6 May 2009: "Need 2 listen to more music that is more ‘glam’ and ‘fabulous.’"

This post is about Roland Barthes. Carles discloses the secret truth hidden within disposable and ever-revolving pop culture, what fuses fashion to culture to make it ephemeral: fashion is a way to become nothing, the ultimate disappearing act. He begins with a wry quip: "‘I have always been inspired by fashion.’ -generic pop icons." Of course, the strain to find a unique and expressive fashion to augment one's artistic presentation guarantees that art will be reduced to a generic status, unable to overcome the burden with which it is encumbered by the trends voluntarily sought after and adopted.

Music and fashion in practice, as Carles notes, are parallex discourses, with no common ground or premises upon which they can synthesize themselves into a unified whole. This metaphysical incompatibility manifests itself in robotic, dehumanized musicians intoning words they barely understand in a foreign language, empty, vacant signifiers that nonetheless succeed in signifying the vacuum left in the wake of fashion's mercurial movements across the surface of the collective popular mind. As Carles notes, this somewhat nihilistic view is in keeping with developments in Continental philosophy in the late 20th century: "I think it is easier for Europeans to get into songs where some1 says ‘fashion’ over and over again because it is one of the only English words that they know." With this, Carles has in mind Barthes The Fashion System, his exhaustive analysis of the fashion industry, deploying an anthropological structuralist apparatus. Barthes asks, "What happens when an object, whether real or imaginary, is converted into language?... If the garment of Fashion appears a paltry thing in the face of so broad a question, we would do well to keep in mind that the same relation is established between literature and the world." Carles makes this much more specific, situating the dilemma within our particular historico-political confluence: "I feel like this ‘glam-core’ fashion music seems like it is written by a tween who is interpreting the world after he/she reads a magazine + they are exploring their sexuality."

Carles furthers his analysis by examining the example of Lady Gaga:

I want to seem like a pop star who ‘gets’ that popculture ‘means nothing’ but still ‘wants more fame’ or something like that. I want to be a pop sensation who sort of thinks that my product is more artistic than it actually is. I want to be a ’sex object’ but have it be ‘artistic’ cuz I ‘realize that dudes wanna fuck me in crazie costumes.’

As usual, in Carles' grim, uncompromising outlook, aestheticism breaks down into atavism and carnal sexuality, the horizon art cannot overcome when it has become caught in the web of fashion, which works most effectively when it triggers a latent, prehuman (posthuman?) estrus cycle of reproduction facilitation. This means nothing precisely because it means everything, it is the precondition for the survival of the species. When popular culture is reduced to this function it ceases to operate autonomously and collapses into ritual, the conservation of the sacred seed amid costumed deities appeasing the fertility gods.