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Cybotron

On the cover of Cybotron's first album (and the album that connects Kraftwerk to Detroit techno), Clear, a man in the middle of jumping through a floating plate of glass is digitized, dematerialized, cleared. This is Juan Atkin's vision of the internet long before it's civilianized. "Clear" is to music what Blade Runner is to cinema and Neuromancer is to literature--all three were released the same year, 1982. As Cybotron says, "Tomorrow is a brighter day."

The Interviewer: "Have you ever had a dream based on a song? (What song, and what happened in the dream)?"

Mudede: "Actually, yes, Grace Jones 'Slave to the Rhythm.' It wasnt one dream with a plot but a recurring dream with the same setting and massive architectures. The sonic imagery of the music was translated into vivid dream imagery: It was about workers, mass production, Fordist factories, power lines, dams, the transformation of raw earth into large reserves of energy. Heidgeggar talks about these reserves in his essay, 'On The Question of Technology.' But the dream was more Marxist than Heideggarian. The imagery in the recurring dream has its proper literary equivalent in Marx's Das Capital. However, when [the dreams] first began, in my late-teens, I had not yet read Das Capital. I only read it in my early-30s, and while reading it discovered that the book possessed the same terrifying beauty of that recurring dream, and that song by the great Grace Jones."

Slave to the Image

Few images have impacted my imagination more than this one: At dusk, the massive, robotic head of Grace Jones rises from the desert floor, turns to the side, opens its metal mouth, and shoots out a silver CX GTi Turbo. Dreamed up by Jean-Paul Goude (Jones's husband at the time--1984) for France's defining automobile corporation, Citroën, the image transports me from any point in real time to a fantastic world where Jones is the entire economic base, the whole productive force, the source and sole generator of labor power. In the pyramids of ancient Egypt we see masses of hardened human energy, human misery; in this giant head of Grace Jones, we do not see the expenditure of a society of slaves mobilized by the will of a master, but, instead, the economy of just one, the production of a single slave who works for no master, who works simply because there's work to be done. The image is of a slave utopia.

Grace Jones

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Walter Benjamin

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Hegel

"Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."

Fredric Jameson

"As for artists, for them too 'the owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk...'"

"It darkles...all this our funnanimal world." -- James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

“God, having become Nature, had extended Himself into the [splendor] and the mute cycle of formations, become conscious of the expansion, of the lost punctuality, and grown angry about it. The anger is this shaping, this gathering into the empty point. He finds Himself as such, and His essence is poured out into unquiet, restless eternity, where there is no present, only a wild going outward, always becoming as fast as [it is] transcended. This anger, while He is this rushing outward, is at the same time an absolute going into Himself, a growing into a central point. In so doing His anger devours His formations into Himself. Your whole realm of extension must pass through this central point: by it your limbs are crushed and your flesh mashed until it becomes part of this fluidity.” HEGEL

"Words like violence/Break the silence/Come crashing in/Into my little world."--Dave Gahan

The substance of my blog Pop Life finds its best representation in this video of Depeche Mode performing "Enjoy The Silence" on the top of the World Trade Center. Photographed in the first year of the 21st century, 1990, we see at once two things: one, the point at which history meets pop music (or, better yet, the interpenetration of history and pop music); two, the visualization of Marx's theory of society, which is composed of the real, the economic base (WTC), and its mirage, the superstructure (the pop tune "Enjoy the Silence").

Another important video in the Pop Life project is "Borrowed Love," which has the leading band of the black elegance period (1979-1990), SOS Band, dreaming up and dancing in, in 1985, an apartment complex ruined by a wrecking ball that's not unlike the one that will, in 1998, begin demolishing the Robert Taylor Homes, a modernist vision that became America's worst slum.