TRENDSPOTTING: The Knife and the privilege of pop

by Richard Trapunski

May 9, 2013

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“I’m ready to lose a privilege,” sings the Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson on “Ready to Lose.” The song comes at the end of Shaking the Habitual, their first proper album together since 2006’s Silent Shout, but it’s a theme that prevails over the 92 minutes that precede it. Throughout the album, the Swedish duo scrutinize one privilege after another: racial privilege; economic privilege; the privilege of traditional Western scales, compact run-times, and song structures; the privilege of being easily accessed, processed, and understood. But there’s one privilege they aren’t ready to lose: the privilege of being the Knife.

According to the precious few interviews the pair gave in the run-up to the album, Dreijer Andersson and her brother Olof Dreijer claimed the music they were composing together was so radically different from their earlier work as the Knife that they considered releasing the material on Shaking the Habitual under a different name. That was essentially what they did on their last collaboration, a Charles Darwin-based opera with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock called Tomorrow, In A Year. In a lot of ways, that project was as challenging as Habitual, but since it wasn’t an “official” Knife album, it was easy for fans and critics to shrug it into the “weird side project” category and resume waiting for the next set of catchy, if eccentric, electro-pop.

Instead, Shaking the Habitual, is a sprawling, politically-charged onslaught of gender theory, noise, and drone that often seeks to actively repel the listener, and it lasts longer than the average Judd Apatow comedy. Listening to it is an exercise in endurance – difficult to digest in one sitting, abstract ambient pieces upwards of ten to twenty minutes interrupting anytime the album starts to settle into a groove. So it’s not surprising that many reviews compared the album to Swans’ 2012 album, The Seer, another behemoth of a record that actively tests what the listener will bear as (loosely speaking) pop music.

But a better comparison is /\/\ /\ Y /\ the 2010 “flop” by M.I.A. Critically and commercially savaged at the time of its release, like Kanye West’s 808’s and Heartbreak, the delayed influence of the album has reared its head with the Knife’s Habitual. At the time, M.I.A.’s themes of information-age paranoia and jittery production turned off fans hoping she’d deliver another ubiquitous megahit like “Paper Planes.” But it was a daring risk for a major label pop star at the height of her celebrity, and one that wouldn’t have had the same impact without the podium afforded by her popularity.

Like M.I.A., the Knife have a major hit to their name that will always stand as subtext to their future work. They can launch as many Foucault-referencing, voice-modulated industrial attacks and Origin of Species overtures as they want, but they’ll always be known in the public consciousness as the band that played the indie dance club staple, “Heartbeats” (later made even more accessible by silk-voiced, nylon-stringed troubadour Jose Gonzalez, who covered it for, of all things, a Sony commercial). Everything they’ve done since then, from their inherently terrifying stage masks to their feminist-porn-invoking videos, can be viewed as a response to that rearview mirror notoriety.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Before she was taken down by the New York Times in a now-infamous truffle fry character assassination piece, M.I.A. told Complex her intent with /\/\ /\ Y /\ was to make the album “so uncomfortably weird and wrong that people begin to exercise their critical-thinking muscles.” From Madonna to Nirvana to Lady Gaga, pop music has a long history of sneaking in subversive political messages, Trojan-horse style, but it’s a different kind of impact when the artist does it overtly. The platform is inherently tied to the critique.

For M.I.A., questioning the complacency of a society so reliant on a powerful few gatekeepers like Google and YouTube, while labouring under the delusion that the Internet is the great democratizer, is extra powerful when it’s done within the bounds of pop, a mode that itself is supposed to be “easy.” That’s what the Knife is seeking – a critique of pop music and all its intrinsic assumptions, power structures, and habits, from within it. If they can’t escape the long shadow of “Heartbeats,” they might as well use it to their advantage.

But there’s a limit to how far a pop artist can push their platform without breaking it, and the Knife push right up against it. A recent Gawker piece, for instance, calls the new album “sort of the ‘Accidental Racist’ of dark, electro-acoustic experimental music.” It’s a clumsy comparison, a pretty plain-faced attempt to capture the Internet-thinkpiece zeitgeist in one fell pageview-friendly swoop, but it raises an interesting point. Both Brad Paisley and the Knife attempt to question unexamined assumptions (one undoubtedly more effectively than the other), but in making Habitual such a difficult listen, the Swedes limit their audience to those that would already consume similar art with similar messages, that would pick up on their allusions to Margaret Atwood and Judith Butler. Or, in Gawker’s words, “Shaking the Habitual is an album of privilege about privilege for the privileged.”

In their album-accompanying interview (presented, like most of their other promo materials, as a miniature art film), the Knife claim to be reaching for a 21st century version of protest songs. But for a protest to be effective, it has to be accessible enough to reach its target. That’s why so many ‘60s folk tunes used plain language and current slang. If future pop stars are going to follow the Knife’s lead, they may have to do so without actively alienating their audience.

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of AUX Magazine. Download and subscribe for free in the App Store.

Tags: Music, Featured, News, AUX Magazine, The Knife, Trendspotting

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