retroligopoly

 Interesting post by Robin James at It's Her Factory about how we've moved into "Pop's Franchise Era". 

Noting the Bob Dylan biopic and the horrific thought that each individual Beatle is getting their own biopic, she argues that what already unfolded in Hollywood - franchization, cinematic universes, stars replaced by characters - is taking hold in pop music. Not just with Legacy Artists, but with relatively young, musically active stars who are prematurely Legacy-izing.  

Hence Taylor Swift's Eras tour: only 34, she's already consolidating the exploitation of  her archive in the way that Bowie did with his Sound + Vision tour of 1990 and the Rolling Stones have done since the late '80s. 

Robin writes: 

"... When Swift repackaged all her individual albums into a catalog of “eras” for a tour of that same name, she created a universe; each album set the vibe for world-building sets, costumes, and the like. The same is true of Beyonce’s various acts: there’s the house music act, the country act, and purportedly a forthcoming rock act....  

"Taylor and Beyonce are franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They are not stars, per se, but tested and proven brand IP that the industry leverages into blockbuster content like the Eras and Renaissance tours and concert films. And they franchise not just in the music industry, but across media – that’s what the Taylor and Beyonce beats at Gannett are, new locations of existing franchises. I will be the last person to be surprised if and when they build a Taylor Swift theme park....

"With their “portfolio careers” spanning various industries like apparel, beauty, instruments, and food... , pop stars treat their own brands as a franchise.... Pop artists are less like stars and more like characters whose vibes grace everything from athleisure to sweet potato pies.

"The problem, of course, is that this concentrates all the wealth in the hands of the richest artists and corporations... 

"In August 2023 Billboard published a piece asking “Why Aren’t More Pop Stars Being Born?” 

At the forefront of the concept-music trend, Prince Rama have announced Never Forever, a "Now Age psych-opera” movie based on songs from their Top Ten Hits of the End of World of late last year. On that "pseudo-compilation album" the Brooklyn sisters-duo "invented ten different pop bands that died during the apocalypse, channeling the ghosts of each one to perform the various songs", in order to explore "music’s relationship to memory, nostalgia, and the spirit world". A sort of future anterior / prospective hauntology, maybe: Prince Rama "filter[ing] each sound through the destroyed lens of a post-apocalyptic future looking back at the wonders of its sonic past....  a retrospective requiem of all pop albums ever made...  its residual echoes will continue to haunt this world and the next"

Conceptually, it's a gas, then, and any band that comes forth with a manifesto deserves a round of applause.

But in practice...

C.f. James Ferraro and the redundancy of his recent attempts at uncanny-fication of contemporary R&B and rap (superflous given that Rap / R&B are already the Simulacrum, abject psychological seepage from the Social Id, Baudillard's "ob-scene" etc), the thing about Prince R's articulation of the  ritualistic, pagan, psychotic, apocalyptic etc undercurrents in modern glitz-pop ("ghost-modern glam" as Prince R snappily dub it) is that these aren't actually undercurrents at all: they don't need exposing or amplifying or "bringing out" via some sort of of conceptual-parodic commentary.  This stuff is all right there on the surface, in plain view....  What could be more unsane, idolatrous, ceremonial, etc than a Beyonce spectactular *, a Britney/Will.i.am or Gaga video? 

It's all a bit redolent of how the art-world typically engages with pop, as if the simple re-presenting of pop within that context somehow supplies an extra layer of value, a whole other dimension.  Which covers over over the true facts of the matter: Art (however sincere in their motives and genuine in their pop-admiration the individual specific artists are) vampirically extracting surplus value for itself through associating itself with the vital, actively-out-there-in-the-world power of pop.

The other thing is that the underground literally can't compete with the overground, on a simple budgetary level...  it's like Guatamela's military trying to take on China. Never Forever does look to be a big step up from the amateur aesthetic of the video for the album's lead single "So Destroyed" (visually redolent of Miracles Club's "Church Song", sonically reminiscent of The Raincoats circa "Animal Rhapsody"). But even so, we're talking Fischerspooner circa 2002 really...

* ha, wrote this and I didn't even realise there was a whole Illuminati symbolism conspiracy theory out there about Beyonce's Superbowl extravaganza...

archive fever diva

From the GQ interview last month, Beyoncé on the "crazy archive" that documents "practically her every waking moment" going back to 2005

Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that's ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny's Child, the '90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she's ever done; every video of every show she's ever performed; every diary entry she's ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop. 

"Stop pretending that I have it all together," she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. "If I'm scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to 'Make Love to Me' and make love to my husband." 

Beyoncé's inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a "visual director" Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay's "Yellow" to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC's library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it'll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button. 

And this room—she calls it her "crazy archive"—is a key part of that, she will explain, so, "you know, I can always say, 'I want that interview I did for GQ,' and we can find it." And indeed, she will be able to find it, because the room in which you are sitting is rigged with a camera and microphone that is capturing not just her every utterance but yours as well. These are the ground rules: Before you get to see Beyoncé, you must first agree to live forever in her archive, too.