Reports of My Demise (ix)

I recall countless high school classes where I sketched compositions during time allotted for a head start on that evening's devoirs. After noting their reticence to intervene, I began silently daring my teachers to reprimand their best student for being off task. I am convinced, however, that status had far less to do with their complicity than did my choice of something as intellectual, esoteric, and over-romanticized as handmade lines-and-dots music. Perhaps on a more practical level my demonstrated ability to lap the field academically without being given extra time to finish my homework had something to do with it too. In any case, by the time it wasn't cute anymore, I was an adult and a college graduate. And man, was it ever not cute anymore. Plastic turns to Cardboard in a hurry for those of us given to intellectual, esoteric, over-romanticized pursuits.

There is a similar reticence that prevails out in the liberal bourgie world, where relativism-as-social-grace acts as a filter and no one wants to be the first to tell you quite so baldly that "Improvising Tuba Player" is not a real job. There is in addition, as I touched upon early on in this series, the lovingly crafted, overdetermined, eminently socially and academically respectable path of university music study. And indeed, not only was I myself almost impossibly meritorious in this academic arena, but my particular mancessory, the tuba, is typically so difficult to recruit that my undergrad school picked up virtually the entire tab for my studies there. And so I left behind high-powered academics in one fell swoop to become a student-athlete of sorts, privy to none of the social perks while suffering from many of the same drawbacks, namely an intellectually stilted curriculum and profoundly limited employment prospects post-graduation. Had I not concurrently taken a student job with the campus security department at a time of rapid post-9/11 growth in both the public and private security sectors, who knows how I would have supported myself in the interim. Indeed, this led me to make yet another statistical contribution to Hanna Rosin's work: I am a college graduate, and now a graduate degree holder, who has never held a job that requires a post-secondary education.

Even having excelled at my course of study and having managed to remain blissfully free from the crushing debt faced by most of my peers, I less launched myself into the real world than did an epic faceplant in its lap. Certainly my timing could not have been worse: an historical recession was on the horizon and, in related news, Western art music had never been less marketable. I don't deny, however, that my distinctively male unwillingness to "adapt" has profoundly shaped this leg of my journey as well. This series of posts has been devoted largely to defending that posture and to enumerating its potentially broader, gender-neutral social utility.

Most of the people I have known who are making a real living as musicians are not the best musicians. Some of them are quite far from it. What distinguishes them, in my experience, is their willingness to do just about anything to achieve this. They will play, teach, and quite frankly, say anything they have to, walking right up to the line between ethical and unethical behavior, and in occasional cases crossing ever so slightly over to the other side. There is, meanwhile, a small collection of people I can count on one hand who are even more uncompromising and sensitive to issues of honesty than I am, who have strongly influenced the way I go about my own business, whose work I find unusually compelling, and who, like me, have generally had a much tougher time of it.

I know, I know, you've heard the art-versus-commerce whine-fest before and you're not too keen on rehashing it through the eyes of a latent mancessionist. If you insist on more excitement, I defy you once again to ponder the deep, dark questions lurking all around this old trope as the (un)willingness to compromise enters popular discourse as a decidedly gendered concern.

The gendering of compromise is a central theme of Rosin's The End of Men. It is a maneuver which holds up quite nicely in the polite company she evidently keeps. The Arts are in this way, though, a far less polite domain, which is why there's no trace of a Maria Schneider, Ingrid Jensen, or Nicole Mitchell anywhere to be found here. How naively parochial and presumptuous such a list is when we're talking about mainstream journalism for mainstream readers; but for me, working in a field where such remarkable women are still breaking ground, it's hard to ignore their being ignored.

In the place they might have occupied, we are of course left with that fleeting, threadbare caricature of a hyper-bourgeois "creative class" of mercenary consultants and entertainment industry frill-mongers, proxies for more substantive notions of creativity and insults to the aesthetic risk-takers who anonymously feed the machine from below. Rosin must understand that creativity and compromise are, if not truly anathema, then at least strange bedfellows, which is why she forgoes meaningful engagement with the kind of art and artists that, wittingly or otherwise, challenge bourgeois values. She sticks instead to an investigation of the new "Plastic Woman" (7) who is "nurturing" (124), "approachable and consumer responsive" (135), "more nimble and responsive to trends." (248) These are above all women who "tend to respond to social cues and bend their personalities to fit in what the times allow," (191) all while demonstrating "the willingness to adapt and bend to a fast-changing economic landscape." (270)

As I encountered each of these turns of phrase for the first time, I was constantly reminded of a paper by Gordon Downie which I had dug up for a prior research project:

With the expansion of free-market neo-liberalization in the form of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics...those performance measures associated with commodity form and behavior have spread to encompass not only public sector services such as health care, utilities, infrastructure, and education, but also cultural provision and production...

...any organization or individual seeking to maximize their strategic advantage in society will be required to adopt those behaviors that are congruent with those metrics of performance associated with marketization and commodity form. Phrases such as "selling yourself" and "making the right impression" point to a process that seeks the extension of the commodity form away from material artifacts and goods to soft services and interpersonal behavior profiling. (197)

'Cultural Production as Self-Surveillance: Making the Right Impression.' Perspectives of New Music 46. 1 (Winter 2008)

At some point in the not-so-distant past, the phrase "Well-behaved women rarely make history" achieved that certain critical mass required to find its way onto a popular bumper sticker. In those terms, the most disturbing aspect of Rosin's Plastic Woman is what a well-behaved capitalist she is. Of course, the key takeaway from The End of Men is that the world we now live in seems keen on rewarding these characteristics to a greater degree than ever before, rendering that bumper sticker a tad bit miscalibrated and odiously vengeful. And yet, anyone who has been shopping for something other than groceries has seen what "the extension of the commodity form away from material artifacts and goods to soft services and interpersonal behavior profiling" looks and feels like. I for one certainly have seen it. Perhaps I have a tad bit more empathy for these workers than the average Cardboard Man, or perhaps I have a raging case of corrugation myself since I just don't like to shop all that much, but generally this is a condition that breaks my heart and my spirit in equal measure. These are the ultimate mediated men and women, and they do not seem to be the least bit happy having been tasked with concealing their employers' criminality beneath parade smiles and complimentary bottles of spring water.

Reports of My Demise (iii)

The notion of compromise is uniquely fraught, loaded, and just plain complicated for artists no matter their particular relationship to it, a fact which makes reading The End of Men from the perspective of an artist a particularly uncomfortable experience. In so breezily and uncritically tossing the notion around, Rosin indicates, at the most parochial level, that The Arts are not on her radar, and, at a more substantive level, that she is oblivious to the pitfalls of hitching the wagon of women's progress to a service economy paradigm rife with both institutionalized and individualized injustices.

Under these circumstances, I believe it might profitably fall to artists to elaborate a bit on our strained relationship with compromise, this in hopes of rounding out the picture for the benefit of those more apt to make peace with the concept on account of having led very different lives. Start with the fact that The Arts inhabit Western society's most hyper-relativistic space and are valued and supported tremendously unevenly across various American demographics. Broad pronouncements about who has "pulled ahead" of whom in The Arts have always been particularly contentious for us, be it a question of gender, nationality, style, discipline, posture, finances, or virtually anything else. There will be no "data wars" here, only style wars, some of which will have a gendered character while others will not.

(A brief aside: faced with this, some will inevitably lament the loss of pre-modern cultural consensus and attempt to appeal exclusively to micro-consensuses, or to grow them in a laboratory so to speak; cultural fragmentation is, however, ultimately just one inevitable consequence of a free society, and so if we intend to build the latter, the former is something we need to learn to live with, and soon.)

This slippery state of affairs has many well-known and much-lamented implications for the quotidian lives of non-celebrity artists. Lurking more quietly: the lines between artistic idealism and "mancession" (TEOM, 3), chasing technical refinement and playing with "boy toys" (113), being dedicated and being "isolated" (156), having a long-term plan and being "slow to cook" (159), and so on are typically difficult or impossible for non-initiates to see. Who among my fellow artists reading this, whether male or female, has not experienced both types of reactions, sometimes in the same evening, maybe even from the same person? To work in a field of endeavor where the notion of success itself is almost entirely subjective is to accept the impossible challenge of ingratiating oneself to everyone while at the same time risk failing to ingratiate oneself to anyone. And so if the drive to ingratiate, or lack thereof, is, as Rosin is convinced, itself a highly gendered phenomenon, that opens quite the can of worms for those of us who work in and value socially marginalized musical subcultures. In fact, you may want to change into clothes you don't mind getting dirty, so numerous are the ensuing wormy messes.

In my unmediated maleness, I can think of two good (to me) arguments against compromise that apply to The Arts and not to the archetypal American office building. One is this: the hyper-relativism of artistic reception dictates that while we certainly can ascribe greater and lesser probabilities of material success to different musico-stylistic arenas, the only thing guaranteed by compromising your own aesthetic and/or cultural values is that you will have compromised them, while the only thing guaranteed by refusing to do so is that you will not have. Professional artists are thus the perfect control group in an evil science experiment designed to disprove the existence of a meritocracy: having all but disallowed the concept of merit itself, and under absurdly redundant, oversaturated supply conditions, the chance elements and pre-existing advantages that are the real wellsprings of material success both here and elsewhere are laid bare. In The Arts, people pay you to do what they want, not what you want; and they seldom qualify as rational actors in why they want it and who they want it from.

The second argument both follows from and completes the first; it concerns how the ego is situated in The Arts as opposed to how it is situated in standard-issue office building politics. Placating the ego by getting one's way over co-workers is always a hollow victory, usually bad for business in the long run anyway, and, to invoke Warren Farrell again, a literal death trap for the red-faced perpetrator and his escalating blood pressure. Conversely, achieving fulfillment through wholly self-directed artmaking, while it is undeniably also an ego-driven pursuit, is real, personal, and ameliorative; if you're happier, so are the people around you, the people around them, and so on. Indeed, on that last count, who better to cite than Hanna Rosin (and Susan Faludi, from whom she gratefully borrows the concept of "ornamental masculinity") for evidence that civilization is virtually disintegrating under a shock wave of deeply personal male discontent? Under these circumstances, it rather boggles the mind that men who have all but disavowed long-term financial stability, creature comforts, social respectability, and long-term domestic partnerships could be routinely derided as egotistical, elitist, self-indulgent, decadent, etc. simply for following their muses. I mean, those manufacturing jobs are not coming back, and there certainly are worse ways to pass the time than making art.