The Third Body

I. A Private Reality

Music is not sound but ambiance, a sensory space, omnipresent and forever 
open. The neonatural environment generated by audio signals reconciles 
the unconscious with its vague condition: the intermingling of to be and 
not to be. Music is a normality-expanding substance that brings on 
drowsiness. The general human tendency to dissolution is counteracted by 
rhythmical sound wave interruptions. The definition of a musical piece 
with a beginning and end leads to punctual interruptions of consciousness 
that build up tension between the here-and-now of local experience and 
the wherever-and-whenever of the brotherhood of consumers. In the musical 
sauna, the human will to unreality is kept awake through periodical cold 
silence showers. The intermission between songs prompts social reflection 
regarding the zoon politicon: "Eh?" This dialectic of absence between 
slow musical intoxication and the rapid sobriety of thought intensifies 
the subcritical attitude required for adjusted behavior. As the arbitrary 
medium between contained savagery and rampant civilization, music is a 
touching achievement of the family of man. In music, man the muse finds 
delight in culture. 

Every musical form creates its own space. Although the boundaries of each 
of these premises are clearly defined, they manage to create an illusion 
of boundlessness and totality. A straight line runs from cradle rattle 
through teenage stereo to walkman and car radio. This musical educational 
trajectory aims at the highly individual design of personal reality. 
Music serves as a public means of production for the manufacture of 
intimacy. "My moment of awakening was when they played the Bee Gees' 'I 
Started a Joke' at the ice rink" (John Sasher). The discovery of a 
personal sensory space is an irreversible point in the shaping of 
identity. Any possible later fusions with favorite tracks refer to that 
primal scene's intensity, no matter what subsequent shifts in musical 
taste may occur. The initiation into the universal audio archives results 
from a sudden and inescapable detachment from the social context: that 
first musical space-time journey into unknown territories. Once evoked, 
the promise contained in this possibility never loses its attraction. The 
recognition of a similar intensity in other musical forms is the driving 
force behind the metamorphoses of personal taste, a unique secret shared 
with millions of other teenagers, hippies, mods, punks, Abba fans, 
Africans, Hindus, ravers, Bach devotees, housewives, and metalheads. The 
technological reproducibility of sounds is a social prerequisite for 
individuality.

II. A Shared Reality

Music is the ideal intermediary between individual and common life. Pop 
music is not just listened to in the privacy of living room and concert 
hall, but in all the spaces in between, from bank and shopping mall to 
construction site and public highway. The normalizing function of public 
music is constantly disrupted by the brief emergence of private reality's 
personal intensities. In fact, this intermingling of the public and 
personal senses is what renders your social adjustment bearable. Public 
space must regulate its volume so as to keep the body in a constant, 
absent-minded movement. Muzak forces the environment into the background 
in order to limit attention to the offered goods and services. The 
aroused boredom must be compensated for by an affirmation of your 
individual will power in the shape of an impulse buy. Increase the 
volume, and the public no longer consumes hard wares but states of mind. 
The walkman reverses these sound levels, declares public space a silent 
zone, and gets on its way, taking with it its own sensory space. The 
walkman or -woman listens to self-programmed muzak, the only possible 
unpleasant surprise being the external intensities in case of empty 
batteries or a broken CD. Whereas the mall's public muzak is designed to 
soften the masses' hard personality, the walkman's private muzak strives 
for a hard personality of its own within the soft crowd. The walkman's 
problem is that it must be part of these masses, whereas the shop music 
strategy aims to detach the individual from the multitudes. 

You only really listen to music if it exercises an alienating effect; 
that is, when you detach yourself from your entire sensory surroundings 
and tune in to one sense alone - the ear. Concentrated listening requires 
effort, an act of will power; to listen is to defy music. It is an 
educational process to enter a previously unknown sensory space. To 
listen is to exclude and to introduce. New music is a generator of 
complexity in which it's hard to discern anything at all, whereas old 
music can be amazingly subtle once you turn on your differential 
accumulator. Whereas the connoisseur can always discover new levels and 
elements to a composition, the reluctant listener clings to familiar 
sounds and older rhythms. Listening precedes the concert; you never know 
if you'll really get into the music or not. Whereas dance clubs invite 
you to hit the dance floor without further ado and let your body do the 
listening, the concert hall initially requires you to be all ears, only 
later to submerge all the senses in a total experience which it is 
impossible for the purely techno sound to generate. This is the promise 
of the live concert. Music that forces you to listen can hardly be 
kosher. The annoying discrepancy between compact disc and live 
performance has been averted through unplugged versions, on one hand, and 
the maximedial spectacle of the megashow on the other. Concert halls and 
dance clubs are temples of the senses whose architectural qualities lend 
a touristic quality to nightlife: they enable the mass experience you 
really paid for. In the case of a techno party in some warehouse, the 
focus is on the sensory qualities of installation and drugs, producing a 
mass no longer aspired to in glam disco. With music, one is never alone.

III. The sensory body.

Let's see what Neil Young has to say about his life on stage. "The guitar 
and the amplifier work together to feed each other. And you have to get 
the amplifier big enough, so you're far enough away from the guitar that 
you can still feed, vibrate the area. And you move the guitar around in 
the area, finding angles and places where the guitar sits and responds to 
the sound. And then you start building the sound coming out of the 
amplifier with effects after the guitar signal is entered. It has to have 
strayed in. And then you take the effects and introduce them again 
between the guitar and the amplifier, through a different route, and you 
blend them together and they start feeding back. It's a very natural 
thing. And to hear it live is really awesome. You feel it in your chest." 
The musician's grounds are limited. The barrier between stage and 
audience is strengthened by the light show and speakers. The musician is 
not looking for audience interaction. He plays for the installation, 
working for the interference between his body and technology. He plays no 
tunes, performs no play, it's a physical experience he's after. It is 
only when his body connects to the equipment, and technology responds, 
that the mass follows. The switch may also be made between band members, 
when the individual musicians suddenly meet and things start to roll. The 
first link between body and music, and between the bodies as such, is 
created on stage, before it hits the concert space. Drugs enhance musical 
attention and increase sound concentration, so the musician can let the 
guitar do all the work. The instrument is allowed to go its own way, so 
far that the performer has no option but to thrash the runaway guitar at 
the end of the evening to silence it. Reggae is the prototype of 
responsible drug use; music, band spirit, and ganja combine to call forth 
the cool runnings, much like beer and polonaise. Every musical form uses 
its own narcotic methods. "We're jamming in the name of the Lord." 

The public appears after the transition from highway to concert hall, via 
the overflowing buffer zone of entrance, box office, wardrobe, toilets, 
and bar. In these interspaces, the individual body prepares itself for 
the mass, discarding redundant textiles, buying T-shirts, and effecting 
the desired level of intoxication. Then begins the ordeal of endless 
waiting, strangers, the racket of the opening bands, and a generally 
noisy ambience. The audience begins to show signs of subdivision between 
the fans and groupies up by the stage, the reserved middle section, the 
talkers in the back, the wall gang, the barflies. Tension rises as the 
band appears: a first moment of discharge, after which the audience 
disperses again and tries to listen. The audience's movement has been 
halted; people stand or sit around. Only the group in front of the stage 
goes berserk at the first sound of a note. The concert hall's 
architecture is designed so as to effect a functional segmentation of the 
audience, which must be entertained to prevent it from turning its charge 
of explosive tension into action prematurely and undirected. The 
audience's physical ecstasy must merge in time with the switch on stage 
and then die out after the band has left in order to prevent trouble. The 
concert shows us that entertainment has a physical basis. It is the 
proprietor's duty to contain the risks that accompany such Dionysian 
aspirations. Mass ecstasy releases fundamental energies of antisocial 
inclination. The live concert's ceremonial structure is part of the 
strategy to contain the pursued mass release. Should the stage be 
besieged and the equipment thrashed, it would be a case of bad 
management. Those who physically cross the line between the sensory 
spaces of stage and concert hall disturb the concert's prescribed peace, 
be it to party or to run riot. If, after three encores, the ecstasy still 
hasn't quieted down, the band can always follow Mano Negra's example and 
dive headlong into the audience.

IV. The Third Body

When we cross the sound barrier the entire body begins to respond. It has 
found the instrument to hook up with: a reggae bass guitar, a raving 
rhythm box, steel guitars that give you goosebumps, punk's throbbing 
rhythm guitar, Irish folk's tin whistle, Nigerian talking drums, rap and 
raggamuffin's pounding human voices, the great vocalists' lyrical 
fragments and intonations, a solo guitar's emotional explosion. "Take me 
to the bridge." At the same time, a single physical zone is discovered to 
be the key to the rest of the body - the belly in country & western, the 
hips in rock & roll, the skin in house, the knees in juju, the head in 
metal, the flying torsos in pogo, the feet off the disco floor, the hands 
in blues, the ass in qawwal and party, clapping in gospel, jumping in 
mod, the click of the finger in jazz. "You get the message." The switch 
between the bodies on stage and those in the audience is made as soon as 
the music takes over. The third body created is a result of the 
connection between a specific technology and an ecstatic potential in 
biological bodies. Techno and bio merge through sound amplification. Each 
musical form or group has its own third body. The physical experience may 
be that of universal grace or elegance, aggression, purity, fun, anger, 
rage, peace and kindness, hysteria, mellow aloofness, doom, or an urge to 
destroy. Once music produces a third body, it represses all other 
potential third bodies: It keeps to itself. That is why it is possible to 
like all kinds of musicologically incompatible genres. Schubert, Bowie 
and the Sabri Brothers can easily be combined over the weekend. Where the 
third body appears, classical space-time limitations disappear and one 
enters a purely Freudian state. The pop concert offers more than just 
spectacle and a good show; it manipulates bodies beyond political and 
sexual economics. It injects the wetware's ego with a stiff dose of id. 

The third body is a state either reached during the concert, or not. 
Musicians are judged according to their ability to invoke and contain it. 
The concert's logistic apparatus is designed to regulate the switch 
between the spaces of stage and audience, an issue that is becoming 
increasingly demanding with the expansion of the latter all the way out 
to playing fields and stadiums. In the sixties, Ken Kesey visits a 
Beatles concert: "John, George, Paul, dips his long electric guitar 
handle in one direction and the whole teeny horde ripples precisely along 
the line of energy he set off - and then in the other direction, 
precisely along that line. Control - it is perfectly obvious - they have 
brought this whole mass of human beings to the point where they are one, 
out of their skulls, one psyche, and they have utter control over them - 
but they don't know what in the hell to do with it, they haven't the 
first idea, and they will lose it. Ghhhhhhwoooooooooowwww, thousands of 
teeny bodies hurtling towards the stage and a fence there and a solid 
line of cops, fighting to hurl the assault back, while the Beatles keep 
moving their chops and switching their hips around sunk like a dumb show 
under the universal scream. And then the girls start fainting, like 
suffocation, and getting tromped on, and they start handing out their 
bodies, cockroach chair debris and the bodies of little teeny freaks 
being shuttled out over the pitched sea like squashed lice picked off the 
beast. The Beatles are the creature's head. The teeny freaks are the 
body. But the head has lost control of the body and the body rebels and 
goes amok and that is what cancer is."

The third body is not an expression of free will, but an acute 
metamorphosis spreading through a sensory space. The audio installation 
and concert hall acoustics see to it that the music fills the entire 
building, rather than merely making itself heard. The same effect is 
aspired to by teenagers when they turn up the volume all the way. The 
third body is implanted through the beat, swing, sound, duende, or vibes, 
and causes motor reactions: stomping, swaying, wavering, bopping, 
wiggling, shaking, jerking, twisting, stripping, rocking or waving. The 
third body dances, it shuns ideological critique. You either get into it 
or you don't; there's no in-between. Denounce the cha-cha or breakdancing 
as the repressive choreographies of actual spasms all you want; it would 
still be an outsider's observation. The concert is a success if it 
realizes the third body, no matter what the quality of the performance or 
the individual pop critic's tastes. In the concert, the human condition 
is indulged in; whether you agree with that condition or not is 
irrelevant, for it exists. Since criticism can't make head or tail of the 
third body, it confines itself to listening, concentrating on musical 
technique, act, and the politico-socio-cultural backgrounds of lyrics and 
band members. Conservative pop criticism is aware of the existence of the 
ecstatic body, for it recognizes its risky aspects that require the 
necessary precautions. In fascism, dancing is equated with sports and the 
third body goes up in smoke. Although the third body can be said to act 
independently of critical consciousness, it does not eliminate it. The 
audience regains its senses at the end of the song, when the clapping of 
hands reestablishes the boundaries between individual and third 
corporality. If the band has lived up to the indefinite expectations 
before the concert, the audience will call for an encore. In this ritual 
afterplay, the audience festively returns its third body to the 
musicians, effectively bringing it to a halt in preparation of its return 
to private reality. The dj's muzak has already begun. The lonely crowd 
disperses, some stick around, the bar is closed. Life goes on.

(Thanks to Klaus Theweleit)
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