Hooray for Everything!

by Jean-Paul Bavard, translated by Daniel Davis
illustration by Ans

(This essay originally appeared in The Journal of French Semiotic Theory, Issue III, Vol. 4, June, 1999. All rights reserved.)

L’synthesizer sculpts a pulsing soundscape, a bold DeChiricoesque statement of purpose, its Fassbinderian sweep majestically in one’s visage with its protruding, pulsating attitude. The ironically thin, passionless voice squeaks out a faux-naïve collection of meaningless cliches, that, like a harshly-lit mirror in a fitting room of the Gap, reflects the bloated banality of life and love, in much the same way that the Postmodernist sculpture of Robert Longo organically redefines the boundaries of self-referential neo-dadaist symbolism. This is the music of our future, and it is here in the present, where it must be kicked and shoved back into the future, where it belongs. Yes, I have seen the future of Rock and Roll, and its name is Jennifer Lopez. And ‘N Sync, Britney Spears, Spice Girls, Hanson, Ricky Martin, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, and Shania Twain.

There can be no denying that Art, in order to succeed, must do what the audience desires and expects it to. It must reinforce the opinions of the audience, mais non? Or it will be misunderstood, or even worse, ignored. There is no one who has time in these massively busy days of ours to labor through level after level of what is known as content. There exists simply too much to be experienced, to be consumed. As Rousseau commanded us, “simplify, simplify.” These times demand Art, and especially music, that simplifies tout le monde – everything. One not only can judge a book by its cover, that is in fact the only way to judge a book. Similarly, one may inescapably tell at once from the cover of a Disque Compacte whether or not one will like the music contained within. In his Genius treatise Emulations, the great Francois Lachance wrote “with an apparatus, reduplication is creative. Without one, reduplication remains mysterious and unaccountable. Passages from one meta-language to another remain inexplicable.” I now declare that the Apparatus is in place, Reduplication is the only form of artistic expression that remains valid; ergo, we are all Livin’ La Vida Loca.

Obviously then, music, like all Art, must reflect the Socially Constructed perception of reality that is accepted by the audience. As of the day of this writing, contemporary popular music has failed to reflect this accepted perception for at least six years, four months and 16 days. For too long now, too much music has been produced and disseminated passionately; Artists have been concerned with Meaning, with Communication; with the obviously futile conception of Originality; with emotion, ideas, and passion. But who among us truly experiences anything like passion, ideas, meaning, communication or emotion in our lives? C’est vrai, we all enjoy to imagine these things as being a part of our existence, and for a time, the music helped to us play along with this Grand Illusion.

“I am intelligent, a person of deep ideas, and therefore I enjoy Pavement,” we told ourselves. “My fertile imagination appreciates the creativity of the Flaming Lips and Neutral Milk Hotel.” Alas, we can fool ourselves no longer. We require Art that will tell us what we want – what we really, really want – and of course we want only sex and money and fame and power and glory; i.e., the nookie, the nookie.

Of course, most of you will have none of these things. But you may console yourselves by observing pretty, well-dressed actors with the expensive haircuts of California pretending to have these things, singing words that reflect the complete vapidity of your existence, to the sound of repetitive beats that allow you to turn off your minds and dance yourselves away from the utter banality of your lives.

But do not despair! This is a wonderful thing! It makes one’s life easier, and therefore better, and we should all celebrate our good fortune that so much of this music is available to us all now. Does your head hurt? Then go and purchase the music of a Supermodel of your favorite gender right now.

Let us not concern ourselves with the fallacy of Substance. Substance does not exist in this world; therefore Style is all that matters. In this world of lies, of virtual everything, of the pre-millennial cyberspace global Internet marketplace, it is as the lyrics of the soporific post-rock emocore heroes Spit Valve boldly declare: “dude, nothing is real.” But do not think that this is a bad thing; it is only an honest thing. Nothing has ever been real, nor will it ever be so. Can anyone prove otherwise? Of course not. Everything is either superficiale at best, or out-and-out false at le worst, but this only means one thing: if nothing is real, then nothing can be false. Let us enjoy this beautiful world where, like a college football player’s mid-term Sociology exam, everything is true and nothing is false. Let us not concern ourselves with the issues of credibility, of meaning, of the fraudulent circa-1997 indie bourgeoisie agenda of artless pathos. Those days are gone. As the Rolling Stones once directed, “Relax, turn off your mind, and float downstream.”

“The machine nature of the semiotic square need not be set in sharp opposition to a putative body. Thought, feeling, and doing are connected by feedback loops which a machine model can emulate.” Francois Lachance, Emulations, 3.31, 1996.

Emulation of thought, feeling and doing by a machine: this is the future of Art, the future of Culture, the future of Humanity! The robotic machines of music are here among us now, and must be embraced! Corporations have spent millions on researching every detail of these machines, from catchphrases to breast sizes to clothing to video imagery, and the new models are there to be played with. Funk soul brother, check it out now.

There are robots for each of us, no matter which demographic group one belongs to. Teenage girls have myriad musical products designed for their consumption to choose from. Teenage boys have Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock to play out their rebellious fantasies; the pseudo-intellectual PoMo hipsters of Generation X may choose between the Empty Suit of Electronica and the repetitive mumbling of hip-hop that exists only to secretly ridicule the White Guilt-ridden urban liberals who extol its virtues. Inexplicably, even the completely irrelevant elderly people of more than three decades of age have a broad choice of machines, including Celine Dion, Cher, and Sting.

Obviously, les temps are always reflected by the music that people listen to and purchase. Now that prosperity is here for almost half of the United States, everyone in the world simply wants to turn off their minds and party down, to Celebrate Good Times, Come On, with the Kool kids and their Gang. Those listeners still looking for Content are not merely hopelessly passe, they are quite plainly objectively wrong. Content is a lie. Pursuit of Meaning leads only to confusion and frustration. There is no longer any need for this. The time has come to proclaim that the long struggle between Form and Content has finally been decided, and the final score is Form 1, Content 0. Content is dead; viva le Form!