4th of August, 2020
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com I was reviewing Get Up, I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine, the single by James Brown. Something about this piece in particular prompted stilton to contact me and ask me about Roland Barthes and Peter Szendy, to ask if I had read them. At the time I had not. I have still not ready any Szendy (as of the date of this reupload, 11/01/21), but Mythologies has become an instant favourite of mine.
The Brown accessible to lonely, socially stunted zoomers is a mythical myroblyte saint. His Odour of Sanctity, his funk, has long ago been transformed into future funk: the remains of Japan's ultra-commodified appropriation of black American music revived by weeaboos with the necromancy of digital compression.
A sex machine is a hideous contraption. It seems like a contradiction in terms: something sweaty and ancient and ritualistic automated by heavy industry. The machine itself isn't an agent, it's a tool to be (mis)used by humans who wish to take the physical motion of a sexual organ and consider it apart from bodily writhing that drives it—simply a back and forth motion. In the most extreme case one doesn't lie against the machine, at least not its prime mover. That is elsewhere in the room—a detached motor which remotely drives the moving parts. The industrialisation of sex is what is accomplished: the machine itself is existence relegated to a tool and the motor becomes an abstract labourer whose toil drives a spatially foreign process it isn't privy to. Sex ought to be fundamentally at odds with alienation, but here Brown feels like being this machine. "Get up," he demands. I think he's demanding it of us, to get up and dance, but it feels so much more wrong than that. Like he's demanding it to some comatose partner of his. He isn't demanding sex from them, he's explicitly expressing his desire to be of service. Get up, I want to feel like a tool. What I want is nothing less than the vanishing of my agency and personhood. Since this is from 1970, before the prevalence of gig work, the labour at least "stays on the scene", but it is only the grounding of a tangible location that unites the detached and abstract internal mechanisms. The sex has become clandestine.