Musical Affect, Musical Citation, Music-Immanence: Kurt Weill and the White Stripes

Nicholas Brown (bio)
University of Chicago at Illinois

Abstract

Beginning from an analysis of the anomalous position of music within Hegel’s system of aesthetics — a position that brings forth the peculiar quality of music as a medium — this essay asks how we are to conceive of musical meaning in an era when music’s relation to the market must be considered not separate from its formal specificity, but part as of the medium of music itself.

As I look over the reasons I have cited to explain why the sculptor of the Laocoön is so measured in the expression of bodily pain, I find that they derive without exception from art-specific conditions, from the necessary limits and exigencies imposed by sculpture. I can scarcely imagine applying any of these to poetry. (28)

G.E. Lessing

As Hegel embarks on his discussion of music, he concedes uncharacteristically that he is “little versed in this area, and must therefore apologize in advance” (Ästhetik 137). Hegel’s perplexity is twofold, and only partly to be chalked up to his relative ignorance of music and lack of advanced musical taste. In a preceding discussion of painting he had, by contrast, come close to defending a pictorial abstraction that did not yet exist:

[Painting] must go to the extreme of appearance as such; that is, to the point where all content is indifferent, and the artistic creation of appearances becomes the main interest… This is no mere industrious detail-work, but rather an intellectually rich effort that rounds out every particular while maintaining the whole in unity and flux. (36-37)

Precisely this same threshold, the point where content becomes indifferent and medium-specific considerations assume the foreground, assumes the opposite valence in his discussion of music:

In recent times music has retreated into its own medium by tearing away from content that is already clear on its own account; it has thereby lost its power over the entire interior landscape. The pleasure it offers is directed only to one side of art, namely mere interest in pure musicality and skill in composition. This side, which little appeals to ordinary people’s interest in art, is only a matter for experts and connoisseurs. (145)

In both cases the substance of the work shifts from content to form on its own account. But in the case of painting, the latter is “no mere industrious detail-work,” while in that of music it is nothing but “mere… skill in composition.” The difference is that in the first case, non-formal content is indifferent but not absent; Hegel, even though he approaches the threshold of medium-immanent meaning in his emphasis on painterly form, has no concept of a purely painterly or purely musical idea.[1] Despite occasional gestures in its direction, then, Hegel has nothing to say about the “intellectually rich effort [geistreicher Fleiß]” or, to use his own jargon, the spiritual content of musical form, which is rather dismissed as “only a matter for experts.” From one side of the threshold, Hegel looks prescient and aesthetically adventurous; from the other, blinkered and provincial. (This pattern in Hegel does not confine itself to the Aesthetics.) Whether or not Hegel’s conception of art can be made to cross this threshold is an important question, but the point for the moment is that Hegel himself produces that limit but does not cross it.

But this is only Hegel’s first perplexity. The second is that music as he understands it then has no place in his system. As long as it can be tied to a non-musical meaning that is “already clear on its own account,” music is second only to poetry in its ability to register the inwardness of thought, and indeed this penultimate position is the place it officially holds in Hegel’s system. But in this case music is reduced to supplying amplificatory effects for an existing content. Alternatively, music may, rather than expressing an idea, “provoke” ideas in us as listeners; but in that case the idea is merely “ours” and does not belong to the work (146-47). Finally, music can affect our mental states directly, bypassing ideation altogether: music can “penetrate,” “seize,” “touch,” “draw on,” “set in motion,” “enflame,” “carry away,” “divert,” “distract,” “spur,” “incite” (eindringen, fassen, berühren, fortziehen, in Bewegung setzen, anfeuern, heben, beschäftigen, abziehen, antreiben, zum Angriff anfeuern) and so on (157, 158). But there is nothing specific to the fine arts about the production of affective states, which are themselves abstract and have no content of their own. Meaning can only be supplied by a non-musical supplement, whether it be a ballad’s lyric or a context of nationalistic fervor. Indeed on closer examination the first two Hegelian possibilities reveal themselves as only versions of the third: if music “provokes” ideas that are not in the music itself or amplifies ideas that are supplementary to it, these are versions of inducing a state instead of producing a meaning. Because Hegel has no concept of a purely musical idea, the remaining possibility, music that remains “within the purely musical domain of sounds” is the fundamental condition of music as such, which is then “not strictly to be counted among the arts” at all (148, 149).

We are not obliged to be interested in the question of where music belongs in Hegel’s system of the arts. Nonetheless, his discussion points to a problem that is urgent for us today. Hegel’s perplexity is brought on by the fact that the specific feature that distinguishes music from the other arts — when it is considered apart from the aspect of its “mere” compositional elaboration — is its ability to produce affective states in listeners directly. To take only the most basic element, any perceived musical beat is enough to organize the internal or external movements of a listener. As Hegel puts it, “since the time of the sound is also that of the subject, sound… sets the self in motion.” Our neuroscientists call this “tempo entrainment” (146-47).[2] The problem for us is that this feature would seem to disqualify music from the arts even more strongly in our own day than in Hegel’s. Why?

In his discussion of the Laocoön, Lessing was exasperated with interpretation that imagined it could leap to hermeneutic conclusions without passing through the moment of medium specificity: it is not that the Greek was, as Winkelmann had it, “even in extremity a great and steadfast soul” in comparison with modern sufferers, but that the sculptor of the Laocoön had to deal with the difficulty of, among other things, the great hole in his sculpture that a proper scream would require (qtd. Lessing 10). Lessing’s insight today must be taken a step further: the concept of medium or material support must today be expanded to include a mode of distribution, which today imposes limits and positively determines possibilities with as much force as the immediately material support itself. Think, for example, of the television show The Office and its American remake. The two shows would seem to share a medium. The remake, however, systematically writes out, from the initial episode on, uncomfortable possibilities in the original: damage is domesticated to quirkiness and ultimately every quirk is a point of relatability. In short, the American Office is Cheers, where everybody knows your name. The temptation is then to make cultural comparisons between the US and the UK, or between “American” and “British” humor. But the difference between The Office and its remake is not the difference between bitter British office workers and quirky American office workers, or that between humour and humor, but rather that between a cultural field supported by a national television license tax, which allows a certain autonomy at the margins, and a cultural field whose one unavoidable function is to sell airtime to advertisers. It is not that the former is “better” in some abstract sense — the American version can be funnier and its identificatory effects are masterfully produced — but that they are different in a specific sense, namely that only the former can plausibly claim a meaning, since its end is not immediately an external one that can only be achieved by being more ingratiating than its competitors at that time slot. The Office can make the “inescapable claim of every work, however negligible, within its limits to reflect the whole”; the American remake, if it can be said to have a meaning, can only have a sociological one, an ideology by default, which is to say the ideology of the sitcom itself: “not, as is maintained, flight from a rotten reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (Horkheimer and Adorno 130).

Now, what music does par excellence — provoke affective states in listeners — would seem, under current conditions, to foreclose absolutely the possibility of its being a medium for artworks. For any provoked effect is, under current conditions, always already a commodity. As the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz concisely puts it, quoting Marx: “In a capitalist regime, any form of utility suffices to make anything or anyone ‘an official member of the world of commodities’” (25). Just because a work of art is a commodity doesn’t mean that it is immediately and only a commodity. Among other possibilities, the commodity-character of the artwork can be contained by means of the establishment of a Bourdieusian “field of restricted production,” which forcibly substitutes for the “unpredictable verdicts of an anonymous public” — the problem of the seller of commodities — a “public of equals who are also competitors” (Bourdieu 54, 56). In this way modernism can, from within a full-blown market society, assert the autonomy of artworks from the market. But the entire weight of the concept of postmodernism is that this moment is no longer: that restricted fields — Hegel’s “experts and connoisseurs” — have been overmatched once and for all by the anonymous market, and that henceforth all artworks are immediately commodities after all. Doubtless, restricted spheres, from amateur to vanguard spaces, still exist here and there, but their tendential extinction is taken for granted by all parties: restricted spheres are justified not by their autonomy from the general market, but by their contribution to it.

Today, the meaning of musical works cannot be established without explicitly taking account of their mode of distribution, which is to say without taking account of the fact that they are understood to be immediately commodities. And in such a situation it is an unavoidable fact that, in Schwarz’s words, “concrete forms of activity cease to have their justifications in themselves. Their end is external, their particular forms inessential” (23). The essential end of the commodity is to find a purchaser on the anonymous market; any other end, the putative use-value, is inessential.[3] In other words, no commodity can plausibly produce a meaning — whose end is by definition essential — and no musical subjective effect is, under current conditions, not a commodity. This has the unhappy consequence that the music one likes is, insofar as its ends are bound up with effects for which one likes it, excluded from the category of art. (This assumes the postulate that an artifact must produce a meaning — which as we shall see may be no more than a purely formal “aboutness” — in order to qualify as an artwork. There is not sufficient space here to justify this assumption, but it may be enough to point out that to do without it would be devastating for cultural study as we know it. The sociology of art would remain, but not as a recognizably distinct field). So the question of how to produce music whose aim is not to produce effects is an urgent one. In the space that remains, we will examine two moments that attempt to contain the commodity character of the musical work without recourse to a restricted field, in other words works that make a plausible claim to meaning while participating immediately in the general market in cultural goods. In the first case — call it modernist — the market is a risk deliberately run, the restricted field a temptation to be avoided; in the second, the restricted field has not only been overpowered by the market, but has disappeared even as a horizon of cultural production.

In his essay “On the Gestic Character of Music” Kurt Weill proclaimed that “today the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment” (Ausgewählte Schriften 41). Weill, writing in the period of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, is contending here with the Brechtian problem of the entertainment-commodity. As is well known, Brecht’s theater aims explicitly at autonomy from the market. Entertainment precedes the market, of course: opera “was a means of pleasure long before it was a commodity” (Brecht 16). But under present conditions, “art is a commodity” whose value derives, in the case of opera, from “the social function of the theater apparatus, namely to provide an evening’s entertainment” (16, 14, 26). In Mahagonny, this pleasure is aesthetically neutralized by framing it:

As for the content of [Mahagonny], its content is pleasure: fun not only as form, but as subject matter. Pleasure is at least to be the object of inquiry, even as the inquiry is to be an object of pleasure. Pleasure enters here in its present historical form: as a commodity. (18)

The two sides of the chiasmus are not symmetrical. The inquiry as an object of pleasure (Mahagonny) is a commodity; pleasure as an object of inquiry (Mahagonny) is not. Supported by the theater apparatus, epic theater  is to be within it a “foreign body” (29).

Weill’s proposition that “the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment” is directed toward this end, which is both more radical and less prudish than his statement suggests. The target of Weill’s criticism is the “theater of the past epoch,” which was “written for sensual enjoyment. It wanted to titillate, to irritate, to arouse, to upset [kitzeln, erregen, aufpeitschen, umwerfen] the spectator” (Weill Ausgewählte Schriften 40). So “to irritate” and “to upset” are included under the heading of “sensual enjoyment.” Indeed, Weill forbids the provocation of any kind of affective state in the spectator in what he calls “gestic music.” This is not really a surprise, being very much in line with Brecht’s anathematization of such theatrical effects as “coerced empathy” (Brecht 210-212). But surely Weill has painted himself into a corner: the thing music is forbidden to do is precisely the thing that, as we have seen, distinguishes music from the other arts.

The paradigmatic modernist solution — the purely music-immanent exploration of music as a medium, supported by a restricted field — is precisely what Weill seeks to overcome:

The recent development of music has been predominantly aesthetic: emancipation from the nineteenth century, struggle against extra-musical influences (program music, symbolism, realism), return to absolute music. […] Today we are a step further. A clear separation is taking place between those musicians who… as if in a private club, work on the solution to aesthetic problems, and others who will undertake to engage any audience whatever. (Musik und Theater 45).

Even as the moment of music-immanent development is seen as a forward step, two contrary imperatives are suggested at once: to engage an audience beyond the specialized restricted field of musicians and experts, and to produce meanings beyond those that only the restricted audience cares about, which is to say meanings that are not purely music-immanent. These two imperatives seem to be aligned, and they have a certain populism in common. In fact, as Weill is well aware, they are deeply in conflict. In a market society, the first imperative can be satisfied only by risking the market — “any audience whatever.” But the second imperative, to produce political meanings of the kind Weill is after, is one that the market is indifferent to; one which, in fact, is unmarketable, since meanings that can be sold — that is, meanings for which there is a demand — are not meanings at all, but commodities. A political meaning that satisfies a demand is not a meaning, but a purchasable point of social identification, like a lapel pin.

What is Weill’s solution? His own commentary in “On the Gestic Character of Music” and elsewhere is not particularly helpful on this score. But his practice is quite clear. The “Cannon Song” from Threepenny Opera is a martial variant of a barroom singalong, what might be classified generically as a barrack-room ballad. Like all good singalongs, it may well move a listener familiar with the piece to want to sing along, and the reason that it has this power might be something brain science or some other discipline can one day explain. Then again, some listeners may not be so moved, and the failure to be moved is in principle susceptible to explanation. But for Weill, this effect or its lack is irrelevant. The “barrack-room ballad” — the phrase is Kipling’s — is in Weill’s hands a gest, which is to say, a citation. Cannon Song frames the gesture, and in so doing creates a meaning, which is to present military camaraderie as deeply creepy.

Brecht’s text is also a citation, a pastiche of Kipling’s martial ditties like “Screw Guns”:

For you all love the screw-guns —
the screw-guns they all love you!

So when we call round with a few guns,
o’ course you know what to do — hoo! hoo!

Jest send your Chief an’ surrender —
it’s worse if you fights or you runs:

You can go where you please,
you can skid up the trees,
but you don’t get away from the guns. (19)

In Brecht’s text, racism and genocide move from (barely) subtext to text in a way that is deliberately unsubtle. On the page it falls a bit flat, but in Weill’s rousing mess-hall setting it is quite spectacular:

The troops live under
The cannons’ thunder
From cape to Cooch Behar.
And if it rained one day,
And they had chanced to stray
Across a different race,
Brown or pale of face,
They made them, if they liked,
Into their beefsteak tartare. (251-52) [4]

What is the source of the creepiness of “Cannon Song”? Like so many of the songs in Threepenny, the tempo marking is already a citation: “Foxtrot-Tempo” (Weill and Brecht 44-55). The basic rhythm is indeed a foxtrot (foursquare rhythm with accents on the off-beats), and the introductory trumpet part develops a jazzy motif, culminating in the ragtime cliché of bar six. But the “swing” of the initial motif is written in as a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note, and meant to be played as written, so it jerks rather than swings. The antiphonal saxophone line recalls jazz call and response — except it arrives a beat early, interrupting and disrupting the trumpet line rather than repeating and endorsing it. The introductory bars do not lead to the tonality of the verse; instead they have no obvious tonal center or direction. The angular melodic line of the introduction is not about to subordinate itself to the business of dancing, as becomes clear when, in the first repetition of the initial idea, the interval of a fifth is tightened up to an augmented fourth in bar three. Meanwhile, the instrumentation — in particular, the use of the lower brass — emphasizes the relationship between popular dance music and marching music, a connection which bears on the meaning of the song. When the song lands on a tonal center (bar seven), the underlying harmonic movement becomes conventional, tied to the cycle of fourths (see particularly bars 14–16), which can be intuited or arrived at analytically. But this structure is estranged by avoiding triads and the movements they imply almost entirely: the harmonic surface consists of paired sets of fifths juxtaposed on the on and off beats. The result is both estranging — the conventional movements are robbed of any illusion of necessity — and vaguely orientalizing, which is emphasized by the largely pentatonic melody. The song finally becomes diatonic and tonally centered only with the martial refrain, which, in a series of descending half notes (“cape to Cooch Behar”), spells out a minor chord (F# minor) and lands on its dominant — the first conventionally outlined chord of the song. This is the music of the beer hall — or of the recruiting station. But the middle voice, a teetotaler or a pacifist, already puts this tonality in doubt. The dominant lasts long enough to disorient, tightening up into a diminished chord rather than resolving. Finally, at the height of the barbarism of the lyrics, a cadence arrives that centers on another fully spelled out dominant, which occurs at the climax of the song (the “beefsteak” before “tartare”) in bar 34. But the implied cadence is doubly false, both misleading about where it is going and where it is coming from. It ought to lead to A minor, but leads to D minor instead. And while the melody at “They made them, if they liked” (bar 32) suggests that we are still essentially in F# minor, bar 33 is already in D minor. So the false cadence is not only false, but rather than lead somewhere surprising, it leads exactly nowhere. The overall effect, if one cares to look at it this closely, is to remove all sense of naturalness from the underlying conventional structures. The song hews just close enough to conventional forms — foxtrot, march, barrack-room ballad; cycle of fourths, largely nachsingbare melody, climactic cadence — to borrow their effects, while simultaneously denaturalizing them by formal means. These means are not effects except inasmuch as they aim at the variously translated Brechtian “disidentification effect,” which in the terms of the present study is not strictly an effect but rather a set of techniques for forestalling effects or framing them and subjecting them to interpretation. All this is simply to read as immanent to the song what it is hard to imagine any listener denying, namely that the product of these formal distortions is deeply creepy.

“Today the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment.” If one imagines setting a war anthem in a state-sanctioned patriotic film, the first thing on the composer’s mind would be producing the singalong effect, an identificatory esprit de corps, in as many people as possible. If one imagines setting an anthem in a commercial film, the first thing on the composer’s mind would be the same, but for a different reason: to appeal to as many people as possible who already want to experience identificatory esprit de corps. Brecht’s and Weill’s version functions entirely differently, since one need not feel the force of the singalong to understand Weill’s meaning. One does, however, need to grasp its citational system (if not with any specificity) to understand how it fuses the brutality of Brecht’s lyric with the social cohesion of military esprit de corps — not so different from that of the dance hall, after all — while framing all these elements by shearing them of all appearance of necessity, and thus imposing an interpretation.

But chances are you will feel its force; “Cannon Song” remains, all this aside, a rousing air. This is irrelevant to the meaning of “Cannon Song” as a work of art, but it is far from irrelevant to its success as popular entertainment. As Brecht says, “Theater remains theater, even when it is didactic theater; and so long as it is good theater, it is entertaining” (Schriften zum Theater 66). If “Cannon Song” failed as a rousing air, that would not change its meaning; but nor would Threepenny have been, in the five years before the Nazis came to power, translated into eighteen languages and been performed more than 10,000 times, and nor would we be talking about it today. “Up to the stable scene the audience seemed cold and apathetic, as though convinced in advance that it had come to a certain flop. Then after the [K]anonen song, an unbelievable roar went up, and from that point it was wonderfully, intoxicatingly clear that the public was with us” (Lenya 93).

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly dramatizes a central problem of the music industry, which is in the business of vending musical stimuli like the singalong effect of the Cannon Song. (By the novel’s end in our own near future, these effects are marketed principally to toddlers.) Because the industry is concerned entirely with saleability —it is an industry, after all — it constitutively cannot concern itself with the “aboutness” of a musical work except to the extent that that aboutness is marketable: to the extent, that is, that the aboutness is a lure, only a pseudo-aboutness. Because the industry cannot recognize restricted spaces that are not already fundamentally oriented toward it, and which it at any rate dwarfs absolutely, there is no way, from the standpoint of the industry, to distinguish between meaning and its lack. But to the characters in the novel, who are not toddlers and who at some point had a love for the medium (if not, significantly, any substantial experience making music), this phenomenon represents an impasse, and induces a state of permanent crisis. The solution to this crisis, and the holy grail of the novel’s main characters, is aesthetic authenticity. Authenticity is not a criterion, but rather something you feel: when a record-industry executive goes back out into the field to hear a sister act that he later recognizes as “awful,” he feels “the music in his mouth, his ears, his ribs — or was that his own pulse? He was on fire!” (Egan 25, 23). If authenticity is something you feel rather than recognize, it is a stimulus after all, and for that reason can be produced more or less reliably like any other stimulus — one cannot exactly say faked or simulated, since there is no criterion other than feeling that distinguishes the putatively authentic. It is worth pointing out that Egan’s own novel traffics in aesthetic stimuli, namely the emotional gutpunches, in retrospect entirely conventional and efficiently, almost mechanically produced, that constitute the reason for being of the published short-story versions of several of its chapters. But the novel (whose A and B sides are meant to remind us of an LP) produces an entirely different solution to the problem of the vendable aesthetic stimulus: rather than concern itself with an emotional authenticity that is, as with its musical model, indistinguishable from purely manipulative inauthenticity, the novel organizes these attractively presented bittersweet candies into something quite different: not an authenticity, but an aboutness, a meaning that is both an indictment of the culture industry and a line of flight through it.

It is in this world, more or less precisely — A Visit from the Goon Squad takes place largely in the first decade of the current century — that the White Stripes achieved an astonishing cultural prominence that was also, of course, a commercial success. What separates the pet projects of the Goon Squad’s record executive referenced a moment ago — who returns in semi-retirement to producing “music with a raspy, analog sound, none of which had really sold” (312) that, presumably, feels to him like authenticity — from the White Stripes’? How do the White Stripes plausibly assert a meaning in a cultural field inimical to meaning as such?

The White Stripes’s “Hello Operator” is about as “raspy” as it is possible to get and still remain recognizably music (De Stijl). Though a suggestion of private meaning seeps through, the lyrics make as little public sense as the children’s rhyme “Miss Susie,” from which the first two lines are borrowed (De Stijl). They are not set to a melody, the pitch being determined by English speech patterns, as is the rhythm, which is regularized just enough to conform to a beat. The vocal quality is an assertive juvenile whine. The drum part under the lyrics consists entirely of quarter notes, on the beat, four to a measure, with the bare minimum — accented snare on beats 2 and 4 — to qualify it as a rock beat. The guitar part is also minimal: two open chords, a fourth apart, each held for half a beat on the first beat of each measure. (The guitar will fill some of the empty space with simple blues lines; elsewhere, the drum part will add exactly one eighth note to the straight quarter note pattern.) There is nothing in the basic structure of the verse that an able-bodied non-musician couldn’t learn to play — indeed nothing that a non-musician couldn’t come up with on her own — in a pair of afternoons.

The verse of “Hello Operator” is, in other words, the precise minimum organization of sound required to make a rock song — but not necessarily a rock song one would have any reason to listen to. Once the rock song has been stripped down to its minimal constituent parts, the question is what the minimum necessary to make a compelling rock song is. And the answer is stated, as clearly as a Beethovenian symphonic theme, in the drum solo immediately following the verse.[5] The phrase “drum solo” might summon the wrong connotations in the context of rock, as this one is played entirely on the rim of a snare drum, is short (four bars and an introductory bar), is repeated twice, and consists in its second half entirely of quarter notes. It is also quiet, so quiet that the hum from a guitar pedal can be heard under it until the latter is muted at the beginning of the first full measure — an apparently non-musical sound that reads as accidental, but, since it could have been fixed in the studio, must be understood as intentional. The solo is, in other words, emphatically framed, and consists of two ideas. The first — two quarter notes comprising half a measure — barely counts as an idea. The second is a cliché about as old as recognizably American popular music: it is none other than the ragtime cliché from bar six of “Cannon Song,” the rhythm Debussy hammers to death in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.”[6] What “Hello Operator” is about, then, what reverberates back to the beginning and culminates in the climax of the song, is the exploration of the relationship between an absolutely minimal musical phrase, two quarter notes, and a minimal syncopation with the same duration.

After the idea is presented by the drum, the guitar displays the pattern in a different light. Leading out of the drum solo, the guitar, transposing the syncopated pattern a half beat, changes its value and its musical function: rather than beginning on a downbeat, it ends on one. The initial statement of the idea on the snare drum is quiet and tentative, beginning from nothing, wavering from the pulse; the chordal guitar line, tightly aligned with the pulse, asserts the shifted pattern at volume, landing hard on a downbeat, and a new section develops the transformed idea. The relation between the two statements is that of premise and inference. As the transformed pattern is repeated, the guitar introduces a new chord: the subdominant, whose introduction has the expected effect of confirming the other two chords as tonic and dominant, and produces the unexpected illusion of opening up the harmonic possibilities of the song: in Lou Reed’s immortal words, three chords and you’re into jazz.

The song is bookended by elaborations of the central idea. The first is a two-bar guitar introduction based on an impure fifth scalar tone. Since it precedes the first explicit statement of the idea, it initially reads as an improvisation. But in retrospect there can be no doubt that the introduction is composed. It sounds moderately complex, but it is assembled out of precisely four elements, which derive from the two simple ideas presented in the drum solo: straight quarter notes, the syncopated pattern (what we will first hear on its own as the drum version), the same pattern transposed half a beat (which we will first hear on its own as the chordal guitar version, but which has yet a third value here, landing on a backbeat instead of a downbeat), and straight eighth notes, a variation on the minimal straight quarter notes phrase. The break is repeated precisely halfway through the song, and also provides an ecstatic climax. What ought to be a guitar solo, essentially postponing the climax once all the ideas have been stated, is played on a heavily distorted harmonica. To end the song, the single guitar line re-enters, in unison with the harmonica, with a third variation on the developed two-bar idea from the introduction. The unison is rough; again this could be accidental, but since another take or two would fix the problem, it must be regarded as intentional. After the rigorous separation of elements throughout the song, the climactic gesture of the convergence of guitar and harmonica is that of two lines of thought — the harmonica and guitar are mixed down into separate channels — simultaneously leading to the same conclusion. The affirmative value of these two bars is hard to exaggerate: it is a musical Q.E.D.

As if to confirm this, the name of the album on which the song appears is De Stijl, a movement that famously championed the abstraction, simplification, separation, exposed articulation, and balance of elements. The album title doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but it is a useful reminder that the simplification involved in “Hello Operator” aims at abstraction rather than primitivism.[7] As de Stijl’s foremost theoretical exponent put it, in medium-specific terms: “Arms, legs, trees, and landscapes are not unequivocally painterly means. Painterly means are: colors, forms, lines, and planes” (van Doesburg 32). The first thing one would want to say about the reading of “Hello Operator” undertaken above is that, unlike our earlier analysis of Kanonen Song, the esoteric meaning of the song — it is about the musical potential of a rhythmic cliché, about what musical elements are necessary to rock, and why — has no obvious relationship to an exoteric meaning. The adolescent aggression of the vocal quality could almost qualify as a kind of social gesture. But the nonsense lyrics, and the fact that the development of the idea occurs only elsewhere than the verse, are designed to undercut this possibility, though they cannot foreclose it entirely. (We shall return to this issue later.) As one of the narrators in A Visit from the Goon Squad remarks, “the songs… have titles like ‘Pet Rock’ and ‘Do the Math,’ and ‘Pass Me the Kool-Aid,’ but when we holler them aloud in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” (Egan 44). Aggressivity is, tautologically, social. But as much as possible, aggressivity is here reduced to a timbral quality, a tenor whine. “Hello Operator” is, in this sense, abstract: its musical idea is developed in near-complete isolation from non-musical or referential content, to which it can therefore no longer be subordinated. Simplicity then becomes a gesture of attention rather than of inattention. If a country song is, in the great songwriter Harlan Howard’s famous formulation, three chords and the truth, then the White Stripes’ definition of a rock song is three chords and an idea.

The well-nigh neo-plasticist songs like “Hello Operator” form one of the axes of the White Stripes’ project: to produce a theory of rock that is purely music-immanent. Even when these songs, as with the possibly even more successful “Fell in Love with a Girl,” do not state an explicit musical thesis, the challenge they set is the same (White Blood Cells). The aim is to produce a rock song to which nothing could be usefully added and from which nothing could be taken away without harm—a rock song with the minimum necessary elements, and which is therefore about what these necessary elements are. “Fell in Love with a Girl” consists of three elements: a drum pattern (with no variations), a rhythmic-harmonic pattern (two variations), and a melodic pattern (three variations). Since the variations overlap, there are essentially three total variations: two make up what are structurally verse and a third makes up what is structurally chorus, though the same ideas underlie both. But since they don’t overlap perfectly — and because the second version of the rhythmic-harmonic pattern is implied by the first, which is repeated under the third variation of the melodic pattern that occupies the place of the chorus — there must be a repeat. The repeat ends and the song is over, at one minute and fifty seconds: there is nothing further the song can say. As Joss Stone’s cover demonstrates, the song can hold one’s interest — quite a different matter — for twice that time, at the cost of overpainting it with cherubs.

The White Stripes’s project continues along another axis, however, one that will probably be more obvious. White Stripes albums are larded with historical references (the B-side of the “Hello Operator” single is a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”), and it is instructive to compare the function of these to Weill’s (Hello Operator). The most conspicuous example on De Stijl is a simplified but basically straight cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can Is Mine.” It would be hard not to read an affirmative relationship to the material (in the vein of Caetano Veloso’s systematic appropriation of Brazilian musical styles) as claiming an indefensible identity with McTell. A negative, disidentificatory one in Weill’s vein would be equally hard to defend: from what perspective, exactly, could a Piedmont Blues song be ironized? The lyrical material — a song that, at least on the surface, celebrates domestic abuse — raises the stakes along the same ethical axis, but with the polarity reversed. At the level of musical form, identification is dishonest, disidentification unthinkable; at the level of lyric, identification is unthinkable, disidentification dishonest. The performance is infused with a mischievous glee (but McTell’s is infused with a similar glee) at raising the same sets of hackles for completely contradictory reasons.

The White Stripes give up the game in the last twenty seconds of the track, but we will return to that in a moment. The riddle to the presence of “Your Southern Can Is Mine” on De Stijl can be solved entirely immanently. The relationship to the social material behind “Your Southern Can Is Mine” is neither affirmative nor critical, but nonexistent; it is raised only in order to be refused. The relationship is, rather, purely musical. (This is also true of the White Stripes’s deformative covers, which seek out potential rock ideas in non-rock genres: pop, country, bolero, and so on.) In both McTell’s original and the White Stripes’s cover, the guitar part is built out of two elements: a quarter note pattern, accented on the offbeats (in McTell’s version, the effect is like stride piano played on guitar), and a syncopated pattern of the same length, none other than the second, shifted statement from “Hello Operator” of the ragtime rhythm we first saw in bar six of “Cannon Song.”[8] In other words, both “Your Southern Can Is Mine” and “Hello Operator” work on the same musical material. The relationship to the material is un-ironic in the sense that McTell’s music is taken absolutely seriously. But there is no identity asserted between the White Stripes and McTell, precisely because no identity is asserted of either one separately. The only identity asserted is between McTell’s musical material and that of the White Stripes — a musical identity between ragtime guitar and rock — and that identity isn’t so much asserted as demonstrated. The straight covers open up the formal exploration of rock to history — but to a history that is purely musical.

A non-musical clip appended to the end of “Your Southern Can is Mine” — and of the album De Stijl — confirms this reading. Without context, the clip is mysterious. One man asks another if something is wrong, and why the other is acting so uncomfortable. The second man responds that he was in a traffic accident the night before, but nobody got hurt. The clip sounds old; there is a difference of power and class between the two men, but the accents are hard to place. The staginess of the first voice suggests nothing so much as a 1940s film. In fact the first man is Alan Lomax, and the second is Blind Willie McTell himself.[9] The moments that precede the included clip give the context. McTell, in Lomax’s hotel room in Atlanta, has just recorded some songs for inclusion in Lomax’s folk song archive at the Library of Congress. As Lomax apparently cannot tell, but is obvious to contemporary listeners, McTell is uncomfortable because Lomax has been trying to bully him into singing some “complainin’ songs.” By the time Lomax asks expressly for “Ain’t it Hard to be a Nigger, Nigger?” (McTell reponds, cautiously: “Well… that’s not… in our time”), a modern listener will be squirming almost as badly as McTell. The clip included on De Stijl begins, “You keep moving around, like you’re uncomfortable.” Why include this clip? Because Lomax is asking McTell to do what we tend to want McTell to do, which is to connect his music to an historical experience, as the product of an historical identity. McTell refuses, for philosophical reasons or out of caution. But the clip isn’t about McTell, it’s about Lomax; his position is an unquestionably false one, requiring someone to assert an identity that is instead being forced upon him — “Ain’t it hard to be a nigger, nigger?” — but it’s also the position we are in, as long as we take the ethical bait of “Your Southern Can is Mine.”

In keeping with the White Stripes’s practice, we have until now more or less ignored or derogated lyrical content by restricting it to private obscurity, nonsense, or purely generic meanings. But lyrical content cannot be ignored entirely: it can be reduced to “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” but not to “darn darn darn darn darn.” Adolescent agressivity is clearly an indispensable element, but adolescent aggressivity is framed or otherwise relativized rather than expressed. When Jack White says categorically, “I never write about myself…. I’m not going to pretend like ‘Oh, I’m waitin’ on a train, and my baby’s comin’ back,’” he’s not saying anything that’s not already true of every lyricist, including many who are taken to be, or let themselves be taken to be, expressing some kind of train-taking or other authenticity (White 78). But the White Stripes are careful to internalize the literary frame, so that any imputation of expression is not only a categorical mistake but also a literary one. To take an almost arbitrary example, the bridge of “There’s No Home for You Here” (Elephant), with its perfectly simple, perfectly direct hatred of bourgeois normalcy, is distilled rock sentiment:

Waking up for breakfast
Burning matches
Talking quickly
Breaking baubles
Throwing garbage
Drinking soda
Looking happy
Taking pictures
So completely stupid
Just go away

Though in the bridge and the title the target might as easily be tourists, the song is generically a kiss-off song, so the hatred is aimed at a specific person as well as at monogamy in general:

I’m only waiting for the proper time to tell you
That it’s impossible to get along with you
It’s hard to look you in the face when we are talking
So it helps to have a mirror in the room

I’ve not been merely looking forward to the performance
But there’s my cue and there’s a question on your face
Fortunately I have come across an answer
Which is go away and do not leave a trace

The situation is clear enough. But the speaker’s self-regard, apparent already in the self-understanding of breaking up as a performance, is literalized in the fact that he is looking not into another’s face but into a mirror as he delivers the coup de grace. Adolescent aggression is presented as inseparable from adolescent self-regard: hardly a novel thought, but one that serves its purpose, which is to relativize the content of generalized antisociality that is necessary to the song. The point is not to write great poetry (great poetry would not be a rock lyric), but to write a rock lyric that is minimally self-framing.

A second technique — and one that may also be at work in “There’s No Home for You Here” with its hatred of soda drinkers and picture takers — is the substitution of a private meaning for the public one that ought to be the core of the song. “Ball and Biscuit” (Elephant), in the song of that title, evidently refers to an illicit sexual practice, a drug recipe, or some kind of mindblowing combination of the two:

Let’s have a ball and a biscuit sugar
And take our sweet little time about it

The lyric, mostly spoken in a bullying drawl over a slow blues-rock, hovers — the vocal equivalent of Jim Morrison’s image on an album cover — between sexually threatening and ridiculous:

Right now you could care less about me
But soon enough you will care, by the time I’m done
…
Go read it in the newspaper
Ask your girlfriends and see if they know
That my strength is ten-fold girl
And I’ll let you see if you want to before you go

The drug-related possibility quickly loses plausibility as the song turns out to be, more than anything else, about the gestural content of guitar solos. There are three guitar solos in the song,  an absurd number for anyone, much less the White Stripes who tend to avoid them or keep them short. All three are spectacular, and spectacularly hyperbolic. The middle one is introduced by the statement, “I can think of one or two things to say about it” — “it” still having the same grammatical referent as “take our sweet little time about it,” namely “a ball and a biscuit” — and is concluded by “Do you get the point now?” immediately before a third solo is launched into. The gestural equivalence of rock guitar solos and sexual swagger has never been lost on anyone, but again it is self-framing rather than profundity which is aimed at, and if ever a work of art managed to fuse fun as an object of inquiry and inquiry as an object of fun, this is it. However, it takes only a moment’s research to discover the literal referent of “it”: “ball and biscuit” is industry jargon for an old omnidirectional microphone formerly used by the BBC, one of which was hanging from the ceiling at the studio where the song was recorded (White 79). This doesn’t change the meaning of the song, which says nothing about microphones and still promises a “girl” a transcendent and dangerous sexual experience. But that experience, the lyrical core of the song, is nothing, just a suggestive piece of language: a fact which both evacuates the meaning of the lyric and heightens the meaning of the social gesture of the form itself, since the meaning insists without a literal signifier.

Why is this derogation or relativization of the lyrics necessary? To the degree that the function of a pop song (i.e., the reason there is a market for it) is to amplify, monumentalize, and universalize an experience that is of necessity general (because appealing to a market) — which is to say trivial — then these techniques are straighforwardly Brechtian disidentification techniques. They present the “fun,” or affective charge, of adolescent antisociality (or of swaggering sexuality), but by making themselves about the affective charge of adolescent antisociality (or of swaggering sexuality), they wrest their autonomy from the requirement to produce that effect, which would otherwise subsume it. But one has also to remember the peculiar place that music holds in Hegel’s system: either it is, after literature, the art form closest to philosophy — that is, closest to the idea as such — or it contains no ideas at all, at best provoking them in others. But these two judgments refer to two different objects: music with lyrics, and music without. As we have seen, Hegel had no concept of music-immanent meaning, and so misunderstood instrumental music. But song as such is still illuminated by Hegel’s understanding, in that both of his judgments are real dangers to be avoided. As long as music accompanies lyrical content, it is liable to become a matter of giving bodily amplification to a meaning that is aimed at by the lyrics, which assume primacy. (If Schumann’s “Abends am Strand” gives some sense of the possibilities this fact opens up at an earlier moment in music history, a glance at any journalistic pop review will confirm the limits imposed by it for music that confronts normativity only as the market.)[10] In this case, music produces an accompanying effect, which the listener suffers. The song as such tends to the kind of synthetic mush that Weill despised.

But the second judgment must equally be avoided. In the last scene of the concert film Under Great White Northern Lights, Meg White sits next to Jack White on a piano bench while he sings and plays their song “White Moon.”[11] About halfway through the song, Meg White begins weeping, which continues throughout the song. Surely, the song is provoking an affective state, one that music has been known to produce even in Brechtians. But what is “White Moon” about? At first glance it appears to be nonsense; on closer inspection, it centers on Rita Hayworth, or rather images of her, in various contexts but mainly as a pinup above an army bunk during World War II. Obscurities remain, but there is nothing particularly shattering about the lyrical content. If one feels that there ought to be, this is because the song is musically a dirge. So Meg White is crying not because of the words, but in spite of them: her reaction is provoked rather than mediated through something expressed. This musical motive force might seem to be a desirable thing. But, to continue paraphrasing Hegel, the reason she is crying therefore is “merely hers,” which is to say not part of the song at all. Perhaps she has a visceral reaction to this song, but if so it is idiosyncratic. (Insisting that the song is about Ida Lupino would be incorrect; saying it is incorrect not to cry when listening to the song, however, would be absurd.) On the other hand the film has provided Meg White with ample reasons to cry: the stress of a punishing concert schedule, performing in a ridiculously exposed context in front of thousands of people, nights spent in hotels too wired to sleep but too tired to get off the couch, with an ex-husband who seems to spend precious down-time worrying about the next night’s tempos. Relief? Exhaustion? Fury? All possible, but even more obviously these reasons are “merely hers” rather than part of the song.

Music’s motive force is thematized within the song: “Oh Rita oh Rita, if you lived in Mesita, I would move you with the beat of a drum.” One is immediately suspicious, not that Jack White has deliberately set up this scene, which would be sadistic, but that the White Stripes—who seem to have had a hand in making the film (presumably the matching his-and-hers red and white propeller planes were neither a logistical necessity nor the filmmaker’s idea)—include this scene as an allegory of the paradox of music’s motive force. At any rate, the point is made. If the music is subordinate to the lyrics, then the song is a pop commodity. If one finds this line a little too direct, one can at best say that music is reduced to producing amplificatory effects. If, on the other hand, music circumvents lyrical content altogether, then it does not even pass through the illusion of meaning, instead directly producing effects that are not part of the song itself. The problem confronted is the same as that which led Weill to “approach his text from a position [other than] sensual enjoyment.” In Jack White’s terms, if “it’s just… trying to make us feel good, [you] could just as well be making drugs or a computer game” (qtd. in Persson).

Two kinds of meaning are aimed at by the White Stripes. First, purely music-immanent meaning, which is to say the exploration of musical ideas in the way neo-plasticism and other abstract pictorial movements explore painterly ideas. Second, a music-immanent theory of rock, which necessarily includes social content but which, also necessarily, abstracts from it as much as possible. For both kinds of meaning, lyrical content has to be retained, but neutralized, and the logic is straightforwardly Brechtian: fun — or whatever other effect — is to be included, but an internal distance from it is required if meaning is to be plausibly asserted.

Kurt Weill and the White Stripes produce music under substantially different historical conditions. Nonetheless, the family resemblance of their approaches is not coincidental. Both understand musical meaning in the same way — as either music-immanent or gestural-citational — as well as the obstacle to it posed by the market (which nonetheless must be risked). While both recognize the horizon of purely music-immanent meaning, it is only the White Stripes who attempt to produce it within a market-transmitted form. This is apparently paradoxical, as The White Stripes are removed from the possibility of a classically modernist, medium-immanent form of meaning sustained by a restricted field — a form of meaning that is actual for Weill but is rejected by him for political reasons. But perhaps there is no paradox: only when the old, non-market, classically modernist horizon is all but forgotten does it begin to seem necessary to assert a medium-immanent meaning within a cultural field saturated by exchange value.

This return to the ambition of music-immanent meaning is a most unexpected development. But it comes at a cost. White Stripes concerts ended with a rock version of the variously-titled “Boll Weevil Song,” best known through a Lead Belly version recorded by Alan Lomax in 1934.[12] There is a certain pedagogical force to the exercise, which is made explicit when the song is taught to the audience as a singalong. In a typically self-aware move, the act of teaching the song (as it was in Lead Belly’s version) is incorporated into the lyrics. But while the pedagogical element of the White Stripes’ project is not insubstantial, it has no ambitions beyond the purely music-immanent: there can be no mistaking the fact that the political content of the White Stripes’ project is negligible. Indeed, it is hard to imagine it having a politics at all. There is nothing that exempts political meanings from the logic of the White Stripes’ project, or from the logic of the commodity form. Any political meaning must either be relativized — in which case it is a politics that is interesting only so far as it is a rock politics, and thus music-immanent after all — or immediately fall prey to a market where it becomes a consumable point of identification, no different than other pop identifications.

But it is the aim of this essay to suggest that, under present circumstances, the assertion of artistic meaning — that is, the production of the unvalorizable within a society that subordinates every activity to the production of value — is itself a politics. It is not merely a matter of producing a line of flight along which artists can, within a value-saturated cultural field, produce non-values, which is to say meanings — though artists may certainly experience it that way. Rather, in a neoliberal regime — whose essence is the demand that everything be valorized — the production of the unvalorizable lodges a “foreign body” at contemporary capitalism’s ideological weak point. The political effectivity of such an act is necessarily beyond the scope of this essay. We are concerned with the problem of securing meaning against the ideological horizon of a fully market-saturated society. Meanings circulate or fail to circulate, compel or fail to compel. Success in the former, which is easily quantifiable, does not guarantee success in the latter, which is not. Arnold Schönberg wrote in 1946 that “if it is art, it is not for everyone, and if it is for everyone, it is not art” (34). One would want to avoid repeating Schönberg’s dogmatic error that because Threepenny was popular, it must not have been understood.

Footnotes

[1] More precisely, and more scandalously, the musical theme for Hegel is not an idea to be developed, but rather a mere sequence that exhausts itself in its first statement (Hegel 142). The scandal of course is that Hegel was an exact contemporary of Beethoven’s.

[2] There is a robust literature on “tempo entrainment.” See, for example, Nozoradan, et. al. Neuroscientific study of the arts has of course not limited itself to the effects of music. (See, for example, Goldman.) But while the neurological effects of literary representation do not include the crucial act of interpretation, and therefore clearly do not account for a key feature of literature, the corporal effects of music, which brain science may eventually be equipped to understand, seem intuitively to constitute the very being of music. It is easy conceptually to subordinate, along with Brecht, “coerced empathy” (an effect whose production in literature it is part of Goldman’s project to explain) to literary meaning (which is not part of Goldman’s project to explain). With music, it is less obvious what the provoked effects would be subordinated to.

[3] This logic is of course worked out most fully in the second chapter of Marx’s Capital, on exchange. For a fuller account of the logic as it applies to artworks, see Brown.

[4] The first couplet is borrowed from the Mannheim/Willet translation.

[5] Stating the essential idea in a drum solo is itself a statement about what constitutes musical necessity, as one thing everyone can agree on is that, in most rock, drum solos are definitely not a musical necessity. One of the self-imposed rules governing White Blood Cells was not to use guitar solos.

[6] The pattern, in Weill’s cut time, is written \EC.EC.C\. The shifted version would be, again in cut time, \S.EC.EC.\C. “Hello Operator” would be transcribed in 4/4 time, where it would look different, but the difference is purely customary — cut time being used for quick march-derived tempos — and has no bearing on the rhythm.

[7] The White Stripes’ determination to use only analog recording technology, while not directly relevant to the argument at hand, might seem to suggest a primitivist drive or a nostalgic one. But the preference for analog technology is purely technical. Analog technology is a victim of what Marx called “moralischer Verschleiss,” something like normative wear and tear, what happens when equipment is rendered worthless not by physical wear and tear, but by the appearance of equipment which is more efficient (which is to say, costs less per unit of value produced) but not necessarily better in any other way. “It’s not trying to sound retro. It’s just recognizing what was the pinnacle of recording technology” (White “Interview” 78). And another word for “worthless” is, of course, “affordable.” The famous department store guitars are also not an aesthetic decision in the usual sense, but rather part of the limiting conditions the White Stripes imposed on themselves to forestall the routinization of live performance. The attraction of the cheap guitars is not the sound, which surely disappears into the pedal board, but that they don’t stay in tune very well. And the point is not to let them go out of tune, but rather to impose an arbitrary constraint: one has to work constantly to keep them in tune.

[8] McTell’s tempo is closer to Weill’s foxtrot. Thinking in cut time: a quarter note pulse is accented on off-beats rather than backbeats, and the syncopation goes by twice as fast in relation to a quarter note as in “Hello Operator.”

[9] See jekk23’s YouTube video, Blind Willie McTell Monologue On Accidents.

[10] See Schumann and Heine.

[11] See Malloy.

[12] See Lead Belly.

Works Cited

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• —. Kurt Weill: Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, mit einer Auswahl von Gesprächen und Interviews. Eds. Stephen Hinton and Jürgen Schebera. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1990. Print.
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• —. Get Behind Me, Satan. V2, 2005. CD.
• —. White Blood Cells. Sympathy for the Record Industry, 2001. CD.