The talk I propose builds on James Rovira’s work on Romanticism in rock music, and on Orrin C. Wang’s critical methodology of “techno-magism,” to read selected texts, creative practices, and media representations of William Blake and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (“LEL”) in relation to those of the US rock band Heart (1971-). Heart’s songwriting shows both Blakean and Landonesque aesthetics, including the former’s Miltonic Satanism and the latter’s ironic, feminist-inflected romanticism, which I theorize as aesthetics of the “delineation of desire,” to misquote Blake. And misquoting’s material to my argument: both the self-referentiality and intensive intertextuality of Blake and LEL resonate throughout Heart’s productions and performances. Initially dismissed as “Lady Zeppelin” (Wilson & Wilson 2012), inducted to Rock’s Hall of Fame in 2012, and now touring, Heart has enjoyed a remarkably long-lived rock career, partly owing, I suggest, to their unique relationship to and inventive management of their intellectual property. Such careful management the band shares with Blake in his period; and if in this Heart contrasts with LEL, then the common fame of these innovative women creatives in the “man’s world” (Brown) of modern cultural industries is common pain and shame we also know—and so must critique—all too well.
The talk’s title quotes “Heartless” from Magazine (1978)
Brown, James. “It’s a man’s man’s man’s world.” It’s a New Day–So Let a Man Come In (UMG, 1970) Grossberg, “Re-placing popular culture” in The Clubcultures Reader, ed. Steve Redhead Heart, Dreamboat Annie (1975); Little Queen (1976); Heart (1985); Fanatic (2012); Beautiful Broken (2016) LEL, Selected Works, ed McGann et al.
is a listening exercise developed as part of my broader, ongoing project to promote critical copyright literacy. The public debate about intellectual property (IP) is dominated by publishing lobbyists’ disinformation (see Nair, Geist) and high-profile pop music legal actions that impact music production and chill expressive freedoms by polarizing the debate into Team Metallica (copyright maximalism in producers’ favour; see Marshall, McIntosh) versus Team Sheeran (copyright balance between consumers and producers; see Katersky et al, McLaren). Yet, as my research shows, the cultural industries’ major corporate producers, including publishers and record labels, exploit the same users’ rights that publishing lobbyists oppose.
This exercise plays short excerpts from Heart’s “Little Queen” (1977) and ABBA’s “Super Trouper” (1980). How does ABBA recognize Heart’s contribution to the latter song? Comparing these songs—in terms of form and subject; copyright status (songwriting credits, fair use of other works); the artists’ oeuvres; and the historical song-writing and genre traditions these works adapt (Ross)—prompts a theorization of their relationship as “refrain”: both echo and eschewal. In today’s hyper-litigious and artistically stifled cultural economy of “digital prohibition” (Guertin, Shields), what might be the “aneconomic” value of not taking legal action? How may culture-making practices of refrain deepen expressive freedoms, towards more sustainable futures for art?
Heart performing “Little Queen” (1977)
ABBA, “Super Trouper” video (1980)
Thanks to ACCUTE for accepting this talk for its conference proceedings this year at Congress, and to the ABC Copyright consortium for accepting a version of this talk for its conference this year too. And I’m grateful that Heart is touring this year, and so looking forward to their Toronto show.
Works Cited
ABBA. “Super Trouper.” Super Trouper. Union Songs AB / Polar Music / Atlantic, 1980.
Downes, Daniel. “Transproperty: Intellectual Property and the Ideal Property Form.” New Fronts in the Copyfight: Multidisciplinary Directions in Critical Copyright Studies, spec. issue of Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, vol. 6, no. 4, 2015-16, https://www.digitalstudies.org/issue/712/info/
Today the journal Red Futures publishes its special issue The Expanse Expanded, edited by Jamie Woodcock; this volume includes SFF writer Heather Clitheroe and my co-written article “‘We should have brought a poetry grad student’: on higher education and organised labour in The Expanse.” At the link you can buy a print copy or get an Open Access pdf copy.
You can find our other writings about The Expanse, all in Open Access editions, at these links:
Clitheroe, Heather and Mark A. McCutcheon. Review of The Expanse Season 6. Foundation, vol. 51, no. 3 (no. 143), 2022, pp. 128-30.
“Queer research is about saving queer lives,” Sarah wrote in 2012, in a debate amongst AU faculty and students over what “safety” means, and for whom, in open learning spaces. “The thrust of my research is that the exclusion of certain queer bodies from public spaces (like this one) is 1) linked to an extraordinary amount of violence that those same queers experience on a daily basis and 2) decided on the basis of how class, racial, gendered and other sexual-social statuses mark some bodies and images as particularly disruptive in relation to heteronormative standards.”
Thanks to AU’s unions for posting and supporting this word for Sarah Mann.
Heartlines Spec is a newly launched speculative writing journal; I’m humbled to join the voices building this vital journal, and so grateful for the friendships that inspire my nonfiction piece in it: “Andromeda (disambiguation).”
Leviathan Jams mixes music used in James S.A.Corey’s #TheExpanse and Dionne Brand’s Inventory; field-tests a countermeasure against copyright bot overreach; and exercises #fairdealing in #openaccess research. The track list and abstract follow below.
Track List
00:00 The Carpenters, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” (A&M, 1977; cover of Klaatu’s 1976 record)
* 00:03 Deep Purple, “Highway Star” (Purple, 1972)
00:04 CC radio static sample
00:05 Rush, “Cygnus X1 Book I: The Voyage” (Anthem, 1977)
00:11 CC radio dial tuning sample
00:12 sample of dialogue from “Flu Season,” Season 3 Episode 2 of Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2011) by Tom Haverford (perf. Aziz Ansari)
* 00:18 sample of dialogue from “Intransigence,” Season 3 Episode 9 of The Expanse (SyFy, 2015) by Drummer (perf. Cara Gee)
00:19 sample of The Beatles, “Revolution 9” (Apple, 1968)
00:21 Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” (1971)
00:29 Deadmau5, “Do It Again” (2006; samples Sneaker Pimps, “Spin Spin Sugar [Armand’s Dark Garage mix]” [Clean Up/Virgin, 1996])
* 00:37 [Cheb] Khaled, “Didi” (Barclay, 1992)
01:10 CT Burners and Jubilee, “Kick It (The Squire of Gothos remix)” (Nightshifters, 2009)
04:46 Crisp Biscuit, “Wink1” (no label, 2002; remix of Josh Wink’s “Higher state of consciousness” [Strictly Rhythm, 1995] sampling Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” [Pride, 1973])
* 08:29 Gatekeeper, “Tense Past” (Punch Drunk, 2007; used in “Rock Bottom,” Season 1 Episode 6 of The Expanse [SyFy, 2015])
08:41 Lou Reed, “Romeo Had Juliette” (Sire, 1989)
08:45 Fader Gladiator, “Battle of the Planets” (Kickin, 1997; samples John Williams’ “Imperial March” [RSO, 1980])
09:12 The Beatles, “Revolution 1” (Apple, 1968)
* 09:30 Tigerstyle feat. Kaur-B, “Zulfaan De Naag (Monstaboy remix)” (AK Music, 2013; used in “Remember the Cant,” Season 1 Episode 3 of The Expanse [SyFy, 2015])
13:19 CC radio static sample * 13:19 sample of dialogue from “Pyre,” Season 2 Episode 8 of The Expanse (SyFy, 2017) by Anderson Daws (perf. Richard Harris)
About “Leviathan Jams”
You can seldom criticize [intellectual property] law by breaking it and yet expect the law to forgive your infraction as criticism. (Saint-Amour 19)
My ACCUTE soundtable contribution is a music mix, “Leviathan Jams,” designed to field-test a particular DJ mixing technique—the sustained synchronization of two to four tracks—in social media platforms surveilled by automated copyright enforcement mechanisms (copyright bots). This mix field-tests the hypothesis that a sufficiently complex music mix can jam the signals copyright bots use to suppress the unlicensed reproduction of copyrighted music on Internet social platforms, where users’ rights (e.g. fair dealing) supposedly apply but copyright bots routinely override them.
My mixing methodology is based on the approaches of DJs like Jeff Mills, Z-Trip, and Grandmaster Flash; on the “CV Dazzle” makeup strategy developed by artist Adam Harvey to resist facial recognition technology; and on arguments for appropriative forms as creative expression (see Amani, Coombe et al, Shields). This music-mixing methodology’s basis in playback and repetition also engages with critical theories of slowness (see Berg and Seeber, Bureau).
“Leviathan Jams” imagines a dialectical dialogue between two improbably paired literary works—Dionne Brand’s 2006 long poem Inventory and James S.A. Corey’s roman fleuve, The Expanse (2011-21)—by combining music cited in Inventory (listed above in bold) with music cited in The Expanse, (listed with asterisk *). Both Brand’s and Corey’s works share practices of quoting music, the exercise of fair dealing and fair use (the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for specific purposes like research), articulations of labour solidarity, and dialectical elements of form. Inventory quotes music by major artists like the Beatles, whose song lyrics command astronomical licensing fees (see Orr); complementarily, The Expanse often mentions poetry (e.g. Corey, LeviathanWakes, p. 520), and the series’ plots involve intellectual property, open access, piracy, and audio remixing (Babylon’s Ashes, p. 245-6, 248; Leviathan Wakes, p. 445; Nemesis Games, p. 454), while self-reflexively acknowledging their own contradictory status as openly derivative (Leviathan Wakes, p. x) intellectual property (Leviathan Wakes, pp. 211, 343; Babylon’s 222). Both works also share a specific anti-colonial trope. In Inventory, Brand writes: “does she care about “the human species / spreading out across the cosmos” / no, God forbid, stop them, and forgive her this one / imprecation to a deity” (p. 48). In the first Expanse novel, the detective Miller (whose investigation of Juliet Mao’s case informs my renaming Lou Reed’s titular “Juliette” with the Beatles’ line in “Revolution 1” about “Mao”), reflecting: “‘Stars are better off without us,’ he said, but too softly for anyone but Julie to hear” (Corey, Leviathan Wakes, p. 465). In the subsequent third novel another character, referring to “the stars,” “wonder[s] if we should have them” (Abaddon’s Gate, p. 539). “Leviathan Jams” echoes this anti-colonial trope in a song Inventory quotes, Marvin Gaye’s 1971 “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)”: “rockets / moonshots / spend it on / the have-nots.” Gaye’s track mixes with “Didi” by the raï musician Cheb Khaled, the only real-world pop star named in the Expanse books (Babylon’s Ashes, p. 168), which refer often to raï music (e.g. Memory’s Legion, pp. 6, 76, 144; Nemesis Games, p. 433). As this shared anti-colonial trope thematizes deterritorialization, so does the mix’s form practice depropertization.
By synchronizing and juxtaposing samples of music cited by Inventory and the Expanse franchise “Leviathan Jams” field-tests copyright bots’ capacity to identify discrete songs. (That listening to the mix resonates with a major plot point in the last Expanse novel, Leviathan Falls, is a happy, uncanny coincidence.) “Leviathan Jams,” then, both prototypes a “jamming” device (Corey, Leviathan Falls, pp. 266, 442) and models fair dealing. Notice or takedown of the mix would prove my hypothesis wrong. The mix was recorded using DJay for iPad (fig. 1), edited using Audacity (fig. 2), and saved as mp3 for sharing; the file is available on request, and a transcript is forthcoming.
Works cited and consulted
1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything. Prod. and dir. Asif Kapadia et al, Apple TV+, 2021.
Amani, Bita. “Copyright and Freedom of Expression: Fair Dealing between Work and Play.” Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online, edited by Rosemary J. Coombe et al, U of Toronto P, 2014, pp. 43-55.
Berg, Maggie and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.
The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research [Victoria Stanton and Stacey Cann]. Slowness and the Institution: Doing Research Differently [webinar series]. 29 Sept.-24 Nov. 2021.
Corey, James S.A. Abaddon’s Gate (2013). Orbit, 2014.
Jameson, Frederic. Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton UP, 1974.
Katz, Ariel. “Fair Use 2.0: The Rebirth of Fair Dealing in Canada.” The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook 20 the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, edited by Michael Geist. U of Ottawa P, 2013, pp. 93-156.
McRobbie, Angela. “Thinking With Music.” Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, edited by Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonell, New York UP, 1999, pp. 37-49.
Murray, Laura J., and Samuel E. Trosow. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide. 2nd ed., Between the Lines, 2013.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Cornell UP, 2003. Shields, David, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). Vintage, 2011.
Dear members of the Canadian government’s “Digital Citizen Initiative,” I am writing to express my alarm and disapproval over the proposed “online harms rules” legislation that the Canadian government now proposes—a combination, it seems, of the worst, most rights-violating regulations adopted in other jurisdictions, many of which aren’t exactly known as bastions of democracy and expressive freedoms. Your proposed legislation’s combination of * prohibitions of broad and poorly defined speech categories; * disproportionate penalties for insufficient blocking; and * requirement of rapid compliance without time for adequate assessment or counter-notifications all guarantee that the major tech firms, on which the onus of your proposed regulations falls, will block all kinds of legitimate speech — and will disproportionately affect marginalized and minorities to persons and communities, as has been shown where such rules have been implemented elsewhere. (See @doctorow’s analysis and that by U Ottawa professor Michael Geist.) Online harms rules have proven a human rights disaster in other jurisdictions; France’s rules were recently ruled as unconstitutional. I urge you to take this whole proposal either back to the proverbial drawing board—or entirely off the table. The Canadian government surely has bigger and more urgent priorities then over-regulating and preferentially censoring citizens’ constitutional expressive rights and freedoms. Sincerely – Mark A. McCutcheon Professor, Literary Studies Chair, Centre for Humanities Athabasca University
An unlooked-for kindness that an astute reader promptly rendered ironic by observing (to my mortification) that I’d misrepresented an Indigenous actor’s identity:
— @lindsaycwalkerdesign (@lindsaycwalker1) May 4, 2021
Thank you for this important correction. My deepest apologies. I should have doublechecked my sources for this detail. I’ll see if a late correction can be made to the copy, or a note added to regret the error.
In working to correct this error, I’m reminded how attentive, sensitive readers like this speak to the calibre of the series and its capacity to generate and (mayhaps) organize such ardent community.
I’m excited to announce a bunch of newly written (and co-written) articles and reviews have been accepted for publication and are forthcoming soon:
McCutcheon, Mark A. “Reading poetry and its paratexts for evidence of fair dealing.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, in press.
—-. “Paratextual and ‘sampladelic’ techniques for ‘committing centonism’ in contemporary poetry published in Canada.” Cento-Texts in the Making: Aesthetics and Poetics of Cento-Techniques from Homer to Zong!, edited by Manuel Baumbach, Bochumer Altertumswissenschaftliches Colloquium series, in press.
—. “Frankenstein meets the FAANG five: figures of monstrous technology in digital media discourse.” Beyond Modern Science: Essays on Frankenstein and STEAM for Charles E. Robinson, edited by Robin Hammerman. Delaware UP, in press.
Academicalism 