introduc tion 29
Salmhofer, Andreas. ‘Grindcore—eine extreme Mutation des Metals? Zur Diskursivierung des
Grindcore.’ Metal Matters: Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt. Ed. Rolf F. Nohr and Herbert
Schwaab. Münster: LIT, 2011. 207–24. Print.
SCRAM Magazine: A Journal of Unpopular Culture. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Tangents: The Home of Unpopular Culture. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.
459–60. Print.
—. Walden; or, Life in the Woods: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod. New York: Library
of America, 1985. Print.
Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars. Amherst: U of Mas-
sachusetts P, 2003. Print.
Twain, Mark (Samuel L. Clemens). Following the Equator: A Journey around the World. 1897. Vol.
2. New York: Harper, 1916. Print.
‘Unpopular Culture: Grayson Perry Selects from the Arts Council Collection.’ Southbank Centre.
Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library
of America, 1996. 5–145. Print.
—. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New
York UP, 1984. Print.
Why We Talk the Talk We Talk
On the Emptiness of Terms, the Processual Un/Popular,
and Benefits of Distinction—Some Auto-Ethnographical
Remarks
Martin Butler
Granted, the term ‘unpopular culture’ adds some spice to the soup of terms
we1 usually stir when we talk the talk we are used to (supposed to?) talk
in the study of popular culture. ‘Unpopular culture’, to be precise, sounds
somewhat more ‘exotic’, even subversive, compared to the more established
repertoire of concepts that usually come in dichotomies—‘mass culture’,
‘low culture’, ‘the mainstream’, as opposed to ‘elite culture’, ‘high culture’,
‘avant-garde’, to mention perhaps the most prominent examples. But what’s
in it, one might well ask, despite its challenging prefix ‘un-’, which, indeed,
somewhat surprisingly, irritates our set of taken-for-granted terms and
concepts? My contribution takes this question as a starting point to explore
if, and, if yes, in how far thinking and talking about ‘unpopular’ culture
might be a fruitful exercise, not so much with regard to the examination
of specific popular cultural practices and forms of expression, but rather
with an eye on the ways we talk a talk in which the above-mentioned terms,
including the ‘unpopular’, are used as categories of self-positioning, rather
than as analytical categories.
The inspiration for this essay sprang from the long-winded discussions
with my 18-year-old daughter on what is popular and what is not—discus-
sions that I get involved in quite regularly to learn why it is that I (and the
things I am doing) are particularly unpopular. This is perhaps no coinci-
dence, as it is exactly these discussions that made me sensitive toward
the contingency of the terms and concepts I regularly employ in scholarly
discourse. To be more precise, the very fact that the conversations with
my daughter happen in a non-academic context made me realize that the
dynamics of the debate about what is popular and what is unpopular are
highly dependent on the social environment in which the debate takes
place. In other words: the debate as well as the actors’ positioning within
that debate are processes that are distinctly context-specific. Consequently,
claims of what is popular and what is not are, first, relational acts of creat-
ing difference, and second, charged with normative implications both in
everyday and in scholarly discourse.
32 Martin Butler
intervention […] or hinder it, while in other constellations the roles might
be inversed’ (Thies and Kaltmeier 30).2
Accordingly, Thies and Kaltmeier describe identitarian capital as
needs to cater to public taste and opinion in order to survive’ (IFUC). Thus,
clearly aligning the unpopular with the subversive, ascribing a distinctly
political momentum to it, the Institute presents and positions itself as a
supporter of cultural ‘dissenters’ and marginalized voices. And, as a more
historical part of this narrative of positioning suggests, the Institute seems
to have been quite successful in this regard:
The Festival of Unpopular Culture, which took place in October 2013, set
out to ‘blur the lines between high-art and pop culture,’ thus implying
quite a different notion of the ‘unpopular’ (‘Festival’). SCRAM magazine,
which calls itself ‘a journal of unpopular cultures,’ has been chronicling
‘the neglected, the odd, the nifty and the nuts’ (SCRAM), whereas a past
exhibition at the Southbank Centre in London called ‘Unpopular Culture’
featured a selection from the Arts Council Collection consisting of ‘modern
British paintings, sculpture and photographs’, thereby associating with
the unpopular a notion of avant-garde, or vice versa (‘Unpopular Culture:
Grayson Perry’).
In all of these examples, the ‘unpopular’ implies something slightly dif-
ferent. What these narratives have in common, though, is that all of them
use the term ‘unpopular’ not only as a descriptive category, but also, and
more significantly so, as a normative category that serves the purpose of
symbolic distinction. The term and concept of the ‘unpopular’, then, indeed
becomes a signifier that is used to draw lines of demarcation and to position
oneself. The discourse that draws on these terms and concepts is therefore
‘primarily a political discourse’ (Tragaki 8). ‘The politics of who says what
is ‘popular’ [or ‘unpopular’, M.B.],’ writes Dafni Tragaki, ‘what it means,
and against what it is defined, and of course, when, where, and for whom,
reproduce ‘the popular’ [as well as the ‘unpopular’, M.B.] as an ideologically
pregnant category’ (8). And though we all know, we sometimes forget that
this discourse not only ‘happens’ in the field of cultural production, but
also among those who observe this very field, i.e. us.
In other words, ‘observers are considered actors in the field which, just
as all other actors, necessarily take the role of observers’, employing a
Why We Talk the Talk We Talk 37
Notes
Works Cited
“Festival of Unpopular Culture.” Institute for Unpopular Culture. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Institute for Unpopular Culture (IFUC). Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Lüthe, Martin, and Sascha Pöhlmann. ‘Introduction: What is Unpopular Culture?’ Unpopular
Culture. Ed. Martin Lüthe and Sascha Pöhlmann. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016. 7-29.
Print.
Maase, Kaspar. ‘Divergente Codierungen: Schwierigkeiten der Wissenstransfers zwischen
Populärkultur, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft.’ Pop / Wissen / Transfers: Zur Kommunikation
und Explikation populärkulturellen Wissens. Ed. Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer, Jochen Bonz,
and Martin Butler. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2014. Print. 113–24.
Why We Talk the Talk We Talk 39
Dominika Ferens
Why does a man with such great talent continually deny his sensitivity and
overprotest his masculinity? He is so virile and so vast—why does he waste his
time roughhousing with playboys, trying to catch the biggest fish,
to bring that fish in the fastest […]?
—Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on Ernest Hemingway (qtd. in Eby 94)
The rivalries between boatmen are keen and important, and they are fostered by
unsportsman-like fishermen. And fishermen live among past associations; they
grow to believe their performances unbeatable and they hate to see a new king
crowned. This may be human, since we are creatures who want always to excel,
but it is irritating to the young fishermen. As for myself, what did I care how
much the swordfish weighed? He was huge, magnificent,
and game to the end of that four-hour battle.
—Zane Grey, Tales of Fishes (42)
This paper was born of a fascination with the overlapping lives of two Ameri-
can writers who made it their business to popularize the unpopular or the
not-yet-popular. When they were not writing about not-yet-popular pursuits
and places, they traveled, fished, and hunted compulsively, leaving behind
them long trails of publicity photographs. With the rise of the internet,
hundreds of photographs of Grey and Hemingway with their trophies—big
fish, rhinos, lions, bulls, bullfighters, and natural wonders—were uploaded
onto fanpages and archive websites.2 Zane Grey (1872–1939) and Ernest
Hemingway (1899–1961) frequented some of the same fishing resorts, includ-
ing Key West and Bimini, and while they never met, biographical sources
on Gray make references to Hemingway, who is said to have so admired
Grey’s non-fiction book Tales of Fishes that he bought several copies to give
to friends. On hearing this, Grey wrote to Hemingway, inviting him on a
round-the-world fishing trip. Hemingway declined—perhaps fearing that
prolonged association with the aging pulp fiction writer might damage his
reputation (cf. May 149).
42 Dominik a Ferens
Stuart Hall and Elizabeth Traube single out the early decades of the twenti-
eth century, when Grey and Hemingway made their careers, as a period of
technological and social transformations that reorganized popular culture.
‘Local entrepreneurs who catered to class-specific urban markets gave way
to oligopolistic corporations producing for national markets’ (Stansell and
Peiss qtd. in Traube 140). In the nineteenth century, print runs had been
relatively small in comparison with those in the 1910s and ’20s. Grey’s books
44 Dominik a Ferens
Hemingway actively pushed older, less modern writers out of the center to
make room for ‘the new’.
of the Purple Sage do not shirk from lynching cattle thieves, kidnappers,
despots, and bad Indians. Grey took over the masculine code wholesale,
creating a series of male characters who risk their lives to protect women’s
honor, expecting nothing in return, not even love.
In line with Roosevelt and Wister, Grey believed the Frontier to be crucial
for hardening white men in body and spirit. According to eugenicists, as a
result of ‘overcivilization’, the white race could lose its dominant position
in the United States and in the world.11 Whites were the only race capable of
bringing progress and making full use of the continent’s natural resources.
As critics Richard Slotkin and Lee Clark Mitchell have argued, the wide-
spread anxiety over the condition of white masculinity was associated with
economic and cultural change. The industrial revolution had pressed the
small farmers and entrepreneurs into factories and offices, where obedience
and productivity was valued higher than individualism and resourcefulness.
The Civil War and the First World War had stripped many men of the faith in
righteous, heroic struggle. Rightly assuming that American male factory and
office workers longed to identify with heroes who were their own antithesis,
Grey created many hypermasculine protagonists who had the freedom
to ride, track and shoot game, herd cattle across wide open spaces, and
dispense justice. Yet, Grey was just as interested in disoriented, indecisive
men weakened by illness. For instance, the Easterner Hare in Heritage of
the Desert learns ranching and survival skills in the uplands of Utah, but
he often hesitates to use arms, and spends days in hiding, outnumbered
by thugs, and unable to make a heroic gesture. Critic Alf F. Wallee goes so
far as to say that the gradual domination of society over the individualistic
hero is what distinguishes Grey’s heroes from Wister’s Virginian.
Hemingway’s indebtedness to nineteenth-century models of masculinity
is less apparent,12 but the fact that he jeered at heroic codes in his fiction
should not blind us to the centrality of heroism in his fiction and to his
insistence on developing codes of conduct better suited to life in the shadow
of modern warfare. Equipped with a personal code of conduct, Hemingway’s
heroes maintain dignity in a world where all authorities, human and divine,
have failed. In the face of chaos and suffering they adopt a stoical stance.
While they have few opportunities to mete out justice, they care about it
profoundly. To allow the reader to observe how the personal code works,
Hemingway juxtaposes his heroes with antiheroes who lack the inner
compass and rely on second-hand codes. As a self-conscious modernist,
Hemingway rejected idealism, but he continued to valorize some of the key
themes of Romantic literature, including masculinity, death, and nature.
Like the frontier mythmakers, he insisted on nature’s regenerative powers.13
Big Fish 47
It may well have been the presence of these themes that led Owen Wister to
take an interest in Hemingway’s career and to put in a good word for him
at Scribners (cf. Trogdon 74–75).
obvious, transformation. Whereas initially she goes wherever she wants and
is sexually adventurous, at the end of The Sun Also Rises she calls on the
narrator to come to her rescue, acting the part of the traditional damsel in
distress. In this respect, Hemingway’s paradigmatic Modernist novel is as
traditional as most of Grey’s romances—a fact that may have contributed
to its readability.
Nature as Asylum
Yet another popular theme that runs through the work of Grey and Heming-
way is the turn away from middle-class urban America toward the bosom
of nature. Grey sought adventure in the Southwest, sublime landscapes,
big game, and big fish. For Hemingway it was adventure at war, at Spanish
village fiestas, in Kenyan savannahs, and on deep-sea fishing trips. In fact,
he immersed himself in premodern worlds so obsessively that Saul Bellows
made him the object of a burlesque, Henderson the Rain King (1959).
Since the turn of the nineteenth century, immersion in nature and the
cultivation of primitive savagery in young boys had been advocated by
American physicians as remedies for ‘overcivilization’, ‘effeminacy’, and
‘neurasthenia’ to which white middle-class men were supposedly succumb-
ing (cf. Bederman 77–120). Such views gave rise to the scouting movement,
of which Grey was a lifelong member and propagator. In his fiction, nature
has regenerative power: it heals the sick and disheartened, gives shelter,
disciplines the body, builds up the spirit, and, no less importantly, delights
the eye. Grey’s protagonists immerse themselves in nature time and again.
Perhaps the most idyllic natural asylum in Grey’s prose is Surprise Valley in
Riders of the Purple Sage, which is only accessible through Deception Pass,
overhung by the Balancing Rock. One of the protagonists comes across
Surprise Valley by accident, and when he first takes a look around,
Rabbits scampered before him, and the beautiful Valley quail, as purple
in color as the sage on the uplands, ran fleetly along the ground into the
forest. It was pleasant under the trees, in the gold-flecked shade, with the
whistle of quail and twittering of birds everywhere. (89)
There is a rambling brook, a spacious cave, and plenty of food. The cave
is conveniently equipped with clay utensils—relics of an extinct Indian
tribe. Surprise Valley gives shelter to two pairs of lovers in succession. It
heals their wounds and erases painful memories. For the first couple it is a
Big Fish 49
temporary asylum, but for the second it is the final destination: Balancing
Rock collapses and ‘the outlet to Deception Pass closed forever’ (238).14
Likewise, Hemingway as a boy was an amateur scout. He wrote memoirs
of trips to the Illinois woods and Indian villages with his father, and in child-
hood photographs he is the splitting image of Huckleberry Finn, complete
with dungarees, a straw hat, and a fish dangling from his hand. We know
that his romantic view of nature was severely shaken by the Second World
War experience as well as naturalist philosophy, for nature in his fiction
is usually indifferent to human dramas. Yet, Hemingway continued to
treasure rituals associated with nature, and the longing for its regenerative
power kept surfacing in his work—perhaps most forcefully in The Sun Also
Rises. There, two American men experience the soothing power of a Spanish
forest and a stream teeming with fish. The shade of the trees protects the
anglers from the midday sun; the stream cools their bodies and their wine
bottles; overhanging the stream are ferns ideal for wrapping the fish they
catch. ‘We stayed five days at Burguete and had good fishing. The nights
were cold and the days were hot, and there was always a breeze even in
the heat of the day. It was hot enough so that it felt good to wade in a cold
stream, and the sun dried you when you came out and sat on the bank’ (125).
The men cannot stay in this idyllic spot forever—they must return to their
work and irresolvable conflicts—but they can always return to the stream
in Burguete: the narrator has been there before, and no falling rock will bar
access to it. Nature as asylum, nature as a regenerative force—such themes
had been present in American literature since their introduction by the
Transcendentalists. Tapping into these time-tried themes, both Grey and
Hemingway appealed to a broad American readership.
Books as Commodities
Nothing could be further from the marketplace and base financial concerns
than the ideal of living the ‘strenuous’ rather than the ‘good life’15 and
retreating from time to time into premodern worlds. Yet, the books that
convey these themes are commodities which transform aesthetic pleasure
into capital. Hemingway’s posthumously published novel Islands in the
Stream (1970) includes a humorous conversation about art that takes place
in the Bahamas between a white painter and a black barman. What the
black man has trouble understanding is how the white man manages to
make a comfortable living by painting scenes from the everyday life of poor
people like himself.
50 Dominik a Ferens
‘You sell those pictures you paint all the time?’ [asks the barman]
‘They sell pretty good now’. [the painter replies]
‘People paying money for pictures of Uncle Edward. Pictures of Negroes
in the water. Negroes on land. Negroes in boats. Sponge boats. Squalls
making up. Water spouts. Schooners that got wrecked. Schooners build-
ing. Everything they could see for free. They really buy them?’
‘Sure they buy them. Once a year you have a show in New York and they
sell them’. (16–17)
Note that the painter in this passage feigns lack of agency in the process of
marketing his own work. He suggests that it becomes popular spontane-
ously. The barman asks, ‘You sell those pictures you paint all the time? […]
They really buy them?’ obviously suggesting that such paintings would
not sell in the Bahamas. To this the painter responds: ‘you have a show’
(instead of I have a show) and ‘they sell them’ instead of ‘I sell them’. I find
this pronoun substitution telling, because it divorces art from the business
of selling art. It also absolves the artist of any suspicion that he might be
knowingly exploiting the exotic potential of the Bahamas. Yet, the fictional
artist’s choice of subjects is guided by the awareness of what is popular
among some segments of New York society, as were Hemingway’s choices.
Hemingway’s literary settings are clearly the result of his search for not-
yet-popular literary terrains whose symbolic value was as yet undetermined.
Spain was one such terrain. Encouraged by Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas to attend a bullfight, Hemingway traveled there. He subsequently
spent years collecting insider knowledge about this spectator sport and
writing a non-fiction book expressly designed to popularize something that
for most Americans was an unfamiliar (and repulsive) subject.
To say that books about bullfighting in Spain or deep-sea fishing in the
Caribbean were popular during Hemingway’s lifetime is, of, course, an over-
statement, since Scribner’s sold a total of just 20,780 copies of Hemingway’s
non-fiction book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and 133,650
copies of The Old Man and the Sea. Nonetheless people in the United States
did pay a great deal of money for ‘pictures of Uncle Edward’ (or someone
very much like him—old Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea).
Unlike the artist in Islands in the Stream, though, Hemingway took an
active interest in the marketing of all his work, badgering his publisher to
spend more money on advertising, making sure his novels were serialized
in prestigious magazines, and collecting far more review clippings from
the syndicated press than Scribners did in their archive. For instance, in a
letter to his editor, Hemingway wrote: ‘What about running a few chapters
Big Fish 51
from Death in the Afternoon [in Scribner’s Magazine] just before it comes
out—Do you think that would be good for it. The book I mean?’ (qtd. in
Trogdon 106). Such requests pepper his correspondence with Scribners, as
do complaints that not enough money was being spent on publicity,16 even
though the publisher’s advertising budget for some novels approximated
his earnings (and, in the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls, exceeded $40,000
[cf. Trogdon 260]).
broad readership. But until the public got used to Hemingway’s style, he
remained a promising minor author.
The fact that he came to be known as a novelist rather than a short-
story or non-fiction writer can be seen as a by-product of trying to secure
popularity. Short fiction was his forte, but his first publisher, Liveright,
and then Scribners pressured him to write novels in order to make his
name, and then to remain popular (cf. Trogdon 19, 157). Scribners used
his short stories strategically, placing them in Scribner’s Magazine and
elsewhere, as a way to keep his name in the reading public’s mind during
the long periods when he was unable to produce a novel. He found writ-
ing long fiction grueling and often asked for extended deadlines. When
writing long fiction, his aesthetic judgment—unerring in the case of short
stories—often failed him.
In correspondence with Perkins, Hemingway explained his understand-
ing of popularity: ‘you can’t be popular all the time unless you make a career
of it like Mr. Galsworthy, etc. I will survive this unpopularity and with one
more good book of stories (only these are going to be with plenty of action
so they can understand them) and one good novel you are in a place where
they will have to come around and eat shit again’ (qtd. in Trogdon 160). This
passage suggests Hemingway was aware that some readers were baffled
by his more experimental stories, so when sequencing short stories he
alternated the more straightforward writing with the more opaque stories
in which meaning is compressed between the lines. In correspondence with
Perkins he explained: ‘If you want to make a living out of it, in addition every
so often, without faking, cheating […] you have to give them something they
understand and that has a story—not a plot—just a story they can follow
instead of simply feel, the way most of the stories are’; ‘I know the book needs
one more simple story of action to balance some of the difficult stories it
contains’ (qtd. in Trogdon 6). What we see here is Hemingway knowingly
balancing popular and unpopular.
More ideas about popularity were occasioned by the planned release
of The Green Hills of Africa. About this novel Hemingway write to Perkins:
It may be what people want to read. […] I believe it should sell better
than 20,000 [it actually sold 12,532]—Winner Take Nothing had not one
element of popularity and everything to make it unpopular. This book
has so many elements that should make people like it—it has a long and
good story […] plenty of story interest, suspense, and conversation, and
it takes people bodily into a place where they have never been and most
of them can never go. (qtd. in Trogdon 155)
Big Fish 53
Now, what puzzles you, madame? What would you like explained?
Old lady: I noticed that when one of the horses was hit by the bull, sawdust
came out. What explanation do you have for that, young man?
Madame, that sawdust was placed in the horse by a kindly veterinarian
to fill a void created by the loss of other organs.
Old lady: Thank you, sir. You made me understand it all. But surely the
horse could not permanently replace those organs with sawdust?
Madame, it is only a temporary measure, and one that no-one can approve
of. (79)
That winter Robert Cohn went to America with his novel and it was
accepted by a fairly good publisher. […] The publishers praised his novel
pretty highly and it rather went to his head. […] He had been reading W.H.
Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and
reread The Purple Land. The Purple Land is a very sinister book if read
too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a
perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of
which is very well described. (8–9)
Conclusions
Notes
so that Gabriel Garcia Lorca, who had never met Hemingway but caught a
glimpse of him once, recalled: ‘I recognized him immediately, passing with
his wife Mary Welsh on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris on a rainy spring
day in 1957’ (New York Times 26 July 1981).
7. What Jane Tompkins intuited but did not know was that Grey had been
immensely interested in sex and that he did, in fact, write about his sexual
exploits, though not in print. As a public figure, Grey strictly adhered to the
Victorian moral code. That he had led a sexually liberated life only became
apparent in 2005, when his encrypted sex diaries came to light. See Thomas
H. Pauly, Zane Grey: His Adventures, His Women (2005).
8. Hemingway once disparagingly wrote to his editor, ‘I am working on a long
plan instead of trying to be popular every day like Mr. Roosevelt’ (qtd. in
Trogdon 160). Yet, we know from biographers that Hemingway lionized
Roosevelt as a huntsman and national hero. For an account of Hemingway’s
safari in Kenya, where he hired the very same guide who had worked for
Roosevelt 20 years earlier, see Reynolds (155-67). Hemingway’s grandson
corroborates this story, giving the guide’s name, Philip Percival. He also
explains that in the 1930s Hemingway ordered a ‘military version of the .30-
06 bolton-action rifle […] essentially the weapon that Teddy Roosevelt took
with him to hunt in Africa’ (Patrick Hemingway xvi–xvii).
9. Owen Wister actually supported Hemingway in the publishing business,
advising Scribner’s to serialize A Farewell to Arms (cf. Trogdon 74).
10. Hemingway’s annual retreats to the L-T ranch in Wyoming are discussed,
among others, by Vaill (62–65) and Hawkins (141–42).
11. Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization (1995) and Richard Slotkin
in Gunfighter Nation (1992) examine white masculinity at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth century.
12. Masculinity in Hemingway’s prose is discussed in depth by Thomas Stry-
chacz in Hemigway’s Theatres of Masculinity (2003) In Ernest Hemingway:
Machismo and Masochism (2005), Richard Fantina confronted the feminist
accusations that Hemingway enacted the worst kind of masculinism. Most
biographers and literary scholars who have written on Hemingway since
the rise of gender studies make some reference to his fraught relation with
masculinity.
13. Hemingway’s belief in the regenerative power of nature is less apparent
than Grey’s because it is tempered by his fatalism. Yet, as Susan B. Fegel
points out, Hemingway ‘grew up in the midst of an environmentalist awak-
ening [...]—the so-called back to nature movement’—a response to rapid
industrialization and the hunting frenzy that eliminated countless animal
species (239). Taught to appreciate the wilderness by his father, he sought
contact with unspoiled nature in the Spanish highlands around Burguete
(depicted in The Sun Also Rises), on the plains of the Serengeti (depicted in
The Green Hills of Africa), and, throughout his life, out at sea which ‘once
you are out of sight of land, [...] is the same as it has ever been since before
58 Dominik a Ferens
men ever went out on it in boats’ (Hemingway qtd. in Fegel 241). Even if one
can only enjoy brief moments of respite from modernity in natural retreats,
the compulsion to do so is evident in Hemingway’s fiction and in his life.
14. Attesting to the lasting inspiration of Grey’s romantic vision of nature is the
following blog http://desertspiritpress.net/2013/06/05/zane-grey-solitude-
and-the-western-hero/ posted by Brad Karelius on 5 June 2013. Karelius is
the pen name of an academic and Episcopalian pastor, author of The Spirit
in the Desert: Pilgrimages to Sacred Sites in the Owens Valley (2009).
15. ‘The Strenuous Life’ is the title of an influential 1899 speech by Theodore
Roosevelt about ideal American manhood. It was subsequently expanded
into The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900).
16. Trogdon gives the figures for Scribner’s advertising expenditures in Appen-
dix 2 (260). They range from in 1926–27 $6,557.93 for The Sun Also Rises to
$43,567.09 in 1940–41 for For Whom the Bell Tolls.
17. Accusations of nihilism, the use of obscene words, as well as representa-
tions of sex, debauchery, and senseless death resulted in many of Heming-
way’s books being banned in Europe and the United States.
18. For example, Hemingway wrote to his editor about The Green Hills of Africa
that ‘it is straight and absolutely true autobiography with no pulling of
punches or lack of frankness’ (qtd. in Trogdon 155). He defended Death in
the Afternoon as ‘a straight book on bullfighting’ (qtd. in Trogdon 120). More
interestingly, he used similar adjectives in a description of Pedro Romero’s
style of bullfighting, which can be read as an exposition on Hemingway’s
aesthetic values. Romero’s style ‘was straight and pure and natural in line’
and ‘gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his
movements’, while his competitors ‘twisted themselves like corkscrews’ and
elicited ‘fake’ emotions (The Sun Also Rises 167–68).
19. According to Aleksandra Litorowicz, writers such as Ernest Hemingway,
D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller were the direct intellectual forerunners of
such hipsters as Norman Mailer (28).
Works Cited
—. Riders of the Purple Sage. 1912. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002. Print.
—. Tales of Fishes. 1919. Lanham, MD: Derrydale Press, 2001. Print.
Hall, Stuart. ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.’ Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Ed.
John Storey. New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 1998. 442–453. Print.
Hawkins, Ruth A. Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage.
Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2012. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. 1939. New York: Arrow Books, 2004. Print.
—. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. Print.
—. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner’s, 1954. Print.
Hemingway, Patrick. Preface. Hemingway on Hunting. Ed. Seán Hemingway. New York: Scribners.
xiii–xviii. Print.
Litrowicz, Aleksandra. Subkultura hipsterów. Od nowoczesnej etyki do ponowoczesnej estetyki.
Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, 2012. Print.
May, Stephen J. Zane Grey: Romancing the West. Ohio UP, 1997. Print.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1988. Print.
Miles, Jonathan. ‘Rider of the Purple Prose: Review of “Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His
Women”, by Thomas H. Pauly.’ New York Times (1/I/ 2006): n.pag. Print.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1996. Print.
Pauly, Thomas H. Zane Grey: His Adventures, His Women. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005. Print.
Reiger, George. Introduction to ‘The First Thousand-Pounder.’ The Best of Zane Grey, Outdoors-
man: Hunting and Fishing Tales. Zane Grey. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1992. Print.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The 1930s. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. Print.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Print.
Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway’s Theatres of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,
2003. Print.
Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.
Traube, Elizabeth G. ‘“The Popular” in American Culture’. Annual Review of Anthropology 25
(1996): 127–51. Print.
Trogdon, Robert W. The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribner’s and the Business of Literature. Kent,
Ohio: Kent State UP, 2007. Print.
Vaill, Amanda. Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, 2014. Print.
Wister, Owen. The Virginian. 1902. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
How (Not) to Make People Like You
The Anti-Popular Art of David Foster Wallace
James Dorson
Few writers have catered to unpopular tastes with such great success as
David Foster Wallace. Not only has his work consistently resisted easy
consumption through its experimental style or sheer volume—as in the 1079
densely annotated pages of Infinite Jest (1996)—it has often sought out the
most unappealing topics, from the arcane, the cruel, the geeky, the awkward,
and the repulsive to the infuriatingly complex and the insanely boring. He
frequently imitates other styles, not just literary ones, but such trying forms
as academic prose, statistical representation, dictionary entries, legal jargon,
and bureaucratese. His novels and stories are not only difficult to read, but
often unpleasant as well, in their detailed accounts of bodily excretions and
psychological neediness. Zadie Smith, in an essay on Wallace’s 1999 short
story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, sums it up well when
she writes: ‘There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and
the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing
context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject
matter, language that is—at the same time!—childishly scatological and
annoyingly obscure’ (275–76). This is from someone who has called Wallace
her ‘favorite living writer’ (261), and whose laudatory blurbs appear on the
front cover of several of his books.
But trying the patience of readers in this way serves an explicit purpose
in Wallace’s work. It is not obstructionist but programmatic, not meant to
provoke outrage but to shake up the institutions of writing and reading.
While Smith reads his challenge to readers in the grain of high culture that
makes them work hard for their aesthetic reward, the notorious difficulty of
his work is not only motivated by a resistance to popular culture, but even
more fundamentally by a deep skepticism toward popularity as such. The
idea of death by entertainment that Infinite Jest explores may have been a
mordant satire of commercial culture, but Wallace’s problem with popular-
ity cuts across the high/low culture divide. From his essay ‘E Unibus Pluram:
62 James Dorson
Television and U.S. Fiction’ and interview with Larry McCaffery—both first
published in 1993 and frequently cited as expressions of Wallace’s aesthetic
program—to his widely circulated 2005 Kenyon College speech, he has
made it clear that automatism and awareness are the two poles that make
up his aesthetic map, with commercial art pushing toward the former, and
what he called ‘real art-fiction’ (McCaffery 32) pushing toward the latter.
Wallace embraced the view that the role of fiction should be ‘to comfort
the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’ (McCaffery 21). To disturb the
reader meant, in Smith’s words, ‘to break the rhythm that excludes thinking’
(268), which is an idea that harks back to the Russian Formalist view of art
as de-automatized perception, and which was central to modernist aesthet-
ics. Such art makes use of what George Saunders, in reference to Wallace,
described as a ‘shock methodology’, ‘a kind of stripping away of the habitual’
(53). But if ‘art-fiction’ could shock us into greater awareness, television for
Wallace had the opposite effect. Television was what he called ‘the epitome
of Low Art’, because ‘it engages without demanding. One can rest while
undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving’ (‘E Unibus Pluram’ 37). If
‘art-fiction’ wakes us up, television fixes viewers ‘in an attitude of relaxed
and total reception, rapt’ (‘E Unibus Pluram’ 26).
Crossing this automatism/awareness axis, which spans from television
and advertising to ‘real art-fiction’, however, is another polarity in Wallace’s
work that ranges from deceit to sincerity, and which cannot be divided
into commercial versus non-commercial art. Whereas television made up
the negative pole on the automatism/awareness axis, then metafiction for
Wallace had come to make up the negative pole of the deceit/sincerity axis.
Metafiction—and by extension the postmodern institutionalization of
irony—did not represent popular culture, but rather what could be called
popularity culture. In contrast to popular culture, popularity culture may
be defined not in commercial terms, although economic gain is often a
byproduct of popularity, or in terms of symbolic capital or distinction, which
is the currency of high culture, but rather in terms of approval. Popularity
culture is art that primarily seeks approval, not money or distinction. The
definition may be expanded to include not only art but a form of sociability
in which approval is the overriding end. As I hope to show in the following,
it is the reaction against popularity culture more than anything else that
defines Wallace’s fiction. It is what impelled him to explore avenues of
unpopularity, but also what ultimately won him such popular approval.
While many critics have engaged with Wallace’s relation to postmodernism,
focusing especially on the relationship between irony and sincerity in his
work, few have tried to uncover the historical reasons for his occupation
How (Not) to Make People Like You 63
The first thing to note about the story is that it is located on page zero of
the story collection, which suggests that Wallace thought of it as a sort
of ground zero for contemporary life. The situation that it describes so
tersely is meant to be representative of the human condition in its present
shape, and it presents itself as a diagnosis of this condition. What the three
characters—or rather caricatures—in the story have in common is a shared
desire to be liked. They behave in a way meant to maximize their likeability;
that is to say, their behavior is calculated and instrumental. This requires
that each character has in mind an ideal model of likeable behavior to which
they seek to adjust their own behavior. If they were seeking admiration or
distinction, or in some other way to impress the others, the model they
would seek to conform to would have to be based on what they imagine is
somehow superior to those they seek to impress. But since their goal is only
‘to be liked’, the ideal model has to be as much like those they seek to be liked
64 James Dorson
(129) had been the key to advancement. In his own era of bureaucracy and
mass consumption, the key to success had become ‘social competence’
(129), as work increasingly required the manipulation of people instead
of things. This shift from an economy based on production to one largely
based on consumption implied a fundamental change in social relations.
To a far greater extent than before, the degree to which people were able
to get along—with coworkers or customers—determined how success-
ful they were at their work. Social skills had become a prerequisite for
upward mobility; it had become necessary ‘to preserve good relations at
all times’, as ‘A Radically Condensed History’ has it. But social competence
involves a level of complexity far greater than that of any technical com-
petence. While natural resources can be manipulated independently of
the relationship between manipulator and manipulated, this is not the
case in the manipulation of people. The successful manipulation of rocks
or trees does not depend on our behavior toward them, but the successful
manipulation of people does. Post-industrial work relationships are inher-
ently more recursive than industrial ones. The engineer with technical
expertise does not need to be popular in order to succeed, but the office
worker among office workers competing for the favor of the manager does.
From the emergence of personnel departments and the Human Relations
Movement in the early decades of the twentieth century to the training of
emotional intelligence and the recruitment of ‘Happiness Engineers’ in the
workplace today, corporate self-help books and managerial practices in the
past century may be characterized as the search for ever better methods
for manipulating what used to be called ‘the human element’.2
Popularity culture is the direct outgrowth of this development: the
increasing correlation between personal and professional success. Post-
industrial work relations demand to an ever greater degree that the emo-
tional and personal qualities of people are counted as assets. For Eva Illouz,
in her account of what she calls ‘emotional capitalism’, the intertwining of
work and affect has made ‘the economic self emotional and emotions more
closely harnessed to instrumental action’ (23). When personal life enters
the workplace, work also enters personal life. The result is that the risk of
manipulation seeps into every aspect of social interaction. If not being
liked jeopardizes not only one’s personal relationships but also one’s work
relationships, then it is never clear whether one seeks approval for reasons
of pure sociability or for instrumental ends. As the line between work and
personal life becomes blurred, every act may or may not be a calculated
one, because every act may or may not serve instrumental purposes. ‘One
never knows, after all, now did one now did one now did one’, as the trailing
66 James Dorson
voice of Wallace’s story says. But not only does it become difficult to know
the motives of others, it becomes difficult to know one’s own motives. If
other people may seem like frauds, one may also feel like a fraud oneself.
This dilemma is played out in Wallace’s story ‘Good Old Neon’ from
Oblivion (2004). The story is narrated by a character who has already killed
himself and is now explaining why. It begins with the character describing
his problem:
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve
ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other
people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than
that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved.
Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. (141)
As an account of how the character could not quiet his ‘mind’s ceaseless
conniving about how to impress people’ (160), it is a stark confession of
‘other-direction’ and its discontents. In characterizing his trouble, he identi-
fies what he calls the ‘fraudulence paradox’:
The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put
into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less
impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud. And the more
of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or
likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a
hollow, fraudulent person you really were. (147)
The recursive trap is typical of Wallace’s work. Here, the recursion inherent
in popularity culture—where seeking approval is a cause for disapproval
which causes one to seek approval—has been internalized. The recursive
game that one plays with others, one also plays with oneself. The effect is
not only that a wedge is driven between people who may feel that others
are fraudulent, but that one feels fraudulent oneself. As the character in the
story says: ‘I actually seemed to have no true inner self, and that the more
I tried to be genuine the more empty and fraudulent I ended up feeling
inside’ (160). Seeking approval empties out the self because it introduces a
level of calculation to our sense of self, which we believe should be free of
calculation in order to be genuine. The trap is that the more empty inside
one feels, the more one needs approval, which in turn makes one feel all the
more empty. As such, if the ‘other-direction’ prompted by twentieth-century
transformations of work results in us having ‘no clear core of self’, as Riesman
How (Not) to Make People Like You 67
said, then having no clear core of self makes us more ‘other-directed’. The
effect is that we are caught in a loop of calculation that appears to isolate us
from each other and alienate us from ourselves—which would explain the
feeling of despair beneath the parody of ‘A Radically Condensed History’,
when ‘each drove home alone, looking straight ahead, with the very same
twist to their faces’.
But while the characters in ‘A Radically Condensed History’ clearly fall
toward the deceit end on the deceit/sincerity axis that structures Wallace’s
fiction, the story itself is also deceptive. It is not the history that the title
promises. By inflating the ‘other-directed’ insecurity of the characters into
a caricature, they become the butt of a joke shared by narrator and readers.
In recognizing the insecurity of the characters we automatically become
superior to them. In other words, the story flatters us. We may like it for
sharing a joke with us over the heads of its characters, yet we may also
dislike it for this very reason, for its smug appeal to our sense of superiority.
Its radical condensation makes it look like the witticism made by the first
character, as if it itself were ‘hoping to be liked’. In this sense, it resembles
the metafiction that Wallace sought to distance himself from. While the
ironic mode of metaf iction—always self-consciously undercutting its
own narrative—at first served to deflate the conceits of realism and the
conformity of the early postwar era, by the late 1980s Wallace felt that it
had outlived its purpose. Irony, now as ‘the dominant mode of hip expres-
sion’ (‘E Unibus Pluram’ 67), had itself become oppressive. For Wallace, the
formal stunts of metafiction often served no other purpose than to exhibit
the skills and astuteness of the writer, as if to say, as he phrased it in his
interview with McCaffery, ‘Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good
writer I am! Like me!’ (25). Revealing the deceits of art had devolved into its
own deceit. And if the anticipatory logic of calculation in popularity culture
was lethal to personal relationships, it was also lethal to fiction. The fiction
writer seeking approval from an audience was just another manifestation
of ‘other-direction’. As the narrator of the story ‘Octet’ from Brief Interviews
warns the reader: ‘there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill
any human urgency in the thing you’re working on than to try to calculate
ahead of time whether that thing will be “liked”’ (129).
Of course, being open about this problem inevitably raises the reader’s
suspicion about whether by confessing this ‘Octet’ is itself only trying to
be liked. The reflexivity about self-reflexivity so characteristic of Wallace’s
work has been described by critics as a form of metafictional self-implosion
that reverts into its opposite.3 But perhaps a more accurate description of
what goes on here is that the reader becomes implicated in the calculated
68 James Dorson
only aggravates the condition they seek to escape. Earlier in the novel, Hal
says about playing tennis that ‘[w]e’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we
all have in common, this aloneness’, to which another character responds:
‘E Unibus Pluram’ (112). Wallace’s fiction is full of lonely crowds—is that not
essentially what ‘out of one, many’ means?4 At the same time, however, as
‘aloneness’ is a common feeling at this particular moment in history, it is also
one that may be shared, and thus possibly revoke the isolating recursions
of popularity culture. Still, if Wallace looked to the sharing of feelings for
an alternative to popularity culture, like everything in his work, this was
easier said than done.
‘Octet’ dramatizes the problem of sharing succinctly. Presented as ad-
vice on how to write good fiction, the narrator of the story underlines the
importance of making readers empathize with characters by feeling ‘some
sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships’
(131-32). This suggests another form of ‘other-direction’ at work in Wallace’s
fiction. ‘Octet’ even uses the term ‘other-directedness’ (117), not in Riesman’s
sense, but as synonymous with empathy. In spite of its radar-like sensitivity,
Riesman’s ‘other-direction’ is rather what Smith described as the ‘other
blindness’ (291) of the hideous men in Brief Interviews, as their concerns
for how they are perceived by others effectively blocks their perception of
them. Against Riesman’s ‘other-direction’, Wallace’s other ‘other-direction’
aims not at winning the approval of others but at sharing a sense of ‘urgent
interhuman sameness’ (‘Octet’ 133). The problem, then, is how to know when
another person is feeling as you do. The story offers the following solution:
The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Mean-
ing not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked—more like
unarmed. Defenseless. ‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it
seems important, ‘do you feel it too?’—this sort of direct question is not
for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to ‘Do you like me?
Please like me,’ which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman
manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely
because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as
somehow obscene. (131)
like ‘a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit
stops and the masks come off’ (qtd. in Max 221).
At the same time, Wallace knew that the colloquial tone he used to
give readers a feeling of intimacy was not only subject to manipulation,
but was the quintessential trick of the conf idence man. His essay on
John McCain’s bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination is a
case in point. The essay, published in Consider the Lobster (2005) as ‘Up,
Simba’, begins with a disclaimer to the reader—addressed as ‘Dear Person
Reading This’ (156)—that the essay is ‘just meant to be the truth as one
person saw it’ (157).5 But even as the style of the essay begins by drawing
the reader into conf idence, conf idence is precisely what it goes on to
problematize. Describing his road trip as a journalist with McCain on his
campaign bus the ‘Straight Talk Express’ (171), Wallace seeks to resolve
the contradiction between McCain’s candid appearance—his ‘straight
talk’, suggesting that he is not merely catering to public opinion—and
his need as a presidential candidate for popular approval. McCain may
have been sincere, ‘all conspicuously honest and open and informal and
idealistic and no-bullshit’ (228), but at the same time his sincerity was
highly effective self-promotion. The essay concludes that it was impossible
‘to tell whether John McCain is a real leader or merely a very talented
political salesman’ (228), and ends with an appeal to the reader: ‘whether
he’s truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what
might be in yours’ (234).
In his essay on ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American
Fiction’, Adam Kelly writes that sincerity ‘can always be taken for ma-
nipulation, and this risk is fundamental—it cannot be reduced by appeal
to intention, or morality, or context—because true sincerity, if there is
ever such a thing, must take place in the aporia between the conditional
and the unconditional’ (140). This non-identity of sincerity means that its
only identity is relational, that ‘the possibility of sincerity depends upon
its becoming dialogic in character, always requiring a response from the
other to bring it into play’ (Kelly 141). Wallace’s appeal to the reader—and
specifically the reader’s heart—in ‘Up, Simba’ is thus symptomatic of how
he deals with the problem of sincerity. Rousseau in The Confessions (1782)
may have thought that he ‘unveiled [his] inmost self’ (3), but for Wallace
the medium of language through which the self must be unveiled is itself
suspect. The ‘whole’ self that sincerity implies cannot possibly be unveiled
through language. ‘Good Old Neon’ is told in the confessional mode with the
first person narrator seeking to account for his fraudulence, but at the same
time he admits to the impossibility of self-revelation through confession.
72 James Dorson
He points out the vast discrepancy between what we are and how little of
ourselves we are able to represent to others:
As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like
everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only
parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny
keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to
see each other through these tiny keyholes. (178)
problem that keeps her trapped. On the one hand, we are as much trapped
within her looping therapeutic logic as she is because the story compels us
to participate in her self-analysis. On the other hand, by representing her
allegorically as ‘the depressed person’, the story makes her representative of
a cultural condition: it universalizes her neurosis. The real question of the
story is not what it says about her but what it says about us. The more she
tries to share her feelings the less she is able to. Her sharing impedes rather
than facilitates communication since it is not reciprocal but one-sided, as
in her relationship with her therapist or ‘Support System’. The only way out
of her recursive trap would be not to ask what she had learned said about
herself, but to ask what it said about being a human being. In other words,
she would have had to ask, ‘do you feel it too?’6
problem apart from its social context. The rejection of dependence that
the search for personal authenticity implies erodes the very self that is
sought, thus making the self more and not less dependent on others for its
affirmation. Instead of autonomy, the rejection of calculated behavior in
favor of personal authenticity only meant its narcissistic transformation,
which Lasch described as a kind of intensified ‘other-direction’:
The choice of a bureaucracy for the setting of The Pale King—a regional
IRS center in Peoria, Illinois—provides Wallace with both an arena for
the further exploration of sincerity and for the direct engagement with
something as unhip as one could possibly imagine. In ‘E Unibus Pluram’,
Wallace famously called for a new rebellion against the hegemony of hip:
The next literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird
bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from
ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and
instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy
human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.
Who eschew self-conscious and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be
outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too
sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe
that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next rebels. Real
rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. (81)
If this was Wallace’s manifesto for unpopularity, The Pale King imagines the
‘anti-rebel’ as a bureaucrat. IRS examiners are trained to detect fraudulence
in tax returns, just as Wallace’s own prose is geared toward detecting fraudu-
lence in readers by drawing us into the recursions of popularity culture.
While irony is about undercutting the equivalence between what is stated
and what is meant, accounting is about determining it. And what could be
more unpopular than holding people to account for what they state in their
tax returns? The Latin motto ascribed to the IRS in the novel—translated by
one character as ‘He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job’ (244)—leaves
no doubt about how unpopular the bureaucrat is. The IRS employee is not
one who seeks approval, but one who risks disapproval. The Pale King even
goes as far as to recast this as a form of heroism. In an epiphanic moment,
one character recounts a lecture by his Jesuit accountancy teacher:
With his bow tie and business fedora, the Jesuit teacher himself seems ‘a
hundred percent indifferent about being liked or seen as cool or likeable
76 James Dorson
Notes
Works Cited
Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2003.
Print.
Burkeman, Oliver. ‘Who Goes to Work to Have Fun?’ The New York Times. 11 Dec. 2013. Web. 7
Apr. 2016.
Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies,
Entertainment, and Infinite Jest.’ New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 675–97. Print.
Holland, Mary K. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary
American Literature. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.
Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Print.
Kelly, Adam. ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.’ Consider David
Foster Wallace: Critical Essay. Ed. David Hering. Austin, TX: Sideshow Media Group Press,
2010. 131–46. Print.
—. ‘David Foster Wallace: The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.’ Irish Journal
of American Studies 2 (2010). Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expecta-
tions. New York: Warner Books, 1979. Print.
Max, D.T. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. London: Granta, 2012.
Print.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2000. Print.
Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. 1950. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Print.
How (Not) to Make People Like You 79
Elizabeth Kovach
This essay discusses three generically diverse pieces of writing that are
critical of U.S.-American foreign policy and society since 9/11: Jane Mayer’s
The Dark Side (2008), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Juliana Spahr’s
thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs (2005). These texts—journalistic,
novelistic, and poetic—are dissenting, critical, and counter-hegemonic
depictions of the direction that the USA has taken since 9/11. They have
been written, marketed, and successfully sold to well-established sectors
of the reading public. While there is a significant body of scholarly work
that focuses on how such examples of post-9/11 writing offer discourses
counter to those perpetuated by top policymakers and mainstream media
outlets, little attention has been paid to the commodified nature of such
writerly dissent. In my analyses of these texts, I explore the tensions and
ambivalences regarding issues of unpopularity and popularity that affect
writers who strive for political impact while they participate in a market
logic that inevitably dampens the blow.
I thus conceive of popularity and unpopularity in terms of marketability.
Raymond Williams writes in Keywords that the word ‘popular’ began as
‘a legal and political term’, referring to what was generated by the people,
but finds that ‘[t]he transition to the predominant modern meaning of
‘widely favoured’ or ‘well-liked’ is interesting in that it contains a strong
element of setting out to gain favour’ (236-37). That which sets out to be
popular is strategically designed to fall within the parameters of what is
known to be favorable. Popular cultural artifacts, news outlets, and political
messages generally enter the realm of the familiar and acceptable, abide
by established tastes and sensibilities, and match desires and expectations
prevalent within the public sphere. They are, simply put, produced with
their markets in mind.
The unpopular is that which does not set out to gain favor. It does not
purposefully appeal to a market, even though it will likely find one, however
small. Within a neoliberal age that accommodates virtually any form of
82 Elizabe th Kovach
The sentences of Balzac and Flaubert may well have been mute stones.
[…] They don’t have voices like princes, generals or orators. But they only
84 Elizabeth Kovach
speak all the better as a result. They bear on their bodies the testimony of
their history. And this testimony is more reliable than any speech offered
by human mouth. It is the truth of things as opposed to the chatter and
lies of orators. (Literature 14)
brings new facts to light, and that it is vital that they reach the public.
The book did, indeed, reach many readers, as its bestseller status proves.
It surely informed a significant number of U.S.-Americans about post-9/11
political realities largely excluded from the mainstream media’s cover-
age. When reviewers write that such a journalistic account is important
and essential, the question is to what ends does such importance and
essentiality aim?
One blurb is particularly striking in a different way than the others,
and it moves me toward a tentative answer. A reviewer for Slate is quoted
as stating: ‘Stunning…. If you’re a fan of 24, you’ll enjoy The Dark Side’. In
other words, viewers of the fictional television series 24 about Counter
Terrorism Unit agent Jack Bauer will also enjoy the heart-racing tale of
American tyranny Mayer reports. What the selection of this blurb for
the front matter (i.e. the pages proceeding the actual text) of this edition
indicates is that The Dark Side is marketed as a consumer experience and
form of entertainment. While I do not wish to insinuate that a TV series
like 24 is not critical in its own right, its critique operates metaphorically
while Mayer’s work of investigative journalism speaks directly of the facts
and gives voice to flesh-and-blood witnesses. The paratextual reference to
24 implicitly relegates The Dark Side to the same market segment occupied
by viewers of fictional television.
The selection of this blurb is symptomatic of an effort to gain favor—a
positioning of the book within a large and established consumer market.
In his work on the forms and functions of paratexts, Gérard Genette writes
that every paratext is
III.2 Freedom
Joey Berglund had received numberless assurances that his life was
destined to be a lucky one. […] The world had given unto him, and he was
fine with the taking. […] [C]ollege looked like it would be an extension of
the world as he had always known it, only better. He was so convinced of
this—took it so much for granted—that on the morning of September 11
he actually left his roommate, Jonathan, to monitor the burning World
Trade Center and Pentagon while he hurried off to his Econ 201 lecture.
Not until he reached the big auditorium and found it all but empty did
he understand that a really serious glitch had occurred. […] [T]he deep
chagrin he’d then experienced […] became the seed of his intensely
personal resentment of the terrorist attacks. […].
In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to
Joey: It was stupid that a ‘Vigil of Concern’ was held for no conceivable
practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster
footage over and over, it was stupid that the Chi Phi boys hung a banner
Dissenting Commodities 89
of ‘support’ from their house, it was stupid that the football game against
Penn State was canceled, it was stupid that so many kids left Grounds to
be with their families […]. (232–33)
The novel performs politics in the way Rancière describes it not simply
because Joey’s perspective obviously counters post-9/11 discourses of
trauma, redemption, and heroism that bolstered the hegemony’s tightly
controlled distribution of the sensible. Rather, in portraying a character
like Joey, the novel performs politics in the detailed, democratic attention it
pays to the psyche of a young adult who is unremarkable, unadmirable, and
has absorbed neoliberal individualism to such a degree that he ‘personally’
resents national, collective tragedy. This is not a story of actors or heroes
but that of mundane living and, according to Rancière, ‘what literature pits
against the […] privileging of action over life, is writing seen as a machine
for making life talk’ (Literature 14). Franzen’s novel is a reporting on life that
integrates the unpopular into its fabric, thereby presenting it as an artifact
available to perception.
As Franzen states in an essay on novel-writing entitled Why Bother?, his
aims as a writer are not explicitly political nor does he expect the aesthetics
of his work to have much societal impact:
I can’t pretend the mainstream will listen to the news I have to bring.
I can’t pretend I’m subverting anything. […] I can’t stomach any notion
that serious [literature] is good for us. It’s hard to consider literature a
medicine, in any case, when reading it serves mainly to deepen your
depressing estrangement from the mainstream. […] Expecting [literature]
to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our
contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.
To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them:
Isn’t it enough? Isn’t it a lot? (73–74)
III.3 thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs
In Frames of War, Judith Butler responds to U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 by
asking that we reconsider subjectivity in a way that ‘implies living socially,
that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other.
It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know’
(14). Spahr engages in a similar reframing by resisting ‘the alone’—resisting
a sense of enclosure to accept complicity, resisting a narrow distribution of
the sensible to cultivate a globally scaled form of awareness. She advocates
a sensibility through which the discrete boundaries of bodies and things
dissolve and frames collapse.
This wish for an all-inclusive distribution of the sensible is a wish for
the end of politics in the way Rancière defines it: with no noise waiting to
be turned into discernible speech, with nothing excluded awaiting entry
into the purview of perception, the post-political, democratic vision Spahr
cultivates is utopian. She figures a space in which everything is awarded
ontological presence, legitimacy, and equal footing—in which terrorism,
weapons of mass destruction, and preemptive war would be rendered use-
less. But, as Spahr acknowledges, the ‘military industrial complex’ persists
and waits ‘outside our door’.
Ultimately, Spahr’s poetry cultivates a vision that self-consciously admits
to its own limitations. Rancière describes writing that tries to prefigure the
future and write new life into being as inherently thwarted by the fact that
it can only draw from the world available at the time of its composition.
Instead of envisioning new forms of life out of nothing, writing is ‘a powerful
machine for self-interpretation and for the re-poetization of life, capable
of converting all the rubbish of ordinary life into poetic bodies and signs
of history’ (Literature 29). The notion of a ‘new body that sings the hymn
of the new world is destined to remain a utopia, at once necessary and
unrealizable, by means of which the regime of literary writing projects itself
beyond itself’ (Literature 29). Instead of forging the new, the writer can only
really convert what is unpopular and excluded into the distribution of the
sensible. Boundaries are not collapsed but shifted.
Dissenting Commodities 93
I have covered a range of different genres of text. Yet, from Mayer’s laying
out of facts to Franzen’s depiction of mundane subjects to Spahr’s verses
about complicity and connectedness, all these texts perform politics, or at
least attempt to add to the way we sense and perceive the social and political
contexts they address. This kind of politics is about illuminating parts that
have no part (to paraphrase Rancière). It is about giving the unpopular the
option to become popular and to ‘introduce lines of fracture’ (Rancière,
Aesthetics 39) into arrangements of perception. A discourse counter to those
disseminated by top policymakers and the mainstream media takes shape,
is circulated and documented, via such publications.
Instead of simply focusing on how the case studies presented here
function in counter-discursive manners, however, my aim has been to
understand the fate of counter-discursive publications within the logic
of the publishing market. Mayer’s investigative journalism is packaged as
a thrilling experience as much as it comprises a document of potentially
serious political consequence. Franzen’s literary fiction seeks to honestly
portray American society and tap into a truthfulness of experience that pan-
dering to a market arguably taints; yet, his novels are hyped more than those
of almost any other contemporary U.S.-American novelist today. Spahr’s
94 Elizabeth Kovach
Works Cited
Dan Udy
‘I’m from this town, I know what’s real and what’s fake.’
—Kyle Richards, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, season 4 opening credits
while MTV’s The Real World used documentary footage and confessional
interviews to narrativize the lives of a group of strangers picked to live
together. This particular mode of production quickly proved unpopular
with critics, who bemoaned the undermining of documentary’s founding
principles in favor of mass entertainment, and expressed frustration with
the quick proliferation of cheaply-produced programming and its cast of
interchangeable, everyday people. The visual format employed by The
Real World has since developed into the most culturally prolific form of
docusoap today, to the extent that it has become synonymous with Real-
ity television—in fact, a sprawling array of diverse media—in the public
imagination. Now continuing into its third decade on the air, the show’s
structure has remained largely unchanged and is reflected in a huge number
of popular programs across a global array of broadcasting networks. The
Real Housewives displays many hallmarks of internationally successful
docusoaps such as Jersey Shore and Keeping Up With the Kardashians: it
combines fly-on-the-wall footage with direct-to-camera interviews, narra-
tivizing its content through soap opera-esque edits and dramatic music.
A continuity of cast members between seasons charts their develop-
ment from ‘normal’ women to public figures, and in doing so the show
produces a self-reflexive documentation of the perks and pitfalls of Reality
TV fame. As their public profile increases, the women adapt their behavior
and appearance accordingly—original Orange County Housewife Lauri
Peterson describes the cast of season one as ‘virgin housewives’ who quickly
substituted ‘no make-up and sweatpants’ for more glamorous fare once
they witnessed themselves on screen (‘100th Episode Special’). Alongside the
manifest pressures of the film crew’s presence, the cameras of the paparazzi
eventually come to exert their influence. After encountering their mediated
representations the women react to their appearance on screen and in print,
and as viewers we witness the trajectory of this peculiar phenomenon. By
allowing the process of celebrification to feature within its tightly-edited
narratives The Real Housewives maintains a precarious link between Real-
ity and reality that carves its own space within a crowded genre whilst
simultaneously undermining its numerous, and necessary, fictions.1
Within the franchise, degrees of authenticity are modelled according
to the multiple footage types used, forming a Chinese box structure. Each
segment purports itself to be the location of authentic thoughts and feelings,
yet as these move outwards cast members reflexively analyze themselves
and others to reveal to their audience their ‘real’ opinions. Confessionals
reflect upon the core documentary footage, official blogs analyze episodes
as a whole and final reunions examine the contents of all three, during
100 Dan Udy
With its setting in the affluent Los Angeles suburb, The Real Housewives
of Beverly Hills is situated in the epicenter of the tabloid and entertain-
ment industries, an area housing major TV and film studios as well as
the headquarters of numerous print and digital media outlets. Its cast
are embedded within a social circle that features many high-prof ile
celebrities—current housewives Kim and Kyle Richards are aunts to
Paris Hilton—and interactions between its cast and tabloid journalists
or paparazzi occur with a higher frequency than other installments of
the franchise. Street photographers are evident as a peripheral element
of everyday life for the city’s wealthy residents, concentrated within
particular areas where the Housewives live and socialize. The relative
normalization of tabloid encounters amongst the residents of Beverly Hills
eases their transition into public figures, initiating conflicts and develop-
ing narratives with which audiences are able to directly engage. One
particular confrontation exemplifies the feedback loop between online
gossip and events within the show, and is constructed through a web of
dialogic exchange between cast members and journalists. Although it is
by no means the only instance of such conflict, it succinctly demonstrates
the complexities of this process.
In the reunion episode for season two, cast members Lisa Vanderpump
and Adrienne Maloof trade accusations regarding the selling of stories.
When Vanderpump alleges that Maloof’s chef leaked information to the
tabloids, the latter responds by claiming that Vanderpump had sold articles
to Radar Online for the amount of $25,000. For viewers wanting to decipher
the truth to these contradictory claims, the website itself posted articles
covering its inclusion in the episode:
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills all have one thing in common—they
love RadarOnline.com! In the reunion episode that aired Monday night,
Radar was the center of attention, because we apparently really get under
their skin. […]
So was Adrienne right? Did RadarOnline.com pay Lisa $25,000? Find the
answer on twitter at @IMPerel.
(‘Real Housewives Fight At Reunion—Over Radar!’)
After talking to both ladies, Perel figured out who had communicated
the false information to Adrienne and the air was cleared.
‘Thank u!! following you @IMPerel glad we can move on to more impor-
tant things! Have a great day!! XoxoA’
This season was hard on Adrienne, as you all know. A secret about her
family was revealed by Brandi. And from that moment on, Adrienne
refused to speak directly about it. We know that frustrated you in the
audience, and that frustrated all of us too. If you read the tabloids you
might have theories on what the secret is, but Adrienne won’t be here to
tell her side of the story. Not only is she absent tonight, but she won’t be
on the show next season. (‘Reunion: Part One’)
Her decision to abstain from the reunion was not followed by Paul Nassif,
Maloof’s then ex-husband from whom she announced her separation in
the season finale. Choosing to appear through a pre-recorded interview,
he dismissed the accusation propagated by his ex-wife that Glanville was
responsible for the breakdown of their marriage, instead blaming the moment
when ‘Reality became reality’ as a catalyst for his divorce (‘Reunion: Part Two’).
Here, the show’s construction of the Real forms a pattern of simultaneous
in-/exteriority. This transformation emerges again within case studies—Mit-
tel’s ‘historically specific moments’—that chart a broader unravelling of the
genre, where lawsuits from external individuals have been brought against
cast members, production companies and Bravo itself, causing fissures
within the precariously maintained docu-soap structure. These points of
rupture take the form of narrative voids which similarly led viewers to tabloid
websites in order to uncover the secrets of absent footage. Two examples from
seasons 4 and 5 of The Real Housewives of New Jersey differ in post-production
editing technique, ranging from a complete and seamless removal of foot-
age to explicit omissions that frame invisible content through remaining
shots. They both, however, share a degree of significance with regards to
the docusoap’s disintegration: they expose the means through which drama
is orchestrated, and the contractual agreements used to maintain control
over the cast, their mediated representations and, by extension, reality itself.
Whilst filming during a holiday in the Dominican Republic for season 4,
internet rumors began to spread of a large-scale brawl at the bar of the Hard
Rock Resort in Punta Cana, which culminated in the detainment of cast
members by local police (‘EXCLUSIVE’). In a 42-page complaint filed after
their return to the U.S., a vacationing family alleged that upon confronting
the cast when one of their party was sprayed with champagne
members of the cast and crew [...], without provocation, brutally and
savagely beat, kicked, punched, scratched, jumped on and smashed glass
on the heads of [the claimants] causing them to sustain severe pain and
suffering and bodily injuries. (‘EXCLUSIVE’)
Secre ts, Lies and The Real Housewives 107
The filing against Bravo and production company Sirens Media also alleged
that they
encourage, promote and demand that the cast [...] engage in verbal and
physical conflict with one another and members of the public, creating
a culture, climate and/or atmosphere of confrontation, hostility and
violence in order to attract viewers. (‘EXCLUSIVE’)
with the fraudulence of cast members’ affluent lifestyles. When The Real
Housewives of New Jersey stars Teresa and Joe Guidice were charged in July
2013 on a 39-count indictment of financial fraud, their legitimacy as cast
members—predicated upon displays of wealth and extravagance—was
quickly undermined. The pair were charged with conspiracy to commit
mail and wire fraud, bank fraud, lying on loan applications, bankruptcy
fraud and failure to file tax returns. After initially pleading not guilty, the
couple brokered a plea bargain in March 2014 admitting to a handful of
charges in exchange for reduced jail time, and at the time of writing are
currently awaiting sentencing.3 In an early stage of the proceedings, Bravo
were subpoenaed to submit hundreds of hours of unedited footage, and it is
through using the show itself as evidence in determining authenticity—or a
lack thereof—that the metaphysical negotiation embarked upon by cast and
audience is now transferred into the courts. The catastrophic impact of the
Guidice case upon The Real Housewives is manifest in subtle but significant
changes, and that such transformations work along and through the limita-
tions of genre is evidence of the docu-soap’s gradual disintegration. In the
final episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey season 5, the cut to a
montage of news coverage of the Giudice trial—covering events between
the end of shooting and the upcoming reunion—indicates a process of
breakdown, in which generic integrity is broken though appropriation of
alien media forms. 4 Subsequently, a disruption of layered temporalities
occurred in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 4, itself a season
revolving primarily around the drama caused by tabloid ‘lies’. At the end of
the final episode, a brief preview of the reunion show revealed the artifice of
this most ‘authentic’ element of the franchise, where backstage and behind-
the-scenes footage documented the women arriving at a studio lot, sitting in
hair and make-up and preparing for the upcoming conflicts during taping
(‘Reunion: Part One’). This breaking open of the Housewives structure moves
another degree closer to the documentary real, but in doing so continues
to lay bare its meticulous construction. It reveals the uneasy co-existence
of documentary and soap, in which the fashioning of entertainment from
the ‘authentic’ proves to be an endless cycle of self-sabotage. Where, then,
does the trajectory of this phenomenon point? Such outcomes can only
be hypothesized, and we must look towards our TV screens to watch the
answers unfold. What is apparent, though, is that we may just be witnessing
the death of an (un)popular genre.
110 Dan Udy
Notes
Works Cited
‘100th Episode Special.’ The Real Housewives of Orange County. Bravo. Season 8 Episode 13. 24 June
2013. Television.
‘Are You My Friend?’ The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Bravo. Season 4 Episode 19. 10 Mar. 2013.
Bruce, Leslie. ‘„Real Housewives“: The Guiltiest Pleasure on Television.’ The Hollywood Reporter
1 April 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Day, Elizabeth. ‘Scott Dunlop: “You can hate The Real Housewives but you can’t ignore it.”’ The
Observer 16 Feb. 2014: 16. Print.
‘EXCLUSIVE: Joe Giudice and NJ Housewives Cast Members Detained By Police Overseas After
Bar Fight.’ Radar Online. American Media. 16 Mar. 2011. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Hill, Annette. Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres.
London & New York: Routledge. 2007. Print.
Jones, Janet. ‘The Postmodern Guessing Game.’ Journal of Media Practice 1.2 (2000): 75–84. Print.
‘Lines in the Sand.’ The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Season 4 Episode 17. Bravo. 24 Feb.
2014. Television.
‘Lisa Vanderpump & Adrienne Maloof Feud Over Radar: All A Big Misunderstanding!’ Radar
Online. American Media. 1 Feb. 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
‘Manzo’s take Punta Cana by Storm: Legal Documents Reveal.’ Faux Reality Entertainment. 8
Oct. 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Mittell, Jason. ‘A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory.’ Cinema Journal 40.3 (2001):
3–24. Print.
‘Monster-In-Law! Kris Jenner Confesses SHE Planned Kanye West’s Proposal To Kim Kardashian
in Shocking New Court Documents.’ Radar Online. 11 Mar. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
‘Producer Testifies Under Oath: Kim Kardashian Faked Scenes to Make Kris Humphries Look
Bad!’ Radar Online. 13 Mar. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
‘Real Housewives Fight At Reunion—Over Radar!’ Radar Online. American Media. 31 Jan. 2012.
Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Secre ts, Lies and The Real Housewives 111
‘Reunion: Part One.’ The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Season 3 Episode 20. Bravo. 25 Mar.
2013. Television.
‘Reunion: Part One.’ The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Season 4 Episode 20. Bravo. 17 Mar.
2014. Television.
‘Reunion: Part Two.’ The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Season 3 Episode 21. Bravo. 1 Apr. 2013.
Television.
Richards, Kyle. Life Is Not a Reality Show: Keeping It Real with the Housewife Who Does it All. San
Francisco: HarperOne. 2011. Print.
Rose, Randall I., and Stacy I. Wood. ‘Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through
Reality Television.’ The Journal of Consumer Research 32.2 (2005): 284–96. Print.
‘Salon, Farewell.’ The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Season 5 Episode 18. Bravo. 29 Sep. 2013.
Television.
‘She’s Gone Too Far.’ The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Season 3 Episode 6. Bravo. 10 Dec.
2012. Television.
‘“We Can Fictionalize The Footage!”: Secret Contract Exposes How “Reality” TV Shows Are
REALLY Made.’ Radar Online. 23 Sep. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Karaoke Americanism Gangnam Style
K-pop, Wonder Girls, and the Asian Unpopular
The year: Unknown. The project W.G. is deemed a success as human genetics are
combined with robotic enhancements. Yubin. Yennie. Sohee. Lim. Sum. Bionic
women given the title of Wonder Girls. They are perfectly designed for complete
domination. The future is now.
— Wonder Girls featuring Akon, ‘Like Money’ (2012)
Since the late 1990s, the South Korean state has strongly supported its
creative industries, resulting in what has been termed ‘the Korean Wave’
(Hallyu). Initially propelled by popular television drama, the Korean Wave
soon included pop music, so-called K-pop (cf. Chua and Iwabuchi; Kim).
The Korean Wave challenged the hegemony of Japanese pop culture in
the region and constituted an important cultural force, termed soft power
by Nye that lasts till today (cf. Nye and Kim). In this way, popular culture
rather than neo-Confucianism connects cultures in East and South-East
Asia (cf, Chua), of which the Korean Wave serves as a prime example. The
dialectics between cultural proximity (a shared sense of ‘Asianness’) and
cultural difference—as reflected, for example, in the different seasons
(which, for example, do not exist in Singapore) or the Korean language—
help to explain the regional appeal of Korean pop culture. Yet, apart from
cultural factors, governmental and corporate support remains crucial
to the success of the Korean Wave. As Doobo Shim has pointed out, the
state’s creative policies were initially developed to protect the cultural
industries against ‘threats of foreign cultural domination’ (30). In terms
of political economy, a localist and protective rationale underpinned the
Korean Wave. That this would lead to regional success beyond national
borders was unintended and took the Korean government by surprise.
As Shim argues, ‘the vitality of East Asian popular culture is growing’,
with Japan, Thailand, and South Korea inspiring each other instead
116 Jeroen de Kloe t and Ja ap Kooijman
“authentic” in his or her own way’ (511-12). One important site for Rain to
construct his authenticity was his muscular body, reflective also of hard
work, an important value in Asian pop culture (cf. Chow and de Kloet), in
combination with his angelic face, a combination that has been hailed as
a new Asian masculinity (cf. Sun).
This development of an Asian masculinity, one that is far more sexy than
that of PSY, underlines the importance of sex and gender in the making
of a star. Given a generally more prudent attitude towards sexuality in
Asia, this makes Shih observe that for K-pop stars, ‘their images were more
“American (Western)” and less “Asian (Korean)”’, to such an extent that
‘the border-crossing appeal of Rain at the regional level came from his
“Asian” element, which is at best secondary’ (Shih 514). When going global,
however, the importance of Asianness returned with a vengeance. In the
West, Rain will be perceived an artist with an Asian background, to be
measured against the hegemonic standards of global (read Western) pop:
‘Asianness will only work if the artist does not care that his or her music
is to be pigeonholed as only “world music” searching for a niche market.
But that is another story, which is different from the world of pop music’
(Shih 516). Here, we would like to add that, indeed, Rain will be measured
against the standards of global pop, but this measurement is bound to be
filled with prejudice as artists from the non-West are de facto perceived
to lag behind. As Jeroen de Kloet explains elsewhere: ‘Creativities that
emerge outside the “West”, constantly carry the burden of geopolitical
representation as authenticating proof. Whereas “the West” can claim to
make universal rock music, in China, this has to be Chinese rock music. Idem
ditto for contemporary art, literature or cinema’ (7). The same argument
can be made about K-pop.
The erasure of Koreanness in K-pop acts like Rain and Wonder Girls can
be seen as clear examples of ‘odorless culture’, using the concept by Koichi
Iwabuchi. Their alleged lack of cultural characteristics aims to facilitate a
smooth travel across national and cultural boundaries. In a similar vein,
Kim argues that K-pop travels well globally, ‘precisely because there is
not very much Korean in K-pop that it can become such an easy sell to
consumers abroad’ (17). However, the lack of Koreanness in K-pop may
also feed the Western perspective of K-pop as a blank imitation, lagging
behind and lacking any local, exotic flavor. K-pop will, especially at a global
level, continue to be haunted by Koreanness, a haunting that is inevitable
given the bodily appearance of the performers. The odorless products
Iwabuchi referred to are all products that do not involve ‘real’ people:
they are consumer technologies, computer/video games, and comics and
118 Jeroen de Kloe t and Ja ap Kooijman
cartoons—all animate objects that are more easily to be stripped off their
Japaneseness than more ‘organic’ forms of popular culture. In the case
of K‑pop, the emphasis on the way K-pop stars are manufactured, thus
artificial constructions, helps to perceive them as ‘odorless’ and ‘inau-
thentic’, while at the same time rendering the Anglo-American ‘original’
as ‘authentic’.
As Shih explains in his analysis of the regional and (mostly failed) global
stardom of Rain, K-pop is just one new component of an already existing
Inter-Asia crisscross flow of pop culture. Chua Beng Huat analyzed this
emerging East and South East Asian cultural sphere and the related distribu-
tion of labor that turns some sites (e.g. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan)
into cultural producer and others (e.g. China and Singapore) into cultural
consumers. ‘The group of Korean cultural industries as its agencies, is just
a new player in this complex and multi-directional traffic’ (Shih 507). Can
the perpetually unpopular—Asian pop music is notoriously absent at a
global level, with only a few exceptions that are often instrumental (such
as ELO) or merely comical (such as PSY)—enter the domain of the popular?
As we have argued above, the chances are small, as the denial of coevalness
continues to haunt possible counterflows of cultural globalization. Non-
popular, non-Western pop products are generally perceived as mere copies,
based on originals that are already outdated. Only the sounds, images,
and styles that are geographically marked, and thus come to represent the
specific sound of a region, may cross the heavily policed boundaries of
Anglo-American pop culture.
To avoid perceiving K-pop—and Wonder Girls in particular—as
merely imitations of an Anglo-American original, we will use the concept
of karaoke Americanism—a term we borrow from film scholar Thomas
Elsaesser, who defines it as ‘that doubly coded space of identity as overlap
and deferral, as compliment and camouflage’ (317). Karaoke, not as actual
practice but as theoretical concept, is quite productive for two reasons:
first, karaoke is an active form of cultural appropriation, which enables
to move beyond the question whether or not the imitation is a successful
imitation of the original (as white male American music critics Jon Pareles
and John Seabrook assessed K-pop), as the focus shifts to how the copy
transforms the original in the new context; second, karaoke openly and
consciously uses the generic character of the original, thereby recognizing
rather than mystifying its construction. It is important to note that our aim
is not to ‘prove’ whether or not a pop-cultural object is a form of karaoke
Americanism, but rather to make the cultural appropriation visible by
perceiving the object as such (cf. Kooijman).
K ar aoke Americanism Gangnam St yle 119
The girl group Wonder Girls was launched in 2007 with the South Korean
reality television show MTV Wonder Girls, broadcast by MTV Korea, part of
the international yet US-based media conglomerate Viacom. Throughout
its four seasons, the show provided viewers with a backstage glimpse of
how pop stars are created, thereby not only following the group members
on their journey to stardom, but also functioning as a tool to promote the
group to its local and regional audience. In this way, the show both reveals
and is part of the construction of stardom. From the start, Wonder Girls
have been explicitly shaped by American pop culture. MTV Wonder Girls
is a Korean adaptation of the American MTV show Making The Band, and,
throughout the show, Wonder Girls perform songs by American artists,
such as Janet Jackson and the American girl groups Destiny’s Child and
the Pussycat Dolls. In the show’s third season, Wonder Girls travel to New
York City to film the music video to their song ‘Wishing On A Star’, thereby
literally occupying the space of ‘real’ Anglo-American pop stardom. Also
the group name is an explicit reference to American pop culture, referring
to Dreamgirls, the 2006 movie starring Beyoncé, which in turn is based
on the 1981 Broadway that presented a fictional account of the 1960s girl
group Diana Ross and the Supremes. The connection is made explicit by
the Wonder Girls, as the song ‘We Are The Dreamgirls’ from the musical
is often included in their live performances. Moreover, the music video of
their biggest hit single ‘Nobody’ also refers to Dreamgirls.
‘Nobody’ is a ‘typical idol K-pop, bubblegum pop song’ (Jung 110), which
was released first in Korea in 2008 and became a major hit in South-East
Asia. In addition to the version sung in South Korean, ‘Nobody’ was also
released in American English (2009), Chinese (2010), and Japanese (2012).
In each version, the choruses are sung in English, with the verses in the
respective language. The Dreamgirls-inspired music video was used for
the first three versions (resulting in some lip-synching inconsistencies),
while a new music video was shot for the Japanese version. In Dancing in
the Distraction Factory, Andrew Goodwin makes a distinction between the
visual narrative—the fictional short story told by the music video—and the
metanarrative of stardom of its performer. He uses Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’
as an example of a music video in which the performer’s star text is most
significant, as the main narrative function of the music video was ‘shifting
Madonna’s image from that of disco-bimbo to “authentic” star’ (100). The
music video of ‘Nobody’ has a similar function, as the fictional story of their
discovery is used to present Wonder Girls as global ‘authentic’ pop stars to
120 Jeroen de Kloe t and Ja ap Kooijman
both Asian and Western audiences. The ‘Nobody’ music video was used as a
main promotional tool to introduce the group in the America in 2009, when
Wonder Girls were the opening act on the US tour of the popular American
boy band the Jonas Brothers. Not surprisingly then, ‘Nobody’ became their
biggest hit single in the US.
After the non-diegetic text ‘JYP Entertainment: Leader in entertainment’,
the music video opens with a performance of ‘Honey’ by JYP (the artist name
of producer Jin-Young Park, who had a minor hit with the song in 1998) with
the five Wonder Girls in white dresses performing the backing vocals. The
setting is the 1960s and clearly inspired by Dreamgirls, with JYP in the role
of soul singer Jimmy Early (played by Eddie Murphy in the movie) and the
Wonder Girls as the Dreamettes. The performance by ‘Honey’ is followed by
a flash forward to rehearsal time, during which two producers approach JYP
with the sheet music of a ‘hot new song’ named ‘Nobody’, which JYP tries to
sing in a high-pitched voice, with Wonder Girls dancing in the background.
This backstory establishes JYP as the song’s lead vocalist, and Wonder Girls
as the backing vocals, while also illustrating the production of pop culture:
producers in black suits bring the music score to the vocalist, who becomes
more like a laborer, the one performing the song, without any involvement
in its creation. Moreover, the backstage rehearsal of the song implicates the
audience in the production of pop culture and helps to authenticate the
song. The leading role of the producers in the creation of the song is rendered
even more self-reflexive given that JYP is the ‘real’ manager of Wonder Girls.
The subsequent flash forward shows Wonder Girls on stage, dressed in gold,
ready to perform, intercut with images of JYP stuck in the toilet, as there
is no toilet paper left. While JYP fails to come to the stage, Wonder Girls
pick up their microphones and move them front stage to perform the song
instead. They become instant stars. Here the music video’s visual narrative
closely resembles the story of Dreamgirls, as similar to the Dreamettes who
become the Dreams when they move from the background to the front of
the stage, Wonder Girls become the main stars of the show.
In reinterpreting the discovery of the ‘Dreamgirls’, the music video evokes
the success myth of stardom, which, as Richard Dyer has argued, mystifies
the construction of the star image by emphasizing the accidental discovery
of the talented star—stars are born, not made (cf. Dyer 42). The conventional
narrative of the soda-fountain girl becoming the hottest Hollywood film
star, or, in this case, the background singers becoming stars because the
main act is stuck in the toilet, adds to the myth of stardom. The backstory
takes up the first two minutes of the music video, followed by another
two minutes of the 1960s Wonder Girls performing ‘Nobody’ on stage. The
K ar aoke Americanism Gangnam St yle 121
Thainess. Karaoke is doing just that: it is copying with a twist, it allows for
slippages of meaning that hold the potential for a renewed politics, a politics
that was not that much at play in the original reception of the song. But, as
Käng observes, these politics in the end resulted in a growing critique on
the music video, suggesting that the securing of heteronormativity in the
end prevailed, as did the critique on imitation and copying. Yet, Wonder Gay
also speaks back to the ‘original’, re-infecting it with a sense of queerness as
well. After all, after seeing Wonder Gay, Wonder Girls are also queered. As
such, cultural karaoke inspires us to focus our attention not only on cultural
appropriations and slippages of meaning that take place in processes of
cultural globalization, but also vice versa, it may help us to rethink the
original itself.
Translate to English
In 2012, Wonder Girls released the music video ‘Like Money’, featuring the
African-American R&B singer Akon. The song was part of the television
movie The Wonder Girls, made for the US American TeenNick channel,
like MTV owned by Viacom. The movie, which also starred producer JYP
as ‘himself’, tells the story of how the ‘international pop sensation [Wonder
Girls] are coming to America to make it big’. The opening of the video is
telling for their global aspirations. A screen flickers, and in Korean 전송시작
( jeonsongsijag) appears, after which a robotic voice commands ‘Translate.
Translate to English’. Then, the translation appears on the screen: ‘Transmis-
sion Begin’. What this opening suggests is that in order to make it globally, a
translation into the lingua franca of global pop, English, is pivotal. As such,
the opening reads as a surrender to the hegemony of Anglo-American pop.
The robot as well as the technologized visuals gesture towards a techno-
orientalism, a conventional trope in which East Asia is constructed as the
technological other of the West (cf. Morley and Robins). The robot voice
continues by speaking the words with which we opened this chapter, ending
with: ‘[Wonder Girls] are perfectly designed. Perfectly designed for complete
domination. The future is now’.
Meanwhile, the music video shows x-rays of the spines of each of the
Wonder Girls, overseen by a Frankenstein doctor (played by producer
Jin-Young Park). When they are introduced one by one, they appear as
robot-like Korean girls, and are turned around as if they are transported
from or towards another dimension. Here, the laboratory that produces
pop stars is not even taken as a metaphor but presented as the real thing.
124 Jeroen de Kloe t and Ja ap Kooijman
The manufacturing of the pop star aims at complete domination, the future
is now, and the future comes from Korea. Only not quite, as the texts are
spoken and sung in English, and the African-American singer Akon is
inserted as if to further Americanize the song. Who dominates who in this
music video, or better, in this manufactured commodity? The song’s title is
ambivalent: are Wonder Girls a purely commercial product, and thus like
money, or do they like money themselves? Again, like ‘Nobody’ the music
video is highly self-reflexive, literarily showing the production of stardom,
this time not by accidental discovery conform to the star myth, but by the
forces of genetic and robotic technology.
Wonder Girls may be designed for complete domination, but in the
end, they fail to dominate, again raising the question of who dominates
who. As Eun-Young Jung argues, ‘Wonder Girls’ “Like Money” is mostly an
American team production—reflecting the American racial and sexual
views on Asian women and the Korean (at least JYP’s) desire to be accepted
by the mainstream US pop market even if they have to greatly compromise
themselves to be racially, sexually, and musically acceptable’ (112). Moreover,
as we have argued in this chapter, despite their attempts to become ‘Ameri-
can’, to produce an odorless image and sound, Wonder Girls continue to be
haunted by Koreanness. The politics of karaoke Americanism may play out
more interestingly both nationally, in South Korea, and regionally, in East
and South-East Asia, as the case of Wonder Gay has illustrated, but when
it comes to the desire to enter the US-based center of global pop the cards
are quite differently played out. Then and there, Wonder Girls are bound to
be framed as lagging behind, as being pop, but not quite, as becomes clear
in some comments about ‘Like Money’ on YouTube:
Seriously, why?! take K-pop, add an American rapper and take away all
the Korean and there’s no way to differentiate it from all that Mainstream
shit that comes out nowadays. I don’t want this to he considered part of
the K-pop scene... I think it’s embarrassing...
I’m glad for their American debut though... at least they made it this far…
(AliceWWND)
Honestly, whoever chose the concept for this debut was insane; who
in their right mind would use robots and technology as a concept for a
music video in America, lol. Let alone the fact that the girls look so weird
with those hairstyles, outfits and make-up, Be My Baby would’ve been a
better debut to be honest. Besides, Akon sings/raps like 50% of the song,
so… (Jessicasadlibs) 1
K ar aoke Americanism Gangnam St yle 125
The first quote puts the group back in their Korean cage, claiming that
Wonder Girls have lost it as they betray their cultural background, whereas
the second quote is illustrative of the assertion that they in any case lag
behind and need the input of an American star to make it work. And it
did not really work, in the end. Karaoke Americanism may thus help us
to understand and indeed appreciate the multiple cultural translations
and appropriations that are happening between Anglo-American pop
culture and its countless cultural ‘others’ around the globe. It sets in motion
subsequent cultural translations that hold the potential to ignite political
debate and controversy. But when it comes to speak back to that imagined
origin, the United States, we are confronted with mere silence, in the end,
global hegemonic fault lines in the production of culture remain in place,
positioning time and again the West as the best, only to be followed by
the rest.
At this moment, K-pop acts such as Wonder Girls find themselves positioned
in between the two poles embodied by Diana Ross and PSY, as presented at
the beginning of this chapter, as they are deemed to be either an outdated
copy of an American original (the girl group image represented by Ross and
Beyoncé) or an exotic, Korean novelty act. However, at the end of the day,
the new sounds of K-pop, these original copies, these absolute fabrications,
are not likely to become popular beyond their cultural comfort zone. While
Wonder Girls sing ‘I want nobody nobody but you’, we can imagine their
American counterparts singing back, ‘We want nobody nobody but us’. After
all, despite decades of intense globalization and significant geopolitical
shifts, we are bound to conclude that Anglo-American pop culture remains
hegemonic on the global scale. When taking the US as the yardstick of
success, the rest, and especially the non-West, remains unpopular, with the
exception of a few one hit wonders like PSY that make us dance Gangnam
Style.
But this might well be too gloomy a conclusion. We would like to close
this chapter with three brief observations that may open up avenues for
future research. First, as Jeroen de Kloet’s research into Chinese popular
culture suggests, a significant change has taken place over the past two
decades. Whereas Chinese rock bands during the 1990s were still very
much engaged with making rock with Chinese characteristics, involving
articulations of ancient as well as communist China, today it seems they
126 Jeroen de Kloe t and Ja ap Kooijman
care much less. They sing in English, adopt a clearly cosmopolitan style, and
parody the predicament that they will always be seen as copycats. The ‘rise
of Asia’ comes with an increased dose of cultural self-confidence. Today,
Asian artists seem to care less about what others think of them, nor are they
so much concerned with making it in the West, or more precisely, in the
United States. Their primary market is the local and the regional market.
To reach that market, creative practices of karaoke Americanism, as we
have analyzed in this chapter, continue to be a productive aesthetics tactic.
Second, in a context of an increased fragmentation of cultural production
and consumption, numerous niche cultures proliferate globally, including,
for example, around Japanese anime culture, around the Japanese musical
genre of Visual Kei, around Chinese art house movies, and around K-pop.
These subcultures may not be massively popular, but they do result in
vibrant cultural practices, Facebook pages have emerged globally where
K-pop fans gather, just as German Visual Kei bands attract substantial
attention. Such subcultural, rather than mainstream popular, counterflows
may indicate a slow and gradual redrawing of cultural hegemonies, in which
the popular and the West do not conflate as strong anymore as they do now.
Third, Japanese hologram star Hatsune Miku has performed in Los Ange-
les as well as Amsterdam, aside from her fan base in East Asia. The star does
not exist; she is just a visual illusion projected on stage, together with a live
band. Through specific software applications, audiences have co-written
her songs that she now plays. The star as a personal being is not needed
any more; what matters is the audience that co-produces the star, together
with cloud technologies developed by the cultural industries. While we do
want to steer away from either a technological utopianism or determinism
here, what Hatsune Miku does tell us is how new technologies may open up
possibilities for a global participation in the making and branding of a star
and a star product. This alludes to the democratic potential Walter Benjamin
already traced in the mechanical reproduction of culture, a potential that
may well be globalized in the case of digital reproduction. Hatsune Miku
illustrates that audiences may in the near future play a more decisive role
in what constitutes the popular, and in this process, the location of the
audience, or that of the star, may become less important, thus also allowing
for a redrawing of global geocultural boundaries.
Note
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Shahaf. London: Routledge, 2012. 260–81. Print.
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of Sound and Image. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. Print.
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5.2 (2004): 200–21. Print.
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Sentiments and Effects.’ East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Ed. Chua Beng
Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2008. 1–12. Print.
De Kloet, Jeroen Looking for a Gown: Creative Production in a Mimetic World. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam UP, 2014. Print. Available online at http://oratiereeks.nl/upload/pdf/PDF-
2229weboratie_JdK.pdf
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UP, 2005. Print.
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‘When order is lost, time spits’
The Abject Unpopular Art of Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge
Florian Zappe
stood for beat and rock music, poster art, the flower child cult and the
drug scene—indeed for any manifestation of ‘subculture’ and ‘under-
ground’. In short, pop became the synonym for the new life style of the
younger generation, a life style which rebelled against authority and
sought liberation from the norms of existing society. (141)
Especially in its first, idealistic phase3 pop culture held the utopian promise
of constituting a counter-space to mainstream bourgeois culture. As the
130 Florian Zappe
analytical tradition of the Birmingham School (and its followers) has shown,
it could serve as a door-opener for alternative models of recognition, com-
munity, self-expression, meaning-production and, after all, identity. The
blueprint narrative of that identity discourse was (and to a large extent still
is) that of the rebel who resists institutionalized and structural authority
and frees himself from the constraints imposed on him by a society he feels
deeply alienated from. The archetypical subject of pop strives, as Patti Smith
programmatically shouted in her iconic 1978 song ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Nigger’, for
an existence ‘outside of society’.
Since the mid-twentieth century, pop culture has provided an enduring
and ever-adjustable myth of liberation around this rebellious outsider and
sold it (in any sense of the word) to its audiences in various guises: the at-
tractive juvenile delinquent, the sophisticated beatnik, the hyper-masculine
biker, the hedonistic hippie drop-out, the cool mod, the libertine rock star,
the desirable pop starlet, the tough-minded gangster rapper—just to name
a few stereotypes.
Yet, this myth is problematic for a variety of reasons. As poststructural-
ism’s analysis of the power structures in Western societies has shown, its
reigning logic based on an ‘inside vs outside’ binarism cannot serve as a
successful strategy of resistance against what Gilles Deleuze described
as the all-embracing web of micro-power regimes that govern our late
capitalist ‘societies of control’. 4 From this perspective, any notion of an
authentic, uncorrupted ‘outside of society’—pop culture being, of course,
just one of many discourses claiming to be a manifestation of such a cultural
realm—appears to be just another normative discourse in disguise. All the
archetypical rebellious identity models mentioned above are themselves
ruled by their respective micro-regimes of normative control in regard to
behavior, body politics, and codes of signification. And even the grand nar-
rative of an essential counter-identity itself carries—in its negative fixation
to the (petty-)bourgeois mainstream it claims to reject—the inherent risk
of morphing into an oppressive ideological dualism.
In the light of this insight, one of the few remaining possibilities for
cultural opposition appears to be the striving for alternative concepts of
subjectivity and identity that have the potential to elude the incorporation
into the binary logic that equally governs our hegemonial culture as well
as our countercultures. These alternatives must avoid the pitfall of an all
too simple apotheosis of the clear-cut difference of ‘the Other’ but embrace
the complexity of hybridity, ambivalence and contradiction.
A variety of viable attempts have been made—both in cultural theory
and practice—to frame such a cultural territory. One is the category of the
‘When order is lost, time spits’ 131
‘abject’ that was defined by Julia Kristeva in her seminal essay Powers of
Horror as that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (4).
As this volume seeks to explore the ‘unpopular’ as the excluded middle
between the cultural realms of ‘high’ and ‘popular’ I will propose a defini-
tion of this middle as the abject space of popular culture. Its inhabitants
employ the classic mechanisms and media channels of popular culture:
they write books, produce films, form bands, release records or play live
concerts. However, with regard to their identity politics and aesthetics
they actively try to elude the traditional forms of incorporation (such as
canonization, commodification, etc.) by employing abjection as a strategy to
provide their audiences with aesthetic experiences that cause a radical and
enduring disturbance of established cultural—also subcultural—concepts
of meaning and identity.
According to Kristeva’s initial psychoanalytical definition, the term
‘abjection’ refers to a feeling of repulsion or nausea that emerges in the face
of decay, filth, body excretions, torn tissue, sickness, effects of violence, the
grotesque, the monstrous, the ugly, etc.—without a doubt highly unpopular
themes that are usually kept outside of everyday experience, concealed un-
der the blanket of societal norms, confined to the realm of the unspeakable.
But if this blanket is lifted and the individual is confronted with these taboo
aspects of life, the experience of the abject, of that what is ‘neither subject
nor object’ (Kristeva 1), has the power to disarrange the clear structures
that define the cultural framework of meaning that we live in.
Megan Becker-Leckrone notes that ‘[a]bjection is, for Kristeva, an ex-
perience of unmatched primordial horror, putting the subject in the most
devastating kind of crisis imaginable; but ultimately, certain modes of
discourse have found a way of speaking that horror instead of repressing
it’ (20). ‘Abject unpopular culture’, as I define it, can be understood as that
particular ‘mode of discourse’ that uses the expressive forms of pop(ular)
culture to articulate this staggering abhorrence of unpopular things and the
existential shock experience provoked by them. By undermining binarisms
such as self/other, inside/outside or the fundamental distinction of subject
and object that forms the basis of every process of subject formation, the
abject has the capability to cause a mind altering experience that upsets the
notions of subjectivity and individual identity that are constructed within
established bourgeois as well as popular culture.
Pop culture’s Promethean rebellious archetypes embody the utopia of an
authentic counter-subjectivity in a space of freedom that is often defined
as the antithesis of one of mainstream culture’s most powerful ideological
132 Florian Zappe
II
COUM Transmissions also managed to disturb the segment of the art world
that—by self-definition—considered itself as the most radical rim of the
avant-garde of that time. The group’s efficacy in this regard can be traced
back to the extreme modalities in which their performances emphasized
the materiality of the body. The concept of the abject is undeniably and by
nature always closely tied to the corporeal. In the context of the discussion
of the collective’s politics of abjection, however, Hanjo Berressem’s distinc-
tion between the terms ‘abjection’6 to describe ‘the production of disgust
from “abjection”, the cultural marking of eventsǀobjects as disgusting’ and
‘abjects’ as a term ‘to highlight the materiality of what is normally called
“the abject”’ (19) can provide valuable insights.
Whereas many so-called ‘abject’ artists evoke the feeling of abjection
on the symbolic or metaphorical level, COUM Transmissions played on
both fields by dealing with ‘abject’ themes on the level of representation
(e.g. by employing sexually explicit imagery with the capability to evoke
abjection) but also by staging ‘abjects’, which are, according to Berressem,
always ‘extremely, one might even say excessively, material’ (21) and defined
by certain characteristic attributes:
I used to do things like stick severed chickens’ heads over my penis, and
then try and masturbate them, whilst pouring maggots all over it. […]
I drank a bottle of whisky and stood on a lot of tacks. And then I gave
myself enemas with blood, milk and urine, and then broke wind so a jet
‘When order is lost, time spits’ 135
of blood, milk and urine combined shot across the floor in front of Chris
Burden and assorted visual artists. I then licked it off the floor, which was
a not-clean concrete floor. Then I got a 10-inch nail and tried to swallow
it, which made me vomit. Then I licked the vomit off the floor and Cosey
helped me lick the vomit off the floor. And she was naked and trying to
sever her vagina to her navel with a razor blade, and she injected blood
into her vagina which then trickled out, and we then sucked the blood
from her vagina into a syringe and injected it into eggs painted black,
which we then tried to eat. […] Chris Burden, who’s known for being
outrageous, walked out with his girlfriend, saying, ‘This is not art, this is
the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, and these people are sick’. (qtd.
in Vale and Juno 17)
What Burden (who, as a key figure of the Body Art movement, was himself
no stranger to abject performances) and the other audience members expe-
rienced in this performance is what Berressem called ‘a moment of abject
verité’ that is defined by the fact that it ‘pushes abjection beyond the level
of the representational logic’ and refers it ‘back to the level of pure physics’
where it cannot be read as ‘either fictional or as a special eǀaffect’ (20).
In the light of the Foucauldian insight that identity is a power effect
inscribed in and on the body, this radical exploration of physical boundaries
in its auratic materiality inevitably raises the general question of the perme-
ability of identity constructs. The complete collapse of the inside/outside
logic of the culturally coded system of normalized corporeality retroacts
with the subjectivity of both the performer and the viewer, because, as Ber-
ressem aptly puts it, ‘abjects are related to material operations that threaten
the material as well as the psychic organisation of a human system’ (42).
III
of “paying your dues, man”; of being “on the road”—rock ‘n’ roll as a career
being worthwhile in itself, and all that shit’ (qtd. in Vale and Juno 10).
As P-Orridge himself has pointed out, founding a band was intended to
be a deliberate move away from the self-centered art world into the sphere
of the popular:
This digression from an elitist ‘high-brow’ cultural scene that had been
growingly infested by the hype about radical performance art such as
Fluxus, the Viennese actionists or the Body Art movement was an intended
democratization, an attempt to overcome bigger audiences’ inhibitions in
terms of intellectual accessibility and reception context.
It is no coincidence that new phenomena like Industrial or Punk emerged
at a time when the vanguard momentum of pop culture showed signs of
serious exhaustion: ‘As a mass-marketed form of rebellious individualism,
rock and roll culture has always peddled the “won’t be fooled again” consola-
tion prize to its consumers, but by the late seventies, the self-reflexive folds
within its inner logic traded the oppositional ambitions (the “counter” in
“counterculture”) for a comfy brand of elitist quietism’ (Daniel 87).
Throbbing Gristle’s injection of those abject themes and aesthetics—
which have proved to work in the art context—into the system of pop
aimed at revitalizing its worn-out vanguard impulse by willfully shocking
its audiences out of their comfort zones. Simultaneously, their persistent
implementation of abject strategies and the fact that ‘they always remained
a far more conceptual entity than the overwhelming majority of popular
music acts’ (Kromhout 26) rendered Throbbing Gristle a more ‘unpopular’
than ‘popular’ pop band, as the group’s biographer Simon Ford noted:
In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz,
I see a heap of children’s shoes, or something like that, something I have
already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I be-
lieve. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in
any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed
to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things. (4)
IV
If we shift our focus from the content level towards the sonic and performa-
tive aesthetics of Throbbing Gristle, we will recognize a subversion of a
traditional cathartic function of rhythm and music in regard to the abject
that Kristeva traces back to Aristotle:
Rhythm and song hence arouse the impure, the other of mind, the
passionate-corporeal-sexual-virile, but they harmonize it [...]. They thus
soothe frenzied outbursts […] by contributing an external rule, a poetic
one, which fills the gap […] between body and soul. (Kristeva 28)
Their performative and sonic disruption of the external rule of music over
the body again serves the group’s overall attack on identity constructs in
general. Reed notes correctly that ‘[t]he normativity they seek to dismantle
is not to be replaced with a new standard, for that would just be as tyran-
nical’ (83). Instead, they advocate an ‘ever shifting absence’ (Reed 83), a
domain of constant becoming—not in a nihilistic void, however, but along
the lines of appropriated and rearranged cultural signifiers. P-Orridge him-
self poetically envisioned such a realm in a text published in the German
underground magazine Gasolin 23:
‘When order is lost, time spits’ 141
This employment of the disruptive power of the abject for the total confu-
sion of the codes of the socio-cultural imaginary established by orthodox
pop narratives and the deconstruction of the rock star archetype have
to be understood in the larger context of the overriding identity politics
P-Orridge followed in all his artistic endeavors, from COUM Transmissions
to Throbbing Gristle and also his later, more occult/esoteric band Psychic
TV, which, according to Reed, ‘was conceived as a fully multimedia project,
integrating music [...], video […], and a philosophical propaganda wing, Thee
Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY)’ (142).
For P-Orridge—as for Throbbing Gristle—the notion of a subject,
regardless if positioned inside or outside the mainstream, cannot entail
true liberation as it remains caught up in the binary system of either/or
or subject/object. So for them, the idea of an essential fixed subjectivity
itself has to be attacked. In a fragment of what presumably is a television
interview with Psychic TV from the early 1980s, P-Orridge elaborates on
this philosophy:
Well the I is what we call the flat people who assume that the person that
they’ve been donated by social conditioning is a one dimensional actual
person. The We is how we see the world which is that everybody is made
up of lots and lots of different personalities, fantasies, [and] attitudes,
and that a multi-personality is in fact the reality, not the I personality...
(‘PTV Interview’)
Staging the ‘abject’ in the domain of the popular is one promising strategy
to evoke this multifaceted notion of the ‘multi-personality’ as
[t]he abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed
to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the
fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes
142 Florian Zappe
Inspired by the language of true love and frustrated by what they felt to
be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity, Genesis and Lady
Jaye applied the ‘cut-up’ to their own bodies in an effort to merge their
two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing
and altered behavior, into a single, ‘pandrogynous’ character, ‘BREYER P-
ORRIDGE’. This project focused on one central concern—deconstructing
the fiction of self. (genesisbreyerporridge.com)
only implicit (or “virtual”) that releases new powers in the capacities of
those bodies to act and respond’ (Lorraine 145).
Art and music to h/er (as s/he prefers to be referred to since the beginning
of the Pandrogyny project) are therefore not primarily modes of expres-
sion—that would presuppose the idea of the ‘I’ of a speaking subject—but
means of communication of this escape route from what s/he perceives
as the prison-house of a fixed and unified identity, a narrative that also
governs traditional pop culture.
Certainly, the growing recognition of Throbbing Gristle as an important
cultural influence on a variety of rock music subgenres and especially
Breyer P-Orridge’s ever increasing canonization in the art world raise the
question of whether h/er strategies can effectively work as a form of cultural
resistance. To answer that problem, we might again draw on Berressem, who
stresses that abjection as a counter-cultural strategy can escape incorpora-
tion if it leaves the level of the symbolic and turns to the materiality of the
body:
Notes
8. Especially the fact that the genre was and is up to this day predominantly
white and masculine—the two central attributes of every fascist identity
narrative—in many ways obstructs the use of its aesthetics for other forms
of identity politics.
9. Of course, this characterization would also apply to other phallocentric
forms of pop(ular) cultural rebellion such as Hip Hop.
10. Throbbing Gristle existed from 1975 to 1981 and reunited in 2004 until Chris-
topherson’s death in 2010 put a definitive end to this project. After a first
phase of existence from 1982 to 1999, Breyer P-Orridge revived h/er Psychic
TV project in 2003. It is active to this day.
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Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Ed. Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika
Mueller. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 19–48. Print.
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Koenig Books, 2012. 25–34. Print.
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‘Famous in a Small Town’
The Authenticity of Unpopularity in Contemporary Country
Music1
Christian Schmidt
In this essay, I aim to analyze the intricate ways in which popularity and
unpopularity are—perhaps oxymoronically—part and parcel of contempo-
rary country music. Importantly, I focus on commercially successful forms
of country music and thus deal with a musical genre that is truly popular
in one sense of the term at the same time as it thrives on its self-conscious
distance from the perceived artificiality of popular culture and aims to
establish itself as the true music of the common American folk—truly
popular music in a slightly different understanding of the term. In this
context, any study of contemporary commercial country music—thus
my claim—needs to come to grips not only with the ways in which the
music taps into a discourse of American popular culture, but also with its
self-styling as this popular culture’s unpopular other. Even though country
music truly is popular music, it relishes an image of un‑popularity that
stands in marked contrast to common ideas about popular music. At least in
part, it does so by staging a notion of authentic Southern and Dixie identity
that is constructed in and through the music and its visual representation in
music videos. If we add to this claim Frith’s by-now classical observation that
‘popular music is popular not because it reflects something, or authentically
articulates some sort of popular taste or experience, but because it creates
our understanding of what popularity is’ (‘Towards’ 137), the interesting
question remains: what identity does country music create and construct?
And how does this idea relate to the notion of unpopularity rather than
popularity as well? In an attempt to provide partial answers to these ques-
tions, this paper analyzes how country music constructs the idea of a truth,
a real thing behind the music, in the first place, and how this produced
notion of the real takes the form of proudly unpopular forms of cultural
expression. Country music, I argue, constructs a notion of authentic identity
that is both widely unpopular and that plays with the image of country as
popularity’s metronormative other, in Judith Halberstam’s terminology. In
order to do justice to country’s simultaneous popularity and unpopularity,
my reading will argue that country music is popular culture, yet at the same
time pinpoint the particular strategies used by the country music industry,
148 Christian Schmidt
its artists, and its audiences to mark their distance to it and construct an
image of country music as the more authentic counterpart to supposedly
artificial popular culture.2
of rural, small-town people, the common folk; yet, such an analysis falls
short when we consider country music’s often implicit claim to being the
American music, of its being the soundtrack of American life more widely
understood. As George Bush, Sr. phrased this when he declared October
1991 ‘Country Music Month’ during the height of the first Gulf War: ‘Of
course, while country music speaks from the heart of the American people,
it has—like liberty itself—a great and universal appeal’ (qtd. in Mann 74).
Yet, while country music speaks to and for all American people, it also
restricts itself to being the music of the ‘Little Man’, as Alan Jackson sang
in his 1999 hit single of that title. Thus, country music epitomizes a form
of self-consciously unpopular culture: it is a highly commercialized genre
with immense sales figures and wide outreach and, as such, part and parcel
of contemporary American popular culture. At the same time, however,
everybody involved in it views this very popularity highly skeptically,
since country music quickly runs the risk of selling out the interests of
the small folk for whom it has to speak and sing. Despite its wide-ranging
popularity and in spite of its own self-fashioning as the music of the people,
country music is seldom mentioned, and even more rarely actually analyzed,
when it comes to discussions of American popular music and culture. As
literary critic Barbara Ching observes in her analysis of hard country and
contemporary culture, country music is ‘one of the most popular forms
of music in the United States’ yet at the same time has not ‘figured in any
of the now canonical discussions of postmodernity’ (Wrong’s 3). And she
goes on to argue that this observation is indicative of ‘just how remote
country music is from intellectual discourse, and thus how overlooked it is
in contemporary cultural politics’ (3). Why is one of the most popular genres
of music so decidedly unpopular both with academics and ‘the people’ in
a broader sense? And why are there still strong prejudices in place against
country music as hopelessly outdated, decidedly un-hip, something from
which it is better to distance oneself? Furthermore, why is country music
proud of this very unpopularity? In this paper, I want to shed some light on
the ways in which country music is a form of such unpopular culture and
in doing so answer the question implied in my title: Why is country music
so dang proud of only being famous in a small town?
that at the same time claims to speak for the average, common Ameri-
can as it refuses to be popular. This entails a self-positioning in explicit
contradistinction to all other forms of popular culture in that it rejects
the rules of pop stardom, the musical market, and the like. At the same
time, however, the music also sets itself in explicit contrast to so-called
high-culture and any form of elitist presumptions. The prime example for
this can be gleaned from one of the oldest institutions of country music: the
Grand Ole Opry, whose very name marks an explicit distinction from opera
as the prototypical example of high culture. In 1925, WSM’s barn dance got
its moniker to differentiate between the rich people’s opera and the folks’
grand ole opry, while also creating a rural, Southern identity in opposition to
urban forms of popular culture. From its inception, then, country music has
operated in opposition to both high culture and mass culture and thus in the
space of unpopularity. As Lüthe and Pöhlmann state in their introduction,
unpopular cultures are productive rather than expressive of identities, and
they argue: ‘If popular culture—just as much as high culture—is being
used to create the people in the first place, not as a culture for the people
but a culture constructing the people as a people by giving them a history
and an identity, the unpopular culture is the disruptive element in this
construction, resisting its homogenizations and omissions, opposing the
complete smoothing of a striated cultural space’ (27). In the context of
my discussion of country music, I take this to mean that constructing the
country folk as unpopular establishes the music as a ‘thorn in the side of
the mainstream’ (Lüthe and Pöhlmann 9) as it sonically creates a rural
Southern identity to oppose a homogenized national culture that I will
describe in Halberstam’s terminology as metronormative. This, of course,
complicates constructions of American (popular) identities, if we bear in
mind that country music establishes itself as simultaneously popular and
unpopular. Contrary to what the editors observe in their introduction,
however, country music, as the popular unpopular, does not ‘sing the songs
nobody else wants to sing, [nor does it] show the world what it does not
want to see’ (27). Rather, it creates a particular notion of the people as pop
culture’s other, but does so not from a subaltern position but from the space
of the (silent) majority—and this population does want to hear and sing
these very songs, in fact needs to hear these songs in order to make sense
of themselves in today’s world. In order to do that, the music clings to a
nostalgic version of a past that never was in order to give the people exactly
what they want and need.
Aaron Fox has convincingly shown that country music defines itself as
music of, by, and for the common folk, the people, and thus is popular music
152 Christian Schmidt
in its most basic definition. In addition, however, country music, more than
any other genre of commercial music, sets itself up as the other of popular
music. In Fox’s words, it stylizes itself as a form of ‘abject’ culture, which
relishes its own status as self-avowedly ‘bad’ and unpopular music by speak-
ing from the much disabused subject position of what Wray and Newitz call
‘white trash’.6 More generally speaking, country music is widely perceived
as a genre that is decidedly unpopular, antiquated, uncool, something to
be ashamed—rather than proud—of. In her study of country’s perceived
otherness, Hubbs argues that a ‘taste for country music is the failure of
taste that flags a lack of moral value’ (41) since a declaration of distaste for
the music, in this context, ‘appears first and foremost as a gesture of social
exclusion. Musical exclusion is secondary, a vehicle and symptom’ (24).
In short, country music is unpopular not because of any inherent musical
flaws, but rather due to what it is perceived to stand for.7 To urban, Northern,
non-country ears, the music appears as ‘dumb, reactionary, sentimental,
maudlin, primitive, and so forth’ as they ‘hear a commodification and cheap-
ening of the same supposed folksy authenticity that so disgusts [them]’
(Ching, ‘Acting Naturally’ 231). Ching calls this the ‘double bind of rustic
authenticity’ (232); that is to say, the music either crudely represents the
rustic life of rural America (and is thus nothing but folklore) or represents
failed attempts at creating the impression of such an authenticity (and is
therefore, perhaps, even worse). In this context, Hubbs’s conclusion that
‘country music function[s] as proxy for the people of the white working class,
figured as ignorant and bigoted’ is spot on and—drawing on Bryson—she
‘suggest[s] that shared distaste may be as culturally significant as shared
taste, the usual object of inquiry in studies by Bourdieu and many other
researchers’ (45, my italics).
In this shared distaste for the ways of small-town Southern folks, which
finds its way into distaste for ‘their’ country music, lies the kernel that
explains both the unpopularity of country music and its pride in this very
unpopularity. As Aaron Fox has elaborated, country music’s ‘working class
fans embrace what is ‘bad’ about the music’s—and their own—cultural
identity and meaning, as a way of discovering and asserting what is valuable
and good about their lives and their communities’ (52). In his argument
about the music’s badness—which is quite similar to my own reading
of the music as self-consciously unpopular, even if I focus more on the
producers’ than on the receivers’ end of the equation—, Fox argues that
the working-class fans embrace country music precisely because it is bad
for them and thus turn it into an ‘abject sublime’. This ambivalent gesture
can productively be read in terms of what Judith Halberstam has called
‘Famous in a Small Town’ 153
Miranda Lambert’s 2007 single ‘Famous in a Small Town’ not only provides
the title for this paper but also points to the central contradiction at the
heart of much of country music: how is it possible to enjoy popular success
without sacrificing one’s own authenticity on the altar of artificiality? In
its lyrics as well as in its musical and visual presentation, Lambert’s music
video addresses the trappings of fame and directly engages the economics
of popularity by singing about the advantages of unpopularity. The lyrics of
the song waste no time getting to the heart of the matter, as the first verse
immediately establishes the contradiction between popularity and small
town anonymity. The first line describes an outsider’s (metronormative)
point of view, cryptically indicting an unreferenced ‘They’ who think that
‘life is so much sweeter through the telephoto lens of fame’, whereas ‘around
here you get just as much attention / cheerin’ at the high school football
game’. The deictic ‘here’ thus juxtaposes the beauty of small-town life where
everybody is a star and, given the upbeat driving rhythm of an acoustic
guitar strumming in a major key, the song already implies that this is neither
a dirge nor an indictment of this small town but a resonant celebration of it.
The song’s video stages this conflict quite effectively by showing us two
parallel narrative strands: on the one hand, we see a small-town girl in boots
154 Christian Schmidt
and dress walking through the eponymous ‘small town’, shot in black and
white. On the other hand, the clip also showcases a musician and her band,
playing on a bright red carpet, closely cordoned off against the backdrop of
a marquee banner with the singer’s name. This contrast is most effectively
introduced in the second verse of the song: after the drums and electric
guitars have set in, the lyrics move to the possible fame of Nashville as the
video switches from monochrome black and white to colorful shots of pop
stardom. Here, the video juxtaposes glamour shots on the red carpet—on
which Lambert, in shiny clothes and full make-up, and her band perform the
song—, including flashing cameras and all the other colorful accoutrements
of pop stardom to the black-and-white popularity in a small town. Through
the harsh juxtaposition of these two storylines, the video shows that being
famous in a small town may be desirable but cannot easily be reconciled
with commercial and popular success. It is an either/or-choice, it seems,
since the worlds are simply too far apart. In fact, the lyrics explicitly ques-
tion the need for pop-star fame and popularity, seeing that in small-town
America everybody dies famous because everybody already is popular,
whether it is for shooting ‘the first buck of the season’ or for ‘cheerin’ at the
high school football game’. To visualize this, the video cuts various faces of
small-town people against the artist singing on the red carpet, juxtaposing
the two versions of popularity: real popularity vs small town popularity,
a.k.a. unpopularity. Hitting home its point, the song’s bridge spells out the
advantages of this latter unpopular popularity: ‘Well, baby who needs their
faces in a magazine? Me and you, we’ve been stars in this town since we were
seventeen’. Importantly, the black-and-white scenes do not appear bleak at
all but come across as more grounded—more ‘real’, if you will—than the
artificial colorfulness of popular stardom.
Given that Miranda Lambert stars in both storylines, however, the video
also implies that it is possible to be both successful and to remain the simple
girl next door, popular and unpopular at the same time. And this is the
important point: in order for the song to work as country music, Lambert
needs to be able to negotiate the gap between pop star and unpopular local
hero, as country music audiences do not allow for distantly aloof superstars.
No, they want even ‘their’ biggest stars to remain normal people—’just
folks’—rather than artificial industrial products. They need to be both, the
black-and-white regular girl next door and the glamorous superstar. In a
certain sense, then, Lambert’s song relishes the authenticity of unpopularity
in country music even as it performs the very tension at the heart of country
music: Miranda Lambert, of course, never would have become the country
superstar she now is if she were literally ‘only famous in a small town’.
‘Famous in a Small Town’ 155
Similarly, her single would not have sold in excess of 500,000 copies and
been certified gold record status had it remained within the confines of
her home town of Lindale, Texas, or within Lebanon, Tennessee, where the
video was shot. Rather, country music sings about and for a metaphorical
small-town America in order to distance itself from mainstream popular-
ity. Presumably, it can do so without succumbing to the allures of pop
stardom, and the country artist can, allegedly, stay true to the expectation
of authenticity, which requires her to remain just a small town girl. As a
country musician, Lambert can, and has to be, both: famous and famous
in a small town.
Another song that plumbs these same depths is Brad Paisley’s 2012 single
‘Southern Comfort Zone’. It also quite self-consciously blends the dimen-
sions of country’s simultaneous popularity and unpopularity and describes
the need to leave behind the singer’s titular Southern comfort zone and
venture out into a world in which ‘Not everybody owns a gun [or] wears
ball-cap, boots, and jeans’. Just as in Lambert’s song, Paisley’s lyrics make
no mention that its lyrical I is a musician—yet, both songs more or less
imply that their singers are not narrating a fictional story but are singing
autobiographically about their own personal lives. Doing so, both Lambert
and Paisley fold their artistic personae and their ‘real’ identities into one,
in an attempt to create an authentic country persona who is the ‘real deal’,
rather than an artificial pop star. ‘Southern Comfort Zone’ tells the story
of a Southerner who leaves home, only to be surprised that ‘not everybody
drives a truck, not everybody drinks sweet tea’. The song opens with an
acoustic guitar intro that is supported by the warm sound of a violin and the
soft resonance of a mandolin, sampled into which are an excerpt from Jeff
Foxworthy’s ‘You Might Be A Redneck’ routine and a snippet from The Andy
Griffith Show, thus setting the story in an imaginary Southern soundscape.
Even more outrageously, the song explicitly refers to the Southern Comfort
Zone as ‘Dixie land’, thus taking on a historically loaded term, complete
with associations of the old South, slavery, rural backwardness, and all
the historical baggage that makes ‘Dixie’ a contentious and thoroughly
unpopular topic. As if this were not enough, the song is framed by choral ren-
ditions of the song ‘Dixie’, and Paisley’s powerful electric guitar, drum, and
banjo-driven chorus inscribes itself into the Southern tradition by directly
addressing ‘Dixie land, I hope you understand’. Yet, in its overemphasis
156 Christian Schmidt
As should have become clear, one of the defining criteria of country music
is a self-conscious questioning of what it actually means to be country in
the first place. As I have claimed, part of what makes country popular to its
practitioners, fans, and critics is its embrace of a certain authentic image of
‘being country’ that celebrates its own unpopularity. In order to continuously
underline this otherness from the merely popular, country music employs a
wide variety of what Joli Jensen calls ‘authenticity markers’ that ‘certify […]
country music as real to fans [yet which] are the same markers that seem
corny and hillbilly to everyone else’ (13, emphasis in original). These markers
range from the ‘ball-cap, boots, and jeans’ mentioned in ‘Southern Comfort
Zone’ to the seemingly ever-present cowboy hat, and also include tractors,
honky tonks, sweet tea, but also conservative values and religious beliefs,
and a large variety of things that make country music appear unpopular
and unappealing to certain audiences. In many country lyrics, you will find
such proud celebrations of authentic country identity, all of which revolve
around a counter-modern, anti-popular form of Southern pride.
158 Christian Schmidt
be both warm and free: a small bar where he performs ‘Wagon Wheel’ in
front of an appreciative audience that joins him in a communal sing-along
of the lyrics.14 Catching the musically ‘southbound train’ of the oft-repeated
chorus, Rucker’s lyrical I yearns for—and ultimately reaches—the small-
town Southern home of authentic country life as the song celebrates the
authenticity of unpopularity in contemporary country music.
The interaction between artists and fans, as staged in the live performance
in the video to Rucker’s ‘Wagon Wheel’, is an important part of country
music but also of unpopular culture more broadly understood. As the editors
of this volume state in their introduction: ‘The study of unpopular culture,
then, is also the study of audiences, and it tends to be concerned more
with the reception of cultural artifacts than with their production, since
unpopularity presupposes an audience’ (26). What is important about this
definition is that production and reception need to be considered together
when talking about unpopular culture, as unpopularity is neither detect-
able in the music per se—just as music’s ‘badness’ as defined by Fox is not
an objectively measurable quality, or lack thereof, in the music—nor is it
something that resides solely with the recipients of the music and thus the
audience (or the people refusing to listen to it). Country music consciously
encodes unpopularity into its music, i.e. produces deliberately unpopular
music, and its audience willingly embraces this unpopularity. That is to
say, performers and fans of country music conspire to create unpopular
identities that find expression in the music. In the words of the second
verse of Paisley’s ‘This Is Country Music’ (2010): ‘It ain’t hip to sing about
tractors, trucks, little towns, and mama’. Here, the song pretends to take
on the metronormative point of view that these, indeed, are topics unfit
for popular culture, only to respond by proudly rejecting its validity; in a
word (or three): ‘This is country music—and we do!’ In this song, the ‘we’
of country music defiantly celebrates its own ‘abject badness’ (Fox) and the
proud unpopularity that the metronormative gaze ascribes to it.
Drawing on Frith’s work on the function of popular music, Hubbs argues:
‘Country music thus performs a type of cultural work that is performed
by popular music generally. It models subjectivity in forms relevant to its
listeners’ (103). Yet, country music also differs from other popular music,
Hubbs claims, in that it ‘treats real-life themes of hard times, including
facing serious illness and facing death’ (103). And, indeed, Paisley’s ‘This
160 Christian Schmidt
footsteps the song quite ambitiously steps. In its extended play-out, the song
reiterates the authentic strength of country music by juxtaposing its titular
phrase ‘This is Country Music’ with song titles such as ‘Hello, Darling’, ‘He
Stopped Loving Her Today’, or ‘Stand By Your Man’. The song never bothers
to mention the names of the artists as the fans will know who they are—
Conway Twitty, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette, respectively—and why
their simple reference is enough to tap into the lineage of authentic country
music. As Aaron Fox has convincingly argued, ‘the standard of authenticity
to which country is consequently held is […] the historicized essence of ‘real’
country music—an originary badness, always receding into the nostalgic
mists of a preceding generation of stars and consumers’ (44). The ‘real’ thing
into which contemporary country music thus taps is not a real to be found
in the world outside, an existing way of life, as Fox importantly reminds us.
Rather, it is an artistic discourse that creates the impression of realness by
invoking the proud history of the music and the South, relishing a nostalgic
version of the past that never was as unproblematic as these reminiscences
imply. Country music is real and authentic because it sounds like the music
that has come to be accepted as an authentic expression of the real, and
the country community is proud of this unpopularity even if—or perhaps
because—it is deemed deviant from a metronormative perspective.
Conclusion
Notes
1. Many thanks to Martin Lüthe und Sascha Pöhlmann for their insightful sug-
gestions on an earlier draft of this essay.
2. Simply by using their real names, most country stars mark their difference
from the artificiality of pop stars such as Madonna or Lady Gaga. The Ger-
man term Künstlername perhaps best expresses the ambiguity of taking
on a persona: the term literally means ‘artist name’, thus naturalizing the
artificiality of choosing a pseudonym rather than one’s real name for the
purpose of performing an artistic identity. For an important analysis of the
ways in which ‘the folk’ and folklore are often read as authentic products
rather than constructions themselves, cf. Bendix.
3. A long list of indicators could be used to document the increasing cross-
over success of country artists, such as ABC’s screening of a three-hour
prime-time broadcast of the CMA Music Festival on 5 August 2014 (cf.
Hudak) or the recent hype about so-called ‘bro-country’ on the general pop
charts (cf. Dauphin and my critical discussion of the latter in ‘All Kinds of
(Queer) Rednecks’).
4. This recent (re-)popularization of Southern culture is, of course, nothing re-
ally new given that Southern music has shaped American (popular) music
throughout its history; as its preeminent historian Bill Malone has argued,
the South ‘was the land that gave rise to virtually every form of American
popular music’ (Southern Music 4).
5. To give just two examples out of a very small number of studies available:
Covach’s essay on ‘unpopular musicology’ only uses the term in its catchy
title and never discusses the term’s wider implications, whereas the editors
of The Popular Music Studies Reader limit discussion of unpopularity in
164 Christian Schmidt
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Bärbel Harju
‘Can’t you see? You’re not making Christianity better, you’re making rock and
roll worse!’ Hank Hill’s assessment of Christian rock music in the episode
‘Reborn to Be Wild’ of the animated sitcom King of the Hill corresponds with
much of the mainstream media’s perception of this phenomenon.1 A Seinfeld
episode, ‘The Burning’, also illustrates the poor reputation of Christian pop.
Upon learning that her boyfriend listens to Christian rock music, Elaine
voices concern about his taste in music, but her friend George disagrees:
‘I like Christian rock. It’s very positive. It’s not like those real musicians
who think they’re so cool and hip’. George’s endorsement backfires, of
course, as he clearly makes a distinction between ‘real’, ‘cool’, ‘hip’ artists
and Christian rock musicians.
Christian pop’s reputation as ‘the least fashionable music on earth’ (Beau-
jon 6) is not limited to mainstream media and pop culture. When I began
researching Christian pop music, I soon found out that this musical genre is
quite unpopular as an academic topic. The amount of scholarly work on the
subject pales next to the books and articles on more popular musical genres
such as hip-hop and punk, gospel and folk music, and in fact most histories
of popular music almost ignore the phenomenon altogether.2 The reactions
of most colleagues when I disclosed my area of research to them ranged
from amusement and skepticism to utter incomprehension as to what the
motives for studying Christian rock might be. Claire Fisher’s comment on
the TV show Six Feet Under when she finds out that her boyfriend listens
to Christian rock captures how most people feel about this topic: ‘Oh my
god, you may just be the most deeply unhip person I have ever met’ (qtd. in
Beaujon 6). Its negative connotations notwithstanding, Christian pop music,
its cultural ramifications and contradictions, had captivated my attention:
anything this unpopular, I supposed, was certainly worth exploring.
Making Christianity cool is a challenge. The term ‘Christian pop music’,
to many, has an almost oxymoronic ring to it.3 Often ridiculed, marginalized
or dismissed as unauthentic, uncool, irrelevant, and unhip, the concept of
evangelical pop and rock music appears to be too far removed from the
infamous triumvirate of drugs, and rock and roll. Since its inception in
the late 1960s, Christian pop music has been a contested genre, generating
170 Bärbel Har ju
culture at large than about Christian pop music. Audiences respond to the
genre based on musical and cultural knowledge and expectation. The value
judgments listed above are equally ethical, musical and heavily dependent
on the identity of the listener (cf. Frith 33). The evolution of Christian pop
music and its critics not only sheds light on the interfaces of music, com-
mercialism, and evangelical Christianity, but also on the complex cultural
mechanisms that produce and construct this genre’s (un)popularity.
Don’t ever leave me, Jesus, I couldn’t stand to see you go.
My heart would simply snap, my Lord, if you walked on out that door.
I promise I’ll be good to you and keep you warm at night.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, why don’t you just shut off the lights.
South Park mocks the way Christian record companies try to exert moral
control over their artists. When the CEO of the fictional Faith Records
comments on some of the lyrics before signing the band, he quips: ‘It appears
you are actually in love with Christ’. The conflict between ministry and
business is poignantly captured as the record company executive assures
that they would ‘just like to make sure the bands we sign are in it for God,
Making Christianit y Cool 175
and not for the money’. He then prods them to just ‘sign here and we’ll get
your album sold’. South Park’s portrayal of Christian pop music is predicated
on the genre’s negative image that goes back to the 1980s: a commercialized,
both musically and lyrically unsophisticated, one-dimensional emulation of
secular pop songs, sometimes dubbed as ‘Christian cotton candy’ (Menconi
20).
This depiction of tame, happy-clappy Christian music is one version
of evangelical popular music during the 1980s. Artists like Amy Grant
became huge commercial hits—and even had some crossover success in
the mainstream—with sweet melodies and simplistic lyrics that did not dig
very deep theologically. At the same time, though, there existed another,
more aggressive type of Christian rock that was deeply entangled with
and influenced by the culture wars raging during the 1980s. Conservative
evangelicals had been heavily politicized and rallied around organizations
of the New Religious Right like Jerry Falwell’s ‘Moral Majority’. The rhetoric
of political debates and televangelist broadcasts was boasting, replete with
militaristic and triumphalist imagery. The framing of conflicts as war, the
emphasis of clearly opposing categories like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and
‘evil’, ‘us’ versus ‘them’ are staples in Christian pop music culture during
the 1980s.14 Christian pop music increasingly became associated with the
Christian Right and evoked images of self-righteous, greedy, f ire-and-
brimstone televangelists and politicians with aggressive political stances
towards abortion, pre-marital sex, and same-sex marriage.
Petra is a case in point. One of the most successful Christian rock bands
of the 1980s, they sold out huge secular venues with their arena rock. Songs
like ‘The Battle Belongs to the Lord’ and ‘Armed and Dangerous’ identified
the secular world as the enemy and positioned Petra as relentless Christian
warriors. Their stage outfits resembled combat gear, and they opened their
shows with the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldier’ (Powell, ‘Petra’). ‘This
Means War!’ illustrates how the band unabashedly interspersed triumphal-
ist rhetoric with military imagery:
explained: ‘We know our music is aimed at the church. […] [The album
This Means War!] deals with all three areas of our spiritual warfare. As
Christians, our enemies are the world, the flesh, and the devil. The songs on
This Means War! deal with one of those three issues and talk about spiritual
warfare’ (Newcomb 99).15 The closing of ranks with the New Religious Right
manifested itself not only in imagery and rhetoric, but also in Petra’s support
of conservative politics, for example their promotion of a constitutional
amendment allowing prayers in public schools (cf. Powell, ‘Petra’).
If mainstream critics took any notice of it at all, they dismissed the music
as ‘mediocre stuff, diluted by hesitation and dogmatic formula, inferior
to the mainstream popular music it emulates’ (Dawidoff).16 The rejection
by mainstream audiences and critics allowed—and continues to allow—
Christian pop bands to tap into a traditional trope among U.S. evangelicals,
namely narratives surrounding its ‘persecution complex’ (Joseph 181). The
perceived dispossession and rejection by the mainstream enables artists to
position themselves as ‘rock’s real rebels’ (Kevin Miller 90) and articulate
their unpopularity in positive terms based on Jesus’ persecution due to his
countercultural stance. Mark Stuart, singer of Audio Adrenaline, elaborates
on the idea of Christian rebellion in the face of adverse circumstances: ‘I
think rebellion and Christianity go together […]. Singing about sex and
drugs is the easiest thing to do. It’s old by now. So pretty much the most
rebellious rock-and-roll person you can be is a Christian-rock frontman
because you get people from every side trying to shut you down’ (Ali 43).
The framing of mainstream culture in terms of conformity to a godless value
system emphasizes Christian pop’s claim to its potential as a subversive
force that questions or undermines dominant ideology.17
The extent to which this potential was achieved during the 1980s remains
disputable. Christian teenagers embraced ‘cool’ Christian bands like Petra,
but conservative evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart publicly denounced the
music while the mainstream was largely unresponsive. Internal struggles
with notions of commercialized ministry and religious entertainment
continued to plague the evangelical music industry. Overall, Christian pop
became a deeply conflicted, self-contained subculture, predicated on its
opposition to an allegedly corrupt ‘secular’ mainstream culture. By adapting
and ‘Christianizing’ secular musical styles, Christian pop provided music for
the converted, a safe and healthy alternative for the Christian youth, not a
vehicle to ‘save lost souls’. Christian pop culture turned into ‘a cultural ghetto,
frequently ridiculed and easily avoided’ (Powell, ‘Jesus’) that had little—if
any—traction beyond its boundaries. This era shaped the image of Christian
pop as second-rate, a ‘pale imitation of the real thing’ (Howard and Streck 35).
Making Christianit y Cool 177
Since the early 1990s, however, Christian pop music has been on a quest
for popularity, ‘hipping itself for the approaching millennium’ (Ali). The
professionalization of the genre was spurred by secular media conglomer-
ates’ acquisition of Christian record labels. Companies like BMG and EMI
identified American evangelicals as a profitable segment for the entertain-
ment industry and noticed the monetary gain to be made with Christian
pop music. Backed by these corporations, the production, distribution and
marketing mechanisms for Christian pop improved drastically and could
now match the mainstream market’s standards. No longer dependent on
conservative, volatile Christian book stores, the music is now available at
secular outlets and garners considerable crossover success with many artists
generating sales in both the Christian and the mainstream market.18 This
transformation and reframing of Christian pop music came along with hip
appearances, subtle lyrics and a new openness towards non-believers. The
rhetoric of the culture war gave way to subtle, more marketable terminology.
In a Newsweek article in 2001, Lorraine Ali described Christian pop music
as the ‘hottest genre in the entire music industry’, quoting recent sales
figures that added up to ‘747 million Dollars in records sales last year—7
percent of the overall sales in the American music industry’. Similar to
country music, Christian pop has carved out a lucrative niche for itself in
the highly competitive cultural marketplace. The music allows evangelicals
to participate in a wholesome version of popular culture without feeling
that they have to make sacrifices in terms of quality and coolness.
Not satisfied with the niche status as part of the evangelical subculture,
however, a growing number of Christian artists have been reaching out to
a broader audience by attempting to abandon the label ‘Christian’—and
the stigma that is attached to it—altogether. Bands like P.O.D., SixPen-
ceNonetheRicher, The Fray, Creed and many others have left the parallel
universe of Christian pop music behind to explore other ways of articulating
the gospel. Presenting a ‘modern version of evangelism that uses a new
language, a new discursive style’ (Hendershot 54), their musical message
is more subtle and toned down. Decoding and interpreting the meaning
of their songs requires an active role on the part of the listener. The lyrics
avoid ‘bible-thumping’ and ‘turn-or-burn’ rhetoric and are characterized by
ambiguity, offering a vaguely Christian perspective based on love, forgive-
ness, responsibility, and social equality. The names of Jesus or God are never
explicitly mentioned, and often substituted with the more embracing ‘you’.
The implication that the song might be addressing a loved-one earned them
178 Bärbel Har ju
Whenever anyone asks Creed if they’re Christian, they say: ‘No, but we’re
searching’. It’s obvious that they’ve either done their homework very well
or they have some sort of a Christian foundation in their background.
[…] It’s great that they’re careful, with the way the world is today, the
way popular culture and the people they’re trying to sell records to are.
Creed’s not ostracizing themselves by communicating that they’ve found
all the answers. (Jonathan Richter qtd. in Hendershot 59)
I feel so alive
For the very first time.
I can’t deny you […].
Notes
3. In fact, the term Christian pop music, although widely used, is contro-
versial, not only because of the vagueness of the term—what counts as
Christian pop?—but also because the Christian music industry is largely
evangelical. The usage of the adjective ‘Christian’ also serves to draw an
imaginary line between the spheres of ‘Christian’ music and ‘secular’ music,
which in fact is hardly visible in US culture—and music especially—be-
cause of the pervasiveness of religion. In general, the affiliation with a cer-
tain denomination has been losing significance, non-denominationalism is
trending. For a more detailed discussion of terminology see Harju (14–21)
and Hochgeschwender (15–31).
4. Robert Laurence Moore uses the term synonymously with ‘commercial
culture’ and notes that ‘America’s boom market in religion operated most
effectively at the popular end of the market in cultural commodities’ (6).
5. Moore’s analysis of religious commercialization since the early nineteenth
century refutes theories of secularization and stresses the continuing
impact of commercialized forms of religion in American culture, observing
that ‘a sizable portion of the Protestant evangelical community has made
its peace with commercial culture’ (255).
6. The difficulty to obtain accurate sales figures derives from the fact that the
term itself and the boundaries of the genre are hard to define. Sometimes
labeled Christian Rock, Contemporary Christian Music, Faith-Based Music
or Contemporary Praise and Worship, a clear categorization is difficult; in
addition, some Christian artists try to avoid the stigma attached to Christian
music by not using any of these labels, while at the same time spiritually-
inclined country or mainstream songs sometimes are included in Christian
sales records, which makes accurate numbers difficult to track.
7. See Harju; Howard and Streck.
8. Frith points out that ‘“bad music” […] is only interesting as part of an argu-
ment,’ positioned in a ‘context in which someone else thinks it’s good’ (17).
The object of labeling records as ‘bad music,’ he continues, is ‘a critique of
public taste’ (18), with contempt leveled at ‘the people who like them, who
take them seriously’ (19). The effects of music, too, elicit value judgments
based on the belief in the ‘power of music to shape society’ (24).
9. While Christian rock music appeared revolutionary at the time, the adapta-
tion of popular music for the purpose of evangelization has actually been a
successful strategy for centuries and can especially be found during eras of
spiritual renewal (Harju 44–57). See also Marini.
10. David Di Sabatino notes that contrary to popular opinion—the view that
Jesus Freaks were saved drug addicts and hippies—‘the breadth of the
movement [...] consisted of teenagers with mainline and evangelical church
backgrounds who adopted the spiritual hippie chic as a middle ground
between the radical counterculture and the overly cautious and often in-
flexible traditions of their home denominations’ (Jesus People 4).
Making Christianit y Cool 183
11. Radio and television evangelist Bob Larson, for example, repeatedly
claimed that ‘the devil’s music’ and Christian lyrics were incompatible
(Howard and Streck 32). In an essay titled ‘Taking Stock of Jesus Rock’ that
appeared in Christianity Today in 1971, Edward Plowman notes that owners
of radios stations ‘claimed that the music was suggestive, desecrating, of the
devil, and that it dwelled too much on personal experience rather than on
doctrine’ (32).
12. The religious music festival Explo 72 held in Dallas in 1972 marks a turn-
ing point: Known as ‘Godstock’, the event organized by Campus Crusade
for Christ drew 180,000 fans and ‘symbolized a conservative evangelical
appropriation of the Jesus Movement: carefully planned, toned down, and
commercialized’ (Turner 121).
13. Singer Steve Taylor, whose career in Christian music spans over three
decades, has been one of the more forward-thinking and progressive voices
in this debate, as this statement made in 1986 demonstrates: ‘I’m tired and
bored with trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong in music. You
know, the whole secular and sacred debate. How did we get off on that
tangent? […] I’m convinced that there are different ways to go about this
business of using music to change the world. Why do we insist on reducing
it to a formula? […] When we limit ourselves, we cut off that access, that av-
enue of communication. People complain about U2 and say that they aren’t
explicit enough about Jesus in their music. But U2 may be opening the door
for other groups that do take a more literal approach […]. We’ve got to allow
for diversity within our ranks or we’ll end up talking to ourselves’ (Seay 28).
14. Notions of an ongoing struggle with the secular world, however, were not
new, as sociologist Christian Smith notes: ‘Distinction, engagement, and
conflict vis-à-vis outsiders constitutes a crucial element of what we might
call the ‘cultural DNA’ of American evangelicalism. The evangelical tradi-
tion’s entire history, theology, and self-identity presupposes and reflects
strong cultural boundaries with non-evangelicals; a zealous burden to
convert and transform the world outside of itself; and a keen perception of
external threats and crises seen as menacing what it means to be true, good,
and valuable’ (121).
15. This strategy was not pursued by all Christian pop bands of the 1980s, as Ei-
leen Luhr points out in her analysis of Christian crossover metal bands be-
tween 1984 and 1994. The glam metal outfit Stryper, for example, employed
stealth tactics to get signed to a secular label but then began to use the
rhetoric and imagery of cultural warriors. They generated some mainstream
interest (including MTV airplay) due to their novelty value as a longhaired,
literally Bible-throwing Christian metal act in black and yellow unitards.
Glam metal bands like Stryper with their long hair, tight outfits and heavy
make up raised some interesting questions concerning evangelicalism and
gender roles that were not approved of by conservative evangelicals (cf.
Luhr 121–22).
184 Bärbel Har ju
16. While there certainly is some ridicule and criticism towards evangelical
cultural products, Lindsay points out that, in general, ‘cultural leaders are
not antagonistic towards Christianity. They’re apathetic toward Christianity’
(145).
17. See also Luhr 125.
18. Many artists resort to double-distribution-deals, where two separate mar-
keting teams cater to the needs and particularities of both markets.
19. Often mega churches, these congregations avoid denominational affiliation,
overtly Christian symbols and rhetoric while offering a number of services
(child care, matchmaking, etc.) and activities (sports, cooking classes,
drama groups) in a casual atmosphere. Sargeant points out that ‘seeker
churches present a more plausible model of Christianity—a model that
fits with pervasive cultural understandings about choice, individualism,
autonomy, the importance of the self, therapeutic sensibilities, and an anti-
institutional inclination common today’ (31).
20. In his book A New Kind of Christian, evangelical pastor Brian McLaren
stresses the movement’s rejection of dogmatic faith.
21. Di Sabatino elaborates: ‘Bono is probably as close to an international
spokesman as the evangelical movement could ever dream of having, a
poster child for the successful marriage of social justice and biblical faith
[…]. Who better than the U2 singer to look to for hints on how to be cultur-
ally relevant, socially concerned and biblically faithful?’ (‘Why’)
22. The song was published through their own independent record label
Rescue on the album Snuff the Punk. Lyrics like this would mean a swift
end of mainstream success: ‘Abortion is murder! There’s nothing you can
do to justify the fact that there’s a living, breathing baby inside of you […].
Murder! Murder! Murder!’
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Listening to Bad Music
White Power and (Un)Popular Culture
C. Richard King
End Apathy began in 2005 […] to figure out what it would take to actually
accomplish positive results in society and what is holding us back. A lot
of what I realized at the time was that if we could figure out how to end
peoples apathetic ways it would be the start towards moving forward.[…]
But I didn’t want to just point the finger at what other people should do,
but also I was willing to point out some of my faults on how I was holding
myself back. And that is how I wrote the song ‘Self Destruct’. (Blood)
On the group’s MySpace page, moreover, Page contrasted its music with
pop: ‘The music is a sad commentary on our sick society and the problems
that prevent true progress’. He concludes that whites are blind and asleep,
an assessment that reflects a deeper white nationalist belief that whites
are ‘zombies’ who need to wake up to their perilous situation. Clearly, Page
hoped his music would be a catalyst for this racist revolution.
Few would classify End Apathy as popular music. The band had a
limited audience, meager sales, and no name recognition. Moreover, the
group openly expressed sentiments many would deem racist, hateful, and
dehumanizing. Indeed, were it not for his act of violence, few would have
ever heard of the band, which was destined to be bad music—offensive,
transgressive, and of questionable quality.
188 C. Richard King
Since the early 1990s, various forms of ‘white power’ music have grown
from a cottage industry serving a few racist skinheads to a multimillion-
dollar, worldwide industry that is a primary conduit of money and young
recruits to the radical right. Although the music originated in Britain in
the early 1980s, it is now popular among hard-core racists throughout
Europe and the United States.
Listening to Bad Music 189
With this in mind, I begin my discussion with a survey of white power music.
Against this background, I endeavor to complicate white power music,
contrasting songs from the first decades of the twentieth century with
more recent works. This comparative analysis allows a rereading of popular
music as ‘race music’ that lays seeds for more radical harvests. Next, I shift
my focus to the use of the sounds and stylings of popular music to reach
new audiences, first in the recruitment of new members to the movement
and second in an unorthodox effort to create a crossover band, a group
that would remain faithful to white power ideals and ideologies and appeal
to a wider audience. In closing, I reflect on the scope and significance of
unpopular culture.
‘Race Music’
In 1955, Asa Carter lost his job at WILD radio station in Birmingham,
Alabama, bringing to an end his regionally syndicated program, which
was sponsored by the American States Rights Association. His firing would
also mark the end of his radio career. Rather than rethink his racist and
anti-Semitic views, Carter redoubled his commitments to segregation
and white supremacy. He publicly broke with longtime ally the Alabama
Citizens’ Council, organizing the North Alabama Citizens’ Council as a
visible alternative. The leadership role arguably gave Carter an advantaged
position to defend Jim Crow and commandeer media attention. Almost im-
mediately, he directed attention at the evils of popular culture. Of particular
concern for Carter and his followers was the rising popularity of rock ‘n’ roll,
which many at the time dubbed ‘race music’. The former radio personality
advocated a ban of the musical style, believing its content encouraged
moral degradation and race mixing. The music itself and the behaviors said
to be promoted by it were perceived to be a grave threat to white culture
(cf. Martin and Segrave). Indeed, Carter saw in rock ‘n’ roll a conspiracy by
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ‘a plot to
mongrelize America’. As such, ‘the obscenity and vulgarity’, he and others
found in the increasing popular genre led them to assert that ‘rock n roll
music is obviously a means by which the white man and his children can
be driven to the level of the negro’ (qtd. in Garofalo 145). To combat the
animalism evoked by the banality of rock music, he laid out a plan to work
with the owners of juke boxes to remove ‘race music’ records.
As outrageous as his reading of pop music seems today, Carter was not an
isolated voice. His protest escalated locally and echoed nationally. Perhaps
190 C. Richard King
As Simi suggests, the white power music scene matters in ways often un-
recognized and unexpected from scholars and non-scholars alike. Like all
subcultures rooted in expression, style, and performance, it has always been
about more than entertainment, parties, fun, and ‘distractions’. For a move-
ment pushed to the margins, it advances the movement organizationally,
facilitates the circulation of ideological positions, anchors interactive spaces
(both in person and online), and establishes a forum for the elaboration of
meaningful identities.1
White power music covers a diverse range of musical styles. In addition to
folk and country, it includes musicians producing hard rock, punk, Oi, hard-
core, and metal, notably National Socialist black metal. Its global audience
produces and consumes it within local and regional subcultures. Although
most visible in North America and Western Europe, it plays an increasingly
important role in cultural politics within Eastern Europe, South America,
and Australia. Producers of white power music have adopted emerging
media with swiftness and relative ease, first embracing CDs over albums
and cassette tapes and more recently moving onto the Internet both to
facilitate distribution and seize upon the marketing possibilities of new
media, tapping the potential of social media to connect with audiences and
increase access to music through streaming audio and internet radio. Not
infrequently, labels have ties to established or emerging white nationalist
organizations.
192 C. Richard King
Resistance Records offers a great illustration of the scene and its organiza-
tional structures and ideological elements. Indeed, as an emblematic label,
it has proven to be a vital institution not only within white power music
but also for the movement as a whole. Established in Windsor, Ontario in
1993, according the Anti-Defamation League, it operated as a ‘one-man
hate-music distribution operation with a handful of album titles’, but rather
rapidly expanded to become the leading hate rock distributor in the US.
Legal problems crippled the label, leading to its eventual sale to Willis
A. Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, and Todd Blodgett, who relocated
it to the US and worked to resuscitate it. A year later, the pair sold it to
William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries and founder of the National
Alliance. Like Carto and Blodgett, Pierce believed Resistance Records had
the potential to recruit young people to the movement and more easily and
broadly communicate its message. As such, the new ownership expanded
the label beyond its historic distribution hub, adding a monthly magazine
and establishing a web presence notable for its scope. While the label has
suffered as lawsuits, Pierce’s death, and factionalism devastated the National
Alliance, it remains a major example of the promise of and problems posed
by white power music. Labels like Resistance Records are not the only space
of dissemination for hate music cultivation. Concerts and music festivals
play a pivotal role in the scene, creating what Simi and Futrell dub ‘free
spaces’ that allow participants to express themselves without reservation,
validating identities and ideologies. Music matters to white power because of
the ways in which it advances the movement, communicates its ideological
messages, and opens spaces for the creation of social networks and identities.
White power music has no singular origin. It has multiple roots and takes
seemingly endless routes in and out of popular culture. It appears in blackface
on the minstrelsy stage, later in the patriotic songs of the Ku Klux Klan (cf.
Crews), and then in the guise of country and rockabilly (cf. Messner et al.;
Wade). Most famously, it has favored the oppositional worlds of alternative
rock—oi, punk, hardcore, and metal (cf. Duncombe and Tremblay; Dyck;
Hochhauser). It exemplifies the transnational dialogues stitching together
white power worldwide and the increasingly translocal articulation of white-
ness that anchors white nationalism. Perhaps ironically, it takes shape in sub-
cultures marked by resistance and known for anti-establishment, progressive,
and even anti-racist sentiments (cf. Duncombe and Tremblay; Home; Sabin).
Listening to Bad Music 193
These elements were the building blocks for more expansive and penetrat-
ing dialogues, enabling hate rock to crystallize, gain traction, and eventually
become the cornerstone of the movement and the key ideological conduit
for it.
194 C. Richard King
Advocacy of violence has led some critics to describe white power music
as terrorism, a point substantiated by Aaronson who asserts that between
1987 and 2003, ‘members of the white power music scene have been linked
to 56 murders as well as thousands of acts of vandalism, assault’, and other
crimes (cf. Aaronson).
Less extreme, though not innocuous, tropes include songs that wax nos-
talgic about Nazi Germany and Viking society, linking past to present, while
laying claims to a virile and romantic versions of a supreme white masculin-
ity. An overlapping theme hails specific heroic figures, often celebrating
their sacrifices to the movement and/or race. Other songs extol the virtues
of contemporary white nationalism, especially embodied by skinheads, as
a way of life. In such music, ‘[t]here is also a clear emphasis on upholding
Aryan values through movement participation, fraternity, kinship ties,
and racial loyalty. These lyrics speak of fostering “global brotherhood”,
“volk”, “white pride”, and “Aryan heritage”’ (Futrell et al. 281). In sum, what
Listening to Bad Music 195
is important to note here is that white power music creates an abject, even
monstrous, other and an empowered and enlightened self, reiterating some
of the most vile and violent imagery directed at people of color, Jews, and
gays and lesbians, and some of the most romanticized assessments of white
(supremacist) agents.
The social structures and cultural meanings associated with white power
music have spawned subcultures around the globe and facilitated the
construction of identities. It not only creates an interactive context for the
presentation and articulation of self, but it also provides a set of frames and
codes through which individuals can fashion themselves. Music matters
to white nationalists not simply for its rhythm or sound, not only because
it gives voice to visions and values, but importantly because it provides a
material expression to white power. It anchors a scene, opens up space,
encourages interaction, fosters the articulation of identity, and creates
community. While critics have rightly highlighted the lyrics of hate rock
and often linked them to violence, such assessments threaten to offer merely
a caricature of the scene, its attractions, and its significance. For clearly,
what white power music means for its producers and audiences is multifac-
eted: part ideological, part, interactional, part identification. While white
supremacist music now might be best described as marginal, if not deviant,
manifesting many of the features of other oppositional musical subcultures,
often interfacing, if not overlapping with them, its present formation differs
markedly from its antecedents in tone, content, and reception.
which advocates have sought to become popular, to expand the base of the
movement and the purchase of their ideological claims.
Two songs clarify these broader shifts in white power and popular
culture, offering keen insight into the scene and its strategies. Both songs
about Mary Phagan, a young factory worker killed under mysterious cir-
cumstances in the Atlanta area in 1913. The subsequent investigation led to
Jewish factory manager Leo Frank being charged with the murder. Labeled
the American Dreyfus, an obvious reference to the fraudulent, anti-Semitic
trial of a French officer at the end of the nineteenth century, Frank was
convicted and initially sentenced to death, which was later commuted by
Governor John M. Slaton. Outraged, a group of local citizens, including many
community leaders, formed the Knights of Mary Phagan (KMP) to avenge
the girl and defend the race. As one speaker said to assembled members
of the group:
This sainted girl […] who, true to her inherent high breeding and the
teachings of her devoted mother, gave up her own life rather than sur-
render that Christian attribute—the crown, glory, and honor of true
womanhood into the threshold of which she was just entering. (qtd. in
Dinnerstein 136)
Shortly thereafter, members of the KMP kidnapped Frank from prison and
lynched him. None of the participants were ever convicted for their roles in
the ritual killing. Frank was pardoned posthumously in 1986. Importantly,
the Knights of Mary Phagan would be central to the rebirth of the Ku Klux
Klan, comprising its core membership at its public unveiling in 1915 (cf.
Dinnerstein).
A folk ballad, ‘Little Mary Phagan’, began circulating after the trial. It
was played at rallies calling for the execution of Frank. Largely a narrative
of key events, it paints the young woman as an innocent and virtuous
victim, while casting the accused killer as cold, calculating, and alien, an
individual who defiled both a young woman and the traditions of region
since he took advantage of her vulnerability and did so on Confederate
Memorial Day.
While the ballad paints a morality tale, pivoting on familiar themes of good
and evil amplified by references to the inhumanity and marginality of the
perpetrator, it does not invoke overt anti-Semitic slurs or celebrate the im-
pending violence of retribution. It does not have to. The audience knows that
the ballad is as much a racial drama as it is a morality play because media
coverage and popular sentiment have already framed it as a young, virginal
and honorable woman mercilessly murder by a racial other and outsider—a
Jew, an industrialist, a transplanted Yankee (though born in San Antonio,
Texas). It was one more text in a broader dialogue about racial justice and social
order in which the execution of the former would ensure a return to the latter.
Seventy-five years later, the white power band Achtung Juden would
release Reich Songs, Volume Two, which featured a photo of the lynching
as its cover. The CD, featuring 14 tracks, opens with ‘The Knights of Mary
Phagan’, and also includes original songs like ‘Keep on Fighting’, ‘Burn
the Books’, and ‘Our Pride is our Loyalty’ and covers of ‘classic’ songs by
Skrewdriver, ‘Hail the New Dawn’, and No Remorse’s ‘Son of Odin’.2 The song
is a simple, fast-paced, and hard-driving rock anthem marked by forceful
guitars and drums and guttural vocals. Key passages follow.
Where the ballad reported a current event, here, the author and listener
becomes one of the Knights, empathizing with, endorsing, and enacting
the lynching. Violent in imagery and sound, the song celebrates the killing,
legitimating the deed through anti-Semitic language and assumptions,
which were absent from the ballad. This should not be too surprising given
that the name of the band itself translates from German as Attention Jews
and makes a fairly explicit reference to Nazism, a reference reinforced by the
CD title (Reich Songs, Volume Two). To make Frank and the impropriety of
his actions stark to contemporary listeners, the band foregrounds the killing
and the pathological character of the killer. And more, it reminds listeners
that this is not an isolated or historical act, but rather an ongoing campaign
by the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG, or more generally, the Jews).
Finally, where the KMP and the ballad itself called for defense of the race
and the honor of its women, the track calls for the reclamation of the nation,
suggesting that necessary action goes beyond defense to recuperation and
renewal.
These two songs highlight a number of important shifts in white su-
premacy and popular culture. First, where racially charged songs were
once accepted and applauded (regionally, if not universally by 1915), today,
they are unpopular, marginal, and taboo. Indeed, white supremacy, for-
merly a shared value and perceived natural fact, has become contested, a
persistent structure held under erasure by colorblindness, new racism, and
multiculturalism. Second, in contrast with the common sense narrative or
recitation of the ballad, ‘The Knights of Mary Phagan’ offers an argument,
rather explicitly advancing racialized rhetoric to make claims about the
current condition. Third, the language, tone, and style of the songs expose
profound changes. Not only does hard rock (somewhere between punk and
metal) replace the fiddle and folks stylings of yore, but the imperiled state
of whiteness is more urgent, the action depicted more vulgar and violent,
and the references to difference more denigrating and starkly anti-Semitic.
Fourth, the regional and racial references in ‘Little Mary Phagan’ give way
to a new imagining of race and nation, in which whiteness has more global
and trans historical referents, can be seen as the foundation for a nation
distinct from and opposed to the USA, and in an existential struggle with
ZOG (Jews). Importantly, in spite of changes in technology and the vis-
ibility of white nationalism, music sits at the core of the movement into the
present moment. Moreover, the changing place and presence of mainstream
popular culture and the dialectics between cultural integration and white
nationalist formation compelled a continued emphasis on counter cultural
production from white supremacist spaces.
200 C. Richard King
Isn’t It Ironic
Asa Carter, whose career and critique opened this essay, seized upon
what he understood to be a fundamental contradiction that many think
should make hate rock unthinkable. Rock music emerges from a hybrid
space, mixing sonic traditions, cultural behaviors, and racialized bodies
(cf. Lipsitz). For Carter and many others in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
these polycultural patterns of integration challenged the rule of Jim Crow
and threatened their understanding of race relations, the boundaries of
whiteness, and the social order. By and large, producers and consumers of
popular music do not consider this origin story when writing, recording,
performing or listening to a recent release or personally meaningful song.
And much the same is true for participants in the white power music scene.
On the one hand, the commercial music industry, beginning at roughly
the moment of Carter’s campaign, whitened popular music, reworking its
polycultural beginnings for increasingly discrete, if not segregated, niche
markets defined by race, class, and gender. As a consequence, rock music
does not so much conjure a multiracial social scene or musical style, as
refer to white artists—the Beatles and Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Rush,
Led Zepplin and Areosmith—while soul, R‘n’B, urban contemporary, Latin
and so forth mark music by and for people of color.
On the other hand, the racial politics of popular music shifted after
rock ‘n’ roll allegedly became white. Over the past two decades, the
normalcy of rock has been contrasted with the deviancy, hypersexuality,
and violence of hip-hop and the oppositional waves of (white) alternative
music. In common with many pundits and parents, hate rock holds the
former in contempt, viewing it as a degenerate genre and social ill. At the
same time, it engages with the latter, drawing on punk, metal, hardcore,
and even neofolk to communicate its ideology and hail prospective
adherents to it.
Without setting aside the irony of white separatist and white supremacist
music policing racial boundaries and reiterating racial hierarchies, two
other elements crucial to the white power music scene merit emphasis.
First, commercial music came to make and market the same racial catego-
ries that Carter sought to defend in his campaign. Second, where whiteness
came to displace the polycultural foundations of rock music, blackness
remained a social problem and source of moral panics over the past half
century.
Listening to Bad Music 201
PLAYBOY: If you didn’t know you, would you think you’re a douche bag?
MAYER: It depends on what I picked up. My two biggest hits are ‘Your
Body Is a Wonderland’ and ‘Daughters’. If you think those songs are
Listening to Bad Music 203
pandering, then you’ll think I’m a douche bag. It’s like I come on very
strong. I am a very…I’m just very. V-E-R-Y. And if you can’t handle very,
then I’m a douche bag. But I think the world needs a little very. That’s
why black people love me.
[…]
PLAYBOY: Do black women throw themselves at you?
MAYER: I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white
supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock.
I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.
Unpopular Culture
If Asa Carter had had his way, parents and politicians would have prohibited
rock music, putting a decisive end to what he saw as a corrupt musical
fashion and arguably more importantly saving the white race from certain
204 C. Richard King
moral degradation and cultural decline. Despite his best efforts, rock ‘n’ roll
did not die, a fact many who make white power music today likely greet
with great joy, because it constitutes a core of the social scene and political
ideology anchoring the movement today. For all of this, while white power
engages with and appropriates pop music for its own ends, it remains wildly
unpopular, as evidenced by market share, public outrage and condemnation,
and the reaction to it within other music subcultures, perhaps notably in
punk songs like ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’ by the Dead Kennedys and ‘Fuck the
K.K.K’. by the Unseen (cf. Spracklen).
This unpopularity has crystallized across the past century. Where white
supremacist music (like white racism generally) once enjoyed a warm wel-
come in public life, especially in areas ruled by Jim Crow and that nurtured
the reinvention of the Ku Klux Klan as a mainstream fraternal order, it now
largely dwells on the margins, emergent in transgressive and oppositional
subcultures. My discussion of songs about Mary Phagan underscores the
decline and marginalization of white power, especially in popular culture.
Nevertheless, music has proven to be especially fecund, enabling adaption
and elaboration of style and sound. For all of its engagements with popular
music, hate rock remains unpopular. It is perhaps best described as un-
popular culture, that is, a set of cultural practices and cultural productions
that draw upon and deploy popular stylings but have little claim beyond a
bounded social field on audience, desire, or fashion.
The unpopularity of white power music certainly derives from the
tastes of audiences and artists in Europe and the USA. For its part, the
music industry has never embraced it, seeing it neither as an acceptable
market nor its producers or consumers as viable. And where new media
has created alternative platforms that increase the appeal and audience of
white power music, scholars of popular culture have largely neglected the
subject, underscoring its unpopularity and reinforcing the idea that it can
be disentangled from more popular musical forms. Even the special issue
of Popular Music and Society on hate rock in 2007 stands as an exception
to the overriding tendency to ignore, demonize, and/or marginalize. In
large measure, this likely derives from the shared values of those who cre-
ate, commercialize, and consume music and those who study it and study
them. It may arise, moreover, from the blurring of the boundaries formerly
separating fans from scholars, and since few scholars openly embrace white
power, and those who have done have become pariahs, there is little chance
it will become a more popular subject in the field. Finally, the subcultures,
sentiments, and stylings of white power make it difficult to place it in
some of the dominant narrative frames of pop culture studies. The very
Listening to Bad Music 205
Notes
1. Cf. Burghart; Corte and Edwards; Dyck; Futrell et al; Kim; Mann 2008; Mess-
ner et al.
2. http://www.micetrap.net/shop/catalog/achtung-juden-reich-songs-volume-
p-2564.html
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Hipster Black Metal?
Deafheaven’s Sunbather and the Evolution of an (Un)
popular Genre
Paola Ferrero
A couple of months ago a guy walks into a bar in Brooklyn and strikes up a
conversation with the bartenders about heavy metal. The guy happens to
mention that Deafheaven, an up-and-coming American black metal (BM)
band, is going to perform at Saint Vitus, the local metal concert venue, in
a couple of weeks. The bartenders immediately become confrontational,
denying Deafheaven the BM ‘label of authenticity’: the band, according to
them, plays ‘hipster metal’ and their singer, George Clarke, clearly sports
a hipster hairstyle. Good thing they probably did not know who they were
talking to: the ‘guy’ in our story is, in fact, Jonah Bayer, a contributor to
Noisey, the music magazine of Vice, considered to be one of the bastions of
hipster online culture. The product of that conversation, a piece entitled
‘Why are black metal fans such elitist assholes?’ was almost certainly
intended as a humorous nod to the ongoing debate, generated mainly by
music webzines and their readers, over Deafheaven’s inclusion in the BM
canon. The article features a promo picture of the band, two young, clean-
shaven guys, wearing indistinct clothing, with short haircuts and mild,
neutral facial expressions, their faces made to look like they were ironically
wearing black and white make up, the typical ‘corpse-paint’ of traditional,
early BM. It certainly did not help that Bayer also included a picture of
Inquisition, a historical BM band from Colombia formed in the early 1990s,
and ridiculed their corpse-paint and black cloaks attire with the following
caption: ‘Here’s what you’re defending, black metal purists. THIS’ (Bayer). The
use of Inquisition as a negative example meant to mock BM purists and their
theatrics was probably unfortunate and a little misinformed: Inquisition
had, in fact, just recently issued Obscure Verses for the Multiverse (2013), a
critically acclaimed album much lauded on indie webzines for its intricate
guitar work and powerful melodies.1
The question framing the article was indeed humorous but also very
provocative, as it pitted ‘traditional’ BM of the 1990s, here represented
by Inquisition, against a new wave of experimental BM bands founded
around the mid-2000s of which Deafheaven are the most popular example.
As a result, a long-winding debate ensued in the comment section of the
208 Paol a Ferrero
article over the nature of ‘authentic’ BM. While comment sections on online
music webzines are notoriously a haven for ‘trolls’ and people generally
insulting each other’s opinions, the discussion arising from Bayer’s piece
was surprisingly articulate and rational.2 Opinions ranged from the mellow
live-and-let-live argument to outspoken attacks on the perceived closed-
mindedness of BM fans’ and also to more articulate and certainly debatable
notions of what constitutes ‘real’ BM. Several identitarian positions arose:
the uncompromising BM fan defending the genre from mass co-optation,
the open-minded BM fan allowing for the genre’s hybridization, and the BM
‘neophyte’, a fan extraneous to the genre’s history that happens however to
like Deafheaven. What emerged from the comment section debate was a
host of different ideas concerning BM’s place in the contemporary musical
market. While the article was purposefully vague on Deafheaven’s actual
musical production and proceeded to bash BM’s elitism (or at least the
author’s version of it), commenters pointed to a much more interesting issue
concerning Deafheaven’s polarizing music: the relationship between the
band’s overwhelming popularity on indie music webzines and the historical,
entrenched, even sought for ‘unpopularity’ of BM.
Deafheaven’s first album, Roads to Judah (2011), was well received on
musical webzines and earned them some honorable spots in end-of-the-year
lists on Pitchfork and NPR, though strictly in metal lists. However, nothing
could prepare them, and BM fans, for the sudden and mind-blowing success
of their next excellent album Sunbather (2013). The album received stellar
reviews and topped Best Album lists in many indie music webzines and
mainstream music publications like NME and Rolling Stone, and the band
was unexpectedly catapulted into indie music stardom. Sounding like the
lovechild of Darkthrone and My Bloody Valentine, Deafheaven are not
your traditional BM band, and they stand at the forefront of a movement
that sees young BM bands, especially from the U.S. and France, playing
with the traditional boundaries of the genre in both its musical and formal
aesthetics. The band’s overall appearance, the unusual composition of their
audiences or the choice of a pink cover instead of the mandatory black of
most BM releases are the elements that have drawn the most criticism
and skepticism from BM fans. While Sunbather was indeed the spark that
ignited the controversy concerning ‘traditional’ vs ‘hipster’ BM, and while
it still remains the most popular object of contention, the critical interest
in the album is not an isolated phenomenon. Deafheaven are only the most
visible product of an undeniable trend that sees BM albums and tracks
being reviewed with increased frequency in general interest publications
like The New Yorker or the San Francisco Weekly or in indie music webzines
Hipster Bl ack Me tal? 209
like Pitchfork and Stereogum.3 These two online zines are considered the
strongholds of musical ‘hipsterdom’, and for good reason. They have quickly
become important cultural powerhouses, musical trendsetters with the
ability of directing musical tastes and pushing unknown artists into the
spotlight. 4
Readers of these webzines in the last couple of years could notice a
steady increase in the number of heavy metal releases reviewed, par-
ticularly extreme metal records. Once obscure bands like the veterans
Agalloch, Alcest, Blut aus Nord, Krallice, Locrian, Wolves in the Throne
Room, Horseback or Panopticon and newcomers like Ash Borer, Castevet,
Deafheaven, Cara Neir, Vattnet Viskar, Raspberry Bulbs and many others
often feature as ‘Albums of the Week’ or as ‘Top Track’ selections in indie
music webzines, a fact that has signif icantly increased their visibility.
How can we therefore explain this shift of BM from the realm of the
unpopular to that of the ‘cool’? How has the genre become part of indie
music discourse despite the fact that it usually poses serious challenges
to an uninitiated listener, revels in obscurity and insularity, and is usually
perceived as static and impermeable to outside influences? And how is
the reception of BM in indie webzines related to the stylistic evolution of
the genre from its early Norwegian roots to the present day? I will answer
these questions by illustrating the receptive strategies put into practice
by reviewers in indie webzines when dealing with new BM records by
using Deafheaven’s latest controversial album Sunbather as a case study.
In doing so, I will rely on the methodological tools of popular musicology,
and particularly on the analysis of musical events through the study of
‘musical collectivities’ and their ‘musical competences’. My analysis, a
sort of online ethnography of BM, will be based on reviews and articles
dedicated to Deafheaven and BM in indie webzines like Pitchfork, Stere-
ogum and Noisey and on the reactions of fans in the comment sections
to those articles.5 BM fans intervene in the definition of BM’s identity by
displaying their own ‘subcultural capital’ against newcomers to the genre
and uphold an idea of BM as transgressive and alien to the mainstream. I
will argue that the growing popularity of BM in indie webzine is a result
of the reification of Deafheaven’s Sunbather as a paradigmatic shift in
the history of genre by indie music critics, a reading counteracted by the
fan’s own ideas concerning the nature of BM as a historically unpopular
genre. The tension arising from this controversy reveals the way a music
subculture as carefully protected as BM polices its own boundaries and
how processes of cultural appropriation threaten the very identity of the
genre.
210 Paol a Ferrero
One way to explain the shift of BM from the realm of the unpopular to
that of the cool is to understand the way BM as a musical event has been
received by the indie music audience and the meaning of this co-optation.
Popular musicologist Richard Middleton in his Studying Popular Music
tries to interpret musical meanings and analyze the reception of musical
events by relying on the dynamics pertaining to ‘musical codes’ and ‘musical
competences’ of a ‘musical collectivity’. BM can be defined as a musical
event characterized by a set of ‘musical codes’, i.e. characteristics that relate
musical sounds to extra-musical factors (cf. Middleton 246). These catego-
ries allow us to describe a particular musical work according to its generic
norms, its musical and historical context as well as its musical content.
The term ‘musical collectivity’ has been devised by Italian musicologist
Franco Fabbri to describe all the social actors involved in the creation and
fruition of music and the definition of musical genres (cf. 85). According
to his definition, a musical collectivity includes musicians, composers,
promoters, label executives, fans, journalists, music critics and scholars.
Said music collectivity is endowed by what another Italian musicologist,
Gino Stefani, has termed ‘musical competence’ (Il Segno della Musica 21),
i.e. the way a musical message is received and interpreted by a musical
community. Stefani has devised a general scheme of musical competences
according to the analytical ‘tools’ used by the music ‘receiver’. All these
codes are grouped into two specific competence types, ‘high competence’
and ‘popular competence’ (Brackett 13).9 The most common example is
the difference between a receiver approaching a piece of music with a
knowledge of music theory and one that approaches it at what Stefani calls
an ‘anthropological’ level, as a daily practice (cf. La Parola all’Ascolto 12–13).
Stefani’s model complements Middleton’s in that it introduces the concept
of ‘context’ of the musical event by ‘telling us about the larger social and
cultural context, about the individual backgrounds of the senders and
the receivers of the message, and about the background of the message
itself’ (Brackett 14). In other words, musical works may be received and
codified by a musical collectivity according to different levels of musical
competence, a process that in turn influences the way in which musical
works are perceived and evaluated. In the case of BM’s reception by both the
indie and the BM musical collectivity, musical competence does not relate
specifically to a knowledge of the inner workings of a BM song in terms of,
say, chord progressions, melody, or harmonic structure: BM has rarely if ever
Hipster Bl ack Me tal? 213
been analyzed from a music theory perspective, and certainly not in music
webzines.10 On the other hand, the musical competences of BM’s fans relate
to a knowledge of the history of the genre, of its musical and ideological
evolution both temporally and spatially, and of the musical characteristics
linking the ‘old guard’ with this new host of young BM bands. This may be
true for most fans of very specialized genres, but in the case of BM, a very
unpopular genre now experiencing a sudden increase in popularity, this
aspect becomes crucial and arguably unique.
The process through which members of the BM ‘musical collectivity’
define themselves through their level of ‘high competence’ of the genre pro-
duces two complementary effects. Firstly, it endows them with ‘subcultural
capital’, a concept that Sarah Thornton, adapting it from Bourdieu’s own
theory of cultural capital, has used to study dance-music subcultures in the
United Kingdom. Translating the concept to the extreme metal subculture,
Keith Kahn-Harris has observed how the display of musical knowledge
within the scene produces an accumulation of subcultural capital. Extreme
metal fans are eager to show that they know all the intricacies of the scene
and the evolutionary paths of influence from one band to another. Secondly,
it creates ‘hierarchies of status’ and ‘hierarchies of power’ (Kahn-Harris
2367) within but, most importantly, as a reaction to outsiders trying to get
in. As Frith argues, if ‘social relations are constituted in cultural practice,
then our sense of identity and difference is established in the process of
discrimination’ (Performing Rites 18). Part of the pleasure of belonging to
the extreme metal scene is in fact derived from the profound knowledge of
the genre’s history, a kind of subcultural capital that allows scene members
to exclude or discriminate newcomers. BM fans and practitioners have
always proudly been conscious of the unpopularity of the genre and have
therefore reveled in the idea of being a part of a ‘secret society’ of like-
minded individuals exclusively conscious of the inner workings of the genre.
BM fans have also been proudly conscious of the genre’s ‘extreme’ or
‘transgressive’ nature. Generally speaking, the fact that BM’s lyrics and
imagery usually deal with death, violence and the occult is part of the
reason of its unpopularity. More specifically, the pleasure of transgression
from the norm of acceptable musical practice that extreme forms of metal
afford their listeners is crucially linked to questions of subcultural identity
formation. Keith-Kahn Harris has individuated three types of transgressions
in extreme metal: ‘sonic’, ‘discursive’ and ‘bodily’ (Kahn-Harris 660). Without
going into the detail of musical analysis, extreme metal transgresses the
‘norm’ of mainstream music and even classic heavy metal by emphasizing
elements such as heavy guitar distortion, down-tuning and volume. Other
214 Paol a Ferrero
Deafheaven’s 2013 album Sunbather just might be the first major splinter-
ing that will eventually see ‘extreme music’ separating completely from
actual heavy metal. [...] It remains the most critically acclaimed album
of 2013, of any genre, marking the first time an album that has occupied
that grey area between ‘metal’ and ‘extreme music’ has captured the
attention of so many mainstream critics and audiences. Some critics
still call Sunbather ‘metal’, but to do so is to forget what makes heavy
metal heavy metal in the first place, merely clutching to the few metallic
threads in an otherwise richly varied musical fabric. In reality, Sunbather
is a tremendous example of extremity transcending the metal ethos
entirely.
statement: that metal and extreme music are two different things. More
importantly, he claims that Sunbather’s success with mainstream audiences
is a result of an excision of the musical elements of metal in favor of the
gray area of extreme music. As he goes on to conclude, while metal lingers
in a state of crystallized motionlessness, extreme music is ‘the true limit-
less form of music’. Using Bergrand’s argument about Sunbather, Nelson
goes even further and questions the nature of metal itself: if Sunbather
is extreme music and thus not bounded by BM’s ‘rigid confines’ (Nelson),
then Alcest’s Shelter is also extreme music, and so are Burzum’s with his
‘washed-out, lulling and gentle’ records. In a post-Deafheaven world, metal
is indefinite.
While I may spend paragraphs arguing why I find very little ‘gentleness’
in any Burzum record, my interest lies more in the way BM has been shoe-
horned into indie cultural consciousness by positing this ‘post-Deafheaven’
world in which BM itself is eliminated from the equation in favor of the
all-encompassing ‘extreme’ label. Initially, Nelson seems to disagree
with Bergrand’s uncompromising view of metal, but he then utilizes his
definition of extreme music to equate extremity with musical innovation
and BM with musical rigidity. Ironically, Burzum need also to become
undefinedly extreme because identifying them strictly with BM would
automatically make their disciples, Deafheaven and Alcest, still BM. BM
musical codes, the ones Burzum allegedly helped to create, are therefore
made irrelevant because they did not exist in the first place. The way BM,
and particularly Sunbather, is received by the indie music collectivity,
in this case reviewers and fans or commenters, dramatizes exactly how
the unpopularity of the genre has been metabolized through a narrative
that downplays its BM elements and at the same time posits the evolution
of BM in the ‘post-Deafheaven’ world as a decisive break rather than an
evolutionary narrative.
Brandon Stosuy’s enthusiastic review of Sunbather on Pitchfork also
favors this narrative of rupture in the BM continuum. First he lists all
the influences present in the record, an impressive roster of bands that,
quite ironically, makes you wonder where Deafheaven’s groundbreaking
originality truly lies: we have the massive, cinematic post-rock of Mogway,
Goospeed You! Black Emperor, and Sigur Rós, but also the 1980’s art rock
of The Cure and The Smiths, and of course the shoegaze of My Bloody
Valentine. He then concludes his review by also positing a ‘post-Deafheaven’
world where ‘black metal won’t be the same now that [Sunbather has] been
released’. Nelson’s review of Sunbather runs along the same line of thought
and tends to stress Deafheaven’s non-BM elements:
218 Paol a Ferrero
If you were to remove all Clarke’s vocals from Deafheaven’s new LP,
Sunbather, and replace them with anodyne, ethereal cooing courtesy
of, say, Bilinda Butcher or Rachel Goswell, you would be unlikely to hear
Sunbather as anything except a shoegazer album. Or you could axe the
vocals entirely and just call it a post-rock record and you wouldn’t be
wrong. Clarke doesn’t even look like what a guy in a black metal band
is supposed to look like: He’s dapper, smartly dressed, cleanly cropped.
You’d be more likely to mistake him for a member of Morrissey’s backing
band than a member of Inquisition or Immortal. But as soon as he opens
his mouth… (‘Premature Evaluation’)
Vuh or the post-rock of Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor! than to
Mayhem or Darkthrone. Yet, while these bands hybridize their sound with
other genres and do away with the more spectacular elements of early BM
(the corpse-paint, the Satanic or occult imagery), stylistically they do not,
or at least not completely. Stereogum’s Chris DeVille pointedly states in
an article on Deafheaven’s crossing over to the ‘dark side’ of hipsterdom
(‘Deconstructing: Deafheaven, Disclosure and Crossing Over’), that indie
music critics are usually eager to present themselves as open-minded
omnivores. Reviews of Sunbather in both indie webzines and mainstream
publications will therefore embrace the album as a break with traditional
BM and disparage BM’s purists supposed backlash.
However, as I have already pointed out at the beginning of this essay,
such a purist backlash is actually rare and discussions on comment sections
to articles about Deafheaven are usually cogent and well-informed dissec-
tions of BM’s myriad influences and subcurrents. Of course, exceptions
apply: some commenters are openly hostile to metal, feeding off the usual
stereotypes about metal fans’ musical immaturity, herd mentality, and
elitism. Other listeners approaching BM for the first time with what we
could term ‘low’ musical competence of the genre, tend to find fault with
some of its most inaccessible musical elements, but they nevertheless show
a certain degree of open-mindedness, certainly fuelled by the hype created
by their favorite indie webzines. A commenter on Sunbather’s reviews on
Stereogum named ‘KiDCHAIR’ states that he would definitely listen to
Deafheaven, he loves the melodies, the emotional surge of the blast beat
coupled with the frantic chord progressions, but he really cannot swallow
a singing that to him is just a series of ‘YAI, YAI, YAAAHAHAH’ that does
not communicate any emotion to him. ‘Why can’t he sing?’ he asks (Nelson,
‘Premature Evaluation’). Some commenters on the articles by Baher, Nelson
and DeVille define themselves as ‘metal outsiders’ and are usually confused
by metal’s endless breakdown into currents and subgenres, but still express
interest in giving BM a try. A commenter on the DeVille article named
‘spo’ for instance states how his enjoyment of the Deafheaven album has
encouraged him to listen to other bands, like Wolves in the Throne Room.
The most interesting insights on the debate come, however, from BM
fans, people with medium to high musical competence about the genre.
The concern of these fans revolves around the crossover of the genre from
the unpopular underground to the popularity of indie music culture, a fact
signaled by the success of Deafheaven. Fans tend to respond to the hostility
of mainstream culture by further asserting and promoting heavy metal as
an exclusive subculture. Heavy metal fans, as Weinstein has noted, take
220 Paol a Ferrero
pride in the fact that they listen to good music that outsiders tend to either
misinterpret or denigrate (cf. 143). While metal’s subcultural status has
historically relied on several ‘external’ signifiers such as the long hair, the
leather jackets and tattoos as well as communal gathering places like the
metal festival or the local record store, the music has always been its most
defining factor. Metal is a ‘music based subculture’ (Weinstein 143) in that
it is grounded in the fans’ assumption of its innate greatness. This, in turn,
generates a heightened sense of commitment and social belonging: heavy
metal fans are loyal to their favorite bands and assume a defensive attitude
towards criticism coming from the outside. In other words, heavy metal is
a quintessentially unpopular genre, a fact that fans take as a point of pride
rather than as a defeat.
Some BM fans commenting on Bayer’s article actually indicate elitism
as the force behind BM’s musical quality. They argue that BM’s co-optation
from indie culture will inevitably result in a decline in the quality of the
music as well as a ‘softening’ of the distinctive features of the genres. The
‘selling out’ paradigm is indeed integral to indie music culture. Kembrew
McLeod’s study on the mid-1990s American hip-hop scene has revealed
the dynamics through which a subculture tries to preserve its identity
from mainstream assimilation. He argues that when members of a musical
community
saturated in?’ (Bayer) As this last comment renders evident, some fans
share a romanticized view of BM as uncorrupted by the forces of the global
music industry. But as Spracklen points out, BM ‘is part of the Westernised,
commercial pop and rock music industry that has imposed itself on the
rest of the world, and as such BM reproduces the instrumental actions that
govern that industry’ (9). In other words, whatever subcultural capital BM
may afford its fans, the genre produces actual capital for its practitioners
and promoters and is part of the same processes of supply and demand that
characterize mainstream musical cultures. The co-optation of BM by other
musical subcultures becomes therefore a battle for the genre’s identity, one
that is still conceived by many fans as the only alternative to mass-produced
pop or the latest indie fad.
Still other BM fans take a completely opposite view and see BM as
naturally suited to hybridization with other genres. Commenting on
Bayer’s article, user ‘Arif Aksit’ interestingly questions Sunbather’s sudden
success, but most poignantly, he points to BM’s past history of musical
innovation, discarding the reading of Sunbather by indie music critics as
a groundbreaking, genre-altering record. A good number of fans also take
issue with the definition of Sunbather as a non-BM record or a generally
extreme record that transcends BM altogether. This is most evident in the
Nelson article on a ‘post-Deafheaven’ world, where fans competently point
to the preponderance of BM musical elements like tremolo picking, the blast
beat, and the high-pitched screaming vocals in Sunbather. A user named
‘themetalpigeon’ counteracts Nelson’s argument and voices an opinion
shared by most commenters to the article: BM, and metal in general, is
not a static genre and Deafheaven are not revolutionary. As he argues:
‘Metal’s malleability is its core strength after all—long before there were
Alcests and Deafheavens metal was already branched out in a myriad of
different directions with unique styles’. User ‘A. Darryl Moton’ re-asserts
the same concept: ‘I like the new Alcest album, much like I enjoyed the
Deafheaven album, but I don’t think anything truly revolutionary is going
down here–to me, it’s pretty much the same thing that metal’s been doing
since Black Sabbath made blues slower and louder’. These comments show
that musically competent BM fans counter the construction of Sunbather as
a break with the tradition and reject the fable of its threatening nature to the
status quo on two accounts: it is not a genre-altering recording and it is a BM
record. The fans’ reading of Deafheaven’s phenomenal success clashes with
a dubious narrative, constructed mainly by the indie webzines, that sees
new BM bands breaking decisively with a monolithic earlier tradition that
is still staunchly defended by a supposed backlash of close-minded purists.
222 Paol a Ferrero
McCoy: Pretty much all the stuff we’re influenced by is the Ukrainian
stuff like Drudkh or Hate Forest. Or the German bands like Lantlos or
Cold World. More of the atmospheric, post-rock kind of thing. Other than
that the French bands, especially. And I hate that I’m about to say this
but Wolves in the Throne Room and Panopticon are great. [Laughs] Then
early Darkthrone, early Burzum, Ulver.
and ferocity to light and sweet melancholy, an effect both Burzum and
Drudkh achieved through repetition of heavy guitar riffs accompanied
by uplifting, melancholic tremolo-picked melodic lines or sequences of
arpeggios. With Deafheaven, melody becomes a key element of the composi-
tion and the tremolo picked guitar crescendos are as much a product of
post-rock experimentations of bands like Sigur Ros , Explosions in the Sky
and God Speed You! Black Emperor as of the melodic overtures of Burzum
and Drudkh. Deafheaven’s music is not a break or a watershed, but rather
a continuum in BM’s ongoing evolutionary narrative of constant rewriting
of its own musical codes. BM is ‘extreme’ insofar as it has always been the
metal subgenre that has been playing the most with the outer hedges of
metal, its ‘extremities’, so to speak.
Conclusion
The reason for the indie webzine’s increasing coverage of BM resides in the
fundamentally experimental attitude of the genre since its very beginnings.
If we set aside the corpse-paint and the Satanic or Pagan imagery and listen
to it, we will find that precisely because BM is the most extreme of metal
subgenres, always skirting at the edges and playing with other genres,
especially electronic music, dark ambient, drone music, and punk, it is also
the most malleable and experimental, the one most prone to a hybridization
of its core elements. The Norwegian bands of the second wave of BM, far
from remaining monolithic protectors of the traditional ‘true’ sound, have
also continued to deconstruct the genre from within, a fact that has had
a direct consequence on the experimentations of the new BM bands. This
evolutionary reading of BM as it travels from Europe to the US and back re-
inscribes a narrative of continuity that counters some of the indie webzines’
narratives of appropriation, discontinuity and disavowal. One just needs
to listen to the latest record by Norwegian BM veterans Darkthrone, The
Underground Resistance (2012), alongside the music of newcomers Rasperry
Bulbs; or the ‘black’ prog-rock of another BM institution, Enslaved, alongside
the psychedelic experimentations of younger bands like Vattnet Viskar
or Oranssi Pazuzu. Musically speaking the core elements of BM are still
present, but they are mixing with other genres, crossing and disrespecting
boundaries to create new brands of BM. Lyrics express anguish, pain and
frustration with the modern world, with society and with relationships in
a different, maybe more personal language, but the feelings typical of BM
are all there. This is a testament to the fact that BM is today the most vital
224 Paol a Ferrero
I may be pushing this a little too far, but there seems to be a forbidden
pleasure in redeeming BM from its unpopularity, freezing it in perpetual
elitism and immutability, and positing a ‘post-Deafheaven’ reality, an
almost post-apocalyptic renewal of BM into popular indie culture that
erases its roots and history. But as Dagon reminds us, pushing the envelope
constitutes ‘the building blocks’ of this genre, and its staunch, sought for, and
well-guarded historical unpopularity is linked to this intrinsic experimental
drive and to the ‘cultural awareness’ of it by BM fans. The crossing-over of
BM into the popular realm of indie webzines is just the realization of this
cultural awareness.
Notes
1. Inquisition’s Obscure Verses for the Multiverse received stellar reviews from
most specialized metal webzines (Cvlt Nation and Invisible Oranges, among
others) as well as an 8.1 score from Pitchfork Magazine. See Kim Kelly ‘Al-
bum Reviews: Inquisition: Obscure Verses From the Multiverse’.
2. The act of ‘trolling’, described by the Urban Dictionary as the act of ‘being
a prick on the internet because you can,’ consists of insulting or offending
other people’s opinions and tastes in the comment sections of various spe-
cialized and non-specialized websites in order to spike controversy. Most
webzines, for example Stereogum, apply a certain degree of censorship and
hide particularly offensive comments, while others, like the overwhelm-
ingly popular Pitchfork, have done away with comment sections altogether.
Wired Mat Honan has declared the death of the comment section in favor
of social network services like Facebook and Twitter. I would however coun-
teract that, at least in the case here at hand of music webzines, a carefully
moderated comment section creates very fruitful and focused conversations
among musically literate individuals as opposed to social network’s disper-
sal through information overflow. See, Mat Honan, ‘Comment Sections are
Wastelands Ruled by Trolls. Here are Alternatives’.
226 Paol a Ferrero
3. The term ‘indie’ has quickly come to be used, starting from the 1990s, to de-
scribe the music produced by labels independent of the major record label
system. R.E.M. are often cited as the primary example of an indie band, to-
gether with the meteoric explosion of the Seattle grunge scene, with bands
like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and others. Nowadays
the term ‘indie’ is used in a much looser sense and indicates those artists
walking a fine line between the underground and the mainstream. For more
on the history of the indie genre see Azzerad and Kruse. For a tentative
definition of indie music see Hibbet.
4. Simon Frith defines rock critics as the ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘ideological
gate-keepers’ (Sound Effects 117) of the musical communities they write for.
They become veritable ‘consumer guides for adults’ and are able to stir the
listeners’ tastes concerning the palatability of certain artists and their place
in the pantheon of music history. The process of ‘legitimization’ of BM by
mainstream rock and indie critics constitutes a crucial aspect of the genre’s
problematic relationship with popularity. On the ideological function of
rock music criticism see also Frith, Performing Rites, and McLeod.
5. ‘Online ethnography’ or ‘Netnography’ is a fairly recent anthropological
field, originally developed for marketing and consumer research, dealing
with online communities and online social interactions. For an introduc-
tion to the methodological tools of Netnography see Robert V. Kozinetz,
Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online.
6. Tremolo picking: double picking of the strings at a fast tempo. It favors
chord progressions around arpeggios.
7. Rapid alternating or coincident strokes, primarily on the bass and snare
drums.
8. The growing interest in the history of Norwegian BM, certainly fuelled in
part by the mythologization surrounding Euronymous’s death, has since
spawned a series of publications on BM of which Michael Moyhinian’s
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (1998) is
the earliest example. However, Moyhinian’s book focuses more on the his-
tory of the Satanic ‘inner circle’ surrounding the scene rather than on the
music itself. A recent, interesting oral history of BM, dedicated but not lim-
ited to the Norwegian scene, is Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries, a volume
collecting the Slayer Magazine, a seminal DIY metal magazine published in
Norway between 1985 and 2010 by Norwegian BM ‘insider’ Jon Kristiansen,
aka Metalion. Other recent publications specifically dedicated to BM offer a
more global history of the genre’s musical output, particularly an essay col-
lection edited by Tom Howells, Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness (2012) and
an encyclopedic volume by Dayal Patterson, Black Metal: Evolution of the
Cult (2014). Of specific interest to Norwegian BM is the recent documentary
by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewells, Until the Light Takes Us (2009), which
features an extensive interview with Burzum’s Varg Vikernes.
Hipster Bl ack Me tal? 227
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Unpopular Culture and the American
Reception of Tinariwen
Barry Shank
Raymond Williams was among the first to argue that popular culture was
the culture of the people and should be analyzed from a perspective alert
to their particular characteristics and needs. Following standard Marxist
thinking, the category of the people was defined by class, and the culture
of the people could be known by observing what the people listened to,
read, and watched (cf. 306–12). But we know now that cultures do not have
boundaries; they have threads that interweave across communities and
geographies, defying any effort to keep them in their place. Our historical
moment is one of intense and rapid change, where traditional organizations
of sounds and traditional organizations of life are being engulfed by global
waves of violence. This is not a time when political or musical boundaries
stand still. Popular music in itself cannot stop war, but newly arranged
timbres, scales and beats can create new musical aesthetics that ratify a
world of sound and meaning shared across borders. When a new sense of
musical beauty spreads across new listeners, a different sense of the political
world is produced. This aesthetic process of changing the boundaries of
the political is not a popular one in the traditional sense. Indeed, it could
be understood as one of the key gestures of truly unpopular culture as it
challenges common sense conceptions of the people.
It is not obvious what happens when people from opposite sides of
the planet share a sense of musical pleasure. Is it possible for that shared
aesthetic to change the shape of the political in a meaningful way? This
essay examines the case of Tinariwen, a band of Tuareg or kel Tamashek
musicians who have been among the leading groups developing a particular
style of what the West has come to call ‘desert blues’. Over the past decade, as
the Western popularity of Tinariwen’s music has increased, political chaos
has descended upon Mali, the nation state that stands upon the ground
from which Tinariwen and Tuareg music emerged. Over the past several
years, this turmoil has intensified, with multiple armies swarming across
the northern portion of Mali. In this example, it might be worth asking what
political force can music have in the face of war’s destruction.
During this recent period of turmoil, Tinariwen has been continually
on the road, performing across Europe and North America. Their Anglo-
American following is drawn by the sounds of their guitars and assumptions
about the cultural histories those sounds carry with them. Curious listeners
to their earlier recordings were hailed by comments in Pitchfork reviews
like this one where Joe Tangari described their 2007 album, Aman Iman:
When reviewing Tinariwen’s 2009 album Imidiwan, the same writer evoked
the social context for its production, describing the ‘intermittent violence
and displacement’ the Tuareg people experience ‘as they’ve fought to main-
tain their culture and lifestyle in a world that isn’t built to accommodate it’
(‘Imidiwan’). Listening to these recordings, the disproportionately young
white male readers of these Pitchfork reviews could imagine a soundscape
that integrated sounds both familiar and exotic, guitar drones amid North
African scales, non-English lyrics—mostly Tamashek, but some French—
repeated with strophic phrasing, within a contemporary geopolitical
struggle, conjuring the associations of global black music with the drive
for human emancipation. ‘The blues is present’, says Tangari, ‘as a sense of
intense longing and defiance in the face of despair that hums in sympathetic
vibration with its trans-Atlantic cousin’ (‘Aman Iman’). In these reviews,
Tinariwen is misrecognized as a modern inheritor of the blues impulse. On
first hearing, their music sounds like the blues created by Black Americans,
and therefore we are to assume that the struggles experienced by the Tuareg
are akin to Black Americans’ struggles for freedom.
The power of this set of assumptions can be understood through a
concept developed by Roshy Kheshti called the ‘aural imaginary’, which
has significant implications for all forms of listening, perhaps especially
the initial listening that might be the first step towards the emergence of
new political communities. The first encounter of new sounds, that moment
when we begin to sort those sounds into musical categories, is fraught.
Inevitably, a kind of misrecognition occurs that results not only from the
extreme differences between the social contexts of the music’s origin and
the contexts of the music’s hearing, but also from deeply held and nearly
unconscious assumptions about the social meanings of particular sounds
(cf. Kheshti 711–31).3 In this case, Tinariwen’s droning guitars and deep
masculine voices reverberate off ear canals trained by decades of rock’s
romanticization of the blues impulse and stimulate the longing for political
music that haunts the aural imaginary of many American listeners. At
least one commentator from 2007 had a more accurate understanding of
Tinariwen’s context. Robert Christgau wrote in a review of that same album
Aman Iman: ‘What’s sought isn’t your affection, but your respect.’ He went
on to quote a translation of one line from the song ‘Tamatart Tilay’, ‘We
232 Barry Shank
kill the enemies and become like eagles. We’ll liberate all those who live in
the places’. Christgau reminded his readers: ‘This is not a metaphor. They
are talking about killing’. But he stood out from the crowd. Most American
reviews were shaped by romantic associations of blues music with civil
resistance and political progressivism.
The effects of the audible imaginary were not limited to US-based listen-
ers. When Tinariwen toured the UK a few years ago, Thomas Jones wrote in
Crack magazine: ‘As dedicated to their music as they are to their struggle
for independence, Tinariwen are the ultimate rebel rockers’. Yet in the
same article, Jones quotes Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, one of the band’s founding
members, saying, ‘Our message is about who we are as people. We are doing
music that comes from our ancestors, with electric guitars, but with the
lyrics, the rhythms and the ambience from our heritage. So we are musicians
first, but the voice of our people at the same time’. Articulating a classic
understanding of the popular, Ag Alhabib insists that Tinariwen’s music is
traditional, rooted in a local heritage of musical performance.
The melodies and rhythms that sound both exotic and familiar to the
carefully nurtured Anglo-American audience emerge from a tradition of
guitar-accompanied warrior praise songs called ichumar or alguitara. (Ichu-
mar is the local word for the unemployed. Alguitara refers, of course, to the
instrument.) It is an adaptation of a slightly (but only slightly) older traditional
style called teherdent. As the ethnomusicologist Nadia Belalimat outlines
it, the teherdent style features both male and female singers, the women
alternating ululations with the men’s chants. The instrumentation is sparse,
featuring rhythms beat out on a tinde drum reinforced by handclaps, while
the melodies are echoed on the three-sting lute from which the style takes its
name. Originally a style that was performed only by local musicians, predomi-
nantly women, for an audience of extended family and friends, its orientation
shifted outward during the 1960s. Belalimat notes: ‘Many musician-artisans
started performing outside their own lineage affiliations in order to provide
for themselves, since their former employers could no longer support them’
(160). The teherdent style adapted to the guitar when that instrument spread
across the region. The guitar could be both louder and more percussive than
the teherdent, and it was just as easy to carry. When the Tuareg resistance
began again in the late 1980s, the instrument quickly became metonymi-
cally linked to weapons of rebellion. Another of the founding members of
Tinariwen, Keddou Ag Ossad, was praised for riding into battle with a rifle
in one hand, a traditional saber in the other, and his guitar on his back (cf.
Rasmussen 643). As Rasmussen explains, ‘in the early ichumar music, the
composers, performers, and audience all were combatants’ (635). Rasmussen
Unpopul ar Culture and the American Reception of Tinariwen 233
goes on to say, ‘Early ichumar songs were composed by one rebel to praise
another and were performed by the composer or the subject of praise in a
tightly knit ‘circle’ of mutual support’ (639). As the alguitara or ichumar style
developed, recordings of this music were banned by the Malian government
and circulated only via underground cassette copies.
Just as the musical style itself emerged from local conditions, the musi-
cians of Tinariwen did not inherit the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave
trade, although apparently they have their own history of slave-trading.
The Tuareg are an ethnic group often included among the Berbers, but
distinguished by their language, Tamashek. When France’s North African
colonies achieved independence in the 1960s, they found their traditional
territory divided among the nations of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Alge-
ria. At the time of decolonization, the Tuareg were a mostly nomadic people,
who herded cattle along the Niger River. Their way of life was increasingly
threatened by the modernizing projects transforming the region’s economy.
Post-colonial national boundaries made little sense to people who drove
their cattle anywhere water and grass could be found. In addition a long
drought period greatly reduced the landscape’s ability to support nomadic
groups and their animal herds (cf. Zoumenou).
One of the results of these environmental and economic pressures was
the Tuareg rebellion. The Tuareg had spent decades resisting French colonial
domination. In 1960, when the new state of Mali was created, it forced
different people with no independent history of political cooperation into
one national formation. The Tuareg saw no reason they should cooperate
with the Malian government centered in Bamako, in the southwestern
region. Vastly different ways of life combined with elements of racial tension
(Government officials were largely Black Africans, while Berbers like the
Tuareg are more light-skinned) to provoke a decades-long conflict that has
gone through periods of greater and lesser violence. Under environmental
and developmental pressures, the Tuareg social world has been fundamen-
tally transformed. The traditional self-sufficient way of life is now nearly
completely eradicated. From its early days, the government of Mali had
inherited a crippling debt, which was enforced by the World Bank, depriving
the government of resources that could have eased some of the tensions.
Almost no money was available for further development in the North (cf.
Prashad). Many Tuareg moved south into the cities, where the formerly
incomprehensible idea of unemployment, something that makes no sense
to a nomadic people, became a lived reality (cf. Lecocq).
Some of the former Tuareg warriors moved to Libya where they joined
with Gaddafi’s forces, gaining modern training and weapons. Several of the
234 Barry Shank
During an early 2012 tour of the UK, Ag Alhabib described the struggle
this way:
‘This year is a special year. Although the first rebellion started in 1963,
we have never been as strong as the rebellion has this year. The MNLA
is controlling 2/3 of Mali in the North, and we need to stay strong and
fight for our autonomy, we want to find a deal with the international
community and with the Malian government’. (Jones, ‘Tinariwen’)
On the ground in Mali, however, military leaders associated with the Tuareg
had slaughtered dozens of the remaining Malian soldiers. The violence
involved in the loss of the region was enough to prompt a change of national
government in Bamako. In the ensuing governmental gap, the foreign fight-
ers began setting up Islamic governments. By July 2012, these governments
controlled most of the region. The worst punishments of Shari’a law were
enacted against the remaining dark-skinned inhabitants. As Andy Morgan,
former manager of Tinariwen, describes it: ‘Almost all the condemned were
‘black’ Songhoi or Bozo men. Almost all those who judged them were ‘white’
or lighter skinned Arabs, Touareg or foreigners’ (19).
As amputations and stonings stoked the racialized divisions in the
country, a general proclamation went out over Azawad:
We do not want Satan’s music. In its place, there will be Quranic verses.
Shari’a demands this. What God commands must be done’. On that day,
Tuareg music was banned in their own homeland. When a large group of
Malian musicians drawn from a wide range of different styles recorded a
special song of unity, ‘Voices United for Mali’, no one from Tinariwen, or
Terakaft, or Tartit, the leading Tuareg bands, participated. (Morgan 21)4
‘France decided to make these borders 50 years ago. France came into
this conflict when it was a bad issue so I’m glad they came…but hopefully
they will leave. Hopefully they won’t take everything. But the French
know EXACTLY what the situation is. We don’t know what the French
will give to us. Maybe they will help or maybe they will just make more
borders and work with the bad politicians. So, actually, we don’t know. It’s
a long bad history with the French. We don’t know what they’re bringing
now’. (Lipez)
lengthy career. The guitars on this track are layered with echo, and the
drones that anchor the band’s sound are played on a pedal steel guitar. The
song begins with spoken words in English intoned by Saul Williams. From
production style to instrument choice to the first appearance of English
words on one of their tracks, this recording addresses its Anglo-American
audience more directly and clearly than Tinariwen ever has before. The
touring in support of the album has been incessant. In 2014, they played
over 130 shows solely in Europe, the UK and the US.
The video for the song, however, presents a visual narrative of isolation
and alienation. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib rides in the back of a car across the
Mojave. No other humans are shown. During most of the video, the camera
shoots out the window of the moving car, showing only the desert racing by.
Railroad tracks, electrical lines and poles, and the occasional speed limit
sign break up the flow of unpopulated dust, scrub trees and hills. As the
song comes to its end, the car pulls up to a fire, suggesting the presence of
others, but not showing them. Finally, the camera pans up, revealing a few
old amplifiers waiting alone. The video makes clear the absence of a public
for whom the band performs, the disappearance of the deep connection
with an audience that grounds the pleasures of popular music, despite the
fact that their popularity in the West continues.
In this way, these Tuareg musicians exemplify the category of unpopular
culture. With their homeland devastated, Tuareg musicians have become
migrant workers moving from f ield to f ield, concert house to concert
house, laboring where the opportunity arises, touring the West, perform-
ing music that draws rapturous crowds, negotiating marketing images
and promotional narratives that misrecognize the political significance
of their music. Tinariwen and their fellow Tuareg musicians continue to
extend their musical offerings to crowds that do not understand their lyrics
and that often subsume their struggles into a monolithic category of rebel
rockers derived from an earlier moment in musical and political history.
Yet, this misrecognition makes possible their financial survival. Ironically,
in this way they have become more like the great blues performers of the
mid-twentieth century who found white college students listening to them
after their black audiences had moved on to soul and hard-bop. Perhaps this
is the true link between desert blues and the older form. Both musical styles
became globally popular with White Western audiences at the moment
when their sounds no longer connected organically with their original
conditions of production. Both musical styles look backwards even as they
sing the future possibility of a larger political community, one not divided
by violence but connected through the shared experience of musical beauty.
238 Barry Shank
Returning their music to the complexities of its context does not situate
Tinariwen as political innocents nor as heroic rebel rockers. While many of
their Western fans retain a blurred picture of that context and a romantic
framework for their listening, the advance in journalistic response evi-
denced in Lipez’s analysis suggests that the experience of musical beauty
is generating a drive towards a more full understanding of the complexi-
ties demanded of a more expansive political community capable of truly
recognizing the range of combatants in North Africa. This suggests that
the inevitable misrecognition that frames all listening to truly new music
can be and indeed often must be the first step towards the interrogative
listening that invites the transformation of political community. Thus, the
unpopular sows the seeds of a popular to come.
Notes
1. Portions of this chapter were first published in the ‘Coda’ to my book The
Political Force of Musical Beauty. Thank you to Duke University Press for
permission to reprint.
2. For a sample critique of the concept of culture as a bounded whole, see
Crehan 36–66.
3. Bob White makes a similar point in ‘The Promise of World Music: Strategies
for Non-Essentialist Listening’ when he asserts that consuming world music
often leads to essentialist assumptions about the culture that produced the
music. His analysis of the problem is less subtle than Kheshti’s, however,
relying as it does on an unnecessary one-to-one link between musical style
and cultural identity for his own position as well as the listening practices
he critiques. But his list of strategies for avoiding essentialist listening is
useful.
4. See also Whitehouse 17–18.
Works Cited
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Performances to the World Scene.’ Tuareg Society within a Globalized World. Ed. Anja Fischer
and Ines Kohl. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. 155–70. Print.
Bignon, Lyle. ‘Tinariwen—Emmaar’. The 405. 25 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Christgau, Robert. ‘Consumer Guides: Tinariwen’. Robertchristgau.com. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Crehan, Kate. Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Print.
Eyre, Banning. ‘Tinariwen’s Abdullah Ag Alhoussein Talks About Mali’. Afropop Worldwide.
3 July 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Unpopul ar Culture and the American Reception of Tinariwen 239
Hirsch, Afua. ‘Islamic Extremists Face Citizen Uprising in Mali’. The Guardian 17 July 2012.
Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Jones, Thomas. ‘Tinariwen’. Crack. 12 Sep. 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Kheshti, Roshanak. ‘Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture’.
American Quarterly 63.3 (October 2011): 711–31. Print.
Lecocq, Baz. ‘Unemployed Intellectuals in the Sahara: The Teshumara Nationalist Movement
and the Revolutions in Tuareg Society’. IRSH 49 (2004): 87–109. Print.
Lipez, Zachary. ‘Tinariwen Talks “Emmaar”, Politics, and Working with Matt Sweeney’. Noisey.
20 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Morgan, Andy. Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali. Barrington: Freemuse, 2013. Print.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. London: Verso, 1993. Print.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Brien,
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Print.
Prashad, Vijay. ‘What’s Happening in Mali?’ Counterpunch. 28 Oct. 2009. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetic: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel
Rockhill. New York: Continuum, 2004. Print.
Rasmussen, Susan. ‘Moving Beyond Protest in Tuareg Ichumar Performance’. Ethnohistory 53.4
(Fall 2006): 633–55. Print.
Shank, Barry. The Political Force of Musical Beauty. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.
Smith, Stephen W. ‘In Search of Monsters, On the French Intervention in Mali’. London Review
of Books 35.3. 7 Feb. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Tangari, Joe. ‘Aman Iman: Water is Life’. Pitchfork. 4 Apr. 2007. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
—. ‘Imidiwan: Companions’. Pitchfork. 13 Oct. 2009. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
—. ‘Tinariwen, Emmaar’. Pitchfork. 10 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Troughton, Richie. ‘Tinariwen—Emmaar’. The Quietus. 11 Mar. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Tsioulcas, Anastasia. ‘First Listen: Tinariwen, “Emmaar.”’ Music.com. 2 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
White, Bob. ‘The Promise of World Music: Strategies for Non-Essentialist Listening’. Music and
Globalization: Critical Encounters. Ed. Bob White. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. 189–217.
Print.
Whitehouse, Bruce. ‘What Went Wrong in Mali?’ London Review of Books 34.16. 30 Aug. 2012.
Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Williams, Raymond. Culture & Society: 1780–1950. 1958. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Print.
Zoumenou, David. ‘West Africa: The Sahel—Is There a Solution to the Tuareg Insurgency?’
AllAfrica. 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Cultural Studies and the Un/Popular
How the Ass-Kicking Work of Steven Seagal May Wrist-
Break Our Paradigms of Culture
Dietmar Meinel
The first foreigner to run an aikido dojo in Japan, declared the reincarna-
tion of a Buddhist lama, blackmailed by the mob, environmental activist,
small-town sheriff, owner of a brand of energy drinks, film producer, writer,
musician, and lead in his first film (cf. Vern vii), 1980s martial arts action
film star Steven Segal is a fascinating but often contradictory figure. Yet,
Seagal is strikingly absent from the contemporary revival of seasoned
action-film heroes such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce
Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, and Chuck Norris in
The Expendables (2010), The Expendables 2 (2012), and The Expendables
3 (2014). In contrast, ‘starring’ in up to four direct-to-video releases each
year over the last decade, Seagal has become a successful entrepreneur of B
movies. The (very) low production values of these films, however, highlight
rather than conceal his physical demise as incongruent, confusing, and
Godard-style editing replaces the fast-paced martial arts action of earlier
movies. While his bulky body has become a disheartening memento of his
glorious past, his uncompromising commitment to spiritual enlighten-
ment and environmental protection arguably elevates him above the mere
ridiculousness of his films.
In this essay, I will explore Seagal and his oeuvre as he moved from ac-
claimed martial arts action star to bizarre media figure in order to devise a
framework for un/popular culture. By reading the thirty-year long career of
Seagal as consistently unpopular and consistently popular, I appropriate and
utilize what James Storey describes as the ‘absent other’ (1). In Cultural Theory
and Popular Culture (2010), Storey draws attention to the dualistic dimension
of any attempt to define the popular. Since most conceptualizations juxtapose
the popular with an ‘absent other’—whether folk, high, or working-class
culture—any analysis will be ‘powerfully affect[ed by] the connotations
brought into play when we use the term “popular culture”’ (Storey 1).
242 Die tmar Meinel
Indeed, def initions of popular culture and its absent others utilize
quantitative and qualitative categories. In his Keywords (1983), for ex-
ample, Raymond Williams describes popular culture as a phenomenon
‘well-liked by many people’ to which ‘well-liked by few people’ functions
as its unpopular other. While to be ‘disliked by many people’ constitutes a
second other in the example, this notion of a detested, yet widely known
phenomenon suggests an additional dimension of the un/popular. Rather
than a quantitative assessment, the popular can, as Williams maintains,
also designate ‘inferior kinds of work (cf. popular literature, popular press as
distinguished from quality press); and work deliberately setting out to win
favour (popular journalism as distinguished from democratic journalism,
or popular entertainment)’ (237, emphases in original). Although differ-
ent qualities define the value of a text (independent of its quantitative
distribution), often high art serves as this absent other of popular literature
or entertainment. In Williams’s example, the notion of a ‘democratic jour-
nalism’ also foreshadows a third category of the popular in addition to its
quantitative (known vs unknown) and qualitative dimension (inferior
culture vs high art). As Williams also deems popular culture to represent
‘the culture actually made by people for themselves’ (237), in this Marxist
understanding of popular culture, an authentic culture of the working class
or ‘the people’ exists that functions as a space of resistance against capitalist
appropriation and commodification.
Similarly, among the six definitions of popular culture James Storey of-
fers, the notion of popular culture as a quantitative measure, an anti-thesis
to high art, and as a (authentic) culture of the people figure prominently.
Even when Storey lists definitions describing the popular as ‘mass culture’,
as part of the ideological apparatuses, or as an essential feature of hegemony
(cf. 5–12), these latter notions all delineate a political function as well. In
this sense, Storey’s definitions equally underscore the quantitative, the
qualitative, and the ideological or conceptual dimension of popular culture
that Williams alludes to. Linked to each other even in their absence, thus,
the notion of the popular, the unpopular, and high art necessitate a shared
conceptual framework I label the un/popular.
Having appeared (and often starred) in over forty films, Steven Seagal
experienced the height of Hollywood blockbuster popularity and the lows
of direct-to-video unpopularity as he evolved from promising action film
performer to blockbuster star to direct-to-video celebrity in the course of his
career. This eventful trajectory from box office draw to low-budget entre-
preneur serves to designate the intimate connections between the popular
and the unpopular—and allows me to assess the quantitative dimension of
Cultur al Studies and the Un/Popul ar 243
the un/popular by looking at the commercial success and failure of his films.
Given that the actor developed and maintained a particular Seagal formula
inseparable from his public persona in his films, his music, and TV shows,
Seagal also mirrors auteur practices and postmodern authorial strategies.
Since the martial artist further advocates an environmentalist position
in his otherwise sensationalist action f ilms, Seagal also echoes those
post-postmodern theories that link postmodern metafictional play with a
‘sincere’ desire for political consciousness (cf. Saldivar, ‘Historical Fantasy’
593–96). In appropriating auteur theory, postmodern performativity, and
notions of the post-postmodern, I analyze the cultural text ‘Steven Seagal’
within the context of high art and investigate the qualitative dimension
of the un/popular in order to question the dichotomous construction of
inferior popular art versus superior (and unpopular) high art. So instead
of attempting to understand the popular, the unpopular, and high art as
autonomous, individual phenomena, I explore their numerous links to
provide a first understanding of Steven Seagal’s un/popularity.
Yet, when Martin Lüthe and Sascha Pöhlmann characterize the unpopu-
lar as ‘that which is not part of a (perceived) mainstream mass culture but
not part of a bourgeois high culture either’ (18) in their introduction to
this volume, both situate the phenomenon in-between high and popular
culture and call attention to the individual quality of the unpopular. Look-
ing at unpopular texts may broaden our prevailing paradigm of culture,
particularly because the abscence of popularity (as a quantative measure)
and high cultural ascriptions often justify a disregard for these texts. Since
scholars refer to either the artistic quality of a text or its widespread recep-
tion to legitimize the study of a particular phenomenon, in this logic, texts
only possess validity if they are representational—of a particular social
formation, period, or idea (cf. Hatt and Klonk 22–25). Due to its (absence
of) particular qualities, unpopular culture disrupts this Hegelian notion
predominant in literary studies and cultural studies. Indeed, unpopular
texts function poorly as representations of their period and their social
formations, because hardly anyone reads, watches, or appraises these
productions. Unpopular culture such as the later Seagal productions even-
tually question this representationalist paradigm and necessitate novel
approaches to conceptualizing culture.
244 Die tmar Meinel
In his first four films, Above the Law (1988), Hard to Kill (1990), Marked for
Death (1990), and Out for Justice (1991), Steven Seagal established himself
as a promising action film performer. Because all of the films grossed a
multiplicity of their production costs at the box office,1 Seagal’s first four
releases must be considered successful genre productions.2 His films did
not rival the commercial success of the most popular action films of the
late 1980s—Top Gun (1986) or Die Hard (1988)3—but Seagal could compete
with the established stars of the genre. Although Sylvester Stallone and
Arnold Schwarzenegger had paved the way for the action film hype of the
1980s, their films often did not perform better at the box office or match
the revenues of the Seagal films. 4 Judging by the people willing to see his
films, Steven Seagal has to be considered popular in the period from 1988
to 1991—particularly within the context of the action film genre. The com-
mercial success of his early films propelled Seagal to star in the high value
productions Under Siege (1992), On Deadly Ground (1994), Under Siege 2
(1995), and Executive Decision (1996). In these films, Seagal was supported
by well-established actors such as Michael Caine or Tommy Lee Jones or
starred alongside Kurt Russell and Halle Berry. But when the last three of
these high-value productions failed at the box office, the commercial fiascos
initiated his descent into direct-to-video obscurity.5 As his follow-up produc-
tions Glimmer Man (1996) and Fire Down Below (1997) led to even greater box
office losses,6 his next film, although initially planned for cinematic release,
was eventually exclusively distributed in video stores: The Patriot (1998) thus
ushered in a period of direct-to-video productions. Although Seagal reap-
peared on the silver screen two additional times with mixed success—in
Exit Wounds (2001) and Half Past Dead (2002)7—his box office career ended
in 1998 and was supplanted by a long-lasting one in direct-to-video projects.
Starring in films exclusively released for the (rental) video, DVD, and Blu-ray
market, Seagal maintained a vocation in film with almost no significant
commercial success to merit high-value productions again.8 Although his
following 23 releases in nine years (2001–2010) generated enough revenue
to continuously finance his next video endeavor, the martial arts actor
Steven Seagal has virtually disappeared from public notice since the late
1990s. While his name may still ring a bell even among people uninitiated
to his films, Seagal has become a faint memory of some cult 1980s action
films or a synonym for cheap and obscure B movies.9
This transformation from blockbuster draw to obscure media figure
represents a decisive quality of the Seagal phenomenon. In contrast to
Cultur al Studies and the Un/Popul ar 245
similarly cult and obscure 1980s action stars such as Jean-Claude van
Damme or Chuck Norris, Seagal actually became popular starring in high-
profile action films.10 But in contrast to Stallone, Schwarzenegger, or Willis,
Seagal eventually disappeared from (big budget) silver screen productions to
submerge in the (quantitative) meaninglessness of direct-to-video releases.
While other actors build a more popular or a more unpopular career, Steven
Seagal functions to exemplify the quantitative aspects of the un/popular.
As Seagal also appropriates a variety of high-art strategies throughout the
popular and unpopular phases of his career, his oeuvre allows us to similarly
explore the ways in which his auteur performance and post-postmodern
practices further shape the un/popular. Much as Seagal’s commercial
un/popularity, the artistic continuity in his work contests the traditional
high art (unpopular) and low culture (popular) divide.
As Seagal films ‘always end up featuring some of his obsessions’ (Vern vi),
the identity of the film artist spills into the films just as character traits
transcend the cultural text. Already the very first shots of his first film,
Above the Law (1988), exhibit this entanglement of artist persona and
film character. Opening with childhood memories of protagonist Nico
Toscani, his voice-over tells the story of a teenage adolescent fascinated by
martial arts who eventually journeys to Japan to become a highly respected
aikido master. While the film score softly plays classical music to further
embellish this narrative of individual success, the cinematography shows
childhood pictures and newspaper clippings of Steven Seagal during his
time in Japan when the actor-to-be trained to become an aikido master. By
using the childhood photos of the artist Steven Seagal and his biographical
experiences to introduce its protagonist, Above the Law questions their
clear-cut distinction.11 As virtually all Seagal characters share these traits,
his films establish a pattern in which the biography of the actor is almost
synonymous with his roles and vice versa. Intimately involved in writing
Cultur al Studies and the Un/Popul ar 247
and producing many of his films, Seagal can bring, as Vern summarizes, ‘a
certain personality, formula and set of motifs to pretty much every picture
he ever does’ (vi). Even when not immediately part of the creative process,
this Seagal formula functioned as an artistic and commercial strategy, as
the actor explains: ‘“I haven’t always been dealt scripts that were palatable
and movies that I thought were even makeable, and I think one of the
secrets of my success is that I changed them into something that was almost
watchable”’ (Vern vi, emphasis in original).
This interrelation of artist persona and film character is a common
phenomenon in the Hollywood film industry; producers, film-makers,
and actors have always employed biographical information to enlarge and
embroider a star persona in order to promote a film (cf. Harris 42–43).12
Most famously, Marilyn Monroe has (been) exploited (by) the assumed
similarities between her roles, her personal experiences, and her private
persona as her symbolic meanings ‘far outrun what actually happens in
her films’ (Dyer 3)—the star system as such ‘is based on the premise that a
star is accepted by the public in terms of a certain set of personality traits
which permeate all of his or her film roles’ (Harris 41). As a consequence,
Christine Gledhill encourages intertextual readings and interdisciplinary
analysis of stars and their roles as one coherent phenomenon (cf. xii).
Instead of an individual film, then, star studies define the actor or per-
former as the principal analytical category and encourage to explore the
entire body of his or her work—which includes a broad variety of material
beyond the cinematic text. This concentration on individual artists, the
concentration on the entire work of a performer, and the notion of a coherent
personal vision resemble the analytical approach of auteur theory. Since
the celebrity status of film auteurs also helps ‘produce and promote texts
that invariably exceed the movie itself, both before and after its release’
(Corrigan 101), star studies and auteur theory allow us to understand the
Seagal phenomenon as part of mass culture (the star) and high art (the
auteur).
By the time of Seagal’s first blockbuster production Under Siege (1992), his
character Casey Ryback did not need an intimate introduction anymore as
audiences already knew in advance about the superior close-combat abili-
ties of Ryback/Seagal. Neither an average street cop nor a lowly cook, Nico
Toscani and Casey Ryback—and Mason Storm and John Hatcher and Gino
Felino and Forest Taft—are all highly decorated elite experts in martial arts,
weaponry, and military tactics of some sort. These characters also share a
clandestine past as well-trained combat men who work some uneventful
job after their dishonorable discharge from the army—usually due to their
248 Die tmar Meinel
Unpopular Popularity
explored the conjunction of artist persona and film character, and hinted
at the post-postmodern qualities of the Seagal oeuvre to explore its links
to different high art discourses. Since Seagal’s commercially successful
films exemplify these practices and strategies, the early phase of his career
combines the quantitative feature of the popular and the qualitative ele-
ments of high art.
Second, after his commercial peak in the mid-1990s, Seagal descended
into the realm of direct-to-video productions and, thus, became quantita-
tively unpopular. The B movie obscurity of his productions, however, does
not conceal their postmodern and post-postmodern quality as numerous
aesthetic features of his early work define Seagal’s later releases—particu-
larly his career as a musician and his TV show further encourage to situate
the complete ‘Steven Seagal archive’ within high art authorial strategies. The
direct-to-video films additionally exhibit a cinematic quality fundamentally
different from the commercially popular Seagal films. Due to the poor
acting, the cheap mise-en-scene, the incoherent fight choreographies, and
the chaotic editing, the former often mirror the discontinuous filming
pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard, while the inconsistencies in the plot further
deconstruct the immersion aimed for by Hollywood cinema. In this sense,
Seagal’s direct-to-video releases (and maybe B movies in general) share
numerous cinematic elements with the French New Wave, whose directors
utilized these strategies to challenge the established codes and boundaries
of Hollywood cinema. As an artist engaged with questions of authorship,
the direct-to-video-Seagal continues to epitomize contemporary high art
practices, but the marginal audience interest in his DVD premiere releases
speaks to his increasing quantitative unpopularity.
Third, despite the numerous high art practices in his oeuvre, Seagal
achieved his commercial success in a highly conventional genre by starring
in predominantly generic productions. Although I have not analyzed their
politics of representation, films such as Marked for Death (1990) or Under
Siege (1992) exhibit highly normative narratives and imagery in the decidedly
Hollywood fashion of mainstream film. As his highest grossing film Under
Siege (1992) also apes the prominent Die Hard (1988) formula, critics deemed
the film an inferior copy of the Bruce Willis vehicle upon release. Due to
this absence of narrative originality, cinematic innovation, or ideological
transgression, Seagal’s commercially successful theatrical releases represent
the popular in its derogatory sense of inferior ‘mass’ culture.
Finally, thanks to the dearth of any artistic, aesthetic, or narrative sophis-
tication viewers often resent the action film genre in general and the Seagal
films in particular as low forms of art or entertainment. Actually, this is not
Cultur al Studies and the Un/Popul ar 251
Notes
1. Above the Law (1988) cost 7.5 million dollars in production and grossed 19
million dollars at U.S. box offices, Hard to Kill (1990) 10 million and 47 mil-
lion, Marked for Death (1990) 12 million and 46 million, and Out for Justice
(1991) 14 million and 40 million dollars respectively (cf. boxofficemojo.com).
2. It is worth mentioning that Steven Seagal began his career by starring in his
first film (with Sharon Stone and Pam Grier in supporting roles).
3. Top Gun (1986) cost 15 million dollars in production and made some 180
million dollars at U.S. box offices; Die Hard (1988) made some 83 million
dollars at the national box office while costing some 28 million dollars (cf.
boxofficemojo.com).
4. Sylvester Stallone’s cult film Cobra (1986) made some 49 million dollars at
U.S. box offices (production budget not available) and his Tango & Cash
(1989) co-starring Kurt Russell some 64 million dollars (with a budget of
55 million dollars). Arnold Schwarzenegger was able to bring in some 60
million dollars (at a budget of 15 million dollars) with his Predator (1987), 38
million dollars on a 27 million dollar budget with Running Man (1987), and
35 million dollars (production budget not available) with Red Heat (1988)
(cf. www.boxofficemojo.com).
5. At U.S. box offices Under Siege (1992) earned 83 million dollars (production
budget: 35 millions), On Deadly Ground (1994) 39 million dollars (produc-
tion budget: 50 millions), Under Siege 2 (1995) 50 million dollars (production
budget: 60 millions), Executive Decision (1996) 56 million dollars (produc-
Cultur al Studies and the Un/Popul ar 255
tion budget: 55 millions). Although all these films roughly earned the same
amount of money at international box offices (not to mention the rental
and video market), these films were considered flops by the studios.
6. At U.S. box offices Glimmer Man (1996) earned 20 million dollars (produc-
tion budget. 45 millions) and Fire Down Below (1997) 16 million dollars
(production budget: 60 millions).
7. At U.S. box offices Exit Wounds (2001) earned 80 million dollars (produc-
tion budget: 33 millions) and Half Past Dead (2002) 19 million dollars (13
millions).
8. Since information about direct-to-video releases (or rental revenues) for
individual films is hard to acquire or often not available, a direct compari-
son between the DVD premiere movies and theatrical releases remains
challenging. In general, home entertainment revenues of all VHS, DVDs,
Blue-Rays, and online distributions (sales and rentals) reached some 18 bil-
lion dollars in 2013 (cf. Fritz http://www.wsj.com), while studio investments
in direct-to-video productions reached some three billion dollars in 2005
(cf. Hettrick and Lerman). These numbers indicate the value of the video
entertainment market in general and the value of DVD premiere movies
in particular. Yet, blockbuster Hollywood production, successful box office
releases, and popular TV shows dominate the home entertainment market
nonetheless—the annual list of the 100 top selling DVDs in the United
States (since 2006), for example, contains no single Seagal film (cf. www.
the-numbers.com). As direct-to-video productions do not necessarily aim
for a wider audience and often struggle to compete with the high-value the-
atrical releases repackaged for home entertainment, this absence of Seagal
films does not come as a surprise.
At the same time, the home entertainment and the direct-to-video mar-
ket present the entrepreneur Seagal with profitable business opportunities.
The martial arts performer earns up to four million dollars ‘for his work in a
DVD premiere movie’ (Hettrick and Lerman). Indeed, many of his produc-
tions are shot on a ten-million-dollar budget and ‘[t]he top titles in the DVD
premiere movie segment, including Seagal’s Belly of the Beast released last
year [2004] and The Foreigner in 2003, each covered their budgets with the
$14.3 million and $16.7 million generated from home video in the U.S. alone’
(Hettrick and Lerman). While these direct-to-video budgets correspond to
the production costs of the early Seagal films in the 1980s (without factoring
in inflation and changed production costs), the present-day direct-to-video
releases compete in a highly enlarged and diversified market and profit from
a dedicated base of supporters as ‘Seagal’s audience […] remains the same
whether it is a movie in theaters or a DVD premiere’ (Hettrick and Lerman).
For Steven Seagal, then, his films continue to provide a source of income
and considerable wealth, but since the home entertainment and the direct-
to-video market profoundly expanded and diversified in the last thirty years,
his profits are not necessarily a sign of wide-spread popularity. In addition,
256 Die tmar Meinel
these people broker toxic waste all over the world. They basically control
the legislation, and, in fact, they control the Law. The Law says, ‘no com-
pany can be fined over $25,000 a day’. For companies making $10,000,000
dollars a day by dumping lethal toxic wastes into the ocean, it’s only good
business to continue doing this. They influence the media so that they can
control our minds. They have made it a crime to speak out for ourselves,
and if we do so we’re called ‘conspiracy nuts’ and we’re laughed at. We’re
angry because we’re all being chemically and genetically damaged, and
we don’t even realize it […] Our most common and God-given rights have
been taken away from us. Unfortunately, the reality of our lives is so grim
that nobody wants to hear it. Now, I’ve been asked what we can do? I think
we need a responsible body of people that can actually represent us rather
than Big Business. This body of people must not allow the introduction of
anything into our environment that is not absolutely biodegradable or able
to be chemically neutralized upon production. And finally, as long as there
is profit to be made from polluting the Earth, companies and individuals
will continue to do what they want. We have to force these companies to
operate safely and responsibly, and with all our best interests in mind. So
that when they don’t, we can take back our resources and our hearts and
our minds and do what’s right’ (On Deadly Ground).
16. The Expendables (2010), RED (2010), The Expendables 2 (2012), Looper (2012),
RED 2 (2012), Escape Plan (2013), and A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) are
some of their most prominent recent releases.
Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 2000. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008. Print.
Barker, Martin. ‘Introduction.’ Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Ed. Thomas Austin and Martin
Barker. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 1–22. Print.
boxofficemojo.com. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Corrigan, Thomas. ‘The Commerce of Auteurism.’ Film and Authorship. Ed. Virginia Wright
Wexman. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003. 96–111. Print.
De Cordova, Richard. ‘The Emergence of the Star System in America.’ Gledhill, Stardom 17–29.
Print.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: MacMillan Education Ltd.,
1987. Print.
Erickson, Steve. ‘Fresh Blood: Three Great Directors of Direct-to-Video Action.’ Roger Ebert.com.
Ebert Digital LLC, 6 Aug. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Fluck, Winfried. ‘Men in Boats and Flaming Skies: American Painting and National Self-
Recognition.’ Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck,
Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011. 141–64.
Print.
Fritz, Ben. ‘Sales of Digital Movies Surge Delaying Availability of DVDs, Rentals Nudged Consum-
ers.’ The Wall Street Journal, 7 Jan. 2014. Web 7 Apr. 2016.
258 Die tmar Meinel
Sports fandom and the social psychology of people who are interested
in sports, who cheer and care for the team of their hometown or alma
mater, and who choose to come together in small self-selected collectives
to amplify their emotional attachment to that sport and team, are fairly
well-understood cultural phenomena. Sociologists and anthropologists
in the late twentieth century have identif ied the most signif icant so-
ciocultural reasons, motivations, and mechanisms behind fan cultures
260 K arsten Senkbeil
hold for hater fans and their loose collectives that can be found on Facebook
and other forums online. Why do ‘normal’ sports fans—those who cheer
fervently for their favorite team at every home and many away games—do
what they do?
Bourdieu’s theory of sports participation differentiates between cultural
tastes and competences common among the privileged members of a society
versus cultural tastes of those deprived from economic and official cultural
capital (cf. Bourdieu 352–53). As the lower classes lacked access to those
institutions that taught the competences and tastes for official3 cultural
forms (such as opera and the fine arts), they founded counter-cultural
forms of ‘non-official’ cultural and social capital among the peer group
of likeminded fans. This countercultural habitus included rougher, more
physical forms of behavior, which is why physically aggressive sports were
long considered typical working-class pastimes (such as for example boxing,
soccer, rugby, and, though to a lesser extent, American football), as opposed
to culturally more ‘refined’ but less physical sports (such as golf and tennis).
When spectatorship of popular (in the sense of ‘non-elite’) sports developed
into fan culture, the commitment to that particular form of habitus thus
always formed outside of official institutions and usually with an implicit
rebellion against established official culture.
The ‘shadow cultural economy’ (30) of fandom, as Fiske calls it, picking up
the Bourdieuian train of thought, usually expropriated certain mechanisms
and characteristics of that official culture to which it was (allegedly) op-
posed. To name just the strongest parallels: the gate-keeping and policing
of the borders between the community of fans for team A (versus those
of team B) continues to work remarkably similar to gatekeeping practices
and processes in ‘higher’ cultural forms. Also, the background knowledge
of historical events, personalities, and ritualized forms of behavior that
an ‘initiate’ or ‘newcomer’ needs to show before he or she can be accepted
among the ranks are as strongly marked as (maybe even more pronounced
than) those within the communities of official culture. Also, it needs hard
work and dedication to become a leading figure within a sports fan group,
just as it needs hard work and lots of practice to be accepted as a knowl-
edgeable arbiter of official culture. Moreover, ‘authenticity’ remains an
essential criterion in the accumulation of official cultural capital, as the
authentic sound of a particular orchestra, the authenticity of a painting,
and the competence to recognize and ultimately own said authenticity
remains at the core of official culture connoisseurship. This is reflected by
the authenticity of one’s emotional involvement as a sports team fan: among
‘ultra’ fans, it is met with the greatest amount of scorn when non-ultras (or
Unpopul ar Sport Teams and the Social Psychology of ‘Anti-Fans’ 263
politicians, or the media, or advertisers) try to fake the emotional highs and
lows of the ‘true believer’ (cf. Langer 54–66).
Moreover, despite the fact that early sports fan cultures (in the twentieth
century) were considered grass-roots movements opposed to the upper
class, the social return of investment of sports fans strongly resembled the
usual forms of social capital. Being an accepted member of a fan collective
grants a young man the esteem of his peers, respect and social status within
the group, a feeling of solidarity among his ‘pseudo-tribe’ (Maffesoli x),
i.e. with people who are neither his family nor close friends, but rather a
‘self-selected fraction’ (Fiske 30) of the people, whose commonalities are
often restricted to comparably small details.
For Bourdieu and Fiske, the huge difference between official culture and
the shadow economy of fans’ cultural capital was that subcultural capital
within the sports fan peer group could not (or only with a lot of difficul-
ties) be translated into real economic capital. If anything, being a deeply
involved fan of a working-class sport more often than not encumbered
social upward mobility up until the late twentieth century. In opposition,
official cultural capital, and this included the cultural capital acquired
through membership in upper-class sports circles, usually produced social
privilege and distinction, enabled networking with likeminded members
of the upper class, and thus often represented an important step towards
more economic capital down the road.
Bourdieu strongly emphasized this class dimension, and in the last
decades both theoretical and empirical works have made the point that
this simple dichotomy of bourgeois vs working-class sports fandom must
be problematized and extended (cf. Sugden and Tomlinson, for example).
We know today that fandom in almost all popular cultural forms is just as
dynamic with regard to the axes of ethnicity, gender, and age. A look at the
demographics of sports fandom shows that age appears to be a particularly
significant variable for sports fandom. The most dedicated fan groups in
stadiums mostly consist of young men (and few young women) intent on
differentiating themselves from the official cultural norms of their parents
and teachers (cf. Langer 51). At the same time, age is the one dimension of
difference that inescapably changes over time for each and every one of us.
From that perspective, it comes as no surprise that the self-proclaimed coun-
terculture of sports fans emulates and reincorporates many characteristics
of official culture: in fact, the quasi-bourgeois mechanisms of inclusion
and exclusion mirrored in sports fan groups prepare their participants
for similar mechanisms in later life. Not coincidentally, a large fraction of
the most devoted, enthusiastic, noisiest sports fans are in fact students at
264 K arsten Senkbeil
high school or university (aged 15–25)4 (cf. Schwier), i.e. young people who
are currently preparing themselves in official educational institutions to
later in their lives become parts of the official culture they (think they) are
symbolically opposing in their youth.
Testing the outlined arguments about ‘regular’ sports fans for a certain
team with regards to those who call themselves ‘haters’ of a certain team,
we find only little differences in the social-psychological rationale that
probably motivates that self-identification. The policing of borders and
mechanisms of exclusion may be less strict: becoming a member of, for
example, the Facebook group called ‘Because I’ll always hate F.C. Bayern’5—
which has more than 86,000 followers—is voluntary and unrestricted,6
but group founders and administrators keep an eye on which posts are
deemed appropriate. For example, hateful remarks about single players
of that despised team are acceptable, even celebrated, unless overt racism
plays into them: even hater fans have to obey some of Facebook’s norms
about political correctness. Those group members with the most cutting or
witty remarks acquire high amounts of ‘Likes’, today’s common currency
for desirable yet non-transferable subcultural social capital. Others put
in hard work and effort, photoshopping the colors or jerseys of the hated
teams into images of pigs (or other unfavorable animals), players’ heads onto
animal bodies or into photos with humiliating sexual contexts, to gather
‘Likes’ and praise for their ‘artwork’. Participants are most often young and
male, their sense of humor (often) decidedly adolescent and intentionally
‘tasteless’—a hint at the fact that hater fans position themselves as opposed
to the mainstream, though probably subconsciously (as opposed to punk
rock bands, for example, who intentionally make ‘bad taste’ a part of their
agenda). In that sense, the social psychology of the hater fan mirrors to a
large extent that of the normal fan—if maybe a bit more extreme in their
neglect of the standardized rules of politeness and political correctness. In
fact, it appears very likely that both groups significantly overlap.
Particularly when it comes to the ‘rowdiness’ and ‘bad taste’ of anti-fan
groups, it is most worthwhile to recapitulate Fiske’s statement from 1992,
in which he discussed the same kind of behavior among (normal) soccer
fans in Great Britain and concluded that those fans,
hatred towards certain clubs in the USA (New York Yankees, LA Lakers),
Germany (TSG Hoffenheim, Bayern Munich), and England (Chelsea F.C.).
Obviously, users in said groups use different languages, i.e. Hoffenheim and
Bayern haters communicate in German, which is certainly a point in case
of the assumed restrictedness to national leagues or cultures. Soon during
research, it became clear that visual elements—photoshopped images and
‘internet memes’ to mock or insult players or opponent fans—also play an
important role in these groups, which is why a combination of methods that
pay close attention to pragmalinguistic details (such as outlined in Wodak
and Krzyzanowski, for example) with a method that addresses the semiotics
of visual media (cf. Van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s edited volume) was applied,
while keeping in mind the communicative particularities of multimedial,
‘Web 2.0’-based discourses (cf. Hinton and Hjorth).7 The result is a tentative
typology of hater fans, which reflects some of the prior arguments well,
while extending others.
The first and very central reason for the overt contempt of one team
across a whole country or sports culture can of course still be found on the
axis of class. Teams that dominate a certain league over a longer period of
time usually do so because of their financial dominance; naturally, their
continued success often leads to an even larger gap between ‘poor’ and ‘rich’
teams. One of the central problems of capitalism—‘the rich are getting
richer, the poor are getting poorer’—seems to be mirrored in sports. Though
of course the market logic in sports is actually much more complicated (cf.
Sage; Senkbeil, Ideology), young men may have their first contacts with the
injustices of the capitalist order through sports. Professional team sports
are easy to understand, and they blatantly show how ‘inherited’ wealth
and success are inseparably interconnected, which some consider unjust
and in seeming opposition to the ideal of a ‘level playing field’. This makes
it relatively easy to hate the ‘fat-cat capitalists’ in New York, London, or
Munich. The fact that this first underlying principle of fan hatred seems to
have a clearly anti-capitalist dimension should by no means be mistaken
with the idea that all hater communities are politically left-leaning. In fact, I
have demonstrated elsewhere that discourses of anti-commercialization in
sports cultures surprisingly often stem from conservative, even reactionary
political stances (cf. Senkbeil, Ideology, 136–48).
As a counterpoint to success through financial dominance, anti-fans usu-
ally argue that poorer teams have more authentic emotions and ‘passion’. For
instance, a widely bought and worn baseball fan T-shirt from Boston reads
that any game against the New York Yankees is a contest of ‘Passion vs Payroll’
(cf. Facebook.com; community ‘The Boston Red Sox Block’). Ironically, the
Unpopul ar Sport Teams and the Social Psychology of ‘Anti-Fans’ 269
Red Sox from Boston are not a team with a particularly small payroll either;
their self-proclaimed image of a team from and for the working class is a
clever PR invention rather than an accurate representation of reality. A look
at this and a large number of other statements and images online reveals
that hater fans do not need logical reasoning or factual evidence for their
claims. This observation is largely congruent with Maffesoli’s argument that
postmodern pseudo-tribes often celebrate irrationality (cf. 143–45), hence
defining a counterpoint to the rationalized work-ethic-driven everyday life
in Western capitalist societies. Also, a related study has shown that overly
emotional, irrational, ‘passionate’ behavior and statements belong to the
characteristics that many sports fans (‘normal’ fans and haters alike) cherish
most, not only among themselves but also with regard to their heroes on
the field (cf. Senkbeil, ‘Apollo’).
The second pattern that can be found among hater groups, complicating
the prior argument a bit, has to do with a differentiation of ‘old money’
versus ‘new money’. Recently, the newly found wealth and success of some
teams stem from external sources, i.e. billionaires who bought themselves
into a leadership position of a sports team and now support that organiza-
tion with money they earned in non-sports-related businesses. Leading
examples from Europe include Dietmar Hopp, software mogul and one
of the richest men in Germany, whose funds helped the village club TSG
Hoffenheim join the top ranks of German soccer. The largest community
of ‘Anti-Hoffenheim’ fans blames that club for being ‘without tradition,
without values, whores of commercialization’8 (cf. Facebook.com; commu-
nity ‘Anti-Hoffenheim’). The choice of words here, in its offensiveness and
explicitness, is in fact quite representative; many insults directed at players
and managers of the hated clubs include sexualized overtones, sometimes
interwoven with misogynistic or homophobic tendencies. I will revisit how
gender intersects with hater fans performances later.
Another example is Roman Abramovitch, a Russian billionaire who owns
Chelsea F.C. and whose money transformed it from a mediocre working-
class club into a UEFA Champions League winner. English fans of teams
without such external support hence consider Chelsea the ‘scum of the
land’ (cf. Facebook.com; community ‘I hate Chelsea, scum of the land’).
In the USA, Mikhail Prokhorov, another Russian industrialist billionaire,
was the key figure behind the recent transformation of the notoriously
unsuccessful basketball franchise New Jersey Nets into a cool, hip, urban
brand, the Brooklyn Nets. Not only local communities were skeptical of the
consequences of the influx of external money on the borough of Brooklyn
and on American basketball in general. This development marks the most
270 K arsten Senkbeil
recent one (the Nets have played in Brooklyn since 2012), and it will be most
interesting to observe the reaction of American basketball fans across the
nation when the Brooklyn Nets actually start winning championships.
Either way, newly found success based on external funds often generates
strong condescension from the self-ascribed traditionalists within a sports
community. In this respect, supporters of notoriously underfunded but
traditional teams (a German example would be 1. F.C. Nürnberg) interest-
ingly come to fully agree with fans of traditionally big, rich, and successful
teams (e.g. Borussia Dortmund). As mentioned above, popular cultures’
fan communities often adapt the mechanisms of ‘social hygiene’ from the
official culture that they are allegedly opposed to. From that perspective,
the traditionalists’ backlash against nouveau riche teams does not come
as a surprise: traditionalism and discrimination against newcomers—and
particularly towards the nouveau riche—is and was one of the core strate-
gies and practices of gatekeeping and exclusion in aristocratic and later
bourgeois forms of high culture. With that argument—‘they don’t belong
here; only we do, because we have a long tradition of being here’—anti-fans
showcase a logic and behavior that is decidedly conservative and ‘petty
bourgeois’. It stands to argue whether this second set of reasons for hatred
towards a certain team is more prominent in Europe than in the USA. It
would not come as a surprise if the different cultural and social histories
on opposite sides of the Atlantic have rendered overt contempt towards the
nouveau riche a European, and not a typically American reaction.
The third type of reason that I would like to discuss here functions outside
the realm of economic realities and envy. Examining the discourses and
semiotics in stadiums and online indicates that overt hate towards virtually
all of the teams mentioned so far crystallizes around powerful men, whose
name is inseparably interwoven with the rise to power of the hated team.
Dietmar Hopp from Germany and Roman Abramovitch from England have
already been mentioned. Uli Hoeneß, former president of F.C. Bayern, one
of the most successful soccer clubs in Europe, fits into the same category.
In the USA, George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees, and Jerry Buss
of the Los Angeles Lakers played a similarly singular role over a span of
several decades. A closer examination of these public personalities reveals
striking similarities, even though they functioned in geographically and
culturally very distant places. These parallels thus deserve close attention.
Obviously, these owners and managers are all male, white, comparably
old, and rich. Neither of them was born rich, but they all stem from a
lower social class and became self-made millionaires. A look at their public
performance and personas reveals that all of them are widely known as
Unpopul ar Sport Teams and the Social Psychology of ‘Anti-Fans’ 271
male and his cause. This symbolic rebellion, which never becomes really
violent or dangerous,9 may (still) be part of growing up and of defining
one’s masculinity. Ironically, this behavior is marked as rejection of adult
behavior on the surface, but on the level of the peer group it prepares young
men to be accepted into the ranks of male domains in official adult culture
later in life. Specifically, this may mean becoming a father yourself later, or
becoming a successful, career-oriented, self-confident man at some point
later in your life. The degree of aggression that these powerful men in the
sports business have had to face is always caused by a mix of envy and
pseudo-adolescent rebellion, but also by a fair share of (secret) admiration.
To conclude this tentative typology of haters based on an inductive
analysis of Facebook group contents, it is probably safe to say that the three
outlined rationales intersect at various points and influence each other.
Jealousy towards the rich, a ‘mock class struggle’, and the mechanisms of a
shadow cultural economy as an extension of and opposition to mainstream
sports culture remain in place as strong motivations to hate a certain team.
Yet, also in terms of the sociocultural work that this unpopular strand of
fan culture is able to do, we should not underestimate the psychological
undercurrents that deal with the negotiation and definition of young men’s
masculinity in opposition to real or imagined father figures.
Conclusion
Notes
1. In this chapter, I specifically focus on successful teams that are met with
overt contempt throughout a nation, or more specifically the leagues in
which they play (whose borders usually but not always coincide with
national borders). That is to say, heated rivalries that are locally restricted
to two cities, regions, or parts of town are explicitly not part of my argu-
ment here, as they usually follow more ‘reasonable’ rationales than those
of the ‘united haters’ from all over the league. Bipolar sports rivalries often
resemble remnants or aftermaths of serious political, ethnic, or religious
conflicts in the past, such as in the rivalry of Glasgow Rangers and Celtic,
or in the Madrid vs Barcelona rivalry in Spain (cf. Mandelbaum; Dunning,
Murphy and Williams). Other traditional city rivalries seem to follow a
Freudian psychological pattern, the ‘narcissism of small differences’, in their
partly playful, partly serious teasing and mutual ridiculing, such as in the
New York vs Boston rivalry, or the feud between Dortmund and Schalke in
Germany. Hater fans, as I hope to show here, cannot be explained by either
line of reasoning though, but follow different social psychological patterns.
2. For lack of a better term, I use the expressions ‘anti-fans’ and ‘hater fans’
synonymously throughout this paper, though clearly both are neither very
precise nor satisfactory in explaining what these people do, and why. The
English language in fact provides no clearer or more precise term for this
phenomenon, a case in point of the general irritation that spawned the
research for this paper: an ‘anti-fan’ is first and foremost an inherently para-
doxical entity (much like the title of this volume, ‘unpopular culture’).
3. The term ‘official culture’ (a translation of the French ‘culture officielle’,
describing the culture of the elites in French sociological discourses) may
strike us as a bit imprecise from today’s perspective. Cultural Studies schol-
ars today might opt for more exact labels such as ‘currently dominant’ to de-
scribe the same practices, hinting at the ambivalence and mobility of what
is deemed ‘official’ and institutionalized in a given time and place. I will
nonetheless use the term ‘official culture’ in the discussion of Bourdieu’s
and Fiske’s arguments in this paper, as it reflects the original diction of
those foundational works most precisely, but also because it is exactly the
shifting status of what used to be and what is today ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’
about sports fan culture that will prepare my later arguments.
4. In the U.S., the college sports system of course is a strong influence: col-
lege football and basketball games are known to draw much noisier and
sometimes rowdier crowds than professional games, often due to the fact
that those crowds largely consist of fellow students of the athletes. Still, in
Europe, which does not have a comparable college sports scene, many lead-
ing figures of ‘ultra’ fan groups in soccer are eloquent and well-organized
young men attending university (cf. Schwier 26–27).
5. ‘Weil ich den FC Bayern für immer hassen werde’ (trans. KS. Facebook.com)
274 K arsten Senkbeil
6. It is one of the ironies of the Facebook age that its members cannot simply
indicate their ‘hate’ for anything but can only ‘like’ or ‘become a fan’. A
thumbs-down icon does not exist. The mentioned process of declaring
oneself a hater of the Yankees (for example) thus only works via a logical
detour (‘I like that I hate the Yankees’), which is, on the one hand, syntacti-
cally quite revealing, and on the other hand highlights the unpreparedness
or unwillingness of Facebook (today’s main stage to define what is currently
popular) to account for countercurrents and anti-fans of popular culture.
7. For reasons of space, the details of this multidisciplinary methodological
approach cannot be fully elaborated here; I refer to the mentioned original
theoretical and methodological works. In this essay, an overview of the
qualitative results will need to suffice.
8. ‘Traditionslos—Wertlos—Kommerzhuren’ (trans. KS).
9. To my knowledge, none of the mentioned team owners and presidents have
ever been really physically attacked or hurt by opponent fans. Aggression
towards them is always limited to verbal abuse in stadiums or online.
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267–91. Print.
Dunning, Eric, and Norbert Elias. Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process.
Oxford/New York: Blackwell, 1986. Print.
—. Patrick Murphy, and John M. Williams. The Roots of Football Hooliganism. A Historical and
Sociological Study. London: Routledge, 1988. Print.
Fiske, John. ‘The Cultural Economy of Fandom.’ The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular
Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. London: Routledge, 1992. 30–49. Print.
Hinton, Sam, and Larissa Hjorth. Understanding Social Media. London: Sage, 2013. Print.
Houlihan, Barrie, ed. Sports and Society. London: Sage, 2003. Print.
Langer, Daniel. Faszination Ultras: Aspekte und Erklärungsansätze zur Fussballfan- und Ju-
gendkultur. Bonn: Scientia Bonnensis, 2010. Print.
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Maffesoli, Michel. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London:
Sage, 1996. Print.
Mandelbaum, Michael. The Meaning of Sports. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Print.
Miller, Toby. Sportsex. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001. Print.
Sage, George. Power and Ideology in American Sport: A Critical Perspective. 2nd ed. Champaign,
IL: Human Kinetics, 1998. Print.
Schwier, Jürgen. ‘Die Welt der Ultras. Eine neue Generation von Fußballfans / The World of the
Ultras. A New Generation of Football Fans.’ Sport und Gesellschaft / Sport and Society 2.1
(2005): 21–38. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Unpopul ar Sport Teams and the Social Psychology of ‘Anti-Fans’ 275
Catherine Bouko
Let us start this paper with a simple question, which many cultural educa-
tion managers are asking themselves as we commemorate the centenary
of the First World War: how does one generate interest in this conflict
among the younger generations when they feel so distant from it? For
example, the British government plans to recreate the Christmas Day 1914
football match between the British and German troops. Here, popular
culture meets historical reconstruction, as football star and pop-cultural
icon David Beckham will be one of the players. Although widely accepted,
the paradigm of ‘popular culture’ is nevertheless not always clear. In the
opinion of Eric Maigret and Eric Macé, the expression ‘popular culture’
is one of those concepts that emerged after the concept of ‘mass culture’
and which clumsily glorify the cultural practices they purport to bring
together without really emphasizing the new forms of relationship that
these practices entail (cf. 10). As far as the media are concerned, the cultural
practices are currently becoming more autonomous; their legitimacy no
longer primarily depends on the domination of one social class over another.
While the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’ media practices is
less frequently subjected to these vertical social breakdowns, this does not
necessarily mean that domination has disappeared; rather, it is apportioned
in a different manner and also takes into account other important variables
(such as age). Nowadays, what differences do we find between the popular
and the unpopular? How do cultural media practices express these differ-
ences? This chapter aims at enhancing our understanding of the manner in
which historical museums, as traditionally ‘sacred spaces’ of high culture,
integrate the codes of popular culture to make the younger generations
sensitive to themes they are likely to consider unattractive. In other words, I
wish to examine how an institution nowadays often considered unpopular,
associated with the values of the traditional, unfashionable, and old, invites
the popular in its treatment of history.
In an attempt to answer these general questions, I have chosen to analyze
the story of the fictional First World War infantryman Léon Vivien that
was disseminated on Facebook. This unique experiment involved present-
ing a fictional approach to the Great War while also incorporating the
278 Catherine Bouko
Before analyzing the Léon Vivien Facebook page as such, let us study its
‘promise’. In François Jost’s terms (cf. 48): to what media genre (real, fic-
tional or playful) do the producers relate it? In other words, is knowledge
or entertainment through fiction and/or game promised? If the promise is
a bit ambiguous, it has also evolved over time. The press release of 10 April
2013, which launched the experience, includes formulations that refer both
to the categories of reality and fiction. The release insists on the ‘patronage
by a historian’ and defines this experience as a ‘formidable instrument
of knowledge and collective memory’. Beyond the formulation, which
Popul ar, Unpopul ar 281
refers to the two registers of the real and the fictional, the ambiguity of
the press release also lies in the expression ‘genuine human story’, which
functions almost like an oxymoron as it refers to seemingly contradictory
ideas, ‘genuine’ referring to the historical truth, and ‘story’ to the fictional
conventions.
The last message written on the Facebook page (on 24 May 2013), which
is written by the Museum (and no longer by Vivien), mentions more mod-
est objectives, which focus on its emotional charge: ‘This page had no other
goal than making you feel and share, as closely as possible to the human,
what the soldiers of 14 could have lived, as well as the relatives remained
in the back. Your thousands of comments, coming straight from the heart,
showed us that we succeeded’ (Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux on
Léon Vivien’s Facebook page, my translation). Here, the issue is not about
its function as learning device but more about a touching, immediate, and
lived experience. As we can see, the promise made to the Internet user
is plural, meandering between knowledge device, emotional experience,
and fictional entertainment. The studies on docudramas and other hybrid
forms often invalidate their historical significance, as Brian McConnell’s
opinion illustrates: ‘Docudrama does not represent historic fact, or history,
or journalism, but crusading entertainment with facts carefully tailored to
sustain a neat storyline and to suit a particular social, political or religious
point of view’ (54). The Léon Vivien Facebook page is not concerned with
these questions inasmuch as it proposes to follow the daily experience
of a called-up primary teacher and does not offer any political treatment
of the conflict. Its point of view is only human size, which makes for its
uniqueness and pedagogical interest. The proceedings of the war are
not mentioned, neither are the specifics of space and geographic locale:
we do not know the name of his training camp, of the trenches where
he fights, of the name of the villages the soldiers cross, etc. The action
evolves in a space-time that is indeterminate, totally fictionalized. The
web surfer does not get any temporal indications either. Vivien’s posts are
dated but these dates do not refer to dates of real events that happened
during the war.
We can draw a parallel between the fictionalization of this infantryman
and some scriptwriting techniques of popular movies, and it is noteworthy
that the museum deploys most of the successful strategies identified by the
famous consultant in scenarios Linda Seger in her book The Art of Adapta-
tion: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film (cf. 52-55), which I will discuss in
the following.
282 Catherine Bouko
It is interesting to notice that the building of the story, which indeed aims at
a dramatic climax, can be divided according to Aristotle’s three acts theory,
which Seger recognizes. Here, the division sticks with the necessary balance
between the acts: the first one lasts three months and a half; it serves to
introduce the context and then the beginnings of the conflicts from an
external point of view, as Vivien has not been called up yet. The second
act is the longest (five months and a half) as it primarily serves to recall
the everyday life in the training camps and in the reserves, while the third
act is the shortest one (one month and a half) and the most dramatically
intense: Vivien bears witness to the horror of the battlefront by evoking
many particularly violent events in great detail.
In his book Aristotle in Hollywood, Ari Hiltunen shows how most stories,
whatever their geographical origin and the period when they appear, are
structured around the mythic journey of a hero. Most stages of this journey
are also visible in Léon Vivien’s story. John Truby insists on the importance
of the quality of the plot, which is different from the story. Its quality greatly
depends on the ways information is hidden and revealed to the reader. Léon
Vivien’s plot obeys that principle and spreads some touches of mystery.
Mystery is produced when some posts conceal some of the information they
evoke, while at the same time making our mouth water. For example, Vivien
evokes the ‘frightening rumors in the streets’1 (20/08/1914) but does not tell
us which ones. Suspense is constructed when some central and dangerous
events are announced step by step, which leads the reader to anticipate
future developments and to be scared for his hero. For example, Vivien notes
that he is ‘called up by the military doctor’; it is only the day after that he
announces his mobilization, while he often posts several messages a day
and could have stopped the suspense earlier. Suspense reaches a climax
with his last message, ‘they (The Germans) are comi…’ which he cannot
finish. His death will be announced the day after.
Nine characters make up the network of relationships. They all fulfill one
of the four character’s functions identified by Seger. Léon Vivien, Jules
Derème and Eugène Lignan mainly fulfill the ‘storytelling function’: these
characters provide most information. Besides, their personalities are very
much alike: all three adopt a dignified behavior, nuanced words, without
any sputters.
Popul ar, Unpopul ar 283
On the contrary, the other male characters fulfill the ‘talking about,
revealing or embodying the theme’ (Seger 124): less used as conveyors of
information, their posts mainly consist of spontaneous, vivacious and not
necessarily nuanced points of view. Most of their comments show their
feeling of unfairness or anger with the monstrosity of the war, which is a
much-developed topic in this Facebook experience. They also fulfill the ‘add-
ing color and texture function’ (Seger 124): these spontaneous characters,
which contrast with the other first three and are never at a loss of words,
provide a certain emphasis to the discussions. The name Lulu L’Andouille,
which could be roughly translated as Lulu the numbskull is a first sign of
it. His wife Madeleine Vivien fulfills two functions: the ‘helping to reveal
the main character function’ (Seger 125): as a confidante who, through their
signs of love, reveals a more intimate side of Léon. As she comments the
war from an external point of view, she also participates in developing the
theme of the horrors of the war and thus also fulfills the second function.
The fictionalization is furthermore created via a process of simplification
and lack of development of the characters as they seem deprived of any
ambiguity and do not change their point of view in the course of the story.
Only Léon Vivien is subjected to transformation: while the beginnings of
the story highlight his patriotism, his posts in the third act demonstrate a
more bitter point of view. The Léon Vivien experience is centered on the
human before the soldier.
This humanization of the war comes true through three major strategies.
Firstly, many posts evoke the details of the soldiers’ daily experience, outside
of military operations, or pick up personal anecdotes or precious and mov-
ing moments: he shows the picture of a human pyramid (14/12/14), the toilets
(11/04/15), a picture of his baby (2/05/15), etc. Secondly, many posts mention
the physical sensations felt by the soldiers, whose body is put through the
mill. Descriptions in details of the sensations felt by the five senses offer
a particularly precise sight of the ordeal endured by the soldiers: the bag
which wrecks the back after a walking day (13/04/15), the corpses everywhere
and the ‘mud, even colder than the inert bodies’ (22/04/15), etc. Thirdly, a
tension between the common and the dreadful is developed. About twenty
messages alternate between telling of the horror of the war and the daily life
of the civilians or of the soldiers. For example, on 22 October 1914, Vivien
announces that Madeleine is pregnant. His subsequent message indicates
he is called up by the military doctor. Two crucial posts succeed each other,
284 Catherine Bouko
and, by doing so, associate the private and military registers. This highlights
even more its intensity; indeed, joy quickly gives way to fear.
According to Seger (cf. 54), a story needs to be told visually. A real work
on images has been produced for this Facebook operation. Generally, the
docudrama’s hybridity lies in its articulation between real events and their
audiovisual re-creation. Steven Lipkin highlights how the docudrama im-
plies a specific suspension of disbelief from the spectators: ‘We are asked
to accept that in this case, re-creation, is a necessary mode of presentation’
(68).
In Léon Vivien’s case, the aim of authenticity is not mainly produced
by that re-creation of events. The impression of truth is above all based
on the plentiful use of the Museum’s rich collection of visual documents.
Around a hundred images have been integrated into the story. These are
authentic documents that have been fictionalized. The story is thus not
based on real facts, but on documents that were integrated and adapted
Popul ar, Unpopul ar 285
to the story. At least f ive methods were used to that purpose. Firstly,
the creators of Léon’s Facebook page have customized blank documents.
This method has been deployed twice by integrating the names of the
characters and the dates in the blank spaces in these documents. For
example, we can see Léon Vivien’s personal call under the flag (4/11/14)
and Eugène Lignan’s ‘war godmother’ certif icate (11/05/15). If the f irst
document is easily understandable for the reader, the second one, less
known, might remain unclear and ambiguous as it is not explained that
war godmothers were soldiers’ pen pals. We see to what extent the inte-
gration of documents does not primarily aim at providing explanations
about the war but rather serve as a support for the fiction. Indeed, the
comment that goes along with this document only refers to the fictional
elements. Secondly, some objects have been contextualized through the
use of photographs. A dozen pictures show a modification of the relation
to the object: the original picture, which comprises a neutral frame and
show the object as element of the Museum’s collection, has been modified
in order to include the narrative context. Vivien’s comments emphasize
this fictionalization. The object’s value is no longer intrinsic but depends
on its possible integration to the fiction. For example, the infantryman’s
backpack has been personalized for Vivien. It is now photographed in
his bedroom. Some objects are photographed in the soldier’s hands (an
amulet on 27/04/15, a knife on 21/05/15). From a ‘neutral’ point of view,
the audience moves to a subject-centered one, impregnated with the
soldier-photographer’s sight, who lives with these objects. Thirdly, some
pictures’ caption and context have been removed. Nearly ten pictures
initially include a caption or a context that have been erased for their use
in posts. These original frames are replaced by Vivien’s comments, which
situate them in the fictional space-time, as for the wake up in the bedroom
(10/11/14), etc. These comments sometimes mention instants of life that
happened before the picture, or will happen after it: the bedroom’s picture
would have been taken after a training session, etc. The image’s production
of a snapshot is integrated into a longer temporality. Fourthly, the portraits
used for the profile pictures on Facebook have been drawn on purpose,
in order to avoid any regrettable confusion between the character and a
person that really existed. The characters’ faces have been added to some
authentic documents, like on the picture of Léon with Eugène (9/12/14),
etc. And finally, some documents have been modified in order to ‘stick’
more with the story. One picture that is quite known has been modified
so that it is no longer identifiable and not awkwardly positioned within
the story. A half a dozen pictures have been deeply modified: the faces
286 Catherine Bouko
and/or the frame have been changed; some elements have been added or
suppressed. Some establishing shots have been altered (13 and 14 April
1915, 12/05/15). Apart from an adaptation to the story, these manipulations
could also aim to create some visual effect by highlighting some elements
of the document. These five techniques show how the goal consists in
making the images talk in the f iction, making their content alive and
human. Far from a political treatment of the war, this use invites us to
follow day-by-day ‘slices of life’ which are more likely than true. They are
more like ‘symbolizations’ than representations, according to Trouche
(200, my translation).
This important use of images raises several questions. In his analysis
of the documentary series Apocalypse, broadcast on a French channel in
2009, Robert Belot denounces the omission of the sources, which tends to
de-realize the event by transforming it into fiction (cf. 172). Such as reproach
cannot be made against the Leon Vivien experience, as it is presented as
fiction, and thus precisely de-realizes the documents in use. But, as we have
seen, the promise refers both to the authentic and the fictional categories.
The producers do not mention the methods of construction of the fiction at
any time. Without any interpretative frame, the power of truth inherent to
images tends to give a status of authenticity to the Facebook page – authen-
ticity that it does not claim but does not refute either. Niney reminds us of
André Bazin’s famous warning: ‘The spectator has the illusion he observes
a visual demonstration while in reality it is a succession of equivocal facts
which hold together only thanks to the cement that goes along with them’
(112, my translation).
The absence of information about the treatment of the documents pro-
vokes a real risk of interpretative misunderstandings concerning the value
of images as traces of real events. Some comments written by followers give
the impression that they sometimes forget the fictional treatment of the
documents and approach them as a proof of reality. Here, the mediation
typical of the ‘interpretative museum type’ (Casey) is not really visible.
Consequently, in order to become a real pedagogical device, the Léon Vivien
experience should go along with a reflection on the production and on
the modes of diffusion of historical knowledge, and in particular on the
complexity of images and their use as trace; it is necessary to show how
it is a question of a deliberately constructed reality. In those years when
education curriculums focus on critical analysis of historical sources, this
Facebook experience as well as its analysis in class will become unique and
exciting pedagogical activities.
Popul ar, Unpopul ar 287
In the analysis of the Léon Vivien story, we have observed the way in which
the mobilization of Hollywood cinematographic codes contributes to famil-
iarizing internet users with the Great War, by avoiding contradictory or less
politically correct opinions and instead focusing on an emotional approach
to an infantryman’s life. Now we shall also see how Facebook, as the media
support for this tale, contributes to rendering the historical treatment of
the 1914–18 War more popular. We know that all testimonies constitute an
undeniably social construct, consistently subjective and conditioned, in
particular by the ideologies of the era to which they belong as well as the
chosen distribution channel. Let us therefore briefly consider the way in
which Facebook operates, as the foremost support for sociability and content
sharing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
According to Van Dijck, the initial ‘participatory culture’ of Facebook has
been transformed into a ‘culture of connectivity’ (4–5); the initial utopian
social design has been overtaken by automated technologies that strongly
influence social practices on Facebook, which raises questions regarding
the molding of cultural practices: with a ‘shift from user-centered con-
nectedness to owner-centered connectivity […] do social media platforms
stimulate active participation and civic engagement, or has collectivity
become a synonym for automated collectivity?’ (54)
What remains of the utopian ambition of the first few years? In Fabien
Benoît’s opinion, Facebook still conforms to an online ‘Bisouland’ (47),
which we can translate as ‘Kissland’, populated with ‘Care Bear’ users.
Sharing, friending and liking are not innocuous powerful ideological
concepts: relativism rules while conflict and contradiction have no place
on Facebook. Above and beyond the endogamy this creates—we become
friends with people who are like us—and the social fragmentation this
maintains—the most privileged social classes are the ones who most benefit
from the network, particularly from a professional standpoint—the way in
which Facebook functions prioritizes the sharing of emotions rather than
a rational approach to the world with its complexities and differences. The
simple fact of being able to like nearly everything, while a dislike function
does not exist, stands as witness to this.
It is worth noting that the forms of sociability Facebook prioritizes
can also be found in followers’ comments. After each message from Léon
or another character, many messages (and sometimes hundreds) were
posted. However, the characters never replied to followers’ messages. In
288 Catherine Bouko
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Figure 1: Types of comments written by Léon Vivien’s fans, who follow this character’s adventures
on his Facebook Page
Note
1. Léon Vivien’s messages were only written in French. In this chapter, his
messages in English are my personal translations.
Works Cited
Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le Cinéma? Ontologie et Langage. Paris: Cerf, 1975. Print.
Belot, Robert. ‘Apocalypse, un Documentaire sur la Seconde Guerre Mondiale.’ Vingtième Siècle.
Revue d’Histoire 107 (2010): 171–75. Print.
Benoît, Fabien. Facebook. Paris: Usbek et Rica, 2013. Print.
Bouko, Catherine. ‘Affinity Spaces on Facebook. A Quantitative Discourse Analysis Towards
Intercultural Dialogue.’ MILID Yearbook 2014. Global Citizenship in a Digital World. Ed. Sherri
Hope Culver and Paulette Kerr. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2014. 107–20. Print.
Casey, Valerie. ‘Staging Meaning: Performance in the Modern Museum.’ TDR 49.3 (2003): 78–95.
Print.
—. ‘The Museum Effect: Gazing from Object to Performance in the Contemporary Cultural-
History Museum.’ Ecole du Louvre, Paris. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
DDB Paris. ‘Press Release for the Launch of Léon Vivien’s Facebook Page.’ Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Gee, James Paul. ‘Semiotic Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces. From the Age of Mythology to
Today’s Schools.’ Beyond Communities of Practice: Language Power and Social Context. Ed.
David Barton and Karin Tusting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 214–32. Print.
290 Catherine Bouko
Introduction
cultures and as such also often directly related to the popularity of other
historical moments.
The nineteenth century constitutes an apt point of departure for a study
of the cultural memory of natural disasters in the United States for several
reasons. First, the growth of the cities, the rising population density, and
the increasingly vertical extension of urban space exacerbated the number
of fatalities and also resulted in costlier and also more eye-catching dam-
ages, which put these catastrophes even more prominently on the map of
nineteenth-century America. Besides, the burgeoning print culture and
the progress in publication technologies enabled a cost-efficient and fast
dissemination of (illustrated) disaster news all through the nation and
allowed for the publication of so-called instant disaster histories within few
weeks after the calamities. Particularly in the second half of the nineteenth
century, the illustrated magazines Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855)
and Harper’s Weekly (1857) as well as the self-pronounced ‘Printmakers to
the American People’ Currier & Ives satisfied their readers’ craving for
images of disasters (cf. Casper 40–69; Gessner; Peters).
Moreover, the nineteenth century was also the time of the profession-
alization and institutionalization of the sciences, which, together with the
refinement of empirical research technologies, enabled the establishment
of specialized research disciplines concentrating on the study of very par-
ticular phenomena such as meteorology and seismology. As a result, major
natural calamities were not only well-documented but also prolifically
discussed in terms of their geophysical causation and with regard to their
prevention (cf., e.g., Kutzbach; Oldroyd 88–128). Despite the strong influence
of Enlightenment ideas, theological and philosophical explanations of these
disastrous events, equally aiming to make sense of them, continued to
produce similarly powerful debates in ‘high’ culture for most of the century.
Ultimately, departing from the nineteenth century makes it possible to trace
changes in the ‘unpopularity’ of natural disasters over the course of several
decades to scrutinize how their status changes over time.
The first case study explores the so-called New Madrid Earthquakes of
1811/12, which comprised over 3,000 distinct seismic shocks over a period of
five months starting in December 1811. They would be referred to regionally
as well as (trans)nationally as the ‘Earthquake America Forgot’ (Steward
and Knox) and as a natural calamity ‘gradually and inexorably forgotten,
294 Susanne Leik am
the memory […] dormant for over a century’ (Valencius 11). With estimated
magnitudes of up to 7.7, these tremors constitute the ‘largest outburst of
seismic energy in American history’ (Steward and Knox 15). The three
strongest shocks alone, according to the United States Geological Survey,
rank among the greatest earthquakes ever to occur in the contiguous
United States.5 The epicenter of most tremors, and thus also the most
devastating damage, was situated near the small town of New Madrid,
which was located in the very south of the Missouri Territory right at the
Mississippi River. Yet, the earthquakes must have been felt with vary-
ing intensity from Canada to New Orleans and from New England to the
prairies in the West. At the time of the earthquakes, New Madrid had been
an aspiring new ‘gateway to the West’ (Zeilinga de Boer and Sanders 126)
and an up-and-coming central trade node in the Mississippi River traffic,
but it was completely destroyed through the seismic shocks and therefore
(temporarily) abandoned (cf. Rozario 57–63; Valencius 14–107; Zeilinga de
Boer and Sanders 108–28).
At the time, there was no central authority to record the number of
fatalities in the United States and the adjacent territories, which is why
the figures can only be estimated. According to recent reassessments,
the number is in the range of about 1,000 (cf. Steward and Knox 240). The
continual earthquakes also caused substantial changes of the visible land-
scape spreading about 600,000 square kilometers around the epicenter
(U.S. Geological Survey): seismic phenomena included the liquefaction of
landmasses, causing entire settlements to slide into the river or be eroded
by the strong currents, the sinking of many boats in the agitated river waves,
spectacular sand blows, and the appearance of deep seismic cracks in the
ground. Raised fault blocks further functioned as dams, famously reversing
the flow of the Mississippi River for several weeks (cf. Fuller; Penick; Rozario
57–63; Zeilinga de Boer and Sanders 108–28).
In the early 1810s, the earthquakes constituted an immensely ‘popular’
subject matter for the numerous Native American tribes as well as for the
European-American settlers in the region and they proved productive in,
among others, news articles, religious as well as spiritual interpretations,
and life-writing documents such as letters or eye-witness reports. Earlier in
1811, a solar eclipse and the appearance of a comet in the night sky—both at
the time not commonly understood as regular occurrences—had already
heated up the mood for widespread speculations about the nature of these
‘mysterious’ signs. When the earthquakes not only triggered a foul smell
through the release of hydrogen sulphide from subterranean enclosures but
later also a partial darkening of the sky due to dust dispersed in the rural
Unpopul ar American Natur al Cal amities 295
the Portuguese government for the same reason (cf. Fonseca 95–123; Kozák
and Čermák 133–34). The 1783 Earthquake of Calabria, Italy, incited an equal
empirical interest in the scientific community, which is why the Neapoli-
tan Royal Academy of Sciences sent a ‘scientific expedition’ (Keller 151) of
surveyors and artists into the cities as well as into the rural backcountry in
order to record the natural phenomena as systematically as possible. While
so-called naturalists, private people with an interest in their environment,
discussed the seismic phenomena in letters and articles, there were no
institutionalized efforts to unravel the workings of the 1811/12 New Madrid
Earthquakes. Not even eminent English geologist Charles Lyell’s expedition
into the region in 1846 changed this situation noticeably.
Over the years, the credibility of the reports of the New Madrid Earth-
quakes was thus disputed and at times even denied in scientific circles. In
1883, geologist James MacFarlane gave a ‘celebrated paper’ (Steward and
Knox 8) at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science titled ‘The Earthquake at New Madrid, Missouri, in 1811—Probably
Not an Earthquake’, in which he claimed that the earthquakes had in fact
been mere landslides. While MacFarlane’s proposition was refuted later, it
nourished the legendary character of the New Madrid shakes and fostered
their unpopularity (cf. Steward and Knox 8–11; Valencius 219). As a result,
the first scientific study of the 1811/12 New Madrid Earthquakes was only
conducted a century after the actual events, when Myron Fuller from the
United States Geological Survey systematically recorded the visible altera-
tions to the regional geology in 1911. Yet, in the decades to come, seismology
concentrated mostly on the costal plate boundaries of the American East
and West coast, which is why the mid-American earthquake region did not
yet come into focus in the scientific community.
It was only in the 1970s that concerns about seismic risks and possible
interferences of nuclear power with such hazards led the U.S. Geological
Survey and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to undertake large-
scale multidisciplinary studies in the region, which involved a multitude
of federal agencies and educational institutions. These studies exposed
seismic activity and reactivated faults in the New Madrid seismic zone
and propelled the 1811/12 earthquakes (back) into the consciousness of
many Americans, albeit mostly in scientific contexts (cf. Russ and Crone
iii–iv). Those people who did not learn about the scientific recovery found
out about the New Madrid calamity at the latest when in October 1989
climatologist Iben Browning predicted a catastrophic repetition of the
New Madrid Earthquakes for December 1990. While his forecast (luckily)
proved wrong, the evocation of the risk of a recurrence of earthquakes along
Unpopul ar American Natur al Cal amities 299
the New Madrid seismic zone brought the New Madrid tremors abruptly
back into consciousness and helped anchor them in the national disaster
memory of both ‘high’ culture and popular culture alike (Zeilinga de Boer
and Sanders 136–38). Last but not least, the much-publicized commemora-
tion of the earthquakes’ bicentennial, including conferences, public events,
and information brochures by the U.S. Geological Survey certainly also
helped strengthen this development.
What we call the ‘Peshtigo Fire’ is a code name for a vast landscape
burning. […] A prolonged drought, a rural agriculture based on burning,
railroads that cast sparks to all sides, a landscape stuffed with slash and
debris from logging, a city built largely of forest materials, the catalytic
passage of a dry cold front—all ensured that fires would break out, that
some would become monumental, that flames would swallow wooden
villages and metropolitan blocks with equal aplomb. (7)
of water were the only (more or less) safe ground. Accordingly, most of
the people who survived either hunkered down with water up to their
necks for hours in the cold Peshtigo River or hid in wells, where many
nevertheless suffocated when the fire consumed the oxygen. Due to the
immense human losses (which in some towns reduced the population by
half or more) and the great destruction of property, the Peshtigo Fire was
highly visible in contemporaneous life-writing documents such as Reverend
Peter Pernin’s eyewitness account and newspaper articles and it constituted
a (sad) landmark in the local communities in the northeastern regions of
Lake Michigan at the time. This also applied for ‘high’-culture approaches
such as scientific studies. Two weeks after the fire (when most reports were
still thought to be highly exaggerated), a local committee investigated the
genesis, course, and extent of the fire—without, however, being able to
fully understand the at the time unknown physics behind the firestorm
(cf. Gess and Lutz 165–67). Whereas religious reactions to and explanations
of the earthquakes had featured large in 1811/12, these were not among the
dominant reactions to natural disasters in the second half of the nineteenth
century anymore (cf. Steinberg 4).
With the flight from the damaged rural farming areas in the long-
aftermath of the conflagration, the arrival of new settlers in Wisconsin
and Michigan, and the gradual loss of eyewitnesses to the firestorm over the
course of time, the events seemed to have lost their immediate importance
and, as in the case of many other historical American fires (such as the Bal-
timore Fire of 1904), began to fade in the cultural memory of the residents in
the region in the first decades of the twentieth century (cf. Riney-Kehrberg
126). According to Denise Gess and William Lutz, ‘[o]ver time, the incom-
plete fragmented story took on the tone and winsome quality of a myth,
a Paul Bunyan tale’, which ‘became a bit of regional elementary-school
history’ (205) in Peshtigo and the surrounding communities. Beyond the
affected regions in Wisconsin and Michigan, the Peshtigo Fire was and
remained rather unpopular—particularly in comparison to the enduring
nationwide fascination with the Great Chicago Fire. This started right after
the firestorm occurred: the remoteness of the rural settlements and the
initial impossibility to communicate the calamity to outside communities
(among others, due to the damaged telegraph lines) enhanced the public
invisibility of the firestorm considerably. As a result, when the news about
the Peshtigo calamity reached cities such as Green Bay, Madison, or Mil-
waukee (and from there the rest of the nation) on 10 October 1871, ‘everyone
in any position of authority had gone to the aid of Chicago’ (Gess and Lutz
158), and with them hundreds of disaster tourists from around the country.
302 Susanne Leik am
convincingly argued that the Peshtigo Fire was still only known by few
people outside Wisconsin (21). Since then, a burgeoning fascination with
‘forgotten’ or ‘lost’ histories and a heightened interest in natural disasters
following the environmental turn in the humanities have resulted in a
wave of recent publications (cf., e.g., Gess and Lutz; Knickelbine; Pernin),
bringing the Peshtigo Fire into the canon of great nineteenth-century fires.
Conclusion
The two case studies illustrate that—regardless of how terrible the loss of
life, how spectacular the geophysical and meteorological phenomena, and
how dreadful the devastation—some nineteenth-century natural calami-
ties moved from a significant cultural productivity in popular as well as
‘high’ culture approaches into unpopularity. This unpopularity was not
accidental but produced by economic, cultural, and political struggles for
hegemony and for visibility in American cultures. In the transformation
from popular to unpopular disasters, the simultaneous occurrence of other
momentous newsworthy crises of national significance (so-called media
events), driving the previously popular (natural) calamities out of the cul-
tural consciousness, played a crucial role. In this manner, the impending
War of 1812 and the Great Chicago Fire drew considerable attention away
from the New Madrid Earthquakes and the Peshtigo Fire, respectively.
Moreover, the Civil War also helped erase the memory of the New Madrid
Earthquakes in the long run, since, as Conevery Valencius argues, ‘[t]he
region of the New Madrid epicenters came to be associated with terrible
battle, not terrible earthquakes’ (222) and with racial strife in the decades
after 1865.
In this context, cultural memory comes forward as disputed territory
with regard to the question of whose stories are remembered and whose
are marginalized. More often than not, the same processes that shape
cultural and political hegemony in the United States today were productive
in determining which disasters were included in the canon of nineteenth-
century disasters and from which perspective(s) they should be told. Along
these lines, the Civil War not only overwrote the New Madrid earthquake
landscape (literally as well as metaphorically) but also obscured the long-
standing Native American presence in the New Madrid seismic zone, ‘along
with the role of the region’s earthquakes in pan-Indian spiritual and cultural
revival’ (Valencius 229). Whereas the recent ‘rediscovery’ of the earthquakes
of 1811/12 also partly brought the Native American experiences (albeit often
Unpopul ar American Natur al Cal amities 305
were mere legends (cf. Valencius 235–50). Eager to draw investors to the forest
around Peshtigo, newspapers in the region likewise barely mentioned the fires
after 1871 but focused on positive news (cf. Gess and Lutz 192–97). This work, in
the long run, led to an accelerated forgetting—particularly in the contexts of
population expansion. In both cases, the influx of new settlers was immense,
which also contributed to the dilution of the local memory of these calamities.
The two cases in point did not stay unpopular without end, however.
Looking at how these unpopular disasters were brought back into popular-
ity, it can be said that more often than not the driving force seems to have
emanated from the nexus of military (research) and technology. From there,
it subsequently also reached popular culture again. In the case of the New
Madrid Earthquakes, the (legitimate) fear in the 1970s that nuclear power
plants in the active seismic zone could cause radioactive contamination
returned the tremors back into the spotlight of seismic and nuclear research
(cf. Russ and Crone iii–iv). When climatologist Iben Browning predicted
the recurrence of the New Madrid quakes in 1989 with much nationwide
publicity, the potential risk caused strong fears, which bestowed a height-
ened visibility to the historical event. In the same way, the fear in the 1910s
that firestorms such as the one at Peshtigo in 1871 might become more
frequent promoted scientific studies, which were taken up and expanded
during the Second World War, when the U.S. military conducted research
on the possible use of firestorms as war weapons (cf. Gess and Lutz 208–09;
Riney-Kehrberg 126). While issues of (national) safety and security—and
the monetary interests and relationships connected to this—thus played
a crucial role, there were other decisive factors at play.
In an age of information overload and the sheer endless and rapid spread
of news, the retrieval of ‘lost’ stories seems to have gained a particular
attraction as the recent flood of ‘forgotten’ or ‘lost’ histories of events in
American history indicates. Besides, ‘today’s “obsession with memory” and
memorials’, which is ‘grounded in a vastly expanded U.S. demographic and
in heightened expectations of rights and representations among the nation’s
increasingly diverse publics’ (Doss 19), is not only concerned with national
narratives but at the same time—and in particular—with the publication
of counterstatements and less visible (disaster) narratives. The unearthing
of unpopular disaster tales and the new wave of publications on the New
Madrid Earthquakes and the Peshtigo Fire in research contexts (e.g. Gess and
Lutz; Kanon; Lovett; Riney-Kehrberg; Steward and Knox; Valencius; Zeilinga
de Boer and Sanders) and popular culture (in the form of earthquake tours,
popular histories, news articles, children’s books, or reprints of eyewitness
reports) hence show that the ‘rediscovery’ of the unpopular resonates with
Unpopul ar American Natur al Cal amities 307
Notes
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The Unpopular Profession?
Graduate Studies in the Humanities and the Genre of the
‘Thesis Hatement’
Sebastian M. Herrmann
‘Don’t do it. Just don’t! [...] [G]raduate school lasts at least six years and
will ruin your life in a very real way’. This is the bottom line of a 2013
article by Rebecca Schuman in the online newspaper slate.com. Noting
that she is not the first to issue this warning, Schuman adds: ‘well-meaning
academics have already attempted to warn you, the best-known screed
in this subgenre being William Pannapacker’s “Graduate School in the
Humanities? Just Don’t Go”. But this convinced no one. It certainly didn’t
convince me!’ Looking back, she explains: ‘In 2005 when I began my own
Ph.D., I should have known better, but I didn’t. Now that you know better,
will you listen?’
At the time, Schuman’s piece attracted considerable attention, not least
from people procrastinating away in front of their computers while writing
on or researching for their own Ph.D. theses. It quickly garnered Facebook
likes and shares (over 38,000 to date), it invited comments on slate.com (over
1,800 by now), it was shared, tweeted, and retweeted, and it was responded
to in blog posts and other articles. Writing about Schuman’s text in The New
Yorker, Joshua Rothman remarks that the responses were so multiple that
it was ‘as though a virtual symposium [had] been convened’. Looking at
the social media interaction, however, one could observe that, ironically,
Schuman’s message was ‘liked’ by exactly those people who had reason to
dislike it; or, more precisely, that the people most vigorously engaging with
it through likes, shares, and comments were precisely those people who,
according to the text, most emphatically ignored its content: practicing
graduate students, who read the text, shared it, and then continued to
work on their Ph.D. The social media circulation thus suggests that the
text’s audience did not read the article as intended, that they did not take
the advice to turn one’s back to academia, and it thus underscores the
point that Schuman’s article self-reflexively makes with regard to other,
similar texts against graduate school: they ‘[convince] no one’. The tension
between the text’s decidedly, self-avowedly unpopular message and its
mass-circulation—a tension between the texts self-proclaimed meaning
and its pragmatic effect—thus parallels the contradiction Schuman herself
314 Sebastian M. Herrmann
openly performs when she says that warning people against going to grad
school most likely is a futile task—in the very moment of engaging in exactly
this task.
These interlocking moments of contradiction, present in Schuman’s essay
as well as in other, similar texts, mark a particular paradox of un/popularity
that warrants further exploration. Going to graduate school arguably is
an unpopular life decision in several senses of the word: it is a decision
that only comparatively few students will make, an elite decision, and it
is one that is often emphatically and ostentatiously disliked. When asked,
graduate students will quickly speak of the hardships of graduate school,
not of the pleasures of learning and of grad school life. Yet, according to
the logic of the texts by Schuman, Pannapacker, and others, getting a Ph.D.
remains too popular a decision. Indeed, their texts work hard to tell people
that they should like it even less, that even fewer people should do it, that
it should be even more unpopular. These texts, in their circulation and in
the images, stereotypes, and sentiments they invoke, constitute a popular
genre advocating for the unpopularity of the humanities Ph.D.; clearly, they
are shaped by complex and contradictory affective dynamics.
This paper will focus on these conflicted affective dynamics to argue that
they are indicative of the role the humanities play in ‘Western’ society more
broadly. My argument will proceed in four larger steps. I will first present
Schuman’s ‘Thesis Hatement’ in greater detail and will contextualize it with
regard to the larger body of similar texts it is representative of, suggesting
that they constitute a particularly precarious form of (mis)communication
marked by irony and hyperbole. As part of my discussion of this genre of
writing, I will, secondly, provide a brief discussion of the politics of these
texts, arguing that they engage in conflicted and contradictory discussions
of labor, class, income, and academia.1 In a third step, I will then trace these
contradictions on a textual level. To do so, I will attend to the somewhat
limited set of metaphors this genre of writing typically employs in the
attempt to express and come to terms with a presumed popularity paradox:
if they convince no one, if they are advice literature that does not give advice
to be followed, they have a particularly insincere, tropical quality, and
this quality gets expressed and exercised in the tropes they use; attending
to these tropes will thus help unfold the contradictions they negotiate.
In a final section, I will look at the larger textual performance of thesis
hatements to discuss in how far and how exactly these texts undermine
their own presumed project. Thesis hatements, I will thus show, are a deeply
conflicted genre. They do not mean what they say, they use metaphors to
talk about this dynamic without talking about it, and they speak about
The Unpopul ar Profession? 315
conflicted social constellations. As texts about the academy, they are indica-
tive of the conflicted role the humanities play in contemporary US society.
quest for tenure) and who are now warning others to enter into it, their
bitterness, again, often complicating their message. Rebecca Schuman’s
‘Thesis Hatement’ is a representative of this type.8 In either case, already in
terms of authorship, thesis hatements are marked by a particular affective
double-bind, and this double-bind, that I will trace in the next three sections
as well, sits at the heart of how they negotiate the un/popularity of the
humanities Ph.D.
often they do not. In terms of their daily work, research and teaching, they
perform work that is highly valued, at least discursively, by society. In terms
of the income this work earns them, they do not. Set against the background
of the particularly unclear class designations in academia, thesis hatements
thus engage a doubly contradictory class discourse: society’s feelings toward
graduate students are contradictory, and the graduate students’ own situa-
tion, with the disparity between social and economic capital is, too.
Lastly, and in addition to the social issues they speak of, thesis hatements
also in themselves pursue a politics of sorts. The politics of these texts and
their circulation reside in how they individualize the social problems of
graduate education and the adjunct market, how they depoliticize the social
role of the university and the humanities, and how they thus participate
in a project of delegitimizing the humanities (in the sense in which the
humanities have claimed legitimacy since the 1970s). These politics begin
with thesis hatements’ generic move of telling students not to pursue a
degree. As Andrew Kalaidjian points out, this advice constitutes a form of
‘opting out of the conversation’, and it prevents a more ‘sustained critique
of the state of intellectual labor as a problem of modernity and a cause for
social activism in its own right’. Telling graduate students to ‘Just Don’t Go’,
in other words, foregrounds a private ‘solution’ to something that could and
should be treated as a social problem instead. Indeed, Paul Cook makes a
more fundamental point about the larger body of academic advice literature
(under which he subsumes thesis hatements) and about the disciplinary and
disciplining work it does: these texts not only ‘delegitimi[ze] the possibil-
ity of large-scale change’ (30), and they not only preempt any perspective
that imagines the university as a starting point of social change. Instead,
academic advice literature, as it is in circulation right now, ‘constructs,
constrains, narrows, and normalizes the way graduate students think of
themselves as individuals constantly in need of introspective work on
themselves in order to remain [...] employable’ (Cook 25). It ‘promotes a
„turning inward“ that has a way of deflecting attention away from social
projects that require collective action’ (Cook 25).15 There is, in other words, a
double impulse toward depoliticization here: thesis hatements tell graduate
students that their economic situation is a private, not a social problem, and
they, more generally, depoliticize the humanities/the university as a site of
introspection rather than of social change. Schuman’s ‘Thesis Hatement’,
then, as Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, may be ‘on the far right extreme of
the ‘don’t go!’ advice market, but it is indicative of what that advice entails.
It’s some combination of an assessment of the academic labor market, the
odds of getting a tenure-track appointment, the high cost of graduate
320 Sebastian M. Herrmann
little reward. Looking at the situation this way, graduate students seem to
be masochistically attracted by the bad treatment they receive from their
partner, academia. And no matter the pain, no matter the disappointment,
they keep going back. What to outsiders looks like abuse apparently seems
to them like an emotionally gratifying relationship, and this blindness to
the abusive nature is at the core of this third metaphor. As one blog post,
responding to Schuman’s article, put it: ‘We cut the same heartbreaking
figure as a woman who has become attached to a cold man, sacrificing more
and more to win his love, willfully ignoring signs of his indifference because
the alternative has become too terrifying to contemplate’ (‘In Valley and in
Plain’). Indeed, as a metaphor, love does particularly interesting work. As,
once again, William Pannapacker aka Thomas H. Benton observes, linking
‘work’ and ‘love’ is characteristic of particular sectors of the job market, and
the rhetoric of love typically ‘supports the transfer of resources from one
group to another, typically from women to men, from minority to majority’.
Love, in other words, is a highly gendered and gendering metaphor, typically
reserved for sectors that are marked by economic exploitation.20 At the
same time, it does describe a manifest and positive experience. As Benton
explains, people often stay in graduate school because they perceive the
‘so-called bohemian lifestyle’, the thrill of discovering new knowledge, the
conversations, the mentoring, and even the focus on immaterial gain as a
whiff of a good life. In fact, Benton’s piece is a particularly telling example
of the ‘ambiguous meaning’ (Pannapacker) of love, and of how the feeling
comes back even in the process of writing about it critically.
All of these metaphors are similar in that they try to explain why gradu-
ate students cannot be swayed away from academia. Implying a particular
understanding of why people should or should not pursue an academic
career, one that is rooted in individual, economic gain, they suggest that
it would be in the students’ best interest if they simply quit. Not quitting,
in this logic, is a weakness, a sign of impaired agency. In other words,
these metaphors try to resolve the presumed and presumably unjustified
popularity of the Ph.D. degree by reading graduate students as mistaken,
intellectually or emotionally, and in need of treatment, psychological or
intellectual, so that they can make a better decision for themselves. Notably,
in using (a limited set of) metaphors, these texts attempt a ‘tropical’ solution
to the problem they have as texts. Giving advice that ‘convince[s] no one’
(Schuman), struggling, in other words, with a disconnect between their
textual project and their textual effect, between denotation and pragmatics,
these texts use metaphors of mistaken self-perception to explain this very
failure.
The Unpopul ar Profession? 323
In this last section, I want to use a different angle to speak about this discon-
nect between thesis hatements’ textual project and their textual effect and
about the discrepancy between graduate students’ presumed unhappiness,
the presumably mistaken quality of their life decision, and the alleged
popularity of the Ph.D. in the humanities. To do so, I will look even more
closely at the discrepancy between what ‘thesis hatements’ say—’Don’t do
it’—and the effect they have—’they convince no one’. This discrepancy
between denotation and pragmatic effect, this textual schism, is crucial to
understanding the complex and contradictory affective dynamics at stake,
dynamics that inform not only this genre but also the cultural meanings
of academia as a social institution. Accordingly, I want to use the next
few paragraphs to explore moments in which these texts end up being
affirmative of the Ph.D. in the very moment in which they claim to reject it.
The f irst (self-inflicted) challenge to the argumentative effective-
ness of thesis hatements lies in the straw man nature of the argument
they set up: their graduate students are usually ridiculously naïve. In
Schuman’s text, this dynamic comes to the fore in the first paragraphs
already: ‘Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work f ive
hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking
about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the
tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is
earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing
this path’. Clearly, no graduate student will actually think that this is
what a professorship is like. The effect of disillusionment, accordingly,
does not happen, because the reader does not feel addressed. Instead, the
text presents a foil of particularly naïve students that, ultimately, do not
deserve success because what they are after is a utopian illusion to begin
with. I will come back to this straw man argument below. In any case,
it marks a first instance in which the textual work of a thesis hatement
defies its presumed pragmatic purpose. If thesis hatements project such
ridiculously naïve implied readers, they cannot meaningfully convince
their actual audience and instead open up a subject position from which
to look down at such naïveté.
A similar yet slightly more complex dynamic can be traced via genre:
Schuman’s text self-identifies as ‘a jeremiad’, and many commentators agree
that this is exactly what it is. This designation draws attention to a form
of textual performance whose pragmatics has been analyzed prominently
by Perry Miller in his seminal ‘Errand into the Wilderness’. Regardless of
324 Sebastian M. Herrmann
If you read them all through, the total effect, curiously enough, is not
at all depressing: you come to the paradoxical realization that they
do not bespeak a despairing frame of mind. There is something of a
ritualistic incantation about them; [...] in [the realm] of psychology they
are purgations of soul; they do not discourage but actually encourage
the community to persist in its heinous conduct. The exhortation to a
reformation which never materializes serves as a token payment upon
the obligation, and so liberates the debtors. (11)
For their authors and, more importantly, for their readers, thesis hatements
might indeed constitute ‘purgations of the soul’. If they ‘convince no one’,
this might be because their purpose is not to trigger actual ‘reformation’—
quitting academia, quitting the Ph.D.—but to perform a ‘token payment’
to anybody ‘outside’ of the logic of grad school. By reading, sharing, or
subscribing to thesis hatements, graduate students, in other words, might
perform a particular ritualistic, symbolic gesture that replaces action in
the real world.
Indeed, rethinking the genre affiliations of the thesis hatement helps
unlock yet another layer of how the textual pragmatics are at odds with
the denotation of the text. Thesis hatements presume to offer advice, and
they arguably fail to effectively do so. However, as Joshua Rothman points
out in an insightful article in The New Yorker, ‘advice helps people when
they are making rational decisions, and the decision to go to grad school
in English is essentially irrational. In fact, it’s representative of a whole
class of decisions that bring you face to face with the basic unknowability
and uncertainty of life’. Other texts similarly assert that one cannot know
whether this is a good decision. As Thomas H. Benton aka William Pan-
napacker confesses: ‘I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from
thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.s in the humanities who will never
have full-time academic jobs’ (Benton, ‘Is Graduate’). So, clearly, advice is
not in order, but why is it given anyway? The reason is that it constitutes
a textual performance that goes beyond the content of the advice: when
thesis hatements cast this decision, that is characterized by the frightening
‘unknowability and uncertainty of life’, in terms of rational knowability,
they reintroduce, ex negativo, rationality into the game. Even though advice
literature on the Ph.D. hardly ever gives good, rational reasons to pursue
a Ph.D., it thus reinscribes rationality, if only so that it can be discarded.
The Unpopul ar Profession? 325
Conclusion
Notes
der sich der Großteil der Promovierenden befindet’ cf. the conference report
(‘Tagungsbericht’). Cf. also Bordel and Ritter, as well as the debate on the ‘aka-
demisches Prekariat’ that briefly flared in German public discourse in 2011/12.
10. This section profited greatly from discussions at the Unpopular Culture
conference. I am particularly grateful for the remarks by Barry Shank, J.
Jesse Ramirez, and Martin Lüthe.
11. Cf. Grafton for a particularly bitter phrasing of the use of graduate students as
a way to provide cheap teaching: ‘Administrators, meanwhile, began to treat
systematic underemployment as a feature, not a bug, and made of it a man-
agement tool. They realized that they could finance elementary teaching by
taking in large numbers of graduate students, keeping them at work for eight
or nine years on low pay, running sections and occasional courses, and then
spewing them forth unemployed or re-employing them as adjuncts.’ Cf. also
the attention the case of Mary Margaret received, an adjunct at Duquesne
‘who died sick, alone and penniless’ after not being able to build up retire-
ment money from her meager payment (Flaherty; cf. also ‘Reality Check’).
12. Note in this context the debate about the study of class in academia that,
Keith Gandal argues, has been hampered by the lack of poor professors. In
the complex class identities at stake, it remains unclear whether ‘facing or
anticipating economic difficulties’ constitutes enough of a ‘poor identity’
to energize ‘literary-critical poverty studies.’ The debate has recently been
energized not just by the last economic crisis but also by Walter Benn
Michaels’s 2006 The Trouble with Diversity, which opens with a discussion of
whether the difference between rich and poor people is simply a matter of
having or not having money (cf. 1–3).
13. This view, of course, plays into a concern haunting the humanities at least
since the revisionary interventions of the 1970s, the democratization of the
university, and the broadening of university access: the concern that the hu-
manities might be a class sanctuary, that their presumably universal quality
might hide mechanisms of exclusion.
14. Note, of course, the conspicuous gendering that aligns the economically
responsible decision to earn money with the (presumably) male job of the
Hooters managers and that associates the humanities with femininity, as well
as the unspoken allegation that graduate students fail to grow up; in these ar-
guments, graduate school often features as a failure to grow up into an male
adult breadwinner role, pointing at the nexus of gender, age, and economy.
15. Cf. also Tressie McMillan Cottom, who points out that the ‘blanket advice’
of thesis hatements comes from a privileged white position, and that
minority students may require the credentials of a Ph.D. (even for non-
academic jobs) to offset the negative hiring effect of their minority status.
‘Plainly put, black folks need credentials because without them our ‘ghetto’
names get our résumés trashed, our clean criminal records lose out to
whites with felony convictions, and discretion works against our type of so-
cial capital (and weak ties and closure of information) to amount to a social
The Unpopul ar Profession? 329
reality that looks and feels a lot like statistical discrimination.’ As Kalaidjian
summarizes her point: the advice to opt out of academia ‘ignores questions
of race, gender, and class, indeed, the very social bedrock upon which the
humanities staked many of its claims in the 1960s.’
16. Cf. also Michael Bérubé’s observation that ‘the contemporary university is
so amorphous that it can be described as the research wing of the corporate
economy, the final resting place of the New Left, the last best hope for criti-
cal thinking, the engine room of global technological advance, the agent of
secularization and the advance of reason, the training ground for the labor
force, the conservatives’ strongest bastion of antifeminist education, the
progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right, the natural home of intel-
lectual isolates, the natural home of goose-stepping groupthinkers, and the
locus of postmodern skepticism and fragmentation’ (147).
17. This text, too, bears two titles. One, marked down in the html title tags, is
given above. The main title on the page reads ‘You Aren’t the Exception.’
18. Cf. also Newhouse’s ‘Deprogramming form the Academic Cult.’
19. On the sub-genre of survival guides in academic advice literature, cf. Cook.
For an example of ‘survivor guilt’, cf. Thomas H. Benton’s self-indictment
that ‘nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-
qualified Ph.D.’s in the humanities who will never have full-time academic
jobs’ (‘Is Graduate’), a quote I will come back to below.
20. Outside of academia, nursing comes to mind as one such sector. Note that
Pannapacker also sees this dynamic inside the academy with the humanities
on the one side and the ‘male-dominated ‘hard’ fields, such as physics or en-
gineering’ on the other. On the particular class dimension of the metaphor,
cf. also Jacqui Shine’s article on ‘Love and Other Secondhand Emotions’.
Shine argues that people from lower class backgrounds have a fundamen-
tally different understanding of what it means to ‘love’ one’s work. She thus
asks ‘whether our reliance on using love as a way to measure one’s suitability
for their work has the effect of excluding low-income and working-class
people from the academic professions. If the love question is, in fact, a kind
of gatekeeping thing—and I think it is—then we run the risk of stacking the
deck with people from middle- and upper-income backgrounds, folks who
can understand and answer the question affirmatively and who have the
luxury of ignoring the hard economic realities of the academic job market.’
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Contributors
Bärbel Harju teaches American Studies at LMU Munich. She holds a Ph.D.
in American History (LMU, 2011). Her dissertation, Rock & Religion. Eine
Kulturgeschichte der christlichen Popmusik in den USA (Bielefeld: tran-
script, 2012), critically surveys Christian pop music in the U.S. In 2015, she
co-edited a collection of essays entitled Cultures of Privacy. Paradigms,
Transformations, Contestations (with Karsten Fitz). Her research interests
include popular culture, music, religious history, film and visual culture.
Her current research project focuses on the cultural history of privacy in
postwar America.
Contributors 333
Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). He is
the co-editor of The Popular Music Studies Reader (Routledge, 2005) (with
Andy Bennett and Jason Toynbee), and American Studies: A New Anthology
(Wiley/Blackwell, 2009) (with Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines and Penny Von
Eschen). He has published in such journals as American Quarterly, American
Studies, boundary 2, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Radical
History Review, and he has served on the editorial boards of American
Quarterly and Popular Music.