Victor Szabo

MUSI 719: Final Paper

EXPRESSING GRIEF, PERFORMING ABJECTION:

AN ANALYSIS OF ‘THIS SONG IS A MESS BUT SO AM I’

“I'm really sad and really angry and why can I not show it publicly? What is
wrong with that? Maybe someone else is really sad and really angry over
something similar. Why can't we share that? Why can't we share our
experiences?” – Freddy Ruppert, aka This Song Is A Mess But So Am I, e-mail
interview with the author

“I definitely understand how hard, scary and awful it is to lose a loved one to a
terminal illness, but this is not the way to pay tribute to them…. The danger here
is letting this kid think he’s creating songs, when he clearly should be working
through his own issues.” – Sean Ford, cokemachineglow review of This Song Is
A Mess But So Am I’s first studio album, Church Point, LA

In this paper, I set out to examine the live and studio performances of This Song

Is A Mess But So Am I, pseudonym for California musician Freddy Ruppert, as a way to

explore the sociopolitical nature of grief and musical expression. Ruppert’s musical

performances directly address the loss of his mother to cancer when he was 19 years old.

As a brutally honest and musically ugly expression of grief, his studio album Church

Point, LA transgresses both social norms of propriety and artistic norms of beauty. Its

emotional and sonic severity reminds us of the impossibility of realizing and recognizing

others’ pain, and the transgressivity of its performance calls to our attention our status as

socialized beings. Through a theoretical analysis of the performances of This Song Is A

Mess…, I broadly outline some of the complications that arise from the normalization

and pathologization of painful emotion, such as grief, and the ways in which music

performance confronts that pain and turns it outward as a challenge to the listener.

DISENFRANCHISED GRIEF
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One of the earliest psychoanalytic accounts of mourning and grief comes from

Freud, who describes mourning as a process of decathexis whereby the libido

“decathects” or detaches from the loved, lost object (165). This process refers to what

later psychoanalysts refer to as grief work, a necessarily painful redistribution of mental

and emotional energies in the wake of loss.1 In terms of decathexis, grief work involves

the commonplace notion of “getting over” or “letting go” of the loved one. This ideal has

rightly received criticism in modern progressive psychotherapeutic models of mourning

that recognize the potential complications of Freud’s individualist rationalization of

mourning. For psychologist George Hagman, grief’s primary function and central goal is

the restoration and preservation of continuity among survivors (“Beyond” 19). We

maintain continuity in recognizing and maintaining an ongoing relationship with, rather

than “letting go,” of the deceased.

Hagman smartly revises Freud’s account of mourning in a number of ways

beyond emphasizing continuity. For one, it realizes the importance of other survivors in

assisting the process of mourning. Individuals that lack meaningful social engagement

tend to have more pain and difficulty living with their loss. “Mourning is fundamentally

an intersubjective process,” writes Hagman (“Beyond” 25); accordingly, discourse and

empathy become key elements of preserving continuity and community. This relates to

the generation of meaning and understanding through dialogue, an aspect central to

Hagman’s account of successful mourning, and a notion that Freud completely overlooks

by instead focusing on economies of libidinal energy. On the whole, Hagman’s critiques

1
Phyllis Silverman alternatively frames grief work in terms of the exercise of adaptive strategies, or
learned responses by which the bereaved manages her loss. In framing grief work in terms of cognitive,
affective, spiritual, and behavioral adaptive strategies, Silverman avoids the negative connotations of the
term “coping,” which presupposes that grieving is a time-bound process rather than an ongoing one (cited
in Martin & Doka 26).
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point to an outright rejection of the notion of a normal, identifiable process of mourning.

This progressive model of mourning instead notes the inherent historical, social and

cultural contingencies and complexities affecting the bereaved, and the fact that his

adaptive strategies may vary accordingly. The idealization or normalization of

decathexis, on the other hand, ignores the variance in mourning behaviors in order to

maintain a coherent account of how the bereaved “normally” functions.

Nonetheless, the ideal of decathexis casts a long shadow across the

psychoanalytic and therapeutic fields, which in the pathologizing tradition of Freud

identify ongoing or lingering grief as abnormal, and frame it in terms of disease, sickness,

or neurosis. Chava Sekeles defines pathological mourning as “the unsuccessful

expression of grief by individuals who are unable to complete the natural stages of

bereavement” (188). Other psychoanalysts typify pathological mourning as

“complicated grief reactions”; including atypical, morbid, absent, neurotic, and

unresolved or chronic grief (Schocter & Zisook 25).

Averill and Nunley importantly note the practicality of assessing complicated

grief as a pathological condition, especially in a time where its diagnosis may be a

concern for health care professionals or private corporations. And the symptoms of grief

do accord with modern medical models of disease: “It is a debilitating condition,

accompanied by pain, anguish, and increased morbidity; it is associated with a consistent

etiology, and ‘it fulfills all the criteria of a discrete syndrome, with relatively predictable

symptomatology and course’ (Engel 1961)” (Averill & Nunley 85). Yet the

standardization of pathological grief patterns is immediately complicated by the need to

establish identifiable conditions for assessment. As Middleton et al. note, the assessment

of pathology for chronic grievers would be less warranted for a widow in a culture that
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

expects prolonged outward expression of grief (60-1). Yet, troublingly, cross-cultural

issues are “not typically reflected in strategies for assessment” (Hansson et al. 72). The

distinct possibility of complication arising from incompatibility between one’s

sociocultural duties and one’s emotional experience simply does not find its way into

pathologizing assessments, for it cannot without seriously calling into question the

implicit ontology of grief as disease.

Empirical accounts of the wide cultural variances on emotive and expressive

sanctions, and their effects on the bereaved individual, do not suffer for a lack of

documentation. Some cultures, for instance, mandate the public expression of grief;

Katherine Ashenburg reports, “In India, the Kol women were expected to cry in the

funeral cortege, while the men were expected not to. Nineteenth-century explorers

reported that Maoris of both sexes wailed, and the formation of a long stream of mucus

from the nose was cultivated as a praiseworthy sign of grief.” (34). In the first centuries

after Christ, Jews close to the lost individual were allotted a “wailing time” or aninut

during which the mourner was exempt from normal activities and allowed “indulgent”

public displays of affect, even rage at God (49). Probably the most radical mandate on

expressing grief may be seen in the Hindu custom of sati, in which the widow immolates

herself on the husband’s funeral pyre (158).

Sati of course being a rather extreme example, restrictive sanctions on expressions

of grief tend to have negative emotional consequences on the bereaved, as comparative

studies by Burgoine (1988) and Lovell et al. (1993) show.2 (cited in Parkes 154) Such

complications have been noted, for instance, to arise from the Navajo tradition of

2
These studies involved comparisons “(between) newly bereaved widows in New Providence, Grand
Bahama, and London,” as well as between Scottish and Swazi women. (Parkes 154)
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

discouraging survivors from mentioning the name of the deceased following their death;

one mental health worker noted that “about one-third of all [Navajo] patients attending

the mental health clinic had a history of the death of a close person within the past year”

(Parkes 154). Ashenburg meanwhile suggests that modern day sanctions on grief

expression in Anglo-American cultures may be traced back to the Christian injunction to

see death as a joyful release, thereby “pitting theological conviction against natural

human affection” and prohibiting signs of anguish (35-6). Though secular social

sanctions within the U.S. may seem relatively lenient, they are most certainly not absent;

intense affective displays in public outside of the wake and burial rituals are generally

discouraged, and are expected to taper off quickly, as evidenced for instance by the

typical workplace policy of a three to five day bereavement leave (Martin & Doka 119).

Perhaps nothing articulates the expressive restrictions expected of the functional

socialized individual better than 20th-century American books on etiquette, which paint

the public appearance of the mourning individual as an intrusion on the everyday social

well-being of others. Millicent Fenwick’s 1948 Vogue’s Book of Etiquette recommends

that the bereaved individual avoid social gatherings during his period of mourning in

order to keep the evening from becoming “a painful and difficult situation which could

easily have been avoided”; in a 1965 update, she reminds us that we should “avoid

casting the shadow of our own sadness upon others” by grieving publically, lest we come

off to others as “selfish” (Ashenburg 140-41). Amy Vanderbilt in the 1967 New

Complete Book of Etiquette likewise paints the public mourner as a self-indulgent social

interferer by noting how it can be “difficult to function well in the constant company of

an outwardly mourning person” (141-2).

Through the indoctrination of social propriety, the differences in expectations for

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MUSI 719: Final Paper

the bereaved between historical, social, and cultural groups partially determine their

actual behavior. Social rules become internalized, and we imagine them to come from

inside the individual rather than out.3 Borrowing from Erving Goffman’s idea of

expression rules, or rules that govern the displaying and masking of feelings (cited in

Brabent 32), Kenneth Doka introduces what he calls grieving rules, rules that define

“who one may grieve, what one may grieve, and how one’s grief is expressed” (Martin &

Doka 118). Generally, expression and grief rules both function in order to arrange and

sustain hierarchies of power; in Lacanian terms, they are factored upon the maintenance

of the Symbolic Order. Expressions of grief that fall outside these parameters by being

marked as “intrusive” consequently become disenfranchised by the group that refuses to

recognize them as appropriate (Doka 7). Disenfranchised grief in the United States may

include, for example, the public expression of intensely painful grief long after the

mourning ritual, an expression that is especially discouraged if the grieving individual is

male. As a result, the individual experiencing disenfranchised grief pays a price for his

affect – either he foregoes its expression, and thus also the possibility for the

intersubjective creation of meaning that accompanies it, or he risks pathologization and

exclusion by his community. The internal dissonance created by grieving rules can lead

to emotional complications if left unrecognized: “Cut off in his or her grief from social

recognition, the disenfranchised griever is prone to experience an underlying sense of

alienation and loneliness, shame, and abandonment” (Kauffman 69). 4 In part, these

complications can be said to arise from an interference with the meaning-making process
3
We ought remember that such rules are rarely ever rigid and systematic among large groups, but
nonetheless exercise a great deal of political power.
4
. The internal dissonance created by grieving rules, it should be noted, may also result from situations
demanding affective expression of grief of the individual who has no feelings to hide, or prefers to express
his or her grief instrumentally through action rather than affect. (See Martin & Doka for a description of
instrumental vs. intuitive grief)
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

between subjects that Hagman points out as crucial to creating continuity. The

suppression of grief affect, especially common in the U.S. in males, has the strong

potential to lead to long-term pain (Martin & Doka 58).

Disenfranchisement of grief expression varies across ethnicity, age, and class, but

especially gender (Martin & Doka 120-21, Ashenburg 158). The discrepancies among

grieving rules between genders generally seems a widespread phenomenon; predictably,

far more cultures encourage the affective expression of grief in females than they do

males.5 The affective expression of grief compromises the male’s status as a self-

sufficient individual; Hagman characterizes such expressions as a “temporary regression

to an archaic state of abandonment, helplessness, and yearning” (“The Role” 336), in

short, a state of need or dependence on another. Outward expressions of intense pain and

dependence following loss can connote feminine weakness or impotence these cultures,

and can be said to generally threaten the male’s reputation. Male individuals who desire

to connect with others through emotional expression, in short, disenfranchised in these

cultures of shame.

In art, creative expressions of disenfranchised grief have the potential to

performatively challenge the audience’s internalized expression rules. By encouraging

the audience to observe and empathize, this art calls for its audience to make a decision

between recognition of its disenfranchised status, or criticism of the art as such. Here, I

choose to discuss the music project This Song Is A Mess But So Am I in order to explore

the surfaces and boundaries created by musical performances of disenfranchised grief.

5
In cultures with “official” lamenters, such as that of ancient Greece, the hysterical lamenter is nearly
always female. Likewise in Victorian England, “What was considered self-indulgent for men was required
therapy for women….” (Ashenburg 163).
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

THIS SONG IS A MESS BUT SO AM I: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION 6

From the This Song Is A Mess But So Am I press release, written by sole member

Freddy Ruppert: “This Song Is A Mess But So Am I was started as a project with the sole

purpose of providing me with an output to deal with my mother’s death from cancer in

2003 when I was 19.” As This Song Is A Mess… (TSIAM), Ruppert released one full-

length LP, Church Point, LA, and one EP, Marble Mouth, on the Mattress Records and

Acuarela Records labels (respectively) before dismantling the project in May 2007, at

which point Ruppert decided that the project had run its course and had ceased to fulfill

its intended cathartic purpose.7

Ruppert initially intended the project to act as therapy by providing an outlet for

cathartic expression; the idea to release his music on a label only came later by

suggestion of a representative of the Mattress Records label. “I didn't have plans on

releasing anything,” he writes. “It was more just like make the songs for myself and

perform live so that I get the feelings out of my body.”8 Prior to 2003, Ruppert played in

several punk and hardcore rock bands in high school, and began to experiment with

electronic sounds in the months leading up to the creation of TSIAM.9 Several months

after Donna Ruppert’s death in January of 2003, Ruppert began to make music on his

6
The factual information and direct quotations in this section of the paper, unless otherwise cited, are taken
from an e-mail interview with the author.
7
“Continuing to play those songs live… started to re-open wounds and that is when I knew that I had
reached the point that I was done with it. That there was nothing else I could do and that I got everything
out of it that I could.” – F.R.
8
The idea to create music about his mother’s death arose intuitively, says Ruppert. Ruppert was not at the
time attending therapy, nor was he familiar with the practice of music therapy. Though an account of
TSIAM from the therapeutic perspective would be an interesting and useful one, it lies beyond my training
and the scope of this paper.
9
Several songs in Ruppert’s prior band dealt with his feelings following his mother’s initial diagnosis with
breast cancer while he was still in high school.
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

own. Equipped with one synthesizer, one drum machine, and a guitar, Ruppert aimed to

produce sounds that replicated and embodied his internal pain. His emotionally wrought

vocal performances were usually recorded in one take over the barrage of distorted synths

and industrial beats.10

Ruppert performed his first live gig in May of 2003, four months following his

mother Donna’s death. He recalls that this show in particular served its cathartic and

expressive function for him: “I remember when I drove home from that first show and I

pulled into my driveway to unload my equipment I just broke down and started crying

heavily…. I felt like I was releasing all of my grief, all of my anger, everything that I

hadn't talked to anyone about.” Ruppert toured extensively as TSIAM between 2003 and

2007, including tours with popular indie bands BARR and Xiu Xiu, and his bombastic

performances over the course of the next few years never ceased to be emotionally

strenuous. Beyond the affective intensity already involved in his music, TSIAM

performances were unselfconscious physical spectacles. “Performing live took on bizarre

moments where I would be totally unaware of my surroundings, completely in my own

world, and it would just take the form of an exorcism for me.” As though possessed,

Ruppert violently thrashed, lurched, and writhed both onstage and at the feet of his

audience to pre-recorded sounds and drum machines, often blasted at ear-splitting

volumes. The spectacle was part and parcel with the carthartic function of Ruppert’s

ritualistic performances: “For me it was more about just capturing that moment and that

emotion and what I was feeling. I just had to get it out. I would say the most catharsis

came in the form of live performances because I got to really just force everything out of

10
Ruppert says that his sound for TSIAM received influence from hardcore industrial bands Throbbing
Gristle and Skinny Puppy.
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

me at those times.” Mixed reactions from the audience predictably tended toward either

extreme of intense disgust or intense awe.

TRANSGRESSION AND AMBIGUITY

The music on Church Point, LA, to put it mildly, does not conform to musical

convention. Beyond the album’s blatant disregard for European-American conventions

of beauty – hardly the aim here in the first place – much of the sound shirks conventional

models of “music” as commonly conceptualized, leaving its greatest detractors to think of

it as self-indulgent noise. The overloaded electronic sound of the album, replete with

distorted industrial drum kits, synthesized PC beeps and blups, and thick sheets of fuzzy

noise, can be rather physically unpleasant to hear at high volume by any standards. The

sound manifests as asymmetrical washes of filthy debris; dense, abdomen-pummeling

techno; and ghastly, hypnotically repetitive dirges. The structural tendency either toward

insistent mechanical repetition or improvised sculptural noodling, by conventional

Western standards of form, suffers a lack of rational, coherent structure. The outright

abdication of traditional, formal structure – generally a sign of musical “maturity” for the

general public – in favor of fluid, dynamic, and often spontaneous construction opens

Ruppert’s music to criticisms of noviceness. Instead of the straitjacketed musical form,

we get unbounded libidinous energy spilling over – a mess.

As if that was not enough, Ruppert’s vocality presents perhaps even more of an

affront to the conventionally refined Western ear. Like the sound, Ruppert’s vocal style

goes beyond a mere transgression of standards of musical beauty – it transgresses

acceptable vocality for any public speech situation. Usually recorded in one take,
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

Ruppert’s volatile vocal style frequently rides the border between singing, speaking, and

crying. His voice on nearly every track trembles and shudders with little to no

diaphragmattic control, invoking the involuntary heaving of the lower abdomen that tends

to accompany sobbing, or the choked throat immediately prior. His unsteady vibrato,

located high in the head, signals an unwieldy expellation of air that often audibly

accompanies the complete loss of self-control. Due to the absence of physical control of

his vocal quality, Ruppert denies the listener the expected self-representation that

accompanies proper discursive convention. By deleting any physical gestures of control

between the “internal” and “external” vocal sound, TSIAM dissolves the division

between public and private image, and in turn foregoes what Doka calls “image

management” (taken from Goffman 1959), or the self-conscious monitoring of one’s

social image. The absence of a physical foundation to Freddy’s voice, and a structural

foundation of the music, both deprive the listener of a rational, symbolic image, or a

representation (in favor of presentation). The bottom falls out, and we are left with

Freddy, his naked voice, and our embarrassment.

TSIAM’s performance of the self eliminates any recognition of a false or

performed self, and presents rather than represents. By foregoing the social convention

of reproducing a self-image in musical performance, Ruppert performatively ambiguates

musical and social propriety. This blurring of performative boundaries disarms the

listener and creates ambiguity between the musical and the social – the listener cannot

distinguish whether TSIAM is willfully musically theatrical, or if Ruppert is unabashedly

“putting on theatrics.” His performance – if it does not totally alienate us, at first – can

subtly remind us that modern social convention normally entails the performance of a

self-image, a representation of the self.

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MUSI 719: Final Paper

Nowhere in TSIAM’s catalogue is this more plainly evident than on the first track

of Church Point, LA, “God and Cancer”: at 1:54, upon a nearly naked rhythm track and

warped synth flute, Ruppert remorsefully cries out with his signature lack of breath

support and a nervously rattling tremolo, a declaration: “I LOST my motherrRRR,” the

“RRR’s” tagged with a weepy falsetto exhalation. We next hear Ruppert inhale as the

bare rhythm track continues nervously for 4 seconds following the phrase, leaving up in

the air all the horrible awkwardness and palpable discomfort his vocal admission invites.

Then: we are blasted with a torrent of scouring white noise and high-frequency

interference at the front of the mix, a wash of sound that continues for two full minutes.

The physical effect is unmistakably jarring, but emotionally, we cannot help but feel

alienated from Ruppert’s pain. Even discounting the uncomfortable timbre of the sound,

the literal registering of Ruppert’s emotional pain in “God and Cancer,” according to

Western pop music convention, boorishly overshoots its emotional mark. It comes across

as beyond sentimental; the move is obscene, overwrought, ridiculous even by punk music

standards. Embarrassing and alienating, Freddy’s performative presentation of

disenfranchised pain backs the listener into a corner, forcing her to empathetically

acknowledge his pain, or establish a critical distance.

When confronted with an embarrassing situation, the listener can respond by

socially redeeming herself through an affirmation of distance from the circumstance.

This affirmation comes in the form of vocal judgment, particularly negative judgment.

Through negative criticism, a type of disassociation or creation of social distance, the

listener establishes the musical agent as an object, which conventionally allows us to

make demands of the musical agent. In the case of TSIAM, the impropriety of Ruppert’s

performance can elicit intensely negative criticism from the socially self-conscious
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

listener.11

Ruppert did not feel prepared for the criticism of his musically and socially

ambiguous performance. “Realizing that I had released something insanely personal to

the public, I was now open for personal attacks. Music criticism didn't seem like just

regular music criticism. Every review seemed to be criticising how I grieved or how I

dealt with my mom's death” (interview with author). The most notorious such review

comes from Cokemachineglow, a Canadian music criticism webzine. In August 2004,

reviewer Sean Ford wrote up a scathing review of Church Point, LA, in which he brutally

dismisses Ruppert’s performance as unoriginal and adolescent.12 As Ruppert attests, such

reviews tended to elide criticism of his musical transgressions to his social ones. Writes

Ford:

“Freddy doesn’t have the chops or vocal range to pull it off convincingly, and his lyrics
sound like a sad thirteen year old child who dresses in goth cliche and gets really mad
because none of the other kids at his junior high understand his ‘pain.’
…
I definitely understand how hard, scary and awful it is to lose a loved one to a terminal
illness, but this is not the way to pay tribute to them. Freddy hasn’t sorted his feelings on
the matter, or else he’s one of the least mature people ever to record an album because his
why of ‘dealing’ with the pain is to repeatedly scream out: ‘Why God, WHY?!?!?!’…
He’s not making songs, he’s making a bullshit diary of how hard it is to be him. And,
outside of that, there’s absolutely nothing here. Nothing.”

Ford’s framing of Ruppert’s emotional expression as immature or childish voices the

notion that youth cannot experience “real” grief, a notion that Doka marks as an ageist

instance of disenfranchisement (11). Ruppert’s disenfranchised status as such disinvites

11
One point of criticism that deserves consideration addresses the practice of charging admission or retail
price for TSIAM’s performances of grief, inviting the criticism of “cheapening” the relationship with the
deceased. I do not feel that I am in a place to criticize this decision. I have, however, gladly paid for both
of his studio releases myself.
12
Ruppert includes a track entitled “Is This Childish Enough for You Sean Ford?” on Marble Mouth,
TSIAM’s follow-up EP
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

him from the opportunity to express himself through music. As a result, Ford’s biting

criticisms fail to distinguish between musical propriety in the context of artistic sound,

and social propriety or “maturity” in confronting one’s grief. The conflation as such

reflects the ambiguity between apparent musical immaturity on the album – the object of

music criticism proper – and the social immaturity to make his disenfranchised feelings

public. Ford’s revulsion meanwhile marks off TSIAM’s abject status: by excluding and

disclaiming TSIAM’s ambiguous performance, a critical distancing from the

disenfranchised individual, Ford recoils and denies the abject performance. And

“abjection is above all ambiguity,” (9) as Julia Kristeva points out; Ford’s critical

blurring thus performatively re-presents TSIAM’s performance as abject.

EXCLUSION AND ABJECTION

“The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of
oblivion that is constantly remembered. …the ashes of oblivion now serve as a
screen and reflect aversion, repugnance.” – Kristeva (8)

TSIAM’s disenfranchised grief, which by nature begs for release but by nurture

denies itself that release, presents itself as abject to the “rational,” socialized individual.

Julia Kristeva refers to the abject as “something rejected” by the social being because it

“disturbs identity, system order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4).

Disenfranchised grief occupies an ambiguous node of pain for the bereaved; its

acknowledgement reminds the bereaved of his own disenfranchisement or rejection by

the social order; yet its repression pains and debilitates the disenfranchised, immobilizing

him. Through his musical performance of disenfranchised grief – his internal abject –

TSIAM reintroduces the excluded emotion into social circulation. It is in this sense that
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MUSI 719: Final Paper

TSIAM can be said to perform abjection.

TSIAM performs abjection, in part, because he does not present us of an image of

himself when, as Fenwick and Vanderbilt would politely remind us, grieving rules say he

should. Through his own disregard for image management, TSIAM calls the listener’s

attention to her own image management, and thus the socialization of her self. The

responsive listener responds to the reviled abject and her own disingenuousness with

embarrassment, causing her either to dis-sociate from the socially disenfranchising group

(and thus opening up the possibility to empathy) or dis-associate herself from the agent

through criticism or denial. It is in this way that it TSIAM demands “collective politics,”

as Sara Ahmed would have it (see next section, “Alienation”); by representing or re-

drawing the boundaries of the social self, TSIAM calls on the receptive listener to draw

and erase her own boundaries, whether between himself and herself, or between herself

and the disenfranchising society.

In discussing abjection, Kristeva continues the Freudian and Lacanian

psychoanalytic tradition of explaining socialization through a mother-child myth, which

imagines a primitive unity between mother and infant prior to the child’s socialization (a

process distinctly marked by language formation). For Kristeva, the abject represents the

infantile separation from the mother by re-presenting the separation of the social ego

from the pre-social Real. “The abject confronts us… with our earliest attempts to release

the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy

of language” (13). TSIAM, in performing his mother-loss and his abject grief, recalls

quite literally the representational splitting off of the social self from a mother-child

unity. By erasing or ambiguating the ego and exposing his ab-ject pain, Ruppert

dramatically exposes his longing for the pre-social unity of mother and child, and
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attempts to resist the overbearing pressure to decathect. By prolonging the period of

mourning through repeated performances, TSIAM performatively takes up and rejects

decathexis, which representationally amounts to socialization.

“Parting Sea,” the ninth song on Church Point, LA, TSIAM performs his grief as

the internal abject, the ambiguous object of revulsion and nausea, of longing. The title

and lyrics employ a metaphorical pun on the word “part,” referring to attempting to reach

an impossible goal (“parting the sea”) but also “parting” with the loved one through the

mourning ritual. The words and performance express an ambivalent, violent attitude

towards his own failure to decathect and his desire to do so, a desire which feels internal

even though imposed from the outside.

Lyrics

I tried to part the sea

but I failed miserably
and on shaky knees I
will vomit the ashes.⊥ pour ( ⊥ beginning of Section B )
it out, pour it out heart.
wrench it out.

The song is in two sections; Section A lasts from 0:00 – 1:10, Section B from there to the

end (3:22). Section A acts as an introduction or verse to the “pour it out” melodic refrain

of Section B; Ruppert here insistently screams the first four lines of the lyrics, angry and

defiant at his grieving, longing self, and eager to cast off the abject. Section B, which

takes the simple refrain of “pour it out,” mimes the affect of reveling in the reviled abject,

of remembering one’s own materiality, of jouissance. For Kristeva, jouissance is a space

where we affectively remember the pre-objectal, pre-social Real; it “demarcates a space

out of which signs and objects arise” (10). A discomforting, dizzy space, jouissance
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presents itself in “centripetal” motion as circulating enjoyment (14). Jouissance as such

marks the abject with ambiguity: “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys

in it. Violently and painfully” (9).

Though a bit odd to think about it in terms of joy, “Parting Sea” enjoys soul-

exhuming catharsis. Section B topples into dizzy, uneasy jouissance, the grief presenting

a pre-objectal part of the internal self set into centrifugal motion by the desire to rid of it.

The four-bar refrain sets the motion into circulation as follows:13

[Example 1]

(lyrics: pour it out heart oh _____ wrench it out

wrench it out heart oh _____ pour it out)
6
Bb: I V42 ? I
D Phryg: I6 __________ 5
(bII ?) I6 ________________

and is accompanied by an unchanging drum & bass rhythm track, which repeats the

following measure:

[Example 2]

The incessant, unchanging repetition of the measure-long rhythm track throughout the

section does not belie any metric structure longer than a measure, and so the listener must

13
At this point in writing, I have not yet figured out the correct modal harmonic notation for the D
Phrygian description – this is a rough approximation.
 Victor Szabo
MUSI 719: Final Paper

turn to the melodic instruments and vocals to get her bearings within the hypermetrical

structure. The vocals enter in Bar 1 on the third iteration of the four-bar figure,

reinforcing Bar 1 as the beginning of the musical phrase. However, the rhythmic and

harmonic energy generated by the leading tone movement from A to Bb from Bars 3 to 4,

and the identical repetition of the Bar 4 into Bar 1, entertains the possibility that Bar 4 is

the true beginning of the 4-bar phrase. This lends the metrical phrase an elliptical

quality; the hypermetric rhythm wobbles off-kilter, and it is not entirely clear whether the

phrase actually starts at the beginning of Bar 1, or at the resolution of the mini-cadence in

Bar 4, on the first repetition of “wrench it out.” What’s more, the change from “pour” to

“wrench” and back to “pour” on Bar 4 enhances the metrical ambiguity; it is unclear if

we should frame the four-bar movement when the lyrics and harmony change, or where

the synth and vocals came in initially.

On the fifth iteration, our already unstable rhythmic orientation gets completely

knocked off balance by the intrusion of a vocal repetition of “pour it out”: the metrical

structure shatters, leaving the listener to situate herself within an unstable circulation of

rhythmic energy.

(next page)
 Victor Szabo
MUSI 719: Final Paper

[Example 3]

(@ track time 1:44) (extra bar) (new beginning of 4-bar phrase?)

(edit: above bar should say

“Wrench”)

The unexpected insertion of the extra bar trips the listener in her desire for metric

regularity. The expectation of further motion and resolution veers across the bars from

measure to measure in the refrain following the break. The stratification of rhythmic,

melodic, harmonic and metrical cadences, simultaneous with the creation of expectation

for the next measure, denies the listener metrical stability and institutes circulating

rhythmic motion. The listener could conceivably begin the metric pattern on any of Bars

1, 3, or 4 of Example 1. Within this metrical ambiguity, the listener embodies the

circulation of energy as jouissance, enabled by the circulation of the abject – here, grief

as rhythmic energy – and the desire to rid of it.

 Victor Szabo
MUSI 719: Final Paper

Ruppert’s represents his failed attempts to dispel his grief lyrically as the

investment of physical energy on reviling in and vomiting out the ashes of oblivion, the

abject. He comments: “This song was written before we returned the ashes to Church

Point. It was about what it would feel like to let those ashes go.”14, 15 The returning of

ashes from the inside to out represents an act of purification, a restoration of continuity,

but only through the violent, nauseating attempt at decathexis, the wrenching out from

the deep gut imposed from the outside. In rhythmically and vocally enacting his physical

energy, Ruppert gives way and gives way to a cathartic jouissance that resounds in the

empathetic listener; the non-empathetic listener is left, alienated, to criticize or ignore the

cries of pain.

PAIN AND ALIENATION 16

“The differentiation between forms of pain and suffering in stories that are told,
and between those that are told and those that are not, is a crucial mechanism for
the distribution of power” – Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (32)

Within TSIAM’s performance arises an inherent dilemma between the implicit

desire of the bereaved for intersubjective dialogue and meaning-making, and the

objectification his performance affords him. By stepping outside the bounds of musical

and social propriety, Ruppert effectively expresses his grief in an embarrassing way,

ironically running the risk of alienating the other so crucial to dialogue and creating

14
Church Point, Louisiana was Donna Ruppert’s hometown. Ruppert and his family traveled from
California to release his mother’s ashes in her Louisiana hometown, an event sonically documented and
released on the final track on the album, “Rest”.
15
TSIAM’s performance of jouissance quite literally echoes Kristeva’s treatment of Dostoyevsky: “by
symbolizing the abject, through a masterful delivery of the jouissance produced by uttering it, Dostoyevsky
delivered himself of that ruthless maternal burden.” (Kristeva 20)
16
This section is intended as a short, concluding gesture toward a fuller exploration on the topics of pain,
alienation, and embarrassment in relation to music and abjection.
 Victor Szabo
MUSI 719: Final Paper

continuity.

Embarrassment, writes philosopher Gabrielle Taylor, arises from the inability to

respond to a situational demand. It is thus a feeling of social failure that signals a threat

to our social status; consequently, embarrassment presupposes some concern with our

subjective position in relation to others (74-5). Ruppert apparently lacks such concern in

his musical and social performance, thanks both to his unpolished DIY aesthetic, as well

as his willingness to make the personal public. By exposing his hysterical grief in such a

brazen and uncouth manner, TSIAM alienatingly calls for empathy, leaving the listener

embarrassed by Ruppert’s exposedness, or by her own inability to empathize. The

observant responds to the feeling of embarrassment through a distancing, either by re-

raising her observer status or disassociation (“I don’t like him”) (Taylor 73). In forcing

the embarrassed listener to confront the boundaries between herself and others, TSIAM

risks alienating her.

In engaging the bereaved-observer boundary, TSIAM’s performance dramatizes

what Sara Ahmed calls the cultural politics of emotion. Here, embarrassment

“produce(s) the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to

be delineated as if they are objects” (10), and thus re-produces or retraces the Symbolic

Order by which the self rationalizes the other. TSIAM performatively represents the

drawing of those boundaries by presenting the listener the demand of empathy through an

incredibly difficult musical situation, and thus setting up the conditions for

embarrassment. Bounding off his positional disenfranchisement as an emotionally

expressive male, TSIAM performs his shortened odds for recovery (and, in turn, for

political mobility) by alienating the listener. Ruppert’s performance of grief thus lays

bare the mechanisms by which his grief is disenfranchised, as well as by which the
 Victor Szabo
MUSI 719: Final Paper

Symbolic Order enforces its boundaries between the emotional and instrumental, body

and mind, self and “self.”

Both through his production of physically and representationally painful sounds,

and his vocal presentation of emotional pain, TSIAM challenges the borders between

public and private, musical and personal. As Ahmed attests, “Pain involves the violation

or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this

transgression that I feel the border in the first place” (Ahmed 27). By opening up his pain

to the audience and enacting the audience’s embarrassment, Ruppert’s musical

performance turns political. Sara Ahmed voices the politics of emotional expression

brought about by Ruppert’s performance startlingly accurately:

“Pain is evoked as that which even our most intimate others cannot feel. The
impossibility of ‘fellow feeling’ is itself the confirmation of injury. The call of
such pain, as a pain that cannot be shared through empathy, is a call not just for an
attentive hearing, but for a different kind of inhabitance. It is a call for action, and
a demand for collective politics, as a politics based not on the possibility that we
might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of
reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are
not as one” (39).

Ruppert’s “call of pain” as TSIAM becomes a call to action. By exposing himself

and presenting his pain, TSIAM demands of the listener a different kind of social

inhabitance. His performances instruct: we must “learn to live” beside Ruppert’s pain,

somehow. In turn, we must also find ways to maneuver ourselves in relation to these

emotional boundaries, lest we run up against them. By exposing the mechanisms of

disenfranchisement that regulate those boundaries, and their unfortunate consequences,

TSIAM forces us to confront the patterns of objectification we establish in order to

mobilize. In short, TSIAM represents the failure of the Symbolic Order, and demands its
 Victor Szabo
MUSI 719: Final Paper

acknowledgement.

Works Cited

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S.; Wolfgang Stroebe; and Robert O. Hansson. Cambridge University Press,
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Brabent, Sarah. “A Closer Look at Doka’s Grieving Rules.” Disenfranchised Grief: New
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Doka, Kenneth J. “Introduction.” Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges,

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MUSI 719: Final Paper

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This Song Is A Mess But So Am I. Marble Mouth. Acuarela Records, 2006.