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Abstract

This essay contrasts two approaches to the interpretation of wildly popular narratives such as Star Wars. The first is the mythological analysis popularized by Joseph Campbell. Campbell argued that the myths of almost every society are fundamentally similar retellings of a few archetypal stories – in the case of Star Wars, “The Hero’s Journey.” Campbell’s work been appropriated by many filmmakers, including the director of Star Wars, George Lucas, to explain the powerful appeal of the most successful Hollywood films. In the wake of Lucas’s endorsement of Cambell’s ideas, influential screenwriting how-to books such as Chrisopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Using Mythic Structures for Writers have shaped how many screenwriters conceive of their craft. The second approach is the ideological analysis pioneered in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. This perspective calls into question Cambell’s and Vogler’s universalizing framework. Instead, for Barthes myths are always about mystifying and naturalizing contingent arrangments of power. The essay will conclude by suggesting ways cultural critics might productively combine the insights of Campbell and Barthes.

Introduction

tk

I: Myth as Spiritual Journey

         George Lucas has often credited Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the inspiration for Star Wars. Lucas read the book in the early 1970s as he was developing the screenplay, and consciously patterned the film’s narrative and characters around the “monomyth” which Campbell describes as a universal story told by societies around the world. After the success of Star Wars, Lucas and Campbell became friends – fans often describe Campbell as “George’s Yoda.” Campbell helped Lucas craft the arcs of the second and third Star Wars films. Lucas returned the favor in 1987, when he furnished his home and production studio, Skywalker Ranch, for the filming of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of interviews with Bill Moyers. Campbell died before the series made it to air, but when it did in 1988, Campbell posthumously reached a rare height of fame for an American intellectual.

         Today, there is a thriving Campbell industry, including his many books and videos, the Joseph Campbell Society, and Mythic Journeys, a lavish conference put together in 2004 by the Mythic Imagination Institute, a nonprofit organization largely funded by the Krispy Kreme donut company, whose CEO believes in bringing Campbell’s ideas into the workplace (Byrne).

         Campbell’s influence on American film has spread far beyond the work of George Lucas. Inspired by The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth, a generation of screenwriters has self-consciously modeled their work after Campbell’s monomyth. In 1985 Christopher Vogler, a newly hired story analyst for Disney’s animation division, distributed a memo outlining Campbell’s ideas. Vogler’s memo became a touchstone at Disney and other firms, forming the basis for films such as 1994’s The Lion King, one of the top-grossing films of all time. Vogler subsequently left Disney to become a freelance screenwriting teacher and consultant, and turned his memo into The Writer’s Journey, a step-by-step how-to for applying Campbell’s ideas to screenplays. The book is one of the most successful screenwriting manuals ever published, and Vogler is now one of the most in-demand of screenwriting teachers. Vogler’s influence is so great that today screenplay outlining software programs such as Power Structure give writers the option of organizing their screenplays around Vogler’s 12 steps, as an alternative to the traditional 3 act structure popularized in Syd Field’s canonical screenwriting text, Screenplay.

         So, what is Campbell’s model, and how well does it fit Star Wars? Campbell argues that all the myths of the globe are versions of one single fundamental story, what he calls “the monomyth.” This “Adventure of the Hero” is divided into three parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Each of the parts is subdivided into a series of stages. (Campbell’s version delineates a total of 17 stages; Vogler edits Campbell down to a more tidy 12 steps.) The story is a cycle: the hero leaves his familiar world for a new world of adventure, acquires a “boon” in that other world, then brings that boon back home for the benefit of his own world. Campbell diagrams the structure in this chart:

[Insert chart from The Hero with a Thousand Faces 245.]

         Star Wars is a quintessential Hero’s Adventure. Luke Skywalker leaves his home planet of Tatooine on a quest to rescue Princess Leia. Having rescued the Princess, he returns to destroy the Death Star and ignite the rebel alliance.

         Going deeper into Campbell’s structure, Star Wars fits tightly into the specific steps outlines in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as do many other popular films inspired by Campbell and Lucas. The chart below, from the fan website Jitterbug Fantasia (2004), matches up the stages of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey with the plots of both Star Wars and The Matrix:

         So, what makes Campbell’s model so appealing to writers, and apparently so effective with audiences? Campbell boiled down his worldview in The Power of Myth to a single catchy phrase: “Follow your bliss.” The hero’s journey, he argued, is the story of an individual who pursues the adventure of self-discovery, facing challenges and dangers along the quest. Not all of us will fight light-saber duels or rescue princesses in our own lives. But we all face the challenges of finding meaning and purpose in our lives. Campbell argued that every life is a hero’s journey, starting with the heroic adventure of just being born: leaving the comfort and familiarity of the womb to cross the threshold into a daunting new world outside. Stories of heroes’ journeys, then, according to Campbell, Lucas, Vogler, and their many followers, are inspiring allegories of personal spiritual struggle and growth.

         A second, related reason for the appeal of Campbell’s vision is its universalism. It suggests that deep down, all societies tell versions of the same story, because we all share the same needs and desires. As Campbell writes in The Hero’s Journey,

There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a  comparative elucidation my contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas, “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names” (Campbell tk. Cited in Gill).

         This universalism, though, is a core problem for Campbell’s critics, who are many. Although Campbell is by far the most famous American interpreter of myths, he is generally not well-regarded by contemporary anthropologists, classicists, and other academic mythologists. Most argue that his urge to universalize distorts the differences and complexities of the stories he examines. His method in The Hero with a Thousand Faces is to cherry-pick individual elements from a wide range of storytelling traditions to fit each step of his monomyth, without addressing counterexamples that don’t conform as neatly. Even the stories he does use he uses selectively, borrowing pieces for a specific step then dropping the rest of the story in subsequent chapters when it doesn’t fit as well. In fact, you could argue that Star Wars and its self-consciously Campbellian descendants, such as The Lion King and The Matrix, are the only stories to faithfully adhere to every stage of the monomyth, since they were designed in its image. Everything before the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a less tidy fit.

         Campbell’s universalism has consequences. In shoehorning the cultures of the world into a single model, Campbell recast global culture around the worldview of a 20^th Century white American man. The Hero’s Journey, according to Campbell, valorizes individualism. It prioritizes personal fulfillment over social change. Campbell, in fact, dismissed the notion that the purpose of art was to make the world a better place. In The Power of Myth, he told Moyers, “The world is great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better.” And while the hero may have 1000 faces, few of them appear to be male; Campbell rarely asks how a woman’s journey might differ from a man’s. Campbell’s monomyth also has little room for destabilizing archetypes such as The Trickster.

         Campbell himself makes for a less than ideal Yoda. Despite the embrace of Campbell’s ideas by hippies, New Agers, and other bohemians, Campbell himself was a strident political conservative. An article by Brendan Gill (1989) in The New York Review of Books shortly after Campbell’s death also outed the scholar as an anti-Semite and casual racist who bemoaned the admission of African-American students to his school, Sarah Lawrence College, and failed any students who engaged in political activism while taking his classes. (See Orr et al 1989.) Even many of Campbell’s defenders in subsequent letters to the magazine were forced to acknowledge what Huston Smith delicately called Campbell’s “shadow.”

[add more here?]

II. Myth as Ideology

         If Joseph Campbell offers one vision of myth, a second is suggested by Roland Barthes classic work of cultural analysis, Mythologies. To Barthes, myth is ideology: culture which hides the underpinnings of power. The purpose of the critic is demystification: to explore how myth distorts our understanding of the world.

         Drawing on this model of myth as ideological mystification, along with the world of the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Robert Ray in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 examines the myths underlying classic Hollywood films. He argues that myth functions as an “imaginary resolution of intractable social conflicts” (tk, check quote). Thus, myths allow for the “denial of choice” which represses the realities of conflicts over inequalities of class, race and gender.

         Ray also identifies several other specific aspects to the “thematic paradigm” of classic Hollywood: a focus on individuals which turns social problems into personal melodrama, and a reliance on the “reluctant hero” story, in which the protagonist is slowly won over from a rebel stance to the role of hero. Ray notes in this story the frequent splitting of the hero role into two characters: the “official hero” and the “outlaw hero,” or what literary critic Leslie Fiedler calls “the good good boy” (like Tom Sawyer) and “the bad good boy” (Huck Finn). The official hero is typically the “moral center” the film, the one judged right and virtuous by the values of the film. But the outlaw hero is the “interest center” of the film – the more exciting, compelling character. Mythic reconciliation occurs when the official hero and the outlaw hero join forces for the common good.

         Ray pinpoints “The Culmination of Classical Hollywood” in Casablanca, a classic reluctant hero story. Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the bitter, cynical outlaw hero. Laszlo, the resistance leader, is the official hero. Laszlo is the moral center of the movie, the film’s most righteous character. But Rick is the interest center, the most compelling character. The climax of the film comes when Rick is finally persuaded to join forces with Laszlo and help him escape Casablanca.

         If Star Wars fits Campbell’s monomyth smoothly, in some ways it fits Ray’s Casablanca model even more snugly. Luke Skywalker is the official hero, the moral center of the film. But Han Solo is the outlaw hero, the interest center of the film. One could argue that the climax of the film comes when Han, who had appeared to have chosen money over helping the rebel alliance, swoops in on the Millennium Falcon at the last moment to pick off Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter and clear the way for Luke to destroy the Death Star. The reluctant hero has finally saved the day. (Star Wars resembles Casablanca in many other ways, as well, most prominently in the Cantina scene, which is an intergalactic homage to the limnal space of Rick’s cosmopolitan nightclub.)

         Ray’s analysis demonstrates how Campbell’s monomyth shortchanges the role of the reluctant hero in classical Hollywood storytelling. (Campbell admitted that he was never much of a moviegoer.) In Campbell’s model, reluctance is an early stage soon overcome. Luke’s refusal of the call comes when he’s kept home to help with the harvest, but he’s quickly pulled into adventure when the Storm Troopers destroy his home and kill his family. This model, however, assumes that the official hero, Luke, is the film’s only hero, and that Han is just a sidekick. The subsequent careers of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, however, attest to the relative charisma of their Star Wars characters. Luke may be the moral center of the story, but Han is the interest center. Star Wars is as much his story as Luke’s.

         The American development of a dual hero model suggests one example of how a society may veer from Campbell’s monomyth. In response to an ideology of individualism which mistrusts official power, American storytellers invented a new kind of rebel hero, one who could serve society while remaining apart from it.

         This angle on the monomyth – that it is not a universal paradigm, but rather a structure that may be reworked and remodeled in different cultural contexts – opens up a way to view not just how cultures differ from each other, but also how individual retellings of myth within a single culture clash. We can examine each version of a myth, not for how it conforms to an ideal monomyth, but exactly for how it differs – how it rings changes off existing patterns as it responds to new social conflicts. This perspective, for example, would highlight the role of Princess Leia as not just another damsel in distress, but as a feminist update of the archetype – an assertive woman who refuses to be a passive victim, responding to Luke’s rescue effort by taking command of their escape from the Death Star. A Campbellian reading would highlight only Leia’s adherence to the monomyth, in line with Campbell’s model of myth as a source of social stability. This feminist reading, on the other hand, would see myth as a site of social struggle, where old stories are reworked in new ways.

III: A Happy Ending?

         I began work on this study conceiving it as an attempt to make Barthes speak to Campbell – to use Barthes’ ideas to disabuse Campbellians of the notion that myth is apolitical and ahistorical. As I’ve worked more deeply on the project, though, I’ve grown more drawn to a second goal: to make Campbell speak to Barthes – to bring questions of personal development and spirituality into the dialogues of cultural studies.

         Cultural studies as it is practiced today takes up the project outlined by Mythologies: demystification. We’ve become very skilled at deconstructing the ideological assumptions behind movies, TV shows, and the rest of our culture. But what’s harder to offer are alternatives – options for moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to new models – new myths, if necessary.

         Campbell, by contrast, offers hope, along with practical advice eagerly soaked up by culture workers everywhere. Compared to Campbell’s monomyth, what can cultural studies offer? How can we make ourselves useful to a group which should be a key target audience of our work: creators?

         As I mentioned above, Campbell’s famous line, “Follow your bliss,” has been interpreted by many critics on the left as a justification for selfishness. As Gill writes in that 1989 New York Review of Books takedown,

. . . what is this condition of bliss, as Campbell has defined it? If it is only to do whatever makes one happy, then it sanctions selfishness on a colossal scale – a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan and post-Reagan years. It is a selfishness that is the unspoken (the studiously unrecognized?) rationale of that contemporary army of Wall Street yuppies, of junk-bond dealers, of takeover lawyers who have come to be among the most conspicuous members of our society. Have they not all been following their bliss?

But Gill willfully misinterprets Campbell. For Campbell, the key is discovering what one’s real, authentic desires are, underneath the social pressures to value more money, a bigger house, a better job, and so on.

Now, the idea of “real, authentic desires” is unfashionably essentialist in cultural studies today. It presumes there’s a “true self” which exists outside of social construction. But this language of authenticity is powerful and resonant, because it speaks to the anomie underlying contemporary American life, and offers a way to envision something more meaningful and true. This seems to me an essentialism worth preserving – not the colonizing universalism of Campbell’s monomyth, but the more basic universalism which values the specificity of every soul.

Fredric Jameson in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” describes popular culture as a continual dialectic between utopian glimpses of a better world, and the reification which blocks and rechannels those hopes into conventional, nonthreatening desires. Jameson, as a good Marxist, identified utopia as a collective desire for a life beyond capitalism. But we can also, drawing on Campbell, think about individual utopianism: a personal fantasy to break free from social constraints and normative values, and follow your bliss. This personal utopianism, too, is smothered by reification, redirected by ideology back into a desire to, say, buy more Star Wars collectibles. But it’s kept alive by the power of the story. Cultural studies, it seems to me, should learn from Campbell to embrace that personal utopianism as well as collective utopianism. Because if we all truly followed our bliss, the Empire would surely crumble.

[expand conclusion?]

Stuff to add:

- Freud vs. Jung – argument for CS moving from F to J

- James Hillman?

- Jenkins, Brooker on SW fandom?

- Brin on SW elitism?

- fantasy vs. SF?

- specific citations of anthro critics of Campbell?

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. tk.

Byrne, Mary. “Mythology and Krispy Kreme.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution. 17 April 2004.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. tk

Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. tk.

Gill, Brendan. “The Faces of Joseph Campbell.” The New York Review of Books 36.14. 28 September 1989. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3906.

Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” tk.

Orr, Carol Wallace et al. “Joseph Campbell: An Exchange.” The New York Review of Books 36.17. 9 November 1989. http://www.nybooks.com/3846.

Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. tk.

“Star Wars Origins – Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey.” Jitterbug Fantasia. http://www.jitterbug.com/origins/myth.html.

Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey. tk

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Most people wouldn't describe the Star Trek shows as politically radical. Compared to the paranoic anti-government edge of '90s creations like "The X-Files," the Trek universe seems a quaint liberal throwback - a safe '60s fantasy of a peaceful future where the Earth lives in racial harmony, and species (usually) cooperate to explore the galaxy. But there's one difference between our own century and the 24th so fundamental we simply take it for granted: there's no money. Nobody ever comes out and admits it, but replicator technology appears to have made capitalism obsolete. When Jean-Luc Picard wants his tea, he doesn't have to fork over any cash—he just tells the replicator, and the machine makes it so. Riker, Data, Dr. Crusher—they don't even seem to have salaries (although they do get vacation time). Nobody ever needs to worry about a bank account, or paying back loans for Starfleet tuition. Sure, the Ferengi still dicker over latinum, but within the Federation, life seems to follow Marx's famous dictum, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

I remember when the full implications of this hit me, while watching "Second Chances," the episode in which Riker discovers a cloned version of himself. The double, "Tom," was accidentally created and abandoned on a deserted planet in a freak transporter accident seven years earlier. Will and Tom bicker over the past, and over Tom's rekindled interest in Deanna. Ultimately Tom decides to leave the Enterprise for another starship. As a going-away present, Will gives Tom his favorite trombone in a moving gesture of reconciliation. But all I kept wondering was, "What do you mean, it's Will's trombone? Why does Will get to keep all the stuff? Isn't everything more than seven years old as much Tom's as Will's? Can't Tom sue or something? How's he going to get by in the world with nothing more than the trombone on his back?"

Needless to say, I was missing the point. Federation citizens don't have "stuff." They have simple, immediate, free access to all the necessities of life. They don't need checking accounts or IRAs. The only things they actually own are objects of special personal value—Picard's volume of Shakespeare, Worf's battleh, and of course, Riker's trombone. So when Will hands over the instrument to Tom, it's not simply a nice gesture. He's giving away one of the few things of value he has to give—he's giving away a pretty large piece of himself.

Of course, there's another explanation for why Will and Tom would have so little concern over their assets: they're in the military. Maybe their room and board are simply taken care of by Starfleet, just as any shipboard troops' would be. But by all accounts, economic arrangements in the rest of the Federation aren't all that different from the way things work on the Enterprise. From what little we've seen of 24th Century Earth, it appears there's a replicator on every streetcorner, and easy, instantaneous transporter access to any spot on the globe. Sure, Picard's brother still runs a traditional French vineyard, while Cisco's dad operates a classic New Orleans restaurant. But these operations seem more like lifestyles than professions; there's no sense that either needs the income to get by. And in fact, both businesses are closer in structure to a feudal system than corporate capitalism—they're small, family run, almost self-consciously archaic affairs, creating handcrafted products for discerning consumers. Like Riker's trombone, the wine of Picard's vineyards is less a commodity in our contemporary sense than a special object of personal significance. If all you want is a drink, you can get free synthahol any time you want it.

So how exactly does one pay for Picard's wine and Cisco's jambalaya? Is there a residual latinum-based trading system? Barter? Or do Picard and Cisco just hand stuff out to all comers? How exactly do folks exchange goods and services in the 24th Century? Here, the details get fuzzy—on purpose. As Gene Rodenberry wrote in his initial guide for Trek writers, "If you want to assume that Earth cities of the future are splendidly planned with fifty-mile parkland strips around them, fine. But for obvious reasons, let's not get into any detail of Earth's politics of Star Trek's century; for example, which socio-economic systems ultimately worked best."

Concentrating on Starfleet, then—along with border outposts like Deep Space 9—is a way to evade extrapolating how the vast changes hinted at must actually work in practice. What do people do with their lives when all of their needs can be taken care of by machines? How do they structure their days when there's no need to seek steady employment? What kind of culture might a people freed from want build? These questions—essentially, what would Utopia look like?—are pretty daunting. And answering them is likely to be less gratifying than simply leaving them tantalizingly open-ended. So instead, Star Trek keeps things within the realm of the familiar by replacing the discipline of the market with the discipline of the military. Why do Riker, Data, and the rest of the crew show up for work every day, listen to their bosses, and do what they're told? Because it's their orders.

Star Trek, then, is an ambiguous kind of Utopia. Following the collapse of communism, in an era in which the capitalist system of labor—what leftists once denounced as "wage slavery"—reigns triumphant over almost all the globe, Star Trek offers the possibility that another, better way of life exists. No wonder so many find its vision of the future so compelling. At the same time, however, it shrinks from imagining a fully fleshed-out alternative, instead replacing one familiar social structure with another, in some ways more ominous one: military hierarchy. Marxist critic Fredric Jameson writes that these days, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Star Trek comes about as close as anything to doing so in turn-of-the-millenium America.

Free Your…

“Free your mind, and your ass will follow.” -Funkadelic, from the song and album of the same name

George Clinton set forth this founding tenet in his ideology of funk in 1970, as a druggy mantra to a swirling psychedelic guitar jam. While the phrase may originally have been intended as a variation on the solipsistic hippie slogan “Turn on/tune in/drop out” (the line that followed promised, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within”), it took on a very different resonance by the mid-’70s, when Clinton and some of his 20-odd bandmates in Parliament and Funkadelic would rap the phrase, along with other exhortations such as “Think! It Ain’t Illegal Yet!” and “Shit/Goddamn/Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” over a dense groove of horns, synths, and Bootsy Collins’ bottomless bass, while concert audiences in the tens of thousands danced, sweated, and chanted along.

In the years that followed, music critics have more often than not misappropriated the slogan as “free your ass and your mind will follow.” [1] The original phrase resurfaced in popular discourse last year, however, on En Vogue’s dance-rock crossover hit “Free Your Mind,” which bowdlerized the second half of the line to “…and the rest will follow.” And currently, MTV News’ regular public affairs segments are presented under the logo, “Free Your Mind” (as in “this week, in ‘Free Your Mind’ news…”).

This potent epigram’s longevity and adaptability demonstrates the complex ways in which Clinton’s theorization of the relationship between mind and booty continue to influence contemporary ideas about the politics of music. The common reversal of the phrase isn’t exactly a distortion of the P-Funk (short for Parliament/Funkadelic) philosophy, in its implication that the first step toward intellectual liberation is to allow one’s body to be carried away by the communal, physical pleasures of dance music. But this revision of Clinton provides too comfortable a hierarchy, assuming that freeing the “ass” is simply a means to the end of freeing the “mind.” The need to turn Clinton’s phrase inside-out to make it fit demonstrates how Clinton consistently destabilizes conventional distinctions between “body” and “mind,” “music” and “message.” As one critic wondered on hearing the original Funkadelic track, “Is that ass as in ‘shake your ass’ or ass as in ‘save your ass’?” [2] —in other words, is the freed mind followed by the booty or the soul? And how could you tell the difference? Likewise, when Clinton describes his music as “doin’ it to your earhole in 3D,” how can the “mind” itself be understood as anything but another organ? Intellectually rigorous, intentionally “stoopid,” insistently physical, continually abstract, P-Funk demands that you think with your body and, as Greg Tate puts it, “dance with your mind.” [3]

A Brief History of Parliament-Funkadelic

Born in 1941, George Clinton began his musical career in 1955 when he formed The Parliaments, a doo- wop quintet based in Plainfield, New Jersey, where Clinton owned a barbershop. In the early 1960s, Clinton moved the band to Detroit in attempt to land a deal with Motown records. While Motown chief Berry Gordy signed Clinton to a staff writing position, he declined to record the Parliaments, deciding their sound was too similar to the Temptations’. Recording instead for the small Revilot label, the Parliaments had their first hit in 1967 with “(I Just Wanna) Testify.” Reaching #3 on the R&B charts and #20 on the pop charts, it would be Clinton’s biggest commercial success until the mid-70s.

While in 1967 the Parliaments were still a rather conventional soul group in the Motown mold, over the late ’60s the band underwent a radical change as Clinton and the rest of the members began hanging out with hippies, taking drugs, and listening to Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, and white Detroit hard-rock bands like the Stooges and the MC5. Originally a suit-and-tied soul act, they began appearing on stage in ripped bedsheets, diapers, or nothing at all, while playing a loud, trippy, and often intentionally ugly blend of R&B and psychedlic rock.

In 1970 Parliament (the “the” and “s” dropped from their name) recorded Osmium, named after the heaviest metal on the periodic table. Legal troubles with their former record companies, however, made it impossible for the band to continue to record under their name, and so they began recording for a different label under a new name: Funkadelic. Over the early ’70s, Funkadelic released a series of albums that built them a devoted cult following if little mass attention.

By 1974, with the legal battles resolved, Clinton signed Parliament to Casablanca records. (Technically, “Funkadelic” was the backup band, “Parliament” the lead singers, and each group guested on the other’s albums.) While continuing to put out Funkadelic records, Clinton decided to make Parliament lighter and more commercial, with fewer guitars and more horns.

P-Funk’s commercial and conceptual breakthrough came in 1976 with the release of Mothership Connection, the first of a series of science fiction-themed “funk operas.” In the late ’70s, Parliament-Funkadelic staged a succession of spectacular concert tours, each show climaxing with the descent of a giant spaceship from the rafters. As Clinton’s “Parliafunkidelicment Thang” grew, he spun off more and more acts outs of the band’s personnel, writing and producing records for Bootsy’s Rubber Band, the Horny Horns, the Brides of Funkenstein, and Parlet, with each act signed to a different record label. [4]

By the early ’80s, however, Clinton’s end-run around the corporate organization of the record business had left his organization tangled in legal complications, and the Parliafunkadelic dream came crashing down in internal dissension, lawsuits, and creative exhaustion. A 1983 comeback single recorded under Clinton’s own name, “Atomic Dog,” was a brilliant update of the P-Funk sound, but his last big hit.

While Clinton has continued to record and tour over the last 10 years, in the mid-’80s his music seemed to have slipped out of public memory, with many of his classic albums falling out of print. [5] His arrangements seemed too lush, his concepts too cartoon-like, his beats to close to discredited “disco.” [6] For cutting-edge rappers who were working to strip their beats down to a hard edge of rage, James Brown’s more minimal groove was the sample of choice. [7] In 1989, though, when De La Soul ended the reign of the minimalists by bringing to hiphop a psychedelic richness and playful indeterminacy, they turned to Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep)” to provide the groove for the hit single “Me, Myself, and I.” The biggest rap single of the following year was Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance,” which not only sampled Parliament’s “Let’s Play House,” but in the character of “Humpty Hump” appropriated the villain of Parliament’s late-70s funk operas, “Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk.”

Today, Clinton’s influence on popular music is immesurable. As rap producers have looked to expand the music’s sonic pallette, Clinton’s multi-layered arrangements have become the leading source of hiphop samples. As rock bands have attempted to find common ground with the increasingly dance-oriented pop marketplace, “funk-rock” bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Spin Doctors have looked to Funkadelic for ways to make guitar-rock sound fresh. And for artists and listeners attempting to theorize the relationship between “music” and “message,” Clinton’s ideology of funk has provided a way to talk about the politics of dancing. As Clinton sang on “One Nation Under a Groove: “Here’s a chance to dance our way/ Out of our constrictions.”

Defining “Funk”

A little etymological background: as P-Funk says, “funk used to be a bad word.” Once a term “not mentioned in polite society” [8] meaning “a stink (usually associated with sex),” [9] in the 1950s the word was appropriated by “hard bop” jazz musicians to mean “having an earthy, unsophisticated style and feeling; esp., having the style and feel of the blues.” [10] In the 1960s, it came to describe a certain kind of popular music: “percussive, polyrhythmic black dance music, with minimal melody and maximum syncopation.” [11] First fully realized by James Brown, this music’s sonic possibilites were then refined and expanded in the work of Sly Stone. By most accounts, George Clinton is the third major figure in the history of the genre.

The very history of the term “funk,” then, is a classic example of what Henry Louis Gates calls Signifyin(g)—the “double-voicedness” of African- American discourse which empowers speakers to play with language—“repeat with a difference”—in ways which critique, destabilize and reconfigure dominant meanings. [12] In this case, the signification had an even more explicit element of cultural nationalism than in the redefining of terms like “bad” and “cool.” As Leroi Jones points out, referring to the inital appropriation of the term by jazz musicians:

The social implication, then, was that even the old stereotype of a distinctive Negro smell that white America subscribed to could be turned against white America. For this smell now, real or not, was made a valuable characteristic of “Negro-ness.” And “Negro-ness,” by the fifties, for many Negroes (and whites) was the only strength left to American culture. [13]

Coming to maturity during the late-’60s era of Black Power, funk music, even more than “soul” or “R&B,” has always been associated with African-American pride in cultural difference—as Joe McEwen points out, its first anthem was James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” [14]

Clinton’s Theory of Funkativity

“Funk” is more than a specific example of Signifyn(g); in Clinton’s universe, it is a rubric for all forms of Signifyn(g), of African-American cultural resistance. Funk is a transformative process—as James Brown would shout to his band, the goal, whatever the tune, is to “make it funky.” Clinton explains to Rolling Stone, funk is a “kind of an attitude….Funk can be anything. Funk is an idea; it’s whatever it needs to be in order to survive. We don’t take nothing as our bag. Everything is our bag.” [15] Or, as he’s put it elsewhere, “Funk means that when you’re in Chinatown you learn to like Chinese food real fast.” [16]

The transformative power of “funk” as can be seen in its effect on language. In Clinton’s lexicon, “funk” colonizes other words, repeating concepts with a difference. “Funk” infests “psychedelic” to create “funkedelic.” “Funkintelechy,” another P-Funk neologism combining “funk,” “intellect,” and “technology,” stands in Clinton’s universe for the “force by which Funk gets stronger.” [17] The power to attatch itself to other words which Clinton invested in the term “funk” has continued beyond his own terms: “techno-funk,” “punk-funk,” and “cyberfunk” have all been coined in the last ten years to explain mutant musical genres.

In “One Nation Under a Groove,” Funkadelic asks,

“Do you promise to funk? the whole funk, nothin’ but the funk.” “Funk” here replaces “Truth” as the fundamental good in Clinton’s utopian society. The relationship between “funk” and “truth” parallels that between “Signifyin(g)” and “signification” in Gates’ schema. “Funk” is truth of the second order, in which language, tropes, and music styles are playfully shuffled, revised, and reconstituted to make a different kind of meaning. The classic Parliament and Funkadelic albums of the late ’70s Signified on everything from nursery rhymes to rock opera, science fiction to spirituals. These appropriations were not simply chaotic celebrations of indeterminacy; as we shall see, they also served to anchor a powerful vision of counter- cultural community and political intervention, all in the name of “The Funk.” Spreading The Funk To supplement Gates’ terminology with a parallel theoretical framework, funk can be described as a version of Ishmael Reed’s “Jes Grew,” the mysterious plague in Mumbo Jumbo which “enliven[s] the host,” leaving people “wriggling like fish…and ‘lusting after relevance.’” [18] The comparison to Jes Grew points out two facets of The Funk not illuminated by Gates’ notion of Signifyin(g): its physicality and its contagiousness. As I’ve already discussed, fundamental to funk’s transformative power is the way it insists on the embodiment of whatever it touches—to make something funky is to make it felt, literally in the sense of shaking the floorboards, rattling the windows, and practically commanding the listener to dance. This physicality, of course, has a lot to do with sexuality; the closeness of the word “funk” to “fuck” is no accident, and Clinton’s Signfications often rest on puns between the two, as in “You should’ve seen the bull when it funked the cow.” But “to funk” never means just “to fuck;” [19] the point of the pun is how interconnected sexuality and music are in the Clinton worldview. The utopian promise of Jes Grew is that everyone will catch it. Likewise, Clinton does not just celebrate The Funk; he prosteletizes for it. The greatest P-Funk songs are propaganda for the funk; as Barry Walters points out, “P. Funk hits are almost entirely reflexive. It’s near impossible to let your mind wander during a P.Funk anthem, as most of the lyrics are about funk iself, funk on the radio, and funk in your earhole.” [20] As the chant to “P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up) puts it:

Make my funk the P-Funk I want my funk uncut Make my funk the P-Funk I wants to get funked up I want the bomb, I want the P-Funk Don’t want my funk stepped on Make my funk the P-Funk Before I take it home

The plotlines of Parliament’s late-’70s concept albums allegorize the spreading of The Funk. They involve the battles of the hero, Starchild, against Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk (pronounced “devoid of funk”). Starchild’s goal is never to kill Sir Nose, but to make him dance—to catch The funk, the way unwilling victims catch Jes Grew in Mumbo Jumbo. On Funkintelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, Starchild “funkatizes” Sir Nose by shooting him with his weapon, the “Bop Gun.” Clinton’s overarching theme is, in the words of Robert Christgau, to show “the forces of life—autonomous intelligence, a childlike openness, sexual energy, and humor—defeat those of death: by seduction if possible, by force if necessary.” [21]

Community in African-American Music

Clinton’s mission is to teach The Funk and spread The Funk, to create a counter-culture of funkateers, “One Nation Under a Groove.” As Reed’s use of Jes Grew as a metaphor for the rise of both ragtime and jazz suggests, this populist aesthetic of community has a long lineage in African-American music. As Simon Frith writes, “At the center of Afro-American music is the performance…. Black music is immediate and democratic—a performance is unique and the listeners of that performance become a part of it.” [22] Paul Gilroy likewise notes,

Black performers aim to overcome rather than exploit the structures which separate them from their audiences. The relationship between the performer and the crowd is transformed in dialogic rituals so that spectators acquire the active role of participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which may symbolize or even create community. [23]

The hope, in turn, is that this constructed community may live on beyond the end of the performance; as Gilroy continues,

The liberatory rationality which is spelled out in the lyrics, if there are lyrics, is thus manifest in the consumption of the musical culture. The whole dialogic process that unites performers and crowds is imported into the culture’s forms. It becomes the basis of an authentic public sphere which is counterposed to the dominant alternative, from which, in any case, blacks have been excluded. The arts which, as slaves, blacks were allowed instead of freedom, have become a means to make their formal freedom tangible. [24]

As Clinton told one reporter, “I’m a hippie at heart. I’m not anti-establishment in a sense that I want to tear down the structure, but I want to provide the people with an alternative to the structure.” [25]

Black and White Audiences of P-Funk

Clinton’s use of an example from a predominantly white subculture demonstrates that while his vision was rooted in the cultural practices of African-Americans, his utopia of “One Nation Under a Groove” was not a separatist one. The battle in his sci-fi universe was between funky and unfunky, not black and white. Clinton’s models for constructing a mass counter-culture, in fact, were the Beatles, the band that for a while could claim to be “bigger than Jesus.” During P-Funk’s late-’70s heyday, Clinton could tell one writer, “If you know what Liverpool was like when the Beatles hit, you know what it’s getting to be like wherever we go.” [26] His goal, as one writer puts it, was “Beatle-size fame,…funkmania.” [27]

Clinton wanted it all: mass popularity among blacks and whites, while never compromising his African-American roots. He frequently criticized other artists attempting to “cross over” for “fakin’ the funk.” Explaining Funkadelic’s attempts to get played on FM “rock” radio in the late ’70s, he told Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, “We ain’t crossin’ over; we just gonna sneak behind enemy lines.” [28] In the face of white radio’s racist resistance to a black rock band, however, Clinton never managed to attract a large white listenership. In P-Funk’s late ’70s heyday, the concert audiences were almost entirely black, and as Barry Walters points out, “as radio turned departmentalized and segregated, P.Funk became the ultimate black FM signifier.” [29] Like Jes Grew, The Funk was overcome before it could infect the entire nation; as Ken Tucker wrote in 1984, “the dream—of Beatle-size fame, of funkmania—is over.” [30] This should hardly be considered a failure; indeed, the disappointment voiced by some white critics in the ’70s that P-Funk hadn’t attracted a mass white audience often seemed to assume that their millions of black fans somehow didn’t count. [31] Clinton’s music created and continues to create a powerful, implicitly political sense of community among his fans; and in any case, his influence among musicians and listeners of all colors today is inescapable.

Creating Community

The P-Funk albums of the late ’70s were examples of what One Nation Under a Groove could sound like. They embraced and expressed a liberating aesthetic of community with individuality. Carefully arranged yet open to each artist’s individual improvisation, P-Funk’s jams blend horns, guitars, synthesizers, percussion, and an array of voices in arrangements of astonishing richness and complexity, with the depth of the groove only enhancing one’s appreciation of each performer’s individual expression. And because Clinton had assembled a collective of astounding talent and diversity — including former James Brown band members William “Bootsy” Collins on bass and Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley on horns, classically-trained Bernie Worrell on keyboards, and vocalist Phillip Wynne, former lead singer of the slick soul band the Spinners — the music never collapsed into chaos.

Clinton’s vocal arrangements alone are powerful models of community-with-individuality. No one individual functions as the “lead singer;” Clinton himself only shows up for a few raps on the P-Funk albums of the late-’70s. Often, five or six vocalists may sing “lead” on different songs on one album, with still other voices, sometimes altered by studio effects, popping up to offer commentary or cary along the album’s plotline. Group choruses skewer the tight soul harmony the Parliaments once practiced; voices in Clinton’s arrangments go off at odd angles, spread across octaves, and range from nasal squeals to gospel bellows, yet still cohere to create a sense of unity more powerful for the diversity it encompasses.

The practical actualization of P-Funk’s idealized community, in turn, occurs at the P-Funk concert, which centers around the active participation of fans, dancing in the aisles and chanting the P-Funk slogans along with the band on stage. At the P-Funk show I attended a few years ago, the shared love of the music among fans was so powerful that for the hour before the band even took the stage, the crowd spontaneously joined together in a series of a cappella chants — something I’ve never seen at any other concert.

Once the fans have gone home, the challenge is to keep the sense of community alive through more mediated forums of communication. For P-Funk fans, the primary forum for this alternative public sphere in the 1970s was black radio, which, as I have already discussed, in part found its own self-definition through P- Funk’s music. Clinton directly addressed how radio creates this mass-mediated community in a series of raps on Parliament records in the voice of a DJ for the mythic radio station “WEFUNK.” These raps solidified Parliament’s status as emblematic of black radio, and helped Parliament fans to think of their records as not just isolated commodities, but as nodes in a communication network linking together fans across the globe more powerfully than any single radio station could. And by taking on the voice of a DJ, Clinton was able communicate directly to his audience without the barriers of stage or song. (Not surprisingly, many rappers have borrowed this conceit in their quest to find more direct modes of expression.) As Barry Walters points out,

Appropriately, the best Parliament records were about black radio and its ability to unify its audience through the airwave differentiation…By parodying the slick black jock rap style, Clinton addressed his audience directly…while choirs of harmonized voice burst forth like idealized listeners demanding the kind of funk only Clinton could deliver.” [32]

Afrocentric Science Fiction

If black radio offered the possibilty of a limited real-life alternate public sphere, Clinton’s vision also held out the possibility of something more sweeping: a futuristic Black Nationalist utopia.

Parliament’s concerts in the late 1970s would begin with a strange monologue, spoken in the manner of the opening narration to a science fiction epic. One version was recorded as the “Prelude” to The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein; a slightly different version is reprinted in the liner notes to Tear the Roof off the Mother: 1974- 1980, a Parliament retrospective album:

Funk upon a time, in the daze of the Funkapus, the earth was on the One. Funk flowed freely and freedom was free from the need to be free. Even Cro-Nasal Sapiens and the Thumpasorus Peoples lived side by side in P(eace).

But soon there arose bumpnoxious empires led by unfunky dictators. These priests, pimps and politicians would spank whole nations of unsuspecting peoples — punishing them for their feelings and desires, constipating their notions and pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny and strung-out. The descendants of Cro-Nasal Sapiens fell in line, for their credo was “Get over by any means necessary.” They slicked their hair and lost all sense of the Groove.

The descendants of the Thumpasorus Peoples knew Funk was its own reward. They tried to remain true to the pure, uncut Funk. But it became impossible in a world woo’d by power and greed. So they locked away the secret of Clone Funk with kings and pharoahs deep in the Egyptian pyramids, and fled to outer speace to party on the Mothership and await the time they could safely return to refunkatize the planet. [33]

This narrative, a sci-fi variant of the story of Osiris and Set in Mumbo Jumbo, outlines the universe of Parliament’s concept albums. The climax to P-Funk’s concerts of the late ’70s was the landing of the Mothership, signifying the return of the exiled Thumpasorus Peoples to earth. As the giant mock- spaceship was slowly lowered, the band would play the title track to Mothership Connection, which transforms the dream of returning to the Motherland of Africa into a journey across the galaxy. Signifyin(g) upon the spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” the band chanted, “Swing down sweet chariot-stop/And let me ride.” Science fiction supplants religion, as “The Funk” becomes a new kind of deliverance.

Clinton’s Signifyin(g) on science fiction, long one of America’s most lily-white preserves, was a bold and original critical step. (Also a trend-setting one; Mothership Connection appeared a year before Star Wars. [34] ) In the mid-’70s there existed to my knowledge only one published black science fiction writer, Samuel Delany. (There did, however, exist one other black musician who dealt in sci-fi themes: jazz giant Sun Ra, who claims to be from Saturn and is a major influence on Clinton’s style, music and persona.) Most sci-fi universes, as Greg Tate points out, are “full of a zillion species of extraterrestrials and only caucasoid humans.” [35]

The particular power of science fiction for African-Americans, as Delany critic Robert Elliot Fox points out, is that blacks especially have a critical stake in future worlds. They constantly have had to struggle to transform dreams into realities, to redeem, as it were, the core of possibility within fantasy. [36]

As Delany himself told Greg Tate, “We need images of tomorrow…and our people need them more than most.” [37] Tate goes on to point out parenthetically, “That Delany was for so long the only black science-fiction writer reminds me of Eugene Genovese’s observation that black Americans have tended toward pragmatic rather than prophetic leadership.” [38] Clinton’s outrageous scenarios offer both a critique of white America’s vision of the future (as one critic writing on Clinton in the late ’70s paused to wonder, “exactly why were all the main characters in Star Wars and Close Encounters white?” [39] ) and a prophetic vision of African-American possibility — of Jes Grew infecting not only America, but the galaxy.

Funkintelechy

Clinton’s sci-fi storylines also served to thematize one way in which P-Funk was already charting a course into the future: through the use new musical technology. Cornel West points out,

Parliament ushered forth the era of black technofunk — the creative encounter of the Afro-American spiritual- blues impulse with highly sophisticated technological instruments, strategies, and effects. [40]

Bernie Worrell’s synthesizer squeals, Sir Nose’s distorted vocals, and Clinton’s multitracked mix put African- American musicians at the cutting edge of musical technology, and set the stage for, as Greg Tate puts it,

Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, the Teller and Truman of hiphop’s Manhattan Project (inasmuch as they engineered and advocated war and peacetime use of the fusion funkbomb Einstein Clinton’s theorems made possible). [41]

Flash’s and Bambaataa’s discoveries, in turn, brought on the culture of sampling which has now returned Clinton’s actual recordings to the musical mainstream; while Parliament never charted a Top Ten record, the current third-best-selling album in the country, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, contains copious P-Funk samples. As Mumbo Jumbo concludes, “Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.” [42

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DISCOGRAPHY

1967 The Parliaments. “(I Just Wanna) Testify.” Reviliot Records

1970 Funkadelic. Funkadelic. Westbound Records. Funkadelic. Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow. Westbound Records. Parliament. Osmium. Invictus Records.

1971 Funkadelic. Maggot Brain. Westbound Records.

1972 Funkadelic. America Eats Its Young. Westbound Records.

1973 Funkadelic. Cosmic Slop. Westbound Records.

1974 Funkadelic. Standing On the Verge of Getting It On. Westbound Records. Parliament. Up for the Down Stroke. Casablanca Records.

1975 Funkadelic. Let’s Take It to the Stage. Westbound Records. Funkadelic. Funkadelic’s Greatest Hits. Westbound Records. Parliament. Chocolate City. Casablanca Records.

1976 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Stretchin’ Out In Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Warner Brothers Records. Funkadelic. Tales of Kidd Funkadelic. Westbound Records. Funkadelic. Hardcore Jollies. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Mothership Connection. Casablanca Records. Parliament. The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. Casablanca Records.

1977 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Ahh…The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! Warner Brothers Records. Funkadelic. The Best of the Funkadelic Early Years. Westbound Records. Parliament. Parliament Live: P-Funk Earth Tour. Casablanca Records. Parliament. Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Casablanca Records. Fred Wesley & The Horny Horns. A Blow For Me, A Toot To You. Atlantic Records.

1978 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Bootsy? Player of the Year. Warner Brothers Records. The Brides of Funkenstein. Funk or Walk. Atlantic Records. Funkadelic. One Nation Under a Groove. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Motor-Booty Affair. Casablanca Records.

1979 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. This Boot Is Made For Fonk-n Funkadelic. Uncle Jam Wants You. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Gloryhallastoopid (Or Pin The Tale On The Funky). Casablanca Records.

1980 Bootsy. Ultra Wave. Warner Brothers Records. The Brides of Funkenstein. Never Buy Texas From A Cowboy. Atlantic Records.

1981 Funkadelic. The Electric Spanking of War Babies. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Trombipulation. Casablanca Records.

1982 George Clinton. Computer Games. Capitol Records. William “Bootsy” Collins. The One Giveth, The Count Taketh Away. Warner Brothers Records.

1983 George Clinton. You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish. Capitol Records. P-Funk All-Stars. Urban Dancefloor Guerrillas. Uncle Jam/CBS Associated Records.

1984 Parliament. Parliament’s Greatest Hits. Casablanca Records.

1985 George Clinton. Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends. Capitol Records.

1986 George Clinton. R&B Skeletons in the Closet. Capitol Records. George Clinton. The Best of George Clinton. Capitol Records. George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic. The Mothership Connection (Live from Houston). Capitol Records.

1988 The Incorporated Thang Band. Lifestyles of the Roach and Famous. Warner Brothers Records.

1989 George Clinton. The Cinderella Theory. Paisley Park/Warner Brothers Records. 1990

P-Funk All-Stars. Live at the Beverly Theater in Hollywood. Westbound Records.

1992 George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars. Go Fer Your Funk: George Clinton Family Series Volume One. AEM Records. Funkadelic. Music For Yer Mother. AEM Records. Trey Lewd. Drop the Line. Reprise Records.

1993 George Clinton Family Series Pt. 2. Castle Communications/Essential! Records. Parliament. Tear the Roof Off: 1974-1980. Casablanca/Mercury Records.

A P-FUNK SAMPLER SONG LISTING

Side A

1. “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow” (excerpt), Funkadelic, Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow, Westbound Records, 1970.

2. “Prelude,” Parliament, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Casablanca Records, 1976.

3. “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up),” Parliament, Mothership Connection, Casablanca Records, 1976.

4. “Mothership Connection,” George Clinton/Parliament- Funkadelic, The Mothership Connection: Live from Houston, Capitol Records, 1986. Original version on Parliament, Mothership Connection, Casablanca Records, 1976

5. “Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk (Pay Attention-B3M),” Parliament, Funkintelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, Casablanca Records, 1976.

Side 2

1. “One Nation Under a Groove,” Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove, Warner Brothers Records, 1978.

2. “Tales of the Funky,” Digital Underground, Sons of the P, Tommy Boy Records, 1991. (Digitial Underground are Clinton’s most self-conscious heirs in hip-hop; the “P” in the album title stands for “Parliament-Funkadelic,” and “Tales of the Funky” is a tribute to Clinton and a reminiscence of P-Funk’s heyday. The song also samples several P-Funk classics, including “One Nation Under a Groove” and “Mothership Connection.”)

3. “The Signifying Monkey,” Dolemite, from the film Dolemite, 1975. (This doesn’t have anything in particular to do with P-Funk, but I’d mentioned it to you earlier, and thought you might want to hear it.)

NOTES

1. Some examples: “…if your ears say you’ve heard some of these grooves before, don’t tell your ass about it and your mind’ll never be the wiser” (Robert Christgau, Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), p. 94). “…you gotta accept Clinton’s funk with your ass, or else your mind ain’t never gonna follow” (Barry Walters, “George Clinton: Learning to Funk the Bomb,” Village Voice, August 6, 1993, p. 63). “BDP may not succeed in freeing my ass every time, but my mind’s almost always ready to follow” (Ted Friedman, Review of Boogie Down Productions’ Edutainment, Spin, October 1990). All of these cases could imply that the authors actually misremembered the phrase, or might simply demonstrate how critics have chosen to reformulate the phrase into a more explicit distinction between cause and effect. (In my own case, I admit that I sometimes get the phrase confused.) Less excusable is The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock’n’Roll, which claims to be an authoritative source on the history of rock’n’roll, getting the quote backwards in its entry on Parliament/Funkadelic: “One of its many mottoes was: “Free your ass and your mind will follow.” (“Parliament/Funkadelic,” in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock’n’Roll, eds. Jon Pareles and Patricia Romanowski (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1983), p. 417.

2. Robert Christgau, Rock Albums of the ’70s: A Critical Guide (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), p. 144.

3. Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk (New York: Fireside, 1992), p. 41.

4. I should point out that while, for the sake of convenience, I am writing as if Parliament-Funkadelic were the product of a single man’s vision, P-Funk has always been a collective endeavor. The contributions of numerous musicians were critical, and most P-Funk songs were collectively written. In addition, many of the overarching concepts may have been dreamed up by Pedro Bell, the artist reponsible for the sci-fi scenarios and critical commentary on Funkadelic’s album covers and inside liner notes from 1973 on. Credit must also go to Overton Lloyd, who drew a series of comic books packaged with the Parliament albums which dramatized the battles between the hero “Starchild” and his enemy, “Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk.” Exactly who deserves credit for what remains a subject of bitter dispute among P-Funk alumni. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this paper it seems more important to discuss the P-Funk concept in its totality than to try to sort out individual contributions. (For more on these disputes, see Pedro Bell, “Pedro Bell: Drawnamic Maestro of Optical Infotainment,” interviewed by Rob Michaels, Motorbooty, 1989.)

5. Parliament’s records for Casablanca and Funkadelic’s for Westbound have now been rereleased on CD. However, Funkadelic’s later albums for Warner Brothers, along with the Bootsy’ Rubber Band, Horny Horns, Parlet, and Brides of Funkenstein albums, all remain out of print.

6. See below for a more extended discussion of P-Funk’s complex relationship to disco.

7. This isn’t to suggest that Clinton’s influence ever disappeared completely; much of Prince’s music of this period, for example, is inconceivable without Parliament- Funkadelic.

8. Joe McEwen, “Funk,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-Warren (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 521.

9. Leroi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow Quill Paperback, 1963), p. 219.

10. Eric Partrige, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, tk), p. 436.

11 . Pareles and Romanowski, eds., p. 208.

12 . See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). I should point out here that my purpose in using Gates, as well as Ishmael Reed, to discuss George Clinton is not an attempt to “legitimate” or “elevate” a popular discourse to the level of literary theory. Nor am I seeking to “impose” Gate’s theory on Clinton’s music. To do either, I think, would be to engage in condescension similar to that Gates describes as the mistake of attempting to mechanically apply “European” theory to African-American literature. Of course, Gates’ theory, rooted in studies of African- American language use, has much to offer; but it remains self-consciously a theory of literature; I agree with Greg Tate that “Gates’ notion of a black tradition built only of figurative language seems a bit text-bound and bookwormish…” (Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 147). Funk not only has its own tradition; in Clinton it has its own theorist, and my purpose is simply to use Gate’s and Reed’s formulations to better illuminate Clinton’s.

13 . Jones, pp. 219-220.

14 . McEwen, p. 521.

15 . George Clinton, from interview with David Fricke, Rolling Stone, September 20, 1990, p. 75.

16 . George Clinton, quoted in Greg Tate, “George Clinton: The Genii in the Genome,” Village Voice, May 20, 1986, p. 75.

17 . “Funkencyclo-P-dia,” liner notes to Tear the Roof Off: 1974-1980, Casablanca/Mercury Records, 1993.

18 . Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Atheneum Press, 1972), p. 4. This similarity hasn’t gone unnoticed; as Joe McEwen writes: “Like the amorphous and liberating plague “Jes Grew” in Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo…funk…aimed to put its audience in the grips of a new fever…” (McEwen, p. 521). Clinton himself has also expressed his admiration for Reed.

19 . Except perhaps for cases like Prince’s “Erotic City,” in which, in order to get the song played on the radio, Prince claimed the chorus’s hard-to-discern lyric was “funk so pretty you and me,” rather than, as it seemed, “fuck so pretty you and me.”

20 . Barry Walters, “George Clinton: Learning to Funk the Bomb,” Village Voice, August 5, 1985, p. 63.

21 . Christgau, Rock Albums of the ’70s, p. 292.

22 . Simon Frith, Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 17.

23 . Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 214. I should point out that I find Gilroy’s statement, as well as Frith’s, much too broadly generalized; Miles Davis, certainly one of the very greatest black performers, sometimes played with his back to the audience. In addition, “overcoming” and “exploiting” the separation between performer and crowd are not the simple polar opposites Gilroy suggests them to be; I would argue that the slick dance routines and elaborate costumes of Motown-style soul acts (including the original Parliaments), for example, serve to highlight the staginess of the performance while at the same time embodying a cosmopolitan ideal with which the audience may strongly identify. The point is that the relationship between artist and audience need not seem transparent to create a sense of community; as Tom Carson points out about Clinton’s extravaganzas, “ritualistic stylization, no matter how novel (and tongue-in-cheek) Clinton’s uses of it, has never implied a lack of direct feeling in black music, with its passion for showbiz conventions” (Tom Carson, “Keep Rolling,” Village Voice, April 5, 1983, p. 59).

24 . Gilroy, p. 215.

25 . “Man Who Makes Millions Pushing P-Funk,” Jet, December 7, 1978, p. 22.

26 . Clinton, interviewed by Ken Tucker, “George Clinton’s Message: Don’t Fake the Funk,” New Times, August 5, 1977, p. 62.

27 . Ken Tucker, “The Walrus is George,” Village Voice, January 24, 1984, p. 65. “The Beatles are my all-time favorites,” Clinton told Greg Tate. “They were at the right place at the right time, and they made the best out of it” (Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 39).

28 . Clinton, quoted in Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, “Funk at the Temple,” Village Voice, October 22, 1979, p. 77. In an earlier interview explaining Funkadelic’s moving from the independent Westbound label to Warner Brothers Records, he explained,

The thing that sold me on Warners was their promotion. All a promo man has to do is visit the FM station and convince ‘em, like they gotta do with any rock group that’s a little different. Now, if they play Kiss on FM stations, they’ll play anything on FM stations, but as it is, they’re fakin’ the funk” (Ed Ward, “The U.S. Funk Mob: ‘We Can Be As Bad As We Need To Be,” Village Voice, July 25, 1977, p. 39.).

29 . Walters, p. 63. The almost all-white rock critical establishment, as well, largely ignored P-Funk at their peak, despite the fact that Clinton’s “funk operas” and concept albums exhibited the kind of “experimental” scope and audacity that critics’ darlings like David Bowie and the Who were being praised for during the same period. (The stage and set for the Mothership Connection tour, in fact, was designed by Jules Fischer, who had orchestrated much-lauded extravaganzas for Bowie and the Rolling Stones.) As Robert Christgau, one of the few white critics who did pay attention, pointed out in 1983, Clinton is “a master of such supposedly Caucasian specialties as stance and persona and pop mind-fuck” (Robert Christgau, “Pazz & Jop ‘82: Funkintelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome,” Village Voice, February 22, 1983.) Nevertheless, none of P-Funk’s late-’70s masterworks placed anywhere near the Top 10 of the Village Voice’s “Pazz & Jop” poll of rock critics. Not until the mid-’80s did most critics begin to look back and realize what they’d missed. And even today, when Clinton is praised, it’s often with backhanded compliments which seemed to suggest that as opposed to white “art-rockers,” Clinton’s claim to the high conceptual ground was only a put-on: “So what if George Clinton…is a ripoff artist” (Jimmy Gutterman, The Best Rock’n’Roll Records of All Time (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), p. 85.) “If the Parliafunkadelicment Thang sometimes seemed like a scam…” (Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: Plume, 1989), p. 347.) Clinton remains outrageously on the margins of the rock’n’roll canon: Gutterman’s book places The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, its lone P-Funk representative, at #42, Marsh’s highest listing of any P- Funk song is at #524, and Clinton still does not merit his own chapter in the newly revised edition of The Rolling Stone IIllustrated History of Rock & Roll.

Like white rock critics’ belated recognition of Clinton, the current success of white funk-rock bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers can in large part be seen as a classic example of white America’s discovery and appropriation of an African-American style years after its creative peak — c.f. the white blues bands of the 1960s. Many of the hip-hop songs which use P-Funk samples, in fact, function less as recontextualizations than as rereleases — raps which simply piggy-back on P-Funk songs which should’ve been hits the first time around, but remain unknown to most white listeners (and perhaps many black listeners as well, as the “Urban Contemporary” stations of today, even more conservative than their late-’70s counterparts, rarely play P-Funk oldies).

30 . Tucker, p. 65. I say “overcome” rather than “dissipated,” because P-Funk was engaged in a struggle; as Greg Tate puts it,

On black radio they functioned as active opposition to a form of record industry sabotage dubbed “disco” — or as I like to pun it, disCOINTELPRO, since it destroyed the self- supporting black band movement which P-Funk (jes) grew out of” (Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 156).

I would moderate Tate’s point by arguing that disco itself was a powerfully liberating movement subverted by a racist (and heterosexist) power structure. Clinton’s own criticisms of disco were always somewhat disingenuous; much of Parliament’s best music sounded a lot more like disco than Clinton, anxious to distinguish his band as purveyors of the “pure, uncut funk,” wanted to admit. To a large extent, in fact, Clinton’s attack on disco (the slogan to “(Not Just) Knee Deep” was “let’s rescue dance music from the blahs”) was probably in the spirit of friendly competition and self-assertion rather than outright distaste; as Clinton himself somewhat more generously acknowledged in 1986, “Disco itself was funk. But all they did was take one funk beat and sanitize it to no end. It’s irritating. I loved Donna Summer’s records. But too much of it…” (Clinton, interviewed by Fricke, p. 77.) Nonetheless, Tate is certainly right that the industry- hyped disco boom of the late ’70s killed many independent funk bands, and allowed record companies to take tighter control of black music by putting creative control in the hands of behind-the-scenes producers who could never develop the clout and autonomy of world- famous performers. (For an excellent discussion of the politics of disco, see Tom Smucker, “Disco,” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, pp. 561-572. See also Richard Dyer, “In Defense of Disco,” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), pp. 410-418.

31 . See, for example, Ed Ward’s 1977 profile of P-Funk: “Still, the key to mass acceptance for Funkadelic lies with the white audience” (Ward, p. 39). Likewise, Tom Smucker worried in 1978 that P-Funk was “wearing out and getting boring, just when white people had a chance to discover it.” (Tom Smucker, “Parlentelechy v. the Bullshit Syndrome,” Village Voice, February 6, 1978).

32 . Walters, p. 63.

33 . Untitled, from the liner notes to Tear the Roof off the Mother: 1974-1980. My guess is that this text was initially printed in the liner notes to Mothership Connection, but as the reissue I own does not include all the original packaging, I cannot tell for sure.

34 . This point is made by Nelson George in his “Chronicle of Post-Soul Black Culture.” (Nelson George, Buppies, B- Boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 13.

35 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 160.

36 . Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 94.

37 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 165.

38 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 166.

39 . Smucker, “Parlentelechy v. the Bullshit Syndrome,” p. 49.

40 . West, p. 287. West’s use of the word “technofunk” is somewhat confusing, as music critics usually use the term to refer to the synthesizer-dominated dance music of the early ’80s. But his point remains valid.

41 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 186.

42 . Reed, p. 218.

In the summer of 1990, the American music industry performed a bizarre ritual. At a press conference, it was announced that the winners of that year’s ‘Best New Artist’ award, Milli Vanilli, had had their prize revoked for misrepresenting their contributions to their own music; it had been discovered (though there was never much of a secret about it) that the group’s putative members, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had not performed any of the vocals on their album. (The vocals were actually performed by Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howe.) Vanilli quickly became a running joke in mass culture. Rob and Fab appeared in a self-mocking chewing-gum commercial, lip-synching the Care-Free jingle. A class-action suit was filed, and eventually purchasers of Girl You Know It’s True were given the opportunity to mail off for a rebate for fraud damages. And in 1991, Rob Pilatus attempted suicide by jumping out of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite. Milli Vanilli today are little more than a fading joke and a trivia question. (A comback album last year by Rob and Fab, featuring their own voices, predictably sank without a trace.) Although they’d sold ten million albums and scored five Top Five singles (including three Number Ones), their hit songs have been erased from the oldies playlists of radio stations across the nation. The only place I’ve come across any trace of Milli Vanilli in the past few years was on a recent episode of Beavis and Butthead, where the dazed metalheads could only stare in utter incomprehension at the two dancing, dreadlocked men on the screen.

But if Milli Vanilli’s songs have been expunged from the collective memory, their disgrace remains a critical episode in the narrative contemporary popular music tells to explain itself. That 1990 press conference came in the midst of crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music. A New Jersey congressman was proposing a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts. The cross-over of hip-hop represented by Milli-Vanilli’s pop-rap fusion was introducing Top 40 audiences to remixing and sampling strategies that called into question assumptions about songs’s originality. Synthesizers, originally exploited for their plastic, unnatural sound in the early 80s, had become the sonic norm, as familiar as amplified guitar strings. And sophisticated recording techniques had emerged which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument.

Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians, edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers. But while most viewers recognize the complex division of labor in moviemaking — nobody gets upset that actors don’t do their own stunts — pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity. They were the recording industry’s sacrifice meant to prove the integrity of the rest of their product — as if the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN’T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched the faces in the videos.

The sacrifice worked. Paula Abdul faced down a lawsuit from a former backup singer claiming Abdul’s voice was barely audible on several of the tracks from her hit Forever Your Girl, and established her artistic credibility by singing ballads on the follow-up Spellbound. Rapper Biz Markie was successfully sued for unliscensed sampling, and now every hip-hop appropriation is contractually accounted for. Gangsta rap and grunge rock emerged as mass genres which laid special claims to authentic expression, and nobody smirked. Sure, the rules had changed somewhat: the hard-rockin’ earnestness of Bruce Springsteen’s comeback records in 1991 sounded painfully out of touch; in place of those plodding electric guitars, aging rockers discovered that they could shed the burden of their years and regain intimacy with their audiences by going acoustic — or at least ‘Unplugged’, which quickly developed to mean anything except electric guitars. Soon, post-Vanilli diva Mariah Carey was performing live on MTV just to prove her multi-octave range was an honest freak of nature, and not just a studio trick. Which begs the question, what the hell difference does it make whether Carey’s dog-whistle-pitched shrieks are live or Memorex? The answer is that the only reason that painful noise impresses in the first place is because it demonstrates Carey’s technical skills, the same way an Eddie Van Halen guitar run is supposed to wow us with his fingering prowess. We’re asked to be impressed by the artists’ mastery of their instruments. But that shriek at the end of Carey’s “Emotions” is a ruse — the worst part of the song — and I’ll take David Lee Roth over Eddie Van Halen any day.

In explaining the pleasures of mass culture, the aesthetic criteria that go along with the rubric of ‘authenticity’ — designations like ‘talent’ and ‘quality’ — are pretty useless standards of judgement — after-the-fact rationalizations, often, for more inexplicable attractions. Why do I love Milli Vanilli’s Girl, You Know It’s True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its soaring synth-strings, its shimmering percussion. But do I think it’s great because the people involved were ‘talented’? Who the hell cares? It’s not like I’m inviting them to dinner. Plenty of the greatest music ever made has been created by hacks, slackers, and no-names, who for whatever reasons stumbled into a little bit of genius. I should point out that just because Rob and Fab didn’t have much to do with the creation of Milli Vanilli’s music, it’s not like nobody else did. The genius behind the Milli Vanilli sound, if you want to know, is producer Frank Farian, also responsible for disco pioneers Boney M. There was probably some specific mastermind behind the image and marketing of Milli Vanilli, as well, whose name is lost to history because of the biases of what gets to count as ‘art’ and what as ‘packaging’. In any case, dividing up the responsibility for the bundle of sound and images known as Milli Vanilli may be a significant historical task, but it does little to make sense of the pleasures of the text. We can explain Farian’s contribution to the bundle of sound and image known as ‘Milli Vanilli’ in terms of valorized technical skills. But how much credit should we give Rob and Fab for their wonderful, slightly off-base charisma? For their enormous pecs? For their great hair? These may be ‘superficial’ attributes, but they have AS much to do with aesthetic effect as rhythm tracks. To classify some qualities as ‘talents’ and others as ‘superficial’ may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

None of this is to say that this art need be seen as in any way ‘compromised’ by its commodity status. That play of images can still create powerful resonances, provoke intense desires, and connote complex politics. Actually, what really blew my mind when Milli Vanilli first showed up was how appealingly, subversively goofy they were. I knew something was up when they could barely pronounce English in their few interviews (they’re both from Germany). They had these huge pectoral muscles, but had none of that Schwarzenegger uebermensch belligerence; they might’ve looked muscle-bound, but they could dance. Actually, their costumes highlighted the irony of their gentle-giant appeal: they wore those power-shoulder jackets as if they didn’t realize that with those bods, they didn’t need them. They were big men wearing the drag of big men. And the weird dynamic they had going was so interestingly, almost incestuously (given how similar they looked to each other) queer — in the “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” video, for example, there’s a woman who’s the putative object of their interest, but they’re obviously much more interested in each other.

Of course, that queerness goes a long way toward explaining why Milli Vanilli were picked out as the scapegoats for the music industry’s ‘authenticity’ problem. It’s no surprise that two effeminate-seeming men were attacked for failing to play a ‘productive’ role in the making of their music. In the gender scheme of capitalism as traditionally envisioned by capitalists and Marxists alike, where productive masculine workers create goods for passive, feminized consumers, the role of commodification gets coded as queer. Packaging, marketing, fashion, image-creation — long gay-associated cultural roles — are seen as parasitic, wasteful, non-reproductive, fetishistic mediations blocking an unalienated, ‘authentic’ relationship between producer and consumer. What this story leaves out — represses — is the physical and intellectual labor — the art — that goes into associating goods with cultural meanings. And what it can’t explain are the undeniable pleasures of commodification.

The disgracing of Milli Vanilli didn’t return popular music to a golden age of direct communication between artist and fan. I’m not sure I’d want such a relationship, if it ever existed — most rock stars become a lot less interesting when you learn what they’re ‘really’ like. But in demarcating the ’90s’ boundary line between ‘art’ and ‘image’, what THIS DISGRACING may have inadvertently helped usher in is the era of the Supermodel. Cindy, Naomi, Linda and their cohort can’t be unmasked as talentless frauds, don’t need to sing, dance, or act to be stars. They’ve given up any claim to creating anything other than images of themselves. Does this mean they produce nothing that can be of any value to their millions of fans? Not according to the most thrilling media phenomenon to come along since Milli Vanilli, RuPaul, who in “Supermodel” asks us to reimagine image-modelling and gender-construction as the archetypical form of postmodern labor: “You’d better work it, girl.” You know it’s true..

Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic

Pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity.

Bad Subjects, Issue #9, November 1993

In the summer of 1990, the American music industry performed a bizarre ritual. At a press conference, it was announced that the winners of that year’s ‘Best New Artist’ award, Milli Vanilli, had had their prize revoked for misrepresenting their contributions to their own music; it had been discovered (though there was never much of a secret about it) that the group’s putative members, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had not performed any of the vocals on their album. (The vocals were actually performed by Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howe.) Vanilli quickly became a running joke in mass culture. Rob and Fab appeared in a self-mocking chewing-gum commercial, lip-synching the Care-Free jingle. A class-action suit was filed, and eventually purchasers of Girl You Know It’s True were given the opportunity to mail off for a rebate for fraud damages. And in 1991, Rob Pilatus attempted suicide by jumping out of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite. Milli Vanilli today are little more than a fading joke and a trivia question. (A comback album last year by Rob and Fab, featuring their own voices, predictably sank without a trace.) Although they’d sold ten million albums and scored five Top Five singles (including three Number Ones), their hit songs have been erased from the oldies playlists of radio stations across the nation. The only place I’ve come across any trace of Milli Vanilli in the past few years was on a recent episode of Beavis and Butthead, where the dazed metalheads could only stare in utter incomprehension at the two dancing, dreadlocked men on the screen.

But if Milli Vanilli’s songs have been expunged from the collective memory, their disgrace remains a critical episode in the narrative contemporary popular music tells to explain itself. That 1990 press conference came in the midst of crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music. A New Jersey congressman was proposing a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts. The cross-over of hip-hop represented by Milli-Vanilli’s pop-rap fusion was introducing Top 40 audiences to remixing and sampling strategies that called into question assumptions about songs’s originality. Synthesizers, originally exploited for their plastic, unnatural sound in the early 80s, had become the sonic norm, as familiar as amplified guitar strings. And sophisticated recording techniques had emerged which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument.

Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians, edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers. But while most viewers recognize the complex division of labor in moviemaking — nobody gets upset that actors don’t do their own stunts — pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity. They were the recording industry’s sacrifice meant to prove the integrity of the rest of their product — as if the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN’T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched the faces in the videos.

The sacrifice worked. Paula Abdul faced down a lawsuit from a former backup singer claiming Abdul’s voice was barely audible on several of the tracks from her hit Forever Your Girl, and established her artistic credibility by singing ballads on the follow-up Spellbound. Rapper Biz Markie was successfully sued for unliscensed sampling, and now every hip-hop appropriation is contractually accounted for. Gangsta rap and grunge rock emerged as mass genres which laid special claims to authentic expression, and nobody smirked. Sure, the rules had changed somewhat: the hard-rockin’ earnestness of Bruce Springsteen’s comeback records in 1991 sounded painfully out of touch; in place of those plodding electric guitars, aging rockers discovered that they could shed the burden of their years and regain intimacy with their audiences by going acoustic — or at least ‘Unplugged’, which quickly developed to mean anything except electric guitars. Soon, post-Vanilli diva Mariah Carey was performing live on MTV just to prove her multi-octave range was an honest freak of nature, and not just a studio trick. Which begs the question, what the hell difference does it make whether Carey’s dog-whistle-pitched shrieks are live or Memorex? The answer is that the only reason that painful noise impresses in the first place is because it demonstrates Carey’s technical skills, the same way an Eddie Van Halen guitar run is supposed to wow us with his fingering prowess. We’re asked to be impressed by the artists’ mastery of their instruments. But that shriek at the end of Carey’s “Emotions” is a ruse — the worst part of the song — and I’ll take David Lee Roth over Eddie Van Halen any day.

In explaining the pleasures of mass culture, the aesthetic criteria that go along with the rubric of ‘authenticity’ — designations like ‘talent’ and ‘quality’ — are pretty useless standards of judgement — after-the-fact rationalizations, often, for more inexplicable attractions. Why do I love Milli Vanilli’s Girl, You Know It’s True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its soaring synth-strings, its shimmering percussion. But do I think it’s great because the people involved were ‘talented’? Who the hell cares? It’s not like I’m inviting them to dinner. Plenty of the greatest music ever made has been created by hacks, slackers, and no-names, who for whatever reasons stumbled into a little bit of genius. I should point out that just because Rob and Fab didn’t have much to do with the creation of Milli Vanilli’s music, it’s not like nobody else did. The genius behind the Milli Vanilli sound, if you want to know, is producer Frank Farian, also responsible for disco pioneers Boney M. There was probably some specific mastermind behind the image and marketing of Milli Vanilli, as well, whose name is lost to history because of the biases of what gets to count as ‘art’ and what as ‘packaging’. In any case, dividing up the responsibility for the bundle of sound and images known as Milli Vanilli may be a significant historical task, but it does little to make sense of the pleasures of the text. We can explain Farian’s contribution to the bundle of sound and image known as ‘Milli Vanilli’ in terms of valorized technical skills. But how much credit should we give Rob and Fab for their wonderful, slightly off-base charisma? For their enormous pecs? For their great hair? These may be ‘superficial’ attributes, but they have AS much to do with aesthetic effect as rhythm tracks. To classify some qualities as ‘talents’ and others as ‘superficial’ may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

None of this is to say that this art need be seen as in any way ‘compromised’ by its commodity status. That play of images can still create powerful resonances, provoke intense desires, and connote complex politics. Actually, what really blew my mind when Milli Vanilli first showed up was how appealingly, subversively goofy they were. I knew something was up when they could barely pronounce English in their few interviews (they’re both from Germany). They had these huge pectoral muscles, but had none of that Schwarzenegger uebermensch belligerence; they might’ve looked muscle-bound, but they could dance. Actually, their costumes highlighted the irony of their gentle-giant appeal: they wore those power-shoulder jackets as if they didn’t realize that with those bods, they didn’t need them. They were big men wearing the drag of big men. And the weird dynamic they had going was so interestingly, almost incestuously (given how similar they looked to each other) queer — in the “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” video, for example, there’s a woman who’s the putative object of their interest, but they’re obviously much more interested in each other.

Of course, that queerness goes a long way toward explaining why Milli Vanilli were picked out as the scapegoats for the music industry’s ‘authenticity’ problem. It’s no surprise that two effeminate-seeming men were attacked for failing to play a ‘productive’ role in the making of their music. In the gender scheme of capitalism as traditionally envisioned by capitalists and Marxists alike, where productive masculine workers create goods for passive, feminized consumers, the role of commodification gets coded as queer. Packaging, marketing, fashion, image-creation — long gay-associated cultural roles — are seen as parasitic, wasteful, non-reproductive, fetishistic mediations blocking an unalienated, ‘authentic’ relationship between producer and consumer. What this story leaves out — represses — is the physical and intellectual labor — the art — that goes into associating goods with cultural meanings. And what it can’t explain are the undeniable pleasures of commodification.

The disgracing of Milli Vanilli didn’t return popular music to a golden age of direct communication between artist and fan. I’m not sure I’d want such a relationship, if it ever existed — most rock stars become a lot less interesting when you learn what they’re ‘really’ like. But in demarcating the ’90s’ boundary line between ‘art’ and ‘image’, what THIS DISGRACING may have inadvertently helped usher in is the era of the Supermodel. Cindy, Naomi, Linda and their cohort can’t be unmasked as talentless frauds, don’t need to sing, dance, or act to be stars. They’ve given up any claim to creating anything other than images of themselves. Does this mean they produce nothing that can be of any value to their millions of fans? Not according to the most thrilling media phenomenon to come along since Milli Vanilli, RuPaul, who in “Supermodel” asks us to reimagine image-modelling and gender-construction as the archetypical form of postmodern labor: “You’d better work it, girl.” You know it’s true.

Let me begin with a personal example of what I want to talk about. When I was a college radio DJ, I'd occasionally get to interview independent-label acts who'd drop by the station before playing a local club. I remember one particularly awkward conversation with the band Yo La Tengo. My co-interviewers and I had these wonderful artists, whose music we all loved, in the studio with us, and all we could think to ask was, "um . . . do you think your video will get played on MTV? How's the distribution for your current record? Would you like to get signed by a major label?"

The band, who certainly had more of a personal - and financial - stake in these issues than we did, nonetheless grew exasperated at our philistinism. They wanted to know, "Don't you have anything to ask about our music?"

Well, no, we didn't. We knew why we liked their music - Ira Kaplan's a great guitar player, Georgia Hubley has a wonderful voice - but we really didn't need to know much more about it.2 What we wanted to know was where Yo La Tengo stood in the big culture game. How many fans listened to them? How many records did they sell? What were the chances they'd turn into rock stars?

This seeming obsession with commerce over culture is typically dismissed as the crassest sort of bottom-line, lowest-common-denominator cynicism. It's the perspective I saw Siskel and Ebert bemoaning just the other day, complaining about how the news these days is only interested in reporting the top grossing movies of each week, rather than on highlighting artistic accomplishments. An affront to critical respectability, it's the antithesis of the "art-for-art's sake" attitude identified by Bourdieu as the "Kantian aesthetic." At the same time, as I'll discuss further in a minute, it doesn't coincide with most of the descriptions and justifications of fandom I've seen in Cultural Studies. It's not a subversive act of "textual poaching" - it's a kind of allegiance, a kind of loyalty. It's not so different from rooting for a sports team, or a political candidate. You develop an investment in a particular band, movie star, or TV show, and you want to see it do well against the competition.

I should point out that the flip side - the subculture's fear that their heroes will "sell out" and become huge - is just as much defined by this dynamic. Either way, the response is determined by the artists' commercial reception, rather than by intrinsic qualities of the artists' texts.

But in scandalously ignoring artistic content, this form of appreciation is often perceived as a guilty pleasure, even by those engaging in it. It remains haunted by the specter of the Kantian aesthetic, which remains the legitimating mechanism for most pop culture claims to "authenticity." I knew as I asked my questions to Yo La Tengo that they were a fan's indulgences, the idle chit-chat a band might make before getting to what's really supposed to matter: the music.

But looking back on that conversation, I'm not so sure I had anything to feel guilty about. Music is music, but when you start talking about record sales and MTV airplay, you're getting closer, I think, to the meat of cultural politics. I want to take some of the stigma away from these conversations - I want to recognize the way this form of pleasure is distinctly useful. Like Bourdieu's "popular aesthetic," it's an attitude which radically challenges the Kantian isolation of "art" from life. It insists on grounding aesthetic appreciation - and pleasure - in a knowledge of the conditions of cultural production and consumption. But at the same time, it's not simply, as Bourdieu defines the popular aesthetic, "the affirmation of the continuity between art and life." It's more self-consciously mediated than that.

Let me explain what I mean in terms of ideas about commodification - one of the alternate vocabularies to Bourdieu's suggested by Professor Jameson last night, but which I think has problems of its own. The relationship I'm describing between fan and cultural commodity can certainly be considered a form of fetishization. The commodified object - the record album, the baseball card, the comic book - is invested with seemingly magical properties. But at the same time, the fan's knowledge in a sense demystifies the commodity - it situates that fetishized commodity within its material conditions of production, distribution, and marketing. I'd argue that the fan's pleasure is a fetishization without mystification. This model of consumer pleasure, I think, is crucial for cultural critics to understand and learn from, because it offers the possibility of recognizing and critiquing the injustices of capitalism and the vagaries of the market without insisting on an ascetic renunciation of the pleasures of commodity culture. It offers the hope, I think, for a commodification without illusions.

Let me clarify my point with an example of one kind of fan behavior: baseball card collecting. In the last twenty years, baseball card collecting has grown from a childhood pleasure rarely noticed by adults, into an industry selling over $1 billion of cards every year.

In the process, many critics have complained that collectors have lost sight of the purpose of collecting - that they seem more interested in the market value of their cards than in the players they represent. But the irony here is: if the fans put so much thought and effort into understanding and following the baseball card market, so that they know as much about the economics of baseball cards as any executive at Topps, how can you describe their relation to the commodity itself as mystified? Fetishized, certainly - these so-called "investments" mean something more to their owners than simple stock certificates would. After all, there are easier ways to make money. Baseball cards are commodities of deep personal and mythic resonance, nostalgically evoking the childhood practices