club 367

Music: Namlook: Music for Urban Meditation (2004)

Every time I teach "Rhetoric and Popular Music" (CMS 367), the class before Thanksgiving is reserved for a very special lecture. The reading for the class that day is an ethnography of "clubbing as ritual performance," and this is nested in a unit on music and space framed by Henri Lefebvre's work. Some of you may recall that Lefebvre's monumental study The Production of Space makes a handy (if not at times confusing) distinction between "representations of space" and "spaces of representation." A representation of space is an idealization of space that is a materialization of hegemony (e.g., a classroom building looking and feeling like a prison), while a space of representation is a space in which "real life" occurs, sometimes in conformity with a representation of space, sometimes not (e.g., pot smoking circles at a Dave Matthews show).

So, what happens on "clubbing" day is that I bring in my DJ lights and set them up before class. I lecture on Lefebvre and we discuss the club as space in which music helps to create a consumptive atmosphere. I then discuss how music can help transform spaces into different kinds of places, like the classroom, for example. I launch into a lecture on the "history of the beat," in which I discuss dance music as a surrender to the music---fundamentally, a masochistic form of enjoyment. I tell them to notice how in dance music, one is often commanded to "move that body" or to "give it up." As I'm talking, one of the rockin' TAs slowly builds the volume of music playing in the background. I start stressing how the students secretly desire to give into the beat. Then the lights go out and the DJ lights start flashing. I mash the fog button and the auditorium fills with fog and colored light beams. The students are astonished; their jaws drop. They laugh nervously. No one dances except me and the TAs. Then, I tell the class there is a sign up sheet for a freebie quiz grade, but they must show me their best dance move first.

Now, the best possible scenario for Club 367 is that students think "what the hell?" and get down and have a good time. That never happens, I suspect, in part, because of the powerful ideology of the auditorium, not to mention the fear of leaving their laptops. What happens is a core group of 20-30 students (out of 130) decide to get into it. Here's a photo gallery of those die-hard students.

It's such a blast, though, to turn an auditorium into something that was never intended. If you decide to do this, however, I recommend contacting the fire safety people and telling them what you're up to. They can turn off the fire alarms. There is a problem if you don't do this, as I learned the last time I taught this course.