What is pop music? A Deleuzian analysis
What is pop music?
It is not really known when music begins. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300)
Before tackling the question posed in the title, one must first work out what music actually is. This proves difficult, because in the most absolute sense music — as Deleuze sees it, following his overall philosophical method — is strictly nothing, or rather the last thing it could be is nothing. Instead, music is a haecceity. Like "a season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date," it is a becoming, a particular kind of affect at varying levels of intensity. It is a "this-ness," not a thing, substance, or subject, but a mode of individuation that possesses "a perfect individuality lacking nothing" and that consists "entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261).
This description visibly touches on music even in its most ordinary sense. Music is completely made of notes (its particles) and rests, drawing relationships of movement and stillness across melody and rhythm, voice and instrument, instrument with instrument, harmony against dissonance, sound paired with silence. At the same time, music is often considered the art form most capable of affect, while the apparent permanence of the musical composition — its sacred inscription as a score — has always been more open to interpretation than other artistic expressions, especially in the age of cover versions and remix culture.
Yet this pseudo-definition only tells us what music is as an event. It says little about the essential ontology of music, about how music comes into be(com)ing in the first place. Then again, perhaps it tells us everything, because for Deleuze becoming is everything. Becoming constitutes an absolute outside that includes everything occurring within it, and it is also inseparable from those events. Everything is set on, and springs from, a plane of consistency — also known as a plane of desire (since it is necessarily productive) or a plane of immanence, because becoming is nothing but immanence. Claire Colebrook explains how this reversal of Platonism does away with a stable foundation of being: "the supposed real world that would lie behind the flux of becoming is not, Deleuze insists, a stable world of being; there 'is' nothing other than the flow of becoming. All 'beings' are just relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life" (Colebrook 2001: 125).
According to Deleuze, the problem for most philosophical or artistic expressions is that this plane of immanence can be understood in two ways. On one hand:
The plane can be a hidden principle, which makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that moment. But the plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only be inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 265)
Seeing the plane this way means the relatively stable moments of becoming-life appear as individuations. Their unpredictable outside is absorbed as a completed process that creates an individuated entity, and we see these moments as fixed forms, separate from the plane (which then becomes transcendent and exists "only in a supplementary dimension to that to which it gives rise"). As Deleuze adds, "the plan(e), conceived or made in this fashion, always concerns the development of forms and the formation of subjects" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 265).
Then Deleuze offers an entirely different conception of the plane:
Here, there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266)
To a certain degree, these two sorts of plane always coexist. Even though the latter is "the plane of Nature" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266), "one continually passes from one to the other, by unnoticeable degrees and without being aware of it, or one becomes aware of it only afterward. Because one continually reconstitutes one plane atop another, or extricates one from the other" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 269). For Deleuze, this is possible because if you do not let the plane of immanence "play freely on the surface" but instead allow it to embed deeply in Nature, it suddenly looks like a ground, a principle of organization standing in a transcendent relation to everything that takes place on it (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 269).
The plane of immanence is certainly more "natural," but "the plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth." At the same time, "the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270). These two planes serve as two abstract poles, pulling differing levels of intensity toward themselves.
Given the suggestion that music is a haecceity, one might think music would usually be drawn toward the latter pole, arising from the plane of immanence made up of movement and rest. Deleuze even names this plane the "plane of consistency or composition" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266; italics in original), a name that once again suggests an affinity with music. However, that is not the case. For music to come into perception, a separation seems to happen between the plane and what springs from it. Deleuze states explicitly that "the developmental or organizational principle [of music] does not appear in itself, in a direct relation with that which is developed or is organized: There is a transcendent compositional principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not 'audible' by itself or for itself" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266).
This does not hold for all music. Deleuze suggests that "to the transcendent, organizational plane of Western music based on sound forms and their development, we [should] oppose the immanent plane of consistency of Eastern music, composed of speeds and slownesses, movements and rest" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270). Nor is Western music's pull toward the plane of organization absolute. Deleuze writes that "certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization [...] to the immanent sound plane" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 267). Still, according to Deleuze, the transcendent plane of organization is said to dominate all of Western classical music, and one can add that it continues to dominate nearly every form and genre of Western music (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 267). This means that even when Western music enters a process of involution where "form is constantly being dissolved" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 267), there is almost always a parallel development of form that drags it toward a plane of organization (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270).
This may be partly due to Western music's reliance on a regular, pulsed metre that anchors it in "Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 262). It might be linked to the dominance of "pre-composed" forms instead of improvisational performances — an opposition that mirrors the pre-recorded versus live binary in many contemporary popular musical genres. It could also have to do, as Deleuze claims, with music's relationship to the refrain (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300). What matters most in the final analysis is that the perceptible (audible) forms of Western music — which on an ideational level appear as a haecceity, a virtual entity of intensity — are constantly pushed toward a plane of transcendence, giving music a double and contradictory movement.
For Deleuze, this movement is the very essence of music. In A Thousand Plateaus, music's content is described as "the refrain itself," yet music is also "a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorialising the refrain" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300). He elaborates: "whereas the refrain is essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes it a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300). In short, "what musicians do should be musical" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300). In other words, while music makes use of the refrain — a type of sonic organization animals often use to create an aural barrier extending their physical presence and warning off competitors — music's goal is not to stake out a territory and create an isolated enclosure shut off from the outside. Instead, its mission is to affect, as do the colors of coral fish and birdsong, deploying attributes designed to attract rather than repel (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 316-17).
While Western music's perceptual embodiment seems to depend largely on a transcendent plane that only produces fixed forms, not becomings, its power of affects — its musicality — comes from a properly musical process: dismantling those very forms, pushing them to the limit, submitting them to the diagonal or transversal as music reterritorialises upon itself qua music (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 303). Thus, "the whole becoming of Western music, all musical becoming, implies a minimum of sound forms and even of melodic and harmonic functions." However, "speeds and slownesses are made to pass across them, and it is precisely these speeds and slownesses that reduce the forms and functions to the minimum" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270). It is a question of "a material proliferation that goes hand in hand with a dissolution of form (involution) but [which is] at the same time accompanied by a continuous development of form" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270). Western music, though dependent on creating forms, only becomes music through undoing those forms, and this double movement is its ground of possibility and salvation — it allows music to form a block of expression and yet remain musical.
That, then, is what music is — but is this what pop is?
Here another difficulty arises, since defining pop music is a contentious issue, seemingly lacking absolute consensus. For Ian Buchanan, pop is simply a code word for the populism found in the refrain — it allows us to return "home," and a prerequisite for pop is the inclusion of a refrain, "a tune that sticks in your head and can be easily whistled or hummed" (Buchanan 2000: 184). According to this definition, pop would certainly seem to be music — in fact, one might call it a kind of ur-music, since it depends even more on the territoriality of the refrain than other musical forms. However, as Buchanan reminds us, for Deleuze and Guattari "the refrain is not music, it is rather 'the block of content proper to music'" (Buchanan 2000: 184, quoting Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 299). Even though music exists only "because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else," the refrain is ultimately "a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300). Although analyzing pop's relationship to the refrain might suggest that pop is not music, this line of inquiry does not allow us to differentiate pop from other musical forms, and therefore it cannot define what pop is.
In their essay "What I Hear Is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop," Timothy Murphy and Daniel Smith define pop differently:
the regime of music production that is tied neither to the European composer / concert tradition and its strict division of labor, nor to any of the various historical traditions of indigenous music making around the world, but rather to the bricolage of modern recording technology (electric / electronic instruments, studios, overdubbing, mixing, etc.) and its media of distribution. (Murphy and Smith 2001: para 2)
This definition of pop retains the standard classical (read: serious) versus pop (read: frivolous) divide but adds another dimension. It suggests that pop opposes both European classical and indigenous musical traditions — traditions built upon entirely different principles, or, one might say, on a different plane. Does Deleuze not oppose "the transcendent, organizational plane of Western music based on sound forms and their development [to] the immanent plane of consistency of Eastern music, composed of speeds and slownesses, movements and rest" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270)? Moreover, in tying their definition of pop to its modes of production and distribution, Smith and Murphy might be seen to overcome the very binary opposition they establish, since many of the traditional modes they oppose to pop have changed their modus operandi to embrace the bricolage of modern recording technology and distribution for survival. (One need only consider "World Music" compact disks and the massive proliferation of live recordings of European classical works.) Smith and Murphy's definition then turns the term pop into little more than a porte-manteau word that can contain any kind of music. This phenomenon does not seem to bother John Corbett, who suggests that "all music is now popular" because the electronic colonization of all music — a sort of musical imperialism — involves "a complex treatment of the notion of 'popularity' that cuts across three territories, blurring their boundaries [: ...] Popular music as a statistical region [, ...] Popular music as a formal genre [... and] Popular music as anything recorded" (Corbett 1994: 35; emphasis in original). Yet such a move is very troubling: it implies that the same criteria can analyze the expressions of The Spice Girls, Kenny G, Scorn, and the Dillinger Escape Plan — which is clearly not the case. Although all these "artists" could be called "popular" due to varying commercial success, there is virtually no common ground between The Spice Girls and Kenny G on one side and Scorn and the Dillinger Escape Plan on the other.
Still, it would be completely unfair to dismiss Smith and Murphy's claims outright. The answer to whether pop is music does indeed lie in music's relationship to the market. To understand what pop is in its truest sense, we must intensify Ian Buchanan's statement that popular culture is "more complexly bound to its milieu than other modes of art perhaps are" (Buchanan 2000: 176). We must suggest that pop at its highest level of intensity is inextricably bound to its milieu, its plane, and its territory. As a result, pop no longer qualifies as music in a Deleuzian sense, because the mode in which it operates is not one where deterritorialization of the refrain — the process intrinsic to properly musical expression — is desirable.
What will here be called pop is pop at its most extreme intensity, pop as an idea rather than a content of expression, much as Deleuze discusses music in its pre-expressive state. The abstractness must be kept in a definition of pop precisely because the term tends to lead to polemic or complete meaninglessness when embodied by actual pop groups or genres. Any discussion giving specific examples seems destined to be accused of reviving a high/low culture debate and thereby making subjective value judgments. This does not mean that these comments on pop cannot apply to specific instances, but rather that the secondary application must be carried out by each reader individually. Subjective examples can only ever be subjective, and therefore of little use when trying to answer an ontological question with a high degree of objectivity.
In the Western tradition — which gave rise to pop — Deleuze and Guattari hold that music's organizational principle does not appear in itself; it remains inaudible. Music's audible forms relate to their plane only as "a transcendent unity or hidden principle" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266). This is not the case for pop in its highest form. If pop is inextricably linked to its milieu, it is because — as the name implies — pop is born from a desire to become popular and populist, so its forms of expression take as a model the forms already existing within the milieu that constitute the popular. In traditional Western music, the plane cannot be given directly but only "inferred from the forms it develops and the subject it forms, since it is for these forms and these subjects" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266). With pop, conversely, the forms exist for the plane. This is the first sense in which pop does not fit a Deleuzian concept of music. Though Western music generally sustains a transcendent relation to its source plane, that plane is a purely musical outside. The outside that creates pop's plane, however, is commercial — it comprises...
Axiomatics designed to attract a particular demographic—and therefore to become popular—underpin the business of pop. Although pop emerges through the manipulation and organization of sonic material, these processes are secondary to its dominant organizational principle, which is dictated by market forces. Thus, pop's creation involves an excessive reliance on a transcendent plane or autonomous outside that has nothing to do with an artistic or musical becoming in which "expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that 'express' the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 317; emphasis in original).
While pop, like Western music, maintains a transcendent relation to its plane, it cannot resist the fixed forms produced on that plane the way that music can. This is because pop's plane specifically demands new expressions that issue from it not in order to resist its pre-existing forms. The forms arising on pop's commercial plane must conform to an average ideal so as to be populist and thus belong to the plane. As Buchanan notes, a certain conformity inherent to pop can only be connected to the privileged status he gives to pop's (non-complex) refrains—these being a symptom of its populism (Buchanan 2000: 180). This conformity extends even to the repeated occurrences of the refrain in a genuine pop song: they are not pushed to their limit, deterritorialised, or reterritorialised qua music; rather, they are merely banal Platonic copies of an original that was already devoid of music. On this point as well, then, pop is not music—a statement entirely consistent with Antoine Hennion's analysis of the formulaic character of specific pop songs in his article "The Production of Success: An Antimusicology of the Pop Song" (Hennion 1990).
This is not to suggest that popular music cannot exist at all, that all popular music is necessarily populist, that no music with a healthy market relationship qualifies as music, or that all popular music is content merely to produce banal copies and refuses to deterritorialise the refrain. Obviously, that is not the case; one need only look at specific examples of popular music to see that the popular can aim for genuinely musical expression, that it can perform deterritorialisations of pop's numerous punctual structures and enter into a becoming-music despite its popularity—meaning it is not inevitably governed by populist tendencies.
Across all of his albums (though perhaps to a lesser extent on some tracks from his 2001 release Blowback—which his official website calls 'his most open, accessible and, yes, downright commercial album in six years', a fact explained by his return from near-insanity after diagnosis and treatment of an illness that affected his immune system and psychological health), Tricky carries out rhythmic and linguistic deterritorialisations at odds with pop's ordered, predictable, punctual structures. Rhythmically, he integrates what he has termed "spastic jungle" rhythms into seemingly ordered and often sedate instrumentation; linguistically, he uses English in a minoritarian fashion. One of the most striking examples of these deterritorialisations appears on his 1996 album Pre-Millennium Tension in the track "Makes me wanna die." The song begins with the main vocalist—Tricky's former collaborator Martina—singing the chorus, "she makes me wanna die," halfway through which the bass and high-hat breakbeat (constant throughout the song) kick in, soon followed by a sparse electric guitar accompaniment that develops over the track, nearly but never quite echoing the vocal melodies' movements. The rhythm section's punctuality establishes a grid system over which the vocals and guitar slip and slide, each enouncing recurrent themes that never recur simultaneously and thus deny the confluence of instrumental and vocal melodies common in pop on both harmonic and rhythmic planes. In Deleuzian terms, the song's forms are submitted "to temporal transformations, augmentations or diminutions, slowdowns or accelerations, which do not occur solely according to laws of organization or even of development" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270). Indeed, the vocal and guitar lines—far from consolidating the organisation of the rhythm section (i.e., its structure, on which its form is premised)—have a deterritorialising effect as they seem to warp and bend the regular, ordered metre of the pulsed beat.
In "Makes me wanna die," then, there appears a properly musical block of expression that exhibits the double movement of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation immanent to Western music. Moreover, consistent with the earlier suggestion that music, in Deleuze's formulation, is a haecceity—a system that is not fixed but rather a mode of individuation whose totality cannot be given but remains open and constantly becoming—this song does not perform the expected, hermetic closure of a pop song. It does not fully individuate itself, fix its form, separate itself from its plane, or become transcendent. Instead, the track's ending denies the listener a transcendent resolution: the final vocal recurrence ("how could you dare? / who do you think you are? / you're insignificant / a small piece / an ism / no more no less / you try to learn the universe / can't even converse in universe / you know…") is brutally cut short, as though the power cord had been severed. It refuses both syntactic closure (previously this lyric continued: "you know it's ironic / smokin' hydroponic") and melodic closure, leaving that last utterance to echo briefly in its own space as the apparent interiority of the vocal line is returned to an absolute outside.
A similar phenomenon can be observed in David Sylvian's "Brilliant Trees" from his 1984 album of the same name. For its first section at least, this song does not follow a strict punctual rhythmic structure; instead, it follows the temporal contractions and expansions of Sylvian's voice in interplay with the instrumentation—in which the absence of a rhythm section is conspicuous. Here, both rhythm and melody are deterritorialised. The last vocal line of the first occurrence of the chorus ("leading my life back to the soil") does not obey the melodic resolution it seems to lead toward: Sylvian's voice, instead of repeating the final note with the last word of the phrase, rises a minor third, creating an expectation of continuation and refusing the closure that the refrain (which draws fixed and closed territories) should provide. Upon the second occurrence of the chorus, although the rhythmic qualities remain consistent, the melody of the vocal line changes, providing the expected resolution: the final note repeats the base note of the key. However, whereas in pop such a resolution would end the song, in "Brilliant Trees" it does not produce a closed, hermetic ending. Instead, it serves as a bridge into the second and final section of the song, where Sylvian's voice (which until this point has acted as a complex attractor pulling the instruments along in the wake of its own utterly contingent speeds and slownesses) is replaced by a very sparse, tribal-sounding rhythm section. While this rhythm section exhibits some punctuality, it certainly does not obey the regular pulsed metre that dominates the Western musical tradition. What is more, its punctuality constantly seems to be pulled away from its moorings by the other instrumental lines—Sakamoto's synthesiser and Hassell's trumpet follow their own logic of individual expression and the exchange in which they are engaged; their trajectories slide over the rhythmic base yet remain entirely unaffected by it. This meandering instrumental section (occupying the last four minutes of the track's eight and a half) eventually peters out to nothingness, refusing neat closure not only for this song but also—since it is the final track—for the entire album.
Of particular interest in Sylvian's career for the present discussion is the single he released following a hiatus. The era that produced Brilliant Trees, the double CD Gone to Earth (1985), and Secrets of the Beehive (1987) was followed by ten years during which Sylvian released no solo albums. He did, however, release a five-CD box set containing the majority of his solo work, titled Weatherbox (1989). To accompany that retrospective, Sylvian concurrently released a single ironically titled "Pop Song." Even the cover art—a negativised image of a topless female—suggested that this single, despite its title, was not intended to signal a shift from artsy maverick to corporate whore eager for profit. "Pop Song" itself is very unlike what its title might evoke; it is perhaps one of Sylvian's most un-melodic compositions, with music based around microtones and John Taylor's piano improvisations. The main instrumental line consists of a synthesiser staccato, bouncing back and forth from an upper pedal note to (mostly) discordant relations: minor thirds, semitones, minor sixths, and augmented fourths. Around this line, other instruments follow the improvisational style of Taylor's piano playing, adhering to no external pattern, logic, or architectural structure—no simple attractor of the kind pop uses to reproduce a fixed form known in advance. The only discernible logic in the instrumental lines arises not from conforming to a melodic convention known in advance (as often happens in pop) but from patterns of exchange established occasionally between them—that is, their relations. Meanwhile, Sylvian's vocal line—based once more primarily around discordant intervals—follows its own logic and progression, singing of everyday life in Sylvian's inimical and distinctly non-everyday way ("Behind the iron gates / the shifts were worked in silence / Each weekend beckoned
like Ulysses' sirens / And as the words were few / We'd listen to the radio / It was loud and irritated me so" (Sylvian 1999: 11)). Each verse proposes a different variation, while the recurrent refrain ("I'll tell you I love you, like my favourite pop song") returns to a semi-stable centre (for variation remains) whose polyvocal harmony is itself built around the kind of discordant interval entirely anathema to a pop song.
Queens of the Stone Age take a somewhat different approach on the track "You Would Know" from their 1998 self-titled album. The song starts with a ring-tone phone sound interplaying with a disjointed guitar line that remains constant throughout the verses. Gradually, jumpy, stuttering instruments and vocals are added, building a deranged verse structure that oozes menace from every orifice on its holey surface. For Deleuze, holey space is a space that communicates with both smooth and striated space: "it is always connected to nomad [smooth] space, whereas it conjugates with sedentary [striated] space" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 415). Holey space is described by an abstract line with two modes of liaison: it can be "a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc.," and on the other side its traits of expression can be put "into a form or a code," its holes made to resonate together, its lines of flight plugged, its connections submitted to "a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 415). If holey space had a soundtrack, it might well sound like this song—as though its score were written by an itinerant hole-punch, its traits of expression (or instrumental lines) desperately trying to conform to a model that appears absent, constantly striving for a pattern to emerge from its wanderings. This verse structure eventually builds into a beautiful, almost sublime melodic chorus that struggles into life, fighting the precarious Jenga-like foundations of the verse—which is built from a progressive yet arbitrary accumulation of elements similar but different enough to render each either entirely independent or a cornerstone of the whole. The first unveiling of the chorus is a tease, allowing only a glimpse of what is to come: one enunciation of the refrain, "You would know," a four-second soundbite that immediately falls away to two moans and a return to the holey verse structure. This happens again—the first snatch of the chorus this time giving way to eleven moans uttered over the verse structure's instrumental backdrop—before returning to the chorus, which is repeated again and again, expanded occasionally, as the instruments gradually organise themselves into a stable structure that locks together ever tighter as more layers accumulate. This leads in turn to a solo instrumental section developing the melodies and themes of the refrain—a passage that would typically serve as a diversion before returning to the proper refrain. Yet QOTSA do not allow this closure: at the very moment the return of the refrain is sensed—which would signal the final completion of the chorus, the sublime moment of transcendent perfection—everything falls away to two single guitars playing the holey, jumpy, discordant style of the verse in a short final burst of slapstick. This leaves the listener wanting more while simultaneously thrusting him outside of himself rather than enclosing him in the warm, homely blanket of the refrain.
Finally, since the list of possible exceptions to the rule (that pop is not music) is potentially infinite, it will be useful to examine Björk, an artist who has achieved enormous critical and commercial success—one who is truly popular. Björk deterritorialises the English language with every utterance, tearing its signifiers away from their syntactic chain through her Icelandic inflections, while the idiosyncrasies and singularity of her musical vocalisations deterritorialise her songs' refrains by rendering them unrepeatable. The curious paths her vocal lines follow come from her own interior music, not from objectively graspable harmonic patterns. In those moments when a more predictable harmonic line threatens to surface, she invariably usurps it with a primal, seemingly impossible scream or guttural howl. Consider the hit single "It's Oh So Quiet" from her 1995 album Post—a big-band musical number whose perfectly orthodox choruses are consistently interrupted by a joyous piercing scream totally out of place in its context.
A more complete deterritorialisation of the refrain—which constitutes the content of music but requires deterritorialising for that content to pass into expression as music—can be found on "Pluto" from Homogenic (1997). The dirty beats, rhythms created from static and other digital dysfunctions, and distorted vocals of this track deterritorialise a transcendent idyll of high-fidelity reproduction. The simple melodic pattern of the refrain, rather than always returning to the same point, is intensified through pitch progression. The first time the refrain occurs, the melody line is repeated four times, ending in a non-final semitone drop (figure 1), which leads into a stuttering rhythm section that sounds like someone trying to jump-start technology on a cold morning. This eventually leads back to the verse structure, which again guides us to the refrain. Here, the same melody line recurs four times, ending in the same semitone drop, but then continuing from the pitch where the first development of the refrain leaves off (figure 2), as the instrumental backdrop drops away to mirror the bridge passage of technology without a choke. This refrain, now at a second level of intensity and pitch, is itself repeated four times. It then ends in a semitone drop and is picked up again at the point where the second level left off, repeated nine times at this third level of intensity. During this second level, the refrain is repeated so many times against a backdrop of looped stuttering rhythms that the music is forced into a locked groove. That groove is broken only when Björk's voice departs from the refrain's punctual pattern at the end of the ninth enunciation, offering a new melodic variation that ends with a throwaway scream (figure 3). This allows the song, for a brief moment, to fully develop its rhythmic pulse before slowly shuddering to a halt. Even at the very death of this album's penultimate track, however, Björk does not allow listeners—especially those who might skip this "difficult" track—to shut off this intensity and dysfunction for good. The index cut dividing the compact disc into tracks has been made so that the final track, "All Is Full of Love"—a haven of calm, offering a degree of resolution and sublime hermetic closure—begins with a fraction of a second of the final technological death spasm of its neighbour.
Doubtless many more examples of popular music achieving proper musical expression could be enumerated, but these have shown some of the ways popular music can enter a becoming-music. Yet these examples also reveal that the term "pop" is even more problematic than initially thought. These songs, being truly musical, cannot of course be genuine pop—even though they are recorded by individuals commonly referred to as pop artists (perhaps with the exception of course).
David Sylvian knowingly applies “pop” to one of his own songs, aware of the term’s problematic nature. Here lies the central difficulty: though these artists are included under pop because of their popularity, they do not share the same relationship to commerce and popularity that pop itself does. In other words, pop’s amusicality has nothing to do with how commercially successful a given expression is; rather, it concerns the nature of the link between that expression and the commercial-popular plane, a link that for pop is genetic and causal. When a popular musician willingly produces an expression formulated according to pop’s commercial plane and thus cannot deviate from its pre-existing forms—risking exclusion from that plane—that expression is not music (within a Deleuzian paradigm, and perhaps others too) but pop. When, however, a popular artist creates an expression that does not faithfully conform to pre-existing forms, that transforms models and forms to produce something singular and new, then that expression is genuinely musical.
Some readers may detect a hostile undercurrent toward pop in this argument, but that is not the intent. While it has indeed been argued that pop is not music within a Deleuzian framework, this is not to dismiss pop from further critical consideration. Rather, it suggests that within this paradigm, trying to analyse pop as a musical expression will fail, since pop operates in an entirely different mode from music—a distinction that demands we differentiate between popular music and Pop. Pop cannot be analysed as musical because it does not emerge from a productive plane of desire that is always generative of the new (as Deleuze insists all art and philosophy are) but from a plane that does not seem to desire difference, one that tends to produce only varying degrees of conformity. Pop operates much like Muzak, which is likewise not music.
Muzak is (not-)music as pure function, (not-)music existing solely to convert the individual into a consumer. Termed “business music,” it programmes behavioural patterns subliminally in commercial environments, boosting workers’ output or shoppers’ spending (see Gifford 1995). As Muzak arranger Muscio stated, “our [Muzak’s] service actually lies in its sequential arrangement to gain certain effects and to serve a functional purpose” (quoted in Lanza 1995: 155). Yet Muzak’s commercial imperative is not its only resemblance to Pop; like Pop with its homely refrains, Muzak is designed to appeal to (or rather, not offend) the largest possible audience. Gifford writes:
Arranging a song for Muzak is like cooking for 50 people. Suzuki [a Muzak arranger] has to please everyone to some degree, but it’s more important that he offend nobody. His job is to take the edges off of songs. Vocals are removed and replaced by a suitably anonymous instrument, usually piano, guitar, woodwinds or vibes. Punchy rhythm parts are deflated a bit; distorted guitars and overly brassy horns are filed down. High, squeaky passages are lowered an octave, and dissonant chords are sweetened. (Gifford 1995)
While the suggestion that pop is nothing more than Muzak may seem contentious and hostile—especially given this quotation that describes the epitome of blandness—it finds support in the fact that Muzak, despite its enduring infamy and its brand’s cheesy symbolic capital, is actually heard less and less in the commercial spaces where its piped-in tones once played (subconsciously, of course, since one is not supposed to hear Muzak). In shopping malls, supermarkets, and hotel lobbies of the new millennium, one is far likelier to hear Pop. Rather than a direct functional equivalence, it may be that Pop has superseded Muzak and become even less musical in the process.
Many readers will still sense latent hostility toward Pop in this reasoning. If such hostility exists, it may only reflect a similar stance in Deleuze’s thought, where the popular is, as Buchanan writes, “the undesirable other, or, worse, an enormous homogenising machine depriving art of its place and value in contemporary society” (Buchanan 2000: 175). To dismiss the popular outright allows philosophy to be governed by its enemy: opinion. If popular art forms are a stumbling block for Deleuze and philosophy more generally, this may be because philosophy repeats the common mistake of conflating Pop and the popular. As long as Pop (a term extendable to other popular forms beside pseudo-musical ones) is analysed using the same principles applied to artistic forms that must produce the new, frustration is inevitable, because they simply do not operate alike, even when sharing characteristics like the refrain. For Deleuze, the refrain in music expresses an individual’s internal music, which subsequently achieves auto-objectivity in expression and reception when, as he writes, “expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that ‘express’ the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 317). Functioning this way, the expressive qualities of the territorialising refrain “are auto-objective, in other words, find an objectivity in the territory they draw” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 317). This occurs only when the expression drawing the territory is an inherent enunciation of the individual from which it issues—when the territorialising expression is the becoming-expressive of qualities proper to the individual (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 316), when, one might say, the music has soul. If Pop’s territorial expression is motivated not by an internal imperative but by an external one, by an axiomatic of the strata of Capital, it cannot become auto-objective and becomes instead merely an auxiliary of the Capitalist machine’s apparatae of capture. This does not inherently make Pop “better” or “worse” than a truly musical expression, but it means that it must be analysed according to its own immanent terms—the guiding principle of all Deleuzian analysis.
List of Works Cited. Buchanan, I. (2000), Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Edinburgh University Press. Colebrook, C. (2001), Gilles Deleuze, London: Routledge. Corbett, J. (1994), ‘Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object’, in Corbett, J., Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gifford, B. (1995), ‘They’re Playing our Songs’, Feedmag, October 1995, available online at http://www.feedmag.com/feature.html, 8th August 2001. Hennion, A. (1990), ‘The Production of Success: An Antimusicology of the Pop Song’, in Frith, S. and Goodwin, A. (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Pantheon Books, pp.185-206, reprinted from Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 3.1 (1986). Lanza, J. (1995), Elevator Music; A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong, London: Quartet Books. Murphy, T.S. and Smith, D.W. (2001), ‘What I Hear Is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop’, Echo: A Music-Centered Journal, 3.1: para. 2, available online at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo, 16 January 2002. Sylvian, D. (1999), Trophies II: The Lyrics of David Sylvian, London: Opium (Arts).
Musical Works: Björk, Post, One Little Indian, 1995. Björk, Homogenic, One Little Indian, 1997. Queens of the Stone Age, Queens of the Stone Age, Loosegroove Records, 1998. Brilliant Trees, Virgin Records, 1984. Gone to Earth, Virgin Records, 1985. Secrets of the Beehive, Virgin Records, 1987. Weatherbox, Virgin, 1989. Sylvian, David, ‘Pop Song’, Virgin Records, 1989. Also included on Everything and Nothing, Virgin Records, 2001. Tricky, Blowback, Hollywood Records, 2001. Tricky, Pre-Millenium Tension, Polygram, 1996.
Keywords: Chronos / commercial / desire / deterritorialisation / expression / haecceity / immanence / instrumentation / minoritarian / music / muzak / new (the) / organisation / plane (of transcendence / of consistency/immanence) / pop / popular music / punctuality / refrain / reterritorialisation / rhythm / space (holey / smooth / striated) / territory
NOTES For the sake of readability, we shall refer to Deleuze even when the ideas discussed can be found in a work co-authored with Félix Guattari. Scorn is the result of the illogical career progression of Mick Harris from drummer in überthrash metal outfit Napalm Death to post-industrial grindcore merchant in the band Scorn to king of dark ambient dub in Scorn the one-man outfit. The Dillinger Escape Plan meanwhile is an extreme hardcore unit from New York heavily influenced by free jazz structures and rhythms and whose sound can only be described in highly metaphorical ways, perhaps as being like the noise of a high-speed train carrying Charlie Parker and Jaco Pastorius from New Orleans to New York at the very moment when, passing over a bridge, it jumps its rails and ploughs head-on into the lines of gridlocked commuter traffic below. ttp://hollywoodrecords.go.com/tricky/index.html, 3 April 2003. This becomes especially apparent when one is able to observe her compositional method. Various documentaries and clips on the internet, for instance, have shown her walking along a beach or sitting at her laptop screaming and singing according to a properly improvisational compositional ideal that springs not from a preformed notion of what a song is to be but what it could become at any instant. It is important to stress that the individual and the strata of Capital cannot be unproblematically opposed to each other in a simple dualism as, respectively, internal and external, even if this terminology seems merely to echo Deleuze’s own vocabulary when he talks of the relationship between expressive qualities and their territory. The individual always retains a transversal relation to the social, political and economic field within which it is produced, it is always merely a folding of subjectification and hence only a partial object. Nonetheless, to think through this opposition in terms of internality and externality is useful inasmuch as it shows the extent to which the strata of Capital, positing itself as an outside to all production, can reproduce only stunted forms of subjectivity, reflections of the personological, familial, structural and institutional models that it favours, subjectivities whose internality is defined precisely by their externality.