The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, February 17, 2020 — 5A

Anne 
Carson 
can 
come 
across as a writer with no clear 
lineage or influences — even 
as she references the work of 
other authors, her poetry and 
prose seem to float relatively 
free of clear affiliation to any 
contemporary literary trend. 
Her 
career 
as 
a 
classicist 
(with 
a 
generalist’s 
flair: 
she’s written about film and 
modernism extensively) might 
have something to do with this: 
It’s possible to interpret her as 
someone who doesn’t follow 
a writer’s career, but works 
through a set of preoccupations, 
trying to draw ever more out 
of them, like an academic. Her 
writings also represent a specific 
stylistic 
preoccupation 
that 
she has been working out in a 
similar way — the transposition 
of Ancient Greek society and 
literature 
onto 
the 
formal 
constraints of Modernists like 
Beckett and Stein. 
Her 
twenty-first 
book, 
“Norma Jeane Baker Of Troy,” 
should 
be 
recognizable 
in 
form and content to readers 
of Carson. The conceit of this 
work is a sort of transposition 
of the plot of Euripides’ “Helen” 
onto the biography of Marilyn 
Monroe, and more broadly to a 
mid-century milieu of writers, 

filmmakers 
and 
celebrities. 
Arthur Miller, Truman Capote 
and 
Fritz 
Lang 
all 
make 
appearances, or are alluded 
to. The titular Norma Jeane 
Baker (Monroe’s birth name) 
both is and isn’t Marilyn, and 

sometimes takes on other guises 
entirely. The framing device 
for the play, according to The 
Shed’s website, is that the text of 
the play is dictated by an office 
manager to a typist in 1963. 

This isn’t explained or included 
in the slim New Directions 
edition that I am reading from. 
The script is mostly done in 
lineated 
monologue 
broken 
up occasionally by segments 
of prose that resemble lesson 
plans. 
The play is really in dialogue 
with two external texts — both 
the play by Euripides and the 
1952 Fritz Lang film “Clash By 
Night.” The latter, in which 
Monroe plays a small part, is 
centered around an increasingly 
violent 
love 
triangle 
that 
becomes 
an 
antagonism 
between the two men involved. 
The theme of both Euripides’ 
and 
Lang’s 
dramatic 
works 
is of a woman as a catalyst 
for violence. Euripides’ play 
additionally draws attention to 
the way that Helen was reduced 
to a prop or a symbol in the 
course of the Trojan War — he 
has Menelaus appear in Egypt 
confused by the sight of his wife, 
as he thought he had captured 
her and hidden her in a cave. 
The Helen Menelaus captured 
turned out to be a phantom. 
In 
Carson’s 
retelling, 
this 
deception (and Helen’s absence 
from the site of the conflict) is 
played up — Norma Jeane is, 
instead of Egypt, in the Chateau 
Marmont to rehearse lines for 
“Clash By Night,” waiting for 
her husband Arthur (Miller; 
described here, clumsily, as 
“King of Sparta and New York”) 
and worrying after her daughter 

Hermione, who she sets out to 
meet at the end.
If this sounds convoluted, it’s 
because it is. One gets the sense 
here that there’s too much in the 
ancient and in the contemporary 
that aren’t effectively talking to 
each other, even if Carson’s aim 
is to make points about the most 
broad human themes possible — 
gender roles, war, storytelling. 
There’s an unsatisfying back-
and-forth 
between 
Carson’s 
muddled attempts to meld these 
disparate sources and her stark, 
generalized proclamations that 
don’t really end up contributing a 
whole lot of clarity or movement 
to the form of the whole. As I 
read, I kept asking myself why 
these historical scenarios were 
being brought together, what 
good it does. It doesn’t help 
that Carson frequently reaches 
for a sort of cheap timeliness — 
using the word “livestreaming” 
for the striking image from the 
Iliad of Helen sewing a tapestry 

depicting the carnage outside 
her window, putting a reference 
to fracking into the play that 
serves no real aesthetic or 

thematic purpose. The whole 
play has a slipshod quality to it, 
pieces never quite aligning the 

way you want them to. 
Carson’s interest in Ancient 
Greek as poetic material seems 
to be in its representative 
directness 
 
as 
opposed 
to 
modern languages — Greek 
represents, for her, a sort of 
symbolic bedrock for Western 
culture, and she is often most 
effective at her most rigorous 
exegetical 
mode 
(e.g. 
“Eros 
the Bittersweet,” “The Gender 
of Sound,” the notes for her 
Sappho translations). “Norma 
Jeane” feels markedly sloppier 
than this. It relies too much on 
the novelty, and doesn’t have the 
sharpness I usually associate 
with her work. It’s possible, 
in retrospect, that some of her 
other poetry traffics in this 
same vagueness — her poem 
“TV Men” from 1995 covers a lot 
of the same thematic ground — 
and this is just the first time it’s 
done too crudely, too obviously, 
with very little of her usual 
precise fire.

Anne Carson fans, prepare 
for a letdown with ‘Troy’

BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

FORT GANSEVOORT

Norma Jeane 
Baker of Troy

Anne Carson

New Directions

Feb. 25, 2020

Justin Bieber released a love 
album on Valentine’s Day. There 
is, quite possibly, no better way 
to fall out of love with your 
significant other than listening to 
Changes.
It feels like a lifetime ago 
since The Biebs’s last album. The 
singles off of Purpose and their 
massive 
commercial 
success 
indicated that perhaps JB had 
more longevity than his boyish 
origins suggested. The smart 
thing to do — release something 
while the sea of relevance was still 
at high tide. Instead, he decided to 
come out with Changes five years 
later, to the interest of no one.
Supposedly, this album details 
the love story that led to Bieber’s 
recent 
marriage 
to 
Hailey 
Baldwin. Considering the last 
big release to address marriage 
(here’s to you Chance), it isn’t 
surprising that Changes at its best 
is uninspiring and at its worst 
makes a swift bid for the worst 
album of 2020.
To start with, there is a serious 
question to be asked about how 
Justin views love. This album 
depicts it as robotic. It feels like an 
unending string of procedurally 
generated platitudes that lack any 
personality or insight into their 
actual relationship. Then there’s 
Justin’s idea of “spicing things 
up,” which is just Bieber adding 
in lyricisms along the lines of 
“Struck a match, you got me litty,” 
a line he thought was so clever he 
decided to use it again in another 

song (verbatim). Justin often 
reuses lines or ideas on Changes. 
How else does one reach their 
goal of 17 songs and nearly an hour 
of material? 
The worst part: The most 
memorable lines on the album 
are 
the 
most 
problematic. 
Typically these lines fall into 
two 
categories: 
uncomfortable 
information about his sex life 
and 
hopefully 
unintentional 
misogyny. Examples of the former 
can be found in lyrics like, “Fully 
committed, you’re here for the stay 

down / Look in the mirror, you’re 
right for the take down.” Literally 
within the first six lines of the 
album, we already have Justin 
looking like a predator. This type 
of highly questionable insinuation 
finds itself on nearly every song in 
some form or fashion. The latter 
category can be boiled down 
to one line: “Stay in the kitchen 
cookin’ up, got your own bread.” 
If it was just a blanket sexist 
statement then that’s one thing, 
but the fact that he was trying to 
use the line as an empowering 
symbol for his woman shows an 
almost unparalleled level of tone-

deafness. Seriously, how many 
people have heard this line before 
the album was dropped? 100? 150? 
That means there exists at least 
that many people with the same 
amount of ignorance.
Musically, things aren’t much 
better. Sure, the production is 
overall inoffensive, but that just 
makes things boring. There are 
a few songs like “Habitual” and 
“Available” that have something 
slightly 
interesting 
going 
on 
underneath, but then are sullied 
by bland trap beats. There are 
trap beats on nearly every song 
of the album, making everything 
sound similar; the beats are used 
as a crutch for bad songwriting. 
The vapidness of this album 
cannot be overstated. It got to a 
point where a Lil Dicky feature 
actually seemed enticing if only to 
appreciate the trainwreck.
Perhaps the biggest problem 
with Changes is that it doesn’t even 
play the role of an awful album 
well. At least with Corey Feldman 
or Speedin’ Bullet to Heaven it feels 
like an event when you decide to 
listen to them. Speedin’ Bullet also 
saw Kid Cudi experimenting with 
his sound. It didn’t pay off at all, 
but at least it showed some type 
of artistic earnesty. Changes has 
none of this. It is as basic as basic 
can be and feels less like art and 
more like advertisement. That’s 
basically what this album is, an 
ad for other artists to see he’s 
available for collaborations. In 
fact, collaborations were the only 
thing keeping him relevant in that 
five-year span of time. Perhaps 
he should stick to what he’s best 
at: flaunting his ass as a cartoon 
baboon for a Lil Dicky song.

Bieber effectively ruins 
Valentine’s Day with LP

DEF JAM RECORDINGS

DREW GADBOIS
Daily Arts Writer

Changes

Justin Bieber

Def Jam Recordings

ALBUM REVIEW
ALBUM REVIEW

“Body music” is what Ralf Hütter 
of the pioneering German electronic 
music group Kraftwerk called their 
1978 album The Man Machine. 
While not the most reflective 
example of Electronic Body Music 
(EBM), it does share the confusing 
mix of qualities that make EBM so 
enticing. Not nearly as groovy as 
house, not nearly as rigid as techno, 
EBM straddled the line between 
the danceable and the experimental 
and while it laid low after its heyday 
in the 1980s, it’s making a bit of a 
comeback.
The roots of the genre can be 
traced back to Kraftwerk of course, 
as well as another German band DAF 
(short for Deutsche Amerikanische 
Freundschaft). Their most iconic 
album, the 1981 release Alles Ist Gut, 
is a classic example of the rather 
dirty, grimy yet somewhat sensual 
sound that characterizes the genre. 
For the most part, the sound on cuts 
like “Der Mussolini” and “Alle Gegen 
Alle” are relatively simple in terms 
of arrangement, with very precise, 
metronomic drums and catchy synth 
riffs. The most enticing part of these 
tracks (as well as most on the album) 
is Gabi Delgado’s deep, powerful 
incantation-like 
vocals. 
Delgado, 
the son of Spanish immigrants, 
also flirts ironically and in a way, 
reclaims Fascist imagery (as in the 
aforementioned “Der Mussolini”), 
paving a way from the outset for a 
genre that is meant to be provocative 
and controversial.

Throughout the 1980s, labels in 
Germany and Belgium promoted 
body music throughout Europe, 
with groups heavily influenced 
by the aforementioned DAF, as 
well as equally provocative groups 
like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb 
(many detailed histories may be 
found online). Its influences also 
spread halfway across the world to 
Australia, in particular to a Sydney-
based band called Severed Heads. 
The group was a pioneer in its usage 

of tape looping and other sound-
generation techniques, combining 
their experimental streak with a 
talent for pop — the best example 
of which is their biggest hit, the 
1983 track “Dead Eyes Opened.” 
Originally a hastily added track to fill 
out a cassette, the single became an 
unlikely hit among non-commercial 
radio stations in Sydney. The track 
begins with a hypnotizing, if fairly 

standard 
electro-poppy 
synth 
pattern. Around a minute in, they 
incorporate a recording of a British 
crime journalist describing a brutal 
double murder, and about a minute 
later, the group incorporates a 
brutal set of industrial noises they 
are well-known for, creating a 
fascinating juxtaposition between 
the rather innocuous synth riff and 
the dissonant harsh sounds they 
introduce. The six-minute track 
feels five times its length, and while 
“Dead Eyes Opened” is not quite 
the best example of “pure” EBM, it 
achieves the main goal of the genre, 
to induce a hypnotic, primal trance.
While EBM died down slightly 
with the advent of other genres in 
the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, its sounds 
have again widely permeated techno 
and other more mainstream types 
of dance music in the last few years. 
Artists like Broken English Club (see 
“Plague Song”) and Phase Fatale 
have infused their techno with 
the characteristic “buzz” of body 
music to create a new and exciting 
hybrid. Frenchman Terence Fixmer 
has collaborated extensively with 
Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas McCarthy 
to create similarly EBM-infused 
techno, with the latter’s vocals on 
tracks like “Chemicals” adding 
that extra edge that harkens back 
to the genre’s heyday. Moreover, 
labels 
like 
the 
Berlin-based 
Aufnahme+Wiedergabe and Fleisch 
Records have led a renaissance of 
EBM in the country of its origins. 
Proof of the cyclical nature of dance 
music as well as the enduring appeal 
of the sounds and attitudes that EBM 
embodies, these artists and labels 
continue to push the genre forward 
for new audiences.

SAYAN GHOSH
Daily World Music Columnist

Sayan Ghosh: 
Electronic Body Music

DAILY WORLD MUSIC COLUMN

If this sounds 
convoluted, it’s 
because it is. One 
gets the sense 
here though 
that there’s too 
much in the 
ancient and in the 
contemporary 
that aren’t 
effectively talking 
to each other

Not nearly as 
groovy as house, 
not nearly as rigid 
as techno, EBM 
straddled the 
line between the 
danceable and the 
experimental

