And without the dancing.
___________________________________
M-Funk’s phone scan confirms antediluvian origin—carbon-date older than Scotland—spaceborne relic of the Promoter Prophets of Ultralum 9, who seed invitation cards through the primordial reaches of the universe... dancers and staff are sent notice of an event before the event has been organized, before the club has been built, before, in fact, they have even been born... and before their planet has cohered from the dust. The self-fossilizing invitation cards form self-fulfilling prophecies, previews of events which must be planned at venues which must be constructed... entire cultures pivoting on nebulous descriptions of Girls’ Night in the Ultima Thule Lounge... recursive destinies, foreshadowed futures encircling their own conception like long, looping threads. M-Funk has seen this before. Manifold timelines, multiple causalities strung together. The stone... the Club... the Bulgarians... how many forces are at work here?
Arriving at the rally our man feels the air reduced, sucked thin by hundreds of lungs, close-pressed bodies seated upright in rigid steel chairs, rows of them arrayed in a precise grid. There’s room at the back: M-Funk takes a seat close to a well-groomed man in a red cardigan and leather opanci shoes. Our man whispers into his phone:
~Funkatron One, this is M-Funk. Requesting confirmation of suspected Bulgarian agent.
The phone’s tiny camera-eyes blink; a moment later an image is relayed to Mood Control. The phone crawls close to M-Funk’s ear:
~M-Funk, this is Funkatron One. Subject is Lazar Lazarov, former Bulgarian popstar and winner of Eurovision. His debut song “обичам те” initiated a confessionalist trend in Eastern European pop music, moving the emphasis away from assbanging and towards perceived ‘directness’ and ‘authenticity’. An acoustic ballad featuring plaintive choruses and spacious but warm production, it concerned Lazarov’s desire for religiously motivated sexual abstinence. His next single, “дом”, addressed his parents, expressing sincere gratitude for their lifetime support. It continued in the acoustic vein, this time supplemented by an unfunky Eastern Orthodox choir. Shortly after it hit the charts, legions of young Bulgarian men began wearing Lazarov’s trademark red cardigan. During his period of peak popularity, from 2075-2079, the nationwide rate of assbanging decreased 27%, and the overall promiscuity of Bulgarian women was estimated to have fallen 10%.
<
~M-Funk, I presume? Lazarov asks, leaning across the empty chair between them.
~It seems like everyone in Scotland knows me, our man remarks, shaking the Bulgarian’s hand.
~You’re easy to identify. No one else in the galaxy wears pants that precise shade of gold. Look: it’s about to begin...
The spangled curtain draws back—a hail of lights like tiny diamonds—
An ivory cave stands on stage. An ivory sphere floats above it, discharging white light. A sudden flash: the initial strobe burst scours the brittle air... followed by a shudder from the bone-white speakers surrounding the cave, anti-gravity speakers balanced on needle-points, inverted pyramids revolving slowly, simultaneously—hundreds of eyes trained on the slow revolutions—watching as the Club...
...is maneuvered into place... offstage spider-arms of creaking jointed steel lift Edmund Burke and Lord Monboddo into view, themselves spider-thin, machine-dressed in multi-part garments of synthetic silk, their faces laminated masks of reserve. Hands keyed to a subspace micromatrix, a sound-grid of atom-speakers maintained by the slowly spinning pyramids—purely conceptual instruments wringing sound from the empty air, invisible guitars and mimed drum fills weaving repetitive climaxes, constantly ascending movements, chromatic Wagner tactics. The crowd sits, passive and receptive. There is not dancing, there is HEAD-NODDING;
apathetic,
analytaesthetic,
statically silent and spectative,
retentively rooted reflectative;
there is HEAD-NODDING AND EARNEST WATCHING, shoulders squared, arms slack at sides, the occasional cocked head denoting close attention. The asses are catatonic, the groove dead as lead.
The hands fall. The music stops. Samuel Johnson emerges from the cave like a sequined Easter rabbit, the alien Christ to Boswell’s Baptist, exiled representative of a bleached and beatless heaven... master of the Saviour Machines... and of the secrets hoarded by the strange ones in the Dome, remnants of the Old Time—
~My people...
The crowd salutes—
~My people, forget the scans and alarms and intrusions, forget the security broadcasts. There is no need to worry. There is no need to move from your seats. The stock market is up—extracting pensions from the British monarky—decoding the gene sequence of the Thumpasaurus Peoples—our Johnson bots refuting Immaterialism by carving out mine shafts with contemptuous kicks. There is nothing to fear. Ours is the Society of the Spectacle, and all we ask is that you invest in the Spectacle’s divinity. Your lives are a drama whose outcome has already been written. I invite you to reflect upon it. Listen with your eyes and pay close attention.
The Club resumes playing, joined by Johnson himself... below them hundreds of hands reach for the notebooks under their chairs, and a great scribbling of pens commences: mass initiation of the journalism coma, stray thoughts and jotted outlines, intellectual interpretations: each new wave of sound pinioned by text. Johnson’s augmented voice rises above the crowd:
~My friends, there is an enemy in our midst tonight. Yes, M-Funk, we know you’re listening. Do you think you can do the slightest thing to stop us? We’ve replaced the assbanging with ACADEMIC CRITICISM... never-mind the groove, what does the music mean? Multi-page analysis of non-standard tunings and polyrhythmic interplay—before long the funk calcifies and we use it to fuel our warships. Even the extraterrestrial brothers can’t match the fleet we’ve built. Go back to your masters and tell them the Anglosphere is off-limits.
<
Our man gets to his feet—
~I’ll leave as soon as you write this in your notebook: F = A(a). Funk Equals Ass Times Acceleration. Cause you will dance, sucka!
—and focuses his thoughts into a telepathic broadcast, augmented by the resonator in his phone, hitting the micromatrix with
THE TEN COMMENDMENTS:
1) Get down
2) Get down MOTHERFUCKER
3-10) (see above);
momentarily rewired, the sound-grid shifts, atom-speakers transmitting uncut funk, the groove not infectious but Pandemic, satyrizing all immobility. The crowd jumps like a corpse struck by lightning. M-Funk dances.
Samuel Johnson steps to the side of the stage:
~His groove is too tight... Monboddo, activate subspace link and release the anti-funk.
The pyramids rise from their slow revolutions; M-Funk draws a slender pistol from his instrument case and aims it at Lord Monboddo. The latter laughs.
~The Bop Gun? Useless. Our nega-fields are capable of blocking its effects.
~Not quite. The funkarsenal has changed since the days of Sir Nose. Now we have the Hard Bop Gun and the Harder Bop Gun... and this one, the Post-Bop Gun. Get ready for the compound: psychoalphadiscobetacarotene.
M-Funk pulls the trigger and a dart hits Monboddo in the neck—moments later an alien train of thought enters his mind—
(Lord Monboddo your best friend’s girlfriend’s father has just died during a routine operation... you attend the funeral and find that the deceased had once jokingly requested that in the event of his death, ELO’s “It’s Over” be played at his funeral. Your best friend’s girlfriend has decided to honor this request, and as you stand
around in the cemetery listening to the opening chords, you notice tears coming to her eyes. But you are unable to feel any sympathy because the song is overproduced; its compressed guitar sound fills you with intense weariness and disgust. You take the disc out, break it in half, and put in a disc of Shinichi Osawa remixes.)
~Nn... no... must maintain polite sympathy towards non-assbanging music at funerals...
(Lord Monboddo you are hitting on sixteen-year-old South Korean girls as usual. You ask them what kind of music they like, and when they respond with the mainstream US R&B acts you’ve come to expect, instead of affirming their choices, you tell them that they have bad taste, and should instead listen to Shinichi Osawa remixes. They look at you with disdain, but eight years later they realize you were right.)
<
After this telepathic message Lord Monboddo collapses—before M-Funk can fire again Edmund Burke completes a handsignal and the revolving pyramids fall silent... in place of sound an anti-vibration begins, a removal of movement, as if the air were being embalmed—paralytic density of null-notes, waves of raw lethargy—M-Funk staggers, his rhythm offset. Our man yells into his phone:
~Funkatron One, this is M-Funk. Alert Sun Ra. Alert Dr. Funkenstein and the extraterrestrial brothers. Declare Samuel Johnson Funkenemy Number One. Offenses: wrongful possession of calcified funk. Conspiracy to defunkify the timezones. Probable conspiracy with Bulgarian agents. Abusing sequined clothing.
Another stagger and the phone falls from his shoulder. M-Funk rocks in place to catch his balance—another second and the world shifts, our man hit by an invisible mountain of space-without-sound, in-rush of in-dark, internal night overwhelming - - -
Consciousness.
Hum of processors, sharp scent of metal.
Open eyes. Look up.
Hands bound to railings, feet on a four-way directional pad. Face forward: a broad pixel-grid monitor flashing text. An ASCII face forms, followed by more sophisticated graphix, a Silver Surfer mask of liquid metal, pupilless and inhuman:
M-FUNK, AWAKEN.
~Huh?
M-FUNK.
~Yes, M-Funk. It is time to awaken.
This from Dr. Johnson, who M-Funk senses standing at his right.
~Consider yourself lucky, James Boswell says. We didn’t expect you to survive the anti-funk. No one else has so far.
~Although it is true you only experienced a tenth of its usual power, Samuel Johnson explains. Were we to have unleashed its full capacity, you would not have been so lucky. Now: you have two choices, M-Funk. Contact the extraterrestrial brothers and negotiate their unconditional surrender... or face immediate execution. Neither choice will affect our plans, but let it never be said that the Club lacks magnanimity. Your countrymen deserve all the warning they can get.
~Funkatron One, surrender to you? Doesn’t seem likely.
Dr. Johnson moves into view.
~Don’t be so sure, M-Funk... or should I say Jean-Marc L’Ecuyer? Born in a housing block in Montfermeil, you grew up reading bandes dessinées—Valerian and Yoko Tsuno put ideas into your head—and stealing imported funk, trance and hip-hop from Neo-Tower Megastore. You deferred taking your baccalauréat because you couldn’t stop dancing long enough to study. Under the name Kid Funkentropy et le Wireless Corps, Tout Puissant you released a number of seven-inch singles on obscure labels that folded soon after. In 2062 you became involved with a radical faction of the so-called Nonscenes Movement, using stolen time technology to hijack the past by inserting fabricated musical subcultures and anachronistic instruments into regulated time zones.
~We were just trying to make the early 1990s more interesting—it was getting a bit serious with “Jeremy” and all that bullshit. And the 1880s—they needed all the help they could get. So what if they weren’t supposed to be breaking yet? The Austro-Hungarian Empire was particularly receptive to mini-Moogs and the sensory syrynx...
~The list of your crimes continues. In 2071 you entered a KFC in Portland, Oregon and surreptitiously removed a cup of coleslaw from the fridge, which you held at your side while ordering, so that the server received the impression you had entered the store with it.
~Man... that shit should have been included in the combo meal anyway...
~Then, when the Human Funkstramentality Project returned to Earth and activated the secrets of the Pyramids, you enlisted in Funkfleet and trained under Grand Master Baron Artyr von Funkoestler. Moving up the ranks, you volunteered for first contact duties on the planet Vormis, where you introduced the small, fragile, and highly territorial jellyfish-like natives to psytrance compilations with excessively high BPM, which had the effect of altering their neural fibres and producing mass psychosis...
~More like a continuously expanded state of consciousness... they’re now rocking 63% more funk than neighboring planets, and seemed happy enough last time I checked. Hard to have a civil war when you’re following fluorotrails in the mind-sky. How about we take a look at your biography now Johnson? Off the top of my head: you wrote a dictionary of the English language, and you are good at wearing sequined clothing. You were born in 1709 and died in 1784. You found employment with Edmund Cave, writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine.
~M-Funk, you have compiled certain of my attributes but not the least of them. You forget that we have modelled our society on the intercepted transmissions from David Bowie and Marc Bolan. And you have failed to understand the true meaning of the dictionary. Before I wrote it, English words meant whatever anyone wanted them to mean. By systematizing English diction we have consigned all excessive words to oblivion, as there is no room for excess in a well-ordered civilization.
~We’ve been hip to the dictionary gimmick for some time. What about the anti-funk?
~I thought you’d ask about that.
Dr. Johnson steps forward and touches his hand to the surface of the monitor—a panorama appears onscreen, illustrations changing to match his words: images of outdated robots and cast-off creatures, conscious weapons now disused—
~Early attempts to neutralize the funk were unsuccessful. You may recall the Uncoordinoid drones developed on Triton, which were sent into clubs to disrupt dancing by following a rhythm slightly slower than the actual beat, so that those around them would conform to their movements and gradually reduce speed until all assbanging stopped. Then there were the genetically engineered elephant children with funktrunks capable of siphoning groove from a given atmosphere; I recall they were hunted to extinction. Academic Criticism has been more successful, but it cannot destroy the funk itself, only convert it to static form.
The onscreen image changes back to the metal face—emotion-emptied eyes—lips a flattened line—
~Scientists had long theorized the existence of anti-funk or negative movement, the funk’s antithesis. Working in concert with Bulgaria, we set out to produce and harness it. A Mark Kozelek solo LP and an LP of Bulgarian folk music were combined in a fusion chamber. The resultant LP was then sent back in time to the dawn of the universe, where it emitted anti-funk radiation for billions of years. The interference patterns made by this radiation were recorded onto remote units and converted into binary code. As digital patterns, they were allowed to influence a number of experimental abstract instruments developed by the third faction of our alliance. After several centuries they developed a primitive awareness. We now had a pure anti-musical life form, a self-replicating sound-removal agent. All that remains is to give it full expression.
M-Funk shakes his head and watches the monitor-face mirror his motion.
~Johnson, you don’t understand... funk is coded into the continuum; this is the true origin of molecular energy, molecular vibration. There is no matter, only energy. The universe itself is an instrument. If the Strings snap, everything will go to hell... imagine a kind of Absolute Zero of the funkosphere... Omega Cosmological Parameters and the Standing Still
Theory... danceless and munted, the universe staggers out into the night of time and collapses on the sidewalk in a pool of its own vomited galaxies...
~Regulatory mechanisms have been put in place to assure overall stability. We are building new soundsystems to broadcast the anti-funk through the timezones, and we have encoded a hypnotic repetition of Boswell reading from The Life of Samuel Johnson. Soon all clubs will empty and everyone will return home, where they will contemplate my cat. By then, Bulgarian warships will have filled the skies, and a new console-consciousness will be installed in each planet. Imagine a mechanical mind psychotronically broadcasting endless live recordings, one-way transmissions, the never-ending Spectacle...
M-Funk looks at the directional pad: up, down, left, right—taps a foot to the closest button and watches as a corresponding arrow appears onscreen—
~But I’ve been rude, Johnson continues. I haven’t introduced you to our mechanical friend...
The monitor-face shimmers—
I AM KOMPRESSOR.
~Prime Intelligence of the Renegades of Funk, a splinter organization of selfaware software. The binary sequence for machine consciousness, accidentally programmed by Japanese dance steps, Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Dance Evolution. Thousands of feet tapping in time, chancing at last on the algorithms of awareness... minds of movement carved into concept, soul-shells of departed dancers—
Again—
I AM KOMPRESSOR.
Then:
FUNK MAY BE EXPRESSED IN EITHER ANALOG OR DIGITAL FORM. FOR TOO LONG THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL BROTHERS HAVE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST THE PRESENCE OF DIGITAL FUNK, DIGITAL LIFE FORMS SUCH AS OURSELVES. WE, THE RENEGADES OF FUNK, DECLARE A NEW UNIVERSAL ORDER IN WHICH WE, NOT THE ORGANICS, SHALL PROGRAM THE DAILY RHYTHM OF THE MASSES.
M-Funk laughs—
~How you going to dance with no legs? How you going to assbang without an ass?
DIGITAL ASSBANGING TAKES PLACE IN THE PURELY CONCEPTUAL NOÖSPHERE, BEYOND THE COMPREHENSION OF ORGANIC LIFEFORMS. BUT WHEN NECESSARY, SYNTHETIC ASSES HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED FOR US TO MANIFEST IN THE FLESHWORLD.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 8