Scary Monsters

Monstrosity, Masculinity and Popular Music

Mark Duffett, Jon Hackett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501313394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Popular music and masculinity have rarely been examined through the lens of research into monstrosity. The discourses associated with rock and pop, however, actually include more 'monsters' than might at first be imagined. Attention to such individuals and cultures can say things about the operation of genre and gender, myth and meaning. Indeed, monstrosity has recently become a growing focus of cultural theory. This is in part because monsters raise shared concerns about transgression, subjectivity, agency, and community. Attention to monstrosity evokes both the spectre of projection (which invokes familial trauma and psychoanalysis) and shared anxieties (that in turn reflect ideologies and beliefs). By pursuing a series of insightful case studies, Scary Monster s considers different aspects of the connection between music, gender and monstrosity. Its argument is that attention to monstrosity provides a unique perspective on the study of masculinity in popular music culture.

1

A night at the Opera: Updating The Phantom

Music and monsters often go together. Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaston Leroux’s perennially popular story The Phantom of the Opera. When it was published in 1909, Leroux was churning out two novels a year – thirty in his lifetime – and saw himself as a commercial writer. He was, in a sense, an early exploitation merchant, a figure who specialized in turning subjects such as mutilation and cannibalism into commercial product. Leroux’s tale of the Phantom was about unrequited love and the haunting of a talented young singer. Christine Daaé’s father has died. As she slides into a state of madness, she hears a voice which she believes is the Angel of Music, sent by him to protect her. It turns out to be Erik, a physically disfigured character who lives underneath the Paris Opera House. Erik falls in love with Christine and teaches her how to excel as a singer. She cannot be his, however, both because he seems mysterious and tainted with death, and as she loves her childhood sweetheart, who is now Vicomte (Viscount) Raoul de Chagny. When Erik realizes that Raoul wants to kill him, he kidnaps Christine and threatens to blow up the Opera House. She then goes along with his ideas and pledges to marry him. In the story’s climax, Erik’s emotions are turned by their first kiss; after it, he frees Christine to be with Raoul and takes his own life.

A few years before Leroux finished The Phantom of the Opera, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (Freud 1900/1997a) talked about the family romance. His conception of psychosexual development centred on the way that our first relationship – that with our parents – shapes our understanding of intimate personal relationships. In brief, Freud believed that until they found ways to move on, boys became possessively attached to their mothers (the Oedipus complex) and feared they might be punished by their fathers (castration anxiety). For girls, the situation was a mirror image, with the father as repressed object of initial romantic stirrings. We are all challenged to move beyond the ties that bind us to such first relationships without losing appreciation for our parents’ unending love. Especially if anything goes wrong in early childhood, it can be hard to understand that you will always be your parents’ son or daughter, without always being their child. The family romance animated gothic literature well before Freud invented psychoanalysis, and The Phantom of the Opera was in the tradition. Beginning in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, the death-obsessed genre of gothic literature often included ghastly family curses and secrets uncovered by hapless innocents; it pointed to the diminishing role of fatherhood. Talking about gothic art, Gilda Williams (2007) adds:

The Gothic is escapist, retreating into distant landscapes, lost eras and outlandish personal appearance. It celebrates depression as a kind of desirable, living death. This inclination to transcend the ordinary, cultivate the anti-social and experiment with the sexual unknown makes Gothic a perfect haven for adolescence.

(p. 15)

She adds that ‘the Gothic remains indebted to an expansive group of broadly related themes’ (p. 16) which include a ‘perpetual erotic subtext’ (p. 17).

The Gothic sensibility is sensual, uncanny, refined, aesthetic, vampiric, abandoned and excessive, bringing together things that should have been kept apart; it rejects common sense, rationality, science and hard work. In short, it offers a kind of receding refuge from the harshness of the modern world; a chance for us to live it again in a different way. This refuge is also, however, a means of entrapment. With its emanating and enveloping, supposedly possessing quality, perhaps nothing is as gothic as music. Sound can therefore challenge the fixity of boundaries of the Self. In classic gothic literature, a vessel for the self is the haunted house. It becomes a dark expression of family patterns being handed on from the past. Leroux sutures Phantom to this tradition when he describes the Paris Opera House: ‘They were almost alone in the huge, gloomy house; and a great silence surrounded them’ (p. 67). Erik nevertheless has a saving grace. He is a hideous, masked ‘monster’ (Leroux 1909/2011, p. 137), but he is also a maestro: a composer and music maker. He explains that he has been working on a piece called Don Juan Triumphant and adds, ‘I began that work twenty years ago. When I have finished, I shall take it away with me in that coffin [where I sleep] and never wake up’ (p. 133).

The Phantom story rests on a number of assumptions about music based on romanticist thinking that emerged slowly and were prominent by the time Beethoven’s work was celebrated. Music professor Nicholas Cook summarizes:

There is, in short, a nexus of interrelated assumptions built into the basic language we use of music: that musicianship is the preserve of appropriately qualified specialists; that innovation (research and design) is central to musical culture; that the key personnel in musical culture are the composers who generate what might be termed the core product; that the performers are in essence no more than middlemen, apart from those exceptional interpreters who acquire a kind of honorary composer’s status; and that listeners are consumers, playing an essentially passive role in the cultural process that, in economic terms, they underpin.

(Cook 2000, p. 17)

Cook suggests that such assumptions led to the idea that music could be collected together in a museum, an archive that both registers the creative contribution of particular individuals from the past and, as collection or canon, keeps alive the memory of originators.

As a composer, Erik occupies a privileged place in this social process, yet as a ghost he is impotent in getting his music heard by anyone other than the performers who sing in his name. The voice promises to return Christine to the plenitude of her first romance with her father, despite his passing, through musical performance: ‘I will play “The Resurrection of Lazarus”, on the stroke of midnight, on your father’s tomb and on your father’s violin’ (p. 124). Inspired by the memory of her father, Christine channels the perfect music which Erik makes available. His music forms part of the sentimental attachment that draws Christine to him. Describing a performance of his piece Don Juan Triumphant, Christine explains that it ‘seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But, little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable. It intoxicated me; and it opened the door which separated us’ (p. 136). Christine is, in some ways, Erik’s fan. She displays traits stereotypically associated with fandom, having a hysterical, ‘highly strung imagination’ (p. 86). She is also possessed, explaining, ‘Alas, I was no longer mistress of myself: I had become his thing!’ (p. 124). Then, ‘I can tell you the effect that the music had upon me. It seemed to command me, personally, to come, to stand up and to come to it … I believed in it’ (p. 125). When Christine vanishes, Raoul ponders, ‘What influence has she undergone. What monster had carried her off and by what means?’ (p. 94) Raoul realizes the danger: ‘I saw your ecstasy at the sound of the voice, Christine … And that is what makes me alarmed on your behalf. You are under a very dangerous spell’ (p. 108). He adds, ‘When a man adopts such romantic methods to entice a young girl’s affections, the man must either be a villain, or the girl a fool: is that it?’ Christine replies, ‘Raoul, why do you condemn a man you have never seen, whom no one knows and about whom you, yourself know nothing?’ (p. 109) Christine’s possession is a point which conjoins the gothic to mass cultural assumptions about fandom,¹ because it suggests an abdication of personal autonomy (she cannot guide her own thoughts) and perhaps also subjectivity (she is no longer herself).

Christine’s tutelage from Erik is in part a matter of him bringing down the music of the spheres, but also of her reaching inside herself to find her soul. Raoul, meanwhile, is also Christine’s fan and finds empathy in her sorrow: ‘Oh Christine, my heart quivered that night at every accent of your voice. I saw the tears stream down your cheeks and I wept with you’ (p. 123). As Raoul said, ‘No professor can teach you accents such as those’ (p. 61). He recalls:

Christine and I knew that music; we had heard it as children. But it had never been executed with such divine art, even by [her father] Monsieur Daaé. I remembered all that Christine had told me of the Angel of Music. The air was The “Resurrection of Lazarus”, which old Monsieur Daaé used to play to us in his hours of melancholy and of faith. If Christine’s Angel had existed, it could not have played better, that night, on the late musician’s violin.

(p. 65)

On one level, we can read Erik simply as crass, commercial culture penetrating the Opera House, a grand bastion of high culture. After shocking his own parents, Erik found employment exploited as a ‘living corpse’ in fairs across Europe (p. 274).

Aural spectrality: Music in the age of sound recording

For several months, there had been nothing discussed at the Opera but this ghost in dress clothes who stalked about the building, from top to bottom, like a shadow, who spoke to nobody, to whom nobody dared speak, and who vanished as soon as he was seen, no one knowing how or where. As became a real ghost, he made no noise in walking. (Leroux, 1909/2011, p. 8)

Erik begins as a ghost in Leroux’s story. Unseen as he is, here, he represents a phantom spectator, perched up in Box Five of the grand tier of the theatre: both an upper class subject (‘in dress clothes’) and an isolated nonentity. Christine’s friend Meg Giry concludes, ‘The ghost is not seen … You only hear him when he is in the box. Mother has never seen him, but she has heard him’ (1909/2011, p. 14). The theme of exclusive audibility recurs when Raoul eavesdrops on Christine’s dressing room, where he hears a man’s voice demand that she love him. Leroux pointedly quips, ‘What a position for Chagny! To be caught listening behind a door!’ (1909/2011, p. 24). The Angel of Music is similarly, an audible experience: ‘No one ever sees the Angel; but he is heard by those who are meant to hear him’ (p. 55). Christine explains, ‘I had heard him for three months without seeing him. The first time I heard it, I thought, as you did, that that adorable voice was singing in another room’ (p. 121). That Raoul hears the voice too is important; Leroux follows it by a passage where the Vicomte sees multiple reflections of his lover in a mirror and wells up with tears, as if he is both aware that she is his own projection, and he is also drawn into her world of melancholic madness.

On another level, Erik himself conforms to the mass cultural notion of the demented fan. He is initially deceptive to Christine, telling her that he is indeed the Angel of Music that her father had promised to send after his death (p. 121). He also runs an extortion racket, demanding 240,000 francs per year in allowances from the Opera management (Leroux, 1909/2011, p. 33). Like a stalker, he lives in the shadows and threatens another singer called Carlotta so that Christine can take her place. At one point Erik writes, ‘If you appear tonight, you must be prepared for a great misfortune at the moment when you open your mouth to sing … a misfortune worse than death’ (p. 74). His interest in Christine is both a matter of unrequited love, and the idea that he can vicariously express his living essence (his creativity) through the voice and body of a ‘real’ living proxy. When Carlotta cannot perform and croaks like a frog, her lost voice signifies Erik’s own impotence: ‘But everyone knew how perfect an instrument her voice was; and there was no display of anger, but only of horror and dismay’ (p. 82). Indeed, the House managers, who are in the audience, in Erik’s box, immediately feel his presence and croak themselves, ‘smarting under the ghost’s attacks’ (p. 83). They ‘distinctly heard his voice in their right ears, the impossible voice, the mouthless voice’ which tells them the chandelier is about to come crashing down (p. 84). This ‘mouthless voice’ is a voice that appears to evoke what Michel Chion, calls acousmatic listening, ‘a situation wherein one hears the sound without seeing its cause’ (1994, p. 32): a form of sound and perceiving it that both confounds the listener’s understanding of its source and allows them to focus on it as sound qua sound.

Leroux’s novel was written in the wake of the early emergence of electronic media and audio playback technology. Recordings of the human voice date back to around 1860, when a phonautogram inscribed a twenty-second recording of the French folk tune, ‘Au clair de la lune.’ It was a short step from here to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which allowed in 1877 for virtually instantaneous playback, and Emile Berliner’s gramophone, a decade later, which played the flat discs that were the forerunner of vinyl records. Music historian Keir Keightley (2015) has shown that the assumptions that emerged around canned food suggesting something tainted or mediocre were transferred into discussions of music. By 1895, critics had begun talking disparagingly about ‘canned music’ as something compromised and made inferior. This gradually led to the idea that commercial imperatives had driven the adoption of sound carriers that both preserved music and, in a sense, destroyed its beauty or spirit.

Erik haunts. Tainted by death and sweetly singing with a ‘mouthless voice’, he is arguably positioned as a kind of contagion emerging from the newly ambient technology of canned music. ‘Hauntology’ is a term developed from the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida (1993/2006) to think about the way one thing can almost imperceptibly influence another, with time being out of joint (see Fisher 2013, 2014). In popular music research, the term has gained currency as a way to talk about how sound recordings give an illusion of rooted experience when what they actually present is a mere surface of sound. Recent academic discussions of ‘hauntology’ do not so much point to actual audience experience; audiences have rapidly become accustomed to the creep of mimetic media and only have an ‘eerie’ experience of it when commentators frame it that way. Instead, hauntology has become a kind of educative reading, designed to highlight the prominence of ‘dead labour’ in the production process. While Marx did not use the term, he outlined the concept in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

The sole antithesis to objectified labour is non-objectified, living labour. The one is present in space, the other in time, the one is in the past, the other is in the present, the one is already embodied in use value, the other, as human activity-in-process, is currently engaged in the process of self-objectification, the one is value, the other is value-creating.

(Marx 1859/2010, p. 35)

As technology moves forwards, the increasing predominance of dead labour in the production process is only meaningful insofar that it displaces and marginalizes living labour, rendering workers unemployed and changing their role. As Marx (1939/1993, p. 705) explained in the Grundrisse, as labour gets objectified, it ‘no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to the production process itself’. The progressive waves of industrialization have both transformed our daily occupations and continually reshaped our modes of entertainment. Seen this way, Phantom of the Opera reads as a novel about the coming of sound recording as a force of creative destruction that upset the live music industry. Before an epilogue, it ends by saying, ‘Erik is dead’; a phrase that takes on the status of a realization if we interpret Erik as the embodiment of documented sound. Journalists often talk about ‘the day the music died’ to be a tragedy that silences a community by robbing it of a key music maker: Buddy Holly, Elvis, Kurt Cobain or whoever. Yet sound recording itself kills music – ends its liveness and relocates the present as a memory. The miracle of ‘dead’ music, though, is that it comes alive when played, unless it is buried. In the prologue to his story, Leroux shares a letter from ‘General D’ about the kidnapping of aristocrat Vicomte de Chagny and disappearance of Chistine Daaé:

It will be remembered that, later, when digging in the substructure of the Opera, before burying the phonographic records of the artist’s voice, the workmen laid bare a corpse. I was at once able to prove that this corpse was that of the Opera ghost. I made the acting-manager put this proof to the test with his own hand; and it is now a matter of indifference to me if the papers pretend that the body was that of a victim of the [Paris] Commune.

(Leroux 1909/2011, p. 5)

The notion of burying the records and finding a corpse is reminiscent of fans who declare their wish to be buried with music, like the dedicated Status Quo fan in the record shop documentary, Sound It Out (Finlay 2011):

I mean, I’ve already said –, I’ve been doing research into this. This sounds morbid, I know, but one of the things I’ve looked into –, I would begrudge selling this [record collection] on to somebody, because I don’t know if they would actually look after it. I don’t have any children myself. I don’t have a partner. And I’ve thought, well, what’s the one way I’d like to be ‘thinged’ with my records? I thought, well, how about being buried with them? I was actually talking to an undertaker. He said, ‘Did you know that there is actually two or three companies that can actually melt your vinyl down and make it into a coffin?’ So that’s one of my things in my will. It’s to have all my vinyl melted down and be buried with my vinyl, in a vinyl coffin. It’s my idea of taking it with me, because it means so much to me.

However, the workmen who bury the records below the Paris Opera House are not so much interring a fan as repressing memories, and in that act of repression/sublimation, they encounter the evidential body of the ghost – they find him by going deep in an effort to bury the vinyl, to stop the music talking. There is much evidence to suggest, though, that Erik can never quite stop talking. As Simon Reynolds (2012) explained online in The Wire:

Edison originally conceived the phonograph as a way of preserving the voices of the dearly beloved after their demise. Records have habituated us to living with ghosts. We keep company with absent presences, the immortal but dead voices of the phonographic pantheon, from Caruso to Cobain.

Such claims raise the issue of spatial, temporal and emotional distance from celebrities. From one perspective they are always already distant (stellar), but we can gain access to them through alienated products, whether sound carriers or digital files. This means that our closeness to them emerges despite inevitable separation and always reflects a sense of loss; recording, physical death and temporal distance (their turning from event to memory) merely intensifies and reinforces the feeling. However, we might also say that such ideas play into the hands of mass cultural thinking that posit audiences as duped into believing that ‘dead’ products carry ‘living’ traces of our favourite performers. Perhaps the most important clue in The Phantom of the Opera is that Christine is kidnapped by Erik in the middle of her public singing, the implica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A night at the Opera: Updating The Phantom
• 2 ‘His muscles still bulged like iron bands’: King Kong and the promotion of Lead Belly
• 3 Colonel Parker and the art of commercial exploitation: The manager as monster
• 4 The platformed Prometheus: Frankenstein and glam rock
• 5 The case of Mark Chapman: Extreme fandom as monstrosity?
• 6 Exhuming the Gravediggaz: Gothic hip hop and monster capital
• 7 Masculinity on trial: Noir Désir and perverse narcissism
• 8 Jingle Jangle Man: Jimmy Savile, paedophilia and the music industry
• Notes
• Reference List
• Index
• Imprint