Rancid Aphrodisiac Subjectivity, Desire, and Rock 'n' Roll

by Vallee, Mickey

• ISBN13: 9781441183620
• ISBN10: 1441183620
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-18
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

It has been sixty years since Rock 'n' Roll exploded into the mainstream, yet we remain limited in our understanding of how its bawdy excesses absorbed into the annals of mass popularity in such a short amount of time. Mickey Vallee asks: what if the Rock 'n' Roll eruption was nothing less than postwar consumer capitalism at its very best, precisely because it was taken as its very worst?

Vallee explores the emergence of Rock 'n' Roll's from an entirely new theoretical disposition in order to answer this question, drawing mainly from Lacanian cultural psychoanalysis to reveal that Rock 'n' Roll was far more conformist than we are generally led to believe; namely, that it was conformist with emerging liberal principles of freedom from the tyranny of the state. Vallee supports this proposition with detailed analyses of familiar (and not-so-familiar) characters and texts in Rock 'n' Roll to suggest that the disruption of our symbolic economy was symptomatic of a new cultural logic of economic freedom.

While not denying Rock 'n' Roll's role in the pre-civil rights movement, Vallee refuses the possibility to deny that Rock 'n' Roll's symbolic efficacy ultimately coordinated a neoliberal foundation to the ideology of individualism in its rhythm, instrumentation, lyrics, and vocals, where its power was at its most effective and affective.

Author Biography

Mickey Vallee is Instructor of Sociology and Music at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published in The Journal of Historical Sociology, Space & Culture, Australasian Canadian Studies, and Alternate Routes. Currently he is editing a glossary of terms by Deleuze and Guattari.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Not Out, But Through It!
Part I: The Psychoanalytic Art of Listening
I - The Medium is the Method
1.1 The Medium is the Message
1.2 The Medium is the Mirror
1.3 The Medium is the Music
1.4 The Medium is the Marrow
1.5 The Medium is the Milieu

Part II: The Terrain
II - Loss: The Afflicted Amalgamation of Music and Nostalgia
2.1 It Isn't What It Was
2.2 The "Afflicted Imagination"
2.3 Haydn's Farewell: A Case of Expunging Nostalgia
2.4 Romantic Distance and the Loss of Loss
2.5 After the Fall: Nostalgia and the Sentimental Ballad
2.6 Towards Phonography
III - Master: The Domestication of Mechanical Phonographs
3.1 Eternal Speech
3.2 The Old Master's Voice: "I Am The Edison Phonograph!"
3.3 From the Office to the Arcades
3.4 From Obscenity to Testimony
3.5 "Metaphysical Melancholy" and Mechanical Phonography
3.6 The New Master's Voice
IV - Intersubjectivity: A Critique of Mashups
4.1 The Grey Album
4.2 The Empowerment of Postmodern Pastiche
4.3 Knee Deep in the Postmodern Shitter
4.4 Ventriloquist H.I.T.L.E.R
4.5 The Contingencies of Media Ecologies
V - Verneinung: Recording Denial
5.1 The Genus of Experimentalism
5.2 The Phallaesthetics of Rock
5.4 The Experimental Album - Kid A
5.5 Kid A as Hip Consumer Item
5.6 Hip Consumerism, Verneinung, and Jouissance
5.7 The Hip Heidegerrian and the Question of Technologies

Part III: Alternate Approaches to Creating and Listening
VI - Alternate Takes: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Psychoanalysis
6.1 Pullhair Rubeye
6.2 Sound Interpellated -- Last Call for Determinism
6.3 I Will Like Spinning Plates
6.4 Backmasked Anxiety
6.5 Towards a Theory of Transition
6.6 The Ecology of Flesh
VII - Alternate Ears: Reshaping the Listening Experience, Reshaping the Unconscious in Sound Installations
7.1 The Murder of Crows by George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff
7.2 Perspectival Phono-Anamorphosis
7.3 Living in the Multiple Unconscious

Conclusion
Bibliography
Select Discography
Index