Identifying with the alien powered 20th century popular music’s political charge

Evidence

Like art pop’s first pioneer, Bowie, it was about identification with the alien, where the alien stood in for the technologically new and the cognitively strange – and ultimately for forms of social relations that were as yet only faintly imaginable. Bowie was by no means the first to make this identification: loving the alien was a gesture that self-mytholo-gizing black magi – Kodwo Eshun’s ‘sonic fictional’ canon of Lee Perry, George Clinton, Sun Ra – had made long before Bowie first did it. Identifying with the alien – not so much speaking for the alien as letting the alien speak through you – was what gave 20th century popular music much of its political charge. Identification with the alien meant the possibility of an escape from identity, into other subjectivities, other worlds. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 103

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Tricky’s female singers sound like mediums being spoken through — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 109; Dub’s emptying-out produces flatness unless voices under erasure remain present — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 214; Pop melancholy marks the moment a commodity achieves selfconsciousness — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 454 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Pervasive music extends political domination by breaking down individual resistance #expands (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 571