get on with the…real?\/\/une danse intentionnelle
hi friends,
So, now a close reading of Rush’s ‘Limelight’…which I acknowledge is totally inappropriate for a prog-rock song, because that’s exactly what those nerds wanted when they wrote it, but here goes…
(oh, by the way, JUDITH BUTLER!!)
From The Daily Clog
The theory that will go into this is comes from Butler’s amazing books Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender. Her language can be difficult, but I swear it’s worth every second you spend staring at it. If you know anyone who’s transgendered or intersex or anything between the supposed norms of masculinity and femininity (which is really all of us, except Chicken Flava, who’s basically He-Man in slimming clothes).
Necessary theory-type background: Butler is a Frankfurt School-style philosopher (which means she’s got things in common with Adorno and them), which partly means that she’s interested in using Philosophy to think critically about culture. She’s also very French philosophy related. She’s not so Marxist as most of the rest of the Frankfurt club, but there’s a little of that (again BIG difference between Marxist philosopher and the Communism of the USSR or China – these people were shocked by what they saw as failures into totalitarianism in both of those governments…so don’t go all Red Scare on me people…)
aaaaaaaaah!!! GIANT OCOPUS - and it's got a Stalin Tattoo!
Butler’s ‘big thing’ is about gender. But gender in this case is not whether you have a dong or a vajj, it’s about how ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ you are. It’s easier to think of it in the context of butch and femme lesbians or gay men for me, since that takes it away from the focus on genitals (though to be honest, my focus is never THAT far away from SOMEONE’S genitals)…
Butler’s is developing the idea that this gender business is almost entirely socially constructed, meaning that it’s a performance, something really subconscious, but still deliberate. The performance is enforced by social norms, things that we seen other’s doing and saying that convince us that we must do that as well, or risk being outcasts. This is a little oversimplified; it all runs into sexuality, too, and then there’s the question of biological sex, and sex change operations and all that…but that’s for another time…
Anyway, Rush, a close reading, totally inappropriate, nerds getting what they want, damn, whatever, etc.
1 – Living in the limelight
2- The universal dream
3- For those who wish to seem
4- Those who wish to be
5- Must put aside the alienation
6- get on with the fascination
7- the real relation
8- the underlying theme
-Rush, Limelight (i inserted the numbers for reference purposes)
– Lines 1-4.The ‘limelight’ is like the social gaze, the peer pressure that we all feel, from ‘people’, or ‘everybody’. ‘Dream’ and ‘seem’ are OBVIOUSLY references to Butler’s concept of gender being a result of deliberate performance. ‘Dream’ and ‘seem’ both refer to images that we either have in our minds or throw up for other people to see, they don’t refer to Reality, but to fictions. The last line, with ‘be’ in it, speaks to the fact that we convince ourselves that this image we paste up is our ‘Real’ self…
“Must put aside the alienation”
–Line 5: is OBVIOUSLY about how we face being thrown out of regular society if we refuse to put up the facade. If you’re a dude, and you like to press flowers while wearing a baby-blue tutu and a lyotard, you don’t tell people about it. As the Phenominal Eddie Izzard (look at 3min, right before the end) once said, “When I was in school, I didn’t tell the other kids that I was a transvestite. Because I thought they might kill me with sticks, yeah?”
“Get on with the fascination / the real relation / The underlying theme”
–Lines 6-8: The first of these lines is like an order, the order that we get from society to ‘ “Get on” with our performance for them, start doing the normal gender for us, or we’ll get freaked out and kill you with sticks!’ (A not all too far fetched threat). The line that follows back up the order, stating that the image is real (not a false image, as Butler’s writing claims). Lines 5-7 can be read as a quoted order, the peer pressure bully from the anti-pot commecials in the 80′s that pushes the good little normal kid up against the locker and calls him a chicken (but he’s a turky, you remember? Oh Turtles, so sad, that kid would have gotten his ass kicked by that giant middleschooler).
www.nataliedee.com awesome comics
Line 8 is special, “The underlying theme” is, like TOTALLY a DIRECT reference to the massive importance Judith Butler places on this performance and the demand that we do it. So much so that the ‘theme’ of a performed gender is so important to the functioning of the status quo that it ‘underlies’ almost the whole of our social relations.
There you go Rush, I’ve made your song relevant. Send me my check asap, Geddy.
love,
G.A.
This is very good, Mr. N., but I would really appreciate a gendered reading of The Trees. Get on it.
Silly sir, every reading is a gendered reading! I mean, as long as the reader has a gender.
Seriously, who could NOT want that Stalin-head tattoo that the octopus has on its back…I’m going to shave my head and get that tattoo on the back of it.
Paul the octopus is absolutely the most authentic psychic ..!