Image Bands and their Discontents

I don't think I've ever used the term 'image band' when talking about music but it's an interesting topic to think about.

Is it merely a band that has carefully constructed a strong visual image which forms an inherent part of the package and the message of the artist?

I think I'd say 'yes' to this, basically my (admittedly simplistic) definition would be "any band you could do as fancy dress".

Johnnie Ray came to mind because - my dad saw him in Wolverhampton at some point in the 50s/60s and told me the place was so packed they had to put chairs out on the stage, and i remembered this because of discussing Adam Faith with him, and he sort of agreeing that Adam Faith had an image that was more okay for young men to be into, he was less of a clown/fop than comparable pop stars of the era, which ties into what Faith was saying about himself - this is right at the beginning of the Rock era and clearly there are already artists (and their managers no doubt) thinking HARD about the Whole Package

I have enjoyed watching this documentary on Iasos and in one way i don't think of him having an image as such but on the other side the positive energy he radiates and transmits definitely adds more vibe especially in the way he speaks and actually maybe i enjoy that part as much as the music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ktDzQp0aU8

sometimes when an image band from the 80s gets back together I'm disappointed that they just look like a bunch of boring middle aged men now, and worry if that's a bad thing to think, and to what extent the disappointment is because they are unavoidably fatter/balder/whatever than they were 25 yrs ago or because they are no longer making the same effort with their image, I generally think it's the latter which seems more justifiable, but I guess it's a fine line?

oh! Oh! Oh! So! Many! Thoughts! I am trying to scrape together into a coherent line of thinking, but all of this discussion has been very very thought-provoking and now there are a million x-posts

I've deliberately used "style" or "image" rather than "fashion band" for a specific reason - to me, although I know "Fashion" is shorthand for the whole style industry, "Fashion", to me, indicates a changeable, weathervane kind of approach, both to clothing and to music. That "Fashion band" = "Oh, Grunge is in right now, let's all wear flannel and record grunge songs. Wait, no, 60s revival is in now, let's wear mod suits and reference the Who. Oops, wind has shifted again, we're a Suit Band referencing post-punk in our riffs." Like, The Soup Dragons are the quintessential laughably Fashion Band.

It was Suzy who taught me the hugely important difference between "Style" and "Fashion". "Style" or "Image" is much more about personal aesthetics and using clothes and haircuts and the like for personal expression. There is an endless tension and dialogue between Style and Fashion, both in clothing and in music. It's not a simple or one-way street, even though the received wisdom is that Style "sets trends" while Fashion "follows them". Knowing the "latest fashion" to the point of seeming 5 minutes ahead enough to seem like a trend-setter is as much an Image Band thing, as "invent a whole new vocabulary and wardrobe which all the kids will be copying in 6 months time". Get either wrong and you look ridiculous, get it right and you look visionary.

The whole "The Who as Mods" thing is absolutely typical of this. (Really tempted to read that book now, NV) Also the relationship between "goth" and "media depiction of goth."

I don't know that "image bands" are solely the province of The Young; the continued careers of Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Madonna, Prince, Suede etc seem to suggest that they are not. In some cases this may be "established a reputation as 'image band' early enough on that people continue to respond to it" and in other cases it may be "perpetual style chameleon who is really really good at continually reinventing new images"?

I think I'd say 'yes' to this, basically my (admittedly simplistic) definition would be "any band you could do as fancy dress".

(I don't want to talk about how much of my youth I spent effectively cosplaying Bauhaus.)

I dont like it so much when people are in black and white - noticing DJs doing this on soundcloud

― cog, Wednesday, February 12, 2014 10:22 AM

i think black and white is a too-easy signifier, but it can work if you put the effort in. would be intersting to work against it, since it feels like a signifier of "i are serious business" unless you're Morrissey or Belle and Sebastian in which case it signifies "i are 1962"

― the undersea world of jacques kernow (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 10:24 AM

I agree that B&W is a lazy, bad signifier, and if I see one more moody B&W photo of a DJ, seriously, I will break something.

But on the other hand, people who use B&W effectively, it has so, so, so many different signifiers than "I are serious business" or "I are 1962" - thinking about Bauhaus, whose spectre is going to hang all over this thread, I can remember the first time I saw a colour photo of Bauhaus, and I was actually *shocked* to discover that, for example, David J was a ginger? They were a band that seemed to *live* in B&W, even in their stage shows, and the effect was "we are characters in a German art school cabaret or a 1920s silent film".

when you listen to a band at home do you visualise them in your head? I discovered Momus in 2003 and whenever I listen to Momus I tend to picture a 2003 early 40s eyepatch wearing Momus even if I'm listening to something he recorded ten years earlier, maybe this is different for bands who radically change their image though?

feel like there's a qualitative shift with Bowie/Roxy 71/72 - something dialectic to it maybe – the image band gets rocket-fuel from existing alongside the 'honest' or 'authentic' band, a tradition of plod to be rejected, or offset Bowie/Roxy leaping out at you - the more strongly the 'real' presses, the more effective or powerful cutting loose can be, the self-conscious embrace of the artificial becomes supercharged, & the image-band can load it with theory (which… once broached becomes implicit in the tradition of the image band?).

this seems important in image bands, the idea that their photos look like they are stills from a film, like they create their own world, this seems important to the Whole Package idea.

re Bauhaus and B&W, which feels v. true, which raises a question - how has the socialization of media impacted the Image Band? in an age where everybody follows their Friends how have the rules of image control changed. feel like a Gaga lets the mask slip much more now than 70s Bowie wd ever have done

also woof articulating something about knowingness that i hadn't quite grasped yet

and soref bringing in Momus is funny because i wanted to mention El Records but know very little beyond some of their 80s press photos which were things of wonder to teenage me

Depends on the band? (x-post to soref's first question now)

Like, it's impossible for me to listen to Bauhaus without imagining what they look like, how they dress, how they *move* to the music, but this is because I have literally watched Shadow of Light and Archive so many damn times that those images are irrevocably burned into my brain.

Whether Momus is an image band or not is an interesting question (my sources say... yes?) but when I listen to his music, I do quite clearly picture him. But I think that's more how the records of his that I own are produced, in that his vocals are foregrounded, a lot, and his tone of voice is very "let me have a confidential whisper in your ear of this wicked and spiteful thought!" That's what makes me picture Momus when I listen to him, not having an image of a guy in functionally engineered Japanese fashion and an eyepatch.

and that's attractive to young people, at that stage where you are fantasising about what your adult life could be like, they create these worlds you imagine could be the lifestyle that you could take on

kind of like a syllabus band

(It's also weird to me that you guys are picking "Bowie/Roxy" as ground zero, when to me "Ground Zero" is so clearly the Velvet Underground, I mean, getting Andy Warhol to not just design your album cover, but "produce" your record, those ~Iconic~ shots with Nico, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable - I suppose it's because they backtracked so much from IMAGE BAND on the first two record to "srz musicans" with their later albums.)

kind of like a syllabus band

― I R Jones (soref), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 11:01 AM

I think Image Bands are probably just a certain *kind* of Syllabus Band, just a *Visual* Syllabus Band.

(Have we got this far and no one has mentioned Visual Kei? I know next to nothing about Visual Kei is why I haven't, but I'd love for someone who knows what they're talking about to address it itt.)

do bands from the past kind of become image bands by default? Like a band from the 60s will seem to have that unified aesthetic, all of their photos and clothes and record covers will scream 1964 (or whatever), even if it may not have appeared styalised and unified in that way at the time?

am pondering a thread or thread within thread about the Non-Image Band tbh, the unconscious of this - amongst other things, the way that notions of masculinity could be attached to the lack of image, despite Being a Pop Musician being essentially an effete occupation...standard 1950s codes wd make being any kind of performer a suspect activity on the queer-meter, yet by the 80s peeps like Sham are reveling in their salt-of-the-earthity...this process feels like the underbelly of the Image

like the Non-Image is the most weirdly constructed Image of them all?

Can't you look at a band from the near present, and see it "scream 2012" or the like? Like, when I see bands with pyramids and galaxies in their artwork, I think "Jesus Christ, early 00s Tumblr band"?

I get what you're saying, in that bands from 1964 start to "look like 1964" whether they looked like 1964 at the time or not, but the thing is, when you listen to a lot of garage rock/freak beat compilations and the like with endless tiny photos of local groups, you get an eye for who "looks like 1964" and who doesn't.

x-post GO FOR IT, NV. I'd love a sub-context on who gets to be perceived as "not an image" because indeed, that *is* the most constructed image of them all.

I was trying to think of who would be the definition of Non-Image Band, but it seems a lot harder that identifying Image Band, as soon as look directly at it, it disappears

I was trying to think of who would be the definition of Non-Image Band, but it seems a lot harder that identifying Image Band, as soon as look directly at it, it disappears

― I R Jones (soref), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 11:09 AM

EXACTLY!!! I was trying to think of this a couple of days ago, trying to come up with an antidote to Interpol, trying to find a band that had no image at all in order to cleanse my palate. I could not find one! (But that's probably because I don't have things like... Maroon 5 in my record collection.)

here's Jeremy Deller to illustrate a fantastical moment in the construction of popular working class masculinity

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/13/artist-industrial-revolution-popular-culture

because altho this is a sidetrack for somewehre else i want to acknowledge whoever talked about the chaos bomb that = Glam Rock upthread, which i feel is v. important towards explaining this:

http://i2.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1904545.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/Robby-Baron-Adrian-Street-Bruno-Elrington-Mick-McManus-Johnny-Kwango-and-Mike-Marino-wrestlers-recording-song-Tip-1904545.jpg

Can anyone think of a band *without* an image? Because the only thing I can think of is artists where there is, literally, no image, like Gareth's weird anonymous techno records from the 80s where any information at all about the artist has been lost - except that has now become such an image in itself that people are now trying to ape it.

think of Oasis as an anti-image band, how badly Noel wants us to think of him as a builder manqué when really he belongs to Peter Noone and David Cassidy's progeny

OASIS ARE TOTALLY AN IMAGE BAND! OASIS ARE A UNION JACK GIBSON HOLLOWBODY SMASHING ON YOUR FACE FOREVER!!!!

was it haitch who talked about aussie resistance to this up there? AC/DC, Cold Chisel, Rose Tattoo, "we are ordinary blokes who appreciate the simple blokey joys of playing musical instruments like some medieval minstrel. with beer."

I have an old issue of the NME from about '94 where they were taking the piss out of Noel's insistence that they didn't care about image and it was all about the music, versus how big an element their haircuts and shoes etc were in their success

...while wearing schoolboy uniforms? AC/DC automatically disqualified.

well quite but how hard Noel wants to be imageless, the dichotomy almost splits between the two brothers

BB i agree the velvets are right there at the proper ground zero of this - but like their other ideas I think it took a while to filter through more widely, hence glam as the point where it became more widespread.

plus maybe not having access to THE key 20th century art/media figure changes the nature of how the image gets manifested in the work of their later followers - iconic Bowie image from Ziggy era probably fellating Ronson's guitar on stage or the red spiky mullet, velvets' iconic image unquestionably the Warhol cover for the first record. (that starts sucking some of the velvets' power away in Warhol's direction, IMO.)

and YES it's ridiculous to be a 60 year-old schoolboy in a non-imagie band...what mental twists are going on in here tho? if you think of DC's blokeish W.C. presentation it's undermined all over the place by wee Jimmy Krankie and a dead singer whose sexuality has routinely been scrutinized for reasons unclear

If one of you has dated a model or television presenter, YOU ARE AN IMAGE BAND
If one of you has started your own fashion label, YOU ARE AN IMAGE BAND
If one of you has talked about how "it's all about the music, maaaan", you know, being "aaaalll about the music, maaaaaaaan" IS A FUCKING IMAGE

x-post

is the fundamental image dichotomy "we are just like you" vs "we are nothing like you" ?

massive xps

totally, yes, I see that on the VU, but Bowie/Roxy feel to me like ground zero because of their success maybe? Like here is where the image band takes over, runs the charts, etc. There are some other distinctions – the visual drive feels more internal, intrinsic or permanent for B/R (art students v roaming avant-garders?) – but they seem to define the field in Britain for a pop generation or two.

I don't think that acknowledging the debt to Warhol invalidates the Velvets' power in any way - in fact, being aware enough to know that they should work with Warhol, and when to leave, shows the Velvets to be way smarter than "throwing power away".

OK, I see the point now - Velvets were never on Top of the Pops; Bowie/Roxy etc were.

That whole dichotomy of "like you" / "not like you" involves an inherent *assumption* about who "you" is, though?

I feel a fuck of a lot more affinity with "genderqueer alien from planet bowie" than I will ever feel with "authentic, northern working class bloke" because of who I am.

And that old dichotomy, of Oasis = authentic working class blokes therefore "real" / Blur = soft southern art school ponces therefore "fake" - you know, I am soft, I am southern, I went to an art school during the brief time I managed tertiary education...

The association of "art school" with "Image Band" is pretty strong, from The Who on, like, I can't discuss Blur without bringing up Goldsmiths like I can't discuss Interpol without bringing up NYU (and anyone who tries to tell me "NYU is not an art school," come on, it's like Goldsmiths. The fact that you can major in French literature or whatever does not make it Not An Art School.) But this is what brings class into it - NYU was "art school for rich kids" where "art school" in the UK implies a mixing of classes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDKF8KkD7rE

thinking about Oasis and image, I find it hard to draw the line between stuff that was self consciously affected, and stuff like their mancunian accents that were legit but became part of their image (and I guess there more general 'northerness' which was real but surely self conscious to some extent as well?)

their more general

when i say "like you" i'm thinking of the fanbase - the "like you" Image is about reassuring fans of your "normality", your connection to them, the same clothes, the same attitudes. and of course this likeness becomes another feedback loop, no doubt public school Oasis fans morphing into their idols to some extent as much as any other fan-relationship

as i said before, the huge irony of Oasis' "northern working class" shtick is that a generation before them ANYBODY playing in a pop group wd be identified as the ponciest of the poncey in northern working class terms

when i say "like you" i'm thinking of the fanbase - the "like you" Image is about reassuring fans of your "normality"

But STILL, who is the fanbase? This is already assuming a fanbase with an idea of what "normal" comprises! And "normal" varies wildly.

sure. which wd bring us into the whole realm of "reading against", i think, which wd be very interesting. fans who get into an artist despite the artist's Image being strongly "not aimed at you or about you"

Oasis's fanbase included both authentic, northern working class blokes and middle class southern student types and they presumably processed to the "like you" / "not like you" thing in different ways?

i guess i started down this road because i'm wondering who Bowie/Roxy/Velvets were defining themselves against? and i thought about early Fleetwood Mac and their dress code being like "camouflaged amongst their audience" and why that might be the case

my initial inclination is to say, "all bands are image bands" (all artists are image artist, w/e), but i realize that such a response doesn't add much to the conversation. thing is, i think all people are "image people", that everyone's in drag all the time, in their clothes, persona, communication, etc. i pretty much have to start from there.

in the 80s, proto-indie punk & hc bands like the minutemen and husker du were often praised for their lack of image. they played and were photographed in worn, shabby, everyday casual & work wear, nothing fancy or otherwise attention-grabbing. this styling, as deliberate as any despite its dgaf trappings, was taken by fans as a badge of authenticity, a symbol of the artists' opposition and superiority to what was often labeled something like "prefabricated, soulless, commercial pop culture". the UK press seemed at leas as interested in the hair and dress of the first sub pop seattle bands as they were with the music. charles peterson's photos helped cement and sell a very specific image of the scene. a few years later, grunge style had become a risible fashion cliché: hideous thrift store sweaters, artfully ripped jeans, bedhead, mangy flannels & dr. martins.

maybe we classify bands as image bands based on our sense of how much emphasis they place on their image, the curatorial care taken. by that standard, i'd say that the white stripes and strokes were image bands in much the same way. the difference, i suppose, is as bb notes, the white stripes seemed to have constructed their image from within a rather personal field of interests & references, while the strokes were more engaged with the mainstream urban fashion of their day. doesn't incline me to think of the latter less in terms of their image. were duran duran more "imagey" than devo? no, just different. they both obviously invested a great deal of care and thought into curating their presentation. i get that dd were trying to look cool & sexy by then-current fashion standards, while devo were just being deliberately weird, but i nevertheless think of them both as image bands.

http://s.pixogs.com/image/R-376907-1235055164.jpeg

^ image band

like by the time Bowie is a big thing loads of his fans are dressing in ways he has inspired but when he came up with Ziggy Stardust i doubt it was because he wanted to reflect his fans back at themselves

(It's also weird to me that you guys are picking "Bowie/Roxy" as ground zero, when to me "Ground Zero" is so clearly the Velvet Underground

ground zero is waaaaay before the velvets. the beatles were very carefully crafted images/styles/etc, and, hell, they made what were basically art house movies about theselves to make sure everyone got it. elvis was an ever-changing series of carefully crafted images. go back another couple generations and you will land on the carter family, who were carefully dressed, and carefully posed in photographs, to project "hillbilly," which is something they were not. i'm sure someone better steeped in history could take it back centuries before that.

and i know you don't want to focus too much on innate beauty in this thread, but good looks have mattered to all kinds of artistic success since the beginning of time. singers, actors, painters, poets -- as a group, they tend to look better than the rest of us, regardless of their gender. looks are an absolute advantage to popular success in every genre of music, from classical to jazz to pop and beyond. studies have shown that even in the corporate world, better looking people, both male and female, tend to have more success. looks are a part of image, and they are unavoidable.

contenderizer makes many good points.

Yes, that was the conclusion that I reached and stated in the first post.

If newness is in the ears that hear and not in the sound that is made, then is image in the eyes that see and not in the sight?

Because everything has an image even regardless of whether we have seen that image - not because the image is hidden from us or presented to us as imageless, but because we havent seen it yet?

With Burial I know about the image but not about the music. With something else i know about the music but not about the artist.

But it isnt that Burial has no music, its just that I am unfamiliar with it

Well, the whole idea behind the thread was this:

Sure, all artists have "images", whether they deliberately plan them or not, whether you're aware of what the image is or not.

But yet, there is an idea in lots of people's heads that there are bands who are known or appreciated for their "image", and that this may have been planned and constructed as carefully as the music was constructed. And it's this latter thing that I wanted to get at.

well, all food is fast food if you think about how long food prep used to take.
but a restaurant in the fast food sector is a specific kind of fast food (and is sometimes a lot slower than other places!)

so maybe that is the same with "image band"?

penglaz is an excellent discovery

Insisting on anonymity is a surefire way of cultivating an image in dance music, where people by and large don't care what any of the producers look like or even who they are. Burial and Daft Punk have done that pretty much better than anyone.

andrew wk mentioned being influenced by the anonymity of dance culture but i don't see how that really translated into AWK unless he's actually not a real person.

[cue evil laughter]

I admit I haven't followed Andrew W.K.'s career since I Get Wet, but there was definitely a Happy Hardcore influence to his music, at least at that time. But yeah, the 'anonymity' part makes no sense to me.

In which case you need to catch up on Steev Mike and all the rest.

Then there's things like this:

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19020-st-vincent-st-vincent/

Where, could someone please explain to me, how the *costumes* that Annie Clark wore during session work in her previous bands are somehow relevant to her current album?

Because I'm struggling with this.

Where, could someone please explain to me, how the *costumes* that Annie Clark wore during session work in her previous bands are somehow relevant to her current album?

It's kinda simplistic, but I think the idea is that it is interesting she was wearing someone else's uniforms yet now presents as fully herself. People are willing her into a sort of Bowie-life, so that to see her dressed in dated Polyphonic Spree robes is like looking at pictures of the Manish Boys: funny how slow the start was. I think the intention is to appreciate the leap, really.

People whose Reference Era is contemporary with your own individual era... it's really tricky. Tends to be either extreme love or hate.

Hmm.

There was a moment in the mid-2000s where lots of indie bands in the UK (Maximo Park and Editors and a bunch of others who merge into one) were supposed to sound like Joy Division and Gang of Four. New Wave and particularly JD had been a key phase for me.

Now here were a bunch of bands made up of ppl roughly my age, referencing records I'd listened to obsessively. Except what they were making was a kind of reverent pastiche, which took the New Wave canon's status as Serious Music for granted, and took pains to smugly position itself as 'anti-pop' whilst in fact providing the plodding soundtrack to countless boring student indie discos and festivals for stupid posh people.

I don't know if 'extreme hate' describes my reaction to that stuff but certainly apathy, boredom, coming close to hatred at points. TLDR ppl who insist on 'reviving' an aesthetic u have loved = dud

"took pains to smugly position itself as 'anti-pop' whilst in fact providing the plodding soundtrack to countless boring student indie discos and festivals" more or less describes Joy Division though doesn't it?

Semi. Less so than the mid-2000s stuff.

I think what you read as smug in jd I might read as weird

Springsteen and lots of image stuff in here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/30/120730fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all

What I was thinking of specifically:

A week after closing down rehearsals at Fort Monmouth, Springsteen and the band start rehearsing at the Sun National Bank Center, the home of the Trenton Titans, a minor-league hockey team. The theatre at Fort Monmouth was secluded and cheap, but not nearly large enough for the crew to set up the full travelling stage, with all the proper lights, risers, ramps, and sound system.

Inside the arena, Springsteen is walking around the empty seats, a microphone in his hand, giving stage directions. “We can’t see the singers from this angle,” he says. “One step to the right, Cindy!” The crew moves the riser. Cindy Mizelle, the most soulful voice in the new, seventeen-piece version of the E Street Band, takes one step to the right.

Springsteen lopes to another corner, and, as he sets his gaze on the horn section, a thought occurs to him. “Do we have some chairs for those guys when they aren’t playing?” he says. His voice ricochets around the empty seats. Chairs appear.

The band gets in position and starts to rip through the basic set list in preparation for the Apollo show. Lofgren plays the slippery opening riff of “We Take Care of Our Own”—a recession anthem in the key of G—and the band is off. Springsteen rehearses deliberately, working out all the spontaneous-seeming moves and postures: the solemn lowered head and raised fist, the hoisted talismanic Fender, the between-songs patter, the look of exultation in a single spotlight that he will enact in front of an audience. (“It’s theatre, you know,” he tells me later. “I’m a theatrical performer. I’m whispering in your ear, and you’re dreaming my dreams, and then I’m getting a feeling for yours. I’ve been doing that for forty years.”) Springsteen has to do so much—lead the band, pace the show, sing, play guitar, command the audience, project to every corner of the hall, including the seats behind the stage—that to wing it completely is asking for disaster.

In the midst of the fifth song in the set, he introduces the band. As they run through a vamp of “People Get Ready,” the old Curtis Mayfield tune, Springsteen grabs a mike and strolls across the stage. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he says to the empty arena. “I’m so glad to be here in your beautiful city tonight. The E Street Band has come back to bring the power, hour after hour, to put a whup-ass session on the recession. We got some old friends, and we got some new friends, and we’ve got a story to tell you . . .”

The tune, thick with horns and vocal harmonies, elides into “My City of Ruins,” one of the elegiac, gospel-tinged songs on the 9/11 album, “The Rising.” The voices sing “Rise up! Rise up!” and there comes a string of horn solos: trombone, trumpet, sax. Then back to the voices. Springsteen quickly introduces the E Street horns and the singing collective. Then he says, “Roll call!” And, with the music rising bit by churchly bit, he introduces the core of the band: “Professor Roy Bittan is in the house. . . . Charlie Giordano is in the house. . . .”

When he finishes the roll call, there is a long ellipsis. The band keeps vamping.

“Are we missing anybody?”

Two spotlights are now trained on the organ, where Federici once sat, and at the mike where Clemons once stood.

“Are we missing anybody?”

Then again: “Are we missing anybody? . . . That’s right. That’s right. We’re missing some. But the only thing I can guarantee tonight is that if you’re here and we’re here, then they’re here!” He repeats this over and over, the volume of the piano and the bass rising, the drums hastening, the voices rising, until finally the song overwhelms him, and, if Springsteen has calculated correctly, there will not be an unmoved soul in the house.

For the next hour and a half, the band plays through a set that alternates tales of economic pain with party-time escape. While the band plays the jolly opening riff of “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” Springsteen practices striding around the stage, beckoning the imaginary hordes everywhere in the arena to sing along. There is a swagger in his stride. He is the rare man of sixty-two who is not shy about showing his ass—an ass finely sausaged into a pair of alarmingly tight black jeans—to twenty thousand paying customers. “Go, Jakie!” he cries, and brings Jake Clemons downstage to solo. He practically has to kick him into the spotlight.

A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending “Thunder Road,” Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me.

who will be the first truly normcore image band? or do they exist already?

Normcore? As in, band who dress normally? Boringly? Modest Mouse. The Shins. Death Cab. Etc etcetera.

Thinking how there are bands with a look and then bands where their look becomes a one- or two-word way to describe them. I know Iron & Wine and Bonnie "Prince" Billie aren't bands per se, but both became "beard" if you wanted to sum them up in a word (vs. their counterparts playing similar music). "Mop-tops" -- there's your Beatles.

Normcore?

http://www.jenniferheller.com/v3/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/NORM.jpg

noamcore

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01672/noam-1_1672796c.jpg

Both of whom look like they could have been in Modest Mouse.

Thanks for the Springsteen link! Talking on this thread seems to have turned into writing a 180000 word LOLnovel about image bands and non-image-bands and their discontents so I'm hungrily sucking all of this up as "research".

I guess I know what that P4k link on Clark was *trying* to say, using her former bands' costumes as "look at the leap from session player wearing other people's costumes to fully informed auteur" but it just fed into my irritation with the way that men are usually described doing stuff and women are usually described wearing clothes and I've tried to spend the entire thread flipping that around, noting both that "men wear clothes too" and also, "wearing clothes" is not just a portable meme but means something, depending on what the clothes are.

Tim De Laughter's alumni have turned up in all sorts of other bands I rate, and I never saw anyone describe what Benjamin Curtis or Phil Karnats were doing as "wearing robes" as opposed to "playing drums/guitar/etc" so it does irk a bit. There are times when discussing an artist's aesthetics feels interesting and worthy, and times when it feels like a lazy shortcut. I don't know what the difference is, though, because Clark talking about her stage set and her album cover choices and her choreography in the Village Voice interview over on the other thread was actually extremely interesting and provided a view into her working methods that really went beyond "wearing clothes".

Mumble, grumble, typical Branwell complaints, I know.

OH MY GOD THIS HAS BEEN STARING ME IN THE FUCKING FACE HOW COULD I NOT HAVE SEEN THIS

That the theatrical band are looking at the meaning and the narrative (and if they are dressed as Renaissance princes it is because they are doing a concept album about Machiavelli) which are weighted semiotics, and the "art" band are weightless semiotics, signifiers pointing at nothing, just for the sake of playing with image, pointing only at a reference to a reference, like Carlos D's empty gun holsters.

...

I was complaining upthread about Carlos D and his empty gun holsters and how he said that his look was *referencing* Blixa from Neubauten, and getting frothingly angry because the imagery that Neubauten played with *meant* something, in the context of post-War Germany, while D was using empty signifiers. However, I could also argue that in the construction and then destruction of D's image, and the whole narrative that became attached to that, to go onstage now wearing that get-up would be "Signifying Carlos D" with its own complex raft of associations and meanings and god it's too tempting to call that meme the perfect viral here heehee. Weighted semiotics become weightless semiotics become weighted again, in this recursive loop of imagery.

And then in this comic book I'm reading about postmodernism, in the section on feminism, I find this:

Male theories of sexuality - Freud's or Lacan's - literally cannot think of a woman except as negatively imaginary, incomplete, an empty signifier (the vacant womb).

Empty holsters. The empty signifier. FFS, the latin word "vagina" literally means scabbard - in the modern sense of weaponry, a holster is a literal linguistic vagina. THIS BAND ARE WALKING AROUND WITH LITERAL AND SIGNIFIED VAGINAS HANGING ALL OVER THEM.

I think I just broke mine own head. *dies*

I'm not sure what the appropriate thread for this is important cultural artefact is, but I'm just going to leave this here:

https://24.media.tumblr.com/0345403877347715f85e36d741933a2d/tumblr_n4p8ebQoD71txg5hvo1_400.jpg