Confessions of a Crap Writer

Håkan Nilsson is a Ph.D candiate in art history at the University of Stockholm. He writes art criticism on a more or less regular basis for Svenska Dagbladet, is an editor of Material and strives hard to get Merge Magazine it's rightful place in the sun. He can't make up his mind about Apollo and Dionysos.

"5 minutes - LPC Live in Stockholm" 1998, edited by Fridjon Rafnsson and Erik Pauser (real video)

The question.

Why is it that every art critic, like myself, all of a sudden has to spill their guts on the subject of music and the music scene, especially the alternative scene and the small labels? Well, one could say, maybe its because the world of sound has infiltrated the visual arts world in a profound way in the nineties.

Some musical experiments have of course always been paralleled, and sometimes joint ventured with the visual arts. We saw it in the experimental art scene of the twenties, in the collaborations between Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, in the parallels between the works of minimalist composers like Terry Riley and late modernist painters. Just to mention a few instances. But in a way, this time it is different. (It always is.)

Part One

The general excuse.

One of the differences is that the visual art scene has found a structure in the world of alternative record labels (and they are quite a few) that it has always dreamt of. Nowhere is the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome more viable. If a certain label gets too rigid, a new one will pop up and form an alternative. Orthodoxies get formed, but they don't last. In this way, there is no center, no one that lasts anyway. If there is any cultural expression that has gained from the availability of Internet, the alternative record label scene ought to be a good candidate. The rhizomatic structure of the net even mirrors the rhizomatic structure of the label scene. Small number counts, and the do-it-yourself becomes quite possible. One could even take the rhizomatic description a step further, to the very musical expression. The concept of cut-up, the sampling technique and the practice of letting other groups/constellations remix what was complied in the first place, problematises the very notion of authenticity and originality. Small wonder, then, that one of the most experimental labels is called Mille Plateaux.

It may be that this description suffers from certain romantic ideas and beliefs. On the other hand, the label scene does apparently have a totally different set of possibilities than the art scene has. The art scene longs for "glocal" dissemination, but remains stuck in the structure of museums, art spaces, galleries, critics and last but not least, curators.

The more specific excuse.

The cut-up, the sampling and the re-mixing of re-used material points to another reason for the heightened awareness of the alternative music scene in the last decade. Not even the constellations of the groups as such are solid. A group, if you can call it that, forms a collective identity whose entities can vary. It becomes more or less a brand name, which gets a certain identity no matter who's actually behind it. This is probably also why the same constellation of people can sometimes have different brand names, depending on what material they work with. One name, one identity for the more experimental stuff, another for more danceable tunes. A dream for us, the ambitious art critics who love to talk about constructed identities, disseminated subjects and anti-oedipal strategies. A match made in heaven, even for a dilettante.

I'll give you an even more specific example: A constellation like Lucky People Center is not a firm structure. LPC, which was started in the early nineties, can be anything from an enormous multimedia constellation to a small group playing at a party. Lucky People Center morphs according to its purpose. Although they have become a very professional structure, they kind of rejuvenate the idea of the collective art groups of the sixties. There is another reason. Art critics love to talk about the sixties because it meant the end of Modernism. Modernism is the Oedipus that anti-oedipans secretly long for. By re-installing it into our secret dream, we once again find someone to say "up yours, daddy-o" to.

Part Two

Trying to be more specific and but keeping on track.

Ever since their first record was released in 1993, LPC has worked with rhythmic music overlaid by various sampled voices from the mass media. The samples can be long or short, but when put into this context, they form a strange web mixing politics and pleasure. Based on relatively uncomplicated rhythms, Lucky People Center could even be described as pleasing. A pleasing strategy, that is. The violence of the world, the weird television preachers and various enigmatic statements are presented against a rhythmic background. The structure, the form Lucky People Center uses confronts and even contradicts the message, and leaves us in an ambiguous zone. It's hard to say what kind of politics they are dealing with; is it politics without statements or statements without politics? When LPC is "about" politics, it's not so much about actual politics as it is about mediated politics. Not totally unlike some of Andy Warhol's earlier works, they register events and these may seem random, but rather are faithful expressions of inconceivability. How should you otherwise express the incomprehensibility of the world? Hence they elude simple analysis: is the reality the Real? (Of course it isn't.)

I start to loose track.

On the other hand, one could describe LPC as the new hippie generation. It's even in the name. The other side to the pleasure of LPC is not a strategy, it's a statement that there actually is pleasure. They seem to think that everything is really much easier than we have made it out to be. Or as a quote of a quote from the second album has it: "The name of the game is to feel real good." The musical experience of LPC is not simply based in Western culture, they use rhythms from all over the world, as if to make a statement about the global phenomenon of dancing. Behind the politics, behind all the weird mass medial mix of voices, one can almost sense LPC trying to communicate something like "relax, man". A total hippie thing.

Yet, it's not in the global aspect they find their deepest well. LPC is a typical result of civilization; it's a product of the urban multicultural melting pot. However, sometimes this turns into a critique of civilization that seems to put forth the proposition that we should get back to basics. In the film International, LPC vacillate between the more general idea of a universal community based on the pleasure principle to a critique of civilization that becomes nothing but clichés. When the ambition becomes to tell the Truth instead of forming a platform for questions, the result often falls to ground. But when LPC is at its best, they combine all of the above. When they blend the wisdom of some native people with the proverbs of the street, they are back on track.

The real confession.

In the true spirit of LPC, some of the tracks from the film are to be found, remixed on the most recent album Interference. LPC is of course a lot about interference. But in the end, it's all mostly about love. I guess that that is the confession. Similarity or no similarity, jealousy or not, no matter the intellectual approach, no matter the rhizomatic structure, in the world of music the cynic dilettante (the art critic) can sense that love is the power supreme. So what if the general idea is romantic? Dance is global, as is mankind. Nothing is impossible. I like that. There, I finally said it. Underneath the pirouettes of language, we all from time to time try to formulate that what sometimes seems so easy: "The name of the game is to feel real good." It is as easy as that. You need no other excuse.

Love

Håkan Nilsson