Against Health and Efficiency
Monitor, issue 5, January 1986

by Simon Reynolds

Spring Breakers

SPRING BREAKERS

Sight & Sound, May 2013

by Simon Reynolds

An American tradition that dates back to shortly after World War 2,  Spring Break today involves hordes of college students descending on Florida beach towns for week-long bacchanals of binge drinking and bare flesh.  Taking place in the gap between the second and third terms of the academic year, Spring Break is essentially an amplified version of what goes on every weekend at frat houses across America, especially at those “party schools” where higher learning is not necessarily a priority for the students. The only difference is the duration of the debauch, and the fact that the revelers wear bikinis and thongs and trunks.

 “Break” echoes the idea of break time in the school day, when the children dash out of the classroom and play free. Confusingly Americans use the word “school” where the British refer to university.  But that does effectively capture the way that college, for most American middle class kids, is merely an extension of high school – marginally more autonomous, but still a time of grafting for grades and extra credit, all of which are entered into a ledger whose final tally determines what kind of career you’ll have.

The first scenes in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers had me flashing on Chuck Berry’s single “School Days”. This 1957 rock’n’roll classic juxtaposes the dragging time of the classroom with the ecstatic release of the jukebox joint:  “Soon as three o'clock rolls around/You finally lay your burden down... All day long you been wanting to dance”.   In the lecture hall, a professor drones earnestly on about Jim Crow laws and the black struggle for civil rights.  Bored and restless, two female students--Brit and Candy, played by Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens—amuse themselves by drawing an erection plus the slogan “I Love Penis” on a sheet of paper and miming fellatio.

The salacious duo and their marginally less wicked friend Cotty (Rachel Korine) are desperate to escape the college grind and get away to Spring Break.  So is their new friend Faith (Selena Gomez), a virginal, goody-two-shoes type who’s in a Christian youth group (“are you jacked up on Jesus?” asks the pastor) but who’s being seduced off the path of righteousness by the charismatic Candy and Brit.  Only hitch is that, after pooling all their cash, the four girls discover they don’t have nearly enough to get to Florida.

Desire confronts a limit. But in the first sign that Spring Breakers is set to ascend through stages of implausibility into sheer fantasy, desire wills itself through.  The girls blindly grope their way past the impasse, almost seeming to stumble on the solution: crime. The script, here and at other critical moments, has an incantatory quality, phrases repeat and accumulate, like a magic spell.  .  Bitching about their plight (“so tired of seeing the same things every single day....”)  the girls seemingly hypnotize  themselves into a volitional state (“I’m not going to sit in the same classroom.. .  we’ve been stuck here...  we’re getting out of here”). Stealing their poor old professor’s car, Britt and Candy and Cotty rob a fast food diner and its working class customers.  Given their slight physiques and girlish voices, pulling this stunt off requires whipping themselves into a thuggish frenzy. “We can do this...  just fucking pretend like it’s a videogame ... act like you’re in a movie or something.”  The girls need to believe their own make-believe. To make it to Spring Break, they break the law but also break with Reality.

Because I’ve more in common with the professor than with these tearaways, watching Spring Breakers I immediately thought of the Situationists: their slogan “take your desires for reality,”  the pamphlet diatribe On the Poverty of Student Life,  the notion of “the politics of boredom”. Above all, I thought of that widely daubed graffiti of Paris 1968:  “under the pavement lies the beach”.  “Pavement” (flat functional surfaces guiding the citizen-consumer to  the workplace or to the shops) representing  mundanity, business as usual, “the poverty of everyday life”.  “Beach”   (a sandy, sunkissed playpen for kids and adults  temporarily reverting to childhood) representing the utopia of  life as permanent vacation. Paradise regained.

I’m afraid I also thought of Bakhtin: the notion of the carnival, which has been defined as “an event in which all rules, inhibitions, restrictions and regulations which determine  the course of everyday life are suspended”. A Medieval ritual in which the world is turned upside down in a potlatch of pleasure, profanity and insubordination. 

As it happens, “carnival” is a word that has new currency in American pop culture through the massive success of Electric Daisy Carnival, the brand-leader of the new breed of  festivals for EDM (electronic dance music). These massive weekend-long dance parties combine the drugginess of Nineties raves with the non-hipster appeal of Spring Break. But they also weave in aspects of fancy dress and fantasia derived from  Mardi Gras and Cirque Du Soleil.  The clothing worn by devotees of Electric Daisy Carnival and similar festivals mixes super-sexed-up (many of the girl-ravers are clad in lingerie, are barely more dressed than the female cast of Spring Breakers) with kitschy-surreal accoutrements like fairy wings.

Spring Breakers latches onto the EDM boom with its soundtrack, partly the work of Skrillex, whose audio-visual spectaculars have made him king of the new dance festival circuit in America. His tracks deftly merge dubstep’s blaring bass-blasts with the hands-in-the-air builds and climaxes of trance. But the overall effect betrays his past in the emo-punk band First To Last: an electronic, digital-maximalist update of the moshing catharsis offered by arena rock styles like nu-metal. EDM buzz phrases like “rage hard” and the popular acronym-slogan YOLO ( “you only live once”) express a spirit of embattled hedonism and lets-get-wrecked recklessness.  My own term for this carpe diem attitude is NOW!-ism. It has a formal corollary in the music and the videos, which offer a barrage of sensational effects and non-sequential intensities: pop videos involving costume changes and location shifts every five seconds, sampled phrases or rapped lyrics that freeze-frame moments of  triumph, glory, excess, disdain,  euphoria.    

Even more than its EDM tie-in, Spring Breakers  references the mainstream radio sounds of dance pop and gangsta rap.  There are several overt nods to Britney Spears, including the deliberate echo of Brit’s name and a scene where the girls sing Spears’s breakthrough smash “... Baby One More Time”.   The arrival of drug dealer and aspiring rapper Alien (James Franco) shifts the movie away from EDM’s artificial elation and pseudo-communality and into hip hop’s fantasy world of regal splendor and paranoia.  Wearing corn-rows and a grill of gold teeth, Alien takes the girls under his wing. Even though he never learns about their foray into armed robbery, this self-described “gangsta with a golden heart” recognizes them instinctively as “motherfuckin’ soul-mates.” 

Some of the key scenes involving Alien appear to have been made expressly with the intention of being DVD-rewind favorites, to be endlessly quoted and karaoke-performed by fans, just like the “say goodnight to the bad guy” and “Say hello to my little friend!” scenes in Scarface.  One of these sequences has Alien showing off to the girls, repeatedly exulting  “look at my shit” as he points to the deluxe bed  (“that not a bed, it’s an art piece”)  and  brandishes a bounteous array of assault weapons.

Even before The Sopranos, it was a cliché that gangsters like to watch gangster movies and are  influenced by them: a feedback Moebius loop of simulacrum shaping reality shaping simulacrum shaping...   And sure enough, Alien points to his flatscreen TV and says “I got Scarface on repeat!” Close on the heels of this scene comes another would-be-classic candidate:  Brit and Candy grab some guns and turn the tables on their host. When they orally “rape” him with the weapons, Alien responds like a true sport and ardently sucks off the barrels.  It’s an echo of an earlier scene where one girl fills a water pistol with liquor and ejaculates it into her own mouth.    

Franco apparently based his character on a real-life white rapper called Dangeruss.  But why Franco even needed a template is unclear, given that the white appropriation of the Staggerlee archetype is one of the longest-running stories in popular culture, from the Rolling Stones to Eminem.  Staggerlee is at once a historical legend and a recurring social fact: the fantasy, realised at severe cost both to those who pursue it and to the community they inhabit, of criminality as a life without limits.  The gangster is a sovereign individual in a world of peons and bureaucrats, someone whose existence is both regal (swathed in luxury and prestige) and primal (a warrior’s life, shedding blood for territory, vengeance and honor).  Alien embroils the girls in his struggle with rival gangster  Archie, played by  cult rapper Gucci Mane. On the surface, the emnity is explained as a mixture of friendship betrayed and turf war (Alien threatening Archie’s ability to put food on his family’s table). But at a subliminal level the dispute is about symbolic capital: Alien’s appropriation  of what belongs to the black gangster, his stylization of rapacity, the lore and lingo he invented. 

As Archie, Gucci Mane gets to utter the movie’s most memorable line, when he praises the giver of a blow job with “you’re playing Mozart on my dick, baby.”   But for a movie whose function is partly to give an adult edge to the careers of  former teen-TV stars like Gomez and Hudgens, there is a surprising deficit of actual carnality.  Mostly what Spring Breakers is about is sexual display. So there’s lots of  bump ‘n’ grind dancing in the semi-nude, guys and girls sniffing coke off the flat abdomens of girls and guys, and  raunchy talk: “the smell of money” makes  a girl wet,   a coquettish and wasted Cotty taunting a guy that he’ll never get the pussy.   But apart from Archie’s blowjob threesome, there’s just one actual sex act. (Gomez, notably, has exited the storyline by this point. Clearly she was only prepared to go so far in an R-Rated direction: she’s not involved in the robbery, is never shown taking drugs or having sex, and doesn’t even swear much).

As depicted in Spring Breakers, the participants in Spring Break act out an idea of unbridled freedom and lascivious irresponsibility that’s as convention-bound and repetitive as the regular, regulated everyday  life of which it’s a carnivalesque inversion.  Is that the message of Korine’s movie? It’s hard to say: the director steadfastly refrains from anything that might resemble judgement. As with his script-writing debut Kids, you can take Spring Breakers as an indictment of youth today,  a comment on how pop culture’s anti-social fantasies contaminate real life. Or you can enjoy it as a (pretty softcore) wank-fantasy. 

There’s a smidgeon of a hint of authorial irony in the juxtaposition of squalor (a passed out girl in a vomit-spattered toilet) with  voice-overs from the girls phoning their mothers to reassure them that they’re having a great time, they’ve met so many wonderful people, “next year I want to come here with you”.  What’s disquieting about these phone calls, which recur at various points and have that same incantatory repetitiousness, is that you’re not sure if the girls are simply spinning a line of bullshit (a thought to give jitters to anyone in the audience who’s actually a parent). Could it be that they actually believe what they’re saying, when waxing lyrical about how “it’s like paradise here...  so magical... I’m starting to think this is the most spiritual place I’ve been...   It’s way more than just having a good time”?

One of the voice-over lines crystallises the movie’s theme: “it’s so nice to get a break from reality”.  The point of carnival is that it’s temporary.  Faith wistfully beseechs “if we could just freeze time, this is the way it’s going be forever, this moment”. But she acquiesces to the school bell call of reality and like everybody else heads back to college. The two really bad girls, Brit and Candy, don’t.  They stay with Alien, who boasts “I live at the beach all year around” and whose chanted “Spring Break, forever” is a recurrent refrain.  To actually live full time without limits is psychosis.  By the movie’s end, the girls finally become videogame characters, indestructible. Toting AK-47s, clad in pink balaclavas and yellow bikinis, they take down a small army of seasoned street warriors. 

Unlike with the earlier youth-gone-bad moves in which nonentities take retaliation for the fate of boredom and anonymity that their environment promises them—Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands, even  ludicrous ram-raiding exploitation vehicle Shopping—there is no comeuppance for these renegades from reality.  The movie, which started out gritty and naturalistic, ends up an oneiric art-movie dilation of the gangsta rap video, a porno tone poem.  

While watching Spring Breakers play out to its morally unsatisfactory (in)conclusion, I thought finally of Marcuse’s concept of “repressive desublimation.” Way back in the 1960s, the Frankfurt School associate grasped that capitalism had an interest in creating wanton consumers,  insatiable and impulsive.  External constraints on  our appetites for sex and destruction still exist (police, law, social services, etc), but they are contradicted and undermined by a consumer capitalism that erodes internal restraints like guilt and inhibition, the ability to defer gratification, even the capacity for linear thought.  Stimulating desire and narcissism, the economy’s interests collide with those of other political structures like church, education, and family, all of which aim to channel energy into long-term projects (“heaven” being the longest-term of them all). Capitalism, advertising, and their bedfellow,  pop culture have  harnessed Romanticism not for repressive ends (unrepression is precisely the modus operandi) but for the dissipation of energy and the displacement of anger from any kind of political articulation. 

  

When a pop star as bland as Katy Perry can sing, in her #1 hit “T.G.I.F”, about binge-drinking past oblivion (“it’s a blackout blur, but I’m pretty sure, it ruled”) and ménage-a-trois romps, it seems pretty clear that excess is normative and “breaking loose” just another set of  chains. Likewise, of Spring Break and Spring Breakers, I found myself wondering: if this is the beach underneath the pavement, what if anything lies beyond the beach?   Pop culture in its present state has exhausted it point:  its incitements to poor impulse control and attention-deficit-disorder no longer threaten anything. 

If desublimation is regressive on both the individual psychological level and in terms of its political consequences, can one talk perhaps of  a “progressive resublimation”?  What seems likely to be valued in the future is the ability to wrench oneself out of the state of distraction, damp down the desirousness stimulated by consumer-capitalism.  Discipline, focus, rigour: everything that cuts through the non-linearity of post-MTV, post-Internet pop culture. (Using the word “linear” as a pejorative is so 20^th Century, don’t you think?).  The artistic corollary of such a shift might be a director who actually dared to pass judgement, who was unafraid to risk being didactic.  To be more like the lecturer in the hall, in other words, and less like a lecher ogling  babes on the dancefloor.   

Chain Reaction, Porter Ricks live

CHAIN REACTION / BASIC CHANNEL

Dance column, Spin 1998

by Simon Reynolds

PORTER RICKS Biokinetics

VAINQUEUR Elevations

MAURIZIO untitled CD

VARIOUS ARTISTS Decay Product

MONOLAKE Hongkong

 Think "house," and in your mind's ear you'll probably hear a thudding, metronomic kick-drum and a shrieking soul-diva. Nearly fifteen years on from its Chicago genesis, house has evolved way beyond this original, winning formula, and diversified into at least a dozen subgenres. From the disco cut-up style popularised by Daft Punk to the unhinged abstraction of nu skool Chicago label Relief, the most exciting contemporary house is designed for  "track-heads"--purist connoisseurs who prefer minimal tracks to anthemic songs. I don't like purists either, but if the truth be known, when pop music's final reckoning is done, house is not going to be remembered for adding to the sum of  "great songs," nor for its pantheon of distinctive vocalists. Its real contribution and innovation resides

elsewhere.

 In this spirit, the Berlin label Chain Reaction have distilled house down to its essence: no songs, no vocals, barely any melodies, sometimes not even a beat. What, you might wonder, is left after such

ruthless pruning? Texture and pulse-rhythm. Or more precisely, texture-rhythm as an indivisible plasma-like substance that is molded and extruded through dub-space. Take Chain Reaction's aesthetic pinnacle to date, "Resilient 1.2": a slow-motion tsunamai of  ego-melting,

body-boundary-haemorrhaging bliss. Some people call the Chain Reaction sound "heroin house"; "Resilient 1.2" actually reminds me of Velvet Underground's "Heroin". A soundtrack in waiting for the first zero-gravity nightclub, it was my favourite track of 1997; you can find it on the Chain

Reaction CD Decay Product, a compilation of tracks by the production team Various Artists.

Based out of Berlin's Hard Wax record store, Chain Reaction is the sister label of Basic Channel, whose nine 12-inch releases were the toast of techno-house cognoscenti  throughout the mid-Nineties (but don't let that put you off!). Devoted to vinyl, the mysterious figures behind the twin labels established their own pressing plant. This makes Chain Reaction's series of single-artist CD compilations--encased in striking metal cans that resemble DJs's record boxes--a sort of ideological lapse, a concession to the market realities of the digital era.

             

Prise open the cannisters, and on tracks like Maurizio's "M6", Vainqueur's "Reduce 2" and Porter Ricks' "Port Gentil" you'll encounter electronic music as warmly cocooning and spongy as the lining of the womb. What initially sounds monotonous reveals itself as an endlessly inflected, fractal mosaic of  glow-pulses and flicker-riffs. Using studio-processes like EQ, filtering, phasing and panning to tweak the frequencies and stereo-imaging of their sonic motifs, CR artists weave tantalising

tapestries whose strands shift in and out of the aural spotlight. The effect is synaesthetic, like fingertips tremulously caressing your neck.

Although CR artists would probably distance themselves from rave's drug culture, their music sounds like Ecstasy sensations encoded in sound, abstracted into a velcro-sticky audio-fabric that tugs at your skin-surface and gets your goosebumps rippling in formation. Melody is minimal--limited

to rudimentary vamps and ostinatos--because it's just a device for displaying sound-in-itself. Simple motifs twist the timbre-fabric in order to best show off its properties, making you thrill to the scintillating play of  creases and folds, crinkles and kinks.

             

CR music isn't all opiated oblivion: Monolake's "Lantau" and "Macau" are like Cantonese reggae, while Porter Ricks material often has an abrasive industrial tinge,  reflecting the fact that one half of the duo is acclaimed ambient experimentalist Thomas Koner. But my favorite CR output

is the stuff that offers a sublime surrogate for MDMA experience, a bliss-space you can access at any time then leave, without cost or comedown. That said, this music's appeal  extends way beyond ravers--anyone who's ever swooned to neo-psychelicists like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody

Valentine, or  been mesmerised by minimalists like Steve Reich, will find almost unbearable pleasures here.

As well as Chain Reaction's own CD and vinyl 12 inch output (available at domestic prices), addicts will want to search out the artists's releases on other labels:  Porter Ricks' self-titled album on

Mille Plateaux, Various Artists's glistening pulsescape "No.8" on Fatcat. Porter Ricks also created a fine remix album, The Koner Experiment, based on  music by Experimental Audio Research--a collective that includes ex-Spacemen 3 leader Sonic Boom and MBV's Kevin Shields. That fact alone

that should seduce any hesitant psych-guitar fiends into taking the plunge.

2013 postscript: "heroin house" it should be noted was in fact the coinage of Kevin Martin aka The Bug, then doing a lot of writing about music as well as making of it. 

PORTER RICKS,

live at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage

Village Voice,  Tuesday, Jul 3 2001

by Simon Reynolds

No doubt about it, the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage is an amazing space. As a music venue, though, this gloomy maze of looming, steep-sided chambers leaves a lot to be desired: Performers tend to drown in a quagmire of reflected sound. On June 28, the final installment of Creative Time's annual series of avant-electronica events (a 10th birthday bash for Frankfurt's Force Inc and its sister label, Mille Plateaux) saw some groups faring better with the acoustics than others. Panacea's 180-b.p.m. Gothkore bombast suited the medieval ambience, but Kid606's set was too busy and event-crammed (Boredoms do IDM) to thrive in this catacomb. SND suffered from the opposite syndrome: Too sparse even for the Anchorage, they sounded like an ailing metronome trapped in an echo chamber.

Luckily, Porter Ricks fit the space like a glove. Thomas Köner and Andy Mellweg first came to acclaim with their late-'90s releases on Chain Reaction, Berlin's "heroin house" label. Combining Köner's texturology (he's an avant-garde composer renowned for bleak arctic dronescapes) with Mellweg's grasp of house's pump-and-pound rhythm, Porter Ricks make formlessness funky.

But that's no preparation for how hard they rocked tonight: Imagine Eno's On Land meets the Stooges. Porter Ricks use a guitar processor on all their synth sounds, which helps explains the added grit in their grind. Early in the set, the songs felt like spelunking through spongy-walled caverns flushed with foamy water: total body-massage. But as the beat got steadily more bangin' and the texture-riffs flared fierce like magnesium, Porter Ricks hit a sublime pitch midway between warm pulse and cold rush: a sound as visceral as hardcore, as sensuous as deep house, as abstract as glitch. The combination of this glorious roar and the Anchorage's architecture was like being teleported through time-space to Berlin's legendary early-'90s club E-Werk, a disused power plant. Finally, the Anchorage became the rave temple it has always promised to be

NERD, In Search of...

N*E*R*D

In Search Of...

Virgin

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

N*E*R*D are The Neptunes are Pharrell Williams & Chad Hugo, the Virginia-bred R&B/rap production team who are just coming off an astounding run of hits. The spate started in late 1999 with Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Got Your Money" and Kelis's "Caught Out There," blew up last year with Jay-Z's "I Just Wanna Love U", Mystikal's "Shake Ya Ass," and Beenie Man's "Girls Dem Sugar," and continues with Ludacris's "Southern Hospitality". But if you expected their debut solo would be drenched in that deliciously chewy, sinewy James-Brown-for-the-Y2K sound that underpins the Jay Z and Mystikal tracks, or take the techno tinged brutalism of the Ludacris single even further, think again. In Search Of... is really a black rock album. True, there's hardly any guitar and the drumming is programmed not played. But songs like the dirty synth-bass riffing "Things Are Getting Better" have the hard, unswinging attack of rock. Basically, there's a reason Pharrell Williams is sporting an AC/DC T-shirt on the back cover.

Given that Williams & Hugo were once in a band with their Virginia Beach neighbour Timbaland, and right now are jousting with the podgy producer for control of the Black American BeatGeist, the obvious parallel for In Search of... is Welcome To Our World, the 1997 album where Timbaland stepped out of the shadows for the first time to claim some limelight (dragging his not immensely talented sidekick Magoo with him). There's a difference, though. For all trackmaster Tim's brilliance as rhythm composer, on Welcome he was talking loud (actually, sotto voce in a sub-Isaac Hayes deep 'n' low baritone) but saying fuck-all. Whereas N*E*R*D... well, they're on some kind of early Seventies cosmic/social consciousness trip, harking back to What's Goin' On/Innversions/Harvest For the World. Williams, in particular, seems intent on Really Saying Something, bringing back capital 'c' Content to the sonically radical but lyrically visionless black pop culture of the day.

That's the intent, at any rate. In terms of political acumen, the politicians-as-strippers analogy of "Lapdance" is only marginally more astute than OutKast's incoherent "Bombs Over Baghdad" (2000's most Over-Rated Single, surely?). But as black noise---that raspy riff like a wasp in your earhole, that coiled hypertense rhythm-track--"Lapdance" is as exhilarating as "911 Is A Joke" off PE's Fear of A Black Planet. And the post-election disgust it voices makes a neat parallel with Radiohead's "You and Whose Army?". "Provider" is one notch up the politics-in-pop sophistication scale, from soapbox speaking-out to first person narrative as cautionary tale, couched in B-boy blues similar to Everlast. The song's protagonist is a drug dealer who can only put bread on the family's table by going out each morning to face the streets and the prospect of not coming back, like, EVER. "Freddie's Dead"/"Pusherman"-era Curtis Mayfield is echoed musically as well as lyrically, with a beautifully fey and floaty mid-section. The kosmik stuff is a tad more subtle: references to the subconscious, phrases like "we are the dreamers," while N*E*R*D itself stands for No One Ever Really Dies. (It's fair to surmise that these boys like the odd puff). And there's more than a trace of full-on psychedelia in the mix: the staccato keyboard-stab and eerie, sneery melody of "Brain" recall Sixties garage-psych bands like The Electric Prunes and The Music Machine.

The difference between the Neptunes sound and the rest of the R&B pack is most apparent in the rhythms, which are stiffer and simpler than the fiddly-with-syncopation post-Destiny's norm. Williams & Hugo's unsupple beats evoke Eighties electro's drum machine sound, but rarely sound retro. What this means, though, is that the drums alone can't carry the song, as they do with so much modern R&B. And so "Truth or Dare" is the album's one dud because the riff, beat and Kelis's vocal lick are all based on the same drab pattern. After this mid-album falter, though, there's a seven song stretch of non-stop awesomeness, kicked off by "Run to the Sun"---a gorgeous Isley-esque song of astral love, all honeydripping interlocked harmonies, Roy Ayers-circa-"Daylight" keyboard ripples, heart-pulse bass, and teasing rhythm guitar. Then follows the Beatlesy "Stay Together; " the "black Jaxx" confection of clavinet, twangadelic guitar, lounge harmonies and dub-house off-beat keyboard licks that is "Baby Doll"; the thick moog sleaze and porno panting of "Tape You"; the exquisitely tight-but-loose slow grind funk of "Am I High". Best of all is closer "Bobby James," the lament of a teenage druggy on a downward spiral, reduced to panhandling for dope money. The phased falsetto and headspinningly intricate arrangement make you really feel the swoony chorus "I'm high as hell and I'm ready to blast/I'm just one hit away from being passed out."

This year's Stankonia, In Search Of.... is further proof of the Dirty South's hegemony over hip hop, and a gauntlet thrown down to Timbaland: raise your game again, son.