I have remained rather fixated on Billie Jean (1983) over the last few days. What’s not to get hooked on—an exceptionally-well selling single from one of the most successful albums of all time! The track is ubiquitous, moreover—not simply in my mind as of late but throughout the world of pop radio and beyond. It's funny, right… I began listening to it again, obsessively, as an invitation to describe art as one experiences it. There's a certain quality of stylistic accomplishment in that alone, detailing the inventory of effects that wash over us with as simple a change as turning on the radio, pressing 'pray' on our Spotify. Spotify itself has added an oddly predictive quality to it all (speak of the devil): from nearly an infinite series of algorithms to mix and match your preferences, we neatly select—with startling regularity—our aesthetic immersion, the preferred poison of the day. An admittedly curious (and curiously predictable) result from a programme generally seen as predictive of other preferences… this sort of repetitiveness, the fetish of reproducibility that comes in studio-doctoring domestication of the vibrantly pulsating life of the musical orgy has been a feature of music recording since the days of the first gramophones. It is not new, nor are constant innovations and upgrades to this basic capacity—the Compact Disc furnishes a simple sort of proof that was once the height of contemporary innovation. And it offers the more melancholic reminder, of course, wherein its eclipse and entombment in the museum clarifies the spritely nature of innovation—forever beyond our grasp and leading us astray into what will become the known. But it's more than that. Spotify affects the rebirth of the DJ as we've never seen it before, when the craft of spinning records took more skill than simply turning on the Pioneer. It’s not simply that Spotify’s regularity of technological compression and reproduction distorts the essence of music, nor that its predictive capacity for unacquainted interest leads us astray regularly. It’s that one leads into the other, and does so rather seamlessly, such that the two cannot be distinguished! This regularity of satisfaction, blurring the line between that brought by our own volition and invoked otherwise, leads reliably into the unexpected instability of the momentary, the communal, the moving. Any sense of comfort in that constant upheaval of swaying preferences, where your desire is hardly distinguishable from that which was selected for you? We have re-entered the regular. This reciprocal interaction and its pendulum effect constitutes the newly-furnished, perennially-fleeting aura of place and presence that comes through technological reproduction. This critical reversal of Benjamin reminds us that aura is a matter exclusively of the commodity world, built unshakably upon the functional supremacy of digital replication. In other words, the lamentation of decay inherent to The Work of Art is integral to the promotion, circulation, and inevitable production of the commodity form: it is not the exit that the critic imagines. The frozen fate of the historical process that has become the forever-now! Steven Shaviro puts this into more explicitly Marxist terms when he emphasizes Orthodox Marxism’s incommensurable gap between use-value and exchange value. This alienated divide is the stuff of rebellion—a torn seam to be seized upon in an effort to tear off a new cloth. Yet this gulf, he clarifies, is actually a duality of constant flight and fancy constitutive of the commodity, not its inherent weakness. It is only through discursive agreement upon exchange value that a sense of use value comes to be defined in retrospect. Its naturalistic quality of passée holism is a creation of the present, not a reminder of a past that is itself lost to us. These antitheses never coincide, but in seeking respective exits from one another (use value a return to essential functionalism à la Nicomachean Ethics and exchange value an existence paced purely to abstracted smoothness of release) they sustain a reciprocal existence of constant movement.
 

Between

       Use value—or the aura

    Exchange value—or technological reproduction aura

This reliability is the basis of circulative capital, and moreover the confused voided collapse of the commodity that constitutes its normalized state of crisis. This un-whole sense of constant release brings no pleasure, but simply a breathless sort of flushness as one pole attempts to reason itself into another sense. Too close to someone else? You need only recover your own essence of pattern, purpose, and pulse. Too isolated, cut off from the world? Note only the gaping maws of life’s strung-out beats and attempt to fill this with social contact—you need only get out onto the dance floor! And this is the joy of Spotify’s looped sense of satisfaction that compresses the excitement of own our volitions with the thrill of being addressed by a veiled, distant other: never mind it to be an algorithm, rather than a smiling stranger catching our eye in the pub. The mirrored sense of ecstasy from my own choice as much as that which it not mine (or was mine) is immediate. You enjoyed listening to Billie Jean? Here’s the Billie Jean Radio: a selection of the song itself, other songs I have listened to in the last few days, music I have appreciated over the last few years, and otherwise unknown tunes I am expected to appreciate. And there’s that active DJ function, pulling me out of my seat: the passion is not strictly my own, but is everywhere. What a beautifully democratic thing… we might as well dance! It doesn’t exactly matter what you dance, it’s more a matter of when. And that’s really the supreme magic both of this radio playlist (which always invites us to dance, less out of consistency with itself and more in service to what sort of regularity it imagines will motivate you) and of Billie Jean as a tune itself. Between its sprawling gulfs of phrases opened up between the snare cracks and the thumping of the synthetic bass, one’s motivation is immediately cast in several directions. While the snare machine recalls a crisp military motivational (I always think of Mancini’s Peter Gunn Theme (1959) necessitating you stand up straight, the bassline’s soaring propensity quickly develops promising flourishes that command a relaxed, if utterly hypnotic attention. They are purely momentary, entirely immanent captures that relieve pressure remarkably from the staggered beat…those sweeping sheets of orchestral soaring, that begin so boldly before their premature ending! BJ surely brings out the real man in us, doesn’t she? Jackson, by all accounts, had to fight tooth and nail with Quincy Jones to ensure the intro remained suitably long. Almost, but not long enough, to forget its lifted origins from Hall and Oates! This famous intro line is almost uncomfortably long in this obvious musical debt so rarely acknowledged, creating a stunned sense of captivation that transcends entirely the mechanical, staggered effect of any satisfaction felt here. Billie Jean opens up the moment, precisely what Jackson’s narrator urges us to fear in the possibility of regular alimony checks. But recall that this paralysis was never the result of any real antagonist: merely of the mirrored self! There is no real Billie Jean; she is a composite figure of dreamlike quality, obviously pedantic tailoring, and surrealism. Like Parton’s Jolene Billie Jean is too real to be real, but this excess merely inspires our endless fascination with her possibility. So too this admiration blinds us to our own weariness of the impossibility of this mythical figure and of her ubiquity on the radio. Is this a hint that we too will be bored of Spotify’s attempt to do it all? Humans fall in love most with imperfection: don’t forget that French opinion poll where Cindy Crawford’s beauty mark elevated her about Claudia Schiffer in the eyes of her fans. Claudia is too perfect, so why bother! And such weariness also illuminates our own unsuitability for reciprocal engagement that is more than superficial. Who could ignore the abortive climax of the guitar solo—whose only remarkable feature is its beginning? Its glimpse of possibility, the chance to plunge into a greater sense of melodic profundity whose substance is withheld from us… perhaps on principle?

And this principle—should it be taken as even a possibility—is closest to what we might identify as the artistic aura of endlessly replicatable desire that remains, even in its abundance, ever-beyond us… what could be better evidence of this than the powerful ‘no’ driving one of the most famous choruses in pop music? The more we deny Billie Jean’s power, the greater her case shall become!

11 October 2022