Troubadours & Troublemakers: Stirring the Network in Transmission & Anti-Transmission

Abstract

With reference to concepts developed in Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics, our objective is to locate trouble (and “trouble”) in and around song, while attending to media forms, transmission processes, and embodied figures that carry trouble through song. These figures include trouble singer, troubadour and DJ, where the latter combines the roles of media curator, Mixmaster and MC. An exploration of and through these interrelated figures serves to elaborate a theory of transmission and anti-transmission of trouble. In all cases we are concerned with the technology of trouble, as well as modes and techniques for its transmission.

transport [of a message] transforms

—Régis Debray

[I]t is one of the important tasks of poems to short-circuit the transparency that words have for the signified and which is usually considered their advantage for practical uses.

—Rosmarie Waldrop

I am a DJ. I am what I play.

—David Bowie

One

Let’s imagine a modern context in which a DJ figure tracks trouble town to town.1 She seeks a (power) system (of amplification), just as she plays for and through a system of signs and sounds. We don’t have to abandon the idea of a trouble singer2 in order to introduce this figure: Our Mixmaster (aka MC) is the trouble singer in another era, with other tools.3

Furthermore, let’s triangulate the DJ4 and the trouble singer with a third figure: the troubadour. We should have reference, recall and recourse to all three (plus) figures while at once imagining them as non-exclusive.5 We seek a trouble singer who may be DJ and troubadour, while we recognize the usefulness of making connections and distinctions between these figures.

We listen for (and sing) connections between lyrics and music, while acknowledging that song does not absolutely or necessarily distinguish between the two: Sung (and/or rapped) words become music,6 and instruments (be they lyres or synthesizers) speak to us. Over-adherence to formal and technical distinctions brings its own troubles (among them genre trouble, but also a tendency to miss the song while listening to the device), and our objective remains to locate trouble in and around song.

Since we investigate via language, let’s look within language for clues, cues and affinities. We begin with “troubadour” and “trouble,” in order to imagine the trouble singer as a (modern) troubadour. Along the way, we might re-discover a connection (or a mix, to bring the DJ to the party) between singing and making: The trouble singer has a reputation not only as summoner and evoker of trouble, but as troublemaker and troubler.7 Music travels, songs make their rounds, and the troubadour both follows them and leads them from context to context, scene to scene: the troubadour attends.8 This may be to confuse the singer for the song, but language and song are full of such confusions, conflations and slippages.9 They might even be composed of them.10 The songbook of trouble (were there such thing) might itself be a compilation of these confusions.

If Trouble Songs travel in a pre-20th century mode,11 they are carried place to place by individuals and in migrant cultural practices. The trouble singer performs a social function in bringing “trouble” to town, then taking trouble away.12 This economy of trouble follows the lineage of the troubadour, a figure from the High Middle Ages who amplifies love and stirs volatile emotions. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of troubadour via the troublesome (and questionable)13 verb form “from Latin turbāre to disturb, through the sense ‘turn up’” and suggests a comparison with “the form French troubler.” Perhaps, then, we can imagine the troubadour as a carrier of trouble: a troublemaker.14 Less contested etymology suggests the troubadour finds, invents or composes his song.15 That the troubadour is known (and remembered) for love songs puts him on trouble(d) ground, just as the trouble singer seems preoccupied with the vicissitudes of love (as rivaled only by her attention to death—and of course love and death are seldom strangers, not for long and certainly not forever).

The troubadour relates songs of love, and the trouble singer presents a “trouble” lyric to which her audience can relate.16 Trouble and love pass through both songs, and both singers. Both figures are trusted and blamed with (and for) carrying their charge. They are artists, servants and provocateurs—and here let us recall that the provocateur is a troublemaker for hire. She stirs trouble, foments sentiment, disturbs and turns up discourse. The troubadour and trouble singer can certainly dig it, as they perform their services, for whatever coin.

The DJ is also a digger (of crates, beats, tropes17). Whatever she turns up is amplified. Have beats, will travel; have system, will supply power for amplification. Such power calls this version of the trouble singer like a block party DJ to a hackable streetlamp. The moth flies by night and makes a light show of her pursuit. The DJ brings a flock to the light of her mixing board.18 Turns it on—pumps up the volume on her amplifier.

Troubadour, trouble singer and DJ are all seekers of the song that finds us where we live:19 love, trouble, the beat of our hearts (in and out of our accustomed rhythms). All bring their cargo, their information, their music, from elsewhere, and take something from us as they move along.20 We are thankful, skeptical and aroused. In trouble, as in song, we are bereaved, bereft, at a loss, and full of gain. I ain’t seen nothing but trouble/…/And I go to the place where good feeling awaits me/…/Oh, and I go crazy when I can’t find it sings Marvin Gaye in “Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky),” deep in and far above his own troubles, and ours (Gaye 1972).21

Two

As Robert Casillo has it, “[M]etonymy is defined as the substitution of the container for the contained” (Casillo 1985, p. 142). So “trouble” as a linguistic container promises, in the Trouble Song, to dispel trouble. This is not the way language is supposed to work; rather, it’s the way language works. The trouble singer makes slippage work for her.

Three

“[T]he troubadour poem is supplementary, an attempt to overcome absence, difference, and delay” (Casillo 1985, p. 139). Whereas the trouble singer attempts to amplify the absence, difference and delay of trouble with the application of “trouble,” the troubadour seeks to prolong the unconsummated heart-on, presenting poem as fetish for the lady (or object of desire in the troubadour’s song). But if, as Casillo goes on to suggest, the troubadour makes his living22 by forestalling consummation (his own and others’), he has something in common with the trouble singer, who sings trouble away with “trouble.” (Here is the transmission of anti-transmission, where the audience gets exactly what it bargains for.)23 For his part, the troubadour sings love (intercourse) away with “love” (the language of desire in song).

Four

A syllogism, of sorts:

troubadour—song—lady; trouble singer—song—trouble

This is a formal and relational comparison, with song at its fulcrum: all terms are not equivalent. The lady is not trouble, despite what the boys might say. But the object of the troubadour’s song confers with the object of the trouble singer’s song. The troubadour claims to draw the lady closer, while pushing her (tantalizingly) away,24 and the trouble singer calls “trouble” to put trouble at bay.25 To stir up, then forestall, remains a powerful linguistic gesture, in any medium, with any toolset. “Trouble”? What trouble?

Five

Let’s add our third figure to the mix:

troubadour—song—lady; trouble singer—song—trouble; DJ—track—beat

The DJ is one who DJs—as Mixmaster, the one who drops (and turns/tropes) the beat. The mode of transmission remains the song (or track[s]).26 As ever, the song is mix and remix, informed and composed of cultural material. Like our first two figures, the DJ/Mixmaster stirs up and forestalls: finds the hook,27 loops it into her beat, and lets it spin. Here we call to mic the MC, who might ride the beat and let “trouble” flow. We might also consider the breakbeat, for which the Mixmaster finds and loops a drum pattern28 to literally forestall a climax in her track. This may be accomplished via turntables and crossfader or with a digital sampler and sequencer.

Six

“The transmission, or the transport of information in time, is to be distinguished radically from that of communication, or the transport of information in space, even if they combine in reality,” writes Régis Debray, in “What is Mediology?” (Debray 1999, as translated by Martin Irvine). We might consider the transport of information in time as a description of song, and in the case of the Trouble Song, what follows is true: We may radically distinguish this transport of “trouble” from communication of trouble. As for the transport of information in space, whether or not it is distinguished from communication, the trouble singer complicates or even frustrates such transmission, by design. Consider again the floating lyric—that is, tropes borrowed and re-turned (or re-tuned) by the singer. Troubles, troubles, I’ve had them all my days; trouble in mind; trouble on the line; leave your troubles behind; nothing but trouble.29 These tropes turn up here having come from elsewhere, but we’ve heard them before and can’t be sure they crossed a line from there to here. Or we know the lines are crossed, but can’t be sure if these bits of information transmitted here to there or there to here, or if they were and are always here and there, a circuit lit up.30 Debray again: “[T]he origin is what arises at the end.” Process does not necessarily imply procession from a point of origin.31 The song was always here and always there,32 but the trouble singer performs the magic of transport in which “trouble” arrives to take (or keep) trouble away, and we too are transported: to and from trouble, via song. And still: Every Trouble Song sings to (and from) the others. Thus “trouble” is transmitted, and trouble is transmuted.

Seven

“The object of transmission does not preexist the mechanism of its transmission” (Debray once more). We necessarily (and correctly) confuse the figure—: troubadour, trouble singer, DJ—for the message—: love, trouble, beat. Each is associated with a technique and a technology;33 nor can we any longer distinguish the analog from the digital. The DJ’s media were record and turntable, and now include the laptop34—all of which require, as does the DJ, a system of amplification, and an audience to receive the transmission (or anti-transmission, in the case of the Trouble Song).

Eight35

Marvin Gaye sings into the intercom, “Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)” without ever leaving the ground. From his view, he sees nothing but trouble, and spins this trope, his for the song, a floating lyric transmitted to us, hung over the precipice of good feeling and self-destruction. Gaye’s voice, above the strings, vibes and rhythm, carries us where the singer can’t go. Nobody really understands, he sings, sparing us. Gaye announces, in the liner notes for the 1971 album What’s Going On, “[Y]ou shouldn’t have to pay any special attention to the lyric on ‘Flyin’ High In the Friendly Sky’ just because I think you ought to.”36 End transmission.