Against Emo, For Dada

AGAINST EMO, FOR DADA

AN ESSAY BY JANIS VIVIAN MEDIA LAGO WITH OCTAVIA SHEFFNER 

    LAGO SAYS: We live in an era of uneasy clairvoyance, an era of discomfort, for we cannot capture every space and are instead captured, held captive, by spaces we imagine. Has this not always been the case? Indeed, music inherently moves through space by its very nature as sound, its limitless complexities and variations captured in the recording medium in an attempt to *preserve* space. Thousands of audio plugins are available online which serve only to emulate the reverberations of physical spaces, varying in their degree of authenticity yet always falling short of preserving the feeling. The 'church' or chamber is equally common in contemplative 'ambient' and tortured 'witch house,' a signifier separated from its origin and devoured by the language of production in the days since Lexicon units first began to quietly invade music studios. The spaces through which we move often do not exist, the songs we produce as musicians irreplicable in concert, for we capture, kidnap, our flukes, yet the idea may be replicated infinitely so long as a recording exists. Our composited flukes, put in the same place and oriented within the same context, are easy to construe as 'worlds.' These recordings will see many spaces, be heard in many realms of experience, yet they do not originate from any particular space. They are nanometer processes, translations of the imagination. So, what are we as musicians if we create spaces and construe worlds with the idea of reproducing the feelings of our worlds in the minds of others, even if those feelings prove inaccurate and often over-fanciful? We are _worldbuilders._ All of us, worldbuilders, inevitably, at all times, even when we believe we are not. Even field recordists are building worlds, just worlds very similar to their own. So, whence originates the idea that worldbuilding is optional, that it is at all possible to escape it, especially when such an idea itself is a product of the human imagination?

    SHEFFNER SAYS: I believe in a thing called love. Specifically, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" by post-ironic or honest to god British hair metal revival, silver sparkling spandex-clad butt rock band The Darkness, clamped ballsack high notes and flowerchild hairdos included. A song whose music video is set in a spaceship and a squeaked call of "GUITAR!" (sounding more like CATCHYA!) in which starts up the guitar solo as the camera pans across a hallway to the guitarist in a green light, and escalates into lasers shooting out of guitars in defeat of a giant space octopus that has landed onto The Darkness' craft and whose tentancles reach inside as the band fend it off with the sheer power of rock. I believe that this Katamari cornball is actually a better expression of the feeling of falling in love than a fragmented queer narrative told by 5 author stand-ins over an acoustic guitar, despite the latter sparing no details and baring everything. I'm not a hardline proponent of concision, I believe indulgence is the space of life. But 'I wanna kiss you every minute, every hour, every day.' kicks an astronomical, space octopus-slaying amount of ass. This work is not intended as an indictment of work that is your last breakup with the names changed, but it is in fact intended as an indictment of the work that in fact parades the fact that it is the minutiae of your last breakup with the names changed. Why do we need 'messy' queer art if 'messy' exclusively constitutes the reliving of one's traumas? Furthermore, do we particularly need honesty of the stranger talking your ear off on public transport while you nod along caliber? Can an elevated honesty exist in burying your head in mediated sand and allowing the healing process to take place guided by filmic cues, the tradition of snowfall indicatory of love, ceiling-mounted machines that drip the water comprising the rain of grief, defeat, loneliness and every other possible negative emotion? Can we become more of ourselves by removing ourselves and instead interrogating genre and convention, what is nostalgically available and what is in some way has been sold to us as universal? _Hell yeah, bro. Bless up. Fingerguns._

    LAGO SAYS: This, inevitably, brings us back to the underlying concept of worldbuilding. We as listeners are conscious of the worldbuilding process because it is primarily _a priori,_ using existing signifiers and coalescing them into a new combination. In fact, I often define the much broader concept of creativity itself as 'the resynthesis of preexisting influences with unique experiences,' perhaps tacking on 'as a conceptual exploration relating to reality' as an optional qualifier, but such an addition would completely disregard a very crucial fact about worldbuilding: not everyone wants to worldbuild. In fact, there exist artists who find themselves so repelled by worldbuilding as to create featureless works, on the surfaces of which they extend little more than vaguely evocative metadata - often metadata in irrational, inexplicable flux not unlike what we see on The Weather Channel, as if to align it with nature - and remark on inconceivable concepts, such as inhumanity. May I, if a bit aimlessly, suggest that inhumanity is only human, since it requires the construction of an intelligent human mind to relativistically map out everything typical of humanity before exploring latent space? Maybe, but let me illustrate a point here, one that anyone familiar with Gabi Losoncy's seminal 2017 release _HH_ will be able to reckon with. Those who have heard _HH_ can still confidently know nothing about it: in other words, those familiar are supposed to ask, what even is _HH_ anyway? Forced Exposure describes _HH_ as "psychologically dense nothingness" at its marketplace, a group of fanciful words which, fittingly enough, say little to nothing about the release itself. Air conditioner recordings, _man._ Absolute fuckall with very few exceptions, all found in the bookendings. On 'Faceshopping,' SOPHIE's lead singer begs the listener, "Reduce me to nothingness." When watching the music video, one will indeed see these words dissolve on the screen into digital darkness: #000000. Such a sentiment of queer transcendence is hard to convey with such eloquent brevity, but is this really where Losoncy's handcuffed figure ends up, or is she simply stoking the flames of pareidolia with tidbits? Is anything about _HH_ truly insignificant, or are we all just children on the inside, wishing to see something more? I say we are all _enfants terribles_: we pick our poisons, and if this is your poison, so be it. You can imagine the music all you want, but there will never be music there without the conscious force of _worldbuilding._ What Losoncy succeeds in is creating an empty world. What you salivate over is indiscernible metadata; perhaps it is better to admit this than to chase the dragon until you have written four thousand words on an incorrect interpretation of John Cage's seminal _4'33._ When confronted with nothingness, we construct our own somethings. Sappho's poems survive fragmented, her Aeolic dialect reframed in the context of modern queerness. Why must partial understandings be left _unconsciously_ empty?
    There is, however, the issue of fullness, being stuffed to the brim with what is now unceremoniously called 'content.' In all its glory, 'content' can nonetheless be reduced to the role of a space-filling fuzzy concept, one which leads either to meaning or to uninterpretation, the perception of depth where there is none, not unlike what we imagine glancing into our screens' inherent degrees of 2.5D, yet more exaggerated: imagine simulating _two_ dimensions instead of just one. Overstuffed lyrical designs thus risk misinterpretation not only by those who have a thesaurus on hand, but by those who have one too many at their fingertips. The latter group get into messy relationships with language, prodding at their pareidolia with a deathwish, poking it as one would a grizzly bear with a stick - perhaps not quite as intensely, but still dangerously. _Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are,_ considered The Brave Little Abacus' magnum opus, illustrates such a concept effectively. I could digress for a while about a personal dislike of this album, sure, with its tender and afraid clean guitar sounds and detestably clean mixing, especially in comparison to _Demo?_, but what I wish to discuss here requires only that you have a lyric sheet for this record on hand. I will put aside what's personal and focus on the text. "I see it too." relates itself first and foremost to nature, what could be called 'lush' language, and Adam Demirjan's narrator quickly builds a world, an abstract world, where trees dominate and 'home' is imminently leavable by any means necessary. Such intensely personal lyrics, however, provide us very little in the end: what we can establish about Demirjan is that he is a teenager with a headstrong sense of independence and vocabularic pride. The evocativity is there, but the words tell us too much and too little: the personal diffuses beyond Demirjan and inspires readers/listeners to project everything from severely repressed trauma to George Bernard Shaw quotes onto his record. Sonically, nothing differentiates it from a bargain-bin indie rock record, except maybe the Alesis Micron, and the cult history of _Masked Dancers_ is more readily connectable to the Internet and its self-fulfilling prophecies than to anything about it being 'personal.' One cannot add a few generic personal names (ex. Abby on "Born Again..."), verbose expressions, and obtuse allegories and expect a 'personal' record. This genericized abstraction may be fuel for long-term fame, but, despite being full to the brim with human language, its world falls apart quickly as it becomes impossible to forget that _Masked Dancers_ was just basement recordings of a few Midwestern young adults who happened to enjoy _Akira_ more than your average joe. Jane Remover, on her modern and now-trimmed-down cult classic "Teen Week," references specific dates and times throughout the songs included and now expresses shame for even the most generic forms of specificity, as the album primarily covers the (unfortunately) common queer feeling of alienation from friends and family. Having since put most of the record in the bin, leaving cuts like "let down" to the wolves, and having moved on to a discontinuous direction, it is arguably more special and peculiar than ever for her to be cryptic. Average, somehow, can become crucial.
    By introducing tiny, tiny pieces of _Akira_ into the medium/framework/idiom/whatever which we happen to call Midwest Emo nowadays (as if the term had any meaning to a few boys from the geographically challenged state of New Hampshire who wanted to form a silly little band as many boys do in young adulthood), Adam Demirjan does something many attempt, yet few truly succeed at: he directly incorporates the material he is working off of, sculpts it into a form still recognizable as its point of origin, something that barely requires tracking down by sleuths who devote hours upon hours to sites like WhoSampled searching for commercials haphazardly picked out by Daniel Lopatin for use - incorporation into - Replica. The brief song in question, rightly polarizing, is constructed out of foreign bodies - the aforementioned groans - looped over Alesis Microns and undistorted guitars, apparently evoking ruined childhoods and homes so toxic you have to wear hazmat suits to hide your face. What we find here is many 21st-century artists, specifically this era's storytellers and worldbuilders, show a preference for introducing obvious formal references in the structures of their work to the exact things they explore in their artworks, restricting themselves thence to the literal, referential structures and considering them "new." Now, TBLA is far from an extreme e\0xample, I must say; for a more hyperbolic expression of what I refer to, I will have to discuss the now-infamous mascot horror genre.
    While much of the music and art I have mentioned hitherto tends to focus on adolescent or early-adult feelings, often fears, mascot horror games make an attempt to connect with childhood terror, using elements readily experienced by most in their early lives (even if not inherently horrifying to the vast majority of children past or present). Early titles were often runaway successes among vloggers now unceremoniously relegated to the flimsy title of 'content creator,' for, in using the forms, qualities, and feelings of childhood as a structural basis, they captured the imaginations of adolescents and adults online, spawning a litany of retrospective analyses and at least a bit of awe. Ostensibly novel, this fictional form soon sprawled into expansive lore, taking on a life of its own while still constrained to the exact elements of childhood. The beauty of _Five Nights at Freddy's,_ however, was not to last forever: soon enough, the appeal had become Flanderized, the demographic shifted towards children - experiencers of childhood - without any point of reference, in some ways replacing ever-declining strongholds of Charles Entertainment Cheese and all the world's _Purble Places_ and public-access television shows. This brand of indistinguishability is never a good sign. Thus, I will state an alternative preference of my own, for art construed using the abstract elements inherent to the artform rather than depending entirely on the formal references I have described here. This thought is far from original, and so I will claim no credit and instead riddle you this: for millennia, we cherished poets for their ability to construe pictures in constrained metrical forms, forms themselves often established for many centuries before any given poet had entered the picture. In the Latin language, there are certain adverbs and even verbal forms which a poet may not use whatsoever in dactylic hexameter without breaking from their rote system of verse. Those who could understand and appreciate the poets praised them for their imagery, as evocative and vivid as many great authors of the modern era who have conjured up with newer literary rules and often wholly reconceptualized rhythms, and the subtleties of their choice of language and even manipulations of syntax and word order to accommodate ideas they expressed. Working within these forms, we have a long continuity of masterpieces leading into our _Waste Lands_ and _Cantos,_ a long history leading back to the pre-print oral tradition. Being able to create a poem in the literal shape of, say, an apple is a new development, but *conveying* the shape of an apple is eternal, fundamental, even transcendental. With this knowledge, we should seek to exhaust as many of the infinite possibilities of the world as we can rather than returning to traditions no longer living with a conservative, neoclassicist bent - no need to RETVRN in *this* economy as the TikTok grifter-influencers command us to do. Instead, it is the task of the artist, the storyteller, the storytelling artist, to understand the worlds she builds.
    To explain this idea of understanding-worldbuilding, I feel I must once again turn to the aforementioned classical tradition of poetry and go from there, for it is one of many of my varied inspirations underlying this essay and contains a wealth of manipulations of form and balanced situations within the established reality of both reading and speaking, within which this poetry existed in its day. The notes I have seen on readers of this Latin poetry (and even of prose) over the years often contain bits and pieces explaining how the poet purposefully altered the word order, which Latin syntax allows and perhaps even encourages, to associate conceptual groups more closely, to emphasize concepts, or even to suggest additional actions or details pertaining thereto, which the audience may figure out from context and further imagine despite the absence of a direct description. Using the understandings taught to them from a young age by authors who had invested their entire adult lives into rhetorical and grammatical arts, Greco-Roman storytellers synthesized their influences and experiences to work medium-internally to build worlds of their own character and emphases, carefully designed and _understood._ The wealth of ideas which stem solely from syntactic choices conjures not something that outright "isn't there," but rather uses little content to create suggestions while the content is actually present - _aliquid adest._ No metadata is necessarily required, although metadata is important: we can look at an individual line with contains chiasmus and identify chiasmus on account of its simple ABBA structure (not to unintentionally reference the European band of the same name), and we can take out-of-context excerpts, as students of classics do due to obvious constraints on what lines of Latin can be covered in the span of a single college semester, and still find extensive meaning. We cannot say the same, however, for something like James Ferraro's earliest solo work, _Cruisin' The Nightbiker Strip 1977,_ a piece so abstracted and imperceptible in every possible regard by way of its extraordinarily low karaoke-machine fidelity, that it depends entirely upon metadata and the narrative of Ferraro's life to capture the imaginations of its listeners and generate hype. In this case, not one segment can be taken from _Nightbiker_ and analyzed on its own, for when we attempt to analyze, we fall back on the metadata rather than the content found in the art itself, and we must ask the rhetorical question: is a transcendence found reading a Wikipedia article or database entry about the thing any different from a transcendence found experiencing the item described by the encyclopedia? Of course, indeed they differ, but are they equally valid? Also yes, but not in the way one might think. Where many make the mistake is in citing the subject of the article as the source of their transcendent experiences rather than the article, which is as painful to admit as having lied about reading a book in full. The Russian language, after all, is quite clever to have a pair of verbs which distinguish between having read a book _at all_ and having read a book in its _entirety,_ something English, the dominant language of both amateur and professional artistic and literary criticism online, ought to take notes on in this day and age. If only the summary is to survive intact in the artistic transmission of a work, then why not attribute the worldbuilding to the summary written by the insider? We are afraid to do so because it means actively admitting that the medium is referentially constructed, that we are inherently inauthentic despite having defined inauthenticity ourselves. Is there anything wrong with that?

REFERENCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKjZuykKY1I - I Believe In A Thing Called Love
https://www.forcedexposure.com/Artists/LOSONCY.GABI.html - HH by Gabi Losoncy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9-P1SOeHU - Music video for Faceshopping by SOPHIE (rest easy)
https://genius.com/albums/The-brave-little-abacus/Masked-dancers-concern-in-so-many-things-you-forget-where-you-are - Lyrics to Demirjan's effort
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeXQ3A1wVQQ - Example of Replica sample sleuthing
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land - The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
https://hexameter.co/how-to-scan - Practical guide to dactylic hexameter, for proper appreciation of the art of classical poetry
https://latin.packhum.org/loc/690/3/0#0 - Text of Vergil's Aeneid (in Latin), full of examples of the syntactic manipulations discussed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K3t34Sazzc - Cruisin' The Nightbiker Strip 1977 by James Ferraro