Image Bands and their Discontents

wow so many x-posts

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"

This kind of gets at the nub of Image Bands and what drives their popularity. Because when it comes down to it, Duran Duran - the bulk of their fanbase were not male; were not from The Midlands, in fact not even British; were certainly not fashionable, we were actually totally uncool teenage bands.

And yet that "aimed at" was in terms of DD being portrayed as objects of desire for the female gaze, even while they wrote entire damn songs about The Male Gaze.

This is where it gets complicated by gender, because (straight) men looking at men, it's considered to be "you can be like this" while with (straight women) and gay men looking at men, there's always that weird double identification/arousal of "do you want to *be* like this" (like you) versus "do you want to *fuck* this?" (totally unlike you). This is why I can't look at this without bringing gender into it. Because the perceived "you" in the "you" of Oasis's fanbase that they are supposed to be "like" has an inherent image of masculinity attached which is just not attainable to many fans.

we were actually totally uncool teenage bands GIRLS.

i do suspect that wholehearted, live-it-breathe-it dedication to a single TOWERINGLY COOL IMAGE that seems emblematic of the exact right place to be in the larger cultural moment might be the sole property of the young (or naïve). as you get older, your field of references widens and you, as a necessary consequence, fall out of step with culture as it is being invented and perceived as "NEW!" within freshly-minted minds.

so perhaps only young artists and fans can invest passionately enough in the fashionable image to really be "of the image", hence "image bands". just thinking aloud...

I can't even count the number of girls I personally know that started playing bass or forming bands or whatever, because of Duran Duran, so it's an understandable mistake.

But identifying with "the people onstage" is complex and takes many different forms.

yeah BB i have been coming from a distinctly homosocial position throughout this morning's thought process

many xps to bramwell - not throwing their power away, just that some would still probably shorthand the velvets as 'the Warhol band', just because he's such a huge figure. Roxy heads would know, say Anthony Price's role in their look but he doesn't dominate in the same way.

the Aussie thing NV mentioned many posts up - AC/DC absolutely not a part of it for reasons mentioned, plus Bon quite campy for a front man of that era here. (Robert Forster wrote well on how Angus is stuck with the school kid outfit for all time a few years back.) but the sound they codified got adopted by the following generation, so they influenced it. also comes from local mistrust of UK music press hype machine, earliest manifestation probably the Saints' experience when they went to england - "we were better, but weren't wearing the 'right' clothes."

http://www.dexys.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/.pond/coming_to_town.jpg.w300h367.jpg

probly my favourite Image Band

Contendo, this is something I wrote about Suit Bands while discussing Interpol last night, but moved on because mh hadn't even bothered to notice the phrase "suit bands". But the thing you wrote on grunge bands and anti-style as "authenticity" just reminded me of it, and I had it still open in another tab, so:

Suit Bands: OK, in the mid 90s, Grunge was huge and inescapable, and just flattened the musical landscape, in New York City as everywhere else. There was a "Grunge Boutique" at Macy's, selling pre-ripped jeans for hundreds of dollars, and you could not go to a show without seeing just a sea of flannel.

It originally started with the mod boys, who wore suits because they rode scooters and listened to Blur. But it spread outside the mod/60s garage/Minds Eye scene, as a reaction against Grunge. If you want to stand out at a gig at Brownie's where everyone is wearing flannel and ripped jeans, you turn up wearing a three-button suit, even if it's a shitty second hand suit from Dompsey's Warehouse, you get attention. It was deliberately turning away from all that Pacific Northwest stuff, and turning your eye instead to British groups and European fashion and caring about style. I remember one of my bands playing this ridiculous art school party around NYU, and turning up, and it was like something out of "Sophisticated Boom Boom" - the girls were wearing formals, the boys were wearing ties, and it was like an anti-grunge costume party. It was about suits, and drinking cocktails at places that were called "Lounges" instead of Bars.

I have no idea if these were the same people, who hung around the same places, who eventually coalesced into a "scene" or if it was just a general cultural shift. But "suit bands" in the late 90s, were totally a thing

I do have to say, that in my personal experience, playing a lot of shitty shows at the Pyramid Club in the early 90s, while there were drag revues going on downstairs, really shaped a lot of both my attitudes around "dressing up to go onstage as a performance" as well as shaping my awareness that *all* image was an image, including "going onstage in the clothes we wear in the street" (but what if you dressed like a suit band On The Street*, as it were?) as well as the idea that all gender was a performance, even "default gender".

*This is the last I'm going to say about my brother or Interpol, or anything, but I found the interview I posted on the other thread so funny, because in the early 90s, when my brother was "majoring in neo-Fascism at Columbia", he used to put on a suit and tie every day in class as a gesture of "solidarity with the Leisure Class", and then he'd come downtown and stick out like a sore thumb at one of my gigs, even though I was also wearing a suit and tie. (He would tut at this and tell me "you know what they say about girls who wear ties?" and when he told me they were all lesbians, hmmmm, yes, do you think I'm trying to tell people anything? *goes and snogs my band's singer's girlfriend just to show who has the real pulling power in the band*)

Anyway, sorry, total derail. No more.

lol i used to do gigs in a jacket and tie because i'd been at work at the Inland Rev during the day

but also because i hated indie grebos tbf

many xps to bramwell - not throwing their power away, just that some would still probably shorthand the velvets as 'the Warhol band', just because he's such a huge figure. Roxy heads would know, say Anthony Price's role in their look but he doesn't dominate in the same way

N, please!

But also thinking about this, I was drawing the connections between Blur -> Goldsmiths and Interpol -> NYU and thinking "now I just know that Bowie, also went to art school, didn't he...?" but being unable to name the school. So I guess, yeah, Bowie/Roxy seemed more self-driven, and not linked to a specific artist or school or movement.

did typical Punk or Metal costumery originate with artists rather than audience,

there were so many paths. richard hell's ripped t-shirts were the doing of a guy who was kind of simutaneously artist and fan. whereas by the time ripped t-shirs and safety pins and graffiti fashion got to the sex pistols and their contemporaries, aspiring couture designers (who would eventually become actual couture designers) were deliberately influencing the mix. as for metal, I've always loved the story that rob halford's influential leather get-up was basically a way for a closeted gay man to project his true identity in broad daylight.

was thinking about Rob Halford when i wrote that and it seems so obviously at least a part truth to me

I've never thought of Duran Duran as an image band in terms of their look (the Rio videos are a different matter) - they had a style, certainly but I always thought they just dressed in the fashions of the time rather than having an image in the way that, say, Adam and the Ants did (I wasn't 'around' at the time though so I might have got this completely wrong).

massive xps again

yes - Dexys are fascinating to me in this context because they are such a deliberate, self-conscious and dramatic image band, but collapse much of what's sketched above - not art school, strong appeal to a kind of bloke that one expects to be repelled from the image-band proper, constantly and explicitly hammering towards the sort of 'truth' that isn't an easy fit here.

Suit Bands: OK, in the mid 90s, Grunge was huge and inescapable, and just flattened the musical landscape, in New York City as everywhere else. There was a "Grunge Boutique" at Macy's, selling pre-ripped jeans for hundreds of dollars, and you could not go to a show without seeing just a sea of flannel.

It originally started with the mod boys, who wore suits because they rode scooters and listened to Blur. But it spread outside the mod/60s garage/Minds Eye scene, as a reaction against Grunge. If you want to stand out at a gig at Brownie's where everyone is wearing flannel and ripped jeans, you turn up wearing a three-button suit, even if it's a shitty second hand suit from Dompsey's Warehouse, you get attention. It was deliberately turning away from all that Pacific Northwest stuff, and turning your eye instead to British groups and European fashion and caring about style.

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell), last nigh

i suppose this sort of thing is always push-pulling back and forth. new wave stylishness replaces freedom rock sideburns, is overturned by slacker chic, which falls to the cocktail revival, and so on. "suit bands" come in and go periodically.

there is something suspect about treating "ordinary" dress as a badge of authenticity. this approach seems to devalue created/creative identity, to consider heteronormativity (especially supposedly "styleless" masculinity within that) as more real and respectable than other forms of self-presentation.

huge x-posts bcz I've been to the shops, but BOOM!

lol i used to do gigs in a jacket and tie because i'd been at work at the Inland Rev during the day

― the undersea world of jacques kernow (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 12:03 PM

This got me thinking about how much of early Joy Division's "shirt and tie" image was down to their dayjobs. Which got me thinking about Kim Deal and her "turn up and play gigs wearing her secretary's skirts" which got me to: BOOM!

The ultimate Non-Image band, in my mind: Pixies.

Because the Pixies never ever registered as anything other than "generic slacker dude college bro jeans and t-shirt and flannels band" and their Non-Image Image seemed almost deliberately in counterpoint to the weirdness of their music and extremity of their lyrics. But that is the *thing* - Pixies were Gay Dude, Racially Ambiguous Dude, Female Dude and Drummer Dude - and yet somehow, even though all of those ways of Being Other would be The Issue, in any other band, their deliberate coding as "Utterly Generic Dude" was this brilliant way of casting their Other status(es) into negative space.

Which made me start thinking about Husker Du again - Husker Dudes, more like - and wondering how much of that beflannelled, down to earth "we don't have an image" was about coding as Straight Acting (Butch) Gay Dudes in the hyper-masculine hardcore scene out of which they grew. Husker Du's workmanlike clothes stop seeming to be about being "authentic" but about another kind of *passing*.

And it's weird that these two seminal (LOL) bands of the whole grunge aesthetic came from this place which got overwhelmed by a sea of cis-het ex-metal dudes in flannel. (OK, I'm willing to contest Kurt as "cis-het" but the whole Grunge Explosion and Grunge Boutiques in Macys? Come on.)

as for metal, I've always loved the story that rob halford's influential leather get-up was basically a way for a closeted gay man to project his true identity in broad daylight

Yeah, good point, this should be on the Image Band 101 syllabus course, here, definitely.

(Do you know how tempting it was to tell teenage metal dudes affecting the styles of their heroes "um, you do know you're wearing a cock ring there, right?" Oh, precarious masculinity, thy name is str8 boy youth.)

And no, I think that history has written the image of the 80s so completely that Duran read as "following fashion" when they were the ones that set the style?

Not so much talking about the original romo, but that kind of "Nagel prints come to life" white trousers and pastels thing - they predated Miami Vice with that look, though that look has come to read "80s" through Miami Vice. That's my memory of it, and I was around them.

yes - Dexys are fascinating to me in this context because they are such a deliberate, self-conscious and dramatic image band, but collapse much of what's sketched above - not art school, strong appeal to a kind of bloke that one expects to be repelled from the image-band proper, constantly and explicitly hammering towards the sort of 'truth' that isn't an easy fit here.

And then you end up onstage at Reading wearing a negligee and suspenders? My eyes may never recover.

Husker Du's workmanlike clothes stop seeming to be about being "authentic" but about another kind of *passing*.

interesting idea, but hard to say. mould's dress sense hasn't changed much over the years.

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/26640591/Bob+Mould+Mould2009.jpg

Another thing I'm trying hard not to think about because: Carlos D is the whole overlap between the Goth/Industrial scene and the Fetish scene?

And then you end up onstage at Reading wearing a negligee and suspenders? My eyes may never recover.

(After I typed this, I realised that with its jokey sentiment, it might seem hypocritical, or even gender-queering-phobic, but I just wanted to say that my discomfort was not with a man dressed in lingerie. It was with Kevin Rowland dressed in lingerie, and very specifically, Kevin Rowland simulating rimming with two women dressed as sex workers at 2pm in a field in Reading. Stuff plays differently in different settings, and that was something that just really came off as tacky and gross, rather than intriguing or provocative or interesting or naughty.)

interesting idea, but hard to say. mould's dress sense hasn't changed much over the years.

Why would Mould's dress sense change? What would that have to do with it?

::really resisting going in on a massive spree of ~the semiotics of suits~ right now::

And no, I think that history has written the image of the 80s so completely that Duran read as "following fashion" when they were the ones that set the style?

Not so much talking about the original romo, but that kind of "Nagel prints come to life" white trousers and pastels thing - they predated Miami Vice with that look, though that look has come to read "80s" through Miami Vice. That's my memory of it, and I was around them.

Ah ok right, I hadn't realised that, I always thought it was just an extension of the new romantic thing.

Why would Mould's dress sense change? What would that have to do with it?

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 5:16 AM (6 minutes ago)

less reason to suppose he's still trying to pass, more to think that's just his style. calls himself a bear, etc.

I think that history has written the image of the 80s so completely that Duran read as "following fashion" when they were the ones that set the style?

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell)

yeah, i'd be more inclined to say they were "engaged with" than "following" the fashion of their moment. but inhabiting it from the center either way.

Feel like there is a history of "the gay scene in the 80s" and "the hardcore punk scene in the 80s" and how they intersected and didn't, and how signifiers evolve, that could be written, but neither of us are experts enough to do it, so should probably drop it. The evolution of the term "bear" and "bear" gender presentation could probably be a whole book in and of itself.

Feel like talking about uniforms for a bit, and "flirting with fascism" but trying to think of way to do this without posting 8000 photos of Interpol.

Hmmmmm.

Like, the whole 80s psuedo-military regalia thing that a *lot* of bands went through, kinda like post-Falklands jingoism collides with commentary on Thatcher's sabre rattling or "dealing with the fallout mess of the British Empire".

Like, the punk era "played for shock value" Sex Pistols' swastikas and Joy Divisions flirtation with the imagery felt like a very deliberate "fuck you" to both the Greatest Generation and swinging 60s iconography, deliberately doing the thing that would be most offensive to their parents and the Bill Grundys of the world.

But, the way Echo & the Bunnymen did military gear, and the way Duran Duran did military gear were miles apart, but part of the same general fashion. Part of it was post-apocalyptic Mad Max iconography, but Duran's uniforms were... different. Part leather boy fascist, but always positioning themselves as "the good guys in the resistance" (New Moon On Monday video?) and the handsome, smiling troops in the Is There Something I Should Know video? Like, they were playing both sides?

Is There Something I Should Know...

http://www.vobvip.com/v7/svcs0907/04.jpg

what are you doing with your life? Searching for a picture of Simon LeBon's epaulettes...

http://www.xtcian.com/lebon.jpg

This is just before they took the turn off to Billy Burroughs Boot Boys...

Is it a million miles from that to this?

http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Jan-Feb-05-Urb-Carlos-Article-interpol-151180_700_886.jpg

Feel like talking about uniforms for a bit, and "flirting with fascism" but trying to think of way to do this without posting 8000 photos of Interpol

Was just coming here to mention Death In June actually, Douglas P's obsession with uniforms seems relevant here. Actually the early DIJ (when it was a proper band, not just him) didn't wear uniforms but dressed all in black and had a nice line in symbolism, iconography and anonymous photo shoots – very seductive

feel like mentioning Test Dept and their Stakhanovite image as well – all vests, sweat and industrial hammering

Feel like there is a history of "the gay scene in the 80s" and "the hardcore punk scene in the 80s" and how they intersected and didn't, and how signifiers evolve, that could be written

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 6:07 AM (9 minutes ago)

otm - 80s american hardcore seemed repellently jock-bro masculine to the me at the time, which kept me away from the genre's mainsream, especially when it came to the east coast scene. the stuff i dug was generally less musclebound aggro and formally constrained. then again, extreme performance of masculine stereotypes is no more intrinsically representative of straight than gay culture. there are a few regular ILM posters who seem like they'd be able to comment on the bleed between the two in 80s hc, but sure, that's not really my area.

The jump from this:

http://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/duranduran-e1339162343321.jpg

to this:

http://www.todayonline.com/sites/default/files/blogs/duran-duran_2011_show_2683.jpg

(At what point did someone just start taking too many of the wrong drugs?)

Wanna come back to Death in June and Test Dept and loads of early proto-industrial bands and their iconography. Because one of the things that irritated me about that Carlos D interview was him talking about how his leather... thing was supposed to be a homage to Blixa Bargeld, and I wanted to shout... but Blixa's iconography actually *meant* something in the context of divided Berlin, you're just using this as a fucking *accessory*, an affectation, a knowing ~reference~ not to the thing itself, but to someone else's representation of the thing?

This is halfway between "we won the Falklands War" shoulder pads, and the full Mad Max, and this is a fucking bizarre, semi-fascist leather boy image:

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/39107313/Duran+Duran+PNG+Cropped+Version.png

but Blixa's iconography actually *meant* something in the context of divided Berlin, you're just using this as a fucking *accessory*, an affectation, a knowing ~reference~ not to the thing itself, but to someone else's representation of the thing?

but isn't this precisely where the privileging of the Image leads? a very Baudrillardy state of nothing but decontextualized images?

maybe not so much decontextualized as endlessly referring to other images, i mean

NV, I L U. "The Baudrillardisation of Blixa Bargeld" is possibly the most ~ILX~ thing anyone has ever said here, and yet... yeah.

But, I have to agree. The ultimate expression of the privileging of The Image, endless reflection and no significance to the signifier. This is why I *love* Image Bands.

(You don't understand, Blixa Bargeld was the name of my cat.)

I think it was a member of Yo La Tengo who said "There's a difference between playing a gig looking like you just walked in in your street clothes and actually playing a gig in your street clothes."

Which made me start thinking about Husker Du again - Husker Dudes, more like - and wondering how much of that beflannelled, down to earth "we don't have an image" was about coding as Straight Acting (Butch) Gay Dudes in the hyper-masculine hardcore scene out of which they grew. Husker Du's workmanlike clothes stop seeming to be about being "authentic" but about another kind of *passing*.

honestly i think ppl not from MN read a lot into how the Replacements and Husker Du dressed and a lot of it was just like, i dunno everyone wore lots of flannels shirts, my dad, grandpa, whoever, they are warm shirts....I'm not sure that a whole lot of concept went into it. I see those dudes just as Minnesota type dudes from that era. The older guys who were in my little farming town high school wore shitty jeans and t-shirts with flannels over them, way before grunge.

also like all those guys were South Mpls or working class St Paul dudes at the end of the day. I know ppl from that era and it was arty in a sense but still very much "dudes" still very much midwestern beer drinking shit too

also there wasn't really that much of a true macho hardcore scene in minneapolis, and it certainly wasn't dominant, the mpls "punk" scene godfathers were the suicide commandos, who were really more of a 60s band, and there was also guys like curtiss A who was still basically a 60s pop guy....and the nascent post punk stuff that was prefiguring chicago like rifle sport, NNB, etc

in reference to this:

Which made me start thinking about Husker Du again - Husker Dudes, more like - and wondering how much of that beflannelled, down to earth "we don't have an image" was about coding as Straight Acting (Butch) Gay Dudes in the hyper-masculine hardcore scene out of which they grew. Husker Du's workmanlike clothes stop seeming to be about being "authentic" but about another kind of *passing*.

Sorry, my mistake. Regular, ordinary "just dudes" masculinity is never constructed, in any sense at all, it just *is*.

well no shit

Straight Acting (Butch) Gay Dudes in the hyper-masculine hardcore scene out of which they grew.

^the mpls punk scene wasn't really like that. you're wrong.