Relocating Rock in Resilience Discourse

In the finale to the first season of HBO’s The Penguin, organized crime mastermind Sofia Falcone/Gigante sets fire to her abusive father’s clothes and family mansion accompanied by indie rock veterans Sleigh Bells’ 2019 cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” 

“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” is a version of an American folk song recorded in the early 20th century by the blues musician Leadbelly, which Nirvana covered in their iconic 1993 MTV Unplugged set. In Nirvana’s version, the lyrics are about a woman who is suspected of fleeing to the forest after possibly murdering her husband. As Kathleen Hanna’s memoir REBEL GIRL makes clear, Cobain likely would have known about his close friend Hanna’s early-90s activist work helping survivors of domestic violence. She writes, “Many of the domestic violence survivors had to work jobs an hour away from where they lived to save money to buy generators. That way they could move into cabins in the middle of the woods and not have any bills so their exes couldn’t find them” (198 ebook). Hanna’s experience working with women trying to escape domestic abuse by fleeing into the woods was a plausibly available interpretive context for Cobain to read “Where Did”’s lyrics as describing a woman escaping an abusive marriage by running into the woods (i.e., “the pines, the pines” – which are largely what populate forests in the Pacific Northwest). Musically, Nirvana’s version builds in intensity and volume over the whole song, punctuated at the end with a quiet-loud move that the band famously took from The Pixies.

Sleigh Bells’ version begins with lead singer Alexis Krauss’s halting, deadpan vocals over cold synths reminiscent of bands like ADULT. Two choruses proceed in this style. In the last measure of that second chorus, there’s a heartbeat-like bass rhythm inserted in the offbeats. Those very modest rhythmic intensifications lead into a measure of silence, and then everyone comes back in a “plugged-in” and distorted take on Nirvana’s version, with a full complement of stringed instruments and percussion. Like Nirvana, Sleigh Bells end with a move from loud to quiet, but unlike Nirvana they never go back to loud(er), fading out with Krauss’s vocals over acoustic guitar and some chords in a SATB choral patch.

With its slight rhythmic intensification that leads into a silence preceding a bit hit, Sleigh Bells’ “Where Did” uses a version of the compositional device I call “the soar.” A sonic representation of neoliberal creative destruction, the soar uses rhythmic and timbral intensification to mimic the experience of blowing out listeners’ ears (hence the silence) and then resiliently recycling that damage into even greater listening pleasure upon the big musical return in the next measure. You can find the soar all over 2010s EDM pop: LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” Florence’s “Sweet Nothing,” etc. In Resilience & Melancholy, I argued that in cases such as the latter two songs, the soar represents not just creative destruction in general, but feminine resilience in particular as women singers create aesthetic pleasure through the overcoming of gendered damage such as the intimate partner violence suggested in the video for “Sweet Nothing.”

The Penguin taps into the soar’s association with feminine resilience to score Sofia’s symbolic overcoming of her abuser. During the silent measure, she flicks a lit cigarette onto a gin-soaked pile of her father’s clothes, which then flares into a blaze of flames when the guitars hit. Just as she had murdered basically the entire Falcone family (echoes of the scene in “Telephone” when Beyonce and Gaga murder everyone in the diner, anyone?) and re-named her syndicate “Gigante” after her abused-to-death mother, Sofia’s fire turns her feminist overcoming of a literal patriarch into a spectacle of both visual and musical pleasure for TV audiences. Unlike Beyonce’s “Diva” video, which uses the spectacle of burning mannequins to pivot the narrative away from one of feminist overcoming, this scene uses the soar and the fire to represent the spectacle of (mostly) white feminist resilience (Italian-Americans only got folded into whiteness in the latter 20th century, and given the way the show and the Batman franchise plays on ethnic stereotypes from before that assimilation I think there’s some degree of racial ambiguity to the Sophia character).

What’s interesting about The Penguin’s use of the soar to depict feminine and popular feminist resilience is that it does so in the musical context not of EDM-pop, but rock. Setting Sleigh Bells’ soar in the explicit narrative context of a woman’s nominally feminist overcoming of gendered damage, The Penguin reworks rock’s gendered and racialized politics of status (dis)identification. After rock got appropriated by the white music industry, its aesthetics centered around a white masculine appropriation of stereotypical Black masculinity. As I have argued elsewhere, James Chance’s 1979 song “Almost Black” depicts this dynamic explicitly and didactically: white guys appropriate the cool detachment, bodily virtuosity, and sexual virility they attribute to Black masculinity as a way to establish their elite status over other, square, white men. This dynamic is so deeply baked into rock aesthetics and culture that it operates below the level of individual artists’ and fans’ intentions to the point that being a “rockist” means you believe only white men can really authentically make rock and roll music. To rock is to be a white man ventrilloquizing Black masculinity. This dynamic guides Nirvana’s turn to Leadbelly as what Cobain describes in the pre-song stage banter as “our favorite musician”: in the rock world, the way to disidentify with mainstream white culture and white masculinity is by identifying instead with Black men and masculinities typically of the blues tradition. With Nirvana rather than Leadbelly as Sleigh Bells’ referent, the racial dynamics of what Matthew Morrison calls “Blacksound” fade into the background (still very much in existence, their presence is just not kept centrally in frame) as the spectacle focuses on the performance of a resilient femininity that does not so much disidentify with but overcomes patriarchy and its models of femininity. Just as Krauss’s vocals replace Cobain’s and reflect the “feminization” of indie rock in 21st century TV, this scene in a show nominally about a masculine antihero puts über-girl-crimeboss Sofia at its center. Here, the femme overtaking of the rock vocals represents Sofia’s overcoming of her past oppressors: women have really Leaned In (™) to both the rock tradition and organized crime (and the show’s narrative). In this way, The Penguin takes rock out of its traditional context of white masculine coolness and resituates it into popular feminist resilience discourse. 

In both this scene from The Penguin and in rock’s tradition of masculine cool, the status politics are about disidentifying with mainstream white masculinity. What’s new in The Penguin is that  the status-seeking subject is not a man, and the sought-after status is not tied to recouping embodied receptivity lost to whiteness, but to the volume of spectacle generated by the overcoming. The aesthetic payoff of Sofia’s “fire woman” scene is the visual spectacle of the fire alongside the musical hit as Sleigh Bells returned after a measure of silence. The volume of that spectacle represents Sofia’s elevated status in the organized crime world: at that moment of the show, she’s believes she’s outwitted and overcome every other boss and family in Gotham. In this context you can almost see the metaphor of feminist “waves” merge with the idea that rock culture is a series of “new waves” of revolutionary innovation to get like a fifth-wave feminist rock aesthetic rooted in resilience discourse.

This scene’s reworking of rock’s traditional politics of white masculine cool or hipness is indicative of a much broader trend across popular music as longstanding structures governing aesthetic and political status have grown obsolete amid economic and technological changes (i.e., neoliberalism, financialization, algorithms, etc.). The high/low or rock/pop status modernist status binaries operative from the Enlightenment through the poptimism debates have given way to a situation where anything can be content so long as it scales. Resilient overcoming helps boost that scale, but it’s not the only way to do that. Maybe I’ll flesh this out more extensively some other time, but Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter seemed to leverage the viral engagement driven by “Old Town Road”’s genre-transgression into its own resilience-discourse-adjacent reclamation of country music for Black women musicians. As in The Penguin, the point here is for women to dis-identify with a traditionally white masculine mainstream in an act of overcoming or reclamation.

2024 seems to be a year full of women pop artists dis-identifying with both women artists and forms offemininity that appear to be too mainstream. Men break through the otherwise quite femme noise only by also going country (think Shaboozey or Post Malone’s country turn) or by going grievance (namely, the Kendrick/Drake beef and uh the manosphere). White masculine coolness and hipness emerged in the context of postwar mass culture’s overtaking of white art music as the platform where elite cultural capital was performed and accrued – that’s literally the story of Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 film The Band Wagon. But in the era of platforms and financialization, mass culture and its politics are a thing of the past. There doesn’t appear to be a singular dominant narrative to replace it (yet), but it’s clear that the status politics of popular music no longer center around white mens’ appropriations of stereotypical Black masculinity. What better proof of that could there be than lesbian pop icon Billie Eilish “dresses like a wigger from Middletown Ohio” (I can verify that’s 100% accurate, I have seen many 90s wiggers from Middletown and other parts of Butler County) but her look carries none of the baggage that it once did?