2009 Pop Conference Bios/AbstractsGreil MarcusGreil Marcus is the author of
The Shape of Things to Come,
Lipstick Traces,
Mystery Train and other books. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the New School and Minnesota. His column Real Life Rock Top 10 appears regularly in the
Believer.
Panel(s):Different StrokesFriday, April 17, 2009, 11:00 - 12:45
Moderator:Take Back the NightclubSaturday, April 18, 2009, 9:00 - 10:30
Abstract:"
The Songs Left Out of "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency"
Nan Goldin's "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," a slide show of more than 800 photographs made between 1979 and 1986, in the punk, bohemian, transgender, and heroin demi-mondes of New York, Berlin, and elsewhere, tell a story of obsession, self-destruction, and perhaps most of all love as abasement. I would like to explore both the slide show and especially its evolving soundtrack as an opening into the music of love as abasement.
This isn't a genre, but maybe a field, where people run to and from each other, from themselves, finding their most feared selves and those they love looming up like specters of damnation. From the Supremes' "Stop! In the Name of Love" to Elvis Costello's "I Want You There are songs of abasement that might overwhelm Goldin's chronicle, or celebration, take it away from her; Lonnie Mack's "Why" might dissolve it.
I want to look at what a soundtrack is, what it is supposed to do, and how it can get away from the person who presume to know how to use songs to orchestrate her or his own creation. I don't know how the story will turn out, or what the last song will be.
Note: "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" is available publically only in book form. The actual work has never been transferred to video or DVD; it exists only as a slide show in the collection of the Whitney and other museums. I will probably have access to a CD of Goldin's soundtrack, but the use of images, which at the moment I would rather try to put into words than show, would have to come from scans of her book.
