Just as postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, so rock lyrics are a reaction to modernist poetry, a return to poetry as it was before being redefined by Eliot and Pound.
The direct dialogue with a general populace, the extravagant exposure of the grotesqueness of the self, the direct need of the lonely individual, and the admiration of this exposed and grotesque self, belong instead to Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Madonna, and to the many rap artists who bare body and soul to an audience of thousands.
Victorian poetry, on the other hand, possesses two elements that modernist poetry eschews: it employs protagonists who more frequently expose apparent secrets before a shocked and admiring society; and it is at present unacknowledged as serious poetry by the academy and so is freed from canonic associations. Therefore, it is to the premodernist artist-hero that contemporary music turns most frequently for identification.
And, indeed, any examination of rock lyrics will find that references to poetry abound, and the most common texts and themes incorporated into rock music seem to be those of the nineteenth century. Thus Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Wilde, Dowson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Yeats, Coleridge, and Poe appear frequently; and the subjects and forms of Victorian poetry—particularly the dramatic monologue, with its built-in emphasis on the difficulty of interpersonal relationships—predominate.
encouragements to reject the values of bourgeois society for immediate pleasure
If in Victorian times the necessity for love was connected to the isolation and alienation of a godless universe, and its insufficiency was related to the fear of encroaching feminism, there are more practical and technical reasons for the rock genre to return the earlier form: the depersonalization of the new mass media of radio and record created for and by the rock culture itself demands specifically that the singer express extreme and compressed emotions in an apparently solitary and isolated situation, albeit to a mass audience. Emotional intensity, in this context, is the most effective and immediate way of communicating.
- Literary Dialogues: Rock and Victorian Poetry / Karen Alkalay-Gut / Poetics Today 21.1 (2000) 33-60
Contemporary girl bands deploy “ugliness” as a resistant practice that challenges cultural representations of “pretty” femininity.
Girl bands’ attention to stereotypically ugly women highlights the problematic status of rebellios, unconventional, and desiring women throughout Wsetern history. To provactively invoke the ugly or despised figure of the witch, bitch, and whore is an act of genealogy (foraging through the history of women’s representation), resignification, and potential self-empowerment. Girl band’s appropriation of negative femlae iconography stages an explosive assault on, and an ironic reversal of, images foundational to misogynist symbolism. Yet it is also significant that girl bands constandlt couple symbols of conventional female “prettiness” with violent and destrcutcive images. Their surrealist juxtopositions create a visual economy that emphasizes the violence to and alienation from the body that obedient performances of “pretty” femininity entail.
Voice, as a physical phenomenon channeled by the lungs in fits of concerted breathing, means nothing without the body. At the same time, “voice,” especiallu as a critcal issue for female subjectivity and agency in feminist studies, is also a symbol of political representation. “Voice,” then, is a concept crucial to identity - which is, after all, primarily a site both of inscription and of “telling.”
Girl bands often use the ugly voice as a tool for cathartic expression; a means to articulate the “self” while acknowledging it as a site of fiction, contest, incoherence, social inscription, and performativity. Girl bands use their voices as weapons.
But the “ugly voice” also constitues a form of revolt against the grammar and syntax of phallogentricism, and arguably, step toward a specifically “female” language, as Helene Cixous has theorized in her notion of l’ecriture feminine. The ugly sounds and incoherent babble of girl rock disrupt “lamguage” as we know it. They operate on the poststructuralist premise that language speaks through us, through our bodies, history, and culture - we do not speak it or, least of all, own it… Girl bands’ rebellion against diction privileges nonsense as sexed excess, as a margin from which to contaminate the patriarchal symbolic center.
The artists approach vocal terrorism; their noise, sound debric, and frequent laughter damage language. Girl bands act as strangers in their own language, appropriating its internal polylingualism and tracing personal lines of escape from its hegemonic order. Speaking in tongues, these women realize perhaps that “the loss of the sense of the ‘normal,’ [...] can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘normal,’ the ‘original,’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody (Butler 1990:139).
Indeed, girls bands’ strategic use of ugly voices seems to “break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (Cicous 1981:258) and to remind us that language is always pregnant with impurity.
Diamanda Galas claims to have trained herself to use her voice like a gun - presumably as protection against, and response to, violation.
Diamanda Galas describes her performances as bloodletting, or “a ripping of the flesh.”
- Witches, Bitches & Fluids: Girl Bands Performing Ugliness as Resistance / Karina Eileraas / TDR (1988-), Vol. 41, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 122-139
Gala’s work deals in real-time transformations of her own singing voice through an array of signal processing equipment including harmonizers, delays, and sometimes simply massive amplifications.
Review: [untitled] / Conrad Cummings / Computer Music Journal, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 95-96
- Intravenal Song / Diamánda Galás / Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1981 - Summer, 1982), pp. 59-65
.S. Eliot wrote, “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest things to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important.”
Baudelaire, writes another critic, “did more than anyone else in the nineteenth century to make the men and women of his century aware of themselves as moderns… If we had to nominate a first modernist, Baudelaire would surely be the man.”
…the very antithesis of Baudelaire’s modernity, of Baudelaire the founder of modern poetry: this is the Baudelaire who invokes demons and the Devil.
…Frederic Jameson distinguishes the modernist and the postmodernist Baudelaires - both worthy of our attention - from what he calls the “second-rate psot-Romantic Baudelaire, the Baudelaire of diabolism and cheap frisson, the poet of blasphemy and of a creaking and musty religious machinery that was no more interesting in the mid-nineteenth century than it is today.”
Perhaps the Satanic Baudelaire would tell us things about modernity we don’t want know.
Certainly the idea of the Devil seems fundamentally at odds with accounts of modernity. Even Christianity itself seems to regard the Devil as outmoded mythology, irrelevant to modern religion… What could be less modern than Satan - a scrawny red man with horns, hooves, tail, and pitchfork?
The Devil pulls the strings; sometimes he makes us act, sometimes prevents us from having the will to act as we would.
…this is what is most worrying about the Davil - that we don’t know what is his work and what is not.
But in general it is striking - given Baudelaire’s interest in Satan - how little he participates in the reversals of romantic Satanism that make the Devil a hero, praised for his revolt against an oppressive despot. Baudelaire’s only poem that places Satan in the title, “Les Litanies de Satan,” invokes him in liturgical accents, in the form of supplication and response, and substitues Satan for Mary in the reponse or refrain, “O stan, prends ptie de ma longue misere [Satan, take pity on my misery]“. This poem addresses Satan as one who, responsible for evil, may have pity ofr humans and even offer solace to human sufferers, but solace of a kind whose value is, to say the least, ambiguous. Satan, it is sais, engenders hope (which may be a further illusion and source of torture); he teaches courage in adversity (a good thing, but which does not overcome adversity); he knows where metals and precious stones are hidden underground (which inspires greed and strife); he gives men gunpowder; he inspires perversions which bring solace (such as the “culte de la plaie et des guenilles [the love of rags, the cult of wounds and pain]“), and so on. This Satanic poem is remarkable, I think, for the modesty of its claims for the figure it addresses structurally as a kind of God: Satan is not a heroic rebel but a figure who offers minor consolations to social outcasts.
If what is most diabolical about the Devil is the difficulty of deciding whether he is at work in a particular scene or situation, then the figure of the Devil poses the general question of whether there is meaning to the scenarios in which we are caught up or misfortunes that befall us or whether they are simply accidents. Can we escape our sense that there are malignant forces that operate independently of human intentions or that the world often works against us? “Everyone feels the Devil and no one believes in him,” wrote Baudelaire in a projected preface to Les Fleurs du mal.
To make Baudelaire modern can’t we just cross out Devil and write in Unconscious or, better, Death Drive, or Repetition Compulsion?
When Gustave Flaubert objected to Baudelaire that he insisted too much on l’Esprit du Mal, Baudelaire replied, de tout temps j’ai été obsedé par l’impossibilité de me rendre compte de certaines actions ou pensées soudaines de l’homme sans l’hypothèse de l’intervention d’une force méchante extérieure à lui. –Voilà un gros aveu dont tout le 19e siècle conjuré ne me fera pas rougir [I have always been obsessed by the impossibility of accounting for some of man's sudden actions or thoughts without the hypothesis of the intervention of an evil force outside him--Here's a scandalous avowal for which the whole nineteenth century ranged against me won't make me blush] [Correspondance 2: 53].
Behind the wish to dismiss him as personification may lie the wishful presumption that only human individuals can act, that they control the world and that there are no other agents; but the world would be a very different place if this were true. Much of its character, its difficulty, its mystery, comes from the effects produced by actions of other sorts of agents, which our grammars may or may not personify: history, classes, capital, freedom, public opinion–forces not graspable at the level of the empirical actions of individuals but which seem to control the world and give events meaningful and often oppressive structures.
In his essay on Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire speaks of hyperbole and apostrophe as the forms of language not only most agreeable but also most necessary to lyric, and goes on to maintain that
l’art moderne a une tendance essentiellement démoniaque. Et il semble que cette part infernale de l’homme, que l’homme prend plaisir à s’expliquer à lui-même, augmente journellement, comme si le Diable s’amusait à la grossir par des procédés artificiels, à l’instar des engraisseurs, empâtant patiemment le genre humain dans ses basses-cours pour se préparer une nourriture plus succulente [modern art has an essentially demonic tendency. And it seems to me that this infernal part of man, which man takes pleasure in explicating to himself, grows larger daily, as if the Devil were amusing himself by fattening it through artificial means, inspired by forcefeeders, patiently stuffing humankind in his farmyards, to prepare more succulent food for himself]. [OC 2: 168]
- Baudelaire’s “Satanic Verses” / Jonathan Culler / Diacritics, Vol. 28, No. 3, Doing French Studies (Autumn, 1998), pp. 86-100
