Rancid Aphrodisiac

Subjectivity, Desire, and Rock 'n' Roll

Mickey Vallee

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623560140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

It has been sixty years since Rock 'n' Roll exploded into the mainstream, yet we remain limited in our understanding of how its bawdy excesses absorbed into the annals of mass popularity in such a short amount of time. Mickey Vallee asks: what if the Rock 'n' Roll eruption was nothing less than postwar consumer capitalism at its very best, precisely because it was taken as its very worst? Vallee explores the emergence of Rock 'n' Roll's from an entirely new theoretical disposition in order to answer this question, drawing mainly from Lacanian cultural psychoanalysis to reveal that Rock 'n' Roll was far more conformist than we are generally led to believe; namely, that it was conformist with emerging liberal principles of freedom from the tyranny of the state. Vallee supports this proposition with detailed analyses of familiar (and not-so-familiar) characters and texts in Rock 'n' Roll to suggest that the disruption of our symbolic economy was symptomatic of a new cultural logic of economic freedom. While not denying Rock 'n' Roll's role in the pre-civil rights movement, Vallee refuses the possibility to deny that Rock 'n' Roll's symbolic efficacy ultimately coordinated a neoliberal foundation to the ideology of individualism in its rhythm, instrumentation, lyrics, and vocals, where its power was at its most effective and affective.

1

“The One with the Waggly Tail”

Even ’n’ Emergence

I would like to begin with the moral regulation of the novelty song, especially its impossibly conformist standards against which Rock ’n’ roll retaliated. The novelty song, I argue, should not be underestimated in terms of its power of subjectification, such as the impossible standards represented in Bob Merrill’s bland novelty song, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” as sung by Patti Page in 1952.

How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf)

The one with the waggly tail

How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf)

I do hope that doggie’s for sale

I must take a trip to California

And leave my poor sweetheart alone

If he has a dog he won’t be lonesome

And the doggie will have a good home

Refrain

I read in the papers there are robbers (arf, arf)

With flashlights that shine in the dark

My love needs a doggie to protect him

And scare them away with one bark

Refrain

I don’t want a bunny or a kitty

I don’t want a parrot that talks

I don’t want a bowl of little fishies

He can’t take a goldfish for a walk

Refrain

The moral regulation implied by “That Doggie” is really quite distressing: Page’s voice ingratiates her sweetheart into a well-managed routine in the horizon of her impending absence by obliging “him” to the responsibility of a creature whose desperate need for attention, love, and regular exercise supersedes any of his own potential injunctions to enjoy a brief period of autonomy from the courtly work of the relationship. Snugly sung in a medium waltz over an oscillating I-V7 pattern, Page’s voice articulates the moral coordinates of appropriate etiquette and the cult of domesticity. Even its technical production is aligned with domesticity, an argument forwarded by Doyle (2005: 144): The specific use of echo and reverb was to reinforce the cult of domesticity established in the early twentieth-century music industry, reinforced through the recording techniques refined in the 1950s. Only by becoming acquiescent to her own housetraining can the domestic properly administer her duty. The law produces energies that are subversive to its imposition since it needs to be imposed on a regular basis in order for its representation to remain intact. What need is there to rebel if not against the blatant conformity of “That Doggie”?

Indeed, how does the voice of Page maintain itself as a domestic? By domesticating her others through a displaced object of domestication: that doggie in the window. She sacrifices herself to the law, producing a subjectivity through power. (By power, I refer to stretching for an all-inclusive representation of subversive subjects, to align them with the ideal or provide them as an example of a wrongdoing.) In place of her absence, she is not supplying her sweetheart with the imaginary phallus, which would be his, but with a traumatic inauguration of the system of meaning itself (Lacan 2011); he will not become her missing phallus, become her object of desire, because she is literally giving him the answer to his question: What is it that you want of me? To behave, but especially to be emotionally satisfied by doing so. This is, according to Žižek (2008: 18) at least, the trope of civilization through which the intersubjective sexual utopia is strained: “And this brings us to civility,” he explains; “an act of civility is precisely to feign that I want to do what the other asks me to do, so that my compliance with the other’s wish does not exert pressure on her.” Is it little wonder that the flipside to this record was “My Jealous Eyes”?

“That Doggie,” as the Other’s answer to the enigmatic question of desire, is decidedly not in the window; rather, it is the window to a predestination towards lack. “That Doggie” functions symbolically to disturb the illusory place of desire because there is indeed no answer that satisfies the question of desire. Instead, in the heteronormative doggie, desire is the veil that maintains the binary split between man and woman. Popular music history, in its most mainstream manifestations at least, has taught us that a woman must maintain her composure for the Ego of the singing man who adulates her in a series of enunciations that position her as his love object (McCusker and Pecknold 2004). And so Page’s direct answer of domestication takes what in other contexts stands as the object of desire (the phallic tail-wagging dog in “Hound Dog” or the curious master-obeying Jack Russell in His Master’s Voice) and disrupts the edifice of male fantasy.

“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” is a pathetic attempt to please the Other of desire, which is why “That Doggie” is nothing less than the imaginary phallus as conceived by Judith Butler, a component of the taxonomy of heteronormative desire. The phallus is metonymically linked with lack, because at once the Ego gives up the phallus in the Imaginary by recognizing that the feminine never possessed it, that it was never there, and that what constituted so much effort to win desire was something that was absent in the first place. So Page purchases “That Doggie in the Window” as an abstract, a general equivalent on the market that, when assuming the role of the Imaginary phallus, provides his ultimate humiliation. This domesticating role of the Other provides precisely the domesticating gaze that the Rock ’n’ roll subject will evade at all costs. And it is why, I argue, that Rock ’n’ roll makes no plea to the Other. It flees impotently and blindly from the Other.

Ultimately, perhaps, “That Doggie” represented a terrifying destination of being-towards-death that Rock ’n’ roll was to eventually thwart off in exaggerated steps of phallus-lacking machismo, a queer orientation. It represents a turning away towards the awry. Much like the man who awakens from his dream wherein which his dead son asks him why he is burning (Freud 1997: 353), it was not that “That Doggie” was too unbearable for music to wake up from its banal slumber, but rather how terrifying the banality of “That Doggie” was to demonstrate a most purely mechanistic function of music: to command through the injunction of the master signifier (Žižek 2004). “That Doggie” is a signifier without signified. It was the traumatic encounter that made necessary the resurrection of the dog as the emblem of virility, which was itself eventually displaced by a the family friendly hound dog Elvis sang to on the Steve Allen show in 1956 (Humphries 2003).

Then again, perhaps it is too polemical to assert that Rock ’n’ roll started with “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—that is, a straw dog. But is it not just as puerile to accredit any event as the inception of emergence? At what point does the emergence edify to mark the event identifiable? When does the event break off from the emergence that determined it? Accrediting an emergence to an event is performing an Ouroboric coup on history—it can only be retroactive, rendered meaningful once one disengages from emergence, to recover the memory of an event from its historical echo. And despite the fact that Rock ’n’ roll did not commence with a singular historical instance, rock historians have disputed each other regarding its genesis, whether in the service of serious scholarship or fandom aside. As Garofalo (1997: 82) famously wrote, “Trying to pinpoint the beginning of rock and roll is like trying to isolate the first drop of rain in a hurricane,” and so the debate about its beginning is really insignificant. G. F. Wald (2008) in Shout Sister Shout! claims it is Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (1944); some say it was “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Roy Brown (1947), as covered by Wynonie Harris; “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino (1949); Goree Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949); “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston (1949); “Rocket 88”—either Jackie Brenston’s original, recorded on 5 March 1951 with Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, or Bill Haley’s cover, later in 1951; “Crazy Man, Crazy” by Bill Haley and His Comets (1953); Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (recorded on 12 April 1954); Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right” (recorded in July 1954), a cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s 1946 song of the same name.

But let’s not toss the champagne out with the cork. When we correlate, for instance, event with emergence, numerous factors materialize in the history of Rock ’n’ roll (segregationist politics, misogyny, market capitalism, moral politics, consumerism, hyper-individualism), which were and continue to be components of the popular music industry and its major historical events. What we are interested in here is the emergence of a constellation of nodes that conditioned the emergence of a particular subjectivity—to re-emphasize, the current study is not necessarily invested in the “real experiences” of “real people” but takes the experiences of early Rock ’n’ roll as the set of conditions through which a type of subjectivity was fortified. Events are easy enough to capture on record. But emergence is a sticky matter. We cannot reduce an historical emergence to the status of the individual, yet we cannot account for emergence by another method. Emergence is a transitory medium, a topological zone, twisted with potential and reification. To put it another way, the actual contrast here is between history and its own becoming. The history books tell us Rock ’n’ roll was an historical event, but it was equally its own becoming. It is important to recognize that emergence encapsulates the idea of becoming, which, say, for a theorist like Deleuze, would imply the flow of forces and desires rid of their consequential shame. Events are like consequences of emergence; they tether emergence to the soil of historical events, much like, in the Lacanian quilting function of language, the S2 signifier threads the S1 signifier through the fabric of a signifying chain so as to retroactively constitute at once meaning and the barred subject (a concept that will be explored below). So becoming is against precisely this reification of the signifying chain, it is a prick of the virtual “becoming-it-itself” removed from the corporeal, ripped from the present and containing always past and potential (Žižek 2012: 8). If Rock ’n’ roll is a signifier, it begins with the conformity it rebelled against. Becoming-new is radically opposed to its historical context, yet is determined by that context. This is why it is tempting to interpret Rock ’n’ roll’s emergence from a Deleuzean perspective. Deleuze writes, for instance:

What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history […] Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new. (Deleuze 1995: 170–1; cited in Žižek 2012: 11)

In response, Žižek wonders if Deleuze in his interrogation of the emergence of the New through repetition is as novel a concept as the latter claims. The new is only capable of emerging through the ongoing process of repetition—like knowing a serial killer is only such when he has killed three victims, quilting the third victim into the elevated significance of the (now-martyred) first. The very concept of the past in a pure becoming is radically changed by how well one can shake off the shame of consequence. The new will always be new because, by transcending its context, it radically changes its historical destination. Žižek’s Deleuzean question is thus: Can the Subject transcend historical conditions in the creation of non-historical synthesis events? Recall that Elvis Presley, for instance, in his infamous recording with Sam Phillips did not intend to sell Rhythm and Blues, nor that Phillips intended on selling Presley as a black and white crossover (despite his later claims). Yet, as Middleton (2006: 87) suggests: “Elvis was at least dimly aware of what was at stake: […] in his performances of, for example, ‘Hound Dog’ he purposely exaggerated what he took to be typical black gestures to the point of caricature—part of an in-built ironic stance that allies him with a specifically blues comedy.” So who were these ostensibly transhistoric performers? Rock ’n’ roll performers such as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard are the figures of prototypical challenges to history (“Roll Over Beethoven” and many other Rock ’n’ roll songs were tackling this dialogue between youth and the parent generation, many of them disingenuously so). Occupying at once the margins and the mainstream, known for their moral reprehensibility yet cultural prominence, critiqued for their primitivist aesthetic yet lauded for their on-stage presence, these were figures who challenged any pre-existing notion of a transparent subjectivity. They performed through multiple identities. Jerry Lee Lewis was born into a strictly Baptist family and could not bear the weight of sin he was obliged to serve. Little Richard’s sexual identity conflicted with the heteronormative symbols that Rock ’n’ roll used as currency. Elvis Presley was “caught in a trap” of his own performance whereby his image overrode his multifarious interests. (The common criticism, for instance, that Elvis “sold out” is laughable given the fact that Elvis was known to be open to a wide variety of music.) There is not one determinant or causation, but a symbiotic series of quasi-causes in the transhistorical events and figures of Rock ’n’ roll.

To reiterate: to fully appreciate the gaze from which Rock ’n’ roll fled means we have to begin with the most normative of situations, such as the novelty song. Where one is threatened with intense domestication with a vulnerable pet: a threat to the heteronormative desire for masculine autonomy. Such a domesticity needs to be resignified as its obscene opposition: in total anarchic freedom. Less the pathetic pleasing of the Other, the Rock ’n’ roll subject is constituted by a terrified and impotent escape from domesticity.

The specular image of the idol

So how can we reconcile the Rock ’n’ roll event with the infinite permutations of its general emergence? Rock ’n’ roll could designate just about any musical category: it could refer to Pat Boone, Doo-Wop, New Orleans blues ensembles, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, later nostalgic acts, Led Zeppelin’s tribute song “Rock and roll,” and so on. How can we reduce the events of Rock ’n’ roll and their provocations to particular causes such as the sentencing of a feminine-subjectivity to the domestic domain and the enthusiastic dialectic between consumption and repression characteristic of the postwar years? The contextual benchmarks that conditioned the emergence of Rock ’n’ roll have been well documented by Peterson (1990), who cites the major industrial shift that contributed to the emergence of Rock ’n’ roll as an attribute of the shift from the vertically integrated structure of Tin Pan Alley popular music (the dominant style of popular music from the early to mid-twentieth century) to a horizontally structured integration of rock and roll. Yet, numerous technological/industrial factors equally contributed to the rise of Rock ’n’ roll: poorly financed radio stations desperate for on-air content after they were abandoned by the National Association of Broadcasters’ migration towards television; the development of the cost-effective 45-rpm record that was simpler to transport than the shellac 78-rpm records that preceded it; the transistor radio that let teenagers listen to the sexually provocative music their parents would have disapproved of; the top-40 radio format that came to eventually dominate the 1950s, which inadvertently desegregated the airwaves by placing otherwise culturally distinct genres next to one another (Latin American popular music, calypso, folk, and, of course, rock and roll). Customer satisfaction became key to the success of corporations by the 1950s in their adoption of the marketing philosophy, so understanding the psyche of the consumer was essential to developing a surplus-generating product. The moral fabric of the individual in the postwar USA was a view of welfare as being a shameful handout along with a host of criteria for reproducing a good citizen and conforming, while those with money were encouraged to contravene the boundaries of the normal by way of the transgressive abilities of the dollar (Hunt 1999: 5–6). In other words, the confluence of factors constituted the event as both singular and multiple. That is, the very spatio-temporal dynamics of consumption in the USA had, by 1959, changed dramatically: first, in regard to the rise in consumer goods (technology, careers, urban space); second, the rise in families in school with jobs and new needs; and third, a new bureaucracy, industry, and government.

As technologies fostered more intimate connections between subjects and celebrities, the former consulted the latter for unlimited advice on domestic life. Exaggerated codes of behavior were imposed upon the new world by the likes of Dr Spock, Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and countless others, who constructed victims as heroes of the self-help rhetoric, the unique historical situation in the production of bureaucracy of education, in alienation, and in paranoia. So there was a progressive change, a protected and suburban orderliness under a constant anxiety that, thanks to the Cold War, everyone could be killed by a nuclear attack (quelled in elementary schools by the bizarre stream of duck-and-cover videos). Betty Crocker, as Cormack (2004: 61) observes, was the totem of domestic normalcy against a potential threat of complete annihilation. Pop literature acted as a bridge between the individual and the social sphere...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Toc
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Felt, Not Perceived
• 1. “The One with the Waggly Tail”: Even ’n’ Emergence
• 2. The Backdoor of Desire
• 3. Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other
• Conclusion: Affect and the Medium of the Real
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page