ke: These days there are a lot of amazing r&b productions. I watch a lot of mtv and there are all these r&b artists like Ginuwine, Missy Elliot, tlc and Timbaland Productions. You listen to them and they are all processed, a bit fast, a bit android, The rhythms are very stop-start, they judder, they falter. The register is very trebly... When I was writing my book this had not started yet, so if I'd be writing it now I'd include a huge section on r&b. I'm currently preparing a long piece about Androids in r&b. It's all about the new-style r&b, which has totally changed itself and moved over the border to the posthuman. It's not posthuman in the Underground Resistance/techno sense. It's not militant. It's inside love, it's a softer, warmer machine.
dvw In their video clips they depict themselves as successful citizens, defined by their surrounding objects and architecture. They are defined by the space; architectural surroundings designed especially for the clip.
ke: That's Hype Williams, the director of video clips for Busta Rhymes/Janet Jackson, TLC and Missy Elliot, who also gave them their animatronic cyborg look. He's always using this fisheye lens, so everything always has this anamorphic look, and the aspect I like is that this relates muscular tension to the environment. So when they dance in the video, the whole space dances with them, or when Missy Elliot blows off a kiss the whole image kisses you as well. Everything they do, their whole world does with them. So he has managed to make this total intimate relationship between muscular effect and world. I relate it to this sixties architectural concept of the pneumocosm. Groups like Coop Himmelblau designed all these pneumatic structures, like the inflatable buildings in Woody Allen's Sleeper. In the Pneumatic Cosmos, each gesture you made, no matter how small, would instantly be transmitted throughout the entire environment you are in. Like the sixties dream where your room would be a heartbeat, where your heartbeat would be instantly transmitted into the room you're in, so that your room would have the sensitivity of your heart. A complete collapse of interior and exterior space. When I look at Hype Williams I see that thing as well; the tiniest movement Missy Elliot makes is transmitted throughout the entire space. The closeness and softness of it; the kind of intimate technology you'll also find in William Gibson's work. When I watch r&b I can clearly see the same tendency towards touch, towards liquidity and new forms of computer love. Zapp, Roger Trautman, a big producer from la who just died, is very important in my book because of his tracks More Bounce to the Ounce and Computer Love. These are like r&b before r&b in the early eighties, but they promote this idea of soft love. It's like going back to Burroughs' Soft Machine, but taking the terror away from it and re-interpreting it as this intimate love. That's why I got obsessed with human-robot sex. r&b seems to be preparing us for this. This aspect of r&b fascinates me because it shows a kind of cyborg aspiration that isn't overtly avant-gardist. It's not terrorising or traumatising at all. It's intimate and it's clinging.
dvw: The weird thing is that it's supposed to do something about alienation. It's singing about getting closer, but in doing so it radicalises a lot of alienating principles, which are also liberating.
ke: Steve Beard and I went to a showing of Crash and the novelist Ian Sinclair, who had just written an introduction to Crash, was quoting Ballard. Ballard, who was such a key figure for us, was saying that you always have to access inconceivable alienations - alienations that previous eras didn't even think of - and that you have to go through them. This made a big impression on us all over again. So then we saw Crash, the movie, and it was completely reduced to these extreme sexual encounters in crashes. But after we watched it we couldn't remember anything about it. Crash has this aggressive amnesia quality, this positive quality of forgetting that we were really amazed by. We would relate it to Nietzsche's concept of this active forgetting, where it is useful to forget whole stretches of history in order to move forward. But R&B, too, has this a lot. Sometimes an r&b clip is really memorable and really forgetful at the same time. You think, Oh my God, this is really incredible! and then it falls out of your head. This also has something to do with the fact that it doesn't really access all the familiar points of the classic avant-garde life. They don't have any interest in this whole way of talking.
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