Recent news items about Justin Bieber’s arrest in Miami
(where he was charged
in January with DUI and with drag racing) and about his subsequent mugshot,
as well as earlier reports – to which I had access, like millions of others,
via Twitter – of him vomiting
milk during a performance and of him collapsing
on stage at a concert in London, seem to offer opportunities to interrogate
the collision of the body and image, of self and celebrity, and of lyric and
media. And to get a little wordy. I have
ended up producing two texts, which I’m calling “Alias Fonds.” The headline for
the report on Justin Bieber collapsing in London, when it appeared on a Twitter
feed, read like a phase-shifted snippet from a Frank O’Hara poem, which set the
composition of the first part in motion. I also overheard a conversation in a
coffee shop at the time between two people I took for graduate students in
actuarial science. The second part draws on the lyrics of a typical Justin
Bieber song, mashed up with Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, some high school
chemistry, and media reports on the arrest. There’s a lot of bent replication.
The texts of the poems can be
read here.
Justin Bieber started out with homemade videos on YouTube.
I’m no Bieber, of course, but the homemade audio is meant to gesture at these
origins. There is only natural reverb, for instance, on the voice: no effects.
I play the instruments – a baritone ukulele and a student-model Yamaha trumpet
– and I programmed and sequenced the drum machine (a DM-1 cloned on an iPad) partly
to reflect the 5-on-4 metre of the first section. (The second section shifts
the rhythm a little, but it’s still there, ghostly-like.) I intend the trumpet loops to be an homage to Bill Dixon. The two poems were
written in the space of about eight months. The recordings happened from
October 2013 to March 2014. So there you go.
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