The Democritus-3 Project

Then the lights came on, it was all a scene
Bend back, give head it’s not pornography
If you do it with lights then it’s art you see
If you do it with a twist, yes, artistically

THE KNIFE (Karen Dreijer Andersson, Olaf Dreijer, et al.)
Berlin, Columbiahalle
11 May 2013 

When I went to see The Magnetic Fields at the Babylon cinema in Berlin in 2010, there were many quiet moments of violin-tuning and sheet-music-adjusting between the songs. Magnetic Fields concerts are generally quite low-key affairs. During one of them, as Stephin Merritt was twisting the knobs of his ukelele, the voice of a young American woman surged up from the rows in front of me:

“Play ‘Love is Like a Bottle of Gin’!” she screamed.

“Shut up!” yelled Merritt. And after another second and a half of ukelele-tuning, he mumbles, “…savages.”

Why did that woman yell that? It’s a question I often ask myself when people do something I would never dream of doing, because identifying a purpose makes incomprehensible behavior comprehensible and forestalls less charitable reactions. A lot of incomprehensible behavior, at least to me, involves people screaming things. At The Knife’s concert in Berlin last night, which they opened about 35 minutes later than the advertised starting time and without an opening act to speak of (a glittering man, poodle-haired, lithe, and black-skinned, did a crowd-warming interactive dance routine he called “deep aerobics” from the side of the hall for about ten minutes before his headset mic stopped working), there was a little bit of time spent standing idly before the blue-lit stage between entering the venue and the time the concert began. This is, for those of you who have ever arrived at anything before its scheduled start time, an expected stage of the process. So why is this young man next to me screaming and whooping? Because he is excited. Why does he follow that screaming and whooping by cupping his hands around his mouth and projecting toward the stage that “WE ARE TIRED OF WAITING!!!”? The only explanantion I can find is that he is an impatient, pubescent, fit-throwing sack of shit, and that is not very charitable.

Then again, it has been seven years. (The screamer would have been, I dunno, eleven when ‘Silent Shout’ was released?) But in my attempt to be charitable to the boorish people around me, I started to ask myself why people come to these concerts. ‘To see a band they like,’ right. But presumably not to lay eyes on Karen Dreijer, like you might on the Stockholm subway. If it’s The Magnetic Fields, you come to the concert to see them get out their instruments and sing and play their songs for the experience of a singlular version of them: “Busby Berkeley Dreams” louder, sadder, more in a church, and with more beer bottles klinking than listening to ‘69 Love Songs’ on your headphones on the way to work. And because the version, the song, you hear, disappears after it is made: having enjoyed the Rodin-scupture-beauty of the album, you come for the expensive-bouquet-of-flowers-beauty of the gig. Or at least you do if it’s The Magnetic Fields. You’d be a fool to expect that from The Knife, and just to go ahead and spoil it for you, when I came out, ears ringing, into the Berlin evening after the show, I overheard an American with a beard and a knit wool hat and tight pants complaining that “they didn’t really play any of their songs, they just kinda performed them”. Tilt your head back to stop the nosebleed getting on your keyboard.

The Knife’s show is a medical-school lecture, a dissection of the pop concert; instead of the Columbiahalle, they should have booked an eighteenth-century operating theater, so that we could all watch down from tiered seats as they took out the organs one by one. (Fans unprepared for this could have taken a cue from the latest album, “Shaking the Habitual”, in which they take their previous oeuvre, slice it open, and spread the entrails out over twice the length of “Silent Shout”.)

At first, this openness is startling: if Fever Ray performed behind a thicket of smoke and lights and plague-doctor masks, The Knife shed their hooded robes after the first number and stand there, faces plainly visible, limbs bare, lit head-on, before the audience. The lack of obfuscation is startling: is this the band whose only press photos are in makeup and masks? Whose children’s names are not publicly known? And now, they’re standing in front of me, genuinely playing instruments and looking at me with their eyes?

That is the situation, the convention, of the beginning of every concert. Of course you come to hear live versions of their songs, but you also come to see them make live versions of their songs. The Knife proceed to do it for about five minutes, until, suddenly, they stop in unison, face the audience, and hold their hands over their heads, perfectly still, and the music keeps going. At the moment they do this, the light switches from above and in front of them to behind and below, replacing the people on stage with blank silhouettes. We are not going to play our songs, the Dreijers make clear: we are going to perform them.

Well, we aren’t, strictly speaking. There are ten people on stage, and Karen and Olof can’t really be located. They are there, but other people take the lead: knowing that The Knife is a brother and sister outfit, you might mistake the frontman and frontwoman for that brother and sister, but the woman on whom the energy and the attention of the audience is focused for much of the concert — who plays out the tropes: the head-banging, the tongue-wagging, the HELLO- and THANK YOU BERLIN — is not Karen Dreijer Andersson, and the man on whom she lavishes her dirty-dancing attention is not her brother. The openness is not revelation; it is transparent, but only like the surface of water, which misdirects. Karen is behind the moving spotlights on a platform on the back of the stage shaking a giant torch-shaped maraca.

Even when they established a layer of interrogation of the pop concert, they would attack it. A dance choreographed to “One Hit” in which the entire company participated was done to a recording of the song, ironing out any musical spontaneity and moving the performance into the physical, a series of relatively literal tableaux based on the song’s lyrics. By the end, they have moved through a song in which the dancing is done by a young, beared man with trendy hair and glasses who exists only on a canvas screen and is rocking back and forth in place (the abyss, dear audience, is gazing back at you) into one dance that consists of the entire company, back in their hooded robes, standing entirely still for the length of the song. The anticipation is agonizing, as if Dr. Frankenfurter had held on to the last syllable forever.

More than many, The Knife was a band positioned to bring all 1,100 people in the Columbiahalle to orgasm at once. All they would have had to do was break one of their intros down into the unmistakeable tin pan riff that begins “Pass This On”, and the tidal wave of ecstasy would have resembled that vulgar scene in ‘Scary Movie’ scaled up to crowd-size. For any artist, even one with a relationship to his audience that is as torturedly love-hate as Olaf Dreijer’s or Stephin Merritt’s, the temptation to do that must be incredible. Merritt routinely gives in to it, acting annoyed but lapping up every squeal fired across his bow during the intro to “Papa Was a Rodeo”. The Knife threw their audience very few bones — maybe only one, “Silent Shout”, and even it was musically indistinguishable from the “album version” (I went back and added quotation marks because I just made an ugly connection between that phrase and talking about “the movie” and “the book” of something), the dance accompanying it done to backlighting that beamed across the stage and out over the audience, blending performers and audience into a single group, all just dancing along to the same music being played over the speakers. And this was the finale: by the time it ended, The Knife was gone from the stage and the DJ in the sound booth began her post-show set. There was no bowing, no clapping, no encore, because when “Silent Shout” began, the concert was over: at the moment at which the audience is given what it wanted all along, The Knife cease to be performers and the audience ceases to be the audience, because if we have all come here just to hear our favorite song played, this is not a Knife show anymore.

JOANNA NEWSOM, “ONLY SKIN” (excerpt)

But I took my fishingpole (fearing your fever)
Down to the swimminghole, where there grows bitter herb
That blooms but one day a year by the riverside - I’d bring it here:
Apply it gently
To the love you’ve lent me

While the river was twisting and braiding, the bait bobbed
And the string sobbed, as it cut through the hustling breeze
And I watched how the water was kneading so neatly, gone treacly
Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat
—frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath

Press on me: we are restless things
Webs of seaweed are swaddling
You call upon the dusk
Of the musk of a squid
Shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, “THE WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND” (excerpt)

On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round—
O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

The first thing you notice is the music. The vocal call out (‘with the terrorists’, the internet translates it as) and the steady beat. What comes next has many variations but in its most refined form, it is well crafted and predicatable. For fifteen seconds, you see a tableau in which one figure dances, usually masked, helmeted, or otherwise strangely garbed. It draws your eye. As visual boredom sets in, you look at the surroundings: everyone else in the scene sits or stands around, ignoring the only activity. And then the bass drops, and all of a sudden an explosion of movement has already happened, the tableau has shifted, and while you race to take everything in (the man on the tricycle, the inflatable sex doll being waved about, the girl swinging from the rafters) the video suddenly ends. What has just happened?



The arch-meme is a finely crafted instrument. It presents a base template through which many ideas can be pulled. Most memes, in their early form, are about taking a joke and extending it by replaying it in different contexts or with minor variations on the original. The humor gets drained quickly, until all that is left is the format. The prime example of this is the iterations on the famous British propaganda poster, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. By the time we’ve arrived at ‘Keep Calm and Stay Southern’, we’ve completely hacked away the compelling notion at the core of the original (an understated, almost accidentally perfect encapsulation of one national character in a particular era) and replaced it with something so totally unrelated that the emblem of the crown which adorns it is a nonsensical interlocutor, a signifier that has been torn from its signified. The format lends nothing at this point, except as a vehicle for being redistributed. Is this what we mean by ‘viral’? Not pandemic-scale dissemination, but rather infesting one idea with wholly alien genetic material and using that idea’s genetic code to manufacture new ones, mutations, until the strain is of a totally different taxonomy.

There are many variations of the Harlem Shake, and you can watch them in rapid succession in the form of 20-odd minute compilations. Taken as a body of work, what is most surprising is that they’re quite addictive, even though you know exactly what’s coming. Partly, it’s the music. Even though it is only the first thirty seconds of a longer song, it loops surprisingly well. That’s probably because the first thirty seconds tell you all you need to know about the rest of the song. It, too, might as well be on a loop. The other factor, of course, is the level of effort and detail that the creators of these videos go to. The simplest videos are the least interesting, whether its five guys in a frat house living room or, as in one particularly arresting example, one guy alone, with his dog. The most compelling ones are the gymnasiums, the universities, the army units, where that bass drop shatters the thin varnish of a scene of reasonably plausible every day life and turns it into a depiction of collective madness that would make Bosch proud. High production values alone doesn’t always win it. Red Bull’s skydiving iteration, though well put together, suffers from giving itself away in the jump cuts. It’s the static camera that does the most work. Like the room at a standstill before the drop, we’re stuck watching the infective dance as it jumps from Patient A in the motorcycle helmet to the entire school around him. We long to join the fray, to leap up from our computer chairs into this brave new world where it’s okay to dance with a floor lamp and take off (almost) all of your clothes.

It’s also impossible to deny that there is a codified sexual release built into this depiction of madness. Men strip down to their underwear, discarding their uniforms or fashionable outfits. Anonymity prevails through costumes. And of course, the music itself is the music of the club beat. The pelvic thrust is everywhere, and whether or not this can be reduced to a symptom of it being the only way left we have of dancing, its implication cannot be wiped away. Other tropes get dragged in quickly, too. Several versions feature Angry Birds paraphernalia, or Pirates of the Caribbean costumes, or whatever else we have handy. Like a Breugel painting, we’ve shoved all of our metaphors into one picture. And it is a picture, the post-animated-gif version of a photograph.

To be sure, the Harlem Shake probably couldn’t have happened until after the Lady Gaga video meme craze, but it is a finer take on the idea, simply for its better absurdity. But this precedent raises another important point: these sorts of videos, this viral spread, is one limited to a specific cultural context. Where Gaga and dubstep have happened, Poker Face and Harlem shake may follow. The low art of the high empire finds its legs in the internal communication channels, but at the borders it stops suddenly and ends. The bizzaro-world democracy of YouTube is one open only to fellow citizens. Whatever the Internet meme culture tells us about ourselves, it tells us only about ourselves, and only in the minutes and half-minutes that the videos last, and only for the week or so in which we pay attention to them. Once they hit CNN, we’re done, we’ve developed the antibodies, and we wait for a new disease to come and take hold of us. Meanwhile, perhaps, we become a little more impervious to the new and strange ideas that leak in from outside our bubble, faster to dismiss the novelty as another passing phase.