anti-theatricality and politics : MAGlamA + K-pop

Interesting piece titled "In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA" by Inae Oh at Mother Jones.  It's about plastic-surgery trends among Republican politicians - the rise of what's been called Mar-a-Lago-face.

She starts by looking at a piece of political theater from January 29, an ICE round-up of undocumented immigrants in New York. A clip of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem talking tough in the Bronx was widely circulated. "She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings.... Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a 'spectacle''.... Here was a top-ranking Trump appointee asserting the absence of performance after a theatrical show of force. That Noem tagged along for the predawn crackdown in the full glam of a Real Housewife made the claim even more absurd."

Inae Oh notes that Noem is just one of a number of women - and the occasional man - who on entering Trump's orbit underwent "striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.” 

And then there's the cosmetic surgery, the veneers, fillers and Botox-style injectables.   "What distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face... is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon... described it"

It's a reversal of the trend for plastic surgery that is subtle and barely perceptible: here, you want the work done to be glaringly visible. "The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt."

Quoted in the piece, a professor of art history, Anne Higonnet, diagnoses the trend as "a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters... These women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor, is also quoted arguing that the hyper-femininity reinforces the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity....  It reaffirms the femininity of women even if they have power” in the form of a cabinet appointment, administrative power within the Republican Party, or an influential media position. (Although Laura Loomer went too far for even Trump in terms of her worked-over appearance).  The trend thus magically reconciles empowering ambition and  conformist submission in a grand American conservative tradition going back to Phyllis Schlafly.

Horrorshow graphic accompanies the piece, combining the fleshiness and the laceration into a single arresting image. The face shards themselves become the knives. 

The pleased-to-meat-you quality of this collage reminds me of this stuff Americans call "headcheese"  (what an offputting name!) and what we Brits know as "brawn" -  discarded meat bits suspended in jelly, like a paperweight you can eat. 

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Incidentally the writer Inae Oh has Korean ancestry and winds up the piece  with talking about her visits to hyper-capitalist South Korea, "the plastic surgery capital of the world and my parents’ birthplace. The faces of manipulated uniformity—double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies—are jolting to witness. And at first, it’s almost funny; the absolute chokehold is weird to behold! But by the third or fourth day, the ambient sense that I am the odd one, even ugly, starts to creep in. Perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things."

This inevitably reminded me of K-Pop, which I wrote about in S+A as a form of digi-glam:

South Korean group GLAM – it stands for Girls Be Ambitious - release their third single “In Front of the Mirror”. They’re just one of scores of K-pop acts whose sound mashes together elements of R&B, rap, and Euro club sounds. Video-wise, there’s a similar whirl of decontextualised signifiers: dance-moves and clothing and fetish-objects from skateboarding, Goth/emo, Disney, ballet, ghetto fabulous, dystopian science fiction, fetish wear, retro-vintage, and a dozen more style dialects.  Luxury rubs against the militaristic, American sports juxtapose with Japanese imperial uniforms.  Androgyny is a big element in K-pop – but only for the boys, whose already-perfect skin is digitally sanded to a ceramic glisten. The girls are as hyper-femme as Nicki Minaj’s Harajuku Barbie (probably inspired by K-pop or its Japanese counterpart, J-pop). Perhaps the most intriguing thing about K-pop’s cachet with a select bunch of Western hipsters is its lack of exoticism. Barely perceptible quirks of cultural distance creep in here and there, but for the most part it’s a mirror image of Britney and One Direction type pop, a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. Half-sweatshop, half sweetshop, South Korea’s audiovideo industry churns out the ultimate in digiglam:  eye candy /ear candy so denatured and ultrabrite it’s hard to hold onto the idea that there is a “real” behind the pixie-dust pixels flickering over your eyeballs. Watching G-Dragon or 2NE1 miniaturised on a phone or hand-held, it feels even more like transmissions from some fairy tale world.

Talking about "K-pop’s cachet with a select bunch of Western hipsters"

It struck me that getting into K-pop is really the crack stage of poptimism. 

You started with a few sneaky white lines of Spice Girls and Britney Spears.

Then you're freebasing all kinds of boybands and girlgroups hatched in the managerial lab, choreographed to within an inch of their lives.

And then crack - that is K-Pop.

And perhaps hyperpop (blank as it tries to be, there's meta-intent lurking in there behind the faces - it's simulation pop, there's that tell-tale whiff of art school). 

Whereas K-pop is art-less -  just a hard hard hit of plastic-surface thrill-power, purely mercenary in its motivations, and as devilishly targeting the pleasure centers as the makers of soft drinks and crisps engineering "bliss points" and super-crunch into their products. 

Just as cocaine users (and the same applies for most other drugs, to be fair) don't care about the means by which the powder reaches their nostrils...  narco-cartels and gang warfare, mules and exploited coca peasants, likewise your K-Pop addict doesn't think about how the sausage gets made (high-pressure, suicides, discarded lives). 

Beyond crack? That would be anime popstars that have no physical existence at all. Vocaloids and whatever AI is coming up with next. 

Make-up with no face behind it, motion retouching without anything there in the first place to retouch or tint .... 

It's less exploitative because there's nobody there to be exploited. 

 

plastique fantastique

SOPHIE's posthumous album SOPHIE is out now on Transgressive and Future Classic - and there's some great stuff on it. 

An interesting piece at the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino looking at SOPHIE's career and work in terms of "plasticity" 

On "Bipp"

"black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel."

On SOPHIE'S early interviews:

"She’d picked the name Sophie, she said, because it “tastes good and it’s like moisturizer.” Her influences were “shopping, mainly.” She wondered if music could work like a theme-park roller coaster, leaving you nauseated and laughing, then leading you to purchase a key ring."

On SOPHIE'S process:

"Nothing else sounded like Sophie, because she made her sounds from scratch. She didn’t sample; she built each hiss and smack and boom by manipulating raw waveforms. She wanted to get to the “molecular level of a particular sound,” to understand why that sound “behaves a certain way when processed or cooked.” 

On SOPHIE's ethos:

"There was a sense that transformation was the point and the teleology; Sophie’s sonic plasticity pointed to interrelational reinvention, toward a truth that had to be formed in the primordial tide pool of a dark, pulsing room...... She had translated her life and her questions into these new sounds, evincing some personal ethic of the transhuman and the trans human, in which states of flux could be captured in digital permanence, in which alteration was how you approached the divine".

 

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As I have said before here, if any artist could have had a lengthy entry in the "Aftershocks" section of Shock and Awe, it would be SOPHIE. Below are my thoughts about "Faceshopping" and Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides

                                                                   

"Faceshopping"  is a digi-glam tour de force. 

                                       

Here's what I said about the video-single in the infamous C-tronica piece: 

"The 2018 song and video works simultaneously as a critique and a celebration of the idea of self-as-brand, drawing inspiration equally from 21st century social media and from the tradition of flamboyant display in ballroom and drag. A digital simulacrum of Sophie’s face—already a stylized mask of makeup—is shattered and reconstituted using computer-animation effects.

Further thoughts:

... What intrigued me about SOPHIE is this collision of extreme exteriority but then still a lingering belief in the idea of interiority. 

In interviews,  SOPHIE sometimes used the words "authentic" and "authenticity" as positive terms 

Some say that the album title Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides is intended to be read phonetically - "I love every person's insides"

An idea continued on the album's other single "It's Okay To Cry", which contains the line "I think your inside is your best side" 

Again playing on the contradiction between exteriority and interiority: the photographable pose ("your best side") versus deep hidden truth ("your inside").

Between selfie and self. 

Tears as a tear in the 2D image presented to the world. The abject inside leaking out.

The Superflat SuperSelf.   Surface as Shield. An inscrutable mask.

So there's a tension that is unresolved between the allure of digi-glamour (creating doctored images  - selfies or videoworks - and disseminating them for unknown eyes) and a lingering longing to be real, to be unprotected and honestly vulnerable,  nakedly pathetic even.  Because the truth is always weakness and damage. 

That is further enacted in the songs not just thematically but in the sound itself - a combo of super-glistening surface sheen and hyper-contoured sounds versus messy splurges of sound and tearing, shredding percussion....

The immaculate  versus maculate (the latter sound-palette evocative of stress, abjection, fragility, torsion).

A sonic dramatization of a fraught mental space caught between the opposed demands of exteriority versus interiority ..   expressive also of an unresolved tension between the idea of the self as performative and constructed versus the idea of identity as innate and fated. 

"Dramatization" is the word  - with the kind of music made by SOPHIE and others, there's a feeling that the music is staged. You don't  immerse yourself in the sound, lose yourself in it; you almost look at it. It enthralls you, but you remain external to it, at a distance: watching it as a sonic spectacle. A ceremony. 

That's why the phrase "tour de force" feels right. It's hard for me to imagine someone listening to "Faceshopping" in a habitual sort of way. It's too imposing. More like a show, an event to experience  rather than something that can accompany  everyday activity.  

A flagellant pageant of ritual rhythm. 

The opening salvo of lyric, as delivered by Cecile Believe - 

My face is the front of shop

My face is the real shop front

My shop is the face I front

I'm real when I shop my face

- also makes me think of a book I read for S+A:  Erving Goffman’s 1959 study of social life as theatre The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he formulated concepts like “impression management” and the “personal front.”  

The song is a deeply ambivalent commentary on the culture of art-I-fice and self-selling - identity as product.

Today's digi-glamorous Instaglam  spaces - a honeycomb hall of mirrors infinity infested by influencers (people paid to be seen - seen with products) - is like a decentralized and democratic version of the royal court.  A placeless place to be, a poser's paradise.  A festival of facades. (No wonder that the courtly world loved nothing more than a masquerade).

  References to pearls and glam(our) inevitably makes me think of this song: 

Me on "Mother of Pearl":

"Just as “Every Dream Home” has a religious undertow, “Mother of Pearl” references goddesses and the Holy Grail. But the most significant aspect of the song is the choice of mother of pearl as the trope of perfection (as opposed to diamonds or gold).The subliminal association is with the Virgin Mother: the whole song revolves around the madonna/whore dichotomy. Mother of pearl, also known as nacre, is an iridescent substance generated by particular species of oyster and other slimy mollusks.  Nacre is found on the inside of the shell, or on the outer surface of pearls. This pearlescent shimmer-stuff is a real-world analogue for glamour: an optically dazzling patina produced by an abject, formless biological interior.   Virtually imperishable, nacre exists right on the edge between the organic and inorganic, the mortal and the deathless.  It suggests that there is something life-denying, or least life-freezing, about glamour. Reversing William Blake’s dictum that “exuberance is beauty,” glamour replaces liveliness with a cold, still perfection: the pose, the photograph." 

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Thought for an essay: contrasting Poly Styrene and SOPHIE,  1970s rad-feminism and 2010s xenofeminism, "when I put on my make-up / the pretty little mask's not me" versus "Scalpel, lipstick, gel /action, camera, lights"

Art-I-Ficial

On X-Ray Spex and Poly in S+A:

"Marianne Elliott-Said picked Poly Styrene as her name as a “a send up of being a pop star... like a little figure, not me... a lightweight disposable product... that’s what pop stars are meant to be”. There’s an echo here of Bowie’s “plastic soul” and Ziggy as “plastic rocker”. As is the case with much punk, glam-turned-inside-out is what you get on the glorious Germfree Adolescents: tunes like  “Art-I-Ficial” cry out with a sort of jubilant bitterness, Poly unloosing her emptiness vengefully upon  a world that has made her generation inauthentic and  soul-less.  “Obsessed With You” blasts advertisers for whom every kid is “just another figure for the sales machine,” but also the impressionable, moldable kids; “I Am A Cliché”' and “I Am A Poseur” reflect back at society its own worst nightmare of youth-gone-wrong. “Let’s Submerge” and “Warrior In Woolworths” lampoon the concepts of rebellion and the underground on which punk itself is based. “The Day The World Turned Day-Glo” and “Plastic Bag” are hallucinatory consumer phantasmagorias - “I eat Kleenex for breakfast and use soft hygienic Weetabix to dry my tears,” “1977 and we are going mad! 1977 and we've seen too many ads!”-  like “Virginia Plain” soured and psychotic. 

"Identity is the crisis can't you see..."

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Related fragment: 

"Fueled by narcissism, our century’s great motivator, the hipster inflicted himself upon the world by way of his affinities, his special brands of choice. Then we bypassed the middleman and became the brands ourselves. “Life has become a performance, a rather banal and meaningless one. That may have been the case for centuries, but even more so now,” wrote Dean Kissick for Spike Magazine in 2021. “The only thing we can make now is ourselves; day after day, again and again.” Not only is this life of endless bonsai-pruning one’s public-facing persona bleak on its own terms, it also comes at the expense of real and lasting art. Today’s avant-garde make memes or podcasts; they generate discourse; they post."

- Meaghan Garvey on indie sleaze at GQ.