Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound
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- The Masculine and the Feminine
Culture and InformationSince the early 1980s, Eno has been preoccupied with working out a theory of “culture as a system of knowledge ... as a system of evolution in the same way that you might talk about genetics as a system of evolution ... But since this is practically all I ever think about, since it occupies practically all of my serious thinking time, I don’t have any simple comments about it.”267 He mentioned in 1981 that he hopes to publish this theory in one form or another, but as yet all we have is a handful of typically Enoesque, thought-provoking fragments. He sees all human culture as a system for the transfer of information, directly analogous to genetics, in the sense that “all creatures transmit information about their environment genetically.” Culture is all human behaviour, outside of pure instinct. Everything we do is cultural: gardening, cooking, different fashions, architecture. What artists do a lot, in music in particular, is look at culture in the world. Music doesn’t depict something, it’s about other music. So quite a lot of the business of “culture merchants” like myself is studying how culture works – how it changes and how it changes us.268 One view of the history of culture, and of specific art forms such as music, holds that the primary role of the creative artist is to innovate, the result being a sort of linear progress or evolution in a (we hope) positive direction. Eno finds this view old-fashioned and outmoded. The artist, according to Eno, “re-mixes” – he perpetuates a great body of received cultural and stylistic assumptions, he re-evaluates and re-introduces certain ideas no longer current, and then he also innovates. But the “innovation” part might be a much smaller proportion than we usually think. Consequently, I started to suspect that the palette of the painter or artist was incredibly broad – that it was the whole history of art. There’s nothing linear about evolution at all: it is a process of trying to stay in the same place, of trying to maintain an identity in a changing landscape.269 All of this is strikingly reminiscent of Leonard B. Meyer’s interpretation of twentieth-century music as having entered a period of stasis, following centuries of what was perceived as evolution.270 In fact, Eno’s musical career itself can be seen as a first-rate example of Meyerian stasis in microcosm: many kinds of music and ideas exist and are available to him as a composer, and although people change and their interests shift, the question of defining their development in terms of evolutionary steps is not really to the point. The Masculine and the FeminineIn the last few decades Western society seems to have undergone a profound change in sexual orientation in the broadest sense. We are familiar enough with many of the outward manifestations of this change: the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when traditional attitudes towards sexual relationships shifted dramatically, the decay of the institution of marriage, the rise of movements dedicated to the acceptance of homosexuality, and, in general, the questioning of very old and ingrained socio-sexual roles, with more women than ever before entering the labor force and (perhaps) more men than ever before taking on aspects of the traditional feminine role of domestic responsibility and nurturing. Some of the most incisive insights into these changes come from Jungian psychologists such as Edward Whitmont, who in his challenging book Return of the Goddess argues, through interpretation of past and present cultural symbols, that the age-old myth of the supremacy of the male deity (representing the triumph of [male] consciousness and will over [female] unconsiousness and instinct), is losing its ability to guide mankind’s collective fate in the age of science and the thermonuclear bomb.271 The last few years have seen the inevitable swing of the pendulum: a conservative backlash seems to be gaining ground, with calls for renewed commitment to traditional family values and sexual mores, yet it seems clear that in the decades and centuries ahead, new masculine and feminine roles will have to be forged and taken on by men and women in order for society to attain a new psychic balance and indeed to avert the catastrophes bound to occur when a society continues to live by a myth that is no longer supported by reality. The role of rock music in contemporary sexual politics is not easy to summarize, since it is played out on many levels. The rise of rock and roll in the 1950s was seen by moralizing critics from the right as a threat to traditional values: the physical movements of the some of the performers were notoriously suggestive (Elvis the Pelvis), the lyrics to some of the songs were openly and provocatively about sex, not euphemistic and sentimental as they had been in the era of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, the music was loud, hypnotic, and mesmerizing, supposedly encouraging teenagers to lower their conscious defenses, and even the term “rock and roll” itself was taken from a black slang expression for the sex act. Since those early and, in retrospect, seemingly innocent times, popular music has been the forum for the testing-out of many different sexual self-images, even if the dominant image continues even today to be that of the macho male youth, or “cock-rocker,” to borrow an expression from Simon Frith.272 The 1960s saw the “girl-group” phenomenon (which Barbara Bradby has argued was not merely a cover for male pop creativity and marketing strategies),273 and also the cosmic bisexuality of the hippie movement and acid rock, in which fashions of dress and of music were nearly interchangeable between the genders, the 1970s saw the emergence of the “sensitive” male singer-songwriter, epitomized by James Taylor, as well as various female roles, from the acute musical intelligence of Joni Mitchell to the wildly visionary, proto-punk posturings of Patti Smith, who didn’t bother to change the gender of the person she was forcibly to seduce in singing Van Morrison’s “Gloria” on her 1975 Horses LP. In the 1970s and 1980s the women’s movement found in song an outlet for the expression of new modes of femininity, notably through singer-songwriters like Holly Near. In the early 1970s one of the most radical of all sexual images surfaced in England – that of the totally feminized male. Stars like David Bowie, Elton John, and Marc Bolan (of the rock group T. Rex) appeared onstage and on album covers in partially or completely feminine attire, or at least the attire of a particular masculine fantasy-image of the feminine. In the whirlwind of dyed hair, exaggerated makeup, platform shoes, and glittery costumes, “glam rock” seemed to pose the question of male identity in a pointed form. How much of this was truly significant role-questioning at a deep collective level, and how much was simply “the latest fashion fad, encouraging an escape from immediate concerns and obvious commitment,” is an issue that has been probed by Iain Chambers, the writer who probably more than any other has dwelt on the connotational importance of visual aspects of rock performance.274 It is against the backdrop of glam rock that we may situate the androgynous public image Eno presented to the public in his work with Roxy Music and subsequent onstage appearances in the early 1970s. According to Eno, that image resulted in part from “a deliberate decision by all of us to dress interestingly as well as to be aurally interesting.”275 In a sense, Eno was simply in the right place at the right time, able to capitalize on his image’s shock effect for publicity purposes while “glam” was at its peak. But at the same time, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his subsequent explanations of why he wore such things as lipstick and mascara, peacock and ostrich plumes, leopard-skin shirts, and a soft beret over cascading blond locks. In 1978, after the release of his solo album Before and After Science, he discussed the matter not only in terms of artistic self-expression but in terms of probing the essence of life through the archetypal duality of the masculine and the feminine: The conditions before and after science are identical in terms of how people will relate to each other. McLuhan’s global village and tribal village are the same thing. Right now, although you may have your personal oases of before or after science, the world is in science. I use that word in a limited sense: deification of rational knowledge ... Before I ever joined Roxy, I got interested in wearing clothing that would have been considered effeminate. I didn’t like masculine clothes. The Western version of masculinity opposes rational man against intuitive woman. The part of my being that interests me has always been my intuition ... I don’t bother to question my intuition. If I feel like doing something, I do it, and figure that I’ll understand it later. If I had questioned my intuition, I would probably be a bank clerk. In any person’s life, the most important decisions are indefensible.276 Paradoxically, Eno’s visual persona changed from “feminine” to “masculine” during the same period around 1975 that his musical style underwent a marked shift from “masculine” to “feminine” values. Since that period he has kept his thinning hair relatively short, and has been photographed in utterly “male” jeans and slacks, T-shirts and sneakers or sandals. His disarmingly normal appearance may be indeed motivated, as one writer has suggested, by a desire “to enjoy the thrill of anonymity.”277 But whereas his work with Roxy Music and on his first three solo albums utilized, at least to a considerable extent, the arguably masculine musical qualities of a thrusting, pulsating rock beat, and a dynamic level that was frequently aggressive and even strident, since his 1975 album Discreet Music Eno’s solo music has embraced and embodied the feminine qualities of containment, being, and spaciousness. Eno has been explicitly aware of the change. An interviewer asked him in 1981 whether he thought Discreet Music, Music for Airports, and Music for Healing (an album that was never released) contained “unmasculine music.” He responded, “I think it’s pretty bisexual, that’s what I think.” The interviewer pressed on: “Do you feel like you’re moving even further into the feminine area?” Eno said: These are interesting questions. My own perspective on what I do is that my work started out as being very distinctively masculine. My look was ahead of the music. Then the music moved away from that position. I’m now working in the opposite direction of just cramming the song with thrills, sharp or harsh things. I’m trying to get rid of things now. Every event either obscures another event or obscures silence, so you may as well leave as much out of everything as you can.278
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