Paula Abdul

New York Times, May 12th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

Just as there are those who worry about additive-riddled junk food, so too there's an unofficial "campaign for real music."

Adherents fret about the unauthenticity of mainstream pop performers who, in the tradition of Milli Vanilli, mime to backing tapes when supposedly performing live. For these people, Paula Abdul has become the focus of the latest crisis of confidence.

The session singer Yvette Marine has claimed that the lead vocal on two tracks from Ms. Abdul's first album, Forever Your Girl, which has sold seven million copies, is a composite voice. Ms. Marine claims that her original "guide vocal" was used to beef up Ms. Abdul's singing and has filed a false-and-deceptive-packaging suit against Virgin Records, which has denied the charges.

Although the allegations are not as threatening to Ms. Abdul's credibility as the Milli Vanilli revelations were to theirs, they are timed to cause maximum embarrassment: Ms. Abdul's second album, Spellbound (Virgin 91611; all three formats), will be released this week. The controversy has reawakened familiar anxieties about the dehumanizing effect of technology on music. As pop production grows steadily more complex, it also becomes increasingly specialized. The person who sings the song is less and less often the person who wrote it, while the sound is more and more the creation of the producer.

Most songs on Spellbound consist of rhythm tracks and keyboard sequences programmed by the album's producers, V. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Lord. Session musicians were occasionally employed to lay down rhythm guitar parts or saxophone and violin solos, but they sound incongruously "organic" amid the inhuman perfection of the metronomic beats.

This way of making records was the norm in the Tin Pan Alley era of the '50s, and it has continued to be the rule in black pop and dance music. But such division of labour cuts against the notion of authenticity that emerged in the countercultural '60s, when it was expected that singers would be responsible for the meanings of their own songs. This notion is what lies behind the hostility toward manufactured pop. The fear is that the artist's style will be totally superseded by the producer's trademark commercial sound, and that the gritty spontaneity of rock-and-roll will lose out to programming expertise.

It has been a long time since pop records documented live performances; instead, their simulation of them is constructed painstakingly in the studio. No longer is it necessary for musicians to play in one another's presence. Vocals rarely take place in "real time" but are a collage of the best-sung phrases edited from numerous vocal takes. Bad notes can be corrected by altering the pitch; weak voices can be thickened by multi-tracking.

For most people, this surgical procedure seems distant from the "raw expression" of Elvis Presley or the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols. It's hard to accept the fact that this techno-pop is music, but it's also unlikely that today's 16-year-old pop consumers care; all they hear is the immediacy and effervescence of the product.

Paula Abdul's unusual route to pop stardom was via her award-winning choreography for promotional videos of artists like Janet Jackson, ZZ Top, George Michael and INXS. This background makes her particularly emblematic of the state of modern pop, the suspicion being that she was given a recording contract because she's videogenic rather than a gifted natural singer.

Ms. Abdul's 1988 debut, Forever Your Girl, was clearly modeled on Janet Jackson's 1986 album, Control, whose widely influential techno-funk sound was created by her producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Like Ms. Abdul, Ms. Jackson has a serviceable rather than astounding voice, and so Mr. Jam and Mr. Lewis devised a breathless, dynamic electro-pop sound based around clipped, urgent hooks rather than complex melodies and soul diva singing.

Ms. Abdul's debut album cleaved to the same effective formula. The crucial difference was that Ms. Abdul replaced Ms. Jackson's soft-core feminism with a more traditional female persona, as can readily be seen by contrasting the album titles Control and Forever Your Girl.

Spellbound builds on that winning approach. Musically, Mr. Smith and Mr. Lord have constructed a state-of-the-art dance pop that mixes influences from house, swing beat, rap, Prince-style pop-funk and "Euro-black" groups like Snap. Lyrically, Ms. Abdul's persona is flirty but wholesome. Although tracks like 'The Promise of a New Day' and 'Rock House' feebly gesture at the social-awareness-by-numbers of Janet Jackson's second album, Rhythm Nation 1814, most of the songs are gushing tributes to boyfriends.

New songs like 'Rush Rush', 'Spellbound', 'To You' and 'Will You Marry Me' reiterate the sexually apolitical attitude of previous hits like 'Knocked Out', 'It's the Way That You Love Me' and 'Forever Your Girl'. Even when wronged in love ('Foolish Heart', 'Blowin' Kisses in the Wind'), Ms. Abdul's persona is aggrieved but hopelessly devoted, her voice tremulously verging on a Betty Boop whine.

The best tracks on Spellbound are those that make the furthest departure from the Abdul norm. 'Vibeology' combines Parliament-Funkadelic influences and contemporary house mannerisms with results as sultry and engaging as Deee-Lite; Ms. Abdul sings dance-floor doggerel like "I'm in a funky way" in a cartoonish chipmunk squeak. 'U', one of the handful of tracks not produced by Mr. Smith and Mr. Lord, is also excellent. Composed and produced by Prince's Paisley Park organization, the track combines a military beat with a staccato, hard-rock riff and jazzy harmonies – Prince's trademark – to eerie effect. It's the best thing Prince has been involved in since his 1988 album Lovesexy.

The main vein of Spellbound, however, is precisely what one expects from Paula Abdul: brisk beats, stuttering synthesizers, stammering bass lines, nervous tics of rhythm guitar and a profusion of hooks designed to snag consumers by the ear. The music sounds spectacular; its endless crescendos and hyperactive rhythms are designed to go in sync with the rapid-fire quick cuts of the videos, the jut and thrust of the choreography.

A phenomenal number of man-hours go into each of these spectacles of effortlessness. For the videos, there's storyboard writing, makeup, lighting, interminable takes, editing, tinting, special effects. Musically, there's programming, arranging, treating, remixing and, in the case of Spellbound, processing the entire album through Q-sound, a technique that makes records sound more three dimensional, so that every snare kick hits the listener in the gut.

If it seems like there's no spontaneity involved in this process, it's best to remind yourself that this isn't rock-and-roll. Ms. Abdul belongs to the tradition of show-biz entertainment in which every inflection and gesture is choreographed and rehearsed to the point of robotic precision. She has said that it wasn't a rock or rhythm-and-blues icon that inspired her to enter the business, but Gene Kelly. What Ms. Abdul's music offers is the sterile exhilaration of a Hollywood blockbuster, where every edit and sound effect is designed to fit into the listener's reduced attention span.

Just as these spectacles are diverting at the time but leave you feeling empty afterward, Spellbound is louder than life but lacking in resonance. As with junk food, you might occasionally want to get high on all the empty calories and additives, but you can't live off the stuff.

techgnosis

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information

by Erik Davis

(Serpent's Tail)

The Guardian, the year it came out whatever dude

by Simon Reynolds

Science and spirituality have long been considered enemies. The Englightenment consigned mystical impulses into the murky netherworld of superstitious unreason. In reaction, the Romantic tradition generally rejected technology as a force of disenchantment---in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzche blamed science for banishing the mythopoeic, Dionysian spirit from modernity, while Henry Adams's famous dichotomy of the Virgin and the Dynamo presented sacred mystery and scientific mastery as mutually incompatible aspects of the human condition.

            American critic Erik Davis aims to complicate this received opposition.  The punning neologism that titles his  book *TechGnosis* condenses his core assertion--that   there has actually long been a mutual entanglement of the scientific and spiritual imaginations.  Davis argues that "magic is technology's unconscious."  For their practitioners, spells and rituals aren't mumbo-jumbo but rather (like "proper" science) attempts to manipulate laws of nature to achieve practical results. Sometimes yesterday's magic becomes tomorrow's science. Alchemy was a prequel to chemistry, a sort of proto-science that blurred the distinction between "ritual" and "experiment", "vision-quest" and "research". Similarly, mesmerism--today regarded as mere smoke'n'mirrors charlatanry--actually laid the groundwork for psychotherapy and Freud's discovery of the unconscious. In one of his most provocative feats of  knowledge archaeology, Davis traces the origin of  the complex "data architectures" of  contemporary cyberculture all the way back to the "memory palaces"  that Renaissance hermeticists  mentally constructed--a mind's eye technique that enabled these scholars of esoteric knowledge to store vast amounts of  information in their own brains. 

            The flipside of  Davis's argument concerns the way that the mystical and Romantic imagination has repeatedly seized on the scientific, technical, and engineering developments of the era as a source of metaphor.  TechGnosis's stand-out chapter, "The Alchemical Fire",  investigates the many manifestations of  what Davis dubs "the electromagnetic imaginary." These include  theories of an "electrical"  life-force (such as Mesmer's  animal magnetism and Theosophy's etheric body)  and Spiritualism's debt to the newly invented telegraph and Morse Code (the movement's leading periodical was called The Spiritual Telegraph).

            Like other paradigm-shifting innovations in telecommunications such as the telephone, wireless, and Internet, the telegraph was hailed as the advent of the New Jersusalem, an earthly paradise of peace, prosperity and global village-like intimacy among all mankind. A fifth-generation Californian, Davis tends to look on the bright side himself;  in a sense, his stance is "why can't spirituality and technology be friends?". But he's too sharp to ignore technology's darkside, its potential for control and cataclysm. Accordingly, TechGnosis explores how technology's  dystopian aspect has been  mirrored by a darkside spirituality. In Medieval times, paranoid schizophrenics expressed their dread through the demonology of witches, fairies, and  incubi; in the Modern era, technology possessed the troubled imagination. Within a few years of Alexander Graham Bell's invention,  one benighted soul suffered the delusion that his enemies were telephonically transmitting "fiendish suggestions" directly into his brain via an subcranial implant. Today, similar persecution complexes involve controlling rays beamed from satellites or  microchips implanted behind the eyes. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick based his later novels like  Radio Free Albemuth on his own paranoid hallucinations that he'd been contacted by a sort of   Cosmological Internet called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System).

            Davis identifies this sort of delusion as a technologized update of Gnosticism, the early Christian heresy that bypassed faith and doctrinal obedience in favor of direct knowledge of  God.  Each human soul contains a latent "spark" of divinity which can be reawakened by a signal from the higher realm--a notion Davis likens to satellite radio transponders that are designed to remain dormant until an activating transmission is received. The most recent example of  this syndrome is the Heaven's Gate cult, who shared the Gnostics' distaste for the human body  and couldn't wait to be beamed up from this fallen world by the Hale Bopp spacecraft. Then there are the Extropians--technophiliacs who believe that humans can become godlike via bionic prosthetics and smart drugs, and look forward to the day when they can defeat death by downloading their consciousness into immortal machines.

            Drawing on a slightly staggering range of erudition, and written in a  vivid style that oscillates between earthy ("the tangled noodles of the collective mind") and flowery  ("blueprints inked upon the fiery heart"), TechGnosis succeeds brilliantly in revealing the unexpected interdependence of science and spirituality. If the book has one flaw, it's  Davis's well-meant  attempt to walk a "sane" midpath between non-judgemental generosity towards the often preposterous expressions of the mystical imagination and  postmodern distrust of belief  (including the theology of science as salvation).  Endorsing Vaclav Havel's rather hazy notion of "post-religious spirituality," Davis aspires to be something oxymoronic:  "a sacred ironist or a visionary skeptic... dancing between logic and archaic perception, myth and modernity."  Yet  surely one of the things that spirituality and science share is the aspiration to truth;  both say "this is how reality/the cosmos really works."  Postmodern irony, which makes every assertion provisional, is ultimately the real enemy to the scientific and spiritual impulses,  which are both based on the conviction that we can know something for certain.

Artetetra

Various Artists

Exotic ésotérique Vol.2

Artetetra 

Various Artists

Jungle Judgin' / Holypalms remix compilation

Artetetra 

The Wire, June 2017

by Simon Reynolds

A visually pleasing palindrome, “Artetetra” also secretes within itself a clue to the concerns of the Italian label of the same name.  “Tetra” means “four” and the Fourth World, Jon Hassell’s Eighties term for audio hybrids of West and non-West, is the placeless place out of which emanate Artetetra musics.  The label goes one better at its bandcamp page, claiming citizenship of Quinto Mondo: the Fifth World. That slight escalation points to the internet’s impact on a new generation of music makers whose creative headspace is utterly deterritorialised, omnivorous audio-tourists able to scavenge influences galore without ever leaving their desks. Indeed INTERNET HOLIDAYS™ is the sly title of a joint project by Artetetra artists Hybrid Palms and Cheap Galapagos.

The “Mondo” in Quinto Mondo further winks at the Italy-spawned Sixties genre of exploitation films: documentaries whose voyeuristic enjoyment at ethnic curiosities paralleled the exotica boom of faux-Polynesian easy listening and tiki bars.   Blithely unbothered by issues like exploitation and misappropriation, not just refusing to fret about the danger of ethno-kitsch but actively enjoying the ersatz and fictitious, Artetetra inhabit a free-for-all world where time and space, history and geography, get guiltlessly jumbled up.

Officially based out of their Adriatic coastal hometown Potenza Picena but operating mostly from Bologna these days, Artetetra is a little over two years old. During that time it’s released eleven single-artist albums and two compilations: Exotic ésotérique Vol.1, which launched the label, and the polemically-themed collection My Goddess has a Crazy Bush, a protest against pubic depilation and a celebration of “the natural look”.  Now come two more compilations: Exotic ésotérique Vol.2, and Jungle Judgin', on which the Artetetra roster rework tracks from labelmate Holypalms’s 2016 album Jungle Judge.

A Moscow-based producer whose music is a frenetic, glittering meshwork of West African and South Asian rhythms, Holypalms is a typical Artetetra outernationalist. Other names seem like they might be alter-egos for the enigmatic duo behind the label. And still others come with colourful back stories that may have you wondering if they’re fabulations.  Kink Gong’s Erhai Floating Sound, for instance -  the label’s stand-out release so far – was supposedly recorded on the Chinese lake Erhai from a fishing boat connected by underwater cables to four other boats each carrying a speaker. “Pull the other one!” was my instant thought, but it seems that Kink Gong really is the alias of independent ethnomusicologist  Laurent Jeanneau,  who roams the Far East archiving vanishing folk musics and then electronically modulates the source sounds (voices, gongs, Chinese mouth organs, etc)  into creations like Floating Sound.

Kink Gong is oddly absent from Exotic ésotérique Vol.2 (although he does contribute one of the more low-key moments on the otherwise rambunctiously energetic and entertaining Holypalms remix album).  Indeed Vol. 2 is as much a foretaste of signings and releases to come as it is a showcase of output to date, featuring unfamiliar names like The Mauskovic Dance Band and Los Siquicos Litoraleños.  Described as a wunderkammer, a sonic cabinet of curiosities, and blended  seamlessly in the mix-tape style,  the compilation is far more assured and intriguing than its predecessor  (now regarded as a juvenile stumble by the label). The first side “Exotic” is – as the title suggests – blatantly worldy in vibe,  a beguiling safari through ethnological forgeries and far-fetched hybrids.  Afropop guitars are fed through postpunk flange; Wally Badarou synths quiver and shimmy; gnarly fuzzed acid-guitar rears up against a skyline of minarets; Hassell trumpet direct from Possible Worlds or “Houses In Motion” woozes like smog draping itself over a tropical megacity.  Now and then things verge on full-of-Eastern-promise cheese:  BICIKL’s “Penga” features belly-dance percussion, gong-crashes, scimitar-flashing Arabian guitar. But mostly the cosmopolitanism is scrambled, the sonic cartography suggestive of magic-realist extensions to the map rather than actual existing countries.  Sometimes the music suggest off-land strangeness: Los Siquicos Litoraleños’s  “Misterios del Amazonas,”  all glassy tinkles and bobbing splodges of keyboard, moves with the absurd-yet-effective underwater gait of a manatee. 

“Esoterik”, the second side, is less ethnodelic, more abstract.  Tracks by Vacuum Templi and Tacet Tacet Tacet recall the amorphous grey zones of industrial’s ambient-leaning outfits, such as Zoviet France.  Other artists intersect with recent online-underground styles like vaporwave, or that texturally splattery, event-crammed style of digital experimental composition associated with labels like PAN. Electro Summer Arcade’s “ラテックスキリスト” is beached yacht rock, the hull corroded and pocked with holes. Jealousy Party’s “Polymorphic stomp” describes itself perfectly:  Deleuze & Guattari’s body-without-organs trying to shake its floppy ‘n’ oozing stuff on a crowded dancefloor. As the track devolves further, imagine a musique concrète jam session involving actually sticky stuff - preserves, syrups, marmalade – as sound-sources. 

Recently there’s been a discernible uptick of interest in the Fourth World concept: from Optimo’s Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017) compilation, through labels such as Discrepant, to music-sharing blogs with a penchant for the “neo geo” Japanese style of Eighties exquisiteness that blurred the borders between ambient, new age and exotica (think Midori Takada).  Indeed “nat-geo 3.0” is another word Artetetra deploy on their bandcamp page, but less as a nod to Sakamoto’s neo-geo concept, they say, more as a play on National Geographic, the periodical that brought the aliens already on this planet into suburban homes and dentist waiting rooms across the West.

You could place Artetetra as the latest outcrop of a long, discontinuous tradition. Most recently, there’s been Sublime Frequencies and hypnagogic tape explorers like Spencer Clark, Sun Araw, and Lieven Martens Moana. Before that, the Nineties techno-travelogue school of Loop Guru and David Toop.  The Eighties, decade of the world music boom, teemed with tourism: Holger Czukay, Malcolm Mclaren, Aksak Maboul,  Byrne/Eno, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, to name just a handful. But even in the Seventies you had Joni Mitchell sampling a Burundi beat on Hissing’s “The Jungle Line,” ethno-tinged side-projects by progressive musicians like Steve Winwood, not forgetting Ginger Baker’s godawful Africa 70.  Artetetra acknowledge many of these predecessors but point to the original exotica of Les Baxter and Arthur Lyman as a deeper affinity. 

Exoticism – or to phrase it less problematically, an openness to sounds, instruments, and rhythms from outside Western pop and unpop traditions – seems to come in waves, linked most likely to lull phases when renewal through external influx seems necessary or alluring. You could easily critique these practices as a hipster version of globalization: an End of Geography to match an alleged End of History, in which xenomania joins forces with  retromania in a desperate ransacking drive to fill up our voids with the reinvigorating riches of  other cultures, other eras.  But in the disorienting new context of a world that’s furiously reterritorializing itself – I write as Le Pen and Macron face off to determine the future of Europe - the light-hearted cosmopolitanism and Other-directed curiosity that characterise Artetetra and their kindred spirits starts to seem not only valid, but valorous.