21 July 2009: "Is Wavves ‘ripping off’ AnCo / the ‘Panda Bear aesthetic’?"

This post is about alterity. Carles begins by admitting that "I have never actively listened to a Wavves song," by which he means much more than he seems at first to be declaring, calling into question what it means to actively listen as opposed to passively absorb. Is there a sense, he implicitly asks, in which active listening is appropriation? This post, as we know from the title, is about appropriation, "ripping off," whether intentionally or not. Carles wants to resituate the artist's supposed anxiety of influence within a Levinasian frame, investigating the radical responsibility we have to the otherness of another artist's work, whether this demands behavior that approaches the asymptotic limit of a blind and total passiveness in order to accord appropriate ethical respect.

Hence, it is no wonder that listening the musical work he brings under study here, he becomes "very confused." This confusion is an ethical mandate. Any less would evince the machinations of a mind not entirely reconciled to radical tolerance. Though the work in question "seems like a very ’simple song’, like to the point that you could say it is ’stupid,’ " Carles is unwilling to adopt a subject position of judgment, and instead commits himself to the far more trying philosophical position of patience, openness. He acknowledges the "cryptic metaphor" of the song, without forcefully arguing for a specific interpretation. Rather the gesture of metaphoricity alone is noted, with figuration serving as a mental key to unlock a door not yet conceptualized.

Carles then demonstrates the vertiginous and ultimately cannibalizing lines of reasoning a hermaneutics of suspicion can unfold:

Feel like he possibly might be ‘making fun of every1′ for ‘liking AnCo’, and made this song to say ‘this type of song is easy to make, I can shit out a song like this as a joke.’ Suddenly felt insecure, like he is making fun of me for wearing a Merriweather Post Pavvy tshirt. Not sure if he just ‘deconstructed’ the state of the modern indie-musicsphere with this song, or if he is ‘trying to break into it.’

The lesson here is that interpretation by reference to another's motives degrades the other and assimilates the pure alterity to a diminished and faulty instrumentalism. Ontological insecurity, a destabilizing of one's own reflexive consciousness can only ensue, as the positionality implied by prescribing the motives of the Other ultimately redounds on the self as proscriptions. For as Carles shows, this culminates in a demoralized cathexis, self-loathing, and infantile projection: "Wavves seems to h8 everything." Or in other words, "I hate myself."