From Revolution to Revelation

Generation X, Popular Memory and Cultural Studies

Tara Brabazon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351935357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

From Revolution to Revelation offers a new paradigm for Cultural Studies. Tara Brabazon explores our understanding of our own past and the collective past we share with others through popular culture. She investigates Generation X, the 'post-youth' generation born between 1961 and 1981, and the popular cultural literacies that are the basis of this imagining community. She looks at the ways in which popular culture offers a vehicle for memory, providing the building blocks of identity - the politics and passion of life captured in an unforgettable song, an amazing nightclub, or an unexpected goal in extra time. For a fan, the joy and exhilaration is enough, but it is the task of cultural studies to understand why particular cultural forms survive the passage of time and space. Brabazon argues, with Lawrence Grossberg, that Cultural Studies is 'the Generation X of the academic world'. She tracks its journey away from Marxism and subcultural theory and looks at its future. In particular she explores the possibilities of popular memory studies in reclaiming and repairing the discipline of Cultural Studies - making it as relevant and as revelatory as in its revolutionary past.

Section Two
Sound and Vision

Chapter five
Reading on your feet and dancing through the revolution

Interviewer: Oh, so when will you be playing your instruments then? ...

Robbie Williams: Look, some of us can play instruments – not me, I might add. But that's not the point – we're not U2, we're entertainers. You wouldn't ask U2 when they're going to learn to dance properly would you?¹

The notion of Bono and The Edge strutting to Donna Summer's 'Hot Stuff is a ludicrous and luscious image. The craggy faces of authentic Celtic rock are above such triviality. For rock journalists, playing a twelve bar blues is more credible and difficult than executing intricate choreography, or elevating the body through the air with style and boldness. The dancing body denies fixity and flits through social, economic and political contradictions. That is why Take That was an easy target for a rock reporter. Attacking boy bands and (ex) Spice Girls is our most popular spectator sport.² It is too easy to ridicule five good-looking men who skilfully move their bodies and audiences while singing complex harmonies. When attacked, Robbie Williams reminded the interviewer that dancers need to be acknowledged for their integral place in popular culture. Too often, dancing is attacked by those who cannot do it. Dance is under-researched, demeaned and ridiculed. Through the twist and stomp, the joy, community and humour of the past can survive.

Striking a pose and other euphoric posturings is a strategy for bad times. Such moments are not escapist: they are transcendent. Popular culture always affects the body, resulting in screams, laughter, tears, desire and dancing. Emotion is frequently the first layer seared from history, as it erupts from transitory significations rather than more stable structures like nation, class, race or gender. Dancing offers a memory trace of past movements and sensibilities. It is a life lived by proxy, having sex without removing clothing, seemingly rich while maintaining nothing but credit card debt, working the body hard because there is nothing else at which to work and grasping the ecstatic moments on a dance floor because the rational world is too painful. The dance floor is not adjacent to real life. It enacts a life by corporeal metaphor. Past rhythms pound present politics.

This chapter investigates dancing as a readership strategy, reading beat through the feet. To enact this project, my words mimic a dance floor mix. The research (re)plays well-trammelled intellectual samples. The first part, the bedrock beat, exposes the weathered surfaces of popular music writing. The second section clears the floor, cranking up a head-banging critique of masculine rock narratives. The next task is to scratch race into the mix, adding loops, anger and dynamism. The final stages of the night sample some disco, move the beat around the world and end with popular memories of the night before.

So, let the music lift you up. Everybody in the house say 'way-oh'. Reach for the lasers. Feel the rush. But even with arms extended and head lowered, feel the rhythm and think about the movement(s) in the mix.

Writing the beat, forgetting the feet

Listening to music is the most universal mass communication behaviour, requires neither literacy nor advanced electronic media.³

Steven Chaffee

Popular music is a misunderstood part of cultural life. Twenty years ago, Steven Chaffee's statement undermined the aural, visual and corporeal literacies triggered through the 'simple' practice of listening. Instead of this banal interpretation, a craving for rhythm feeds a desire for difference. Music provides a history of magic, excess, power and desire, offering "an inextricable chronicle of feelings".⁴ To write about music transforms the affectivity of a text into the realm of mediated abstraction. There is no correct position from which to write about music. There is a desperate need to place in prose what is felt through the feet. Cultural Studies offers potential through its ability to move between scholarly and journalistic writing modalities. To value one mode of prose over another returns to the tired debate about who has the right to mediate and translate meaning. Grossberg's theoretical corrective is important: "my research questions about rock have always been about its political possibilities rather than about any judgement of its aesthetic quality or cultural authenticity."⁵ Grossberg is highlighting far more than New Labour dalliances with Britpop⁶ or Bill Clinton's use of Fleetwood Mac. Writing about popular music is difficult. It always feels like we are draining the life from the beat, image, fabric or feeling. Because so much of music is non-linguistic, there is a necessity to access the meaning systems of fashion, rhythm, space and bodies. This writing of the popular does not capture the real, but widens the terrain of the imaginary, the probable and the possible. Music is a discourse of maybes. In a time of rigid definitions of us and them, right and wrong, a Coalition of the Willing and an Axis of Evil, ambivalence has an important function.

Theorists of popular music are intellectual trolls. Watching shadowy bodies through smoke and mirrors, we write of shapes and scents of meaning. The irony of dance writing is that the recent 'histories' of rave and electronic dance music are invariably banal in their structure and methodology. While Simon Reynolds attempted to create the definitive history of modern electronic music in Energy Flash, he used a highly conservative chronological structure to shape his story. The utilization of an historical narrative has displaced the volatile temporal and spatial movements of the dancing body. He presents a(nother) tale of great men: DJs, mixers, producers and club owners. He readily admits that his "take on dance music was fundamentally rockist".⁷ This explains why the focus remains on 'the artist', rather than audiences, reception practices or consumption. In many ways, Energy Flash is an inferior, dance culture equivalent of Hebdige's Subculture: it invents and freezes the very events and people that it appears to be chronicling.⁸

The oddity is that so much writing about dance is boring and lacking energy. There is also a damaging obsession with personal experience, rather than collective and popular memories. As Simon Reynolds has stated,

Participation is essential ... or at least, you have to have gone through a phase of being intensely into clubbing and dancing at some point to really understand the appeal.⁹

Part of me, the dancing part, wants to raise my hands and touch the lasers with Reynolds. Moving on the bouncing floor, jumping with the shining faces, feeling beat reverberate from the heels to the head, is an unforgettable experience. The buzzing lights illuminate an audience of dancers into a morphing shimmer. With electronic music synchronized through the lasers, it is like: living in a computer game, dancing through the rhythm of the night. The problem with this type of experiential dogma is that it stops the clock, denying present movements and interpretations in favour of a mystical, personal nirvana. It also does not permit the presentation of diverse theories, sources and inflections. It is important to note that mobile bodies dance through the prose, thereby developing a critical history — not a static narrative – of dance music.

The higher purpose of Reynolds' analysis is not only an affirmation of experience. He is also denying the right of academics to comment on, critique and create culture. Too often in his career, Reynolds has excluded Cultural Studies theorists from the right to enter the metaphoric dance floor. He observed that

Just as punk and rap became grist for the cult studs mill, rave music may be next on the academy's menu. Once upon a time, rave was just a case of London proles escaping workaday drudgery by losing it on the dance floor every weekend. But where once there was mere madness soon a thousand dissertations will bloom.¹⁰

In this way, experiential ideology becomes a way to protect terrain from academics and secure cultural territory for journalists. The great revelation of dance music is that it does not allow anyone to sit comfortably in such distinctions. The beat pushes us – either physically or metaphorically – out of a seat and into the grip of sinewy, spiralling keyboards.

Academics must remember – and remind Reynolds and others – what makes Cultural Studies important and intellectually revelatory. The paradigm takes (on) the popular forms that most people spend their time enjoying, thinking about and living through. In all honesty, census figures, shipping information, dates and immigration data are easier to interpret than popular music, film, radio, hypertexted documents and television. To deny these popular cultural sources because they are ambiguous, contradictory and ephemeral is to cut the heart out of the past and the people who populate it. While affirming radicalism, Reynolds actually argues a complementary position of a conservative historian like Keith Windschuttle, valuing a narrow range of sources.

Burning with an inferiority complex towards the 'high' culture in whose discourse they are fluent, their [Cultural Studies scholars'] overweening concern is to validate pop culture. This they have done by bringing to bear on it all the gamut of 'high' cultural tools and terms.¹¹

The lads obviously have a secret knowledge that the scholar could never understand. In this way, academics are denied an identity. They – we –become one-dimensional shadows of a self. The knowledge and language we possess become dangerous, difficult and irrelevant. No one would deny a medical doctor the need for a specialist language, or a lawyer the necessity for torts to be precisely framed. Cultural Studies has a specialist vocabulary because it enables us to understand the texture of culture with all its light, intricacy and passion.

Disempowered groups – young people, women, gay and lesbian communities, working class, indigenous populations and citizens of colour –leave few traces in historical sources. I am not prepared to allow generation after generation of the disempowered to be written out of history because journalists have mortgaged cultural credibility. A graft between history and Cultural Studies provides the tools for pop to be interpreted and made available for future researchers to ignore, incorporate or critique. Scholars with this revisionist urge are easy targets for journalists who desperately need to cling to the cutting edge of culture.

Over 50 up-for-it academics attended a two-day conference on clubbing at Leeds University ... But the weekend wasn't just for dry analysis. A 'field trip' had been planned – in the end, five or six dons made it to a drum 'n' bass night at Leeds's Met Bar, where an eyewitness saw the academics dance badly to drum 'n' bass, only to sit down again ten minutes later.¹²

A great revenge narrative is triggered through such arrogance. These journalis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Changing the dedication
• Section One – Building the Hacienda
• Section Two – Sound and Vision
• Conclusion: Save Ferris
• Select Bibliography
• Index