Deconstruction, Fetishism, and the Racial Contract: On the Politics of "Faking It" in Music

Deconstruction, Fetishism, and the Racial Contract

On the Politics of "Faking It" in Music

Recently, on one of the music message boards I frequent, a participant questioned whether the use of digital pitch correction (and, by apparent implication, much production work in general) was evidence of a lack of artistic "integrity," skill, or effort.¹ Essentially, the author of the question was asking whether or not music made utilizing such techniques was "good" music, in both an aesthetic and moral sense—indeed, the author titled the thread "Should [Internet radio stations] have a 'no artist who uses voice correction' policy?," implying that this is primarily an issue of values and standards.²

If you seek out this thread, you'll see that I've taken up this question in a somewhat informal way. But the issues surrounding the question and the way the discussion unfolded bear more rigorous analysis, because they engage a number of interesting philosophical problems: the purpose of art and its relationship to "truth"; the role of the artist and his or her aesthetic and moral "virtue"; the ways in which the labor theory of value informs common notions of aesthetically and morally "good" art; the relationship between "good" music and technology/the military industrial complex; the relationship between embodiment and technology in making and listening to music; the role of race and gender in judgments of musical value; and the assumptions behind and legitimacy of serious/popular hierarchies (just to name a few). I can't hope to address them all here.

As a musician who composes only in Cubase and "sings" mostly in vocoder, for me the most important questions here revolve around the aesthetics and politics of making contemporary popular electronic music ("electronica," "electro," "synthpop," "house," "techno," "hip-hop"—whatever you choose to call it). Can "faked" music—such as digitally altered performances, machine-generated rhythm or melody lines—be "good"? What are the politics of "faking it"? What assumptions about technology and the body, about the relationship between culture and nature, are operative in musical judgments such as the one discussed earlier—that is, judgments against the proper "musicality" of electronically "faked" music?

The overarching question here, then, is whether musicians can "fake it" and still be considered "good" musicians making "good" music. Behind this question, obviously, are assumptions about the nature of and relationship between conceptions of "real" and "fake," as well as the more blatant assumption that "good" music is somehow not "fake." This latter assumption has roots in both nineteenth-century romanticism and in the race, class, and gender politics of mid- to late twentieth-century Western popular music; indeed, as I will demonstrate in this essay, deconstructing the first set of assumptions helps illustrate the politics at play in this latter set.

To this end, I turn to Sara Kofman—a thinker whose contributions to deconstruction continue to be overlooked—and her analysis of Nietzsche's interrelated conceptions of fetishism, deconstruction, and art. Insofar as the notion of fetishism posits a "normal" or "real" state in contrast to a "perverse" or "fake" one, Kofman's attention to Nietzsche's deconstruction of this term and its relation to art illuminates the possibilities for rethinking the relationship between "real" and "fake" as neither oppositional nor identical. Moreover, in Kofman's Nietzsche, this deconstruction of real/fake binaries operates in the context of/in order to recalibrate systems of musical and aesthetic judgment, such that they no longer privilege values that are politically and materially problematic. Thus, as Kofman's Nietzsche demonstrates how this deconstructive work is important for musical judgments, late 1970s British post-punk band Essential Logic's piece "Music is a Better Noise" performatively illustrates how this project is important in musical practice and its politics. Presenting a deconstruction of the opposition between "music" and industrial "noise" (either in the over...