Royal Music Association - Philosophy Study Group July 2012

Clothes Make the Singer

I have already noted that part of kd lang’s appeal apparently derives for her following
from what some call her cross-dressing.

There is, and for this reason I will refrain from citing it here, a well-known and massive literature on this topic.

I confess that I find kd lang's style of dress unremarkable -- and I have never understood why only a man might be permitted to wear a comfortable jacket, covering most of his body with decent tailoring, and be thought to look well-dressed but women were seemingly required to uncover theirs.

This exactly double standard holds when it comes to song and dance shows, think Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and only Gene Kelly or more recently Patrick Swayze (and both had good,
muscular reasons to do so) take a care to opt for form fitting dance clothes — I will not
mention Dean Martin or kd lang’s Tony Bennett because they, of course, exemplify the
point.

The form-fitting clothes rule is hard on middle-aged women singers and these days and for some time now, Madonna has struggled to match the bodies of her more youthful competitors and then too there is the always debated issue of damaging one’s voice by starving oneself.

But and apart from the fear of death that manifests itself in our obsession with weight, or any kind of bodily change, as Nietzsche points out, kd lang’s own sexuality seems to make all the difference.

At the same time the constant comment, 'she looks like a man' -- a claim often referring only to her style of dress  --- refers more than anything else to her lack of undress.

A lack of undress, indeed, which she manages to pull off to great success in video performances of Sexuality, where what makes the erotic difference is not her skirt (her fans will not forgive me for this observation) nor the quasi-Greek choral group of Rottweilers at the end of the video (Woody Allen will not forgive me for this reservation, and only Woody Allen or, maybe, Percy Adlon would regard the Rottweilers as a kind of Greek chorus), the same Rottweilers that seemingly ascend the staircase with kd lang, exactly not nude, at the start of the video or at any time throughout -- she even stands chest high in a swimming pool still fully clothed. Instead, and even still, it is  her own bodily comportment, with chairs, a mirror, cracked glass, a piano, balconies, pools, an entire, seemingly vacant or abandoned house, jello, cherries (ok already), pitchers of milk (no less), and the teenager's favorite tv show, refrigerator tv (wherein one sits in front of an open refrigerator, rapt with attention for minutes on end, as if something might transpire, if only one waits long enough) all and quite apart from her own body.

For Ernest McClain

Pfingstensonntag in Weimar, Straßenmusikanten

You don’t really care for music, do ya?

Indeed and during the heyday of the sexual revolution which also for good measure included women’s ‘liberation’ (if we may speak of that failed undertaking in that way),¹ when it was popularly protested that women ought not perhaps be regarded as sex objects, men were fond of countering with the assertion that they would love to be sex objects. 

And they claimed this not because it was true but because they were keen on what they called ‘free love’ or sex without strings (and s&m, until kd lang’s singing of Cohen’s Hallelujah was not part of  Cohen’s reference to the real anxiety, the unmanning threat consequent to being tied to a kitchen chair, as indeed in the original circumstance that that was for Samson himself).

In fact, that is, in practice or real life, men do not ‘like’ women who come on to them (ladies at the bar, please take note). And women know this and this is why they dress and act and walk the way they do. But even suborned as objects to the subject who gets to desire in the first place, women do not get close to loving men for their beauty (unless arranged in such a way that men do not notice, just take care not to give yourself away). At best one might adjust a tie, choose a shirt, mend a shaving scar, etc. 

But woman, as such, remains the sexual, the erotic object for both heterosexual men as also for both lesbian and  for heterosexual women, though one can take a shot at changing that if one wishes to stage some kind of performance-inspired drama, not a full on erotic encounter. 

Not really. 

Although it is the erotic encounter that matters here, it is music that is in question in Cohen’s song: You don’t really care for music, do ya? Set up by the inside talk of a secret chord, that David had and it pleased the Lord, it was, I have said, lang’s rendering of Cohen’s exposed illustration of the verse: it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, that caught me, utterly, and I needed to see her do it for it to have the effect that it did. Not only acoustic, but visual, not only visual, but dramatic and add to that the resonance with life, the body, god, and time, the intellect, and sex: a minor riff on the 19th century ideal of the Gesammtkunstwerk. 

Is kd lang’s version different from other versions? How so? How does she do what she does? Indeed, how does she manage to do it again and again — though professional singers do this all the time: c’est son métier, quand même, but this is also why they lip synch their songs from time to time, singing back up, as it were, with themselves.

1 See Babich, “Women and Status in Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy, 160 (March/April 2010): 36-38.

On the Hallelujah Effect as Performance

Every bit of kd lang's interpretation of Cohen's Hallelujah is deliberate, controlled, contrived, packaged, performed.  To say this takes no part of the achievement away from kd lang (nor, indeed as her performance is indebted to him, does it detract from John Cale’s song-setting achievement, just as Buckley and Wainwright are similarly, indeed far more closely indebted). And to say such things, as they also apply ceteris paribus, does not detract from Leonard Cohen, the master song-writer.  How could any such claim detract?

In each case, and this is a matter, in varying ways, of taste, programming, affect: we are watching a consummate artist at work. And as Nietzsche said, speaking of Wagner, we might do well to ignore all such issues of technique, that is to say, all questions concerning the conditions/motivations/practices of the “artist” where, as Nietzsche supposed, what matters is the work, the working of the work of art as music. 

Nietzsche himself suggests that he would be both drawn in and made anxious at the same time by what he in the title of a Gay Science aphorism, described as Women who Master the Masters.  As Nietzsche reflects and his observation touches on the voice quite apart from gender and apart from music, but not apart from the stage:

A deep and powerful alto voice of the kind one sometimes hears in the theater can suddenly raise the curtain upon possibilities in which we usually do not believe.  All at once we believe that somewhere in the world there could be women with lofty, heroic, and royal souls, capable of and ready for rule over men because in them the best elements of man apart from his sex have become an incarnate ideal. (GS §70)

 The problem for Nietzsche is that this ideality is usually then read back into men and that the entire project still falls short of what real human beings do, or better said what they do not do.  If Nietzsche had learned one thing from less than enraptured reading of Goethe’s Faust, it would be to see through love to its vanities.

But where Nietzsche challenged that the theatrical bet placed on the efficacy of such voices, female, or as he pointed out, mostly male (as in “the ideal male lover such as Romeo” [ibid.], and we should not miss the irony here), tended not to succeed, the musicologist, Ernest McClain reminds us that Leonard Cohen’s achievement is a real or working one, a practiced one, attuned to musical efficacy, for us, today.