CHAPTER 13

PERFORMANCE

The group will be expected to perform its music “live” in concert for an audience. Though adults scoff at the affection which infants and animals have for repetition (children with their Teletubbies, for example, or dogs with their stick rituals), they expect the performer in a rock group to repeat things over and over again. The performer’s body of work is expected to be cohesive and “of a thread,” they are supposed to play their hit songs dutifully at each concert and look the same their entire life (eternally youthful). Each day on tour is a repeat of the previous day, each performance is expected to be essentially the same, and songs are expected to be verse and chorus repeated again and again. The solo, or “free” part of a song, which apparently defies the structure of a tune, is actually just a slight variation of the chords and notes that comprise the song. The solo is a tease of chaos, a moment of anxiety before order is restored with the return of the comforting chorus, galloping over the hill like the proverbial cavalry.

Performers who are liked and respected are ones who have “signature” styles and moves; repetition again.

What is at the root of this desire on the part of the audience for the group or performer to repeat the same thing again and again, like some brainless machine? Answer: the desire to be a brainless machine.

Before the machines took control, people did “work.” Lots of manual labor, which took lots of time. The time used for working was the time when people ordered their thoughts. Work was repetitive and therefore meditative. People were like machines then. They honed their limbs to work the fields, wash the clothes, weave the baskets, cook the food, and bake the clay. But they were imperfect machines. They got distracted and socialized with one another or napped on the job. Since nobody knew any other way, however, it was fine—until the machines came, with the “Industrial Revolution.”

At first this was greeted as a novel and silly development. The machines were ungainly, inefficient, brainless, and would often break down. People laughed at them. But as time went on, improvements were made and they were recognized to be effective—even revolutionarily so. They could do the work of a dozen or more laborers. The bosses started using them not to make the worker’s lot easier, but as the worker’s replacement. The machines started displacing the workforce, shattering the family unit and traditional, even ancient ways of life. Knowledge passed down for generations was suddenly obsolete. Farms were abandoned. Cities filled up with hayseeds looking for factory jobs. People were tramping, prostituting, being mashed up by the machines. Society was in its twilight. All the rules, honed over hundreds of years, were suddenly kaput. Time was now the central concern. Increments of time. Efficiency. And numbers. No one looked at the stars anymore. People stopped living with the beasts. Humanity saw itself being overtaken by machines. Even if the ruling class recognized that they had unleashed a demonic force, they were making too much money to care. They had created for themselves a new, uncontrollable, amoral supermachine with its own demented logic: capitalism. It was a juggernaut that wrought a new and incomprehensible epoch, a Götterdämmerung. The time of plants and animals was being eclipsed by that of oil, cogs, and gears.

Increasingly, humans were living according to the dictates of the machines and what made sense for the machines. Resentment of the machines’ power grew. John Henry was a popular legend of a man-martyr who challenged and beat the machine, but died doing so. Metropolis by Fritz Lang features a “machine-man” robot who infiltrates and subverts workers’ movements. Séances, table rapping, and a craze for spiritualism were an outgrowth of the havoc and fear wreaked by industrialism, as people sought refuge in the mystical from the bewildering changes they endured. So were Fascist movements, which lauded the lost values of the arcane, agrarian world. Sci-fi books such as The Time Machine prophesied the total degeneration of industrialized mankind. Chess masters fought against Deep Blue—a chess-master computer. It was all for naught. Humanity gave up, bested by the army of androids and hard drives that now monitors our every thought and movement. But during the time of transition, before the machines took over completely, man worked with machine, side by side in the factories and steelyards. And just as different human cultures pick up habits from one another when sharing an environment, so it was with man and the machines.

What the humans learned from their machine coworkers was the seduction of “existential repetition.” The comfort found in the familiarity of an action combined with the machine’s simple resolve to just do what it did, free of pretense or the need to explain itself. In the face of the machine, people felt embarrassed about their old-timey penchant for ideas like resolution, narrative, plot, and morality. The cyclical philosophies of the Hindus, the Mayans, the Egyptians, and the Norse were reconsidered by previously linear Westerners. Nietzsche wrote about the “eternal recurrence of the same.” Mankind swore to never again paint a picture of a thing, or create a play with a moral or a point. It just didn’t make sense anymore.

Once the machines had taken over, humans were off the hook. They no longer needed to do laundry, thresh wheat, or stamp dies. They were saddled with the oppressive “leisure time” paradox. Not coincidentally, they—for the most part—abandoned their former hobbies such as painting, poetry, and writing, and focused on creating something as brainless, self-satisfied, and repetitive as their masters. First they tried modernism; then abstraction, collage, avant-noise, and existentialism. Eventually these experiments were retired with the discovery of the most devolved mode of expression ever. It was called The Group.

As opposed to writing, which typically required a narrative plot with a conclusion, or a painting, which was static, humans decided to imitate their overlords and just be content with “doing.” Success, for the group, was simply the completed performance of the same thing over and over. There was no conclusion, as in a play, and there was no cerebral element, as in poetry. It was enough for the group to be seen in fighting trim, its parts oiled and chugging along. Like a reliable appliance, all that mattered was that it “worked.” A great performance was one that was “tight.” Some groups tried to use their music to spout opinions or political statements, particularly during the folk revival era (1948–1964), but this kind of coherence and intellectual engagement, this attempt to inject humanism and meaning into the meaningless was eventually abandoned for the internal logic of the absolutely nonsensical.

One intention for every serious group was to create records. A record was a single performance captured forever and designed for endless repeated playings. This kind of soulless ability to reproduce an exact action again and again made the group a beautiful thing in the mechanized age. If the group was a machine, the group’s record was like its “spare parts,” an army of clones waiting in the warehouse for the day when the group had to be retired for whatever reason, designed to do its job precisely the same, or even better.

Therefore, when a group-machine breaks down or “breaks up,” it’s not mourned for what it did—that’s with us forever via the records—but that it won’t be able to produce any more moments which closely resemble the things it did before.

Like the machine, the group produced work (in the form of songs, performances, or recordings, with the latter actually being built for use by machines). While the machines had made products for humans, such as the sewing machine, the whoopie cushion, or the Q-tip, the group made records or cassette tapes which could only be translated to a human via another automaton. Therefore, the group consisted of humans making themselves into machines, which could only communicate via other machines.

Rock ’n’ roll groups could be seen as “trading places” with the gadgets, which had started their existence as simple workhorses for humans and were now savoring their vengeance.

The group, in a sense, is a surrender, a concession to the machine, a karmic payback to the appliances which gave us our prosperity and relative ease of existence. As such, the human in the group must repeat his or her nightly ritual in a penitent “endless recurrence of the same.”

 

I. AUDIENCE

The audience typically wants you to repeat what they already know.

What kind of audience you have will depend on who you hearken to. If you just call out wildly to a mass—“Hey you!”—there’s no telling who might come to dinner. So you must decide who you want. Are you trying to appeal to a select audience which is sophisticated—an “intelligentsia”—or are you looking to deliver some new truth to the masses? As with any political/religious movement, these are central questions. Lenin envisioned a “revolutionary avant-garde,” or intellectual cadre, to deliver the masses from exploitation, while Marx’s “First International” anarchist rival Bakunin expressed faith in the people’s ability to lead themselves. In the theological world, the Catholic Church is a hierarchical institution which invests priests and bishops with the power to dispense the word of the Lord to the flock, while Islamists and Protestants are more democratic vis-à-vis the individual’s relationship to God.

With your group, you too must consider: are you designed to engage with an elite club or can you coddle up to the great unwashed?

The average person is part of a vast community of nonengaged music listeners who don’t actively care what they are hearing, though they might imagine they enjoy a tune after subjection to its interminable repetition. “Notoriety” amongst these sorts of people can mean political influence, celebrity, and, of course, wealth. Ironically, their seduction requires enormous capital (typically via corporate collusion) and careful adherence to radio regulations and the aesthetic status quo.

However, this audience—even if they are snared by your group, for whatever reason—are a fickle bunch who don’t actually listen to music except as a distraction whilst out in the car or at the bar. They don’t care about the narrative you create from record to record, or that you added horns to this song, or that the whole group cut their hair. In fact, they won’t notice your name, your lyrics, what you look like, or much of anything about you. They are not the sort of fans the group should seek out, as they display none of the blind loyalty it craves.