Strangers, Binaries and Metamorphoses
Oct 22, 2023
I’ve been spending a lot of time in clubs, standing in crowds of people. If you’ve read any of my previous writings, you know the reason why. I won’t repeat myself. I’m one of those weird introverts who, rather than making conversation with new people, instead stands around philosophizing about the meaning of conversation. In the same way, when surrounded by strangers, the sort of people who seek the flood of flashing red lights that steal away the natural color of all things as a background for their own self-expression, I become very curious about them. A crowd can be a single object, especially when looking at it from a distance, but when inside of it, all I see is the handful of people standing in front of me and beside me. The bigger the crowd, the less fluid it is, and the less likely individual members are to come and go. We all become locked together. I spend an hour standing behind a stranger. Tapestries of hair, done up in mini-ponytails that are all cascading on top of each other. Short bangs and massive glasses. High-waist skin-tight pants with an infinitely repeating logo on it, that you could almost imagine as a scrolling background for a video game. Windbreaker-like jackets that are too short, revealing flesh or just tucked in t-shirts. In the darkness ahead of us, behind the stage that everyone is ultimately trying to direct their gaze at, a photographer appears, crouching in a corner, getting the perfect shot. She’s wearing an oversized black-and-white striped shirt and jeans. She’s there for only a moment, before receding back into the darkness she came from. Time passes. Someone is pushing me to the side, piercing through the densely packed bodies of this crowd. It’s the photographer. She takes another photo. Then she just stands there, staring at the man on the stage, his hair parted, his two hands twirling knobs, activating and deactivating feedback-delays and VCFs. He is surrounded by a jungle of wires. When his set ends, I find myself somewhere else, at a balcony, staring down at the crowd I was a part of moments earlier. Someone bumps into me. It’s the photographer. Now she’s here, fiddling with the zoom on her camera, taking shot after shot. I step backwards. There are sofas behind us. I sit down. Now that there’s some distance between me and the photographer, I notice that her shirt says Terminal69 on it — the name of Xiaoxi’s friend Liujiu’s store. It’s the uniform everyone who works there wears. I’ve been there before, many times. I’ve seen the staff there. Maybe I’ve even seen this photographer before, somewhere else, in another context.
Every time I go to these sorts of performances, I leave a little disappointed. I’ve concluded that I don’t like most “experimental” music at anything beyond an intellectual level. I have a reason for this, though it might sound dumb if I try put it into words. Essentially I conceptualize music as existing on a spectrum between Yin and Yang, the Yin and Yang of Daoism or Taichi. I use these two words in English because I’ve gotten used to Chinese arbitrarily using them whenever there’s some binary involved. Other than Yin having the connotation of cold shadows and Yang indicating warm sunlight, I’m not at all trying to invoke their philosophical meaning. The mainstream is overwhelmingly Yang. While popular songs might be sad, there’s ultimately some human feeling in them, some desire to connect with others. This may be completely manufactured, but the facade of that human feeling is there. That’s what I’m referring to by Yang. It’s only natural that the underground and the experimental would revel in Yin — cold, inhuman, machinelike — a sound that doesn’t care about your feelings, that isn’t trying to relate to you, and could care even less if you relate to it. This is where we go to think thoughts that “normal people” could never think (or at least that we delude ourselves into believing they never would). Since so much of the experimental is electronic, and since electronics are not naturally human — they have to be made human — it makes sense that so much of it would gravitate to noise. One can sacrifice their body to this “unnatural nature” and feel something new — a feeling that is neither pain nor pleasure. It’s tempting to liken this feeling to a becoming — a transformation into machine. I’ve spent many hours listening to this kind of music, contemplating this “Yin” that I’m referring to. After further consideration though, I ultimately find the Yang more interesting. When experimental music, new machines, new ideas can be redirected and reshaped into something more human — even if it’s a distant kind of humanity, like the sentimental yearnings hidden behind a vocoder — this is always exciting to me, and makes me want to do my own creating, my own exploring, my own understanding. Perhaps it’s harder though, so I don’t come across it as much.
New technology and new purchases have changed me in ways I'm not quite comfortable with (what would my life be like if I'd never bought an iPhone?), and I'm never quite certain what repeatedly doing the same activities over and over -- like writing this blog, forcing myself to write sequences of words that I can send out to an audience of strangers -- does to me. How much has the world changed due to word processors having an instantly accessible word count, always telling you exactly how much (or how little) you’ve written?
It's embarrassing to admit, but I was an extravert until I read Murakami's Norwegian Wood. The protagonist is introverted-weirdo who feels some flavor of disdain to the world around him, but hangs out with a bunch of girls. I wanted to hang out with girls. Up until then, I only seemed to attract the kind of wannabe alpha-male in need of a sidekick. In comparison to the world described in Norwegian Wood, I felt like I was living the life of an idiot. So I stopped talking to people, I stopped making dumb jokes, and I read all the books Murakami referenced, and as many of the works of American literature he'd translated into Japanese as I could. (I have a lot more to say about this, but that American literature -- the literature of my own country -- felt more foreign to me than, say, Tanizaki or any of the other Japanese literature I'd read up until then.)
I don’t really go into anything expecting it to change me. When I consciously pursue certain changes to my lifestyle, I do it thinking those changes will be positive. Sometimes they turn out negative. Years later, I’m an extravert turned introvert trying to become extraverted again, or at least to get over the social anxiety I’ve developed over the past decade.