Book Review

My review of Neil Lerner and Joseph Straus's Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music has been published in Review of Disability Studies: an International Journal.  The Journal can be accessed for free at: http://www.rds.hawaii.edu/

Do Gays Need a Backbeat? The Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus’s “Friends ARE Benefits” and the Complexities of Musical Rhetoric

Um . . . What the Hell Just Happened?

Few experiences in my life have given me chills so consistently as singing Jonny Cowell’s “Walk Hand in Hand” at concerts of the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus. For many members of our community, the Chorus’s traditional closing number may be as close to sacrosanct as any social ritual offered in the Twin Cities. TCGMC’s most recent program, “Friends ARE Benefits,” closed with a musical recontextualization of Cowell’s hymn of unity and love in the face of social pressure and the continuing threats from a culture frequently hostile to sexual and gender difference.[i]

Artistic Director Stan Hill knew the revision might rile some feathers, prefacing the closer by telling the audience not to “freak out.” Hill and composer/arranger Michael Shaieb sought to let the crowd leave with a “sense of empowerment . . . and disco fever,” after experiencing what they anticipated would be a sobering and introspective experience: the premiere of Shaieb’s “Through a Glass, Darkly,” a part cantata/part musical play addressing methamphetamine addiction in the gay male community. In March 2008, the anthemic “Walk Hand in Hand” got groovy, accompanied by a funky dance track. While on a personal aesthetic level, I had a profoundly ambivalent response to both Shaieb’s show and the revised “Walk Hand in Hand,” I am not so much interested in reviewing the concert as I am interested in reflecting upon how the performance highlighted the crucial and complex role music plays in the presentation of gay male identities. Honestly, I’m a little confused, not by any of the concert’s numbers themselves, but by the construction of the program as a whole, which ran roughshod over musical rhetorical devices that have profound consequences for gay men.

As a musicologist who spends his every waking hour examining music-making and reception among queer communities, I have always advocated strongly for the thoughtful revision of existing music. Revision and recontextualization are powerful tools. After all, they are the bread and butter of that most queer of sensibilities, camp. Since the writing of Susan Sontag in the 1960s, camp has been much maligned as “merely” aesthetic or as a vapid celebration of style over content.[ii] Nevertheless, I place myself firmly among the ranks of those who strongly believe that campy revision is one of the most potent and politically-charged means of self-fashioning among LGBT communities.[iii] I am not at all uncomfortable with changing things up, even if the material is something I adore as much as “Walk Hand in Hand.” Yet, the contents of the changes we make, especially when they involve musical style or rhetoric, can easily masquerade as “just something new” and, therefore, not a big deal. They are a big deal. Here’s why . . .

Why Can’t I Just Shut Up and Listen?

There’s just no denying that music has been, and continues to be, a critical means of fashioning gay communities. It’s no accident that, pre-Stonewall, the euphemism “he’s musical” served as a sure-fire means of identifying members of the “family.” To give but one example among many, the gay male obsession with Judy Garland isn’t just ironic, melodramatic buffoonery, and it certainly isn’t, as some have claimed, simply identification with a diva whose tragic life mirrored the “tragedy” of gay sexuality. “Get Happy,” “Over the Rainbow,” and countless other numbers made famous by Garland have meaning for many gays. In his preface to “Through a Glass, Darkly,” Hill joked that many people had asked, “why do a piece on methamphetamine addiction? Why not do a Judy Garland medley?” His answer was “because we do them all the time.” They sure do, with a little Cher and ABBA thrown in for good measure. Hill should be lauded for both his willingness to do the “expected” and his desire to tackle touchy subjects like meth addiction. They both matter. I’d like to propose, however, that taking on meth doesn’t necessarily matter more than taking on Judy.

More significantly, I’d like to propose that, for gay communities, the old closet paradigm of silence versus speaking up—apparently the driving force behind this commission—is no longer enough (in fact, some queer theorists believe it is regressive . . . I’m not necessarily one of them). Hill framed the newly commissioned work as a kind of “breaking of the silence.” But what is it that we say when we speak up? That question can’t be answered simply through consideration of subject matter or even through consideration of the words we use. When we choose to say something musically, the music—by which I don’t mean lyrics—makes a difference. Shaieb clearly knows this, as his work cleverly utilizes stylistic and rhetorical juxtapositions to highlight the emotional and social contexts of its plot (such as it is; plot doesn’t seem to be particularly central to this play, as it is intensely conventional and predictable).

“Through a Glass, Darkly” tells the tale of Sebastian, a meth addict whose downward spiral destroys his relationship with his boyfriend Zack. Sebastian also pulls Billy, a trick he meets in a club, down with him into the abyss of drug addiction. The story, in fact, seems to be less about the effects of drug abuse than it is about the effects of just being a straight-up jerk. It doesn’t take meth addiction for someone to behave irresponsibly, to disregard the effects of his/her actions on others, to betray a lover, or to use a vulnerable stranger for sexual gratification. Believe me. I, in fact, have no doubt that there are some in our community who think these behaviors are just part of “being gay.” That attitude, in my opinion, is precisely why this work is important, but it doesn’t magically emerge from drug use and it requires a truly thoughtful critique in order to make its representation in cultural products productive (Queer as Folk—as much enjoyment as the show provides me—isn’t it).

Shaieb’s tale, I think, tells us more about music than it tells us about meth. The vast majority of the work contains a backing track, which, frankly, varies in quality. Previously recorded music is pumped into the hall, eliminating the need for live instrumentalists. Yet, live instrumentalists do, in fact, show up at a critical moment, when the elimination of the recording in favor of a live piano and oboe creates a jarring—and quite effective—change of timbre. In this way, the play and the concert itself knock us over the head with a central issue in contemporary music: the conflict between “natural” and “synthetic” sounds. This might seem to be a benign binary, but music’s significance, while massive, can be enacted subtly and, therefore, can easily be disregarded on its surface. That’s the point. Music is non-referential . . . or, at least, that’s what we’ve been trained to believe.

If we toss out conventional wisdom and choose to be honest about music, it’s not hard to acknowledge that “Through a Glass, Darkly” couldn’t function musically without the realities of referentiality. When Sebastian gives Billy his first taste of meth, their drug haze is marked by a Danny Elfman-esque (think Edward Scissorhands or The Nightmare Before Christmas) chorus, “Transitions.” This music evokes childlike innocence combined with full-on psychosis, the hallmark of Elfman’s film scores and a musical trope fully embedded in most Americans’ musical subconscious. It is horrific, bizarre, and familiar all at the same time. There are few tactics in any of the arts that can so completely evoke the “unrealness” of reality. Yep. This is drug music. Got it.

But this is just one of two significant departures from the overall musical landscape of the work . . . at least until the moralizing final number. The other is “Making It: The Meth Song,” a “message from someone else’s sponsor,” which divides the musical in half (this is a two-act play pretending to be a one-act; there’s just not enough going on to justify a longer duration). This strange interlude gives us a how-to of meth production and a cautionary tale consisting of, well: “it’s bad because you’ll get arrested. In addition, you’ll die” (I’m not entirely sure that drug addicts are unaware that drug use isn’t a good thing. “Just say no,” and whatnot. It’s a bit tiresome.). The song’s pseudo-calypso musical texture is troubling. Using a “racialized” musical rhetoric (by this, I mean the evocation of a style, not the style itself) is another consistent trope for severing narratives from “reality” within Western musical parlance. It serves a purpose similar to the evocation of Elfman’s creepy aesthetic—it’s just a tad more difficult to justify decontextualizing an actual musical/cultural tradition and we should always be wary when shifts in seemingly ethnically-placed musical styles come to signify detachment from narrative cohesion. Combine this with the image of gay men in hazmat suits (unsavory folks have dubbed us the “viral” community in more ways than one and, in fact, more than once), and you’ll understand why I bristled a bit at this “apex” of the musical arch.

One has to isolate these momentary departures to get at the crux of the musical rhetoric of “Through a Glass, Darkly.” The actual musical texture of the majority of the work is one of dance music, or at least the constant referencing of “clubbiness” through a persistent “thumpy” rhythmic track. To the extent that this musical device serves to foreground the continual ramifications of Sebastian’s partying ways, I find it to be effective. The dance club, represented on stage by members of the chorus who remain on the “club” section of the set for much of the narrative, becomes an omni-present aspect of Sebastian’s life, even when he is elsewhere.

Functioning as the dominant musical tapestry of the work, dance, or at least the suggestion of dance music, constitutes a crucial aesthetic aspect of “Though a Glass, Darkly.” Shaieb characterizes Billy’s addiction entirely through the musical referencing of the social context in which he meets Sebastian. Billy’s anguished desire to see Sebastian (after the asshole disappears without contact . . . again, not necessarily a “meth-related” event) continuously manifests itself through his declarations of “I just want to dance.” Likewise, in his confrontations with Zack near the end of the show, Sebastian attempts to justify his addiction as a logical offshoot of his desire to dance.

Dance, dance, dance. Seems like we’re beating a dead horse, doesn’t it? Actually, I don’t think so. The ubiquity of this musical reference constitutes what I think is the brilliance of Shaieb’s score. Many gay men know—probably unconsciously—exactly what’s going on here. Sebastian and Billy aren’t just addicted to meth. They are addicted to a specific queer cultural formulation of self-fashioning, a formulation that may certainly involve substance abuse, but is not defined by it. It is a variety of self-fashioning, however, that when lived to excess can quickly become overwhelming, high-pressure, and can come to permeate or even control one’s life. By accompanying the presentation of a particular lifestyle with a musical rhetoric that both plays upon a direct association with that lifestyle and functions non-teleologically (it moves, but doesn’t get anywhere; it constitutes a sonic “loop,” both figuratively and literally), Shaieb really quite intelligently harnesses musical style to make his point in a way words or actions alone cannot.

That is why the sudden substitution of a live pianist and oboist for the recorded track, as simple a device as it may seem, is so powerful. The loop suddenly stops, the synthetic replaced by the acoustic. “If You Only Knew,” provides a moment of real (if bordering on the sappy) beauty. Note my terminology: “real beauty.” It’s loaded, and I’m getting to why. Even with my notebook in hand and my apparatus of cultural-critical weaponry fully locked and loaded, I allowed myself to sink in and get a goose-bump or two.

Then I realized what had happened and I jerked back to my senses. The “false,” synthetic, non-teleological sonic world of Sebastian’s spiral to the dark side had been swept away by the spare, semantically-rich, acoustic sonority of the “authentic.” Appropriate, as Zack declares Sebastian’s “authentic” value, in opposition to the superficial world of instant gratification that had turned him into little more than a commodity: “If you only knew that you are beautiful.” It’s a simple and obvious device, but not necessarily a cheap trick. Shaieb doesn’t need to be subtle here. He just needs to flip the switch that will, without fail, trigger a response so thoroughly culturally-conditioned that even jaded-old-me, a guy whose capacity to “just listen” has been “educated” right out of him, didn’t manage to resist. But then "technologized" sound returned, this time with synthetic strings, which accomplished absolutely nothing musically, other than detracting from the frankly gut-wrenching and gorgeous swell of the chorus. I thought there was something moving, critically sophisticated, and downright redemptive going on, and it was taken away. From my personal aesthetic perspective . . . ick, and how dare you?

Yet, again, these things aren’t benign. They’ve got a history, and that history is more consequential than my personal disappointment at a moment whose effectiveness, in my opinion, was trashily subverted. What’s real and what’s false; what’s genuine and what’s pandering; what’s beautiful and what’s trashy; who gives a shit? I do, and you should too . . .

That Pesky Business of History

The day before I attended the concert, I had given a talk for my University of Minnesota colleagues in which I asserted that, for some members of LGBT communities, the act of dance can symbolically transfer the physical manifestations of homophobia to a kind of physical/psychological healing, and that taking dance music outside of the dance club (listening to it in their cars, for example), can extend that healing-via-movement to other parts of their lives. Another speaker, in a different context, brought up the notion that communities seen as ungrounded—he referenced “Jews, ‘Gypsies,’ and Gays”—have historically been seen as expendable, not part of “the folk.” If the dominant culture can’t pinpoint your “point of origin,” this classic xenophobic line of thought goes, you are neither useful, nor worthy of serious consideration. This is heavy stuff in the realm of music because musical rhetoric has a series of direct parallels, which have been used historically to activate music in the service of some truly hateful projects: “authentic” versus “fake” sound; natural versus synthetic; substantive versus surface-level; acoustic versus technologized; rock versus pop.

This isn’t a minor issue. More “classically”-minded queens might find it enlightening to consider, the next time they visit the Minnesota Orchestra or the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the ethnicities of the composers on the program. Trust me when I tell you that not all of the good music of the 18^th and 19^th centuries was written by men who spoke German. Composers who were not lucky enough to be born in Bonn, Leipzig, or Salzburg, or who didn’t settle in Vienna, knew full well that they needed to negotiate the tricky terrain of Germanic musical rhetoric if they were to achieve success among the cultural elites. Schoenberg, Mahler, and the massive host of other Jewish composers doing interesting things at the nineteenth-century fin de siècle had an entirely more complex series of cultural hurdles to negotiate in their musical production. And God help you if you desire to dig into the kinds of things Wagner had to say about Mendelssohn. The translation of this concept to an American musical context is demonstrated by the avant-garde—and clearly charming—composer Edgar Varèse, who bitterly asserted that the key to musical success in 1940s New York society was to “use your arse as a prick garage—or your mouth as a night lodging . . .”[iv]

Don’t try to tell me that musical style and sexual identity are unlinked, at least at a discursive level. After all, Varèse wasn’t just grumpy that the most successful composers of his day were gay; he was grumpy that they were gay and wrote diatonic tonal music (the gigantic exception to this remarkable connection would be John Cage; there are others, of course). Oh good lord, that kind of music must have really ticked off the modernist “innovators.” Small wonder then, that some critics and composers revitalized the old gendered rhetoric that has accompanied Western music since, well, the very beginning. Music, this line of thinking goes, becomes effete, weak, and feminine when it privileges surface beauty over structural complexity and innovation. “Feminine” music uses artifice and falsity to enact a hedonistic manipulation of emotional states. “Virile” music innovates in a substantive and authentic way (at deeper levels of analysis, in other words). “Weak” music panders to base emotion.

Artifice versus substance, falsity versus authenticity, virile versus weak: this should be starting to sound familiar. Gender has historically provided a rhetorical binary framework of value so potent and conventional that it has lurked, ready to be activated in the service of discounting the composer/musical community pariah-du-jour, since the Apollonian/Dionysian divide of Ancient Greece. It’s not going to go away any time soon, and queer musicians know its power. Indeed, the historical development of the musical rhetoric mobilized in “Through a Glass, Darkly,” serves as one of its most striking examples.

Like camp, disco—as well as its dance music progeny—provided an extremely important framework for gay community building, as well as for community building among racial and ethnic minorities, before its mainstreaming made it fodder for ridicule. To make disco palatable—and thus marketable—to a large audience, it had to be detached from its cultural roots and transformed into the white heterosexual fantasy of Saturday Night Fever. But the roots still managed to hold on and it wasn’t long before one of the most massive musical backlashes in American history—“Disco Sucks”—almost perfectly solidified a cultural “truism” that became virtually futile to try to refute (though some, notably Richard Dyer, have done an admirable job of it).[v] The notion of the “authentic” made it incontrovertible: disco—a practice originating among sexual and racial minorities, facilitating community in the face of a hostile society, subsequently co-opted by the mainstream, tossed about haphazardly, and tortured on the critical rack before being tossed in the cultural refuse bin—was now the punch-line to one of the greatest cultural jokes of all time. Whatever you think of disco or its musical descendents, I really hope that pisses you off.

By foregrounding some of the tensions between the synthetic and the “real,” I think “Through a Glass, Darkly” has some interesting things to say. I really don’t think the move from track to live instruments in “If You Only Knew” is schmaltz. I think it invites us to consider critically the centrality of the authentic/false dichotomy that has been foisted upon gay culture from the outside. We sometimes play right into the hands of this discourse through apathy and disconnected hedonism. There are legitimate historical reasons for some of these attitudes and behaviors, but wallowing in victimization and using it to justify destructive or non-productive frameworks of living doesn’t accomplish a damn thing. It would be tempting to offer an argument that might run along the lines of “if ‘artificiality’ has been construed as gay, and if we want to critique the value judgment it implies, lets celebrate it instead. Dance, dance, dance.” But Shaieb reminds us that we can’t be uncritical about our practices.

The “authentic”/”artificial” divide is a great big lie, but it is a lie with an enormous amount of cultural currency. Picking a side and celebrating it unconditionally doesn’t make the binary go away. It strengthens it. By interrogating it through musical rhetoric, “Through a Glass, Darkly” suggests that we should also claim the other half of the binary, recognize both the destructive and the productive powers of both halves, and finally begin to dictate our own representation (now if only I had had the foresight to unplug the input from the sound system before that awful synth-driven disaster that ended the show. The sound engineer was within spitting distance of my seat, after all.).

Happy. All wrapped up, right? Wrong . . .

So . . . Remind Me, Again: Why Do I Have This Bee in My Bonnet?

“ . . . A sense of empowerment and disco fever.” I’m back to that. Look, I really don’t have a problem with choosing to “bump and grind hand in hand” rather than “Walk Hand in Hand.” It was sort of cute and people seemed to enjoy it. But, while I was surprised to find that I didn’t think “Through a Glass, Darkly” was pandering, this revision of Cowell really, REALLY was.

To be fair, I was already pretty annoyed with how “Through a Glass, Darkly” was framed in the larger program. The first half of the concert consisted of a number of songs addressing the notions of friendship and support systems. This included a ditty (Porter's "Friendship")—the ubiquitous “goofy” song—incorporating synthetic (yes, synthetic) steel drum sounds, placed, of course, roughly at the mid-point of the act. I haven't a clue why the song ended up with a synthesizer, but please see the above discussion of “Making It: The Meth Song” for my opinion of uncritical cultural appropriation (in this case, via timbre) in the service of delineating key structural moments or narrative or musical “difference.” If I were granted one wish, with which I could make a single change in queer musical practices, I would eliminate that crap. Yes, I said it. It’s crap and a repugnant tactic for a historically reviled and frequently appropriated population to use.

Moreover, the Chorus just wasn’t digging it. Why should they, with the hype surrounding the second half’s premiere? It had its moments because, frankly, the TCGMC is GOOD. That’s why the closing number of the first half was so irritating. In an effort to make a cohesive concert out of “Friends ARE Benefits”—and please note that I haven’t railed against that title; that’s another essay entirely, and it’s screaming to be let out, so it might be best not to mention it—Hill construed “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as a transition to “Through a Glass, Darkly.” So, given the musical processes present in Shaieb’s piece, why, why, WHY would they stick synth-strings with this anthem to “genuine” selflessness?

It certainly didn’t serve a musical purpose. The synthesizer provided no distinct musical content to speak of, rather functioning on a surface timbral level. Here we’ve got that loaded dichotomy again. I suppose this could be some kind of foreshadowing, but somehow I doubt it. As the song drew to a close, the Chorus swelled brilliantly, just as it would do at the end of the second half. But here, the exhilaration was even more tainted by the “synthetic” because it didn’t have the critical context provided by Shaieb for his closing number. There were very few moments in the concert when the Chorus could really demonstrate its power, so I was disappointed that even those moments had to be muddied.

When “Walk Hand in Hand” was altered, therefore, my frustration was magnified. Shaieb’s play had enacted what I heard as a remarkable critique of musical rhetoric, in which gay masculinity came face to face with its historical representation and reclaimed the privileged half of a discursive binary that the culture of dominance has traditionally utilized to justify its revulsion. Perhaps the move back to the synthetic is a demonstration of authority. Perhaps it is reclamation of a trashed history. These are possibilities. But wouldn’t it have been more powerful, at that moment, if they had stayed on the side of the "authentic?" How much more of a “sense of empowerment” the performance would have provided had Hill and Shaieb chosen to preserve a song whose musical and cultural position had been demonstrated, through the preceding concert, to be fraught with political and social complexities. What a perfect opportunity to say, “Look! We’ve had this all along.”

And I Take a Deep Breath . . .

It probably seems like I take this awfully seriously. That’s because I do. Susan McClary does, too:

Music and other discourses do not simply reflect a social reality that exists immutably on the outside; rather, social reality itself is constituted within such discursive practices. It is in accordance with the terms provided by language, film, advertising, ritual, or music that individuals are socialized: take on gendered identities, learn ranges of proper behaviors, structure their perceptions and even their experiences. But it is also within the arena of these discourses that alternative models of organizing the social world are submitted and negotiated. This is where the ongoing work of social formation occurs.[vi]

It’s just so easy to write off music as either meaningless due to its supposed “non-referentiality” or containing meaning that is impossible to evaluate politically, for the same reason. But those are lies. They are lies told by people who have privilege and don’t want to lose it or share it. They are lies that serve no purpose other than to render apathetic precisely those people for whom social engagement is the most crucial.

At least, that’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong . . .

---

[i] I attended the second performance: Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus, “Friends ARE Benefits,” 30 March 2008, 2:00 pm, Ted Mann Concert Hall, Minneapolis, MN.

[ii] See Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966).

[iii] Some of the most compelling attempts at revitalizing the political potential of camp aesthetics can be found in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

[iv] Quoted in Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 156.

[v] See Richard Dyer, “In Defense of Disco,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, 407-415 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).

[vi] Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 21.