"So long as your mind falls for life then life will fall for you"

Today, I tracked down the lyrics to Penny Sparkle (new Blonde Redhead album which I’d been previously disappointed with) and consciously followed the words while listening to the music. The album finally made sense, I really felt what was going on, and now I’m sure it’s one of their best. 23 was a huge musical jump to shoegazery mournful sexiness; Penny Sparkle is jump from that to restrained, ambient mournful sexiness. Musical intensity of mood is peeled back, allowing the lyrics to take on greater responsibility, with the result being a highly affecting synthesis between lyrical meaning and sound. Ambient music is characteristically repetitive, but the effect of this throughout the album is to create the sense of a resigned, imprisoned melancholy. Love Or Prison is a good example. The lines “is this love or prison/ is this love or prison/ this is love” are repeated for the last third of the song, with the final line being “this is love”. That she settles on “this is love” could perhaps be interpreted optimistically. However, the prolonged repetition creates an uncertainty, whereby it’s implied that the question will be asked again (also suggested by the line “I ask you again”). The fact that the song begins and ends with (or is contained by) a sparse electronic metronome reiterates these themes of entrapment and stasis; while vocal tone is also pretty pessimistic. The question “is this love or prison” itself constructs an interesting binary; a prison is evoked, and yet we’re told “this is love” as opposed to prison. The contrast here seems to lead to the idea that that (this) love is a prison, which is also signaled through the repeated line “in your love”. In other words, inside your love prison. A subtle and interesting twist on the cliché of being “in love”.
I had a different kind of response to the lyrics in "My Plants Are Dead". For all the talk about the positioning of the implied reader, I’ve never thought about or heard any mention of the positioning of the implied listener. The questions to an unidentified listener in the first verse of My Plants Are Dead are unanswered, the lines are fragmented and create the feeling of listening to half of a phone conversation; Kazu’s half. The use of second person positions the listener as the unheard other side of the conversation. Maybe. Right? I’m interested to find more written about this, all I could find from a brief search was this paper on the positioning of the listener in relation to the use of female orgasm sounds in pop music. Uni of Sydney kids (U-Kydneys?) can read it at JSTOR.

And here is an excerpt:

“In all of these songs there is an ambiguity of address: Is the listener being asked to identify with whoever is satisfying the vocalizing woman, or is the listener an outside eavesdropper (the aural equivalent of a voyeur) who "gets off" on the very sound of her voice?5 Assuming that the ideal listening subject for female orgasm sounds (from the music industry's point of view) is almost certainly male, what happens-as it often must-when the listener is a woman? How does this reorganize the chain of signification? Given a dominant heterosexist perspective, do the cooing sounds of female sexual pleasure serve as a normative model for the "correct" female response to sexual stimulation? Are these sounds part of a disciplinary framework in which supposedly "free" sex vocalizations are ideologically instituted as the acceptable sound of stimulation? Is this a tyranny of ecstasy, teaching women how to sound and men what to try to make women sound like?
The explicit sex sounds used in popular music are clearly often a direct genre reference to mainstream cinematic and videographic pornography. In these forms, the soundtrack during sex scenes will typically relate to the actions that are visually depicted in only the most general way; thus, synchronization is not used as a verification of the "actuality" of the scene. Postsynchronized groans and moans function more as an additional stimulant than as an effet du reel. Naturally, this brings us back to issues of "evidence." As Williams says:

When characters talk their lips often fail to match the sounds spoken, and in the sexual numbers a dubbed-over "disembodied" female voice (saying "oooh" and aaah") may stand as the most prominent signifier of female pleasure in the absence of other, more visual assurances. Sounds of pleasure [...] seem almost to flout the realist function of anchoring body to image, halfway becoming aural fetishes of the female pleasures we cannot see. (I989:I22-23)

Since these female voices in porn film and video are already disembodied from their visual referent, they make a fitting item for purely aural production. Devoid of the usual realist evidentiary role, female sex sounds are free to be used in highly stylized and seemingly antirealist settings. For instance, the samplings of female sex sounds are used in some forms of postdisco dance music in a compulsive-repetitive way. In these contexts, the very same sex sound may be repeated ad infinitum. Though on the surface this appears to be completely nonrealist (as are all mechanistic uses of sample loops and repetitions), at base it still carries deep, "real" connotations about female sexuality. When sampled in this way, these women's voices are hyperrepresentations of female sexuality as out-of-control and excessive. As we have noted, the male orgasm is culturally constructed as terminal and limited, while female sexual pleasure is seen as infinitely renewable and multiple. Like the female orgasm, the technology of sampling is not subject to the generational "exhaustion" of analog technology, but digitally replicates and proliferates the original text. As infinitely repeatable and renewable resources, women's orgasm sounds are thus the perfect item for digital sampling, epitomizing the ecstasy of communication.”

Overall it’s an interesting read, posing more questions than providing answers. I’ve been also seriously interested in porno-criticism (I don’t know if there’s a better term for this – I haven’t encountered much of a literature, but one would presume there is one lurking somewhere and committing all manners of wank) lately, particularly in regard to self-referential porn. In porn, the woman will generally stare into the camera, positioning the viewer as sexual partner. Right, easy. But apart from the effect of positioning the viewer in the scene, is there anything else being achieved? On some basic level, the recognition of the camera must be a reminder of both the constructed intimacy between characters/ people engaged in sex-acts on camera and the constructed intimacy between the woman and the viewer. Yet then there’s an immediate irony that there is both a real sexual engagement in the video and also a real sexual engagement for the viewer (this is presumed). What is the relationship between pornstars and viewers? Could you say it’s intimate? Perhaps, but then somehow this pretend intimacy also draws attention to distance/ absence. Can we talk about porn as being postmodern? Can we talk about characters and narrative in porn in a critical way? What about videos which make explicit reference to the viewer? Or videos that explicitly expose their constructedness through such things as the appearance of cameras and sound equipment on set? Is porn defined by content (in which case, what happens in cases like Crash, where pornographic acts are used stylistically or as a trope?), or by function (in which case, should otherwise “postmodern” techniques be disregarded as meaningful in the face of a more obvious directorial intent)? Can we talk about directorial intent, and can we view porn videos as texts open to this kind of (multiple) interpretation, the same as we do with Everything Else? Is there porn which explores these ideas, or would it then cease to be porn? What is the effect of all of this on how we think about sex and human relationships, how we interact with partners in various real and cyber settings, and the notion of "real" vs. "fake" (?) sex? Is there anything important about these questions, or should some taboos be maintained at the expense of cultural insight/ discussion? who knows.

EDIT:
1.links fixed, blogger sucks.
2. also this is the working link to the guy's website whose photos i posted earlier.
3. based on another brief search, it appears there's a "porn studies" course running or once run at the University of Boston, a bunch of really interesting books about all of this, and a performance artist named Joanna Frueh has coined the area of criticism "Fuck Theory". incidentally, this is a neat blog.
4. "The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes." — Michel Foucault