American Shivaree: A Class Warfare Torch Song

A biker’s mother asks, “Our other neighbor has lodged complaints. Do you mind too?” I grin, “Not really. I tell myself it’s electric guitar and they’re shredding.”6 She grins. Are the adolescents shredding gender? Not likely. Am I shredding gender like a vocalist-as-high-priestess, oscillating through the vocal register to ultimately dispatch with a contemporary binary? Again, barely. I attempt the affect of a casual dude (with a vulva) who rolls with the noise as long as it remains a series of considered sonic abstractions tipping towards speed metal. To ride the score instead of being riddled one must convince oneself that the noise upends other uninvited yet also marshalling sounds, like those ultra-processed soft-serves of Muzak and ads in dollar stores and phone-hold cycles.

2.

Some react to this sort of shred by running around compulsively, stretching and folding the earlobes over every ear in the land. To not only block the path of the sound, but its competing narrative. But a listener, instead, could champion the gunning motors, as another way of disrupting the sly tempo of infinite sales jingles and repetitive jingoism. A punk band, Fuck Taco Bell,7 rented a generator, threw it in the back of a pickup truck, and hooked it to their amp. Their concert was now mobile. Fuck Taco Bell drove up and down Albuquerque’s central drag until the police pulled them over. There’s no record of the duration of that thrash. It was back in the mid-nineties, but locally, the story occasionally resurfaces. Perhaps this is because saying the name of the band functions as a mnemonic: you know you have to renounce. This was the same era when blood-red paint was repeatedly poured over a bust of Don Juan Onate—the unlawfully pardoned conquistador. All of his orifices gummed up.

eXtreme Sport Games: Dirt Bike Dominance

3.

Some art things mute themselves: for Circular Surface Planar Displacement Drawing (1970), Michael Heizer drew into the surface of Jean Dry Lake with a motorcycle, cut the motor, and turned earth into document. Jean Dry Lake is an endorheic basin in Nevada, not always the same desert but ecological sibling to the Aral Sea and the Sea of Sodom.8 There is no outflow—all water pours in, then evaporates. In 1969, the Bureau of Land Management leased the rights to the surface of Jean Dry Lake to a friend of Heizer’s. This is the place where the Nuwuvi and Newe Sogobia peoples overlap precontact, in the present, and into the future.9 Today, off-road vehicles, introduced species, and drought tip the purple flower Penstemon albomarginatus towards population collapse. Heizer’s documentation photos prop up an anti-biotic aesthetic of solitude and silence, but it’s reality is more habitat than studio: desert worker wasps buzz, long taproots tangle under old-growth surface crust. Heizer’s motorcycle-as-pen may have marked deep, but the inky grooves have since vanished. I admit that the black-and-white documentation is seductive; it’s all sheen and scale or stomach and scar until one realizes that endangered soils and plants were busted through. Brahim El Guabli has forged the term “Saharanism” for this “globalizing imaginary that perceives desert spaces as empty, exploitable, and dangerous … at the center of all desert-focused enterprises.”10 In the Mojave Desert, Heizer operated as if he thought a lake like this was a dumb, empty material to be turned toward his cultural gain. But was this land so dangerous to a discrete sense of self that an artist needed to endanger it?

Some want to consume or replicate the do-good, but some of us still desire to consume the do-bad. My own desire to ingest or embody masculinity unpredictably strobes. Sometimes I have craved its noisy bravado and in other moments mimicked its emotional economy. I have wanted to skin it and wear it like an animal’s hide. Had such a hide been available, would I have slid on this sheath and pillaged an image, a person, a people, a desert lake, a swamped planet?11 A snatch of Farid Matuk’s poem “Art and Craft” snatches what it needs from “the man” without sweat and without neurosis: “Then whoso frees whatever masc they want / From men is already king.”12 

The mountain score that runs on repeat around my home is also broadcast in Mountain Standard Time, Tucson. But my neighborhood anthem is not a poem but a torch song for class warfare. It seems the boys without dirt bikes are the sons of the elite and the boys with the bikes are the sons of the working class. Yet Hocquenghem is careful to point out that the phallus is not enough for the elite, who will claim it all somehow and otherwise—both dick and phallus, the slang and swagger of cultural resistance and status, rank, money, security.13

My uncle raced dirtbikes as a teen. His triple row of plastic trophies featured tiny gold men rearing up on golden bikes, all on mute. There are loads of these, dusty and askew, in junk shops; nobody else’s fetish.

Class-devourer, alpine Pantagruel, I pick apart their instrumentation from a forest of deepfakes. Maybe I detect a 140 cc pit bike before another engine emerges, more subtle because the rider zip-tied a ten-inch bicycle innertube to the muffler and retarded the ignition timing by five degrees. There is no timekeeper in their song. In other moments, the revs are stylized script and a claim to public property temporarily writ to airspace that includes both glider and stray military chopper. Before, later, and never at the same time, the red-tailed hawks fly over and for two or three seconds scream kree-eee-ar. Later in Matuk’s poem: 

Where both the story
And the state break a little,
Dicks are just more of the porous
Surface on the folding river running tense 
Enough for anyone to walk on

Decades ago, the experimental musician Pauline Oliveros playfully suggested sticking a banana in an ear. I lightly touch at my concha. But why not stick a Fat Mike14 in a surveillance drone’s orb? The reality is that this motocross score is without melody or direction. The banana enters the ear shaped like a conch shell and exits by way of the exhaust. Pauline peels out. RIP. Who eats the banana after this journey? And what becomes of an ear that has functioned as fruit bowl, holster, and glory hole?

4.

A lock of hair belonging to the son of composer and musician Charles Mingus is sold to the Library of Congress.15 The seller of the lock? His white last wife. But the lock is not from the last wife’s child and it has become national property without the consent of its living source. I have not checked the Library of Congress holdings for other chunks of American DNA to see if these government librarians are holding the fingernail clippings of Conlon Nancarrow or Pauline Oliveros, the earwax of Harry Partch or Yoshi Wada. A family memory overlaps: my great-grandmother, the Mississippi-born Fannella, burned hair and fingernail clippings to prevent enemies from salvaging our parts as material for curses. I had not imagined my government resorting to Southern folk magic. The WWII resistance code phrase generated by poets, “the library is burning,” takes on yet another valence: destroy the data.

Tonescape lattice diagram of Harry Partch’s forty-three-tone just intonation scale. © 2000 by Joe Monzo.

As Mingus was forcibly evicted from the space he hoped to turn into a jazz school, the press asked how he felt about having all his things on the streets. He replied: “I hope the communists blow you up.”

By holding this body part, does the government think some otherworldly detente has been reached? But even in capture, the lock is in closer symbolic proximity to a single beard hair of the prophet in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.16 If a holy person sheds holy, a radical musician sheds radicality. Still, this profane acquisition does not ease the hostility between a government institution and an experimenter generating out of bounds, especially one who deploys sound.

The radical, sacred, and sonic sometimes sort themselves out in the same headspace. Prior to starting the composition of Half-Mast Inhibition, Mingus had come to an endpoint with a meditative practice that seemed, to him, to will death.17 Beyond “stop time” and its resolution, the structure of the meditation propelled him onward until the spirit and the sound closed down. In Mingus’s own words: “I had a little thing in there like Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells … Not funny style but because it represented Christmas and Christ. While I was lying there, I got to such a point that it scared me and I decided I wasn’t ready. And ever since, actually, I’ve been running because I saw something I didn’t want to see. I felt I was too young to reach this point.”18 The bottoming-out of his spiritual practice is the inception of a sonic practice that will undo convention. It is 1939 and Mingus is now ready to use the double bass to bust up the berm between jazz and classical; is the near death of the self also the grounds for sonically disorganizing the separation of sound and politics?

By the time I heard Mingus recordings, sometime in the seventies, the commercial metabolization of his hybrid sounds had taken place. At that point, I couldn’t identify the transgression. I piece it back together now because I want to retain his aural objection: the peel-back of the commercial Christmas song, to reveal a sacrificial liberator, and deeper down, an elusive godhead.

5.

Motocross bikers-as-musicians are lost in their jam and are, like most jam bands, one another’s audience.19 They appear to be solely feeling, as if all other sense retreated some time ago. Notice that jammers don’t lock gazes as they jam and the riders don’t either. Perhaps this is protective. No untoward interpersonal sexual eye-lock and no police lineup identification. The male gaze is buried in helmet. All bones thrum.

In Bavaria, the scharivari is a chain laden with ornate hunting talismans. The word and the ritual aspect, derived from the French “charivari,” have mutated over time. The belt incorporates remnants of a hunters’ kills, such as a marten’s skull, a ferret’s claw, or a stag’s tooth; they are encased in intricate metalwork and hang from the waist of a hunter. Do they emit a soft jangle when the hunter is in hot pursuit? I could not locate a video of the scharivari in use.

But sometimes these bikers are demonstrating a technique for collectively dispatching with the evil eye in all its local iterations. They are inviting one another to disrupt a fancy hiker with his unnerving, hueless stare. My neighbors bury the elitist’s slide-gaze20 in noise.

The bikers aren’t doing anything new. They tap into a hinterland posture where the interloper is repulsed with a din that is neither music nor noise. For example, charivari birthed the shivaree: the former ritual, practiced throughout Europe, was marked by a violent mock serenade comprised of hisses, insults, horns, and clanking kettles directed at a widow who has dared to remarry. This gave way to the American shivaree where a throng of young men would beat pots, discharge pistols, and caterwaul because a very old man married a very young woman. Out of rank, unmarried males protest an exchange of property that has surpassed them. Who bangs the pots and pans for the Mingus hairlock?

But a defensive sound wall need not be solely deployed by men against men. In 1998, a tiny septuagenarian named Antonia Apodaca mounted the stage at a nightclub in Albuquerque, explaining that she came from a long line of musicians who play a synthesis of Pueblan and Ranchero forms. At one point, she sang oh my little flower, you drive me crazy, accompanying herself by playing a fast, rollicking tune on the guitar. Years later, I still chant this line a cappella, over and over again, like an addled biologist or lover addled by beautiful genitals. Later, she told us she lived alone in a cabin in the mountains up north. She said that a bear, over and over again, had been trying to burst into the cabin until she repulsed the bear with her accordion. Some of us operate like Antonia, repulsing local aggressions with noise, and some of us walk around like we are a skin-and-bone accordion, a machine played by others. And some of us, like it or not, are the bear—blasted (by sound) but intact.