Author’s Note: This piece was written during a turbulent period of the author’s life and features certain stylistic eccentricities which may be intimidating to the unsuspecting reader.It remains here as a curious artifact but is best explored after familiarizing one’s self with the shorter, more recent entries.
As an aesthete living in the past 40 or so years that encapsulate the 21st century, I have been an obsessive fan of both “art” and “the artist.” My position in time has given me an opportunity to negotiate exactly what that means as the mediums saturating my pop cultural landscape have evolved, changed and exploded. In addition I have been something of an antiquarian, I have been blessed with a memory verging on the eidetic, and as a member of Generation X, I have consistently had some form or iteration of “irony” as the primary spice that flavors all my endeavors and achievements as a pop culture gourmand.
To put it somewhat differently, before there was an internet I had my own neural network and bloodhound like enthusiasm to catalogue my impressions of everything on the menu, if the art itself was not relevant to my interests, the mythos of the artist as hero certainly always was, and I grew to see fandom itself as a form of hero’s quest: a journey to seek out and enjoy the most obscure and anachronistic works available and earn my place as a true Olympian in fanboy heaven. What began with encyclopedic books about dinosaurs, mythological Gods and monsters and the Heroes of American Tall Tales soon followed a well worn path from comic books to authors and auteur film directors, visual art and animation, design and architecture, and finally the millennium’s most enduring legend: the popular musician.
Much of this fanning out has followed a metaphysical path, reveling in an artist’s body of work, their constructed persona as chronicled in popular culture and ultimately what can be seen as the hero’s quest and tragic flaws in the legends surrounding what drove these artists to create, what transformations public perception and reception of this artwork wrought in these artists, and what impressions of the personas of these artists I was able to construct based on all information I had about their artworks and their public and private lives.
Ultimately I was chasing a very elusive thing called catharsis, also clinically known as Stendahl’s Syndrome, an extreme intellectual and emotional ecstasy that borders on the physical, manifesting most often in my personal experience as vertigo, a tingling of the scalp and an intense sensation of suddenly existing outside of space and time.
https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/aug/02/art-ill-stendhal-syndrome
This feeling can be very similar to a drug, it offers a very concrete form of escapism, and this is tempered by the reality of diminishing returns: that once cathartic fan experiences will lose their enchanting power and ever more intoxicating aesthetic ambrosias must be sought, as Art Fan Olympus and Asgard recede further and further from our mundane and practical lives.
This is all of course heady stuff, and it would be all too easy to lose the thread of my reasoning as I wade ever deeper into these metaphysical, aesthetic waters. To keep this exploration fully anchored in shared and relatable experiences I am going to construct an analogy built around the basic Newtonian physics describing the states of matter and the physical processes governing transitions between these states. Matter, as we experience it, is consistently in the form of one of three familiar states; solid, liquid and gas. Let us think of the artist as a living person as solid, the medium in which they work as liquid, and the “fan experience” as gas. As many of you know matter has a 4th state, plasma, a “hot ionized gas” like the literal flames of fire.
It could be argued that in the internet 3.x universe all of this is plasma, “the cloud” is on fire as fame, fandom, and constant performative loafing/living gently circle pit each other like tiny tongues of flame on a faux ceramic log BUT this particular essay is about either old things or “lurking” so we will stick primarily with the three classic physical states. Now let us discuss the mechanisms of matter transitioning between states: the solid “artist” melts into their liquid medium in the act of performing or creating, the “fan experience” evaporates this liquid to a gas in the form of the feelings of all who access it, their perceptions of the artist, and how they relate it to themselves.
We can follow this analogy in the other direction as well: the consumer checks out an artist’s work for some particular reason rooted in the perception of this work and artist in the culture at large, their gaseous fandom undergoes condensation as it contends with the liquid work in medium. Next the specific work and the fans’ experience of it, specifically as it relates to their own emotions enables them to construct a personal perception of the artist, rooted in what they believe to be shared expressible emotions, the liquid work is frozen into a solid mythologized impression of the artist as hero.
We have analogized four very familiar physical processes: melting, evaporation, condensation and freezing. But what does it mean to SUBLIME??? Sublimation is when matter passes from a solid to a gas WITHOUT passing through a liquid state. The word sublime also has a metaphysical quality to it, of the finest yet ineffable and unearthly quality. That which is guaranteed to bring about catharsis in the process of its consumption.
Viewed as a physical process in the context of this constructed analogy sublimation would describe the act of deriving a fan experience from impressions of an artist’s mythologized, pop cultural persona without actually consuming or interacting with any of the artist’s body of work in the process. In fact we do this kind of thing all the time when we enjoy and consume the “idea” of an “artist” without really looking at the medium they worked in.
For example the average viewer of a film like the Basquiat biopic walks away with an interest not in the band GREY or the canon of Basquiat paintings, but the “fan experience” of who they feel Jean-Michel Basquiat was as a person in the context of contemporary art, street art, the myth of 1980’s New York City and the storied relationship between race and identity in the 20th Century United States of America.
However complex all of that is, this example is somehow mundane, pedestrian even, especially as the commercial forces behind all art consumption can further distill the experience of this biopic into a print on a messenger bag or a T Shirt. This could certainly be a Basquiat painting, but could just as easily be a photograph of his once living body or the simple symbolic signifier of his name.
What is actually being sold is an expression of fandom, a signal to the outside world that the bearer of this object is “into” Jean Michel Basquiat, whether that means an appreciation of his canon or the mythos constructed around him, the impression is the same. Basquiat was “cool”, this fan is into “cool stuff”. When does the “fan experience” truly become SUBLIME?
CHAPTER 2 : I’M A BADFISH TOO
I remember reading an article, I think it was in Vice, about how a millennial cover band was formed as a purely business based decision of what band the most other millennials wanted to see but couldn’t, and the answer was obvious: SUBLIME. They had framed the question: what live music experience is most desired by the greatest number of young “target demographic” consumers but unattainable?
An untimely overdose had left “youth college culture” without its poet laureate, Bradley Nowell of the band SUBLIME. The appeal of SUBLIME can be best summed up by a brief conversation I overheard in 1996 San Diego, I was walking behind two young white “traveler punks” and we passed an apartment with a Bob Marley flag in its window. One turned to the other and said “I’ve got a Bob Marley flag too but I don’t put it up cause I’m racist”.
This frank admission captured an experience which was rampant in the Zeitgeist of the era. SUBLIME’s demographic was dominated by angry young privileged white males who both believed they were being marginalized by affirmative action and denied their god given right to appropriate the cultures of reggae, Southern California urban gangsta culture of a mostly Latin flavor and equal participation in the LA riots – as angry young white men who hated cops “just as good”, and with what they saw as equal justification as the black and brown communities who were responding to the very real threat of violence against their bodies implicit in the viral video of the Rodney King beating.
As antiestablishment young consumers who defined themselves by their consumption of marijuana and alcohol, the partying ethos and their appreciation of aspects of reggae, west coast gangsta rap and mexican American cholo culture. They similarly felt alienated by the fact that this music was made by people who didn’t look like them or come from similar backgrounds. The Insane Clown Posse lacked SUBLIME’s SoCal cool, Eminem was a couple years away, but SUBLIME represented everything about their culture they wanted to celebrate and was very straightforward in their message that this was all for white boys too.
Bands like Operation Ivy and many members of third wave ska had been performing a mixture of punk and reggae, but did not explicitly proclaim ownership and the right to participate in exciting subcultures to anything near the same degree. Bradley Nowell’s death by overdose in 1996 cemented SUBLIME’s membership in the pantheon of rock star Gods and martyrs, and the music and art created became unimpeachable without the threat of artistic stagnation or the possibility of ungodlike actions by the now sainted frontman.
When I began my research for this essay I expected to find the article I remembered and the band defunct with a quick google search, instead I found the band BADFISH on tour, more successful than ever, and validated/co-signed by a huge number of SUBLIME survivors. I clearly had not realized the enduring power of their target demographic, and the article about the bands formation as clever form as marketing was nowhere to be seen as an enduring sense of authenticity was required to provide the “fan experience” sought by millions.
A BADFISH concert has become a cultural experience similar to a Grateful Dead tour or Juggalo Gathering but one in which the entertainers are clearly abstaining from the lifestyle espoused in the source material and celebrated by the fans, or at least indulging with enough self control to continue delivering experiences on a nightly basis without internal friction or overintoxicated members. One thing the articles do not shy from is the fact that BADFISH has achieved commercial success to a degree that dwarves the material accolades SUBLIME was able to accumulate in their 8 year existence.
The gas of “fan experience” is created directly from the solid bodies of performer/entertainers without them creating any new liquid material. Is this sublimation? No, it demonstrates simple evaporation, turning a “body of work” into “fan experience” for “money” when the literal body of the artist is no longer with us. In fact I think it can be argued that this band is literally “bad fish”, swimming through the medium of music in the wrong direction, “evaporating” the very medium they work in, rather than “melting” their own “creativity” or “freezing” the medium for other “artists”.
But this is absurd. Would you call a classical pianist a “bad fish” for performing and interpreting a “Chopin Liszt” of tunes from popular, dead composers? Would you call the many recording artists who don’t create music “bad fish” for creating performances, personas and social media accounts that connect with fans around the world? Clearly to move in any medium at all is to be a “bad fish”, for what fish can only ever be good, and any fish pulled from it’s liquid medium will “go bad” at some point, right?
So all “artists”,”fans” and “lurkers” of the Burning Plasma Cloud of Contemporary Popular Music Culture proclaim in your loudest and proudest voice:
“I’M A BAD FISH TOO”
CHAPTER 3: FOR REAL THIS TIME, THE ALCHEMY OF DECADENCE AND THE HEROIC QUEST FOR THE TRUE SUBLIME EXPERIENCE
Music interacts with the listener’s emotions in a variety of ways that transcend language and symbols. Some musical keys are known to create celebratory, exuberant moods while others are described as melancholic. The creation and release of tension is a fundamental part of creating patterns and rhythms, and much music is enjoyed by listeners who connect despite not understanding the language of the lyrics.
However, lyrics are the most straightforward device for a musician to convey emotion, and in a social media saturated world artists continually use language to communicate with their fans and construct their personas. The fan consistently searches for a song which speaks to an emotion or mood through its music and lyrics, and when the mood is described with perfect, effortless eloquence it is easy to connect with the fact that an artist appears to experience emotions similar to our own, and feel that they are someone we could know and connect with personally. There is a current popular song which repeats the refrain “FOR REAL FOR REAL FOR REAL THIS TIME”, in my own brief musical career I had written a song with the refrain “ITS FOR REAL, THIS TIME ITS FOR REAL”.
The songs are incredibly different in mood, harmony, tempo and production but the experience they speak to is similar and enduring. The feeling of having made yourself vulnerable to another person and having your raw, unarmored emotions shook up by the intense difference between expectations and reality. The popular song is called EARFQUAKE, mine was called SEALEGS. It is worth noting that both titles reference powerful, natural forces that are outside of our control and describe physical sensations on the body as a metaphor for emotions.
The reference to “realness” in both works is important, as targeted consumers we are all constantly in search of authenticity in the art we consume and wary of inauthentic “cheesy” or “BASIC/CLICHE” appeals to our emotions that fall short of the mark. However by constantly seeking out the most precise, perfect SUBLIME expressions of our emotions and moods we leave ourselves vulnerable, and create fragile expectations that rarely fare well when pitted against reality.
A common trope in popular music fandom is the devastation or disappointment that often accompanies interacting with an artist in real life. Ultimately we are consumers, art and performance are forms of labor and interaction with an artist in real life can often feel transactional despite the best intentions of all parties involved. The disappointment of these heavily anticipated meetings is not sublime, there is in fact, no space in my “states of matter” analogy to describe this specific form of emotional disenfranchisement. Perhaps it is “antimatter”. Perhaps it is plasma, a delicately constructed gaseous cloud of “fan experience” burning away in a gloriously destructive chain reaction of combusted ions. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all.
If you have followed me this far, dear reader, you may be getting a bit dubious, and with good reason. You have waded through a lot of architectural follies and soul crushingly ornate curlicues that function only as finials on the curtain rod that continues to support the wool tapestry that stubbornly rests between your vision and the purported “point” of this essay: the elusive “sublime” fan experience. It may be tempting to banish the sublime and the sensation of catharsis to the same cryptid folder that contains oft described but seldom to never spotted creatures such as the “unicorn male feminist”, the “altruistic Christian” and the “racially unbiased Democrat.”
However they do exist, or at the very least I believe I have seen them, and although I can not send you a concrete set of directions I can tell you a bit about how I got there. As any adherent of “aesthetic pragmatism” can tell you, beauty is personal and even the most earnest click of the bluest hypertext from another’s heart often confounds the pilgrim with a cruel 404. Or in more mundane terms: I can tell you which bus on which Panamanian Island may lead you to the overgrown pasture bordering primary forest in which you may see the specific color variation of tiny poison dart frog, but I can not guarantee that the ground will recede from your feet and your heart will shoot straight through your practical, self sabotaging brain to become one with the cosmos when you see it.
If the paragraph you have just read did not give you adequate cause to jump ship than you should certainly be willing to indulge me in yet another detour. The metaphor at the heart of this essay, a comparison between the emotional processes of creating, consuming and enjoying works of art and the transition of matter between distinct states merits a brief exploration of the science of physical chemistry and its spiritually synthesized analogue Alchemy. Derived from the Arabic word for “the chemistry”, Alchemy was practiced in the Classical era of the Oriental world spreading from Greece, the Islamic Kingdoms, Northern Africa, Sanskrit India and China and entered the European canon through translation of Classical works during the Renaissance.
Alchemy has always been concerned with reconciling the scientific world of observable and verifiable phenomena with the savage and subjective wilderness of the human spirit. As part of the “Western Tradition”, Alchemy has centered on the concepts of purity, elevation and ennoblement. It is linguistically telling that each of those concepts can be applied to descriptions of the condition of both physical substances and the human soul. As Alchemy has historically focused on the pursuit of spiritual purity I propose an exploration of the less explored logical opposite of this concept: An Alchemy of Decadence or simply Decadent Alchemy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_Exhibition
In 1937 the German Nazi Party staged an exhibition of Degenerate or Decadent Art. The purpose of this exhibition was to highlight what they saw as the excesses of Weimar Era Art, the dissolution of modern experimental art movements such as Expressionism and the growing influence of multiculturalism in Popular and Folk Art. This collection of artworks seen by the Nazis as anathema to a desired standard of Purity and Elevation in artistic pursuits is useful in deriving a definition of Decadence: Art which appeals directly to sensation and hedonism, the pursuit of ecstasy through the senses and so called Primitivism in the traditional arts of various cultures from around the world.
Decadence is now used to describe a late 19th century European art movement which is defined by the Tate Glossary as an “extreme manifestation of symbolism which … emphasised the spiritual, the morbid and the erotic.” In contrast to traditional Alchemy, Decadent Alchemy is characterized by the use of chemical, physical and spiritual processes to enrich and revel in sensation and emotion.
To provide a concrete counter example: while Alchemy’s central pursuit was the purification of noble metals from base materials as a metaphor for the process of ennobling the Alchemist’s spirit through meditation, fasting and similar monastic pursuits. Decadent Alchemy is concerned with the body, sensations and pursuit of ecstatic states. One illuminating example would be the use of various compounds and metals to launch an explosion of sound and color against the night sky, a firework constructed, ignited and regarded purely for the pleasure of observing the resulting panorama of fleeting sound and vision and exciting the aesthetic faculties of the body, mind and soul, and generally accompanied by the ecstasies of intoxication and leisure.
The purpose of this lengthy detour is to add Decadent Alchemy to the set of tools for distilling the purest “fan experience” from this essay’s central metaphor of experienced art as transitional matter and provide a context for pursuing the heretofore elusive process of sublimation and provide a roadmap for triangulating and ultimately locating the very personal destination of catharsis. The Heroic Quest as a metaphor for the artist’s mythologized journey to create their canon and magnum opus is a familiar trope to anyone who has watched a biopic or read an in depth artist interview. The proposed innovation is to elevate fandom to an art form and incite a similar Heroic Quest to discover the extreme boundaries of aesthetic appreciation, nothing less than to create a magnum opus of fandom and transcend the physical body through catharsis and enter the timelessness of fanboy heaven.
To fully understand my definition of sublimation as a process of heroic fandom it will be instructive to return to the example of BADFISH, and the precise reasons why this SUBLIME coverband eludes all attempts at sublimation. Let us return to definitions of artist, art and fan experience. The solid artist is made of molecules in a locked, rigid format and therefore has a nature outside of their own control. When perception is introduced into the equation the artist becomes a multitude: The artist as they “objectively are” undefinable in any real sense, the artist constructed by their own self image and identity and finally the different versions of the artist built within the mental and spiritual landscape of each person who has awareness of their existence and work.
Some of the building blocks for this solid object are thoughts and feelings, and these are added to design, virtuosity and many others to create the liquid work in medium. The artist has little to no control over who they are as a solid, but styling and managing this persona is one of the many media they work in. Unlike a rigid solid, liquid works in medium allow ideas to move and free associate as they please and functions as a literal medium for transmissions from one solid human mind to another.
An artist has limited control at best over their solid identity and the experiences and emotions that have shaped it, much of this being “influences” or historical exposure to and appreciation of other artworks in medium and personal perceptions of the personas of these other artists. Finally in the form of a gas, ideas and feelings cam move completely unrestrained in the mind of a fan and constantly collide with one another thus changing trajectories and the complex of meanings.
In the use of Decadent Alchemy to practice Heroic Artistic Fandom it is essential that the link between artist and artwork be direct and original if sublimation is to occur and the fan is to transform perceived artist persona directly into cathartic fan experience. Herein lies the problem of BADFISH in relation to the sublime: the frontman of BADFISH may be a douche, perhaps even a douche of Titanic proportions but he is not THE douche that penned anthems both condemning date rape and justifying the desire to fuck a twelve year old. He is an artist in the mediums of cover band formation, capitalism and disruptive marketing but in the medium of SUBLIME songs he is merely an interpreter.
As I have stated several times earlier, sublimation and catharsis are intensely personal experiences which depend entirely on the solid identity of the fan as artist and their own formative heroic origin story as it relates to the construction of tastes and preferences. The process goes something like this: a personal symbolic portrait of the artist is constructed via the canon of created work, the identity put forward by the artist in interviews, social media accounts and public behavior. Having developed a fandom through the synthesis of the body and work and public persona of the artist, the fan builds an ideal representation of the artist and undertakes a Heroic Quest to discover the perfect expression of this ideal within the performance of persona that exists outside of the body of works in medium.
Generationally speaking the toolset for this heroic search tends to include caricature, sarcasm, schadenfreude and a bit of cyberstalking. In a best case scenario sublimation occurs, the fan feels they have found a unique and personal glimpse directly into the soul of the artist, and is rewarded with a feeling of catharsis that is transcendental and combines the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Complete catharsis must include physical sensations such as tingling and a giant rush of rewarding brain chemicals such as dopamine and adrenaline, intense emotional identification with the artist, a sense of extreme cleverness and an escape from the shackles of the physical and temporal into the realm of the spiritual. This and only this is the SUBLIME FAN EXPERIENCE.
Only you can accurately gauge your own thoughts and feelings in this endeavor and I invite you to go forth and undertake this quest, catharsis is out there but it will not find itself and no one else can find it for you. One click equals one prayer, one share equals one blessing, namaste my ninjas.
APPENDIX 1: THE SMASHING PUMPKINS AND THE TROPE OF THE MEGALOMANIAC AS ROCKSTAR
I leave you with an instructive and epic tale of one of my many heroic quests in the art of super fandom. I had begun listening to several classic albums by the band ‘The Smashing Pumpkins’, beginning with a cassette of the b sides collection ‘Pisces Iscariot’, and eventually coming across CDs of ‘Gish’ and ‘Siamese Dream’ in Thrift Stores. I had heard many of the tracks from ‘Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ from this album’s radio and MTV saturation in my teenage years but had not previously owned any of the bands albums. I wanted to dig deeper into Smashing Pumpkins mythos and felt fairly certain that no recorded output beyond MCIS would yield the slightest bit of satisfaction.
I actually had come across a Corgan interview some years earlier that had stuck with me because of the poetic language he had used to describe his own vulnerability and character armor through the classic, Kafkaesque metaphor of the castle. I had searched fruitlessly for this interview for many years but am now pleased to offer you the following pull out quote:
“When someone tries to hurt you, you know they’re trying to aim at some sort of weakness–generally. I want to know what weakness they see so I can fix it or shore it up. If I had this perfect castle and I found out that they were sneaking in through the sewer, I’d want to concrete up the sewer.” -The Korg
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjw35XT9avjAhUeIDQIHST-A3cQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spin.com%2F2003%2F06%2Fzwan-end-beginning%2F&psig=AOvVaw0k_gvBSWKygcN9oe6iazNS&ust=1562901961571008
Excuse my sloppy link but there are of course two very significant things about this interview.
1) it is a Zwan interview
2) it was conducted by fictional literary persona JT Leroy
I feel that the JT Leroy moment in millennial culture is essential to understanding what is happening in this interview. Ironically the entirely fictional character of JT Leroy seemed to offer the type of realness that early 21st century cultural influencers were actively starving for. Like all good heroes he had an extremely gripping and emotionally visceral origin story.
In a time where file sharing and the beginnings of social media were leading to media saturation, too much of a good thing, unrestricted access to art and the death of obscurity in the popular arts. The fact that Leroy was shy, introverted and overwhelmingly quiet as both the cause and effect of just being some girl in a wig and dark glasses filling in for someone who didn’t exist.
Interview subjects felt privileged by the fact that “Leroy” was speaking to them at all and guards would come down accordingly. The effect was similar to when an exotic bird trainer tells his audience that the Cockatoo only raises its signature crest in the presence of those rare individuals it naturally feels attracted to, and then using a hand signal or whistle to instruct the bird to signal this “rare demonstration of affection” to any and all volunteers who need the ego boost.
This interview contained another gem that led me straight down the Rabbit Hole of Smashing Pumpkins classic band drama. Asked to describe the various contributions of the original members of Smashing Pumpkins as a legendary quartet, Corgan offers this bit of unmitigated praise for bassist D’Arcy Wretzky:
“Sometimes the four of us would be sitting around ordering food and [former bassist] D’Arcy would be the person who would make it happen.
What–the food?
Yeah. Different people step up to the plate for different situations”
Billy Corgan/JT Leroy
This tasty tidbit whet my appetite for more of the same. Corgan is famous for insisting on total creative control and recruiting talented and attractive band mates only to force them out of both the musical spotlight and the spotlight spotlight, and after my excitement about finding this long sought after interview began to wear off I was hungry for another serving. My goal was clear, I knew there was gold to be found in King Billy’s proclamations and with my heart/mind dial decisively set at “sublime/cathartic” I was absolutely going to find it.
What I found far exceeded my hopes and dreams. Here was the most emotionally vital Easter egg filled material produced by the Smashing Pumpkins in decades, it was a collaboration between Billy and D’Arcy and most importantly, D’Arcy had taken full agency in the form of public release it took, acting in direct defiance of Billy’s orders. The skies opened up and once again I was standing in that Panamanian virgin forest following the drum like mating calls to a tiny green frog with orange legs, black spots and a yellow stomach. Believe in Me like I believe in You. The impossible was possible that night.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 