Dominatrix in a mental institution: A MASSEDUCTION Review
“Dominatrix in a mental institution.” This is how Annie Clark popularly known as St. Vincent described the archetype of her fifth studio album MASSEDUCTION. A word coined from the phrase ‘seduction of the masses.’ The seduction, her first foray into popular music which some devoted fans (who are also rock fans and surely possess a distaste for popular music) touted as a cop-out. She’s becoming generic, is the fear. This incursion toward the pop music landscape was met with this guarded dread.
In the pantheon of Western female indie-pop landscape, St. Vincent as opposed to her contemporaries like for instance Lana Del Rey, Mitski, etc. is nothing but the proverbial black dot on a white paper. An artist only mentioned in passing. I’d like to think that it’s because her music is hard to parse through. There’s a deliberate obfuscation, refusal to be pinned down in either genre or her personal life. If Lana and Mitski represent the sad, bleak nihilism of today’s era, St. Vincent refuses to be pinned down into these neat sad girl categories.
Power
When I first listened to MASSEDUCTION, it felt like an assault. Not so much on the ears but to my sensibility. An overwhelming surge of sounds. A heteroglossia about love, power, sex, and death, according to Clark. The album art, a dominatrix clad in pink latex jumpsuit. The model wearing a leopard-print top and pink heels, ass protruding against a backdrop of orange-pink neon.
The dominatrix is an interesting persona to take over. Because, dominatrices albeit having the assumption that it’s an “easy money” is also a performance.
“But I keep you on your best behavior,
But honey, I can’t be your savior” she sings in Savior.
Clark, in departing from what she calls a singer-songwriter “persona” typified by the trademark of real name (e.g Taylor Swift) allows her to fully inhabit a creative space where the genuine and the performance can be blurred. She has been, in previous records, a housewife on pills, near-future cult leader, and now a dominatrix in a mental institution.
I can’t turn off what turns me on, she sings in the title track.
In some press releases leading up to the release of the album, Clark, together with her friend Carrie Brownstein, produced various satire clips that reference cliche interview questions repeatedly asked to Clark over the years.
Intimacy and loneliness
However, despite the obvious power play of this record, cracks, and spills are felt in various junctures of the record. Clark, admittedly, is not a confessional singer-songwriter. There’s a lacerating truth when she says that once her records come out, it’s no longer hers but it’s everyone’s. It takes a lot to disassociate from one’s work, to divorce the personal, once it gets out. However, it’s also freeing for listeners. That Clark’s music can be freely ascribed to one’s personal experiences without having to refer to the author’s experience.
You and me, we’re not meant for this world she sings in Hang On Me, the first track. The void is back and unblinking, sung like a drunk midnight lament over the phone,
A ballad about the city, New York isn’t New York without you love. A falling out with a friend, Happy birthday Johnny, wherever you are.
In an interview, Clark said that this is her most personal album yet. “You can’t fact-check it, but if you want to know about my life, listen to this record,” she says. Steeped in celebrity high such as partying with Taylor Swift and a public spectacle of her relationship with famous model Cara Delevingne, various speculations about the who’s who of the songs emerged.
But what limns MASSEDUCTION, much in the same vein as Melodrama’s house party, is the highs and lows of the artificiality or the unsustainability of performing power. This is apparent in the song Pills. It starts off as this garrulous nursery rhyme as if depicting the start of a mania.
Pills to wake, pills to sleep, pills pills pills everyday of the week
Then shedding its pulsating beats, descending to a Pink Floyd-esque refrain, the high of pill-popping wearing off, and the eventual come down results into a terrifying existential cry.
Come all you children, come out to play, everyone you love will all go away
It seems that making the personal an artifice by virtue of aesthetics and humor presented to the public tends to mitigate the earnestness of the record, a marker that one has already made peace with it.
Futuristic pop
But even with this fame, the deliberate choice to shy away from pop conventions was immediate in singles. These are like Los Ageless and to album tracks like Fear the Future. Many labeled MASSEDUCTION as a futuristic-pop album. It is the kind of people in the ’70s expect music to become in the new millennium. Some even compared it to Kraftwerk. Which was also another way of saying that it’s not futuristic at all.
Mark Fisher has an interesting critique of this kind of music. Here, the employment of the term “futuristic” denotes not a temporal juncture but an already existing set of aesthetics (sound, cover, space-age aesthetic etc).
In tracing this kind of sonic trend, Mark Fisher ascribed to neoliberalism the effect of flattening of the culture. It is where sound merely becomes a pastiche of past eras.
Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar?
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life
St. Vincent’s new record Daddy’s Home continues this trajectory. Moreover, as she ventures, new directions, shape-shifting genres, she assumes a place in the margin. She further obfuscates and unable to be pinned down.
