I was originally writing this as part of the second instalment of the My Bloody Valentine: EPs 1988-91 review but decided it would make sense to spin it out as it is more of an artistic profile than a part of the track by track review. I decided I wanted to break away from the dynamics of gender and sex for a moment when describing My Bloody Valentine, because despite the theory often sounding reasonable it just does not seem pertinent half the time. This came up in conversation yesterday when I was watching footage of one of Primal Scream's Screamadelica gigs. For all the rock'n'roll clichés, gender seemed the last thing worth discussing. Certainly not from the standpoint of diagnosing patriarchal societies or something like that. Reading this blog post about Oneohtrix Point Never inspired me a little. More after the jump.
While I find the arguments used by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press in The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ‘N’ Roll valid, gender theories can be somewhat stark and reductive when applied to music. To be fair, this is because they diagnose a conscious and unconscious effort in wider society to control and limit what human beings can be. The story can be spiced up through the inclusion of elements from the Cyberpunk meta-narrative, the William Gibson coined ‘Cyberspace’ in particular. From his novel, Neuromancer:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
Kevin Shields, with his famously sculpted sonic textures, is not so far from this vision. The guitar sound in particular is a marriage of high power amplification, valve and solid-state distortion, meticulous frequency filtration and digital signal processing in the form of the reverb units used to create the washing glide guitar sound in conjunction with his use of the Fender Jazzmaster guitar’s tremolo (vibrato, it bends pitch) arm. Reynolds and Press also allude to this incremental digital transformation, arguing that ‘on Loveless, they go beyond the [digitally facilitated] ethereality of “glide guitar” into full-blown alchemy (sampling their own feedback and playing it on a keyboard, so there’s even less sense that what you hear was generated by physical acts and fleshly creatures).’ How, then, to square the apparent contradiction between feelings of intimacy and high tech alienation? I first encountered this problem in Pitchfork’s worthwhile Why We Fight column? I opt for a grand synthesis of the two strands here, in which both ideas are not merely coexistent but common facets:
My Bloody Valentine, for instance, got reactions from both angles: Some people said the band's sheets of noise symbolized confusion, information overload, and frustration. Others said they were just beautiful and comforting. The fact that both descriptions worked was a lot of the richness of the thing. You could draw a similar mix of brutality and prettiness out of, say, Sonic Youth.
While cyberspace is a confusing place, Gibson’s protagonists can traverse it, barely, just so long as their luck holds out and their will to succeed is great enough. Cyberspace is a bewildering place, made not by those who dive into it, but it can be a place where the truth is discovered and more. Likewise, in Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell anime feature, the lines of desire are drawn through cyberspace itself, with two beings converging across it to become one. This scene in Sophia Copolla’s marvellous Lost in Translation always reminds me of Ghost in the Shell .The city lights have a definite sense of futurity to them; Oshii’s film features a soul searching sequence around his cyberpunk Hong Kong that I have always felt could be set to the same My Bloody Valentine song, Loveless’s ‘Sometimes:’
I should note there are fan made music videos for ‘Sometimes’ which use additional footage from Lost in Translation, too. This one perhaps makes more of a convincing link with Ghost in the Shell:
The urban elements and the visual intimation of the cultural and linguistic barriers between the Americans and the Japanese who surround them, at home in the futuristic environs of what was latterly present day Tokyo, brings out the searching nature of the song. Without giving away too much of Ghost in the Shell’s plot, I would say that the song’s lyrical sense of psychic if not bodily distance soundtracks the literal soul-searching of protagonist Motoko Kusanagi well.
The noise can symbolize frustrations and distractions—on ‘Feed Me with Your Kiss’ it certainly fights with the voices. Feeling, that ghost of artistic intentionality, and perhaps the ghost in the machine that is all music, survives the sonic expression of information overload—the rhythm is there, the emotion remains present in the vocals. Seen as a Cyberpunk oeuvre (what a retro conceit!), My Bloody Valentine’s songs bring to the foreground the sense of bewilderment and future shock, yet I posit that it is the instruments of this same dislocation that ultimately furnish the band with the capacity to connect with each other and the audience. At this point I should bring up the fact that William Gibson has a villain called Mr. Loveless in his novel Virtual Light, just saying.
When discussing post-modernism and that sense of future shock, as well as the digital visions of Cyberpunk, it is only ordinary to mention Jean Baudrillard. For an insight into the sense of alienation that stems from a hypernetworked (one word, why not?), corporate controlled media sphere, look no further than Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra. The use of digital reverb units against their design to create the seemingly formless guitar (a manifestation of the Body without Organs discussed in the first part of the EPs review) is central here. These reverb units, and the digital delay units used for looping audio are heralds of our present age of instant digital copying.
They are Baudrillardian devices—multiplying musical sound or diffusing it through the imposition of synthesized reflections, but the real future shocks or heralds of the hyperreal are likely far off yet. Though most musical instruments and studio tools can now be successfully emulated in the digital domain (more simulation), there are barriers hinted at by the Tupac appearance at Coachella which have not yet been breached. I cannot think of a present example of a musical simulacrum, or what that would even be if it was a valid category.
The delay units, echoing in time ad infinitum and the reverb units, copying sound waves digitally and designed to smear around ones and zeroes in an attempt to simulate acoustic spaces: there is a potent symbolism here for the shifting sands we find ourselves in when viewing the effects of digital technology on our society. For all the musicians made clones and seeming simulacrums by such technology, My Bloody Valentine pursue these technologies for their psychedelic potential. Losing limitations rather than gaining them, they achieve a kind of astral projection. One suspects they bypass the stage of digital avatars so common today and, as poets, point to a direct intersubjective communication.
Now listen to 'Soon,' either the version from the Glider EP or Loveless.
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