How I learned to stop worrying and love THE DROP; why the Keen UNEEK cord sandal is 2020's most erotic shoe; and why AJ Soprano's missing eyebrows feel particularly millennial
Beats, Boots, and Brows
Whenever I reunite with my normy but lovable friends from undergrad, I prepare myself for an inevitable ritual: THE DROP. By this I do not mean some sort of cultish group-dosing fest or the enacting of a silly dance that only our little cadre knows how to perform. I refer specifically to the bass drops punctuating the Top 40 EDM songs of yesteryear, the particular blast of subwoofer that barred-out 2012 kids wearing, like, Cookie Monster flatbills and Illuminati tank-tops go hella dummy for.
Not to cast aspersions, though. Indeed, I have a soft spot somewhere in my heart for THE DROP, as I spent a fair share of my OSU party-time DJing, poorly blending audio stems of blink-182 hooks into subbed-out Zedd bangers for seas of kids sporting helmet hair, Sperry’s, and Southern Marsh polos. Today, THE DROP forces me to recall those memories of undergrad dipsomania, a sensation which is nice for about five minutes until the escapism of nostalgia wears off and I am sucked back into a hyper-polished reality lifted straight outta Josie and the Pussycats or some cyberpunk shit. Top 40 EDM’s mechanical 4 x 4 rhythm, its use of trite vocal hooks and its digitally-airbrushed production often make for a grating if not flat-out disconcerting listen, a sorta MUZAK for the Fyre Fest set. Its same-soundingness always seemed to confirm to me Walter Benjamin’s dictum that, “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” Nonetheless, when the gang gets back together Big Chill-style, you better believe bro-y DJ acts like Two Friends, Kygo, Above and Beyond, Marshmello, and The Chainsmokers will score our pouring of the libations.
As one of OSU’s most elegant socialites, however, I know better than to play the role of the pre-game sourpuss, the bore scowling in the back of the room with crossed arms, anxiously wondering when he’ll get ahold of the AUX so he can enlighten the lesser-thans with REAL MUSIC, MAN. (Though I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit, for sure lol.) Despite my insanely polished aptitude for reading social cues, I have found myself uncontrollably slipping into the curmudgeon figure during meet-ups post-grad, and it freaks me tf out because I’ve never wanted to become something of an even less-charming Chuck Klosterman. So, for the last year or so, I’ve been drumming up ways to convince myself to stop worrying and love THE DROP, and I struck gold during a spring break trip I made to Chicago just a few days before the VIRUS went totally nuts.
A dear friend and I, over Windy City wings and PBR pints, struck up an energizing, lightly flirtatious conversation with our waitress. About halfway through the banter, the Calvin Harris x Rihanna 2011 heat machine “We Found Love” began playing throughout the bar n grill, resulting in a change of mood which whisked the waitress away from us, back into her duty of serving tables. At first, the song’s piercing intro of synth stabs coupled with the waitress’s abrupt departure bummed me out. Another EDM song soundtracking another missed opportunity, I thought. Teardrops in the back of the club. But as my dear friend and I continued shoveling down the remaining wings and beer, I began to hear “We Found Love” anew. The song’s titular hook, “we found love in a hopeless place,” repeated almost ad-nauseam throughout, began to sorta work its way deep into my subconscious, unlocking something within me that was once buried. I looked around at the other beer drinkers n gullet-stuffers, all laughing and enjoying their little dose of Friday-night decadence, and suddenly Rihanna’s hook became meaningful, maybe even profound. The deep, driving pulse of her looped falsetto seemed to suspend time within the restaurant, bridging the gap between past and present with its eternal return, and for a brief moment, I felt as if I was stuck in time too, immortally preserved within a painting or some shit.
I quickly discerned that it was the repetitive loops at the center of “We Found Love” which excited me, so I started thinking about repetition in music, and I eventually hit a face-smackingly obvious solution to my problem with the THE DROP. Electronic loops, unvaried rhythms, recurring melodies—the stuff of EDM—allow for greater participation by locking its audience into a universal oneness. Ethnomusicologist boss John Miller Chernoff makes the case for repetition’s egalitarian power in his book African Rhythm and African Sensibility where he essentially argues that West African music—drum circles in particular—allows individuals to make distinct, singular contributions to a collective groove, thus achieving a oneness composed of tiny lil ones, if that makes sense. But a problem emerges when attempting to map Chernoff’s theory onto EDM: unlike West African music, EDM does not offer a mode of live performance where individuals can directly influence the course of musical flow. Or does it?
Drawing on my own experiences DJing, I contend that the marriage between group and artist that Chernoff celebrates does indeed occur in the wild world of EDM. The DJ, though not performing live in the way a four-piece rock and/or roll band might, blends a variety of songs into one continuous mix which feeds off the engagement of the crowd and the singular personalities comprising that crowd. Instead of producing an interplay between 1st drum and 2nd drum, EDM collapses the distinction between performer and spectator through a unification of dancer and mixtrack. The crowd, through dance, shouting, yelling “wohhhh" or “yeahhhh,” participates in the composition of the mix, informing the DJ where to go next, when to chill on a groove, or when to bring THE DROP. You can see this dialectical relationship occur vividly in certain Boiler Room sets like Chippy Nonstop x Pxssy Palace’s 2019 jamboree where both DJs seem to enthusiastically dissolve into the rambunctious crowd, or, conversely, in DNTEL’s 2012 minimalist party where a cadre of LA too-cool-for-schoolers stand quietly stiff like Antonioni’s mannequins, in solidarity with the equally inelastic mixmaster. Whatever the occasion or subculture, DJ and crowd almost always interact democratically, making for that sorta organic oneness that we’re all after in different ways. The old showbiz cliche, “read the room” really means feel the room, man.
As my dear friend and I left the restaurant to brave the icy Lake Michigan gales, tipsy from pints n wings, I couldn’t help but to feel more connected to the folks around me, as hacky as that sounds. Every tv in every bar was broadcasting dire COVID possibilities, suggesting imminent death while simultaneously bringing the general epistemological crisis surrounding daily life in 2020 to the forefront. Those wings could have been Eucharists for all we knew. When we got back to his/his gf’s apartment, I grabbed a Modelo from the fridge, sat down on his couch, and fired up Pearl Jam’s killer 1992 MTV unplugged performance of “Black.” As Eddie V hit that part that goes, “how quick the sun can drop awayyyyy,” their wonderful cat, Dorothy, leapt onto my lap and nuzzled my arm, indicating that yes she wanted some rubs. I obliged, placed my feet on their coffee table, and thought to myself, “yeah, we found love in a hopeless place.”
Those who know me well know Ima man who prizes tactile splendor; soft fabrics like fine wool, aged cotton, and quality cashmere speak to me the same way ACRONYM speaks to my man jonatan leandoer. So when I spied the Keen UNEEK cord sandal during an early-summer plunge into the online shopping Matrix, my interests were obviously piqued. The shoe, to me, seemed a tangled mess of polyester and nylon, a gorpy assault on the foot that gotta feel wild when worn. I resisted the urge to cop for the sake of FUNDS-STACKING, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them the following week.
I sent pics of the shoe to a dear friend whose taste I do not trust but whose general approval I still crave. They responded as predicted: “those are some of the ugliest fucking shoes I’ve ever seen.” Rather than shoot off an insta-reply like some autist-cum-dandy—“that’s the FREAKING point you IGNORAMUS”—I neglected response, hit the books, and returned with a fully-developed thesis to prove them wrong.
“Actually it’s the sexiest shoe of 2020,” I replied, anxiously waiting for the always-coveted iMessage bubble-ellipsis which lets me know that people do indeed like me. They eventually responded with an “ok, how?” so I let ‘em know. The shoe’s intricate weaving of nylon cord, not totally unlike what you see on, say, women’s lingerie, communicates through tantalizing irony: it simultaneously covers and uncovers, obscures and reveals, withholds and discloses, throwing into question the distinction between public and private, between body and garment, between life and death.
In this way, the UNEEK can be run through traditional theories of eroticism involving sex and death. The erotic, according to critical theorist/cool perv Georges Bataille, is “assenting to life even in death.” In plain-speak this sorta means you gotta sacrifice yourself to achieve erotic bliss, i.e. lose yourself within an Other to effectively become one. This little death, for Bataille and for many other theorists, is the chief principal of eroticism. Does the Keen UNEEK not do exactly this? The shoe’s honeycombed gridlock of cord merges foot with nylon like a camping dad’s take on body horror, RV meets Videodrome. It is precisely this marriage between body and garment, between skin and commodity—a little death if you will—which makes the UNEEK so erotic. In a way, putting on the shoe allows the wearer to transcend corporeality and become one with man’s first? second? love: commodities. Does wearing a Keen UNEEK sandal constitute the ULTIMATE SACRIFICE?
IS THIS THE NEW FLESH?
Last night, while plucking an errant and elongated eyebrow hair, my mind wandered to Episode 4, Season 5 of The Sopranos. In the ep, AJ gets absolutely turnt tf up at a Mudvayne concert, waking the following morning with his face Krazy Glue’d to the carpet of his Manhattan hotel room and his eyebrows shaven clean, the victim of a frat boy prank carried about by his posse of equally-privileged failsons. As I plucked my brow, I began to wonder why David Chase, a WAKE FOREST-EDUCATED/pop culture kingpin, chose to eliminate AJ’s eyebrows rather than, say, give him a haphazard dick tattoo or an embarrassing haircut?
Initially, I thought of an old friend from my undergrad classes on comedy, Henri Bergson, who centers his theory of comic physiognomy—transl.: the science of funny faces lmao—on the principles of incongruity, this idea that laughter stems from witnessing an awkward out-of-placeness, a sorta rigidity against normalcy. This is why pratfalls are funny. Could AJ’s missing eyebrows just be another comic gag of incongruity from one of TV’s most deceptively funny misanthropes? Or was Chase after something more profound?
It is here in my train of thought where I recalled a seven-beers-in conversation I once had with a dear friend circa 2018. We both agreed on the commonplace that AJ was Chase’s imagining of a particular millennial male archetype, the privileged white kid who has everything but his parents’ love and guidance so he turns toward nu-metal, Camus, and destroying his private high school’s poolside trophy room for attention. With this in mind, I began digging deeper into the missing eyebrows, and I eventually arrived at the conclusion that Chase’s choice of deformity perfectly mirrored millennial white male subjectivity.
First and foremost, eyebrows communicate. Through moments of movement and action—arching, scrunching, widening, narrowing, etc.—eyebrows seek to offer glimpses of #emotion, or whatever the stuff is that lurks beneath what we may call persona or personality. To exist without eyebrows is to exist without an essence, without a self. The man lacking eyebrows ultimately lives as a lifeless duplicate, a ghost in the shell. Hence all those sci-fi movies featuring hairless androids and clones and what not. The hirsute points toward life! Hair grows!
AJ, as all children do, arrives at his adolescent sense of self through an education helmed by his parents. Tony and Carmela, hyper-materialistic as they are (can we really blame them?), deal with AJ’s teenage bs through moments of dismissive transaction rather than loving guidance or constructive criticism. They chide AJ for his misdeeds, then reward him a few days after inflicting punishment. They buy him a drum set, a glossy Nissan Xterra, tons of sick band merch, post-game feasts at Stewart’s, etc. in order to mitigate their own feelings of guilt and reclaim AJ’s attachment. By upholding such a practice, however, Tony and Carmela avoid emotionally engaging with a son lurching wayward and replace familial love with a process of gift giving where price tags attempt to signify love but always fall short. AJ is ultimately reduced to little more than a post in an exchange route, something of a commodity himself.
With this in mind, AJ (in)directly recalls Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson’s notion of pastiche, a genre of art that imitates the style of another work, artist, or period for the sake of imitation. For Jameson, pastiche, as opposed to its superior, more concretely political cousin, parody, exists as a heavily commodified genre, endlessly duplicated by cheap novels, hacky artists, and Hollywood films looking to earn a big dumb stupid audience rather than correct societal ills or speak truth to power or do whatever it is that parody supposedly does. Think of the maddeningly bad Stranger Things and how it apes ‘80s aesthetics solely to gain an aging Gen X/Millennial audience, or go to any bar in ATX and see the deluge of shitty local bands borrowing yacht rock vibes to score cool kid cred. (I resist the urge to hyperlink here...) Jameson goes so far to call pastiche “blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs,” a phrase which closely mirrors the critic’s theoretical calling card, his whole “disappearance of the individual subject” thing. (Notice Jameson’s eye(brow?)-oriented metaphor here, too.) Pastiche, then, can be read as a sort of lifeless duplicate of parody, symptomatic of a BOGUS CAPITALIST PROCESS which cannibalizes everything in its path and erodes human essence through the logic of FUNDS-STACKING.
Pastiche’s notion of imitation works nicely when run through traditional Father-Son pop-psych since it’s commonly accepted that Son imitates Father. If we can accept the well-established idea that Tony Soprano parodies the swinging-dick masculinity of his own father—“the strong, silent type!”—by attempting to be even more of a tough-guy, then we can consider AJ an imitation of Tony’s imitation. Through this sorta third-stage simulacra type shit, AJ operates as a watered-down pastiche of Tony’s own emulation of his father’s masculinity. This 20th-century generational succession goes as follows:
Greatest Generation: Giovanni Soprano - Establishes image of Soprano-family masculinity (yeah yeah, Giovanni is probably imitating another imitation, infinite regression blah blah but let’s keep it to these three for the sake of brevity)
Boomer: Tony Soprano - imitation of Giovanni’s masculinity
Millennial: AJ Soprano - imitation of Tony’s imitation of Giovanni’s masculinity
When AJ employs the signs and images of being a “man”—potty language, Pantera t-shirts, schoolyard fights—they fail to take on meaning because they have no connection or relationship to a real masculinity in the first place since they emerge as imitations of imitations—the real may exist somewhere beyond this Russian Doll of duplication but AJ certainly does not have access to it. His incorrigibility and his trademark not-thereness stems from being stuck within this confused order of meaning/masculinity where signs/images ultimately refer to infinite regression, a zone which Baudrillard might call “the order of sorcery.” Is this the plight of the privileged white millennial male at large? Are we stuck in a crisis of imitation, aping fathers who are, in turn, aping their fathers who are, in turn, aping their fathers, and so on? Is the likely-invented notion of how to be a man out of reach in 2020, lost within an endless chain of referents or whatever? Is this why we all know someone like AJ? Or why I see bits of AJ within myself at times?
AJ exists as a duplicate of a duplicate, a statue with blind eyeballs. And what better way to capture AJ’s erosion of self than to remove his eyebrows, perhaps the true windows into the soul.