Original scientific paper
Festive Critique and Agency in Felix Laband's 4/4 Down the Stairs
Michael Titlestad
; University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Martina Viljeon
; University of the Free State, Department of Music, Bloemfontein, South Africa
Abstract
This article presents an analysis of Cape Town-based electronic artist Felix Laband’s album, 4/4 Down the Stairs (African Dope Records: 2002). The discussion comprises three sections. The first theorises, through the contested lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of the carnivalesque, Laband’s use of the ‘low-other’ as festive critique. It unravels the aesthetico-ideological discourse in which the cover design and the music participate. The second discussion, which sounds an additional cautionary note in counterpoint to celebrating festive critique, turns to the work of the French economist and philosopher, Jacques Attali, to consider his distinction between ‘mass music’ and what he defines rather idiosyncratically as ‘composition’. Attali’s theory of musical production, which juxtaposes the multivalent tropes of Carnival and Lent, presents a persuasive critique of the popular music industry. We consider, in our description of Attali’s representation of the trap of commercial circulation, the extent to which Laband’s work registers as the ‘background noise’ of ‘consumer integration, interclass levelling, cultural homogenization’ (1985: 111). The third and final section of the argument is rather more optimistic. It seeks to develop, through the ideas of Michel de Certeau, a theory of (muted and conditional) subversive agency that applauds Laband’s creativity as the capture of musical possibility in a mode that de Certeau describes as ‘pedestrian’ combinational and relational practice.
Keywords
cultural theory; carnival; festive critique; mass culture; Bakhtin; Attali; de Certeau
Hrčak ID:
64286
URI
Publication date:
14.1.2005.
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