I'm real.

I love Neil Cooper and, it turns out, I love Peter York. Coops posted the link to York's attack on authenticity. After getting slightly pissed off at the whole Azaelia and Iggy beef (ideas of authenticity came up there, with their old pal, racial stereotyping), I thought this would be another slow clap for The Guardian as one of their writers woke up to something the rest of the world realised in 1996, that authenticity, as a concept, is a vague idea that can't be located in the world as lived, but is an advertising short-hand for 'good'.

But York is on the money, so I am going to steal his words and nod my head in agreement.

Having noted that anyone who uses the word is trying to sell something - it's true, he's trying to sell his book - York associates it with a bunch of other words that are used to deceive (vibrant, passionate, creative - all of them on my dating profile). 

I'd do deeper. There is a whole lexicon of associated words - authentic, real, street, whatever - that are supposed to signify an object's unique value. Unique is another one, only no-one knows what it really means, and constantly misuse it.

The word confers a quality on the object, but also onto the observer. The object is special, and the observer is special enough to know it is special. It's elitist - which I can live with - and dishonest. It implies that authenticity is possible. 

It's not. 

Madness in his Method

After they have realised that they won't be able to get me to just shut up, people often ask me why I bang on about methodology. Following the latest debacle from Anonymous - the one where they said that they had stuff on Iggy that would make Bill Cosby look like an innocent (implying that they have material on her that is worse than drugging and raping women) - I am all the more convinced that, as The Fun Boy Three reminded me, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. 

Today's lecture is on theatre as semiotic system. You can jump to the post in which I talk about face sitting now.

Honzl, one of the Prague Linguistic School (once again, thank wikipedia), pointed out in 1940 that 'stage space need not be spatial... and scenery can be a text'. Apart from the obvious implication that radio plays and post visual theatre are now in the game, Honzl is opening up the possibility that the usual gubbins of theatre can be absent, and the performance can still be a play.

Since he died before Andy Arnold staged some plays in the toilets at The Arches, Honzl has to be content with pointing out how the use of sound denoted the stage in The Cherry Orchard before proudly stating 'modern theatre has had the effect precisely of freeing the stage from its previously permanent architectural constraints'. 

He'd love the NTS' theatre without walls slogan.

After a brief detour into cubo-futurist theatre (sorry, can't help you with that), he preempts Goffman by considering the theatre of everyday life, Honzl celebrates the new freedoms of scenography and metonymic scenery. Finally, he gets to semiotics.

My understanding of semiotics is that it is a system of signs that, taken collectively, represent meaning. I emphasis context as a defining quality, and my current attempt to learn French by just reading loads of it in the vague hope of getting the general idea is a holistic effort to use the semiotics of a language. 

It's not working. 

In the olden days, anyhow, the scenery of the stage tried to be complete and realistic: those bloody backdrops, the attention to detail, the changes between the scene in the bathroom and the scene in the garden. 

Honzl, had he seen Slope, would have rejoiced in the way that a single chair could be used to evoke multiple different things, depending on who was sitting on it/ throwing it across the room/ trying to use the leg as a sex aid. He talks about a plank being used to represent multiple things in those whacky cubo-futurist shows, and the way that Meyerhold used a crate in Tarelkin's Death to represent 'any number of things, but none of them without ambiguity'.

Back to Slope, where Pamela Carter and Stewart Laing used a

from Slope

minimum of props and scenery to represent Verlaine's posh home, a doss-house in London and a bog in a fancy hotel. 

And here's where Honzl gets helpful: it is the antics of the actor, he notes, that provides the context that gives meaning to the scenography. In Vanishing Point's Tomorrow, for comparison, there was no need for hospital beds, institutional walls and nurses in sexy outfits to conjure the ward. The script did the heavy lifting. 

Honzl nails the magic of Meyerhold's allusive, even indeterminate use of objects: it's not abstract because each object has a very clear function. It was 'the actor's actions' that gave the objects their 'representative function'.

Honzl goes on to give a bit of historical context, noting how the revolution in theatre had stripped away the conventions of the nineteenth century, then hits the reader with another whammy. 

It is in the changeability, he says, of the theatrical sign that the main difficulty of defining theatrical art lies. Definitions of this concept either narrow down theatricality to the manner of expression of our conventional drama... or expand it to such an extent that it becomes meaningless.

The latter is exactly what Schechner does with his 'broad school of performance' position. Once everything is theatre, nothing is. 
(That probably needs unpacking, but would require E-Prime to explain.)

In a semiotic approach, this is a pain. The traditional elements combine to create a system, I think. I know I am watching Romeo and Juliet and not a fight in Sauchiehall Street because Romeo is wearing tights and we are in the Theatre Royal. Get rid of too much semiotic context, and I am not sure whether to applaud the fight choreography or stand between the two men wailing on each other.

Honzl starts cutting away the elements that are essential for theatre. The writer goes, the actor - puppets, anyone? - then the director. He concludes that the semiotic systems change in different historical periods, but are rarely fixed to include all the elements - then Wagner turns up.

As always, I'll remind you that I do do funny posts on this blog, too. 

Anyway, Wagner's gesamtkunswerk, Honzl says, gathers together all different arts and makes theatre the sum of the other arts. In an aside, he invents the theory of post-dramatic theatre... which is kind of cool,  but not really for this article. Still, Honzl is the fucking  man.

And he boots out Wagner by mentioning those solo monologues that just have the actor in them.. no sum of arts there, sunbeam. Plus, and this really impresses me, Wagner has this madcap idea that completely ignores the subjectivity of the audience experience. 

He's too polite to say it, but most productions of The Ring involve periods where the audience either nods off or tries to ignore the music and, if they are lucky, focus on the cute woman in the Valkyrie outfit.

He spends the rest of the essay dismissing other ideas, before admitting that he just wanted to make it all a big problem: he compares theatre to the Trinity (out of Christianity) and laughs at its 'protean' dynamism. As it turned out, this article wasn't about methodology, or semiotics, really. It was about the negative capability of definition, or something. 

However, bullying woman is not a good look, Anonymous.

Appropriation Squared

some appropriation, yesterday

This is like my post-script to my previous thoughts on the Iggy Azalea/ Azaelia Banks beef. I had a look at the commentary by Aamer Rahman. I know it is a serious matter, but I hoped a comedian would put a few more jokes into his lectures.

Appropriation can take (at least) two forms. In one, we have the stealing of a culture's forms, like what Iggy has been accused of doing. In two, we have the adaptation by an oppressed group of their oppressor's cultural forms.

A good example of this is the way in which writers in post-colonial societies use the language of their former colonial masters to explore their own culture. I think the novels of Chinua Achebe are a fine place to start: and Achebe even had a crack at western critics for the way that they interpreted his work.

Wole Soyinka's Bacchae is worth a look, too. He takes a Greek classic and reworks it in an African context. And there's that time when I dressed up in my mother's underwear and stomped about the house shouting 'tidy your room, wash the dishes' in a high-pitched voice.

This kind of appropriation is usually a liberating tactic: it challenges the dominance of colonial culture, and demonstrates the resilience of marginalised groups. Burlesque, with its roots in the mockery of high art, references a time when working class culture appropriated the fancy-pants tropes of opera and ballet.

Against this, we have stuff like Iggy's appropriation of hip hop from a position of power. I had a listen to her album yesterday. It certainly appropriates the beats that Missy Elliot used to have on her tracks with the Neptunes, that low-down, sparse and sensual bass and chattering percussion. Iggy  ruins the tunes with a caterwauling vocal that manages to be both mannered and piercing. She appears to be the missing link between Maria Carey and Genesis P.

I think it is pretty clear that the music is not the issue here: Iggy has been making racist comments (racist in the sense that they caricature Azaelia Banks and other rappers). It might be worth poking at Iggy's music to see whether the way she appropriates hip hop in a racist manner - stripping away the nuance and context and exaggerating stereotypes. 

Hang on, I am drifting back into that beef. Sorry.

My new favourite writer (this week) Tom Hawking used the beef as a platform to consider 'authenticity' in pop - he mainly has a crack at the superannuated rock critic Robert Christau for his complete lack of contextual knowledge. And these two versions of appropriation, sat next to another one I just found on Google (it describes the use of found objects, like Marcel Duchamp did, and a bunch of lazy fuckers in the past century), open up that old chestnut, THE REAL. 

Iggy Azalea/ Azaelia Banks and Me (part 2)

She accused Banks of playing the race card - and, by branding her a bigot, she actually wandered into reverse racism territory. Her response didn’t take into account Banks’ political points. Instead, it was shaped to make Banks look like the angry black woman - jealous, bitter and obsessive.

This retort comes from a blonde, Australian woman who raps in a voice imitating a black American. Watching one of her music videos is like watching a modern day version of the blackface minstrel show.

Strong words here from Renni Edo Lodge, in her breakdown of the Iggy Azalea/ Azaelia Banks feud. It might be worth doing a close reading of this article: the use of names gives a clue as to where Lodge's sympathies lie (as if accusing Iggy of being a minstrel didn't).


I am still following this, via its media representation (the reality behind it might just be two rappers having a chuckle as they establish their respective identities through a performed dialectic of difference, natch). It brings up all sorts of questions that I can't answer, about race, culture difference, aesthetics and that. Let's dive back in.


Black face is a serious accusation: like those actors who think having a straggling beard and rubbing their hands together is acting Jewish, doing blackface is mocking an entire culture (unless done by Molly Dancers). How does Lodge back this up?

In his post White Rapper FAQ, comedian Aamer Rahman writes: “Blackface was all about white people acting out caricatured, fetishized depictions of black people for the entertainment of white audiences. Iggy Azalea, Kreashawn etc. are all about… well, you get the picture. Their entire careers rely on them perpetually acting, talking and behaving like college students at an ironic-not-racist-but-actually-racist ‘Ghetto Fabulous’ themed frat party.”

He continues: “A white rapper like Iggy Azalea acts out signifiers which the white majority associates with black culture - hyper sexuality, senseless materialism, an obsession with drugs, money and alcohol – as well as adopting clothing, speech and music – as a costume that they can put on and discard at will. It’s a cheap circus act.” Quite.

I get it: she apes the surface behaviours of hip hop artists, but fails to recognise the broader context. Rahman's definition is not entirely historically accurate, though: there were African American performers who did blackface, and the minstrel song was often performed by black artists. That does not make it okay (Frederick Douglass commented on its racism early on), but it does mean that not only white performers can be accused of it. Anyone who performs a caricature of blackness (and probably for the amusement of a white audience) is doing blackface.

Rahman then freaks me out: 'signifiers which the white majority associates with black culture - hyper sexuality, senseless materialism, an obsession with drugs, money and alcohol.' Er - I guess I am not this notional white majority. I associate hyper-sexuality with pop starlets (Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus), rock musicians (Robert Plant before his face transplant, him off Kiss) and Russell Brand. I guess there is a narrative somewhere that associates black culture with hyper-sexuality, but even those artists who do bang on about banging (R Kelly? Does Kanye? Sir Mix-a-Lot?), I tend to see it as being about them rather than the culture they come from.

'Senseless materialism': that's interesting. I read an article that criticised Lorde for complaining about conspicuous consumption in pop - the gist was that, as a white woman, Lorde did not have the authority to question hip hop's aesthetics. This area is really complicated... I am making Veronica Bayetti Flores' argument a bit simplistic, but she suggests that there is a reason for the celebration of meaningless materialism in hip hop, rooted in the culture's history of poverty. But, yeah, I see how that's an element that can be caricatured.


'An obsession with drugs, money and alcohol' sums up most of my friends, one way or another. And I do see all of these things in Iggy's videos. I'd add that they have shit acting and a very dubious exploitation of sexual stereotypes. Although I haven't managed to get through a whole one, because I cum in the first two minutes.

That was a joke. I am trying to get to the bottom of this...