The Face of Wonky

Having adorned the tops of my two posts on wonky with portraits demonstrating the modernist approaches to form I was reading in the music, it was very interesting to see something pretty similar (above) on the cover of wonky-funk producer Débruit’s new release Let’s Post Funk. Reminiscent of dada and cubism, it could be something Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Hans Richter or Raoul Hausmann would have done if they’d had access to advanced graphics software – though they’d have abstracted the face of a bourgeois gent, and here we have a B-boy in classic streetwear striking a pose. The art and beautifully designed sleeve is by The Rainbowmonkey, who also did the video (click here) for the first track ‘I’m Goin’ Wit’ You’, in which the head on the cover is cut up and exploded into various spinning abstract shapes. Adding a contemporary, nostalgic twist to the modernist theme of finding radical new ways of representing and seeing, the art and the video can become three-dimensional if you happen to have any of those old red-blue glasses handy (incidentally, a pair can be found free in the latest issue of Dazed and Confused, which includes a similarly ‘3D’ but unrelated fashion-shoot feature on Marios Schwab – perhaps it’s in the zeitgeist, but in neither case does it seem overridingly ironic or kitsch.)

Raoul Hausmann’s Der Geist Unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf (The Spirit of Our Age – Mechanical Head), circa 1920. Zeitgeist – the Rainbowmonkey’s semi-abstract B-boy arguably represents the spirit of our own times: an extravagantly stylised hybrid of various pasts and futures, its identity and expression unclear, obfuscated or obscured.
You could argue that it’s simply that the modernist look is in style, as it was in the eighties, or that it’s little more than another example of the ‘doodling’ aesthetic that has been prominent in art and design for at least a decade, but listening to the music that goes with it I feel more and more persuaded that wonky can be read as a neo-modernism or a ‘little modernism’. Sure, as a neo-modernism it’s smaller and more casual than the original project and it’s still perhaps subsumed by the wider macro-aesthetic currents and economies of postmodernism, but most interesting here is the social context of this modernist aesthetic: its home is hip hop and dance rather than orchestral ensembles or the ‘intelligent (dance, etc) music’ non/barely-scene collected by The Wire's readers, and it can’t really be dismissed as the inevitable experimental fringe either. Another thing marking this neo-modernism out is that it’s enabled to a significant extent by the personal computers and software without which the early twentieth-century modernist artists, musicians and architects could only go so far, thus it picks up where they left off. In a stimulating post on ‘wonky’ trends in architecture as they compare with the music, Jeff of the blog There Was Always Doubt makes the crucial observation:

In his book Skyscraper, Eric Howeler writes “the complexity of some recent skyscrapers reflects the increased use of the computer as a design tool. Many of the projects in this chapter would never have been built without computer-aided design and 3D-modelling software”. Although he’s talking about buildings, he might as well be talking about electronic music. Matthew Woebot Ingram points to the rise of softsynths, synthesisers that run completely on a pc or mac and which allow for total micro-control, as a key factor in wonky. By “simplifying the technicalities”, producers are afforded ample room for experimentation, just as architects are freed from the constraints of worrying if their buildings will stand up when powerful software can do that for them.

And as I’d suggested in ‘Loving Wonky’, the gorgeous subtlety of wonky’s precision unquantisation is something only truly possible in musique concrète, and even then can only be truly mastered with software that’s been available in the last decade or two.
Hans Richter’s Dada Head, 1974.
The music of Débruit (Xavier Thomas, from Paris – bout time we heard from them), not just Let’s Post Funk but his excellent previous discs Coupé Décalé and Clé De Bras too, embodies practically every characteristic of wonky I outlined in ‘Loving Wonky’, and often mixes in a glorious helping of the freshest funk besides. Funk’s bouncy, complex and melodic basslines are just so ripe for wonkification, and the bass loop of ‘I’m Goin’ Wit’ You’ has got to be one of the most jaw-dropping bass entities in recent memory, decidedly wacky yet miraculously retaining a delicious groove (you can get a basic idea of it on the video). With Sa-Ra’s Om’Mas Keith’s metrically delayed, lazy-gaited rapping over it, when this bass isn’t throwing us off utterly with mad syncopation (the first note, following a rest, is on the offbeat for gossakes) or resting for a bit with an artfully unquantised swing, it’s transformed itself into an effervescent scale rapidly running up a series of modally unexpected, slow-attack bleeps towards a dazzling chord. It’s like watching an incredible break dancing solo and suddenly seeing the dancer disobey the laws of physics or anatomy in some shockingly flagrant fashion. Like repeatedly turning themselves inside out and spinning at 100mph in mid-air for ten seconds, for example (you begin to notice the relevance of the video’s virtuoso graphical improvisation – synesthesia anyone?)
Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921.
I’m not convinced that ‘post funk’ is the most appropriate name for the music on Let’s Post Funk, if that’s what’s being suggested, as it implies some antithesis to the basic characteristics of the funk that I’m not really detecting in the music (wait, maybe Débruit is actually encouraging us to send funk through the mail, as a riposte to the rising popularity of digital mp3 downloads). Very different to Sly and the Family Stone it undoubtedly is, but it doesn’t ‘move on’ from funk in that ‘post’ kind of way, just as dubstep isn’t ‘post dub’. Something like ‘fonky’ (see what I did there), ‘hyperfunk’ (kind of vague though), ‘wonky-funk’ (as in ‘jazz-funk’) or ‘aquafunk’ (after Rustie) could be wot u might call it, if indeed u had to call it anything.

Yes, Débruit might vaguely remind you of acts like Zapp or Grandmaster Flash, but you’d be a fool to bemoan such weak resonances and dismiss it as ‘retro-necro’ pastiche. Would Zapp have written a bassline like that? Or have integrated the wonky aesthetic of unquantisation so elegantly? Wonky continues to expand our musical sensibilities.

UPDATE 07/08/09: A response to this post came from Edwin at Nothing to Be Done, seeing wonky’s (post)modernism in a different way and drawing an interesting comparison with pixelbleeding. I wrote some reactions in the comment box there. Edwin persuasively argues that wonky isn’t particularly modernist at all. A few days later I found this article by Owen Hatherley, which describes in detail some very similar ‘neo-modernisms’ in architecture under the apparently appropriate name of ‘pseudomodernism’. Both posts have challenged my own thoughts on any hypothetical ‘returns’ to modernism and while I won’t rewrite the above post, I don’t think I’ll be so eager to diagnose and wave around the word ‘modernism’ in the future.