THE
ADVENT OF MUZAK: Part 2
Beautiful Nothingness
published in The Wire No. 173, July, 1998,
London
When
a lover whispers sweet nothings into another's ear, what is being
stated? When the singer's voice can emote while singing trivial
lyrics, what is being said? When a one-finger melody sends people
into rapture, what is being communicated? Modes of musicalization
from the lyrical to the timbrel abound with aural complexity in
the po-faced spectrum of understatement, vacuousness, mundanity,
dumbness.
Film
music is generally deaf to the power of beautiful nothingness
- of music's potency in reduction, of its force when cast in slight
stature. Film music is brassy, sassy, classy. It either foists
its mass upon our audio consciousness to suggest quality and production
value, or its recourse to the sotto vocce (a single wandering
pan pipe, the sole shimmering breath of a pubescent girl) effects
a similar bombast. Finally - and continually - film music generates
musical nothingness through its mimicry of itself, performing
caricatures of its own aural images and tonal gestures in a grotesquery
once expects from the drag queen's performance. The drag effect,
though, exists by default: film music is desperate to be active,
promotional, performative. It is there to assure you that it is
doing its job. It feels it has to signify, communicate, organize
narrational data for the ear. In its own way, film music then
whispers sweet nothings to us through its drenched and saturated
expression: its excessiveness amounts to the blandly articulated
presence of that which we expect to be 'film music'. Hence the
strong reactions against any music which does not perform in this
way.
Muzak
- the most carefully crafted inversion of music's sweet nothings
- occupies a peculiar place in the terrain of film music. Its
self-conscious presence is marked in occasional moments in early
70s counter-culture films (Robert Altman's oeuvre returns to this
sardonic motif often). De-vocalised music softly plays in an elevator,
waiting room or restaurant as a sign of middle class America's
self-sanitation and anaesthetisation. The music is coded as a
form of socio-political somnambulism. The point is as obvious
as a Rolling Stone editorial; the effect is equally cheap. To
this day, muzak is similarly employed as critique (even in fairly
recent MTV promos as a gag) - even though such social spaces have
not used lush 50s-style muzak or squaresville cover versions for
over two decades. These days, Kenny G, Vivaldi, Mariah Carey,
Deep Forest, the score to BETTY BLUE are more likely heard. Music
that has clear identity, purpose, status; music not designed to
erase its presence within your consciousness, but to fuse its
dimensional beauty with your own mindscaped lifestyle.
The
earliest and most astute inversion of muzak's numbing self-erasure
is to be found in the colour films of Jacques Tati. Muzak - a
mix of stock source music and composed frivolities - permeates
MON ONCLE (1958), PLAYTIME (1967), TRAFFIC (1972) and PARADE (1974).
Tati did not simply allude to the then-contemporaneous flavour
of glitzy pseudo-jazzy cocktail combos: he depicted the social
environs of such music. His scored moments are piped through the
visible architecture of the urban design upon which Tati based
his gags. Automation, urbanization, mechanisation are all ridiculed
as bourgeois ideals, and the muzak which wafts out of offices,
cafes and restaurants in Tati's films are the ambience of the
disinfected city which urban design to this day snorts so salaciously.
While films like FIVE EASY PIECES and THE GRADUATE frame muzak
in opposition to the songs, icons or performances which trumpet
the heroics of beat/hippie/college counter culture, Tati's films
smother one with the oppressiveness of the finicky style-obsessed
bourgeoisie and their mania for cosmetic altering of the social
terrain. His films feature hardcore muzak by openly declaring
the vapid aerated artiness that exists within that most suspect
of aesthetic categories - the beautiful.
The
70s cinematic aesthetic of bludgeoning both ignorant and knowing
forms of artificiality with the rubber mallets of 'realism' and
'naturalism' contributed to the mandate that film music be active
in its statement, pro-active in its presentation and committed
to is realization. Not suprisingly this has led to an ongoing
70s style aesthetic that feels comfortable with global/world eco-cliches
of pan pipes, pygmy samples and libraries of exotic percussion
purchasable from German CD companies. Muzak these days is conscious
and conscionable; tasteful and tasty. Enya (airlines - comfort
your patrons with this calming angel). The Gypsy Kings (spice
up your restaurant with these heady musicians). Art cinema especially
resembles the social domains from which these post/anti-muzak
stylings emerge. In doing so, all critical distance evaporates,
irony congeals, and the arty film score functions identical to
the cheesy, queasy aural niceties which irritated Tati so many
years ago.
It
took the violently obvious postmodernism of David Lynch's TWIN
PEAKS (1989) to make a clear statement on the preceding 20 years
of collusions between empty beauty and the existentialism inherent
in cosmeticized life-styles. Firstly, TWIN PEAKS engages in a
deft historical revisionism. Americana in the cinema has often
utilized the Southern and mid-Western states as retrogressive
repositories of all that east coast intellectualism has abhorred
for decades - particularly racism, xenophobia and insularism.
Music scores of most social issue films since the 50s focused
on a dialectic between the orchestral score and quotations of
folk musics (from the blues to bluegrass) localized in the land
mostly, from radio sometimes, on juke-boxes occasionally. Muzak
- a non-folk industrialized fabrication which the listener consumes
rather than identifies with - never appears in these scenarios.
TWIN PEAKS is a PEYTON PLACE whose aural ambience of timber mills
has been neutralized by the muzak of diners, clubs, hotels and
casinos. No 'music of the local population' is evident; all has
been replaced by a smothering somnambulistic softness. If muzak
is the music of soulless machines, TWIN PEAKS posits people as
a mix of the machinic, the mystical, the soulless, the sleepless.
Secondly, TWIN PEAKS actively allows this blanket of aural repression
to seep into the film score and replace it with what could be
termed a 'possessed muzak': a score which is trapped into behaving
like muzak while silencing its any overt or meta-textual mechanisms
of character interiority and psychological inquiry.
There
are few moments in TWIN PEAKS which sound like 'classic' muzak.
If anything, Angelo Badalamenti's score is like a slowed-down
rendering of Michael Mann's wilfully electronic soundscaping.
Badalamenti's rockabilly reverb is highly digital; the strings
are extremely electronic; the arrangements are archly modern in
their Hermanesque lumbering of dark motifs; the blurred jazz intonations
recall the early minimalist serialism of John Adams' AMERICAN
STANDARD. But one figure anchors the main theme in the world of
the beautiful: the 'water guitar' (sic) of Vinnie Bell. Since
the 50s, Bell has recorded numerous 'light instrumental/pop' albums
of evergreens and popular tunes of the times (from Caravan to
Let The Sunshine In). A renowned experimenter with amplifiers,
studio effects and tape manipulation (he was the first king of
the double-speed guitar), one of Bell's inventions - the shimmering
vibrato of the 'water guitar' - helped Ferrente and Teicher have
a huge international hit with their cover version of the theme
from AIRPORT (1970). The irony of known Easy Listening stars having
a hit with Alfred Newman's last score inspired by muzak-airport
lounge ambience certainly befits TWIN PEAKS' postmodern agenda.
The sleepy death erotic of hearing heavenly music prior to you
taking what might be your last flight has continued unabated since
- through Eno's MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS (1978) at JFK to the angelic
global soaring of X used in British Airway television ads. By
TWIN PEAKS, there was nearly 20 years of beautiful music that
was clearly coded with death: this will be the last sweetness
you hear before you become nothing. The texture of Badalamenti's
muzak-effects and Vinnie Bell's archaeology of waiting room music
resonates strongly in TWIN PEAKS and accounts for much of the
series' haunting and stilling qualities.
In
the Coen's THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), contemporary muzak behaves
similarly, but modulated by a penchant for abject blandness and
the numbingly ugly. Like TWIN PEAKS, the production design is
unerringly modern without resorting to camp. Many muzak moments
shine: The Gypsy Kings' version of The Eagles' Hotel California
plays in the bowling alley; Jeff Bridges pleads with an Afro-American
cab driver to turn The Eagles off the radio; Bridges listens to
whale songs on a shitty Walkman while he smokes joints in the
bath; a trio of German thugs blast bad late-70s John Fox-style
electro-angst-pop on a ghetto blaster; Esquivel bubbles as a bimbo
paints her toe nails by the pool; Yuma Sumac plays at the beach
party of a wealthy pornographer. Not all these moments are 'classically
muzak' - but they each demonstrate how all forms of music can
be emptied of value through production and consumption, rendering
them as aural nothingness within which people find solace or terror.
The
suburban mall pall of THE BIG LEBOWSKI echoes the Coen's excursions
into stop-and-shop culture in RAISING ARIZONA (1985) and their
most intense study of contemporary existentialism, FARGO (1996).
Both feature sublime scenes of muzak-infected domains, but an
oft-neglected aspect of the Coen's visual sterility is the counterpoint
played by the hyper-eclectic scoring of Carter Burwell. FARGO
demonstrates this vividly.
Against
the film's opening white screen, a luridly evocative title theme
swells and builds in volume, key modulation and orchestration.
It feels Gaelic; it moves like a funeral march; it performs with
a gypsy waywardness; it climbs in mythical scale. Its emotional
content is the exact opposite of muzak, for where muzak signifies
nothing by draining all recognizable dynamics into a muted referencing
of a known tune, Burwell's score to FARGO accrues impossibly high
dramatic levels of conflicting dramatics. Plus, the pure white
screen gives zero cues as to how this music is to be read. In
fact, it is not until the final scenes of the film that the score
reveals its identity as a mellowed acceptance of the most extreme
deviations of normality in the domestic realm. Rather than explicate
the dysfunctionality of its many characters and the mind-destroying
circumstances in which they sink or swim, FARGO opts for a rare
acknowledgment that normality is neither an ideal nor an aspirant.
It is merely a wafting veil like the snow of North Dakota. It
falls on you; you sweep it away; you rug up against it; it often
can look beautiful; it can make you lose your way. Burwell's scored
moments - decisively few and critically selective - make a clear
statement about beautiful nothingness through overscoring to create
an alienating effect. In the end, the gorgeous orchestrations
of his music are tempered by the abrasive existential veneer which
created muzak in the first place. Muzak mumurs the nothingness
of sweetness directly into your inner ear. Burwell's score to
FARGO scares your aural consciousness with the realization that
no amount of sweetness can cover the nothingness of everday life.
