Now, music
by Kristian Vistrup Madsen
One thing that was very often remarked upon back then was the beauty of the Corrs sisters – all three of them, how could it be? And reporters would ask them how they felt about their beauty, and what could they do but blush? Blush and say that it would be nice, of course, to be recognised also for one’s talents as a musician.
Pop music's appeal is largely external to itself, for instance sourced from the prestige associated with a performer, and other forms of branding. But its greater and more lasting appeal it sources from its own emptiness. That is, because hollowness resounds, because inside that familiar three-verses-and-a-bridge structure is a resonance space–a void precisely in the shape of whatever malformation of the spirit you bring to it. Where other forms of music offer too much weight, too much character – as art works tend to, as well – leaving no space for distraction, the pop song is light because it is a container. And because it is a container, it travels. By taking it with you and repeating it close to your body, again and again, you slowly fill the container, until, by a sort of miracle, it seems that all along it had been made just for you.
Capitalism maintains itself through this kind of affirmative culture. Pop songs are instances of what Herbert Marcuse called 'events in the individual’s soul' which are received with 'celebration and exaltation', however, without freeing the individual from their factual debasement. But something more uncanny, too, travels by this vessel. A secret message inside its tinny cadaver, like a Trojan horse. 'I haven’t slept at all in days,' sang the beautiful Corrs sisters, sleep deprivation being, of course, a highly efficient form of torture. Ariana Grande sings about being so depressed she cannot walk to her car without collapsing. A very strong image: that tiny, tiny lady, wavering unsteadily along, ravaged. In Robin’s Call your girlfriend, I wonder if the narrator is merely lying to us, or also to herself. Is this a misguided, even somewhat sadistic attempt at female solidarity, or it is the Other Woman’s deluded anthem? That is: will he ever actually call?
When really listened to, many lyrics perform the work of protest, or at least pay testimony to the price paid for our alienation from the fruits of our labour and the reification of our every thought and feeling. I’ve often thought about Madonna’s Holiday, not as a celebration of free time, but as a plea against the oppression of labour: we need a holiday, she strains her voice, just one day out of life–she is really not asking for a lot. On the track Honey Robin likewise offers the uncomfortable truth that we’re never going to get what we need–what do humans need? Sleep, love, safety – but that she at least has what we want: honey, which is sweeter. Is this a song about how, as subjects of capitalism, we are shortchanged on a daily basis, fed off with sweets, when what we need, as Marie Antoinette learned the hard way, is bread?
I started thinking about The Corrs–a band of Irish siblings many people have likely forgotten – because Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s series of pinkish reliefs is titled Leave Me Breathless. In an iconic refrain that marries romance to death drive, The Corrs also implored to be left breathless in their hit single from 2000. Years later, not being able to breathe would once again become a refrain in the protests surrounding the death by police brutality of Eric Garner. Romantic culture is allegorical; it speaks in hyperbole because it is actually speaking about something other than it purports, usually what Marcuse called our 'factual debasement'. Goethe’s young Werther swooned and swooned before, in the end, he killed himself. But Lotte knew it was not really about her, and that Werther had only needed to give his suffering a name, to embellish it by the language of love in that way.
A tragedy such as Werther’s – or Romeo and Juliet’s, or Anna Karenina’s – is elevated because it is aesthetic, and aesthetic because it is entirely unnecessary. Did those stories have to turn out as badly as they did? Certainly not. Base and utilitarian, the violence of capitalism, on the other hand, unfortunately makes a lot of sense. It offers reasons why we suffer and the reasons are power and profit. As Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about George Elliot’s character Hetty Sorrel:
She hasn't the quality to be tragic. Instead she has something smaller and lesser–she is
miserable. But miserable in the most extreme way, because she is profoundly betrayed by
her beauty, by the shallow and easy conscience of her lover.
Life under capitalism is Hetty’s, a small one of systematic humiliation. In art we call this realism – a genre, fairly limited in appeal, which cannot be traced back to the Greeks. As antidote, enter romance novels, pop songs, Hollywood: by packaging our misery as tragedy, we mourn the spiritual emptiness of our lives by epic proxy, and in that way live to see another day. 'I've turned all my sorrow into glass,' sings Robyn, 'It don't leave no shadow.'
Christiansen’s series Leave Me Breathless are solid plaster casts of cardboard boxes – imprints of containers become solid. Wrinkled, soft-looking, they bear the marks of old stickers and tape, the residue of their meaning, the last thing an object is left with, like those hard bits that hide inside the Trojan horse of a pop song, the grain of the voice. To the extent that they speak, their message is minimal: 'I once moved through the world,' the pinkish slabs say, barely audibly, 'I once had a purpose.' But they never did move through the world and nor did they ever have a purpose. The plaster casts speak on behalf of the cardboard box–itself a mere container, a shred of life, long gone. Hung too high for us to get close, we squint at their textured surfaces looking for clues that might give them away, hooks to hang ourselves onto. And as we play that game of hide and seek, time passes in parcels of four minutes, the exact duration of a radio edit, and that in itself is something, isn’t it? The time spent looking, time spent entertaining the desire to find–for that time, at least, there is purpose and meaning.
A cardboard box does not have the quality to be tragic–instead it is something smaller, lesser. An abandoned vehicle, it is very close to nothing. It is moving if only because it used to move; it touches us only because we used to touch it. Could we say that Christiansen takes the empty boxes of love and misery that belong to Hetty Sorrel and the rest of us, and, by casting them in plaster and literally elevating them to the point where the wall meets the ceiling, makes them useless, aesthetic? And that perhaps at this point it becomes possible – if only in glimpses – for these imprints of the scraps of life to perform a small tragedy?
The feat is hard won. Christiansen’s reliefs protect themselves by carefully keeping beauty and language at a distance. For beauty takes a toll, ask the Corrs sisters, or Hetty Sorrel: beauty betrays and ravages, leaves doubt in its wake. And so I wonder if the relief of Christiansen’s title is not just the sculptural form, but also the relief of giving beauty up for lost. If we were to ask him if he does not think that they are beautiful he would ask us in return what beauty even is.
Christiansen positions this absence of breath, this unspecified relief at the precise midpoint between romantic allegory and modernist 'thing-itself'. The work survives in this airless non-space by borrowing two elements from pop: the emptiness produced by the repetition of form – a trick that modernism knew, too – and the vague allusion to romantic suffering smuggled in through its title. That is, the sparsest possible structure that allows the work its presence without breaching its autonomy by the inference of narrative. We stand before a work that is anxious not to speak and not to dazzle because in doing so it hopes to make space for something else. There is purpose and there is meaning – the winner is the one who can resist asking what they might be.
– June 2024
