Black Tongue. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 2003. Interscope.

 Implicit in the recent social slogan “The Future Is Female,” comes this note of prohibitive resignation, “Because there’s no room for her in the present.” Rock and roll fucks with that specious presumption by addressing the present in as nakedly raucous a voice as allowed by current recording standards. Living now, we’re privileged to witness the public emergence of a collective voice restructuring the female image across the media board. Questioning the accuracies at the heart of this narrative as it takes shape and reshapes itself along its evolutionary trajectory actively invigorates the project of social female empowerment. The vocalist Karen O’s performance on Black Tongue is so dynamic a discursive critique of this shift in attitudes that it cunningly both blurs and refines gender distinctions but, given its place in rock and roll history, that’s not so unusual. Black Tongue is about a form of aggression that draws attention to itself in most relationships; a taste for violence, for subjecting the routine of physical intimacy to a danger both consenting partners dare to introduce into their sex lives. Pop audiences love to hear this appetite for force sung by females, who are otherwise so orderly and efficient about their daily conduct that we’ve come to associate it with nurture itself. When, for the sake of erotic expression, a woman strips herself of the organizational principles that are at the core of her essence, it’s as sexy as when, in the erotic moment, a man armors himself with those very principles and begins to dictate them to his beastly, warrior persona. Rock and roll once commercialized this ritual trade of gender norms between the sexes, and, in its absence, we’ve elevated that ritual into the social sphere with mixed results. Have we found a music that is influenced by gender plurality? I’m not sure we have, and I can’t even know yet if, once we have, whether it will belong to the rock tradition at all. It’s possible it may have more to do with pre- or post-western cultures that are currently on their way to us from the globe’s remotest regions. If such regions even exist. Black Tongue functions as a remarkable bridge between centuries when certainties about fixed identity begin to fade under pressure of the human insistence to live according to our interior maps, the fantasies of our individual ambitions, as well as our carnal instincts. We lose ourselves in Black Tongue’s rhythmic clamor, and in this pentecostal abandonment of personality we come to resemble one another, acquiring the shared appearance of the unfocused crowd, the mass of Brownian movement caught up in dance or play or orgiastic surrender. The remaining question is how will the self-appointed guardians of technology and the market that sustain it commercialize this shared madness for sale back to its practitioners? And, in that commercialization, how much of its originality and passion will be diffused. The Void Is Now.

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